# Recently Watched & Favorite Movies: Personal Reviews & More



## Andy

My answer has always been Casablanca (even over Citizen Kane) since in my opinion there is not one single wasted scene in the movie.

However, after once again seeing American Graffiti last night on TV (with commercial breaks which should be illegal) I am revising my opinion. It has to be American Graffiti!


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## WouldaShoulda

I saw a woman on the Metro I once had carnal knowlege of in a previous life.

"Of all the commuter trains in all the towns in all the world she had to walk into mine."

I should have said it, but I ignored her and walked off the train.


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## KenR

Yes, _American Graffiti_ certainly strikes a chord with many of us. If was to give a serious answer I'd say _The Godfather_ (saga). If I'm feeling whimsical (or is it cynically humerous) I would say _Animal House_ or _How to Murder Your Wife_ (please note that Jack Lemmon and Verna Lisi end up happily ever after).


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## WouldaShoulda

I found it remarkable the AG was made just 12 years or so following the events it depicted. 

That would be akin to making a movie about coming of age during the dot.com bubble today!! 

I don't think I'll even pitch that idea.


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## JJR512

I do not like to single movies out for "best ever" or "best comedy" or "best drama" or "best modern" or "best classic" and so on. There are so many movies that are so very good in very different ways that I feel it's an injustice to single out any single one of them.

That being said, if I was pre-arranging to be marooned on a desert island-which conveniently has a TV, DVD player, and electricity-but could only pick one movie to bring with me, I'd bring the original _Star Wars_.


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## dmbfrisb

Best is tough. Citizen Kane is pretty much the standard. I think American Beauty is the textbook perfect movie in line with Kane. But my favorite is far and away David Lynch's Mulholland Drive.


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## JDC

Some on my list would be

Papillon
Network
Chinatown
2001: A Space Odyssey
Wizard of Oz
American Graffiti
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
It's a Wonderful Life
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Airplane!

One little-known gem is called The Last of Sheila, released the same year (1973) as American Graffiti. It had an all-star cast but was buried at the box office by other films that year (AG, The Sting, The Exorcist and a half dozen other blockbusters). Definitely the best mystery I've ever seen, and one of the few that kept me guessing until the very end of the movie.


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## dandymandy

I liked dirty dancing a lot.
I think it is my best movie ever  Watched it like 10 time.


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## halldaniel21

My list of best movies ever is as follows:
The Shawshank Redemption, The Godfather1-3, Schindler's List, Inception, Fight Club, Forest Gump and Casablanca. 
Loved all the movies.


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## Richard Minks

I am a Steven McQueen fan so for me it is "The Getaway". Papillon was great too.


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## eagle2250

^^
A Steve McQueen fan here as well but, my choice for best movie would have to be "The Great Escape!"


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## ZachGranstrom

This is a tough one, but I guess the best movies in my book are:

Inception
Odd couple 
Citizen cane 
The Searchers
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Planes,Trains, and Automobiles
Arsenic and Old Lace
All Mel Brooks Movies
All Monty Python movies
Shop Around The Corner (remake too)
Sleepless in Seattle
When Harry met Sally....


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## Jovan

WouldaShoulda said:


> I found it remarkable the AG was made just 12 years or so following the events it depicted.
> 
> That would be akin to making a movie about coming of age during the dot.com bubble today!!
> 
> I don't think I'll even pitch that idea.


 Why not? I'll totally make it.


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## calfnkip

Some great movies here, but I have a soft spot for The Magnificent Seven (1960).

OK, the story really isn't original. It's John Sturges' adaptation of Kurosawa's adaptation of a traditional samurai story.

But along with Sturges, Elmer Bernstein's theme and incidental music gave the whole project a distinctly American flavor.

And how could a movie go wrong with the likes of Yul Brynner, Eli Wallach, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson and James Coburn?

Here's a link to the theme. Give your ears a treat.


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## tjacks55

Casablanca is also my fav movie alongside with Scarface...I don't know if you guys ever seen the Theatre show in french...Ive seen it last year at the Theatre des inconnus in Paris and its pretty amazing. In London you can see priscilla queen of the desert in the same style. But not as good of couse but it will entertain you on a night out. I recommend also Bloodbrothers and Legally blonde wich are pretty descent aswel xx


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## Zakk

Lots of good movies here. I would have to say "Goldfinger" is in my top three. "Double Indemnity" is also one of my favorites.


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## thebot

halldaniel21 said:


> My list of best movies ever is as follows:
> The Shawshank Redemption, The Godfather1-3, Schindler's List, Inception, Fight Club, Forest Gump and Casablanca.
> Loved all the movies.


I like the list, but you have to remove Godfather 3! I am enjoying Mob week on AMC, so there is actually some decent options on TV when I am at the gym.


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## thebot

ZachGranstrom said:


> This is a tough one, but I guess the best movies in my book are:
> 
> Inception
> Odd couple
> Citizen cane
> The Searchers
> Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
> Planes,Trains, and Automobiles
> Arsenic and Old Lace
> All Mel Brooks Movies
> All Monty Python movies
> Shop Around The Corner (remake too)
> Sleepless in Seattle
> When Harry met Sally....


Love the Mark Twain quote on your signature page .. One of my favorites.


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## thebot

Okay here is my list (no particular order):

Citizen Kane
Casablanca
Godfather 1/2
Bourne Trilogy
Braveheart
Rushmore
Zoolander/Office Space (two of my favorite comedies)


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## The Rambler

For best ever:

_The Treasure of the Sierra Madre_

I like reading the lists. Not many comedies, it's sort of a separate list, but for that I nominate _The Thin Man, _but I must see _American Grafitti _again, haven't seen since it came out.


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## MikeDT

Here's my list for best ever, again in no particular order. 

Transformers
Robocop
Terminator
Alien
Predator
Demolition Man
Iron Man
iRobot
Forbidden Planet
War of the Worlds(the 50s one)
Time Machine(the 50s one)
Planet of the Apes(The 60s one)
This Island Earth
Avatar
Mystery Science Theatre(The Movie)
E.T.
Close Encounters
The Conqueror


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## Francisco D'Anconia

&bull; Casablanca
&bull; The Sting
&bull; The Blues Brothers
&bull; Fast Times at Ridgemont High
&bull; Fight Club
&bull; Dark Passage
&bull; Office Space
&bull; Cheech and Chong: The Corsican Borthers
&bull; Dr. Zhivago
&bull; Beavis and Butt-Head Do America
&bull; Caddy Shack


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## Kurtz

I love Alfie(old and new), Fight club and Network are classics, Kubrick's Lolita, When a man loves a woman . . . Just first toughts


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## bailey25

Schindler's List is beautiful and absolutely heart-renching! So I think it's definitely one of my favourites! Apart from that, I'm a sci-fi geek so Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica are up there!


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## mommatook1

Airplane! and Caddyshack. Done.


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## Pliny

JJR512 said:


> I do not like to single movies out for "best ever" or "best comedy" or "best drama" or "best modern" or "best classic" and so on. There are so many movies that are so very good in very different ways that I feel it's an injustice to single out any single one of them.
> 
> That being said, if I was pre-arranging to be marooned on a desert island-which conveniently has a TV, DVD player, and electricity-but could only pick one movie to bring with me, I'd bring the original _Star Wars_.


I agree- comparisons are odious, esp where high art is involved.

.. but _The Maltese Falcon_ is number one.
Mary Astor, 'I've been bad- very bad'. Goose bumps just thinking about her. 
Sydney Greenstreet aka 'The Fat Man' and villain's villain; Wilmer, the patsy; Peter Lorre, mincing, simpering, and creepily comical; the ship's Captain's priceless doorway face-plant; Bogie wise-cracking and high-handed and u never quite know if he's a wrong-un. and doesn't it end well?



dmbfrisb said:


> Best is tough. Citizen Kane is pretty much the standard. I think American Beauty is the textbook perfect movie in line with Kane. But my favorite is far and away David Lynch's *Mulholland Drive*.


bizarre movie! with _21 grammes_ Naomi Watts' great. I like Lynch's Blue Velvet too- Isabella Rosellini naked and dazed on the suburban lawn; Kyle McLachlan in the car with Frank and the boys.



FrankDC said:


> Some on my list would be
> 
> Papillon
> Network
> Chinatown
> 2001: A Space Odyssey
> Wizard of Oz
> American Graffiti
> Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
> It's a Wonderful Life
> Monty Python and the Holy Grail
> Airplane!
> 
> One little-known gem is called *The Last of Sheila*, released the same year (1973) as American Graffiti. It had an all-star cast but was buried at the box office by other films that year (AG, The Sting, The Exorcist and a half dozen other blockbusters). Definitely the best mystery I've ever seen, and one of the few that kept me guessing until the very end of the movie.


thanx, will try to find it



ZachGranstrom said:


> This is a tough one, but I guess the best movies in my book are:
> 
> Inception
> Odd couple
> Citizen cane
> The Searchers
> Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
> Planes,Trains, and Automobiles
> Arsenic and Old Lace
> All Mel Brooks Movies
> All Monty Python movies
> Shop Around The Corner (remake too)
> Sleepless in Seattle
> When Harry met Sally....


rom-com fan too, and Tom hanks _is_ good except for _Forrest Gump_. 


Zakk said:


> Lots of good movies here. I would have to say "Goldfinger" is in my top three. "*Double Indemnity*" is also one of my favorites.


Fred Macmurray is the American dark side to me. and another great _femme fatale
_


Francisco D'Anconia said:


> • Casablanca
> • The Sting
> • The Blues Brothers
> • Fast Times at Ridgemont High
> • Fight Club
> • Dark Passage
> • Office Space
> • Cheech and Chong: The Corsican Borthers
> • Dr. Zhivago
> • Beavis and Butt-Head Do America
> • Caddy Shack


_True Grit _the Coen bros version will be a classic_.
Les Enfants du Paradis, Nosferatu, Wild Strawberries, Bicycle Thieves, Atanarjuat, Twelve Canoes, Oh Brother Where Art Thou, Once Were Warriors, Ghost Busters, Glitter_


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## mr.v

3. stand by me
2. a few good men
1. shawshank


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## Chouan

I can't believe that "Braveheart" could have made it to anybody's list!

https://www.moviemistakes.com/film207
https://www.moviemistakes.com/film207/page2
https://medievalscotland.org/scotbiblio/bravehearterrors.shtml

and much much more.....


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## Jovan

The homophobia isn't really nice either.

I can't say I have any fondness for Mel Gibson directed movies.


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## Liberty Ship

Last of the Mohecians

Tombstone


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## AncientMadder

Nosferatu
City Lights
The Maltese Falcon
The Big Sleep
Connery-era James Bond
Umbrellas of Cherbourg
Annie Hall
Bourne trilogy


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## bblizzard

i love *THE CROW *a lot  it's an intelligent, beautifully-filmed, touching thriller.


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## Evanla

Most movies with Liam Neeson, and Titanic. Wonderfully done. They blend good drama with mostly historically accurate scenes with the ship. It's just an epic, stressful, riveting film, and it gets me going whenever I watch it.

It also inspired me to wear white tie to prom this year :aportnoy::icon_smile_big:


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## Hitch

Andy said:


> My answer has always been Casablanca (even over Citizen Kane) since in my opinion there is not one single wasted scene in the movie.
> 
> However, after once again seeing American Graffiti last night on TV (with commercial breaks which should be illegal) I am revising my opinion. It has to be American Graffiti!


In '62 I wasnt far from Modesto, south a ways and near the coast.

*Mort Drucker *!


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## msphotog

My vote goes to Apocalypse Now..."never get off the f***in' boat!!!"
I also love:
American Grafitti
Schindler's List
Casino
The Godfather
The Quick and the Dead
The Dirty Dozen
The Big Lebowski
The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
Unforgiven
Pulp Fiction
Kill Bill
The Wild Bunch
The Shawshank Redemption


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## Earl of Ormonde

In no order other than as I think of them:

The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Blues Brothers, This is England, Shadow of a Vampire, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, From Hell, The Quiet Man, Riff-Raff, Saving Grace, Under Milk Wood, Nightmare Before Christmas, Fistful of Dollars, Robin Hood (Disney), Joan of Arc(Ingrid Bergman), Mrs Henderson Presents, Secrets and Lies, Ben Hur, Career Girls, El Cid, the Robe, The King's Speech, Divorcing Jack, The Jungle Book (Disney), Dracula (Oldman), The Commitments, The Hitcher (original),For a Few Dollars More, Sweeney Todd (Depp) Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid, Still Crazy, Diamonds Are Forever, Alfie (original), The Time Machine (original), War of the Worlds (50s), The Day the Earth Stood Still (original), Corpse Bride, Coraline, The Italian Job (original), Clockwork Orange, 16 Years of Alcohol, Michael Collins, Waking Ned Devine, The Eagle Has Landed, Where Eagles Dare and many many more.


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## lalaland

Fave directors: P.T. Anderson, Sofia Coppola


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## db601

I wouldn't call it the best, but one of the most exciting is "Wages of Fear". From the pre CGI era, it hints a massive explosion when a lit match during a cigarette break puffs out. Being French it has some remarkable expectorating, which I hadn't before realized can be a form of communication and, of course, it has a pointless, tragic ending.

+1 The Getaway - the subplot of a marriage on the rocks is also entertainingly funny. I particularly like the point of hitting bottom and the healing beginning represented by walking hand in hand, bathed in mellow sunset light in a smoking garbage dump.

Also +1 on Am Graffiti. More than a couple times in a business meeting on, say, team building the phrase "Everybody wants to be a Pharoah" pops up in my head.


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## imabsolutelyunique

it may not be the best movie, but it's my favorite : Brokeback Mountain. It's the purest emotion I've ever seen on screen.


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## Hitch

In '62 I wasnt far from Modesto...


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## The FourHorseMen

I prefer movies like the Omen, the Exorcist, and haunting movies if I can use that term, hence my nick name here. Not the Halloween, the Friday the 13[SUP]th[/SUP] etc. I also like drama documentaries; the JFK, 13 Days, Apollo 13.


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## Joe Frances

You were right the first time, Casablanca absolutely.


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## Shaver

The Rambler said:


> For best ever:
> 
> _The Treasure of the Sierra Madre_
> 
> I like reading the lists. Not many comedies, it's sort of a separate list, but for that I nominate _The Thin Man, _but I must see _American Grafitti _again, haven't seen since it came out.


Yup. Rambler is correct. Treasure of the Sierra Madre *is* the best film ever made. 'I don't have to show you any stinking badges'. Just thinking about that movie makes me feel fuzzy and warm.

This thread is now probably about discussion of the second best film ever made. :icon_smile_wink:

.
.
.
.
.


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## El_Abogado

Lawrence of Arabia.


Or, the 1984 version of Red Dawn.


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## blairrob

Shaver said:


> *Yup. Rambler is correct. Treasure of the Sierra Madre is the best film ever made. *'I don't have to show you any stinking badges'. Just thinking about that movie makes me feel fuzzy and warm.
> 
> This thread is now probably about discussion of the second best film ever made. :icon_smile_wink:
> .
> .


Since we have (correctly) :thumbs-up: answered the original question let me suggest _The Deer Hunter_, with DeNiro, Walken, Streep, Dzundza, Cazale, and John Savage, a flawless film imo, for number 2, with _In the Heat of the Night_, and _Breaker Morant_ not too far behind. Mind you, unless you're Aussie, no one has _Breaker Morant _in a top twenty list.


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## Snow Hill Pond

blairrob said:


> _Breaker Morant_ not too far behind. Mind you, unless you're Aussie, no one has _Breaker Morant _in a top twenty list.


<Being led to the firing squad>
Priest: Would you like a reading my son?
Morant: No thank you, Father, I'm a pagan.
Hamilton: What's a pagan?
Morant: It's someone who believes there isn't a devine being dispensing justice to mankind.
Hamilton: I'm a pagan too.

Very good movie...and as I remember, a favorite of Ronald Reagan.


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## Snow Hill Pond

Not so fast with the "Treasure of the Sierra Madre" being #1. I've seen TSM, and I like TSM, but it doesn't hold a candle to one of my personal favorites, "*The Best Years of Our Lives*" (1946). Men home from war dealing with guilt, infidelity, alcoholism, disability, class, an uncaring civilian populace, and failure. What's not to love?


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## Snow Hill Pond

Richard Minks said:


> I am a Steven McQueen fan so for me it is "The Getaway".


You should read the novel (by Jim Thompson) on which the movie is based. The ending is a freak show.


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## Snow Hill Pond

From a clothing point-of-view, I admire the following movies:

1. Chariots of Fire (1920's menswear)
2. Scent of a Woman (Al Pacino's dark suit is impeccable, Chris O'Donnell's attire is Trad personified)
3. North-by-Northwest (Cary Grant's gray suit)
4. The Right Stuff (Early 1960's menswear)
5. Heat (DeNiro's gray sport coat is cool)
6. The Talented Mr Ripley (1950's menswear)


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## Shaver

Snow Hill Pond said:


> From a clothing point-of-view, I admire the following movies:
> 
> 1. Chariots of Fire (1920's menswear)
> 2. Scent of a Woman (Al Pacino's dark suit is impeccable, Chris O'Donnell's attire is Trad personified)
> 3. North-by-Northwest (Cary Grant's gray suit)
> 4. The Right Stuff (Early 1960's menswear)
> 5. Heat (DeNiro's gray sport coat is cool)
> 6. The Talented Mr Ripley (1950's menswear)


If it's clothes you are after then 'Brideshead Revisited' - not the movie version, though, *must* be the mini-series version.


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## Ματθαῖος

Snow Hill Pond said:


> Not so fast with the "Treasure of the Sierra Madre" being #1. I've seen TSM, and I like TSM, but it doesn't hold a candle to one of my personal favorites, "*The Best Years of Our Lives*" (1946). Men home from war dealing with guilt, infidelity, alcoholism, disability, class, an uncaring civilian populace, and failure. What's not to love?


That movie _so _good. One of my favorites, as is _Casablanca._


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## blairrob

El_Abogado said:


> Lawrence of Arabia.
> 
> *Or, the 1984 version of Red Dawn*.


I can only surmise you have only seen 2 films thus far. ic12337:

Alternatively, if you are just being, you know, like _that_, then I am going to add 'Ferris Beuller's Day Off ' :thumbs-up:.


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## Shaver

blairrob said:


> I can only surmise you have only seen 2 films thus far. ic12337:
> 
> Alternatively, if you are just being, you know, like _that_, then I am going to add 'Ferris Beuller's Day Off ' :thumbs-up:.


If this is the way it's going, then I'm in.

Sister Act.


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## Snow Hill Pond

Shaver said:


> If this is the way it's going, then I'm in.
> 
> Sister Act.


Ok, if you wanna get crazy, let's get crazy.

"Road House" (1989) or anything with Christopher Walken. In fact, if they remade "Road House" with Christopher Walken playing Dalton, it would be almost perfect...almost! Perfection would be Christopher Walken playing all of the roles.


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## Shaver

Snow Hill Pond said:


> Ok, if you wanna get crazy, let's get crazy.
> 
> "Road House" (1989) or anything with Christopher Walken. In fact, if they remade "Road House" with Christopher Walken playing Dalton, it would be almost perfect...almost! Perfection would be Christopher Walken playing all of the roles.


Whoa! *Whoa! *Don't diss Walken. 

Good call Road House though.

Top Gun. Excruciatingly dreadful


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## Snow Hill Pond

Shaver said:


> Whoa! *Whoa! *Don't diss Walken.
> 
> Good call Road House though.
> 
> Top Gun. Excruciatingly dreadful


"Road House" is so bad, it's good, but it could be badder...and thus...gooder(?)

Christopher Walken doing the Cooler Speech at the Double Deuce:

"I want <20 second pause> you to be nice. <In a rush...all in one breath> Ask him to walk be nice if he won't <10 second pause> walk walk him but be <10 second pause> nice."


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## Youthful Repp-robate

I don't think I could pick a "best ever" without qualifiers -- heck, I can barely pick favorites. It's made doubly hard because I haven't seen so much as a frame of mine yet, so I don't know if I can back up the brashness of saying "mine."


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## Shaver

I'll admit that Walken plays Walken, whatever the role he's cast in. Much in the same way that Hopper does. I imagine that you either like that or you don't. I like it. And here are the two masters, being themselves, together:


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## Orsini

Citizen Kane. Casablanca. How Green Was My Valley. Enchanted Cottage.


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## Shaver

Orsini said:


> Citizen Kane. Casablanca. How Green Was My Valley. Enchanted Cottage.


A shiver down my spine at every viewing:


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## Snow Hill Pond

Shaver said:


> I'll admit that Walken plays Walken,


I will admit that his work in the Deer Hunter was brilliant. And I've heard his new movie "A Late Quartet" is a revelation.


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## Miket61

Shaver said:


> Sister Act.


If this is becoming a nun forum, I'm outta here.


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## Earl of Ormonde

theonlythingmoreenjoyablethanwatchingchriswalken is...... watching....... someONE..... try....ing... to... DO.....an impersonation..... OF..... him.


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## Curmudgeon

I really enjoy movies but my vote for best movie ever is To Kill a Mockingbird.


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## Zakk

I've probably seen 100 movies since the time I last posted in this thread. A few great movies I haven't seen mentioned yet include:
-The Lost Weekend (1945)
-Se7en (1995)
-Gone With The Wind (1939)
-The Sound of Music (1965)

I also really liked Les Miserables last year, but I'm not too upset that it lost to Argo, which was also a fine movie.


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## LordSmoke

Since no one has gotten the correct answer so far, *Fail-Safe*


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## Snow Hill Pond

LordSmoke said:


> Since no one has gotten the correct answer so far, *Fail-Safe*


Good film, but I'm not sure FS is even the best movie of that genre. I submit "Dr. Strangelove", "On the Beach", and even "Wargames" as worthy rivals.


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## Snow Hill Pond

I've been thinking about *Miller's Crossing* lately and was wondering why it doesn't get as many accolades as it should. From the Coen brothers, it stars Gabriel Byrne, Albert Finney, Jon Polito, Marcia Gay Harden, Steve Buscemi, and John Turturro. Irish and Italian gangsters in the 20s/30s. The story is complicated but not unnecessarily so, and the acting is top notch. Production values and direction are also impressive. The soundtrack is incredible...possibly the best work of Carter Burwell. A great film.


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## WouldaShoulda

Zakk said:


> Lots of good movies here. I would have to say "Goldfinger" is in my top three. "Double Indemnity" is also one of my favorites.


Goldfinger is rediculous!!

He reveals the plot to everyone, kills the guy who doesn't want to go along, then kills everyone else anyway.

Why??

So JB can hide under the table and listen in??

**** like that drives me nuts!!

Anyone remotely involved in the insureance business should love "Double Indemnity"


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## tocqueville

Annie Hall
Apocalypse Now
Star Wars Ep. 4
​The Lion King


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## Jovan

Don't you mean Episode V? :icon_smile_big:


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## tocqueville

V is good, but IV is in a class by itself. Although, for me IV will always be 1.

​


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## Zakk

WouldaShoulda said:


> Goldfinger is rediculous!!
> 
> He reveals the plot to everyone, kills the guy who doesn't want to go along, then kills everyone else anyway.
> 
> Why??
> 
> So JB can hide under the table and listen in??
> 
> **** like that drives me nuts!!
> 
> Anyone remotely involved in the insureance business should love "Double Indemnity"


I miss the cheesy James Bond movies. I just watched Skyfall, and everything is so _serious_ now!


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## Snow Hill Pond

WouldaShoulda said:


> Goldfinger is rediculous!!
> 
> He reveals the plot to everyone, kills the guy who doesn't want to go along, then kills everyone else anyway.
> 
> Why??
> 
> So JB can hide under the table and listen in??
> 
> **** like that drives me nuts!!
> 
> QUOTE]
> 
> Yes, but Honor Blackman is special.
> 
> BTW, that table has a nice diorama of the Gold Vault grounds...which was a very accurate pre-9/11 depiction of the area...even many years after the movie. In the early 80s, I used to play golf on the Officer's Golf Course (Lindsey GC?) next door. I think Hole number 2 or 3 had out-of-bounds on the left which was the fence that separated the course from the Gold Vault grounds. I never tried to climb that fence to retrieve a lost ball.


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## Jovan

Everyone's going to hate me, but what's so special about Honor Blackman?



Zakk said:


> I miss the cheesy James Bond movies. I just watched Skyfall, and everything is so _serious_ now!


Really? I thought Skyfall struck a good balance between the humour of the early Bond movies and the more serious side of recent movies. I did like Casino Royale, though. Quantum of Solace was frustratingly average.


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## Snow Hill Pond

Jovan said:


> Everyone's going to hate me, but what's so special about Honor Blackman?


Have you ever watched an episode of the pre-Emma Peel "Avengers"?


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## DJH_of_Doom

GoldenEye. I'm a sucker for Bond.


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## Zakk

Jovan said:


> Really? I thought Skyfall struck a good balance between the humour of the early Bond movies and the more serious side of recent movies. I did like Casino Royale, though. Quantum of Solace was frustratingly average.


Oh I agree. James Bond still has the witty one liners, and they did strike a good balance. But just like I can't imagine Daniel Craig doing the helicopter scene in You Only Live Twice, I also can't see Sean Connery doing the intense gun fight scenes in Skyfall. However, I do think the series is still going strong after fifty years :smile:


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## Zakk

Can't help but bump this thread since I'm a movie buff. Just saw "Lawrence of Arabia" and "Mildred Pierce," both of which I would consider must-see films. I'm going to the TCM Classic Film Festival in Hollywood this month, so I'm expecting to see some classic masterpieces up there on the big screen. :biggrin:


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## parnaxxus

Mmmm... I think that "the best movie" doesn't exist.
If you've and Android device, I suggest you to install "Muze".
It helps you to choose which movie to see based on your preferences. The only films Muze will show you are the ones you will like for sure.
Thanks to the votes you gave to the movies you have seen in the past, this app will be able to create a virtual avatar that shares your preferences. And... his name is 'Muze'.
Try it. It's free...

Bye


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## toddorbertBU

For me, and it has been since I first saw it, the greatest film is The Third Man. Orson Welles is in it for 10 minutes and completely steals the movie. Joseph Cotton is at the top of his game and every actor is perfectly cast. No movie has ever had such an immediate and long lasting impact on me.


----------



## salsalero

Shawshank Redemption was good


----------



## eagle2250

^^
+1. Indeed, the Shawshank Redemption is/was a classic...and welcome to AAAC, salsalero! :thumbs-up:


----------



## Jovan

^ Great movie and acting. It's unfortunate though that, in person, Freeman and Robbins are so self-impressed.


----------



## MaxBuck

Great movies mentioned throughout this thread. Let me add a few more that don't get enough run.

Dead Again - a master work by Kenneth Branagh
La Femme Nikita with Anne Parillaud
House of Games with Joe Mantegna - David Mamet's first movie
Dogma
Tess - by that disgusting pervert Roman Polanski (who is nonetheless a genius)
Elmer Gantry
The Philadelphia Story
The Front Page
The Battleship Potemkin
​Das Boot

Also love everything Fred Astaire ever appeared in, all James Bond movies (even the David Niven version of Casino Royale), Monty Python & the Holy Grail, and Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (it's a lot smarter movie than most people think, and it's hilarious).

If I had to name the "best" I've ever seen, I might answer with There Will Be Blood.

Oh, and if you want to watch some highly entertaining crap, look for films directed by Hugo Haas (which he usually also acted in). "Pickup" is a particularly cynical and lurid example of depressing B-movie exploitation flicks that played harshly on the base emotions. A "classic" that makes David Lynch look tame.


----------



## Ματθαῖος

"Sunset Boulevard" is quite a testament to Hollywood.


----------



## Howard

The Wizard Of Oz.


----------



## ichiran

I love classic Hitchcock -- Vertigo, Rear Window, North by Northwest, etc.


----------



## Claybuster

Casablanca.


----------



## Howard

E.T. (1982)


----------



## gaseousclay

John Carpenters The Thing


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk


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## Laudams

salsalero said:


> Shawshank Redemption was good


+1. Great movie with top-notch acting.

To this list I would add Green Mile, another great example of powerful message and acting.


----------



## racebannon

So many great films. 

Rushmore
Casino
There will be blood


----------



## Flairball

Apocalypse Now.


----------



## dr.butcher

Flairball said:


> Apocalypse Now.


+1

Does Apocalypse Now Redux come a close second? Followed by the 5-hour plus Apocalypse Now workprint?


----------



## MaxBuck

Certainly not the "Best Movie Ever," but saw Birdman last night. Was thoroughly underwhelmed until, literally, the last 15 seconds of the film - at which point the whole thing made sense and came together most satisfyingly.

Edward Norton was, as he always is, outstanding.


----------



## Dhaller

"Best Movie Ever" is simply too situational - I mean, I might find film A to be "best", but still choose B if it's the only film I can ever see for the rest of my life.

"Best" can mean it was very important cinematically, and we owe much subsequent film to its techniques: here is the realm of Eisenstein, for example.

It can be "best" for being the very best thing of its kind - best horror film, best drama, and so on. Here is where films like "Citizen Kane" and "2001" lie.

It can be very rewatchable, with something new each time you see it, like "A Clockwork Orange" or "Lost in Translation".

I think, for me, "best", if I had to choose it, would have to adhere to the "moon-prison" critereon: if you are being imprisoned on the moon (perhaps in an inaccessible sublunar enclosure shielded from all exterior transmissions), and you can take only one film, which will it be? It has to be, for me, something from the third category: very re-watchable.

Ideally, something which can be enjoyed in occasional bits, not necessarily all at once. Film snacks of a scene or two, or the whole feast from time-to-time.

A short list might include:
Brazil
Goodfellas
A Clockwork Orange
Blade Runner
Manhattan
Lost in Translation
Fantasia
Requiem for a Dream
Amelie

Obviously this is hideously incomplete, but they come to mind.

Probably I'd stick to the happier ones (I'm in a moon-prison), so I'm *really* choosing between "Lost in Translation" and "Amelie"... and I think I'd go with "Lost in Translation" (which also has a very nice sound track, so it can do double duty as a film and as an album).

So, the Best Movie in the World to take with you to your moon-prison? "Lost in Translation."

Rinse/repeat for other scenarios.

DH


----------



## Peak and Pine

Dhaller said:


> So, the Best Movie in the World to take with you to your moon-prison? "*Lost in Translation*."


Hmmmmmm. I would have thought *Pretty In Pink*. But each to his own. Pity tho, something new in each viewing, except my Beta copy finally crapped and Sony says -- get this -- they're not making Betas any more. O life moves so fast.

Wanted to jump all over Max Buck because he likes Tiny Dancer's films -- but I'd have to mention shooting at the screen and he may be anti-gun. Max redeems himself by listing as his best one of THE best, *There Will Be Blood.* Not sure even Daniel Day Lewis understood every frame of that one, but I loved watching it. Whadda film. My best of course is* Lawrence of Arabia*. They probably shoulda just stopped making films after that. Or _talkies_, as my 106 year-old mailman calls them, which is why I'm just now getting Xmas cards, probably.


----------



## LordSmoke

Oh, yes, _Lawrence of Arabia _is outstanding. Last week on a long flight, I re-watched_ *Barry Lyndon*_. I recalled watching it many years ago and being impressed by everything except Ryan O'Neal. This time, I was just impressed by the whole damned thing.


----------



## Dhaller

LordSmoke said:


> Oh, yes, _Lawrence of Arabia _is outstanding. Last week on a long flight, I re-watched_ *Barry Lyndon*_. I recalled watching it many years ago and being impressed by everything except Ryan O'Neal. This time, I was just impressed by the whole damned thing.


Lawrence of Arabia is outstanding, but I can't imagine watching it again and again. If you have a chance to see it on the Big Screen, though, definitely take it.

I'd considered "Barry Lyndon", because it's such a gorgeous film (and, like all Kubrick films, has a wonderful sound track). The final scene at the writing desk with a Schubert trio (I think) playing is quite haunting. I just don't think it's a moon-prison film, though... more of a "solitary month in a mountain cabin" film.

DH


----------



## Duvel

Agree. I love a lot of movies, but Hitchcock's stuff is unbeatable, for me. Northwest and To Catch a Thief are movies I can watch again and again.

Special places in my heart, too, for The Graduate, Lolita (Kubrick's), and Manhattan.

Recent discoveries that I liked a lot include Last Days of Disco, Metropolitan, and Last Lovers Left Alive (best vampire movie ever!).



ichiran said:


> I love classic Hitchcock -- Vertigo, Rear Window, North by Northwest, etc.


----------



## Dmontez

I cannot believe no one has mentioned Coming to America a movie which I consider to be one of the best ever made. 

From a a sartorial aspect isn't doesn't get any better than Trading Places for me.

A few other favorites of mine...

Long Gone
Bull Durham
For Love of the Game, every time I watch that one I get chills when I hear Vin Scully say "The cathedral that is Yankee stadium now belongs to a Chapel"


----------



## coynedj

Many great movies have already been listed. Favorites of mine that (I think) haven't been mentioned yet:

A Night at the Opera
Spirited Away
Dr. Strangelove
The Seven Samurai
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
Matilda
Master and Commander

As for the best, someone has already posted with To Kill a Mockingbird. Or maybe The Seven Samurai - the only three hour movie that flows so well that it feels like an hour and a half. Or maybe a dozen others, depending on when you ask me.


----------



## Adventure Wolf

I'm going to agree with Andy that it is Casablanca. "Here's to looking at you, kid"


----------



## Josh P

Somehow found this thread on a search. Very old but the correct answer to this question is All About Eve. If you don't think so you should watch it again. If you still don't think so you should sober up. The dialog is unreal and the plot is great. The acting is phenomenal. I have introduced it to several people, one of whom got to the end and pressed play again. 
I also like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, Third Man, and for fun The Princess Bride.


----------



## FJW

Duvel said:


> Agree. I love a lot of movies, but Hitchcock's stuff is unbeatable, for me. Northwest and To Catch a Thief are movies I can watch again and again.
> 
> Special places in my heart, too, for The Graduate, Lolita (Kubrick's), and Manhattan.
> 
> Recent discoveries that I liked a lot include Last Days of Disco, Metropolitan, and Last Lovers Left Alive (best vampire movie ever!).


A day late, but North By Northwest was on TCM yesterday!


----------



## ESilver

Another late reply: Vertigo! 

No matter how many times I watch it (and I have lost count) the emotional response is as strong as ever. No other film comes close to doing that to me.


----------



## Shaver

Not the Best Movie Ever - no such beast exists - but, nevertheless, a dreadfully _important_ movie (I shan't attempt to make the case for that claim here and, in truth, expect that those of you who might care a jot for such cultural edifice are already fully cognisant of the manifold reasons why it is so) made even more glorious with the 2010 restoration for bluray: Forbidden Planet.

"Monsters. Monsters from the id."


----------



## Vecchio Vespa

To my way of thinking, best movie ever is sort of like a dog show. On any given day it might be the PBGV, or it might be the Gordon Setter. In my life of watching movies the ones that I am always aware of their surpassing greatness include Lawrence of Arabia, Godfather 2, and Rear Window. Then there are the movies that were just amazing turning points, especially in the world of SciFi, like Forbidden Planet, 2001, and Star Wars. There are the ones I could watch over and over, like Caddyshack, House Bunny, Animal House, and, surprise, the A & E version of Pride and Prejudice. And there are the ones that every time I watch them I think to myself, “What a Gem,” like A Room with a View, Enchanted April, certain Woody Allen films, and Chocolat.


----------



## Mr. B. Scott Robinson

As it is known in Atlanta, hands down GWTW.

Tomorrow is another day y’all!

Cheers,

BSR


----------



## Shaver

Having finally found a suitable window of opportunity and then happily defenestrated I am now compelled to allocate an honourable mention to the glorious 251 minute bluray restoration of that incomparable epic - Mankiewicz's 'Cleopatra'. 

With the unfortunate advent of computer generated imagery such physically present spectacle as this is unlikely to be captured on celluloid ever again - more's the pity. 

Sprawling technicolour opulence frames the incandescent beauty of Taylor and Burton, captures their corruscating passion and seeks to bewilder the viewer with a cascading excess of sensation, exponential and enveloping. 

"How strangely awake I feel. As if living had been just a long dream. Someone else’s dream. Now finished at last..."


----------



## Oldsarge

First let me make one thing clear. I am not a movie fan. Given a choice between an Academy Award winner and a hot dog, pass the mustard. However, one film sticks in my memory. _The Longest Day. _"Those ships you say the Allies don't have? Well, they're shooting at me!"


----------



## Peak and Pine

Interesting that both flicks @Shaver and @Oldsarge have brought up I saw first-run in the summer of '63 while at a summer semester at the University of Denver. Along with a third. To that one in a moment. Have not seen any of these since those first in-theater screenings, but remember thinking Cleopatria s**ked and have now enjoyed Shaver's overwrought review far more than the movie itself. Longest Day was in B&W and I think Red Buttons and Sal Mineo were in it, which sorta says it all, and I don't think I stayed to conclusion, preferring maybe to hear my one-armed Uncle Tuck tell his tale of actually being there. The way he tells it, the Day went pretty fast. (Sarge, how the hell can you not be a fan of movies? Get a DVD player a copy of _Road to Perdition_ and _Pulp Fiction_ and a six pack send me the bill.)

The third movie I saw that summer of '63 turned how to be, to me, the greatest movie ever made and I will not be moved on this: Lawrence of Arabia. David Lean. O'Toole, we do not forget you.


----------



## Oldsarge

I have Asperger's syndrome. It makes it hard for me to relate to other people personally and to divorce myself from the fiction on the screen. Books are okay and I enjoy documentaries. The overwrought emotion of fictional film is . . . difficult. So I avoid them.


----------



## Shaver

Peak and Pine said:


> Interesting that both flicks @Shaver and @Oldsarge have brought up I saw first-run in the summer of '63 while at a summer semester at the University of Denver. Along with a third. To that one in a moment. Have not seen any of these since those first in-theater screenings, but remember thinking Cleopatria s**ked and have now enjoyed Shaver's overwrought review far more than the movie itself. Longest Day was in B&W and I think Red Buttons and Sal Mineo were in it, which sorta says it all, and I don't think I stayed to conclusion, preferring maybe to hear my one-armed Uncle Tuck tell his tale of actually being there. The way he tells it, the Day went pretty fast. (Sarge, how the hell can you not be a fan of movies? Get a DVD player a copy of _Road to Perdition_ and _Pulp Fiction_ and a six pack send me the bill.)
> 
> The third movie I saw that summer of '63 turned how to be, to me, the greatest movie ever made and I will not be moved on this: Lawrence of Arabia. David Lean. O'Toole, we do not forget you.


If all of those hours in which I paid attention to LoA were refunded to the balance sheet of my life then I would live a little longer but with far less dividend.

Unjaded but possessed of an excess of familiarity, which these heavily repeated viewings had bestowed, still, incredibly the bluray restoration of LoA is a revelation.

Lean's movie quietly insists of the discerning viewer to reflect upon its subtext. A work with such powerful gravity of themes, in which we might orbit the meaning, provoking the tidal shift of one's heart.

I would go so far as to suggest that LoA is amongst the few movies which, properly grappled with, contains a galdr capable of improving a man.

"I know you've been well educated,
Lawrence. It says so in your dossier."


----------



## Shaver

Oldsarge said:


> I have Asperger's syndrome. It makes it hard for me to relate to other people personally and to divorce myself from the fiction on the screen. Books are okay and I enjoy documentaries. The overwrought emotion of fictional film is . . . difficult. So I avoid them.


Idée fixe, loquacious verbosity, absence of empathy, preference toward solitude, these attributes are less a diagnosis and more a prescription.

For my part I thrive in the realm of motion pictures but am irritated by televised news, especially when (as is most often the case) it involves tedious and banal suffering.


----------



## SG_67

Peak and Pine said:


> The third movie I saw that summer of '63 turned how to be, to me, the greatest movie ever made and I will not be moved on this: Lawrence of Arabia. David Lean. O'Toole, we do not forget you.


A truly fantastic movie! About as perfect a movie as can be made.

I'll never forget Faisal's line toward the end of the movie comparing the virtues of war to the virtues of young men and the vices of peace to the vices of old men.


----------



## eagle2250

Amazon just sent us our DVD of the movie Vice. I can't classify it as "the best movie ever," but the approach to the story was creative and though biased, it was informative...not surprised that it was nominated for seven Academy awards. I suppose that one might argue that the characters dressed in a Tradly way, but frankly, in each and every scene Christian Bale's version of Dick Cheaney had him looking like three pounds stuffed in a two pound sack. Were Dick Cheaney's suits always that ill fitting? :icon_scratch:


----------



## Shaver

Jason and the Argonauts. 

A simple Quest yarn perhaps but elevated to the pinnacle of cinematic triumph by the singular genius of Harryhausen. Telos, Harpies, Hydra and the Skeleton Fight sequence - Dynamation's finest.


----------



## SG_67

Shaver said:


> Jason and the Argonauts.
> 
> A simple Quest yarn perhaps but elevated to the pinnacle of cinematic triumph by the singular genius of Harryhausen. Telos, Harpies, Hydra and the Skeleton Fight sequence - Dynamation's finest.


I must admit I was a sucker for those films when I was younger.


----------



## Vecchio Vespa

I rewatched a true classic this past weekend, _Caddyshack. "Now I know why tigers eat their young." _Such casting. And the script! Right up there with _The House Bunny. 
_
Now that I've given you this insight into my sophisticated tastes, I'll share (if I've shared this previously, I apologize) further. My daughter sat down with me to watch my actual favorite movie, _Lawrence of Arabia. _We were almost to the intermission and she asked, "Dad, when does it get funny?" She was young.


----------



## Shaver

Shaver said:


> Jason and the Argonauts.
> 
> A simple Quest yarn perhaps but elevated to the pinnacle of cinematic triumph by the singular genius of Harryhausen. Telos, Harpies, Hydra and the Skeleton Fight sequence - Dynamation's finest.


Ye gods and little fishes! Scatter brain that I am now caught dealing grievous omission. Permit me to fashion my amends.

One other, equal to Harryhausen, contributed to the splendours of J&A. I speak, of course, of Bernard Hermann that most extraordinarily gifted composer who provided the flawless score which accompanies the visuals.

Hermann may not be a name that registers immediately in your mind but I guarantee you that his work will have enhanced your viewing pleasure at least once. From Citizen Kane to Taxi Driver, and a myriad in between, Hermann scattered notes upon the stave of human experience and in so doing composed works possessed of profundity and wit in quite equal measure.


----------



## Shaver

TKI67 said:


> I rewatched a true classic this past weekend, _Caddyshack. "Now I know why tigers eat their young." _Such casting. And the script! Right up there with _The House Bunny.
> _
> Now that I've given you this insight into my sophisticated tastes, I'll share (if I've shared this previously, I apologize) further. My daughter sat down with me to watch my actual favorite movie, _Lawrence of Arabia. _We were almost to the intermission and she asked, "Dad, when does it get funny?" She was young.


----------



## Shaver

SG_67 said:


> I must admit I was a sucker for those films when I was younger.


Revisit them, they fare well under the discerning gaze of maturity.


----------



## SG_67

Shaver said:


> Revisit them, they fare well under the discerning gaze of maturity.


I will thank you.

I also always liked the Steve Reeves Hercules movies.


----------



## John M

As someone who was born in 1987, my answer may surprise you though I give a nod to the Deer Hunter.


----------



## Shaver

The first Eastwood western I saw remains, despite stiff (as a smoking barrel) competition, my favourite.

"I wonder why it took her so long to get mad?"

"Because, maybe, you didn't go back for more."


----------



## eagle2250

Shaver said:


> The first Eastwood western I saw remains, despite stiff (as a smoking barrel) competition, my favourite.
> 
> "I wonder why it took her so long to get mad?"
> 
> "Because, maybe, you didn't go back for more."


At some point well after High Plains Drifter hit the silver screen, the wife gifted me with Clint Eastwood's The Man With No Name Trilogy (A Fistful of Dollars, For A Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly). We also have Eastwood's Dirty Harry series of movies, Universal Studios 7 Movie Clint Eastwood collection (which includes High Plains Drifter, plus...), Heartbreak Ridge, In The Line of Fire, Grand Torino, and the Mule, in our collection. I guess we just might have a Clint Eastwood fan in the house? :crazy:


----------



## Shaver

eagle2250 said:


> At some point well after High Plains Drifter hit the silver screen, the wife gifted me with Clint Eastwood's The Man With No Name Trilogy (A Fistful of Dollars, For A Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly). We also have Eastwood's Dirty Harry series of movies, Universal Studios 7 Movie Clint Eastwood collection (which includes High Plains Drifter, plus...), Heartbreak Ridge, In The Line of Fire, Grand Torino, and the Mule, in our collection. I guess we just might have a Clint Eastwood fan in the house? :crazy:


Sir, you are a man after my own heart.

The breadth, volume and quality of Eastwood's contribution to cinema is quite remarkable, both as an actor and a director.

I cannot speak highly enough of Eastwood and struggle to envisage an existance deprived of the significant pleasure his films have bestowed upon me.


----------



## Vecchio Vespa

Shaver said:


> Sir, you are a man after my own heart.
> 
> The breadth, volume and quality of Eastwood's contribution to cinema is quite remarkable, both as an actor and a director.
> 
> I cannot speak highly enough of Eastwood and struggle to envisage an existance deprived of the significant pleasure his films have bestowed upon me.


I liked _Absolute Power _quite a bit. For that one you can add his piano soundtrack, I believe.


----------



## Shaver

TKI67 said:


> I liked _Absolute Power _quite a bit. For that one you can add his piano soundtrack, I believe.


It was but recently, whilst watching an interview with the great man, that I became aware of his musical abilities. What a guy!


----------



## Shaver

Upgraded, by the 70th Anniversary digital restoration, to exhibit even more of its dazzling spectacle. This epitome of blunt force morality play endures, fresh - fresher, even - as it was at the first screening.

GWTW's account of grapple twit the genders, set against a backdrop of a political but equally tumultuous conflict, sharply illustrates an eternal truth - the male who is capable of refusing to yield to the urgent requirements oft precipitated by the honeyed waft of the Bartholin glands will retain the confident dignity required to possess such charms on his own terms.

"Yankees! In Georgia?! How did they ever get in?" - Miss Pittypat.


----------



## Shaver

*twixt.


----------



## eagle2250

MY friend, you view a movie on many more complex levels than I am capable of doing. However, Gone With The Wind was one that caught the wife's fancy and hence it became part of our collection of DVDs.










Egad, my favorite line from the movie (and pretty much all that stuck in my mind from the movie) was "Retch Butler's iconic comeback, "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn!" LOL.


----------



## Mr. B. Scott Robinson

Agreed, as a native Georgian, and an unreconstructed Rebel at heart, GWTW is the best film of all time.






"As God as my witness...I'll never be angry again!"

Cheers,

BSR


----------



## SG_67

Last night, watched the following in succession:

1) The Guns of Navarone 
2) The Great Escape 
3) The Bridge on the River Kwai 

Any one of them The Best? I’m sure the advocates could argue for or against as appropriate. 

As a trifecta of movies made about WWII, certainly among the best.


----------



## SG_67

Mr. B. Scott Robinson said:


> Agreed, as a native Georgian, and an unreconstructed Rebel at heart, GWTW is the best film of all time.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> "As God as my witness...I'll never be angry again!"
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> BSR


It's sad to think that in today "woke" popular culture, a film like that would earn anyone involved with its production permanent banishment and exile.


----------



## Peak and Pine

eagle2250 said:


> ... was Retch Butler's iconic comeback...





Mr. B. Scott Robinson said:


> "As God as my witness...I'll never be angry again!"


You two have your license to watch movies suspended.

Rhett, not Retch.
Hungry, not Angry.

Jeezus.


----------



## Shaver

SG_67 said:


> It's sad to think that in today "woke" popular culture, a film like that would earn anyone involved with its production permanent banishment and exile.


It would?


----------



## Mr. B. Scott Robinson

Peak and Pine said:


> You two have your license to watch movies suspended.
> 
> Rhett, not Retch.
> Hungry, not Angry.
> 
> Jeezus.


Revoke auto correct and my hurry license please. Not me!

Cheers,

BSR


----------



## Mr. B. Scott Robinson

SG_67 said:


> Last night, watched the following in succession:
> 
> 1) The Guns of Navarone
> 2) The Great Escape
> 3) The Bridge on the River Kwai
> 
> Any one of them The Best? I'm sure the advocates could argue for or against as appropriate.
> 
> As a trifecta of movies made about WWII, certainly among the best.


My favorite oldie is The Longest Day. Of the three listed, I find BOTRK the most interesting and complex. Plus Obi Wan blowing up his own bridge is hard to top!

Cheers,

BSR


----------



## Fading Fast

SG_67 said:


> Last night, watched the following in succession:
> 
> 1) The Guns of Navarone
> 2) The Great Escape
> 3) The Bridge on the River Kwai
> 
> Any one of them The Best? I'm sure the advocates could argue for or against as appropriate.
> 
> As a trifecta of movies made about WWII, certainly among the best.


1. Good
2. Very Good
3. Very, Very Good


----------



## Fading Fast

Staying with classic war movies, my sleeper favorite is "12 O'Clock High." My quirky favorite is "The Americanization of Emily."


----------



## Peak and Pine

Fading Fast said:


> Staying with classic war movies, my sleeper favorite is "12 O'Clock High." My quirky favorite is "The Americanization of Emily."


Check out "A Very Long Engagement" and "Atonement", especially the tracking shot when McAvoy reaches the beach. Skip "Dunkirk".


----------



## Fading Fast

Peak and Pine said:


> Check out "A Very Long Engagement" and "Atonement", especially the tracking shot when McAvoy reaches the beach. Skip "Dunkirk".


Saw *Dunkirk* and *Atonement*, but too long ago to remember the scene you note (I'll look for it the next time I see it) and will now look to see *A Very Long Engagement*.


----------



## Peak and Pine

Fading Fast said:


> Saw *Dunkirk* and *Atonement*, but too long ago to remember the scene you note (I'll look for it the next time I see it) and will now look to see *A Very Long Engagement*.


*Engagement *is the best of the bunch. To me, the best WWI movie ever, but that conflict is of special interest. Saw *Dunkirk* in a theater a few summers ago. Or a half-hour's worth anyway.


----------



## Fading Fast

Question as I'm new to this part of the forum: Has this become the general movie thread - "I saw this, " "I like that" movie, despite it's title, or is there another movie thread for that as I don't want to mess up what you guys are doing here if you're staying mainly with the "best movies ever" for this thread. Thank you.


----------



## eagle2250

^^
To my knowledge, this is the only active movie thread we have working. I look forward to your future offerings in this thread!


----------



## Fading Fast

⇧ Thank you.

My last two ⇩

*To Have and Have Not* from 1944 with Bogie, Bacall, Walter Brennan and Hoagy Carmichael (apparently, Ian Fleming's visual ideal for Bond!)

This is a very good movie that was even better when it was first made as *Casablanca*. I'm only the ten-millionth person to note that, but it's such an obvious rip-off that it hurts ,not helps, the movie as one is forced to see and judge the comparisons.

So, here goes: Carmichael is really good as the piano player as is Brennan as the alchy, but combined they are no Sam / Frenchy is no Captain Renault / other than being really fat, Captain Renard is no Signor Ferrari / Bogie as Harry is not as complex as Rick nor is his transition to freedom fighter as powerful / the closing scenes of friends going off to fight for the allies aren't even worthy of comparison / the *To Have and Have Not* sets are obviously fake versus *Casablanca's* better done fakes / Letters of Transit trump Harbor Passes / but I'll concede that Bacall wrestles Bergman to a draw.

There's more, but you get it. A good movie diminished by its shining progenitor.

***************************************************************

*Nora Prentiss* from 1947 with Ann Sheridan and Kent Smith

Up until the crazy starts to happen about half way through, this is solid noir as a successful and, seemingly, happily married San Francisco physician (Smith) with two kids slow walks himself into an affair with a patient (smoldering Sheridan).

You get it, Smith's wife (and life) isn't bad - she's a good mother and decent wife - she's just become tone deaf to her husband's subtle cries for help (he's painfully bored with the social routine she pushes on him). Add in a mind-numbingly repetitive daily routine, his wife's rejection (again) of his requests for adventure and the usual pressures from work and kids and you see that beneath his mild and seemingly contented exterior is a man ready to break.

In walks (well faints - she's a patient) adventure in a killer body with long, flowing hair (versus his wife's tied-up-tighter-than-a-drum do) and all the pieces are in place. But still - and kudos to both the writers and director, Vincent Sherman, for this - the affair doesn't blast off [] as it does in most noirs, as both Smith and Sheridan try not to let it happen.

You almost wonder if the story is going in a different direction as Smith and Sheridan pull back several times before the affair finally happens, which is so much more real than the usual "meet and immediately forget everything important in our lives so that we can have sex" formula. But once the Rubicon's been crossed, things start to spiral in the usual bad direction: wife suspects, husband covers up and lies (while work slips and friends are insulted), the cheaters agree to stop (several times) but fail until it comes to a full boil.

Here, this excellent noir descends into crazytown. (Spoiler alert) Smith, lacking the will to divorce his wife, but unable to give up Sheridan, fakes his own death by using the body of an obscure patient who conveniently drops dead in his office. He then lies to Sheridan (who sincerely does't want to break up Smith's home) that he is getting a divorce, but convinces her to move across country to NYC with him until it is "all settled." (Gotta love a noir that takes place in the twin capital cities of noirdom.)

Now in NYC, Smith all but hides out in a hotel with Sheridan who doesn't understand his name change or fear of being seen. As the tension in their relationship rises - helped along by her relationship with an old friend and eligible bachelor - Smith falls into a jealous rage, tries to kill the friend (but doesn't), steals and smashes up a car while running from police, has plastic surgery to reconstruct his burned and broken face ............ shall I go on?

Okay, let's go - more crazy follows - detectives, extradition, false charges, a bizarre trial and a capital crime conviction. Noir wrecks lives, but this is extreme even for noir. Watch the first half for an outstanding movie and the second half to see what happens when screenwriters decide to just go all-in with the crazy. And watch it for Sheridan - while she has less screen time than Smith, she's the glue that holds it all together with an outstanding and nuanced performance (plus you can't take your eyes off her).


----------



## Peak and Pine

Fading Fast said:


> Has this become the general movie thread - "I saw this, " "I like that" movie, despite it's title, or is there another...


There is one other. The Geatest Movie Ever That Shaver Saw. When clicking it, Google Translate also pops up.


----------



## Shaver

Peak and Pine said:


> There is one other. The Geatest Movie Ever That Shaver Saw. When clicking it, Google Translate also pops up.


An extraordinarily droll witticism - its power remains wholly undiminished despite the repeated presentation.

Please do regale us further with this priceless quip again, sometime soon.


----------



## Mr. B. Scott Robinson

Fading Fast said:


> ⇧ Thank you.
> 
> My last two ⇩
> 
> *To Have and Have Not* from 1944 with Bogie, Bacall, Walter Brennan and Hoagy Carmichael (apparently, Ian Fleming's visual ideal for Bond!)
> 
> This is a very good movie that was even better when it was first made as *Casablanca*. I'm only the ten-millionth person to note that, but it's such an obvious rip-off that it hurts ,not helps, the movie as one is forced to see and judge the comparisons.
> 
> So, here goes: Carmichael is really good as the piano player as is Brennan as the alchy, but combined they are no Sam / Frenchy is no Captain Renault / other than being really fat, Captain Renard is no Signor Ferrari / Bogie as Harry is not as complex as Rick nor is his transition to freedom fighter as powerful / the closing scenes of friends going off to fight for the allies aren't even worthy of comparison / the *To Have and Have Not* sets are obviously fake versus *Casablanca's* better done fakes / Letters of Transit trump Harbor Passes / but I'll concede that Bacall wrestles Bergman to a draw.
> 
> There's more, but you get it. A good movie diminished by its shining progenitor.
> 
> ***************************************************************
> 
> *Nora Prentiss* from 1947 with Ann Sheridan and Kent Smith
> 
> Up until the crazy starts to happen about half way through, this is solid noir as a successful and, seemingly, happily married San Francisco physician (Smith) with two kids slow walks himself into an affair with a patient (smoldering Sheridan).
> 
> You get it, Smith's wife (and life) isn't bad - she's a good mother and decent wife - she's just become tone deaf to her husband's subtle cries for help (he's painfully bored with the social routine she pushes on him). Add in a mind-numbingly repetitive daily routine, his wife's rejection (again) of his requests for adventure and the usual pressures from work and kids and you see that beneath his mild and seemingly contented exterior is a man ready to break.
> 
> In walks (well faints - she's a patient) adventure in a killer body with long, flowing hair (versus his wife's tied-up-tighter-than-a-drum do) and all the pieces are in place. But still - and kudos to both the writers and director, Vincent Sherman, for this - the affair doesn't blast off [] as it does in most noirs, as both Smith and Sheridan try not to let it happen.
> 
> You almost wonder if the story is going in a different direction as Smith and Sheridan pull back several times before the affair finally happens, which is so much more real than the usual "meet and immediately forget everything important in our lives so that we can have sex" formula. But once the Rubicon's been crossed, things start to spiral in the usual bad direction: wife suspects, husband covers up and lies (while work slips and friends are insulted), the cheaters agree to stop (several times) but fail until it comes to a full boil.
> 
> Here, this excellent noir descends into crazytown. (Spoiler alert) Smith, lacking the will to divorce his wife, but unable to give up Sheridan, fakes his own death by using the body of an obscure patient who conveniently drops dead in his office. He then lies to Sheridan (who sincerely does't want to break up Smith's home) that he is getting a divorce, but convinces her to move across country to NYC with him until it is "all settled." (Gotta love a noir that takes place in the twin capital cities of noirdom.)
> 
> Now in NYC, Smith all but hides out in a hotel with Sheridan who doesn't understand his name change or fear of being seen. As the tension in their relationship rises - helped along by her relationship with an old friend and eligible bachelor - Smith falls into a jealous rage, tries to kill the friend (but doesn't), steals and smashes up a car while running from police, has plastic surgery to reconstruct his burned and broken face ............ shall I go on?
> 
> Okay, let's go - more crazy follows - detectives, extradition, false charges, a bizarre trial and a capital crime conviction. Noir wrecks lives, but this is extreme even for noir. Watch the first half for an outstanding movie and the second half to see what happens when screenwriters decide to just go all-in with the crazy. And watch it for Sheridan - while she has less screen time than Smith, she's the glue that holds it all together with an outstanding and nuanced performance (plus you can't take your eyes off her).


An interesting study comparing THAHN to Casablanca, arguably one of the top 5 movies ever made.

Hemingway published THAHN in 1937. The writing of the play "Everyone Comes to Ricks", on which Casablanca was based, wasn't written till 1938. One of those situations where the zeitgeist created two similar but different versions of the same type of tale with WWII on the horizon.
Is everyone aware of how many astronaut movies are coming out now that the 50th anniversary of the moon landing is coming soon?

But Warner certainly had the big box office of Casablanca in mind when making THAHN.

Cheers,

BSR


----------



## Fading Fast

Mr. B. Scott Robinson said:


> An interesting study comparing THAHN to Casablanca, arguably one of the top 5 movies ever made.
> 
> Hemingway published THAHN in 1937. The writing of the play "Everyone Comes to Ricks", on which Casablanca was based, wasn't written till 1938. One of those situations where the zeitgeist created two similar but different versions of the same type of tale with WWII on the horizon.
> Is everyone aware of how many astronaut movies are coming out now that the 50th anniversary of the moon landing is coming soon?
> 
> But Warner certainly had the big box office of Casablanca in mind when making THAHN.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> BSR


Fair point - quite often, for the reasons you note, similar movies get made. It's been a long time since I read THAHN, but my distant memory of the book says that Hollywood changed the THAHN story from the book to much more resemble the *Casablanca* story. A more accurate adaptation of the book was done in 1950 as the movie "The Breaking Point," which is a really good movie with two of my favorite stars - John Garfield and Patricia Neal (and, also, the underrated Phyllis Thaxter).


----------



## Peak and Pine

Shaver said:


> An extraordinarily droll witticism - its power remains wholly undiminished despite the repeated presentation.


Certain bon mots cry out for additional airings, tho I was unaware this one had aired prior. Chalk it up to advanced age and the difficulty in finding good weed. My apologies. Drinks at my place, maybe darts.


----------



## ran23

Starting 22 Bullets right now.


----------



## Mr. B. Scott Robinson

Fading Fast said:


> Fair point - quite often, for the reasons you note, similar movies get made. It's been a long time since I read THAHN, but my distant memory of the book says that Hollywood changed the THAHN story from the book to much more resemble the *Casablanca* story. A more accurate adaptation of the book was done in 1950 as the movie "The Breaking Point," which is a really good movie with two of my favorite stars - John Garfield and Patricia Neal (and, also, the underrated Phyllis Thaxter).


I just finished reading Across the River and Into the trees, so I am on a Hemingway kick at the moment.

The copy I read was a first edition I borrowed and brought home from the private library of a castle I stayed in while visiting Burgundy. I now have the book and the burning moral imperative to return to the castle to have it placed back on the shelf before being charged overdue book fees. I am currently scheduled to return the summer of 2021.

However, I will see the owner in a few weeks here in Atlanta and can make the repatriation in person.

Cheers,

BSR


----------



## Fading Fast

*Dunkirk* from 1958 (not 2017)

In 1942's *Mrs. Miniver, *the Dunkirk evacuation scene is emotionally and patriotically pitch perfect - any Englishman with any kind of motorboat selflessly risks his life and property joining a heroic flotilla of civilian ships evacuating the trapped-on-the-French-coast British Expeditionary Force allowing it to live to fight another day for an on-its-heels England. In '42, a lift-your-spirits story was the right movie at the right time.

By 2017, some movies had become like avant-garde food - deconstructed so much so that they lost the point of the meal. 2017's *Dunkirk *brought you pieces of a great war movie - incredible in-the-action cinematography, gut-wrenchingly pointless loss of life, moments of heroism and moments of selfishness and the feeling that something _big_ was going on - but if you didn't know the historical facts and context of The Battle of Dunkirk, the movie was like walking into the middle of a video game where you didn't understand who was fighting whom and why.

Sandwich between these two efforts is 1958's *Dunkirk *- a traditional movie more than a decade removed from the war and thus able to step back from *Mrs. Miniver's* pure propaganda. To be sure, it's an English film (from the wonderful Ealing Studios) with England's military and civilians as heroes, but with the honesty to show some war profiteering, small mindedness and senseless loss of life as well.

Employing an almost documentary style, the movie moves back and forth between the soldiers trapped on the French coast (almost reversing a future "Saving Private Ryan" by showing a small unit, under fire, retreating from inland France to the beach redoubt) and the civilians back at home slowly absorbing the news of the potential colossal loss of its expeditionary force while realizing that any hope lies with a quick marshaling of its civilian boats and owners in an unprecedented effort to save its trapped soldiers.

The movie shines at "small" moments - soldiers selflessly sacrificing themselves to allow the larger unit to safely retreat and boat owners - hours ago safely eating dinner at home - under fire from German Stukas but still motoring into battle. It also provides a moral / religious context - normal for the time - for the the battle and sacrifice that defined the 20th Century. It only lacked that one touch-you-to-your-core moment of the armada sailing into view that* Mrs. Miniver* delivered perfectly - but heck, you can always watch both movies.

N.B., For time travel, the movie's military equipment, architecture, cars, boats and clothes (the Navy sweaters and duffle coats are still being copied today ⇩) are pure joy.


----------



## SG_67

realizing this thread is to encompass more than just war movies, it does appear to have ventured in that direction, even if but for a moment. But given we are in that moment, I will nominate the 1966 Italian film “The Battle of Algiers”. 

Any movie banned by an entire country must have at least a ring of truth to it that cannot be flattering. 

It is perhaps the most realistic and complex movie about war and armed conflict in general. Fictionalized as it may be, it is nonetheless as good as any documentary taking no sides and exposing the poor strategic judgements that eventually lead to death and in the end, prove to be utterly futile in the achievement of the objective.


----------



## culverwood

Mrs Miniver is such a great film. Wonderful propaganda. Churchill said it was worth more than a flotilla of destroyers. Gobells wrote "Mrs Miniver shows the destiny of a family during the current war, and its refined powerful propagandistic tendency has up to now only been dreamed of. There is not a single angry word spoken against Germany; nevertheless the anti-German tendency is perfectly accomplished."


----------



## Corcovado

As an aside (rather than a comment about my favorite movie ever), there's a good 1953 British war movie called "Malta Story" starring Alec Guinness. Watching it, I was struck here and there with themes, moments, and scenes that must've caught the attention of George Lucas when he was dreaming up Star Wars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malta_Story


----------



## Fading Fast

*The Glass Key* from 1942 with Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake and Brian Donlevy


We think of that era (the '40s) as a more innocent time, but this movie's entire premise is that, in a major city, the mob completely controls the politicians while the mob and politicians, combined, completely control and corrupt the police and DA's office - pause on that for a moment - as a major Hollywood release, this movie hardly argues that America was or saw itself as innocent


Adding to the "innocent time" canard - William Bendix plays a sociopathic mob "enforcer" who clearly lives for torturing and killing others (Tarantino could of thought this guy up)


I've seen this movie several times and could probably suss out the real plot if I had to, but it's not worth the effort (think "The Big Sleep" or any Hitchcock movie); instead, you "get it," mobsters and corrupt politicians fight and form temporary alliances at the expense of the public and, as noted, with the police in their pockets - meanwhile, ever guy wants to sleep with Veronica Lake - the real fun is watching the style and passion of it / the details don't matter


Veronica Lake is ridiculously beautiful, but I'm challenging her IMDB height of 5'2" and making the over-under 5' and my money's leaning to under


Maybe it was only Hollywood, but the mobsters and politicians dress as if they had stepped out of an Apparel Arts spread - there's even a long scene where a mid-level mob guy (Ladd) is packing to move and he has a wardrobe of suits, ties, etc. to rival Beau Brummell - and he's not considered a dandy - it argues the entire culture around clothes and dressing for men was just that different from today


When I was a kid, well before I knew what "film noir" was, I liked this movie as, dated as aspect are, it holds up because it puts real human nature on display - integrity, corruption, friendship, cheating, sexual passion, and on and on - it's all there in a real and raw way


Sure, now, I know it's called "noir," but that's whatever, it works because it's just a heck of good movie

N.B., *The Glass Key* is a solid film version of a Dashiell Hammett novel; also, it's one of four pairings of Ladd and Lake (my favorite is probably *The Blue Dahlia*, but every movie they are in together is good).


----------



## Fading Fast

*The Highwaymen* from 2019 with Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson

As always with these "historical" movies, there's a lot of back and forth about the accuracy, which I'll leave for other who can talk to that much, much better than I can.

I go into all of these type of movies assuming they'll play fast and loose with the facts - which is another way of saying that I look to get my historical facts elsewhere - so I just try to take these movies as they come.

And that way, I liked, didn't love, this one. The two things that worked well were the period details and the Costner-Harrelson relationship.

On the period details - I'm sure there are plenty of inaccuracy that many here will spot, but I'm not that good at it and simply enjoyed the beautiful time-travel of it all. From filing cabinets, mailboxes and gas stations to cars, planes and office buildings (with wonderfully high ceilings, wide hallways and windows everywhere) - it felt like a pretty real trip to a thoughtfully curated 1930s.

But the core of the movie is the Costner-Harrelson relationship arguing that, sometimes, plots and stories - even important historical ones - exist only to frame what really matters - the human drama. Acknowledging some cliches and easy fixes, Costner and Harrelson humanized the renascent friendship of two older men - friends that had fallen out of touch and whose lives had gone in different directions - similarly to what Eastwood and Freeman did in *Million Dollar Baby*.

As the kids say, IRL, friends lose touch, but the friendship is still there just waiting to come back. You see it in the trust Costner and Harrelson have for each other, in their easy banter, their ability to pick on each other but knowing where the lines are and, when necessary, their willingness to push the line to help the other. It's complex, sometimes challenging, but also life at its best.

If I had trekked to the movie theater - and paid movie theater prices (in NYC, for two, it's approaching $30) - I'd have grumbled a bit, but in a "hey, what do you want to watch tonight from our couch" scenario, it is an enjoyable enough couple of hours highlighted by two acting pros bringing a complex old friendship to life amidst a lot of period eye candy.

N.B., Maybe not the "real" Bonnie and Clyde story (whatever that is at this point), but* The* *Highwaymen* at least helps erase the horrible memory of Hollywood's last B&C effort, 2013's *Bonnie & Clyde, *whose singular redeeming feature was Nico Vega's outstanding cover of *Bang Bang*.


----------



## Fading Fast

Nightmare Alley from 1947 with Tyrone Power, Joan Blondell, Coleen Gray (⇧) and Helen Walker

This is what you get when you move noir off the gritty streets of NYC or San Fran and drop it in - let's just say it - the always-a-bit-creepy world of traveling carnivals.

With classic and slightly menacing carnival music playing on in the background, we meet Power's character - an abused orphan with Christianity beaten into his brain but not heart - now a young man and trying to find fame and fortune by convincing a former husband and wife (Blondell) "mentalist" team (as in "what am I holding in my hand oh great Santini" / "it is a blue purse") to teach him their valuable word code so that they can rebuild the act, now-struggling owing to the husband's alcoholism.

Power is a force of nature who, in a "did he / didn't he" scene equal to the tree-branch-diving scene from A Separate Peace, supplies the alcohol that finishes off the husband allowing Power to partner with the ex-wife (one of several women he's, umm, on friendly terms with throughout the story).

From here you need a score card as pitches and hits pile up quickly including a forced marriage for Power to a beautiful and loyal wife (Coleen Gray, we should all be forced into this type of marriage), fame and money flowing in from the resurrected act, a psychiatrist/con artist partnering with and playing Power for big-time money from the society world they both now traffic in, dizzying heights of success, moral qualms for the wife, con-games wrapped inside con-games, gunfire, cops, last-minute escapes and a gut wrenching, full-on-noir fall back to the gutter with dreams shattered, lives broken and a Christian ethic marginally resurrected or, at least, reaching a hand into the pit of despair to offer a way up.

If noir at its best is dark atmosphere combined with dark souls motivated by dark morals rising and falling in a brutal world of rough justice or no justice or, just maybe, biblical justice that's hard to see amidst the darkness, then Nightmare Alley belongs up near the top of the list of noir greats.

N.B., Nightmare Alley has a darn good con-gets-conned scenario highlighting an amazing contradiction of the con world: a con can get conned, but it takes a better one as - at some crazy level - the great cons almost believe their own lies, which makes them susceptible to an even better con's lies. And in this case, wrap the meta-con inside the beautiful and smarter-than-Power Helen Walker (who plays a femme fatale with a frightening charm that can turn on a dime into vicious selfishness) and womanizing Power doesn't really stand a chance.










(Originally posted by accident in the What Are You Reading Thread - sorry.)


----------



## Shaver

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 32429
> 
> 
> Nightmare Alley from 1947 with Tyrone Power, Joan Blondell, Coleen Gray (⇧) and Helen Walker
> 
> This is what you get when you move noir off the gritty streets of NYC or San Fran and drop it in - let's just say it - the always-a-bit-creepy world of traveling carnivals.
> 
> With classic and slightly menacing carnival music playing on in the background, we meet Power's character - an abused orphan with Christianity beaten into his brain but not heart - now a young man and trying to find fame and fortune by convincing a former husband and wife (Blondell) "mentalist" team (as in "what am I holding in my hand oh great Santini" / "it is a blue purse") to teach him their valuable word code so that they can rebuild the act, now-struggling owing to the husband's alcoholism.
> 
> Power is a force of nature who, in a "did he / didn't he" scene equal to the tree-branch-diving scene from A Separate Peace, supplies the alcohol that finishes off the husband allowing Power to partner with the ex-wife (one of several women he's, umm, on friendly terms with throughout the story).
> 
> From here you need a score card as pitches and hits pile up quickly including a forced marriage for Power to a beautiful and loyal wife (Coleen Gray, we should all be forced into this type of marriage), fame and money flowing in from the resurrected act, a psychiatrist/con artist partnering with and playing Power for big-time money from the society world they both now traffic in, dizzying heights of success, moral qualms for the wife, con-games wrapped inside con-games, gunfire, cops, last-minute escapes and a gut wrenching, full-on-noir fall back to the gutter with dreams shattered, lives broken and a Christian ethic marginally resurrected or, at least, reaching a hand into the pit of despair to offer a way up.
> 
> If noir at its best is dark atmosphere combined with dark souls motivated by dark morals rising and falling in a brutal world of rough justice or no justice or, just maybe, biblical justice that's hard to see amidst the darkness, then Nightmare Alley belongs up near the top of the list of noir greats.
> 
> N.B., Nightmare Alley has a darn good con-gets-conned scenario highlighting an amazing contradiction of the con world: a con can get conned, but it takes a better one as - at some crazy level - the great cons almost believe their own lies, which makes them susceptible to an even better con's lies. And in this case, wrap the meta-con inside the beautiful and smarter-than-Power Helen Walker (who plays a femme fatale with a frightening charm that can turn on a dime into vicious selfishness) and womanizing Power doesn't really stand a chance.
> 
> View attachment 32430
> 
> 
> (Originally posted by accident in the What Are You Reading Thread - sorry.)


Nightmare Alley ranks amongst my favourite Noir.

After the initial cinema run concluded, c. 1948, a turbulent dispute between the producer, George Jessel, and 20th Century Fox prevented the movie both from being screened and from being released on any home format until 2005. This lengthy lack of availability doubtless impeded the movie which failed to achieve the wider recognition and stature of which it is so richly deserving.

The scene in which a geek reenacts his former glory as a succesful fortune teller but substituting a gin bottle for the crystal ball is extraordinarily powerful, emblematic of the claustrophobic unease and hubristic tragedy which permeates the entire tale.


----------



## Fading Fast

Shaver said:


> Nightmare Alley ranks amongst my favourite Noir.
> 
> After the initial cinema run concluded, c. 1948, a turbulent dispute between the producer, George Jessel, and 20th Century Fox prevented the movie both from being screened and from being released on any home format until 2005. This lengthy lack of availability doubtless impeded the movie which failed to achieve the wider recognition and stature of which it is so richly deserving.
> 
> The scene in which a geek reenacts his former glory as a succesful fortune teller but substituting a gin bottle for the crystal ball is extraordinarily powerful, emblematic of the claustrophobic unease and hubristic tragedy which permeates the entire tale.


Probably, in part, because of the issues you note, I never saw this one until just recently. I was - as I tried to reflect in my comments - very impressed.

Power was outstanding as was old-pro Blondell and the very attractive Walker and Gray.

Also as you note - there's a Greek Tragedy or Biblical Fall permeating the entire movie which gives it greater meaning than your average low-life noir story.

I'm looking forward to seeing it again when, I'm sure, I'll get much more out of it.


----------



## Peak and Pine

Fading Fast said:


> Probably, in part, because of the issues you note, I never saw this one until just recently. I was - as I tried to reflect in my comments - very impressed.
> 
> Power was outstanding as was old-pro Blondell and the very attractive Walker and Gray.
> 
> Also as you note - there's a Greek Tragedy or Biblical Fall permeating the entire movie which gives it greater meaning than your average low-life noir story.
> 
> I'm looking forward to seeing it again when, I'm sure, I'll get much more out of it.


Have not seen the film or ever knew it was a film, but remember seeing the book in a bookcase when I was a little boy and the title, on its side, being one of the first things I could read and asking my mother about it. She told me some of it and the book soon disappeared from its usual spot and I remember being scared by something called a geek who bit the heads off of live chickens and swallowed (and wondering years later how tech nerds could come to embrace such a name).

The World of Mirth, a 50 car train carnival, would come to town every two years and I would be taken to it (glorious) and I would always think about that geek thing, but the law or good sense had stopped it by then.

$5.28, including shipping. Just bought the DVD on eBay.


----------



## Fading Fast

.

*Daughters Courageous* from 1939 with Fay Bainter, Claud Rains, John Garfield, three Lane sisters and Donald Crisp

If Hallmark movies had some bite, they'd be more like *Daughters Courageous*.

Twenty years ago, husband (Rains) deserted his wife and four infant daughters, but when we join the family today - living in a wonderful home up on a cliff overlooking the ocean - they've long since overcome that blow and are happily looking forward to their middle-aged mom's (Bainter) coming nuptials to an unassuming local banker (Crisp), while several of the daughters are dating nice young men - all a little too Hallmark at this point

But it does work as the daughters' infectious energy - led by the eldest, the insanely cute Buff Masters (played by Priscilla Lane)* - draws you into their world - the girls are in community plays or chasing boys or going swimming or riding or something with such enthusiasm that you're excited for then. And of course, it's all amped up now owing to their mother's pending marriage to a man the girls clearly embrace as a father figure.

But then two disrupting winds blow into their lives: Global-vagabond pater returns while local bad-boy (Garfield) catches the eye of ring-leader sister Buff. Rains, the father, is back, he tells us, worn out from his wandering and looking to reclaim his family while Garfield plays the youthful doppleganger of Rains - a young man with too much wanderlust to take on conventional roles - worker, boyfriend, husband, etc.

You get all of that in about the first half hour and then watch it unfold. It's more than surface happy in this family as you believe the good will and positive outlook of the aptly titled Daughters Courageous is not just surface deep. They face these life-changing challenges with quiet grit, a strong moral compass and an open mind - all a testament to the love and considered upbringing provided by their mother.

Will the mother step away from her stable banker fiancee to remarry Rains (he asks her to) who is darn charming as the contrite wayward husband and father returned home to make good? Will Buff - all sunshine-and-happiness Buff - run away with sardonic Garfield, potentially repeating her mother's mistake? The tension rises just enough and the uncertainty holds throughout to keep you engaged and to keep this one from being too easy / too predictable / too Hallmark to enjoy.

* It's not often when you can replace a character's name for his or her real-life name and come away with the same affect, but, in this case, either name - Priscilla Lane or Buff Masters - works as both scream 1930s American girl next door. I think Buff Masters has a bit more punch, but either one fits Ms. Lane's apple-pie looks and general sparkle to a tee.


----------



## jamieereynoldss

For me this is Interstellar.


----------



## Fading Fast

*The Aftermath* from 2019 with Kiera Knightly, Jason Clarke and Alexander Skarsgård

Some movies just never reach escape velocity as you keep waiting for the promising early scenes, plot developments and characters to come together in a compelling way...but sometimes they just don't.

And the elements are all here in this one including a good setting - just-defeated-in-WWII Germany with an almost ghost-like population of underfed and shellshocked civilians shuffling amidst the rubble of the Allied bombing - some attempting to clean up and rebuild, others just wandering aimlessly.

There's also a promising story - the Commander (Clarke) of the British Zone moves with his just-come-over-from-England wife (Knightly) into a former wealthy German architect's (Skarsgård) home (the house is incredible).

Early tension rises as the English couple is still grieving the loss of their young son to German bombing while the German owner (living with his daughter in the attic owing to the kindness of the English couple; otherwise, it's off to a detention camp for them) lost his wife in the war.

Upping that early stress, the English Commander is dealing with the "88" mini-rebellion of diehard nazis - killing English soldiers - while living under the same roof with a potential former nazi (we don't know yet).

But after that set up - not much unexpected or compelling happens. By now, we're familiar with post-war complexity undermining war-time moral clarity - are underfed Germans getting what they deserve? / was Allied bombing unfairly indiscriminate? / were there actually any Germans who were nazis during the war? - challenging issues, but no fresh insights are offered up here.

Throw in some obligatory infidelity and gratuitous sex scenes, a lot of brooding, some boorish behavior, a not believable ending and cut to the credits. The period details (as almost always today) are amazing - Kiera Knightly was born to wear '40s clothes - but are not enough to make this anything other than a watch-and-forget movie.


----------



## ran23

just starting Invisible child, did a search for 'invisible' may not be worth it.


----------



## Shaver

ran23 said:


> just starting Invisible child, did a search for 'invisible' may not be worth it.


Unless, of course, that search returns The Invisible Man.

Of the big 6 classic Universal Horrors Dracula, Mummy, Wolfman and the 2 Frankenstein flicks are rightly lauded (and if one has not viewed the recent[ish] restorations then one has not truly seen them) but Whales' masterpiece isn't, as some would have it, Bride of rather it is Rains' remarkable turn as Jack Griffin. The spectacular effects - which remain so despite this era of *ugh* cgi - taut plot, witty dialogue and manic acting provide a mesmerising portrayal of psychological disintegration bestowing an experience that is fresh and fearsome despite the nigh on 90 years since first release.

"The drugs I took seemed to light up my brain. Suddenly I realized the power I held, the power to rule, to make the world grovel at my feet".


----------



## Fading Fast

*Niagara* from 1953 with Marylin Monroe, Joseph Cotton, Jean Peters and Max Showalter

I always expect to - and want to - like this one more than I do. It checks so many boxes - film noir(ish), beautiful and exotic locale, decent story, solid actors and great time travel - and it always receives high ratings, but I'm always a bit underwhelmed.

Maybe it's because I don't really feel that bad for Cotton as the (we assume) veteran experiencing some form of PTSD that is worsened by his accurate belief that his wife is cheating on him. He loses my support when he tells us he knew exactly what she was - a cheating dancehall girl - when he married her. Sure, she could have been less mean to him (and maybe even have helped him if she had been a decent person), but he knew exactly what he was getting: You are responsible for your voluntary choices and actions in this world and marrying a cheating dancehall girl is not a path to happiness.

Maybe it's because the husband (Showalter) of the vacationing couple drawn into Cotton-and-Monroe's world over acts by trying to be some sort of caricature of a super-friendly, glad-handing salesman who never turns it off except when he explodes in anger, perhaps built up during his forced overly friendly periods.

Maybe it's because the only character I like and care about - and the one giving the strongest performance - is Peters as the salesman's wife (you have to wonder what the heck made her agree to marry him) who tries to help Cotton and Monroe even as she begins to see their train wreck of a marriage for what it is (unfortunately, she remains blind to her husband throughout).

And lastly, maybe it's because Marilyn is just too "Marilyn" in this one - boomeranging from sexpot on steroid to wounded bird and back too many times and only revealing her character's, seemingly, true self all too briefly (but showing real acting talent when she does).

All that said, if you go in with modest expectations, it's a good movie with incredible time travel to mid-'50s Niagara Falls - cars, clothes, Art Deco architecture, tourist cabins and the Falls themselves are wonderfully showcased. And there's this: you could learn a lot about a man by knowing if he prefers Monroe or Peters in this movie and a woman by if she'd rather be Monroe or Peters.

I have nothing much to say about director Henry Hathaway other than that I felt he dragged some scenes out too long and, I checked, was disappointed to find that he doesn't seem related to the Hathaway shirt company in any way.









Monroe and Peters


----------



## Vecchio Vespa

We recently saw _Yesterday. _It was far from a best movie ever, but you could make a good case for the soundtrack, even though my tastes in that regard would give the nod to _Elvira Madigan _or _Slaughterhouse Five_. _Yesterday _was a very pleasant flick with a few quirky questions over which to noodle.


----------



## eagle2250

Tonight, after dinner, we will be watching the Top Gun DVD with the kids and grandkids (and a few of their friends) to get us all prepared for the June 2020 release of the Top Gun: Maverick sequel. It sure took em long enough to put out a sequel! Many actors just seem to come and go, but Tom Cruise just keeps making bacon.


----------



## Shaver

eagle2250 said:


> Tonight, after dinner, we will be watching the Top Gun DVD with the kids and grandkids (and a few of their friends) to get us all prepared for the June 2020 release of the Top Gun: Maverick sequel. It sure took em long enough to put out a sequel! Many actors just seem to come and go, but Tom Cruise just keeps making bacon.


You are aware of the subtext of this movie?


----------



## Cassadine

SG_67 said:


> Last night, watched the following in succession:
> 
> 1) The Guns of Navarone
> 2) The Great Escape
> 3) The Bridge on the River Kwai
> 
> Any one of them The Best? I'm sure the advocates could argue for or against as appropriate.
> 
> As a trifecta of movies made about WWII, certainly among the best.


Outstanding trio, there.


----------



## Cassadine

I cannot vote for a "best", as wha entertains me always depends on my mood at the time of viewing. However...

Comedy--_Duck Soup_ and _Annie Hall _are tough to beat.

Crime Drama-- _Godfather Trilogy_--watching Michael Corleone's character develop is incredible.

Biographical Drama--_Amadeus_ cannot be topped--if one overlooks the historical insanity and inaccuracies on two major points: 1. Mozart did not compose via "dictation"--no one does 
2. Salieri did not kill Mozart--see Maynard Solomon's fine bio. Shaffer should've just created fictional characters. But F. Murray Abraham's performance was for the ages.

_Quiz Show_ must be allocated its due.

Sci-Fi--_Alien_ (first installment) and original _Blade Runne_r run neck and neck.

War-- I'd have to go with _Patton_ with a long list of runner-ups.

Film that scared me the most--Dario Argento's _Deep Red_. I snuck in the summer after 8th Grade--had nightmares for weeks.

The film most impacting me sartorially is _American Gigolo_--it came out my senior year in high school-- I cut my hair the next day and asked for a Nino Cerruti light blue 3 piece pinstripe for a grad gift!

Best Movie Never Made-- Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson as a gritty pair of urban detectives.

Superhero--_Batman Begins_

However, regarding the numerous _Batman _films, I can honestly say they're all woefully inaccurate. I make this assertion because... _I AM BATMAN. _


----------



## Mr. B. Scott Robinson

Read this am that Gone With the Wind is the top grossing film of all time if considering nothing but total ticket sales. This makes adjusting for inflation an easier calculation.

Cheers,

BSR


----------



## Fading Fast

Mr. B. Scott Robinson said:


> Read this am that Gone With the Wind is the top grossing film of all time if considering nothing but total ticket sales. This makes adjusting for inflation an easier calculation.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> BSR


I saw that too - pretty cool. It did have the advantage of being a movie at a time when movie theaters didn't have to compete with TV, gaming, streaming, social media, Youtube, etc., but still, it's neat.


----------



## eagle2250

I thought the more recent movie Avatar held that honor, but now that that disillusionment has been wiped clean from my eyes by the sage counsel offered in the two posts above! However, quoting the late, great Clark Gable, "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn!" LOL.


----------



## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> I thought the more recent movie Avatar held that honor, but now that that disillusionment has been wiped clean from my eyes by the sage counsel offered in the two posts above! However, quoting the late, great Clark Gable, "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn!" LOL.


In nominal dollars, "Avatar" held the title until this past weekend when "Avengers: Endgame" past it - which is why all these "highest grossing movies of all time" articles are popping up.


----------



## Shaver

The actor (and co writer) of one of the great moments in one of the greatest films has passed away.

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.

I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.

All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

Time to die."

He did questionable things but nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you in heaven for.

RIP Mr Hauer.


----------



## SG_67

Fading Fast said:


> In nominal dollars, "Avatar" held the title until this past weekend when "Avengers: Endgame" past it - which is why all these "highest grossing movies of all time" articles are popping up.


What a dreadful piece of cinematic crap, Avatar.


----------



## Shaver

SG_67 said:


> What a dreadful piece of cinematic crap, Avatar.


I have viewed this movie and found it to be reasonably entertaining. I was rooting for Quaritch and the RDA forces as they unleashed their overwhelming firepower and reduced the dirt-worshipping space-hippies and their laughable tree-house to smithereens. However, bewilderingly, one is apparently supposed to side with Jake and Grace, who have (quite literally) gone native. The ending was rather bleak, with the forces of ignorance prevailing and the traitors in ascendancy, but I understand that a sequel is in the offing and so perhaps the loathsome practises of Eywa and the Na'vi will be obliterated by reason and technology in this next instalment?


----------



## Fading Fast

*That Kind of Woman* from 1959 with Tab Hunter, Sofia Loren, Jack Warden, George Sanders and Keenan Wynn - a heck of a cast.

Tab Hunter stars in a solid movie and his acting is professional. There, I said it. Hunter's no Spencer Tracy and *That Kind of Woman* is no *Casablanca*, but go in with reasonable expectations and it's a solid hour and half spent in front of a screen.

But it's also no *Pillow Talk*. Instead, it's much closer to *Sweet Smell of Success* as Hunter and Ward play Marines on leave during WWII taking a train from Miami to NYC where they meet two kept women, Loren, Loren's friend - and an older man (Keenan) traveling with them in a sorta guardian manner.

The implication is that Loren and her friend have been at this game for years and with several men. Think about that for a moment in the context of the movie being released in the 1950s. Ward immediately gets it, but Hunter is the innocent Vermont farm boy who initially just sees Loren as a beautiful bird in some kind of trouble.

Hunter and Loren spend the night on the train together - as noted, it's no *Pillow Talk* - with Hunter wanting Loren to stay with him during his leave. She tells him the unvarnished score - she's lives with an older man for his money and she won't give it up for, said derisively by Loren, "love".

After Loren leaves Hunter at Penn Station in NYC, Hunter goes on an urban vision quest, sometimes aided by Ward, to find Loren and change her mind. Little is held back as we see Loren's gilded cage - Sutton Place uber luxury provided dispassionately but not abusively by Sanders who, recognizing that he might lose Loren, offers to marry her. Hunter counters with his own offer of marriage - no money, little prospect, but genuine love and decency in the hills of Vermont (assuming he survives the war).

The climax - stripped down to its essential - is a will-she-won't-she moment starkly framed by Loren's choice between a transactional, loveless, but not mean-spirited marriage providing wealth and security and a leap-of-faith-marriage to earnest Hunter, providing nothing but the love of a man, to help her face all of life's uncertainties. You have to watch the movie to get the answer as it isn't clear which way this noir-ish feeling movie dripping with cynicism from most everyone but Hunter will go.

And kudos to director Sidney Lumet who shows a shot-on-location NYC that, like the movie narrative, is alternately brutal and hopeful. Scenes of bucolic Central Park framed by soaring skyscrapers are interspersed with grubby street scenes of urban decay and poverty. Even Loren, younger in real life, looks older and a bit torn and frayed compared to freshly scrubbed and full-of-hope Hunter.

The Oscars didn't accidentally over look this movie or its acting, but most even good movies, like *That Kind of Woman*, aren't Oscar-worthy. What it does show, not unlike one or two early Elvis movie efforts, is that if pop-iconography hadn't interfered, Hunter might have had a chance to develop into a decent actor with a real career in movies - but alas, the thrall of America's teenagers had to be sated and another career was stillborn.


----------



## Mr. B. Scott Robinson

Fading Fast said:


> In nominal dollars, "Avatar" held the title until this past weekend when "Avengers: Endgame" past it - which is why all these "highest grossing movies of all time" articles are popping up.


That is why I like the direct comparison of total ticket sales. GWTW is the clear champ.

Cheers,

BSR


----------



## Fading Fast

Mr. B. Scott Robinson said:


> That is why I like the direct comparison of total ticket sales. GWTW is the clear champ.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> BSR


Agreed. And even there, since the population was so much smaller, it's still not apples to apples. And another factor - arguing the other way - there were fewer entertainment options back then.

But I'm with you, taking into account everything one can and recognizing that no perfect comparison exists, I'd say GWTW is still box office champ.


----------



## Fading Fast

*The Last Hurrah* from 1958 with Spencer Tracy, Jeffrey Hunter, Pat O'Brien, Donald Crisp and on and on - great cast.

It's a good movie about politics, just not as good as it thinks it is and not as good as the numerous better political movies that, in only a few years, were about to spill out of the early '60s - *Seven Days In May*, *Fail Safe*, *The Best Man* and more.

Long-time Irish mayor (Tracy) of (effectively, though it never says) Boston is running his last campaign against the candidate put forward by the "Brahmins" desirous to put the "Irish," "immigrants," "workers" back in their place by taking the reins of power back for the old Protestant order.

Fair enough story, but unfortunately, the writers and director John Ford stereotype out both sides - the working-class politicians and supporters are almost all goodhearted and decent; whereas, the Brahmins are cardboard evil - prejudice cheaters that quickly lose their temper when confronted.

Probably meant to represent the "big" issues in a personal way - Tracy's nephew (Hunter) is an "impartial" newspaper man who is dating one of the leading Brahmin's daughter, but he becomes close to Tracy during the campaign. Somehow it doesn't really work as, again, the issues are all too black and white, but it is enjoyable to see pros like Tracy and Hunter carry a scene.

It's a good effort, but like other '50s political movies, such as *Washington Story* or *Born Yesterday*, it doesn't dig deep enough into the dirty inner workings of politics or admit the compromises that even the "heroes" have to make to win, but it's still worth the viewing time for its quality of acting and fun time travel to the '50s.
​


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 33053
> 
> *That Kind of Woman* from 1959 with Tab Hunter, Sofia Loren, Jack Warden, George Sanders and Keenan Wynn - a heck of a cast.
> 
> Tab Hunter stars in a solid movie and his acting is professional. There, I said it. Hunter's no Spencer Tracy and *That Kind of Woman* is no *Casablanca*, but go in with reasonable expectations and it's a solid hour and half spent in front of a screen.
> 
> But it's also no *Pillow Talk*. Instead, it's much closer to *Sweet Smell of Success* as Hunter and Ward play Marines on leave during WWII taking a train from Miami to NYC where they meet two kept women, Loren, Loren's friend - and an older man (Keenan) traveling with them in a sorta guardian manner.
> 
> The implication is that Loren and her friend have been at this game for years and with several men. Think about that for a moment in the context of the movie being released in the 1950s. Ward immediately gets it, but Hunter is the innocent Vermont farm boy who initially just sees Loren as a beautiful bird in some kind of trouble.
> 
> Hunter and Loren spend the night on the train together - as noted, it's no *Pillow Talk* - with Hunter wanting Loren to stay with him during his leave. She tells him the unvarnished score - she's lives with an older man for his money and she won't give it up for, said derisively by Loren, "love".
> 
> After Loren leaves Hunter at Penn Station in NYC, Hunter goes on an urban vision quest, sometimes aided by Ward, to find Loren and change her mind. Little is held back as we see Loren's gilded cage - Sutton Place uber luxury provided dispassionately but not abusively by Sanders who, recognizing that he might lose Loren, offers to marry her. Hunter counters with his own offer of marriage - no money, little prospect, but genuine love and decency in the hills of Vermont (assuming he survives the war).
> 
> The climax - stripped down to its essential - is a will-she-won't-she moment starkly framed by Loren's choice between a transactional, loveless, but not mean-spirited marriage providing wealth and security and a leap-of-faith-marriage to earnest Hunter, providing nothing but the love of a man, to help her face all of life's uncertainties. You have to watch the movie to get the answer as it isn't clear which way this noir-ish feeling movie dripping with cynicism from most everyone but Hunter will go.
> 
> And kudos to director Sidney Lumet who shows a shot-on-location NYC that, like the movie narrative, is alternately brutal and hopeful. Scenes of bucolic Central Park framed by soaring skyscrapers are interspersed with grubby street scenes of urban decay and poverty. Even Loren, younger in real life, looks older and a bit torn and frayed compared to freshly scrubbed and full-of-hope Hunter.
> 
> The Oscars didn't accidentally over look this movie or its acting, but most even good movies, like *That Kind of Woman*, aren't Oscar-worthy. What it does show, not unlike one or two early Elvis movie efforts, is that if pop-iconography hadn't interfered, Hunter might have had a chance to develop into a decent actor with a real career in movies - but alas, the thrall of America's teenagers had to be sated and another career was stillborn.


Didn't Tab Hunter also make a movie in which he played a spoiled rotten rich kid who was given the choice of jail or the Army by a municipal court judge. The movie focused on his transition in basic training from a spoiled brat to a mature solder, with a meritorious promotion to corporal and a job assignment as a Drill Instructor!. I certainly remember the movie (well sort of), but I can't remember the title.


----------



## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> Didn't Tab Hunter also make a movie in which he played a spoiled rotten rich kid who was given the choice of jail or the Army by a municipal court judge. The movie focused on his transition in basic training from a spoiled brat to a mature solder, with a meritorious promotion to corporal and a job assignment as a Drill Instructor!. I certainly remember the movie (well sort of), but I can't remember the title.


"The Girl He Left Behind -" it's on my list. Next up, though, in the Tab Hunter world (I recorded a few when TCM ran a bunch) is "Battle Cry."


----------



## Fading Fast

*Thieve's Highway* from 1949 with Richard Conte (a young Barzini!) and Lee J. Cobb

I started to write a standard play-by-play and, then, realized nobody needs that for this movie. What you need to know is it's classic noir.

You have independent truckers - hardscrabble men in barebones trucks (there are no refrigerators, sleeping beds or air-conditioning in these death-traps) - fighting with their rigs, each other, shippers and buyers. There's also a corrupt wholesale market dealer (Cobb - born to play a noir bad guy as his aura speaks dirty business / dirty politics / dirty whatever is going on) who uses muscle, cops on the take and whores to bribe, lie, cheat and steal his way to wholesale market success.

There's a son on a mission to avenge his father who was crippled by Cobb while he also is trying to earn money to marry his girl-next-door-looking fiancee. He's the "hero" dipped into the slime of noir world and we watch voyeuristically to see if he can stay, kinda / sorta, clean as an alluring prostitute, corrupting money and a friend-cheating deal are all tossed his way.

And in classic noir fashion, the atmosphere, the streets, wholesale market and dark alleys of post-war San Francisco, share top billing as we see a city from its grimy side. Despite a slapped on "code-approved" ending, the more noir movies you see, the more you know all Americans weren't buying / nor was every studio selling the "happy '50s" story. Hollywood always liked money, so there had to be large demand for these seedy-side-of-life stories even during the "simple and good" '50s.


----------



## eagle2250

^^
My friend, you write such incredibly insightful, detailed and absolutely fascinating movie reviews...I always look forward to them and have never been disappointed! Thank you. Though, way back in the dregs of my memory, I seem to have a vague memory of seeing today's/yesterday's feature. :icon_scratch:


----------



## Fading Fast

*Pickup on South Street* from 1953 with Richard Widmark, Jean Peters and Thelma Ritter

_"That muffin you grifted, she's okay. Stuck her chin way out for yo_u." - Moe (Thelma Ritter)

Many Hitchcock films have noir elements, so it's only fair that some noirs have Hitchcock elements. In *Pickup on South Street,* a work-a-day pickpocket (Widmark) - not a bad guy if you ignore his career in thievery - picks the purse of a courier (Peters) who, unbeknownst to her or Widmark, was carrying secret film to a Communist cell operating out of NYC in the mid-'50s.

Because the FBI had her under surveillance, waiting to capture whomever she dropped her film off to, Widmark and Peters now find themselves in a noir version of the common Hitchcock plot device of an average man caught up in world events with everyone chasing a MacGuffin (in this one, it's film we know is important to the security of the United States, but we really don't care that much about the film itself).

It takes awhile to understand the plot and keep straight all the groups chasing Widmark and Peters - a few different government entities (including the FBI) plus members of the Communist cell - but as with a Hitchcock movie, all you really need to know is that some good guys and some bad guys are both looking for some innocents stuck in the middle, with the twist in this one being that the innocents are average noir bad guys who you still kinda root for as they seem unfairly trapped.

To be sure, this is the '50s, and writer/director Sam Fuller was commenting on America's anti-Communist fury (which, ironically, turned out to be a long-term gift to the left as that era's horrible persecution - which ruined innocent lives - is still regularly evoked as one of the left's most heroic moment and used as a forever cudgel to bludgeon the right). But in noir fashion, the movie's dismissive view toward any big morality is well captured with this exchange:

*Skip McCoy (pickpocket Widmark)*: "You boys are talking to the wrong corner. I'm just a guy keeping my hands in my own pockets."​*FBI Agent Zara*: "If you refuse to cooperate you'll be as guilty as the traitors who gave Stalin the A-bomb."​*Skip McCoy*: "Are you waving the flag at _me_?"​
Basically, Widmark as McCoy is derisively saying, "hey I'm on the fringe of your society; I got a chip on my shoulder about the US and the police and you want me to join forces with the same guys who want to lock me up because of Communism?" But despite his cynicism, most of the criminals are presented as having some sort of _omertà_ where normal criminal activity is fine, but they won't help the Commies.

You can spend as much or as little time as you want contemplating those big issues as the movie really works because of the things that almost always make a movie work: a few well-developed characters deal with life's real challenges in a compressed and dramatic fashion.

In addition to Widmark as an almost-likable pickpocket and Peters as the knocked-about tramp you want to believe in, it's Thelma Ritter - as a street snitch barely holding on (she'll sell info to the cops or other criminals, but not the Commies) - who brings the most humanity (broken as it is) to the movie while stealing every scene she's in.

As cops and Commies chase and pressure Widmark, Peters and Ritter - while also keeping a close eye on each other - Peters begins to fall for Widmark (Widmark takes longer) with Ritter being the only one who sees the whole picture - prompting the above opening quote where she tries to knock some sense into Widmark regarding Peters' loyalty. It's also just a beautiful example of noir argot as she tells Widmark the the muffin (girl) he grifted (pick pocketed) stuck her chin out hard for him (she took a beating, literally, instead of selling him out).

The on-location New York scenes - crowded and screeching subways, dilapidated docks, looming iconic bridges and seedy bars and tenements - are used by Fuller to maximum advantage. His dissolute and brooding vision of New York City increases the plot tension while framing the movie's moral relativism. And for us today, throw in the period clothes, cars and architecture and the time travel is outstanding. But even with that aside, this movie - its acting and Hitchcock-like plot and tension - stands on its own as a noir classic.

N.B.








⇧ Peters, a perfect film-noir woman - looks a bit dirty even while taking a bath.


----------



## Vecchio Vespa

I love Thelma Ritter, such a great foil to anyone.


----------



## Fading Fast

TKI67 said:


> I love Thelma Ritter, such a great foil to anyone.


This could be her best role - it's central to the story, complex and heartbreaking. She owns it.


----------



## Fading Fast

*Faithless* from 1932 with Tallulah Bankhead and Robert Montgomery 

Fast pre-code that's more morality tale than pre-code raunch


Spoiled, rich socialite Bankhead blames the poor for being poor and dismisses marriage to a middle-class guy (Montgomery) - "live without my many servants, never! -" before her money dries up in the depression


Then, reduced to being a kept woman by a former social "inferior," she begins to see the light and leaves him to marry the now poor, former middle-class guy


But there's one more big step down - hubby gets beaten up by union guys on strike when he takes a job as a replacement driver - so, Bankhead becomes a common street whore to pay for hubby's medicine


Being MGM and not Warners, the story is framed as an lesson to not give up in the depression / that hard work and decency will pay off (I'll leave the how unspoiled in case you ever see it)


Tallulah Bankhead is her birth name - fanfreakin'tastic name, but no way she didn't have a bare-knuckle's brawl with the studio to keep it / those geniuses probably tried to turn her into Tally Bank or some such other stupidity


----------



## Fading Fast

*Fate is the Hunter* from 1964 with Glen Ford, Rod Taylor, Nancy Kwan and Suzanne Pleshette

This is one of the first movies I saw on TCM back in the early '90s, so I have a soft spot for it as, back then, TCM - and AMC, now changed - starting running old movies that rarely if ever made it to the usual play-old-movies-on-occasion PBS or second-tier local stations that ran a much smaller selection since they didn't have to fill up twenty four hours a day with old movies. Hence, at that time, seeing a movie like this was a bit of a treat even if the movie itself was only okay.

And *Fate is the Hunter *is a classic example of an only-okay movie that's enjoyable enough as a story, but equally enjoyable for its time-travel snapshot. In this one, the pretty straight-forward plot is the investigation of a commercial plane crash where "the powers that be" want to quickly wrap-up the investigation with a blame-the-pilot (Taylor) explanation, while the pilot's former Air Force friend and boss at the airline (Ford) passionately believes there has to be an exculpating-his-now-deceased-friend reason for the crash.

Not helping Ford is Taylor's known lifestyle as a not-religious womanizer and boozer at a time when both companies and the public expected people in positions of responsibility to be church-going family men with (outwardly) unimpeachable moral character - the story has much less drama if seen through today's libertine values.

Against this, Ford pushes for a thorough investigation including a complete reenactment of the flight. Aiding him, hesitantly, is one of the three crash survivors, a stewardess (Pleshette) - understandably frazzled and scared to fly again - and one of Taylor's former girlfriends, the against type for playboy Taylor, brains-and-looks super combo of Nancy Kwan who, like Ford, also wants to clear Taylor's name.

As the investigation reveals troubling evidence such as Taylor being seen in a bar just hours before the flight, Ford's position becomes less tenable at the airline, thus, building up to the all-or-none career moment for Ford of the flight reenactment. I'll leave it there for anyone who might want to see it in the future.

This brings us to the other, aforementioned, joy of these old movies: time travel. I usually refer to time travel as the cars, clothes, architecture, etc., of the period, but that's an incomplete view as these movies are also an imperfect window into the cultural norms, the unwritten rules, the prevailing mindsets, the acceptable etiquette, etc., of a time.

Two reasonably non-controversial ones that come up regularly if you watch old movies (as they do in *Fate is the Hunter*) are train travel and couple's dancing. In the '30s and '40s (and into the '50s), train travel between cities makes an appearance in, easily, ninety-plus percent of movies. From this, you can see and feel how woven into the fabric of America train travel was in a way that a history book showing you the factual evidence will never accomplish.

And dancing - men and women would regularly get up to dance together at a restaurant, a soda shop (yes), their own home, a dive bar (yes) and other places if there was a band, a record or just a radio playing music. If you aren't used to it, it looks really weird to see a couple in a soda shop get up and dance alone on the floor especially as no one pays them the least attention because couple's dancing was common knowledge - everyone knows that everyone knows that public dancing to music, almost anywhere, is normal.

To be sure, the stuff we still fight about today - religion, politics, money, family responsibilities, etc. - is also all on display in old movies. While these movies no more perfectly reflect their times than today's do, taken as part of the story - along with a study of history, non-fiction accounts, etc., - old movies provide further input into our view of the past.

Hence, a run-of-the-mill movie like *Fate is the Hunter* becomes more than run-of-the-mill to us today. Yes, it's a solid movie that can be watched for its plot, etc., but it also is an incredible opportunity to see social and cultural norms from the past. It's a much better - less inaccurate - step back in time than are modern period pieces riddled, as they always are, with their own present-day, intentional and unintentional, biases and prejudices.









Nancy Kwan and Glen Ford


----------



## Fading Fast

*Our Kind of Traitor* 2016

While based on a John le Carré novel, the screenplay was written and movie directed, unfortunately, with too much fealty to the book - there was so much exposition that you could almost feel the pages turning as scenes progressed. But to be fair, le Carré books are dense and ambiguous at the same time, which is not the easiest material to turn into a taut two-hour film.

And the story - a top Russian money launderer wants to make a deal with MI5 to get his family safely to England in return for exposing corruption that reaches into the highest levels of English government and society - is solid, but, honestly, it felt stale and unimportant.

Sure, defeating high-level corruption is important, but these international mafia stories always feel flat compared to the old Cold War tension of East versus West, Capitalism versus Communism, Individualism versus Collectivism, Democracy versus Dictatorship, Freedom versus Statism.

Everything was on the line then - or felt that way - with authors like le Carré and Clancy producing their best books and movie offspring. Now, the bad guys aren't arguing they have a morally superior way of life; they just want money and wealth and will lie, cheat, steal and kill to get it - hence, these stories are just modern day cops-and-robbers tails with the chases, sex (it's a modern movie, after all) and explosions all amped up.

This is the same challenge that modern Bond films face when compared to their early classics - there are no competing world philosophies standing toe to toe, so all that's left is bigger, faster and louder special effects. To be fair, *Our Kind of Traitor* tries to treat its story with respect; there just isn't enough story there to matter.


----------



## Fading Fast

*Out of Africa* from 1985 with Meryl Streep and Robert Redford

Not a lot of timeless classic movies were made in the '80s; hence, *Out of Africa* is the exception that proves the rule (a truly horrible expression when one stops and analyzes it).

If David Lean - of *Doctor Zhivago*, *Lawrence of Arabia* and others fame - was still making movies in the '80s, this epic drama, with its sweeping, loving cinematography of Africa and life-altering personal heartbreak delivered in poignant "small" reveals, would have been the result, but instead - and much to his credit - Sidney Pollack channeled his inner-Lean to direct it.

At its heart, *Out of Africa* is a good old-fashion, wholesome love story of boy chases and gets married girl / loses married girl / married girl gets syphilis from her cheating husband / boy gets now-cured and divorced girl back / boy wants both the girl and his freedom / girl just wants the boy / boy dies in plane crash before it's all resolved. A simpler story from a simpler time. And it all plays out against the backdrop of early 20th Century British Colonial Africa.

While the love story is rolled out slowly but directly, the conflicts, intents, good and bad of colonization is only peeked at as ambiguity - not "Yah Colonialism!" nor modern perfect political piety - is revealed. The British didn't invent conquering and ruling other people, but they did it more successfully than others for a long period of time resulting in a far-flung empire where a wide-range of support and resistant developed in both the conquering and conquered populations.

Did author Karen Blixen, writing under the nome de plume Isak Dinesen, intentionally juxtapose the conflicted love and hate of her personal relationships with that of the British to their empire and the subjugated to the British? Probably, but it doesn't matter if intentional or not as great authors intuit their way to brilliant writing by revealing parallels, which, when in the hands of skilled screenwriters and directors, translate into timeless film epics.

And if all that isn't enough, Africa itself, with its sweeping open spaces, looming mountains and majestic animals, brings its own power and drama and heartache and hope to Blixen's tale and Pollack's movie - just as Mother Russia did in Lean's "Doctor Zhivago." There's so much here in the story and so much here in the visuals that multiple viewings enhance the experience. And there's also this - the clothes are period awesome.


----------



## Peak and Pine

Yes. A favorite. As is the soundtrack I have on CD. _I had a fahm in Afhreeka... _the opening line I believe, Streep in voice over. Imagine you viewed this on DVD, but I saw it, once only, the day it opened at the glorious old movie palace, the Uptown in Washington, DC. This film deserves a theater. Think it won Best Picture that year. The opening shot, so I read years ago, had to be hastily added, trying to remember here, 34 yrs ago, Streep in a snowy scene in Denmark, done hastily in front of a green screen, cheesy not in keeping with the Lean-esque, as you say, ethic of this film. I loved it. As I do almost every time I see The Greatest Actress That Ever Lived in anything.


----------



## Fading Fast

Peak and Pine said:


> Yes. A favorite. As is the soundtrack I have on CD. _I had a fahm in Afhreeka... _the opening line I believe, Streep in voice over. Imagine you viewed this on DVD, but I saw it, once only, the day it opened at the glorious old movie palace, the Uptown in Washington, DC. This film deserves a theater. Think it won Best Picture that year. The opening shot, so I read years ago, had to be hastily added, trying to remember here, 34 yrs ago, Streep in a snowy scene in Denmark, done hastily in front of a green screen, cheesy not in keeping with the Lean-esque, as you say, ethic of this film. I loved it. As I do almost every time I see The Greatest Actress That Ever Lived in anything.


I, too, saw it in the theater when it came out, but in a nondescript multiplex. I have no argument with your point - it was meant for the big screen.

It was one of the films that my girlfriend and I immediately connected over when we met in '96 (one of the few post '60s movies we both loved).

She often quotes the line you note:

"I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills."​
with a not bad imitation of Streep's incredible accent.

We, too, have the soundtrack.

Not as good as the theater, but on today's high-def, larger screens with a good sound system, the experience of seeing it at home is much better than on the old tube TVs.

It's funny you note the opening shot as it does feel separate from and inferior to the rest of the movie, but until you explained it, I always assumed it was intentional to showcase and emphasize the beauty and majesty of the African landscape.


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## eagle2250

The wife and I saw Out of Africa quite some time ago on the large screen. Perhaps it's time to add the DVD to our collection and enjoy it once again...adding, as always seems the case, to another category in the Eagle's hoard!


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## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> The wife and I saw Out of Africa quite some time ago on the large screen. Perhaps it's time to add the DVD to our collection and enjoy it once again...adding, as always seems the case, to another category in the Eagle's hoard!


I'd be embarrassed to admit the number of times I've seen it over the years - first in the theater, then on VHS, then DVD and, most recently, streamed. Well worth the investment.


----------



## Fading Fast

*The* *Barefoot Contessa* from 1954 starring Ava Gardner, Humphrey Bogart, Edmond O'Brien and Warren Stevens.

Written and directed by Joseph Mankiewicz - of *All about Eve* and many others fame - *The* *Barefoot Contessa *has all the ingredients of a successful, nay, blockbuster, film including big name stars and exotic locals, but while it kinda, sorta holds your interest, it morosely plods along from scene to scene never really gelling.

Ava Gardner* is the Barefoot Contessa - a poor Spanish flamenco dancer plucked from obscurity by an American film-producer wannabe and preternaturally rude and laconic millionaire (Stevens) who hires washed-up film director (Bogart) and a PR man (O'Brien) to travel the globe to find him an undiscovered star and make a hit movie.

Maybe that's not a bad premise for an inside-Hollywood movie, but Mankiewicz chose to tell it through the flashbacks the men in the Contessa's life have during her funeral - with the story's mystery being why this young, beautiful and successful star died (at some point, I stopped caring even when the "big" reveal came, insider hint: think a twist on the Jean Harlow story). Since, right away, you know she died young and her funeral frames it, the entire movie has a lugubrious feel - it drags, it's sad and it gave the real conclusion away up front - she's dead / the unknown-until-the-end "how" never seems that interesting.

And there's so much soap opera here, so much melodrama - husbands shot by wives, bed-hopping by almost everyone, fake love affairs (yup, he's happy if everyone just thinks she's sleeping with him), millionaires behaving boorishly and on and on - that the story gets lost in asides that aren't that important.

I'm a Bogey fan, but even he seems a bit lost in this one and, worse, Edward O'Brien so overacts and Stevens so underacts (or sleepwalks) that, at points, it seems like everyone's just reading dialogue.

Still there's enough talent here to produce some good scenes and drama, but the sum is much less than the parts and only some of the parts are good. As to the big reveal [spoiler alert], Gardner, the Contessa, who's been used by men her entire life, believes she's found true live with a rich Italian Count, who does truly love her, but owing to an unrevealed-until-after-they're-married war injury, can't fully "express" his love. From there, it's a quick affair and a miraculously pregnant Countess, an irate Count, a gun and a funeral.

I'm glad I saw it for the stars and the effort - and the Count's awesome car (a ~1950 Alfa Romeo 6C 2500 SS Cabriolet, see below) - but now that it's checked off, I don't have to sit through it again.

* I know Gardner was a huge star, but I'm always left a bit underwhelmed - I have a feeling her famous beauty and sexuality were either a period thing or more apparent in person. That said, she is still the author of possibly the most audacious quote a 1950s movie star ever said. There are several version of it floating around, but that she said something close to one of those versions does not seem in doubt. Here's a link to one version (it's the second quote down):

https://www.imdb.com/news/ni5371215 (pass if you don't want to read a profane word)

The car:









Bonus pic:


----------



## Peak and Pine

Good review. Better than the movie I bet, since it stars all the people I really dislike.

Does it open with Ava dead, face down floating in a pool somewhere in Hollywood and then, rather surprisingly since she's dead as a door knob, she narrates the entire movie. Or is that something else?


----------



## Fading Fast

Peak and Pine said:


> Good review. Better than the movie I bet, since it stars all the people I really dislike.
> 
> Does it open with Ava dead, face down floating in a pool somewhere in Hollywood and then, rather surprisingly since she's dead as a door knob, she narrates the entire movie. Or is that something else?


Thank you.

I believe you are tongue-in-cheek referencing a very good movie, "Sunset Boulevard."

But no, this one starts (90% sure) at her funeral where we only see the casket and it's all the men in her life narrating.

"The Barefoot Contessa" is no J̵a̵c̵k̵ ̵K̵e̵n̵n̵e̵d̵y̵ "Sunset Boulevard."

SB, fyi, has a great scene for AAAC where William Holden goes shopping for a suit and topcoat and even gets "marked up" by the tailor - a very I'm-into-clothes scene.


----------



## SG_67

Fading Fast said:


> SB, fyi, has a great scene for AAAC where William Holden goes shopping for a suit and topcoat and even gets "marked up" by the tailor - a very I'm-into-clothes scene.


I think Norma Desmond takes him shopping. The salesman brings two top coats, one is vicuña. The salesman tells Holden "as long as she's paying for it, take the vicuña".


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## Fading Fast

SG_67 said:


> I think Norma Desmond takes him shopping. The salesman brings two top coats, one is vicuña. The salesman tells Holden "as long as she's paying for it, take the vicuña".


You are spot on. I wrote about that scene here  #147 

And my comments on the movie when I saw it in a theater last year: https://www.thefedoralounge.com/thr...ovie-you-watched.20830/page-1257#post-2417375


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## eagle2250

A couple weekends back the Sci-Fy channel was sponsoring a Sharknado movie marathon. I can't say exactly how many there were, but am confident in saying there were far too many, as expressed by the title of the last one, "The Last Sharknado: It's About Time!" Not surprisingly the sum total of Oscars accounted for by these movies is zero, but the number of Razzi's has got to number well into the double digits. The acting is bad, the scrips corny, the plot lines are just plain dumb and the conclusions, boringly predictable. The rest of the world can blithely ignore these travesties of the TV screen, but living almost dead center of this never ending peninsula that juts out into the Caribbean, we Floridian's must take these things seriously. With Tropical Storm/Hurricane Dorian set to arrive this weekend I better get out to the garage and sharpen my chain saw! LOL.


----------



## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> A couple weekends back the Sci-Fy channel was sponsoring a Sharknado movie marathon. I can't say exactly how many there were, but am confident in saying there were far too many, as expressed by the title of the last one, "The Last Sharknado: It's About Time!" Not surprisingly the sum total of Oscars accounted for by these movies is zero, but the number of Razzi's has got to number well into the double digits. The acting is bad, the scrips corny, the plot lines are just plain dumb and the conclusions, boringly predictable. The rest of the world can blithely ignore these travesties of the TV screen, but living almost dead center of this never ending peninsula that juts out into the Caribbean, we Floridian's must take these things seriously. With Tropical Storm/Hurricane Dorian set to arrive this weekend I better get out to the garage and sharpen my chain saw! LOL.


We watched the first one ⇧ years ago - okay campy fun, but one was enough.

My favorite classic Florida movie is "Key Largo" (sadly, not shot in FLA).

And a good FLA read ⇩ (combines history and trains - two of my favorite things):


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## eagle2250

^^
I've seen Key Largo, but can't say I realized it was not shot in Florida. I'll have to pick me up a copy of that book. Is it a novelized history lesson? :icon_scratch:


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## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> ^^
> I've seen Key Largo, but can't say I realized it was not shot in Florida. I'll have to pick me up a copy of that book. Is it a novelized history lesson? :icon_scratch:


It's a non-fiction, but parts are a bit novel like as it's a good story with plenty of human and natural-disaster drama.


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## Peak and Pine

And if you drive south and east, Eagle, to Homestead and beyond and eventually to Key West, you will be driving over the bridges that Flagler intended for the railroad. Very beautiful and two-lane scary. It's US Route 1, ending in Key West in a line of sand, beginning above me here. in Fort Kent, Maine, in a line of trees.


----------



## Fading Fast

*An American in Paris* from 1951 with Gene Kelly, Leslie Caron, Nina Foch and Oscar Levant

This is not a good movie unless you are in the mood for this specific type of movie, then it's a pretty darn good one.

Okay, let's unpack that starting with the story. An American ex-pat wanna-be painter (Kelly) living in post-WWII France hangs out with his friend (Levant, another ex-pat, but he wants to be a concert pianist), tries to sell his paintings on the street, meets an attractive female benefactor (Foch), simultaneously meets a cute French store clerk (Caron) who is also the fiancé of a French friend of his, which leads to plenty of romantic contretemps and opportunities for song and dance - the backbone of the movie.

Nothing is really believable - these are the healthiest looking starving artists ever, the landladies and bistro owners are financially forgiving good friends, the conflicts are predictable and safe, the acting not too serious and the sets (away from a few stock-looking location shots) nothing more than an American romanticized view of Paris right down to the cute, beret-wearing French girl on the bicycle with a crusty baguette peaking out of her grocery bag (not really, but you get the idea).

Hence, if you are not in the mood for an ersatz romance, set in an ersatz Paris with some song and dance numbers tucked in, this is a tough movie...but, if you feel like an escapist movie where everything is pretty, Kelly's dancing is infectious, the songs catchy and the romance light and safe - you can't get much better than this one.

(Spoiler alert) Personally, if I had been Kelly, I'd have chosen smart Foch - an under-appreciated actress - over mousy Caron, but I'll always go for the smart one that will help you stand up in the world as you help her do the same.

Usually, this is the point where I talk about the time-travel value of the movie, but this one's time-travel only works if you want to time travel to an American postcard version of early '50s Paris - fun, but hardly historical. However, there is this pleasant surprise: the Technicolor is pretty darn good as it's not amped up - as most '50s Technicolor movies are - to an almost cartoon look; instead, the tones are deeper and richer than usual with not too many scenes intentionally stocked with an overload of loud color.

And if all else leaves you meh, you have this - Gene Kelly dancing, which never leaves you meh.


----------



## Mr. B. Scott Robinson

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 33934
> 
> *Out of Africa* from 1985 with Meryl Streep and Robert Redford
> 
> Not a lot of timeless classic movies were made in the '80s; hence, *Out of Africa* is the exception that proves the rule (a truly horrible expression when one stops and analyzes it).
> 
> If David Lean - of *Doctor Zhivago*, *Lawrence of Arabia* and others fame - was still making movies in the '80s, this epic drama, with its sweeping, loving cinematography of Africa and life-altering personal heartbreak delivered in poignant "small" reveals, would have been the result, but instead - and much to his credit - Sidney Pollack channeled his inner-Lean to direct it.
> 
> At its heart, *Out of Africa* is a good old-fashion, wholesome love story of boy chases and gets married girl / loses married girl / married girl gets syphilis from her cheating husband / boy gets now-cured and divorced girl back / boy wants both the girl and his freedom / girl just wants the boy / boy dies in plane crash before it's all resolved. A simpler story from a simpler time. And it all plays out against the backdrop of early 20th Century British Colonial Africa.
> 
> While the love story is rolled out slowly but directly, the conflicts, intents, good and bad of colonization is only peeked at as ambiguity - not "Yah Colonialism!" nor modern perfect political piety - is revealed. The British didn't invent conquering and ruling other people, but they did it more successfully than others for a long period of time resulting in a far-flung empire where a wide-range of support and resistant developed in both the conquering and conquered populations.
> 
> Did author Karen Blixen, writing under the nome de plume Isak Dinesen, intentionally juxtapose the conflicted love and hate of her personal relationships with that of the British to their empire and the subjugated to the British? Probably, but it doesn't matter if intentional or not as great authors intuit their way to brilliant writing by revealing parallels, which, when in the hands of skilled screenwriters and directors, translate into timeless film epics.
> 
> And if all that isn't enough, Africa itself, with its sweeping open spaces, looming mountains and majestic animals, brings its own power and drama and heartache and hope to Blixen's tale and Pollack's movie - just as Mother Russia did in Lean's "Doctor Zhivago." There's so much here in the story and so much here in the visuals that multiple viewings enhance the experience. And there's also this - the clothes are period awesome.
> 
> View attachment 33935


Love this film having spent a great deal of time at the Muthaiga Club as well as the Karen Blixen house museum and environs around Karen outside of Nairobi. But Redford playing an Englishman with an American accent? I found it impossible to suspend my disbelief and get into his character. But still great fun!

Cheers,

BSR


----------



## Fading Fast

Mr. B. Scott Robinson said:


> Love this film having spent a great deal of time at the Muthaiga Club as well as the Karen Blixen house museum and environs around Karen outside of Nairobi. But Redford playing an Englishman with an American accent? I found it impossible to suspend my disbelief and get into his character. But still great fun!
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> BSR


Re Redford - agreed. Hollywood will be Hollywood, but after enough viewings, I just elide those flaws and enjoy the beauty of a rare well-done '80s movie.


----------



## Fading Fast

Today, with the sound off and only catching bits and pieces when I looked up from work, I saw 1940's *One Million BC*, followed by 1966's *One Million Years BC* as it was kind of TCM to conveniently run the original and remake back to back.

I don't think I really missed much watching them on mute nor did I miss much catching only parts of them.

In either version, it's fair to say that the ratio of super-attractive women to the overall population of women was much higher in caveman times than today. And cavewomen seemed to wear a lot less clothing in 1966 than in 1940.

Also, my opinion of the advancements of modern dentistry is going down as everyone seems to have had nearly perfect teeth back in caveman times - probably the lack of refined sugar or something.

And the improvement in special effects was not impressive for twenty six years, especially compared to the advancements in special effects from 1993 to today. In some ways, 1940's version - and the B&W cinematography helped, I think - had more verisimilitude or, more accurately, less cheese than the 1966 version.

I'll close with some heresy. While there is no wrong answer, given the choice of Carole Landis or Raquel Welch, I'd choose Landis as I prefer some subtlety and, I think, Welch might have broken me - literally, physically broken me.

And so concludes my review of these two movies.

Carole Landis









Raquel Welch


----------



## Fading Fast

*A Kiss Before Dying *from 1956 with Robert Wagner, Joanne Woodward and Jeffery Hunter

The original Star Trek TV series was of unimpressive quality - the sets were slapdash, the dialogue often cheesy, the acting often mediocre and the budget reminded one of a father grudgingly handing out an allowance to a child, but the ideas and philosophy were fresh and challenging as were some of the special effects / sci-fi "stuff."

Now, picture all the bad production quality of Star Trek in a movie lacking the philosophical challenge and sci-fi fun of it and you'd have *A Kiss Before Dying.*

The plot: a young man of modest means schemes to marry the daughter of a wealthy industrialist to advance himself socially, monetarily and career-wise, but she gets pregnant and wants to marry him without her father's approval (and all the advantages the young man wants).

Up to this point, the movie is an okay soap opera despite its two-cent budget, but after this, all heck breaks out as unbelievable events and actions pile up one after another - murders, ridiculous explanations, beyond-sloppy police investigations, a second daughter to court and so on.

It's silly but kinda holds your attention; however, you can't help noticing the low budget as, for example, there are few extras even in scenes calling out for them. The quad - a beehive of activity at most colleges - is all but empty (except for the same kid in a pink sweater vest who seemed to be in the background of every other scene).

It reminds you of when Kirk and Spock would beam down to a city described as populated by seven million, but the streets would seem to have the same five people walking around. Even the awkward dialogue and stilted acting will remind you of Star Trek. Poor Joanne Woodward, an acting pro, tried hard, but struggled to make this material not seem amateurish.

There is some good time travel to the '50s - clothes, cars, architecture and a coffee shop - but it is hard to recommend this one other than in a kitschy, I-have-time-to-kill way. And finally, you have to assume that budget constraints explain why Robert Wagner got the preppy-ish dressing, dreamboat college-kid role screaming out for Tab Hunter or Troy Donahue.


----------



## eagle2250

^^
Might we assume "A Kiss Before Dying" planted the seeds for what played out in Robert Wagner's real life crime drama with his wife Natalie Wood.? Robert Wagner was never cleared of the 1981 death of her death. As of this past year he was still considered a suspect. Just wondering?


----------



## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> ^^
> Might we assume "A Kiss Before Dying" planted the seeds for what played out in Robert Wagner's real life crime drama with his wife Natalie Wood.? Robert Wagner was never cleared of the 1981 death of her death. As of this past year he was still considered a suspect. Just wondering?


My girlfriend and I talk about that all the time as we've always felt that he might have gotten away with that one. Obviously, to be fair, we don't have the full story, but it definitely looked suspicious.


----------



## eagle2250

^^
"Robert Wagner was never cleared of the 1981 *death of her death." *Jeez Louise, did I really type that? Based on my errant grammar I must be getting even older than I thought. It might be time to confirm my reservation at the Home? :crazy:


----------



## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> ^^
> "Robert Wagner was never cleared of the 1981 *death of her death." *Jeez Louise, did I really type that? Based on my errant grammar I must be getting even older than I thought. It might be time to confirm my reservation at the Home? :crazy:


I'll stay with my two points: I certainly don't have all the facts, but the ones that were in all the papers make me suspicious - regardless of whether he was officially cleared or not.


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> I'll stay with my two points: I certainly don't have all the facts, but the ones that were in all the papers make me suspicious - regardless of whether he was officially cleared or not.


Oh-my! I wasn't questioning your original "two points" (I actually agree with your conclusions), but rather my typing in my original post "death of her death" vs 'investigation of her death.' I must do a better job of editing my posts!


----------



## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> Oh-my! I wasn't questioning your original "two points" (I actually agree with your conclusions), but rather my typing in my original post "death of her death" vs 'investigation of her death.' I must do a better job of editing my posts!


I'm sorry if I seemed affronted as I wasn't at all and got where you were coming from. I was just being (unsuccessfully) funny in saying that no matter what the "officials" say, I have my doubts.

All that being what it is, Ms. Wood made a lot of movies. For acting chops, it's hard to top her performance in "Splendor in the Grass," and she held her own with the King of Cool in "Love With a Proper Stranger," a fun, albeit, silly one.


----------



## culverwood

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. Controversial when released in 1943 but a classic for me.

Written, produced and directed by Powell and Pressburger, Blimp traces the career of a fictitious soldier, Maj Gen Clive Candy.


----------



## Fading Fast

*Susan Slade *from 1961 with Connie Stevens, Troy Donahue, Dorothy McGuire and Lloyd Nolan.

I've only seen about four or five Troy Donahue movies from his heyday (plus a few more when he popped up, incongruously, in movies like *The Godfather *later in his career). But in that heyday, he seems to have nearly had a lock on the young all-American boy with a chip in his shoulder (a safe '50s-style chip, not a burn-it-all-down-late-'60s chip) who wants the bookend-to-his-looks blonde all-American girl, but encounters some obstacles in his quest - poor family status, a troubled background, forbidden out-of-wedlock sex, lack of money or something similar.

*Susan Slade *is just a less-well-known version of the movie that was the peak of the Donahue canon, *A Summer Place*. Fortunately, *Susan Slade *focuses more on Connie Stevens (not sure if I think she's pretty enough to star opposite Donahue, but no one asked me) as she takes on the usually-reserved-for-Sandra-Dee role of cute upper-middle-class girl who needs to rebel (safely) against her parents' approved path in life - especially the part about not having sex until married.

All the other stuff going on in the movie - her father's successful engineering career, the family's move to an incredible (if it's your thing) mid-century modern house blended with Japanese elements, the hackneyed riding-a-horse metaphor for learning to trust after a fall, etc. - are just filler as we watch Stevens go from good girl to young woman exploring her sexuality and rejecting her parents' approved choice (the boss' boring son who's a bit of a stuck-up *ss).

To be fair, for its day, it was probably risqué with (spoiler alert) an out-of-wedlock pregnancy being handled with sympathy by Steven's parents, despite all the bending and twisting done to conform to late-'50s norms. The real problem in this one - besides the cheap-and-predictable romance-novel plot - is Donahue's wooden acting. His range was never impressive and, even at his best, his performances were never engaging, but he seems to be sleepwalking through this one, except when he overacts with exaggerated anger.

That said, I have a weak spot for these '50s/early '60s soap-opera movies - I refuse to 
admit how many times I've seen *Peyton Place* or *The Best of Everything *- so, despite its flaws, I still enjoyed parts of *Susan Slade*. Some of that has to do with knowing what was coming next in America (and, by proxy, its movies), which was the rage of the late sixties when problems like the ones in *Susan Slade *would seem silly - not worthy of a movie - compared to the blow-it-all-up attitude of that latter time. Hence, today, it's almost an indulgence to enjoy the last time saponaceous and tightly-circumscribe-by-social-norms movies like Susan Slade would be made.


----------



## eagle2250

^^
Wow! Once again a great write up, my friend. I will be checking with Amazon to see if Susan Slade is available for rental of sale. :icon_scratch:


----------



## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> ^^
> Wow! Once again a great write up, my friend. I will be checking with Amazon to see if Susan Slade is available for rental of sale. :icon_scratch:


Thank you.

Also, keep your eye on TCM as it plays it now and again.


----------



## Fading Fast

*Summer and Smoke *from 1961 starring Geraldine Page, Lawrence Harvey and Rita Moreno

Possibly the only question to ask at the start of a movie based on a Tennessee Williams play is what will be the body count?

Because you know, by the end, a bunch of broken people with shattered lives will be piled up in the corner; the point of the play is to see how they get broken or, for those already broken, how they can be further smashed.

It's a tough assignment, but it's what you sign up for when you choose to watch a Williams play.

And *Summer and Smoke *doesn't disappoint as immediately we meet a late-twenties woman (Page) in a fin de siècle southern town trying to survive repressed emotions, unrequited love and hovering spinsterhood all brought to a boil by the return home of her childhood friend (Harvey) - the object of her unrequited love and now a wayward young doctor.

Page, a minister's daughter with Victorian values who knows her "window" is closing, does connect emotionally with the wild young doctor that's "dating" a girl from the "wrong" side of the tracks (Moreno), but when he tries to advance their relationship sexually, Page flees and later gives him a lecture on morality, sin, God - you get it.

All that's heavy and slow moving - as is the "I'm disappointed in you, son" relationship prodigal-son Harvey has with his by-the-book physician father - but if you can put up with the first hour or so of drudgery, several climatic moments toward the end do captivate.

One is when Harvey, starting to see the wreckage of his wine-women-and-song life pile up - his father lay dying from a gunshot indirectly caused by Harvey's partying, Harvey is facing an unwanted marriage owing to gambling debts, and a fever clinic needs him to fill in for his now bed-ridden dad - has a come-to-Jesus tete-a-tete with Page.

There, he argues for a life of physical pleasure all but free of commitment and she argues for a life of restraint and charity driven by religious rectitude, but neither one fully believes his or her own arguments anymore as each is experiencing the downside of absolute devotion to their beliefs. (Spoiler alert) But unfortunately, it's too late for inchoate revelations to save them.

Harvey's father dies and Page and he part in anger as Harvey heads off to save the fever clinic. Fast forward and Harvey returns, which inspires Page - now open to bringing passion and understanding to their relationship - to try again, but crushingly for her, she discovers a now-matured Harvey - leaning toward her views on love and marriage - is already engaged to one of Page's younger friends. Ouch, that freakin' hurt.

So ends another Tennessee Williams trip through soul-destroying relationships and life-ruining passions. As to that body count: one dead father, one going-to-prison father (Moreno's, who shot Harvey's dad), one tossed-aside fiancee (Moreno), one broken father who's lost his daughter's love and respect (Page's - she's given his hard-core religion the heave-ho) and one completely wrecked young woman - Page. And all in just under two hours.


----------



## Fading Fast

What if they made a nice movie that was also a good movie?

What if there was no violence, no gratuitous sex - no gratuitous anything - and it was still good?

What if it was set in present day, but had a timeless quality to it - a fairytale quality to it?

What if it was about a somewhat broken person who wasn't smashed - destroyed by drugs or alcoholism or emotionally crippled by a vicious childhood (so, not "that" movie) - a person who could be fixed by kindness, decency and a little more inner gumption?

What if the nice people were also real people - not Hallmark made-for-TV movie characters?

It's all but impossible to do, except if the right script, the right director and the right actors come together as happened in 2016's *This Beautiful Fantastic*.

Other than a few small false notes, *This Beautiful Fantastic *works from beginning to end. A withdrawn young woman with some OCD and dreams of being a writer all but hides away from life working as a clerk in a library while living in a small rental house with a run-down garden.

When threatened with eviction owing to her neglect of the garden (upkeep is in her lease agreement) and because of a fallout between her reclusive and cantankerous old neighbor and his cook, her insular world is challenged as she takes in the cook and reaches out to the same neighbor for guidances in repairing the garden. Throw in her meeting a quirky young inventor and potential suitor at work - where her job is at risk owing to her tardiness and a persnickety boss - and our atypical heroine, played with beautiful nuance by Jessica Brown Findlay, is forced to open her life up or crash.

That's it, that's the plot and it hardly matters as the magic is in the small - her growing relationships with the cook, her neighbor and the inventor / overcoming her fear of gardening while pulling her neighbor out of his cocoon / the beauty of her house and garden - now blooming under tender care - an obvious but effective metaphor for her own personal growth.

There's more small, more quirky and more fun, but it will all either engage you or not - it's that type of movie. Kudos to the writers, director and actors as it took every knob adjusted just right for this one to work: turn any one of them a tiny bit one way and it becomes a cloying mess, the other way and it loses its magic. But the knobs were set all but perfectly in *This Beautiful Fantastic* as I'm still smiling just thinking about it.


----------



## Shaver

I collected my copy of the latest tinkering by Coppola, Apocalypse Now: Final Cut, earlier today. I hesitate to estimate the rate at which I fixate upon this condensate of nitro cellulite.*

Joseph Conrad's proposed flicker extrapolated, magnificent tribute to the power of heterogametic imagination, a Vietnam movie that is not about Vietnam, a war film that is unconcerned with war, a road movie on a river, a journey of escape and freedom lacking both direction and destination, a spirited renunciation of feeble ideals toward any variety of equality, an achingly beautiful celebration of the masculine consciousness, a hymn to the Heart of Darkness that all serious men must expect to encounter at least once in their lives. Apocalypse When? Apocalypse Forever!

Who's in charge here, soldier?

Ain't you?

_*PeakandPineoriser: I seen this film lots._


----------



## Shaver

Coming soon to this theatre - an analysis of The Wizard of Oz that will make you think twice before permitting your children to ever watch it again.

This trailer rated G: General audiences.


----------



## Peak and Pine

Shaver said:


> I collected my copy of the latest tinkering by Coppola, Apocalypse Now: Final Cut, earlier today. I hesitate to estimate the rate at which I fixate upon this condensate of nitro cellulite.*
> 
> Joseph Conrad's proposed flicker extrapolated, magnificent tribute to the power of heterogametic imagination, a Vietnam movie that is not about Vietnam, a war film that is unconcerned with war, a road movie on a river, a journey of escape and freedom lacking both direction and destination, a spirited renunciation of feeble ideals toward any variety of equality, an achingly beautiful celebration of the masculine consciousness, a hymn to the Heart of Darkness that all serious men must expect to encounter at least once in their lives. Apocalypse When? Apocalypse Forever!
> 
> Who's in charge here, soldier?
> 
> Ain't you?
> 
> _*PeakandPineoriser: I seen this film lots._


Thank you for asterisking the PeakandPineoriser near the top so I can pull back early from a full wade. Have never seen this film and have no plans to. (I may have read the source material in its original form, but that can't be since I can't read Polish.) I understand why you in particular would appreciate Coppola's self absorbtion. I once read where Conrad himself walked out of an early screening.

Edit. I did have two close guys, one high school, one college, bite it big* in Viet Nam.

*splattered, resulting in death. Maine speak.


----------



## Shaver

Peak and Pine said:


> .


Oh my dear fellow, such an unfortunate contribution. It is my grave duty to inform you that there are two factual errors contained within your post. A poorly contrived submission which is further qualified by an opinion which would wither under even the mildest of scrutiny. Like the first whisper of a rising wind - The horror! The horror!

However, I am a sporting chap and have generously chosen not to include your text within my response in order that you might adjust (or delete, as you prefer) your rather lamentable content, thus sparing us all the potentially uncomfortable sensation of pitying you.

Peakandpineoriser: ya dun goofed.


----------



## Mr. B. Scott Robinson

I hope to still screen films a half century after my passing. 

I have an unshakable faith in the afterlife, yet my many failings in life might result in my spending considerable time in Purgatory screening Toy Story 12 or the latest reboot of the reboot of the reboot of the Spider-man franchise.



Cheers,

BSR


----------



## Peak and Pine

Shaver said:


> Oh my dear fellow, such an unfortunate contribution. It is my grave duty to inform you that there are two factual errors contained within your post. A poorly contrived submission which is further qualified by an opinion which would wither under even the mildest of scrutiny. Like the first whisper of a rising wind - The horror! The horror!
> 
> However, I am a sporting chap and have generously chosen not to include your text within my response in order that you might adjust (or delete, as you prefer) your rather lamentable content, thus sparing us all the potentially uncomfortable sensation of pitying you.
> 
> Peakandpineoriser: ya dun goofed.


Will have to have my editor look into this. Will get back to you.


----------



## Fading Fast

*Two for the Seesaw* from 1962 staring Robert Mitchum and Shirley MacLaine.

The late '50s / early '60s saw the movie wheel make a big turn toward movies showing more realistic adult situations including the gritty side of life and no longer only when tucked inside a film-noir structure.

*The Sweet Smell of Success* (noir), *The Children's Hour*, *Paris Blues*, *The Apartment* and this one, *Two for the Seesaw* - amongst others - revealed a world of lying, scheming, cheating adults having affairs, sex out of wedlock and all sorts of other wanton things, thus, debunking the wholesome image of '50s America.

While less well known than the others mentioned above, *Two for the Seesaw* holds it own in moving Hollywood's needle more toward a realistic representation of life. As with the pre-code '30s movie, though, these early '60s-era movies let you know what was going on, showed you enough of it all for realism, but didn't gratuitously throw every nasty, viscous and ugly thing in life in your face.

Today we need a word past _gratuitous_ for the sex, drugs, violence and cruelty that regularly makes it to movies and, heck, TV, with the mindnumbingness of it all arguing that the pre-code '30s and early '60s movies might have had a more effective formula for engaging the viewer in life's struggles and challenges. Those movies didn't hide what was going on; they showed you enough to understand, but left the last needle track, the last punch to the face, the last knocking of the knees to the imagination.

Two for the Seesaw brings a WASPy mid-western lawyer (Mitchum) - trying to rebuild his post-divorce life - to New York City where he meets an ethnically Jewish, kind and enervated-from-life at, what, all of twenty five years old, struggling ballerina wannabe (MacLaine). Just pairing those two types was envelope pushing for the time - but throw in their casual sex, drug using friends and general disregard for many of "the rules" of the time and the movie is just shy of groundbreaking.

Was Mitchum miscast or a brilliant choice? If the idea was to put two people together who don't natural match up, it's brilliant as you know the only way these two antipodes could connect is after life had beaten them both up enough for any decent lifeboat to look appealing.

And that leads to the story: not can opposites attract - we all know they can - but can they sustain a long-term relationship? Can upright lawyer Mitchum resist the pull to his old world of a certain kind of manners and emotional stoicism, represented by his always-calling ex-wife? Can a live-out-loud MacLaine understand and accept a quietly kind man who wants to help her or does she need the drama and - in an early, if rough-edged, kinda feminism - financial equality she's used to in her Greenwich Village-style relationships?

It is a bit uneven and forced in spots, but its freshness for the time - and still challenging themes today - keep it engaging. Director Robert Wise, one of my favorites, who comfortably operates in all sorts of genres - his sci-fi *The Day the Earth Stood Still* and musical *The Sound of Music* being just two examples - always creates three-dimensional characters dealing with fully fleshed out real-life situations.

Finally, *Two For the Seesaw's* shot-on-location New York City street scenes and tenement apartments (which still looked that way in the '80s when I first hunted for an affordable apartment in NYC) are wonderful early '60s time travel. Plus, you'll have the advantage that I didn't of knowing that MacLaine's character's name is not Kibble (I kept saying to myself throughout the move, "that can't be it") but Gittel.


----------



## Fading Fast

*A Town Without Pity* from 1961 starring Kirk Douglas, Christine Kaufman and E.G. Marshall

Long-time classic movie fans live for finding a hidden gem - that unknown or little-known movie you've never seen before, but that is so incredibly well done and engaging that you become an instant fan: *A Town Without Pity* is the first hidden gem I've found in a long time.

To be sure, this is not an easy movie: its plot is the gang rape of a local German girl by four serviceman from the nearby US Army base and their subsequent court martial.

By the early '60s, movies starting taking on tough subjects with a reveal and frankness that had been all but disallowed since 1934 when the movie production code was enforced. But by the early '60s, many movies finally discussed and showed infidelity and pre-marital sex; however, rape - gang rape - was taking it deeper into ugly reality. To be sure, other movies - *Anatomy of a Murder*, for one - dealt with rape, but the graphic, brutal, gang-rape nature of this movie was on a much harsher plane.

Shot in crisp black and white, in a decidedly not picture-post-card old German town - where it seemed to almost always be overcast - and with a jarring, but haunting jazz theme song that doubles as the majority of the score, the mood is not one of a bright future, but of a struggling humanity barely keeping its depravity hidden under a very thin veneer of civility.

And that's the movie and that's the town without pity. A town without pity for the slightly stuck up - knows she's pretty because she is - blonde beauty who gets gang raped by four drunken, on-leave soldiers who stumble upon her in the woods where she is enjoying being naked (she intentionally does that as she lingers while changing from her bikini to her regular clothes after a swim in the nearby lake).

After that - and the trip to the hospital, and the arrests, and the push and pull between the town authorities and the US military - the movie shifts into trial mode where the soldiers' appointed defendant (Douglas) finds a surprising number of local folks willing to help him gather evidence against the girl's character.

Fifty-plus years later, we are familiar with the challenges of a rape trial - the presumed victim gets "raped" again in the court as the defense tries to tear down her character while the accused demand and a deserve a fair trail, which all but guarantees said assault on the presumed victim's character.

And Douglas is powerful as the attorney doing what he knows he has to do but hating it at the same time. The scene where he begs the young girl's father not to put his daughter on the stand (if she refuses, the defendants can't be sentenced to death, but she also can't be cross examined) is tense, sad and gripping. He warns - nay, pleads - with the father that he will have to tear his daughter apart, as we know, the town without pity willingly provided him with all the character-debasing evidence a smart attorney would need to demolish a, for the time, free-spirited, pretty young girl.

At the end, a lot happens quickly, but you want to see it without advanced insight. In truth, though, the end only matters from a story telling perspective; we already know from the setup to the trial everything we know today - there aren't any good answers to a rape trial, so we have them and we hate them. Which leaves us with Douglas' performance - up there with any he gave - serving as our troubled conscience.

That's not an answer to the problem, but it is a reflection of the challenging and impressive film making on display here. Not noir, but dark and sad - it's another and surprisingly under-the-radar early '60s movie that lets much of society's unpleasantness hang out in a stark and painfully realistic manner.

Full disclosure: I think I might have seen parts of this one before as I kept having déjà vu moments during some scenes, but I don't know if that is true. If so, shame on me for missing the value of this hidden gem the first time.


----------



## Winhes2

Shaver said:


> I collected my copy of the latest tinkering by Coppola, Apocalypse Now: Final Cut, earlier today. I hesitate to estimate the rate at which I fixate upon this condensate of nitro cellulite.*
> 
> Joseph Conrad's proposed flicker extrapolated, magnificent tribute to the power of heterogametic imagination, a Vietnam movie that is not about Vietnam, a war film that is unconcerned with war, a road movie on a river, a journey of escape and freedom lacking both direction and destination, a spirited renunciation of feeble ideals toward any variety of equality, an achingly beautiful celebration of the masculine consciousness, a hymn to the Heart of Darkness that all serious men must expect to encounter at least once in their lives. Apocalypse When? Apocalypse Forever!
> 
> Who's in charge here, soldier?
> 
> Ain't you?
> 
> _*PeakandPineoriser: I seen this film lots._


Assuming much of this version is the same as the original, enjoy Coppola's use of light on Kurtz's face. If I recall correctly, the side that was lit was either related to what was said or foreshadowed subsequent events. Since seeing it I've occasionally, I think, because it may have been avoided, avoided potential folly by reminding myself not to get out of the boat.

Condolences to Peak and Pine and everyone else who lost friends in this conflict and any other.


----------



## SG_67

^ from watching other documentaries about the making of the film, one of the chief reasons why Brando was filmed as he was (in the dark, sitting, close ups of his face and only head) is because he showed up for filming completely fat and out of shape for the character he was portraying.
In hindsight, it worked though at the time Coppola was not amused.


----------



## Mr. B. Scott Robinson

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 35319
> 
> *A Town Without Pity* from 1961 starring Kirk Douglas, Christine Kaufman and E.G. Marshall
> 
> Long-time classic movie fans live for finding a hidden gem - that unknown or little-known movie you've never seen before, but that is so incredibly well done and engaging that you become an instant fan: *A Town Without Pity* is the first hidden gem I've found in a long time.
> 
> To be sure, this is not an easy movie: its plot is the gang rape of a local German girl by four serviceman from the nearby US Army base and their subsequent court martial.
> 
> By the early '60s, movies starting taking on tough subjects with a reveal and frankness that had been all but disallowed since 1934 when the movie production code was enforced. But by the early '60s, many movies finally discussed and showed infidelity and pre-marital sex; however, rape - gang rape - was taking it deeper into ugly reality. To be sure, other movies - *Anatomy of a Murder*, for one - dealt with rape, but the graphic, brutal, gang-rape nature of this movie was on a much harsher plane.
> 
> Shot in crisp black and white, in a decidedly not picture-post-card old German town - where it seemed to almost always be overcast - and with a jarring, but haunting jazz theme song that doubles as the majority of the score, the mood is not one of a bright future, but of a struggling humanity barely keeping its depravity hidden under a very thin veneer of civility.
> 
> And that's the movie and that's the town without pity. A town without pity for the slightly stuck up - knows she's pretty because she is - blonde beauty who gets gang raped by four drunken, on-leave soldiers who stumble upon her in the woods where she is enjoying being naked (she intentionally does that as she lingers while changing from her bikini to her regular clothes after a swim in the nearby lake).
> 
> After that - and the trip to the hospital, and the arrests, and the push and pull between the town authorities and the US military - the movie shifts into trial mode where the soldiers' appointed defendant (Douglas) finds a surprising number of local folks willing to help him gather evidence against the girl's character.
> 
> Fifty-plus years later, we are familiar with the challenges of a rape trial - the presumed victim gets "raped" again in the court as the defense tries to tear down her character while the accused demand and a deserve a fair trail, which all but guarantees said assault on the presumed victim's character.
> 
> And Douglas is powerful as the attorney doing what he knows he has to do but hating it at the same time. The scene where he begs the young girl's father not to put his daughter on the stand (if she refuses, the defendants can't be sentenced to death, but she also can't be cross examined) is tense, sad and gripping. He warns - nay, pleads - with the father that he will have to tear his daughter apart, as we know, the town without pity willingly provided him with all the character-debasing evidence a smart attorney would need to demolish a, for the time, free-spirited, pretty young girl.
> 
> At the end, a lot happens quickly, but you want to see it without advanced insight. In truth, though, the end only matters from a story telling perspective; we already know from the setup to the trial everything we know today - there aren't any good answers to a rape trial, so we have them and we hate them. Which leaves us with Douglas' performance - up there with any he gave - serving as our troubled conscience.
> 
> That's not an answer to the problem, but it is a reflection of the challenging and impressive film making on display here. Not noir, but dark and sad - it's another and surprisingly under-the-radar early '60s movie that lets much of society's unpleasantness hang out in a stark and painfully realistic manner.
> 
> Full disclosure: I think I might have seen parts of this one before as I kept having déjà vu moments during some scenes, but I don't know if that is true. If so, shame on me for missing the value of this hidden gem the first time.
> View attachment 35320
> View attachment 35321


Anatomy of a Murder is one of my all time favorites. I watch it once a year.

Cheers,

BSR


----------



## Mr. B. Scott Robinson

SG_67 said:


> ^ from watching other documentaries about the making of the film, one of the chief reasons why Brando was filmed as he was (in the dark, sitting, close ups of his face and only head) is because he showed up for filming completely fat and out of shape for the character he was portraying.
> In hindsight, it worked though at the time Coppola was not amused.


Yes, the documentary is priceless and horrifying to me, speaking as a professional project manager. What a disaster that set was in so many ways!

Cheers,

BSR


----------



## SG_67

Mr. B. Scott Robinson said:


> Yes, the documentary is priceless and horrifying to me, speaking as a professional project manager. What a disaster that set was in so many ways!
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> BSR


And yet it's now a classic. It's a good thing the studio didn't pull the plug.

National Review recently called it the best war movie ever made.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/apocalypse-now-greatest-war-movie-ever-made/


----------



## Winhes2

Clarifying my early comment, my recollection is that they switched which side of his face was lit and the particular side lit corresponded with something. But it's been about 40 years, so I may have misremembered.


----------



## Fading Fast

Mr. B. Scott Robinson said:


> Anatomy of a Murder is one of my all time favorites. I watch it once a year.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> BSR


Agreed - it's a really good one with an incredible cast.


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 35319
> 
> *A Town Without Pity* from 1961 starring Kirk Douglas, Christine Kaufman and E.G. Marshall
> 
> Long-time classic movie fans live for finding a hidden gem - that unknown or little-known movie you've never seen before, but that is so incredibly well done and engaging that you become an instant fan: *A Town Without Pity* is the first hidden gem I've found in a long time.
> 
> To be sure, this is not an easy movie: its plot is the gang rape of a local German girl by four serviceman from the nearby US Army base and their subsequent court martial.
> 
> By the early '60s, movies starting taking on tough subjects with a reveal and frankness that had been all but disallowed since 1934 when the movie production code was enforced. But by the early '60s, many movies finally discussed and showed infidelity and pre-marital sex; however, rape - gang rape - was taking it deeper into ugly reality. To be sure, other movies - *Anatomy of a Murder*, for one - dealt with rape, but the graphic, brutal, gang-rape nature of this movie was on a much harsher plane.
> 
> Shot in crisp black and white, in a decidedly not picture-post-card old German town - where it seemed to almost always be overcast - and with a jarring, but haunting jazz theme song that doubles as the majority of the score, the mood is not one of a bright future, but of a struggling humanity barely keeping its depravity hidden under a very thin veneer of civility.
> 
> And that's the movie and that's the town without pity. A town without pity for the slightly stuck up - knows she's pretty because she is - blonde beauty who gets gang raped by four drunken, on-leave soldiers who stumble upon her in the woods where she is enjoying being naked (she intentionally does that as she lingers while changing from her bikini to her regular clothes after a swim in the nearby lake).
> 
> After that - and the trip to the hospital, and the arrests, and the push and pull between the town authorities and the US military - the movie shifts into trial mode where the soldiers' appointed defendant (Douglas) finds a surprising number of local folks willing to help him gather evidence against the girl's character.
> 
> Fifty-plus years later, we are familiar with the challenges of a rape trial - the presumed victim gets "raped" again in the court as the defense tries to tear down her character while the accused demand and a deserve a fair trail, which all but guarantees said assault on the presumed victim's character.
> 
> And Douglas is powerful as the attorney doing what he knows he has to do but hating it at the same time. The scene where he begs the young girl's father not to put his daughter on the stand (if she refuses, the defendants can't be sentenced to death, but she also can't be cross examined) is tense, sad and gripping. He warns - nay, pleads - with the father that he will have to tear his daughter apart, as we know, the town without pity willingly provided him with all the character-debasing evidence a smart attorney would need to demolish a, for the time, free-spirited, pretty young girl.
> 
> At the end, a lot happens quickly, but you want to see it without advanced insight. In truth, though, the end only matters from a story telling perspective; we already know from the setup to the trial everything we know today - there aren't any good answers to a rape trial, so we have them and we hate them. Which leaves us with Douglas' performance - up there with any he gave - serving as our troubled conscience.
> 
> That's not an answer to the problem, but it is a reflection of the challenging and impressive film making on display here. Not noir, but dark and sad - it's another and surprisingly under-the-radar early '60s movie that lets much of society's unpleasantness hang out in a stark and painfully realistic manner.
> 
> Full disclosure: I think I might have seen parts of this one before as I kept having déjà vu moments during some scenes, but I don't know if that is true. If so, shame on me for missing the value of this hidden gem the first time.
> View attachment 35320
> View attachment 35321


Here we go again....looks like Amazon with be getting another order for a DVD, from, the "Nest!" Jeez Louise, we just got around to re watching Out of Africa and The Bridges of Madison County, that we ordered quite some weeks/months back.


----------



## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> Here we go again....looks like Amazon with be getting another order for a DVD, from, the "Nest!" Jeez Louise, we just got around to re watching Out of Africa and The Bridges of Madison County, that we ordered quite some weeks/months back.


Definitely not a light or easy movie, but powerful and moving.

Can't wait to hear what you think of it after you see it.


----------



## Peak and Pine

Didn't know _Town Without Pity_ was a movie. But it was a big teen tune when I was in high school. Gene Pitney, the overwrought lyrics of which don't seem to fit your movie description so wasn't sure it had anything to do with it until I Googled and found it was in the film, and nominated for an Oscar for best song (It's a terrible song). Tangent with something just written in the Cool 50s Ads thread, the term _town without pity_ was used by me and my crooked circle to describe any sad sack town visited or lived in, but unlike the reference re the Pepsi ad which got dusted off a 60 year old shelf, TWP has been used as late as last year visiting Eagle's area, Orlando, lunching in an Outback, chatting up the young waitress who insisted upon telling tale after tale of woe as it related to her and O'town, to which my brother said finally, So you'd call this a town without pity? It flew past though, as much Peak and Pine family chatter always does.

Good film review. I like Kirk Douglas. He also stars as a French officer in WWI in *Paths of Glory. *B&W and chilling.


----------



## Andy

Peak and Pine:

That was the theme song for the movie!


----------



## Vecchio Vespa

I lived through Gene Pitney once in high school. I don’t want to do it again, even if it’s a good flick.


----------



## Fading Fast

Peak and Pine said:


> Didn't know _Town Without Pity_ was a movie. But it was a big teen tune when I was in high school. Gene Pitney, the overwrought lyrics of which don't seem to fit your movie description so wasn't sure it had anything to do with it until I Googled and found it was in the film, and nominated for an Oscar for best song (It's a terrible song). Tangent with something just written in the Cool 50s Ads thread, the term _town without pity_ was used by me and my crooked circle to describe any sad sack town visited or lived in, but unlike the reference re the Pepsi ad which got dusted off a 60 year old shelf, TWP has been used as late as last year visiting Eagle's area, Orlando, lunching in an Outback, chatting up the young waitress who insisted upon telling tale after tale of woe as it related to her and O'town, to which my brother said finally, So you'd call this a town without pity? It flew past though, as much Peak and Pine family chatter always does.
> 
> Good film review. I like Kirk Douglas. He also stars as a French officer in WWI in *Paths of Glory. *B&W and chilling.


*Paths of Glory* is, as you note, chilling and one of Douglas' best performances. I am amazed at how good that movie is as I get more out of it each time I see it.

As to *Town Without Pity,* the song is effective in the movie in a '60s "cool" way - dated but, for the time, the song said - like the movie - this isn't what you are used to seeing or hearing. This no Max Steiner classic Hollywood soundtrack and we don't want it to be.

Also, the song (with the volume turned down and without lyrics) is used as the leitmotif throughout, which is perfect as its cold, haunting aloofness (sans lyric and volume) echoes the theme of the town being vindictive to the girl.


----------



## eagle2250

Peak and Pine said:


> Didn't know _Town Without Pity_ was a movie. But it was a big teen tune when I was in high school. Gene Pitney, the overwrought lyrics of which don't seem to fit your movie description so wasn't sure it had anything to do with it until I Googled and found it was in the film, and nominated for an Oscar for best song (It's a terrible song). Tangent with something just written in the Cool 50s Ads thread, the term _town without pity_ was used by me and my crooked circle to describe any sad sack town visited or lived in, but unlike the reference re the Pepsi ad which got dusted off a 60 year old shelf, TWP has been used as late as last year visiting Eagle's area, Orlando, lunching in an Outback, chatting up the young waitress who insisted upon telling tale after tale of woe as it related to her and O'town, to which my brother said finally, So you'd call this a town without pity? It flew past though, as much Peak and Pine family chatter always does.
> 
> Good film review. I like Kirk Douglas. He also stars as a French officer in WWI in *Paths of Glory. *B&W and chilling.


Whils I can't say I agree with the conclusion that Orlando might be a "Town without Pity," I enthusiastically agree that Paths of Glory was one of Kirk Douglass's more memorable films!


----------



## Fading Fast

*Black Book* from 2006

I don't know why this ripping WWII Dutch resistance/spy thriller seems to get no notice. I saw it in the theater in 2006, thought, "outstanding movie" and, then, nothing - never see it on cable, regular TV, etc. (I just watched it on DVD.)


Full-on-evil Nazis, complicated not-full-on-evil Nazis, selfless Dutch resistance fighters, turncoat Dutch resistance fighters, a normal woman forced to become a super spy and endure a Candide-like journey landing her on a Kibbutz in scrappy Israel in the '50s - all larger than life and all reflect people who existed in this larger-than-life period in history


I have no idea what its budget was, but money was spent as the scenes, period details, action sequences, rich colors, dramatic shadows and, well, everything is beautiful and impressive - an early entry in the modern era of almost every movie being visually gorgeous


Director Paul Verhoeven has somewhat of an all-over-the-map movie directorial resume, but most of his films have a strong sexual drumbeat (loudest in his *Basic Instinct *all-but-porn effort) that is present in *Black Book* and, for the most part, is effective and not forced. Desperate people, pushed to the wall, will use every single asset, bodies included, they have to survive


There are a lot of WWII movies - define a century and you'll get your deserved share of artistic effort - it's just surprising that this one never seems to show up on TV or in commentaries on WWII movies


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## Fading Fast

@eagle2250 - I'd put this one ⇧ on the list too. Fair warning, there are some brutally graphic scenes, but they are in the service of a serious and solid WWII movie.

When/if you do watch any of these movies - I'm looking forward to your thoughts.


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## eagle2250

Fading Fast - Consider Black Book to be the latest addition to my list of movies to be watched. Thank you. Oh, BTW, Town Without Pity is a movie I can watch for nothing, as an Amazon Prime selection. Now I just have to find the time to do so.


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## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> Fading Fast - Consider Black Book to be the latest addition to my list of movies to be watched. Thank you. Oh, BTW, Town Without Pity is a movie I can watch for nothing, as an Amazon Prime selection. Now I just have to find the time to do so.


That's great regarding "Town Without Pity." It's not cheery, but it is well-done and challenging. Can't wait to hear what you think.


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## Fading Fast

*A Nun's Story* from 1959 starring Audrey Hepburn, Dean Jagger and Peter Finch

I have no idea what it took to become a nun in pre-WWII Belgium - so no idea how realistic this portrayal is - but it doesn't matter as, even if complete fiction, it is a powerful tale of morality, personal conviction and inner conflict playing out in the Congo, WWII Belgium and one young woman's head and heart.

The daughter (Hepburn) of a wealthy Belgium family, to the family's dismay, chooses to give up her identity, her family and her aborning career as a successful epidemiologist nurse to become a nun. Her father, (played by the always outstanding Dean Jagger), a prominent surgeon, had hoped his smart daughter would follow him in his work, but supports her decision with all the love and apprehension that comes naturally, albeit painfully, to this thoughtful and good man.

The Church requires a nun to give herself completely to the Church, in part, by giving up all sense of individuality, pride and ambition. While seemingly unfairly demanding - especially to a 2019 world view and something even 1959's Hepburn greatly struggled with - the terms are clear ahead of time and the choice purely voluntary. Despite that, Hepburn still hopes to be sent by the Church to the Congo where her medical skills are needed most.

After a long period of training and tests of her convictions - seemingly to break down her sense of self and make her a pure vassal of the church - Hepburn is sent to the Congo where her skills prove valuable. But a bout of TB sees her, eventually, back in Belgium working as a nurse during the outbreak of WWII. More moral challenges face Hepburn as the Church demands neutrality to the combatants, but Hepburn still sees the bigger issues and struggles not to take sides.

And it is this never-settled inner struggle that leads to the final climax of whether or not Hepburn will remain a nun in the Church - a Church she loves and doing work she loves, but a Church that might be asking too much of her, too much of her identity, to remain.

The power of movie, well understood by director Fred Zimmerman (who knew how to make morality tales as seen in his "High Noon" and "From Here to Eternity" efforts) is the balanced treatment of the Church's and Hepburn's views and positions. As in life, neither is all right or all wrong / all evil or all goodness - a thoughtfulness modern writers and directors, who often seem to suffer no uncertainty of the purity of their values, would benefit from emulating.


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## Fading Fast

*A Hologram for the King* from 2016 starring Tom Hanks

It's kinda like they tried to make "Lost in Translation" in Saudi Arabia - not really, but kinda.

Tom Hanks plays a middle-aged divorcee whose career struggles forces his daughter to to drop out of college. He's in Saudi Arabia owing to a family connection disgruntledly giving him a last chance to salvage his career by attempting to sell a computer holographic system to the Kingdom.

If that seems to be a weak plot, it is, as this is not a plot-driven movie but a moment-of-crisis-in-one's-life movie. With a nasty looking cyst on his back - the metaphor for that writes itself - a slacker Saudi driver who entangles Hanks in his family's problems, a team of technicians being shunted by the Saudi government and his own noted personal issues, Hanks is a man at a crossroads and spiraling down fast.

Amongst his challenges, finding alcohol in a country that forbids it becomes a daily effort and risk as every day brings new life failures for Hanks. And, sitting at the center of it all in Saudi Arabia is the built-by-fiat mega city he's trying to pitch his holographic system to - a city that is both splendid and menacing but, ultimately, soulless.

One night, after passing out drunk and awaking in a blood-soaked bed - the cyst opened up - Hanks winds up in a Saudi doctor's office that would put almost any medical facility in the West to shame. He's treated by a female Saudi doctor - also a divorcee - with whom he shares a moment, but neither fully sees nor embraces it as he's too enervated by life and she's too restrained by her culture.

That's it - any more would give too much away. Will Hanks pull victory, or something positive, out of the jaws of defeat? Will he sell the holographic system and revive his career and finances - and put his daughter back in school? Will he pursue a relationship with seemingly insurmountable challenges but also great promise? Will that darn cyst kill him or be cured?

Effectively, will the crazy of his Saudi experience save or finish him? Based on a novel by Dave Eggars, one senses more depth and passion in the book than the, probably, overly distilled movie plot - you can only do so much nuance and life complexity in two hours of screen time. It doesn't really work, but it does have some good moments and as noted, points to a better story behind it.


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## Shaver

Two words capable of sending shivers up and down the back of any sophisticated movie buff: Andrei. Tarkovsky.

Tarkovsky's masterpiece (acknowleged by many critics as cinema's finest moment) represents 161 minutes of precious ecstasy. 

Stalker both invites and declines scrutiny. No matter how eagerly - how deftly - one divides the whole, extracting the minutiae from its form, still, the work remains monolithic; cerebral, visceral, implacable.

A religious metaphor? A political euphemism? An existential simile? A soufflé of falsehoods? A spasm of misdirection and switch? A premonition of Chernobyl?

Stalker addresses the vertiginous and overwhelming terror induced by the possibility of wrenching back the veil to expose the viewer's secret and truest desire. 

The recent Criterion bluray edition is a new transfer from the restored 35 mm negative. There has never been a better time to fall in love with this deliriously pulchritudinous work.


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## Fading Fast

*The Prisoner of Zenda* from 1937 with Ronald Coleman, Madeleine Carroll, C. Aubrey Smith, Raymond Massey, Mary Astor and David Niven

I became a fan of old movies as a kid growing up in the '70s watching them on a '50s black-and-white TV. At about ten years old, Errol Flynn was one of my heroes. I had only a vague idea of the historical periods of his movies (as, sometimes, did the scriptwriters), but I got the point: he was flamboyant, handsome, fearless, talented (with a sword, ship, horse, etc.); men wanted to follow him; he saved the day and he got the girl. I was sold.

*The Sea Hawk* was my favorite, but *The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Charge of the Light Brigade* and *Captain Blood *were not far behind. To this day, I can sit down and greatly enjoy any of those (and other) Flynn movies. Had I seen *The Prisoner of Zenda* at this age, Ronald Coleman might have also been a hero, but alas, the few stations that ran old movies in the '70s in my area never played it.

And that is a shame as this movie should first be enjoyed as a kid. It's a romp of an action-adventure for its day with heroes, villains, castles, kings, sword fights, (style-wise, out of place) gun fights, scheming women, beautiful women, missions of honor and, yes, the hero gets the girl.

As an adult, I enjoyed it enough, but didn't love it. My guess is that's because I didn't have any childhood history with it. Seeing it first as an adult, I saw some of its clunkiness - some of its silliness - not as part of the fun, but as a weakness. When I see those old Flynn movies, I unconsciously forgive all that and just enjoy the spirit of the movie and the echo of childhood joy.

If you've read the novel or seen one of the movie versions made of *The Prisoner of Zenda*, then you know the plot, if not, then all you need to know is it's the story of a kingdom somewhere that has a weak, but good-hearted heir, a scheming heir's brother, loyal advisors, scheming advisors, loyal troops, scheming troops, good women, scheming women, two beautiful women (how did Madeleine Carroll not have more of a career?), poisoned wine and a whole bunch of action.

It was good, maybe I'll like it even more the next time, but I'm sure I'd have loved it as a kid.


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## eagle2250

Youzza. With that uniform any man could win the attention and love of the "classic Beauty." The one I had to work with back in the day was a lot plainer and it took a whole lot more effort on my part...but I got her! LOL.


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## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> Youzza. With that uniform any man could win the attention and love of the "classic Beauty." The one I had to work with back in the day was a lot plainer and it took a whole lot more effort on my part...but I got her! LOL.


He was the king - they kinda get the most-flamboyant costumes. 

Your wife chose well - it's still all about the man inside and not the clothes.


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## Shaver

Shaver said:


> The actor (and co writer) of one of the great moments in one of the greatest films has passed away.
> 
> "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.
> 
> I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.
> 
> All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
> 
> Time to die."
> 
> He did questionable things but nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you in heaven for.
> 
> RIP Mr Hauer.


Guess what happens in just over 2 weeks time?


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## Fading Fast

*Bhowani Junction* from 1956 with Ava Gardner and Stewart Ranger

It took a long time, but I finally found a movie where Ava Gardner is an actress - and a darn good one - first and "Ava Gardner!" sex symbol second
It's a good "Sunday Afternoon epic," Garner - as an Anglo-Indian trying to find her place in a post-Colonial India - carries the movie as her beauty attracts men, but not always true love
With a plot pivoting on the plight of the Anglo-Indians - accepted by neither the English nor Indians - it serves as a contrast and comment on today's rigid view of race - every generation will have its prejudices and forward thinkers, none will get it all right or all wrong
It's hard not to lament the optimism India felt back then at the English leaving with the struggles we now know were to follow
George Cukor is one of the great directors, but this attempted sweeping epic of England's final days in India needed David Lean, master of this genre, to give it its full cinematic impact









*It Came from Outer Space* from 1953

Perhaps one needs to see it, as originally shown, in 3-D, because in 2-D, it's a pretty flat copycat movie of several other sci-fi '50 efforts
The, by-far, best of the lot is *The Day the Earth Stood Still*
A better copycat is *Earth vs. the Flying Saucers*
The few pluses are an opportunity to see a pre-*Gilligan's Island* professor (Russell Johnson). Barbara Rush as the female leads tries hard and it's good time travel to the '50s
I get why you'd take a gun to fight an alien invasion - it's the weapon you have - but I don't get why you'd be at all confident it would be effective, but most '50s sci-fi movies, characters seem to start out quite confident in their guns' alien-killing potential









*Dead Ringer*from 1964 with Bette Davis, Karl Malden and Peter Lawford

Feels more like an 1950's *Alfred Hitchcock Presents* TV episode with a movie star cast than a first-release movie
But that movie star cast makes it worthwhile as Davis lost none of her acting chops as she aged and Malden delivers his usual professional performance
It's a variation on the theme of several earlier-in-her-career Davis movies, where, in this one, she kills her richer twin sister and attempts to take her place
Yup, that's the plot - throw in an incredible number of coincidences and unbelievable moments and you'd have a bad movie except for the aforementioned acting talent, crisp directing from former-Davis-costar Paul Henreid and, for us today, some great time travel to 1960's LA


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## Fading Fast

*Safe in Hel*l from 1931 with Dorothy MacKaill

There's a lot to like in this dated pre-code, but it suffers from occasional clunkiness as Hollywood was still figuring out how to do "talkies."

It also suffers from a thin script where atmosphere, tension and palpable lacentiousness - not plot - try to hold the viewer's attention. But if you adjust to it, you'll see a twisted morality tale set in the muck of humanity where a few still manage to maintain some dignity and integrity.

MacKaill plays a New Orleans prostitute - forced into it by circumstances (it beats starving), but still judged harshly by the societal norms of the time - who believes she accidentally killed a man. She flees with her fiancé, a ship's officer, to a Caribbean island that doesn't extradite criminals - hence, it's a haven for sketchy characters also hiding out.

Once there, the movie shifts fully into atmospheric- and psycological-tension mode as MacKaill, with her husband at sea, is left in a seedy hotel with only herself for company, except for the heat, bugs, loneliness, boredom and a bunch of ex-pat criminals lurking in the lobby - all aggressively wanting carnal knowledge of MacKaill. This is no island retreat, but a dank, oppressive town with MacKail almost a prisoner in a decrepit hotel with filthy water and animalistic and creepy men lurking about.

The movie drags a bit here, but is also impressive as you feel all that MacKaill feels and understands how she desperately tries to remain faithful to the one good man in her life - her, now, husband - as everything and nearly everyone works against her. After a period of isolation, MacKaill - just in need of some human interaction - engages with the sketchy men in the hotel lobby.

This is a woman that has been kicked hard by life, has sold her body to survive, is considered dirt by the "respectable" people and, now, finds herself isolated in a criminal redoubt, but she fights with all she has to keep faith with the one man that has treated her with respect and compassion in her life.

With willpower, passion and grit, she fends off one after another subtle and not subtle assault on her integrity, but just as her life is looking up because (spoiler alert) she finds she did not kill the man in New Orleans and her husband is heading back from sea, a mendacious local sheriff puts her morality to the ultimate test. You want to see the subsequent courtroom scene, verdict twist and anguishing decision facing MacKaill to fully appreciate her moral conundrum - and the harrowing way she maintains her integrity. It's not a stretch to say its ending would do justice to a Greek Tragedy.

And there's also this, why didn't MacKaill - beautiful with her wan blonde timelessness - who had a strong career in the '20s and seemed to transition successfully to the talkies all but drop out of acting by the second half of the '30s?


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## Shaver

Two directors have emerged as masters of the unfilmable novel. Gilliam is one of them.

"We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers...also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether, two dozen amyls.

Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can."


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## Shaver

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 35951
> 
> *Safe in Hel*l from 1931 with Dorothy MacKaill
> 
> There's a lot to like in this dated pre-code, but it suffers from occasional clunkiness as Hollywood was still figuring out how to do "talkies."
> 
> It also suffers from a thin script where atmosphere, tension and palpable lacentiousness - not plot - try to hold the viewer's attention. But if you adjust to it, you'll see a twisted morality tale set in the muck of humanity where a few still manage to maintain some dignity and integrity.
> 
> MacKaill plays a New Orleans prostitute - forced into it by circumstances (it beats starving), but still judged harshly by the societal norms of the time - who believes she accidentally killed a man. She flees with her fiancé, a ship's officer, to a Caribbean island that doesn't extradite criminals - hence, it's a haven for sketchy characters also hiding out.
> 
> Once there, the movie shifts fully into atmospheric- and psycological-tension mode as MacKaill, with her husband at sea, is left in a seedy hotel with only herself for company, except for the heat, bugs, loneliness, boredom and a bunch of ex-pat criminals lurking in the lobby - all aggressively wanting carnal knowledge of MacKaill. This is no island retreat, but a dank, oppressive town with MacKail almost a prisoner in a decrepit hotel with filthy water and animalistic and creepy men lurking about.
> 
> The movie drags a bit here, but is also impressive as you feel all that MacKaill feels and understands how she desperately tries to remain faithful to the one good man in her life - her, now, husband - as everything and nearly everyone works against her. After a period of isolation, MacKaill - just in need of some human interaction - engages with the sketchy men in the hotel lobby.
> 
> This is a woman that has been kicked hard by life, has sold her body to survive, is considered dirt by the "respectable" people and, now, finds herself isolated in a criminal redoubt, but she fights with all she has to keep faith with the one man that has treated her with respect and compassion in her life.
> 
> With willpower, passion and grit, she fends off one after another subtle and not subtle assault on her integrity, but just as her life is looking up because (spoiler alert) she finds she did not kill the man in New Orleans and her husband is heading back from sea, a mendacious local sheriff puts her morality to the ultimate test. You want to see the subsequent courtroom scene, verdict twist and anguishing decision facing MacKaill to fully appreciate her moral conundrum - and the harrowing way she maintains her integrity. It's not a stretch to say its ending would do justice to a Greek Tragedy.
> 
> And there's also this, why didn't MacKaill - beautiful with her wan blonde timelessness - who had a strong career in the '20s and seemed to transition successfully to the talkies all but drop out of acting by the second half of the '30s?
> 
> View attachment 35952


I am ever keen on pre Hays delights. Added to my list, thank you FF.


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## Fading Fast

Shaver said:


> I am ever keen on pre Hays delights. Added to my list, thank you FF.


Like you, I'm a big fan. It's amazing what they were doing in movies from '30-'34.

I just started this book ⇩ on the period. So far, so good, but I'm all of one chapter in and am reading two other books, so it might take a little bit of time to get through.


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## Shaver

Fading Fast said:


> Like you, I'm a big fan. It's amazing what they were doing in movies from '30-'34.
> 
> I just started this book ⇩ on the period. So far, so good, but I'm all of one chapter in and am reading two other books, so it might take a little bit of time to get through.
> View attachment 36054


As it happens, I already have this volume sitting on my Amazon 'wish list'. However, as it is a rather lengthy list, please do provide us with a review once you have completed the read. A positive recommendation from you would likely be sufficient prompt for me to activate the 'buy now' option.


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## Fading Fast

Shaver said:


> As it happens, I already have this volume sitting on my Amazon 'wish list'. However, as it is a rather lengthy list, please do provide us with a review once you have completed the read. A positive recommendation from you would likely be sufficient prompt for me to activate the 'buy now' option.


Will do - I'll report out after I finish it.


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## Fading Fast

*Ex-Lady* from 1933 with Bette Davis and Gene Raymond

"Pre-code" movies existed for only about four years ('30-'34), but they include many styles, subjects and degrees of envelope pushing.

*Ex-Lady* is of the type that shows that women's roles, marriage in general and the business world, were nowhere near the all-male world - with roles and beliefs about women as tightly circumscribed - as post '34 movies would imply.

Bette Davis plays a successful business woman - an illustrator who understands how to market her talents to clients. She's no delicate genius untouched by commercial concerns - she's a professional who knows how to optimize her value in the marketplace.

And she's equally independent at home where she flatly refuses to marry her boyfriend (with whom, in perfect pre-code balance, we learn she is sleeping with but, as opposed to today, we don't have to watch them go at it in the obligatory sex scene) despite his repeated proposals. She not only says no, but says no because, she argues, she doesn't want to be tied down, give up her career or having fun and has no interest in starting a family.

With other than a tweak here or there, her full-throttled defense of personal freedom could be spoken by a character in a modern movie - it's stunning how many of today's oh-so-modern views were clearly part of the conversation in the '30s.

Another echo of today's movies is how Davis and her boyfriend agree not to marry, but then, struggle to find a balance that works for them. Do they see other people; do they get jealous; do they fight; do they make up - check, check, check and check - a common plot scenario in many modern movies and TV shows.

That's the incredible value of pre-codes - you see how many challenges are timeless and how the post-'34 movie world was, often, a fake construct to conform to a code, not reality.

Adding to the fun is a lithe, but well-endowed, Davis (it's pre-code, hence, women's underwear is optional and, if worn, is to be shown partially sliding off), early in her career, but still out-acting everyone else as the camera loves her youth, her enthusiasm and her still-developing, but incredible talent.

Since this is early Warner Brothers, this short movie (just over an hour) speeds through its plot as break-ups, recriminations, get-back-togethers, business failures and successes, along with fights with "old-fashioned" parents happen in rapid succession. And the time travel to (most probably) exaggerated Art Deco New York City is alone worth a look-see (as is the extended scene in a 1933 kitchen).

In case you haven't seen it, I'll Ieave the conclusion out except to say it ends like many modern movies addressing the same issues end.* Ex-Lady *could be "exhibit A" in any argument that pre-code movies have more in common with today's movies than those that followed the enforcement of the code in '34.










N.B. To my friend Shaver - simply put, *Ex-Lady* is a solid pre-code. Also, enjoying the book we chatted about; I know I owe you a post-read review.


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## Fading Fast

*Union Depot* form 1932 with Douglas Fairbanks, Joan Blondell and Alan Hale

Some old movies work simply as movies - pure entertainment (*The Wizard of Oz**) - while some both entertain and provide a window into the period / a feeling of time travel; *Union Depot *is good entertainment, but incredible time travel to 1932.

It's an early entry in the "watch the lives of a bunch of people intersect at a busy place" genre (like 1932's better-known *The Grand Hotel)* with its plot centering around a violin case of counterfeit money that is lost and found by accident at the depot, which then, changes lives and, generally, wreaks havoc.

The plot is solid if direct, with many parts of it being used again and again over the years, but the real value of this one is the window into 1932 Depression America.

And this is no MGM "isn't life grand even when it has some grit" effort, but a Warner Brothers "isn't life gritty when it has some grit" effort. The station is populated by grifters, hustlers, down-and-outers, immigrants (again, this is not MGM-scrubbed America) and other, mainly, bedraggled-looking souls.

Early on, one of the bedraggled, star Fairbanks - a seemingly good guy beaten down by unemployment and hunger and just out from a recent stay in prison for petty theft - is seen lifting a wallet from an unattended bag whose cash he uses to buy a big meal at the station.

Twice in Union Depot, we'll see copious amounts of food ordered and served - with the camera lovingly lingering on the food - which had to be attractive (but also frustrating) to a very hungry public. Today, at least in America and across income levels, we have an obesity problem; hence, these scenes may not have the same emotional connect that they must have had to, not only the very poor and hungry, but also, the many "just-getting-by" Americans in the '30s. And to emphasize the challenge, the price of the diner food is repeatedly referenced with the impression clearly being that it is out of the reach of many back then.

Talking about the price of food is one thing, but talking about the price of, well, the oldest profession in the world, is harsher. This emphasizes the plain desperation in the 1930s as prostitutes in the depot openly jockey for customers while bargaining over their fee. By '34, with the enforcement of the movie-production code, reality like this would be tucked away, but it's on display here.

Blondell, a chorus girl recovering from a broken ankle and in desperate need of funds to rejoin her traveling troop, is mistaken for a working girl by flush-with-stolen-cash Fairbanks who picks her up as she considers her "options." After some confusion, anger and recriminations, Fairbanks, a good guy at heart who understands struggle, tries to help Blondell catch up with her company.

Here, in this short sixty seven minute movie - where stuff is always happening (Warner Brothers gives you plenty of plot for your ticket price) - is when all hell breaks loose. The counterfeit money ends up to have been lost by its original owner (Hale) and, then, found by Fairbanks - who sees all of his life's struggles falling away (highlighted by an in-train-station shopping spree for Fairbanks and Blondell - more Depression Era super-fantasy fulfillment). The police then arrest him and Blondell. Racing to the climax brings further police investigations, a shootout, some action-adventure chases in a busy train yard and, finally, an Agatha Christie too-neat denouement.

But it doesn't really matter as this is a movie about the times, not the plot - and the times are troubled and breaking people. Sure, the ending provides some Christian redemption and hope and maybe that helped to hold people together back then, but the point had already been made. *Union Depot* is clunky in parts and in need of (and deserving) film restoration, but it is an enthusiastic romp enhanced by its window into the times.










* Of course, there are plenty of period reveals in *The Wizard of Oz*, but it also works, more than most period movies, as pure, timeless entertainment


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## rishabhb398

Hey, my favorite movie is *Aawarapan (2007)*

_Actor: Emran Hashmi _


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## Fading Fast

*The Three Faces of Eve* from 1957 with Joanne Woodward, Lee J Cobb and David Wayne

An okay movie about a woman with three distinct personalities from a period when the science of psychology was just starting to understand the condition
Despite the movie being introduced by a serious looking and sounding man declaring that it's all true, it still seems too neatly tucked into a Hollywood-style story to not have been "curated" by the Dream Factory
It's Joanne Woodward's movie as the tripartite woman and she owns it from beginning to end. It is more about her performance than the somewhat plodding movie itself
Lee J. Cobb gives his usual professional performance and is believable as the caring psychiatrist. But as always, he has a hint of menace to him, which is why he is always at his best playing the heavy
It was another time, but the casual attitude toward domestic violence is jarring









*My Foolish Heart* from 1947 with Susan Hayward, Dana Andrews, Lois Wheeler and Kent Smith

It opens with the failing marriage of a couple who loath each other, then it flashbacks to how they met
It is a bit contrived, but it works as you have their awful marriage in your head as you watch the pieces that built it come together
The Hollywood production code tried to elide premarital sex again, but adults watching (then and now) get that the young couple had sex before marriage 
Watch for the scenes with Hayward and her character's father - Robert Kieth - as they have a genuineness and decency that would make any girl want him to be her father and any man want to be that kind of father
Kent Smith seems to alway play the dog that gets kicked 
Gary Cooper uses him as a mop in "The Fountainhead"
Ann Sheridan smashes his entire life in "Nora Prentiss"
And, here, Susan Hayward twists him into a loveless marriage for her own advantage (you want to see why and how)

Susan Hayward's character is presented here as arrestingly beautiful - Hollywood's selling, but I'm not sure I'm buying. She is pretty, yes, but the earth is still spinning on its axis as she passes









*Rocketman* from 2019 with Taron Egerton and Jamie Bell

Fighting parents, divorce, unloved by one's father, uneven love from one's mother, picked on at school, insecure, awkward, homosexual in an closeted time, child music prodigy, a few kind people provide help along the way, rock 'n roll as a soul-touching oasis, early struggles, the breakthrough/moment/album/performance, success, more success, adulation, easy money/drugs/booze/sex, cheating managers, sychopants, hangers-on, excess wealth not providing fulfillment, descent into drug/booze/sex/spending addictions, recovery...
Yes, you've seen this movie and story before, even if you know nothing about Elton John, because many elements of it are, unfortunately, a not-uncommon story about superstars
Done in a fantasy/musical style - the movie unfolds against the backdrop of Elton's songs performed in '60s musical fashion
Lead Egerton deserves more than a shout-out for capturing Elton and even echoes his voice as he sings those famous songs
Predictable, and at times tiring, but if you like Elton songs and musicals, in general, it holds together

N.B. for the Trad side of the house, Elton's father wears this ⇩ Fair Isle button vest. Overall, there are a lot of neat '60s clothes in the earlier and flashback scenes.


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## eagle2250

^^
I am consistently amazed at the level of detail incorporated in your movie and book reviews, my friend. Those details provide perspective that has frequently added to my understanding as I have watched several of the films you have recommended. Having seen The Three Faces of Eve quite some time ago, my memories of the films details are admittedly shaky, but I must tell you, should I watch it again, given the advantage of having read your review, I will get a whole lot more out of it! Thanks again for a great review!


----------



## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> ^^
> I am consistently amazed at the level of detail incorporated in your movie and book reviews, my friend. Those details provide perspective that has frequently added to my understanding as I have watched several of the films you have recommended. Having seen The Three Faces of Eve quite some time ago, my memories of the films details are admittedly shaky, but I must tell you, should I watch it again, given the advantage of having read your review, I will get a whole lot more out of it! Thanks again for a great review!


Thank you for your kind comments - I am sincerely blushing. I'm so glad you enjoy my reviews.


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## Mr. B. Scott Robinson

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 36469
> 
> *The Three Faces of Eve* from 1957 with Joanne Woodward, Lee J Cobb and David Wayne
> 
> An okay movie about a woman with three distinct personalities from a period when the science of psychology was just starting to understand the condition
> Despite the movie being introduced by a serious looking and sounding man declaring that it's all true, it still seems too neatly tucked into a Hollywood-style story to not have been "curated" by the Dream Factory
> It's Joanne Woodward's movie as the tripartite woman and she owns it from beginning to end. It is more about her performance than the somewhat plodding movie itself
> Lee J. Cobb gives his usual professional performance and is believable as the caring psychiatrist. But as always, he has a hint of menace to him, which is why he is always at his best playing the heavy
> It was another time, but the casual attitude toward domestic violence is jarring
> 
> View attachment 36470
> 
> *My Foolish Heart* from 1947 with Susan Hayward, Dana Andrews, Lois Wheeler and Kent Smith
> 
> It opens with the failing marriage of a couple who loath each other, then it flashbacks to how they met
> It is a bit contrived, but it works as you have their awful marriage in your head as you watch the pieces that built it come together
> The Hollywood production code tried to elide premarital sex again, but adults watching (then and now) get that the young couple had sex before marriage
> Watch for the scenes with Hayward and her character's father - Robert Kieth - as they have a genuineness and decency that would make any girl want him to be her father and any man want to be that kind of father
> Kent Smith seems to alway play the dog that gets kicked
> Gary Cooper uses him as a mop in "The Fountainhead"
> Ann Sheridan smashes his entire life in "Nora Prentiss"
> And, here, Susan Hayward twists him into a loveless marriage for her own advantage (you want to see why and how)
> 
> Susan Hayward's character is presented here as arrestingly beautiful - Hollywood's selling, but I'm not sure I'm buying. She is pretty, yes, but the earth is still spinning on its axis as she passes
> 
> View attachment 36471
> 
> *Rocketman* from 2019 with Taron Egerton and Jamie Bell
> 
> Fighting parents, divorce, unloved by one's father, uneven love from one's mother, picked on at school, insecure, awkward, homosexual in an closeted time, child music prodigy, a few kind people provide help along the way, rock 'n roll as a soul-touching oasis, early struggles, the breakthrough/moment/album/performance, success, more success, adulation, easy money/drugs/booze/sex, cheating managers, sychopants, hangers-on, excess wealth not providing fulfillment, descent into drug/booze/sex/spending addictions, recovery...
> Yes, you've seen this movie and story before, even if you know nothing about Elton John, because many elements of it are, unfortunately, a not-uncommon story about superstars
> Done in a fantasy/musical style - the movie unfolds against the backdrop of Elton's songs performed in '60s musical fashion
> Lead Egerton deserves more than a shout-out for capturing Elton and even echoes his voice as he sings those famous songs
> Predictable, and at times tiring, but if you like Elton songs and musicals, in general, it holds together
> 
> N.B. for the Trad side of the house, Elton's father wears this ⇩ Fair Isle button vest. Overall, there are a lot of neat '60s clothes in the earlier and flashback scenes.
> View attachment 36472


Susan Hayward is one of my favorites.
She married a car dealer (Mr. Chalkley) from my home town, Carrollton, Ga, and moved to Carroll Co. A genuine Hollywood movie star living among the hayseeds in a very rural part of southern Appalachia. She is remembered by the locals as a very down to earth and nice lady. Susan is buried in the local Catholic Church cemetery, a church which she paid to build. I have visited her grave a couple of times.

Cheers,

BSR


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## Fading Fast

Mr. B. Scott Robinson said:


> Susan Hayward is one of my favorites.
> She married a car dealer (Mr. Chalkley) from my home town, Carrollton, Ga, and moved to Carroll Co. A genuine Hollywood movie star living among the hayseeds in a very rural part of southern Appalachia. She is remembered by the locals as a very down to earth and nice lady. Susan is buried in the local Catholic Church cemetery, a church which she paid to build. I have visited her grave a couple of times.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> BSR


Despite being a fan of old movies going back to being a kid in the '70s when I'd watch them on an old B&W TV on Saturday and Sunday afternoons (when they played on local stations) - heck, until I was in my '20s, in the mid '80s, and bought a color TV, all old movies where in B&W to me even "Gone With the Wind" and "Wizard of Oz -" I rarely saw the movies of some big stars like Susan Hayward and Betty Grable.

I have no idea why as I didn't choose not to see their movies; I guess they just weren't played much on the stations where I saw old movies. After your post, I looked Ms. Hayward up on IMDB and was surprised to see that I've only seen her in three or four movies despite her career spanning five decades and fifty or so films. I'm going to make an extra effort to see more of her movies now as I love what you noted about her life as so few stars manage to escape the Hollywood bubble.


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## Fading Fast

*Ford v Ferrari* from 2019 staring Matt Damon and Christian Bale

See it in the movie theater because, while the story and acting are so good they will work on the small screen, the race scenes - setting a new film standard - demand and deserve the biggest and best canvas.

When Ayn Rand looked for a business to frame her themes of the individual versus the collective / the brilliance and achievements of the singular mind versus soul-destroying groupthink, she chose architecture as it was a field where one man could still redefine an entire discipline stupefied by bureaucratic hegemony.

Had she waited, she could have use the field of auto racing, as *Ford v Ferrari* is really a Randian tale of highly confident, brilliant, risk-taking individuals beating the creativity destroying force of rulebooks, of decisions by committee, of decisions for "the good of the many".

Sure, it's slick and manipulative as Hollywood brought everything in its bag of tricks to this one, but as the original movie moguls knew when they built early Hollywood in the '20s, a good story with people you care about is all that matters - and this is a good story with people you care about.

Early Hollywood also knew (and, at times, hated) the value of actors - not just stars, but actors. And, while there are many good actors in *Ford v Ferrari*, this is Matt Damon's and Christian Bale's movie - good all the time, better when either is in a scene, magic when they both are.

You can read reviews to get the entire plot: Henry Ford's grandson, Henry Ford II - the Deuce - in the '60s, encouraged by Ford executive Lee Iacocca, wants to do the unthinkable and build a racing team at Ford to beat Ferrari and win Le Mans. He hires racing legend and race car builder Caroll Shelby to do something a corporate monolith shouldn't be able to do - defeat the tiny, craftsman-driven Ferrari team in an extreme test of individual and technological achievement.

This individual-versus-the-collective schism is instantiated by Shelby's chosen star driver and real-life Randian hero, Ken Miles. Miles represents everything that buttoned-down Ford and its boot-licking executives aren't. It is a movie of operatic sweep capturing, possibly, one of the last moments when man's raw intelligence and instinct, not translated to computer code and algorithms, could still win at the apex of a field driven by science, math, engineering, technology...and preternatural human talent. You need to see this movie.

N.B., The book that the movie is based on, "Go Like Hell", is every bit as good as the movie or, really, the movie is as good as the book - a surprise as both are brilliant. How a book about the singular achievements of singular men was made into a clearly corporate-driven movie without losing its soul is mystifying, but it happened.


----------



## Mr. B. Scott Robinson

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 36698
> 
> *Ford v Ferrari* from 2019 staring Matt Damon and Christian Bale
> 
> See it in the movie theater because, while the story and acting are so good they will work on the small screen, the race scenes - setting a new film standard - demand and deserve the biggest and best canvas.
> 
> When Ayn Rand looked for a business to frame her themes of the individual versus the collective / the brilliance and achievements of the singular mind versus soul-destroying groupthink, she chose architecture as it was a field where one man could still redefine an entire discipline stupefied by bureaucratic hegemony.
> 
> Had she waited, she could have use the field of auto racing, as *Ford v Ferrari* is really a Randian tale of highly confident, brilliant, risk-taking individuals beating the creativity destroying force of rulebooks, of decisions by committee, of decisions for "the good of the many".
> 
> Sure, it's slick and manipulative as Hollywood brought everything in its bag of tricks to this one, but as the original movie moguls knew when they built early Hollywood in the '20s, a good story with people you care about is all that matters - and this is a good story with people you care about.
> 
> Early Hollywood also knew (and, at times, hated) the value of actors - not just stars, but actors. And, while there are many good actors in *Ford v Ferrari*, this is Matt Damon's and Christian Bale's movie - good all the time, better when either is in a scene, magic when they both are.
> 
> You can read reviews to get the entire plot: Henry Ford's grandson, Henry Ford II - the Deuce - in the '60s, encouraged by Ford executive Lee Iacocca, wants to do the unthinkable and build a racing team at Ford to beat Ferrari and win Le Mans. He hires racing legend and race car builder Caroll Shelby to do something a corporate monolith shouldn't be able to do - defeat the tiny, craftsman-driven Ferrari team in an extreme test of individual and technological achievement.
> 
> This individual-versus-the-collective schism is instantiated by Shelby's chosen star driver and real-life Randian hero, Ken Miles. Miles represents everything that buttoned-down Ford and its boot-licking executives aren't. It is a movie of operatic sweep capturing, possibly, one of the last moments when man's raw intelligence and instinct, not translated to computer code and algorithms, could still win at the apex of a field driven by science, math, engineering, technology...and preternatural human talent. You need to see this movie.
> 
> N.B., The book that the movie is based on, "Go Like Hell", is every bit as good as the movie or, really, the movie is as good as the book - a surprise as both are brilliant. How a book about the singular achievements of singular men was made into a clearly corporate-driven movie without losing its soul is mystifying, but it happened.


Saw it at the theater on opening night with my daughter. A ripping tale, which I was familiar with due to my love of 1960s Detroit muscle, well done.

Some of the racing movie cliches made
me groan because they were just silly (Shelby needing to be told well into the film why the car was called the "40" was a scream...) but they were easy to overlook due to the solid effort across the board.

My favorite race film remains Polanski's "Weekend of a Champion" because Jackie Stewart is a personal hero and the documentary goes a long way in explaining Stewart's ethos, his near flawless God given talent behind the wheel, and his understanding of the mechanics of the death traps he drove at 200mph.

Cheers,

BSR


----------



## Fading Fast

Mr. B. Scott Robinson said:


> Saw it at the theater on opening night with my daughter. A ripping tale, which I was familiar with due to my love of 1960s Detroit muscle, well done.
> 
> Some of the racing movie cliches made
> me groan because they were just silly (Shelby needing to be told well into the film why the car was called the "40" was a scream...) but they were easy to overlook due to the solid effort across the board.
> 
> My favorite race film remains Polanski's "Weekend of a Champion" because Jackie Stewart is a personal hero and the documentary goes a long way in explaining Stewart's ethos, his near flawless God given talent behind the wheel, and his understanding of the mechanics of the death traps he drove at 200mph.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> BSR


I haven't seen "Weekend of Champion," but will look for it now.

I have no race industry knowledge. I did read the outstanding book "Go Like Hell" that the movie was based on, but otherwise, I couldn't catch an error in it to save my life.

As you said, it was a ripping good tail - I'm sure puffed up and smoothed out to fit Hollywood's needs, but still better than most new movies.

Was the scene where Damon as Shelby carried out a sign to Miles that said "Go Like Hell" real or Hollywood fiction?

My memory from the book, with is now about ten years old, was that Henry Ford told Shelby to "Go Like Hell" and that's where the line came from, but as noted, I might simply be memory challenged.


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## Fading Fast

*Fashions of 1934* from, well, 1934 with William Powell and Bette Davis

It's a bit clunky and dated, but if you can see past that, it's a fun pre-code as Powell and Davis bring their Powellness and Davisness in full force


Powell plays a lovable conman - a "Thin Man" on the wrong side of the law, really where he belongs - and Davis a fashion illustrator who team up to, well, cheat the silly fashion world via a series of schemes that get harder to follow as they go from stealing designs, to stealing clients, to putting on stage shows with (let me emphasize this) very scantily clade feather dancers, to... well, you get it


The plot - also involving an old female friend of Powell's from Brooklyn who has "reinvented" herself as a Russian Princess living in Paris - is not the point as the joy is in watching Powell's insouciant confidence get them into trouble as Davis' pragmatism and smarts try to get them out, plus, did I mention those girls and their feathers









*The Girl From 10th Avenue* from 1935 with Bette Davis, Ian Hunter and Alison Skipworth (I'm guessing, Warner Brothers' answer to MGM's Marie Dressler)

This quick, tight 75 minute movie deserve more than the two stars assigned by my cable company's on-screen guide as, as always, Warner Brother packs a lot of smart plot into these quick '30s era movies


This is another "they got married in a hurry / accident" code-enforce movie, as Davis plays a working girl who prevents a drunk society man from making a fool of himself outside the wedding of the girl who jilted him, then Davis and he spend the day together ⇨ get close ⇨ get drunk (him more so) ⇨ get married


In real life, they'd have just lived together as there's immediate chemistry and he needed companionship and she needed finical help, but the code forced a quick marriage, so be it, but he still keeps her tucked away as she's not "proper" for his society friends


It's better than the plot sounds as Davis, as always, imbues her proud working girl with character (she'll divorce him anytime he wants with no strings or alimony) and passion (she gets him and his career back up and running) / at the same time, husband Ian Hunter is not a cad, but is healing his heart while trying to do right by Davis whom he is growing fonder of right when the girl who jilted him reappears in his life


In a killer scene, Davis debones the jilter who was trying to embarrass unsure-of-her-manners Davis - this scene alone is worth the watch, but the entire movie works and has more heart than many modern ones (see next movie)









*The Art of Racing in the Rain* from 2019 with Milo Ventimiglia and Amanda Sayfried

It's all Hallmark, Hallmark, Hallmark, despite my desire for a movie with a dog narrating to be more


If you can get past the cloying plot and cliched characters, it is, well, kinda pretty mainly because of the dog and occasional Ferrari


The movie's one villain is so desperately drawn to fit today's acceptable political narrative that it's laughably obvious, albeit still insulting


Did I mention the dog and the Ferrari?


----------



## Fading Fast

A Bette Davis mini movie marathon.

I'm becoming convinced that the two best actors of all time are Bette Davis and Edward G. Robinson - a view only reinforced by my recent Davis "mini marathon." Sure, Davis has her "big" movies - watch her own an entire film despite an all-star cast in *All About Eve* or make an okay melodrama a classic by dint of her performance in *Now, Voyager*. But it is also in her more mundane movies - the ones Hollywood was spitting out of its "factory" to serve a weekly need for new movies - where you come to appreciate her incredible talent.









In *Marked Woman* (from 1937, also with Humphrey Bogart), Davis plays a kinda, sorta high-priced call girl who works at a nightclub - a clip joint - where she "entertains" wealthy men while running up their bill and, well, providing a full menu of personal options. Being a code-era movie, good is good and bad is bad, but Davis still manages to stride the divide as she works in the muck (glitzed up as it is) to pay for her "unsoiled" sister to go to college and associate with the "right" people. Davis convinces you that she can be tough enough to survive the mob-run world of nightclubs and hustling while sincerely trying to keep her sister on a straight path. Even when her two worlds collide - with ugly consequences - it's Davis' acting that balances good and bad in a code-acceptable way while letting the audience see what's really at stake.









In *The Working Man* form 1933, Davis plays the prodigal party girl daughter (of a deceased wealthy industrialist) running around, smoking, canoodling and boozing her way to a wayward life and - along with her equally wasteful brother - to bankruptcy. Even at her profligate worst, Davis subtly shows us there is more to her character, which bears fruit later when offered the option to turn her life and father's legacy around or watch it all circle the drain. In a nice acting lab experiment, we see Davis portray a believable conversion to serious young adult while her brother doesn't have the acting chops to convince you of his makeover. Davis runs the table from flighty and useless to serious and devoted without a false note. It is an okay movie, but fun time travel and a look at an incredibly young and cute Davis already showing impressive range and screen presence.









In 1941's *Little Foxes* (a wonderful Biblical reference) Davis plays more to type as the domineering wife of a socially and financially-middling southern family that she wants to elevate despite her husband's failing health and daughter's indifference to it all. But instead of just being a word-that-rhymes-with-witch, she knows when to pull back - when to show vulnerability as real people do. To be sure, watching Davis outwit and out muscle her husband and male cousins in business and life is the fun here - in an atypical role for a '40s woman (some snuck in under the code) - but it would be all but camp without Davis' nuanced ability to bring a range of emotions to her character. And, if you've ever wondered what a Pyrrhic Victory looks like, note Davis' expression at the close of the movie - she knows she's won, but at a tremendous cost.









I've already written (here: https://www.thefedoralounge.com/thr...ovie-you-watched.20830/page-1314#post-2492753) about Davis' later-in-life tour-de-force performance in 1956's *The Catered Affair* (as an all but broken-down Brooklyn housewife trying to salvage something from her sad life by giving her daughter a big wedding despite there being no money in the family), so I'll just note, regardless of her inability to hold an Irish accent, it's a role that only a fearless actress at the top of her craft could own. And if you do watch it, notice how Ernest Borgnine plays against her. He knows he's no match, but instead of trying to equal her or just fading away, he carves out a brilliant supporting performance by reacting to Davis' dominance by subtly responding in facial expression and body English while saving his few outbursts for moments when they'll have the maximum impact. It's an outstanding movie that could double as an acting class.


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## Fading Fast

*People Against O'Hara* form 1951 with Spencer Tracy, John Hodiak, James Arness and Pat O'Brien

It's a good movie, if you overlook all its flaws, as the acting and atmosphere power it past plenty of plot weakness and cliches. TV wasn't far enough along or this would have been better as a two-hour episode of a solid TV crime-drama show.

Tracy plays a well-past-his-prime alcoholic, brilliant ex-defense attorney who, as a favor to old friends, takes a murder case pro-bono for a poor neighbor's son (yup, cliche number one). This brings him up against the current slick DA looking to use this high-profile case to propel himself into the governor's mansion (cliche number two). The neighbor's son, played by a really young James Arness, is on trial for murder, but won't reveal a key piece of exculpating evidence because he wants to protect his girlfriend (cliche number three).

All of that set up - plus a bunch of mob corruption and a few scenes of Tracy fighting the bottle with the aid of his putting-her-life-on-hold self-sacrificing daughter (cliche number four) - happens in the first half of the film. After that, some of the wheels start to come off this movie's bus.

Instead of Tracy brilliantly rallying to win the case, he gets dope-slapped around the courtroom by the slick DA (played well by John Hodiak). Then, in a move completely out of character and beyond stupid, Tracy tries to bribe a key witness not to testify and pays him off with a check(!). It kind of makes one wonder if "brilliant" lawyer Tracy even went to law school.

Things continue to spiral out of control from here. After a conviction, new evidence is discovered that leads to Tracy working with the DA to free Arness (sure, because politically driven DAs always happily work to overturn their own career-advancing convictions because the truth is that important to them). At this point, even though you generally know what's going on, keeping all the details straight is an effort as mob involvement, Tracy wearing a wire to collect evidence, witnesses suddenly cracking under interrogation, gun battles, etc., lead to an unconventional ending.

But what holds this mess of a story together is Tracy being Tracy - a man born to play a tired, disheveled good guy fighting "the system," beautiful noir atmosphere with a few iconic New York City scenes and characters that you care about despite the addled plot. Also, Pat O'Brien, as Tracy's detective friend, with his laconic style brings some Golden Era gravitas to a movie struggling to stay centered. *People Against O'Hara *is worth the time, even if the plot itself spirals a bit out of super-director John Sturges' control.


----------



## Fading Fast

*And One Was Beautiful* from 1940 with Laraine Day, Robert Cummings, Jean Muir and Billy Burke

At seventy minutes long and with tier-two stars, I assume this was a B-picture., If so, MGM packed a lot of challenging moral dilemmas into this low-profile but impactful effort.

Two wealthy young sisters in their early twenties - Long Island mansion, chauffeur, swanky dinner parties, etc. - are polar opposites as the older one (Muir) loves the social life while the younger one (Day) prefers playing with cars to boys.

But both seem nice and fun with the older one focusing her attentions on the wealthy, glamorous and a-bit-wild young "catch" (Cummings) who just returned from overseas. When Muir sends her tom-boy sister to a dinner party where Cummings isn't expected, but surprisingly shows, the not-interested-in-boys younger sister becomes smitten. Cummings bestows his attentions on her, in part, we are led to believe, to avoid the cloying attentions of the young society women.

The above happens in about fifteen minutes in what is, at this point, just a mildly amusing tale when (spoiler alerts come nonstop now - no way to avoid them) all hell breaks loose. While not really fighting over him, Muir moves in on her younger sister to get Cummings back. She does, but in the effort, Cummings and she wind up alone and drunk at a roadside tavern. Cummings wants to drive; Muir refuses to get in the car, but after this and that happens, Muir, at the wheel with a passed-out Cummings beside her, hits and kills a man on a bicycle.

From here, the movie gets even darker with Muir fleeing the scene and letting Cummings take the rap while tom-boy sister Day all but figures out what really happened. When Cummings is sentenced to five years for manslaughter, Day constantly harasses her sister whose conscience is starting to weigh on her.

In a beautiful Christian moment of both forgiveness and taking personal responsibility, Cummings asks Day - she visits him in prison - to leave her older sister alone as he believes his overall lifestyle and willingness to drive drunk means that he deserves his punishment even if, technically, he's not guilty for the event that lead to his sentence.

There's a little more to go from here in this morality tale - some rise up further while others slip into old habits - but in the end, you are mentally exhausted while still questioning the morality of all that happened. Not bad for a "B" picture just over an hour long.









N.B. The top pic is of older sister Jean Muir and the bottom pic is younger sister Laraine Day - Robert Cummings is in both.


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 37934
> 
> *And One Was Beautiful* from 1940 with Laraine Day, Robert Cummings, Jean Muir and Billy Burke
> 
> At seventy minutes long and with tier-two stars, I assume this was a B-picture., If so, MGM packed a lot of challenging moral dilemmas into this low-profile but impactful effort.
> 
> Two wealthy young sisters in their early twenties - Long Island mansion, chauffeur, swanky dinner parties, etc. - are polar opposites as the older one (Muir) loves the social life while the younger one (Day) prefers playing with cars to boys.
> 
> But both seem nice and fun with the older one focusing her attentions on the wealthy, glamorous and a-bit-wild young "catch" (Cummings) who just returned from overseas. When Muir sends her tom-boy sister to a dinner party where Cummings isn't expected, but surprisingly shows, the not-interested-in-boys younger sister becomes smitten. Cummings bestows his attentions on her, in part, we are led to believe, to avoid the cloying attentions of the young society women.
> 
> The above happens in about fifteen minutes in what is, at this point, just a mildly amusing tale when (spoiler alerts come nonstop now - no way to avoid them) all hell breaks loose. While not really fighting over him, Muir moves in on her younger sister to get Cummings back. She does, but in the effort, Cummings and she wind up alone and drunk at a roadside tavern. Cummings wants to drive; Muir refuses to get in the car, but after this and that happens, Muir, at the wheel with a passed-out Cummings beside her, hits and kills a man on a bicycle.
> 
> From here, the movie gets even darker with Muir fleeing the scene and letting Cummings take the rap while tom-boy sister Day all but figures out what really happened. When Cummings is sentenced to five years for manslaughter, Day constantly harasses her sister whose conscience is starting to weigh on her.
> 
> In a beautiful Christian moment of both forgiveness and taking personal responsibility, Cummings asks Day - she visits him in prison - to leave her older sister alone as he believes his overall lifestyle and willingness to drive drunk means that he deserves his punishment even if, technically, he's not guilty for the event that lead to his sentence.
> 
> There's a little more to go from here in this morality tale - some rise up further while others slip into old habits - but in the end, you are mentally exhausted while still questioning the morality of all that happened. Not bad for a "B" picture just over an hour long.
> View attachment 37935
> 
> 
> N.B. The top pic is of older sister Jean Muir and the bottom pic is younger sister Laraine Day - Robert Cummings is in both.


As seems to occur on a fairly regular basis, your interestingly detailed and well written critique has me back on the hunt for another vintage movie in a DVD format. Thanks for that...I think? I'm going to have to get additional DVD storage capacity! Between books and DVD's and shoes/boots (I suppose) it's getting a bit cluttered around here! :crazy:


----------



## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> As seems to occur on a fairly regular basis, your interestingly detailed and well written critique has me back on the hunt for another vintage movie in a DVD format. Thanks for that...I think? I'm going to have to get additional DVD storage capacity! Between books and DVD's and shoes/boots (I suppose) it's getting a bit cluttered around here! :crazy:


I'm glad you enjoyed the review - thank you for your kind words.

Most - not all - of the old movies I see are from Turner Classic Movies (TCM) - do you get that channel?

If so, usually, you just have to wait until this or that movie rotates back on through as TCM re-shows almost all of its movies, which eliminates the need to buy, store, etc.

Also, some - not all - can be found on the streaming services. We get Netflix and Amazon. The selection of old movies on both is only okay, but on Amazon the selection expands for those they charge, usually about $3, a fee to rent.

Last thought, for the DVDs we have, we bought "storage books" - basically, large looseleaf type of storage cases with plastic sleeves that hold your DVDs. What had been a bookshelf full of DVDs was reduced to about five big binders (that took up, maybe, a tenth the space). This is a link to the cases we bought:

https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics...locphy=9067609&hvtargid=pla-79075543766&psc=1


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> I'm glad you enjoyed the review - thank you for your kind words.
> 
> Most - not all - of the old movies I see are from Turner Classic Movies (TCM) - do you get that channel?
> 
> If so, usually, you just have to wait until this or that movie rotates back on through as TCM re-shows almost all of its movies, which eliminates the need to buy, store, etc.
> 
> Also, some - not all - can be found on the streaming services. We get Netflix and Amazon. The selection of old movies on both is only okay, but on Amazon the selection expands for those they charge, usually about $3, a fee to rent.
> 
> Last thought, for the DVDs we have, we bought "storage books" - basically, large looseleaf type of storage cases with plastic sleeves that hold your DVDs. What had been a bookshelf full of DVDs was reduced to about five big binders (that took up, maybe, a tenth the space). This is a link to the cases we bought:
> 
> https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics...locphy=9067609&hvtargid=pla-79075543766&psc=1


Thanks for the helpful suggestions! We do do view some movies through our Amazon Prime account and I've watched a couple of the movies you have reviewed through that source. Our cable account with Spectrum does not include the TCM channel and the cost of adding it is a $35 activation fee and $13 a month added to our already almost $200 monthly cable/internet/phone bundle bill. The storage books you recommend are interesting and worth a try, I think. Thanks again


----------



## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> Thanks for the helpful suggestions! We do do view some movies through our Amazon Prime account and I've watched a couple of the movies you have reviewed through that source. Our cable account with Spectrum does not include the TCM channel and the cost of adding it is a $35 activation fee and $13 a month added to our already almost $200 monthly cable/internet/phone bundle bill. The storage books you recommend are interesting and worth a try, I think. Thanks again


Spectrum bought out Time Warner a few years back, so we have the same (hateful) cable company as you do.

It's all the crazy (and BS) "bundling," "packages," "tiers" or whatever other nonsense the cable companies use to push the bill up that makes it hard to just add a channel.

That said, I've called Spectrum - just recently - and very politely, but forcefully, pushed them to look hard to cut out what I don't want and add in what I do and I was able to modestly cut the bill while picking up a few things we wanted (with only losing stuff we didn't).

Maybe you've done all that as Spectrum doesn't make it easy, but I know I, effectively, pay a lot less than you were quoted for TCM (but since "my" TCM is part of a "package," I only got there through dropping this "package" and adding that one, it's hard to say I pay $X for TCM alone). Just a thought as Spectrum's first "answer" isn't the only answer if you keep pushing.


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## Fading Fast

*Bachelor Mother* from 1939 with Ginger Rogers, David Niven and Charles Coburn

Here's the story they told: a single woman (Rogers) who was just let go from a department store sees a baby left on the doorstep of a foundling charity and is mistaken by the charity for its mother. The charity reaches out to the department store whose young, playboy heir (Niven) hires her back at a higher wage believing this will allow her to keep her baby. From here, it's a standard screwball-ish comedy where Niven's father (Coburn) becomes convinced his son is the baby's father and he wants his son to man-up and, even more, he just wants a grandkid. Rogers and Niven parry back and forth with great chemistry - while both also deny they are falling in love with the baby (and each other) - until the inevitable conclusion.

Okay, it's a pretty good movie despite all the silliness because the actors have the talent to carry the script past its nonsensical parts. Rogers shines. She was great with Astaire, but didn't need him. In* Bachelor Mother,* she and Niven imbue it with enough gravitas to keep you engaged. But here's the story they wanted to tell: A playboy heir of a department store knocks-up one of the store's cute salesclerks. He denies he's the father but guilt has him give the salesclerk a raise while his father figures it all out and wants his son to do the right thing by the salesclerk (by the standards of that day). And he also wants his grandkid. Unfortunately, it's another serious movie forced into screwball-land owing to the movie production code. It still works; it just could have been so much better if not mangled by the code.

N.B., The time travel in this movie is good overall with several visits to a department store standing out - the toys, the management (much harsher than today's surface-nice management approach) and the openly mocked return department are a wonderful window into stores of that era. It's a consistent view with the department store in 1949's *A Holiday Affair*.


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## Fading Fast

*Joyeux Noel* from 2015 staring Diane Kruger and Benno Furmann

Based on the true story of the 1914 Christmas truce that spontaneously broke out along various parts of the Western Front, *Joyeux Noe*l soars at showing the humanity that pushed through the hardened lines, top-down-orders, battle-inspired emotions and strict rules of war to allow combatants to jointly share some Christmas merriment in the least merry place on earth then - WWI's no-man's land.

To be sure, there's some oversimplification - early scenes showing each country teaching its little children to hate - passionately hate - every single person from the other country unfairly presents the complex feelings and relationships that then existed between the two countries highlighted (England and Germany).

The goal seemed to be to show that even men taught to hate and hardened by war have enough innate humanity to "love thy neighbor" if they can just get to know "thy neighbor."

Fair enough - movies have limited timespans and their own agendas, but very few things are black and white. Yes, war is horrible; yes, maybe we'd have fewer of them if only those who had to fight voted for war (although, our volunteer armed forces today challenge that view) and, yes, the destruction of lives and property are a monumentally insane tragedy.

But none of that has stopped countries from invading / blockading / boycotting / sanctioning other countries and doing all the other things that lead to war. And when those things happen to your country, what is the right response?

World War II was horrible on a scale never before seen - and I'm sure the majority of allied and axis men fighting would have gotten along fine if introduced in a social situation - but none of that was going to stop Hitler or the Empire of Japan from waging war.

So, yes, as done so well in *Joyeux Noel*, seeing a German soldier carrying a small Christmas tree into no man's land to start the truce is poignant / seeing men who had been trying to kill each other hours ago pray together, play soccer together and share food and drink with each other is touching and moving, but smugly thinking there's an answer to be found in that spontaneous bonhomie denies the realities of history.

*Joyeux Noel* shines at the personal - a soldier's joy of finding his lost wallet with his wife's picture, a hawkish minister and his ambivalent soldier son arguing about the morality of the Christmas truce or a French lieutenant letting German soldiers he just befriended shelter in his trench while his own army's artillery shells the German trenches - and it's well worth watching for those moments.

But, as always, the bigger questions of war and humanity that have challenged the great philosophers and the common man forever don't fit easily into a two-hour movie.

N.B. I have no idea if there's any truth behind the story of Diane Kruger's character - Anna Sörensen - negotiating a pass for herself to come to the front, and, then, sing _Ave Maria_ during the truce, but even if completely made up, kudos to director Christian Carion for creating a moment where it appears an angel from above descended to bring joy, hope and beauty to the crucible of war.


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## Hellbent

Le Grand Bleu (The Big Blue) - by Luc Besson and Featuring Jean Reno among others. It's simply a beautiful movie especially if one is into diving.


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## Fading Fast

*Men of Chance* from 1931 staring Mary Astor, Richard Cortez and John Halliday

A down-and-out young female artist wannabe (Astor) in Paris, just about to shift to the world's oldest profession perforce, is befriended by an older male grifter (Halliday) who sees in her aristocratic pulchritude an opportunity to scam wealthy men, in part, via a race-track betting swindle.

It's a fine, clunky (almost all early talkies are) and fast effort with two excellent reasons to watch. First, it's a revealing look at race-track gambling in 1931 Paris and New York. Just like Wall Street, when there were limited rules and regs, the cheaters, scammers and frauds proliferated in a version of bad/dishonest money/people driving out good/honest money/people.

Second, you get to see Mary Astor before her hard life (sadly filled with real-life grifter parents and husbands) had taken the shine off of her incredible youth and beauty.









*The Hucksters* from 1947 with Clark Gable, Deborah Kerr, Ava Gardner and Sydney Greenstreet

A returning war veteran (Gable) tries to restart his career in advertising, but finds the business' dirty tricks, little cheats and the meaningless of it all are hard to take after fighting in a real war with noble goals - who wouldn't?

It doesn't help that his first client is a bullying, arrogant Greenstreet, much deserving a rebuke from someone. (Recently read the book, "The Wolf That Fed Us" by Robert Lowry that hit on a similar theme, my comments here:  #738 ).

Running on a parallel path, Gable is also trying to amend his pre-war playboy ways as he, now, sees a meaninglessness in that as well. In this effort, he pursues saintly widow Kerr while kicking nightclub singer Gardner to the curb.

Here, though, he chose the wrong one, as Gardner is a good woman that's been knocked around, but who fully gets Gable; whereas, Kerr is wrong for Gable's let-it-rip personality.









*The Letter *from 1929 with Jeanne Eagles, Reginald Owens and Herbert Marshall

It's an early Talkie that gets a lot more right than wrong and deserves at least a star and half more than the one and a half the on-screen guide gave it.

Yes, it's stagey and a bit clunky (and in desperate need of restoration), but at an hour long, it doesn't waste anytime rolling out its Somerset-Maugham-penned compelling story of a British plantation owner's wife (Eagles) whose boredom with her husband (Owens) and the isolation of plantation life in Singapore drive her to an affair with an Englishman (Marshall) who, eventually, throws her over for a local Chinese woman.

In a fit of rage, Eagles shoots and kills her former lover with her subsequent trial - and life and marriage - hinging on an inculpating letter she wrote that's now in the hands of the Chinese woman.

This is Eagles' movie from beginning to end with her arresting beauty overshadowed by her powerful performance as a woman gone slightly mad, but still fighting for her life.

Eagles herself would die later that year from - quoting Keith Richards - booze and pills and powders, but with this role, she gave an advance class in how to act in the aborning era of sound.









*Bordertown* from 1935 starring Bette Davis, Paul Muni and Eugene Pallette

A poor Mexican kid (Muni), against the odds in a system favoring the well-to-do, works his way through law school only to find that career success also depends on money and connections (despite this message, he's shown as unprepared in court, but that fact is oddly ignored).

Now on a drive for money, he gives up his ideals and practice to become a successful casino manager for a rich, older man (Pallette) with a pretty, young and bored wife (Davis).

Here, the second odd thing happens - Davis all but throws herself at Muni, but he expresses no interest. Despite this, as her older husband's drunkenness and personality weighs on her (he's not at all bad or abusive toward her), she (spoiler alert) kills him and continues pursuing Muni.

What starts out as a Muni movie switches to a Davis movie as her half-crazed, unbridled passion takes the movie away from him. The effort overall is good, but the story just can't breathe owing to the movie production code preventing the casual sex, infidelity and other "sins" necessary to the story from coming out into the open without resulting in punishment.


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## Fading Fast

*All Fall Down* from 1962 with Warren Beatty, Angela Lansbury, Karl Malden and Eva Marie Saint

The late '50s / early '60s saw movie after movie of broken families breaking some more as happens in *All Fall Down*, albeit, here with a little variation on the Oedipal Complex mixing in a touch of creepiness to the sadness of this family.

The Willart family - mother (Lansbury), father (Malden) and second son (Barndon de Wilde) - adore/idolize/blindly love handsome first-born son, Berry Berry (Beatty), who is mad at adult life in the way a wild horse is mad at being broken (or maybe he's just mad at his ridiculously horrible name).

Unable to live up to the expectation of his lionizing family, Berry Berry vagabonds around the country keeping alive doing odd jobs, getting money wired from home (for bail now and again when he gets drunk and does something stupid) and skating around the edges of being a gigolo.

Meanwhile, back at the homestead - a rundown old Victorian - the family pines away for their absent hero son, somewhat appeased by the appearance of cousin Echo (in what parallel universe do these names not seem insane?), a pretty, early '30s school teacher, played by Marie Saint, who the family feels is on a glide path to spinsterhood.

With all the pieces now in place, they can start falling down. Right when the sixteen-year-old second son is developing a hard puppy dog crush on Echo, in walks Berry Berry to steal her heart. Despite initial concern, matriarch Lansbury embraces the relationship as she and her enervated and alcoholic communist husband (Mauldin) thinks this might be the thing to settle their prodigal hero son down. Even though the second son still pines for Echo, he so idolizes his older brother that he, too, embraces the relationship because anything Berry Berry does is right.

From here, things really fall apart (and, alert, spoilers come fast and furious). While still just dating Berry Berry, we learn that, until-now, virgin Echo is pregnant with his child, which - of course - pushes away Berry Berry, who wants nothing to do with responsibility, while breaking Echo's heart (maybe) and her hold on life (for sure).

As all of this comes out, the scales fall from the eyes of the second son and the father who finally see Berry Berry for the wrecking ball that he is, which only pushes the mother into deeper denial and a deeper love with her son. To be sure, she was jealous of his potential marriage all along, which was just part of this family's variation on the Oedipal thing, which includes the second son plotting to kill Berry Berry to avenge the wrong he did to Echo.

At the end - I saved a little plot if you haven't seen it yet - nobody is left standing, least of all the viewer. Despite a feels-forced final-moment attempt to put a positive spin on all this breakage, the message - as with so many of this period's movies - is, as Berry Berry screams at some point, "I hate life." Hopefully you don't - I don't (except on that rare really awful day) - but like wanting to almost touch a hot stove as a kid, sometimes it's cathartic to see your worst fears played out in a safe way. At least all these depressing movies argue the public, at that time, wanted this release.

N.B. I don't think Karl Malden has ever given a bad performance - or at least not one that I've seen. Usually, he's perfectly cast as a model of propriety as a cop, priest or some other person of authority keeping things grounded as the world spins into chaos around him, but here he's equally convincing being part of the spinning chaos.


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## Fading Fast

*Cash on Demand* from 1962 with Peter Cushing, Andre' Morell and Richard Vernon

I've been watching old movies since I was a kid in the '70s and am always amazed that, almost every year, one or two little gems that I've never seen nor heard about pop up - *Cash on Demand* is one of those little gems. And it's even got a wonderful echo of *A Christmas Carol* without any mawkishness.

Post-war British cinema didn't have the money of Hollywood to put on spectacles - lavish productions with large casts, impressive action scenes, incredible location shots, etc. - so instead, and to our benefit, it mastered "small" stories, on small sets all done in crips black and white with outstanding actors working, probably, for a fraction of a Hollywood payday.

*Cash on Demand* has all these things. Set in a small-town bank branch at Christmas, a scrooge-like branch manager (Cushing) meanly and condescendingly - but without bombast - terrorizes his small staff as they try to generate some Christmas cheer with a planed party, which he'll neither attend nor contribute to, and general feelings of holiday bonhomie that he negates with a punctilious enforcement of protocol. But he saves his greatest venom for his head cashier (Vernon), whom he sadistically threatens with dismissal for small derelictions (which would end the cashier's career and his ability to support his family in that era).

With that Scrooge-Cratchet dynamic in place, in walks the bank's insurance company inspector (Morell) who (minor spoiler alert as it comes up quickly and is in the TCM guide snippet) is really a bank robber cum Ghost of Christmas Present who will bat Cushing's conscience around as he unfurls his heist plans.

What follows is a tense, filmed-in-real-time, psychological thriller as Morell threatens Cushing's never seen, but heard over the telephone, wife and child with torture if Cushing doesn't aid him in his robbery. From here, it's all locked and unlocked inner and outer doors, false presentations of normalcy to the staff - punctuated by just-missed exposures of the crime - as Cushing suffers inside while Morell shows Cushing his failings as a human as the cheery crook nearly comes off as the better person by comparison.

Good throughout, the payoff - the moment when the tortured head cashier and bank staff have to decide to take revenge or pity on their tormenting manager - adds a moral dilemma to the basic *A Christmas Carol* story that succeeds in an eminently understated British way that leaves you wishing there was more.

I'm saving this one on my DVR as I'm looking forward to seeing it again soon where I know I'll pick up on many nuances missed on the first viewing. And I want to focus in on the details of the 1962 bank branch where mechanical perpetual calendars are updated daily before opening, milk-glass patricians abound and summer fans sit idle as snow falling can be seen through the large, wood-framed windows - all wonderful time travel to 1962. When several months go by and a little gem like *Cash on Demand* doesn't pop up, I always get a bit nervous that another one won't becoming, but somehow, one always does.


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## Fading Fast

*Personal Maid's Secret* from 1935 with Margaret Lindsay, Warren Hull and Ruth Donnelly

Some B-movies are good in their own B-movie way, as this one is a simple story, told in a straightforward manner where the joy is seeing things work out - think of it as anti-noir


A young couple trying to "come up in the world" professionally (the husband is in insurance) and socially (in New York City) hire a maid who had worked for a "prominent" family who, effectively, guides them, by suggestion, to success


Along the way, there are the usual fumbles and embarrassments including a brother of the couple pursuing a socialite who likes him, but is chasing a married man


The other "big" issue (spoiler alert) is that the titular maid had an affair with a society boy years ago and now tries to surreptitiously help her daughter who doesn't know she exists (the daughter was raised as a "legitimate" niece of the society family)


The two other fun things, (1) the time travel to upper-class '30s New York is all penthouses, country mansions, big cars and fancy clothes and, (2) Margaret Lindsay is simply stunningly beautiful - don't understand why she didn't have a bigger career / if Myrna Loy hadn't defined the role, Lindsay would have made a perfect wife to William Powell in the *Thin Man* series









*Repeat Performance* from 1947 with Joan Leslie, Louis Hayward and Tim Conway

Interesting premise, reasonable story, uneven acting


The premise: a woman murders her husband on New Year's Eve and gets to live the year over again trying desperately to change the outcome


The story: a rising theater star kills her jealous, alcoholic and cheating husband in a fit of rage over his latest affair and, then, gets the do-over


The acting: reasonable performance by Leslie as the ingenue murderess, elegant performance by George Sander's lessor-known brother Tim Conway and an almost buffoon-like performance by Hayward whose characterization of a drunk man looked like a parody of a drunk man


As noted by the TCM host, the movie has a very "The Twilight Zone" feel









*Some Like it Hot* from 1959 with Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, Pat O'Brien and George Raft

I like most of the elements of this movie when not part of this movie - the actors, Lemmon, Curtis, Monroe and O'Brien; the director Billy Wilder; extended train scenes; black and white cinematography; and an older George Raft still playing a gangster - but I didn't enjoy them here in what I know is a classic that I'm suppose to love


Men in unconvincing drag does not work for me; it didn't work for me when I saw *Tootsie *as a kid and it still doesn't as I can't accept that anyone believes these obvious men are women (just like I don't accept thirty one year old Ginger Rogers playing a twelve year old girl in another Billy Wilder directed movie, *The Majors and the Minor*)


And there's too much slapstick in this one even for a 1930s movie and this is a late 1950s effort when the slapstick shtick had really, truly worn thin


I almost felt sorry for Marilyn as her role seemed written as a parody of her cliched public persona


I get it, you're just suppose to "go with it" and enjoy the silly ride; heck, I like a lot of movies that way, but somehow, I can't get there with this one









*My Reputation* from 1946 with Barbara Stanwyck, George Brent and Lucile Watson

Twisted and mangled inside the movie production code is a pretty good story about a widow (Stanwyck) with two young sons trying to balance her children's needs, the "expectations" of conservative Chicago-suburb "society" (and her somewhat hidebound mother - Watson) and her desire to love again when a Major (Brent) comes into her life


In the movie, as Brent and Stanwyck fall in love, much nonsense happens to show that they are not sleeping together; but the story only really makes sense if they are (like real adults do and did in 1946 - married or not)


It's also a lesson in why actors get paid a lot of money as Stanwyck and the-always-wonderful Lucile Watson carry this adulterated plot along - Stanwyck is a first-class actress with no first-class-actress fussing / she deserves to be remembered today more than she is


A lot of searching and I still couldn't find a pic of the incredible woodie wagon that Stanwyck drives - the movie's worth a look-see for that alone


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## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 39307
> 
> *Personal Maid's Secret* from 1935 with Margaret Lindsay, Warren Hull and Ruth Donnelly
> 
> Some B-movies are good in their own B-movie way, as this one is a simple story, told in a straightforward manner where the joy is seeing things work out - think of it as anti-noir
> 
> 
> A young couple trying to "come up in the world" professionally (the husband is in insurance) and socially (in New York City) hire a maid who had worked for a "prominent" family who, effectively, guides them, by suggestion, to success
> 
> 
> Along the way, there are the usual fumbles and embarrassments including a brother of the couple pursuing a socialite who likes him, but is chasing a married man
> 
> 
> The other "big" issue (spoiler alert) is that the titular maid had an affair with a society boy years ago and now tries to surreptitiously help her daughter who doesn't know she exists (the daughter was raised as a "legitimate" niece of the society family)
> 
> 
> The two other fun things, (1) the time travel to upper-class '30s New York is all penthouses, country mansions, big cars and fancy clothes and, (2) Margaret Lindsay is simply stunningly beautiful - don't understand why she didn't have a bigger career / if Myrna Loy hadn't defined the role, Lindsay would have made a perfect wife to William Powell in the *Thin Man* series
> 
> View attachment 39303
> 
> *Repeat Performance* from 1947 with Joan Leslie, Louis Hayward and Tim Conway
> 
> Interesting premise, reasonable story, uneven acting
> 
> 
> The premise: a woman murders her husband on New Year's Eve and gets to live the year over again trying desperately to change the outcome
> 
> 
> The story: a rising theater star kills her jealous, alcoholic and cheating husband in a fit of rage over his latest affair and, then, gets the do-over
> 
> 
> The acting: reasonable performance by Leslie as the ingenue murderess, elegant performance by George Sander's lessor-known brother Tim Conway and an almost buffoon-like performance by Hayward whose characterization of a drunk man looked like a parody of a drunk man
> 
> 
> As noted by the TCM host, the movie has a very "The Twilight Zone" feel
> 
> View attachment 39305
> 
> *Some Like it Hot* from 1959 with Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, Pat O'Brien and George Raft
> 
> I like most of the elements of this movie when not part of this movie - the actors, Lemmon, Curtis, Monroe and O'Brien; the director Billy Wilder; extended train scenes; black and white cinematography; and an older George Raft still playing a gangster - but I didn't enjoy them here in what I know is a classic that I'm suppose to love
> 
> 
> Men in unconvincing drag does not work for me; it didn't work for me when I saw *Tootsie *as a kid and it still doesn't as I can't accept that anyone believes these obvious men are women (just like I don't accept thirty one year old Ginger Rogers playing a twelve year old girl in another Billy Wilder directed movie, *The Majors and the Minor*)
> 
> 
> And there's too much slapstick in this one even for a 1930s movie and this is a late 1950s effort when the slapstick shtick had really, truly worn thin
> 
> 
> I almost felt sorry for Marilyn as her role seemed written as a parody of her cliched public persona
> 
> 
> I get it, you're just suppose to "go with it" and enjoy the silly ride; heck, I like a lot of movies that way, but somehow, I can't get there with this one
> 
> View attachment 39306
> 
> *My Reputation* from 1946 with Barbara Stanwyck, George Brent and Lucile Watson
> 
> Twisted and mangled inside the movie production code is a pretty good story about a widow (Stanwyck) with two young sons trying to balance her children's needs, the "expectations" of conservative Chicago-suburb "society" (and her somewhat hidebound mother - Watson) and her desire to love again when a Major (Brent) comes into her life
> 
> 
> In the movie, as Brent and Stanwyck fall in love, much nonsense happens to show that they are not sleeping together; but the story only really makes sense if they are (like real adults do and did in 1946 - married or not)
> 
> 
> It's also a lesson in why actors get paid a lot of money as Stanwyck and the-always-wonderful Lucile Watson carry this adulterated plot along - Stanwyck is a first-class actress with no first-class-actress fussing / she deserves to be remembered today more than she is
> 
> 
> A lot of searching and I still couldn't find a pic of the incredible woodie wagon that Stanwyck drives - the movie's worth a look-see for that alone


Not bad? Of the four you review, I recall seeing two of them; Some Like It Hot (seen several times) and My Reputation, but frankly other that the fact Barbara Stanwick was a cinematic 'hottie,' I don't recall many details from the movie. For the future, Repeat Performance has a definite appeal to it! Thanks for sharing these with us.


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## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> Not bad? Of the four you review, I recall seeing two of them; Some Like It Hot (seen several times) and My Reputation, but frankly other that the fact Barbara Stanwick was a cinematic 'hottie,' I don't recall many details from the movie. For the future, Repeat Performance has a definite appeal to it! Thanks for sharing these with us.


You're welcome. I appreciate that you read them.

The Stanwyck one, "My Reputation," is a bit slow, but she and Lucile Watson - who plays her mother - are so good, that it's worth watching for them along (and the woody wagon).

"Repeat Performance" plays like an extended "The Twilight Zone" episode. It was good not great as, to be honest, it would have been better as an hour-long TV show as it didn't have enough oomph to hold up a full movie.

As far as movie "hotties" go, if you get TCM, check out "Personal Maid's Secret" next time it's on as Margaret Lindsay is stunning (she's the woman at the top of the first pic). It's probably fair to say less of a "hottie" and more just a beautiful woman in a very perfect-features-and-glowing-skin way.


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## Fading Fast

*Five Star Final* from 1931 staring Edward G. Robinson

Tabloid journalism in the '30s - when the newspapers were that generation's Silicon Valley / internet stocks - captured Hollywood's attention in a way that Silicon Valley hasn't today because newsrooms, especially back then, had a visual and palpable dynamism that a tech start up simply doesn't. Heck, everyone knows what a newspaper does; whereas, how many people really understand coding and, even if one does, who wants to see a movie about it?

But '30s newsrooms and the newspaper business were alive with a febrile energy to "get the story" that was kept somewhat respectable by a facade of a public service to "inform the people," which, in the tabloids in particular, masks a greedy, amoral drive to sell the muck of society - its dirty underwear - to a willingly paying customer. While this movie genre hit its apotheosis with 1939's *His Gal Friday *(my dark horse for one of the top-ten movies of all time), *Five Star Final* is an outstanding entry, especially considering its '31 date when Hollywood was still figuring out "the talkies."

*Five Star Final* is an unabashed morality tale with Robinson at its center as the conscience-conflicted editor who knows every lever to pull to get and sell a sleazy story, but seems at the end of his moral tether as the paper's circulation-obsessed owner pushes him to "stop going highbrow and just hawk the 'human interest' stories our readers want." To comply, Robinson - a man born to be an actor - stirs up a decades-old wife-kills-husband story that sets in motion a series of life-destroying events for a nice, minding-its-own-business family.

As he unleashes his hatchet reporters (both men and woman because, before we discovered today that women were locked out of all jobs in the '30s, it appears many women worked as newspaper reporters), Robinson's secretary plays the part of the angel on his shoulder to, almost, everyone else's devil.

To drive circulation, newsboys report "obstinate" newsstand owners who get roughed up by some sort of mob, discretely, paid for - off the books - by the paper; reporters pose as ministers to get sources to talk or they just break into houses; and innuendo, slander and threats are all in the mix. It's an ugly business that thrives on everything we'd like to think civilization refutes, but those things were there back then and are still with us today.

As in the recent housing crisis, while we'd like to fob it all off on corrupt business or politics - both certainly share a lot of the blame - the public owns its share too, as - be it the liar loans many willingly signed their names to or nickels spent on "extras" to read the latest salacious detail about this or that scandal - there'd be no money in this ugliness if the public simply said "no" and closed its pocketbook.

Director Mervyn LeRoy isn't subtle here, as he isn't in many of his movies, but he is effective in a punch-you-in-the-face kind of way. Right up to the closing speeches - which are all but sermons or, at least, editorials - the good and the bad, the right and the wrong are labelled clearly for you. To wit, every time Robinson's character does something sleazy, he goes into his office's private sink closet and scrubs and scrubs his hand with soap - you almost expect him to put on a hair shirt - it's not subtle, but you get the point.

There's some '31 clunkiness to *Five Star Final* as a few of the actors haven't learned to adjust their theater-trained heavy gesticulating for movies' subtler needs, camera angles can be off and transitions, awkward, but it's easy to see past all that for a fast-paced movie with Robinson - who had already perfectly adjusted his acting style to films - powering it forward. And beyond that, it is incredible time travel to the 1930s where that period's clothes, cars, architecture and the newsroom itself - with typewriters pinging, phones ringing, reporters screaming and chaos only somewhat controlled - feel very much alive to us today.


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## Fading Fast

*The Entertainer *from 1960 with Laurence Olivier, Albert Finney and Joan Plowright

Until this outstanding movie, I knew Laurence Olivier was an major talent because (1) his reputation said his was, (2) *Rebecca *and *Wuthering Heights* (he was fine in both, but no more) and (3) with a name like Laurence Olivier, you have to be a major talent - there are no Laurence Oliviers flipping burgers in this world.

But now I get it. Playing an all-but-failed second-rate performer in the dying music hall business (think vaudeville) of early '60s England - and a drunk - and a womanizer - and a cheater - and a check kiter - Olivier embodies this sad charlatan trying to keep all the deflating balls of his checkered life in the air by dint of personality and fear - if he stops, he knows whatever is left of him dies.

Drawn into his circle of failure is his second wife - whom he originally bedded while his first wife was giving birth to his daughter. Wife number two is now an alcoholic, in part, over fear that another woman will do to her what she did to the first wife (which seems like karmically fair, but brutal, punishment). Also in this circle is the aforementioned daughter (now a young woman with a preternatural ability to forgive her father), a couple of sons - one in the army, another Olivieir's factotum - and Olivier's father, a retired but more-successful version of Olivier, which eats away at the son.

Yes, it's a version of a kitchen sink movie with the family disfunction painfully limned in too much drinking - which starts early in the day and with the parents encouraging their just-adult children to join in - violent outbursts, fear of bill collectors, recriminations and general anger toward each other and life. But this one is broader as Olivier's failed career, life and family symbolizes England's post-war ennui and slide - highlighted by the aforementioned army son being mobilized to Egypt to fight for the embers of the Empire, but really for nothing anyone can explain.

Kudos to director Tony Richardson as we see Olivier's hackneyed performance of old material given to a sparse and disinterested crowd in a formerly impressive, but now torn and frayed, dance hall "palace," as the perfect metaphor for the British Empire in the early '60s: the signs of past glory are all around, but it can't be maintained and nobody really knows what to do but keep on keeping on even when that doesn't work. It isn't subtle, but it packs a punch.

While Oliviers' on-screen daughter played by Joan Plowright centers the story and the fragile family (sometimes parents get more from their children than they deserve), it is Oliviers' loud but nuanced performance (not an easy thing to do) that powers the movie forward. Be it an old dance-hall singer breaking down, a former Empire stumbling to find its footing, a factory job replaced by a robot or a desk job eliminated by computer code, our struggles today might be different in facts and circumstances from those before, but they don't really change in substance as we can all see a part of our lives in something as removed from our day to day as an old performer in 1960s London forced to face his professional obsolescence and personal failings. In the end, one thing you come away with is that Sir Laurence Olivier deserves his reputation.


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## Fading Fast

*Trio* from 1950 with way too many (mainly British) stars to list, but a shoutout is deserved to Ronald Culver for one of his best performances

Three short stories by (and introduced by) W. Somerset Maugham


Maugham said it in the introduction, there are no truly new stories - it's all about what the author does with them and, kudos to Maugham, these are well told


The first tells the tale of a middle aged verger who's fired from his job because he can't read or write (but has done his job well for seventeen years) - felt modern as so many of us have to "reinvent" our careers in middle age these days as skill requirements change


The middle one takes place on a luxury liner and brings a neat twist to the old story of a pushy "know it all" proving to be a bit more than the blowhard he appears (a random act of kindness is one of life's treasures, 'nuff said)


Finally - and the best was saved for last - we see the lives of wealthy TB patients in a Scottish sanitarium (don't think hospital, think luxury hotel) and what happens when one couple falls in love with dim life prospects


There's nothing earth shattering here (these are the opposite of so many modern movies that believe they must be loud and shocking to be art), but they are sincere story telling 


Lastly, for us today, they're little time-capsules to post-war Europe well worth seeing for that alone - clothes, cars, architecture, cruise ships (for travel not Disney profits) and manners transport you to another time









*The Two Mrs. Carrolls *from 1947 with Barbara Stanwyck, Humphrey Bogart, Alexis Smith and Nigel Bruce

I want to like this movie more than I did - what, with Bogie and Stanwyck, I was all but sold before I saw it - but unfortunately, it struggles


It's a Hitchcock-like movie without Hitchcock at the helm to pace the mystery and to make you care more about the people than the plot


Bogie plays a disturbed artist, a painter, whose has an affair with Stanwyck and then marries her after his first wife dies at a young age 


Surprisingly - as I find most children in movies a distraction (at best) - Bogie's mature-beyond-her-years ten-year-old daughter is one of the more engaging characters as she sees better than the adults that something is off in Bogie and Stanwyck's marriage, but her love for her dad blinds her to what's obvious to the rest of us (and it's only a mild spoiler alert as it's telegraphed pretty early) - her dad kills his wives when he finds a new woman he wants to marry


And I wasn't kidding about the movie needing Hitchcock to direct as he, basically, did a much-better (somewhat) version of this story in '41's *Suspicion *with Cary Grant and (drop dead gorgeous) Joan Fontaine where only the movie production code made him addle the outcome 









*Follow Me Quietly* from 1949

It's a B-movie - an hour long - but somehow it rises above itself in the, at the time, aborning genre of crime drama/documentary that follows a police investigation step by step


Here, a serial killer, "The Judge" is strangling women on rainy nights, but not leaving enough clues to be caught


The lead detective - in a characterization that will become a cliche - is obsessed with capturing the elusive killer


And something that was already a movie cliche at the time, we have the "intrepid" reporter both hounding and helping the police; this time, in the form of a pretty blonde who initially fights with the detective while they begin to fall for each other - it's too obvious to work well in this one


 It's really all too obvious here, but it still has some good things - the use of a mannequin instead of the usual composition sketch is a neat trick as is the methodical investigation leading from one clue (a magazine left at the crime scent) to, eventually, a B-movie style (read, guns blazing) shootout at a chemical factory (no one seems to be worried about machine gun bullets flying around pipes with God knows what chemicals flowing through them)


Is it good - not really, but somehow it's still fun in a sometimes serious, sometimes almost campy way


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## Fading Fast

*Background to Danger* from 1943 starring George Raft, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre and Brenda Marshal

It's a movie, seemingly, made up of parts of other movies - *Casablanca, Night Train to Munich, Watch on the Rhine* and other WWII propaganda flicks - resulting in a movie with some enjoyable scenes, but that, as a whole, feels flat.

*Background to Danger *borrows shamelessly from *Casablanca's* style: there's an opening-scene voice over with maps describing desperate people "trapped" in a city of intrigue, a hero in a trench coat and fedora, and a scene with a plane leaving the city as those left behind longing look on. Also like *Casablanca*, *Background to Danger's* story is a bit muddled and not really that interesting when it gets straightened-out at the end; hence, like with a Hitchcock movie, what matters is the "who" and not the "what."

The who is George Raft masquerading as an American businesses man in Ankara, but he's really an agent of the American government trying to expose a German spy ring plotting to create a reason for Russia to invade Turkey so that neutral Turkey will become an ally of Germany. In my defense, that sentence is less confusing than the explanation provided in the movie.

Along the way, Raft encounters a German Colonel, Greenstreet (born to play sinisterly charming characters), trying to provoke the incident to push Turkey into German arms and a few Russian agents (siblings Lorrie and Marshall - arguing that anything can come out of the same parental gene pool) trying to thwart the Germans.

With those pieces in place for this war-time propaganda film, the movie becomes a bunch of chase, capture, torture and escape scenes combined with tentative alliances and misunderstandings (and the usual Lorre craziness).

Driving the narrative, Raft faces off against rotund Greenstreet (he's fortunate it isn't a pie eating contest) while he somewhat partners with, but still doesn't trust, the Russians nor they him. Raft and the Russian operatives, eventually and grudging, come to respect each other (message to war-time American public about its Soviet ally received). Simultaneously, Raft and Marshal realize that since they are the two best-looking people in the movie, they need to fall in love.

It's fine for an 80-minute long diversion - and there are some neat 1940's car, clothes and architectural details (Greenstreet's over-the-top office pretty well captures Nazi architecture) - but see any of the movies noted in the first paragraph for a better version of a similar type of propaganda film.


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## N05J3W3

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy [2011] for the unequalled casting and performances, production design, and cinematography. A great story about human relationships that just happens to be set in a Cold War espionage narrative.


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## Fading Fast

*Blinded by the Light* from 2019

Okay, I grew up in a seedy-ish New Jersey town in the '70s; one of the Jerusalems of the religion of Bruce Springsteen. But to be honest, I like, but have never loved, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band - the Rolling Stones held the answers to life for a fifteen-year-old me. But I get the devotion of his fans as you can't live in the Vatican and not understand the passion true believers have for Catholicism.

Apparently, the hopelessness, angst, sexual frustration and the need for more that a young, angry man in a depressed New Jersey town in the '70s cried out for on vinyl translated across the Atlantic to an angry teenager experiencing hopelessness, angst, sexual frustration and the need for more in a depressed English town in the '80s.

That's the theme of *Blinded by the Light. The* story is *Bend it Like Beckham*, with Bruce substituting for the soccer great and a put-upon-by-a-traditional-father Pakistani teenage boy substituting for a soccer-playing white teenage tom-boy with a mom who wants a girly-girl daughter.

And here's the reason they keep making these movies: they work. They aren't original or surprising, but teenage angst is universal and finding answers in something - a soccer star who can work magic with a ball or a rock star who writes meaningful-to-the-young lyrics - is inspiring.

All the rest is by-the-numbers filler: our teenage hero fights prejudice, overcomes his shyness with girls and loneliness at school, hurts his best friend and learns the humility of apologizing, fights with and, then, finds common ground with his procrustean father (who miraculously sees the light - get it - by the end) and gets to meet his hero (which based on the pics run during the credits - and since this is based a real story - apparently did happen).

Other than the awkward way Bruce's lyrics are scattered across the screen when his songs are playing and the gratuitous Reagan-Thatcher-hate political statement, it's a well done version of a movie we've seen before and will see again.


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## Fading Fast

*Back Street* from 1941 with Charles Boyer, Margaret Sullavan and Frank McHugh

In the early 1900s, a midwest girl (Sullavan) meets a New York businessman (Boyer) in town on a stopover; they fall in love; plan to elope; circumstances prevent her from making the boat they were leaving on; he assumes she had a change of heart (she didn't) and he goes back to New York.

Five years later, she is living in New York and runs into (married) him on the street, they have an affair - both are upfront about what's happening - that turns into a permanent mistress situation.

How the heck did this movie get made in 1941? Were all the censors out getting coffee at the same time?

The rest of the movie is a thoughtful look at the pain, and occasional periods of joy, a long-term mistress experiences: the real family gets him for holidays and vacations, children get born and grow up, milestones come and go while the mistress mainly waits for the small windows of togetherness they have.

Slow in parts, but overall a strong movie with this one questionable casting decision: Margaret Sullivan (who has an alluringly wistful clutch to her voice) is beautiful in every way, but she does not look, feel, carry herself or imply "kept woman" in any manner. Marlene Dietrich or Greta Garbo, with their fallen-Eve vibe, were born to play mistresses; Sullivan not so much - but she tries hard here.

As the lovers reach old age, there's a big confrontation - sparked by his adult children violating the unspoken agreement that everyone looks the other way regarding dad's mistress - resulting in a surprisingly modern outcome (recognizing the context of the times). But the real question is, again, how did this sensitive look at, what is effectively, a long-term extra-marital affair slide by the censors?

And a shoutout is owed to character actor Frank McHugh - even if you don't recognize his name, if you know old movies, you know him as he pops up as a goofy character with a forced nasally laugh, almost snicker, in a lot of '30s and '40s pictures. I sometimes find his one-note act grating, but here, his character, a friend of Sullivan's, shows another dimension - a sensitivity to Sullavan's position by not judging, but sincerely trying to help - that argues he had more acting depth than the studio system usually allowed him to display.


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## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 40470
> 
> *Back Street* from 1941 with Charles Boyer, Margaret Sullavan and Frank McHugh
> 
> In the early 1900s, a midwest girl (Sullavan) meets a New York businessman (Boyer) in town on a stopover; they fall in love; plan to elope; circumstances prevent her from making the boat they were leaving on; he assumes she had a change of heart (she didn't) and he goes back to New York.
> 
> Five years later, she is living in New York and runs into (married) him on the street, they have an affair - both are upfront about what's happening - that turns into a permanent mistress situation.
> 
> How the heck did this movie get made in 1941? Were all the censors out getting coffee at the same time?
> 
> The rest of the movie is a thoughtful look at the pain, and occasional periods of joy, a long-term mistress experiences: the real family gets him for holidays and vacations, children get born and grow up, milestones come and go while the mistress mainly waits for the small windows of togetherness they have.
> 
> Slow in parts, but overall a strong movie with this one questionable casting decision: Margaret Sullivan (who has an alluringly wistful clutch to her voice) is beautiful in every way, but she does not look, feel, carry herself or imply "kept woman" in any manner. Marlene Dietrich or Greta Garbo, with their fallen-Eve vibe, were born to play mistresses; Sullivan not so much - but she tries hard here.
> 
> As the lovers reach old age, there's a big confrontation - sparked by his adult children violating the unspoken agreement that everyone looks the other way regarding dad's mistress - resulting in a surprisingly modern outcome (recognizing the context of the times). But the real question is, again, how did this sensitive look at, what is effectively, a long-term extra-marital affair slide by the censors?
> 
> And a shoutout is owed to character actor Frank McHugh - even if you don't recognize his name, if you know old movies, you know him as he pops up as a goofy character with a forced nasally laugh, almost snicker, in a lot of '30s and '40s pictures. I sometimes find his one-note act grating, but here, his character, a friend of Sullivan's, shows another dimension - a sensitivity to Sullavan's position by not judging, but sincerely trying to help - that argues he had more acting depth than the studio system usually allowed him to display.


I have seen the movie Back Street, I think, two times to date, but I am sure I will most enjoy watching it the third time given the benefit of your review, as detailed above. To my mind, your analysis and conclusions are insightful and spot-on! Thank you, my friend.


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## Peak and Pine

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 40470
> 
> *Back Street* from 1941 with Charles Boyer, Margaret Sullavan and Frank McHugh
> 
> In the early 1900s, a midwest girl (Sullavan) meets a New York businessman (Boyer) in town on a stopover; they fall in love; plan to elope; circumstances prevent her from making the boat they were leaving on; he assumes she had a change of heart (she didn't) and he goes back to New York.
> 
> Five years later, she is living in New York and runs into (married) him on the street, they have an affair - both are upfront about what's happening - that turns into a permanent mistress situation.
> 
> How the heck did this movie get made in 1941? Were all the censors out getting coffee at the same time?
> 
> The rest of the movie is a thoughtful look at the pain, and occasional periods of joy, a long-term mistress experiences: the real family gets him for holidays and vacations, children get born and grow up, milestones come and go while the mistress mainly waits for the small windows of togetherness they have.
> 
> Slow in parts, but overall a strong movie with this one questionable casting decision: Margaret Sullivan (who has an alluringly wistfqul clutch to her voice) is beautiful in every way, but she does not look, feel, carry herself or imply "kept woman" in any manner. Marlene Dietrich or Greta Garbo, with their fallen-Eve vibe, were born to play mistresses; Sullivan not so much - but she tries hard here.
> 
> As the lovers reach old age, there's a big confrontation - sparked by his adult children violating the unspoken agreement that everyone looks the other way regarding dad's mistress - resulting in a surprisingly modern outcome (recognizing the context of the times). But the real question is, again, how did this sensitive look at, what is effectively, a long-term extra-marital affair slide by the censors?
> 
> And a shoutout is owed to character actor Frank McHugh - even if you don't recognize his name, if you know old movies, you know him as he pops up as a goofy character with a forced nasally laugh, almost snicker, in a lot of '30s and '40s pictures. I sometimes find his one-note act grating, but here, his character, a friend of Sullivan's, shows another dimension - a sensitivity to Sullavan's position by not judging, but sincerely trying to help - that argues he had more acting depth than the studio system usually allowed him to display.


How does Boyer fare with his permanent French accent* as a NYC businessman? Probably okay since you didn't mention it. Another 40s film you recently reviewed is due to start filming a remake, starring Leo DeCaprio, _Nightmare Alley_.

*_Caedmon_ was a label that offered spoken word recordings, LPs, long before CDs or even cassettes. Being once and still very big on the spoken voice, I had a small, expensive collection of these as a late teenager: Burton, Thomas,, Laughton, others. One was a recording of Boyer reading song lyrics, La Vie En Rose, What Now My Love and others. I could listen to it all day long, and did.


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## Fading Fast

Peak and Pine said:


> How does Boyer fare with his permanent French accent* as a NYC businessman? Probably okay since you didn't mention it. Another 40s film you recently reviewed is due to start filming a remake, starring Leo DeCaprio, _Nightmare Alley_.
> 
> *_Caedmon_ was a label that offered spoken word recordings, LPs, long before CDs or even cassettes. Being once and still very big on the spoken voice, I had a small, expensive collection of these as a late teenager: Burton, Thomas,, Laughton, others. One was a recording of Boyer reading song lyrics, La Vie En Rose, What Now My Love and others. I could listen to it all day long, and did.


Thank you - I didn't know a remake was being made. From the little I could find about it online, it appears it will be set in the '40s when the original was made - good for them. That said, considering how the public today has no real appreciation for old-time carnivals or "mystics," it will be interesting to see if they can get into this one.


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## Peak and Pine

Fading Fast said:


> ..considering how the public today has no real appreciation for old-time carnivals or "mystics," it will be interesting to see if they can get into this one.


Sometimes the public pleasantly suprises us. Whoda thought a saga about a bunch of English thugs in 1890s would catch on, and even inspire a manner of dress? (Well me maybe since I dressed that way all along.)


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## Fading Fast

A pic from the new "Nightmare Alley"


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## Fading Fast

*Hold Back the Dawn* from 1941 starring Charles Boyer, Olivia de Havilland and Paulette Goddard

A European grifter (Boyer) staying in a Mexican border town is looking for an American "mark" to marry to gain entrance into the US and then divorce


While doing so, he meets up with a former partner in crime and romantic interest (Goddard), who is basically working the same scam - they team up planning to share resources once they both get into the US


There's a bit of *Casablanca* to this one as the town has that feel of the desperation of exiles looking to move on


Somehow Goddard's screaming-sex character - with her lack of underwear and feral desire for Boyer that is clearly sated outside of marriage - slid right by the censors


Fulfilling his plan, Boyer meets a schoolmarm (de Havilland - only in Hollywood do schoolmarms look like her), charms and marries her in 24 hours and then she leaves to go back to her job in the US while he waits the four weeks required for even spouses to obtain entry


So, here's the formula that you probably saw coming at this point: manipulative boy meets sincere girl. They marry, then, he starts to fall in love with her (when she comes back to Mexico for a brief honeymoon during his waiting period)


That last part surprises Boyer, infuriates Goddard and perplexes the U.S. border inspector keeping an eye on Boyer and Goddard


It all comes to a head when (spoiler alert) Goddard, in a fit of jealousy (and vicious cattiness), outs Boyer to de Havilland and the U.S. border inspector leading to this money scene: 
de Havilland, despite her heart having just been crushed when she learned that Boyer was only using her, fully supports Boyer's fake cover story when the border inspector interviews her, then, once the inspector leaves, she walks out on Boyer, leaving him broken: he got what he wants and now wants none of it but de Havilland



And that's were the movie should have stopped - it was a Victor-Hugo-worthy moment of Christian forgiveness meeting mendacity and not blinking. Maybe the code, maybe some "test-audience" feedback or maybe because it was just the norm, the movie kept going until (another spoiler alert) it wrapped-up in a nice happy ending that felt forced and deflating

Only posting this pic because I couldn't find a better one of de Havilland's school "bus," an outstanding woody wagon:


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## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 40641
> 
> *Hold Back the Dawn* from 1941 starring Charles Boyer, Olivia de Havilland and Paulette Goddard
> 
> A European grifter (Boyer) staying in a Mexican border town is looking for an American "mark" to marry to gain entrance into the US and then divorce
> 
> 
> While doing so, he meets up with a former partner in crime and romantic interest (Goddard), who is basically working the same scam - they team up planning to share resources once they both get into the US
> 
> 
> There's a bit of *Casablanca* to this one as the town has that feel of the desperation of exiles looking to move on
> 
> 
> Somehow Goddard's screaming-sex character - with her lack of underwear and feral desire for Boyer that is clearly sated outside of marriage - slid right by the censors
> 
> 
> Fulfilling his plan, Boyer meets a schoolmarm (de Havilland - only in Hollywood do schoolmarms look like her), charms and marries her in 24 hours and then she leaves to go back to her job in the US while he waits the four weeks required for even spouses to obtain entry
> 
> 
> So, here's the formula that you probably saw coming at this point: manipulative boy meets sincere girl. They marry, then, he starts to fall in love with her (when she comes back to Mexico for a brief honeymoon during his waiting period)
> 
> 
> That last part surprises Boyer, infuriates Goddard and perplexes the U.S. border inspector keeping an eye on Boyer and Goddard
> 
> 
> It all comes to a head when (spoiler alert) Goddard, in a fit of jealousy (and vicious cattiness), outs Boyer to de Havilland and the U.S. border inspector leading to this money scene:
> de Havilland, despite her heart having just been crushed when she learned that Boyer was only using her, fully supports Boyer's fake cover story when the border inspector interviews her, then, once the inspector leaves, she walks out on Boyer, leaving him broken: he got what he wants and now wants none of it but de Havilland
> 
> 
> 
> And that's were the movie should have stopped - it was a Victor-Hugo-worthy moment of Christian forgiveness meeting mendacity and not blinking. Maybe the code, maybe some "test-audience" feedback or maybe because it was just the norm, the movie kept going until (another spoiler alert) it wrapped-up in a nice happy ending that felt forced and deflating
> 
> Only posting this pic because I couldn't find a better one of de Havilland's school "bus," an outstanding woody wagon:
> View attachment 40642


Another great review, at once informative and riveting. Hold Back The Dawn is another film classic on my list to be located and watched! Thank you, my friend, for a great lead.


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## Fading Fast

*The Hunchback of Notre Dame* from 1939 with Charles Laughton, Maureen O'Hara and Cedric Hardwicke

Sometimes I don't like pre-Industrial-Revolution stories as they lack so many of our modern inventions - transportation, corporations, technology, medicine, etc. - that they can seem remote or foreign to our lives today. But *The Hunchback of Notre Dame,* the movie and, even more so, the book, is the opposite as its lack of modern distractions helps reveal eternal human truths in all their raw, sometimes crushing, sometimes uplifting, timelessness.

In the book, Victor Hugo boldly sets up extremes: the Hunchback is not just unattractive, but he is horribly deformed, Esmeralda isn't pretty, she is ethereally beautiful, Frollo isn't smitten with her, he is besot beyond all reason and he isn't a bad man, but the devil's stand-in, and on and on. In lesser hands, these characters would become cliches, but Hugo does the impossible by making these hyper-extremes so human that we see and feel ourselves and our lives in these 15th Century people and challenges, while also seeing eternal truths and struggles.

To be sure, this 1939 film had to tamp down some of the boldness of the book; to wit, the character of Frollo, the Archdeacon of Notre Dame, becomes the Deacon's brother in some kind of administrative but not religious position. The irony of this can't be lost on modern audiences as 1939 sensitivity wouldn't allow a Archdeacon to be a deeply evil character; whereas today, the default setting of Hollywood is to make almost every church leader evil or corrupt or a molester or a drug user or an embezzler or....

But once you allow for whatever had to happen to let a movie be made in 1939, you're in for an entertaining and philosophical treat. You'll see: a very open-minded king extolling the benefits of the printing press to allow the people to read and learn for themselves versus authoritarian Frollo wanting the printing press destroyed to keep the public ignorant; mob justice cruelly enjoying the punishment and suffering of the horribly deformed and mistakingly convicted hunchback; a moment of poignant humanity as a "nobody" gypsy girl steps forward to ease the hunchback's pain; the hunchback repaying the gypsy girl with his last-minute gallows' rescue of her and escape to the sanctuary of the church (there might be no better joy-of-defiance scene in movie history); armies of peasants storming Notre Dame to protect sanctuary as the confused hunchback provides a one-man defense - and stunning visual - by pouring boiling oil out of the church's gargoyles. And that list only touches on some of the movie's many, many powerful moments.

The year nineteen thirty-nine deserves its title as Hollywood's greatest year. If it wasn't, a movie like* The* *Hunchback of Notre Dame* wouldn't be all but lost amidst the other great '39 movies - *Gone with the Wind* and T*he Wizard of Oz*, for example - that have more popular appeal today. But none of them have Victor Hugo's genuinely timeless classic at its core. Hence, none of them put up on screen *The Hunchback of Notre Dame's* incredibly wide, powerful and raw array of human emotions - love, hate, forgiveness, compassion, loss, despair, cruelty, mendacity and hope.


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## Peak and Pine

^Agree.

But you didn't mention Laughton, whose spoken word 2-disc LP, ("The Storyteller"?), I wore thin when I was 16 (and forever after pronounced_ behemoth_ as _BEE-a-moth_, because he did). A young man's idol Laughton was, and now a much older, jaded man's idol, Daniel Day Lewis, says this about Laughton "He was probably the greatest film actor who came from that period of time. He had something quite remarkable. As an actor, you cannot take your eyes off him." Ditto that. And of course it didn't hurt that he and Franenstein were married to the same woman (you may want to check that one out). Good review, and thnx for posting.


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## Fading Fast

Peak and Pine said:


> ^Agree.
> 
> But you didn't mention Laughton, whose spoken word 2-disc LP, ("The Storyteller"?), I wore thin when I was 16 (and forever after pronounced_ behemoth_ as _BEE-a-moth_, because he did). A young man's idol Laughton was, and now a much older, jaded man's idol, Daniel Day Lewis, says this about Laughton "He was probably the greatest film actor who came from that period of time. He had something quite remarkable. As an actor, you cannot take your eyes off him." Ditto that. And of course it didn't hurt that he and Franenstein were married to the same woman (you may want to check that one out). Good review, and thnx for posting.


Agreed on Laughton. I'm not kidding, I was about to type a paragraph about his insanely great performance and, then, thought my comments were long enough (instead, I added in that second pic). I love him in all his famous '30s stuff, but also in '57's "Witness for the Prosecution" as, once again and as you noted, you have to watch him when he's in a scene. Thank you for the kind comments.


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## Fading Fast

*This Woman is Dangerous* from 1952 starring Joan Crawford and Dennis Morgan.

Joan Crawford was a successful movie-making machine for three decades, but even she had a miss now and then and this is one


To be sure, it's far from the worst movie made and it has some okay scenes, but as happened in several of her late '40s/early '50s movie, she was simply too old for the role


Here, she's the head of a small criminal gang whom she temporarily leaves to have surgery at a hospital for eye disease - she'll go blind without the operation - but for some inexplicable reason (she is clearly losing her sight), her gangster boyfriend thinks she's really going away to have an affair


Then, at the clinic, she falls in love with her doctor (Morgan) and he with her, which only fuels her gangster boyfriend's jealousy


And this is why her age matters - she's almost fifty here, looks it. And, as always, she doesn't exude an abundance of warmth and sensuality. Hence, it's hard to understand why these men, four and ten years younger than her (Morgan, in particular looks freshly scrubbed next to I've-lived-my-life-hard Crawford), are taking all sorts of risk with their lives (the gangster boyfriend risks capture; physician Morgan risks, at minimum, his career and reputation) for cold and rough-around-the-edges Crawford


The few pluses are the incredibly beautiful and crisp black-and-white cinematography, Crawford and Morgan are both strong enough pros that they still power a few scenes engagingly forward and there's some nice time travel to early '50s America


It's not enough to save the effort, but as noted, there are plenty of worse movies out there


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## John M

Back in January, I saw 1917 and while it might not be a classic yet like the Deer Hunter, it ranks up there. I am a bit biased and love war films though.


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## Fading Fast

*A Stolen Life* from 1946 with Bette Davis, Bette Davis (again), Walter Brennan, Charles Ruggles and Glenn Ford

If you feel like you've seen this movie before, it's probably because you remember when Bette Davis stole her sister's husband/fiance (twice!) in 1942's *In This Our Life* or later in her career when, in 1964's *Dead Ringer,* she's the poor sister that kills her twin to live the rich sister's life - movie life is hard.

*A Stolen Life* is kinda a mash-up of those two where evil-twin Davis steals her good-twin's boyfriend (Ford), but when the evil twin dies in a boating accident, the good twin assumes the evil twin's identity, mainly, to get the man she loved back (evil twin's husband) only to discover evil twin's marriage had been heading for a divorce - movie life is hard.

By now you know you don't watch this movie for its plot believability, you watch it for Davis' acting - always a treat but on steroids here as she gets to play her good and evil twin and does both with nuance and verisimilitude - and to see California's coast try to look like Maine's coast (it tries hard, but the particulars of the geographies defeat the effort). You also watch it to see a young Glen Ford try hard to hold his own as the much-wanted husband, but his acting chops just weren't ready to star across from two Bette Davises.

Finally, you watch it because it's not a bad story even if you don't really believe it; just like it isn't really Maine, but it still takes place, for the most part, in a pretty coastal village. And if Davis' acting, a decent story and pretty scenery isn't enough, there is the added, for us today, time travel to 1946 boats, cars, clothes and architecture. And lastly, you have Walter Brennan as the cantankerous, but big-hearted, lighthouse keeper and Charles Ruggles as the kindly uncle, both trying to steer the love triangle to a good outcome, but as noted, movie life is hard.


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## Fading Fast

*The Captive City* from 1952 with John Forsythe, Joan Camden and Ray Teal (yup, Sheriff Roy Coffee)

Based on a true story, it's an early entry in the "crime exposé" genre which follows an investigation by local Midwest-town newspaper editor Forsythe into a bookmaking operation seemingly more advanced and sinister than everyone in town, but Forsythe, wants to believe


Shot in super-crisp black-and-white cinematography (color would have ruined it), and with Forsythe's narration, it has somewhat of a documentary feel (as these efforts did), but it's still all movie as the transition from a story about a quiet town to "holy cow, this syndicate is murderously dangerous" almost sneaks up on you


And that's the point the movie is making: this local "look the other way" bookmaking business is really tied into a national crime syndicate (the mob), which will happily keep a "light touch" on the town until its business is threatened, as it is by Forsythe's relentless investigation


Tying it all together is a hokey but, now, historical-curio introduction and epilogue by Estese Kefauver - the head of an early '50s US Senate committee investigating organized crime - explaining that the movie is based on a real story and, in a bit of self promotion, how valuable his committee's work is in combatting similar cases


And, to be sure, it was important as we see that the "quiet" bookmaking business has corrupted the town's political and law enforcement leadership as they are allowed to do their jobs only if they leave the bookmaking business alone


Also brought to light is how most townspeople pass off the bookmaking effort as a harmless vice / something most people actual want - which was probably true if not for the mob tie-in (what really are lotteries today if not numbers rackets run by governments, not organized crime?)


Holding it all together is the outstanding effort of Forsythe and his supportive, and, sometimes, involved in the investigation, wife (Camden) who go from thinking they live in a "good" town to realizing their lives are at risk if they continue to pursue the story


Well worth the ninety minutes for the solid storytelling peek at small-town corruption and national mob influence in post-WWII America, but it's also incredible time-travel to shot-on-location (scrubbed of gambling details) Reno Nevada filling in as the Midwest town


And, lastly, a shout-out is owed to one of my favorite directors, Robert Wise, who makes movies in every genre (probably why he's less-well-known as he doesn't have a signature style), but regardless, he always creates believable and relatable characters, which is why his films age so well

Couldn't resist posting this film noir pic from the movie:


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## Fading Fast

*The Young Philadelphians* from 1959 staring Paul Newman, Alexis Smith, Barbara Rush, John Williams and many other names you know well

Soap operas dressed up as serious life-revealing stories, but whose melodramatic seams show have always been with us - half or more of all our TV shows today fall into this category. But the apotheosis of this format was in the 1950s when books were allowed to go places - with sex and corruption, in particular - that movies could only nibble at. I love these efforts and sadly consider myself somewhat of expert on 1950s-era saponaceous books and movies - my parents are not proud.

The novel *The Young Philadelphians* (comments here:  #719  ) has it all - multigenerational intrigue and struggle between an immigrant social-climbing family and the old-guard of Main Line Philadelphia. There's plenty of sex - more outside than within marriage - clandestine affairs, illegitimate children, homosexuality, impotence, coverups, payoffs, murder and mayhem all bubbling below and occasional above the surface of "proper" Philadelphia society.

When translated to the screen, the timeline in *The Young Philadelphians* had to be truncated and some of the tawdriness and salaciousness culled, but it's still a ripping tail of dirty laundry, lust, greed, power, excess, corruption and abject betrayal juxtaposed with the polished and elegant-looking "refinement" of 1950's upper-class society.

The theme throughout is how handsome and young Anthony Judson Lawrence (Newman) - the kept-at-a-distance-by-society, but putative product of a society-boy-immigrant-girl marriage - will achieve his ferociously-ambitious mother's goal of having her son break into the rarified world of proper Philadelphia society.

A pause is needed here to recognize that Newman played variations of this role in half a dozen movies in the '50s and '60s because he was absolutely, positively perfect at it. When Hollywood tried others in the role - Warren Beaty, William Holden or Montgomery Clift, for example - it only served to highlight how much better Newman was at it. Newman had great roles right up to the end of his career, but he was never more Paul Newman than as a young man pushing his way into somewhere he wasn't quite wanted.

Back in *The Young Philadelphians*, Newman has to cope with an engagement to a society girl that gets oh-so-smoothly broken up by her urbane father who buys Newman off, not with money or threats, but promises of a position in business and society after he graduates law school. A boys' gotta do, what a boy's gotta do.

From there, so much happens - revenge marriages, young husbands dying at war, prodigal rich society boy becoming a drunkard and potential murderer, corrupt political careers exposed, wealthy clients stolen (something that "just wasn't done"), Mrs. Robinson-type affairs* (coo-coo-ca-choo) and a bring-it-all-together, trial-of-the-year that puts Main Line Philadelphia in the dock with only the tenuous loyalty of the never-fully-embraced outsider Anthony Judson Lawrence - our boy Newman - to rely on for its defense.

If this is your bag, you'll want to read the book first - it has so much more in it and, as always, you can form your own opinions and visuals - then watch the movie as a fun indulgence to see what Hollywood could do with a story still somewhat out-of-bounds for its late-'50s weakening movie-production code. Plus, you want to see Newman in all his perfect-for-this-genre Newmanness.

* Had sexy and weathered Ann Bancroft not been available to seduce an innocent Dustin Hoffman in *The Graduate*, Alexis Smith's upper-class cougar come-hither moves on a youthful Paul Newman in *The Young Philadelphians* shows that she could have easily filled Bancroft's shoes albeit without Bancroft's five-packs-a-day desiccated voice of scorn and amorality.

Newman and Smith having a coo-coo-ca-choo moment:


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## Fading Fast

*The Roaring Twenties* from 1939 staring James Cagney, Priscilla Lane, Humphrey Bogart and Gladys George

Made during enforcement of the movie production code and a decade after the period it's set in, this Warner Brothers gangster movie looks and feels - and messages - differently than earlier gangster classics, but still packs quite a punch both as a movie and as an influencer.

Three World War I buddies return from the conflict and struggle to restart their lives. Cagney, barely getting by as a cabby, is pulled into the aborning "industry" of bootlegging by been-kicked-around-and-is-wiser-for-it Gladys George. Buddy number two, Bogart, is brought into the "business" by Cagney as Cagney starts to move up. Meanwhile, buddy number three, Lynn, follows the honest path to law school.

With that set-up, a lot of the movie clicks along as you'd expect - Cagney gets bigger and richer and cockier; Bogie moves up, but gets jealous of his old friend Cagney, and Lynn, kinda sorta, works as Cagney's lawyer (but without crossing the line into gangster-hood). As a catalyst for what we know is coming, Cagney falls in love with a from-the-right-side-of-town, ivory-soap-clean singer, Lane, who needs his help to start and advance her career. She likes him in a brotherly way, but rejects his romantic advances.

As the Twenties roar along (sorry, couldn't resist), surprise, surprise, Lane falls in love with good-guy Lynn. Even though Cagney takes the blow hard, he continues to build his bootlegging empire with his original tutor, George, working for, but sometimes, still mentoring him. Finally, the stock market crashes, prohibition ends, Cagney's empire crumbles, but Bogie manages to become a more successful mob boss in the '30s while Lynn becomes a district attorney focusing on mob corruption.

Since this is a production code movie (spoiler alert), we follow the fall of Cagney as he's reduced to driving a cab again and struggling just to eat. And a down-and-out Cagney sums it all up with, perhaps, the line of the movie - the line that also sums up the '30s in America versus the '20s - when he turns to an also destitute George and says, "you're right Panama [George], we have finished out of the money."

Despite his impoverished circumstances, when Cagney learns that Bogart is going to knock off Lynn (because Lynn is going to indict him), Cagney shows that he still has just a little kick left in him. Mainly to protect his long unrequited love who is now Lynn's wife (Lane), Cagney confronts Bogart and both end up dead. Cagney, coincidentally, stumbles to the steps of a church as he dies (in case you somehow missed the morality of this tale).

It's good. It's very good, but it is a beat off the best '30s gangster movies as those movies felt more raw as they blurred the line between good and bad. Those early '30s efforts left much in the gray area where real life exists, but here, the divide is more clearly defined. In *The Roaring Twenties*, only Cagney and George exist in the gray and only until the end when punishment must be meted out.

And maybe because they were allowed to exist in the gray, Cagney and George, in particular, deliver powerful performances. Bogie, Lynn and Lane all do fine, but come off more as caricatures of good or evil (again, that darn code messing up a fine movie).

Another difference from those earlier effort is the style of the movie with *The Roaring Twenties *- effectively, a 1939 period movie about the 1920s - having a somewhat documentary feel in a way that adumbrates the "groundbreaking" approach of *Citizen Kane*. It also felt closer in style to the late 1950s' TV show *The Untouchables* than those early '30s efforts like *The Public Enemy*.

But despite it's flaws and code-enforced nonsense, *The Roaring Twenties* is still an outstanding coda to the 1930s' gangster-movie genre.


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## eagle2250

I'm not sure it qualifies as "The Best Movie Ever," but given recent events, it sure is timely; Stephen King's "The Stand!" I've read the book twice and with last night's viewing , have seen the movie three times. The story opens with a weaponized virus falling out of control and wiping out most of the population in the USA as well as throughout the rest of the Globe, There remain small pockets of virus resistant civilization left to struggle to reestablish society and to carry on the seemingly never ending battle between good and evil, and arguably between the Christ and the anti-Christ. 

This seems eerily reminiscent of our present circumstance in dealing with the challenges of the corona virus pandemic that we face, to include the requisite social distancing and self-imposed isolation in our respective homes. Admittedly the virus involved was not a militarized version, despite what the Chinese first alluded and our government's equally chaotic and misleading response to those claims might have led some to believe. The virus with which we must deal is an evolution of nature, but our response to it requires as much personal sacrifice and concern for the well being of others as would a response to a man made challenge. The good news is that good eventually prevails! This evening I will be watching the second half of my third viewing of The Stand!


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## Fading Fast

"This Land is Mine" from 1943 on TCM right now. I've never seen the movie and all I caught was Charles Laughton's two closing speeches - in the courtroom and classroom.

Are they wartime propaganda speeches - maybe.

When does courage and belief in ideals become propaganda - I don't know and I'm not sure I care.

Laughton's speeches - by a man who found his courage after a life of cowardliness (I'm guessing as all I heard were the closing speeches) - are powerful, moving and timeless both in their truths and owing to his acting prowess.

What a performance; what a pair of speeches.

Now I have to wait for the movie to cycle back to TCM's schedule so that I can see the other 90% of it - can't wait.

And this is what a hero can look like:


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## Fading Fast

*Desirable* from 1934 with Jean Muir, George Brent and Verree Teasdale

A short (68 minute) B-movie that works in an obvious way, but with a "Mrs. Robinson - coo-coo-ca-choo" backbeat


Jean Muir is the stunning, overly-protected and hidden-from-view daughter of a Broadway star (Teasdale) who doesn't want the world to know she has a daughter (age, vanity, legitimate business reason - you choose)


The daughter, now 19 and too old for school, shows up at her mother's apartment and accidentally meets her mother's younger secret lover, Brent (publicly, the mother and Brent are just friends, but privately...). The daughter and Brent become fast friends, but not lovers


The mother, perforce, publicly acknowledges the daughter and tries to arrange a quick society marriage for her to wrap everything up neatly and to abort her daughter and Brent from becoming more than friends ("and here's to your Mrs. Robinson...")


It all comes to a boil when the daughter's fiancé's "society" family kinda, sorta rejects their new daughter-in-law to be who was having doubts about the marriage anyway


The daughter's mother pushes hard for the marriage; the society boyfriend waffles; Brent tries to stay neutral - all leaving the final decision in the hands of beautiful and, basically, innocent Muir to choose


It's an obvious, but good story with, as noted, *The Graduate's* ickiness of the mother's lover potentially marrying the mother's daughter - it's not openly discussed, but it's definitely in play 
It's interesting to see this early take on *The Graduate* more from the daughter's viewpoint and without scary Ann Bancroft's bone-chilling threat to her former lover not to marry her daughter*



Better-than-average B movie with a lot packed into just over an hour including the aforementioned parallels to *The Graduate*. 

*So many things have gone wrong in your life if you are either one of the participants in that conversation.


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## Fading Fast

*River of No Return* from 1954 with Robert Mitchum and Marilyn Monroe

Solid Western morality tale, within a morality tale - the Western's stock and trade
Mitchum and his son live on the frontier with only a rifle to keep the Indians at bay (there's a lot of not PC stuff in here - more later)
Enter saloon-singer Monroe and her boyfriend gambler who, because he needs to get to town fast to file a gold claim, steals Mitchum's horse and rifle and leaves Monroe behind (apparently, a good man was also hard to find in the Old West)
Unable to defend themselves and with Mitchum looking for revenge on gambler, the three embark on a dangerous - owing to the rapids and stalking Indians - raft trip back to civilization
Along the way, they learn (the inner morality tale part) that many of their assumptions about each other are wrong, the value of working toward a shared goal, to support each other when necessary and some other wholesome '50s stuff
Then, back in town, the long-sought revenge mission gets twisted up to, once again, challenge our views on morality



There is, to today's view, a horrible scene where the hero, Mitchum, all but forces himself on Monroe, which just tells you where the acceptable morality of the time sat 
We don't have to like it, but it doesn't change the fact that it was, which also makes judging people's actions from back then blindly, based on our present-day standards, disputable
The same applies to the views of guns back then, where the young boy saves his father's life by shooing his father's would-be killer in the back - a scene that would never, ever be filmed today



There is an inverse relationship between the amount of makeup Marilyn Monroe wears and her attractiveness


And this is one of Marilyn's best genuine acting efforts - had she not become "Star Marilyn Monroe!", she had had a shot at being a decent actress and at, possibly, having a heck of a better life than she did 
Flow: Less Marilyn Monroe! ⇨ Less Makeup ⇨ Better actress ⇨ More attractive in a real way ⇨ Better life (hopefully)



On today's large screen HD TVs, it is obvious in the close-up scenes, when Mitchum and company are on the raft going down the river, that they are on a soundstage in front of a screen. I'm guessing, but don't know, that it actually looked better on a 1950 movie screen?


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## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 41930
> 
> *River of No Return* from 1954 with Robert Mitchum and Marilyn Monroe
> 
> Solid Western morality tale, within a morality tale - the Western's stock and trade
> Mitchum and his son live on the frontier with only a rifle to keep the Indians at bay (there's a lot of not PC stuff in here - more later)
> Enter saloon-singer Monroe and her boyfriend gambler who, because he needs to get to town fast to file a gold claim, steals Mitchum's horse and rifle and leaves Monroe behind (apparently, a good man was also hard to find in the Old West)
> Unable to defend themselves and with Mitchum looking for revenge on gambler, the three embark on a dangerous - owing to the rapids and stalking Indians - raft trip back to civilization
> Along the way, they learn (the inner morality tale part) that many of their assumptions about each other are wrong, the value of working toward a shared goal, to support each other when necessary and some other wholesome '50s stuff
> Then, back in town, the long-sought revenge mission gets twisted up to, once again, challenge our views on morality
> 
> 
> 
> There is, to today's view, a horrible scene where the hero, Mitchum, all but forces himself on Monroe, which just tells you where the acceptable morality of the time sat
> We don't have to like it, but it doesn't change the fact that it was, which also makes judging people's actions from back then blindly, based on our present-day standards, disputable
> The same applies to the views of guns back then, where the young boy saves his father's life by shooing his father's would-be killer in the back - a scene that would never, ever be filmed today
> 
> 
> 
> There is an inverse relationship between the amount of makeup Marilyn Monroe wears and her attractiveness
> 
> 
> And this is one of Marilyn's best genuine acting efforts - had she not become "Star Marilyn Monroe!", she had had a shot at being a decent actress and at, possibly, having a heck of a better life than she did
> Flow: Less Marilyn Monroe! ⇨ Less Makeup ⇨ Better actress ⇨ More attractive in a real way ⇨ Better life (hopefully)
> 
> 
> 
> On today's large screen HD TVs, it is obvious in the close-up scenes, when Mitchum and company are on the raft going down the river, that they are on a soundstage in front of a screen. I'm guessing, but don't know, that it actually looked better on a 1950 movie screen?


River of No Return is indeed a great movie. I've watched it at least twice and perhaps more than that. However, I feel compelled to watch it at least one more time....to confirm the observations you offer in your closing paragraph. I am impressed with your observational skills, my good man!


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## Fading Fast

*The Rising of the Moon* from 1957 narrated by Tyrone Power

It's a short movie (eighty minutes) composed of three twenty-ish minute vignettes (based on three short stories) about life and times in "old" Ireland each with an introduction by narrator Tyrone Power who, as is the skill of actors, appears to be casually talking to you as he leans against a doorframe in an old Irish cottage.

The real joy in this film today is, as Power notes, the view of "old" Ireland (the stories seem set in the early part of the 1900s) as all three segments were filmed on location using local actors and people from the towns and villages as extras. From stone-walled-thatched-roofed cottages and rickety-wheeled carts, to long dusty roads and wide open fields, the scenery aligns with the popular image of "old" Ireland - as do the people.

With enough classic wool to make a Brooklynite Hipster swoon, the clothes and quirky personalities of the locals also align to the popular image. And it is those locals who form the cornerstone of the stories. The first two vignettes, in particular, are character studies in the picaresque Irish personalities and off-beat social customs of that world.

In the first, a respected local farmer - seemingly an informal "mayor" of the village - is to be arrested for refusing to pay a fine because he punched a man who accused him of dishonesty. The police inspector sent to arrest him, a friend and old acquaintance, hates that he as to do it and starts by having tea with the farmer. As neighbors come and go, everyone seems to know what is happening, but are too embarrassed for themselves or for the farmer to mention it.

After this long dance and right when the inspector is about to make his arrest, the man who was punched comes by to pay the fine for the farmer (even he doesn't want the farmer to go to jail), which prompts the farmer to show he has the money to pay the fine but won't on principal as he was only defending his honor. It wraps up with the inspector and farmer agreeing on a mutually convenient day for the farmer to turn himself in, which he does, on the settled-on day, by walking through the village with his head held high as the villagers look on with respect.

Keeping the quirkiness going, in the second vignette, a local train stops at a small village station with the loudly announced warning that the train will be leaving "in one minute!" Uh-huh. Immediately, almost everyone piles off the train to stretch their legs or to buy beer at the quickly overcrowded single-attendant station bar - clearly, this train is not leaving "in one minute."

For the next several hours, the train conductor repeatedly attempts to get the passengers to board and the train on its way, but each time, it is held up for some reasons or another: a football team is coming, the local farmer needs to get his goat to the next stop (this is a passenger train; hence, hard to find space for a goat), an important dignitary called ahead to hold the train and on and on....

The joy is the happy insouciance with which the passengers (and, even, the train crew) endure or cause all the pleasant chaos and delays. You feel that the train ride - and long station stop - is an adventure for most of them with the hiccups and holdups just part of the fun. Who knows if "old" Ireland was every really this affable and good spirited, but it's nice to think so.

The final vignette is more serious as it takes place on a day the British are to execute a much-beloved-by-the-Irish-people fighter for Irish independence. Despite the grave circumstances, the quirkiness of the Irish are still on display as a wife brings her Irish policeman husband his lunch, despite berating him for being a traitor to his country for guarding the prisoner.

Avoiding spoiler alerts, the plot centers around an escape attempt - with all the usual Irish (let's call it as it is presented her) wacky aplomb - and efforts to get the prisoner out of Ireland. Sure, you care about the fate of the prisoner, and, even to this day, you can feel the passionate politics at play in that long conflict, but it really is the Irish people of that time (1921 for this segment) and their mindset that life is hard, but is also to be endured and enjoyed that sets the tone.

You'll have to watch it to learn the fate of the prisoner; however, the closing scene is not about the prisoner, but shows the same policeman and his wife from earlier, both bickering and expressing a deep love for each other as they walk home grumbling and laughing.

The entire movie is an oddball effort that works, if you're in the mood for this type of oddball effort.


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## Fading Fast

*Millions Like Us* from 1943 with Patricia Roc, Gordon Jackson and Anne Crawford

There are better WWII propaganda movies, like *Mortal Storm* and *Mrs. Miniver*, as they, overall, hide their propagandaness better, but there's something to be said for full-throttled propaganda -- especially from a country in the middle of the war where its civilians were on the frontline as arial bombing brought the conflict directly to England's cities and towns.

*Millions Like Us* follows a successful formula by opening with pre-WWII England enjoying its life as families pleasantly bicker and go to the seaside on vacation while their teenage boys and girls chase each other and parents complain about the cost of everything even knowing secretly that they can kinda, sorta afford it. Then war hits and everything, literally everything, changes.

The family in this movie did all the pre-war stuff above and, then, serves as an example of what everyone is expected to do after. The father joins the home guard, the son goes off to fight and the late-teenage sisters argue as a way to hide their fear as the outgoing one becomes an army mechanic and the shy one - after being disabused of her dream of saving the world and meeting handsome flyboys as a WAC or WAVE (realism is not part of dreaming) - is all but drafted into factory work.

And here the propaganda ramps up even more. From the bus conga line sweeping up the girls and depositing them at the factory dormitory (a mix of a YMCA and women-only hotel), the spirit is all "we can do this" with the girls' fears and hesitations seen as normal, but manageable; after all, there's a war to be won.

While most of the girls are working/middle class, tossed into the group is a toff (wonderful British slang for upper class) who somehow found herself in this mix and only modestly hides her general disdain for it all. And when the girls hit the factory, intentionally or not, feminism is given a tremendous boost as all those jobs that "only men can do" are now explained as perfectly within a woman's capabilities - and they are, and the women do, while getting scuffed and dirtied-up while producing the the military equipment that England needs to win the war.

Along the way, a few fall in and out of love, some get married (to flyboys with potentially short lifespans) and some, like our toff and her no-nonsense male working-class manager, go from mutual hate, to tolerance, to respect, to maybe more in the most-interesting and realistic relationship of the movie. Yes, not only were gender roles broken open by the war, but class distinction was also dealt a body blow as our toff and section manager show.

The blatant propaganda is less a problem for the movie than is the indecision of the directors to go with a documentary style or a classic-story style as it jarringly pings back and forth. That said, during the documentary-like segments, the film footage of the factories is incredible as it shows us how England managed to hold its own against the Luftwaffe's onslaught. And the personal stories, while by the numbers, do humanize the trauma and highlight the courage of the average Brit.

Since this is '43, it's surprising that the directors, Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, fumbled their attempt at a rousing patriotic-music scene set to the genuinely inspiring Colonel Bogey March, as they had the nonpareil of rousing patriotic-music scenes to study: '42's *Casablanca's* La Marseillaise clip.

But still, *Millions Like Us* is a fun and interesting propaganda curio. Also, the buses used in the aforementioned conga line are the same ones that almost every WWII-period TV show or movie set in England (*Foyle's War *or *Jam Busters,* for example) use to show WWII-era authenticity. It's cool to see them as regular buses before they became period icons.

And heck, who would've thought that this ⇩ "toff" would have made a good factory worker?


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## Fading Fast

*Biography of a Bachelor Girl *from 1935 staring Ann Harding, Robert Montgomery and Edward Everett Horton

Many stories are basically a version of boy-meets-girl-and-then-something-happens with the "something happens" quite often being that they dislike each other, but are also strongly attracted to each other. Another quite-common story is whether or not someone will sell the intimate details of his or her life (and hurt many people) for money, basically, a tame version of the soul-devil thing.

Here, we have a 1935 version of both stories entwined that, while a bit flat in the first half of the movie, does pick up as it moves along (in part because it isn't overly addled by the enforcement of the movie production code). Quietly-beautiful-in-a-not-Hollywood-way, Ann Harding plays an early version of a person famous for being famous - she's a "from-the-_right_-family, bit-bohemian second-rate artist" who moves in first-rate social circles while having casual affairs with notable men.

Harding, just returning from a romp around Europe (painting portraits, partying and canoodling) encounters newspaper-man Montgomery (up from poverty, tilting commie, angry at the rich and idle, full of ideas and ideals -you get it, there were many of him in the '30s) who wants to sign her to a biography book deal as he knows her titillating stories will sell.

If Harding was a self-absorbed "artist" snob, the story wouldn't work. But she's a seemingly decent, sensitive, albeit somewhat unaware, nice young women who enjoys life without judging others (that part feels very campus modern). To add to the mix, despite appearances, she is all but broke. When mad-at-the-world's-injustices Montgomery meets her, he's a bit taken back as he really wants to hate her, but, one, she doesn't fit his assumptions about her, two, she is cute as heck and, three, he wants to sign her to a book deal (his ideals somehow include his making money selling her story). He lands on taking an exaggeratedly angry attitude toward her which she all but ignores as they agree to work together on her biography.

From here, the story moves through a reasonably predictable arc. He gets more angry at her as she doesn't fully commit to the biography because she's concerned it will hurt the people she will have to write about. She is seemingly agnostic to his anger, but you feel her developing some interest in him while his passion builds for her under the surface pose of anger. Also, stirring the pot, old boyfriends and girlfriends for both come and go; business and financial pressures mount; misunderstandings abound as it all climaxes with Harding still deciding whether to finish the book (what Montgomery wants) or not (again, she needs the money but doesn't want to sell out her friends). Simultaneously, Montgomery has to decide if he'll put his class-warrior pose aside and admit his love for Harding.

It's 1935 and the goody-two-shoes code was being enforced, so you can guess the ending. But the ending doesn't matter as the real fun in this one is Harding. Her acting is nuanced - she's definitely from the less-is-more school - and impressive as she carries the movie on her back while Montgomery never gets into a groove (he overplays his anger and then stumbles on his "conversion" moment).

To close and summarize: boy meets girl and they immediately dislike - but are simultaneously attracted to - each other. A conflict of conscience about money and principals provides grist for their relationship mill and must be resolved for the couple to find their way. It's a good version of two stories that have been told over and over again and, at eighty-two minutes, is enjoyably free of much of the ballyhoo that Hollywood puts in these tales today. Plus, Ann Harding is subtly stunning to look at and offers us a view of an extremely talented actress at the top of her game powering a movie forward almost by herself.


----------



## Fading Fast

Over the past few weeks and for the first time in several years, I watched the first two Daniel Craig Bond movies, *Casino Royale* and *Quantum of Solace*.

*Casino Royale* has held up very well with, for a Bond movie, a tight and engaging story (thank you Ian Fleming, as it was based on one of the original books); whereas, *Quantum of Solace*, while still superior to most, maybe all, of the Moore-Dalton-Brosnan-Bond pics, feels more generic action-adventure-hero like than an original Bond movie.

The good in both is that most of the cheesy, cliché Bond lines and tics are gone resulting in a Bond that feels more like a genuine secret agent than, as he had become, a comic-book version of one. Unfortunately - and I'm sure modern audience expectations and demands require this - the action scenes, while visual stunning, are completely unbelievable. I guess you just have to go with it, and most of the time I can, or you end up taking yourself out of too many movies altogether.

Craig and the new approach "saved" the Bond franchise, at least for another decade or so; so good on them, but for my money, there are only four must-see iconic Bond films - the first three plus *Casino Royale*.


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> Over the past few weeks and for the first time in several years, I watched the first two Daniel Craig Bond movies, *Casino Royale* and *Quantum of Solace*.
> 
> *Casino Royale* has held up very well with, for a Bond movie, a tight and engaging story (thank you Ian Fleming, as it was based on one of the original books); whereas, *Quantum of Solace*, while still superior to most, maybe all, of the Moore-Dalton-Brosnan-Bond pics, feels more generic action-adventure-hero like than an original Bond movie.
> 
> The good in both is that most of the cheesy, cliché Bond lines and tics are gone resulting in a Bond that feels more like a genuine secret agent than, as he had become, a comic-book version of one. Unfortunately - and I'm sure modern audience expectations and demands require this - the action scenes, while visual stunning, are completely unbelievable. I guess you just have to go with it, and most of the time I can, or you end up taking yourself out of too many movies altogether.
> 
> Craig and the new approach "saved" the Bond franchise, at least for another decade or so; so good on them, but for my money, there are only four must-see iconic Bond films - the first three plus *Casino Royale*.


So we may assun=me you to be a fire breathing Sean Connery (Bond) fan...yes, no? If so, I agree!


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## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> So we may assun=me you to be a fire breathing Sean Connery (Bond) fan...yes, no? If so, I agree!


Connery = Bond and the torch sat un-passed until Craig picked it up as a worthy successor.


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## Fading Fast

*A Successful Calamity* from 1932 with George Arliss, Mary Astor and Grant Mitchell

Some movies work by going the straightforward route of simply telling a story without multiple layers, "witty" distractions or complex plot ploys. *A Successful Calamity* is such a straightforward effort and, while it's not a great film, it's a fine 72 minute effort of whimsy that - one assumes (as they made many like it) - played well to Depression-Era audiences.

A successful international banker (Arliss) returns from a year abroad helping the President launch a foreign policy initiative requiring a bond issuance only to find his college-aged son and daughter and young second wife engaged in so many high-society events that they hardly have time to welcome him home.

But this is not a mean-spirited movie where the kids and wife are obnoxiously greedy or dismissive of the man paying for it all -- it's more of a blithe unawareness that their lives have become social dross leaving them "simply too busy" to spend a night at home having dinner with their dad or, for Mary Astor, her husband.

And Wall Street tycoon dad, played by bemused-by-it-all George Arliss, is more frustrated than angry as he, by default, spends his evenings with his long-time butler (wonderful played by Mitchell) who has become his friend and confident.

It is during one of those evenings that Mitchell inadvertently give Arliss an idea. He tells him the poor don't have these problems with their families as "the poor rarely go out." From here, Arliss contrives to tell that family that he's "ruined" (bankrupt).

Propitiously, the family quickly rallies by cutting its spending and social engagements and dad finally gets to have dinner and spend time with them. Trying to help, his daughter accepts a marriage proposal from a wealthy beau she had been putting off while his son plans to quit college to get a job. The wife, too, initially seems willing to help by stoping her spending and providing emotional support to her husband.

While not fitting today's accepted pieties, (but in possibly the best scene in the movie) the butler, upon learning of his employer's troubles, presents his employer with a $3000 check - his entire life savings - and says he will always do all he can for his friend and employer. Cynically chuckle all you want, but these men, as later events show, are friends in the best meaning of the word.

Now that he's spending time with his wife and children, the father has to somehow "unwind" his fake bankruptcy without alienating the family. Additionally, in the "you never really know" category, young wife Astor, after an initial show of fortitude, appear to, maybe, be jumping ship for greener (tee-hee) pastures.

From here, a lot happens in a hurry (a common occurrence in a just-over-an-hour movie). Dad, Arliss, with the inadvertent help of his looking-for-a-job son, successfully closes a major takeover deal; he also repays his butler-friend with a hundred percent bonus while his daughter gets rejected by the now-suspicious-of-her-motives wealthy beau. Additionally and concernedly, the wife, as noted, wobbles and disappears with her jewelry just before the father announces to the family that they are not "ruined."

The wrap-up from there is quick and fun, as is the entire movie. The message to Depression-Era audiences seems to be that, rich or poor, family and friends, not money, is what matters. This was a common movie message that the struggling population seemed to enjoy. Many movies of the time deliver a version of it, while, oddly, highlighting the wealth and opulence of the tippity top of society.

Two other small fun things to note. One, Mary Astor, playing what today we'd call of "trophy wife," as she's the much younger second wife of a wealthy Wall Street banker, is the exact same age as her step daughter - a somewhat awkward occurrence that still happens today and still generates snickers, derision and tabloid media attention.

And, two, Arliss is only able to pull off his corporate takeover deal by engaging in activities that would be illegal today, but since this is a '32 movie and the relevant security laws were enacted in The Security and Exchange Acts of '33 and '34, his machination, while looking dirty to us today, were perfectly legal at the time.

Hence, today, the law says you can no longer buy a controlling amount of a company's stock anonymously through a third party, but the law does still allow a man to marry a woman the same age as his adult daughter.


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## Fading Fast

*The Girl Downstairs* from 1938 with Franchot Tone, Franciska Gall and Walter Connolly

A society playboy (Tone) is banned from seeing his society girlfriend by her father (Connolly) so he tries to keep contact with his girlfriend via the girlfriend's family's kitchen maid who, owing to series of misunderstandings, comes to believe she is dating Tone (who tells her he's a chauffeur)


It's as silly and forced as it sounds and it's not helped at all by Gall who plays the maid as a mental simpleton to the point of being irritating


You've probably guess this already, but the maid falls hard for Tone, while Tone vacillates between wanting his society girl and seeing the inherent goodness of the maid


The best part of this one is Connolly who - since he's played the aggrieved/bemused father of so many marriageable daughters, he could probably use the same dialogue from movie to movie - still brings a spark of enthusiasm to this flat effort


And this goofy movie exposes the power of stars as Grant and Hepburn or Flynn and Davis would have been able to carry this fluff over the finish line; whereas, try as they do, Tone and Gall just can't quite do it


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## Fading Fast

*








Address Unknown* form 1944 with Paul Lukas and K.T. Stevens

WWII propaganda film meets film noir meets silent-era angle-and-mood cinematography 
It works thanks in large part to director William Cameron Menzie's background and talents in art design 



Based on a short, but powerful anti-Nazi novel by Katherine Kressman Taylor, this also short, seventy-five minute, movie warps through its story of two German friends (one Jewish, one Christian) and business partners living in America in the '30s who see their friendship and families torn apart after the Christian one returns to German and gradually becomes a Nazi


To say this story is familiar by now is fair - *Mortal Storm,* *Watch on the Rhine* and others had already tread this ground by '44 - but *Address Unknown* does it as well as those with, as noted, a greater emphasis on mood-driving visuals (Nazi evil lends itself to foreboding camera angles and harrowing images)


Also look for the powerful scene where K.T. Stevens as the Jewish daughter and aborning actress (with an Aryan stage name) makes a life-determining decision to quote Christian Bible verse during a performance to stand up to Nazi censorship. 
A Jewish actress, risking life and limb by quoting Christian scripture to denounce Nazi propaganda in the heart of Hitler's Germany, is about as moving as it gets 



And here's an oddity as the book is almost always better than the movie, but this time the movie alters the story to add in a powerful plot twist (it's only revealed right at the end) that enhances the story by delivering a brutal-but-moral message of revenge









*Till the End of Time *from 1946 with Guy Madison, Dorothy McGuire and Robert Mitchum

It treads the same ground as the much-more-well-known *The Best Years of Our Lives*, but deserves attention despite, overall, being a less-complete effort


Basically, it looks at the life of a few marines returning from WWII - one in fine physical health, one with a steel plate in his head and one who lost his legs - and how they adjust to civilian life and how their friends, neighbors and families adjust to their return


The men all carry wounds - mental, physical or both - and the adjustment is difficult for all the reasons we've come to know today, but that we were still learning in 1946


With those wounds, the adjustment is, honestly, bad as family and friends try to be understanding, but also just want the returning vets to re-integrate (not mean-spirited, but you can feel that almost everyone wants the vets to "just get over it"). When the returning vets can't adjust on others' timelines, it becomes a series of battles: families battle, old-friends (ones who went, ones who didn't) battle, civilians and vets battle, girlfriends and vets battle and bosses and vets battle


For painful realism, the scene where the main characters see a vet have the shakes in a coffee shop is honest even if the "solution" is a bit easy - and that's the movie itself as it pings back and forth between honest-and-raw and easy-ish solutions with happy endings


Hey, it's 1946, we get it, the country probably wasn't ready for a completely honest and brutal reveal of the damage war did to these men, so credit to *Till the end of Time* for weaving in a decent amount of honesty and brutality even if the overall effort is uneven


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## Fading Fast

*The Next Voice Your Hear* from 1950 with James Whitmore and Nancy Reagan

I've been watching old movies since the I was a kid in the '70s and, still, some pop up, like this one, that I never heard of, but are darn good with, in this case, a foreshadowing of *The Twilight Zone*


A basic American post-war family living in a basic American post-war suburb - husband, a factory worker (Whitmore), wife, a homemaker (Reagan), son, a newspaper delivery boy who also plays little league, baby on the way and an annoying aunt (but, also, kinda okay) - go about their day grumbling about all the stuff we all grumble about - the cost of this, that and the other thing, the car won't start, the fridge door is broken, doing homework, washing the dishes, having "the same thing for dinner," you know, life - until a radio program is seemingly interrupted by a voice


It is another "Orson Welles" stunt or "some sort of promotion" is the first thought, but when it turns out that anyone who was listening to any station, on any radio, in any country and in any language also heard the exact same message, a (literal) come-to-Jesus (or Allah or...) moment is in the making


The messages - they come one each night for six days - are basically a call to return to faith, goodness, neighborly love - the basic values of most religions


Everybody's gyroscope is thrown off: husband (Whitmore) kinda melts down a bit at the idea of God speaking to mankind over the radio and gets drunk with his wanton friend, the son (kinda) runs away from home, the cranky aunt gets more fire and brimstone initially and the mother (the only adult in the room) calmly and reflectively takes it all in


It's a wonderful premise, reasonably well-acted but - like many *The Twilight Zone* episodes - leaves the ending a bit open, a bit unsatisfying. But still, it is an, overall, engaging and different effort than so many wash-rinse-repeat movie plots


And, for this agnostic, it was nice to see a confidently pro-religious movie. Today, mainstream Hollywood would never make this movie as its default setting runs from being snarky to outright hostile toward religion


Great - really great - time travel to 1950s America as the homes, cars, appliances, airplane factory, clothes (workman clothes, not suits and ties) and architecture are wonderful


----------



## Fading Fast

*The Citadel* from 1938 with Robert Donat, Rosalind Russell and Rex Harrison (in a small role)

A young, fresh-out-of-medical-school idealistic doctor (Donat) begins practicing medicine in an English mining town (top pic) where the union and the company have created an in-house medical system that is not only inadequate for the workers' needs, but is, basically, corrupted by everyone involved.

Union management and the company created a construct that allows for favored union members to featherbed (get excused from work with pay for a non-existent or minor medical condition), while the company gets the doctors to look the other way regarding safety issues like air or water quality. The union management and company have sold out the workers and, effectively, the doctors either go along or they don't get paid.

After a few years of trying to do the right thing in this miasma of corruption and only getting denounced for his good efforts (Donat studied the air and water and found issues / wouldn't sign bogus "not able to work" slips), idealistic Donat, now married to equally idealistic mining-company school teacher (Russell), quits and moves to London where he buys a small practice.

Once again, honesty and putting your patients first doesn't pay, especially in the lower-income neighborhood Donat practices in. By chance, in an emergency, he treats a wealthy society woman and discovers an entirely different world of medicine.

Here, a former medical school friend (Harrison) introduces Donat to the world of medicine for the wealthy and neurotic where padded bills, unnecessary consultations and questionable treatments (ineffective, harmless, but expensive) support a luxurious lifestyle of fancy clothes, cars, meals and homes for the physicians willing to play in this softly corrupt, elite sandbox.

After a few misgivings, Donat quickly adapts, thoroughly enjoying his new wealth and status (bottom pic). But wife Russell won't kid herself as she knows that what he's doing is morally wrong and a waste of his talents. Since we're now about ninety percent in, the rest of the movie happens fast and furiously.

An old doctor friend tries to recruit Donat to his new healthcare clinic for the poor (sounded like a 1990s HMO), which Donat initially rejects - after all, Donat's eyeing a fancy new car, umm, his current work is important too - but then an all-to-obvious set of events occur exposing the corruption of his present world and the need for the clinic that results in a come-to-Jesus moment for Donat.

To be sure, this is not new ground as, even by 1938, several movies had already addressed the "practice medicine for profit or virtue" question and many more would do so later. Even so, and despite *The Citadel* being a bit clunky, it's worth watching as Donat and Russell are enjoyable and skilled actors and the story does have several powerful moments.


----------



## Fading Fast

*Once Upon a Time in Hollywood *from 2019 with Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio and an incredible array of stars ranging from newcomers to long-in-the-tooth veterans.

I flat-out enjoyed it, as I do most Tarantino movies, as his brand of craziness works for me.

Less a plot-driven than a moment-in-time movie, it's the story, at least from one angle, of how a now-struggling, but once-successful TV actor (DiCaprio) and his friend, stuntman double and factotum (Pitt) try to navigate the insanity of 1969 Hollywood, its drug scene and, not unrelatedly, its counterculture. Heavily weaving in and taking great liberties with "The Manson Family" and Sharon Tate murder stories allows Tarantino to launch into a trip through America's late-60s' zeitgeist closet.

And, as Tarantino does, he amps it all up, changes what he wants, fires dialogue out of a machine gun, indulges in gratuitous violence, shows you intimate details that highlight the difference between our outward lives and what really goes on all the while spinning you through a world of madness and insanity that only works because our world is mad and insane.

We see some of that madness and insanity when Pitt - picking up a young female hippie hitchhiker - takes a trip out to The Manson Family ranch owned by an old friend of Pitt's, where, in one defining scene he, effectively, confronts this sadistic and crazy sleeve of the hippie culture by showing that a combination of human decency (his concern for his old friend) and a greater physical prowess (these are not peacenik hippies) easily cowed the confident-in-numbers cult. Even though you might have to turn away once or twice seeing Pitt beat-up the hippie who flattened his car's tire until said hippie agrees to change it, this is Tarantino rough justice at its best.

There's simply too much to capture in this two-plus hour phantasmagoria, but another highlight is a drunk-and-dispirited DiCaprio having an on-set private conversation with an eight-year-old acting prodigy in which he thoughtfully discusses her method for "getting into character" and that conversation inspires DiCaprio to, later, deliver a stunning performance -- a classic Tarantino "out of the mouths of babes" moment.

Possibly the most touching scene was the joy and innocence of an early-in-her-career Sharon Tate going to a movie theater to see one of her own pictures. The glee she feels - it ripples through her - at both seeing herself on screen and the audience enjoying her performance is infectious. You are happy for her, but sad knowing her fate; it's a beautiful and touching moment from Tarantino.

But mainly you get scenes like Pitt throwing an arrogant and self-absorbed Bruce Lee (no idea if he was those thing) into a Lincoln simply to shut him up. Lee was so obnoxious that I didn't want the scene to end. Or you get a drunk, in-his-bathrobe, holding-a-pitcher-of-frozen-margaritas DiCaprio walking out of his house to rebuke the Manson hippies because they drove onto his neighborhood association's "private road."

And, as always, Tarantino packs a lot of craziness into this scene as the Manson-DiCaprio confrontation highlights a clash of cultures: the '60s-rebellion-against-the-man culture versus traditional American values represented - quirkily - by a fading TV cowboy. Also, this tense but comic scene has Tarantino's signature weaving in of humor amidst threatened violence as one of the hippies fingers the trigger of a hidden gun while DiCaprio blithely continues his tirade taking, almost without thinking, periodical gulps from his pitcher of margaritas, clearly oblivious to the threat.

Of course, this being Tarantino, you also get plenty of exaggerated violence highlighted by a blowtorch that is first introduced to us (gun, hung, wall, Chekhov) when, DiCaprio, learning to work it for a role, asks, in classic clueless-actor mode, if it could be used without throwing off so much heat. This nasty piece of equipment appears much later to (minor spoiler alert) immolate one of the hippies in a scene that also includes Pitt smashing a female intruder's head into a stone fireplace mantle so many times you have to look away: gratuitous violence is just part of the Tarantino "touch."

Along with so much else, a few more key things to watch out for / to enjoy are the DiCaprio-Pitt friendship - best employer-personal assistant relationship since Eastwood and Freeman in *Million Dollar Baby* - DiCaprio's career detour (desperation move) into Spaghetti Westerns, the of-the-'60s Italian bride he brings back to LA with him who proceeds to proves that screaming - when mayhem and murder take place in your home as will happen in Tarantino's world - is a universal language and the Playboy Mansion party where handsome Steve McQueen laments losing Sharon Tate to troll-like Roman Polanski (who continues to get a pass on his MeToo behavior).

Lastly, this film offers incredible time travel to late '60s Hollywood. The clothes, cars, architecture, hairstyles and vibe all look and feel legitimate, including Sharon Tate's awesome white go-go boots, barefoot hippies hitching rides with anyone who'll stop and restaurants where dishes are enflamed for whatever reason that era liked to see its food on fire. As are all Tarantino films, it's a crazy romp through some romanticized and tortured version of some period in history, in this case, the romanticized and tortured Hollywood of 1969. Oh, and the soundtrack is rock music awesomeness.


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 43163
> 
> *Once Upon a Time in Hollywood *from 2019 with Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio and an incredible array of stars ranging from newcomers to long-in-the-tooth veterans.
> 
> I flat-out enjoyed it, as I do most Tarantino movies, as his brand of craziness works for me.
> 
> Less a plot-driven than a moment-in-time movie, it's the story, at least from one angle, of how a now-struggling, but once-successful TV actor (DiCaprio) and his friend, stuntman double and factotum (Pitt) try to navigate the insanity of 1969 Hollywood, its drug scene and, not unrelatedly, its counterculture. Heavily weaving in and taking great liberties with "The Manson Family" and Sharon Tate murder stories allows Tarantino to launch into a trip through America's late-60s' zeitgeist closet.
> 
> And, as Tarantino does, he amps it all up, changes what he wants, fires dialogue out of a machine gun, indulges in gratuitous violence, shows you intimate details that highlight the difference between our outward lives and what really goes on all the while spinning you through a world of madness and insanity that only works because our world is mad and insane.
> 
> We see some of that madness and insanity when Pitt - picking up a young female hippie hitchhiker - takes a trip out to The Manson Family ranch owned by an old friend of Pitt's, where, in one defining scene he, effectively, confronts this sadistic and crazy sleeve of the hippie culture by showing that a combination of human decency (his concern for his old friend) and a greater physical prowess (these are not peacenik hippies) easily cowed the confident-in-numbers cult. Even though you might have to turn away once or twice seeing Pitt beat-up the hippie who flattened his car's tire until said hippie agrees to change it, this is Tarantino rough justice at its best.
> 
> There's simply too much to capture in this two-plus hour phantasmagoria, but another highlight is a drunk-and-dispirited DiCaprio having an on-set private conversation with an eight-year-old acting prodigy in which he thoughtfully discusses her method for "getting into character" and that conversation inspires DiCaprio to, later, deliver a stunning performance -- a classic Tarantino "out of the mouths of babes" moment.
> 
> Possibly the most touching scene was the joy and innocence of an early-in-her-career Sharon Tate going to a movie theater to see one of her own pictures. The glee she feels - it ripples through her - at both seeing herself on screen and the audience enjoying her performance is infectious. You are happy for her, but sad knowing her fate; it's a beautiful and touching moment from Tarantino.
> 
> But mainly you get scenes like Pitt throwing an arrogant and self-absorbed Bruce Lee (no idea if he was those thing) into a Lincoln simply to shut him up. Lee was so obnoxious that I didn't want the scene to end. Or you get a drunk, in-his-bathrobe, holding-a-pitcher-of-frozen-margaritas DiCaprio walking out of his house to rebuke the Manson hippies because they drove onto his neighborhood association's "private road."
> 
> And, as always, Tarantino packs a lot of craziness into this scene as the Manson-DiCaprio confrontation highlights a clash of cultures: the '60s-rebellion-against-the-man culture versus traditional American values represented - quirkily - by a fading TV cowboy. Also, this tense but comic scene has Tarantino's signature weaving in of humor amidst threatened violence as one of the hippies fingers the trigger of a hidden gun while DiCaprio blithely continues his tirade taking, almost without thinking, periodical gulps from his pitcher of margaritas, clearly oblivious to the threat.
> 
> Of course, this being Tarantino, you also get plenty of exaggerated violence highlighted by a blowtorch that is first introduced to us (gun, hung, wall, Chekhov) when, DiCaprio, learning to work it for a role, asks, in classic clueless-actor mode, if it could be used without throwing off so much heat. This nasty piece of equipment appears much later to (minor spoiler alert) immolate one of the hippies in a scene that also includes Pitt smashing a female intruder's head into a stone fireplace mantle so many times you have to look away: gratuitous violence is just part of the Tarantino "touch."
> 
> Along with so much else, a few more key things to watch out for / to enjoy are the DiCaprio-Pitt friendship - best employer-personal assistant relationship since Eastwood and Freeman in *Million Dollar Baby* - DiCaprio's career detour (desperation move) into Spaghetti Westerns, the of-the-'60s Italian bride he brings back to LA with him who proceeds to proves that screaming - when mayhem and murder take place in your home as will happen in Tarantino's world - is a universal language and the Playboy Mansion party where handsome Steve McQueen laments losing Sharon Tate to troll-like Roman Polanski (who continues to get a pass on his MeToo behavior).
> 
> Lastly, this film offers incredible time travel to late '60s Hollywood. The clothes, cars, architecture, hairstyles and vibe all look and feel legitimate, including Sharon Tate's awesome white go-go boots, barefoot hippies hitching rides with anyone who'll stop and restaurants where dishes are enflamed for whatever reason that era liked to see its food on fire. As are all Tarantino films, it's a crazy romp through some romanticized and tortured version of some period in history, in this case, the romanticized and tortured Hollywood of 1969. Oh, and the soundtrack is rock music awesomeness.
> 
> View attachment 43164


Thank you for sharing this with us...it is on my list!

While you were enjoying Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, I was getting depressed watching "Michael Moore's Planet of The Humans, directed by Jeff Gibbs....a one hour and 40 minute disillusionment of the mythical promise of sustainable, renewable, green energy; biomass vs bio fuels sources of energy. To save everyone from sacrificing 1:40 of their lives, allow me to share with you, according to this documentary, we have already killed the planet Earth, the war is lost and entire ecosystems are being wiped out at a rate that cannot be back walked out of the danger zone. The Earth is dying and we are going to go with it. :crazy::crazy::crazy:Jeez Louise, and I thought Covid 19 was a problem! This really sucks.


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## Fading Fast

*Beyond a Reasonable Doubt* from 1956 with Dana Andrews, Joan Fontaine, Sydney Blackmer and Barbara Nichols

An ardent anti-death-penalty big-city newspaper editor (Blackmer) joins forces with an sympathetic young novelist (Andrews) to "expose" the inhumanity of capital punishment by - get ready for it - planting false evidence, that, they hope, will result in the state convicting an innocent man. Of course, immediately after the conviction, the dynamic dual of justice plan to produce exonerating evidence while a hailstorm of condemnation rains down upon death-penalty advocates.

This would not be an incredibly stupid premise except for two things: (1) no justice system claims it will never convict an innocent man (that standard is unachievable) and (2) pro-actively trying to generate a false positive proves absolutely nothing about the system's real-world fallibility.

Okay, in movies, we know sometimes we just have to "go with it," and if you do, this one works a little bit - notwithstanding the self-satisfied smugness of the editor nor the eight-hundred plot flaws - as the upside-down world of trying to get oneself convicted of a murder one didn't commit is modestly interesting (if you're insane).

Adding tension or conflict or something, the novelist is engaged to the editor's daughter (Fontaine) who thinks their idea is nuts because, well, it is. As one of the few voices of reason, her role is limited - something one guesses Fontaine was quite happy about in a get-me-out-of-this-nut-house way.

So, in advancing their scheme, as Andrews and Blackmer run around the city and its outskirts planting incriminating evidence after the fact, such as dropping an initialed lighter at the crime scene (come on) and taking putatively exonerating pictures of their efforts. One part of this ridiculousness has urbane, upper-class Andrews - tall, good looking and impeccably dressed - trying to pick up a burlesque dancer (wonderfully played by Nichols) at the same bar the murder victim worked at so as to create more incriminating evidence.

Proving that neither brains and money nor brains and surface manners have any correlation, one of the burlesque dancers, upon noting that Andrews is politely courting, and not just trying to sleep with, Nichols (her brassy, gum-smacking, gold-digging burlesque dancer friend), summarizes her disbelief with this line: "With his looks and his dough, what's he shopping around in the basement for?" Beyond being a perfect film noir line and sharp elbow to Nichols, it also shows that this rough-and-rowdy girl has more self awareness and brains than the "sophisticated" editor and novelist combined.

On the chance you want to see this one, I'll leave out the end and its "big twist," which takes disbelief to a whole other level while managing to double the number of plot flaws all in one or two scenes. That said, *Beyond a Reasonable Doubt* does have some good film noir time travel to Chicago (a pretty good noir city even if it isn't New York or San Francisco).

(⇩ Note: On the left, Andrews "shopping" in the "basement;" on the right, "Park Avenue")


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## Peak and Pine

The NYT sent me this today. Thought it might interest Fast, or anyone else tired of them damn Technicolor movie things...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/30/movies/film-noir-criterion.html


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## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 43305
> 
> *Beyond a Reasonable Doubt* from 1956 with Dana Andrews, Joan Fontaine, Sydney Blackmer and Barbara Nichols
> 
> An ardent anti-death-penalty big-city newspaper editor (Blackmer) joins forces with an sympathetic young novelist (Andrews) to "expose" the inhumanity of capital punishment by - get ready for it - planting false evidence, that, they hope, will result in the state convicting an innocent man. Of course, immediately after the conviction, the dynamic dual of justice plan to produce exonerating evidence while a hailstorm of condemnation rains down upon death-penalty advocates.
> 
> This would not be an incredibly stupid premise except for two things: (1) no justice system claims it will never convict an innocent man (that standard is unachievable) and (2) pro-actively trying to generate a false positive proves absolutely nothing about the system's real-world fallibility.
> 
> Okay, in movies, we know sometimes we just have to "go with it," and if you do, this one works a little bit - notwithstanding the self-satisfied smugness of the editor nor the eight-hundred plot flaws - as the upside-down world of trying to get oneself convicted of a murder one didn't commit is modestly interesting (if you're insane).
> 
> Adding tension or conflict or something, the novelist is engaged to the editor's daughter (Fontaine) who thinks their idea is nuts because, well, it is. As one of the few voices of reason, her role is limited - something one guesses Fontaine was quite happy about in a get-me-out-of-this-nut-house way.
> 
> So, in advancing their scheme, as Andrews and Blackmer run around the city and its outskirts planting incriminating evidence after the fact, such as dropping an initialed lighter at the crime scene (come on) and taking putatively exonerating pictures of their efforts. One part of this ridiculousness has urbane, upper-class Andrews - tall, good looking and impeccably dressed - trying to pick up a burlesque dancer (wonderfully played by Nichols) at the same bar the murder victim worked at so as to create more incriminating evidence.
> 
> Proving that neither brains and money nor brains and surface manners have any correlation, one of the burlesque dancers, upon noting that Andrews is politely courting, and not just trying to sleep with, Nichols (her brassy, gum-smacking, gold-digging burlesque dancer friend), summarizes her disbelief with this line: "With his looks and his dough, what's he shopping around in the basement for?" Beyond being a perfect film noir line and sharp elbow to Nichols, it also shows that this rough-and-rowdy girl has more self awareness and brains than the "sophisticated" editor and novelist combined.
> 
> On the chance you want to see this one, I'll leave out the end and its "big twist," which takes disbelief to a whole other level while managing to double the number of plot flaws all in one or two scenes. That said, *Beyond a Reasonable Doubt* does have some good film noir time travel to Chicago (a pretty good noir city even if it isn't New York or San Francisco).
> 
> (⇩ Note: On the left, Andrews "shopping" in the "basement;" on the right, "Park Avenue")
> View attachment 43309
> View attachment 43307


Was Beyond a Reasonable Doubt redone in 2009, starring Michael Douglas? If so, the 2009 movie seemed to flow pretty well, as I recall. I am wondering as to the value of watching the 1956 version if indeed it was redone in 2009. :icon_scratch:


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## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> Was Beyond a Reasonable Doubt redone in 2009, starring Michael Douglas? If so, the 2009 movie seemed to flow pretty well, as I recall. I am wondering as to the value of watching the 1956 version if indeed it was redone in 2009. :icon_scratch:


Until your post here, I had never heard of the '09 version, but according to IMDB (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1183251/) it is a remake. That said, and this is not at all unusual, the take on the '09 version (from the IMDB summary) seems different from the '56 one.

To be sure, both versions have a man framing himself for murder to expose, in the '56 version, the risk that an honest man could go to the chair; whereas, the '09 version is trying to expose a corrupt DA. In fact (that scream you hear is every English teacher saying "just write the fact, if it's a fact"), the '56 version specifically noted that the DA acted within the boundaries of the law.

Even if the movies aren't great, it is usually fun to see the original and the remake (if you've already seen one), as you get to see the changes both in movie-making styles and what was important to society at different time periods.


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## Fading Fast

*The Revolt of Mamie Stover *from 1956 with Jane Russell and Richard Egan

It's not a bad movie at all, but the book is better, much better. (Comments on the book here: #8207)

Mamie is a whore - yes, a whore; she's not a woman men or sailors pay good money to drink tea and play cards with. The movie kinda wants you to believe the latter, but it also gives you enough dots to connect to what's really going on, but that's all a distraction when the story's reason for being is that Mamie's a whore.

Ready, set, go: Mamie grew up dirt poor and laughed at by the "good" people in a small Midwest town; she tried to make it in Hollywood, but came up short, so she turned to the oldest profession to make a buck but wound up on the wrong side of the mob and police and got shipped off to Hawaii where her options to earn a living were to become either a whore or a whore.

On the boat over, she meets a "respectable" man from the "hill" and proceeds to spends her time in Hawaii trying to make money and elbow her way into his "polite" society. This attempt is aggressively thwarted by the police who are bought and paid for by the good people on the "hill." Then, the war comes and Mamie exchanges her piles of (genuinely) hard-earned cash into good real estate offered cheap by scared-by-the-war sellers. Fast forward a few years and Mamie has real-estate money rolling in, but, even with the loosening of societal rules during the war, she is still not acceptable on the "hill -" painful lesson learned.

That's the story in the book and it's a good one with the addition of a bit of a love triangle between Mamie, the man she met on the way over and his "respectable" girlfriend from the "hill." He's wishy-washy as he likes being a rebel and "seeing" Mamie, but he's not going to truly throw his position away for her.

Unfortunately, as noted, the movie wouldn't or couldn't face the whore thing head on (the movie code was starting to wobble by '56, but was not gone yet), so a lot of energy is wasted with the card-playing-and-tea-serving charade. Also, the movie speeds through the whole "respectable-society-doesn't-want-a-whore thing," so all it's left with is a woman trying to make money as a "hostess" (wink-wink, nod-nod) and win a man in a love triangle.

Okay, so the story from the book got shredded in the movie, but surprisingly the movie still works. You can see through enough to understand what Mamie really is about. Also, Jane Russel, an actress I've always been indifferent to (big-boned, sloppily full-figured, man-like jaw line, thick mane of blazing red hair, in this one), was born to play Mamie Stover - a woman who is more about exuding sex than beauty, more about attitude than femininity. Russell is the physical embodiment of Mamie and seems to know it as she acts with more confidence here than in many of her other efforts.

And, if all that isn't enough, you get some really nice location shots of Hawaii.

Still, read the book first and, then, check out the movie.


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## Fading Fast

*Julie* from 1956 with Doris Day, Louis Jourdan and Barry Sullivan

An early woman-in-distress movie: newly remarried woman realizes her husband is an insanely jealous sociopath who killed her first husband so as to marry her and will kill her if she leaves him. From this early set-up, it's a how-does-she-get-away-from-him effort until taking a weird twist for the last half hour or so (more shortly)


Doris Day (the titular Julie) does an admirable job after realizing her concert-pianist husband (Jourdan) is nuts as she shows courage and smarts trying to escape, while also soliciting help from long-time friend Sullivan


It probably felt a bit fresher back in '56s, as, by now, the plot's become a cliche


Jourdan is effectively scary as the cold, psychotic murderer husband who leverages his brilliant mind to hunt his wife down through every evading twist and turn she makes - his preternatural ability to track her keeps the movie somewhat engaging


The sympathetic police - clearly advocating for updated stalker laws - explain that there is little they can do do if all Julie has is her word against her husband's


In an odd twist that dramatically changes the tone of the movie (spoiler alert), Julie, an airline stewardess, ends up having to land a passenger plane after her husband kills the pilot and co-pilot (and dies himself in a gun battle in the cockpit) / I'm all for women saving the day, but it felt as if one movie ended an hour in (psychotic husband dead, phew) and a new one started (untrained woman must save the day by landing the plane)


Despite its standard story and a strange plot shift, it's an interesting enough hour and half, greatly enhanced for us today by its wonderful time travel to 1950s coastal California, all filmed in beautiful and crisp black and white


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## Fading Fast

*Angels in the Outfield* from 1951 with Paul Douglas, Janet Leigh and Keenan Wynn

The rules are different for Christmas movies as, for those, we accept angels, divine interventions, spiritual transformations, faith overcoming mendacity, etc., it's Christmas for God's sakes. Heck, it took three ghosts to arm wrestle Scrooge into buying one lousy Turkey for his family, and our eyes welled-up when he did.

But trying to bring that Christmas magic - that whimsy - to a not-Christmas movie is harder as, away from the Christmas season, we're rational people - men and women of science - who know angels don't alter the outcome of, say, baseball games...or do they?

Paul Douglas is the gruff, cursing, punching manager of the last place Pittsburg Pirates - he's a Scrooge, not about money, but about life. To him, it's all baseball with no friends, family, faith or hobbies - he treats his players like they are all Bob Crachits. And like Scrooge with his business, Douglas seems angry about the only thing - baseball - he cares about; his is a dour life even doing the thing he loves.

But instead of visits from ghosts, late one night at the stadium, after an embarrassing defeat, Douglas hears an angel offer him a better life and winning team if he'll mend his cursing, combative ways. Simultaneously, a female reporter (Leigh) is assigned to cover the Pirates and, like Scrooge's nephew Fred, she tries to see the good and ignore the blasphemy in Douglas. They initially get along about as well as Scrooge and Fred did.

When the Pirates start winning and Douglas stops fighting and cursing and ranting and raving, the public is happily bemused. The media hounds want the real story behind the team and its manager's turnaround. Enter a little eight-year-old girl from the local Catholic orphanage who, at an outing to a Pirates game, actually sees the angels help the Pirates win.

While the girl's story is picked up by reporter Leigh as a human interest piece in the local paper (further alienating her from Douglas) and dismissed by all adults as a child's fantasy, Douglas goes to the orphanage to quietly talk with the young girl about it. Unfortunately for Douglas, the newspapers catch on to his visit and try to turn it into a "this manager is nuts and believes in angels" story.

Douglas denies all until he's hit in the head by a baseball and, in a concussed state, admits to the angels. Even Leigh tries to tamp his public statements down, despite sorta being a believer herself. A firestorm ensues resulting in a hearing by baseball's commissioner to assess Douglas' sanity and competency to stay in baseball.

Here the movie veers from the Scrooge narrative to the *Miracle on 34th Street* trial scene where, effectively, faith itself is put on trial. In this case, Leigh, the little orphan girl, a Minister, Rabbi and Catholic Father (wonderfully working together) all aver that, yes, angels can actively engage in the affairs of mankind.

All that's left is the complete transformation moment - Scrooge gleefully throwing the money out the window to secure the best Turkey for Christmas dinner. *Angels in the Outfield *doesn't disappoint with (minor spoiler alert if you haven't been paying attention) everything working out really, really well...even for the orphan girl.

Whimsy is a hard thing to pull off in any movie and harder still when you don't have a leg-up from Christmas, but *Angels in the Outfield* pulls it off with charm, passion and, well, faith. If Christmas movies work for you, this not-Christmas one should too; if they don't, well...

Plus, there's incredible time travel to 1951 America. Yes, the architecture, cars, clothes, appliances and furniture are outstanding, but also, in this one, you get a look at 1951 baseball and baseball stadiums and even, maybe, a peek at a 1951 angel.

N.B. Look for the scenes where Douglas and Leigh, after he has to carry her, playfully argue about how much she weighs; an aging pitcher (Bruce Bennett - Mildred Pierce's first husband) gets one last chance at glory and Keenan Wynn, as the acerbic baseball radio announcer, puts his anti-Douglas inflections into almost every word.


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 43540
> 
> *Angels in the Outfield* from 1951 with Paul Douglas, Janet Leigh and Keenan Wynn
> 
> The rules are different for Christmas movies as, for those, we accept angels, divine interventions, spiritual transformations, faith overcoming mendacity, etc., it's Christmas for God's sakes. Heck, it took three ghosts to arm wrestle Scrooge into buying one lousy Turkey for his family, and our eyes welled-up when he did.
> 
> But trying to bring that Christmas magic - that whimsy - to a not-Christmas movie is harder as, away from the Christmas season, we're rational people - men and women of science - who know angels don't alter the outcome of, say, baseball games...or do they?
> 
> Paul Douglas is the gruff, cursing, punching manager of the last place Pittsburg Pirates - he's a Scrooge, not about money, but about life. To him, it's all baseball with no friends, family, faith or hobbies - he treats his players like they are all Bob Crachits. And like Scrooge with his business, Douglas seems angry about the only thing - baseball - he cares about; his is a dour life even doing the thing he loves.
> 
> But instead of visits from ghosts, late one night at the stadium, after an embarrassing defeat, Douglas hears an angel offer him a better life and winning team if he'll mend his cursing, combative ways. Simultaneously, a female reporter (Leigh) is assigned to cover the Pirates and, like Scrooge's nephew Fred, she tries to see the good and ignore the blasphemy in Douglas. They initially get along about as well as Scrooge and Fred did.
> 
> When the Pirates start winning and Douglas stops fighting and cursing and ranting and raving, the public is happily bemused. The media hounds want the real story behind the team and its manager's turnaround. Enter a little eight-year-old girl from the local Catholic orphanage who, at an outing to a Pirates game, actually sees the angels help the Pirates win.
> 
> While the girl's story is picked up by reporter Leigh as a human interest piece in the local paper (further alienating her from Douglas) and dismissed by all adults as a child's fantasy, Douglas goes to the orphanage to quietly talk with the young girl about it. Unfortunately for Douglas, the newspapers catch on to his visit and try to turn it into a "this manager is nuts and believes in angels" story.
> 
> Douglas denies all until he's hit in the head by a baseball and, in a concussed state, admits to the angels. Even Leigh tries to tamp his public statements down, despite sorta being a believer herself. A firestorm ensues resulting in a hearing by baseball's commissioner to assess Douglas' sanity and competency to stay in baseball.
> 
> Here the movie veers from the Scrooge narrative to the *Miracle on 34th Street* trial scene where, effectively, faith itself is put on trial. In this case, Leigh, the little orphan girl, a Minister, Rabbi and Catholic Father (wonderfully working together) all aver that, yes, angels can actively engage in the affairs of mankind.
> 
> All that's left is the complete transformation moment - Scrooge gleefully throwing the money out the window to secure the best Turkey for Christmas dinner. *Angels in the Outfield *doesn't disappoint with (minor spoiler alert if you haven't been paying attention) everything working out really, really well...even for the orphan girl.
> 
> Whimsy is a hard thing to pull off in any movie and harder still when you don't have a leg-up from Christmas, but *Angels in the Outfield* pulls it off with charm, passion and, well, faith. If Christmas movies work for you, this not-Christmas one should too; if they don't, well...
> 
> Plus, there's incredible time travel to 1951 America. Yes, the architecture, cars, clothes, appliances and furniture are outstanding, but also, in this one, you get a look at 1951 baseball and baseball stadiums and even, maybe, a peek at a 1951 angel.
> 
> N.B. Look for the scenes where Douglas and Leigh, after he has to carry her, playfully argue about how much she weighs; an aging pitcher (Bruce Bennett - Mildred Pierce's first husband) gets one last chance at glory and Keenan Wynn, as the acerbic baseball radio announcer, puts his anti-Douglas inflections into almost every word.


I loved that movie, the first time I watched it and your review inspires me to watch it a second time! Thanks for reminding me of a long pas, yet very pleasant viewing experience.


----------



## Fading Fast

*Klute* from 1971 with Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland and Roy Scheider

From a 2020 perspective, we've seen the story in 1971's *Klute* done many times since (and film versions of it go back to, at least, the 1930s), but the humanizing of a prostitute living a gritty life in a gritty city had to jar 1971 audiences used to a cleaner New York City and a cleaner Jane Fonda.

The value here is not the plot (a small town detective [Sutherland] comes to New York City to investigate the disappearance of a local businessman whose only clue is a link to a New York City prostitute [Fonda as Bree]), the value is the cultural moment of a film, sans any code restrictions, revealing both the raw life of a prostitute and the casual drug use, crime and general licentiousness of an emerging-from-the-'60s New York City.

According to the TCM host, the predominantly dark, close shots of Fonda were an intentional decision of director Alan Pakula to emphasize her dark, emotionally claustrophobic world. Fine - got it - but it was taken too far as you want to adjust the settings on the TV as you feel like you are only seeing half the movie.

When the light was allowed to shine - mainly in outdoor day shots - it exposed a grimy New York. This NYC is no longer the shining Apple of Fonda's 1967's *Barefoot in the Park*, but more the desperate and breaking city of another of 1971's offerings, *Panic in Needle Park*.

This had to lead many in America to ask - what happened? What happened to New York? What happened to create a world of Brees (Fonda) / of sexual deviants in socially prominent positions / of seemingly middle-class young people strung out on drugs / of shag hairstyles / of braless women having casual sex / of violent pimps / of everything in the '70s that was not the image of pre-'60s America?

Of course, it was all there before (well, maybe not the shag hairstyle), but the volume and exposure of it increased when the '60s said we should let it all hang out. Well, by '71, out it is and - at least in* Klute* (oddly, not Fonda's character's name, but Sutherland's; having never seen the movie before, I had that wrong in my head for the past thirty or so years) - the cultural revolution's freedom created (or revealed) a dark, ugly world of broken, mean, sad, angry, violent, distraught people.

And the lack of sunshine in the movie is mirrored by the lack of sunshine anywhere in anyone's life. Even when Fonda and Sutherland connect (minor spoiler alert), their love (in a very '60s zeitgeist way) won't work as free-spirt Fonda knows she would suffocate settling down with "square" Sutherland. I guess that its back to the "nightshift" for her.

While there's a lot of detective work, sexual deviancy and me-generaton stuff (prostitute Fonda has a psychiatrist, of course) going on in *Klute*, the story is perfectly framed and summarized (spoiler alert) by the denouement shot of a man hit by a bullet, falling backwards, shattering a large window and plunging to his death. *Klute* might not be a rebuke to the '60s' cultural revolution or to the Summer of Love or to Flower Power, but it is, at least, a long, despairing hangover from those once optimistic-in-spirit movements.


----------



## Peak and Pine

^

One of my most admired films, for somewhat odd reasons. I saw it twice in the year it came out (they didn't empty the theatres then, you could stay put and watch it all over again.) And have not seen it since. So that was 49 years ago. Help me, Fast, with this, but doesn't it open with a voice over of Fonda as the credits roll, maybe talking to a therapist or a john? This is what hooked me on Fonda, the voice, you couldn't see her so you had to concentrate on the voice, the incredible voice, the best woman voice ever I thought as I sat there. It made me want to know more about her, this was all pre I'net so it took a bit of doing. And then she became news because of her politics, and I had none and became intrigued by hers and this set me on the road to becoming the silently screaming liberal I am today. Love Jane Fonda, my lefty goddess. 

Oh, and the review. Very good, much deeper than I think I thought 49 yesrs ago. And The City, where I ljved '62 through '66, sharp insights from both you and the film.


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## Fading Fast

*Midway* from 2019 with Ed Skien, Patrick Wilson, Woody Harrelson and Dennis Quaid

Maybe they don't know how to make war movies anymore. You have a lot of options - tell a geopolitical-macro-strategy story, tell a this-is-how-it-effected-the-lives-of-these-people story, focus on one key event or family or battle or defining figure or...the list is almost endless.

And when you do any of those, you have to personalize the story - let the audience get to know the characters a bit so when they are in the cauldron of war, making life-and-death decisions, dying or coming home - we care because we've become vested in them.

In Midway, they tried to cover the overall geopolitical strategy of the war in the Pacific and a crucial theater-of-war-defining battle and, perhaps, bit off more than this movie-making team could chew. And despite many of the characters being famous historical figures, none of them felt real as no hard work was done to personalize them / to build their backstory / to have us care about them.

Be it the "big" guys like Charles Nimitz (Harrelson) or William Halsey (Quaid) or less-well-known ones like the dive bomber commander, they all just pop up either fully formed or with cliched moments to, one presumes, give them backstories. Seeing a pilot put a picture of his wife and kid on his dashboard means nothing if you don't know and feel his relationship with his wife because the few times they are together was a montage of cookie-cutter moments.

The acting talent is here, but even the really good ones can only do so much with trite dialogue and cliched stories. Lines of heroism ring empty when the movie is, mainly, lines like that strung together. It's as if someone watched a lot of good war movies and took all of their stirring moment and stitched them together here without realizes those moments won't be stirring if the movie hasn't done the background-building work.

Okay, so forget caring much about the characters; how was the big-picture story? Despite starting out promising with a few reasonably well done scenes in Japan in the late '30s explaining the Japanese view, most of the story flies by in brief vignettes that tells the very big picture - if you knew all but nothing about WWII - but left any nuance or complex-war strategy out.

Well then, how were the battle scenes? The CGI stunk. Based on looking over my nephews' shoulders at Christmas time, the action sequences felt like ten-year-old video-game images where, often, the explosions and resulting fires seemed superimposed on the battleships, etc. Being bored by the characters and sloppy story telling, unfortunately, leaves you more bandwidth to notice the poor graphics.

Midway is a confusing as heck battle that is hard to follow even in a well-written book (multiple ships and carrier groups on both sides going this way and that / ditto the planes / submarines here and there / strategies shifting mid battle multiple times / a lot of different weapons and technology in play / all happening over a large area), so it would take a skilled team to bring control to that chaos on screen - and Midway was not made by a skilled team (nor, for that matter was the 1976 version). The bad news - they tried and failed; the good news; a great Battle of Midway movie is still waiting to be made.


----------



## Mike Petrik

_Beyond a RD_ and _Klute_ are terrific films, and _Midway_ was great fun notwithstanding excess CGI. But Andy had it right from the very first post on this thread -- _Casablanca_. His second-guessing himself into _American Graffiti_ -- also a very good film -- was just an embarrassing gaffe. No worries Andy -- we all make them.


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 43788
> 
> *Midway* from 2019 with Ed Skien, Patrick Wilson, Woody Harrelson and Dennis Quaid
> 
> Maybe they don't know how to make war movies anymore. You have a lot of options - tell a geopolitical-macro-strategy story, tell a this-is-how-it-effected-the-lives-of-these-people story, focus on one key event or family or battle or defining figure or...the list is almost endless.
> 
> And when you do any of those, you have to personalize the story - let the audience get to know the characters a bit so when they are in the cauldron of war, making life-and-death decisions, dying or coming home - we care because we've become vested in them.
> 
> In Midway, they tried to cover the overall geopolitical strategy of the war in the Pacific and a crucial theater-of-war-defining battle and, perhaps, bit off more than this movie-making team could chew. And despite many of the characters being famous historical figures, none of them felt real as no hard work was done to personalize them / to build their backstory / to have us care about them.
> 
> Be it the "big" guys like Charles Nimitz (Harrelson) or William Halsey (Quaid) or less-well-known ones like the dive bomber commander, they all just pop up either fully formed or with cliched moments to, one presumes, give them backstories. Seeing a pilot put a picture of his wife and kid on his dashboard means nothing if you don't know and feel his relationship with his wife because the few times they are together was a montage of cookie-cutter moments.
> 
> The acting talent is here, but even the really good ones can only do so much with trite dialogue and cliched stories. Lines of heroism ring empty when the movie is, mainly, lines like that strung together. It's as if someone watched a lot of good war movies and took all of their stirring moment and stitched them together here without realizes those moments won't be stirring if the movie hasn't done the background-building work.
> 
> Okay, so forget caring much about the characters; how was the big-picture story? Despite starting out promising with a few reasonably well done scenes in Japan in the late '30s explaining the Japanese view, most of the story flies by in brief vignettes that tells the very big picture - if you knew all but nothing about WWII - but left any nuance or complex-war strategy out.
> 
> Well then, how were the battle scenes? The CGI stunk. Based on looking over my nephews' shoulders at Christmas time, the action sequences felt like ten-year-old video-game images where, often, the explosions and resulting fires seemed superimposed on the battleships, etc. Being bored by the characters and sloppy story telling, unfortunately, leaves you more bandwidth to notice the poor graphics.
> 
> Midway is a confusing as heck battle that is hard to follow even in a well-written book (multiple ships and carrier groups on both sides going this way and that / ditto the planes / submarines here and there / strategies shifting mid battle multiple times / a lot of different weapons and technology in play / all happening over a large area), so it would take a skilled team to bring control to that chaos on screen - and Midway was not made by a skilled team (nor, for that matter was the 1976 version). The bad news - they tried and failed; the good news; a great Battle of Midway movie is still waiting to be made.


Well written and very informative. Taking your much appreciated and respected cinematic advice, I will cross Midway off my list of movies to be watched. Let us hope the Top Gun II movie on Navel aviation, coming out in December will prove itself to be better cinematic fare! The aircraft designs certainly have the edge in raw sex appeal.


----------



## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> Well written and very informative. Taking your much appreciated and respected cinematic advice, I will cross Midway off my list of movies to be watched. Let us hope the Top Gun II movie on Navel aviation, coming out in December will prove itself to be better cinematic fare! The aircraft designs certainly have the edge in raw sex appeal.


Thank you. I wanted to like "Midway" and tried, but it was too silly for me. It reminded me of the "new" (now, what ~20 years old) "Pearl Harbor" movie where they took the "guts" out and just made a two-dimensional movie with cliches. While far from a perfect movie, "Tora, Tora, Tora" did a much better job as a Pearl Harbor movie.


----------



## Mike Petrik

Fading Fast said:


> Thank you. I wanted to like "Midway" and tried, but it was too silly for me. It reminded me of the "new" (now, what ~20 years old) "Pearl Harbor" movie where they took the "guts" out and just made a two-dimensional movie with cliches. While far from a perfect movie, "Tora, Tora, Tora" did a much better job as a Pearl Harbor movie.


IMO _Midway_ was sufficiently entertaining to watch and recommend, even if far short of being the great film I had hoped it would be (and the battle deserved). But much better than _Pearl Harbor_ IMO because it wasn't nearly as burdened by a contrived and uninspiring romance.


----------



## Fading Fast

*Young Man with a Horn* from 1950 with Kirk Douglas, Juano Hernandez, Doris Day, Hoagy Carmichael and Lauren BaCall

There are two movies here. There is the ostensible story of a young tortured artist and it's a good one, even if it does crawl a bit here and there. But there is an even better story within the main one that really lifts off.

In the main story, we meet a young man with talent, in this case, a jazz trumpet player whose music is so far ahead of its time that few care about his exceptional talent; instead, he has to make a living playing popular music that saps his soul.

Okay, we've seen this story before and this one, like all of them, has its own spin. Here, our tortured artist - a basically good guy with a volatile temper - falls for and marries the really wrong woman. It takes a bad marriage (to angry, crazy, spoiled BaCall), too much booze and having to play too much pop music to break him. And, sadly, all along, the good women (Day) - who "gets" him and his music - is right in front of him. Of course, as these things go, he doesn't see her until he's made all the wrong decisions first.

But here's the better and, for the time, daring movie within a movie: it's the story of a black man (Hernandez) who effectively raises a white kid, a street urchin with a talent for music, but with no one to love or guide him.

With dignity and quiet persistence, Hernandez, a successful trumpet player himself, tutors his protege in life and music. He uses an impressively soft touch as he rarely scolds, just teaches with understanding, by his own example and with a street-smart socratic method that continuously forces a young Douglas to see the errors in his thinking.

After building this foundation, there is a later-in-life scene when Hernandez tries to rescue a broken Douglas that is soul crushing. Douglas lashes out at the most important man in his life. Hernandez doesn't become angry, but is sad because he can't reach Douglas and because he knows Douglas is not really mad at him. Hernandez has a maturity and understanding of life and people that few of us ever achieve.

And knowing the time, one assumes Hernandez has not had an easy life. The scars are written on his face at crucial moments (acting talent at its best), so to see a man come out of those experiences not outwardly bitter, but wise, not outwardly angry, but hopeful, is impressive and humbling.

There is no doubt that the writers and the director knew what they were doing: they made a movie about an incredible black man guiding a lost white boy through life, but they made it inside another movie as it was, undoubtedly, the only way they could get it done.

Sure, the Douglas tortured-artist story is good, but the hidden gem is the story of a black man standing as a model of decency, character and Christian charity (talk about turning the other cheek). An almost subversive story for its day hiding in plain sight inside a movie made in 1950.


----------



## Fading Fast

*A Modern Hero* from 1934 with Richard Barthelmess and Jean Muir

For the first sixty minutes of this fast seventy-one minute movie, we see a poor, young circus performer (Barthelmess), first, dream about and, then, achieve a better life by leaving the circus and building a successful automobile manufacturing business through hard work, smart risk taking, offering a better product and by treating his employees, partners and customers with respect - you know, leveraging personal freedom and capitalism the right way


As a young man, Barthelmess had an affair with a local farm girl (Muir) whom he wanted to marry, but she wanted to stay on the farm and knew he needed to move on to grow, so she married a local farmer, but when Barthelmess becomes successful and learns (for the first time) that she had his son, he tries to help the boy - the opposite of a deadbeat dad (he tries to help when it isn't even asked for)


That's the first sixty minutes (plus some stuff about his circus-performing mother thinking he should have stayed in the hardscrabble world of circus performers - "thanks mom") and, then, it's as if the writers decided they wanted to make a different movie, so (spoiler alert) our heretofore hero risks everything he has in an out-of-character stock-market scheme (nothing illegal, just risky), loses everything and has to humbly return to his mother who tells him, effectively, I told you it was wrong to, paraphrasing, "step over people and only care about money -" two things he didn't do when he was successful


For whatever reason - ideology, market-testing - it's as if they decided at the last minute to slap a Depression-era morality-tale ending on a capitalism success story


Despite being a modest effort, Barthelmess gives his all and rises above his usual soporific performance; while Muir - looking absolutely stunning at 5'9" - shows more acting promise than her reasonably successful career delivered


Well worth the seventy one minutes even with the forced ending


----------



## Fading Fast

*Bureau of Missing Persons* from 1933 with Pat O'Brien, Bette Davis and Lewis Stone

Not quite sure what they were trying for with this, at times, documentary style picture and, at times, traditional movie about a big city's Missing Persons Bureau, presented here as a critical Police department with a large budget and devoted officers passionately looking for missing persons


The movie does reveal that the bulk of the missing persons are husbands or wives who've run away to lovers or they are teenage children running from abuse or neglect 


One story has a very modern feel: a child prodigy violinist runs away because he wants a "normal" childhood, which his mother seems to understand, but the father will have none of that and just wants to milk the son - it's a '30s version of some of today's sport-driven-parent stories


If there is a central plot, it's that Pat O'Brien, a young rising star detective, feels "above" his new assignment with the Missing Persons Bureau, but then he gets wrapped up in an apparent missing-wife story (Bette Davis), which twists into an embezzlement and murder story that has him both seeing the value of the Bureau and the value of a young and blonde Miss Davis


At just over an hour, and with O'Brien and Davis firing out dialogue at warp speed, the movie (1) flies by (once she gets into it), (2) is a quirky but fun early talky and (3) has really neat time travel to the '30s - cars, clothes, architecture and cool police technology (pictures sent over phone lines, radio broadcasts to patrol cars, etc.)


----------



## Fading Fast

*Tokyo Joe* from 1949 with Humphrey Bogart, Alexander Knox and Sessue Hayakawa

All the elements of a decent post-war international-intrigue movie are here - many recycled from earlier successful efforts like a little movie call *Casablanca* - but they just don't gel


Bogie plays a former WWII serviceman who owned a bar in Japan before the war who returns to Japan to restart his old life only to find that:
To restart the bar he, effectively, has to partner with the Japanese mafia (and for some confusing and shady reason needs to also start a freight airline - he was an army pilot)
His former girlfriend, whom he thought was dead, has married - oh, and she and her new (rich) husband (Knox) are raising Bogie's and her kid as their own (Bogie didn't know she had the baby - wartime and all)



Hence, the bar owner of a shady establishment (sounds like Rick's Café Américain) is involved in a love triangle (like Rick-Ilsa-Laszlo) where the other man is an upstanding citizen (who even looks like Paul Henreid) trying to help Japan rebuild (not the same as fighting Nazis, but that hero opportunity, thankfully, only came around once in the 20th Century)


And, yes, Rick, excuse me, Joe (Bogie), after learning the truth about his former girlfriend and new husband - gets drunk and bangs the table in despair (without "As Time Goes By" playing)


There's some other stuff in here about his former girlfriend forced to do pro-Japanese radio broadcasts during the war to save her child and former Japanese military leaders planning to subvert the American occupation (and occupation which is given a heck of a positive propaganda push), but it all just slushes along unconvincingly


Other than some interesting on-location shots of post-war Japan, there's not a lot here that you haven't seen done better in other movies

N.B. Does this remind anyone of a scene from *Casablanca*?


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## Fading Fast

*The Dark Horse* from 1932 with Warren William, Guy Kibbee and Bette Davis

Not all movies are art; some are entertainment and that's more than good enough and harder to do than it may seem or almost all movies would be entertaining.

And not all good movies have great or original stories, for some, having strong actors who engage the audience is enough.

*The Dark Horse* isn't movie art and the story - a political party puts up an empty suit as a candidate and then creates a compelling campaign around him, led by a brilliant-but-dicey campaign manager - wasn't new in '32, but it's executed pretty well here and, more importantly, it has outstanding actors to carry the material over its rough spots.

And not only carry but engage as Williams is wonderful as the alimony-dodging, fast-talking, truth-spinning and womanizing campaign manager. He's more picaresque scoundrel who loves playing the game than evil villain.

Fortunately for him and the movie, he meets his match in preternaturally mature Bette Davis (before the production code decided women were rarely smarter than men) who, as his secretary / junior business partner, plays his conscience as she sees through almost all his BS while reining him in each time he's about to get out over his skis.

And help he needs as his ex-wife - spiteful, greedy and malicious - is ready to have him jailed for missed alimony while he tries to earn money (in part to pay her) managing the campaign of bland, dull and stupid Guy Kibbee.

The drama builds as the ex-wife calls the police, candidate Kibbee almost exposes his complete lack of qualifications and William pushes Davis to marry him while she, intrigued (he has charm), ducks and dives his advances afraid he'll never reform his Casanova and slippery ways.

Her smarts - she gets who Williams and Kibbee are and the game being played - and how she manages to keep those two reasonably in line is the glue that holds this movie together. It's acting elevating the material above itself. And that's the entire movie as there's nothing spectacular here other than the actors.

But what actors they are as Warren Williams is at his best as an enjoyable rogue, a ridiculously young Davis lifts every scene she's in with her aborning-but-outsized acting talent and Kibbee brings a silly joy to his role as the idiot candidate. And if we're complimenting actors, a hat-tip is also owed to perennial character actor Frank McHugh as William's happy but flummoxed factotum.

*The Dark Horse* is entertainment, not art, driven by actors who learned early how to practice their craft in the new world of "talkies." This story was told before and would be told again and again, but it's fun to see an early version with so much on-screen talent making a basic script enjoyable as heck to watch.


----------



## Fading Fast

*42nd Street* from 1933 with a whole bunch of stars and stars-to-be.

This is not my type of movie - a "let's put on a show" movie doesn't excite me the way it does so many other; so, while I've seen twenty minutes of it here and there over the years, I never sat down to watch it from beginning to end until now.

Now that I did, I enjoyed it more than I thought I would, but I'm still not a "let's put on a show" movie kinda guy. Guy Kibbee - a wonderful character actor - as the wealthy man who puts up the money for the show so that he can sleep with the star (let's not kid ourselves) is way too creepy by todays' standards to be enjoyed. I assume the newer versions of *42nd Street *have altered this defining aspect somehow.

But one thing it did highlight is how starved Broadway was for capital in the Depression as everyone from the successful producer to the guy who sweeps up after the show is excited about somebody putting up money for a show - anyone, any show.

With that spark, all the things we are used to, but that might have been pretty fresh in '33, happen: unemployed actors and actresses come out of the woodwork trying to get parts; the bigger stars feign disinterest while biting their nails in private; the money people argue over the details in the contracts while almost everyone outwardly denies what they all really know - a Broadway show is just one big gamble.

After that, it's all the stress of, well, putting on a show: actors fall in and out of love and lust, which distracts the production; producers yell; actors cry; numbers are rehearsed - a lot of chorus line and '30s song and dance numbers - as we build to the climax. And the climax has everything we've come to expect: will the money guys pull their money at the last second; the big star might not go on; the unknown ingenue might have to save the show (can she?) - and then it's showtime.

(I guess spoiler alerts if I am not the last person on earth who hadn't seen *42nd Street*.) The show starts; the chorus girl subbed into the staring role stumbles a bit but rises to the occasion; a bunch of reasonably famous numbers are done; the show ends; the crowd roars; the now new star bows and the famous producer listens to the exiting crowd to, happily, discover that the audience really did love it. After that, a few loose relationship issues are tied up and *42nd Street* ends.

Having never seen it before, it's clear how influential it has been on many other productions; also, the cast of stars and soon-to-be stars almost overwhelms and the numbers are, overall, enjoyable. But while it was enjoyable enough, I went in and came out still not being a "let's put on a show" movie kinda guy.


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## Fading Fast

*The Seventh Veil* from 1945 with Ann Todd, James Mason and Herbert Lom

A bit slow in places, but overall an enjoyable if odd psychological melodrama (I guess that's a thing) that smartly uses Ann Todd to patch over any weaknesses. She plays the orphaned young teenage ward of an aloof non-blood uncle who recognizes and promotes her incipient talent as a pianist.

As her talent emerges - through her hard work and his smart and relentless coaching efforts - he emphasizes to her the value of her hands as the tools of her art, but this happens inside a prickly relationship where Todd all but begs for affection which Mason all but can't give. This working dysfunction is challenged when seventeen-year-old Todd falls in love with a popular local band leader (Lom), but Mason kiboshes that as he, her legal guardian until she is 21, won't consent to her marriage.

From there, their relationship, not surprisingly, becomes somewhat embittered, but her career takes off, somewhat papering over the tension. Years later, even after she is legally free, Todd stays with Mason as some odd bond holds these two together - love, hate, respect, habit - who knows, I guess that's why it's a "psychological melodrama."

Then enters another man; Todd falls in love again; Mason tries to thwart their plans, but fails this time. As the young couple escapes, they have a car accident resulting in Todd's all-important hands getting burned. Todd suffers some sort of mental breakdown even though the injury to her hands is minor and temporary. She tries to commit suicide and winds up under the care of a modern-thinking-for-1945 psychiatrist (Freud, dreams, repressed fears, etc.)

The movie actually opens here with most of the story told through flashbacks that Todd has while under hypnosis (it's 1945 and this is what smart psychiatrists did and, in movies, hypnosis works). From here, it's Todd struggling with her mind, Mason trying to dismiss the psychiatrist, the fiancee hanging around waiting for Todd to "come back to him" and a lot of Todd's angst and repressed feelings coming out.

Finally, we have the emotional breakthrough resulting in Todd able to play the piano again. Now, to complete her recovery, she must choose which of the men she truly loves: Mason, the fiancee or the old-flame bandleader (whom the psychiatrist finds to help Todd). And her choice is surprising. To wit, *The Seventh Veil *is rightly billed as a psychological melodrama as it has plenty of Freud and plenty of soap opera.

It's not bad - kinda a poor-man's *Spellbound* (also a psychological melodrama from the same year - movie themes do have a vogue). And *The Seventh Veil* gets over its slow part owing to Todd's arresting beauty and serious acting talent.

Considering that her beauty is a combination of blondness, chiseled features, haunting eyes, glowing skin and aloofness, one wonders why Hitchcock, a connoisseur of icy-cold blondes, only worked with Ann Todd one time, in *The Paradine Case*.

In fact, *The Seventh Veil,* a reasonably well-done psychological melodrama, could have used a little help from the master director to speed it along in spots and add some oomph in others. Ironically, he was tied up making its movie cognate *Spellbound* at the same time. That's *The Seventh Veil's* loss, but still, it's worth the watch for the story and for Todd.


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## Fading Fast

*On The Waterfront *from 1954 with Marlon Brando, Eva Marie Saint, Karl Maulden, Lee J. Cobb and Rob Steiger

Despite having a bit too neatly and nicely tied-up ending, this one's a classic for a good reason: it tells a story of deep, ruthless and cynical union, mob and political corruption - payoffs, kickbacks, muscle, favoritism - crushing the union men and local businesses (via "protection" money) who provide the funds for it all.

While you get the big picture - the union bosses, literally, counting the ill-gotten money and paying it out to the favored (who enforce the entire racket) - the story is poignantly personalized by the plight of slow-but-not-stupid Terry Malloy (Brando) who was all but born into the corrupt system and only starts to see its evil when he unintentionally fingers his good friend to be rubbed out.

And even then, it takes his friend's seraphic sister - the insanely clean and blonde Eva Marie Saint, the only thing in the entire movie that doesn't look soiled by the waterfront (literally and figuratively) - furiously pushing Brando's conscience to help her find the killers, to help him see that he wants to find the killers, to help him see the rot of the system he's part of.

She does get some help from a roll-up-your-sleeves-and-throw-a-punch Catholic priest (Mauldin) learning the difference between preaching from the pulpit and getting out amongst his flock and doing what is, effectively, waterfront missionary work. It's a very pro-religion movie, but this is no from-a-distance spiritualistic religion. Maudlin stands with the men quoting the bible to criticize their passivity to corruption and he denounces the union bosses right to their faces with more bible quotes when they steal and bully. And, as noted, when necessary, priest Mauldin will land a right to someone's jaw - think Jesus turning over the money-changers' tables.

And it all comes down to this for every single man on the waterfront: play along with the corruption and get what you can from the system (work that day, a better or easier job, more pay, some skim of the take, a not smashed-in head, etc.) or fight it and risk your life and limb, literally.

Terry, whose brother (Steiger) is a bigwig in the union, plays along as that's what he knows until the afore-noted death of his friend and the ensuing badgering from Saint. We also learn that Terry was a boxer with a future until he was told to take a dive in his big match because the union bosses bet on his opponent (the source of the famous "I coulda been a contender" line). And this past grievance resurfaces in Terry's mind while he's digesting his part in his friend's death - all the while with angelic and persistent Saint nipping at his heals and libido - leading Terry to slowly, but with growing anger, see he's part of an evil system.

While Terry is a strong physical man - a former boxer and stevedore - he's really a gentle giant who, as a hobby, raises homing pigeons with care and compassion. As the union/mob sees Terry slipping way - and afraid he'll testify against them at upcoming hearings - they send him a message by killing all his pigeons, completing the symbolism of the average union worker being nothing more than a pigeon to the bosses.

From here, there's another breakpoint for Terry (too much of a spoiler to tell) until he goes full force against the union by testifying at the very 1950's-era televised trial of mob and union corruption. Then it's the climatic waterfront confrontation - Terry versus the big mob boss (Cobb) / good versus evil - and a pleasing and just-a-bit-too simplistic ending.

Two more pluses, the movie excels at connecting small dots - if Terry fingers the mob, his brother's life is at risk / if Saint pushes for an investigation, her aging father won't be chosen for work anymore. It's well done story telling that shows how it all works - the rubber hits the road in this one very clearly. And, lastly, the acting is insane - Brando, Saint, Cobb, Steiger, Maulden and others - all deliver intense and passionate performances as did the cinematographer whose work in black-and-white made the grime and depredation of the waterfront another character.

Yes, the wrap-up is too easy, but for a 1954 picture, you can't ask for much more reality than this. Director Elia Kazan more than deserved his Oscar as did the recipients of the seven other Oscars awarded to *On The Waterfront.*


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## Fading Fast

*The Hatchet Man* from 1932 with Edward G. Robinson and Loretta Young

White actors playing Chinese characters are not acceptable to modern audiences, but they were to 1930s' audiences (and to '40s' and '50s' and '60s' and '70s' audiences - it was in the '80s into the '90s that it was discover by the majority who decide these things that it was wrong).

I don't care what ethnicity plays what ethnicity as long as it is convincing and it's not convincing here, but as always, Robinson delivers such a strong, thoughtful and nuanced performance that his awful Chinese makeup and butchered attempt at English with a Chinese accent makes you forget all those flaws and just enjoy his effort.

And that goes for the rest of the movie, you either accept that there were prejudices and ways of looking at these things in the '30s that don't align to modern views or this is not the movie for you. To be sure, this is far from an all-insulting movie to Chinese Americans; in reality, at times, it's quite the opposite. Parts of Chinese culture and values are shown in a better light than - superior to - traditional America culture and values.

That and the, overall, strong story are what I enjoyed. The story is straightforward, Robinson plays a Tong "Hatchet Man," sort of a senior person in the Tong who has the responsibility and skill to carry out sanctioned-by-the-Tong murders of opponents. As the movie opens, we are told it is fifteen years earlier when San Francisco experienced Tong wars and Robinson is sent to kill his best friend.

We don't have all the background, but his best friend understands that Robinson has to do his duty and the friend leaves his property and the care of bringing up his young daughter to Robinson - that's some serious belief in the integrity of the Tong system. Then, we fast forward to present day San Francisco, 1932, when, in theory, Tong wars are over.

Robinson's best friend's daughter is now a young woman (Young) whom Robinson has raised with kindness and decency as he has become a successful businessman who now dresses, mostly, in Western business suits. With no pressure at all - almost scripted out of a 2020 college-dating handbook - Robinson asks her to marry him and she agrees seemingly happy to marry this generous and decent, if much older, man.

Then all hell breaks loose. A Tong war flares up, Robinson travels to an out-of-town "peace" conference where he learns it is a white businessman who is stirring up all the trouble (a whose-culture-is-superior challenge 1930s' style). Meanwhile, while Robinson is away, a young, handsome local Chinese drug dealer (yup, it's pre-code) moves in on Robinson's wife.

While Robinson solves the Tong war, he is disowned by the local Chinese community because he will not kill the man who dishonored him by stealing his wife. We'll give that round to Western values. As a result, Robinson loses his business and becomes a farm worker. Then, later, he learns that his wife is in terrible straights in China as her boyfriend has become a drug addict. Off to China Robinson goes to save his wife.

Mind you, this all happens in a seventy-four minute movie and Robinson still has to sort things out in China. They knew how to pack a lot of story into short movies back then. To avoid spoiler alerts, we'll leave the final China scene out, but it, like the rest of the movie, is basically a commentary of traditional Chinese values of honor and integrity held up favorably against both 1930s American values and the Chinese who game the honor system for selfish reasons.

By today's standards, much of what is shown here is unacceptable, but by 1930s' standards, this is pretty progressive stuff as the message - not even that subtle - is that traditional Chinese cultural values of honor and integrity are superior to America's individual-striver (and often corrupt) system. While I'd argue it's a phony dichotomy - individuals can compete aggressively while also treating each other with respect and integrity - as a message movie in the '30s, it's pretty darn complimentary to Chinese culture.


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## Fading Fast

*Criss Cross* from 1949 with Burt Lancaster, Yvonne De Carlo and Dan Duryea

Burt Lancaster might get top billing and the most screen time, but the heart and soul (or really, the heartlessness and soullessness) of this movie is femme fatal par excellence Yvonne De Carlo (the future Lillian Monster not Batgirl; Batgirl was Yvonne Craig - I always confuse those names).

Some femme fatals take pleasure in their evilness; some would almost choose being evil over getting whatever they want - money, power or some man - because their raison d'être is evil. But De Carlo is all business in this one; being evil is just a means to an end. She's indifferent to it, which is almost more frightening than the sociopath who enjoys being evil. With the sociopath, you know she's broken; with De Carlo, you almost think she's not.

We come into this story as De Carlo's former husband, Lancaster, returns from a few years of traveling the country hopping from job to job to, as we'll learn, get over his divorce from De Carlo (fat chance). Once back in town, he goes looking for her in their old haunt despite everyone in town sensing the pending doom of these two reuniting.

While Lancaster was away licking his wounds, De Carlo, clad in tight dresses, jangling jewelry and bad-girl sunglasses, moved on to local gangster Duryea, equally dressed for his part in gangster noir-cliched dark shirts and suits with light ties and suspenders. De Carlo, a bit bored (one senses she's always a bit bored), starts sniffing around Lancaster while Duryea immediately senses the threat from her ex-husband.

De Carlo, the lynchpin of it all, who clearly has a physical attraction to Lancaster, plays her boy toys against each other. But Lancaster is an honest guy with a regular job as an armored-car driver who can't give her the things a prosperous gangster can (gun-hung-wall).

So, after much angst, sex we know is happening but the movie code palliates and Lancaster and Duryea at each others' throats a few times, seemingly out of nowhere, Lancaster offers up the idea of leading an inside job to rob the armored-car company. This solves two problems for Lancaster as it would stop Duryea from killing him (Lancaster's the irreplaceable inside guy after all) and would produce the funds for him to run away with De Carlo afterwards (the plan those two have).

Okay, with that horrible plan in place, the rest of the movie is a pretty good heist story from planning to, as always, bungled execution and, then, the denouement. Leaving out the spoilers, the thing to look for is De Carlo, the catalyst for almost every single bad thing that has happened to everyone in this story, explaining her philosophy on life, which boils down to I want expensive things and an easy life and don't really care who provides that or how, but that's what I want.

Heck, had she met a rich, honest guy, she'd have probably led a rich, honest life. Her game isn't evil; her game is me-first with no rules - a frightening amorality scarier than most off-the-shelf femme fatales. She lifts *Criss Cross* several notches above your average-good film noir.

This is a femme fatale par excellence ⇩









N.B. The location shots of late '40s Los Angeles are time-travel and noir perfect.


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## Fading Fast

*Picture Snatcher* from 1933 with James Cagney, Ralph Bellamy and Patricia Ellis

In the '30s, Warner Brothers knew how to bang out short (77 minute) movies with a lot of story, romance and action 


Cagney is an ex-con trying to go straight as a newspaper photographer despite his old mob trying to pull him back and the other newspaper guys not taking him seriously 


Throw into the mix that he's hired onto a rag - a National Enquirer of its day - by an old friend (Bellamy) who, later, owing to a misunderstanding, thinks Cagney's slept with his girl; meanwhile, Cagney really wants to be with a police captain's daughter (Ellis), but in order to get an important photograph, Cagney ends up getting the captain demoted


There's also a trip to a death-row electrocution (the pic Cagney pinched that cost the captain his stripes) and a lone-shooter that Cagney has to calm in order to get another picture - he gets the pic, but no calm as the police let rip with a torrent of bullets that would do Tarantino proud


Basically, a lot's going on and it's all propelled forward by Cagney on speed (wouldn't be shocked if true) - talking a mile a minute, laughing, fighting, drinking, feeling self pity and then bucking up and, of course, chasing the pretty girl - he's both a talented actor and a star (the camera loves him)


It's no classic, but a fun, quick diversion punching above its weight owing to Cagney









*All Through the Night* from 1942 with Humphrey Bogart, Conrad Veidt, Frank McHugh, Peter Lorre and William Demarest

More propaganda than serious movie, it still works in a fun way on a very real subject


Mobsters and non-violent gambler Bogie ("non-violent" eh? - they needed Bogie to be both a gambler and a good guy in this one) uncover a Nazi spy ring in New York City and put their mob biz aside to help the good old USA


Bogie's so nice his day is constantly disrupted by his very typical mother, unaware of her son's real biz, asking for this or that small thing for which Bogie drops everything 


Juxtaposed with that humor is the very deadly German spy ring (led by Veidt, aided by Lorre), spoiler alert, plotting to blow up a battleship in NY harbor


With that set up, it's a pretty good balance of humor (a mob underling, McHugh, can't "consummate" his marriage as Bogie keeps giving him things to do) and international intrigue (a large and well-organized underground network of Nazi spies is exposed)


It is a bit muddled in parts as Bogie and team run all over NYC chasing Nazis - 30 minutes could easily have been edited out - but it has strong actors, some fun moments and it is another neat example of war-time propaganda


And you don't want to miss a 26-year-old (but already fat) Jackie Gleason looking insanely young in one of his first roles (he's in Bogie's "mob").

In twenty-plus years, this guy will be coming to you "live from Miami Beach."


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 44667
> 
> *Picture Snatcher* from 1933 with James Cagney, Ralph Bellamy and Patricia Ellis
> 
> In the '30s, Warner Brothers knew how to bang out short (77 minute) movies with a lot of story, romance and action
> 
> 
> Cagney is an ex-con trying to go straight as a newspaper photographer despite his old mob trying to pull him back and the other newspaper guys not taking him seriously
> 
> 
> Throw into the mix that he's hired onto a rag - a National Enquirer of its day - by an old friend (Bellamy) who, later, owing to a misunderstanding, thinks Cagney's slept with his girl; meanwhile, Cagney really wants to be with a police captain's daughter (Ellis), but in order to get an important photograph, Cagney ends up getting the captain demoted
> 
> 
> There's also a trip to a death-row electrocution (the pic Cagney pinched that cost the captain his stripes) and a lone-shooter that Cagney has to calm in order to get another picture - he gets the pic, but no calm as the police let rip with a torrent of bullets that would do Tarantino proud
> 
> 
> Basically, a lot's going on and it's all propelled forward by Cagney on speed (wouldn't be shocked if true) - talking a mile a minute, laughing, fighting, drinking, feeling self pity and then bucking up and, of course, chasing the pretty girl - he's both a talented actor and a star (the camera loves him)
> 
> 
> It's no classic, but a fun, quick diversion punching above its weight owing to Cagney
> 
> View attachment 44668
> 
> *All Through the Night* from 1942 with Humphrey Bogart, Conrad Veidt, Frank McHugh, Peter Lorre and William Demarest
> 
> More propaganda than serious movie, it still works in a fun way on a very real subject
> 
> 
> Mobsters and non-violent gambler Bogie ("non-violent" eh? - they needed Bogie to be both a gambler and a good guy in this one) uncover a Nazi spy ring in New York City and put their mob biz aside to help the good old USA
> 
> 
> Bogie's so nice his day is constantly disrupted by his very typical mother, unaware of her son's real biz, asking for this or that small thing for which Bogie drops everything
> 
> 
> Juxtaposed with that humor is the very deadly German spy ring (led by Veidt, aided by Lorre), spoiler alert, plotting to blow up a battleship in NY harbor
> 
> 
> With that set up, it's a pretty good balance of humor (a mob underling, McHugh, can't "consummate" his marriage as Bogie keeps giving him things to do) and international intrigue (a large and well-organized underground network of Nazi spies is exposed)
> 
> 
> It is a bit muddled in parts as Bogie and team run all over NYC chasing Nazis - 30 minutes could easily have been edited out - but it has strong actors, some fun moments and it is another neat example of war-time propaganda
> 
> 
> And you don't want to miss a 26-year-old (but already fat) Jackie Gleason looking insanely young in one of his first roles (he's in Bogie's "mob").
> 
> In twenty-plus years, this guy will be coming to you "live from Miami Beach."
> View attachment 44669


A double feature and both good movies. That makes two more on my "TBW" list!


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## Fading Fast

*Some Kind of Wonderful from 1987*

If John Hughes had something meaningful to say as a writer-director in the '80s, he said it in *The Breakfast Club*, as most of his other movies just, less effectively, replayed themes of high school angst / cliques / alienation / insecurity / etc.

*Some Kind of Wonderful* should be lumped right in with the rest of his by-the-numbers movies, but for some reason - despite having many (and I mean many) cringe worthy / cliched moments - writer Hughes and director Howard Deutch bring enough humanity to the three main characters to keep you engaged.

Keith (Eric Stoltz) is that high school kid who preternaturally sees the silliness and hypocrisy of everything around him, but still succumbs to the allure of the "unreachable" pretty girl. You get it; you know he gets it, but like many teenage boys, it doesn't matter as this smart, observant kid, still, just simply wants the pretty girl.

The pretty girl (Lea Thompson) has it all until we (and she) realize she doesn't have much of anything but a fragile existence supported by the need to keep up an image, which she slowly realizes she doesn't want anymore. Showing real growth, she comes to see that she, not only doesn't like her popular friends, doesn't like whom she's become.

Completing the movie's love triangle is Watts (Mary Stuart Masterson), the rebel, outcast girl (who's too pretty for the role, but heck, Hollywood does what Hollywood does) who doesn't become a cliche because she keeps her rebel anger in check while slowly rolling out a performance of unrequited love that hits you in the gut just as it hits her.

I almost hate that I like this movie as much of it is bad, formulaic and predictable, but just when I'm ready to give up, Hughes and Deutch produce a poignant moment of humanity and I'm back in.

N.B., The movie, in a very effective montage, uses an early Rolling Stone's song, "Amanda Jones," which is a nice change from the usual "big hit" Stones' songs that pop up in most mainstream movies. Since the Stones' song was written in the early '60s, I assume Hughes named his female lead after the song's titular character.


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 44737
> 
> *Some Kind of Wonderful from 1987*
> 
> If John Hughes had something meaningful to say as a writer-director in the '80s, he said it in *The Breakfast Club*, as most of his other movies just, less effectively, replayed themes of high school angst / cliques / alienation / insecurity / etc.
> 
> *Some Kind of Wonderful* should be lumped right in with the rest of his by-the-numbers movies, but for some reason - despite having many (and I mean many) cringe worthy / cliched moments - writer Hughes and director Howard Deutch bring enough humanity to the three main characters to keep you engaged.
> 
> Keith (Eric Stoltz) is that high school kid who preternaturally sees the silliness and hypocrisy of everything around him, but still succumbs to the allure of the "unreachable" pretty girl. You get it; you know he gets it, but like many teenage boys, it doesn't matter as this smart, observant kid, still, just simply wants the pretty girl.
> 
> The pretty girl (Lea Thompson) has it all until we (and she) realize she doesn't have much of anything but a fragile existence supported by the need to keep up an image, which she slowly realizes she doesn't want anymore. Showing real growth, she comes to see that she, not only doesn't like her popular friends, doesn't like whom she's become.
> 
> Completing the movie's love triangle is Watts (Mary Stuart Masterson), the rebel, outcast girl (who's too pretty for the role, but heck, Hollywood does what Hollywood does) who doesn't become a cliche because she keeps her rebel anger in check while slowly rolling out a performance of unrequited love that hits you in the gut just as it hits her.
> 
> I almost hate that I like this movie as much of it is bad, formulaic and predictable, but just when I'm ready to give up, Hughes and Deutch produce a poignant moment of humanity and I'm back in.
> 
> N.B., The movie, in a very effective montage, uses an early Rolling Stone's song, "Amanda Jones," which is a nice change from the usual "big hit" Stones' songs that pop up in most mainstream movies. Since the Stones' song was written in the early '60s, I assume Hughes named his female lead after the song's titular character.


Sounds like a movie well worth watching...it's on the list!


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## Fading Fast

*Sabotage* from 1936

I like these early efforts from Hitchcock. Yes, they can be a bit clunky and the small budgets show, but you also get Hitchcock in quick, short, digestible bites. Unfortunately, this one needs restoration (at least the TCM copy, which, I assume, means there isn't a better copy out there) as the picture is dark and hazy.

Despite that, the story engages even though this is not, what would become, a typical Hitchcock movie. Here, the plot and the event at its center - an attempt to terrorize London by setting off a bomb in its underground - is not a macguffin, but something audiences, then and today, can understand and fear.

Also, this is not about an innocent person falsely accused; instead, this is more of a traditional spy drama where the foreign spy (terrorist from England's perspective) is on the police's watch list, but still might be able to carry out his plan. It sounds unpleasantly familiar to our post-9/11 world.

The spy/terrorist is a nondescript married man who, with his wife and her adolescent brother, run a movie theater that they live above. Watching them is an undercover inspector posing as a grocery clerk in the store adjacent to the theater. Centered between the inspector and spy is the spy's pretty young wife (unaware of her husband's activities), whom the inspector befriends to get closer to her husband.

From that set up, the movie plays out pretty much by the numbers: inspector gets closer, spy finalizes plans, innocent wife becomes suspicious of husband and young boy accidentally reveals details about his stepfather to the inspector. Then, the inspector is exposed, the plan advances to the execution stage, the wife becomes more suspicious, the young boy becomes an unwitting accomplice and the clock ticks down, excruciatingly, to the detonation hour.

The rest would give too much away, but, back in the '30s, it was probably dramatic and it is still quite impactful today. And while, as noted, it's more detective drama than usual Hitchcock film, several Hitchcock elements are here: pretty birds in a cage used to hide true intent, regular people (wife, young brother) put in an extraordinary situation and a plot ticking down to terror all while two innocents fall in love (the wife and the undercover inspector).

A fine movie on its own enhanced simply by being an early example of Hitchcock's work.


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## Fading Fast

*Upperworld* from 1934 with Warren William, Mary Astor and Ginger Rogers

Another short (73 minutes), fast Warner Brothers pre-code where William plays a decent-hearted tycoon whose wife (Astor) is too busy with her social-climbing efforts to spend time with him, so he stumbles into an affair (he didn't set out to have one) with body-tight chorus girl Ginger Rogers


As an aside, a Depression Era America seemed, surprisingly, quite concerned with uber-wealthy men whose wives ignore them owing to their social commitments as this theme came up before in *A Successful Calamity* and *The Rich are Always with Us *- no jobs, no food, but the real issue for the average American is, are millionaires being ignored by their wives!?


Back to our story, which is a basic rich-man-cheats-on-indifferent-to-him-wife tale until things take a really bad turn as Rogers' former kinda boyfriend wants to blackmail William (Rogers doesn't want to)


This leads to a hotel-room confrontation with bullets flying, two dead bodies and William realizing his entire life just got dynamited in under five minutes


After that, it's exposure by the press, an investigation, courtroom drama and resolution all in about 20 minutes and, if told, would all be spoilers


Tucked into the middle of this is a homily about treating everyone with respect as, in an out-of-character move early on, William belittles a traffic cop ticketing his driver / the revenge-driven cop later becomes the dogged investigator into William's hotel imbroglio - this would have been more effective as a message if William wasn't a really nice guy and the cop a jerk


Warners Brothers had a formula: bang out fast, short movies with lots of story, romance and action; this by-the-numbers version works okay owing to the talents of William and Rogers


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## Fading Fast

*Cornered *from 1945 with Dick Powell, Walter Slezak and Micheline Cheirel

There's a lot to like in this post-war noir, but the sum is less than its parts. Dick Powell plays a just-demobilized WWII Canadian airman single-mindedly on the hunt for the killer of his member-of-the-French-resistance wife. Okay, that's a fine plot that leads to a lot of neat stuff, but Powell's obtuse approach to his search fueled by his all-consuming anger comes off more as if he's dead inside than passionately revenge driven; maybe a reflection of reality, but it makes it hard to relate to him for almost two hours.

Powell's investigative techniques are all "bull in the china shop," all the time. After, effectively, sneaking into France (from England), he pushes around some officials until he finds the name of his wife's probable killer: a French collaborator. From there, it's off to Argentina as the few documents he found indicate his wife's killer fled with other escaping French collaborators and Nazis to South America.

Once there, a surface-friendly but shady "tour guide" (Slezak) meets Powell, as he's deplaning, with an offer to help. Slezak does an admirable job in the Sydney Greenstreet noir-template role of the fat, pleasant but dangerous foil to the hero as he brings more personality and life to the effort than does Powell.

The rest of the movie, like it's been so far, is Powell angrily blundering forward in a hunt for his wife's killer, but now in the locus of what's left of the true-believing Nazis and their French collaborators. So his search has him bouncing around from sinister parties, to police stations (maybe protecting the ex-pat Nazis - not clear), to women's bedrooms (it's noir), to bars (it's noir) and, finally, to a waterfront hideout (it's noir). And it's a final confrontation in that hideout where many loose ends come together in an almost comic series of "who has the gun," "who bonked whom over the head," "who's double dealing whom" turnarounds.

With a little brain power, you can untangle the convoluted plot, but you almost feel cheated as there was a lot of buildup to a pretty by-the-numbers conclusion. The big flaw, as noted, is Powell's one-note portrayal of a man on the hunt for his wife's killer. Right or wrong, we like our heroes to be relatable (and likable) even when their cause is just. So, despite a lot of good stuff - exotic settings, some interesting characters (hating Nazis is evergreen) and a noirishly twisting plot and atmosphere - you still come away a little disappointed owing to Powell's blunt approach to his character.


----------



## Fading Fast

*Too Late for Tears* from 1949 with Lizabeth Scott, Arthur Kennedy, Dan Duryea and Dom DeFore

There are the great noirs - *The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, Out of the Past* and others - but there are also a lot of really good noirs like *Too Late for Tears*.

A middle-class couple, stopped for a moment on the side of a highway one night, have a bag full of money, literally, tossed into their open-topped car from a passing vehicle (it's rationally explained much later), setting off a series of, well, disasters.

The husband (Kennedy) is content with their life and wants to turn the money over to the police; the wife (Scott) is not content (at all) and wants to keep it. He sees their middle-class life as successful and fortunate; she - openly showing contempt for him - expresses disgust at their "meager" existence as she wants more - more money, things, status.

After contentiously agreeing to keep, but not touch, the money for a week, Kennedy trots off to work while Scott stays home losing her mind thinking about all that money. From here, the movie is about one thing: Scott's all-consuming passion to get the money (presently, in a train-station locker with the claim check in her husband's coat - she thinks) as one obstacle after another pops up between her and the bag 'o cash.

First up is Scott's sister-in-law who quickly sees that Scott is up to no good, but being a normal human being, she doesn't have the capacity to quickly jump to the conclusion that Scott would commit murder (more in a moment) for money. Instead, she shadows Scott, stumbles upon clues and makes Scott squirm. At one point, I thought Scott would shoot the sister-in-law just to shut her up, despite the sister-in-law not being close to figuring things out. Even though the sister-in-law was in the right, she was so annoying about it, I almost wanted Scott to shoot her too.

Next up, and much more effective in his pursuit of Scott, is Dan Duryea, the intended recipient of the tossed bag of money, which was the product of an insurance fraud Duryea stumbled upon and cut himself in on. He and Scott engage in a wonderful game of cat-and-mouse as they vie for the money and the upper hand against an ever shifting dynamic of "we need each other, but can't trust each other one bit" (think *The Treasure of the Sierra Madre*, but in '49 LA). Even when they have sex - oh yeah, they flirt, they hate, they sleep together - you know each one is half plotting to kill the other. It's a good, healthy noir relationship.

(Minor spoiler alert as it comes along pretty early on) Scott and Duryea kill Scott's husband as the husband's moral stance - the money should go to the police - is untenable to Scott or Duryea. Scott's husband seemed like a good guy, but he did not understand, one bit, the woman he married.

Right after the murder, another obstacle comes along: a putative old war buddy (DeFore) of Scott's husband, apparently, just in town for a short visit. DeFore plays the innocent good guy only trying to help, but he is better than the sister-in-law at connecting dots and seeing Scott for who she is.

As if this wasn't enough, Scott has to report her murdered husband to the police as missing. The sister-in-law would have gotten even more suspicious if Scott just went about her day (hunting feverishly for the now missing claim-check ticket) without even showing a thought for her husband who, in theory, just disappeared.

So, for those keeping score, standing between Scott and the money are the missing claim-check ticket, the guy who originally stole the money (whom she's having hate-sex with), her murdered husband's sister-in-law, her murdered husband's supposed old war buddy and the police (oddly, the least of her worries). But a woman after money's gotta do what a woman after money's gotta do.

To avoid giving the rest away (you really want to see it), Scott tries to plow through one obstacle after another and does an admirable job even getting a brief moment in the sun to luxuriate with her ill-gotten dough. But this is noir and this is Hollywood under the code, so you know how it's going to end. And credit to the writers for tying a lot of loose ends together in the climactic scene.

The funny thing is that, while this is Scott's movie - she's an obsessed ball of 5'3" blonde greed - her acting is wooden in this one (she's better in some other movies). However, she's gorgeous in a cold, aloof, calculating way that works so well for the character that she carries the movie despite her stolid performance. And being short helps as, if she was a tall gorgeous blonde, you'd be like, "come on" she already has everything she needs. But, here, her shortness seems to fit her psychotic obsessing and pathetic social bounding.

It's not up there with the great noirs, but it's a fine workingman's noir with a lot of good stuff going on, especially Lizabeth Scott as the lost-her-mind-over-a-bag-of-money femme fatale who smashes up everybody in her orbit, including herself.

Ms. "I want the bag 'o money" femme fatale.


----------



## Fading Fast

*Lilies of the Field* from 1963 with Sidney Poitier, Lila Skala and Stanley Adams

Two things make this gem of a movie work and work very well: subtle and charming interpersonal relationships and a honest, passionate, but not hellfire, belief in and advocacy of Christianity.

Sidney Poitier, a young black man driving cross country stops at a desert enclave of six poor East German escapee nuns (back when we were allowed to acknowledge that people risked their lives to get out of the hell of East Germany and the USSR) and, despite a language barrier owing to the head nun's (Skala) very broken English, he kinda agrees to do a days work in exchange for pay and food.

Right off, Poitier and the head nun, the "Mother," are movie-gold chemistry - they irritate each other over small things, in part, owing to the language barrier, but are also oddly intrigued by and, deep down, respectful of each other. Over time, the surface battles continue as the respect grows. Most cop-buddy movies work on the same concept, but the relationship dynamic here is one of the best ever.

Poitier's character's name is Homer Smith, but the Mother, being German, mangles it to Schmidtt and obdurately refuses to change despite Poitier's repeated efforts to correct her. The payoff comes when Poitier, exhausted from trying, in one case, refers to himself as Schmidtt just to move things along.

And while that's harmless fun, these two engage in some serious battles over his pay as she kinda cheats him - promised food yes, money no - in her effort to rope him into helping build a small chapel for the all but penniless nuns and the surrounding Catholoic community, which, currently, have to pray outside at a miles-away parking lot.

While they never really come to concrete terms, Poitier stays and works and even leaves once, in exasperation, only to come back later. Director Ralph Nelson clearly knows the magic in this tale isn't the plot, but the cross-culture interactions and the religious theme - tying in with the '60s social movement's idealized goals - of harmony and respect for all. It was a time when '60s idealism and Hollywood could still make room for - even embrace - Judeo-Christain values and beliefs.

Just seeing young, strong, black and handsome Poitier in wheat jeans and a wheat jean jacket drive six white nuns, clad head to toe in black, in his falling-apart Plymouth station wagon, to the prayer meeting's parking lot each Sunday is visual humor at its best. The poor locals - seemingly, mainly Mexicans - accept this disparate group with outward respect, but also with a few "what the heck is going on here" side-looks.

And beyond Poitier and the nuns, the movie is chocablock with awkwardly enjoyable relationships as, for example, Poitier pleasantly spars with the Mexican owner of the local cafe (Adams), while the nuns bump elbows with pretty much everyone they encounter, but no one seems to mind that much.

However, it's not all pleasant banter, as Poitier goes toe to toe with a racist (but sadly not out of line for the times) white construction company owner who believably changes a bit for the better after interacting with Poitier. While the movie would be a treat if all there was to it were these relationships, this message movie also shines as it proudly advocates for Christianty as a faith to bridge all these cultural gaps.

Stripped to its core, the story is one of East German Catholic nuns sorta hiring (really playing on his generous nature) a kind black Southern Baptist man to build a chapel for them, the local community of Mexican Catholics and, as the Mother says, for God.

And, yes, it is a belief in God, in Jesus and the unifying and uplifting passages in the Bible that hold the story and the chapel-building effort together. In one outstanding scene, Poitier and the Mother "discuss" the Bible with him desperately thumbing through his tiny pocket edition to find supporting passages for his views while she confidently locates and reads self-supporting selections from her big-as-a-Gutenberg Bible. It is pure movie joy. (See pic below.)

As the chapel takes shape, Poitier - despite his early resistance, now sees the effort as his personal project - initially rejects the help of the locals, but then embraces it. And in a 1963 version of "it takes a village," not only do the locals bring materials and their labor, but the racist construction company owner, eventually, donates materials (trying to pass off quality material as inferior, as he doesn't want to admit how generous he's being). Heck, even the proudly self-described non-believer cafe owner shows up to work and support the chapel building.

Sure, it's too easy, but '60s idealism was naively optimistic then, as, not having been tried, it didn't yet have the baggage of mixed results and failures that followed so many of the programs initiated by the end of the '60s. And it's a movie, so you either go with it or not. When Poitier is affixing the large cross on the roof of the chapel at the end of construction, whatever your beliefs, you, like this agnostic, will be moved by what the power of faith and effort of community can accomplish.

In many ways, this is a simple movie, shot in simple black and white, with a simple plot, small cast and minimal budget. But director Ralph Nelson knew he had two powerful tools to work with - relationships and faith - and, in *Lilies of the Field*, he uses both of them as effectively as any director has.

Finally, for what it's worth, there's this: I haven't enjoyed a movie more in years.


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 45315
> 
> *Lilies of the Field* from 1963 with Sidney Poitier, Lila Skala and Stanley Adams
> 
> Two things make this gem of a movie work and work very well: subtle and charming interpersonal relationships and a honest, passionate, but not hellfire, belief in and advocacy of Christianity.
> 
> Sidney Poitier, a young black man driving cross country stops at a desert enclave of six poor East German escapee nuns (back when we were allowed to acknowledge that people risked their lives to get out of the hell of East Germany and the USSR) and, despite a language barrier owing to the head nun's (Skala) very broken English, he kinda agrees to do a days work in exchange for pay and food.
> 
> Right off, Poitier and the head nun, the "Mother," are movie-gold chemistry - they irritate each other over small things, in part, owing to the language barrier, but are also oddly intrigued by and, deep down, respectful of each other. Over time, the surface battles continue as the respect grows. Most cop-buddy movies work on the same concept, but the relationship dynamic here is one of the best ever.
> 
> Poitier's character's name is Homer Smith, but the Mother, being German, mangles it to Schmidtt and obdurately refuses to change despite Poitier's repeated efforts to correct her. The payoff comes when Poitier, exhausted from trying, in one case, refers to himself as Schmidtt just to move things along.
> 
> And while that's harmless fun, these two engage in some serious battles over his pay as she kinda cheats him - promised food yes, money no - in her effort to rope him into helping build a small chapel for the all but penniless nuns and the surrounding Catholoic community, which, currently, have to pray outside at a miles-away parking lot.
> 
> While they never really come to concrete terms, Poitier stays and works and even leaves once, in exasperation, only to come back later. Director Ralph Nelson clearly knows the magic in this tale isn't the plot, but the cross-culture interactions and the religious theme - tying in with the '60s social movement's idealized goals - of harmony and respect for all. It was a time when '60s idealism and Hollywood could still make room for - even embrace - Judeo-Christain values and beliefs.
> 
> Just seeing young, strong, black and handsome Poitier in wheat jeans and a wheat jean jacket drive six white nuns, clad head to toe in black, in his falling-apart Plymouth station wagon, to the prayer meeting's parking lot each Sunday is visual humor at its best. The poor locals - seemingly, mainly Mexicans - accept this disparate group with outward respect, but also with a few "what the heck is going on here" side-looks.
> 
> And beyond Poitier and the nuns, the movie is chocablock with awkwardly enjoyable relationships as, for example, Poitier pleasantly spars with the Mexican owner of the local cafe (Adams), while the nuns bump elbows with pretty much everyone they encounter, but no one seems to mind that much.
> 
> However, it's not all pleasant banter, as Poitier goes toe to toe with a racist (but sadly not out of line for the times) white construction company owner who believably changes a bit for the better after interacting with Poitier. While the movie would be a treat if all there was to it were these relationships, this message movie also shines as it proudly advocates for Christianty as a faith to bridge all these cultural gaps.
> 
> Stripped to its core, the story is one of East German Catholic nuns sorta hiring (really playing on his generous nature) a kind black Southern Baptist man to build a chapel for them, the local community of Mexican Catholics and, as the Mother says, for God.
> 
> And, yes, it is a belief in God, in Jesus and the unifying and uplifting passages in the Bible that hold the story and the chapel-building effort together. In one outstanding scene, Poitier and the Mother "discuss" the Bible with him desperately thumbing through his pocket edition to find supporting passages for his views while she confidently locates and reads self-supporting selections from her big-as-a-Gutenberg Bible. It is pure movie joy. (See pic below.)
> 
> As the chapel takes shape, Poitier - despite his early resistance, now sees the effort as his personal project - initially rejects the help of the locals, but then embraces it. And in a 1963 version of "it takes a village," not only do the locals bring materials and their labor, but the racist construction company owner, eventually, donates materials (trying to pass off quality material as inferior, as he doesn't want to admit how generous he's being). Heck, even the proudly self-described non-believer cafe owner shows up to work and support the chapel building.
> 
> Sure, it's too easy, but '60s idealism was naively optimistic then, as, not having been tried, it didn't yet have the baggage of mixed results and failures that followed so many of the programs initiated by the end of the '60s. And it's a movie, so you either go with it or not. When Poitier is affixing the large cross on the roof of the chapel at the end of construction, whatever your beliefs, you, like this agnostic, will be moved by what the power of faith and effort of community can accomplish.
> 
> In many ways, this is a simple movie, shot in simple black and white, with a simple plot, small cast and minimal budget. But director Ralph Nelson knew he had two powerful tools to work with - relationships and faith - and, in *Lilies of the Field*, he uses both of them as effectively as any director has.
> 
> Finally, for what it's worth, there's this: I haven't enjoyed a movie more in years.
> 
> View attachment 45316


Watching the movie many years ago was great, but reading your review was even better. Well done, Sir!


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## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> Watching the movie many years ago was great, but reading your review was even better. Well done, Sir!


Thank you so much, that's very nice of you to say. I was really impressed with the movie and, besides that, it is incredibly entertaining. It's based on a book, which is on its way to me now.


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## Fading Fast

*Dust Be My Destiny* from 1939 with John Garfield, Priscilla Lane and Alan Hale

This is best understood to be Warner Brothers social commentary delivered as a movie. Garfield plays a young man riding the rails in the Great Depression who is falsely imprisoned, then falls in love with the work farm's overseer's daughter (Lane). But after seriously injuring the overseer in a fight, Garfield and Lane escape and go on the lam believing Garfield would never get a fair shake. From there, it's the hard life of being penniless and on the road, until a few breaks come their way, but eventual exposure results in arrest for Garfield and a trial that serves as the final editorial comment.

The message the movie screams out at you is that these young men, who many see as vagrants and petty criminals, are really decent people who, if given a chance, would work hard and live honest, upstanding lives. Hollywood has been telling this tale ever since, including right up to today (see the mercifully just-cancelled TV show *God Friended Me* as one of many examples).

It's an emotionally appealing message of kindness, redemption, charity, hope and justice - that's why it's told again and again. And it's true, just like its opposite is true. Yes, some people are poor and struggling (and even turn to crime) because they have suffered injustice, neglect and bad luck. But some people are crooks and cheats who have failed owing to their own actions. Hollywood occasionally tells the latter tale, but it saves its passion for the former.

If you like the happy tale, *Dust Be My Destiny* is a good version owing to Garfield's angry martyrdom and Lane's angelic offset.

N.B. Alan Hale pops up toward the end in one of his better roles as an editor who believes in Garfield.









*The Card* from 1952 with Alec Guinness, Glynis Johns and Petula Clark

A quirky, fun British movie taking a lighthearted look at a young roguish working-class man (Guinness), in turn-of-the-century England, trying to rise up in the world as an entrepreneur/financier who goes from beaten-down clerk, to small-business owner, to, finally, successful owner of a substantial financing club for the working class.

Along the way, he meets equally roguish, but also, gold-digging, social-climbing and cute Glynis Johns who challenges nice and good Petula Clark for Guinness' affections. Throw in a few fun schemes, a countess who takes a liking to Guinness and an obdurate donkey and there are worse ways to spend eighty five minutes.

Plus this, along the way, Guinness comes up with the idea to turn a small seashore shipwreck (that had been left to rot) into a tourist attraction (after his capital improvements, he offers day trips with harrowing sea tales, etc.) that becomes very successful and employs several people. One day, he has this perfect exchange with a jealous employee bringing Guinness, sitting on the beach, the day's receipts:

Employee (standing over and sneering at Guinness reclining in a beach chair): "That seems a lot of money for doing nothing."​​Guinness (looking up smiling): "But I did do something: I thought of it."​
A lesson in business, entrepreneurism and capitalism that so many today still don't understand.


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 45436
> 
> *Dust Be My Destiny* from 1939 with John Garfield, Priscilla Lane and Alan Hale
> 
> This is best understood to be Warner Brothers social commentary delivered as a movie. Garfield plays a young man riding the rails in the Great Depression who is falsely imprisoned, then falls in love with the work farm's overseer's daughter (Lane). But after seriously injuring the overseer in a fight, Garfield and Lane escape and go on the lam believing Garfield would never get a fair shake. From there, it's the hard life of being penniless and on the road, until a few breaks come their way, but eventual exposure results in arrest for Garfield and a trial that serves as the final editorial comment.
> 
> The message the movie screams out at you is that these young men, who many see as vagrants and petty criminals, are really decent people who, if given a chance, would work hard and live honest, upstanding lives. Hollywood has been telling this tale ever since, including right up to today (see the mercifully just-cancelled TV show *God Friended Me* as one of many examples).
> 
> It's an emotionally appealing message of kindness, redemption, charity, hope and justice - that's why it's told again and again. And it's true, just like its opposite is true. Yes, some people are poor and struggling (and even turn to crime) because they have suffered injustice, neglect and bad luck. But some people are crooks and cheats who have failed owing to their own actions. Hollywood occasionally tells the latter tale, but it saves its passion for the former.
> 
> If you like the happy tale, *Dust Be My Destiny* is a good version owing to Garfield's angry martyrdom and Lane's angelic offset.
> 
> N.B. Alan Hale pops up toward the end in one of his better roles as an editor who believes in Garfield.


I can't believe Alan Hale was ever that thin! We're talking the Skipper of the SS Minnow on that infamous "three hour cruise?" :icon_scratch:


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## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> I can't believe Alan Hale was ever that thin! We're talking the Skipper of the SS Minnow on that infamous "three hour cruise?" :icon_scratch:


That my fault, as the way I wrote it, it appears to say that's Alan Hale in the pic, but it isn't - sorry.

You are spot on as here's how our never-small Mr. Hale looked in the movie (he's at the far right looking, as usual, bigger than everyone else):


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## Fading Fast

⇧ One more Alan Hale fact.

He had a son who looked just like him. The skipper of the SS Minnow is actually Alan Hale Jr. Effectively, with the father and the son, Hollywood had about seventy years of the Hales to use in the same character actor roles.

Alan Hale Sr and Jr second.


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## eagle2250

Thanks for the clarification(s) and for refreshing my memory. I guess I never picked up on the fact that the actor in Gilligan's Island was a junior.


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## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> Thanks for the clarification(s) and for refreshing my memory. I guess I never picked up on the fact that the actor in Gilligan's Island was a junior.


It's easy to do as they look and act so much alike.


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## Fading Fast

*Broadway Musketeers* from 1938 with Margaret Lindsay, Ann Sheridan and Marie Wilson.

This remake of the excellent 1932 movie *Three on a Match* is a study in the destructive force that was the Motion Picture Production Code.

In the pre-code '32 version, three young women, raised in the same orphanage, reunite in early adulthood. One is a hard-working stenographer, one a lounge singer and one married a kind, wealthy man with whom she has a four-year-old daughter and a seemingly perfect life. After that setup, the married woman, owing to boredom with the safe life that she has, proceeds to destroy it by leaving her husband for a low-level mobster, gambler and drug user.

Her downward spiral in the original movie is brutal as she becomes a drug addict, living in a dumpy tenement and scrounging around for money for food and rent while her boyfriend's gambling debts result in the mob coming after them. Her girlfriends and husband try to help, but she is a woman on a mission of personal destruction, and she's successful. In the end, she is so strung out on drugs that she ignores her personal hygiene - it's as raw and real as any pre-code.

And while it's a strong story, I was never sure of the point of the three women other than to show that some people appreciate even the small things they get/earn in life while others can "get it all" and still be dissatisfied. But in the remake, only six years later, the Motion Picture Production Code sucks most of the heart right out of the story.

First, in the newer version, the downward spiral is no longer fueled by drugs (a code no-no), but alcohol and, even here, the addiction seems mild. The hard drug use of the '32 version made sense as a life-destroying force; drinking too much now and then, as happens in the '38 version, feels too tame (she's not presented as an inveterate alcoholic) and undermines the entire story.

Additionally, the '38 version gets all tied up with divorces and marriages as, God forbid, somebody had sex out of wedlock. But in '32 version, the woman just starts living with her new boyfriend (they do get married at some point), which emphasizes her promiscuity and willful behavior.

Finally, in the '32 version, Ann Dvorak is perfectly cast as the throw-it-all-away drug user as she has a pallor and physical tension to her that fits the role. And her looks are more raw sexuality - more feral - than Hollywood pretty. She's believable as a drug addict with a rabid sexuality.

Conversely, in the '38 version, pure-as-the-driven-snow looking and picture-perfect pretty Margaret Lindsay plays the out-of-control woman and it doesn't work. She's a good actress and tries hard, but even with dark-eye makeup and unkempt hair, when things for her go bad, she looks more like Bambi in the hunter's cross hairs than a self-destructive alcoholic and wanton.

I assume they remade the movie to make money, and maybe the effort did so, but its value to us today is as a study of the same movie made before and after the Production Code was enforced. The pre-code one is a powerful, gritty and ugly tale of senseless personal destruction; the one made under the code is neutered of its essence, resulting in a flat story lacking verisimilitude. And beyond all that, the title of the remake, *Broadway Musketeers*, is stupid and makes no sense at all.

1932's earthy Dvorak left and 1938's ethereal Lindsay right.


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## Fading Fast

*Black Legion* from 1937 with Humphrey Bogart, Dick Foran and Erin O'Brien-Moore

Propaganda works best when it is subtle, but it can still be impactful when it throws rocks through the windows (in this case, literally). *Black Legion* is rock-throwing propaganda; nothing is subtle here, but you definitely won't miss its point.

Bogart plays an upstanding citizen - a family man who loves his wife (O'Brien-Moore) and son and works hard at his factory job - a "real" American. But when a promotion he wanted goes to a "Polish" American - a hard working young man who goes to night school to better himself (again, nothing is subtle here) - he becomes embittered.

In an angry response, he joins a secret organization, the Black Legion - the Klan in all but name - that fights for "real" Americans against, in this case, "foreigners who take our jobs" (and other things like foreign-owned businesses that under price "American" businesses).

Not holding back one bit, the Legion goes out at night and severely beats up "foreigners," burns down their property, runs them out of town and even, as Bogart does one evening, kills them.

While he's doing all this, his family is falling apart owing to his absence and anger and, eventually, loss of his job. His fall from decent family man to criminal on trial for murder is swift and jarring. And his trial is just the setup to reinforce the movie's message, in case, somehow, you didn't get it.

After an initial and clumsy attempt at a defense, Bogart admits all and names names - the other members of the Black Legion who participated in the killing. This allows the trial judge to deliver his summation sermon about the American Constitution and its Bill of Rights protecting the rights and freedoms of Every. Single. Person.

It's a short, but powerful and specific speech emphasizing the protections guaranteed for religious freedom and security of person and property against attack. The judge denounces racial and religious hatreds and any vigilantism in support of these hatreds. In an particularly impactful passage, he avers that "the American people made their choice long ago" to defend human rights - life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The only issue with the speech is that the judge asserts that America's "democratic form of government" protects these rights when it is, specifically, our Republic form of government which really protects the rights of minorities (no smaller minority on earth than each individual) from mob rule - which is what pure democracy can spiral down to. It's a distinction that makes a very, very big difference and one that we still need to understand today.

But away from that issue, the message of this very "message-y" movie is a good one, even if it's, as done here, delivered in as heavy handed a way as possible.


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## Orsini

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 45603
> 
> *Black Legion* from 1937 with Humphrey Bogart, Dick Foran and Erin O'Brien-Moore...


The Black Legion was for real: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Legion_(political_movement)


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## Fading Fast

Orsini said:


> The Black Legion was for real: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Legion_(political_movement)


Thank you. I did not know it was real. I knew the Klan and several similar groups existed back in the '30s, but I just assumed Warner Bros made up the Black Legion's name.


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## Orsini

Fading Fast said:


> Thank you. I did not know it was real. I knew the Klan and several similar groups existed back in the '30s, but I just assumed Warner Bros made up the Black Legion's name.


You are quite welcome. Some years ago I happened to be watching that very movie and I googled "Black Legion" and was surprised to see what I found.


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## Fading Fast

*I Am a Thief* from 1934 with Mary Astor (left) and Ricardo Cortez (far right).

Could they, in 1934, make an Agatha-Christie-like movie in sixty four minutes that's better than almost every Agatha-Christie movie ever made? Yup.

While I want to like movies based on Christie's books, they never quite work for me. I'm not sure why as the style, settings and stories sound up my alley, but I usually find myself bored or disenchanted in the middle of them.

However, in '34, Warner Brothers worked a basic Christie-ish formula into a fast, enjoyable who-done-it. And while I think I got the plot, that happened only at the end, as the story is confusing as heck and happens at warp speed.

A bunch of rich people - a wealthy loud (of course) American, a mysterious and beautiful woman (Astor), a maybe Jewel thief or just playboy (Cortez) and a nervous jewelry insurance agent - are all staying at the same European hotel where a famous diamond necklace is maybe stolen, with, conveniently, everyone possibly involved hopping aboard the Orient Express the next day.

Once on board, the list of suspects and inspectors expands to include some, maybe (sorry, it's all kept intentionally vague until the end), detectives, additional thieves and a few more rich women. Here, it turns into a game of three-card monte with the diamond necklace or a fake being stolen (again), hidden, sold, insured, lost, substituted, tossed from the train and returned to the train as each operative maneuvers to get the diamonds or expose the thief.

The plot doesn't matter as the joy is watching each character play his or her game with young and pretty Mary Astor and suave Richard Cortez seemingly playing the game better than most while flirting with each other. Throw into the mix a smart detective, a murder, a suicide and a fast-as-heck "all suspects are gathered in the dining car" denouement and the story comes to a rapid conclusion just before all the not-believable stuff overwhelms.

There have been a lot - a whole lot - of versions of this movie made since (sometimes a murdered wealthy person replaces the diamonds as the plot motivator), but as an early entry in the genre, it's impressive. Not only are many of the classic elements of the story already here, it adduces that, sometimes, a story is better told with less fuss and more speed.

Finally, for us today, since most of the movie takes place aboard the Orient Express, the time travel to luxurious passenger rail travel of lore - elegant sleeping compartments, mahogany-lined corridors, linen and silver dining-car service and white-gloved porters - is enjoyable escapism.

N.B. In the final "gathering all suspects" scene, look for the cool behind-the-back catch of a tossed gun Cortez makes. It would be all but impossible to do in the real world, but fun to see in a movie.


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## Fading Fast

*Gun Crazy* from 1950 with Peggy Cummins and John Dall

"Some guys are born smart about women and some guys are born dumb. You were born dumb." - Berry Kroeger warning John Dall in *Gun Crazy*

And with that early quote, the theme of Gun Crazy is defined better than any "sophisticated" analysis could ever provide.

John Dall plays a somewhat lost but decent young man who, from an early age, loved guns, but after killing a baby chick with a BB gun as a child, was repelled by killing of any kind. Peggy Cummins, on the other hand, whom Dall meets when she is a twenty-year-old sharp-shooter performer in a carnival, loves guns and, as we'll learn, loves killing.

When 6'1" tall Dall meets 5'1" Cummins, pretty and all woman, we know immediately that height won't determine who has the upper hand in this relationship. And while everything about her physically reads sex, her defining feature is her mind because, well, she's psychotic - she's turned on by killing.

She's a femme fatale in every way. She wants more out of life - money, things, adventure - and she wants them now and without long-term struggle or effort. She not only has all but no empathy for others, she takes pleasure in killing them.

She knows her sexuality is her ticket and she uses it relentlessly on Dall to push him to do things he doesn't want to do. After they meet, they soon leave the carnival and embark on a crime spree - he's resistant, but she gets her way - that foreshadows a Tarrantino-directed effort of robbing, shooting, murder and mayhem.

This is a B-movie (a second-tier effort from the studio to be shown with a prestige A-picture) rising above its station. The leads' relationship is complex and real - your heart breaks as you know Dall could have lived a good, normal life had he met the right woman, but Cummins just keeps driving him further into a (short) life of crime. Despite that, you do get it; these two have a connection that keeps them together.

And proving its B-movie bona fides, the action is nonstop and violent, but the movie becomes more than its appellation as almost every scene by director Joseph H. Lewis is thoughtfully shot. A bank robbery scene - filmed entirely from the back of the getaway car - is an example of less being more. While the robbery takes place off camera, we watch Cummings, the getaway driver, desperately trying to calmly deal with a policeman who happens by while Dall is inside robbing the bank.

All this is good stuff, but the crux of the movie is Cummins who kills from some inner need. And like many a femme fatale, she seems to enjoy the getting more than the got, as she's more alive stealing, running, shooting and killing than she is wrapped in a fur trying to enjoy a "normal" night out.

Meanwhile Dall is simply trapped; he's in love with a crazy woman. The rest of the movie is just more killing, chasing, robing, running and, finally, a desperate trip back to Dall's hometown before the necessary ending.

And in the end, we know we were given the key to this outstanding movie at the beginning - Dall, sadly and fatally, wasn't smart about women, this one ⇩ right here.


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## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 45932
> 
> *Gun Crazy* from 1950 with Peggy Cummins and John Dall
> 
> "Some guys are born smart about women and some guys are born dumb. You were born dumb." - Berry Kroeger warning John Dall in *Gun Crazy*
> 
> And with that early quote, the theme of Gun Crazy is defined better than any "sophisticated" analysis could ever provide.
> 
> John Dall plays a somewhat lost but decent young man who, from an early age, loved guns, but after killing a baby chick with a BB gun as a child, was repelled by killing of any kind. Peggy Cummins, on the other hand, whom Dall meets when she is a twenty-year-old sharp-shooter performer in a carnival, loves guns and, as we'll learn, loves killing.
> 
> When 6'1" tall Dall meets 5'1" Cummins, pretty and all woman, we know immediately that height won't determine who has the upper hand in this relationship. And while everything about her physically reads sex, her defining feature is her mind because, well, she's psychotic - she's turned on by killing.
> 
> She's a femme fatale in every way. She wants more out of life - money, things, adventure - and she wants them now and without long-term struggle or effort. She not only has all but no empathy for others, she takes pleasure in killing them.
> 
> She knows her sexuality is her ticket and she uses it relentlessly on Dall to push him to do things he doesn't want to do. After they meet, they soon leave the carnival and embark on a crime spree - he's resistant, but she gets her way - that foreshadows a Tarrantino-directed effort of robbing, shooting, murder and mayhem.
> 
> This is a B-movie (a second-tier effort from the studio to be shown with a prestige A-picture) rising above its station. The leads' relationship is complex and real - your heart breaks as you know Dall could have lived a good, normal life had he met the right woman, but Cummins just keeps driving him further into a (short) life of crime. Despite that, you do get it; these two have a connection that keeps them together.
> 
> And proving its B-movie bona fides, the action is nonstop and violent, but the movie becomes more than its appellation as almost every scene by director Joseph H. Lewis is thoughtfully shot. A bank robbery scene - filmed entirely from the back of the getaway car - is an example of less being more. While the robbery takes place off camera, we watch Cummings, the getaway driver, desperately trying to calmly deal with a policeman who happens by while Dall is inside robbing the bank.
> 
> All this is good stuff, but the crux of the movie is Cummins who kills from some inner need. And like many a femme fatale, she seems to enjoy the getting more than the got, as she's more alive stealing, running, shooting and killing than she is wrapped in a fur trying to enjoy a "normal" night out.
> 
> Meanwhile Dall is simply trapped; he's in love with a crazy woman. The rest of the movie is just more killing, chasing, robing, running and, finally, a desperate trip back to Dall's hometown before the necessary ending.
> 
> And in the end, we know we were given the key to this outstanding movie at the beginning - Dall, sadly and fatally, wasn't smart about women, this one ⇩ right here.
> 
> View attachment 45933


Going to have that one to my "To be watched list!" Thanks for the great revue.


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## Fading Fast

I recently re-watched the outstanding movie *Ford v Ferrari *(original comments here: #279  ).

I noted the first time that the story is basically an Ayn Rand novel not written by Ayn Rand. Watching it again only reinforced that view.

So, in that spirit, here's how the characters in *Ford v Ferrari *align to Rand's famous novel and movie *The Fountainhead*.

Race-car driver Ken Miles is architect Howard Roark, the brilliant individualist who has his own vision for how his job should be done and won't "play the game" of getting along and compromising when he feels that his and his work's integrity are at stake. He is everything the collective, the commune, the state, the bureaucracy hates as he won't bow to its edicts while his existence rebukes its ideology of "collective" work, achievement and responsibility.

Race-car builder Carroll Shelby is editor Gail Wynand, the man who understands the value of the Ken Miles' and Howard Roarks of the world, but doesn't have the strength of character (Wynand) or opportunity (Shelby) to be one himself. Instead, he becomes the individualist's most passionate supporter fighting the collective on behalf of the individual.

Ford executive Leo Beebe is evil socialist Ellsworth Toohey, the man who hates - absolutely loathes - and tries to destroy the individualist. Toohey/Beebe's skill is "playing the game" of manipulating others - sucking up to those above / browbeating those below. He has an abject fear of those with true creative talent, genius and individual spirit, in part, because he can't really manipulate them and, in part, because their skills belittle by comparison his smarmy "people and process" skills.

Lee Iacocca is pandering architect Peter Keating, the man who works for a group-think collective, Ford in Iacocca's case. He tries to be an individualist, but compromises too often. Finally, crushed by the collective's soulless hatred of true independent thought and ability, he hires an outsider, an individualist, to do the work his Borg can't (Keating hires Roark to build a housing project in Keating's name and Iacocca hires Carroll Shelby and Ken Miles to win Le Mans for Ford).

Henry Ford II could have been Roger Enright, the man who runs a company, but knows he needs an individualist like Roark or Miles to accomplish something brilliant. However, "The Deuce" couldn't really, truly give up control, so he keeps sicking his corporate stooges on Miles. Conversely, Enright "gets it," he knows that if you hire a genius, you then have to, like with any great thoroughbred, just let him run.

Finally, Mollie Miles is Dominique Francon, the woman who not only sees and understands the individualist (and marries one), she has the talent herself to be one. Fortunately, Mollie appears to have Dominique's talents without her, um, odd sexual behaviors.


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## Fading Fast

*I Want You* from 1951 with Dana Andrews, Farley Granger, Mildred Dunnock and Robert Keith

Under the strict Motion Picture Production Code, Hollywood writers and directors used a few tricks to, occasionally, make the movies they wanted to make. One way is they would tell one story and, then, right at the end reverse the outcome to satisfy the code, while hoping the audience would see the "unreversed" story as the real one (*The Flame Within* is one of many examples). Another legerdemain was to embed the real movie inside an "acceptable" larger movie and hope the censors, but not the public, would miss it (see *Young Man with a Horn* as, possibly, the best example).

In *I Want You,* director Mark Robson and the writers employ the _volte-face_ technique to take a cynical look at America's patriotism and its young men's willingness to fight for their country by flipping the end of the movie to a code-acceptable pro-American-military way. Robson uses the story of how one family deals with the pending draft of a son from the aborning Korean war to tell his meta tale.

Upon that son receiving a draft notice, his mother (Dunnock) is ripping mad that she might lose another son (she lost one to WWII) and doesn't give a hoot about "obligations," "duty," etc., as she simply doesn't want to lose another son. The son (Granger) also has no interest in risking dying for some "far away place" and is outright dismissive of all the patriotic speeches he's given by the adults. At the draft board, he tears into the older board members for sending young men off to die while they sit safely at home. At this point, this is no rah-rah let's-go-fight movie.

Granger's father (Keith), a WWI veteran, who proudly displays all his triumphant war paraphernalia in his living room, gives his son mild and canned speeches about being a good soldier that his son completely dismisses. Sitting in the middle of this is the son's older brother (Andrews), a WWII veteran, who, as the owner of a local engineering firm, has the power to exempt employees by designating them "essential" workers.

While Andrews' mother is pushing him to do just that for Granger, another employee's father (a widower with only one son) importunes Andrews to do the same for his son. Let's just call it what it is, parents are looking for any angle or loophole to get their sons out of having to serve. Added into the mix, a former military buddy wants Andrews to re-enlist, as the friend just did, because, he says, the Army needs men with their combined military experience and engineering skills. Andrews, initially, is all but hostile to the idea.

All this subversion percolates in the first two-thirds of the movie culminating in a gut-wrenching scene where wife Dunnock smashes husband Kieth's WWI military paraphernalia as she screams that she knew it was all bought in a New York City pawn shop because her husband never saw battle. She's right; he's ashamed that he lied all those years, but is relieved that the secret is finally out. And decades of movie-making norms were tossed overboard as one military-hero narrative took a brutal body blow.

That is also the money scene in the movie: a mother loudly and defiantly says "no mas" to the macho war ethos of her husband. If they gave Oscars out for just one scene, Dunnock would have had 1951's award all sewn up.

To be fair, though, both sides of the arguments for and against serving are presented throughout; however, as noted, the "against" side has the upper hand for most of the movie. But this being 1951 and not 1971, everybody starts to play their assigned roles as the movie wraps up. And, yes, there's a bunch of soap opera stuff about young, middle-aged and older love all being stressed by the war that plays out alongside the I-don't-want-to-fight story that dominates.

As always, reality and history are more complex than the shorthands we carry around in our heads. To wit, even back in the "conservative 1950s," with the Motion Picture Production Code in place and cultural norms tilted toward public displays of patriotism, movies still found ways to get out counter-cultural messages and challenges to the prevailing moods and conventions, as was done in *I Want You*.


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## Fading Fast

*Born to be Bad* from 1950 with Joan Fontaine, Robert Ryan, Zachary Scott, Joan Leslie and Mel Ferrer

This melodrama on steroids tries, a bit, to be noir, but it isn't - it's simply and deliciously high-end soap opera.

Young (but still too old for the role, but so are all the men) Joan Fontaine, a distant niece of someone, enters a tight circle of several upper-middle-class San Francisco society people and proceeds to wreck all their lives with her pulchritude, smile and lies (and lies and more lies).

Wealthy scion Scott is about to marry pretty, poor and sincere Leslie until Fontaine plants doubts about Leslie's motives in Scott's head, all the while outwardly only complimenting Leslie to Scott. And this is Fontaine's stock-in-trade as she never says anything outwardly mean, but through lies and innuendos, always delivered with an unctuous smile, manipulates everyone with awful consequences.

Fontaine, who sets her sights on Scott's money, is sincerely attracted to not-rich novelist Ryan who is the only one who sees through all of her shenanigans, but oddly, he falls in love with her anyway. It's wonderful fun to watch him call her "faker" and "liar" throughout as she denies all, but knows he's got her number.

And like any inveterately lying, selfish woman, Fontaine isn't happy even when she gets what she wants - marriage to wealthy Scott, who loves her and treats her like a princess. No, she wants all that plus, let's just acknowledge it, sex with Ryan. With that difficult goal, Fontaine keeps piling up the lies and deceptions to the point that even she's getting tired. But credit to her, no one tries harder to keep all those balls in the air.

The rest of the movie is watching Fontaine's world fall down around her, which is, oddly, less satisfying than you'd expect. And keep an eye out for Mel Ferrer as a painter who delivers a wonderful performance as a Fontaine foil. He announces every scheme he has - mainly, to get people to buy his paintings - upfront and out loud. While Fontaine sweats over the secrecy of every one of her machinations, Ferrer enjoys his dissembling because he's so honest about it.

That's it - it's lies, deceit, broken engagements, affairs and failed marriages all provoked by one petite, pretty and half-nuts woman. It's a fine hour and a half of mindless entertainment backed up by solid acting from an impressive cast.

--------------He's ⇩ got------------------------------------her ⇩ number.


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## Fading Fast

*Don't Make Waves* from 1967 with Tony Curtis, Claudia Cardinale, Robert Webber and Sharon Tate

This is one of many '60s "beach" movies that use silly plots as a reason to show pretty, nubile young women in bikinis. Okay, there's nothing wrong with the premise - maybe even a genius in its simplicity - but to work, the plot still has to engage you somewhat and not become beyond ridiculous.

As an aside, the original "beach" movie, *Where the Boys Are, *is actually not a classic beach movie at all as the plot, underneath the string bikinis, is serious and a bit dark. While the sexual concerns in *Where the Boys Are* aren't our concerns today, by the end, the movie takes a hard look at the downside of all the beach romping.

*Don't Make Waves* is decidedly in the silly, not serious, "beach" movie category, but manages to be an okay enough story for the first three quarters. It begins with a young man, Curtis, driving out West to make a new start in life. There he meets a kept woman (Cardinale) of the owner (Webber) of a successful swimming pool construction company. After forming a friendship with her, Curtis, oddly, ends up working for Webber. At the same time, Curtis falls hard for a bikini-clad beach girl, Sharon Tate, who's living with a beach muscle man (in the pic above, that's Tate jumping into her muscle man's arms).

Hey, it's a beach movie, but still, for 1967, the movie is open about people having affairs and sex out of wedlock, which the early beach movies were almost never doing. I chose to watch this one because of Sharon Tate, and only because I had recently seen *Once Upon a Time in Hollywood*, which touches on Tate's life and inspired me to want to see one of her movies.

The movie is what it is (and, as implied, falls into goofiness in the last quarter), but Tate doesn't disappoint as a beautiful young woman with enough talent in a not-challenging role to show promise. Even after all these years, knowing Tate's sad ending at such a young age impacts your ability to just get lost in the movie. Unless you are really, really, really in the mood for a silly "beach" movie or, like me, you're curious about Sharon Tate, passing on this movie is probably the right choice.


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## Fading Fast

*Man Wanted* from 1932 with Kay Francis, David Manners and Una Merkel

It's a mishmash of Pre-Code themes starting with a smart, hard-driving woman publisher (Francis) running a major magazine. And while it's noted that she's not the norm, she's also accepted for what she is with no inferences made doubting her abilities. For 1932, that is either ahead of its time or where the time was with our view today distorted by later movies ('34 and out), when the Motion Picture Production Code was enforced, which rarely allowed similar portrayals of women.

Within that '32 framework, a few more Pre-Code themes follow including Francis' marriage to a wealthy playboy who continues to pursue extracurricular marital activities, despite his sincere affinity for Francis. Pre-Codes are chockablock with wealthy people married to others they sincerely like, but cheat on anyway. Francis kinda knows and kinda looks the other way until she can't.

And the catalyst for her changing attitude toward her philandering husband is her newly hired secretary, Manners. In another Pre-Code norm, a male takes on a traditional female role and works under a woman. Additionally, Manners is handsome (out of Francis' league) with office gossip positing that his looks are the main reason Francis hires him as her secretary (like many men do when the roles are reversed).

Pause on all that for a moment: in 1932, a male secretary is hired by a hard-charging female CEO, in part, because he's good looking. Heck, combined with some other Pre-Code movies with similar setups - see 1933's *Female* where Ruth Chatterton uses her male employees as a stud farm, I kid you not - and had Twitter been around, #SheToo could have taken off.

Thrown into this mix is Manners' annoyingly loud and pushy girlfriend, Merkel, who's not smart, but has enough girl-radar to know that something is up with Manner and Francis. That's about forty-five of this sixty minute movie with the next step being everything - jobs, marriages and relationships - blowing up. After that, it's picking up the pieces and roll credits.

It's an entertaining enough movie, but the real joy is seeing a Pre-Code-movie world where women are smart bosses, men eye candy, marriages open and casual sex not proscribed. Also, the time travel to the 1930s - cars, clothes, offices and architecture - is pure fun.


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## Fading Fast

*Clash by Night* form 1952 with Barbara Stanwyck, Paul Douglas and Robert Ryan

This well-done soap opera benefits from its A-list talent, A-list director (Fritz Lane), wonderful sets (plus some on-location background shots) and a solid story.

Frustrated and deflated by a failed love life in New York City, dejected daughter Stanwyck returns to her fishing-industry-dominated hometown to, what, start over, recharge her batteries, quit all together? We don't know, but that she couldn't get out of the town quick enough years ago or hates returning now is pretty clear.

Enter salt-of-the-earth fisherman (pun intended) Douglas who offers Stanwyck a lifeboat - a sincerely good man who'll provide a good home - but not what she really wants. To her credit, Stanwyck tells Douglas, before she marries him, this might not work as, she says, I'm not the good-wife kind of woman. But they marry anyway, have a daughter and seem to be making it work until...

Enter Ryan, a tall, good looking, angry-at-the-world, separated-from-his-wife man who is Douglas's friend and the fire that's been missing from Stanwyck's domesticated life (and libido). From here, it's waiting for the inevitable to happen and then seeing how, afterwards, the pieces get picked up, or not.

There's also a couple of side plots: one is a by-the-numbers story about Douglas' alcoholic father and the other focuses on Douglas' brother's relationship with a local cannery worker girl who is - get ready for it - an incredibly young, pre-mega-stardom Marilyn Monroe.

Marilyn looks fantastic here (director Lang does his best to find reasons to keep her as unclothed as possible) and her acting is good in a role perfectly suited for her. Whenever I see these early Marilyn efforts, I always think that, with a little luck, she could have had a better career and life.

*Clash by Night* is a solid movie with a good story and talented actors, but nothing more.

Cannery Row worker Marilyn Monroe (wearing more clothes than usual in this one):


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## Fading Fast

*I Confess* from 1953 with Montgomery Clift, Anne Baxter and Karl Malden

Compared to Hitchcock's best, this one comes up a bit short; but compared to most other movies, it's outstanding.

While several of the classic Hitchcock elements are here - a man wrongly accused of murder, a beautiful icey blonde (Baxter) shattering lives left and right, a dogged detective (Maulden) and an artisically filmed final shootout scene - instead of a MacGuffin (a plot driver that is confusing or unimportant), the center of the story is a murder committed by the caretaker of a Catholic Church.

The twist is that he confesses his crime immediately, but to a priest (Clift) in a confessional meaning the priest, by vow, can't reveal what he knows to the police. This problem becomes a whole lot bigger when the priest himself is accused of the murder.

And just to amp things up more, the aforementioned blonde is married to the state's lead prosecutor, whom she married even though she was still in love with Clift, with whom she had had a love affair before he became ordained. With priest Clift under investigation by the police (the lead detective is the always outstanding Maulden), his prior affair and ongoing friendship with Baxter hardly reflect well on his character. Also, this relationship might provide a motive for Clift to have committed the murder.

With that set up, the rest of the movie is watching Clift twist internally knowing that he might be found guilty despite also knowing that he could easily prove his innocence. At the same time, Baxter tries to help Clift, but can't really as her efforts to finesse her way out of a few too many lies (about the men she's been with) thwarts the greater good. And, of course, playing on throughout is Maulden's pleasant but relentless pursuit of the murderer, who surely appears to be the priest.

Filmed in wonderful and crisp black and white - fitting the darker mood of this one versus some of Hitchcock's lighter efforts - and using the beautiful Province of Quebec for a backdrop, *I Confess* proves to be an outstanding, even if less-popular, Hitchcock effort.


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## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 46573
> 
> *I Confess* from 1953 with Montgomery Clift, Anne Baxter and Karl Malden
> 
> Compared to Hitchcock's best, this one comes up a bit short; but compared to most other movies, it's outstanding.
> 
> While several of the classic Hitchcock elements are here - a man wrongly accused of murder, a beautiful icey blonde (Baxter) shattering lives left and right, a dogged detective (Maulden) and an artisically filmed final shootout scene - instead of a MacGuffin (a plot driver that is confusing or unimportant), the center of the story is a murder committed by the caretaker of a Catholic Church.
> 
> The twist is that he confesses his crime immediately, but to a priest (Clift) in a confessional meaning the priest, by vow, can't reveal what he knows to the police. This problem becomes a whole lot bigger when the priest himself is accused of the murder.
> 
> And just to amp things up more, the aforementioned blonde is married to the state's lead prosecutor, whom she married even though she was still in love with Clift, with whom she had had a love affair before he became ordained. With priest Clift under investigation by the police (the lead detective is the always outstanding Maulden), his prior affair and ongoing friendship with Baxter hardly reflect well on his character. Also, this relationship might provide a motive for Clift to have committed the murder.
> 
> With that set up, the rest of the movie is watching Clift twist internally knowing that he might be found guilty despite also knowing that he could easily prove his innocence. At the same time, Baxter tries to help Clift, but can't really as her efforts to finesse her way out of a few too many lies (about the men she's been with) thwarts the greater good. And, of course, playing on throughout is Maulden's pleasant but relentless pursuit of the murderer, who surely appears to be the priest.
> 
> Filmed in wonderful and crisp black and white - fitting the darker mood of this one versus some of Hitchcock's lighter efforts - and using the beautiful Province of Quebec for a backdrop, *I Confess* proves to be an outstanding, even if less-popular, Hitchcock effort.


As seems to be your style, your review is so well written and your comments regarding the film, so insightful, I find myself compelled to watch another movie. I have a nagging sense that I may have once watched I confess, quite some time ago, but even so, it sounds well worth a second watching! Thanks for that inspirational review.


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## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> As seems to be your style, your review is so well written and your comments regarding the film, so insightful, I find myself compelled to watch another movie. I have a nagging sense that I may have once watched I confess, quite some time ago, but even so, it sounds well worth a second watching! Thanks for that inspirational review.


Thank you so much for the very nice comment.

If you do get a chance to watch it or any of the others, your thoughts and impressions would be great to hear.

I had seen "I Confess" a long time ago and had a vague memory of being underwhelmed, but I was not underwhelmed this time. My guess is, the first time, I wanted another "To Catch a Thief" or "North by Northwest" and was disappointed as this is a darker, slower moving movie. But now, going in with no expectations, I "got it," and think it's one of Hitch's better movies.


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## Fading Fast

*1917* from 2019 with Dean-Charles Chapman and George MacKay

In WWI, two front-line British soldiers must deliver an urgent life-saving order to a remote unit of 1600 men by crossing on foot through no-man's land and enemy territory


Homeric in its "Odyssey" like struggle, this is a "personal" view of war that takes the perspective of two soldiers engaged in a nearly impossible task (it's a bit like the recent *Dunkirk* movie, but with a little more context)


Along the way, the waste, killing and destruction of war provides the backdrop as the two men are forced to continually reassess the morality of the war and their commitment to their mission


If you've seen a lot of war movies, nothing is really new here - right down to "the challenge of balancing personal loss against some greater good" theme - but it's a solid entry in the war-movie genre










*The Marrying Kind* from 1952 with Judy Holiday, Aldo Ray and Madge Kennedy

A look at an on-the-rocks marriage that combines an odd mix of humor, anger, sadness and despair


Judy Holiday and Aldo Ray end up in divorce court after seven or so years of marriage where a sympathetic judge (Kennedy) sits down to just "talk" with them - leading to a story told through flashbacks


We see everything from the happy falling-in-love moments, through the bumpy early years and, then, to some good and, finally, tragic moments 


It feels very real to life, which makes the screwball-comedy moments seem out of place and, also, shows that reality doesn't always make for the most easy viewing


The location shots of 1952 New York City and all the other time-capsule items - cars, clothes, appliances, kitchens, architecture, etc. - are fantastic (the clips of a 1952 postal-sorting facility, where husband Ray works, are awesome)


Credit where credit is due: other than its occasion drift into silliness, this is a serious look at the failing marriage of two humanly flawed and decent people. Unfortunately, it's sad because it is so much like life


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## Fading Fast

*The Talented Mr. Ripley* from 1999 with Matt Damon, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Phillip Serymore Hoffman and Cate Blanchett

Very good story in "a stretches credibility but is just so delicious you don't care" way


Set in the 1950s, the father of a young playboy (Law) living frivolously on his allowance in Italy sends a poor, young social-climbing man (Damon) to retrieve his prodigal son


Once there, the errand boy inserts himself into the playboy's life, which includes the playboy's pretty blonde girlfriend (Paltrow). The errand boy is just excited to be "in" with the class of people he aspires to


(Spoiler alert) After initial acceptance and fun, literally, all hell breaks loose as Damon has to lie, cheat, steal, commit fraud, identity theft and a few murders to keep himself in his new world of wealth and status: the talented Mr. Ripley is a talented sociopath


As noted, it's not really believable, but oh what fun it is plus the more-beautiful-than-they-ever-probably-were period details, especially of post-war Italy, make this movie a visual treat


And finally, the cast is basically a cheat sheet of several young actors who went on to become major stars for the next two decades









*Bodyguard* from 1948 with Lawrence Tierney and Priscilla Lana 

This B-noir plays like an antecedent to all those '60s and '70s TV shows (*Mannix, Cannon, The Rockford Files*, etc.) where a former cop/detective - who's a bit of a maverick - leaves or is thrown off the police force and becomes a private eye always trying to prove he's better than the force which rejected him


Tierney is the do-it-his-way detective who gets tossed from the force (great scene when he gets fired and punches out his smug boss) and, then, in TV-like fashion, reluctantly takes on a suspicious case 


The plot itself is something, something wealthy meat-processing family, cheating son-in-law, murder, cover-up, wrong person accused, Tierney set up to be the fall guy, etc. It's a very TV-like plot; *The Rockford Files* used this one a bunch of times


Just as in its later TV incarnation, the former cop also has an "insider" at the police to help him do all the _policey _stuff he needs to succeed - in this case, adorable Priscilla Lane who is too cute and peppy for this one (think Nancy Drew in noirland)


That's it, it's a good-enough 62-minute-long effort with some great time-travel locations shots of late-'40s LA


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## Fading Fast

*Lady from Shanghai* from 1947 with Rita Hayworth, Orson Welles and Everett Sloan

What do you do after your directorial debut is a film-industry-defining classic? You reach for greater heights and end up making artistic, crazy, confusing, interesting, but not necessarily good, movies like *Lady from Shanghai*.

The TCM Noir-Alley host Eddie Muller sums this one up pretty well when he calls it a "hot mess." It tries too hard to be what? Noir, groundbreaking, moving, alluring - all of those, I don't know.

The plot, while confusing, doesn't rise to the confusing heights of, say, T*he Big Sleep*, as you kinda get it even before it's ploddingly explained at the end.

Hayworth married an older and partially crippled wealthy criminal attorney (Sloan) who resents his wife for marrying him for, we and he guess, his money.

On a long cruise aboard his yacht, where he has hired a young sailor (Welles) to join the crew, Sloan cruelly needles both Hayworth and Welles (and anyone else in his surround), which serves to drive those two together. And, yes, Welles sporting an intermittent Irish brogue and Hayworth with cropped platinum blonde hair and an "are you kidding me" body are attracted to each other.

However, it's hard to take Welles seriously in this one as he takes himself waaaaay-too seriously. And while Hayworth looks beautiful, her aloofness combined with Welles' character's pretentiousness leave you all but disinterested in Welles-and-Hayworth's struggle to get together and out of her husband's clutches.

Thrown into the mix is a confusing-for-confusing-sake plot about Sloan's law partner wanting Welles to help him fake his murder (for insurance money and to get away from Sloan). It goes horribly wrong (no surprise there) leading to a trial followed by a Hitchcock-on-steroids final chase scene in a house of mirrors and *Lady From Shanghai* staggers to a close.

We all know the Welles story: the boy-genius director of *Citizen Kane *spends the rest of his career running from or trying to top *Kane* with neither effort often leading to good results. *Lady From Shanghai* seems to be a "top *Kane*" effort that spun horribly out of control. It's worth the watch for some good or, at least, interesting parts, but also simply because it's another piece of the more-interesting Welles' life saga.


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## Fading Fast

*The Gentlemen* from 2019 with Mathew McConaughey, Charlie Hunnan, Hugh Grant, Jeremy Strong, Colin Farrell, Henry Golding and Michelle Dockery

Sometimes the most-important question about a movie is did you enjoy it? For *The Gentlemen*, my answer is an emphatic "yes."

Director Guy Richie has a somewhat-lighter, somewhat-more-stylish view of the world than Quentin Tarantino, but they both live in the same zip code of Crazytown.

Richie's world is one of insanely dapper and chess-master-smart gangsters, drug dealers and thugs who completely understand how their criminal world works and co-exists with the regular world of, comparatively, more law and order. They don't view themselves so much as criminals, but as men and women who've chosen an alternative path.

Here, the plot - surprisingly less confusing to follow than most Richie movies - is about a current London drug kingpin (Mathew McConaughey) trying to "get out" by selling his business to another kingpin (Jeremy Strong), which sets off a crazy serious of machinations including violent raids attempting to drive the price of McConaughey business down, shifting criminal alliances, generational mob coups, blackmail and extensive murder and mayhem. It's fun, over the top and ridiculously engaging. You know it's all beyond the pale and you don't care.

And that's in part because Richie knows what he wants and how to get it. The sequences are seamless when that's what he needs or effectively jarring when that's his intent. He also knows how to make good actors great and great actors greater. Here, Mathew McConaughey, Charlie Hunnan, Hugh Grant, Jeremy Strong, Colin Farrell and Henry Golding put in the best or nearly the best performances of their careers.

Michelle Dockery as McConaughey's wife, too, would have given a career performance, but her part was too small. However in her one main scene - outwitting and, eventually, out shooting her husband's rival drug kingpin and his thugs - she gives you a hint of what Mary from *Downton Abbey* would have been like had she grown up on the streets and not in a manor house.

Guy Richie, similar to Tarantino, creates a captivatingly fictitious world of super-intelligent, super-violent, super-Machiavellian and super-well-dressed criminals. To be sure, while that world is no longer new to us - the Godfather movies introduced it and Tarantino reinvented it a few decades later - Richie knows how to amp up the roller-coaster ride while also, somehow, lightening its tone just enough so that you're laughing as the insanity unfolds. And the best part, because the dialogue is so smart and rapid fire, the movie will still be enjoyable - maybe even more so - the second and third time you see it.


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## Fading Fast

*Honeymoon for Three* from 1941 starring Ann Sheridan, George Brent, Charles Ruggles and Osa Massen

Let's get the unimportant stuff out of the way. The plot is weak. A novelist (Brent) engaged to his secretary (Sheridan) meets an old girlfriend (Massen) on a book tour and has an all but harmless flirtation - no sex, no deep connection.

Sheridan, the secretary/fiance, pretty much doesn't care as she doesn't believe much is going on, but the old-flame's husband (Ruggles) wants to unload his annoying wife on Brent, so he tries to sue for divorce. Throw in a few lawyers looking to profit from the affair and potential divorce and, that's it. That's the plot and it descends, from time to time, into screwballness. But...

Tick, tick, tick, BOOM!

I've always liked Ann Sheridan in a blasé way, but this is the movie where Ann Sheridan went BOOM! for me. And it wasn't her Oomph Girl-ness (not that there's anything wrong with her Oomph), but her humor, lilted cynicism and sarcastic wit is what won me over here.

Right out of the gate, she's firing off one liners as when she taps on Brent's train compartment door early in the morning.

Sheridan: "Got anything on?"
Brent: "Yeh."
Sheridan: "I never do get a break, do I?"

How Sheridan's asking for a morning "quicky," in the movie's opening line, made it by the censors in 1940 is a separate issue, but in doing so, she announces that this is her movie.

And it is. Basically, she's surrounded by idiots, knows she's surrounded by idiots and lets us in on the joke, but she does love one of the idiots, Brent, _c'est la vie._ So she struts through the movie firing off one-liners, giving dead stares, rolling her eyes and delivering deprecating looks to Brent and everyone else who's an idiot, which is, almost, everyone else.

But it's not mean spirited; she's having fun, knows that most of the idiocy around her is harmless and, since she's in love with Brent, she protects him as much as she elbows him. He's lucky to have her. Pro tip: Marry someone smart.

Spendthrift and broke, Brent is a big tipper which causes pragmatic Sheridan, every time he over tips, to lower her head, show a slight smirk and make a small "give me" wave of her hand to retrieve his excessive tips from bellboys, waiters, etc., which she takes back and replaces with an appropriate tip. By the end, the bellhops are so familiar with this game, that after Brent tips them, they immediately and unprovoked make the "exchange" with Sheridan behind Brent's back.

The other fun in this movie is Brent's old-flame's husband, Charles Ruggles, who wants to peddle his wife off on Brent. He has a bit of a brain and he also has an agenda - to get rid of said wife - so he's working hard to advance his goal while Sheridan has the luxury of sitting back and watching everyone else make fools of themselves.

When these two meet up, it's movie-relationship fun as Ruggles' little machinations are uncovered and smirked at by Sheridan. And when he takes her for drinks and dinner and then tries to split the check with her, you know she's more amused than annoyed as she calls him on every gambit he throws at her. He's smart enough (smarter than everyone else but her) to know when he's outmatched, so he just picks himself up from each Sheridan roundhouse as his only goal is to get rid of his wife (as any man married to his wife would).

Since it's a Code-era movie, there's too much avoiding sex and screwball stuff going on, but this one is all about Sheridan and she's up to the challenge. It's hard to recommend a silly movie with an addled plot, but if you enjoy seeing a smart - and darn good looking - woman tweak everyone else in a movie with wit, spirit and eye rolls, it's well worth the seventy-five-minute investment.


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## Fading Fast

*The Private Lives of Pippa Lee* from 2009 with Robin Wright, Alan Arkin, Blake Lively and Keanu Reeves (and a bunch more names you know)

An oddball movie about a middle-aged woman (Wright) married to an old, and now, dying man (Arkin) who reflects on her life (through flashbacks) to make sense of the present uncertainty she's feeling


Years earlier, Pippa's mom, a manic-depressive pill popper, provided an exciting but chaotic childhood for Pippa, resulting in Pippa (young Pippa is portrayed by Lively) leaving home at an early age to join the counterculture-world of Greenwich Village


There she meets her now-dying husband who was, even then, married to a young, pretty woman who had replaced his earlier wife. He leaves this second wife and marries Pippa who proceeds to morph into a kinda traditional wife and mom (right down to, years later, having the de rigueur young-adult daughter who hates her)


As all this looking back is happening, Pippa's dying husband (true to form) has an affair with one of Pippa's friends pushing Pippa, who was thinking about it anyway, to have an affair of her own with lost-in-life-himself Keanu Reeves


There's more - sleepwalking, a quirky son, jealous friends, some kinky photography, a (seriously) crazy ex-wife - basically, it's a darker, much-less-kibitzy Woody-Allen-style movie


And a shout out is deserved for both Robin Wright's and Blake Lively's engaging performances


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## Fading Fast

*Night and the City* from 1950 with Richard Widmark, Gene Tierney, Googie Withers and Francis L. Sullivan

This is a noir morality tale bordering on Greek Tragedy. London-based petty grifter Widmark tries to break into big-time wrestling promotion, after much scheming and a bit of luck, by signing a famous wrestler.

But London wrestling is mob controlled meaning Widmark really needs connections, money and muscle to succeed and he has none of the three. The entire movie is, basically, watching this small-timer with big aspirations desperately run around London trying to get the three things he needs and, ultimately, failing at each turn. The mob didn't get to be the mob by letting street detritus muscle in on its territory.

This turf battle takes place against a backdrop of outstanding noir style centering on Widmark who - in a fancy light-colored suit, collar pin, tie and white shoes - looks like a low-rent bounder versus all the dark suits, dark alleys and dark clubs he haunts. And when the action shifts outside at night, London's overly lit club and theater streets make an always-scrambling Widmark look like a pinball getting smacked around by the flippers.

In typical noir fashion, Widmark wrecks a bunch of lives along the way - an older, respected wrestler dies owing to a Widmark scheme, Widmark steals from his ridiculously devoted girlfriend (Tierney) and he destroys the marriage of his business partners leading one to suicide. Not bad for a day's work in noirland.

Sadly, the few decent people in this seedy world suffer the most. Widmark's girlfriend's unconditional love is repaid with neglect, abuse, (the aforementioned) theft of her property and one-last desperately humbling attempt to save Widmark.

Meanwhile, the marriage Widmark destroys is between an older heavy nightclub owner (Sullivan) and his _younger-ish _shrew wife (Withers) whom he nonetheless loves unconditionally and treats incredibly well. Widmark needs to pit these two against each other to raise funds for his promotion. The wife seeing an out to her marriage lets lose an invective on her husband when she leaves that breaks him, in part, because he knows he still completely and stupidly loves her and would take her back.

So, while Widmark's tale is a basic noir one - a second-rate grifter reaches too high and gets smacked down hard by the criminals with more skills and brains - the real lesson here is a Greek Tragedy one. It painfully exposes how life destroying unconditional love for the wrong person can be. Peters is a broken woman at the end while (spoiler alert) the nightclub owner takes his own life when his wife leaves. It's rough justice and rough morality in *Night and the City*.

It's not always easy to watch Widmark get bounced around this seedy corner of London, but it's an outstanding British entry into the noir genre propelled higher by the incredibly stylish directing of Jules Dassin, its classic black-and-white cinematography and its meta-tale of unconditional love getting punished unconditionally.


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## eagle2250

^^
I'm hooked!


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## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> ^^
> I'm hooked!


If you like noir, it's a really good one. And in what other world would a broke grifter be dressed so smartly (okay, flashy)? TCM runs it regularly, so it should come up in rotation sooner or later.


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## Guest

_*Bob le flambeur*_ ("Bob the Gambler" or "Bob the High Roller") is a 1956 French gangster film directed by Jean-Pierre Melville. The film stars Roger Duchesne as Bob. Oceans 11 was loosely based on this movie. In French, with subtitles.

_*Le Cercle Rouge*_ (French pronunciation: [lə sɛʁkl ʁuʒ], "The Red Circle") is a 1970 Franco-Italian crime film set mostly in Paris. It was directed by Jean-Pierre Melville and stars Alain Delon, Andre Bourvil, Gian Maria Volonté, François Périer and Yves Montand. It is known for its climactic heist sequence which is about half an hour in length and has almost no dialogue.


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## Fading Fast

*The Long Night* from 1947 with Henry Fonda, Barbara Bel Geddes, Vincent Price and Ann Dvorak


This A-movie with an A-movie cast was given a good B-movie script, but nothing more, so you get a lot of acting and a long movie with a story that would have been better told in sixty or seventy, not a hundred, minutes


A WWII vet and, now, factory worker (Fonda) - a salt of the earth guy - falls in love with a pretty, innocent young woman (Bel Geddes), but he has a rival for her affections in an older magician/showman/grifter (Price) who appears more "worldly" to Bel Geddes


Also amping up the tension in this love triangle is Price's sometimes assistant, a life-weary showgirl (Dvorak), who makes a play for Fonda when Bel Geddes tilts toward Price


The thing about Dvorak is not only that she always looks ready for a roll in the hay (which she does), but also that she always looks like she just had one


Unnecessarily told through flashbacks, we are given the climax in the opening scene: Fonda shoots and kills Price as he can't stand the thought of - as Price mercilessly taunts Fonda - that he, Price, "deflowered" Fonda's girlfriend, Bel Geddes


Since the ending is told at the beginning, the only real suspense comes from watching the police try to capture Fonda who, with a gun, is barricaded in his apartment. It's overwrought and forced as a straight-timeline story would have been less complicated and made for a better movie


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## Fading Fast

*Taste of Honey* from 1961 with Rita Tushingham, Dora Bryan, Paul Danquah and Murray Melvin

How the heck did this movie get made in 1961? It's like the Brits snuck a pre-code movie from the early 1930s into the movie houses of the early 1960s.

A white, negligent single mother, who had a daughter out of wedlock and who still sleeps around, all but abandons her, now, teenage daughter when she marries a man ten years her junior. Odder still, she's no cougar and he's a decent catch.

The daughter, now simply struggling to survive, moves into a horrible dump, takes a job in a shoe store and - think about the era - has a love affair with a young black merchant sailor about to ship out (he tells her this upfront). Of course, after he's gone, she discovers she's pregnant, but fortunately, an all but openly gay young man (did I mention this movie was made in 1961) moves in with her to help with the rent and, after she gives birth, the baby.

And if the plot isn't enough real life for you, each character is flawed, complex, inconsistent and emotional - you know, like real people. Even as bad as the mother is, she still has some love and kindness for (and, occasionally, feels guilty about her treatment toward) her daughter.

The daughter - a truly damaged person as anyone with her upbringing would be - is alternately kind and angry. However, in a haphazard fashion, she is also trying to build a better life for herself and her unborn child. It's painful to watch this much-nicer-than-her-mother young woman try to find a path to a decent life without having a positive past framework or normal upbringing to guide her.

And before shipping out, we see that her sailor paramour is a good and kind man, but he also seems emotionally lost as he tries to make more of his brief relationship with the daughter than she wants. Finally, in the most heartbreaking of all performances, the young gay man that the daughter befriends is caring and gentle, but adrift, as he hasn't come to terms with his sexuality or found his place in a society that views his feelings as a sin and a crime.

Sadly, but true to life, all of these characters in anger and frustration periodically lash out at each other, themselves and society causing everyone pain. Watching people make emotional decisions that hurt themselves and others, while also showing bursts of kindness and humanity, can be tough, but it is also engaging viewing as it's real life.

The climax pivots around which family structure the daughter will choose. First, the mother returns to the daughter after sabotaging her advantageous marriage. Her mother is struggling and poor because she makes bad decisions and not because of a cruel or greedy society. So, the question is will the daughter let her returning mother help her raise the baby or will she stay with her gay friend who treats her well and who is excited to be a father to her child?

But the climax is less important than the journey in this one. And it's an amazing journey for 1961, which, in addition to all the above taboos it breaks, also includes a frank discussion of an abortion with nuance and honesty that one hears little of in today's brittle debate. It also gives lie to today's period books and movies that have characters in the early '60s spouting abortion arguments perfectly aligned with today's thinking.

We'll close where we opened, which is how did a movie about an negligent mother abandoning her born-out-of-wedlock white teenage daughter who, shortly after that, becomes pregnant as the result of a brief affair with a black man but, then, moves in with a gay man get made in 1961? But thankfully it did as it's well worth the watch because, like its 1930s pre-code progenitors, it powerfully asserts that life and people were much more complex - and similar to us today - than most of the movies of that time showed.


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## Fading Fast

*I Wake Up Screaming* from 1941 with Victor Mature, Carole Landis, Betty Grable, Laird Cregar and Elisha Cook Jr.

An early, solid if slightly quirky noir effort with overtones of the better-noir *Laura* to come


A sports and celebrity promoter (Mature), on a bet, tries to take "nobody" waitress Landis (still sporting her tight *One Million B.C*., body, but with more clothes on here) and turn her into a "hot property" by dressing her up and bringing her around to NYC's social spots, of-the-moment nightclubs and marquee sporting events


It works so well that Hollywood comes knocking, but before graspy Landis can leave, she is killed, thus, turning the rest of the movie into who-done-it


In addition to lead-suspect Mature, a creepy but dogged detective (Cregar), a few other of Landis' new society friends and her apartment building's odd switchboard operator (Cook) are suspects


Amping up the sexual tension is foil-to-her-sister, good-girl Grable who has a crush on Mature even while suspecting him of killing her sister


The rest is good, standard noir stuff: a wrongly accused man, rough police interrogations, chase scenes through dark, wet city streets and plenty of snarky lines and creepy shadows, all topped off with a sexual deviant who turned his apartment into an altar to Landis


And finally, there's this, *Over the Rainbow*, the least-noir song ever, is the leitmotif of the movie - you hear it in the background all the time. It maybe, kinda works in the way the happy sound of an ice-cream truck heightens tension in a harrowing situation. Still, it's a crazy choice for a noir-movie theme song


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## Fading Fast

*Torrid Zone* from 1940 with James Cagney, Ann Sheridan and Pat O'Brien

Yes it's an A-movie with an A-cast and A-quality special effects, and all those things help, but it's basically a very good formulaic movie of the week with a bigger budget.

A large banana company's Caribbean plantation foreman, O'Brien, tries to both cajole and bully his top man, Cagney, into coming back to work for him as Cagney is about to leave for a cushy job in the States. Simultaneously, O'Brien, trying to keep order in the nearby town where he acts like a dictatorial mayor, wants to ship out recently arrived for unknown-but-suspected-untoward reasons nightclub-singer and card-shark Sheridan.

No surprise, Sheridan and Cagney meet, rub each other the wrong way, but while they won't admit it, they really like each other. Cagney, with a month to spare before his new job, agrees to a two-week stint for a big paycheck to help O'Brien "get the fruit moving again." Thrown into the mix is a local rebel leader who keeps stealing the plantation's workers away and another plantation manager whose wife is having an all but open affair with Cagney.

From here, the movie warps through a lot of plot and action with Cagney and O'Brien spitting out dialogue in machine-gun fashion at everyone (the best part of the movie). Also, the rebel leader is captured, escapes, is hunted down and captured by Cagney anew, and then, kinda, escapes anew; meanwhile, the bananas sometimes get on the train and sometimes don't.

And while he's dealing with all that, Cagney engages in a lot of verbal fighting and foreplay with both Sheridan and the manager's wife. It's another movie where Cagney has several job issues and women all up in the air at once with him spinning like a top to keep everything from crashing down. Basically, it's Cagney being Cagney in a Cagney movie and that's a very good thing especially when he has equally talented O'Brien as a verbal sparring partner.

It's fun, it's entertaining and fast moving. Warner Brothers knew the movie gold it had in Cagney, O'Brien and Sheridan and it let its horses run. Why is Sheridan stuck on a Carribean plantation with an extensive wardrobe of Cafe Society outfits? Who knows and who cares. She's there for, sorry gotta say it, the oomph (with Cagney parodying her famous sexual sobriquet by referring to her as "fourteen carrot oomph").

Also, what is it with Ann Sheridan having to beg for sex - how is that possible? In *Honeymoon for Three*, the movie opens with Sheridan asking for a "quicky" from George Brent and lamenting his rejection. Here, when a female rival says Cagney's no longer interested in her, Sheridan complains that Cagney never showed enough sexual interest in her in the first place, "You can't be jilted when you haven't been given a tumble." Something is wrong with a world where Ann Sheridan is always begging for sex.

It's a quick and by-the-numbers movie that works because Cagney, O'Brien and Sheridan are insanely enjoyable to watch, especially as they fire off one-liners at each other. The story is off the shelf, but the movie is worth the watch for the talented acting and star power alone.


----------



## Fading Fast

*Tender Comrade* from 1943 with Ginger Rogers, Robert Ryan, Ruth Hussey and Patricia Collinge

Let's get this out of the way up front. This film was used as part of the evidence by the House Un-American Activities Committee when it accused the movie's writer Dalton Trumbo of spreading communist propaganda. Eventually, Trumbo was blacklisted.

As a libertarian-leaning, raised-in-the-Cold-War-era anti-communist, clear blips appear on my radar for even small communist propaganda, but other than a ghost image here or there, I didn't see much agitprop nonsense in *Tender Comrade*.

To be sure, there are a few Marxist-ish lines about a bunch female factory workers sharing and sharing alike to save expenses and some other lines about the "fairness" of "having enough," but the latter weren't far off from the government's view, at the time, of war rationing and "pulling together" on the home front.

And, yes, Trumbo has some muddled thinking about democracy and economics that sometimes sounds faintly pink, but his thoughts, overall, struck me as more stupid than dangerous. If there was a crime committed by author Trumbo in this one, it was more for immature dialogue and pompous-but-trite speeches than any great subversive effort.

That's why the movie fails to be anything more than a "B effort" as a WWII "home front" movie that is clearly not in the same class with *The Best Years of our Lives* or *The More the Merrier*. In *Tender Comrades*, the characters often spew out rote lines that are just not that believable.

The simple plot here is four female factory workers, with husbands away at war and wanting to improve their living conditions, rent a home together. Of course, they all have their personality quirks and preferences that lead to them sharply bumping into each other now and then, but you know all along that they'll pull together when someone takes a war-related body blow.

So we see the obligatory arguments over rationing, volunteering, keeping one's lips sealed about their factory work, husbands and even sharing household chores. However, when someone learns that her husband has been taken prisoner or, on a positive note, a husband on leave is coming home, they all support each other and "pitch in." There's even the stock character (Hussey) who doesn't buy the "pitch in" stuff at first, but of course, she sees the light by the end as we learn her cynicism was, yawn, just a cover for her fears.

The only real bright spot in this flick is Ginger Rogers and her husband Robert Ryan as this not-obvious pairing has some real movie chemistry. You want to look for the scene where a calm Ryan nonchalantly asks Rogers to marry him and she immediately starts yelling at him for being "a wolf" and stringing her along.

He's more amused than angered because, as we soon learn, she's mad that he's kept his feelings so close to his vest that she didn't even know if he cared for her. To cut off her non-stop verbal pummeling, he gives her a much-deserved ultimatum - "say yes or no, not another word -" that brings the proposal to a happy conclusion.

And, heck, it doesn't hurt that Rogers has a rockin'-tight body on display throughout the proposal scene. Even in 1943, code and all, Hollywood knew how to fire up the prurience when it had the raw material to work with.

The movie needed more scenes like the proposal one and less pontification masquerading as dialogue. In this one, Trumbo's writing is ineffectual and obvious around the propaganda, but sometimes touching and astute when limning human foibles like Roger's insecurity in her relationship.

Finally, since we had to endure a bunch of cliches and way-too-much moralizing as dialogue, at least this bit of philosophy from Rogers, to a grumbling-about-America Hussey, landed a good blow: "Mistakes, sure we [America] make mistakes, plenty of them, You want a country where they won't stand for mistakes, go to Germany, go to Japan." Oh but for that wisdom today.


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## Fading Fast

*The Journey* from 1959 with Deborah Kerr, Yul Brynner and Jason Robards

Taking place in Hungary in 1956 as the USSR was crushing the Hungarian rebellion, several foreigners (mainly English) trying to get out of Hungary are held up in a hotel by a Russian Major (Brynner) suspicious that they are smuggling out Hungarian resistance fighters


The foreigners, overall, aren't doing so, but one, Kerr, is trying to smuggle one resistance fighter out - a wounded Robards - which sets up a battle of wits and sexual tension between Kerr and Brynner


A bunch of other stuff takes place around the core story - pockets of Hungarian resistance attack Brynner's Soviet headquarters, we see the Hungarian locals conflicted over joining the resistance and several of the British being held are forced to choose between exposing Kerr and Robards or helping them and, thus, risking imprisonment or death for themselves


But most of the two-plus hours are spent with Kerr and Brynner not sleeping with each other as he continues to suspect Robards is not English (Robards' cover story), but a Hungarian resistance fighter (which we know he is)


Not that it's bad in a melodramatic way, but it's hard to believe that Brynner wouldn't have figured out who Robards was in ten minutes and it's harder still to believe he'd risk his career and life by not immediately arresting him and Kerr


Brynner is presented as a man conflicted with the moral issues of the Soviet suppression of the Hungarians - so much so, that he's willing to risk it all to let one Hungarian go, in truth, mainly because, let's just say it, he wants to bang Kerr - eh, not that believable 


All this is made harder still because Deborah Kerr, while pretty, has an expression and body English that read as if she'd shattered into little pieces if a man touched her, but I guess the subtext and country metaphor is the fiery Russian wanting to conquer the aloof Englishwoman - yawn


Lastly, there's so much Russian and Hungarian spoken (without subtitles) that you feel left out of a third of the movie - maybe done to give the audience a sense of how the English captives felt, but still, you don't go to a movie to not know what the characters are saying


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## Peak and Pine

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 47777
> 
> *The Journey* from 1959 with Deborah Kerr, Yul Brynner and Jason Robards
> 
> Taking place in Hungary in 1956 as the USSR was crushing the Hungarian rebellion, several foreigners (mainly English) trying to get out of Hungary are held up in a hotel by a Russian Major (Brynner) suspicious that they are smuggling out Hungarian resistance fighters
> 
> 
> The foreigners, overall, aren't doing so, but one, Kerr, is trying to smuggle one resistance fighter out - a wounded Robards - which sets up a battle of wits and sexual tension between Kerr and Brynner
> 
> 
> A bunch of other stuff takes place around the core story - pockets of Hungarian resistance attack Brynner's Soviet headquarters, we see the Hungarian locals conflicted over joining the resistance and several of the British being held are forced to choose between exposing Kerr and Robards or helping them and, thus, risking imprisonment or death for themselves
> 
> 
> But most of the two-plus hours are spent with Kerr and Brynner not sleeping with each other as he continues to suspect Robards is not English (Robards' cover story), but a Hungarian resistance fighter (which we know he is)
> 
> 
> Not that it's bad in a melodramatic way, but it's hard to believe that Brynner wouldn't have figured out who Robards was in ten minutes and it's harder still to believe he'd risk his career and life by not immediately arresting him and Kerr
> 
> 
> Brynner is presented as a man conflicted with the moral issues of the Soviet suppression of the Hungarians - so much so, that he's willing to risk it all to let one Hungarian go, in truth, mainly because, let's just say it, he wants to bang Kerr - eh, not that believable
> 
> 
> All this is made harder still because Deborah Kerr, while pretty, has an expression and body English that read as if she'd shattered into little pieces if a man touched her, but I guess the subtext and country metaphor is the fiery Russian wanting to conquer the aloof Englishwoman - yawn
> 
> 
> Lastly, there's so much Russian and Hungarian spoken (without subtitles) that you feel left out of a third of the movie - maybe done to give the audience a sense of how the English captives felt, but still, you don't go to a movie to not know what the characters are saying


Unfamiliar with the film, but may be interesting to note that this was the second pairing of Brynner and Kerr, the first three years earlier in one of the most famous films of all times, _The King and I (_from _Anna and the King of Siam* _which I read as a little boy.) _King_ made Brynner famous and gave him the Oscar for Best Actor. Kerr was already a big deal. Kerr pronounced her name _Carr, _for no discernable reason, especially since it wasn't her real name..

*Of course the book wasn't a musical so I had to make up my own tunes. Siam is present day Tailand. Or Denmark, I get the two confused.


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## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 47777
> 
> *The Journey* from 1959 with Deborah Kerr, Yul Brynner and Jason Robards
> 
> Taking place in Hungary in 1956 as the USSR was crushing the Hungarian rebellion, several foreigners (mainly English) trying to get out of Hungary are held up in a hotel by a Russian Major (Brynner) suspicious that they are smuggling out Hungarian resistance fighters
> 
> 
> The foreigners, overall, aren't doing so, but one, Kerr, is trying to smuggle one resistance fighter out - a wounded Robards - which sets up a battle of wits and sexual tension between Kerr and Brynner
> 
> 
> A bunch of other stuff takes place around the core story - pockets of Hungarian resistance attack Brynner's Soviet headquarters, we see the Hungarian locals conflicted over joining the resistance and several of the British being held are forced to choose between exposing Kerr and Robards or helping them and, thus, risking imprisonment or death for themselves
> 
> 
> But most of the two-plus hours are spent with Kerr and Brynner not sleeping with each other as he continues to suspect Robards is not English (Robards' cover story), but a Hungarian resistance fighter (which we know he is)
> 
> 
> Not that it's bad in a melodramatic way, but it's hard to believe that Brynner wouldn't have figured out who Robards was in ten minutes and it's harder still to believe he'd risk his career and life by not immediately arresting him and Kerr
> 
> 
> Brynner is presented as a man conflicted with the moral issues of the Soviet suppression of the Hungarians - so much so, that he's willing to risk it all to let one Hungarian go, in truth, mainly because, let's just say it, he wants to bang Kerr - eh, not that believable
> 
> 
> All this is made harder still because Deborah Kerr, while pretty, has an expression and body English that read as if she'd shattered into little pieces if a man touched her, but I guess the subtext and country metaphor is the fiery Russian wanting to conquer the aloof Englishwoman - yawn
> 
> 
> Lastly, there's so much Russian and Hungarian spoken (without subtitles) that you feel left out of a third of the movie - maybe done to give the audience a sense of how the English captives felt, but still, you don't go to a movie to not know what the characters are saying


I find myself consistently amazed at the clarity and level of detail reflected in your book and movie reviews you share with us. When you read a book or watch a movie you don't miss a thing and your reviews very effectively allow us to benefit from your experience. I must admit, I do wish you had written this present review a quarter of a century past so that I might have saved the two hours of my life that I spent watching "The Journey" way back then! LOL. Thank you my friend for another outstanding review.


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## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> I find myself consistently amazed at the clarity and level of detail reflected in your book and movie reviews you share with us. When you read a book or watch a movie you don't miss a thing and your reviews very effectively allow us to benefit from your experience. I must admit, I do wish you had written this present review a quarter of a century past so that I might have saved the two hours of my life that I spent watching "The Journey" way back then! LOL. Thank you my friend for another outstanding review.


Thank you, I very much appreciate your kind comments - that's very nice of you.

Basically, that movie was a swing and a miss. I'm glad I didn't have to sit in a movie theater to see it. Watching a bad movie at home is much easier.


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## Fading Fast

*Hide-Out* from 1934 with Robert Montgomery, Maureen O'Sullivan, Edward Arnold and Mickey Rooney

Montgomery plays a New York City mob guy - an urbane "protection" racketeer - who runs away to a farm in upstate New York to hide out until a recent "issue" with the police can be "fixed"


There, by movie-magic happenstance, he winds up living with a honest, hard-working American farm family who also happens to have a preternaturally beautiful daughter - O'Sullivan of Jane-from-Tarzan fame who proves here that she looks gorgeous even with her clothes on


Since the family doesn't know he's a mobster hiding out, they think he's just recovering from an injury, there are a lot of jokes around and contretemps that occur from him concealing his true "career" from them - about half of the jokes/situations work


Being a code-enforced movie, all goes as planned: Montgomery transforms from cynical mobster to enlightened man who sees the good in honest, hard work and decent living (especially when a pretty girl sits like a cherry on top of it)


All that's left is for him to come clean to the family (and see if they reject him) and to pay his debt to society


It's harmless fun - nothing great, but Montgomery and O'Sullivan, with an assist from Edward Arnold as the doggedly pursuing NYC detective, make it interesting enough


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## Fading Fast

*George Washington Slept Here* from 1942 with Ann Sheridan, Jack Benny and Charles Coburn

It turns out, 1948's well-known *Mr. Blandings Builds his Dream House* was first made in 1942 as *George Washington Slept Here*. Not really, but the two movies all but share the same story


An upper-middle-class New York City family, living in a cramped apartment (a typical New York story), on the wife's (Sheridan) whim and unbeknownst to the husband (Benny), buy an in-complete-disrepair Pennsylvania farmhouse 


After decamping to their "new" home and intent on "fixing it up," the story follows the usual arc of many fish-out-of-water stories as the local contractors and real estate agents take advantage of the "city slickers" as they spend all their money trying to make a run-down two-hundred-plus-year-old shack into a home


The one-liners - the reason for the movie's existence - are good, but not great with Benny trying hard to make average material funnier than it is as he both needles his wife for buying this white elephant and all the locals for fleecing them


Along the way, as troubles mount - no water from the always-being-drilled well, loss of the house's only access road, insanely leaky roofs, and on and on - the family also, naturally, fall in the love with the slowly-being-restored house and the warming-to-them locals


The climax comes as the money runs out, the bank is about to foreclose and their rich uncle (Coburn) turns out not to be rich, necessitating a deus ex machina to save the day


As noted, if this all sounds familiar to *Mr. Blandings Builds his Dream House*, it's because it's, pretty much, the same story. Overall, the *Blandings'* version is a bit slicker, and Grant's more-subtle humor is more to my taste than Benny's "yak-yak" style, but both are reasonably enjoyable movie cognates


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## Fading Fast

*Sweet Bird of Youth* from 1962 starring Paul Newman, Geraldine Page, Shirley Knight and Ed Begley

You enter a Tennessee Williams world at your own risk as despair, shattered dreams, broken lives and crushed souls await. The only real differences from play to play are the particular human afflictions on display.

Compared to your run-of-the-mill movie, *Sweet Bird of Youth* is pretty good stuff, but in the Williams' plays-turned-into-movies oeuvre, *Bird* feels like a poor man's *Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.* Most of the same dysfunctional family pieces are there, just arranged a bit differently, but it's not as impactful (read, soul crushing) as *Cat* is.

In *Sweet Bird of Youth*, Newman plays an aging pretty boy returning to his home town with a "patroness" in tow. He claims he's on the brink of a movie career, but he's really a gigolo / gofer for this aging Hollywood star [Page] whose career is in a downturn. Newman has returned to "get his girl back -" the daughter (Knight) of the town's corrupt political boss (Begley) who, pretty much, forced Newman out of town when no-prospects Newman tried to marry his daughter some years ago.

Making things worse - as they always are in a Williams world - Newman's patroness is an alcoholic and drug user (smoking marijuana is surprisingly shown) who is alternately kind and viciously mean to Newman who returns the favor. The majority of the movie is watching these two - secluded in a suffocating hotel suite in town - tear each other down and, then, somewhat make up when they realize that all they have is each other. It's honest, but exhausting.

When we do get out of that oppressive hotel room, we see Newman trying to get in touch with his former girlfriend, whose father, the aforementioned political boss, is doing everything he can to thwart a reunion, even unleashing his mentally unstable son (that Williams' touch again) to threaten and rough up Newman. Newman and the former girlfriend meet a few times, old sparks fly, but old baggage weighs (spoiler alert) as their last pairing and parting resulted in an abortion, whose public revelation is now threatening her father's political career.

And on the dysfunction goes: Town-boss Begley mentally and physically abuses his tucked-away-at-the-hotel mistress, while playing the wholesome family man in public. And sitting in the middle of the simmering abortion scandal is the young doctor who performed the illegal procedure on Knight when Newman left town. He's been promoted, before his time, to head of surgery at the local hospital owing to Begley's influence. Furthermore, the doctor is now engaged to Knight who, by now, is all but numb to everything being thrown at her.

Okay, that might be a lot to follow in a brief summary, but it is a bit easier to keep up with all the human wreckage as it unfolds on screen in over two hours. The conclusion (no spoiler alert, you'll have to watch the movie) was, according to TCM, watered down from the play owing to the remaining influence of the movie production code. But the conclusion, ugly and unpleasant as it is, is not that important as Tennessee Williams' goal, as always, is to show broken people breaking some more. Mission accomplished.


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## Fading Fast

*The Office Wife* from 1930 with Dorothy MacKaill, Lewis Stone and Joan Blondell

Early talky and pre-code with element of both that result in an good movie and an even more-interesting look at a moment in movie history


There's no soundtrack, little action, few sets and a lot of talking - basically, they filmed a souped-up play done in a fast sixty minutes


The subject is the "office wife" 1930 style: when a high-powered executive forms a bond with his secretary that is stronger and closer than the one with his wife, thus, threatening his marriage


Stone (who is a bit too old for the role) plays a publishing exec who encourages one of his top authors to write about the "office wife," but then ends up living the experience. To wit, his new wife loses interest in him, in part, owing to his long hours at work, while his new secretary (MacKaill) develops a romantic interest in him (and vice versa)


The rest is watching it play out - does he leave his wife for the secretary he's falling in love with (especially after he learns his wife is having an affair) and does his secretary leave her decent (if bumptious) boyfriend for her much older and wealthier boss? And since the movie's run time is all of sixty minutes, you don't have to wait long to find out


Despite its crude, by today's standards, production quality, the story's timelessness engages as does MacKaill, a talented and wanly pretty actress


But equally interesting are the pre-code curios such as:
A girl-on-girl, in-their-underwear, kiss (MacKaill and Blondell, see pic below)
A clearly lesbian author wearing men's-style suits and smoking cigars
MacKaill's inability to find a single bra to wear
Booze being readily consumed without condemnation despite Prohibition
Divorce accepted as just something that happens / not a big deal
In four short years, when the Motion Picture Production Code would be enforced, most of these situations would be verboten



Visually, the trip to 1930 is time-travel fun with Stone's outer office a wonderful example of '30s high Art Deco

Pre-code early 1930s enjoying a girl-on-girl kiss (it created a bit of a stir when the TV show *Friends* had a girl-on-girl kiss in 2001 - this one was seventy-plus years earlier):


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 48137
> 
> *The Office Wife* with Dorothy MacKaill, Lewis Stone and Joan Blondell
> 
> Early talky and pre-code with element of both that result in an good movie and an even more-interesting look at a moment in movie history
> 
> 
> There's no soundtrack, little action, few sets and a lot of talking - basically, they filmed a souped-up play done in a fast sixty minutes
> 
> 
> The subject is the "office wife" 1930 style: when a high-powered executive forms a bond with his secretary that is stronger and closer than the one with his wife, thus, threatening his marriage
> 
> 
> Stone (who is a bit too old for the role) plays a publishing exec who encourages one of his top authors to write about the "office wife," but then ends up living the experience. To wit, his new wife loses interest in him, in part, owing to his long hours at work, while his new secretary (MacKaill) develops a romantic interest in him (and vice versa)
> 
> 
> The rest is watching it play out - does he leave his wife for the secretary he's falling in love with (especially after he learns his wife is having an affair) and does his secretary leave her decent (if bumptious) boyfriend for her much older and wealthier boss? And since the movie's run time is all of sixty minutes, you don't have to wait long to find out
> 
> 
> Despite its crude, by today's standards, production quality, the story's timelessness engages as does MacKaill, a talented and wanly pretty actress
> 
> 
> But equally interesting are the pre-code curios such as:
> A girl-on-girl, in-their-underwear, kiss (MacKaill and Blondell, see pic below)
> A clearly lesbian author wearing men's-style suits and smoking cigars
> MacKaill's inability to find a single bra to wear
> Booze being readily consumed without condemnation despite Prohibition
> Divorce accepted as just something that happens / not a big deal
> In four short years, when the Motion Picture Production Code would be enforced, most of these situations would be verboten
> 
> 
> 
> Visually, the trip to 1930 is time-travel fun with Stone's outer office a wonderful example of '30s high Art Deco
> 
> Pre-code early 1930s enjoying a girl-on-girl kiss (it created a bit of a stir when the TV show *Friends* had a girl-on-girl kiss in 2001 - this one was seventy-plus years earlier):
> View attachment 48139


Is the gal standing by the side of the "Girl on girl" kiss scene a young Joan Blondell? The cheek line and facial structure seems to indicate such. :icon_scratch:


----------



## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> Is the gal standing by the side of the "Girl on girl" kiss scene a young Joan Blondell? The cheek line and facial structure seems to indicate such. :icon_scratch:


You are spot on - quite the "Eagle" eye you have there.

She, as always, delivers an enjoyable performance as a wisecracking, non-nonsense young woman who sees all the ridiculous going on around her. A role she'd play many times.


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> You are spot on - quite the "Eagle" eye you have there.
> 
> She, as always, delivers an enjoyable performance as a wisecracking, non-nonsense young woman who sees all the ridiculous going on around her. A role she'd play many times.


Clearly I am going to have to watch that movie. Is it another TCM presentation?


----------



## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> Clearly I am going to have to watch that movie. Is it another TCM presentation?


Yes it is. They play it now and then. If I see it coming up, I'll let you know, but usually, it's a while between showings.

This was the first time I had watched it from beginning to end.

Dorothy MacKaill is one of my favorite all-but-forgotten actresses of that era. She's talented and beautiful, but I think it hurt her that she was a bit older than stars like Bette Davis or Loretta Young by the time the "talkies" started as she had less time to make her mark before "aging" out.


----------



## Fading Fast

*The Law in Her Hands* from 1936 with Margaret Lindsay, Glenda Farrell, Lyle Talbot and Warren Hull

B-movies can rise above their station to be outstanding films or they can be terrible efforts of weak acting, weak writing and weak directing. But a lot of them, like *The Law in Her Hands*, can be - with one big caveat - fun, quick (60 minute) "movies" that are really more like hour-long TV dramas.

Here, two young women (Lindsay and Farrell) - who worked their way through law school - graduate, quit waitressing, open a law office and try to find clients - tough to do in the Depression. The smarter of the two, Lindsay, is dating an assistant district attorney (Hull) who wants her to quit working, marry him and become a mother and homemaker. She resists (for God sakes, she just passed the bar) as her passion is to build a law practise, but despite their differences, they continue dating.

To smooth things over, Lindsay, a beautiful young woman whose every pore reads well-bred nice girl - but not spoiled - invites Manhattan-centric Hull out to her place in Brooklyn for dinner with this little gem of an exchange (the first sentence is a paraphrasing):

Lindsay: "If I can get you to leave Manhattan, come out to Brooklyn and I'll cook you dinner tonight."

Hull: "How far out in Brooklyn?"

Lindsay: "Oh, way out, where 'oil' is 'earl'."

That's it, but what an inside-New-York moment as she is basically telling him she lives in the part of Brooklyn where the dialect is full-on Brooklynese and Manhattanites rarely tread. It flies by, but it's great fun hearing Lindsay break from her WASP-perfect diction for one second to pronounce "oil" as "earl" with Brooklyn verisimilitude.

But back at the law office, with their practice not attracting clients and the furniture repo man knocking on the door, the women are offered a large retainer from a known mob boss (Talbot) that Lindsay's DA boyfriend has been trying to put away. After initially rejecting his offer, the women take on his business under certain conditions that allow them to think they are staying honest, but as we all know, you can't be a little pregnant.

From here, the women's practice thrives as Lindsay proves very good at lawyering for the mob, while her relationship with the boyfriend gets strained. But then, as we knew would happen all along, Lindsay and her mob-boss client have a come-to-Jesus moment when he wants her to defend the mob in a horrible child-poisoning case.

You'll guess the outcome ahead of time, but still, I have to note the following as a spoiler alert: Lindsay stands up to the mob even though it will hurt her business. Now, here's where the movie goes full-on Motion-Picture-Production-Code stupid.

After Lindsay - unwilling to fight dirty in this one - loses the case and her largest (but not only) client, she meets up with the DA boyfriend and, smiling like she means it (she's got a heck of an arresting smile), agrees to quit the law to become a homemaker and mother as he's wanted her to do all along. End of movie - puke.

It not only rings false, you can almost feel the Motion Picture Production Code stamp coming down on the film. A lot of women and men want to be homemakers - good for them, freedom of choice is a wonderful thing - but until this forced-auto-correct moment, everything about Lindsay's character said, "I want to succeed as a lawyer," as she comes alive preparing for cases and arguing in the courtroom.

Had this been a pre-code movie, Lindsay, like pre-code heroines Ruth Chatterton and Kay Francis (the latter's horrible diction balances out the universe for Lindsay's elegantly perfection diction) would have picked herself up from the floor, shaken off the dirt and gone back to work with, maybe, a pause for a "quicky" with her DA boyfriend. Now, that's how this fun-and-breezy B-movie / hour-long TV-style drama deserved to end.


----------



## Fading Fast

*The Breaking Point* from 1950 with John Garfield, Phyllis Thaxter (a favorites less-well-known actress of mine), Juano Hernandez and Patricia Neal

_"You got that stubborn stupid look on your face you always get when you're going to do something you know isn't right, but you're going to do it anyway cause that's the way you are."_ - Phyllis Thaxter to husband John Garfield (and God bless her)

That fantastic line is also a pretty darn good summary of The Breaking Point. Garfield, up against it as a commercial charter-boat captain behind on his boat payments and house rent and with a wife and two kids to support, basically, spends the movie making one desperately stupid choice after another all the while sporting an arrogantly dumb look on his face while doing so. Fair or not, Garfield is unable to accept that, despite being a war hero, he is failing in civilian life.

I didn't much like this movie the first time I saw it years ago, but am revising my opinion up, a lot, as the story holds together well, the emotions in it are real, raw and powerful and the acting is outstanding, starting with Garfield, but including the entire cast.

Right out of the gate, Garfield ignores the advice and offers of help and support from his kind and decent wife (Thaxter) and equally kind and decent best friend and crewman (Hernandez) as financial problems mount. Instead, on his own, he makes the fateful decision to transport illegal immigrants into the country (yup, nothing's new) for an out-sized payday.

While a lot more happens after that, that's the trigger moment as that's when Garfield crossed the Rubicon from honest struggling family man to criminal covering his tracks. Throw into the mix that, as he distances his wife, he develops a friendship with a young wayward and pretty woman, Neal, who, like the illegal charter does for his money problems, seems to offer him a way out of his collapsing emotional world.

But wife Thaxter is no wallflower; she sees the danger Neal poses to her marriage and she fights to keep Garfield, if not faithful, at least wanting to return to her. But Garfield is a one-man wrecking crew who, despite a horrible first experience at crime, tries again, while also continuing to play footsie with Neal (the Motion Picture Production Code wouldn't allow it, but we all get that he's really sleeping with her).

From here, it's all more bad decisions and bad outcomes. But you stay with it because you're seeing, ugly at times, but viscerally real life exposed. And nothing is more real than watching Thaxter fight to save her family with grit: if she could have wrestled her husband to the ground to stop him from making another bad decision, you know she would have. Instead she delivers the quoted-at-the-top, fire-all-weapons line to try and prevent her husband from doing more stupid things.

Meanwhile, in his own misguided way, Garfield tenaciously and tragically fights to survive the consequences of his bad decisions as we watch a proud man crumble under the weight of all his awful choices. And in the end (spoiler alert), no one wins as Garfield survives, but is physically and mentally broken, while his best friend has been murdered. Sure, Garfield's wife keeps her family together, but despite the happy Motion-Picture-Production-Code forced spin, what's really left of it?

If you do watch it, stay with it to the end to see the child-alone-on-the-pier shot. I won't spoil it by giving you the _what _and _why_ of the scene, just note that you want to see it because it is one of the most heartbreaking and poignant moments in any movie.

Maybe the real theme of The Breaking Point is that a man needs his family to not be alone in the world. But I'll go with Thaxter's crushing quote as a darn good close second, which says, effectively, some men are so stubborn that they'll make stupid choices, even though they know they won't work, rather than lose face.

N.B., Pay attention to the performance of Juano Hernandez as Garfield's first mate as it's different but equally powerful to the one he gave in Young Man with a Horn. This man is an actor. Had he worked at a time when there were more opportunities in film for black men, you have to believe he'd have been a major star.


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## Peak and Pine

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 48332
> 
> *The Breaking Point* from 1950 with John Garfield, Phyllis Thaxter (a favorites less-well-known actress of mine), Juano Hernandez and Patricia Neal.


.
The town where I spent most of my growing up, Cape Elizabeth, had a tiny wooden movie theater called The Cape. Was surprised to return a few years ago to find it a turned into a live stage theater and renamed The Phyllis Thaxter Theater, now home to the Portland Players. I grew up and buddied with a kid named Creighton Getchell. His mom's sister was Thaxter. I never saw her, probably in California.
]


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## Fading Fast

*Special Agent* from 1935 with Richard Cortez, George Brent and Bette Davis

A good-guys-win, code-enforced movie that still brings some verve with a reasonably believable Feds-vs-the-mob script and A-list acting from Davis, Brent and Cortez


Cribbing from the real-world takedown of Al Capone on tax evasion, undercover Federal Agent Brent sets out to convict New York City mob-boss Cortez on tax-fraud charges 


The local police and prosecutors have repeatedly failed to nab Cortez on racketeering charges as he's good at hiding evidence of his illicit business and, when that fails, killing off any potential witnesses against him 


The lynchpin in Brent's effort to bring down Cortez is Cortez's top bookkeeper - super smart, young and cute - Davis (note: she's a young woman acknowledge by all as a numbers and business whiz), who is portrayed as stuck working for Cortez as, as she says, "you don't resign from this job"


And while it works and makes sense, the story would have been better in pre-code land where Davis would have been sleeping with both Cortez and Brent and would have had to decide which one of her lovers to, ultimately, sell out


But alas, by 1935, the Production Code didn't allow good girls to sleep with bad men (or any they weren't married to), so the climax revolves around Cortez trying to kill Davis before she can testify against him. A lot of gun-play and bullets flying ensue


Brent, as always, is solid but stolid, Davis is too corralled in the role to really flex her acting muscles but Cortez shines as the oleaginous crime boss. He's polished, urbane, ruthless, evil and always wearing glove - this was seemingly a thing for mob bosses back then (see Bogey in *All Through the Night*)


It's an entertaining enough hour-and-fifteen-minute flick held back by the Production Code and not enough screen time for Davis


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## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 48432
> 
> *Special Agent* from 1935 with Richard Cortez, George Brent and Bette Davis
> 
> A good-guys-win, code-enforced movie that still brings some verve with a reasonably believable Feds-vs-the-mob script and A-list acting from Davis, Brent and Cortez
> 
> 
> Cribbing from the real-world takedown of Al Capone on tax evasion, undercover Federal Agent Brent sets out to convict New York City mob-boss Cortez on tax-fraud charges
> 
> 
> The local police and prosecutors have repeatedly failed to nab Cortez on racketeering charges as he's good at hiding evidence of his illicit business and, when that fails, killing off any potential witnesses against him
> 
> 
> The lynchpin in Brent's effort to bring down Cortez is Cortez's top bookkeeper - super smart, young and cute - Davis (note: she's a young woman acknowledge by all as a numbers and business whiz), who is portrayed as stuck working for Cortez as, as she says, "you don't resign from this job"
> 
> 
> And while it works and makes sense, the story would have been better in pre-code land where Davis would have been sleeping with both Cortez and Brent and would have had to decide which one of her lovers to, ultimately, sell out
> 
> 
> But alas, by 1935, the Production Code didn't allow good girls to sleep with bad men (or any they weren't married to), so the climax revolves around Cortez trying to kill Davis before she can testify against him. A lot of gun-play and bullets flying ensue
> 
> 
> Brent, as always, is solid but stolid, Davis is too corralled in the role to really flex her acting muscles but Cortez shines as the oleaginous crime boss. He's polished, urbane, ruthless, evil and always wearing glove - this was seemingly a thing for mob bosses back then (see Bogey in *All Through the Night*)
> 
> 
> It's an entertaining enough hour-and-fifteen-minute flick held back by the Production Code and not enough screen time for Davis


Don't you miss the days when actors could really act, grabbing and holding out attention and not have to depend so heavily on special effects to hold the viewers attention? I do! In many ways the old films are still the best of the bunch out there.


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## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> Don't you miss the days when actors could really act, grabbing and holding out attention and not have to depend so heavily on special effects to hold the viewers attention? I do! In many ways the old films are still the best of the bunch out there.


I'm seeing some of that acting quality return, oddly, to TV shows. As the major movie releases, anyway, seem to be very special-effects driven, TV shows are where the better stories and acting appear to have set up camp.

On another site, I posted these comments about these current TV shows. All have their issues - and all have some degree of obnoxious political correctness, identity politics and virtue signaling built in - but all are pretty good story and quality acting-driven efforts that are more engaging than most of today's "big" movie releases.

I noticed we don't have a TV thread and was going to start one when I posted this stuff on the other site, but then thought that maybe we don't have one because we don't want one. Heck, our movie thread doesn't get that much traffic as it is.

If you do watch any of these shows at some point, I'd love to hear your thoughts.









*Dead to Me*
In season two, this well-acted mystery drama hasn't lost a step with lead Christina Applegate doing such an outstanding job that you wonder why she doesn't have a bigger career. And with episodes that are only thirty minutes long (an unfortunate rarity today), the crazy of murder, mayhem and mystery that is woven into regular family life here feels much like an updated version of those '50s *Alfred Hitchcock Presents *TV shows. Is it believable - no, but the characters are fun, the stories engrossing and the acting is fantastic.









*In The Dark*
Season two (so far, three episodes in) is just as good as season one, but the plot is very bumpy as it appears the writers hadn't planned on a second season, so they've had to untie some loose ends they had tied up at the end of season one. The acting, like so many shows today, is outstanding, with Perry Mattfeld killing it as the beautiful young blind woman with a brilliant detective-like mind and self-destructive lifestyle. As with many modern shows, you can pick the unbelievable plot apart, or just go with it as the dialogue is smart, the storylines engaging and the acting excellent.









*Perry Mason*
A solid '30s period drama that is beautifully filmed (with awesome 1930s' details), very well acted (with a parade of stars from other successful series), a story that's becoming more engrossing (two episodes in) and characters that are developing nuances and real personalities. Here, Mason is a private eye, not lawyer (yet), damaged from WWI and the Depression, but with a preternatural eye (aided by his always present camera) for details that other investigators miss. I was suspicious of this one at first, but it's winning me over. N.B. The Los Angeles funicular, Angels Flight (outstanding name), is fantastic to see and plays a major role in the plot.









*Godless *
This 2017 TV miniseries (half way through) is a bit slow-moving-but-engaging offering in the 19th Century American West genre. The aging leader of a gang of outlaws takes his gang on the hunt for a former member who, he believes, betrayed him, which leads him right into a town of almost all women owing to a mine explosion that killed most of the men. Like so many shows today, it's beautifully filmed and wonderfully acted with an impressive list of well-known veterans - Sam Waterston, Michelle Dockery and Jeff Daniels deserve special mention - and up-and-coming young actors. The story and characters are well drawn and complex, with only the now-and-again virtue signaling of anachronistic modern political correctness and identity politics detracting from the narrative.


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## eagle2250

^^
It strikes me that I need to expand my TV viewing beyond the nightly news on major networks and Fox News in general, Big Bang Theory reruns, American Pickers and.........I guess that's about it. Uh-Oh!


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## Fading Fast

*Crossroads* from1942 with Wiliam Powell, Hedy Lamarr, Basil Rathbone and Claire Trevor

A rising-star French diplomat (Powell) with a beautiful young bride (Lamarr) is on the verge of being promoted to ambassador to Brazil when he is accused of identity fraud owing to an amnesia-inducing car accident he had over a decade ago. While he wins the fraud trial, he is subsequently blackmailed by two individuals (Rathbone and Trever) claiming to be former accomplices in a robbery and murder all three supposedly committed before Powell's loss of memory.

They present Powell with, what they claim is, evidence of his former life and then demand a large sum of money in return for their silence. With that set up, the rest of the movie is watching Powell desperately trying to remember his past as he runs around Paris attempting to confirm the blackmailers' story while also trying to keep his wife unaware of his troubles and his career on track.

If this sounds Hitchcockian, it's because it is very Hitchcockian - amnesia, blackmail, important man's successful life at risk, dramatic trial, beautiful wife (albeit, not blonde), harrowing chase scene at the climax - but it misses the master-director's touch. Here, director Jack Conway does an adequate job, but he doesn't frame scenes with Hitchcock's eye for tension and fear, nor does he use Hitchcock's audience-friendly faster pace. Hence, the movie drags in several spots despite its charismatic stars and engaging story.

That said, it's still worth the watch, especially with the always lovely-to-look-at Hedy Lamarr playing the devoted and befuddled wife. Having seen Lamarr clearly comfortable being fully naked in 1933's *Ecstasy,* I always half expect her to take her clothes off in any movie she's in just for the heck of it. She always looks like she wants to - but alas, the Motion Picture Production Code scores another victory. Even with her clothes on though, she's still an enjoyable actress to watch.


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## Fading Fast

*B.F.'s Daughter* from 1948 with Barbara Stanwyck, Van Heflin (now that's a name), Charles Coburn and Keenan Wynn

Once in a while (almost never now), Hollywood makes a movie that looks at capitalism versus socialism (in this case, as a secondary plot) and, while giving the nod to capitalism (wait, what?), presents both sides with nuance and respect.

A wealthy industrialist's (Coburn) daughter (Stanwyck) drops her slowly rising businessman and father-approved fiance to marry a left-wing, socialist professor and writer (Heflin) who's the ideological antipode to her capitalist pater.

Her father describes himself thusly, "I'm a builder, the world needs builders," and if, in my life, I stood for something "I stood for rugged individualism." Somewhere Ayn Rand is smiling. Conversely, his daughter's new husband opposes wealth and capitalism and reflexively supports any group perceived as weak and needy regardless of facts and circumstances.

In a beautiful early scene, when the father and new husband meet, neither play to pat stereotypes: the father sincerely wants to understand the daughter's choice and the new husband sympathetically realizes the pain his marriage is causing the old man.

Modern writers would have flexed their virtue-signally progressive muscles by turning the scene into one of a cold-hearted capitalist disowning his daughter as the socialist son-in-law denounces everything the old man stands for. Here, the daughter isn't disowned and the son-in-law doesn't denounce - making the scene real and powerful.

And while the theme of competing economic systems will also indirectly drive the newlywed's bumpy marriage, the marriage itself is the main story. These newlyweds, like most newlyweds, enthusiastically believe their love will overcome all obstacles, the first ones being all but no money to live on and Heflin's career as a writer/speaker stuck in idle.

While Heflin refuses all offers of assistance from his father-in-law, Coburn covertly helps the newlyweds with money he passes to Stanwyck, while, also unbeknownst to Heflin, Stanwyck uses this money (and her father's influence) to jump-start Heflin's career. And as Heflin's career grows, his wife, combining her husband's new money with her father's, purchases a home and the other accoutrements necessary to place her and her husband in society.

As all this slowly dawns on Heflin, he and his wife become estranged as he resents her surreptitious aid and her social aspirations, but also has no intention of going backwards professionally. Instead, a modus vivendi takes place in the marriage as she stays in society in New York, while he goes off to join, his heroes, the New Dealers in WWII Washington.

With the marriage aging poorly, her father, on his deathbed, encourages his daughter to fight for her husband, despite his ideological disagreements with him as he knows her husband is a good man even if he hates his politics. And upon the old man's passing, Helfin reflects that he wasn't fair to a good man who saw the world differently than he does. The movie's strength is its nuanced balance of competing ideas and personalities versus the approach most movies today take of political and ideological purity (and virtue signaling).

Also running in the background are a couple of on-message subplots. Stanwyck, playing to type for a moment as the jealous society wife, assumes her husband is cheating on her when she finds bills in his things related to another woman's living expenses. Accusing without asking, she eventually discovers, to her embarrassment, her husband is helping a blind war refugee get a new start in America. So, we learn that even those who narcissistically put charity on the highest moral pedestal for all to see do some sincere and private good at times.

Conversely, a cocky liberal reporter (Wynn) and friend of Heflin's who denounces Ivy league commissioned officers as the pampered elite of the war - which starts another fight in the Stanwyck-Heflin household - has to eat crow as one of the "elites" he singled out for public mockery (a long-time friend of Stanwyck's) dies heroically on a voluntary mission. So, we learn that having been born to money and status doesn't define, perforce, a person as cowardly and callous.

And all of this reflects on the one question the movie asks repeatedly, can a marriage of ideologically opposed people work? The movie - until the Motion Picture Production Code forces a not-believable happy ending in, literally, the last thirty seconds - says no, while real life says it's hard at best. In our politically polarizing times, many married and dating couples are probably asking themselves the exact same question that 1948's *B.F.'s Daughter* debated so well.


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## Fading Fast

*Gambling Lady* from 1934 with Barbara Stanwyck, Joel McCrea, C. Aubrey Smith and Pat O'Brien

Another sixty-ish-minute-long movie that's the 1930's equivalent of today's hour-long TV drama - and that's meant as a compliment.

Barbara Stanwyck is the honest gambler daughter of an honest gambler father who managed to avoid the corruption, tricks, cheats and deceptions most gamblers of that time used. Also, a gambling syndicate - a mob group that controls the illegal betting in the city - regularly tries to recruit her father; however, he manages to play it straight and solo.

But Stanwyck will need all of her aleatory talents to survive and dodge the syndicate when her father passes away suddenly leaving her a young single woman with little money. Okay, she's Barbara Stanwyck, so a few men pop up quickly like gambling shark and syndicate member Pat O'Brien. He's a long-time friend who wants to marry her, but despite having affection for him, Stanwyck feels no spark.

Next up is wealthy society scion Joel McCrea; there's a spark, but also a rub - he's "class;" she's, well, not. And in a neat twist, this bothers Stanwyck, not McCrea, as he's just a sap in love, but she's thinking big picture and sees the challenges her background will create in his world.

But McCrea's father (Smith), a prominent industrialist with, like his son, a taste for gambling dens, after initial suspicions, supports his son's efforts. The father understands that Stanwyck - whom he's known for years, having met her while gambling - singularly has more character than any combination of five of the society debutantes chasing his son.

So, despite a few more typical 1930s movie misunderstandings, McCrea and Stanwyck find their way past all of it and get married. Things initially go pretty well even with McCrea's jealous streak, especially when it comes to O'Brien. To be sure, his society friends have mixed feelings about his new wife - the men love her (tip: men tend to love pretty women); the women look down on her especially since she stole away one of the catches of their clique.

But then O'Brien gets arrested and Stanwyck, despite husband McCrea's objection, comes to his aid out of long-time loyalty that McCrea mistakes for romantic affection. From here, more misunderstandings and a concealed self sacrifice all but doom the marriage, or do they?

And remember, while we are almost at the end, all of this happens in about sixty minutes. They really knew how to pack a lot of plot into these fast efforts. To be sure, the plot is mainly contrived and cliched, but still enjoyable especially when being propelled forward by pros like Stanwyck, Smith, O'Brien and McCrea.

Is it a great movie? No. But thought of as an hour-long show in a pre-TV era, it more than holds its own with most modern TV efforts. It provided a 1930s audience with at least as much escapism as television does for us today.


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## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 48693
> 
> *Gambling Lady* from 1934 with Barbara Stanwyck, Joel McCrea, C. Aubrey Smith and Pat O'Brien
> 
> Another sixty-ish-minute-long movie that's the 1930's equivalent of today's hour-long TV drama - and that's meant as a compliment.
> 
> Barbara Stanwyck is the honest gambler daughter of an honest gambler father who managed to avoid the corruption, tricks, cheats and deceptions most gamblers of that time used. Also, a gambling syndicate - a mob group that controls the illegal betting in the city - regularly tries to recruit her father; however, he manages to play it straight and solo.
> 
> But Stanwyck will need all of her aleatory talents to survive and dodge the syndicate when her father passes away suddenly leaving her a young single woman with little money. Okay, she's Barbara Stanwyck, so a few men pop up quickly like gambling shark and syndicate member Pat O'Brien. He's a long-time friend who wants to marry her, but despite having affection for him, Stanwyck feels no spark.
> 
> Next up is wealthy society scion Joel McCrea; there's a spark, but also a rub - he's "class;" she's, well, not. And in a neat twist, this bothers Stanwyck, not McCrea, as he's just a sap in love, but she's thinking big picture and sees the challenges her background will create in his world.
> 
> But McCrea's father (Smith), a prominent industrialist with, like his son, a taste for gambling dens, after initial suspicions, supports his son's efforts. The father understands that Stanwyck - whom he's known for years, having met her while gambling - singularly has more character than any combination of five of the society debutantes chasing his son.
> 
> So, despite a few more typical 1930s movie misunderstandings, McCrea and Stanwyck find their way past all of it and get married. Things initially go pretty well even with McCrea's jealous streak, especially when it comes to O'Brien. To be sure, his society friends have mixed feelings about his new wife - the men love her (tip: men tend to love pretty women); the women look down on her especially since she stole away one of the catches of their clique.
> 
> But then O'Brien gets arrested and Stanwyck, despite husband McCrea's objection, comes to his aid out of long-time loyalty that McCrea mistakes for romantic affection. From here, more misunderstandings and a concealed self sacrifice all but doom the marriage, or do they?
> 
> And remember, while we are almost at the end, all of this happens in about sixty minutes. They really knew how to pack a lot of plot into these fast efforts. To be sure, the plot is mainly contrived and cliched, but still enjoyable especially when being propelled forward by pros like Stanwyck, Smith, O'Brien and McCrea.
> 
> Is it a great movie? No. But thought of as an hour-long show in a pre-TV era, it more than holds its own with most modern TV efforts. It provided a 1930s audience with at least as much escapism as television does for us today.


If the movie is in black and white and was put out more than 40 years back, it must be worth watching. Besides Barbara Stanwyck is a handsome woman who traditionally played strong, sturdy women in her roles! Who has not watched an episode or two of Big Valley, the TV series? As always, an excellent review.


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## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> If the movie is in black and white and was put out more than 40 years back, it must be worth watching. Besides Barbara Stanwyck is a handsome woman who traditionally played strong, sturdy women in her roles! Who has not watched an episode or two of Big Valley, the TV series? As always, an excellent review.


Thank you. I was "introduced" to Ms. Stanwyck as a young kid watching "The Big Valley" repeats on TV in the early '70s. She seemed really cool even then as a women in her 60s.

It was only later that decade, when I started watching old movies that I "discovered" that Health and Nick's mom was really a big-time movie star from the '30s and '40s.

I agree, a naturally beautiful woman who, usually, played smart and formidable women. She's one of my favorites. You've probably noticed that I post a lot of her movies in this thread.


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## Fading Fast

*The Night of the Iguana* from 1964 with Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr, Grayson Hall and Sue Lyon

It's a play turned into a movie by Tennessee Williams that ends on an upbeat note. Wait, what?

Yup, the master of stories about broken people breaking some more, wrote a story about broken people healing somewhat and finding hope. And somehow, despite being about depressed people failing in life, *The Night of the Iguana* doesn't weigh as heavily throughout as other Wiliams' moribundity, such as *Cat on a Hot Tin Roof *or *The Glass Menagerie*.

A defrocked (or not, a bit unclear, but definitely on the outs with his church) minister (Burton) - he canoodled with a parishioner - makes a bare-bones living running tours in Mexico for, at least in the movie's case, Christian school teachers looking for a morally uplifting holiday.

Well, they chose the wrong guide. Richard Burton (who, just a side note, should never have been allowed to act in the same movie with Elizabeth Taylor) is pitch perfect here as the wayward man of God. Tested immediately, Burton spends the beginning of the tour trying not to sleep with comely-and-curvy blonde and come-hither teenager Sue Lyon, especially as her ascetic and dessicated chaperone, wonderfully played by Grayson Hall, breathes down his neck threatening to get him fired at every turn.

To escape her threats, the heat and the bus-load of bible-song-singing women, Burton, in desperation, breaks with the tour's itinerary and all but shanghais the women to a remote mountain hotel run by an old girlfriend, Ava Gardner. Here, Burton hopes to buy time to save his job. With the women grumbling, and Gardner not sure she wants her old boyfriend around, into the hotel walks a middle-aged sketch artist (Kerr) and her ninety-year-old poet grandfather.

The rest of the movie is, one, watching Burton, fueled with alcohol (supposedly, not just a fiction as he was said to reek of booze throughout the filming) fight his demons and conscience as this damaged man tries to use sex and drink to overcome doubts about Church and faith. Second, is Ava Gardner having her own mid-life crisis, but suffering no such pangs of guilt as she throws back liquor while sleeping with two young, buff local boys that she keeps on the staff, seemingly, just for her enjoyment.

But while Burton writhes in agony over his dilemmas, Gardner appears to almost enjoy having them as she wisecracks her way through each crisis. The third leg of this my-life-is-crumbling stool is the approaching-forty and still-virginal Kerr, broke and hiding from life as her grandfather's caretaker.

With the chaperone still trying to get Burton fired and the other women constantly caterwauling, Burton, Gardner and Kerr alternately support and berate each other through their personal crises. Yet, as opposed to most Wiliams' offerings, there's a little light and mirth mixed in with the angst and distress. You don't want to miss seeing Burton, first with cynicism, and then, with empathy, cajole middle-aged Kerr into telling him why she's still a virgin: it's real, raw, painful and, sadly, believable.

And it comes down to this: all three ultimately realize that life is agonizingly hard for everyone, but the trick is to find out how you can fight off your own pain and despair. You'll have to watch to see what each one decides to do, but as a hint, toward the end, the titular and metaphoric iguana - tied to a rope to be fattened up as a meal for the locals - is cut free by Burton with this declamation (and awful pun): "I just cut loose one of God's creatures at the end of his rope."

It's a good, solid story and the gorgeous black-and-white cinematography beautifully captures 1960s Mexico. But this is an actors' movie and Burton, Gardner and Kerr (with a healthy assist from Hall) all rise to the challenge by giving some of the best performances of their careers.


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## Peak and Pine

That was good, Fast. Refreshed the whole thing to me, which I saw first-run in a theater on Staten Island when I was 19. With a bunch of rowdy college buddies. We were somewhat tanked. We always were. I remember a certain phrase, a euphemism that I've since used all my life, correct me here please, _the big swim, _for suicide by ocean. Is that in the film?

You of all people, and me, might like to know that starring in the play from which this is adapted, playing the Ava Gardiner rôle, a woman that I badly wanted to see on Broadway, but I was maybe 16 and still living in Maine (about a mile from where she once lived and on the same road), why that would be...Bette Daaaa-vis (in a poor attempt to imitate her cadence.).

Your review made the film seem bearable. I had never seen the then almost over-the-hill twin famousies, Ava Gardined and Deborah Kerr, and went because, though I disliked Williams and his southern gothic take on contemporary life, being then a White New England Supremacist which had nothing to do with looking down on Blacks since we looked down on everybody, went for Burton from whom I took voice lessons though he doesn't know that. His biggest young fan. And later coming to my senses, an enormous Tennessee Williams one as well. _Night of the Iguana _is not his best play, but is his best play title. Insightful review. Could have used you as a seat maybe, back in '64.


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## Fading Fast

*Ocean's Eleven* from 1960 with Frank Sinatra, his Rat Pack and a bunch of other stars

I had never seen this one before (other than ten minutes here and there), but having just read a Frank Sinatra biography (see comments here:  #814 ) that talked about this movie, when it popped up on TCM, I hit record.

I'm glad I did. Yes, it's silly and contrived, but it's not hiding any of that. This is a personality movie - you either like Sinatra, his crew and their Rat-Pack-ness or not. The fun is seeing the stars - Sinatra, Dean Martin, Peter Lawford and Sammy Davis Jr. - basically play themselves (or, at least, their public personas) with nonchalance but not mockery.

The plot is simple enough: a group of WWII 182 Airborne Division vets, a decade and a half after the war, are pulled together by their former leader, Sinatra, to execute a heist of the five major casinos in Las Vegas on New Year's Eve. And the plot serves its purpose to give these guys a reason to be in a movie together, wear cool clothes, say cool things and run around a cool town.

Each star plays to type: Sinatra is the bit-angry, bit-sarcastic, but caring leader with women troubles (a reason to bring in hot-thing-of-the-moment Angie Dickinson who never gets to really do anything in the movie); Martin is relaxed cool; Lawford is the rich boy only in on the heist so that he doesn't have to keep asking his mother for money and Davis Jr. is the funny, smart guy who gets the joke all along but stays in on the heist out of camaraderie.

And in his best role ever (that I've seen him in), Cesar Romero plays a "retired" professional crook, now Lawford's rich mother's fiance who's tasked by the local sheriff with sussing out the _who_ and _what_ of the heist after the fact. It's kind of like the Rat Pack's father shows up to teach the boys a lesson. Romero is completely comfortable in his role, neither under nor over playing it, and seemingly having as much fun as the Rat Pack "boys" were.

The denouement is enjoyable, if not that original, with the closing shot so iconic that Tarantino riffed on it thirty-plus years later in *Reservoir Dogs*. I'm sure the public got the movie's joke at the time - just enjoy Sinatra and his buddies having fun and looking cool in Vegas and don't worry too much about the rest of it.

And that might be why it's aged pretty well as it was never a serious effort in the first place. It's a time capsule of early '60s cool when "cool" meant well-tailored dark suits, skinny ties, smoking, Vegas, cocktails in tumblers and crooners. By the end of the decade, all that would look "square," but it was cool in its day and it's cool to look back at it now.


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## Big T

I can't say a favorite, as that changes quite frequently.

Lately, I've been watching and rewatching W.C. Fields. His humor was timeless (and quite risque!).


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## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 48792
> 
> *Ocean's Eleven* from 1960 with Frank Sinatra, his Rat Pack and a bunch of other stars
> 
> I had never seen this one before (other than ten minutes here and there), but having just read a Frank Sinatra biography (see comments here:  #814 ) that talked about this movie, when it popped up on TCM, I hit record.
> 
> I'm glad I did. Yes, it's silly and contrived, but it's not hiding any of that. This is a personality movie - you either like Sinatra, his crew and their Rat-Pack-ness or not. The fun is seeing the stars - Sinatra, Dean Martin, Peter Lawford and Sammy Davis Jr. - basically play themselves (or, at least, their public personas) with nonchalance but not mockery.
> 
> The plot is simple enough: a group of WWII 182 Airborne Division vets, a decade and a half after the war, are pulled together by their former leader, Sinatra, to execute a heist of the five major casinos in Las Vegas on New Year's Eve. And the plot serves its purpose to give these guys a reason to be in a movie together, wear cool clothes, say cool things and run around a cool town.
> 
> Each star plays to type: Sinatra is the bit-angry, bit-sarcastic, but caring leader with women troubles (a reason to bring in hot-thing-of-the-moment Angie Dickinson who never gets to really do anything in the movie); Martin is relaxed cool; Lawford is the rich boy only in on the heist so that he doesn't have to keep asking his mother for money and Davis Jr. is the funny, smart guy who gets the joke all along but stays in on the heist out of camaraderie.
> 
> And in his best role ever (that I've seen him in), Cesar Romero plays a "retired" professional crook, now Lawford's rich mother's fiance who's tasked by the local sheriff with sussing out the _who_ and _what_ of the heist after the fact. It's kind of like the Rat Pack's father shows up to teach the boys a lesson. Romero is completely comfortable in his role, neither under nor over playing it, and seemingly having as much fun as the Rat Pack "boys" were.
> 
> The denouement is enjoyable, if not that original, with the closing shot so iconic that Tarantino riffed on it thirty-plus years later in *Reservoir Dogs*. I'm sure the public got the movie's joke at the time - just enjoy Sinatra and his buddies having fun and looking cool in Vegas and don't worry too much about the rest of it.
> 
> And that might be why it's aged pretty well as it was never a serious effort in the first place. It's a time capsule of early '60s cool when "cool" meant well-tailored dark suits, skinny ties, smoking, Vegas, cocktails in tumblers and crooners. By the end of the decade, all that would look "square," but it was cool in its day and it's cool to look back at it now.
> 
> View attachment 48793


 The remake of Ocean's Eleven in 2001, starring George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon could hold a candle to the original production with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis, Jr.


----------



## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> The remake of Ocean's Eleven in 2001, starring George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon could hold a candle to the original production with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis, Jr.


I've never seen the remake and, after having seen the original, am indifferent to seeing it.

The original is special because of the actors and place at that time; the story was unimportant. Hence a remake is basically taking the least important element of the original movie - the story - and using that as the basis for a new movie - meh.

I have nothing against the remake and might watch it if it happens to come on when I'm flipping through channels or something. Although, your comment isn't encouraging me.

A more interesting concept would be to make a movie about the making of the original movie that focused on Frank's and the others' lives at the time they made "Ocean's Eleven."

Then you'd have a story to tell as Frank and Sammy both had some serious stuff going on in their lives at that time and you'd also have the fun of recreating a wonderful time and place. Expand the timeline and you could even make it into at TV series today.


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> I've never seen the remake and, after having seen the original, am indifferent to seeing it.
> 
> The original is special because of the actors and place at that time; the story was unimportant. Hence a remake is basically taking the least important element of the original movie - the story - and using that as the basis for a new movie - meh.
> 
> I have nothing against the remake and might watch it if it happens to come on when I'm flipping through channels or something. Although, your comment isn't encouraging me.
> 
> A more interesting concept would be to make a movie about the making of the original movie that focused on Frank's and the others' lives at the time they made "Ocean's Eleven."
> 
> Then you'd have a story to tell as Frank and Sammy both had some serious stuff going on in their lives at that time and you'd also have the fun of recreating a wonderful time and place. Expand the timeline and you could even make it into at TV series today.


I wholeheartedly concur with the post above. In my post #442 above, I intended to say the remake could not hold a candle to the original movie. Alas I left out the critical word NOT! Sorry about that.


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## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> I wholeheartedly concur with the post above. In my post #442 above, I intended to say the remake could not hold a candle to the original movie. Alas I left out the critical word NOT! Sorry about that.


I got it from context especially since I make typos, leave words out, etc., all the time.

Hey, there is so much streaming and so much demand for "content" maybe a Sinatra period show will happen at some point.


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## Vecchio Vespa

I don't know that it is "best ever," but we rewatched North by Northwest last night. It is still awfully good and wearing quite well.


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## Fading Fast

*Mr. Smith Goes to Washington* from 1939 with James Stewart, Jean Arthur, Claude Rains, Edward Arnold and Guy Kibbee

I'm not above sentimentality and melodrama in movies (or books) - I've seen *The Bishop's Wife* and *Shop Around the Corner* more times than I care to admit - I'm just not a big buyer of director Frank Capra's particular brand of mawkishness. Maybe it's too obvious or too grandiose or too in love with itself, but I find my cynicism, not optimism, is awakened by his "single knight charging the corrupt citadel" stories.

So when naive Jimmy Stewart is plucked from political obscurity to fill the vacated junior senator seat of a Western state because the state's corrupt political machine believes it can control him, you know, immediately with Capra, what you are in for.

Every point is exaggerated and pounded in with a sledge hammer. The political machine isn't just corrupt, but so corrupt that the state's governor (Kibbee) and senior senator (Rains) snap to attention at every order from the machine's boss (Arnold). And Arnold, who made a career playing venal fat cats in the '30s and '40s, is at his most venal fat cat-ness here - demanding, pushing, shoving, fulsomely charming, bribing and threatening everyone so as to line his pockets.

But Stewart is Arnold's ridiculously innocent opposite. Upon arriving in Washington, he gushes over every building, every statue of a Founding Father and every inscription propounding the ideals of America (modern progressive won't be filming a remake of this one). With that set up - and the catalyst of a political-machine-sponsored corrupt dam bill butting heads with Stewart's "boys camp" bill (a '40s Fresh-Air-Fund-like idea) - Capra has his David-versus-Goliath narrative in place.

And I'd have yawned and rolled my eyes all the way through except for the movie's truly saving grace, Jean Arthur. As the experienced secretary to both senators - Rains (the movie's second saving grace) and Stewart - she knows the ins and outs, peccadilloes, cheats and inside baseball of the Senate. With her femininely husky voice, smart eyes and blonde pulchritude, she tries to warn Stewart about the real "ideals" and machinations of the Senate to prevent him from getting cut up into little pieces.

But this cynical city girl - she can drink with the boys or spot a dirty deal a mile away - starts to like the virtue in Stewart while seeing anew, and disliking, the mendacity in Rains, Arnold and that crew.

While a lot is fake or caricatures here, Arthur's character's personal life rings true. Despite being past her prime marrying age, this single and intelligent woman has a male suitor, a goofy-but-good-guy reporter, begging her to marry him, but she's in no hurry and is not worried. Feminist icons can be secretaries who sincerely like men, but play the game by their own rules and timeline.

Also, let's not kid ourselves, part of why Arthur rejects the offer of marriage is because she has eyes for someone else. And that someone else is Stewart who, after initially getting mauled by the political machine, is coaxed back to his feet by Arthur who will also guide him as coach and mentor for his next attempted broadside.

And in that fight, Stewart's closing Senate speech - we've lost our way from our founding values - is outstanding acting, but it's also designed bravura to be the shining moment of the movie. However, it's Arthur's nuanced and mirthful performance as his stealth Senate tutor during his speech that is the heart, soul and joy of the picture. She's too smart for either of the men in her life, but the heart wants what the heart wants.

The movie is all Capra; if you love his stuff, you'll love *Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.* If you, like me, are a lesser fan, then Jean Arthur's performance will carry you through the Capra schmaltz. And there's also the fun time travel to iconic 1940s Washington to keep you engaged while cloyingly good battles comic-book evil.

Ms. Arthur, what do you think of all these smart men in Washington?


----------



## Fading Fast

Two from TCM's Nina Foch Day








Thanks for watching my movies. Yours truly, NF









*The Dark Past* from 1948 with William Holden, Lee J. Cobb and Nina Foch

Decent noir / Freudian psychodrama


Escaped convict Holden and his gang (including Foch) take psychiatrist Cobb and his family and friends hostage at their country house


All the usual hostage-in-the-country-house stuff happens: a few escape attempt are thwarted, some secrets come out, tempers flare amongst the crooks and hostages, somebody gets shot, etc. - probably fresher material in '48


The hook in this one, though, is when Cobb begins to psychoanalyze Holden who resists at first, but then gives in, because one reoccurring nightmare has been haunting criminal Holden his entire life


Cobb's professional approach is Freudian-dream-analysis-as-cure on steroids: find the childhood reason for the nightmare and the patient is cured (and criminal reformed). If only, but it was a fairytale that several movies told at the time


Hint: the solution is creepily close to an Oedipal Complex


Cobb and Holden are engaging antagonists / their psychodrama battle makes the movie worth watching


Foch, looking all sunshine and cleanliness, is miscast as the gun moll, but she gives it the college try









*My Name is Julia Ross* from 1945 with Nina Foch, Mae Whitty and George Macready

This is B-noir at its finest blending elements of *Gaslight* and *Jane Eyre*


Ms Foch is the innocent young lady hired into a "dream job" in London as the personal secretary to the lovely old lady (Whitty). However, on day two of her new job, she wakes up to find she's in a different house (a classic gothic mansion on a sea-side cliff), being called by another name and, effectively, being held prisoner, but with no idea why


Throw into the mix a creepy adult son with an abnormal passion for knives and violence, secret passageways, dispassionate servants and, maybe, a friend on the outside looking for her (or not) and all the elements of a good "I can't get out of this crazy place" movie are present


From there it's failed escape attempts, followed by tighter lock-downs, followed by more harrowing attempts, all while Ms. Foch tries to unravel the reason that she's here


It's a fun, occasionally tense, fast sixty-plus-minutes film where Ms. Foch shines as the distraught ingenue, while talented Mae Whitty, looking like every one's kind grandmother, is perfect as the mastermind of the nefarious plot

N.B. *Executive Suite* from 1954 (re-teaming Foch and Holden) is my favorite Nina Foch movie (it was on, but I didn't see it this time). It has a solid story where, shockingly, Hollywood takes a somewhat balanced look at how business and politics in the executive suite really work. Its all-star cast is pitch perfect, including Foch as the super-efficient, loyal and smart executive secretary. Yes, she's as buttoned-up as her bosses, but she lets her sexual passion peek out from her icy blondness now and then. Hitchcock missed on never casting this tall, aloof, flaxen-haired beauty in one of his films.


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## Fading Fast

*Here Come the Huggetts* from 1948 with Jack Warner, Diana Dors, Petula Clark, Susan Shaw and Jane Hylton

Post-war English cinema is a treat. Lacking the funds of Hollywood, British filmmakers relied on strong stories, smart dialogue and talented actors to make engaging movies. They had to as they didn't have the budget to paper over weak efforts with whiz-bang special effects, gripping action-adventure sequences, exotic location shots or glamorous star power.

*Here Come the Huggetts* is not the best of these efforts, but it's still a small gem of a movie - kind of the British version of America's *Four Daughters*. The Huggetts are a middle-class family living at a time when England had won the war but was losing its Empire and economic might.

So, despite pater Huggett being the number two man in a small manufacturing firm, there's little opulence in their household as evidenced when we see the fuss made by his three daughters and wife over the installation of their first telephone. Which was only ordered because the father's boss wants to be able to get in touch with his employee after work hours (not unlike how firms were "giving" employees Blackberrys twenty years ago).

It is real day-to-day issues like getting a telephone put in or the family camping out overnight to get a good location to see the Royal Wedding (Grandma's corporeal demands defeat that effort at the last minute) that make the Huggetts real and relatable. Just like when mother and daughter fight over the morality of "black market" food that they both know they'll, eventually, shut up about and just eat (rationing continued for many years after the war in England) or when the oldest daughter has doubts right before her wedding.

The plot - if there is one in this slice-of-life story - involves the arrival of cousin Diana (Diana Dors) who's staying with the Huggetts temporarily while her mom has an operation. Teenager Dors, looking still baby-fat chubby to my eye, is supposedly a va-va-voom girl that throws the house in a tizzy as she kinda steals one of the daughter's boyfriends while nearly costing Mr. Huggett his position with her sloppy effort at the job he obtained for her at his factory.

But it's really the daughters who bring the interesting teen spirit, in particular, a pre-stardom Petula Clark as the smart but not snarky youngest who gets the craziness of her house. But she loves her family and its nuttiness and shows it when she wonderfully stands up to her dad's intimidating boss on his behalf. And why anyone is looking at a bit lumpy Diana Dors when blonde, lithe and angular middle daughter Susan Shaw is around makes no sense, but watching Shaw go from slightly stuck-up to aware and kinder when her taken-for-granted boyfriend drops her is life made real.

If you do see it, look for the scene when a gentleman caller, who's not her fiance, shows up for kind-of-engaged oldest daughter Jane Hylton. Few words are exchanged when dad opens the door, but the young man's attempt to overcompensate for his nervousness with a quirky offer to dad of a produced-from-his-coat-pocket peach as dad stays stone faced until giving just an inch of warmth with the slightest hand gesture is writing, directing and acting at its nuanced best.

The joy of the Huggetts are sincere moments like that or the wonderful relationship Mr. and Mrs. Huggett have as they occasionally grumble at each other, but it's clear that, underneath, their marriage is a well-oiled machine based on love and respect without a lot of having to say it.

The budget for *Here Come the Huggetts* was probably a fraction of the average Hollywood offering at the time, but it proves again that filmmaking is at its best when it focuses on telling real stories about real people in a relatable way. All the attention-grabbing big-budget stuff can be fun and enhancing, but nothing beats old-fashioned storytelling done well. I only learned afterwards that this is the second in a series of four Huggett movies; I'll now be on the lookout for the other three.


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## Fading Fast

*Sorority House* from 1939 with Anne Shirley, J.M. Kerrigan and Barbara Read

1939 deserves its reputation as the greatest year for movies ever, but it was not because of this effort. To be fair, *Sorority House *is a fine college-fluff B-movie with some engaging moments, but unfortunately, it takes the easy, two-dimensional way out of too-many difficulties.

It starts out with promise as we see a small-town widower and grocery-store owner (Kerrigan) quietly borrow money to surprise his devoted daughter (Shirley) with a last-minute opportunity to go to college. So off to an institution of higher education goes perky and optimistic Shirley not realizing that women's colleges (at that time) were mainly a connected and clubby rich girl's affair socially driven by the cliquish sorority system.

Stuck in the social wasteland of a college boarding house, Shirley quickly learns about and yearns to join a sorority as "rush week" begins. One of her roommates, a mousy looking girl (by Hollywood standards as they put thick-framed glasses on cute-as-heck Barbara Read) who knows she's not "sorority material," provides wonderful balance to Shirley's newbie enthusiasm as Read points out all the foibles and snobbery of the sorority system. Shirley's other roommate is a "legacy" student desperate to live up to her family's expectations that she'll be pursued by a top sorority.

After Shirley unintentionally catches the eye of one of the big men on campus (BMOC), he starts a rumor that Shirley comes from money in a naive attempt to help her chances to be rushed. As a result, Shirley - pretty, now presumed rich and dating the BOMC - is inundated with offers. Realizing she'll need more money from her dad to join - having nice clothes and funds for social events are, basically, a sorority requirement - Shirley is about to give up until her really nice dad shows up with the needed funds.

And the night of his arrival provides the movie's best sequence. When Shirley, at a sorority rush party, realizes that everyone thinks her dad is rich, she tries to tell them otherwise (good girl), but when her dad actually shows up and she sees he won't fit in with his shabby suit and aw-shucks manner, she pushes him away from the party (bad girl), but then realizes her mistakes and runs after him to apologize and invite him back (good girl).

Here is where this relatively good movie flips to quickly messaging a bunch of sugary stuff as salt-of-the-earth dad sets the just-rejected and now-depressed legacy roommate straight about what's important in life. He also gently lectures the three girls about not becoming the same snobs the sorority girls are when they pursue their plans to form an anti-sorority club.

Meh, it went from telling a story to pontificating in an effort to wrap things up in a hurry. But to be fair, it does an okay job as a sixty-minute-long effort better thought of as the equivalent of today's hour-long TV drama than a major-movie release.

N.B. There were a series of girls-at-college movies in the '30s, with the best one being the surprisingly challenging and real *These Glamour Girls* that is very much worth seeing. (Comments here: #24172 )


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## Fading Fast

*This Land is Mine* from 1943 with Charles Laughton, Maureen O'Hara, Walter Slezak, George Sanders and Kent Smith

The word propaganda, like so many things, has been tainted by its association with Nazi Germany, but its core meaning - promoting a particular, usually political, point of view - is also part of what we call freedom of speech.

It's dangerous when the state - as in Nazi Germany - controls speech and promotes only its point of view, hence the taint, but in a free society, where everyone advocates for his or her own beliefs, everyone, effectively, is propagandizing for his or her own viewpoint and ideas.

So it is as a compliment that I say, *This Land is Mine* is outstanding propaganda.

"Some town" in Europe is occupied by the Germans, but as the Germans did in several places, they wanted this to be a "soft" occupation where they collaborate with willing locals to leave a patina of self-governance in place. Many opportunistic and many just understandably scared locals go along, but a few resist by printing an underground newspaper while others physically resist through sabotage.

Cowardly mamma's boy and schoolteacher Charles Laughton plays by the new rules and looks the other way until his hero, the school's headmaster, is arrested for promoting "unacceptable" ideas at the school. Later, the headmaster is chosen as one of ten hostages to be executed by the Germans in retaliation for a murdered-by-the-resistance German soldier.

Laughton, meanwhile, stumbles upon the body of a collaborator, George Sanders, whose conscience drove him to suicide after he turned his fiance's brother in for sabotage and the brother is killed trying to avoid arrest. Laughton, having found the body, is then arrested and charged with the murder of the collaborator. Adding to the complications, the collaborator's fiancé is a school teacher, Maureen O'Hara, with whom Laughton has been secretly in love.

This brings Laughton into direct conflict with the town's Nazi overseer beautifully played by Walter Slezak. Slezak is no cardboard Nazi thug. He's an educated man who quotes and clearly respects the leading philosophers of Western Civilization; a man who would prefer not to use force, not to kill the innocent. But he is also a shrewd and, when necessary, ruthless Nazi willing to kill ten innocent locals in retaliation for one murdered German soldier - order must be maintained.

Slezak doesn't want to have Laughton put on trial, but if he must be tried and found guilty of murder to maintain the fiction that the collaborator's death wasn't a suicide, then, so be it. Having the public know that collaborators are committing suicide over guilt is not in the Nazi's interest.

It takes two thirds of this better-than-average WWII propaganda film to get to this point, but then it only gets much, much better.

With his fears almost realized, Laughton, on trial in an all but rigged court for a murder he didn't commit, finds his inner fortitude, in part, when he sees, from his jail cell awaiting trial, his former headmaster executed in the prison's yard by the Nazis.

In dramatic courtroom fashion, with the prosecutor screaming to have his defense speech shut down, Laughton - disheveled, a bit nervous, but clearly not scared anymore - quietly and methodically exposes and dissects the evil of the Nazi occupation, the hypocrisy of the collaborators and his own cowardice to date.

It's not only a speech of hammering logic, it's a tour-de-force acting performance as you forget everything else as this fat, rumpled and awkward man single-handedly eviscerates all the evil fictions holding the town in its grip. And just when you think he has nothing left, this shy man, who's never expressed romantic love or passion for another in his entire life, in open court, declares his love for O'Hara and, at this point, you realize she's a lucky woman.

But there's still a little more movie left. Despite being knocked back on their heels with their immorality exposed by Laughton, Nazis are gonna Nazi, so they respond with brutal force. And Laughton is given one last moment before the inevitable, which he uses to teach his students the value of keeping the ideals of freedom and individual liberty alive in your head and heart even if all around you others are trying to stomp them out. Basically, he teaches that a book can be burned, but an idea can't be removed from your mind.

Is it propaganda? Sure, and *This Land is Mine* should be darn proud of it.


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 49108
> 
> *This Land is Mine* from 1943 with Charles Laughton, Maureen O'Hara, Walter Slezak, George Sanders and Kent Smith
> 
> The word propaganda, like so many things, has been tainted by its association with Nazi Germany, but its core meaning - promoting a particular, usually political, point of view - is also part of what we call freedom of speech.
> 
> It's dangerous when the state - as in Nazi Germany - controls speech and promotes only its point of view, hence the taint, but in a free society, where everyone advocates for his or her own beliefs, everyone, effectively, is propagandizing for his or her own viewpoint and ideas.
> 
> So it is as a compliment that I say, *This Land is Mine* is outstanding propaganda.
> 
> "Some town" in Europe is occupied by the Germans, but as the Germans did in several places, they wanted this to be a "soft" occupation where they collaborate with willing locals to leave a patina of self-governance in place. Many opportunistic and many just understandably scared locals go along, but a few resist by printing an underground newspaper while others physically resist through sabotage.
> 
> Cowardly mamma's boy and schoolteacher Charles Laughton plays by the new rules and looks the other way until his hero, the school's headmaster, is arrested for promoting "unacceptable" ideas at the school. Later, the headmaster is chosen as one of ten hostages to be executed by the Germans in retaliation for a murdered-by-the-resistance German soldier.
> 
> Laughton, meanwhile, stumbles upon the body of a collaborator, George Sanders, whose conscience drove him to suicide after he turned his fiance's brother in for sabotage and the brother is killed trying to avoid arrest. Laughton, having found the body, is then arrested and charged with the murder of the collaborator. Adding to the complications, the collaborator's fiancé is a school teacher, Maureen O'Hara, with whom Laughton has been secretly in love.
> 
> This brings Laughton into direct conflict with the town's Nazi overseer beautifully played by Walter Slezak. Slezak is no cardboard Nazi thug. He's an educated man who quotes and clearly respects the leading philosophers of Western Civilization; a man who would prefer not to use force, not to kill the innocent. But he is also a shrewd and, when necessary, ruthless Nazi willing to kill ten innocent locals in retaliation for one murdered German soldier - order must be maintained.
> 
> Slezak doesn't want to have Laughton put on trial, but if he must be tried and found guilty of murder to maintain the fiction that the collaborator's death wasn't a suicide, then, so be it. Having the public know that collaborators are committing suicide over guilt is not in the Nazi's interest.
> 
> It takes two thirds of this better-than-average WWII propaganda film to get to this point, but then it only gets much, much better.
> 
> With his fears almost realized, Laughton, on trial in an all but rigged court for a murder he didn't commit, finds his inner fortitude, in part, when he sees, from his jail cell awaiting trial, his former headmaster executed in the prison's yard by the Nazis.
> 
> In dramatic courtroom fashion, with the prosecutor screaming to have his defense speech shut down, Laughton - disheveled, a bit nervous, but clearly not scared anymore - quietly and methodically exposes and dissects the evil of the Nazi occupation, the hypocrisy of the collaborators and his own cowardice to date.
> 
> It's not only a speech of hammering logic, it's a tour-de-force acting performance as you forget everything else as this fat, rumpled and awkward man single-handedly eviscerates all the evil fictions holding the town in its grip. And just when you think he has nothing left, this shy man, who's never expressed romantic love or passion for another in his entire life, in open court, declares his love for O'Hara and, at this point, you realize she's a lucky woman.
> 
> But there's still a little more movie left. Despite being knocked back on their heels with their immorality exposed by Laughton, Nazis are gonna Nazi, so they respond with brutal force. And Laughton is given one last moment before the inevitable, which he uses to teach his students the value of keeping the ideals of freedom and individual liberty alive in your head and heart even if all around you others are trying to stomp them out. Basically, he teaches that a book can be burned, but an idea can't be removed from your mind.
> 
> Is it propaganda? Sure, and *This Land is Mine* should be darn proud of it.


As always you review is informative and well written, but given your past reviews, that is what we've come to expect from you with your current offering(s). However, the incredible level of detail(s) you are able to incorporate in your reviews is truly remarkable. I would have to watch a movie at least a half dozen times to be able to recall the level of detail you routinely report. With all sincerity I greatly respect that ability!


----------



## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> As always you review is informative and well written, but given your past reviews, that is what we've come to expect from you with your current offering(s). However, the incredible level of detail(s) you are able to incorporate in your reviews is truly remarkable. I would have to watch a movie at least a half dozen times to be able to recall the level of detail you routinely report. With all sincerity I greatly respect that ability!


Thank you very much - that's very nice of you to say. If you do see the movie, I think you'll enjoy it - it's a really good one.

As to the memory thing, I'd bet if you started to write about movies, you be surprised at how much you really retain. I've been writing professionally (only as a side gig to my real job) for decades, so my mind kind of sees things consciously and subconsciously with a thought as to how I would write about them. That's why I'd bet that if you started doing it, after awhile, you'd find your recall is good too.


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## Fading Fast

*Man Bait* from 1952 with George Brent, Diana Dors and Peter Reynolds

With a small budget and at a-little-over an hour in length, this effort feels more like a TV drama than a full-length movie. Book store owner, George Brent, with an invalid wife that he sincerely loves has the briefest of weak moments and shares nothing more than one consensual kiss with his employee: young, flirting-hard and looking-for-trouble Diana Dors.

From this tiny mistake, all hell eventually breaks loose for Brent. Dors' just-out-of-prison new boyfriend, Peter Reynolds, learns of the kiss and Brent's inflated bank account as he just cashed in an insurance policy to take his wife on a needed-for-her-health vacation. While far from the sharpest tool in the shed, Reynolds, as most bottom feeders will, can see the opportunity in these two disparate facts.

Okay, you can probably guess a lot of the rest as that setup leads to soft blackmail, then hard blackmail, a cruel letter to the invalid wife, a double cross between the blackmailers that goes horribly wrong, murder, a falsely accused Brent, a flight from justice, weird allies and enemies popping up in the book store and that wonderful British invention, the put-upon, understated, but-does-his-job-ridiculously-well British detective (who has a seven-word job title including "superintendent," "chief" and a bunch of other words).

With a reasonably satisfying conclusion, it's worth the watch in the same way any good hour-long TV drama is. Plus you get to see old-acting-pro George Brent carry a small movie while a young Diana Dors wears very tight-fitting clothing.


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## Fading Fast

*Yesterday* from 2019 with Himesh Patel and Lily James

This answers the never-asked question of what would a rom-com powered by The Beatles songs be like


The answer is a fun two hours of mindless escapism as some sort of global "electrical" anomaly leaves the world unchanged except that only one English failing-but-talented singer-songwriter, Himesh Patel, remembers The Beatles - to the rest of the 2019 world, they never existed


Patel slowly realizes the musical gold he has in his hands and, with the support of his long-time friend and manager, Lily James, sees his career begin to take off as he starts to leverage "his" "new" songs like "Let it Be" and "Yesterday"


James, who has been carrying an unrequited torch for Patel since forever, passes on Patel's offer to go with him as his manager to record in LA as she knows it's his journey not hers. Plus, you can only love someone without being loved back for so long


From here, it's off to rock stardom for Patel, but with nagging doubts about the morality of passing off The Beatles (now never-existed-before) songs as his own and leaving behind James whom he slowly realizes he has feelings for


Throw in a rapacious LA manager, some fun Beatles references, plenty of their songs and all the usual-to-a-rom-com just-missed opportunities for, and last-minute efforts of, Patel and James to get together and a fun, silly time is had by all


With the one sour note being, as always, moral preening by the writers who preach that walking away from money is a virtue; although, I'd bet real money, they don't do that in their own careers


----------



## Fading Fast

*They Drive by Night* from 1940 with George Raft, Ann Sheridan, Ida Lupino, Humphrey Bogart and Alan Hale

There's a lot that's good here, but the parts are assembled in a bumpy way with some awkward-style and abrupt-narrative shifts that almost feel like you've been taken to a different movie. But still, overall, it's a heck of an effort even if held back by its odd transitions.

The first part of the movie is the story of two brother truckers, George Raft and Humphrey Bogart, trying to remain as independents (versus taking safer salary jobs with a trucking company) as they hope to build up their one-rig effort to a multi-truck profitable business.

This is good stuff as you see and feel the hardscrabble existence of the independent trucker, his struggles financially to cover his costs (including paying off his truck's mortgage), physically to drive these early difficult vehicles (and stay awake on long runs) and personally to maintain a family life. From the truck stops, to the camaraderie, crashes and negotiations with shippers, it's a good window into 1940s trucking.

And just as things are looking up for brothers Raft and Bogart, a crash destroys their uninsured truck while disabling Bogart. Raft, perforce, takes a job at a big trucking concern, but owing to the intervention of the company owner's wife (Ida Lupino), seemingly a former girlfriend of Raft's, he's given a lucrative management job.

Despite Raft having a girlfriend (Sheridan) and Lupino; a husband (Hale), Lupino charges hard at Raft as she all but flirts with him in front of her decent, albeit harmlessly bombastic, husband. But Raft is playing it straight; he's happy to have a good job, be able to support himself, gainfully employ his disabled brother and spend time with Sheridan. However, Lupino is having none of that.

Awkward shift number one is when you suddenly realize the story's moved from basic Horatio Alger drama to crazy ex-and-now-married girlfriend who won't take "no" for an answer. It's not the smoothest transition, but Lupino is so enjoyably malicious and sexually wanton in her need for Raft, that you just go with it as she's a volcano that you know is going to blow as each one of his polite rejections only enrages her more.

And blow she does (spoiler alert even if it's in most of the movie's descriptions) when she stumbles upon a way to kill her husband and make it look like an accident. Borrowing heavily from the plot of 1935's *Bordertown*, Lupino uses the old technology of carbon monoxide combined with the relatively new technology of automatic garage doors to off her husband. She wants to give Raft a clear flightpath. Conveniently, the police buy the accidental-death explanation.

But Raft's still not interested as any man with normal-in-the-head Ann Sheridan wouldn't be in off-her-rocker Lupino. Pre-dating Glen Close in *Fatal Attraction* by forty-plus years, Lupino left nothing on the table in her psycho-woman performance as Raft ducks and dives her every advance. And just when you think she couldn't, Lupino ups the crazy more by - get ready for it - telling the police that Raft forced her to kill her husband.

Pause on that for a moment. Here's a woman married to a wealthy man she no longer can stand, so she kills him and the police buy her "it was an accident" story. So, she gets to keep the now-dead husband's substantial money, but the man she hoped she would get afterwards rejects her advances. Instead of pocketing her victories and licking her one wound, she goes to the police with a false confession that implicates her in a murder simply to hurt the man who said "no" to her. That's loco.

From here, it's on to a trial where Lupino, fully lost in her crazy, is the star witness against Raft. It's a good courtroom scene (one more spoiler alert) with Lupino completely melting down and, effectively, exonerating Raft. That's followed by another awkward movie transition to a Capra-like ending of rainbows and unicorns for Raft, Sheridan, Bogart and the truckers at the company Raft now owns. It's right up there with the townspeople bringing their money back to George Bailey's bank.

Even with its jarring narrative and stylistic shifts, there's so much to enjoy here that you just shake off the occasional story arc concussion. The acting by almost all the principals is top notch - Raft is a bit wooden at times - even if Lupino is given the scene-stealing role. Not only is it, overall, engaging, but the window into 1940s trucking is time-travel heaven. It's flawed, but well worth the watch.









Forty plus years before Glenn Close in *Fatal Attraction*, Ida Lupino plays a scary, crazy woman who won't be ignored in *They Drive by Night*.


----------



## Fading Fast

*The Prisoner of Second Avenue* from 1975 with Jack Lemmon and Anne Bancroft based on a play by Neil Simon

Watching this was a spur of the moment decision as the opening credits are superimposed over street scenes of New York City, so I gave it a shot as I enjoy seeing how places I know in the city looked in the past


And the street scenes throughout were wonderful time travel - thoroughly enjoyed them as they even included one of the office buildings I worked in years ago - but the rest of the movie, despite being billed as a comedy, was only occasionally funny and often times grating


I'll admit, I'm not a big Niel Simon fan (I like some of his stuff), but this was a miss if comedy was its purpose. The premise - a middle aged couple, Lemmon and Bancroft, living in downwardly spiraling 1970s NYC, question their reason for staying especially after Lemmon loses his job - led to a movie of anger not humor


Fair enough, living in a failing city and losing your job are reasons to be mad, but that did not seem to be the intent of the movie; however, Lemmon played it genuinely angry most of the time, so it was hard to laugh as his jokes came across as bitter and snide. Maybe that was the intent; if so, mission accomplished


Also, it's hard to adjust to Bancroft, who played the uber-WASP woman - emotionless even during sex - in *The Graduate*, play, in this movie, a kinda neurotic NYC wife, running the gamut of human emotions often in just one scene


As noted, there is great NYC time travel here to a not-fun-but-real period in NYC history - bell bottoms and polyester suits, garbage-strewn sidewalks, graffiti everywhere and street hustling you can see and feel - but the rest just wasn't my cup of tea


N.B. There is a fun scene with a just-pre-*Rocky*-fame Sylvester Stallone


----------



## Big T

Maybe not "best movies", but still great: a drive-in, about twenty miles away, has a double feature tonight! Blazing Saddles and Caddyshack! The Missus wants to go! Maybe a triple feature!


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## eagle2250

Big T said:


> Maybe not "best movies", but still great: a drive-in, about twenty miles away, has a double feature tonight! Blazing Saddles and Caddyshack! The Missus wants to go! Maybe a triple feature!


Blazing Saddles and Caddy Shack are both great movies and the old Drive In theaters, featuring box seats as we sait in our respective vehicles, allow one to see such entertainment in a public venue and still maintain the social distancing required by the Pandemic. Here's hoping you all have a lot of fun!


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## Big T

eagle2250 said:


> Blazing Saddles and Caddy Shack are both great movies and the old Drive In theaters, featuring box seats as we sait in our respective vehicles, allow one to see such entertainment in a public venue and still maintain the social distancing required by the Pandemic. Here's hoping you all have a lot of fun!


Chaperoning will be provided by GRAND KIDS!!!!!!


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## Fading Fast

*Stage Fright* from 1950 with Jane Wyman, Marlene Dietrich, Richard Todd, Michael Wilding and Alastair Sim

All Hitchcock-directed movies carry the weight of being "Hitchcock films," which is probably why this solid movie is not particularly well known as it's generally regarded as one of his "lesser efforts."

And maybe it is, but few pick a movie based on the director and, away from the Hitchcock mystique, this is a fine and entertaining film. It also feels more like his earlier 1930s efforts than the "big" movies still to come in the 1950s or even his very tight films from the 1940s like "Suspicion" and "Rebecca."

Jane Wyman, an aspiring actress, tries to help her boyfriend, Richard Todd, who is accused of killing the husband of his paramour, Marlene Dietrich. While that's enough to unravel, since this is Hitchcock, there's more: Dietrich is nearly twenty years Todd's senior (making Dietrich a cougar before the word took on that meaning) and appears to have killed her husband and set Todd up to take the fall...or not.

Despite finding out at the same time that her boyfriend has been cheating on her with a woman nearly two decades older than she and that he also might be a murderer, Wyman doesn't pause to risk her own life and freedom trying to exculpate her boyfriend.

From here, the movie is very Hitchcockian as innocent people do more and more illegal things trying to prove their own or someone else's innocence, thus getting into deeper and deeper trouble with the police. Also in classic Hitchcock fashion, Wyman befriends the detective on the murder case to gain information and direct his investigation, but then begins to fall for him. This makes for a quite interesting love triangle as, as noted, her boyfriend is also the prime murder suspect.

Early on, Wyman reaches out to her father, Alastair Sim, a member of the upper class who has drifted Bohemian and, thus, enjoys both helping his daughter in her illegal sleuthing efforts and tweaking the police. And Sim becomes the joy of the movie as he insouciantly guides his much-more-serious-than-he daughter's efforts while seeing and joyfully smirking at all the silliness and hypocrisy around him. He owns every scene he's in and you miss him when he isn't there.

The rest of the movie plays out as you'd expect. Things get worse for Todd and Wyman while Dietrich seems to be getting away with everything. Along the way, we get some near-missed opportunities to expose Dietrich, the police ploddingly but effectively putting the pieces together (a classic Hitchcock touch), a creepy doll used for psychological effect, a harrowing chase scene, a Hitchcock cameo and then, literally, the final curtain falling.

The acting is top notch, the story is serviceable and, while there are tense moments, like many of the master director's efforts, the overall feel is almost light and joyful - it's as much about love and family as it is about murder and mayhem. Yes, it's fair to say this is not Hitchcock's best, but as a run-of-the-mill movie, it's better than many.


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## Vecchio Vespa

Big T said:


> Maybe not "best movies", but still great: a drive-in, about twenty miles away, has a double feature tonight! Blazing Saddles and Caddyshack! The Missus wants to go! Maybe a triple feature!


Add The House Bunny. Good as it sounds, it's even better than it sounds!


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## Fading Fast

*It's a Wonderful World* from 1939 with Jimmy Stewart and Claudette Colbert

A private detective, Stewart, is arrested trying to protect his wealthy elderly client from being charged with a murder his client didn't commit. The wealthy client's young wife and her lover are trying to frame her husband for murder so that he'll be executed and she will get his money. That's the movie's conflict, but it's really just an excuse to put Stewart and Colbert together.

And that happens when Stewart, now convicted of aiding his client in avoiding arrest, escapes from the train taking him to prison. Hiding out in the woods, he meets up with, for her day, free-spirited Colbert who is so smitten with Stewart that she quickly goes from being his hostage to accomplice even as the two bicker during their efforts to elude capture.

It's probably obvious by now that this is a riff on *It Happened One Night*. However, the charming chemistry that Gable and Colbert have, as somewhat antagonists in that one (not my favorite move, but it is a recognized classic), doesn't develop, at all, between Stewart and Colbert in this one.

Stewart tries too hard to be gruff while Colbert is outright annoying as she, literally, screeches her way through some of her scenes. And to make things worse, her poetess character periodically quotes verse to either woo Stewart or, I guess, advance the plot, but it's simply awful.

The rest of the movie is Stewart and Colbert attempting to avoid capture while also finding evidence to exonerate Stewart and his client. The plot gets unnecessarily confusing with a bunch of screwball comedy stuff happening along the way that grates only modestly less than Colbert's character.

It is, effectively, a 1940's rom-com, so you know what will happen. But that doesn't really matter as you're just supposed to enjoy watching Stewart and Colbert fall in love. The best part about that finally happening is that the movie is, then, mercifully, over.


----------



## oli150194

Its so hard to choose just one so here are my top 3:
- Inception
- Kingsman
- Thor Rahnarok


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## Fading Fast

@mikel,

Hi, what do you think about changing the name of this thread to "Recently Watched Movies" (or something similar) as it's really evolved into being a place where we discuss movies we've seen recently versus (as starting member @oli150194 quite appropriately did) listing our favorite movies?

Just a thought.

And welcome, @oli150194 - glad you joined us.


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## iam.mike

Fading Fast said:


> what do you think about changing the name of this thread to "Recently Watched Movies"


Great suggestion! Done


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## Vecchio Vespa

We are lit majors in this household and love Jane Austen. Over the years there have been numerous versions of Pride and Prejudice. We recently rewatched the six hour A&E version with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth, the gold standard. We also watched the new Emma. Bill Nighy was, as he always is, wonderful, and much of the movie was very well cast and very well done, but it is on the whole well below the Gwyneth Paltrow et al. version. It felt almost like a stage production at times in an highly stylized way that was distracting more than endearing.


----------



## Fading Fast

TKI67 said:


> We are lit majors in this household and love Jane Austen. Over the years there have been numerous versions of Pride and Prejudice. We recently rewatched the six hour A&E version with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth, the gold standard. We also watched the new Emma. Bill Nighy was, as he always is, wonderful, and much of the movie was very well cast and very well done, but it is on the whole well below the Gwyneth Paltrow et al. version. It felt almost like a stage production at times in an highly stylized way that was distracting more than endearing.


I've read all her books and have seen most of the movies. And, embarrassingly, have even read a few of the "offshoot" modern "Austen" books (like this not good one "The Jane Austen Society"  #791  )

My favorite, today (my favorite has changed a few times over the years), adaptation is the 1940 "Pride and Prejudice" with Greer Garson. Her performance as Elizabeth is incredible as is Edmund Gwenn's as the father. And the scenes when those two are together are movie gold.

Also, the critical Elizabeth-Lady Catherine confrontation scene is insanely well done in this version. To be sure, it's a 1940s movie, so it has the style of that period, but still, I find it is the one I enjoy the most to watch again and again.

It's been awhile since I've seen it, but I also remember really liking the 1995 "Sense and Sensibility" with Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet.


----------



## Vecchio Vespa

Fading Fast said:


> I've read all her books and have seen most of the movies. And, embarrassingly, have even read a few of the "offshoot" modern "Austen" books (like this not good one "The Jane Austen Society"  #791  )
> 
> My favorite, today (my favorite has changed a few times over the years), adaptation is the 1940 "Pride and Prejudice" with Greer Garson. Her performance as Elizabeth is incredible as is Edmund Gwenn's as the father. And the scenes when those two are together are movie gold.
> 
> Also, the critical Elizabeth-Lady Catherine confrontation scene is insanely well done in this version. To be sure, it's a 1940s movie, so it has the style of that period, but still, I find it is the one I enjoy the most to watch again and again.
> 
> It's been awhile since I've seen it, but I also remember really liking the 1995 "Sense and Sensibility" with Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet.


Yes. The Ang Lee Sense and Sensibility was spectacularly good. I love the 1940 Pride and Prejudice too. To me the Keira Knightley version has phenomenal aspects but fails when it deviates from Jane Austen.


----------



## Fading Fast

*Jeopardy* from 1953 with Barbara Stanwyck, Barry Sullivan and Ralph Meeker

At one hour and seven minutes in runtime and with a pretty straight-foward, family-in-jeopardy plot, this is more like a really well-done one-hour TV drama than a major-motion-picture release. But within its box, it's outstanding.

An American family, mother (Stanwyck), father (Sullivan) and son, are vacationing on a remote Mexican beach when Sullivan gets his leg caught in the remains of an old pier. Unable to free him and with the tide balefully coming in, Stanwyck goes for help hindered by the remoteness of the location and the language barrier.

As drama, it draws you in owing to the quick shift from happy family vacationing to husband only hours away from being drowned while his wife desperately speeds along a remote single-lane road in search of help. Director John Sturges keeps the tension elevated as he regularly cuts back to scenes of the husband, with water rising higher around him in each successive shot, eventually trying to keep his young son calm who has yet to fully process what's happening to his dad.

And then, everything gets much worse. At an isolated-and-closed-for-a-local-fiesta gas station, Stanwyck runs into a young American man (Meeker) whom she asks for help. Moments later, as he's getting in the car, we and she realize he's not a kindly stranger but a thug seizing an opportunity.

So now, Stanwyck is in the car with what, we quickly learn, is an escaped convict looking to capitalize on the family's situation any way he can. Using a gun taken from Stanwyck and reminding her that if she dies so does her husband, Stanwyck helps him pass several roadblocks and other police encounters all looking for him.

Stanwyck, adumbrating the character she'll perfect later in her *The Big Valley* TV days, tries everything, including physically attacking the much-bigger Meeker*, to get away and get back to helping her husband, but Meeker is up to the challenge from Stanwyck's hundred pounds of fury. Finally, it comes down to this, all buried deep in movie-code lingo and signaling: Stanwyck agrees to have sex with Meeker if he'll, then, help rescue her husband. Blink and you'll miss it, but that's what happened.

After that, it's a shared cigarette - just kidding - it's off to rescue the husband in a pretty gripping scene for 1950s special effects including a rope struggling to provide enough torque and a car that can't get enough traction as the incoming tide all but swallows up Sullivan. It's not *Citizen Kane*, but with TV in its infancy, these short, well-done sixty-minute movies - with first-rate actors - provided solid TV-style entertainment to a movie-going public.

*If filmed today, petite Stanwyck would have beaten up fit and close-to-twice-her-weight Meeker because in 2020-TV-and-movie land, petite women regularly beat up physically fit men nearly twice their weight, but that interesting understanding of physics and reality hadn't happened yet in 1953.


----------



## Fading Fast

*The Killing* from 1956 with Sterling Hayden, Elisha Cook Jr., Marie Windsor and Joe Sawyer

Crime dramas with heavy doses of film noir were big in the 1950s with *The Asphalt Jungle* being the apotheosis of the genre. But *The Killing* deserves a mention as it's really a stripped-down version of *The Asphalt Jungle.*

Whereas *The Asphalt Jungle* gives you a lot of character background, relationships and the planning of the heist from the absolute beginning, *The Killing* strips much of that away. It simply says: here are some bad men, we'll hint at their background, but know they have a complex and thoughtful plan to rob a racetrack, so we'll just drop you in right before the plan is launched.

Thus, *The Killing* starts with the team of five crooks, led by Sterling Hayden (who is one intimidating-looking man), going over the final details of the plan while you learn a little about each man's motivation for stealing and responsibility in the heist. And while Hayden is trying to run a tight ship, one of the plotters, Elisha Cook Jr., has a bullying and badgering wife, Marie Windsor, who coaxes some information out of him about the plan, which - and you get this early - sows a major seed of destruction.

Effectively, the first hour of the movie is seeing everyone rehearse his part, which - and you know director Stanley Kubrick knew this - kinda gets you on the side of the crooks; after all, you see how hard everyone is working to knock off the racetrack, even the crooked cop. We are all pretty much hardwired to want to see diligence and effort like that rewarded.

From there, it's game day, uh, heist day and, as you'd expect, some pieces go flawlessly while others get gummed up requiring on-the-fly adjustments. But since you've fully bought into the plan at this point, you are excited to see it in action. Plus, heck, there are some great racetrack, gunfight, chase and hold up scenes all flying by really fast.

The heist's twenty or so minutes are the heart and soul of the movie and they don't disappoint. From a sniper shooting at a horse in the middle of a race to a giant sack of money flying out a second-story window, each piece is gripping. And it concludes with the wonderful moment when the bag o' money leaves the track in the trunk of a car as the cops speed by it going in the other direction trying to stop the heist. The entire segment is a deeply engaging action sequence that holds up very well today.

After that, it's back to the meeting place to divide up the money where all hell breaks loose - thank you Marie Windsor (the bitter wife) - but you want to see it without any prior knowledge so we'll stop there. Also, the final scene is perfectly done and beautifully filmed, but to avoid spoilers, I'll only say that you feel the heartbreak of head-crook Hayden as, no surprise since this is a 1950s movie, his ill-gotten gains, effectively, blow away.

Kubrick cut away almost all the fat in this one as you pretty much strap in from the opening sequence and only get a few chances to catch your breath. There is an oddly out-of-place, occasional documentary-like narrative voice-over that tries to provide additional exposition and framing, but it, unfortunately, is the one awkward note in an otherwise tight and gripping film. Despite that, for a low-budget effort with highly talented-but-not-marquee-name actors, *The Killing* (odd title) belongs in the top tier of crime-drama movies.

N.B. Had, at some point, devoted husband Elisha Cook Jr. decided to off his harridan wife who was always belittling and cheating on him and, by chance, you noticed Cook burying a body - not saying whose body - late at night, I'd forgive you for looking the other way. Sure, I get the sanctity of life, the Ten Commandments - the morality of it all - but then, I wasn't married to that woman.


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 49621
> 
> *The Killing* from 1956 with Sterling Hayden, Elisha Cook Jr., Marie Windsor and Joe Sawyer
> 
> Crime dramas with heavy doses of film noir were big in the 1950s with *The Asphalt Jungle* being the apotheosis of the genre. But *The Killing* deserves a mention as it's really a stripped-down version of *The Asphalt Jungle.*
> 
> Whereas *The Asphalt Jungle* gives you a lot of character background, relationships and the planning of the heist from the absolute beginning, *The Killing* strips much of that away. It simply says: here are some bad men, we'll hint at their background, but know they have a complex and thoughtful plan to rob a racetrack, so we'll just drop you in right before the plan is launched.
> 
> Thus, *The Killing* starts with the team of five crooks, led by Sterling Hayden (who is one intimidating-looking man), going over the final details of the plan while you learn a little about each man's motivation for stealing and responsibility in the heist. And while Hayden is trying to run a tight ship, one of the plotters, Elisha Cook Jr., has a bullying and badgering wife, Marie Windsor, who coaxes some information out of him about the plan, which - and you get this early - sows a major seed of destruction.
> 
> Effectively, the first hour of the movie is seeing everyone rehearse his part, which - and you know director Stanley Kubrick knew this - kinda gets you on the side of the crooks; after all, you see how hard everyone is working to knock off the racetrack, even the crooked cop. We are all pretty much hardwired to want to see diligence and effort like that rewarded.
> 
> From there, it's game day, uh, heist day and, as you'd expect, some pieces go flawlessly while others get gummed up requiring on-the-fly adjustments. But since you've fully bought into the plan at this point, you are excited to see it in action. Plus, heck, there are some great racetrack, gunfight, chase and hold up scenes all flying by really fast.
> 
> The heist's twenty or so minutes are the heart and soul of the movie and they don't disappoint. From a sniper shooting at a horse in the middle of a race to a giant sack of money flying out a second-story window, each piece is gripping. And it concludes with the wonderful moment when the bag o' money leaves the track in the trunk of a car as the cops speed by it going in the other direction trying to stop the heist. The entire segment is a deeply engaging action sequence that holds up very well today.
> 
> After that, it's back to the meeting place to divide up the money where all hell breaks loose - thank you Marie Windsor (the bitter wife) - but you want to see it without any prior knowledge so we'll stop there. Also, the final scene is perfectly done and beautifully filmed, but to avoid spoilers, I'll only say that you feel the heartbreak of head-crook Hayden as, no surprise since this is a 1950s movie, his ill-gotten gains, effectively, blow away.
> 
> Kubrick cut away almost all the fat in this one as you pretty much strap in from the opening sequence and only get a few chances to catch your breath. There is an oddly out-of-place, occasional documentary-like narrative voice-over that tries to provide additional exposition and framing, but it, unfortunately, is the one awkward note in an otherwise tight and gripping film. Despite that, for a low-budget effort with highly talented-but-not-marquee-name actors, *The Killing* (odd title) belongs in the top tier of crime-drama movies.
> 
> N.B. Had, at some point, devoted husband Elisha Cook Jr. decided to off his harridan wife who was always belittling and cheating on him and, by chance, you noticed Cook burying a body - not saying whose body - late at night, I'd forgive you for looking the other way. Sure, I get the sanctity of life, the Ten Commandments - the morality of it all - but then, I wasn't married to that woman.


My friend, another of those fantastic reviews of your has inspired me to watch another movie, but first I must complete an ongoing quest to watch the entire NCIS and NCIS New Orleans series's .


----------



## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> My friend, another of those fantastic reviews of your has inspired me to watch another movie, but first I must complete an ongoing quest to watch the entire NCIS and NCIS New Orleans series's .


Thank you. It's a really good one. I think you'll enjoy it.


----------



## Fading Fast

*Touch of Evil* from 1958 with Orson Welles, Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh, Akim Tamiroff and Ray Collins

Somehow, until now, I had never watched this one from beginning to end.

Knowing it is directed by, with a screenplay written by and starring Orson Welles, you anticipate and you get a full-on Orson Welles movie. The pace, as always with Welles directing, is frenetic, which gives the impression that you are seeing important events. The actors deliver their lines as if every word is important. The often-crooked camera angles and stark lighting also argue these are important visuals for you to see. And the way the soundtrack builds to repeated crescendos in many scenes reinforces all this importance.

Okay, that's Welles' style and it definitely draws you in. And the story here is a good one, but unfortunately, nothing more than good. An American contractor who just crossed the border from Mexico into The United States is killed by a car bomb that was planted in Mexico. This brings in the Mexican authorities led by a crusading narcotics officer, Heston, who is in the process of bringing down a notorious and corrupt Mexican cartel family - the Grandis. But American police officer Welles, a local legend for his successful record, claims authority and bullies his way through the investigation with questionable tactics that by-the-book Heston dislikes.

And while Heston is battling with Welles, Heston's young, pretty and new American wife, Leigh, is being harassed and threatened by the Grandis family who is trying to get to her to stop Heston's investigation of their criminal activities.

Effectively, the movie is watching heavy, grizzled, Welles - clearly dealing with a lot of demons including alcohol and women (one in the form of Marlene Dietrich) - try to push Heston out of the way so that he can employ his usual investigative techniques of planting clues and coercing confessions. Simultaneously, Heston tries to conduct a legitimate investigation while also attempting to protect his wife - by moving her from this hotel to that one - from the Grandis.

While Welles is on his game in this one as the dirty, arrogant but falling apart "famous" policeman, Heston seems to struggle to find his character's center as he pings from confident lawman to insecure newbie. This contrast is highlighted by Welles, using a cane owing to a bum leg, always arrogantly pushing forward; whereas, young and healthy Heston struggles in many scenes to even keep his footing. To be fair to Heston, he does have a lot on his plate as he has to deal with an overbearing Welles while his blonde and all-woman-body wife is, effectively, kidnapped by the cartel.

You can see big themes here if you wish: police corruption undermining individual justice, American dominance of Mexico, cartels acting as a threat to legitimate governance and a man willing to do anything to protect his wife's virtue. And given the Welles treatment, you feel like something big is going on. But in the end, it's just a good story about an honest cop fighting both a corrupt cop and a corrupt cartel (and, yes, those stories overlap as the corrupt cop and corrupt cartel make shady deals to help each other).

Welles' dramatic, okay, bombastic style worked best when it was fresh in *Citizen Kane*. *Kane* also had the advantage of dealing with a large, dramatic and bombastic theme - the fictionalized life of publishing magnate William Randolph Heart - which aligned perfectly to Welles' style. But here, in *Touch of Evil*, unfortunately, Welles' over-the-top writing, directing and acting technique promises more than this good, but not great, movie can deliver.


----------



## Fading Fast

*They Live By Night* from 1948 with Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell

Before director Nicholas Ray made the classic *Rebel Without a Cause*, you can see him playing with some of the same themes from that movie - teenage defiance, societal hypocrisy, institutionalized injustice and young love - in his directorial debut effort, the B-movie noir, *They Live By Night*.

A young man, Farley Granger, in prison since he was sixteen, breaks out in his early twenties. After getting injured during a subsequent bank robbery he and his partners pull, they hide out in "the mountains" where he meets a poor, cute, seemingly modestly abused (hard to tell) young girl, Cathy O'Donnell. As she nurses him back to health, they fall in love.

Trying to escape everything - their pasts, his record, the police, the adults in their lives, their unhappiness - they take his share of the money from the bank heist and run away. From here, the movie is one of two young adults, with insuperable pasts, trying to make a normal life for themselves. After a sad justice-of-the-peace marriage, they hold up for a time in a one-room cabin where, attempting to create something of a home, they decorate it and try to live like regular people.

But it's not to be as he's a fugitive, so his past - old partners in crime, the police and people looking to turn him in (he's modestly infamous in the papers) - comes calling in one way or another. Hence, his life, and hers by proxy, is one of always being "on the run," never really comfortable in public or, even, private as every knock on the door has a baleful overtone. Since it's a noir in '48, you can all but guess the outcome, but this is a journey movie anyway - a journey to escape a bleak past and present.

And that bleakness implies that neither of these two had a chance in life as he was put into an adult prison at only sixteen and she seems trapped in poverty with no one really caring or looking out for her. Their escape road trip is all but destined to fail, but these two needed some joy, love and hope in their life no matter how fleeting. And as in *Rebel Without a Cause*, the morality is grey and unsatisfying: are all the adults bad, no, but many are; are the kids always right, no, but you understand their anger; is their love doomed, sure, but you know they have to go for it anyway; is society unjust, yes, but anarchy is not the answer.

Director Ray will revisit these themes, as noted, in *Rebel Without a Cause*, but you can see him wrestling with them early in this solid, if sometimes plodding, B-noir.

If you do see it, a few other neat things to look out for are one, proof, once again, that there is no honor amongst thieves, two, Ian Wolfe's wonderfully smarmy performance as a huckster justice of the peace and, three, some incredible time-travel shots - cars, clothes, architecture and motor lodges - of 1948 America.


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## Fading Fast

*The Senator was Indiscreet *from 1947 with William Powell, Peter Lind Hayes, Ray Collins and Ella Raines

William Powell plays a stupid but affably stubborn Senator who all but blackmails his own party into supporting his nomination for President owing to his diary which he implies has dirt on the party


The diary then gets stolen and a Keystone Cops type search for it takes place involving Powell's press secretary, a newspaper reporter, the party heads, a few other almost random characters and Powell himself


That's pretty much the movie which is supposed to be a witty commentary on politics and Washington, but other than getting in a few good lines, never rises to the challenge it sets for itself


There's also some offensive-to-today's-standards stereotyping of Indians and an odd character - a hotel busboy who is clearly and openly a Russian spy, but that thread is never followed


The one gem in the movie is Ella Raines as the newspaper reporter who is smart, funny and about the only character who gets the joke, which is that everyone else in the movie is an idiot. I've never understood why this talented and beautiful actress didn't have a better career


I wanted to like this one, but found it only okay in spots and boring and silly overall


There is a fun closing, surprise cameo, if you stick around for it

N.B. Ms. Raines should have had a bigger career as she had all the talent and looks necessary to be a star.


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## Fading Fast

*Blood on the Moon* from 1948 with Robert Mitchum, Barbara Bel Geddes, Robert Preston, Walter Brennan, Phyllis Thaxter, Frank Faylen and Tom Tully

This is no Western for the kiddies. In director Robert Wise's noir-Western mashup, the world is morally complex where men and women have the capacity to do great good and great evil. This is a place where, thank you Thomas Hobbes, the natural state of mankind is shown to be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short."

If this one isn't a classic, it should be as it quickly pulls you into an ethically ambiguous and challenging world populated by complex humans where right and wrong aren't easy to discern and almost everyone ends up being, as in real life, somewhere in between.

A cattle rancher, Tom Tully, is losing his land owing to a changing government policy forcing him off the Indian reservation he has used for his herd for years, but his efforts to return to his old land bring him up against homesteaders who now claim it for themselves.

Attempting to manipulate this situation for their own enrichment is a corrupt government agent, Frank Faylen, and his partner, Robert Preston, who opportunistically and insincerely back the homesteaders. They intend to buy Tully's herd on the cheap when he has nowhere to take it and, then, to quickly resell the herd to the government at a huge markup.

Mitchum, an old friend of Preston's, is hired by him to both fight on his side and help negotiate the crooked sale. Mitchum goes along, initially, as he's promised a big pay day. However, while he's okay with a little larceny and rough stuff, once he sees the big picture - and that people are getting killed and men wiped out financially if they get in Preston and Faylen's way - he attempts to get out.

Complicating the picture and Mitchum's exit are Tully's daughters whose loyalties are split, with daughter Bel Geddes firmly with her dad while daughter Thaxter is covertly selling her dad out to help her manipulative boyfriend Preston who promises to marry her if he can get rich off this deal. Preston is a consummate noir character as he initially charms both Mitchum and Thaxter (and the audience) into believing his intent might be decent - marriage and to help the homesteaders - while he's later shown to be willing to do anything, and kill anyone, to get his profitable-to-him deal done.

Mitchum, initially on Preston's side, comes up against Bel Geddes, but even as antagonists, their chemistry is palpable. However, when Mitchum tries to break from Preston and even help Tully (Bel Geddes' dad) - he wants to right his wrong of having supported Preston - it takes time for her to believe he's changed, especially, as everyone's hands are a little bit dirty by now.

If Mitchum is the hero here, he's a way-ahead-of-his-time hero as he's no cardboard good guy, but a complex man who makes some bad decisions and isn't opposed to modest cheating. But he also has a moral line he won't cross. Plus, let's not kid ourselves, he wants to hang around to, yes, right a wrong, but also to win over Bel Geddes. Basically, he plays a standard Mitchum noir character just in Western clothes, but it works both here and in his noir roles as he has the nuance and talent to convincingly be morally grey.

From here, the rest of the movie is watching Mitchum trying to stop Preston and Faylen, which results in a brutal bar fight that belongs more in a Tarrantino film than a '50s Western. More battles ensue - the violence is strikingly real and vicious in this movie - until, finally, Mitchum and Bel Geddes are held up with homesteader Walter Brennan in a small house fighting it out with Tully and his remaining men.

Being 1948, unfortunately, the ending is too clean and too nice, but the audience, then and now, will see through that because director Wise serves up a morality tale with no simple solutions. He twists good and bad men this way and that while tossing in a lot of bad faith, some genuine misunderstanding, several turnabouts and much violence. Wise leaves the viewer exhausted but thinking at the end of *Blood on the Moon*, as, just like in real life, he shows us that there rarely are any easy answers.

N.B., Barbara Bel Geddes - a slip of youth and cuteness here - might have broken Hollywood's land-speed record for going from hottie to middle-aged matron as, just ten years later, she'll play the spinster friend pining for greying and in-his-fifties Jimmy Steward in *Vertigo* (and she won't get him).

.


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## Fading Fast

*A Letter to Three Wives* from 1949 with Linda Darnell, Ann Southern, Kirk Douglas, Paul Douglas and Jeanne Crain

A letter from the town's siren sent to three wives as they start a day boat trip informs them that she has left town with one of their husbands - holy cow!


While "trapped" on the boat and through flashbacks, we see why each woman thinks her husband could be the one
One women is a successful writer married to a school teacher where her financial success undermines their marriage and his manhood - sometimes his fault / sometimes hers
Another is married to the handsome, wealthy "catch," but as she's just a plain farm girl he met and married during the war, she thinks he regrets his spontaneous decision
The third is a "wrong side of the tracks" pretty young woman who married the middle-aged wealthy businessman in a marriage that began based on a transaction - my youth for your money - not love



It's as contrived as could be, but it works as the three marriages are brought to life - you can see any of these husbands being the one who left


The themes of class, love and money in small towns and within marriages are smartly explored


I enjoy this one more each time I see it 


N.B. As she always does, Thelma Ritter brings depth and dimension to her performance as a maid who does not fade into the background - she's an acting talent









*Turn Back the Clock* from 1933 with Lee Tracy, Mae Clarke and Otto Kruger


An early *Sliding Doors* or alternative-timeline story


A just-getting-by cigar-store owner, Tracy, married to a good woman, Clarke, whom, twenty years ago, he chose over the town's wealthy girl has an accident that propels him back in time where he gets to do his life over, but this time, with the knowledge of how his original choices turned out


Watching Tracy make different decision with his second chance had to feel fresh in 1933


Unfortunately, Tracy, a stage-trained actor, had yet to adjust to movie acting, so he over gestures and exaggeratedly projects as many stage actors did on film at that time


In the end, the movie boils down to the question of marrying for true love versus for money


It's clunky, but interesting enough for a 78 minute effort


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## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 49902
> 
> *A Letter to Three Wives* from 1949 with Linda Darnell, Ann Southern, Kirk Douglas, Paul Douglas and Jeanne Crain
> 
> A letter from the town's siren sent to three wives as they start a day boat trip informs them that she has left town with one of their husbands - holy cow!
> 
> 
> While "trapped" on the boat and through flashbacks, we see why each woman thinks her husband could be the one
> One women is a successful writer married to a school teacher where her financial success undermines their marriage and his manhood - sometimes his fault / sometimes hers
> Another is married to the handsome, wealthy "catch," but as she's just a plain farm girl he met and married during the war, she thinks he regrets his spontaneous decision
> The third is a "wrong side of the tracks" pretty young woman who married the middle-aged wealthy businessman in a marriage that began based on a transaction - my youth for your money - not love
> 
> 
> 
> It's as contrived as could be, but it works as the three marriages are brought to life - you can see any of these husbands being the one who left
> 
> 
> The themes of class, love and money in small towns and within marriages are smartly explored
> 
> 
> I enjoy this one more each time I see it
> 
> 
> N.B. As she always does, Thelma Ritter brings depth and dimension to her performance as a maid who does not fade into the background - she's an acting talent
> 
> View attachment 49903
> 
> *Turn Back the Clock* from 1933 with Lee Tracy, Mae Clarke and Otto Kruger
> 
> 
> An early *Sliding Doors* or alternative-timeline story
> 
> 
> A just-getting-by cigar-store owner, Tracy, married to a good woman, Clarke, whom, twenty years ago, he chose over the town's wealthy girl has an accident that propels him back in time where he gets to do his life over, but this time, with the knowledge of how his original choices turned out
> 
> 
> Watching Tracy make different decision with his second chance had to feel fresh in 1933
> 
> 
> Unfortunately, Tracy, a stage-trained actor, had yet to adjust to movie acting, so he over gestures and exaggeratedly projects as many stage actors did on film at that time
> 
> 
> In the end, the movie boils down to the question of marrying for true love versus for money
> 
> 
> It's clunky, but interesting enough for a 78 minute effort


Ok! That's one more added to my ever growing list of movies to be watched. On Amazon the movie has 4.7 out of 5 stars. Once again thanks.


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## Fading Fast

*Wicked Woman* from 1953 with Beverly Michaels, Richard Egan and Percy Helton

What comes after the letter B, oh, yes, C. So, maybe this is a C movie - much closer in story and production quality to a 1950s hour-long TV drama than a major motion picture. But if you accept its limitations in, well, story, budget and acting talent, it's deliciously fun in an almost campy way.

A "wicked woman," Beverly Michaels, a drifter with looks and no morality comes to town, takes a room in a boarding house (with a super-creepy neighbor, Helton) and gets a job as a waitress in a cocktail bar. At work, she immediately begins hitting on the husband (Egan) part of the husband-and-wife bar-ownership team, while plying the alcoholic wife with booze.

Tall, lean in a gangly all-arms-and-legs way, but with a large chest and white-blonde hair, Beverly Michaels looks like a stretched-out Marilyn Monroe. With her somnolent acting style and as the film's lead, she doesn't so much carry the movie, but instead, drags it along like a little kid does with a baby blanket. However, you can't deny that all five feet and nine inches of her captures your attention. (And I'll take the over on 5'9".)

Michael's plan - more opportunistic happenstance as she doesn't think meaningfully far into the future - is to get Egan, they are now having an affair, to sell the bar out from under his wife and take her (Michaels) to Mexico for a long vacation. Okay, not everyone dreams as big as you'd think.

While this is in motion, Michaels uses her creepy neighbor, gnome-like Percy Helton, for favors and money by stringing him along with the promise of a date. However, just as Egan and she are about to complete the fraudulent sale of the bar - Michaels has to pretend to be the wife at the closing to fake her signature - Helton has had enough being put off and tries to blackmail Michael for sex with the information he's learned about her corrupt plan. Watching an older, overly short, fat, balding man try to come on sexually to a young, overly tall, comely blonde has an awful creep and ick factor that you'll struggle to wipe from your memory.

From here, as you expect in a noir film, things unravel quickly, but surprisingly, the justice meted out is incredibly tame. Effectively, everybody gets sent home for a do-over. Along the way, though, look for two quirks of the era.

One, Michaels has an ongoing morning battle to beat another woman to the boarding house's bathroom leading to a funny scene where Michaels wins an impromptu footrace and, then, tweaks her defeated adversary. Two, there's a poorly explained scene where Michaels is seen giving some of her tip money to a man described as an "employment" man, but, I guess, he's a mob guy collecting "protection" money. Boarding-house wars and the rackets - you can't get more '50s or more film noir than that.

*Wicked Woman* is a not-good movie that is still enjoyable in a campy way because of awkwardly tall and sleepy, but appealing, Michaels, an embarrassingly cheap budget and unapologetically immoral characters. There are worse ways to spend an hour.


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## Fading Fast

*Hold Your Man* from 1933 with Clark Gable and Jean Harlow

This is not an easy movie to categorize as it's a full-throttle pre-code story about two grifters - Gable and Harlow - who meet and deny that they are falling in love, but it ends with a Christianity redemption moment delivered by one of the era's most-oppressed people.

At first, after meeting and hooking up, Gable and Harlow act like they kinda don't care about each other and just go on grifting and sort of living together. But you know Harlow cares as when one of Gable's ex-girlfriends shows up, a girl-fight ensues: the ex-girlfriend slaps Harlow who counters with a left jab that knocks the ex back hard...girlfight over, Harlow won.

But it takes much more trouble for Gable and Harlow to see what they mean to each other. When Harlow is sent to a women's reform prison (more dorm-like than prison), she discovers she's pregnant with Gable's baby. Stop there for a second to ponder what 1933 Hollywood has just offered up: Two criminals conceive a baby out of wedlock with the pregnant and still-unwed mother now in prison - holy smokes.

Harlow, because she doesn't want to be "that girl," the kind that gets a man by guilt, keeps this a secret from Gable (she won't wear a bra, but for the important things, the girl does have her values). Meanwhile, not much reform is happening initially to Harlow in prison, but she does befriend a fellow black inmate who is a preacher's daughter.

(Spoiler alerts) And just when all hope looks lost, Gable learns of Harlow's condition and risks his own freedom by coming to see her in prison. After some angry words and confusion and with the police coming to arrest Gable, he and Harlow attempt to get married on the fly with the only preacher available being Harlow's black friend's father who is visiting his daughter that day.

So we have a wonderful moment of Christian salvation as Harlow and Gable want to "legitimize" their baby and give it a chance for a decent life as both of them commit to "going straight." And this is all overseen and encouraged by a black preacher who believes in the kindness-and-forgiveness form of Christianity as it is implied that he knows how unfair and hard life can be. And being black in 1933, we have no doubt that he does.

So, to recap, two street-level criminals have casual sex resulting in a baby that leads to an in-prison spiritual epiphany by a pregnant mom and an on-the-lam father all shepherded by a black preacher with a convict daughter. This is a two-fisted pre-code with a bracing shot of religion. It might not fit in a typical Hollywood box, and it's clunky as heck by today's standards, but give MGM credit for making a gritty movie with a quietly subversive social and racial message wrapped inside a redemption story.

N.B., If you do watch it, look for Gable's line during his impromptu prison wedding to Harlow. With the police bearing down on them, Gable, knowing this will be his only chance to marry a pregnant-with-his-baby Harlow, tries to hurry up the preacher (attempting to conduct a proper marriage ceremony) with this comment, "can't you skip some of it and just marry us?" Who says romance was dead in 1933?


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## Fading Fast

*The Hard Way* from 1943 with Ida Lupino, Dennis Miller, Joan Leslie and Jack Carson

They packed a lot into this classic story of a struggle to escape a hardscrabble existence. Older sister Ida Lupino sees her talented teenage singer/actress younger sister, Joan Leslie, as their ticket out of a dreary steel town. So, she leaves her reasonably decent steel-worker husband - nothing gets in Lupino's way in this one - and takes Leslie on the road to start her career.

There, they meet the struggling vaudeville team of Dennis Miller and Jack Carson. Seeing an opportunity, ruthless Lupino steers Leslie into a marriage to Carson. Miller, a good-guy playboy - he has a fun woman in every town - sees through Lupino, but can't stop the ill-fated marriage nor Lupino's passive-aggressive efforts to push him out.

While palliated for the code, Lupino, who is physically attracted to handsome Miller, has - and this is the phrase for - hate sex with Miller, but she's still hurt when he brushes her off afterwords. And he's not wrong, as she's been awful to him and Carson, so he leaves Lupino and the act.

Worse still, later, as Leslie's star starts to rise, Lupino manipulates a separation for Leslie from, now, not-needed Carson even though the marriage is working (spoiler alert) causing Carson to commit suicide. Again, nothing will get in Lupino's way to turn her sister into a star.

Next up, Lupino, effectively, destroys the last career chance of a fading Broadway star just to create an opportunity for her sister. It's a gut-wrenching scene as Lupino "befriends" the older actress and, then, gets this battling-alcoholism woman drunk before her key rehearsal: old star out, sister in.

Finally, though, after being her sister's pawn all these years, Leslie pushes back and takes a vacation without Lupino at a resort where she accidentally meets Miller, who has, since their split years ago, become a successful bandleader. We are now at the movie's money moment as the man Lupino pushed aside to advance her sister's career, the same man Lupino slept with and was hurt when he, then, brushed her off, has a genuine love affair with Lupino's sister.

By the time Lupino gets to the resort, Miller and Leslie plan to marry, which sparks one last successful machination from Lupino. She guilts her sister back to the stage and away from Miller with the old saw about "how much I sacrificed for you," and she reminds her sister that all their money is tied up in the new show.

But the spell's been broken and Leslie, after one night where she collapses on stage, quits the play and marries Miller. Phew, as noted, a lot happens, but really very little could be a spoiler alert as the movie opens with Lupino - well dressed - attempting suicide. Then, dying in a hospital, the story is told through flashbacks until, in the very final scene, we learn if Lupino makes it or not.

It's a shame that the suicide construct begins and ends the movie as this solid, albeit, well-tread story stands on its own without the awkward suicide framing. Regardless, it's a good almost two-hours of watching a ruthless woman pull her sister and herself up from poverty by mercilessly ploughing down every obstacle in their way. And as she does, your sympathies switch several times - as happens often in real life.

I can't call this a post script or a _nota bene_ as it's too ugly. Early in the movie, there is an almost tossed-off line delivered by the manager of a theater who offers to help the struggling vaudeville team of Miller and Carson out even though he has to let them go as they aren't drawing a crowd.

The manager is trying hard to strike a fair balance between his business needs and being a good guy to the team. But when the team rejects his offer of help - not in anger, but pride - almost to himself, the theater manager says (paraphrasing), "when this gets out, people will say 'dirty Heb'," clearly referring to himself.

That's it, the movie moves on without any further note of that comment. But you know, that line didn't wander into the movie by itself, so someone - a writer, director, producer - wanted to make a point about antisemitism. Even under the Motion Picture Production Code, some poignant social commentary made it into movies, often, in a quiet but effective way.


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## Fading Fast

*The Natura*l from 1984 with Robert Redford, Glen Close, Robert Duvall, Wilford Brimley and Kim Basinger

It's the fourth or fifth time I've seen it and, while I enjoy it, I'm, also, always a bit disappointed


It has the look and feel of (nostalgic) classic baseball 


It also has a story about corruption, money, gambling and throwing games that echoes the 1919 Chicago Black Sox scandal


But instead of telling that fascinating and true story, it tells an opaque fictional tale about a brilliant young prospect who is shot in a hotel room by a mysterious woman, which takes him out of baseball until he attempts a comeback sixteen years later - huh, what?


And that's the fail as the story is never fully explained and feels pointless, so you're always scratching your head a bit 


Watch it for the beautiful period details and nostalgic-baseball vibe, while paying only enough attention to the story to follow its outline









*The Human Comedy* from 1943 with Mickey Rooney, Frank Morgan, James Craig, Donna Reed and Van Johnson

Based on the excellent William Saroyan book by the same name (comments here:  #818  ) the movie is faithful to the book, but struggles a bit to capture the novel's whimsy, pathos and spirituality


As a slice of life story about a California family during WWII - father passed away, traditional mother, older brother off to war, middle brother (Rooney) takes a job to help the family out, sister is coming of age, youngest brother still in the wonderment years - the movie is propaganda in a "we're fighting for this wholesome way of life" approach, but is also a warm picture of a modest family doing what all families do - live, love, argue, make up, go forward


And perhaps that's why the movie struggles a bit as movies prefer traditional story arcs with a conflict followed by resolution, not touching vignettes evoking an uplifting feeling


What little traditional story there is here centers around the middle boy's job as a messenger for a telegraph office, which allows him and us to see all the highs and lows of life


But we also see schools where teachers are, basically, respected, kids raised "free range" style, a kiss being a big deal to teenagers and religion questioned but still woven into the daily life of the community


No surprise, the book is better, but after a bumpy start, the movie finds its legs and is worth the watch (with a particularly impressive and nuanced performance by Mickey Rooney - not a line I write often) 


N.B., look for (1) the reverse snobbery scene where the "radical" telegraph business owner expects to hate his fiance's upper-class family but comes to realize that his prejudices and not theirs are the problem and (2) the sympathetic portrayal of an older alcoholic (Morgan)


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## Fading Fast

*Take Care of My Little Girl* from 1951 with Jeanne Crain, Dale Robertson and Jeffery Hunter

While this rich-kids-at-college movie never rises much above the level of a made-for-TV movie, it does throw some hard punches at the, as presented here, cliquish and snobbish world of sororities.

Sorority legacy student, Jeanne Crain, is enthusiastic to join her mother's sorority. Pretty, from the "right" family and with the "right" wardrobe, she's a shoo-in for the best sorority. However, some of her friends - a lifelong bestie and a new friend she just met upon arriving at college - are less-certain candidates owing to family background, finances, personalities, etc.

Additionally, Jeanne starts dating a decidedly not-fraternity boy, Dale Robertson, who, having deferred college owing to the war, serves as a voice of reason and maturity to Jeanne's newbie enthusiasm. However, she is also dating one of the big fraternity boys, Jeffery Hunter, who boosts her chances of acceptance.

And just when you think this is all fluff, the fraternity boyfriend asks her to help him cheat on a critical final (since it's still rush-week, the timeline is inconsistent, but heck, they had a point to make), which, surprisingly she does and is lauded by the sorority for "beating the system."

It's surprisingly callous and immoral that the sorority girls just laugh cheating off - so much for the "wholesome fifties." Even when I went to college in the '80s, there was still a vestige of the "honor code" left as cheating was seen, rightfully, as a major offense that could lead to expulsion.

The climax of *Take Care of My Little Girl* comes as the "pledges" are hazed and pushed out (asked to depledge), voted out or like Jeanne, accepted. Still struggling a bit with her decision to help her boyfriend cheat and, now, seeing good friends rejected for not having the "right" clothes, background or "just so" personality, Jeanne has the epiphany moment you knew was coming.

(Spoiler alert, I guess) After much thought and discussion and amidst plenty of pressure from the sorority (and her mother) to just say "yes" and join, Jeanne turns the sorority down as she no longer wants to be part of its (our modern term for it) elitist world.

Okay, it's a message movie that completes its mission with gusto. Heck, if accurate, these sorority girls can be so mean to each other and, worse, to those not in a sorority, that any rebuke they get seems earned.

But there's also this: at one level, you do feel bad for the girls who get emotionally crushed when they get rejected as, yes, teenagers are impressionable and insecure, but part of "adulting" is learning to take rejection while keeping things in perspective. Even teenagers should be able to realize that not getting into a sorority is a bump in the road, not a dead-end.

Unless it's your specific cup of tea, I'd recommend passing on this one, but would encourage you to see a much, much better variation on the sorority theme in 1939's *These Glamour Girls* (comments here: #24172)


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## Fading Fast

*Play Girl *from 1932 with Loretta Young, Norman Foster and Guy Kibbee

A fast sixty minute pre-code about a smart young woman (Young), with no desire to marry, trying to make a career for herself in a department store


She then meets a charming salesman (Foster) and, after a setback at work, agrees to marry him only to learn he's really a gambler who pings from being broke to "in the money" regularly - the opposite of the stable life she wanted and he promised


Then, of course, she gets pregnant, he says he'll get a real job, a misunderstanding leads to a split and Young is back at the department store, but with a baby on the way


Things then get really crazy as Young, all along against gambling, kinda gets hooked on gambling herself, loses her job and is all but destitute until the forced ending, which we'll leave unsaid for those who want to see the movie


A few fun things to look for are the great time travel to a 1933 department store and an even neater look at an illegal gambling joint complete with tote boards, cashier windows, touts and a police raid


These fast, low-budget pre-code movies are really more like one-hour TV dramas than motion pictures, but looked at that way, they are quick, enjoyable stories where you can see young actresses, like Loretta Young, before they became major stars


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## Howard

I just finished watching the final season of Fuller House on Netflix.


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## Fading Fast

Howard said:


> I just finished watching the final season of Fuller House on Netflix.


You did not have to admit that.

I'm just kidding with you Howard as I watch my share of silly / goofy shows too.


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## Fading Fast

*The Purple Rose of Cairo* from 1985 with Mia Farrow, Jeff Daniels and Danny Aiello

The creative idea employed here of having an actor, in a movie within a movie, "walk out of the screen" and into the audience to interact with real-live people is cool and innovative. And, in some scenes, director Woody Allen leverages this stratagem for all its comedic and plot potential, but the overall story still falls flat.

A Depression-era wife, Mia Farrow, now supporting her layabout and abusive husband, Danny Aiello, by working in a diner, escapes her weary reality by regularly going to the movies. There, she sees a world of wealthy, well-dressed and well-fed beautiful people living in luxurious homes and penthouses, driving shiny new cars and taking exotic vacations. [Side note: the massive number of movies made during the Depression about people living wealthy, luxurious lives argues that Farrow's character was a quite common reality in the '30s.]

And then, one day, it happens: a character - a handsome explorer, Jeff Daniels - walks right out of the screen and up to Mia Farrow because he's seen here in the theater watching his movie, *The Purple Rose of Cairo*, so many times. Mimicking movie romance, these two immediately fall in love, but have to navigate both the obstacles facing a movie character, now, living in the real world and Farrow being married.

When movie-character-now-in-the-real-world Daniels discovers his movie money isn't any good and that restaurant reservations don't just magically happen or when he notes how, of course, his hair is always perfect even after fights or adventures, the movie's charm and whimsy quotient takes off. Similarly, when he accidentally finds himself in a real-world bordello, his square-jawed, movie-hero-innocense view of the world's oldest profession is movie gold.

Further, when the producers of the movie back in Hollywood get word that a star has walked off the screen, they acknowledge they had always worried about this and begin a plan to pull the movie from all theaters before it becomes "a thing:" what would they do if actors everywhere just walked out of the movies? Real business Hollywood metaphors are easy to see as the "money" people in the studio era are forced to acknowledge the value of actors.

And why would a character walking out of a movie to live in the real world become a thing? Well, the other actors in the movie - who now are just hanging around waiting for Daniels to return before the movie can resume - discuss it as an option, but most seem to prefer the safe predictability of their movie universe. Compared to living in the real-world Depression at that time, they might just be right.

All this kinda crazy parallel-world stuff is the movie's joy and energy, but it gets weighed down by a plodding love story between Farrow and movie-character Daniels that becomes a plodding love triangle when the real-life Daniels - the actual actor and not the one that walked off the screen - shows up in town to try to coax his character doppleganger to return to the screen. He, like his character, falls immediately in love with Farrow and has to compete with his screen persona for her affections.

The movie devotes its main energies to this uninteresting real-life man / movie character / real-life woman love triangle, which is really just two takes on the same metaphor about those who try to escape their humdrum lives through movie-inspired daydreams. Because of this, the unique tale of a movie character "escaping" the screen to live in the real world gets less attention and development than it deserves.

The climax and ending are disappointing as the settling of the love triangle feels rushed and forced; while at the same time, the true charm of the movie - a screen character attempting to live in the real world - is tied up neatly but without any clear explanation. And the movie's big message that studios are just dream factories seems hardly worth the effort.

Being a 1980s movie, the period details are uneven and the film quality has already deteriorated, but still, the cool plot innovation provides so much fun when it's the focus, that it's worth seeing this movie at least once even if it did too little with its smart idea. I know it's been riffed on since (*The Truman Show* is one variation), but there still seems to be an opportunity to take Woody Allen's fun idea and develop it into a more engaging movie.


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## Vecchio Vespa

Despite the off putting title we watched Beautiful Girls the other night. It got progressively better and better and on balance was an engaging flick. Timothy Hutton, Uma Thurman, a very young Natalie Portman, Anna Beth Gish, Matt Dillon, Mira Sorvino, Rosie O'Donnell. Sort of a bit of Garden State, a bit of Diner, and a fun nod to Lolita.


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## Fading Fast

TKI67 said:


> Despite the off putting title we watched Beautiful Girls the other night. It got progressively better and better and on balance was an engaging flick. Timothy Hutton, Uma Thurman, a very young Natalie Portman, Anna Beth Gish, Matt Dillon, Mira Sorvino, Rosie O'Donnell. Sort of a bit of Garden State, a bit of Diner, and a fun nod to Lolita.


I remember seeing this one when it came out and liking it, but don't remember much about it other than that Uma Thurman was gorgeous. I did notice it was in rotation on HBO, so with your endorsing post, I think I'll give it a second watch.


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## The Great Garbanzo

Sorry, I could not read through the entire thread but two of my favorites that I will re watch anytime, no matter where in the movie I happen to tune in are:

Going My Way, (Bing Crosby), and The Devil Wears Prada.

Short list on long stay on deserted Island:


Hunt for Red October
Crimson Tide
The Sum of All Fears
Dark Knight-- Heath Ledger was otherworldly
Senna-Didn't care for him as a driver but good flick
1- Another F-1 movie
We are Marshall


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## eagle2250

The Great Garbanzo said:


> Sorry, I could not read through the entire thread but two of my favorites that I will re watch anytime, no matter where in the movie I happen to tune in are:
> 
> Going My Way, (Bing Crosby), and The Devil Wears Prada.
> 
> Short list on long stay on deserted Island:
> 
> Hunt for Red October
> Crimson Tide
> The Sum of All Fears
> Dark Knight-- Heath Ledger was otherworldly
> Senna-Didn't care for him as a driver but good flick
> 1- Another F-1 movie
> We are Marshall


We seem to have similar tastes in movies. With the exception of "Senna" I have seen every movie on your list....all great flicks!


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## Fading Fast

*Kitty Foyle* from 1940 with Ginger Rogers, Dennis Miller and James Craig

My journey to watching this movie a second time started with me watching this movie a few years back. I could "feel" that there was a better story behind it - meaning the Motion Picture Production Code had mangled it - so I bought the book it was based on.

The 1939 book is outstanding in a real-life way (comments here:  #798 ). There's a lot of not-code-approved stuff going on in the book - sex and pregnancy out of wedlock, an abortion, working women supporting themselves in careers by choice, interfaith relationships and more - and none of it is gratiutious or salacious. It just reminds us that life was always way-more messy, expansive and complicated than code-enforced movies allowed.

So, after the book, I returned to the movie to see if there was more here than I remembered. Unfortunately, there really isn't, as the code strangled this story to death. I'm good at code-speak, but I still struggled to see through all the obfuscation; at some point, it's just too much.

The very broad outlines of the story are still there in the movie. Kitty Foyle is a young girl from working-class Philadelphia who falls in love with an uber-society, "Mainline" boy, which, apparently, means everything in Philadelphia at that time. After several attempts at making their relationship work, but failing, Kitty decamps to New York City for a fresh start where she builds a career in marketing for a cosmetics firm. There, she begins to date a young doctor, but Philly boy keeps popping in and out of her life, buffeting Kitty's attempts to make a clean break and start anew in New York.

Using that outline, the movie starts near the end with, in the opening scene, Kitty having to decide between marrying the doctor or having an affair with her now-married Mainline love. Then, through flashbacks, the movie shows how Kitty got to that point.

But so much of Kitty's and her society man's background are left out and so much is "cleaned" up for the movie code, that the characters' motivations are obscured and life experiences elided. In the end, not much of the book's engaging story is left. Sadly, Kitty's really well-handled interfaith relationship in the book - she's Catholic, her New York boyfriend is Jewish - is scrubbed out of the movie.

One good thing that made it to the movie is the scene where Kitty basically tells the Mainline family - who is willing to accept her if she's willing to adopt their social customs and manners - to shove it. We all love a good "go to hell" comeuppance for the old guard and it's well done here, but also sneaking in - both in the book and the movie - is that the family isn't really that snobbish or bad. They sincerely like Kitty and want to embrace her; however, they can't see completely past the norms of their insular culture to say "come as you are," but still, they did genuinely invite her in.

Ginger Rogers gives her all as Kitty and it's a good performance as is James Craig's as the doctor boyfriend, but Dennis Morgan comes across as wooden as the love of her life. That said, with the movie stripped of so much that made the book good, the fault in the movie lies with the Motion Picture Production Code destroying the verisimilitude and nuance of the story and not with the actors.

I clearly devoted too much effort to this *Kitty Foyle* exercise, so to benefit from my experience, just read the book.


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## The Great Garbanzo

_ I clearly devoted too much effort to this *Kitty Foyle* exercise, so to benefit from my experience, just read the book. _

Certainly made a compelling argument to do so. I've ordered it through my local library branch. Should be there Saturday morning!!


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## Fading Fast

The Great Garbanzo said:


> _ I clearly devoted too much effort to this *Kitty Foyle* exercise, so to benefit from my experience, just read the book. _
> 
> Certainly made a compelling argument to do so. I've ordered it through my local library branch. Should be there Saturday morning!!


That's awesome. I hope you enjoy it.


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## Vecchio Vespa

We watched The Gentlemen last night (Matthew McConaughey, Michele Dockery, Charlie Hunnam, Hugh Grant, Jeremy Strong, Henry Golding, Eddie Marsan, and loads more). Matthew McConaughey plays an expat in England who has a rather incredible Mary Jane empire. When he goes to sell it, an incredible series of intrigues to jack with the sale is set in motion, laying the groundwork for an hilarious, gripping, complex story told beautifully by the characters. Many you might have long felt hopelessly hemmed in by type casting show some real range, especially Hugh Grant. Great fun and sufficiently loaded with details to merit rewatching. Fans of clothing will be treated to spectacular wardrobes well assembled and carried off. The soundtrack is terrific.


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## Fading Fast

*College Humor* from 1933 with Bing Crosby (!), Mary Carlisle and Jack Oakie 

Early entry in the almost-always busy college-movie genre 


Not a musical in the traditional sense (dialogue and action played out in song and dance), but a movie with several musical numbers performed as part of the story by up-and-coming crooner Bing Crosby (still perfecting his laid-back acting style)


Like most college movies, albeit in a '30s way, it's about boys and girls chasing each other, kids (and some helicopter parents, yup, they existed back then, too) worrying or not about grades and their future, plus tests, cheating, sports, clothes, fraternities and drinking - you know, a college movie


Being the '30s, a coed is openly dating a teacher; he's young and not married, but I would think that's still a complete no-no today


The uber-importance of football obviously started early as we see intense pressure on the players, "bending" of the rules for star athletes and the administration kowtowing to big-donor alumni who want a winning team


Drama amps up a bit when a star athlete is expelled for drinking and a teacher who defends him gets fired, but still, *College Humor* is mainly a fun romp and early look at college life









*Design for Scandal* from 1941 with Walter Pidgeon, Rosalind Russell and Edward Arnold

While billed as a screwball comedy, it's more like a romcom as there isn't too much screwballness going on, but there's plenty of silly romcomness happening


Pidgeon, a reporter, tries to help his boss, Arnold, get some dirt on a female judge, Russell, who ruled against Arnold in a divorce case


The plot these two idiots hatch is to have Pidgeon get close to Russell by romancing her so that he can then tarnish her reputation - you know, silly, stupid romcom stuff


While it has a few good moments, Pidgeon and Russell never develop any real chemistry as comedy is not Pidgeon's forte and the script is forced and flat 


The highlight of the film is Arnold, once again, playing a morally challenged tycoon who pushes everyone around, including his gold-digging ex-wife, but, as usually happens to him, everything, eventually, blows up in his face


I'm a Rosalind Russell fan, but even she never finds her real grove in this one perhaps because she's stuck with a hairdo that looks like she was auditioning for the role of an alien on* Star Trek*


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## Fading Fast

TKI67 said:


> We watched The Gentleman last night (Matthew McConaughey, Michele Dockery, Charlie Hunnam, Hugh Grant, Jeremy Strong, Henry Golding, Eddie Marsan, and loads more). Matthew McConaughey plays an expat in England who has a rather incredible Mary Jane empire. When he goes to sell it, an incredible series of intrigues to jack with the sale is set in motion, laying the groundwork for an hilarious, gripping, complex story told beautifully by the characters. Many you might have long felt hopelessly hemmed in by type casting show some real range, especially Hugh Grant. Great fun and sufficiently loaded with details to merit rewatching. Fans of clothing will be treated to spectacular wardrobes well assembled and carried off. The soundtrack is terrific.


Could not agree more with your review. My comments on it here  #402 

As you note, can't wait to watch it again.


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## Vecchio Vespa

Fading Fast said:


> Could not agree more with your review. My comments on it here  #402
> 
> As you note, can't wait to watch it again.


Sorry I missed your earlier and terrific review. I am just coming to follow this thread, your reviews in particular.


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## Fading Fast

*Million Dollar Baby* from 1941 with Priscilla Lane, May Robson, Jeffery Lynn and Ronald Reagan

It's an early entry in the "working-class man or woman is gifted/inherited/wins a million dollars" genre. The premise here is that an eccentric, wealthy older woman, May Robson, discovers that some of her fortune was originally obtained, decades ago, by her father embezzling from his partner, so she sets out to right the wrong.

Robson is pitch perfect as a rich, but pragmatic octogenarian used to getting her way as, early on, she rebukes her affable and young lawyer, Jeffery Lynn, to give her the facts without any "wherases or wherefores -" who hasn't wanted to say that to a lawyer?

A quick search for an heir of her father's wronged partner, led by lawyer Lynn, leads Robson to Hollywood's perfect version of the girl next door, Priscilla Lane. Happy and optimistic Lane lives in a boarding house, works in a department store and dates a somewhat-radical piano player, (future president) Ronald Reagan, trying to break into classical music.

Upon learning of her good fortune, Lane is half happy and half suspicious, so, in one of the movie's better scenes, she all but tells a stuffy banker, at the bank where her money is being held, that she doesn't trust his bank with her new-found wealth. She even makes him show her some of the bank's physical money and demands a tour of the vault.

It is a wonderful moment of common sense cutting through pompous speech (like earlier, when Robson upbraided her solicitor for using "lawyer-speak"). A country less than ten years removed from hundreds of bank failures would appreciate Lane's skepticism.

And Lane, who sees the money as an end to her and boyfriend Reagan's struggle, is surprised when Reagan expresses happiness for her good fortune, but tells her they are over as a couple as he won't live off of her and that their two worlds no longer meet. Meanwhile, lawyer Lynn, who has been guiding Lane through the wrinkles her new-found wealth creates, is falling for Lane.

From here, it's a bunch of '30s/'40s movie cliches - Lane gives a lot of the money away to the other needy residents in the boarding house while, separately, she is also taught "proper" upper-class ways to fit into society, which she, then, finds stuffy and boring. It's not hard to understand why these bromides were popular with Depression Era audiences: a shared windfall has serious political overtones and mocking the ways of the wealthy might be the oldest movie stereotype of them all.

You can probably guess the ending of both the Lane-Lynn-Reagan love triangle (I thought Lane chose the wrong guy) and Lane's windfall itself, but the fun is seeing Lane cutely and innocently stumble her way to the outcome. The movie is charm over substance, but, with several witty lines and scenes and strong performances from Robson, Lynn and Lane, it's a reasonable way to spend an hour and forty minutes. Plus there's some great footage of a Clipper "flying boat" landing at LaGuardia Field's Marine Air Terminal.


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## Fading Fast

*The Gay Bride* from 1934 with Carole Lombard, Chester Morris, Zasu Pitts and Ned Pendleton

A quirky '30s romcom about a gold-digging woman, Lombard, marrying or trying to marry several mob men for their money while sparring with a mob factotum, "office boy," Morris, who sees completely through her act, but falls for her anyway


Morris does work for the mob, but only on legitimate business (it's that type of movie, so you just go with it) as he's staying clean while saving up to buy a gas station so that he can get out and lead a normal life


Lombard, initially, laughs at Morris and his "small life" ambition as she wants money and possessions (and, literally, steals from her mob boyfriends and husbands to get them) 


But as riches come and go for her (mob money is tenuous), she begins to see the limitations of "stuff," the downside of being with men you don't care for and the appeal of an honest man - Morris


It's pretty predictable, and the mob stuff - and body count - is treated pretty callously here, but for a '30s romcom, they keep the screwball comedy to a minimum


Morris and Lombard have real chemistry with, surprisingly, Morris stealing several scenes from Lombard as she comes off shrilly at times, while he's in the enviable role of being the only person in the room with both integrity and who gets the joke


It's nothing more than a hour-and-twenty-minute romcom, but Morris and Lombard make it work









*The Joker* from 2019 with Joaquin Phoenix, Robert De Niro and Zazie Beetz

Outstanding performance by Joaquin Phoenix


Because of the incredible hype, I found I liked this very good movie less than I thought I would / also, good as it is, it's depressing as heck


You can see it as an alternative Joker-origin story in the Batman oeuvre or, more as I did, a story about an isolated, lonely, broken and mentally ill man slowly being broken further by a society with limited resources that hasn't figured out how to consistently help people like him


As with most movies today, the visuals are incredible, which, in this case, includes a pretty-accurate time capsule of NYC in the '70s - meaning much garbage, graffiti and disorder - just as it was when I first started coming to the city as a kid


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## Fading Fast

*Born to Kill* from 1947 with Claire Trever, Lawrence Tierney, Elisha Cook Jr. and Walter Slezak

A handsome sociopath, a man who kills at the smallest provocation, manages to worm his way into the life of a wealthy society family in San Francisco.

Tierney, the sociopath, is chilling as a cold blooded killer whose hair-trigger anger at even small slights can cause him to take a life. The real mystery is how this man made it to middle age without being caught by the police or killed by somebody.

He is aided by a sycophant sidekick, Elisha Cook Jr, whose slavish devotion to Tierney has him covering up Tierney's murders. No explanation for Cook's loyalty is given, but my wild guess is that, in the novel the movie is based on, something homosexual is going on or implied. Nobody is that devoted to someone who treats him as horribly as Tierney does Cook, without something more than a warped friendship driving the relationship.

Clair Trevor, the poor relative of the wealthy San Francisco family, provides Tierney's entry to the family and society as she is infatuated with him despite knowing he is a killer. She stumbled upon two of Tierney's victims early on and, even though she hardly knew him at that point, somewhat covered up for him anyway, which immediately makes us question her mental stability.

But this is Trevor's movie, as she owns it, drives it, centers it and saves it as her anger issues and emotional baggage are slowly revealed. She greatly resents being the poor relative, but hides her resentment from everyone but, eventually, Tierney. In some perverse way, she is attracted to Tierney, yes, sexually, but also because he is someone more willing than she is to show his anger to the world.

In classic noir fashion, these are two people whose worst instincts destroy all the opportunity and good that does come into their lives. Trevor is engaged to a decent society man, but risks it all by (implied, but we get it) having an affair with Tierney. Worse, Tierney - a human wrecking ball - begins courting Trever's wealthy half sister, which infuriates Trevor who employs a crazy "I can cheat, but you can't" kind of logic.

From here, the story ramps up as Tierney marries the half sister while Trevor and he continue to canoodle behind everyone's back. Meanwhile, a private investigator, Walter Slezak, shows up to investigate an earlier Tierney murder. At this point, you know it's all going to come crashing down; the fun is seeing it happen.

Despite Cook Jr's best efforts to protect his friend Tierney, Slezak - in a pitch-perfect role as a greedy but effective investigator - slowly tightens the noose around Tierney. Simultaneously, Trevor bounces back and forth between protecting Tierney and hurting him because he married her sister. Meanwhile, psychotic Tierney simply plows ahead by forcing his will on everyone while having intense spasms of anger at the slightest pushback.

Finally, Tierney takes one too many chances that neither Cook nor Trevor can cover up. It ends how most noirs end, with a reasonably large body count and the bad guys not winning, but somehow, it doesn't feel as if right and justice won either. Instead, you're left believing the world is a bit uglier, greedier and unjust than you thought it was before.


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## Vecchio Vespa

Between COVID19, the messed up football season, and politics, I confess that a Hallmark Christmas movie can be a nice diversion.


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## Fading Fast

TKI67 said:


> Between COVID19, the messed up football season, and politics, I confess that a Hallmark Christmas movie can be a nice diversion.


I've gotten sucked into a few of those each season as well. I'm not proud of it, but sometimes it's nice to get away from the real world. Normally, I just run it as background as they are a little hard to just sit and watch.


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## Vecchio Vespa

Fading Fast said:


> I've gotten sucked into a few of those each season as well. I'm not proud of it, but sometimes it's nice to get away from the real world. Normally, I just run it as background as they are a little hard to just sit and watch.


Most are truly horrid as movies, but every now and then they have their moments. I like the one with Henry Winkler as the retired cop uncle. Also the one with Mira Sorvino suffering from amnesia.

When we need full strength escapism, nothing beats period pieces like the A&E version of Pride and Prejudice, Downton Abbey, Gosford Park, or A Little Chaos. Also good for escapism are Waking Ned Devine, The Secret of Roan Inish, Enchanted April, Room With A View, and any of the new-ish Oscar Wilde's (A Good Woman, The Importance of Being Earnest, and An Ideal Husband).


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## Fading Fast

*The Solitaire Man* from 1933 with Herbert Marshall, Elizabeth Allen and May Robson

Based on a play, the plot is complex, contrived and engaging as The Solitaire Man, Marshall, is a jewel thief (a popular 1930s career) about to marry his pretty, young accomplice, Allan, and retire, but owing to an underling's mistake, he has to execute one last break in to, in this case, return jewelry to get the police off his tracks


But that effort goes awry as another thief is there, which, in the dark, leads to gunfire resulting in a dead police inspector and too many clues


After that, it's to the heart and soul of the movie: a plane flight for the "gang" out of France to England with a, maybe-maybe-not, police inspector also on the flight trying to arrest Marshall


The flight is all "you're guilty, no I'm not, here's evidence, no it isn't, I have the pilfered necklace, no you have it (everyone checks pockets, again), you're not a real inspector, yes I am, turn this plane around, land it here, radio the police to meet the plane, I have your gun, I have the bullets" and on and on


It's fun in a witty, smartly-engineered way with complex characters and a bunch of plot twists and turns all in rapid-fire succession - not believable, but entertaining


And there's also pre-code fun: 
The young female thief (Allan), upon being proposed to by Marshall says, "you want to marry me, but why? You don't have to you know" (i.e., we can keep on just having sex and living together).
Another thief's drug addiction is openly discussed
The bad guys don't all lose in the end



Finally, it's great time travel to the '30s - clothes, cars, architecture and the aforementioned early-in-aviation-history plane flight

N.B., It's a shame talented and pretty actress Elizabeth Allan, whose vivacious and smart personality all but jumps off the screen, didn't have more of a career.


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## Vecchio Vespa

Another wonderful escapist type movie, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day. Frances McDormand, Amy Adams, Ciaran Hinds, Lee Pace, Mark Strong, and more. A feel good adult version of Victor/Victoria and Mary Poppins at the beginning of World War II.


----------



## Fading Fast

*In a Lonely Place* from 1950 with Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, Frank Lovejoy, Art Smith and Jeff Donnell

This outstanding movie plays around with the usual noir element to create a romance, wrapped around a murder mystery all inside a character study. And it's Bogart as a temperamental, violent and insecure screenwriter accused of murdering a young girl he met one night who provides the character to be studied.

The romance comes from his nearby neighbor and his alibi to the murder, Gloria Grahame. While Bogart is broken in many obvious ways - hair trigger temper leading to fist fights, arrogant, rigid and self-destructive opinions and a manic-depressive personality - Grahame is broken in a quiet, but almost, just as disturbing way.

These two meet the night after the murder in question as Bogart remembers his neighbor, Grahame, saw him through a window in his apartment at the time the girl in question was murdered in the nearby woods. After confirming Bogart's story to the police, Grahame and Bogie begin a love affair that, initially, produces an upbeat manic phase in Bogart.

Bogart starts writing again, sparking joy in his woebegone agent, wonderfully played by Art Smith. He also is able to socialize without fighting owing to Grahame's presence and influence. But with the police, including a former army buddy of Bogart's who's now a detective, Frank Lovejoy, still suspicious of Bogart, the pressure of being a suspect begins to bring out the worst in Bogie.

His paranoia resurfaces exposing Grahame, for the first time, to his temper, violence, condescension and irrational jealousy. From here, the movie is watching Bogart ping back and forth between being a nice guy in love to an angry man fighting the world, which ricochets Grahame's emotions all over the place as she realizes she's in love with a volatile and dangerous man.

And we learn, by innuendo, that Graham has a history with dangerous men, which explains why she doesn't immediately get out - as most normal people would - once she sees Bogart's violent side. Even Bogie's long-suffering friend and agent, Smith, admits to Graham that you have to just put up with all of Bogart's ways if you want to be in Bogart's world.

In the end, and trying to avoid giving the climax and conclusion away, the story comes down to whether two broken people can somehow help fix each other, despite first smashing everything and each other up. Of course, that will only even be possible if Bogart is actually innocent of the murder that hangs over his head throughout.

Director Nicholaus Ray, most famous for *Rebel Without a Cause*, serves up another outstanding tale of alienated, unstable people whose struggle to adjust to the world is stressed by hounding police and chaffing societal rules. It's a good twist on the basic noir structure, especially as much of the darkness in this one takes place in the, not typical to noir, daytime. Also, it's fun to see Grahame, in possibly her best role, matching Bogart scene for scene.

N.B. Look for the wonderfully named actress Jeff Donnell as the wife of Bogart's detective friend and a confidant to Grahame. Those two are a fun physical contrast as Grahame's beautify announces itself almost before she enters the room; whereas, Donnell's takes time to wash over you.

Jeff Donnell


----------



## Fading Fast

*Yes, God, Yes* from 2019 with Natalia Dyer and Timothy Simons

A short (78 minutes) film about a Midwest Catholic teenage girl, Dyer, who attends a religious school that teaches sexual abstinence until marriage and eternal damnation for unrepentant sinners


Set in the early '00s, Dyer's aborning sexuality and interest in masturbation is sparked by an anonymous on-line chat, but her urges and self-restraint are tested when she attends a weekend religious retreat that, also, emphasizes abstinence


At the retreat, she sees hypocrisy everywhere as teenage group leaders preach chastity in public, but engage in fellatio in private, while she, also, sees the priest who runs the retreat masturbating to on-line porn


Confused and dispirited, she leaves the retreat and wanders into a lesbian bar (hey, it's a movie) where an older woman - a former '60s flower child - tells her to drop her religious beliefs and go to a college on one of the coasts to escape her religious oppression 


So, effectively, this is an anti-religion, anti-Midwest message movie that presents a awful view of Christianity while singing the hallelujahs of the 1960s sexual revolution


As an agnostic with a casual attitude toward sex, I found the movie condescending and insulting to views I don't share, but respect that others sincerely do as those views were presented here in the worst, most-cliched and biased way possible: this movie is a perfect instantiation of one of the divides between the coasts and middle of the country


That said, the movie does, at times, present teenage sexual desire and confusion in a thoughtful manner


And kudos to star Dyer for her nuanced performance as a young girl trying to understand her body and the conflicting messages she's receiving from her parents, the religious school and the broader culture


----------



## Fading Fast

*The Country Girl *from 1954 with Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly and William Holden

This outstanding movie about success, failure, alcoholism, marriage and the randomness of luck deserves more attention today than it gets.

Crosby is an up-and-coming crooner married to pretty Grace Kelly. They have a young son and all is going well in their happy life. Then, one day, while the boy is with him, Crosby momentarily lets go of his son's hand and, seconds later, the boy is killed in a traffic accident.

Ten years later, the couple is living in a dilapidated one-room tenement apartment. Kelly is weary looking having, we discover, spent the past decade nursing Crosby through his alcoholism, anger, lack of confidence and failing career. One unlucky and maybe irresponsible moment has wrecked his success and wrecked both of their lives.

All this we learn early through flashbacks, which explains why Crosby needs to be triumphant in a surprising chance he's now getting to star in a new play. If he can hold himself together - far from a given - this opportunity could be his comeback. However, a career rebirth is tenuous because, even though the play's young, hard-charging director, Holden, believes in Crosby, the producer (the guy putting up the money) has serious doubts about him as opening night approaches.

And while Crosby presents a genial and confident front publicly and to Holden, he viciously dumps all his insecurities and anger onto wife Kelly in private, leaving her to address his long list of complaints about the part and how he's being treated to Holden.

As a result, Holden sees Kelly as a negative influence and meddler that is hurting Cosby and the play. Crosby is so good at presenting himself pleasantly in public - he is a cunning alcoholic who regularly fools those around him - and Kelly is so enervated and dour from Crosby's abuse that, from Holden's point of view, you understand why he mistakenly thinks Kelly is the problem.

And that leads to several of the movie's money scenes and moments as Kelly and Holden, with antipathy having built to a boil, let loose on each other as he denounces her as a shrew destroying her husband. Kelly, in response, finally, angrily breaks down and venomously tells Holden the truth about Crosby, which Holden doesn't initially believe.

After a few insanely well-acted rounds of that battle take place, a drunk Crosby, unintentionally, reveals himself to Holden, who now has the horrible realization that he's unfairly beaten up on Kelly. Also, Holden now sees that he has risked his play and reputation on the weak shoulders of a drunken shell of a man.

It's here where we get to the crux of Crosby's self destruction. In a crushing but very real admission to Holden and Kelly (Kelly had already guessed it), Crosby, who was always insecure, even during his early success, latched on to the tragic death of his son to "fail with a forgivable excuse." He found comfort in an acceptable failure - a failure that people would forgive - versus the fear that his career would decline or worse on its own. That is a powerful reveal of a human insecurity that few movies have tackled as well as *The Country Girl*.

With that out in the open and the play soon to premiere in New York, Kelly and Holden now team up to nurse Crosby and the play to success. But their shared goal and forced proximity spark a palpable sexual tension between them - plus, they are the two best-looking people in the movie. So, it's no real surprise that Kelly, having become nothing more than a mother to Crosby, and Holden fall for each other as their once intense hatred turns to passion, which turns to, maybe, love.

But the play comes first as the movie races to its conclusion: the show's New York City opening. Will Crosby deliver a star performance in the demanding leading role, thus, propelling the play to success and reviving his career? Will Kelly stay with Crosby or leave him for Holden? *The Country Girl *might not give you the ending you want - you'll want to see it for yourself - but kudos to director George Seaton for his skillful and poignant closing scene.

Why this powerful mashup of *The Lost Weekend* and *All About Eve* - with a much-deserved Best Actress Oscar going to Grace Kelly - doesn't get more notice today is hard to understand. Yes, it's heavy, but so is *The Lost Weekend*. Maybe it's due for a moment of new attention, but whether that moment comes or not, it's still an impressive movie that explores the brutal decline of a man and a marriage with unvarnished insight and moving sensitivity.


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## Fading Fast

*Personal Property* from 1937 with Robert Taylor, Jean Harlow, Reginald Owen and Una O'Connor

They call them screwball comedies, but many, such as *Personal Property*, are more like romcoms as there isn't much screwball-ness going on, but plenty of silly romcom-ness. And, as in many romcoms, then and now, the plot is forced but kinda okay when you watch it; however, it sounds ridiculous when you describe it.

So here goes: Robert Taylor plays a just-out-of-prison black-sheep son of a respectable and wealthy British family who stumbles into a job as a repo man. He then ends up living with, for the weekend - by law to keep an eye on her property - behind-on-her-furniture-payments Jean Harlow. And Harlow - get ready for it - is engaged to Taylor's stuffy older brother. She's trying to keep up the appearance that she's a well-to-do young widow, hence, the furniture that she can't afford. Of course, initially, Taylor and Harlow do not know that they share a connection via his family.

Have I lost you yet? There's more as Taylor and Harlow begin developing feelings for each other after the initial romcom period when she, naturally, dislikes him, but really, is intrigued by him. She then asks him to act as a butler for a dinner she's hosting for her fiancé's (Taylor's brother's) family because she'd be embarrassed and the brother would break the engagement if he knew she was in hock and had a repo man living in her house. With Taylor and Harlow still oblivious to their connection via his family, he agrees to be the butler.

And all this crazy culminates in the dinner itself when his family, of course, immediately recognizes who Taylor is, but keeps quiet about it as they don't want to be embarrassed by admitting he's their son (an ex-con presently working as a repo man).

Taylor, now fully smitten with Harlow, tries to undermine his brother at the dinner with smart barbs and silly pranks, such as spilling food. Meanwhile, Harlow, having doubts about marrying for money now that she's falling for Taylor, begins to see her tiresome fiancé for who he is. The rest you can probably guess as it plays out per romcom rules.

Believe it or not, this insanely silly story sort of works okay in the movie as Harlow and Taylor banter and fall in love in a fun way while the eccentricities of the British upper class, real or cliched, are milked for all they are worth. In particular, one of the dinner guests is a middle-aged man who speaks with such exaggerated "poshness" (long vowels, clipped phrases) that the Americans have no idea what he is saying while the Brits respond as if they do. It's pushed too far, but it is still pretty funny.

And that is the movie - everything is pushed too far, but, mostly, it's still okay. I wouldn't seek it out, but if it happens to be on - and you like Harlow and Taylor - it's a modestly entertaining way to spend just over an hour.

N.B. How neat is this picture I found of Harlow and Taylor on the promotional tour for this movie:


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## Fading Fast

*Mr. & Mrs. Smith* from 1941 with Carole Lombard, Robert Montgomery and Gene Raymond

This is probably the third or fourth time I've seen this movie in the past four decades and I always want to like it more than I do. I like the principal actors, they spent money making it, the story's outline is silly but okay and the time travel to New York City - including a trip to the 1939 World's Fair - is outstanding; however, I find the movie too forced and screwball to really enjoy. Plus, none of the characters are really likeable.

The Smiths, Carole Lombard and Robert Montgomery, are a young married-for-three-years couple who have epic fights with equally epic makeups. During one battle royal, she asks if he could go back in time, would he marry her again and he says no - ouch, but it's how they fight.

However, right after that latest battle-and-makeup event, Montgomery and Lombard learn, separately, that, owing to a technicality in the town where they were wed, their marriage was never legal, so, away from common law, they are not married.

While Montgomery has every intention of making things right, when he doesn't immediately propose marriage again to Lombard, she goes ballistic (it's what they do) and, amidst broken dishes and screams, throws him out of their apartment.

Montgomery seems genuinely surprised as he tells her multiple times that he wants to marry her again. However, drama-queen Lombard, still smarting from his "no" comment from several days ago, begins using her maiden name while starting to date men, including, just to rub it in, Montgomery's friend and law partner.

From here, the movie is all Montgomery trying to convince Lombard to marry him again, while she rejects all his offers, even though you know - and she knows - she wants to say yes, but is too prideful to admit it. All this happens amidst silly scenes like one in a restaurant where Montgomery shows up with a date to make Lombard, whom he knew would be there on a date herself, jealous or at a ski lodge where he feigns illness to arouse her sympathy.

Throw into the mix, the aforementioned law partner and his judgmental family, a bunch of screwball scenes with elevator operators and doormen and the movie stumbles to its inevitable conclusion.

Maybe the problem with the movie is that none of the characters are likeable, except Montgomery sometimes, and his and Lombard's marriage is so unappealing that you're not rooting for the thing you're supposed to be rooting for: to see the Smiths get back together.

In five to ten years, I'll have kinda forgotten why I don't enjoy this movie and I will try it again, only to be disappointed again. Sadly, it seems to be what I do with this one.


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## Fading Fast

*Breakfast for Two* from 1937 with Barbara Stanwyck, Herbert Marshall, Glenda Farrel and Eric Blore

This is what happens to a pre-code-like movie idea when it gets mangled by the Motion Picture Production Code


Stanwyck plays a smart, young, wealthy woman with a head for business who falls in love with party boy and shipping-heir Marshall whose neglect of his company is destroying it


Once Stanwyck sees the full picture, she buys Marshall's company to both save it and to save Marshall by bringing him in as her vice-president as she believes he's "got what it takes" if he just gets a push in the right direction


In pre-code land, Stanwyck could have tutored Marshall to become a businessman or, more likely, she'd have realized he was better as a boy toy and she'd have just run the darn company herself and "kept" Marshall, kinda like Kay Francis did with David Manners in 1932's *Man Wanted* or as Ruth Chatterton did with a series of young, handsome "executives" in 1933's *Female*


But by 1937, the code wouldn't allow a smart women to run a company and keep a silly man around for pleasure, so all sorts of stupid and unbelievable things happen like Stanwyck allowing the company to fail and Marshall, magically now seeing the light, but with no business experience, convincing investors to back him as the man to bring it out of receivership


Also in dumb land, Marshal tries to marry his friend Glenda Farrell to spite Stanwyck, even though he obviously loves her, which leads to a bunch of screwball things happening to both thwart that wedding (loud window washers, a long-winded minister) and push Stanwyck and Marshall together (a food fight and a serious of phone-call misunderstandings) 


A screwball scene or two can occasionally work (see *Bringing up Baby*), but string several together and you end up with a Three-Stooges routine, which is fine for a Three-Stooges movie, but makes no sense in a reasonably adult romcom


Stanwyck is such an enjoyable actress that this one is almost worth it, but the code so brutalized the plot's logic and characters' consistency and maturity that passing is probably the right choice


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## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 51346
> 
> *Breakfast for Two* from 1937 with Barbara Stanwyck, Herbert Marshall, Glenda Farrel and Eric Blore
> 
> This is what happens to a pre-code-like movie idea when it gets mangled by the Motion Picture Production Code
> 
> 
> Stanwyck plays a smart, young, wealthy woman with a head for business who falls in love with party boy and shipping-heir Marshall whose neglect of his company is destroying it
> 
> 
> Once Stanwyck sees the full picture, she buys Marshall's company to both save it and to save Marshall by bringing him in as her vice-president as she believes he's "got what it takes" if he just gets a push in the right direction
> 
> 
> In pre-code land, Stanwyck could have tutored Marshall to become a businessman or, more likely, she'd have realized he was better as a boy toy and she'd have just run the darn company herself and "kept" Marshall, kinda like Kay Francis did with David Manners in 1932's *Man Wanted* or as Ruth Chatterton did with a series of young, handsome "executives" in 1933's *Female*
> 
> 
> But by 1937, the code wouldn't allow a smart women to run a company and keep a silly man around for pleasure, so all sorts of stupid and unbelievable things happen like Stanwyck allowing the company to fail and Marshall, magically now seeing the light, but with no business experience, convincing investors to back him as the man to bring it out of receivership
> 
> 
> Also in dumb land, Marshal tries to marry his friend Glenda Farrell to spite Stanwyck, even though he obviously loves her, which leads to a bunch of screwball things happening to both thwart that wedding (loud window washers, a long-winded minister) and push Stanwyck and Marshall together (a food fight and a serious of phone-call misunderstandings)
> 
> 
> A screwball scene or two can occasionally work (see *Bringing up Baby*), but string several together and you end up with a Three-Stooges routine, which is fine for a Three-Stooges movie, but makes no sense in a reasonably adult romcom
> 
> 
> Stanwyck is such an enjoyable actress that this one is almost worth it, but the code so brutalized the plot's logic and characters' consistency and maturity that passing is probably the right choice


Point taken...it is crossed off my list. Thank you!


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## Fading Fast

*Kept Husbands* from 1931 with Joel McCrea and Dorothy Mackaill

It's an early and clunky talkie, in need of a restoration, that feels more like a play than a movie, as many of those first talkies did. But it is an early effort at a theme movies will return to again and again: what happens when a woman has or makes much, much more money than the man in a marriage.

McCrea plays the young poor man working for a large construction company as a kind of low-level manager who meets Mackaill, the boss' spoiled society daughter. Mackaill then takes a hard run at McCrea seemingly because she wants something other than the society boys she's used to, plus he's handsome as heck.

In usual movie sloppiness, despite McCrea telling her they'd have to live on his salary, they never really come to an agreement, but marry anyway. From the honeymoon on, her dad spoils them with money, possessions and a cushy executive job for McCrea.

Mackaill is happy to have her fancy life and her handsome husband whom she plans to make into an acceptable-to-society gentleman. And no, the illogic of marrying someone because he isn't a society gentleman only to, then, go about making him into one is never explored.

McCrea, in the first throes of love, pretty much goes along with it all even though he doesn't like, effectively, being a kept husband. But it all comes to a climax when McCrea gets an opportunity at work to take on an important project that will require him to go to another city for several weeks.

While he assumes Mackaill will go with him, when he asks her, she has a temper tantrum haranguing him for disrupting her plans during the "social season" and dismisses his work as unimportant as, in a vicious blow, she tells him her father pays all their bills anyway. Throw into the mix some confusions as to whether Mackaill is having an affair and this aborning marriage is in heavy wobble.

From here it comes down to the usual questions: will Mackaill see the error of her ways and will McCrea put his ego aside to make room for forgiveness. It's pretty standard fare with few surprises, but it is kinda fun - if you can take the early-talkie bumpiness - to see a poor-boy-rich-girl marriage explored early in Hollywood history.

N.B., In a scene that could have come right out of an Ayn Rand novel, ten years before Ayn Rand became a household name with the publication of her breakthrough novel "The Fountainhead," McCrea gives a Randian speech about individual, ground-breaking creators having to push their innovative ideas - in this case, a radically new bridge design - past hidebound and unimaginative committees. Howard Roark, Rand's genius and individualist architect, would have been proud.


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## Fading Fast

*Lost in Yonkers* from 1993 with Richard Dreyfuss, Mercedes Ruehl and Irene Worth, written by Neil Simon

It starts out as a Woody-Allen-like stylized period movie that gets much darker by the second half


In WWII, a widower dad, in order to earn a living to pay off his now-deceased wife's medical bills, has to leave his two young boys with their strict and emotional-distant (think scary) grandmother who owns a small candy shop in Yonkers 


At home is also the grandmother's mentally challenged adult daughter and, for a time, her other son, a bagman of sorts for the mob


Seen through the eyes of the two boys, the crazy of this house forces them to grow up quickly as this is no tough-exterior-heart-of-gold grandmother, but a damaged woman (it is alluded to that she's had great hardship in her life) incapable of showing warmth, but having no issue with petty meanness


Additionally, the boys see the excruciatingly heartbreaking challenge the daughter has trying to find love and an adult life with her limitations, while also seeing the downside to their "cool" uncle who, effectively, is now on the run from the mob


It's a pretty tough "coming of age" movie that ends without much resolution, as one of its point is that, despite its hardships and challenges, life goes on


It's also one of those movies that you respect for what it did (and its beautiful period details), but unless feeling worse about the world is your thing, you might be glad when it is over


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## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 51443
> 
> *Lost in Yonkers* from 1993 with Richard Dreyfuss, Mercedes Ruehl and Irene Worth, written by Neil Simon
> 
> It starts out as a Woody-Allen-like stylized period movie that gets much darker by the second half
> 
> 
> In WWII, a widower dad, in order to earn a living to pay off his now-deceased wife's medical bills, has to leave his two young boys with their strict and emotional-distant (think scary) grandmother who owns a small candy shop in Yonkers
> 
> 
> At home is also the grandmother's mentally challenged adult daughter and, for a time, her other son, a bagman of sorts for the mob
> 
> 
> Seen through the eyes of the two boys, the crazy of this house forces them to grow up quickly as this is no tough-exterior-heart-of-gold grandmother, but a damaged woman (it is alluded to that she's had great hardship in her life) incapable of showing warmth, but having no issue with petty meanness
> 
> 
> Additionally, the boys see the excruciatingly heartbreaking challenge the daughter has trying to find love and an adult life with her limitations, while also seeing the downside to their "cool" uncle who, effectively, is now on the run from the mob
> 
> 
> It's a pretty tough "coming of age" movie that ends without much resolution, as one of its point is that, despite its hardships and challenges, life goes on
> 
> 
> It's also one of those movies that you respect for what it did (and its beautiful period details), but unless feeling worse about the world is your thing, you might be glad when it is over


As always, well done. Lost In Yonkers is on my must watch list! Thanks for the review.


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## John M

So I recently re-watched two movies. The first is a cheap Charles Bronson action flick called Murphy's Law. It's not great but it could certainly be worse. My late grandmother LOVED Charles Bronson, so I guess that's where some of my appreciation of him comes from.

The second is an 80s comedy classic featuring the late Rodney Dangerfield with Back to School. I think the best scenes are Rodney with the business teacher.


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## Fading Fast

*Women Wanted* from 1935 with Joel McCrea and Maureen O'Sullivan

Once a movie is successful, Hollywood keeps trying to make the same movie until the public says "enough." With the outsized success of *It Happened One Night *in 1934, Hollywood spent the following several years making "road-trip" style movies where a not-married couple of two young and good-looking people, usually being chased by the police (but, most of the time, they are innocent), run around (usually the countryside) trying to prove his or her (or both of their) innocence.

It's not a bad formula at all as, in a day when casual sex was, in theory, a big no-no, you had a not-married couple having to navigate sleeping arrangements while on the lam. Heck, when not-married Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert shared a cabin (with a blanket hung between their twin beds) in *It Happened One Night* and Gable took off his dress shirt which revealed he wasn't wearing a T-shirt, T-shirt sales declined nationally. These movies were about more than the story.

*Women Wanted* is a modest entry in this category. Ridiculously pretty Maureen O'Sullivan is convicted of murder (but we kinda know she's innocent), escapes (almost by accident) and teams up (by accident) with wealthy playboy and lawyer Joel McCrea. As noted, and as can be seen by all the "accidental" stuff that drives the action, the stories in these movies exist to put two attractive people of the opposite sex as close together as possible. And as a related side note, it's a shame Superman hadn't been invented five years earlier as, at this moment in his career, McCrea looks more like Superman than Superman does himself.

So now we have handsome McCrea - tentatively engaged to a bitchy society woman - and pretty O'Sullivan teamed up and running from the law while trying to prove her innocence. Since O'Sullivan was set up to be the fall guy (girl) for the mob - that's how she was convicted in the first place - not only are the police after her, but the mob is too. What follows is a fun little romp where McCrea and Sullivan run around New York City and parts of its more rural surroundings with cops and mobsters chasing them.

For these movies to really work, the leads need to have chemistry, which McCrea and O'Sullivan do, but mainly owing to O'Sullivan who owns scene after scene with her verve, super cuteness and perfect comedic timing. She makes it her movie and she propels it forward.

At one point, when McCrea's uppity fiancé, angry that McCrea has been ignoring her for another woman, sees O'Sullivan, she tells McCrea over the phone, but with O'Sullivan standing next to her that, "if she [O'Sullivan] wasn't so cheaply pretty, you wouldn't [be with her]." O'Sullivan, instead of doing a standard snarl at being insulted, gives a look of, first, surprise and, then, nonchalance that says your putdown meant nothing to me. It made an average moment outstanding.

Basically, everything that you expect to happen, happens. The mob captures them, but they escape; the police get close, but they escape; they come up empty, at first, trying to find exculpatory evidence, but carry on. And all this happens amidst plenty of gunfights, car and boat chases and general running hither and yon with plenty of opportunities for McCrea and O'Sullivan to get close, kiss and fall asleep on each other. It's a fun-enough effort for a copycat movie made much, much better by O'Sullivan.


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## Fading Fast

*Death of a Scoundrel* from 1956 with George Sanders, Yvonne De Carlo, John Hoyt and Zsa Zsa Gabor (that last name, usually, being a reason not to see the movie)

Literature → Drama → Melodrama → Soap Opera → Death of a Scoundrel


As an admitted, if not proud, fan of 1950s melodrama /soap opera movies (and books), *Death of a Scoundrel *proves that too much of a good thing can turn bad


Just after WWII, a released Czechoslovakia political prisoner reports his brother to the police for having stolen from him and receives an under-the-table reward that provides the funds to immigrate to the US


Once in NYC, he pyramids one financial / Wall Street scheme on top of another, while bedding wealthy women (married or not) as a source of funds for his schemes or just amusement


Along the way, he corrupts or tries to corrupt brokers, secretaries, business owners, a theater producer, wannabe actresses and a few others I've probably forgotten


And, of course, he buys big houses, penthouse apartments, fancy cars and jewelry for his many women while staying in luxury hotels and dining at top restaurants


And when it all starts to come crashing down, he ups his deviousness even trying to soil his mother's name to save his skin


It has its moments of tawdry enjoyment - and Sanders is such a pro that he give gravitas to a popinjay character - but it's simply too much, too silly and too unbelievable to really work


At least I learned that even my weakness for 1950's melodrama has its limits


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## Fading Fast

*Penthouse* from 1933 with Warren Baxter, Myrna Loy, Charles Butterworth and Nat Pendleton

This pre-code-on-steroids story is a bit sloppy and obvious in its plotting, but makes up for it in its aggressive reveal of the grey areas of life that, in only a year, with the coming enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code, would be mostly hidden from view in movies for several decades.

But before that window closed, in *Penthouse*, Warren Baxter played a white-shoe lawyer who gets a mob boss, Pendleton, off on a murder rap, but is then dropped by both his law firm and society fiance who disapproved of Baxter's "association" with criminals. Baxter, bored with writing wills for wealthy old ladies, continues in his new career path, even socializing with Pendleton.

When he tells Pendleton of his romantic travails, Pendleton offers him one of the young women, in this case, Myrna Loy, who are, effectively, kept mistresses of the racketeers or other wealthy men. Loy, clearly loving the role of a wanton woman, is more than happy to "entertain" Baxter and is shocked when, after a late evening that winds up at his penthouse, he lets her sleep over without making any advances - advances that she encouraged (you got to love the pre-codes).

Heck, taking it a step further, we see that Loy's pride is hurt by his behavior, as, the next morning, when he tells her she's alluring, she responds, "Alluring? I doubted it last night as I didn't exactly have to fight for my honor. A few more weeks of this and I'll be out a position." I guess you have to respect that she takes pride in her work. Kidding aside, it is a stark reveal of a woman who understands her role and what is expected of her. It's a shame that, in only a year, we'd no longer meet women like her in movies for several decades.

But with that set up, the movie ramps up all the tension and conflict when a young society man is charged with murdering his mistress. He was trying to break up with her - get ready for it - to marry the society woman who broke off her engagement with Baxter when he became a lawyer for the mob. So now, Baxter's ex-fiance comes to Baxter asking him to defend her new fiance. Are there no other good lawyers in Manhattan?

Thrown into this mix are rival gangs, one of which is using the society boy as a fall guy for, what was, a mob hit on his former mistress. From here, the rest of this short, fast movie is watching Baxter reveal the frame-up of the society boy while avoiding being killed by one of the gangs. Along the way, both his former society girlfriend and Loy try to help him, which shows that Loy is the one of the two women with character, grit and loyalty despite being, as she describes herself, not someone you can take into proper society.

The wrap up is fast and clean (spoiler alerts) as the society boy is proven innocent by Baxter, Baxter's mob-boss friend is killed (in a surprisingly bloody way - blood also being something that will disappear from the screen in only a year) and Baxter refuses Loy's offer to be his mistress, instead, asking her to be his wife. The message here is a good one that denounces "society's" hypocrisy and the underworld's crime and violence, while advocating for each individual - like former society lawyer Baxter and high-price call-girl Loy - to be judged on their character, not on their "social standing."

N.B. Look for Charles Butterworth in the role of Baxter's butler. While we cringe a bit today at the thought of a butler, it was honest employment that, as shown here, could oftentimes evolve into a friendship based on respect and affection. In *Penthouse*, Butterworth delivers a wonderfully understated performance as the guy on the sideline who sees all the nonsense while firing off the occasional subtle putdown, but he will also defend the good guys - Baxter and Loy - when necessary.


----------



## Fading Fast

*Finger of Guilt* from 1956 with Richard Basehart, Mary Murphy, Roger Livesey and Faith Brook

This modest-budget UK production feels more like a long-play *The Twilight Zone* TV episode than a major studio release. That's both a good and not-so-good thing as, at times, it feels more intimate and real, while, at other times, the low budget shows.

As the story opens, we see a hard-charging American, Basehart, running a thriving British movie studio, but he's knocked back on his heels when he receives a vaguely worded letter from a woman, Mary Murphy, he claims not to know implying she wants to resume the affair they'd been having.

We then learn that he's received several of these letters and has even shown them to the chairman of the studio, his mentor and father-in-law, Livesey - yes Basehart married the boss' daughter. We also learned that Basehart had to leave America under a cloud of suspicion that "another woman" led to his divorce and dismissal from a Hollywood studio.

While all that looks bad for Basehart, that he shares the letters with Livesey and vociferously denies any knowledge of this woman, leaves us unsure of his guilt. He also, on the advice of Livesey, tells his wife all about these letters. If Basehart is guilty, he's playing an aggressive bluffing game, which has the viewer leaning to believing him.

At this point, the movie is in full-on *The Twilight Zone* mode as Basehart begins to question his own mental sanity as the letters keep coming and he sees his entire world - a good marriage and job - at risk. In an effort to get to the bottom of the letters and clear his name, he and his wife (yup, he's either innocent or still bluffing hard) take a trip, based on the letters' return address, to confront the woman.

Things get even more *The Twilight Zone* like as the woman has some physical evidence that seems to show that she knows Basehart. Further supporting her claims, her diary lists days and times of their meeting that coincide with periods when he was traveling on business. However, even confronted with all this, Basehart continues to profess his innocence in a kind of believable way.

After that confrontation, his life spirals out of control as his wife leaves him and the studio suspends him. With all these bad things happening, he shifts into full "am I nuts" mode, even seeking psychiatric help. From here, it's quickly onto the conclusion, which we'll leave unstated, but climaxes with a violent confrontation involving all the key parties.

It's a good story for a TV episode, but a little thin for a full-length movie. And as with those old *The Twilight Zone* shows, because of its small budget, most scenes lack the necessary extras to give them verisimilitude. In a way, that works to emphasize the otherworldliness of these types of stories, but at times, they just look like cheap and shabby productions. Yet overall, it's got enough good to make it worth the effort, especially if you like *The Twilight Zone* type stories.


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## Fading Fast

*The Seventh Victim* from 1943 with Kim Hunter, Tom Conway and Jean Brooks

TCM film-noir host Eddie Muller (whom I enjoy as a commentator) had a lot of positive things to say about this one - subtle acting, early psychological thriller where the horror is implied but not shown (true), effectively an antecedent to Rosemary's Baby and a haunting closing scene


Um, sure, yeah, it has some faint echo of Rosemary's Baby as both have a group of NYC elites who are devil worshipers, but that's about it for parallels


As to all the rest of his praise, maybe his professional eye is seeing things I'm not, as the movie moves at a slow and disjointed pace with uneven directing where several scenes felt independent from the rest of the movie


Overall, the story is confusing and boring: a sister, looking for her missing sister in NYC, discovers that her sister, who has weird suicidal tendencies, is/was a member of the aforementioned devil-worshiping cult. And with everyone's motives hidden for so long, you all but don't care when they are finally revealed


Lead Kim Hunter's acting, which Mr. Mueller saw as subtle and reactive, struck me as somnambulant to the point that I thought she might have been on some sort of prescribed sedative during the filming


I'm not a horror-film guy, so maybe this is an early entry in the genre that has all these subtly brilliant features that will later become part of the horror-film canon, but I just saw an awkward movie, unevenly directed, with a mishmash of a story and mediocre acting - and almost none of it was scary.


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## Fading Fast

*Winter Meeting* from 1948 with Bette Davis, Jim Davis and John Hoyt.

At some point, actors become too old for certain roles, but usually, stars overstay their welcome in the type of character that has propelled them to fame. Also, movies need to be about something, which is usually a conflict between ideas, people or events.

In *Winter Meeting*, we see Bette Davis having overstayed her welcome in the role of the young, smart, pretty socialite, in this case, with an aversion to marriage. The young-socialite role is one she played many, many times in her twenties and thirties, but now, in her early forties, it's forced and not believable.

Here she plays a wealthy Manhattan dilettante poetess (it's nice to have a substantial trust fund behind you) who, at the end of the war, meets a moody and aloof WWII naval hero, Jim Davis. Instead of acknowledging their age difference, we are just supposed to accept Ms. Davis as a woman in her twenties. She might be the best movie actress ever, but even she can't act twenty years off her real age.

Even putting that aside, we are left with a movie without much story or conflict. Moody Jim Davis and hesitant-to-love Bette Davis, in theory, are too angsty soles who find comfort in each other, but their love affair struggles to take flight owing to some unknown internal conflict each has.

The bulk of the movie is watching each lead try to draw the past secrets out of the other so that they can overcome their inner demons and embrace their new love affair. That effort takes way too long - extended kitchen conversations, a trip to a country house, exhausting fireside chats - and then offers up challenges that are not dramatic.

(Spoiler alerts) Bette Davis' wealthy, socially proper minister father married a working-class Irish Catholic girl, Davis' mother, who proceeds to have affairs and finally abandons him and Davis - the shame! Meanwhile, Jim Davis has struggled since he was a teenager with a desire to become a priest (I know, what!?, it comes out of nowhere), but an uncertainty if it is the right path for him. Additionally, he dislikes that his heroic war efforts are being used by the media and Washington for propaganda reasons. That's it, those are the two big secrets that torture these struggling lovers.

Sure, there's a bit of a connection between Bette Davis' embarrassment over her Catholic mother's behavior and Jim Davis' desire to become a priest and, yes, he helps to minister her through her guilt and anger, but by now the movie has gone on for almost an hour and a half. And even then, the angst kinda continues and the resolution, I'll leave that for those who want to see it, is pat and unsatisfying.

But there are two bright spots. One is the 1940's version of east-coast elitism on display throughout as Bette Davis and her snarky sophisticated friend, businessman John Hoyt, look down on all things not east-coast establishment and money, like the Midwest roots of war-hero Jim Davis. It's only hinted at here, but Hoyt's character, today, would loudly proclaim his homosexuality as he is, and there's no other word for it, bitchier than Davis is when looking down his elitist nose at everything from how someone holds a fork to who their parents are. Bette Davis and he have a friendship chemistry that, unfortunately, never develops between her and Jim Davis.

The other bright spot, and it's a very inside-baseball thing is Davis' voice and delivery. By this point in her career, she had perfected her acting voice: a subtler but as distinct a voice as Cary Grant's. Her diction and inflection are all her own as she constantly varies her speaking pace and cadence, from long pauses to rapid-fire delivery, all the while bringing her idiosyncratic pronunciation as words and vowels seem to go through some sort of high-brow nasal filter before coming out. The result is an incredible ability to project complex emotions - and condescension - with nothing more than the delivery of a few words and a look to match.

Unfortunately, neither Hoyt's performance nor Davis's voice are enough to wake up this sleepy effort where Bette Davis is too old for the role and the conflicts too mild to carry nearly two hours of movie.


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## Fading Fast

*The Racket* from 1951 with Robert Ryan, Robert Mitchum, Lizabeth Scott and Ray Collins

This crime-drama film noir offers, for the early '50s, a surprisingly frank and nuanced look at political corruption via mob influence in local politics and policing. To be sure, it's wrapped up neatly and nicely, but audiences, then and now, can see past the code-approved packaging.

That frankness and nuance start with local mob boss, Robert Ryan - an old school rough-'em-up-or-kill-'em boss - who is somehow now part of a national mob syndicate that has influence at the highest level of the (never named) city's political leadership. And it's presented here not as a-bad-apple-or-two type of corruption, but a web of crookedness - graft, fraud, bribery, shady land deals - going up to the mayor and, maybe, state governor where even judgeships are handed out as political favors and crimes swept under the rug when necessary.

Fighting the good fight is incorruptible police captain Robert Mitchum and his small band of honest officers who have been banished to a marginal precinct. The real-world nuance here is that, while the powers that be don't like Mitchum, they know that, with the press watching, they have to deal with him in a somewhat above-board manner. Similarly, Mitchum notes that the district attorney is far from honest, but he "sometimes wants to be a good guy," so Mitchum compromises and tries to work with him. It's real world stuff where heroes and villains aren't all good or bad and principles have to bend a bit to reality to get anything done.

With those pieces in place, Mitchum goes about trying to bring down mob-boss Ryan and, maybe, expose the larger web of corruption. Meanwhile, Ryan, who hates Mitchum on principle (Mitchum can't be bought), is also angry that the new mob syndicate wants him to rein in his violent ways and compromise more with the local politicians.

From here, the story pivots around a trumped-up gun-possession charge against Ryan's brother - a stupid young man who gets involved with a nightclub singer, Lizabeth Scott - and a naive reporter being played by Mitchum. In response to the charge against his brother, Ryan loses his cool by trying to use both his political connections and bullying personality to free his sibling. In another example of the movie's moral ambiguity, Mitchum steps over the line of legal actions to expose Ryan - writs get torn up, people are held on false charges and lawyers are kept at bay while suspects are aggressively interrogated.

It's a film noir world where even the good guys need to get some dirt on them to get the job done. In the end, Ryan does get his, but the larger political corruption is left unexposed. Mitchum explains all this to a demoralized newbie officer as being a fight that is never over. He avers, you don't win it all on one day, but, in a closing code-approved speech, Mitchum says that (paraphrasing) "while the machine of justice often gets some sand in it, it still grinds on to eventually right itself."

Maybe, but audiences probably saw that his speech is at odds with the movie's real message of a more difficult battle against both a national crime syndicate and a corrupt political organization. For 1951, it's a pretty frank look at big-city politics and mob activity. And it's all inside a solid noir with plenty of action - bombs, car chases, gun fights, a high body count and everybody throwing punches. Finally, it has a lot of star power and is all filmed in beautiful and crisp black and white.

N.B., I'm a fan of film-noir regular Lizabeth Scott, however, here, she seems a bit unsure of herself in the role of a nightclub singer trying to do the right thing - help Mitchum - perhaps because she's used to doing the wrong thing of just going along with all the corruption.


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## Fading Fast

Three from TCM's Sean Connery Day.









*Thunderball *from 1965

While still a decent Bond effort, the "cartoonification" of Bond advanced a lot with this one (the jetpack was painfully forced and the quips seemed cheesier). Of course, Bond was always an adult cartoon, but the first three movies had an intimacy and scale that almost made them kinda sorta believable.

Also, the pace was a touch slower in those early ones, which made them feel more like a story and less like a series of scenes as* Thunderball* does. And while this is not a fault of the later ones, we were still being introduced to 007 in those first three, which felt fresh, but by this one, it's all pretty much old hat.

Oddly, this is also the first one where Connery's toupee, to my eye, was clearly visible in every scene, which all but kills Bond's "cool" factor. It's hard to look super-spy suave wearing a hair hat.

I did like the theme song to *Thunderball* more than I remember, but the story left me indifferent. Again, it's a good effort, just not up there with the first three.









*You Only Live Twice* from 1967

I'd repeat most of my comments from above for this one as well, but I did enjoy its view of mid-'60s Japan a lot. Also, Bond's relationship with both of the Japanese women was more mature and equal - for a Bond movie - than I had remembered from my long-ago viewing of this one.

Both women held their own intellectually and in physical skill with Bond, more so than some of the Bond women from the earlier or later ones. These women gave as good as they got from the super spy.

More broadly, considering how supine Japan was in 1945, what it had accomplished in twenty years was quite obvious and impressive. But the story felt like a retread of Goldfinger, just in Japan and with space capsules not a precious metal.

I get it, you can only do so much with a spy story and the first three had a newness that later ones simply couldn't match. That said, give it five or more years and I'll happily watch this one and *Thunderball* again.









*Marnie* from 1964

If you learn nothing else from this overwrought psychological Hitchcock drama, it is this: Rule number one when meeting a deeply psychologically damaged person is to try to get them professional help and rule number two is to not marry them. That's it; it's not hard, but Connery's character ignores both of those simple rules and spends the next two hours in a whirlwind of crazy.

After wealthy publishing magnate and amateur sociologist Connery marries a thieving and aloof Tippi Hedren in the worst case of wounded-bird-rescue syndrome ever, he tries to "fix" her. For no apparent reason, he's decided that she is really a good person who will make a loving wife, despite her kleptomania and being repulsed by a man's touch, if he can just figure out the root cause of her psychological problem.

This beautifully stylized Hitchcock effort didn't do as well at the boxoffice as several of his other films as most viewers were probably just annoyed that Connery had taken on this completely unnecessary effort. It's hard to root for the hero when you think he's an idiot.

Heck, initially, you think Connery's sister-in-law, Diana Baker, (Connery's a widower in this one) is just a conniving little witch, who wants Connery for his money. But after watching Hedren twist Connery into knots in their sexless marriage and seeing that Baker is a just a garden-variety tribalist - she'll lie, cheat and steal to get her way, but if you are part of her tribe, she'll fight ferociously to protect you - you wish he had just married her. She has her morality issues, but he could have managed through those. And she made it clear to him that she's not frigid.

As to all the Freud and dream stuff that, no surprise, is behind Hedren's psychosis, it seemed pretty by the numbers if a bit dated by 1964. Despite the movie's serious issues, it is, as noted, Hitchcock beautiful and has enough of the master's touch to make it well worth the watch. And, thankfully, the good toupee was still being used on Connery in this one.


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## Fading Fast

*Brother Orchid* from 1940 with Edward G. Robinson, Anne Sothern, Humphrey Bogart and Donald Crisp

This quirky movie mashup of a mob story morphing into a Christian redemption story is uneven and clumsy at times, but lead Edward G. Robinson holds it all together with his incredible talent and screen presence.

Rackets boss Robinson retires from the mob at the top of his game to go out in the legitimate world and buy his idea of "class" for himself - luxury goods, artwork, culture, etc. Five years later, after being fleeced by the purveyors of class and culture, he tries to return to his former position only to be turned away by his old gang, now run by Humphrey Bogart.

Also, while away, Robinson's girlfriend, Ann Sothern, has moved on to a wealthy Texan. Robinson then sets out on a mission to build a rival gang and to get his girl back. All of this is handled in an almost lighthearted away, which leaves us somewhat sympathetic to mobster Robinson.

After some initial success, Robinson is captured by his old gang and taken out to the woods to be shot, but he escapes and, injured, stumbles into a pleasantly run monastery. Here, the monks nurse him back to health and offer him a home for as long as he wants it, as long as he'll do his share of the work.

This is where the movie shines as Robinson keeps looking for the Monks' angle - are they featherbedding for the free room and board, running an illegal business or working some other scam - as he can't accept that their humble and charitable worldview is real. It is a perfect fish-out-of-water moment as every assumption a mobster has about human nature fails in an atmosphere of Christian charity.

After trying his own minor scam on the Monks, getting caught and being forgiven, Robinson begins to see the light in their charity and forgiveness. While still leaning to the view that they are "suckers," their Christian goodness is worming its way into Robinson's heart. So much so, that when he sees the Monks' business - selling flowers to support themselves and their charitable efforts - is threatened by his old mob's protection racket, he leaves the monastery to break the mob's control of the flower market.

After defeating the mob and getting his old girl back, Robinson has his, literal, come-to-Jesus moment: it's all his for the taking as he can go back to running the mob with his old girlfriend at his side or has he seen the light? You can probably guess, but let's leave it there for those who want to see the ending for themselves.

Is it a great movie, no. But it has two things that you can't get in a modern Hollywood production. One, a leading man who looks like a dented garbage can, but who has such outsized talent that he carries the entire movie and, two, an unabashed belief in the redemptive powers of Christianity.


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## Fading Fast

*Mank *from 2020 on Netflix

*Mank* is an inside-baseball look at deep-state Hollywood in the 1930s, so much so that this Turner Classic Movies uber-fan and consumer of many Golden-Era Hollywood books only recognized some of the references and parts of the story: a story that reveals how an all but washed-up alcoholic-screenwriter, Herman Mankiewicz, struggled to complete the screenplay for, what would become, the cinematic masterpiece *Citizen Kane*.

It's 1940 and Mankiewicz is in bed recovering from an auto accident while writing *Kane* at a much slower pace than his contract and the film's young phenom director*,* Orson Welles, demand. And even though he is in desperate need for this screenplay to be a career Hail Mary, instead of putting his nose to the grindstone, a convalescing Mankiewicz boozes away, banters with his whip-smart English secretary and wallows in reminiscences.

So to save his skin, he pens a scathing roman à clef of the life of media baron William Randolph Hearst and his young wife, screen-star Marion Davies. In flashbacks, which make up half the movie, we see that Mankiewicz was an intimate friend of both Hearst and Davies throughout the 1930s when Hearst was at the peak of his power as lord of his personal Xanadu, San Simeon.

Mankiewicz betrays that former friendship for ego, he wants a capstone to his screenwriting career, and money, he's a spendthrift alcoholic gambler with an ignored family to support. It's a betrayal he both boldly defends and, in weaker moments, guiltily agonizes over. But *Mank's* director, David Fincher, doesn't make any of this story easy for the viewer as the relevance of characters, events and flashbacks only partially reveal themselves over time and only if you are, at least, reasonably familiar with 1930's movie-studio history.

For everyone else, the movie is more like a roller-coaster ride through 1930s Hollywood where famous and not-so-famous names pop up, while stories about Mankiewicz's career path, his rivalry and friendship with his brother Joe, the mendacity and crudeness of MGM studio-head Louis B. Mayer, the socialist promulgations and political aspirations of Upton Sinclair and other Golden-Era-Hollywood ephemera are all presented in a phantasmagoria of confusing but engaging scenes and stories.

And kind of framing it all is Mankiewicz's relationship with Marion Davies, wonderfully portrayed by Amanda Seyfried. During Mankiewicz's visits to San Simeon, the two bond over their insecurities, owing to humble roots, amidst the epic opulence of Hearst's mise en scène and the outsized egos of the noted guests. This makes Mankiewicz's later betrayal all the more treacherous and poignant.

While that's most of the story, the movie's beautiful style, meant to echo *Citizen Kane's *groundbreaking cinematography, competes for your attention. Shot in black and white and using many of *Kane's* unconventional camera angles and fast, but sometimes jarring, scene transitions, in *Mank*, you are visually reminded of Welles' masterpiece, while seeing how *Kane's* screenplay itself was birthed. That said, there is something about *Mank's* particular black and white cinematography that, while usually crisp and clear, occasionally lacks focus.

*Mank's* final notable feature is a surprising amount of humorous dialogue, often seen in asides, as when Mankiewicz's wife is spelling out her long and annoying-to-her marital name to a maitre d and, after reciting all the letters in "Mankiewicz" but the last one, notes with a blend of mirth and exhaustion, "and out of nowhere at the end, a Z."

Much like *Citizen Kane*, *Mank* is a wonderful ball of too-muchness that asks a lot of its audience, but does hold up its end of the bargain. Perhaps director Fincher could have connected a few more dots and contextualized more of *Mank's *Hollywood references for its audience, but to absorb everything, most really good movies require multiple viewings. That's why *Mank* will be even more enjoyable the second and third time through.

N.B. Kudos not only to Amanda Seyfried (below) for her Oscar-worthy performance, but also to Gary Oldman as Mankiewicz, Lily Collins as Mankiewicz's conscience and secretary and Tom Burke who must have studied hundreds of hours of tape to have nearly perfectly captured Orson Welles' singular voice.


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## Fading Fast

*The Lost Squadron* from 1932 with Richard Dix, Mary Astor, Joel McCrea and Eric von Stroheim

It's an early and in-need-of-restoration talkie that packs a lot of jumbled-up plot into its seventy-nine minutes. Three WWI pilots from the same squadron, along with their dedicated mechanic, swear a life-long allegiance to each other at the end of the war.

But when they return to the states and find that their jobs or money or girlfriends have been taken or stolen from them during the war, starting over is hard and they scatter a bit. Then, it's a decade later and two of the pilots are riding the rails in the depression where, after arriving in California, they see that the third pilot from their group is a successful stunt flier for the movies.

He immediately gets the other two jobs as stunt pilots and gets their old mechanic hired on to work on the planes. While that is all good, old girlfriends, a love-triangle involving a pilot's sister and a tyrannical director turn their lives into soap operas amped up by the stress of daily life-and-death movie stunt flying.

For 1932, the flight sequences have held up very well. In a move-inside-a-movie moment, the filming of the risky flights - a reenactment of a WWI battle - are gripping and realistic. Naturally, reenacting a dog fight from the war is emotionally disturbing to these former WWI pilots.

But it all comes to a boil - remember, it's a soap opera at this point - when the tyrannical director, jealous of one of the pilots because he used to date his current girlfriend, sabotages that pilot's plane before a stunt. From here, with only fifteen or so minutes to go, the movie morphs into two, yes two, murder mysteries complete with a hidden body and police inspectors.

Being a pre-code, the justice that is meted out is harsh and only somewhat fair, but isn't that life? Director George Archainbaum lost a bit of control of his multifaceted story a few times, but still put out a pretty good tale with some outstanding action sequences all in an insanely fast effort. If you can deal with early '30s movie-making clunkiness, it's worth the watch.

N.B. If you do watch it, look for Eric von Stroheim as the tyrannical director - a role not far from real life as this double-threat director/actor had a reputation as being a difficult director to work for. As an actor, I can never decide if he's a ham or just an early method-actor. That said, when he's in a scene, you can't help watching him.


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## Fading Fast

*Woman of the Yea*r from 1942 with Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy

This is a better, more-nuanced, more-serious and more-relevant-to-today movie than I remember it being from a long-ago viewing.

The general premise is one that's been around since they've been making movies: a male sportswriter, Tracy, and a more-successful female international journalist, Hepburn, meet, flirt, fall in love, marry and, then, the problems set in. He's a down-to-earth man of the people who drinks beer and kinda knows a bit about the world; she's an East Coast elite, highly educated, international traveler who is on a first name basis with heads of state.

After they marry, Hepburn just carries on with her very busy life blithely expecting Tracy to fit into her world, even her apartment. While he's willing to meet her more than half way, Hepburn sees him as just another something she picked up along the way, like the many journalist and humanitarian awards she's won or, worse, the immigrant child she selfishly adopts (without telling Tracy) because, in truth, doing so fits her public image.

While that is some harsh behavior, there is also easy humor to be milked from this opposites-attract story. Tracy takes newbie baseball-fan Hepburn to a game and, after he simplifies and explains the rules throughout, she asks, "Aren't we leaving, you said there were only nine innings?" "Uh, well, um, except when the score is tied." But this is not really a comedy as their marriage is failing in a real and painful way as Hepburn's genuinely unlikable character is gratingly self absorbed.

After repeatedly being ignored and watching Hepburn ignore their adopted child all for her career and public adulation, Tracy leaves by simply walking out. It's quietly powerful and raw as he didn't want a big row; he simply had had enough. Then, after an epiphany moment where Hepburn sees how empty a public life without someone to share it with can be, she tries to win Tracy back.

A lot has been written about the final scene where Hepburn attempts to make breakfast for Tracy - she's clearly never cracked an egg before in her life - as it triggers anaphylactic shock in some who see it as a metaphor for the "barefoot and pregnant woman in the kitchen" trope.

But watch and listen closely as Tracy is bemused by her kitchen bumbling - he never expected her, nor wants her, to be a traditional housewife. He tells her he doesn't want her to give up being who she is, but to become a real partner in their marriage.

Sure, the code and norms of the time obscure it a bit, but the message clearly isn't that Hepburn should renounce her career to bring Tracy his slippers every night, but that in a marriage of two successful, career-driven people, each has to re-oriented themselves to a shared life of compromise and support. Advice that's at least as relevant today as when *Woman of the Year *came out.

N.B. This is the first and one of the more-famous pairing of Tracy and Hepburn who went on to make a total of nine films together. My favorite, less talked about of their efforts is a modest Christmas movie, *Desk Set*, where you see these two, now middle-aged stars, verbally parry and thrust their way into love.


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## Fading Fast

*Shag* from 1989 with (L to R) Page Hannah, Bridget Fonda, Phoebe Cates and Annabeth Gish

This was part of TCM's "Women Make Film" series - a series TCM noted required it to reach outside of its usual type of movie to find enough offerings.

The 1980s were chockablock with silly movies about teenagers in high school or college trying to figure life out - school, sex, romance, future career, parents, you know, all the typical-teenage-angsty stuff. Some were pretty good, like *The Breakfast Club*, but many were not.

Despite TCM's efforts to make *Shag* into a significant or, at least, standout movie in its genre because it was directed by a woman, Zelda Barron, and about four young women, it's simply a mediocre effort in a crowded field. Set in 1963, it's the story of four southern girlfriends going on a not-parent-approved, kinda-bachelorette weekend to Myrtle Beach to dance (shag), party, meet boys - have fun.

As per the genre, each girl has her own issue - the engaged one is getting married to the "right" boy because her parents want her to; another one, the "rebel," is busting to get out of her claustrophobic-to-her town; a third one, the shy one, just wants to experience more of life and I never really figured out the fourth one's issue. And while the movie's secondary theme is that young girls like these in 1963 had less opportunities, or had to push harder to get those opportunities, this is no suffragette-cum-60s-feminist movie.

It's all by the numbers and you have it pretty much figured out no later than the first half of the movie. The engaged one meets a not-safe boy that she truly connects with and now is scared to tell her fiance and parents that she wants to break the engagement. The "rebel," in movie-world silliness, meets a talent agent and convinces him to take her to Hollywood (uh-huh) and the shy one meets a boy and learns to break out of her shell by dancing (see *Footloose* for a full exploration of this theme).

And while there are some nice moments and fun scenes, overall, the movie is more silly than poignant with a lot of sophomoric humor - like house trashing parties and scatological jokes - that, even by 1989, had been exhausted. While I yearn for a world where we don't care about the race or sex of the director, or anyone else, if TCM wants to highlight films made by women, that's its choice, but it should pick better ones than *Shag*.


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## Fading Fast

*Trial* from 1955 with Glenn Ford, Dorothy McGuire, Author Kennedy and Juano Hernandez

A movie that starts out as a progressive-for-the-era look at racial prejudice through the common device of the trial of a young minority - a Mexican boy, in this case - accused of murdering a young white girl morphs pretty aggressively into a story about the communist party in America cynically using the trial as a fundraiser and moral cause celebre to advance its objective of a global communist revolution.

Holy cow, but yes, that's the plot and while overwrought, it does a darn good job of showing almost everyone in a mendacious light. That list starts with many of the "good" white townspeople who want the "Mex" lynched - "hey, we all know he's guilty, so let's just do it." Thwarting them are an idealistic law professor, Ford, "summering" as a practicing lawyer, the firm's senior partner, Kennedy, and their paralegal, McGuire.

At this point, it's a pretty by-the-numbers legal drama challenging America's justice system to live up to its own ideals when everyone knows the outcome they want ahead of time. And because the senior partner wants to travel across the country to raise funds for the trial, he turns the courtroom defense over to the newbie law professor.

Initially, this move kinda makes sense as the Mexican boy's family has no money and robust defense cases are expensive. But when Ford is called away from his case preparation by Kennedy as Kennedy "needs" him to speak at a fundraiser, Ford is all but tricked into speaking at a communist rally - yes, to raise money for the defense, but also in support of "the communist cause."

He's no communist, so disgusted, Ford returns to his case preparations, but is issued a subpoena by The House Un-American Activities Committee. Now, paralegal McGuire, who we learn once dabbled in communism in college and helped Kennedy in his radical efforts for years, explains the real game to Ford: Kennedy is a true-believer communist who is using the Mexican boy's plight as a massive fundraiser for communism (with only a small amount of the proceeds going to the defense).

At this point, you need to regulate your breathing just to keep up with all the big-issue bombshells falling, but you don't get a chance as the trial begins in this white town itching for a conviction presided over by, hold on, a black trial judge, Juano Hernandez. Seriously, writer Don Mankiewicz and director Mark Robson somehow decided they could boil a full ocean of social issues in an hour and forty-five minutes.

After the usual trial machinations - juror bias (against the Mexican boy) exposed, tendentious testimony (against the Mexican boy) debunked, "objection" screamed a million times - Ford is about to rest for the defense in a case that looks good, at this point, for his client, the young Mexican boy. But in swoops Kennedy (he's still the lead defense attorney) who, sensing the Mexican boy will be found innocent, overrules Ford and puts the kid on the stand - wait, what? Why is Kennedy undermining his own case?

Once again, it is McGuire who explains that Kennedy wants the kid convicted as he can then milk the boy's "martyr" status for more money for the communist party - the kid be damned. (Spoiler alert) After the boy is overwhelmed on the stand by the prosecuting attorney (the exact reason why Ford didn't want to put the boy on the stand), a guilty verdict is handed down and the movie ramps up again.

(More spoiler alerts) Ford, now fuming with indignation, pulls some post-conviction-but-pre-sentencing legal machination to get the boy, a minor, off with, effectively, a slap on the wrist, which will undermine Kennedy's fund-raising-martyr strategy. This move pits Kennedy against the judge where Kennedy viciously tries to goad the black judge to overreact by accusing him of racial bias. Kennedy is angling for a mistrial - as noted, Mankiewicz and Robson have no fear that they can't manage every explosive social issue in America, at this time, in one movie.

(And even more spoilers - a lot happens in this movie) Judge Hernandez (see the postscript) doesn't take the bait and hands down a light sentence. Now victorious and clearly no communist stooge, the chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, effectively, drops his subpoena of Ford as, it's explained, the smarmy Chairman only wants easy targets he can use to advance his political career.

Okay, so let's go to the scoreboard. The "good" white people of the town wanted to lynch a Mexican boy. The liberal lawyer who took the case pro-bono turns out to be a communist cynically using the trial to advance the party's objectives in America. He and the party actually want the boy given the death sentence so that they can use his death as a cause celebre for fundraising. And the chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee is revealed to be a cynical political opportunist wrapping himself in the flag only for his own career gain.

One the plus side, though, an idealistic law professor and a black trial judge (in 1950s America) were able to leverage the philosophical ideals of justice embedded in the American legal system to prevent a complete travesty. There is, believe it or not, more - a love triangle between Kennedy, Ford and McGuire, cohabitation without marriage (again, in the '50s) and the Mexican boy's mother's complex motives - but you now have the big picture in this insanely ambitious movie.

P.S., Juano Hernandez is possibly the most-talented "unknown" actor of the era. As a black man, he sadly wasn't given the opportunity to be the leading man he should have been, but his performances have such nuance and integrity that each Hernandez effort leaves an impression. Beside his incredible work in this movie, see him elevate every scene he's in, in *Young Man with a Horn* and *The Breaking Point*.


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## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 52394
> 
> *Shag* from 1989 with (L to R) Page Hannah, Bridget Fonda, Phoebe Cates and Annabeth Gish
> 
> This was part of TCM's "Women Make Film" series - a series TCM noted required it to reach outside of its usual type of movie to find enough offerings.
> 
> The 1980s were chockablock with silly movies about teenagers in high school or college trying to figure life out - school, sex, romance, future career, parents, you know, all the typical-teenage-angsty stuff. Some were pretty good, like *The Breakfast Club*, but many were not.
> 
> Despite TCM's efforts to make *Shag* into a significant or, at least, standout movie in its genre because it was directed by a woman, Zelda Barron, and about four young women, it's simply a mediocre effort in a crowded field. Set in 1963, it's the story of four southern girlfriends going on a not-parent-approved, kinda-bachelorette weekend to Myrtle Beach to dance (shag), party, meet boys - have fun.
> 
> As per the genre, each girl has her own issue - the engaged one is getting married to the "right" boy because her parents want her to; another one, the "rebel," is busting to get out of her claustrophobic-to-her town; a third one, the shy one, just wants to experience more of life and I never really figured out the fourth one's issue. And while the movie's secondary theme is that young girls like these in 1963 had less opportunities, or had to push harder to get those opportunities, this is no suffragette-cum-60s-feminist movie.
> 
> It's all by the numbers and you have it pretty much figured out no later than the first half of the movie. The engaged one meets a not-safe boy that she truly connects with and now is scared to tell her fiance and parents that she wants to break the engagement. The "rebel," in movie-world silliness, meets a talent agent and convinces him to take her to Hollywood (uh-huh) and the shy one meets a boy and learns to break out of her shell by dancing (see *Footloose* for a full exploration of this theme).
> 
> And while there are some nice moments and fun scenes, overall, the movie is more silly than poignant with a lot of sophomoric humor - like house trashing parties and scatological jokes - that, even by 1989, had been exhausted. While I yearn for a world where we don't care about the race or sex of the director, or anyone else, if TCM wants to highlight films made by women, that's its choice, but it should pick better ones than *Shag*.


A well written and very helpful review. Based on your recommendations, I will avoid this one. Thanks for the heads up!


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 52453
> 
> *Trial* from 1955 with Glenn Ford, Dorothy McGuire, Author Kennedy and Juano Hernandez
> 
> A movie that starts out as a progressive-for-the-era look at racial prejudice through the common device of the trial of a young minority - a Mexican boy, in this case - accused of murdering a young white girl morphs pretty aggressively into a story about the communist party in America cynically using the trial as a fundraiser and moral cause celebre to advance its objective of a global communist revolution.
> 
> Holy cow, but yes, that's the plot and while overwrought, it does a darn good job of showing almost everyone in a mendacious light. That list starts with many of the "good" white townspeople who want the "Mex" lynched - "hey, we all know he's guilty, so let's just do it." Thwarting them are an idealistic law professor, Ford, "summering" as a practicing lawyer, the firm's senior partner, Kennedy, and their paralegal, McGuire.
> 
> At this point, it's a pretty by-the-numbers legal drama challenging America's justice system to live up to its own ideals when everyone knows the outcome they want ahead of time. And because the senior partner wants to travel across the country to raise funds for the trial, he turns the courtroom defense over to the newbie law professor.
> 
> Initially, this move kinda makes sense as the Mexican boy's family has no money and robust defense cases are expensive. But when Ford is called away from his case preparation by Kennedy as Kennedy "needs" him to speak at a fundraiser, Ford is all but tricked into speaking at a communist rally - yes, to raise money for the defense, but also in support of "the communist cause."
> 
> He's no communist, so disgusted, Ford returns to his case preparations, but is issued a subpoena by The House Un-American Activities Committee. Now, paralegal McGuire, who we learn once dabbled in communism in college and helped Kennedy in his radical efforts for years, explains the real game to Ford: Kennedy is a true-believer communist who is using the Mexican boy's plight as a massive fundraiser for communism (with only a small amount of the proceeds going to the defense).
> 
> At this point, you need to regulate your breathing just to keep up with all the big-issue bombshells falling, but you don't get a chance as the trial begins in this white town itching for a conviction presided over by, hold on, a black trial judge, Juano Hernandez. Seriously, writer Don Mankiewicz and director Mark Robson somehow decided they could boil a full ocean of social issues in an hour and forty-five minutes.
> 
> After the usual trial machinations - juror bias (against the Mexican boy) exposed, tendentious testimony (against the Mexican boy) debunked, "objection" screamed a million times - Ford is about to rest for the defense in a case that looks good, at this point, for his client, the young Mexican boy. But in swoops Kennedy (he's still the lead defense attorney) who, sensing the Mexican boy will be found innocent, overrules Ford and puts the kid on the stand - wait, what? Why is Kennedy undermining his own case?
> 
> Once again, it is McGuire who explains that Kennedy wants the kid convicted as he can then milk the boy's "martyr" status for more money for the communist party - the kid be damned. (Spoiler alert) After the boy is overwhelmed on the stand by the prosecuting attorney (the exact reason why Ford didn't want to put the boy on the stand), a guilty verdict is handed down and the movie ramps up again.
> 
> (More spoiler alerts) Ford, now fuming with indignation, pulls some post-conviction-but-pre-sentencing legal machination to get the boy, a minor, off with, effectively, a slap on the wrist, which will undermine Kennedy's fund-raising-martyr strategy. This move pits Kennedy against the judge where Kennedy viciously tries to goad the black judge to overreact by accusing him of racial bias. Kennedy is angling for a mistrial - as noted, Mankiewicz and Robson have no fear that they can't manage every explosive social issue in America, at this time, in one movie.
> 
> (And even more spoilers - a lot happens in this movie) Judge Hernandez (see the postscript) doesn't take the bait and hands down a light sentence. Now victorious and clearly no communist stooge, the chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, effectively, drops his subpoena of Ford as, it's explained, the smarmy Chairman only wants easy targets he can use to advance his political career.
> 
> Okay, so let's go to the scoreboard. The "good" white people of the town wanted to lynch a Mexican boy. The liberal lawyer who took the case pro-bono turns out to be a communist cynically using the trial to advance the party's objectives in America. He and the party actually want the boy given the death sentence so that they can use his death as a cause celebre for fundraising. And the chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee is revealed to be a cynical political opportunist wrapping himself in the flag only for his own career gain.
> 
> One the plus side, though, an idealistic law professor and a black trial judge (in 1950s America) were able to leverage the philosophical ideals of justice embedded in the American legal system to prevent a complete travesty. There is, believe it or not, more - a love triangle between Kennedy, Ford and McGuire, cohabitation without marriage (again, in the '50s) and the Mexican boy's mother's complex motives - but you now have the big picture in this insanely ambitious movie.
> 
> P.S., Juano Hernandez is possibly the most-talented "unknown" actor of the era. As a black man, he sadly wasn't given the opportunity to be the leading man he should have been, but his performances have such nuance and integrity that each Hernandez effort leaves an impression. Beside his incredible work in this movie, see him elevate every scene he's in, in *Young Man with a Horn* and *The Breaking Point*.
> View attachment 52455


Trial is on my list, to be watched!


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## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> Trial is on my list, to be watched!


I'm surprised this one isn't more well known.


----------



## Fading Fast

*While the City Sleeps* from 1956 with Dana Andrews, George Sanders, Ida Lupino, Vincent Price, Sally Forrest, James Craig and Thomas Mitchel

Billed as a film-noir crime drama, it's really a soap-opera crime drama with a splash of noir.

When media mogul Amos Kyne dies, his son, smarmy playboy Vincent Price takes over and puts Kyne Media's top three men in competition to be his executive director. With a serial killer currently stalking New York City, the one who can bring him "the scoop," will get the new position.

Cagey head of Kyne Media Newswires, George Sanders, gruff editor, Thomas Mitchel and polished executive lackey, James Craig, are the contenders, with golden-boy reporter Dana Andrews helping Mitchel, the real "newsman" of the three.

And while the movie opens with a chilling murder of a single woman in her apartment by the serial killer, the picture, overall, devotes more time to the drinking, bed hopping, gossiping and backstabbing of the newsroom men and women than solving the mystery.

You'll need a scorecard to keep track of the sexual and political betrayals as, for example, women's features writer Ida Lupino makes and breaks alliances frequently, while she seems to proposition Andrews for a one-night stand mainly to dynamite his engagement to younger and prettier Nancy Forrest just for the sport or perverted principal of it. (While the Motion Picture Production Code forced Andrews, afterwards, to say they "only kissed" on the night he more than canoodled with Lupino, the audience got what really happened.)

When these newspaper men and women aren't hopping in and out of bed or plotting to undermine each other, they head over - day and night - to the nearby bar to fire back a lot of booze. While the Picture Code was strict about wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am, it seemed fine with endless rounds of drinks being guzzled by everyone, all the time.

Playing on in the background of this alcoholic and sexual haze is a ferocious fight for the executive job as everyone scrambles to find the killer. Unfortunately, director Fritz Lang or the writers never settled on which story they wanted to tell - the hunt for a serial killer or the newsroom shenanigans - so the tone of the movie keeps pinging back and forth from serious crime drama to salaciously fun soap opera.

The predictable Code-driven end (spoiler alert) - hero-reporter Andrews captures the killer and gets his waits-till-she's-married good girl back - is inconsistent with the more real-to-life tawdriness of the rest of the movie. And while the Kyne newsroom is clearly a set, it still provides a time-capsule peek at how the 1950s news business was awkwardly adjusting to TV while trying to keep its newspapers and wire-services relevant. The movie's a bit of a mess, but overall, still has enough good to make it worth the watch.


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## Fading Fast

*The Front Page* from 1974 with Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Susan Sarandon and a ton of sitcom and movie character actors from the '50s-'70s

This is Hollywood's third go at the same story as the movie was made in 1931 as *The Front Page* with Pat O'Brien and Adolphe Menjou and in 1940 as *His Girl Friday* with Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant. The '31 version is very good if you can deal with its early talky clunkiness, but the '40 version is, IMHO, one of the top-five- or ten-best movies ever made.

The basic story is the same in all three: an unscrupulous, hard-driving editor tries to prevent his best reporter from quitting to get married right in the middle of a sensational death-row hanging story he (or she) is covering. The '40 movie flipped the star reporter's sex from male to female, amping up this key reporter-editor relationship with sexual tension, which Grant and Russell - with rapid-fire dialogue and incredible chemistry - exploit to its fullest.

But for some reason, this 1974 version flips the reporter's sex back to male, which took much of the spark out of the leads' relationship. A remake should do one of two things: one, simply be a superior movie to the first as the '40 version of *The Front Page* is to the very good '31 version or, two, doing something interesting or fun with the remake as *High Society *does as a star-studded musical remake of *The Philadelphia Story*.

But nothing is better or more interesting in this 1974 version of *The Front Page*. Director Billy Wilder seemed to be channeling his inner Woody Allen as the movie's imbued with a New York shtick (despite being set in late 1920s Chicago) that takes itself even less seriously than the other two reasonably lighthearted versions. At points, its slapstick felt almost like intentional parody.

Too often, Wilder also takes the focus off of the editor and reporter's relationship to spend time on the mundane death-row-hanging story with its red-scare overtones. Hitchcock knew that movies like this should use the MacGuffin (the thing advancing the plot) to draw attention to the characters human foibles and challenges and not vice versa.

Leads Jack Lemmon as the reporter and Walter Mathou as the unscrupulous editor do have some good exchanges, but they never rise to a Russell-Grant level of brilliance. Heck, of the three versions, the exchange of dialogue is the slowest in this one - a real surprise as machine-gun repartee is the other versions' stylistic raison d'être.

If those two earlier versions hadn't been made, 1974's would be an okay movie on its own. But with two better cognates already out there, '74's feels hollow and tired. Not helping things was an awful performance by Carol Burnett in the role of the condemned man's hooker friend. Conversely, for a 1970s movie set in the '20s, the period details were above average. There are worse movies, but one's time would be better spent watching either of the two earlier versions.


----------



## Fading Fast

Christmas-movie roundup, part one (we usually continue watching Christmas movies through New Years):









*The Cheaters* from 1945. This was a new one to me and, while not a tier-one or even two Christmas movie, it does have its moments (the carolers scene), strong acting (Eugene Pallette and Joseph Schildkraut) and a generally fun vibe. A stronger director could have smoothed some of the clunky transitions and known how to pull off the Christmas moments better, but still, in a few years, I'll be ready to see it again.









*Holiday Affair* from 1949. This one still gets my vote as the most underrated of all the Christmas movies as, beneath the fun Christmas story, there is a lot of real life: a war widow struggling with her grief, a veteran struggling to restart his civilian life, a man asking the wrong-for-him woman to marry and almost everyone struggling with money problems. Despite this, the general vibe is still uplifting, the dialogue is, overall, smart and funny and the just-post-war-period details are time-travel heaven. Plus, there's a cool model electric train right at the center of the story.









*A Christmas Carol* from 1938. One year, I watched four versions of this movie and discovered that I liked them all - it's a wonderful story with, in the versions I saw, outstanding actors. I only watched this one version, this year, as it was the one TCM ran, but I have no complaints. Reginald Owens is an outstanding Scrooge, the movie rips through its story in sixty-nine minutes and I've had the wonderful Fred-Scrooge exchange of "Uncle!," "Nephew!" piquantly suck in my head since.









*The Holly and the Ivy *from 1952. For all those who complain that Christmas movies are too treacly, this is the one for you (with the exception of the too-easy solutions at the end - hey, it is a Christmas movie). It has a surprising amount of real dysfunction - alcoholism, out-of-wedlock children (when that was a big deal) and a middle-aged daughter having to decide between taking care of her aging father or grabbing her, probably, last chance at marriage. The general Christmas trappings are here - decorations, turkey, carolers and snow - but this one brings some real grit and an outstanding cast headed by the always-excellent Celia Johnson.









*Desk Set* from 1957. To be sure, Hollywood exaggerates, but if this one and* The Apartment* from 1960 are to be, even somewhat, believed (and from what I saw in the '80s before the PC police took over) big-city office Christmas parties used to truly be drunken, sexual bacchanalia. That alone makes this a time-capsule must-see movie, but the best part is watching Hepburn and Tracy exchange some fantastically smart and funny dialogue while falling in love at Christmas time.









*The Man Who Came to Dinner* from 1942. It's only a Christmas movie in that it takes place during the Christmas holiday, but the whip-smart dialogue and tour-de-force performances by Monty Woolley, Bette Davis and the obviously braless-throughout Ann Sheridan (how did that get past the censors?) makes this an always fun one to see. Plus, heck, with all the snow, skating, fireplaces and presents, it does feel sorta Christmasy, despite the real story in this one being elsewhere.

Ms. Sheridan in *The Man Who Came to Dinner*:


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## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> Christmas-movie roundup, part one (we usually continue watching Christmas movies through New Years):
> 
> View attachment 52686
> 
> *The Cheaters* from 1945. This was a new one to me and, while not a tier-one or even two Christmas movie, it does have its moments (the carolers scene), strong acting (Eugene Pallette and Joseph Schildkraut) and a generally fun vibe. A stronger director could have smoothed some of the clunky transitions and known how to pull off the Christmas moments better, but still, in a few years, I'll be ready to see it again.
> 
> View attachment 52684
> 
> *Holiday Affair* from 1949. This one still gets my vote as the most underrated of all the Christmas movies as, beneath the fun Christmas story, there is a lot of real life: a war widow struggling with her grief, a veteran struggling to restart his civilian life, a man asking the wrong-for-him woman to marry and almost everyone struggling with money problems. Despite this, the general vibe is still uplifting, the dialogue is, overall, smart and funny and the just-post-war-period details are time-travel heaven. Plus, there's a cool model electric train right at the center of the story.
> 
> View attachment 52687
> 
> *A Christmas Carol* from 1938. One year, I watched four versions of this movie and discovered that I liked them all - it's a wonderful story with, in the versions I saw, outstanding actors. I only watched this one version, this year, as it was the one TCM ran, but I have no complaints. Reginald Owens is an outstanding Scrooge, the movie rips through its story in sixty-nine minutes and I've had the wonderful Fred-Scrooge exchange of "Uncle!," "Nephew!" piquantly suck in my head since.
> 
> View attachment 52682
> 
> *The Holly and the Ivy *from 1952. For all those who complain that Christmas movies are too treacly, this is the one for you (with the exception of the too-easy solutions at the end - hey, it is a Christmas movie). It has a surprising amount of real dysfunction - alcoholism, out-of-wedlock children (when that was a big deal) and a middle-aged daughter having to decide between taking care of her aging father or grabbing her, probably, last chance at marriage. The general Christmas trappings are here - decorations, turkey, carolers and snow - but this one brings some real grit and an outstanding cast headed by the always-excellent Celia Johnson.
> 
> View attachment 52689
> 
> *Desk Set* from 1957. To be sure, Hollywood exaggerates, but if this one and* The Apartment* from 1960 are to be, even somewhat, believed (and from what I saw in the '80s before the PC police took over) big-city office Christmas parties used to truly be drunken, sexual bacchanalia. That alone makes this a time-capsule must-see movie, but the best part is watching Hepburn and Tracy exchange some fantastically smart and funny dialogue while falling in love at Christmas time.
> 
> View attachment 52679
> 
> *The Man Who Came to Dinner* from 1942. It's only a Christmas movie in that it takes place during the Christmas holiday, but the whip-smart dialogue and tour-de-force performances by Monty Woolley, Bette Davis and the obviously braless-throughout Ann Sheridan (how did that get past the censors?) makes this an always fun one to see. Plus, heck, with all the snow, skating, fireplaces and presents, it does feel sorta Christmasy, despite the real story in this one being elsewhere.
> 
> Ms. Sheridan in *The Man Who Came to Dinner*:
> View attachment 52677


My friend, you seem to have a full dance card for the rest of 2020. Enjoy!


----------



## Faust

The Man Who Would be King is one of my all time favorites. Sean Connery and Michael Caine were real life friends and you can see that relationship on screen. Great style, adventure and a nice reminder of the importance of Masonry as an international institution.


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## Fading Fast

*High Sierra* form 1941 with Humphrey Bogart, Ida Lupino, Henry Travers and Joan Leslie

There's a lot of moral ambiguity going on beneath the code-approved wrapping of this gangster picture cum film noir where you end up kinda rooting for the wrong people at times.

Bogart, serving a life sentence, is sprung from jail by a governor's pardon obtained by a bribe paid by a gang leader who gets Bogie freed so that he can mastermind a heist for him. Pause on that corruption at a high level for a moment; a corruption that is not later "fixed" by the Motion Picture Production Code. It is never exposed and the governor suffers no consequences.

Bogie, now freed and on his way to the heist job on the west coast, befriends a poor family whose one daughter, Joan Leslie, has a club foot. His kindness to the family and girl reveals that Bogie has a mixed-up morality that can be cold and ruthless at times, but also kind and caring.

Once out west, Bogart connects with the new gang - amateurs that he tries to mold into professionals while he meets hanger-on-girl Ida Lupino, whose horrible family life has led her to become, essentially, a gangster groupie. Here again, we see Bogie the antihero as a caring man who shows kindness to Lupino. And Lupino, like a beaten dog, responds with love and devotion to the modest scraps of decency Bogie throws her way.

But Bogie's real affections are reserved for club-footed Leslie who seems to represent for Bogart the innocence of his youth and the respectability society will no longer offer him. With the movie's two paths - a crime caper and a love triangle - set, we shift to the jewelry heist part of the story, which goes horribly wrong as we see the ruthless side of Bogie when he shoots innocent people who get in the way.

From here, it's all a painful unravel of the few hopes for a normal life Bogie and Lupino (she sticks to him like glue) have. After paying for a surgery to fix Leslie's foot, Bogart asks her to marry him, but she rejects him, at first nicely, and then, as he pushes, not so nicely.

With that dream crushed, the law closing in and Lupino still around, Bogart ships Lupino, who is kinda sorta not guilty (other than that she knew the heist was being planned), ahead to Vegas so that he can try to escape the law and get the money from the stolen jewels on his own.

But it's the 1940s and even antiheroes have to pay for their sins, so (spoiler alert) in a well-filmed, tense final scene, Bogie, with a rifle and plenty of ammo, attempts to hold off the police in the Sierra Mountains. During the standoff, Lupino appears pleading for Bogie's life. But in a final twist of irony, as Bogie goes to pick up his and Lupino's dog - who Lupino brought with her and who has run up to Bogie's redoubt - Bogie exposes himself enough to be shot.

The man is a ruthless killer; a hardened criminal foreshadowing a Tarantino character by decades as he sees crime and even murder as just part of his job. But he can also be kind, wistful and compassionate, and darn it, half the time you are rooting for him. Kudos to writers John Huston and W.R. Burnett and director Raoul Walsh for creating a morally complex character and story tucked inside the tightly circumscribed world of the Motion Picture Production Code.


----------



## Fading Fast

*Rope* from 1948 with John Dall, James Stewart and Farley Granger

The reason why filming a theatrical play and showing it on TV doesn't work is, well, I don't really know why, but it doesn't as evidenced by this experimental effort by master director Alfred Hitchcock. Shot in one setting - an expensive NYC apartment (the skylight-ish windows are incredible) - this theatrical-play-like movie is left with only dialogue and characters to engage you. While both have their moments, they are not consistent enough to prop up this short, but surprisingly slow-moving, movie.

Two young, wealthy, upper-class, well-educated and (it's only implied, but we get it) gay men, Dall and Granger, kill by strangulation (using the titular "rope") a former classmate and friend. They commit this murder simply to test out their warped version of one of their former college professor's theories that intellectually superior people should not be restrained by the same moral and legal code as the benighted.

I get the Nietzsche superman concept at work and I know it oddly titillates many philosophers - and absorbs a lot of their intellectual bandwidth - but twisting it into justifiable murder for sport is stupid, boring and morally repugnant to those of us less cerebrally inclined; you know, us benighted folks who don't kill for intellectual exercise.

After the opening murder, these two sociopaths host a party with their dead friend's body stuffed in a trunk being used as a buffet for the soiree's food. Following that ten minutes of set up, the rest of the movie is about an hour of a boring party where we learn about all the interconnections between the victim's former friends, while concern grows over the friend's failure to appear at the party. This and some tedious side stories happen while we watch Dall luxuriate in his "achievement," as Granger welters in guilt and fear over being caught.

It's only when party guest and the inspiration for the murder, the boys' former professor, James Stewart, starts to get suspicious that some real tension builds. There's even a pretty good scene toward the end where Stewart realizes what these two nutcases have done and exposes their crime, but it's not enough to save this torpid effort.

I believe I read at some point that this movie was inspired by the true story of two young men, Leopold and Loeb, who did commit a murder just to see if they could get away with it. Now, a movie version of that story - with its extensive police search for the killers that hinged on one obscure clue - would have been a much more interesting movie.

But credit to Hitchcock for this attempt, flawed as it is, and for learning from it to use more of what movies allow a director to do when he made a film version of the play *Dial M for Murder *a few years later.


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 52841
> 
> *Rope* from 1948 with John Dall, James Stewart and Farley Granger
> 
> The reason why filming a theatrical play and showing it on TV doesn't work is, well, I don't really know why, but it doesn't as evidenced by this experimental effort by master director Alfred Hitchcock. Shot in one setting - an expensive NYC apartment (the skylight-ish windows are incredible) - this theatrical-play-like movie is left with only dialogue and characters to engage you. While both have their moments, they are not consistent enough to prop up this short, but surprisingly slow-moving, movie.
> 
> Two young, wealthy, upper-class, well-educated and (it's only implied, but we get it) gay men, Dall and Granger, kill by strangulation (using the titular "rope") a former classmate and friend. They commit this murder simply to test out their warped version of one of their former college professor's theories that intellectually superior people should not be restrained by the same moral and legal code as the benighted.
> 
> I get the Nietzsche superman concept at work and I know it oddly titillates many philosophers - and absorbs a lot of their intellectual bandwidth - but twisting it into justifiable murder for sport is stupid, boring and morally repugnant to those of us less cerebrally inclined; you know, us benighted folks who don't kill for intellectual exercise.
> 
> After the opening murder, these two sociopaths host a party with their dead friend's body stuffed in a trunk being used as a buffet for the soiree's food. Following that ten minutes of set up, the rest of the movie is about an hour of a boring party where we learn about all the interconnections between the victim's former friends, while concern grows over the friend's failure to appear at the party. This and some tedious side stories happen while we watch Dall luxuriate in his "achievement," as Granger welters in guilt and fear over being caught.
> 
> It's only when party guest and the inspiration for the murder, the boys' former professor, James Stewart, starts to get suspicious that some real tension builds. There's even a pretty good scene toward the end where Stewart realizes what these two nutcases have done and exposes their crime, but it's not enough to save this torpid effort.
> 
> I believe I read at some point that this movie was inspired by the true story of two young men, Leopold and Loeb, who did commit a murder just to see if they could get away with it. Now, a movie version of that story - with its extensive police search for the killers that hinged on one obscure clue - would have been a much more interesting movie.
> 
> But credit to Hitchcock for this attempt, flawed as it is, and for learning from it to use more of what movies allow a director to do when he made a film version of the play *Dial M for Murder *a few years later.


Jimmy Stewart, Bomber Pilot...the man does it al so very well!


----------



## Fading Fast

Caught a few episodes of *The Twilight Zone* during the SyFy marathon this weekend.









*Number 12 Looks Just Like You*

I had remembered this episode as being about people choosing which "beautiful" person they wanted to be "transformed" into with one teenage girl discomfiting everyone by not wanting to change. But this time, I saw it more as a parable for a "benign" dictatorship. Whenever someone disagreed with an accepted practice, you could feel some fear creep in as that person was immediately offered a "glass of instant smile" like s_oma_ from *Brave New World*. There were also overtones of *The Stepford Wives* and the Star Trek episode *This Side of Paradise*.









*The Last Flight*

A WWI fighter pilot gets lost in the clouds and lands at a 1960 American airbase. It is a really well-constructed story that smartly connects a lot of dots between the two time periods. Maybe it is not as "cerebral" as some *The Twilight Zone *episodes, but it's tightly written and quite engaging.









*Willoughby*

I must have seen this episode of a businessman having a mental breakdown ten or more times in my life and it still hurts every time he calls his wife for help and support and she hangs up on him. Plus, I've sat in plenty of business meetings where I've thought about the curmudgeonly and bullying boss yelling "this is a push, push, push business."


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> Caught a few episodes of *The Twilight Zone* during the SyFy marathon this weekend.
> 
> View attachment 52928
> 
> *Number 12 Looks Just Like You*
> 
> I had remembered this episode as being about people choosing which "beautiful" person they wanted to be "transformed" into with one teenage girl discomfiting everyone by not wanting to change. But this time, I saw it more as a parable for a "benign" dictatorship. Whenever someone disagreed with an accepted practice, you could feel some fear creep in as that person was immediately offered a "glass of instant smile" like s_oma_ from *Brave New World*. There were also overtones of *The Stepford Wives* and the Star Trek episode *This Side of Paradise*.
> 
> View attachment 52927
> 
> *The Last Flight*
> 
> A WWI fighter pilot gets lost in the clouds and lands at a 1960 American airbase. It is a really well-constructed story that smartly connects a lot of dots between the two time periods. Maybe it is not as "cerebral" as some *The Twilight Zone *episodes, but it's tightly written and quite engaging.
> 
> View attachment 52929
> 
> *Willoughby*
> 
> I must have seen this episode of a businessman having a mental breakdown ten or more times in my life and it still hurts every time he calls his wife for help and support and she hangs up on him. Plus, I've sat in plenty of business meetings where I've thought about the curmudgeonly and bullying boss yelling "this is a push, push, push business."


It appears the Twilight Zone Series sounds like a marathon well worth watching!


----------



## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> It appears the Twilight Zone Series sounds like a marathon well worth watching!


SyFy has been doing a "The Twilight Zone" marathon for decades now on New Years. Several years ago, I realized I was burned out, but after years of not watching them, I dipped my toe in this year, watched a few and found it's been long enough that I enjoyed them again. Next year, I'll watch more. I know I could find them right now, but I'm happy to keep them as a New Years "special" thing.


----------



## Fading Fast

*The Burgla*r from 1957 with Dan Duryea, Jayne Mansfield and Martha Vickers

_"I'm a woman. I'm flesh and blood and I got feelings, but you never knew that. You never wanted to know, I was starving for you, night after night I tore pillows apart with my teeth, so hungry for you. I wanted you so much, you, you knew from nothing."_

- Jayne Mansfield to Dan Duryea in *The Burglar*

We'll return to Jayne's unrequited lust shortly.

In *The Burglar*, a gang of four jewel thieves steal an expensive and well-known necklace from a famous female evangelist's mansion. Mansfield's job is to befriend the evangelist and case the mansion so that the three men can rob it later. And while "the job" itself is successful, with a hiccup - two cops noticed the gang's parked car and, thus, saw head-crook Dan Duryea's face - the real challenges begin after the heist.

Hold up in a run-down tenement in Philadelphia as they wait for the heat to cool a bit before they attempt to sell the necklace, the crooks begin to fight amongst themselves. Duryea, the leader and clearly the brains of the operation, wants to wait a good long time, but the other two men are itching to get their money, while Mansfield is in Duryea's camp.

Not helping the claustrophobic oppression of the small apartment is the summer's enervating heat and Mansfield, with all her Mansfieldness, creating an unbearable sexual tension for, in particular, one of the anxious-to-sell crooks.

Meanwhile, as in all good film noir crime dramas, the police are slowly but painstakingly putting clues together, while a police sketch artist, working with the two cops who saw Duryea, creates a frighteningly accurate image of his face. But one of those officers has also gone surreptitiously rogue and, with his girlfriend, Martha Vickers, is tracking the movements of the crooks as he waits for an opportunity to steal the necklace from them.

Any moral person would be rooting for the cops (the good ones, not the dirty one), but as we learn more about Duryea, our allegiances waiver. Durea was an orphan raised by a kind thief who taught him the criminal way of life and instilled in him a moral code that included no violence when "on a job" and a pledge from Duryea to always take care of the older crook's daughter, Mansfield.

Having learned this, we now see Duryea as a man broken by his upbringing, but still trying to do right within his warped moral code. He's clearly tired of it all and just wants to fence the necklace to have enough to get out and to give Mansfield a shot at a decent future, but everything is closing in on him fast.

With the other two crooks pushing for an immediate sale, the police getting closer and the rogue cop and his girlfriend, now revealed to Duryea, circling the gang, Duryea knows he has to get out of Philly and sell the necklace fast. Here, this low-budget film makes wonderful use of just-post-war Atlantic City's incredible combination of wealth, tackiness and sea-side scenery as Duryea and the gang try to "escape" from Philly via Atlantic City, which (minor spoiler alert) becomes their Alamo.

Since it's a 1950s movie, it will be no surprise that the crooks all lose, the dirty cop is exposed and the good guys win. But one of the geniuses of film noir is that it usually makes you see the "bad guys" in a morally complex light. And that's what ultimately makes this sad and challenging movie punch well above its low budget's weight class.

Duryea, in particular, is the man you hurt for even knowing he is a criminal. Usually, he plays the loud, obnoxious, overly confident or weaselly scared member of the gang, but here, in a career performance, he's the pensive, quiet one who acts with his eyes, facial inflections and body movements, while others make noise around him.

And it's only when it's too late that Mansfield delivers those lines about carnal desire to Duryea. In response, he crumbles emotionally and physically without saying a word as he has repressed all his feelings for Mansfield out of a misunderstood loyalty to the man who raised him. In this, the movie's money moment, he sees that he and Mansfield could have had a chance, but now all is lost. It's a painfully raw reveal in this well-done, but not well-known entry in the film-noir genre.


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## Fading Fast

*Bell Book and Candle* from 1958 with Kim Novak, James Stewart, Jack Lemmon and Janice Rule

_And I wish I been out in California
When the lights on all the Christmas trees went out
But I been burnin' my bell, book and candle
And the restoration plays have all gone 'round
_
- From the Rolling Stones song "Winter."

Some movies get better after you've seen them a few times as the plot is almost a distraction to the movie's more enjoyable style and verve, as in *Bell Book and Candle*. I've always liked this one, but now in my third or fourth viewing in, well, three or four decades, I found I really enjoyed it because I took it in more as a stylized 1950s experience, than a plot-driven story.

Sure, there's a plot: a comely, cat-like witch, Kim Novak, bored with living amongst, but culturally separate from, humans, wants to fall in love with a human, which will cost her, her sorceress powers. Her amorous target is her upstairs neighbor, successful and conservative book publisher James Stewart, who is a bit too old for the role of a middle-aged bachelor.

All the stuff you expect to happen in this normal witch-human love story (see *I Married a Witch* and most episodes of *Bewitched*) happens: she initially casts a spell on Stewart to win his affections; his life gets turned upside down; her witch and warlock friends warn her to not give up her powers and try to sabotage her efforts at love; he discovers (after haughtily dismissing the idea of witches) what happened and angrily leaves her, but things work out in the end as he, ultimately, falls in love with her of his own free will.

Okay, that's a good story, which is why Hollywood keeps telling it, but the fun and frolic in *Bell Book and Candle* is the stylized look into a witchy world acting as a surrogate for 1950s' Beatnik culture centered around New York's Greenwich Village.

Here, women wear pants and men turtlenecks (except some of the jazz musicians who wear Ivy-league suits as that was a thing then) while the witches' potions and herbs are, one assumes, a stand-in for drugs and weed. Basically, it's witches and warlocks as a proxy for mid-twentieth-century Village bohemians.

Hence, where Stewart's society fiance, Janice Rule, is fussily dressed, bejeweled, status conscious and uptight, Novak is cool, aloof, casually (but highly witchily) styled and overtly sexual. Coincidentally, Novak and Rule were rivals when they both attended Radcliffe years ago. Adding to the present day frisson and friction, Stewart, under Novak's spell, dumps Rule, on the day of Stewart and Rule's wedding - ouch.

Sure, witch Novak is weird as heck, but Stewart - under a spell or not - could sense the difference between a passionate female and a calculating woman. And that's just one contrast in this movie of contrasts as Stewart's upscale and conservative apartment and office looks worlds apart from Novak's coven-like flat and the dark and smokey underground clubs and stores she frequents.

And nothing contrasts more than publisher Stewart, in his tailored suits, running around Greenwich Village with clad-in-body-hugging-black-slacks-and-top Novak. But that is also part of the charm as it's enjoyable seeing fish-out-of-water Stewart go from skeptic dismissing witchcraft to believer as his love for Novak evolves from spell driven to heartfelt, despite having his world turned topsy turvy.

While not a Hitchcock effort, director Richard Quine produced a somewhat Hitchcock-like movie where the style is so visually captivating and the people so engaging, that the story fades as you just enjoy the ride.

And no one is more engaging in this one than Novak channeling her inner witch to be both mysterious and vulnerable as she finds love more fulfilling than power. When she runs out barefoot into the snow to find her lost partner in witchcraft, her cat Pywacket, as she simply can't stand losing both him and Stewart (they're on the outs at this moment) at the same time, your heart aches for her.

There's more going on in this one - Ernie Kovaks in the role of an offbeat writer of witch stories and Jack Lemmon as Novak's warlock and mischievous bongo-playing brother - but it's Novak as the witch in search of love who centers and drives the story. A highly stylized movie about a witch falling in love with a human is a tightrope effort, but *Bell Book and Candle* pulls it off with an enthusiastic confidence that only makes repeated viewings more enjoyable.


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## Fading Fast

*The Last Days of Disco* from 1998 with Kate Beckinsale, Chloe Sevigny (that name doesn't spell itself), Chris Eigman and Mackenzie Astin / written and directed by Whit Stillman

Other than that I know there are very strong opinions out there about Whit Stillman movies, I don't really know what the debate is about nor could I have named a Whit Stillman movie prior to seeing this one, even though, I subsequently checked, I had already seen two or three of them. Hence, I know my comments will miss the mark on whatever the bigger Whit Stillman's issues out there are.

Set in the early '80s, the story centers around two young college-graduate women, Beckinsale and Sevigny, trying to transition to adulthood in New York City. They work as interns at a publishing house during the day and party at night with their guy friends at "The Club," New York's hottest disco, which I assume is modeled after Studio 54.

As is common with young kids, their friends are entwined in their lives - they share apartments, steal each other's boyfriends and girlfriends, hook up casually, gossip and both undermine and help each other.

In a way, that's the movie. Sure there are some small plots about the club being investigated by the district attorney's office (with one friend working at the club and another on the DA's staff) and whether the women will be promoted to assistant editors, etc., but this is a character-driven, moment-in-time movie.

And as a character, Kate Beckinsale nails the post-college, smart, arrogant, manipulating, know-it-all woman who projects a confidence that hides the same insecurities everyone is dealing with. She issues edicts and maxims with conviction in one scene, only to dismiss them in the next one when they are inconvenient: "never date someone in advertising" she tells her friend when she wants to break up her relationship, followed later by, "of course I wasn't serious" when she starts dating the same guy [quotes are paraphrases].

All the characters here are a type - the shy brainy one, the guy who ditched college but is doing well, for the moment, managing at The Club, the liberal idealist bemoaning the plight of the low-paid white-collar workers in publishing, the advertising guy trying to suck up to his bosses for a promotion - but each actor brings enough personality and distinction to keep you somewhat interested.

Having moved to NYC in the '80s after college, I knew the people in *The Last Days of Disco* - cocky, "in the know," opinionated, lived in their group and, generally, annoying. Stillman clearly knows these people too as he perfectly captured, not only the type, but that type at just that moment and place in time. And while New York City in the movie looks more like late 1990s New York, when the movie was filmed, than early 1980s, the actors' attitude and posturing are all 1980s.

Now, twenty-plus years after it was filmed, the movie's New York street scenes are a treat. Combined with smart, if sometimes, over-written dialogue, the full-on-'80s zeitgeist and enough humanity to counter the many cliches, it's kinda an enjoyable movie. Plus, if you happened to have been just out of college and living in New York City in the '80s back then, the movie will produce some feelings of nostalgia.


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## Fading Fast

*Dr Stangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb* from 1964 with Peter Sellers, Sterling Hayden and George C. Scott

A rogue US general, wonderfully played by Sterling Hayden, spouting crazy anti-communist theories launches an unauthorized nuclear attack on the USSR at the height of the Cold War. The rest of the movie is saner people - the general's aide-de-camp, the president, most of his military leadership team, the rightfully-suspicious Soviet America diplomat and the USSR's president - trying to stop the attack before it sets off, owing to a Soviet "doomsday machine," a nuclear armageddon.

Sure, it's a smart black comedy about the Cold War and the arms race. And if you accept that the characters are supposed to be over the top, then the acting is spot on. And if you think about it in the context of 1964, the height of the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis, then it must have had a timeliness that increased its impact.

It's all those things - and they're good - but it's also smug and condescending. Most people are philosophically against war, fighting and arms races. And few would argue against the moral superiority of being for peace. So it's easy to be "against war and killing," as this movie is, the hard thing is to stop the Hitlers, the USSRs and other dictatorships set on world domination with flowers, not bullets, with nice ideas, not physical might.

*Dr Stangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb* doesn't try to offer a solution to that question because it takes the easier route of pointing out how all of our military efforts and conflicts can look absurd when you step outside of them. *Strangelove* shines at showing that absurdity by exaggeration as when we learn that the rogue general launched the attack in part because he believes fluoridation of the water is a communist plot to poison our "precious bodily fluids." Or they look absurd when we watch equally wackadoodle top-military advisor to the president, George C. Scott, ridiculously twist every turn in the story into a communist plot or a way for him to have more casual sex.

There's even more crazy here as we see a former Nazi scientist, now one of the president's top advisors (one of the three roles played by Sellers, the other two are the president and the rogue-general's aide-de-camp) who has an injured arm that can't help giving the Nazi solute as he discusses plans to repopulate the earth after a nuclear winter. And perhaps the movie's most-famous crazy moment is when the pilot of the one American bomber that makes it through the Soviet air defences - a stereotyped and exaggerated American cowboy itching to bomb "the commies -" ends up riding the bomb like a rodeo bull to its target. No symbol or message is subtle or nuanced here.

This low-budget film is a bit clunky for a Stanley Kubrick effort with, for example, poorly done combat scenes when the army tries to storm the rogue general's base. *Stranglelove* is a secondary entry in the early '60s plethora of bleak political commentary movies like *Seven Days in May* or *Fail Safe*. Most of them are good movies that raise smart and serious questions, but most of them also, like *Strangelove,* take the easy route of denouncing war or bombs or something most of us denounce, without telling us how to resolve the problem. The viewer, like the movie maker, gets to feel morally superior, but it is an on-the-cheap emotion as mocking a problem isn't the same as solving it.


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## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 53488
> 
> *Dr Stangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb* from 1964 with Peter Sellers, Sterling Hayden and George C. Scott
> 
> A rogue US general, wonderfully played by Sterling Hayden, spouting crazy anti-communist theories launches an unauthorized nuclear attack on the USSR at the height of the Cold War. The rest of the movie is saner people - the general's aide-de-camp, the president, most of his military leadership team, the rightfully-suspicious Soviet America diplomat and the USSR's president - trying to stop the attack before it sets off, owing to a Soviet "doomsday machine," a nuclear armageddon.
> 
> Sure, it's a smart black comedy about the Cold War and the arms race. And if you accept that the characters are supposed to be over the top, then the acting is spot on. And if you think about it in the context of 1964, the height of the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis, then it must have had a timeliness that increased its impact.
> 
> It's all those things - and they're good - but it's also smug and condescending. Most people are philosophically against war, fighting and arms races. And few would argue against the moral superiority of being for peace. So it's easy to be "against war and killing," as this movie is, the hard thing is to stop the Hitlers, the USSRs and other dictatorships set on world domination with flowers, not bullets, with nice ideas, not physical might.
> 
> *Dr Stangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb* doesn't try to offer a solution to that question because it takes the easier route of pointing out how all of our military efforts and conflicts can look absurd when you step outside of them. *Strangelove* shines at showing that absurdity by exaggeration as when we learn that the rogue general launched the attack in part because he believes fluoridation of the water is a communist plot to poison our "precious bodily fluids." Or they look absurd when we watch equally wackadoodle top-military advisor to the president, George C. Scott, ridiculously twist every turn in the story into a communist plot or a way for him to have more casual sex.
> 
> There's even more crazy here as we see a former Nazi scientist, now one of the president's top advisors (one of the three roles played by Sellers, the other two are the president and the rogue-general's aide-de-camp) who has an injured arm that can't help giving the Nazi solute as he discusses plans to repopulate the earth after a nuclear winter. And perhaps the movie's most-famous crazy moment is when the pilot of the one American bomber that makes it through the Soviet air defences - a stereotyped and exaggerated American cowboy itching to bomb "the commies -" ends up riding the bomb like a rodeo bull to its target. No symbol or message is subtle or nuanced here.
> 
> This low-budget film is a bit clunky for a Stanley Kubrick effort with, for example, poorly done combat scenes when the army tries to storm the rogue general's base. *Stranglelove* is a secondary entry in the early '60s plethora of bleak political commentary movies like *Seven Days in May* or *Fail Safe*. Most of them are good movies that raise smart and serious questions, but most of them also, like *Strangelove,* take the easy route of denouncing war or bombs or something most of us denounce, without telling us how to resolve the problem. The viewer, like the movie maker, gets to feel morally superior, but it is an on-the-cheap emotion as mocking a problem isn't the same as solving it.


We have this movie in our DVD collection and watced it most recently two weeks ago! LOL. My collection also includes Seven Days In May and Fail Safe. If you have not seen it yet, you might want to watch Twilight's Last Gleaming, with Burt Lancaster. At least it's in color.


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## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> We have this movie in our DVD collection and watced it most recently two weeks ago! LOL. My collection also includes Seven Days In May and Fail Safe. If you have not seen it yet, you might want to watch Twilight's Last Gleaming, with Burt Lancaster. At least it's in color.


It's funny, I hadn't heard of that Lancaster movie until a week or so ago and now you just mentioned it. I will keep an eye out for it.


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## Fading Fast

*Parachute Jumper* from 1933 with Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Bette Davis and Frank McHugh

A very Warner Brothers pre-code B-movie where they pack a ton of story and stuff into seventy-two minutes.

Front and center is the Depression as our three leads are jobless, hungry, bedraggled (for glamorous movie stars) and nearly homeless. Former US Marine flyboys Fairbanks and McHugh ask unemployed secretary Davis to move into their tenement apartment to help her out and to share the expenses and cause, well, Fairbanks is kinda sweet on her.

But no hanky-panky happens yet as these three need jobs. First up, Fairbanks gets hired by a gangster's girlfriend as her chauffeur and, and it's not hidden at all, boy toy (he'd have an open and shut case of sexual harassment against her today). From here (everything happens quickly in this one), Fairbanks is hired away by the gangster himself to be his bodyguard and, then, he becomes the gangster's pilot for bootleg liquor (with Prohibition mocked by all in this movie) and, unbeknownst to Fairbanks, narcotics.

In some pretty good action scenes for the day, Fairbanks and McHugh (he gets hired as a pilot by the gangster, too), with a plane full of bootlegged alcohol, engage in a mid-air gunfight (pistols and machine guns) with border patrol planes. Warner Brothers made sure there was never a dull moment in this one.

Meanwhile, coincidentally, Davis gets hired by the same gangster to be his secretary, which causes Fairbanks and Davis to separate (Fairbanks thinks there's something going on between those two). But that's secondary for the moment as the Feds are closing in on the gangster and Fairbanks and McHugh could go down in the bust. (Spoiler alert) Fairbanks and McHugh turn the tables on the gangster who had planned for those two to take the fall, but once they are out of that jam, they are unemployed again.

The wrap up (more spoilers), like everything else in the movie, is fast as Fairbanks hunts down Davis and, in a fun and charming scene, borrows two-bucks from her to get a marriage license so that he can ask her to marry him. That one-minute scene has more real romance in it than ninety percent of the treacly nonsense Hollywood usually puts out.

And going full-in on its pre-codeness, there's a scene near the end where Fairbanks, trying to find Davis, walks into a series of offices in his search: the first one is a divorce lawyer who denigrates marriage, the second one is a stereotypical gay man and women that Fairbanks openly mocks and the third is "The Society for the Enforcement of Prohibition" where the man at the desk is caught sneaking a drink. It's as if Warner Brothers had a list of taboos they wanted to get into the movie and had to all but force them in at the end.

Add in an earlier scene where McHugh, hitchhiking, gives the bird to a car that passed him by, all the casual sex, sexual harassment (of a man by a woman) and the narcotics dealing and this pre-code is ready to call it a day - phew.

Finally, there's this: Davis gets my nod as the greatest actress of all time, but even she can't hold onto her southern accent in this one for more than half a scene. However, still, even inchoate, Davis' acting talent shines.


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## Fading Fast

*The Age of Innocence* from 1934 with John Boles, Irene Dunn and Julie Haydon

Oh but for one year. Edith Wharton's wonderful novel of fin-de-siècle New York society pivots on one thing, an extramarital affair. The Motion Picture Production Code, which was only seriously enforced for the first time in 1934, does not believe in extramarital affairs. You see the problem. Had it been filmed in the pre-code year of 1933, problem solved.

In the narrow space of upper-class New York society in the early 1900s, you followed a strict set of rules of conduct to, not only maintain your own position, but that of your family's. Hence, when well-liked and engaged society lawyer John Boles begins an affair with a divorcee, Irene Dunn (points are subtracted from your social standing for even associating with a divorcee), the family tries to circle the wagons by covering up the affair (really, just ignoring its existence) and talking Boles out of it. But you need to be a bit of a movie-code windtalker to even know that an affair is going on as it's never shown and only discussed indirectly.

You can dismiss this story as one of rich people playing a vicious but silly game in their expensive little sandbox, or see it as a metaphor for any group, tribe, clique etc. that creates and then enforces strict rules on its members. Seen as the latter, *The Age of Innocence* is a parable for everything from high school inner circles to political parties as enforcement against a favored member usually employs both a carrot and a stick as the real goal is not expulsion, but conformity by the offending party and, then, acceptance of the now-contrite individual back into the tribe.

It's effectively a story of individual choice fighting group rules as the individual is faced with suppressing personal desires to remain a member in good standing. So Boles and Dunn have to decide if following their hearts is worth having to leave society and besmirching their families on the way out.

Wharton knew her world well, so the source material is strong and RKO and director Philip Moeller give it their best shot, but you can't have an excommunication story without sin. Hence, while we know, and the 1934 audience knew, what was really going on, it's still a bridge too far to ask viewers to accept that the only thing that matters in this movie - a full-on, knees-knocking-hard affair - can't be shown or even explicitly discussed.

Despite that, and despite feeling more like a stage production than a movie (my kingdom for a soundtrack), Wharton's searing dialogue still provides some verve, while Dune, Boles and Julie Haydon, as the woebegone wife, do yeoman's work in carrying this code-addled production over the finish line.


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## Fading Fast

*The Apartment *from 1960 Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine and Fred MacMurray

Jack Lemmon is a young New York City insurance company employee who informally loans his bachelor apartment out to some of the married senior executives to use for their affairs. But since Lemmon's smitten by one of the office building's female elevator operators, Shirley MacLaine, his attention is elsewhere as he's nothing more than amused by his bosses' assignations, even as he begins to benefit from this arrangement as his pandering bosses promote him.

However, when he accidentally discovers that a very senior married executive, Fred MacMurray, is having an affair with MacLaine, which MacMuarray sees as nothing more than a casual side adventure, despite leading MacLaine to believe it's more, Lemmon's indifference is shattered. When MacLaine painful learns the truth of her status in a crushing scene where MacMurray all but hands her cash for their recent roll in the hay, she attempts suicide in Lemmon's apartment only to be rescued and nursed by back to health by Lemmon and his doctor neighbor.

The rest of the movie is Lemmon coming to terms with his part in these "harmless" affairs, MacMurray, as things unravel, viciously trying to keep the affair secret from his wife and MacLaine accepting that she's been played hard while, finally, noticing that Lemmon isn't just a friend.

Having seen this one several times over several decades, what struck me during this viewing was, yes, how frank, even nonchalant, the movie is about extra-marital affairs and, yes, how stone-cold selfish Fred MacMurray's character is (and how frighteningly good MacMurray is at playing him), but even more so, how soul-crushingly sad almost everyone's life in this movie is.

While the men joke about their affairs, there's no real joy in them as the men are bitter, cynical husbands who seem to be going through the motions of having affairs either as a temporary escape or to have something to brag about at work.

And while their "girlfriends" might giggle and put on a show of happiness on the outside, they too seem broken and bitter just below the surface. They're either disappointed that they are "the other woman" or are cynically playing the men for money and gifts while the men are playing them for sex without commitment. No one is really enjoying themselves.

Standing atop all this miserableness is MacMurray who plays the perfect husband and dad at home while lying to everyone, all the time, to keep his two worlds apart. And even though it's easy and right to despise him for his brutal nastiness - he keeps a former aging "girlfriend" on as his secretary to, as she notes, see the younger models come and go - he seems no happier than anyone else - financially successful, yes; happy, no.

In *The Apartment,* director and co-writer, with I.A.L. Diamond, Billy Wilder serves up an amazing rebuke to all those lighthearted, early 1960s "battle of the sexes" movies - think Rock Hudson and Doris Day in *Pillow Talk *- where single middle-aged adults don't have sex and marriage is the answer to all problems. In Wilder's much darker world, Shirley MacLaine sums up the disaffection felt by all when Lemmon, noticing that her compact mirror is cracked, asks her if she knows it's broken, responds, "yes, I know, I like it that way, it makes me look the way I feel."


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## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 53727
> 
> *The Apartment *from 1960 Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine and Fred MacMurray
> 
> Jack Lemmon is a young New York City insurance company employee who informally loans his bachelor apartment out to some of the married senior executives to use for their affairs. But since Lemmon's smitten by one of the office building's female elevator operators, Shirley MacLaine, his attention is elsewhere as he's nothing more than amused by his bosses' assignations, even as he begins to benefit from this arrangement as his pandering bosses promote him.
> 
> However, when he accidentally discovers that a very senior married executive, Fred MacMurray, is having an affair with MacLaine, which MacMuarray sees as nothing more than a casual side adventure, despite leading MacLaine to believe it's more, Lemmon's indifference is shattered. When MacLaine painful learns the truth of her status in a crushing scene where MacMurray all but hands her cash for their recent roll in the hay, she attempts suicide in Lemmon's apartment only to be rescued and nursed by back to health by Lemmon and his doctor neighbor.
> 
> The rest of the movie is Lemmon coming to terms with his part in these "harmless" affairs, MacMurray, as things unravel, viciously trying to keep the affair secret from his wife and MacLaine accepting that she's been played hard while, finally, noticing that Lemmon isn't just a friend.
> 
> Having seen this one several times over several decades, what struck me during this viewing was, yes, how frank, even nonchalant, the movie is about extra-marital affairs and, yes, how stone-cold selfish Fred MacMurray's character is (and how frighteningly good MacMurray is at playing him), but even more so, how soul-crushingly sad almost everyone's life in this movie is.
> 
> While the men joke about their affairs, there's no real joy in them as the men are bitter, cynical husbands who seem to be going through the motions of having affairs either as a temporary escape or to have something to brag about at work.
> 
> And while their "girlfriends" might giggle and put on a show of happiness on the outside, they too seem broken and bitter just below the surface. They're either disappointed that they are "the other woman" or are cynically playing the men for money and gifts while the men are playing them for sex without commitment. No one is really enjoying themselves.
> 
> Standing atop all this miserableness is MacMurray who plays the perfect husband and dad at home while lying to everyone, all the time, to keep his two worlds apart. And even though it's easy and right to despise him for his brutal nastiness - he keeps a former aging "girlfriend" on as his secretary to, as she notes, see the younger models come and go - he seems no happier than anyone else - financially successful, yes; happy, no.
> 
> In *The Apartment,* director and co-writer, with I.A.L. Diamond, Billy Wilder serves up an amazing rebuke to all those lighthearted, early 1960s "battle of the sexes" movies - think Rock Hudson and Doris Day in *Pillow Talk *- where single middle-aged adults don't have sex and marriage is the answer to all problems. In Wilder's much darker world, Shirley MacLaine sums up the disaffection felt by all when Lemmon, noticing that her compact mirror is cracked, asks her if she knows it's broken, responds, "yes, I know, I like it that way, it makes me look the way I feel."


I can't recall ever seeing Fred MacMurray playing the bad guy and your review describes enough twists and turns to convince me that this is a movie well worth watching. It's on my list and once again, thank you!


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## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> I can't recall ever seeing Fred MacMurray playing the bad guy and your review describes enough twists and turns to convince me that this is a movie well worth watching. It's on my list and once again, thank you!


Another couple of must-see MacMurray-as-bad-guy movie are "The Caine Mutiny" and "Double Indemnity." To many in our generation, he was the kind dad in "My Three Sons," but he played some serious heavies earlier in his career.


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## Fading Fast

*Enchantment* from 1948 with David Niven, Teresa Wright, Evelyn Keyes and Farley Granger

In present day (WWII) London, a curmudgeonly old man, David Niven, living in a beautiful 19th century house, grudgingly offers a room to his young niece, Evelyn Keyes, serving as an ambulance driver during the Blitz. Through flashbacks, sparked by family discussions with Keyes, we learn that, when Niven was a child, his father had taken in a young girl, Teresa Wright, as his charge when Wright's parents died suddenly.

While Niven and his brother embraced this addition to the family, his only sister, Jane Meadows, resented Wright from the start. Later, as a young adult, we see that Meadows had already become a hard and bitter woman who, after their father died, was Wright's antagonistic and spiteful legal guardian.

All that ramps up when Niven and Wright fall in love. Meadows, furious, maneuvers to break them up by having army officer Niven shipped overseas. Two lessons come out of this movie's misery.

One, never believe in or accept that some entity, so empowered, will look after your interests in a benevolent way. Even when good, it pleasantly steals your freedom, and when bad, and, eventually, it always becomes bad - see Meadows and Wright - it dispirits, imprisons and/or defeats in some other way the individual soul and, often, the body.

And, two, at least according to old man Niven's advice to his young niece being courted by a fighter pilot, Farley Granger, always pursue true love despite the costs, risks and trade-offs. Keyes is a young, thoughtful woman trying to weigh the practicality of marrying a man who might die tomorrow; Niven, now an old man, having missed his chance at young love, passionately advises Keyes to go after it despite any practical concerns.

That's the story, but this is less of a story-driven movie than an emotional and sentimental one. The aforementioned house itself narrates as it has "shared the joys and miseries of all the different generations that have lived inside its walls" [paraphrasing]. The star-crossed lovers have a timeless quality to their youthful passions as Niven and Wright's past challenges are mirrored in the present-day problems of Keyes and Granger. And impractical grand romantic gestures - like selling your last possession to buy your girlfriend an expensive necklace - are treated with reverence.

It works in a slow-moving way, but only if you are in the mood for a romantic and sentimental movie. I immediately started having an odd deja vu when the movie came on, even though I was pretty sure I had never seen it before. Somehow, the story felt faintly familiar, but it took until about twenty minutes in for me to realize that I had read the book the movie is based on, *Take Three Tenses: A Fugue in Time* by Rumer Godden. I believe the book was better, as it almost always is, but it too, was a highly romanticized and sentimental story.


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## Fading Fast

*The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry* from 1945 with George Sanders, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Ella Raines and Moyna MacGill

It's a bit noir, bit soap opera, bit horror and a bit Hitchcock and, other than its off-putting ending, it works pretty well as strong acting and directing carry its, sometimes, thin story over its weaker parts.

Middle-aged bachelor George Sanders is a senior designer for a clothing factory in a small town where all that's left of his once-wealthy family is he and his two sisters who live together in the family's big old house. While a bit quirky, as adult siblings living together will be, all is going okay enough in their lives until a female fashion designer, (ridiculously striking-looking) Ella Raines, from New York is hired onto the factory's design team.

When Sanders and Raines' dating turns into a serious relationship, one sister, ditsy Moyna MacGill, is happy for them, but layabout and snobbish Geraldine Fitzgerald (she has a nice lilting echo to her full name) is outward supportive while frantically trying to undermine the relationship as she wants nothing in her life to change, in particular, having her brother there to dote on her.

Up to now, the story is a by-the-numbers, but engaging, soap opera, as Sanders is outstanding as a confused middle-aged man who is, one believes, shocked to find himself in a relationship with any woman, let alone a young, pretty and vibrant Raines. Director Robert Siodmak smartly creates two worlds for Sanders: one is oppressive in his overly-furnished and dark Victorian with his two dead-weight sisters stuck in the family's past glory and the other is all sunshine and sparkle with young and beautiful (and brainy) Raines.

Good-guy and weak Sanders, now engaged to Raines, tries to merge these two worlds, but good luck with that as Fitzgerald employs every passive-aggressive move possible to prevent the marriage while Raines, realizing the quicksand of that house with the sisters, refuses to marry him unless they live separate from his siblings.

Here, this soap opera, quickly but effectively, slides into horror / noir / Hitchcock world as poison (which cup has the poison?), a dead body (announced with a resounding thump), a trial, a death sentence and a last-minute confession all speed by. To say more about any of that or about the questionable switcheroo ending would give too much away.

*The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry* succeeds because all the actors - Sanders in particular - more than pull their weight and the director only slows it down in a few critical scenes. He also keeps it light enough to be fun, but like Hitchcock, he can, almost without you noticing, quickly shift into nail-biting tension and, even, murder. It's no Oscar winner, but it does what good movies do: it provides an hour-plus of solid entertainment.

N.B., Later in his career, Sanders would almost always play a highly confident, usually smarmy, manipulator, so it's interesting to see him convincingly play an insecure and bumbling man so well. And Ella Raines is one of those Hollywood mysteries as she seems to have had everything needed - looks, talent, screen personality - to be a major star, but alas, it didn't happened.


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## Fading Fast

*Detour* from 1945 with Tom Neal and Ann Savage

For this first-time viewer, it was amazing to see how many iconic film-noir images came out of *Detour:* it was like discovering the fountainhead of film-noir image zeitgeist.

To be sure, there are earlier and better noir movies, but this sixty-eight-minute immersion in a man seeing his life shattered to pieces in front of him might be the best $30,000 ever spent making a movie. Inflation adjust all you want, that's still a tiny amount of money to make a movie.

And it took thirty-four years, but I have now found a woman who scares me more than Glenn Close in *Fatal Attraction*.

Calling Ann Savage a femme fatale, at least in this movie, is like calling a lion a kitten as female-lead Savage (yes a stage name, but seriously accurate) is a feral force of evil. She doesn't lure men to their destruction as a femme fatale; instead, she completely dominates men with a vicious and all encompassing bullying that belies any stereotype one has of the portrayal of women of that era.

It all starts with Tom Neal, a struggling New York City piano player who decides to hitchhike to California to meet up with his girlfriend who is trying to break into Hollywood. After catching a ride with a prosperous gambler who Tom, as the unreliable narrator of the story, claims died accidentally in the car, he takes on the man's identity as he thinks the police won't believe he is innocent.

Down the same road, in possibly the worst decision a man ever made in a movie, he picks up a female hitchhiker, Ann Savage. She immediately recognizes the car as she had ridden with the gambler earlier, puts two and two together, and then bullies and blackmails Neal into doing what she wants under threat of exposure.

Not satisfied with only taking the gambler's bankroll and car off of Neal (as she says, her cut will be one-hundred percent), she hatches a crazy scheme to have Neal pose as the gambling man's son to claim a huge inheritance. It's a hopeless plan that Neal, now, basically, Savage's prisoner in a hotel room, can't talk her out of.

In a perfectly prurient moment (blink and you'll miss it) that slipped by the censors, Savage, drunk and sweating in their hot and claustrophobic hotel room, late at night, propositions Neal for some hate sex, but he rejects her (I'd have been scared to say yes or no to her). No surprise, this infuriates her more, but since her only settings are infuriated and more infuriated, he couldn't win.

(Spoiler alerts) From here, Neal accidentally kills Savage - assuming he's recounting this part honestly (I doubt it) - and, shortly later, is picked up by the police as he wanders down a desolate highway. That last part felt code-required, as the better ending, and the one both more noir and more consistent with the story, would be that he goes on wandering, but looking over his shoulder for the police.

It's an insanely fast and stripped-to-its-core noir story of an average man who, by accident or one bad impulsive act, tips his life into a downward spiral accelerated by, possibly, the most arrantly evil woman ever in noirland. 
*
Detour* can also be seen as the most film-noir feminist movie ever made in the Golden Era: Mildred Peirce baked pies to gain her independence; Savage takes men on, on their own terms, and by dint of harrowing presence and unholy disposition overwhelms them for her own purposes. And while all that is going on in this dark gem of a movie, one iconic film-noir image after another speeds by.

If someone asked me to show them classic film noir in one photo, this pic would be near the top of the list.


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## Fading Fast

*Let Us be Gay* from 1930 with Norma Shearer, Marie Dessler and Rod La Rocque

If you're a fan of pre-codes and Norma Shearer, then this is an okay movie in a curio way, but you will not, if you weren't already, become a fan of pre-codes or Shearer from this clunky, early talkie effort.

The pre-code thirties are chockablock with stagey, drawing-room movies about wealthy society people getting together over a long weekend (at a "house party") to drink, smoke, play tennis and cards, ride horses, swim, have many affairs and make sly references to all those same affairs. *The Rich Are Always with Us* and *Our Betters* are two superior examples of this type of effort.

*Let Us Be Gay* tries hard to be a good one too, but Hollywood - writers, directors, actors, cinematographers, etc. - hadn't learned yet how to make "talkies," so you end up with this clumsy effort with odd moments when no actor is talking or even on screen.

Also, many of the actors over gesture and emote, having not yet learned to tamp down their stage and silent performance techniques for the less demonstrative needs of the "talkies." Within a few years, Hollywood would fix most of these problems; although, Ms. Shearer, despite being a huge star through most of the thirties, never really left her theater/silent-movie-acting mannerisms behind.

The quick and dirty in this one is that Ms. Shearer was a young, devoted but dowdy housewife whose husband had an affair leading to their divorce. Fast forward a few years and Shearer is an attractive, much sought after woman of the world in an early Hollywood version of the ugly duckling discovering that she is really a beautiful swan.

From here, the big moment for the story is when her former husband, three years after their divorce, unexpectedly runs into her at a house party and, and this is only a spoiler alert if you've never been to the movies, falls in love, anew, with his now glamorous ex-wife. There's also a bunch of other rich-people shenanigans going on here, sparking jealousy and cheating, all fueled by too-much drinking.

And a shoutout is owed to the house-party's host, Marrie Dessler, who is sixty eight in this one, looks closer to eighty and shines versus the rest of the cast with her intuitive understanding of how to act in a "talkie." In need of a restoration and, as noted, a hot-mess overall, this one can only be enjoyed as a museum piece from early Hollywood.

N.B., Despite its movie-making techniques being dated as heck, the men's wardrobes look like they come from a modern Ralph Lauren advertisement. Ralph Lauren makes no secret that he was inspired by classic Hollywood, an inspiration on perfect display in *Let us Be Gay*.


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## Fading Fast

*Citizen Kane* from 1941 with Orson Welles, Dorothy Comingore, Joseph Cotten and Everett Sloane

After a handful of viewings over several decades, one's relationship with a movie, especially one as noted as *Citizen Kane*, kinda morphs into a series of impressions that evolve each time you see it.

I watched *Kane* this time because I had recently seen the Netflix movie *Mank* (comments here:  #528 ), which is a biopic focused on *Kane's* screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz's struggles to complete *Kane's* screenplay.

So, for this viewing of *Kane*, I was looking to see how *Mank* reflected on *Kane*. In particular, it had me over-focused on how the Mankiewicz-created fictional characters of Charles Kane and Susan Alexander in the movie aligned with their real-life inspirations, William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies.

Here, I was surprised, as in *Mank*, Davies is portrayed as a bright, thoughtful woman who truly loved Hearst and stayed with him till he passed. However, her *Kane* doppelganger, as penned by Mankiewicz, comes off as a manipulative shrew who maybe had some initial affection for Kane, but ended up resentful of him by the time she left and filed for divorce.

That noted, based on *Mank* anyway, it seems that even with the poetic licence he used, Mankiewicz still cut too close to the bone when portraying his former friends. Okay, but how about *Citizen Kane* away from *Mank*?

Before I ever saw *Citizen Kane*, I "knew" it was "the greatest movie ever made," so I've never been able to see it as just a movie, as I'm always, consciously or subconsciously, waiting for its perfectness to elevate me to a transcendental state of movie watching.

It never does, but it's still a very good movie even if it's a bit of a jumble that could have benefited from more thoughtful scene and story transitions. And I say that even knowing that the "jumble" was part of its groundbreaking technique and approach.

In addition to that, what I noticed on this viewing, more than before, was how good several of the supporting actors were in it as Welles' bravura tends to overwhelm discussion of the others.

Everett Sloan as Kane's unquestioningly loyal employee creates a sympathetic character of a thoughtful man with a lifelong blind spot for, or unconditional love of (you can choose), Charles Foster Kane. Despite his sometimes irritating obsequiousness, you feel for Sloan as he appears a decent and talented man whose life's tragedy is to have spent it all in service to a megalomaniac. But if you asked Sloan's character, you believe - and kudos to Sloan for pulling this off - that he wouldn't have wanted a different life.

Dorothy Comingore as Kane's mistress and second wife, Susan Alexander, delivers a painfully convincing performance as a woman of average intelligence, ambition and morality trying to navigate her way through the massive and emotionally disrupting pull of outsized-planet Kane. Her wonderful ordinariness is an incredible foil to Kane's extraordinariness: he's made smaller as she's made larger by their relationship.

And as the credits rolled, I was thinking, as I do each time I see it, I didn't see "the greatest movie ever made," but I did see something special. Maybe something too ego driven and too all sixes and sevens as Welles had too much Hollywood clout to be reined in, but heck, it's still a captivating picture eighty year later.


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## Vecchio Vespa

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 54174
> 
> *Citizen Kane* from 1941 with Orson Welles, Dorothy Comingore, Joseph Cotten and Everett Sloane
> 
> After a handful of viewings over several decades, one's relationship with a movie, especially one as noted as *Citizen Kane*, kinda morphs into a series of impressions that evolve each time you see it.
> 
> I watched *Kane* this time because I had recently seen the Netflix movie *Mank* (comments here:  #528 ), which is a biopic focused on *Kane's* screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz's struggles to complete *Kane's* screenplay.
> 
> So, for this viewing of *Kane*, I was looking to see how *Mank* reflected on *Kane*. In particular, it had me over-focused on how the Mankiewicz-created fictional characters of Charles Kane and Susan Alexander in the movie aligned with their real-life inspirations, William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies.
> 
> Here, I was surprised, as in *Mank*, Davies is portrayed as a bright, thoughtful woman who truly loved Hearst and stayed with him till he passed. However, her *Kane* doppelganger, as penned by Mankiewicz, comes off as a manipulative shrew who maybe had some initial affection for Kane, but ended up resentful of him by the time she left and filed for divorce.
> 
> That noted, based on *Mank* anyway, it seems that even with the poetic licence he used, Mankiewicz still cut too close to the bone when portraying his former friends. Okay, but how about *Citizen Kane* away from *Mank*?
> 
> Before I ever saw *Citizen Kane*, I "knew" it was "the greatest movie ever made," so I've never been able to see it as just a movie, as I'm always, consciously or subconsciously, waiting for its perfectness to elevate me to a transcendental state of movie watching.
> 
> It never does, but it's still a very good movie even if it's a bit of a jumble that could have benefited from more thoughtful scene and story transitions. And I say that even knowing that the "jumble" was part of its groundbreaking technique and approach.
> 
> In addition to that, what I noticed on this viewing, more than before, was how good several of the supporting actors were in it as Welles' bravura tends to overwhelm discussion of the others.
> 
> Everett Sloan as Kane's unquestioningly loyal employee creates a sympathetic character of a thoughtful man with a lifelong blind spot for, or unconditional love of (you can choose), Charles Foster Kane. Despite his sometimes irritating obsequiousness, you feel for Sloan as he appears a decent and talented man whose life's tragedy is to have spent it all in service to a megalomaniac. But if you asked Sloan's character, you believe - and kudos to Sloan for pulling this off - that he wouldn't have wanted a different life.
> 
> Dorothy Comingore as Kane's mistress and second wife, Susan Alexander, delivers a painfully convincing performance as a woman of average intelligence, ambition and morality trying to navigate her way through the massive and emotionally disrupting pull of outsized-planet Kane. Her wonderful ordinariness is an incredible foil to Kane's extraordinariness: he's made smaller as she's made larger by their relationship.
> 
> And as the credits rolled, I was thinking, as I do each time I see it, I didn't see "the greatest movie ever made," but I did see something special. Maybe something too ego driven and too all sixes and sevens as Welles had too much Hollywood clout to be reined in, but heck, it's still a captivating picture eighty year later.


I agree it is special, has held up well for many years, and is worthy of many viewings. I also agree it is not the greatest film ever made. In fact, but for its reputation among others, it would not be raised by me in a "greatest of all time" discussion.


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## Fading Fast

*Dead Reckoning* from 1947 with Humphrey Bogart and Lizabeth Scott

This outstanding noir sits one level below the great noirs of all time like *The Maltese Falcon* or *Out of the Past*: that is a compliment, not a put-down.

All the elements of a top-notch noir are here as we see a regular guy tossed into a noir world of gambling, alcohol, corruption, sex, violence and murder. It is a seedy milieu of smooth and oily nightclub owners, thuggish sadistic bodyguards, femme fatales and weary but smart cops.

Bogart plays a army hero whom Washington sends to (what I think is) a Midwest town to investigate the disappearance and, then, murder of his army friend who was about to receive the Medal of Honor. It's there that he discovers (minor spoiler alert as it comes up early) that his buddy had changed his identity and joined the army to escape a murder rap he was facing just before the war.

After that, the plot and clues go into a cuisinart that has the viewer at least as confused as Bogart is trying to untangle this mess of a story. It involves a pre-war affair between Bogie's friend and then-married nightclub singer / siren Lizabeth Scott, a smooth and creepy gangster, his thug, a casino and a couple of detectives very suspicious of Bogart.

A wary Bogart teams up with Scott to find the killer of Bogie's friend and Scott's boyfriend more out of need than faith in her integrity. Both thoughts prove prescient as Scott, a mix of blond seduction and ruthless self interest, does help Bogie, but also sets him up, surprisingly, several times. Men really will do stupid things for pretty women.

In the end, the story sort of fits together (at least eighty percent of it does), but you're watching this one for its noir vibe of gangsters with wall-safes holding inculpating letters, Scott lipsyching a torch song, charred bodies in morgues, gun fights, car chases on dark and rainy nights and, most importantly, Bogie falling in love with Scott even though he knows he shouldn't.

And much like its better antecedent *The Maltese Falcon*, the real story here is the love-hate attraction between Bogie and Scott (like Bogie and Mary Astor in *The Maltese Falcon*) that produces the final pivot of whether Bogie will save Scott or let her fry. The chemistry between those two is good, not great, the supporting characters are interesting, but not iconic and the story is a bit too much of a muddle, which is why this very good noir is a notch below the great ones.

N.B., Lizabeth Scott needed more height; there, I said it. IMDB lists her height as 5'5", a number I'd challenge, but whatever it is, she needs more of it. Some women comfortably fit their short frames - Joan Fontaine and Veronica Lake come to mind - but some, like Scott, are tall women stuck inside a short woman's body. Heck, Scott could have been Lauren Bacall - husky voice, straight hair, cool aloofness, gets Bogie to do stupid things for her - if she had just had Bacall's three additional inches.


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## Fading Fast

*Meet John Doe *from 1941 with Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward Arnold and Walter Brennan

I like some Frank Capra directed movies, they just tend to be the ones that aren't too "Capraesque." It's not just because I disagree with many (not all) of the messages in the Capra movies - if I let that bother me, I'd only be able to enjoy about one percent of Hollywood's message movies. Instead, it's both the pie-in-the-sky silliness and the complete kitschiness of them that grate on me while every point is pontificated and every idea heralded loudly.

Also, Capra leaves nothing to chance or shows any faith in the intelligence of his audience; good is pure good and bad is pure evil in a Capra movie, despite real life being full of gray ideas and morally complex people. Perhaps that's an intentional part of his messaging, but it's also why his most famous movies are really just fairy tales for adults.

In *Meet John Doe*, reporter Barbara Stanwyck, having just been given the heave-ho from her job, pens a spite-driven story that sparks a Depression-era movement for the common man. Rehired owing to the story's success and its ensuing movement, Stanwyck is tasked by the paper's cardboardly mendacious owner, Edward Arnold, to find a real man to fill the role of the made-up leader Stanwyck created.

In walks hobo Gary Cooper who becomes the leader of the movement of, effectively, an idealized collaboration of everyday people banding together to help their neighbors as a rebuke to slimy politicians and political parties. It's a nationwide political-movement (without politicians - uh-huh) version of George Bailey's town's kumbaya moment or the communally perfect joy in the house in *You Can't Take it With You*.

The bulk of this long movie, which would have benefited greatly from forty-five of its minutes having been left on the cutting-room floor, is the movement growing while Arnold plots to co-opt it for his own political career. Simultaneously, Cooper and Stanwyck, now falling in love, but (of course) denying it, inconsistently fight Arnold's efforts.

There are a ton of speeches in the movie that, boiled down, say "if we could all just get along and be nice to each other" we would solve most of our problems. Concentrated efforts like that can absolutely work for a limited time in very small groups with a narrow and specific goal, but good luck running a country that way. Yet after having the message endlessly drilled into you, the movie climaxes with a crash, burn and resurrection of the movement that takes suspension of belief to, yet, another level.

If you can put the exhausting treacle aside, the performance of Gary Cooper - a man built for the role of a hero - is outstanding (the scene where he plays an imaginary game of baseball is acting talent at its best). Unfortunately, Stanwyck, an immensely talented actress, comes across as a bit lost in this one as she ricochets back and forth between being an intelligent, thoughtful woman and a shrill scatterbrain. Arnold, like Stanwyck, is a talented actor capable of smart nuance in his performances, but here he's stuck saying such cookie-cutter "evil businessman" lines that he comes across as almost campy.

If *Meet John Doe* is not the most Capraesque of all his movies, it's close. And if Hallmark today hired a top director, screenwriters and actors and had a big Hollywood budget, its movies would be modern Capra efforts. Most of Capra's movies don't work for me as I quickly become bored and irritated watching them, but their long-standing success argues that many feel differently.

N.B.,* Meet John Doe* does have beautiful Art Deco architecture (the skyscraper in the climatic scene is incredible) and some wonderfully picturesque moments in the snow. Capra seems to love snow's visually magical qualities and, perhaps, its symbolic blanketing of the world's soot. And much like snow, Capra ideas have the same depth of thought as a light dusting does to the ground.


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## Fading Fast

*Boys' Night Out *from 1962 with Kim Novak, James Garner and Tony Randall

This is not a good movie. That doesn't mean some of it isn't enjoyable or that the actors did a bad job, it's just that the story is too silly and forced to keep you engaged throughout.

In the '50s and early '60s, they made a bunch of these "battle of the sexes" movies, basically, romcoms with the slant usually being that the man doesn't want to get married and the woman is too good to do any of the fun stuff unless she is married. Hence, for most of the movie, we watch each plot to accomplish his or her goal: premarital sex for him, marriage before sex for her.

Despite the fact that real movies about real relationships where men and women have sex and live together out of wedlock (see *The Apartment* or *Two for the Seesaw*) were being made concomitantly, in these battle-of-the-sexes movies, you just accept that good girls don't do it and good men don't really, truly push (at least, the good) women to do it before marriage.

*In Boys' Night Out*, three married men and bachelor James Garner, all friends who live in a suburb, rent an apartment together in New York City as a place to have affairs. Kim Novak plays a graduate student who stumbles into the apartment just when they rent it and (and you just have to go with it) agrees to be the paramour of all the men, but she really plans to fend off their advances while studying their behavior for her graduate thesis (uh-huh).

While everything in this movie is silly and safe - with just a little insight, we know from the start that Novak isn't going to sleep with any of them and that she'll end up marrying Garner - there still is something icky about the set up as each man has "his" night of the week with Novak. And since these movies thrive on misunderstandings, the men's wives begin to suspect something is going on with their husbands' staying late in the city, so they combine forces to hire an idiotic private investigator.

Further upping the "conflict," Garner falls hard for Novak (and she for him), but he struggles to accept what he believes is her, umm, career choice, so their relationship moves forward and then stumbles back. She can't tell him the truth (and ruin her research project), while he has a hard time, let's just say it, thinking that his three best friends are all nailing his girlfriend weekly (everyone's got a past, but come on).

As is usual in these movies, massive misunderstandings lead to a climactic scene of chaos, recriminations and threatened breakups, all followed by some sort of last-minute save where everything works out and the couple gets engaged (without having had sex), while the message that marriage is wonderful gets delivered.

Some of these nonsensical movies are fun in a mindless way like *Pillow Talk *or *That Touch of Mink*, but this one started with a ridiculous premise, descended into farce and never recovered. And while Garner and Novak have good screen chemistry, it's all but wasted here.

N.B., Sure, it's a dumb movie, but there's no question that Kim Novak was at the top of her game in this one. Yes, her looks are in their prime, but you can also feel her confidence and comfort in front of the camera: Whatever spark this one has, comes from her.


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## Fading Fast

*When You Were Born* from 1938 with Anna May Wong, Margaret Lindsay, Charles Wilson and Jeffrey Lynn

Many B movies can best be understood as antecedents to 1960's/70's TV shows before there was TV. They are often about an hour long, have small budgets, are fast moving with wash-rinse-repeat stories and some actors you recognize, but who aren't major stars. While there are all sorts of exceptions - a few B movie elevate themselves to A movie status - usually they are simpler and more transparent efforts. Taken for what they are, they can be fun, quick diversions.

*When You Were Born* is all that - a fun B movie diversion that whips by with some stars you recognize, a by-the-numbers plot and an enjoyably cheap production quality. Anna May Wong is an astrologist who helps the police solve the murder of a wealthy importer where the main suspects are the importer's butler, his fiancee Margaret Lindsay and his Chinese business partner.

The bulk of the movie takes place in the police station (one assumes, to save budget) as Chief Inspector Charles Wilson brings in suspects and witnesses for questioning as he attempts to solve the murder. The hook in this one, though, is Ms. Wong as her advocacy for astrology as a science that can help the police solve crimes is taken deadly seriously by her, respectfully by the inspector and with skepticism by his sergeant. To be fair, modern-to-the-times police forensics get pretty good advocacy, too, as fingerprints, hair samples and bullet trajectories are all used to aid the investigation.

But at least half the movie is Ms. Wong using astrology to help the police as her predictions of events and exposure of facts and evidence bring almost everyone around to her view. Heck, if astrology worked as effectively and precisely as shown here, we'd all be converted. Whatever your views on it, it's surprising that Warner Bros. put out such a full-throttled promotion of it, even if only in a B movie.

Away form the astrology angle, the movie flows not unlike a *Columbo* TV episode where a lot of mystery and angles are jammed into an hour with false leads and clues everywhere until it all comes clear in the last ten minutes. Also, like a '60s/'70s TV detective show, a little action adventure gets thrown in at the end for excitement, followed by a quick and friendly wrap up.

If you go into *When You Were Born* expecting a Hollywood A picture, you'll be disappointed. However, if you go into it recognizing that B movies are the progenitors of early TV, you can enjoyed this one's slapdash but enthusiastic attempt to combine astrology with a regular-old murder mystery. Plus, you get the always-fun-to-see Margaret Lindsay having little to do here, but looking pretty doing it.


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## Fading Fast

*The Case of the Curious Bride* from 1935 with Warren William, Margaret Lindsay, Claire Dodd, Allen Jenkins and, in one of his first movie roles, Errol Flynn

This early Perry Mason movie adaptation is fun in a very Warner Bros. warp-speed way that packs a ton of plot and characters into eighty minute.

Warren William basically plays one of his stock Warner Bros.' characters, but with the name of Perry Mason, yet it works as William is comfortable in Warner's warp-speed world. He's clearly having a lot of fun as the genius defense attorney and bon vivant who gets to tweak the police, mix it up with mobsters and charm the women while being a step ahead of everyone almost all the time.

He's not really the Mason of the books or of later incarnations, but if you don't take it any more seriously than the actors or director do, it's a fun romp. And while William is the star in command of this effort, Claire Dodd, as his whip-smart, gets-the-joke secretary, Della Street, lights up every scene she's in. She and William are movie-chemistry gold. This helps as William and female lead, Margaret Lindsay - William's falsely accused-of-murder former girlfriend and, now, client - never really click in this movie's one flat note.

The plot is confusing as heck: Lindsay's first husband (Flynn) was supposedly dead, but reappeared to blackmail Lindsay four years later when she remarries a wealthy man. This is a trick Flynn's character seems to have played on more than one woman, which makes for a lot of characters, false clues and dead ends that I stopped trying to follow closely about half-way through and, instead, just enjoyed the ride.

And the ride is fun as this movie's Mason's only scruple, once he decides his client is innocent (a Hollywood add, as, in the book, he doesn't really care if they are innocent or not), is to get him or her off by every honest and dishonest trick he can play. So, with side-kick and wonderful character actor Allen Jenkins doing the scut work, Mason gins up false alibis and evidence without a qualm. While the police work equally hard at exposing these machinations, it's clear no one is really concerned about the morality of it all.

With San Francisco providing a beautiful backdrop, the movie has Mason and company - and the police - running all over the city to "solve the case," but the real joy in this one is watching the actors exchange barbs, have fun, never slow down and look 1930s' cool as heck doing it. It's nothing more than a good, standard Warner Bros. effort of that period with the "Perry Mason" brand stamped on the cover, but that's more than enough to provide eighty minutes of entertainment.


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## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 54666
> 
> *The Case of the Curious Bride* from 1935 with Warren William, Margaret Lindsay, Claire Dodd, Allen Jenkins and, in one of his first movie roles, Errol Flynn
> 
> This early Perry Mason movie adaptation is fun in a very Warner Bros. warp-speed way that packs a ton of plot and characters into eighty minute.
> 
> Warren William basically plays one of his stock Warner Bros.' characters, but with the name of Perry Mason, yet it works as William is comfortable in Warner's warp-speed world. He's clearly having a lot of fun as the genius defense attorney and bon vivant who gets to tweak the police, mix it up with mobsters and charm the women while being a step ahead of everyone almost all the time.
> 
> He's not really the Mason of the books or of later incarnations, but if you don't take it any more seriously than the actors or director do, it's a fun romp. And while William is the star in command of this effort, Claire Dodd, as his whip-smart, gets-the-joke secretary, Della Street, lights up every scene she's in. She and William are movie-chemistry gold. This helps as William and female lead, Margaret Lindsay - William's falsely accused-of-murder former girlfriend and, now, client - never really click in this movie's one flat note.
> 
> The plot is confusing as heck: Lindsay's first husband (Flynn) was supposedly dead, but reappeared to blackmail Lindsay four years later when she remarries a wealthy man. This is a trick Flynn's character seems to have played on more than one woman, which makes for a lot of characters, false clues and dead ends that I stopped trying to follow closely about half-way through and, instead, just enjoyed the ride.
> 
> And the ride is fun as this movie's Mason's only scruple, once he decides his client is innocent (a Hollywood add, as, in the book, he doesn't really care if they are innocent or not), is to get him or her off by every honest and dishonest trick he can play. So, with side-kick and wonderful character actor Allen Jenkins doing the scut work, Mason gins up false alibis and evidence without a qualm. While the police work equally hard at exposing these machinations, it's clear no one is really concerned about the morality of it all.
> 
> With San Francisco providing a beautiful backdrop, the movie has Mason and company - and the police - running all over the city to "solve the case," but the real joy in this one is watching the actors exchange barbs, have fun, never slow down and look 1930s' cool as heck doing it. It's nothing more than a good, standard Warner Bros. effort of that period with the "Perry Mason" brand stamped on the cover, but that's more than enough to provide eighty minutes of entertainment.


Your review convinces the reader that this movie is one worth looking up and watching! Thank you for another great review.


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## Fading Fast

*Tonight's the Night* from 1954 with David Niven, Yvonne De Carlo and Barry Fitzgerald

An Irish village, that functions on a little graft, even less work, a lot of credit (that's never expected to be paid off) and the largess of the beloved old Squire, is thrown into turmoil when said Squire dies and his young nephew, David Niven, assumes the title and tries to call in all the IOUs.

It's lighthearted at first as this whimsical town could only exist in the mind of a screenwriter. And even Niven's Scrooge-like character is charming in a rakish way as he affably goes around telling all the debtors it's time to pay up. Thrown into the mix is Niven's interest in a local vixen, Yvonne De Carlo, who plays him against her old suitor, the village doctor.

Even when several of the town leaders decide to murder Niven, the general vibe of quirky fun is maintained, but after a reasonably good half hour of the above as setup, the movie slips into screwball comedy. If seeing villagers bumble their bomb making efforts and nearly blow themselves up, shoot each other accidentally instead of Niven and drop the obligatory glass with poison meant for Niven is your thing, then *Tonight's the Night* should prove entertaining.

But two decades past the peak of screwball comedy in movies, it was just too much slapstick for me. I like David Niven a lot and he is the only thing that kinda holds this effort together, yet even he can't make a Keystone Cops version of a fire brigade - yes, this movie has one - funny in a 1954 movie. Plus the Technicolor - which was almost always a too-much-of-a-good-thing endeavor back then - looks really awful here as it is sorely in need of restoration. And as the credits roll, one is left with just this thought: did Niven really need the money that badly?


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## Vecchio Vespa

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 54502
> 
> *Boys' Night Out *from 1962 with Kim Novak, James Garner and Tony Randall
> 
> This is not a good movie. That doesn't mean some of it isn't enjoyable or that the actors did a bad job, it's just that the story is too silly and forced to keep you engaged throughout.
> 
> In the '50s and early '60s, they made a bunch of these "battle of the sexes" movies, basically, romcoms with the slant usually being that the man doesn't want to get married and the woman is too good to do any of the fun stuff unless she is married. Hence, for most of the movie, we watch each plot to accomplish his or her goal: premarital sex for him, marriage before sex for her.
> 
> Despite the fact that real movies about real relationships where men and women have sex and live together out of wedlock (see *The Apartment* or *Two for the Seesaw*) were being made concomitantly, in these battle-of-the-sexes movies, you just accept that good girls don't do it and good men don't really, truly push (at least, the good) women to do it before marriage.
> 
> *In Boys' Night Out*, three married men and bachelor James Garner, all friends who live in a suburb, rent an apartment together in New York City as a place to have affairs. Kim Novak plays a graduate student who stumbles into the apartment just when they rent it and (and you just have to go with it) agrees to be the paramour of all the men, but she really plans to fend off their advances while studying their behavior for her graduate thesis (uh-huh).
> 
> While everything in this movie is silly and safe - with just a little insight, we know from the start that Novak isn't going to sleep with any of them and that she'll end up marrying Garner - there still is something icky about the set up as each man has "his" night of the week with Novak. And since these movies thrive on misunderstandings, the men's wives begin to suspect something is going on with their husbands' staying late in the city, so they combine forces to hire an idiotic private investigator.
> 
> Further upping the "conflict," Garner falls hard for Novak (and she for him), but he struggles to accept what he believes is her, umm, career choice, so their relationship moves forward and then stumbles back. She can't tell him the truth (and ruin her research project), while he has a hard time, let's just say it, thinking that his three best friends are all nailing his girlfriend weekly (everyone's got a past, but come on).
> 
> As is usual in these movies, massive misunderstandings lead to a climactic scene of chaos, recriminations and threatened breakups, all followed by some sort of last-minute save where everything works out and the couple gets engaged (without having had sex), while the message that marriage is wonderful gets delivered.
> 
> Some of these nonsensical movies are fun in a mindless way like *Pillow Talk *or *That Touch of Mink*, but this one started with a ridiculous premise, descended into farce and never recovered. And while Garner and Novak have good screen chemistry, it's all but wasted here.
> 
> N.B., Sure, it's a dumb movie, but there's no question that Kim Novak was at the top of her game in this one. Yes, her looks are in their prime, but you can also feel her confidence and comfort in front of the camera: Whatever spark this one has, comes from her.
> View attachment 54503


Good take on Boys' Night Out and Ms. Novak. She has long been one of my very favorites. I loved her in Bell, Book, and Candle.


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## Vecchio Vespa

The other night Mary and I finally watched Blazing Saddles. Yes, we were likely the last two USA boomers to see it. It may have worked when it was made, but for us, watching it in 2021, it was truly awful.


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## Fading Fast

TKI67 said:


> Good take on Boys' Night Out and Ms. Novak. She has long been one of my very favorites. I loved her in Bell, Book, and Candle.


Thank you. I thought she was fantastic in "Bell, Book and Candle," and happened to see and comment on it recently here  #548 .


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## Fading Fast

*The Big Heat* from 1953 with Glen Ford, Gloria Grahame, Lee Marvin and Jocelyn Brando

This movie is further proof that people living in the fifties knew that the fifties weren't the wholesome nirvana that later generations would tag it with as a shorthand.

A political machine, in bed with the mob, controls a city almost as an open and accepted-by-the-police secret. When a senior police officer, living in a pretty-darn-nice house for even a senior officer in those days, commits suicide, the word is sent down to investigate this one "lightly." Basically, "investigate," accept that it's a suicide, close the case quickly and move on.

When honest detective Glenn Ford tries to conduct a real investigation, he uncovers some "unpleasant" information and is all but told from above to stand down. But that's not Ford, so he barrels forward causing both the city's political leaders and local mob to come down hard on him: his wife, Jocelyn Brando, is murdered in a mob hit (Ford was the intended victim) and he is fired from the force.

But in an early cop-as-vigilante-justice-warrior effort, Ford, now off the force, keeps pushing hard and following every clue to avenge his wife's murder. This leads him directly to the mob and indirectly to the mob's political connections.

Eventually aided by an abused top-level gangster's girlfriend, Gloria Graham, he keeps shoving everyone out of the way and turning over every clue while playing by no rulebook but his own. (Spoiler alert) After a lot of fist fights and gun fights, a high body count and a beautiful woman's face (Graham's) horribly scarred - he exposes and brings down the political-mob nexus of corruption.

It's a solid anti-wholesome fifties story that director Fritz Lang tells by mashing the accelerator pedal down early and only letting his foot off a bit now and then. And at that speed, the city's arrant corruption and Ford's revenge-driven passion smash into each other time and again until all that's left is a lot of wreckage. A final scene of a cleaned-up police department feels snapped on to make the censors happy.

Equally impressive and engaging in this one are the performances by Ford, Lee Marvin and Gloria Graham. Ford is intense as the rogue former cop hell bent on revenge and Marvin is frighteningly oleaginous and despicable as the girlfriend-beating, smart-in-a-conniving way, dandily dressed gangster, but Graham is the real treasure in this one.

She is the vain, greedy and stupid (probably because she's never tried to think) girlfriend of Marvin whose unaware-but-provocative personality rolls in and owns scene after scene. But when disfigured by Marvin, Graham begins to think about the world and about right and wrong and, proving a quick study, becomes Ford's ally in his quest for revenge masquerading as justice. It's not an easy transition from idiot gun moll to scarred righteous crusader, but Graham is up for the challenge briefly providing a spark of hope to this grim tale.

Away from the aforementioned forced ending, this is a tight and dispiriting story of political corruption as a way of life where honesty and integrity truckle to malfeasance and graft in the institutions that are suppose to protect us. If an innocent life or two have to get heaved overboard now and then to defend the political machine, so be it. This is not a nostalgic-redolent happy picture of the fifties. But like so many noir movies, *The Big Heat *argues that the fifties never really looked that happy, especially to many who lived through them.

Gloria Graham rolls into a scene in *The Big Heat*.


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## Fading Fast

*Old Acquaintance* from 1943 with Bette Davis and Mariam Hopkins

You could call it a drama, and it is, but that's just a way to avoid calling it by its real name, a soap opera: a wonderfully over-the-top soap opera rescued by acting talent, directing skill and occasional moments of restraint.

Spread over a twenty-year span, this tale of two female friends (one's a friend, the other's a frenemy) weaves in all the elements of a good soap opera - love, hate, affairs, melodrama, ridiculous coincidences and perfectly timed overheard conversations - that serve, more than anything else, to highlight the acting talents of Bette Davis.

Davis and Mariam Hopkins are life-long friends where Davis is the genuine one and Hopkins the secretly competitive and manipulative one. When the movie opens, Davis is a critically, but only modestly commercially successful writer; whereas, Hopkins is a young housewife envious of her independent friend, despite disingenuously proclaiming her contentment as a wife and mother.

Then, Hopkins turns her closet hobby of writing romance novels into massive commercial success, which brings her much wealth and adulation. However, she still resents Davis' status as a literary talent, while Hopkins' books are viewed as mass-market fluff. From here, the soap opera ramps up as Hopkins ignores her husband and child in pursuit of her new career. Davis then kindly fills in the gaps in Hopkins' domestic efforts, leading Hopkins to eventually and unfairly resent Davis for "stealing" her husband and child.

Years go by and Hopkins' husband leaves her, her daughter grows up and closer to Davis and Hopkins' resentment and anger grows despite ongoing commercial success. More affairs come into the mix, past recriminations are dredged up and Davis, oddly, winds up in a relationship with a much younger man who, then, pursues Hopkins' now-adult daughter (yup, this movie has no shame).

The story is nothing daytime soaps don't recycle regularly, but the fun in this one is Davis battling with and, also, simply out acting Hopkins. Hopkins, perhaps intentionally, acts with theatrical flourishes that exaggerate the melodrama of her character. She's the star in her so-incredibly-interesting-to-her life that she can't imagine everyone around her not finding it equally interesting.

Davis is the grounded one who, finally and literally, shakes some sense into Hopkins in the movie's climatic moment when these two have the confrontation that was coming for years. The actresses were well known to loathe each other in real life, an antipathy that seems to have inspired their acting in this one as you have no trouble feeling their passion.

The story has more zigs and zags, but you watch it for Davis versus Hopkins. And along with Davis' acting talent, director Vincent Sherman deserves a hand for somehow smoothly guiding you through all the plot's twists and turns, while keeping the focus on the two stars. It won't be on any best-of movie lists, but *Old Acquaintance* is a fun, nearly two hours of saponaceous indulgence.

At the end, Davis' character sums it up nicely, "Darling it's late and I'm very, very tired of youth and love and self sacrifice." By then, viewers are equally exhausted.


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## Fading Fast

*It Started with Eve* from 1941 with Charles Laughton, Deanna Durbin and Robert Cummings

Q: Why watch a movie with Charles Laughton in it?
A: Because Charles Laughton is in it.

*It Started with Eve* is a silly little movie with a silly little plot that is elevated to a lighthearted and enjoyable picture because Charles Laughton and Deanna Durbin are just that good individually and even better together.

A sick, wealthy old man, Laughton, seemingly on his deathbed, asks his son, Robert Cummings, to bring his new fiancee to meet him before he dies. As only happens in movies, when the son can't locate his fiancee, and fearing that his father will pass away that night, he pays a shopgirl, Deanna Durbin, to pose as his fiancee to make the old man happy.

When Durbin and Laughton meet, there's an immediate connection between them that seems to revive the old man. A few days later, a recovering Laughton asks to see Durbin again and the son panics as he now has to go on with the charade that Durbin is his fiancee as Laughton's doctor says the shock of the truth would be too much for Laughton.

Adding to the "conflict" (a strong word for the blitheness of this movie) is that Cummings' real fiancee and her mother just arrived in the city to meet his father. This leaves Cummings having to explain to them why another woman is posing as his fiancee. The mother and daughter are understanding at first, but as time drags on, they, not surprisingly, become impatient.

Finally, you have Durbin who genuinely likes Laughton and is both irritated by and attracted to Cummings (you see where this one is going very early on), but who was about to return to her hometown as her singing career, the reason she came to the city, never took off. The rest of the movie is watching Cummings trying to keep all the balls in the air as the old man - who, early on, figures out the switch, but plays dumb - tries to put Durbin and his son together.

You don't watch this one for the dopey story; you watch it to see Laughton and Durbin turn their goofy roles into enjoyable comedy as Durbin proves equal to the immensely talented Laughton. Be it Durbin practicing her smile at Cummings' direction so that she can fool Laughton or Laughton lying straight faced time and again to Durbin just to keep her around, their chemistry brings such mirth to the movie that you don't care about its nonsensical plot.

Stars like Laughton and Durbin make a lot of money for a reason. Sure, in some way the fates just shined on these two as the camera simply loves them (yes, it loves misshaped and craggy Laughton in its own way), but they also are incredibly talented actors. They have a deep understanding of their roles, what is called for in a scene and the little nuances necessary (their facial expressions in this one are spot on time and again) to take a mediocre script like *It Started with Eve* and turn it into an entertaining hour-and-a-half movie.


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## Fading Fast

*The Killers* from 1964 with Lee Marvin, Clu Gulager, John Cassavetes, Angie Dickinson and Ronald Reagan

There is so much one could criticize in this movie, but I still liked it a lot.

Despite being on TCM's "Noir Alley," host Eddie Muller acknowledged that this one isn't noir, but something he called "neo-noir," sure, okay, whatever. I guess it was on "Noir Alley" because it's an alternative version of the 1946 noir-classic *The Killers*. And, heck, if you took out the 1964 version's color cinematography and lighthearted elements, you'd be left with a pretty grim hitman and crime-caper story.

But why would one take out the color and quasi casual vibe as those things work really well here. The visual style is a mashup of *Ocean's Eleven* and *Viva Las Vegas* making it as early '60s cool as it could be with the two hitmen, Lee Marvin and Clu Gulager, dressed in what could only be described as Ivy-league-gangster style.

But despite being visually pretty and not noir somber, it is a violent tale of two hit men, Marvin and Gulager, who, after completing a job, realize the target, John Cassavetes, didn't run when he had the chance.

Marvin, being a thinking man's assassin, ponders this for a bit and, then, decides he's going to trace the hit backwards. He believes the one-million dollars Cassavetes supposedly stole from his partners in a mail-truck heist (the reason he was "rubbed out") is still out there for the taking because, if Cassavavetes had the money, he would have tried to escape when he had the chance.

The rest of the movie is watching Marvin and Gulager work up the chain from their hit to find each gang member as they hunt down the money. The joy in this one is watching methodical, weary and focused Marvin partner with the younger and half-nuts Gulager. If ever a hitman should have been on Ritalin, Gulager would be it as he can't stop touching things, twitching, losing his train of thought and, generally, moving around like a gnat.

Yet somehow, instead of irritating each other, Marvin seems to enjoy Gulanger's crazy and, while Gulager will tweak Marvin, you can tell he respects the older man's brains and experience. It's an odd buddy movie, but the chemistry between these two is palpable and immensely enjoyable. And as they hunt down the money, the unusual combination of Marvin's menacing calmness and Gulager's frightening unpredictability throws everyone off his or her game.

As their search takes them up the chain to this film's femme fatale, Angie Dickinson, we see, through flashbacks, that she either played professional race-car driver Cassavetes hard - got him to fall in love with her so that he'd drive the getaway car for the heist - or truly fell in love with him, but had to, maybe, sell him out to survive in the end.

Dickinson is a bit of a stretch as femme fatale, but she gives it her all here with her somewhat tired faced - yes pretty, but not dewy - fitting the character. And despite proving that no woman should ever tease her hair up into a bubble (if it can't work for her, how many can it work for?), she needs no explanation when sporting a pair of capri pants and a T-shirt (see pic below).

From Dickinson, it's only one more dot to the brains behind the heist, future President of the United States Ronald Reagan as the "respectable-businessman" front for the gang, who becomes the last man standing between the team of Marvin and Gulager and the money.

The plot flaws and character inconsistencies are all over the place in this one, but if you just go with it, then the super-cool early '60s style, Marvin and Gulager's Mutt-and-Jeff pairing, Dickinson's good looks but overtaxed acting chops and Reagan's cheesy bad guy portrayal make it a fun, quick hour and half. Also, the film has either been restored or just never aged, as the TCM print was incredibly clear, crisp and vibrant, making this trip to the early '60s a visual treat.

And speaking of visual treats, Ms. Dickinson.


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## Fading Fast

*Forsaking All Others* from 1934 with Joan Crawford, Robert Montgomery and Clark Gable

*Forsaking All Others* starts out as a harsh look at a woman publicly and painfully jilted at the altar. And while it maintains its focus and energy initially, it, unfortunately, loses both in the last third.

As the movie opens, we see childhood sweethearts Joan Crawford and Robert Montgomery seemingly ecstatic to be getting married. Also in town for the wedding is the couple's mutual childhood friend, Clark Gable, who is carrying a covert torch for Ms. Crawford.

But the fly in the ointment for this one is Montgomery's ex-girlfriend Frances Drake (I know, even as a stage name, it's a bit of an odd nod to history). Despite being an obvious and manipulative witch-with-a-B, she convinces Montgomery to jilt Crawford and elope with her the night before the planned marriage - ouch.

And while, as was oddly common in Depression-era movies, this is a tale of rich people doing stupid rich-people things, Crawford's pain and humiliation are real. After recuperating from the shock in a very nice cabin in the woods, where Gable comes by to comfort her as a friend, Crawford returns to society and quickly begins having an affair with, now, unhappily married Montgomery.

Here's where the movie, which up till this point is a reasonably poignant and real-to-life tale of a woman left at the alter, gets goofy as we see her and Montgomery "escape" from the city only to have a prank-and-pitfall-filled day in the country resulting in them staying over night, but obviously not having sex (thank you silly Motion Picture Production Code for that nonsense).

After that, we jump forward (I'm guessing) about a year where, once again, Crawford and now-divorced Montgomery are to be married the next day. However, (spoiler alert) this time, at the last moment, Crawford sees that reliable-and-decent Gable and not the nice-but-frivolous Montgomery would make the better husband. Hence, she now returns the jilt of a year ago and leaves Montgomery all but at the altar as she, literally, sails away with Gable.

It's not a bad movie, but the restrictions of the Production Code and a rushed last third addled the effort. Had it been made a year earlier in the pre-code era, instead of a screwball day in the country of not having sex, Crawford and Montgomery, cheating on his wife, would have been shacked up somewhere while the wife stewed. Not nice, but life is often not nice.

Also, instead of a bemused, but cheerful Montgomery waiving Crawford and Gable goodbye at the end, pre-code Montgomery would have been more solemn and reflective about the mess that he's made of his life and relationships. The three leads have enough talent to hold this wobbly toward the end effort together, but one can see the better pre-code movie suffocating inside this code-approved one.

N.B. There is some very real and rapid dialogue early on as Crawford, Montgomery and Gable discuss the fallout from Crawford's jilting. It is refreshingly frank and visceral, but unfortunately, that quality of writing all but disappears by the last third of the movie. Separately, if you do watch it, look for the roadside hamburger shack scene - great time travel to a place you'd love to visit (I tried, but couldn't find a pic of it anywhere).


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## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 54924
> 
> *Forsaking All Others* from 1934 with Joan Crawford, Robert Montgomery and Clark Gable
> 
> *Forsaking All Others* starts out as a harsh look at a woman publicly and painfully jilted at the altar. And while it maintains its focus and energy initially, it, unfortunately, loses both in the last third.
> 
> As the movie opens, we see childhood sweethearts Joan Crawford and Robert Montgomery seemingly ecstatic to be getting married. Also in town for the wedding is the couple's mutual childhood friend, Clark Gable, who is carrying a covert torch for Ms. Crawford.
> 
> But the fly in the ointment for this one is Montgomery's ex-girlfriend Frances Drake (I know, even as a stage name, it's a bit of an odd nod to history). Despite being an obvious and manipulative witch-with-a-B, she convinces Montgomery to jilt Crawford and elope with her the night before the planned marriage - ouch.
> 
> And while, as was oddly common in Depression-era movies, this is a tale of rich people doing stupid rich-people things, Crawford's pain and humiliation are real. After recuperating from the shock in a very nice cabin in the woods, where Gable comes by to comfort her as a friend, Crawford returns to society and quickly begins having an affair with, now, unhappily married Montgomery.
> 
> Here's where the movie, which up till this point is a reasonably poignant and real-to-life tale of a woman left at the alter, gets goofy as we see her and Montgomery "escape" from the city only to have a prank-and-pitfall-filled day in the country resulting in them staying over night, but obviously not having sex (thank you silly Motion Picture Production Code for that nonsense).
> 
> After that, we jump forward (I'm guessing) about a year where, once again, Crawford and now-divorced Montgomery are to be married the next day. However, (spoiler alert) this time, at the last moment, Crawford sees that reliable-and-decent Gable and not the nice-but-frivolous Montgomery would make the better husband. Hence, she now returns the jilt of a year ago and leaves Montgomery all but at the altar as she, literally, sails away with Gable.
> 
> It's not a bad movie, but the restrictions of the Production Code and a rushed last third addled the effort. Had it been made a year earlier in the pre-code era, instead of a screwball day in the country of not having sex, Crawford and Montgomery, cheating on his wife, would have been shacked up somewhere while the wife stewed. Not nice, but life is often not nice.
> 
> Also, instead of a bemused, but cheerful Montgomery waiving Crawford and Gable goodbye at the end, pre-code Montgomery would have been more solemn and reflective about the mess that he's made of his life and relationships. The three leads have enough talent to hold this wobbly toward the end effort together, but one can see the better pre-code movie suffocating inside this code-approved one.
> 
> N.B. There is some very real and rapid dialogue early on as Crawford, Montgomery and Gable discuss the fallout from Crawford's jilting. It is refreshingly frank and visceral, but unfortunately, that quality of writing all but disappears by the last third of the movie. Separately, if you do watch it, look for the roadside hamburger shack scene - great time travel to a place you'd love to visit (I tried, but couldn't find a pic of it anywhere).


A great review, as always, well written informative and a great catalyst for causing a reader to sit down and watch the movie. However, if I may also note two things that are valuable life lessons; first, paybacks are always a b....h... well you know what I mean and second, Clark Gable always get's the girl!


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## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> A great review, as always, well written informative and a great catalyst for causing a reader to sit down and watch the movie. However, if I may also note two things that are valuable life lessons; first, paybacks are always a b....h... well you know what I mean and second, Clark Gable always get's the girl!


Thank you for your kind comments. I agree with you on both points on the movie: What comes around goes around and, yes, Gable was called the King of Hollywood for a reason.

It's such a shame this movie got messed up by the Motion Picture Production Code as it was a good movie until the Code, effectively took over.

And even given a Hollywood gloss, you can still feel the extreme pain and embarrassment of being jilted at the alter. It happened to a friend of mine - the wedding was called off about an hour before it was to start; everybody was at or on their way to the church - it was brutal.


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## Fading Fast

*Murder at the Gallop* from 1963 with Margaret Rutherford, Charles Tingwell and Stringer Davis

There were four Agatha Christie Miss Marple movies made in the early sixties; based on the two I've seen, they are fun-enough efforts if thought of as good B-movies or TV-shows that happened to be made in a movie format.

The general story seems to be the same in the two I've seen so far. Miss Marple, a grandmotherly looking woman who lives in a small English village, stumbles upon a murder and doubts that the police are conducting a thorough-enough investigation. So, she pursues her own inquiry getting underfoot of the police inspector, Charles Tingwell, who likes Miss Marple, but is often irritated by her, to be honest, constantly upstaging him.

It's all lighthearted stuff as the fun is seeing a scripted-out-of-central-casting grandmother - as a somewhat antecedent of the *Columbo*-TV model - seemingly harmlessly following clues and asking questions as she's all but dismissed by everyone until, right at the end, they realize that grandma has figured it all out.

In *Murder at the Gallop*, the story is set amongst the horsey set as a patriarch of a wealthy family is murdered with all his relatives, and a few other people, suspects. To tell more isn't so much to risk giving anything away, but wasting effort as you've seen some version of the plot fifty or more times if you've watched any TV-detective-mystery dramas from the sixties through the nineties. Here, eventually, usually after an attempt is made on Miss Marple's life by the murderer, she, in her understated and almost clumsy manner, gathers everyone together in one room and exposes the guilty person.

In these films, there's a delicate balance between tongue-in-cheek whimsy and mystery story that leans toward the former but nods enough at the latter to hold the two ends together. But you don't watch a Miss Marple film for the story, you watch it because you enjoy the eccentric Miss Marple - it either works for you or it doesn't. I can only enjoy them with plenty of time between each one.

But if their quirkiness does appeal to you, the chemistry between the frustrated young police inspector and septuagenarian Miss Marple is movie gold. Not since Marie Dressler in the 1930s has there been an elderly female star who could carry a movie with such presence and personality. Plus, for us today, the time travel these movies provide to a small village in early '60s England is pure fun.


----------



## Fading Fast

*The Killer that Stalked New York* from 1950 with Evelyn Keyes, Charles Korvin, Lola Albright and an underused Dorothy Malone as a mousy nurse, but look closely and you'll still see her flash those famous come-hither eyes (above left) from the classic bookshop pick-up scene in *The Big Sleep*.

Movies can walk and chew gum at the same time - tell two stories at once - but it does take some skill to seamlessly knit the separate threads together. In *The Killer that Stalked New York*, the writers and director Earl McEvoy failed to complete the knitting, so this overall solid movie suffers from being a bit of a bifurcated effort.

The main tale is one of New York City on the brink of a smallpox outbreak with eerily similar overtones to today's Covid pandemic. But it is also the story of Treasury Department officers tracking stolen diamonds smuggled in from Cuba to be fenced in New York. The connection between the two stories is diamond "mule" Evelyn Keyes who knowingly brings the gems into the city while unknowingly bringing in smallpox.

The knitting problem is mainly one of tone and style. The smallpox story is told kinda like a public service announcement film with a resonating-voiced narrator guiding us through how a city organizes its resources to prevent a pandemic. Conversely, the diamond-heist story has a traditional noir vibe of bad people doing bad things to both their friends and foes.

With Keyes as the link between the two tales, we see her arrive in the city already feeling sick and, thus, spreading the disease. She immediately tries to connect with her husband, Korvin, who is going to sell the gems. Yet unknown to her, while she was away, he was having an affair. And upping the noirness, he wasn't just cheating on Keyes with another woman, but with her sister - damn, people can do really bad things to each other. Pause on that for a moment, while Keyes is down in Cuba getting the stolen diamonds and risking arrest smuggling them into the country for her husband, he's banging her sister, ouch.

And if that isn't enough, while Keyes lies sick in bed, hubby takes the diamonds and whatever money she has and, employing a scorched-earth policy, skedaddles on both of the sisters. Keyes, with the sickness advancing to the point where her skin is showing the blisters - she's a bit frightening to look at now - is hellbent on finding her, no other word for it, scumbag husband. But all this noir stuff plays on in the background as the movie mainly focuses on the politicians' and healthcare community's efforts to stop the spread of the disease.

Here, the parallels to today's Covid pandemic are jarring: an initial test and trace efforts fails; a public education outreach includes discussion of how the virus is transmitted through the air and by touch; once available, a huge public campaign ensues to convince everyone to get vaccinated; at times, there is not enough vaccine and, finally, we see a push by others against the vaccine who believe it is some sort of conspiracy. I know, it's frighteningly similar to today.

Both stories are good and are, at the end, connected, once again, through Keyes because the Treasury officers and healthcare officials eventually team up to find her as the latter are now looking for her as patient zero. Unfortunately, the distinctive style and arc of the two stories leaves the viewer feeling as if he or she is almost watching separate movies at the same time. The combined effort is worth it, but you just can't help wishing the two narratives had been harmonized better.

A double N.B. for this one. One, the 1950 on-location footage of New York City is time-travel heaven. And, two, in the opening scene, Keyes wears a houndstooth wool suit with a hat and coat lined in the same fabric (see below, it's the best pic I could find, but it doesn't do it justice). She looks impressive; she's a woman to be reckoned with, but that outfit must have cost a small fortune and probably explains why she needed to steal the diamonds in the first place.


----------



## Fading Fast

*The Blue Dahlia* from 1946 with Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake, William Bendix, Hugh Beaumont and Howard Da Silva

Yes, *The Blue Dahlia* is another noir pairing of Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd, but it's also a disturbing look at a returning WWII serviceman with severe PTSD and, if that's not enough, it's also a fine "who killed the cheatin' wife" murder mystery.

Character actor William Bendix delivers a career performance as the damaged veteran who can't keep the noises in his head straight and whose violent anger is sparked by loud music (or, sometimes, nothing). This man needs serious medical attention, but other than hanging with his two former service buddies, Ladd and Hugh Beaumont, he's on his own.

When those three return from the war, Ladd finds his wife partying at their Los Angeles bungalow apartment where she is clearly having an affair with local nightclub-owner Howard Da Silva. Ladd and the wife fight, then after the party, they fight again and he leaves (and leaves his service revolver behind, gun-wall-hung). Later that evening, separately, Da Silva (looking for nooky) and Bendix (looking for Ladd) come by - all spied on by the slimy apartment-complex house detective.

But when the wife is found shot dead the following morning, Ladd is the lead suspect owing to, one, the loud and public fight he had with his wife at the party and, two, his gun being the murder weapon. Realizing he looks guilty, Ladd goes on the lam so that he can find the real killer and clear his name.

In a fortuitous occurrence that only happens in movieland, Veronica freakin' Lake drives by and stops to pick up Ladd as he's walking down the road. And in another movieland-only occurrence, she just happens to be the somewhat estranged wife of the man, Da Silva, who was having an affair with Ladd's wife (yes, it's a bit confusing). So, these two kinda sorta team up to help Ladd clear his name.

The rest of the movie is solid noir - no surprise as the screenplay was penned by Raymond Chandler - as Ladd mixes it up with Da Silva and his henchmen, he and Lake quarrel on the surface but fall in love beneath it, the police stay a step behind both the bad guys and Ladd and damaged Bendix is all but beaten by the police into confessing, true or not, to killing the wife.

Chandler's original ending, according to the TCM host, was changed for the movie, at the request of the Navy, to a new ending that you might or might not like, but as with most noir movies, the journey is the real joy. And the journey in this one is greatly enhanced by Lake and Ladd who have palpable screen chemistry as they are, arguably, the first couple of Noirland. And if all that's not enough, there's plenty of 1940s period details, noir cinematography and Art Deco architecture to make it a fun time capsule for us today.

N.B. Check out the early on massive-downpour scene that runs for at least twenty minutes of screen time and that has the actors constantly soaked to the bone. It had to be challenging to film and unpleasant to act in, but it is powerfully effective in setting the mood by subliminally telling the viewer that this noir movie will be no sunny Los Angeles story.

Three returning WWII vets showing us what men looked like in the 1940s.








Really wanted to post another pic of Veronica Lake, but this one ⇧ was just too good to pass up.


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## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 55316
> 
> *The Blue Dahlia* from 1946 with Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake, William Bendix, Hugh Beaumont and Howard Da Silva
> 
> Yes, *The Blue Dahlia* is another noir pairing of Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd, but it's also a disturbing look at a returning WWII serviceman with severe PTSD and, if that's not enough, it's also a fine "who killed the cheatin' wife" murder mystery.
> 
> Character actor William Bendix delivers a career performance as the damaged veteran who can't keep the noises in his head straight and whose violent anger is sparked by loud music (or, sometimes, nothing). This man needs serious medical attention, but other than hanging with his two former service buddies, Ladd and Hugh Beaumont, he's on his own.
> 
> When those three return from the war, Ladd finds his wife partying at their Los Angeles bungalow apartment where she is clearly having an affair with local nightclub-owner Howard Da Silva. Ladd and the wife fight, then after the party, they fight again and he leaves (and leaves his service revolver behind, gun-wall-hung). Later that evening, separately, Da Silva (looking for nooky) and Bendix (looking for Ladd) come by - all spied on by the slimy apartment-complex house detective.
> 
> But when the wife is found shot dead the following morning, Ladd is the lead suspect owing to, one, the loud and public fight he had with his wife at the party and, two, his gun being the murder weapon. Realizing he looks guilty, Ladd goes on the lam so that he can find the real killer and clear his name.
> 
> In a fortuitous occurrence that only happens in movieland, Veronica freakin' Lake drives by and stops to pick up Ladd as he's walking down the road. And in another movieland-only occurrence, she just happens to be the somewhat estranged wife of the man, Da Silva, who was having an affair with Ladd's wife (yes, it's a bit confusing). So, these two kinda sorta team up to help Ladd clear his name.
> 
> The rest of the movie is solid noir - no surprise as the screenplay was penned by Raymond Chandler - as Ladd mixes it up with Da Silva and his henchmen, he and Lake quarrel on the surface but fall in love beneath it, the police stay a step behind both the bad guys and Ladd and damaged Bendix is all but beaten by the police into confessing, true or not, to killing the wife.
> 
> Chandler's original ending, according to the TCM host, was changed for the movie, at the request of the Navy, to a new ending that you might or might not like, but as with most noir movies, the journey is the real joy. And the journey in this one is greatly enhanced by Lake and Ladd who have palpable screen chemistry as they are, arguably, the first couple of Noirland. And if all that's not enough, there's plenty of 1940s period details, noir cinematography and Art Deco architecture to make it a fun time capsule for us today.
> 
> N.B. Check out the early on massive-downpour scene that runs for at least twenty minutes of screen time and that has the actors constantly soaked to the bone. It had to be challenging to film and unpleasant to act in, but it is powerfully effective in setting the mood by subliminally telling the viewer that this noir movie will be no sunny Los Angeles story.
> 
> Three returning WWII vets showing us what men looked like in the 1940s.
> View attachment 55317
> 
> Really wanted to post another pic of Veronica Lake, but this one ⇧ was just too good to pass up.


Great review! This is one I've seen before, but it would certainly be worth a second viewing. Thanks.


----------



## Vecchio Vespa

We watched Bright Young Things the other evening. It was a delightful prewar period piece (my how time flies) with an absolutely over the top cast. Stephen Campbell Moore, Emily Mortimer, Michael Sheen, Imelda Staunton, James McAvoy, Peter O'Toole, Simon Callow, Stephen Fry, Stockard Channing, Dan Ackroyd, David Tennant, Jim Broadbent, Jim Carter, and more. Fenella Woolgar is awesome. The story revolves around Moore's efforts to collect money from Broadbent, money he desperately needs to marry Mortimer. I hope we shall be treated to a typically superlative review by Fading Fast. (I searched but did not find such a review on the fora.)


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## Fading Fast

TKI67 said:


> We watched Bright Young Things the other evening. It was a delightful prewar period piece (my how time flies) with an absolutely over the top cast. Stephen Campbell Moore, Emily Mortimer, Michael Sheen, Imelda Staunton, James McAvoy, Peter O'Toole, Simon Callow, Stephen Fry, Stockard Channing, Dan Ackroyd, David Tennant, Jim Broadbent, Jim Carter, and more. Fenella Woolgar is awesome. The story revolves around Moore's efforts to collect money from Broadbent, money he desperately needs to marry Mortimer. I hope we shall be treated to a typically superlative review by Fading Fast. (I searched but did not find such a review on the fora.)


I haven't seen it, but will be looking for now as it sounds fantastic. And thank you for your kind words, they are very nice to hear.


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## Fading Fast

*Ever Since Eve* from 1937 with Marion Davies, Robert Montgomery, Allen Jenkins, Patsy Kelly and Frank McHugh

Every once in a while, even during the code era, studios snuck stuff past the sensors, surprisingly, right out in the open. *Ever Since Eve* is chockablock with gender-bending scenes and characters, including a lesbian-like reference to "motorcycle girls of the Everglades," a man named Mabel and woman name Mr. Bellldam dressed in traditionally masculine-ish clothing.

It's so out there and obvious to us today, that maybe it came across more as farce than sexual fluidity back then, at least to the sensors. Though, I'd bet in the underground gay and lesbian communities of the time, this movie was well known.

And while all the above is there, the story itself is one Hollywood has told since there was a Hollywood. A pretty woman, Marion Davies (in her last career role), is a secretary who keeps getting propositioned by her bosses and, then, fired when she rejects their advances or she isn't offered a position at all as the companies don't want to hire attractive secretaries for just that reason.

So, in order to get a secretarial job with a handsome novelist, Robert Montgomery, who has run through his share of pretty secretaries, Davies makes herself over into a dowdy-looking woman.

It all plays to the standard Hollywood formula as, after initially being turned off by plain Davies, Montgomery begins to see the pretty girl camouflaged beneath the big-framed glasses, mousy hair and drab clothing. And since he's a lazy playboy who is running up against his publisher's deadline (or he'll have to give back an advance he's already spent), Davies' efficiency is just what he needs and proves attractive in a way that surprises him.

The rest of the movie is also off-the-shelf stuff for this type of story as Montgomery's greedy society girlfriend high hats Davies, but becomes jealous of her as she sees the connection Davies has with Montgomery. Then, Davis falls for Montgomery while he accidentally meets and falls for pretty, not-camouflaged Davies, but doesn't recognize that she is also his secretary (it's a movie, you just go with it). Finally more confusion and hijinks ensue.

You know practically from the first scene how it will all work out, but it's still a fun-enough hour and twenty minutes as Davies and Montgomery seem to be enjoying themselves. Plus, there's all that incredible-for-the-time gender-bending stuff hiding in plain sight.

It's pretty fantastic that, somehow or other, despite a strongly enforced Motion Picture Production Code, Warner Bros. produced an A-list movie with gay and lesbian characters and innuendos that made it right passed the censors. And, oddly, the gay and lesbian stuff isn't even important to the overall story. Somebody at Warner Bros. was looking to make a point...and made it.

And if you are wondering what "dowdy" Marian Davies, as seen in the top pic, looks like out of her alter-ego getup, see below.


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## Fading Fast

*Shane* from 1953 with Alan Ladd, Van Heflin, Jean Arthur, Jack Palance and Brandon De Wilde

Somehow, before now, I had never seen anything other than clips of this movie despite its reputation as one of the best Westerns ever - a heavy burden on a first-time viewer.

It is very good, but maybe it's because my expectations were set so high that I only liked, but didn't love it. Also, I didn't feel any need to bounce a movie out of my top-three-Westerns list (of this admittedly not huge fan of Westerns): *High Noon*, *The Big Country* and, a more modern one, *Open Range *(with an honorable mention to *The Gunfighter*).

Shane is a darn good movie of archetypes: the religious-and-family-oriented homesteaders being pushed off their land by arrogant cattle ranchers (free rangers, I think, but never said, so maybe not) that requires the iconic "reluctant gunman," Alan Ladd as Shane, to settle the score in favor of the homesteaders.

That framework provides a too-simple-for-my-taste good-versus-evil narrative that is pounded home by director George Stevens who seems to be making love to his movie with all its sweeping shots, heroic speeches, meaningful closeups and Capraesque-moments of underdog declamations and victories.

It all works fine for what it is, but it feels over constructed as I could see the seams and director-driven emotional manipulation, most of which I usually don't pick up until the second or third viewing of a movie. Also, I couldn't stand Jean Arthur's obviously fake blonde curly haired wig. That said, she delivers an outstanding performance as the female lead and woman at the center of an understated love triangle at the age of, good for her, fifty three.

The strong cast also includes Elisha Cook Jr., as a hotheaded but well-meaning settler whose accent sounds less "Old West" and more like his tongue has swollen up from a bee sting. And making an early career appearance, Jack Palance might have set a new standard for evil gunmen at the time, but today his rendering in *Shane* feels two dimensional (yet, I admit, I was still glad when he got his).

Even the outstanding acting by Brandon De Wilde as little Joey is so clearly directed to be a paradigm of youthful innocence and wonder (right down to the obligatory loyal dog) that he feels less like a kid than an ideal.

*Shane* is a good epic Western with many fine scenes and performances, including Van Heflin as the settlers' leader who has to cede the heroic moment to Shane, but I couldn't help being put off by the stark good-guys-versus-bad-guys construct that only occasionally let some real-life grey sneak in. Maybe the next time I see it, with my expectations set back down to earth, I'll just be swept up by its fairytale story.


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 55511
> 
> *Shane* from 1953 with Alan Ladd, Van Heflin, Jean Arthur, Jack Palance and Brandon De Wilde
> 
> Somehow, before now, I had never seen anything other than clips of this movie despite its reputation as one of the best Westerns ever - a heavy burden on a first-time viewer.
> 
> It is very good, but maybe it's because my expectations were set so high that I only liked, but didn't love it. Also, I didn't feel any need to bounce a movie out of my top-three-Westerns list (of this admittedly not huge fan of Westerns): *High Noon*, *The Big Country* and, a more modern one, *Open Range *(with an honorable mention to *The Gunfighter*).
> 
> Shane is a darn good movie of archetypes: the religious-and-family-oriented homesteaders being pushed off their land by arrogant cattle ranchers (free rangers, I think, but never said, so maybe not) that requires the iconic "reluctant gunman," Alan Ladd as Shane, to settle the score in favor of the homesteaders.
> 
> That framework provides a too-simple-for-my-taste good-versus-evil narrative that is pounded home by director George Stevens who seems to be making love to his movie with all its sweeping shots, heroic speeches, meaningful closeups and Capraesque-moments of underdog declamations and victories.
> 
> It all works fine for what it is, but it feels over constructed as I could see the seams and director-driven emotional manipulation, most of which I usually don't pick up until the second or third viewing of a movie. Also, I couldn't stand Jean Arthur's obviously fake blonde curly haired wig. That said, she delivers an outstanding performance as the female lead and woman at the center of an understated love triangle at the age of, good for her, fifty three.
> 
> The strong cast also includes Elisha Cook Jr., as a hotheaded but well-meaning settler whose accent sounds less "Old West" and more like his tongue has swollen up from a bee sting. And making an early career appearance, Jack Palance might have set a new standard for evil gunmen at the time, but today his rendering in *Shane* feels two dimensional (yet, I admit, I was still glad when he got his).
> 
> Even the outstanding acting by Brandon De Wilde as little Joey is so clearly directed to be a paradigm of youthful innocence and wonder (right down to the obligatory loyal dog) that he feels less like a kid than an ideal.
> 
> *Shane* is a good epic Western with many fine scenes and performances, including Van Heflin as the settlers' leader who has to cede the heroic moment to Shane, but I couldn't help being put off by the stark good-guys-versus-bad-guys construct that only occasionally let some real-life grey sneak in. Maybe the next time I see it, with my expectations set back down to earth, I'll just be swept up by its fairytale story.


I've enjoyed watching Shane in it's entirety at least a couple of times and have caught clips of the movie on countless occasions. It is a very watchable movie, for sure. Every time I see that final scene with Shane riding off into the night, the blood stain from a gut shot seemingly ever growing.on the waist of his rawhide shooter's jacket, I find myself wondering...'has that shootist participated in his last gunfight?' I suspect he has and I like to think it is by choice that he does so! Thanks for another great review.


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## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> I've enjoyed watching Shane in it's entirety at least a couple of times and have caught clips of the movie on countless occasions. It is a very watchable movie, for sure. Every time I see that final scene with Shane riding off into the night, the blood stain from a gut shot seemingly ever growing.on the waist of his rawhide shooter's jacket, I find myself wondering...'has that shootist participated in his last gunfight?' I suspect he has and I like to think it is by choice that he does so! Thanks for another great review.


I agree, I think the point is he's done - there's nothing left for him in life with his past - and his exit was saving the settlers.

And thank you for the kind compliment.


----------



## Corcovado

I watched a movie this week from 1977 called "Rolling Thunder." It stars William Devane, and features a young Tommy Lee Jones in a supporting role. Kind of an odd and sad movie, and honestly not as action packed as the title might suggest, but I enjoyed it.


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## eagle2250

Corcovado said:


> I watched a movie this week from 1977 called "Rolling Thunder." It stars William Devane, and features a young Tommy Lee Jones in a supporting role. Kind of an odd and sad movie, and honestly not as action packed as the title might suggest, but I enjoyed it.


Interesting twist on a theme. At first I assumed the film title referred to Operation Rolling Thunder, a series of air strikes carried out by the magnificent B52 air frame, BUFF's (Big Ugly Fat Fellows) against North Vietnamese targets, dropping more than 860,000 tons of bombs and killing more than 52,000 North Vietnamese. The B52 has been in service since 1955, still serving the defensive needs of this beloved Country of ours, flying cautionary "Don't Tread on Me" missions as recently as this month in the mid-east to put Iran on notice to be careful with the games they have been playing. They just don't make em like the B52 anymore.


----------



## Fading Fast

*Rear Window* from 1954 with James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter and Raymond Burr

The joy in watching a classic like Hitchcock's *Rear Window* for the fifth or sixth time in over a few decades - away from it just being a darn good movie - is focusing on things other than the main plot. This time, for me, it was Grace Kelly, someone eminently easy to focus on.

Surprisingly not stuck in my memory from prior viewings is that Kelly is pursuing a proposal from James Stewart, real hard, and he's resisting, real hard. He's on the far side of middle aged and she's Grace freakin' Kelly in her ethereal prime. Plus he's a just-getting-by photojournalist and she's a model and Park Avenue regular.

Yet, these two acting pros have you believing that she's willing to humble herself time and again before him and he genuinely doesn't want to get married to her, despite, shall I say it again, she's Grace freakin' Kelly. He doesn't believe she could adjust to his hardscrabble, adventure-driven lifestyle.

As difficult as it is to imagine ever feeling bad for Grace Kelly (or Tom Brady), you do feel bad for this prepossessingly gorgeous, but still rejected woman who tries everything including even bringing, unannounced, an overnight bag to win Stewart over.

To be clear, that's Grace Kelly saying she's here to have sex with you. Yet, while the rest of the male population would spontaneously combust at this point, he just sees her as a pretty thing that won't fit into his peripatetic and dangerous photojournalist life. It's not lighthearted, as you can feel her hurt.

Most of this happens before the main story really gets going. So, while you initially feel bad for Kelly, by the time you're considering that Stewart's neighbor may have killed his wife and might now be cutting up her body in the bathtub so that he can carry it out in several trips in a suitcase, Kelly's woes seem less important.

However, none of the Kelly-Stewart relationship stuff even stayed with me from the prior times that I've seen this one, as the main story is that gripping: Stewart, recovering from a broken leg, innocently watching his neighbors out the window, starts to suspect something is very wrong.

The voyeurism by proxy is delicious and when we, like Stewart, begin to distrust the neighbor, your mind is completely occupied sifting through clues everywhere. Even Kelly, unconvinced of Stewart's suspicions at first, has a wonderfully acted epiphany moment where you see her facial expression go from dismissal to dread in an instant.

Aided by his nurse and super-talented actress Thelma Ritter, Stewart and Kelly are in full amateur-detective mode, especially when Stewart's police inspector friend, Wendell Corey, all but ignores Stewart's importuning him to investigate. Neatly tying the two plot threads together, the climactic scene has immobile Stewart watching his presumed-precious girlfriend scale fire escapes and heroically confront a murderer to prevent his attempted getaway.

It is a heck of an effort even for Hitchcock as it all takes place on one set - a busy multi-apartment-building courtyard during a hot summer where everyone's shades are up, windows are open and lives are on display. Ranking Hitchcock films is hard, but *Rear Window*, with Grace Kelly believably suffering unrequited love and a man in a wheelchair solving a murder mystery from his living room window, is pretty impressive stuff even for the master director.


----------



## Vecchio Vespa

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 55621
> 
> *Rear Window* from 1954 with James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter and Raymond Burr
> 
> The joy in watching a classic like Hitchcock's *Rear Window* for the fifth or sixth time in over a few decades - away from it just being a darn good movie - is focusing on things other than the main plot. This time, for me, it was Grace Kelly, someone eminently easy to focus on.
> 
> Surprisingly not stuck in my memory from prior viewings is that Kelly is pursuing a proposal from James Stewart, real hard, and he's resisting, real hard. He's on the far side of middle aged and she's Grace freakin' Kelly in her ethereal prime. Plus he's a just-getting-by photojournalist and she's a model and Park Avenue regular.
> 
> Yet, these two acting pros have you believing that she's willing to humble herself time and again before him and he genuinely doesn't want to get married to her, despite, shall I say it again, she's Grace freakin' Kelly. He doesn't believe she could adjust to his hardscrabble, adventure-driven lifestyle.
> 
> As difficult as it is to imagine ever feeling bad for Grace Kelly (or Tom Brady), you do feel bad for this prepossessingly gorgeous, but still rejected woman who tries everything including even bringing, unannounced, an overnight bag to win Stewart over.
> 
> To be clear, that's Grace Kelly saying she's here to have sex with you. Yet, while the rest of the male population would spontaneously combust at this point, he just sees her as a pretty thing that won't fit into his peripatetic and dangerous photojournalist life. It's not lighthearted, as you can feel her hurt.
> 
> Most of this happens before the main story really gets going. So, while you initially feel bad for Kelly, by the time you're considering that Stewart's neighbor may have killed his wife and might now be cutting up her body in the bathtub so that he can carry it out in several trips in a suitcase, Kelly's woes seem less important.
> 
> However, none of the Kelly-Stewart relationship stuff even stayed with me from the prior times that I've seen this one, as the main story is that gripping: Stewart, recovering from a broken leg, innocently watching his neighbors out the window, starts to suspect something is very wrong.
> 
> The voyeurism by proxy is delicious and when we, like Stewart, begin to distrust the neighbor, your mind is completely occupied sifting through clues everywhere. Even Kelly, unconvinced of Stewart's suspicions at first, has a wonderfully acted epiphany moment where you see her facial expression go from dismissal to dread in an instant.
> 
> Aided by his nurse and super-talented actress Thelma Ritter, Stewart and Kelly are in full amateur-detective mode, especially when Stewart's police inspector friend, Wendell Corey, all but ignores Stewart's importuning him to investigate. Neatly tying the two plot threads together, the climactic scene has immobile Stewart watching his presumed-precious girlfriend scale fire escapes and heroically confront a murderer to prevent his attempted getaway.
> 
> It is a heck of an effort even for Hitchcock as it all takes place on one set - a busy multi-apartment-building courtyard during a hot summer where everyone's shades are up, windows are open and lives are on display. Ranking Hitchcock films is hard, but *Rear Window*, with Grace Kelly believably suffering unrequited love and a man in a wheelchair solving a murder mystery from his living room window, is pretty impressive stuff even for the master director.
> 
> View attachment 55622


A favorite movie of ours, the notion of having Grace Kelly after you and not yielding is sci-fi at its finest.


----------



## Fading Fast

TKI67 said:


> A favorite movie of ours, the notion of having Grace Kelly after you and not yielding is sci-fi at its finest.


At one point (all in fun), my girlfriend (who knows I'm a huge Grace Kelly fan) asked if I would cheat on her with GK, to which, without missing a beat, I told her I'd have sex with Grace Kelly right in front of her. To which, she responded without missing a beat, "yeah, I get that."


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## eagle2250

Add the wife and I to the growing list of those who have enjoyed the film Rear Window more than a few times. Indeed, before this weekend is past, we may have watched it again!


----------



## Fading Fast

*Slightly Dangerous* from 1943 with Lana Turner, Robert Young, Walter Brennan and May Whitty

This one proves the value of stars, a view shared by its studio MGM, famous for claiming to have "more stars than there are in heaven." Take away the famous and talented actors in this one and you have, well, not much here but a very silly story.

Small-town girl Lana Turner, bored with her shopgirl job and going nowhere, moves to a big city without much of a plan. Once there, and adumbrating, by a decade, Judy Holiday in *It Should Happen to You*, she spends a chunk of her small funds on a glamorous makeover (I thought she looked cuter pre makeover). Then, through a series of happenstances that only make sense in the mind of a screenwriter, Turner ends up faking amnesia in order to be mistaken for the long-lost daughter of a millionaire - uh-huh.

And while that crazy plan, surprisingly, is working, her former hometown boss, Robert Young, comes looking for Turner as he needs to prove he didn't drive her to suicide, which is what most of her old town believes happened to her - uh-huh, again. But Young's presence and persistence in Turner's big-city life threatens her with exposure and the loss of her new wealthy family.

Most of the rest of the movie is Young trying to get Turner to admit her real identity even as a romance sparks between the two. Meanwhile, Turner tries to keep the lost-daughter charade going, especially as she and her new family, including father Walter Brennan and governess May Whitty, begin to form a real bond.

Sometimes movies are less silly on screen than they sound...not this one. You've probably figured it out already, but the plot is nothing more than a reason to give Lana Turner, rocking her famous "sweater girl" figure, a vehicle to advance her career. To that end, it was probably successful as it is mildly entertaining because of its deep pool of MGM acting talent and Turner's look-at-me body. If nothing else, *Slightly Dangerous* justified MGM's belief in its star system.


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## eagle2250

Last evening the wife and I watched our recently acquired copy of the Rear Window DVD. This was a colorized version and frankly I prefer watching the movie in black and white...it shows to better effect that way!


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## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> Last evening the wife and I watched our recently acquired copy of the Rear Window DVD. This was a colorized version and frankly I prefer watching the movie in black and white...it shows to better effect that way!


So here's something funny. Growing up in the '70s, I watched all these old movies in B&W because I watched them on a '50s-era B&W TV.

Later on in life, it was funny to see that some where actually made in color. It also got confusing when, for awhile, "colorizing" was a thing.

Like you, I originally thought "Rear Window" was a B&W movie, but it was actually filmed and shown in color right from the start.


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## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> So here's something funny. Growing up in the '70s, I watched all these old movies in B&W because I watched them on a '50s-era B&W TV.
> 
> Later on in life, it was funny to see that some where actually made in color. It also got confusing when, for awhile, "colorizing" was a thing.
> 
> Like you, I originally thought "Rear Window" was a B&W movie, but it was actually filmed and shown in color right from the start.


My friend, you are one of the AAAC membership, from whom I am always learning something new. Thank you for that!


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## Fading Fast

*Bright Young Things* from 2003 with Fenella Wooglar, Emily Mortimer, Michael Sheen, Dan Aykroyd, Peter O'Toole, Stockard Channing and James McAvoy

Start with the excellent capture-the-moment Evelyn Waugh novel, *Vile Bodies*, add in a strong cast and smart directing by Stephen Fry and, right out of the shoot, you're on a exhilarating and exhausting romp with England's young, idle and aimlessly rich 1930s party set - the Bright Young Things.

The first three-quarters of *Bright Young Things* is mainly a phantasmagoria of one party after another - masquerade balls, hunts, car races, enough cocaine to supply the 1980s, charlatan spiritualists, endless boozing, gambling, casual sex, gay sex (when that was a felony) and general debauchery.

It's all smartly filmed in the wonderfully brassy, cheering and blithe style of the society newsreels of the era. Had the movie been shot in black and white, you would be wondering if director Fry had interspersed vintage clips.

After seeing these Bright Young Things partying, seemingly, without a care in the world, we meet several of them and learn, not surprisingly, that their real lives are much-less gay and easy than their public personas project.

Attractive young lovers Michael Sheen and Emily Mortimer have upper-class pedigree but not its money, which frustrates their efforts to marry. This leads to a fury of get-rich-quick efforts and a quirky hunt for an allusive colonel who, maybe, is holding a huge race-track payoff for Sheen.

Fenella Wooglar, the putative party-girl leader of the clique, uses partying, booze and cocaine to escape real life. Some of the group's gay men are able to somewhat "come out" at parties as their cross dressing and exaggerated mannerisms are seen as part of their set's "crazy" and not the "abnormality" homosexuality was perceived to be at the time.

Hovering over all of this is Dan Aykroyd as the wealthy, immoral and brash American publisher who is insensitive to England's cultural nuances. He hires "spies" (mainly society hanger-ons who need money) from within the Bright Young Things to obtain copy and pictures for his British tabloid.

It, much like any tabloid reporting on the rich and famous, creates a reinforcing feedback loop between the public hungry to read about the antics of the Bright Young Things and the Bright Young Things themselves, feigning disinterest in the attention, but really enjoying it.

All parties must end, as this one does when WWII begins and the bills come due. Pretty, flighty Emily Mortimer breaks her engagement to (and the heart of) Michael Sheen when she becomes engaged to a wealthy man because "It's all very well to look down on money, but a girl's got to look after herself these days." There's a wonderful twist and payoff to this specific story thread, but you want to see in the movie how the reality of WWII forces maturity and perspective on these two former Bright Young Things.

Others Bright Young Things don't make out as well as a trip to a mental asylum for one and flight from England to avoid arrest under the sodomy laws for a few of the others turn out the final lights on this decade-long party.

The Bright Young Things had the money and verve to play outrageously during the Depression, which seemed to both pique and fascinate the struggling-to-get-by British public. But the real story here, as always, is the complex lives behind the happy facades - the tears of the clown.

If *Bright Young Things *has a flaw, it could have shown a little less partying and a little more of the behind-the-scenes tears and post-party reconciliations. Yet Director Stephen Fry more than admirably translated Waugh's insightful novel into an enjoyable and poignant commentary on England's young upper class taking its last grasp at excess before WWII would provide its life-or-death test for the Empire.

N.B. For those looking to do further "research" on the Bright Young Things, I recommend *Bright Young People* by J. D. Taylor. Unrelated to the movie, I remember this 2010 book as an entertaining read about this quirky nook of pre-war British history. Plus, you get to meet one of the perfectly named leaders of the young partying English set, Elizabeth Ponsonby.

And finally, a hat-tip to @TKI67 for this enjoyable recommendation and request for a review - thank you.


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## karenburton1305

_Saving Mr Banks_ is one of my favourite films! I love how it blends so many different mediums!


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## Fading Fast

*Mrs. O'Malley and Mr. Malone* from 1950 with James Whitmore, Marjorie Main, Fred Clark and (bad girl of the pre-code 1930s) Ann Dvorak

B-Movies, as often noted, were the antecedents to the formulaic TV shows of the '60s through the '90s. Usually, at around an hour or so in length, they had simple, repeatable stories and were produced on a small budget with familiar actors but not major stars. In an era of limited competition, they contained just-enough mindless entertainment value to keep you watching (you know, like much of the first forty-or-so years of TV).

*Mrs. O'Malley and Mr. Malone* is nothing more or less than this, with the talents of James Whitmore, Marjorie Main, Fred Clark and Ann Dvorak boosting it a bit higher than most of its B-Movie peers. Whitmore, a successful and roguish defense attorney who spends twice his huge income on booze and babes, hops a train from his hometown of Chicago to New York in pursuit of a former client who owes him a ten-grand fee (the client stole a hundred grand).

Also on the train is pragmatic middle-aged Midwest farmer Marjorie Main who won a radio contest that's bringing her to New York City (just go with it), a Chicago District Attorney, Fred Clark, Whitmore's antagonist who is also after the thief and his money (but he'd love to lock Whitmore up too) and the thief's wife, Ann Dvorak, who wants the money as well.

In classic Hitchcock MacGuffin mode, you don't really care about the thief or the hundred grand. The modest fun in this one is watching no-nonsense Marjorie Main team up with her opposite, irrepressible and irresponsible Whitmore, to find the money. Meanwhile, the district attorney and the thief's wife nip at Main and Whitmore's heels all in the claustrophobic setting of a Chicago-to-New York City overnight train.

This one only works because all four main characters have a wonderfully fun chemistry where you feel they are letting you in on the jokes and pranks, which include a dead body that keeps inconveniently popping up in different rooms, Whitmore's futilely obvious womanizing and the DA's exasperation at knowing Whitmore will, once again, get the best of him.

I didn't want to like it, but kinda sorta did as, heck, the actors seemed to be genuinely enjoying themselves and, at about an hour in length, it's over before you can get too annoyed with it. Plus, it's incredible time travel as you feel that you're on an overnight train to New York. It's as if they extended the length of the cool train scene in *North by Northwest* to an hour.


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## Fading Fast

*Two-Faced Woman* from 1941 with Greta Garbo, Melvin Douglas, Roland Young and Ruth Gordon

The Motion Picture Production Code forced much silliness into movies, especially in the second half of the '30s and the '40s when Hollywood worked overtime coming up with scenarios where married people could almost, but not really, have affairs.

Sometimes it turned out well as in The Philadelphia Story, which, if you cut through the code, basically has Katherine Hepburn sleeping with all three male leads. But sometimes too much is asked of the code's scaffolding and the entire plot just collapses in on itself.

After a wobbly but okay start, *Two-Faced Woman* collapses in on itself. Melvin Douglas (an odd male lead at best with his squeaky voice and receding hairline) plays a New York City publishing tycoon on vacation who, in a week, meets, falls in love with and marries a carefree ski instructor, Greta Garbo. But when the vacation is over, he obnoxiously renegades on his pre-marriage promises of a laid-back life that he made to Garbo and "orders" her to come back to New York City with him so that he can return to his business.

I respect that cultural norms were different throughout history and we can't just arrogantly and arrantly judge every period by today's unforgiving political pieties, but even by 1940 standards, Douglas comes across as an imperious jerk. You don't promise your fiancee one life and, then, break that promise an hour after you're married and get mad at her for complaining.

But he is mad and goes back to New York by himself. At least up till now, *Two-Faced Woman* is a real movie, but then much nonsense ensues. Garbo, attempting to get her husband back (why? who knows), shows up in New York and comes up with the crazy plan to act as her (made up) philandering twin sister to, and this makes no sense, attract Douglas to somehow save their marriage.

She doesn't even seem really upset when Douglas tries to sleep with, what he believes is, his wife's sister - I wanted to punch the guy through the screen. But, I guess, the censors were happy as the affair wasn't really an affair because he was cheating on his wife with his wife (heavy sigh).

More nonsense follows, but somehow we are to believe it all works out as Douglas falls in love with Garbo again and she, now, agrees to move to New York. I stuck around till the end because this is Garbo's last film appearance, she looks great and did the best she could with awful material. Roland Young as Douglas' friend and Ruth Gordon as his secretary and Garbo confidant also deserve credit for bringing some credibility to this ridiculousness

There is one fun scene where teetotaler Garbo gets drunk on champagne for the first time in her life - the woman was an actress - but it is nowhere near enough to save this hot mess of a plot. It's a shame Garbo couldn't have gone out on a high note, but the problem here is the material not her. Sometimes the Motion Picture Production Code's limitations drove creativity and nuance, unfortunately, *Two-Faced Woman* is not one of those times.


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## Fading Fast

*Harper* from 1966 with Paul Newman, Lauren Bacall, Julie Harris and Janet Leigh

*Harper* is a bit of a hot mess, but a strong performance by Paul Newman holds this 1960s version of the classic 1940s noir-detective movie together. While there's, thankfully, all but no 1960s camp here, some of the decade's later new-age and hippie stuff seeps in to muddle the noir visuals, but that was reality in the second half of the decade.

Newman is a torn-and-frayed private detective - he's Bogey in *The Maltese Falcon* adjusted to 1960s cultural norms. Like Bogey, he's got a moral code that isn't Boy-Scout approved, but still, it's not bad and Newman, as did Bogey, tries to honor it.

Kicking off with an inside-Hollywood echo of *The Big Sleep*, Lauren Bacall hires Newman to find her missing, wealthy husband. Bacall, and almost everyone who knows her husband - his lascivious teenage daughter, his pilot and his former mistress - seem to be hoping Newman will find a corpse at the end of his search.

When that search reveals that Bacall's husband has been kidnapped, Newman drives his cool beat-up Porsche, which like him, seems held together by Bondo, all over the greater LA area trying to put the pieces together.

This leads him to a complicated-as-heck kidnapping strategy that includes a spiritual cult with a shady leader (do cults have any other kind of leaders?), a jazz clubs with a strung-out junkie singer (Julie Harris), oil fields used by the mob to "hide the bodies" and, in some kind of tangential connection, an illegal immigrant labor scheme.

It all somewhat comes together at the end if you think real hard, but for most of the movie you're just trying to catch up to Newman in figuring this one out. Even he seems to be throwing a lot of punches in the dark; still, he's several steps ahead of the plodding police.

The good in this one is not the Rube-Goldberg plot, but Newman doing the cool, disaffected private-investigator thing. This includes getting beat up a few times, aggressively tweaking the police and unenthusiastically shooting some of the bad guys. It also includes a wonderfully real, late-night booty call to his divorcing-him wife, Janet Leigh (stuffed into her jeans), who clearly still wants Newman in her...umm, life.

In a perfect mashup of film noir and later-sixties' zeitgeist, the end is, literally and philosophically, an amoral shrug of the shoulders that (minor spoiler alert) lets one of the bad guys go free, but it kinda makes sense.

Had a half hour of *Harper's* two hours of run time been left on the cutting-room floor, nothing much would have been lost. But despite its shortcomings, it's still good to see the iconic noir-detective torch picked up in the 1960s by Newman to later be handed off to Jack Nicholson in the 1970s classic *Chinatown*.


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## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 56141
> 
> *Harper* from 1966 with Paul Newman, Lauren Bacall, Julie Harris and Janet Leigh
> 
> *Harper* is a bit of a hot mess, but a strong performance by Paul Newman holds this 1960s version of the classic 1940s noir-detective movie together. While there's, thankfully, all but no 1960s camp here, some of the decade's later new-age and hippie stuff seeps in to muddle the noir visuals, but that was reality in the second half of the decade.
> 
> Newman is a torn-and-frayed private detective - he's Bogey in *The Maltese Falcon* adjusted to 1960s cultural norms. Like Bogey, he's got a moral code that isn't Boy-Scout approved, but still, it's not bad and Newman, as did Bogey, tries to honor it.
> 
> Kicking off with an inside-Hollywood echo of *The Big Sleep*, Lauren Bacall hires Newman to find her missing, wealthy husband. Bacall, and almost everyone who knows her husband - his lascivious teenage daughter, his pilot and his former mistress - seem to be hoping Newman will find a corpse at the end of his search.
> 
> When that search reveals that Bacall's husband has been kidnapped, Newman drives his cool beat-up Porsche, which like him, seems held together by Bondo, all over the greater LA area trying to put the pieces together.
> 
> This leads him to a complicated-as-heck kidnapping strategy that includes a spiritual cult with a shady leader (do cults have any other kind of leaders?), a jazz clubs with a strung-out junkie singer (Julie Harris), oil fields used by the mob to "hide the bodies" and, in some kind of tangential connection, an illegal immigrant labor scheme.
> 
> It all somewhat comes together at the end if you think real hard, but for most of the movie you're just trying to catch up to Newman in figuring this one out. Even he seems to be throwing a lot of punches in the dark; still, he's several steps ahead of the plodding police.
> 
> The good in this one is not the Rube-Goldberg plot, but Newman doing the cool, disaffected private-investigator thing. This includes getting beat up a few times, aggressively tweaking the police and unenthusiastically shooting some of the bad guys. It also includes a wonderfully real, late-night booty call to his divorcing-him wife, Janet Leigh (stuffed into her jeans), who clearly still wants Newman in her...umm, life.
> 
> In a perfect mashup of film noir and later-sixties' zeitgeist, the end is, literally and philosophically, an amoral shrug of the shoulders that (minor spoiler alert) lets one of the bad guys go free, but it kinda makes sense.
> 
> Had a half hour of *Harper's* two hours of run time been left on the cutting-room floor, nothing much would have been lost. But despite its shortcomings, it's still good to see the iconic noir-detective torch picked up in the 1960s by Newman to later be handed off to Jack Nicholson in the 1970s classic *Chinatown*.


I've watched Harper a couple of times in my past and suspect if I run into a showing in my future, I would watch it again. The wife has always liked Paul Newman...movies. Perhaps I'm just one of those guys that likes to keep an eye on the potential competition...LOL!


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## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> I've watched Harper a couple of times in my past and suspect if I run into a showing in my future, I would watch it again. The wife has always liked Paul Newman...movies. Perhaps I'm just one of those guys that likes to keep an eye on the potential competition...LOL!


My girlfriend loves Paul Newman too. But he's no competition as I have no doubt she'd leave me for him if she could and wouldn't even stop to say goodbye on the way out.


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## Fading Fast

Kidding aside, the guy had an insane career with decades of outstanding movies. But in the second half of the '50s and the '60s, he was spitting out good movies seemingly almost every year.


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## Fading Fast

*The Old Maid* from 1939 with Bette Davis, Mariam Hopkins and Donald Crisp

A young man from a "good" family is too poor to marry his society girlfriend. When she marries another man for money, he, in frustration, has an affair with his former society girlfriend's cousin (odder things have happened).

Out of this comes a secret birth (the cousin went out west "for her health" for several months), followed by a cover-up involving the cousin running an orphanage when she returns.

Years later, in an elaborate ruse, the baby, now a young girl, is adopted by her biological mother's cousin (the society girlfriend of many years ago), so as to give the girl a "proper" name.

This entire kit and caboodle required two decades of lies, feints and evasions that embittered the cousins and left a young woman, the "bastard" baby, ignorant of her own parentage.

Ah, the good old days. Today, we, pretty much, don't care about any of these former social conventions. Instead, we often celebrate the same behaviours that were once so disgraceful. Whatever your view of our new standards (overall, I'm in the camp they are better, but still, we could use more respect for self restraint and personal responsibility today), the old rules and norms made for much better storytelling.

Golden Era Hollywood milked the heck out this opportunity. Since the social rules seemed more elaborate and restrictive in the "Old South," many movies were set in some sort of "generic South" of the 1800s where a woman showing too much ankle would be horsewhipped in the public square (of course she wouldn't, but you get the point).

The above is pretty much the story and context of *The Old Maid* where Bette Davis is the biological mother who gives up her "bastard" baby to be adopted by wealthy and socially respectable cousin Mariam Hopkins as Davis becomes "auntie" to her own daughter. Davis then watches her child grow closer to her now legal mother, Hopkins, over the years, leading the two cousins to spend the next couple of decades living under one roof in mutual hate.

There are a bunch of other small twists and turns to the story all adding up to fantastic melodrama on steroids. Seriously, the writers have no shame in this one, but if you go with it, it's got some great jaw-dropping moments and it's got Bette Davis.

Davis can pretty much do anything on screen (but hold an accent). Here, she's at the top of her game showing a range of emotions with a flash of those famous eyes, nuanced facial expressions and her withering voice - it is a tour de force performance despite the saponaceous material. While Mariam Hopkins holds her own as the cousin who all but takes Davis' baby form her, this is Davis' movie from beginning to end.

Warner Bros., in particular, loved these "Old South" melodramas, *The Old Maid,* *Jezebel*, *Little Foxes*, etc., knowing that Davis could bring gravitas to even the most salaciously juicy of plots. Warner Bros. was right. In the hands of a lesser actress, *The Old Maid* might crumble under the weight of its own histrionics, but Davis' talent more than holds it together.


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## Fading Fast

*The Age of Consent* from 1932 with Dorothy Wilson, Richard Cromwell and John Haliday

This is what pre-code movies are all about. Set in a generic Midwest college, *The Age of Consent *is no rah-rah college musical or happy sorority-house-party movie like Hollywood's assembly line would stamp out with regularity in the second half of the decade. Instead, it's an honest look at the taut sexual relations at college in the early thirties.

Dorothy Wilson and Richard Cromwell are the young college lovers who fight out of frustration as they, simply put, want to have sex but believe, based on the conventions of the day, they shouldn't. So they continue to see other people and only end up making themselves jealous and unhappy.

They debate quitting school and getting married, but realize leaving college without a degree isn't a smart move either. One night, while they're on the outs, Richard walks a waitress friend home, they get drunk and have sex - yup, that's exactly what happens.

The girl's father walks in afterwards (thank God, not sooner) and has Richard arrested as his daughter is a minor (she's seventeen). The father wants Richard to "do the right thing" and marry his daughter or he wants him prosecuted and sent to jail. Holy smokes - right? This is no "are we going to win the 'big game'" or "will he ask me to the 'spring dance'" college movie.

The conclusion, involving a car accident and hospital scene, forces everyone to reflect hard on his or her beliefs. The waitress begins to buck her father; the father reexamines his religious views; Richard and Dorothy consider anew the value of their love and a few of the older faculty members see relationships, life and conventions in a fresh light.

Sure, the style of the movie is old fashioned and some of the moral issues seem outdated to us today as we've settled most of these questions (with the help of movies like *Age of Consent*), but you can feel the intensity of the contradictions and distress these young men and women faced back then.

With the enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code by the end of 1934, issues like these would be stripped out of or highly palliated in movies for the next several decades. This only makes these pre-code movies, clunky as they can sometimes be, more valuable for their realistic look at the moral and social issues of the thirties.

The waitress friend Richard turns to when he's on the outs with Dorothy. All goes horribly wrong from here.


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## Fading Fast

*High Fidelity* from 2000 with John Cusack, Iben Hjejle (pronounce "Eebin blah, blah, blah") and Jack Black

Having recently read the book *High Fidelity* by Nick Hornby (comments here:  #856 ), I was on the outlook for the movie, which I had seen before, but I wanted to watch it anew now having read the book.

The book is good in a fluffy, capturing-a-cultural-moment way. The movie also captures the period, the 1990s, pretty well, but the lead actor, John Cusack, misses the mark.

Cusack's character in the book, Rob, is a bag of neuroses and insecurities that cripple him emotionally. As a result, he has an inability to form stable and lasting relationships with women. One bad breakup even leads to his dropping out of college. He agonizes over decades-old minor mistakes and slights that most of us would quickly forget while he covers up his self-doubt with erratic outbursts of anger and ego.

Rob is not a strong, confident man. But Cusack, in the movie, comes across as a big, good-looking guy who is more annoyed with life than insecure about it. His physical presence and demeanor speak conviction not self-doubt. Even when he's saying the diffident words of the book's character, you don't believe it.

A man whose entire being reads confidence playing an insecure man just doesn't work, which is a shame as the rest of the movie is reasonably enjoyable and captures the book pretty well.

The plot (using that word generously) is Rob reflecting on all his failed relationships and, now, in his thirties trying to take stock of his life as the owner of a just-getting-by record shop. He is also deciding if he wants to commit to his girlfriend that just left him, but isn't really gone.

The fun here is the 1990s cultural representation, like Rob's "indie" record shop, which perfectly captures that type of store. It's in an old and dilapidated building and has a disheveled and dusty atmosphere with vinyl records displayed in beat-up wood bins. Its staff of slightly disaffected young men are condescending to even their customers about their musical tastes.

Rob's former girlfriends, whom we meet when he does a self-help tour of his past dating life, are also a 1990s mix of women in their thirties from that time. Some are as messed up as Rob and some have their act together, seemingly, like normal people who have all but forgotten a guy they had a relationship with five, ten or twenty years ago.

The climax determines if Rob will continue to surf through his days more as an observer than a participant in his own life or will commit to a career he cares about (being a DJ) and a woman he loves (and who is way too good for him).

Lopping off a half hour from its nearly two-hour run time would have helped as stories need more heft and plot to last that long. If you were in your thirties in the 1990s (my hand's raised), then you'll enjoy the cultural touchpoints and the relationship foibles and angst well captured by *High Fidelity*. However, when a lead actor's mien and physicality refute the words of his character, the movie is going to struggle to find its center as *High Fidelity* does.

N.B. There's a scene toward the end (minor spoiler alert) where self-absorbed Rob's proposal to his girlfriend is egotistically all about him. Yet, proving to be, possibly, the only (gorgeous) woman on earth who would bother to understand this man, his girlfriend Iben Hjejle, in a wonderful bit of subtle acting, turns the scene around by exposing his self-centeredness without undermining his confidence. He should marry this woman if she's stupid enough to have him.

Here's the scene:


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## Fading Fast

*Oscar Wilde* from 1960 with Robert Morley, John Neville and Alexander Knox

I have nothing more than a Cliff Notes knowledge of Oscar Wilde's life: a talented playwright, poet and novelist (I enjoyed *The Picture of Dorian Gray),* gay or bi-sexual, convicted under the sodomy laws and has a cool picture that shows up on a lot of T-shirts and coffee mugs. I know there's much more, but that's what I got.

With that thumbnail of knowledge, I don't know how true this movie is, but assuming a modicum of accuracy as it aligns with my Cliff Notes version of Wilde's life, it does a good job with its two-dollar-and-fifty-cent budget.

A heavy, successful, middle-aged Oscar Wilde played by Robert Morley is publicly accused of "posing as a ********," which his incredibly understanding wife, kind friends and wise lawyer advise him to ignore, but he presses a libel suit and all goes horribly wrong from there.

After the above thirty or so minutes of set up, which leaves little doubt that Mr. Wilde was, by the standards of the day, guilty of, in the terminology of the day, "the love that dare not speak its name," the trial and fireworks begin.

Wilde proves his famous wit almost equal to the relentless opposing attorney, Alexander Knox, as the ripostes fly back and forth with entertaining verve and bite during Wilde's testimony. But Wilde makes the mistake of playing his game on another man's field as, eventually, Wilde stumbles and experienced Knox hammers away mercilessly in the movie's money moment.

It is all sad denouement for Wilde from there. A subsequent sodomy trial leads to a few years in prison. A broken Wilde is released, but with nothing left in his emotional tank or his bank account, he dies a few years later at the age of forty six.

The small message in the movie is one of pride before a fall as Wilde pushed a fight he didn't have to, but his power and ego - he was incredibly successful and held in high esteem by society at that moment - had him believe, despite much good advice to the contrary, that he would succeed.

Wilde, whatever the popular perception of him is today, was not fighting the good fight for gay rights back then, but to clear his reputation as his defense, effectively, was to deny his sexual involvement with other men.

The big message in the movie - note this is 1960 - is the injustice of a man being persecuted for consensual sex with other adult men (although, one was sixteen, which wouldn't fly today, but that's treated as tomayto, tomahto in the sweep of this movie). It's easy to cheer for the good guys now, but kudos to the producers for making this tiny-budgeted effort back then.

*Oscar Wilde*, the movie, proves, again, that a good story tops special effects and expensive sets. When Wilde and Knox are exchanging retorts and you feel the momentum shift from Wilde to Knox - and you can see it all going terribly wrong for Wilde - the cheap sets, costumes and toupees of this movie don't mean a thing because real and raw human tragedy is on display.


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## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 56585
> 
> *Oscar Wilde* from 1960 with Robert Morley, John Neville and Alexander Knox
> 
> I have nothing more than a Cliff Notes knowledge of Oscar Wilde's life: a talented playwright, poet and novelist (I enjoyed *The Picture of Dorian Gray),* gay or bi-sexual, convicted under the sodomy laws and has a cool picture that shows up on a lot of T-shirts and coffee mugs. I know there's much more, but that's what I got.
> 
> With that thumbnail of knowledge, I don't know how true this movie is, but assuming a modicum of accuracy as it aligns with my Cliff Notes version of Wilde's life, it does a good job with its two-dollar-and-fifty-cent budget.
> 
> A heavy, successful, middle-aged Oscar Wilde played by Robert Morley is publicly accused of "posing as a ********," which his incredibly understanding wife, kind friends and wise lawyer advise him to ignore, but he presses a libel suit and all goes horribly wrong from there.
> 
> After the above thirty or so minutes of set up, which leaves little doubt that Mr. Wilde was, by the standards of the day, guilty of, in the terminology of the day, "the love that dare not speak its name," the trial and fireworks begin.
> 
> Wilde proves his famous wit almost equal to the relentless opposing attorney, Alexander Knox, as the ripostes fly back and forth with entertaining verve and bite during Wilde's testimony. But Wilde makes the mistake of playing his game on another man's field as, eventually, Wilde stumbles and experienced Knox hammers away mercilessly in the movie's money moment.
> 
> It is all sad denouement for Wilde from there. A subsequent sodomy trial leads to a few years in prison. A broken Wilde is released, but with nothing left in his emotional tank or his bank account, he dies a few years later at the age of forty six.
> 
> The small message in the movie is one of pride before a fall as Wilde pushed a fight he didn't have to, but his power and ego - he was incredibly successful and held in high esteem by society at that moment - had him believe, despite much good advice to the contrary, that he would succeed.
> 
> Wilde, whatever the popular perception of him is today, was not fighting the good fight for gay rights back then, but to clear his reputation as his defense, effectively, was to deny his sexual involvement with other men.
> 
> The big message in the movie - note this is 1960 - is the injustice of a man being persecuted for consensual sex with other adult men (although, one was sixteen, which wouldn't fly today, but that's treated as tomayto, tomahto in the sweep of this movie). It's easy to cheer for the good guys now, but kudos to the producers for making this tiny-budgeted effort back then.
> 
> *Oscar Wilde*, the movie, proves, again, that a good story tops special effects and expensive sets. When Wilde and Knox are exchanging retorts and you feel the momentum shift from Wilde to Knox - and you can see it all going terribly wrong for Wilde - the cheap sets, costumes and toupees of this movie don't mean a thing because real and raw human tragedy is on display.


A very difficult subject artfully and well handled. I think I have seen the movie, but my memory of the subject is admittedly sketchy and I would be well served to see the movie again. This seems a subject with which society continues to struggle mightily. It is a subject which requires our best and most ardent efforts to achieve a higher and more fair understanding! Thanks for a very worthwhile review.


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## Fading Fast

*Smart Woman* from 1931 with Mary Astor, Robert Aims and John Halliday

*Smart Woman* is an early talkie that feels like they simply filmed the play it is based on with a few exterior shots thrown in to make it look a bit more like a movie. It's also another 1930s movie about rich people living in big houses, driving luxury cars and taking exotic vacations all while cheating on their spouses. Depression-era audiences, struggling to find jobs and food, seemed to enjoy these films about rich people's peccadilloes, as Hollywood made a ton of them.

Young wife Mary Astor returns from a trip abroad visiting her ailing mother to find her husband, Robert Aims, has stepped out on her and now wants a divorce so that he can marry his very blonde girlfriend. Astor, truly in love with her husband and unaware he was straying, buckles at first and then decides to be gracious to her husband's girlfriend so as to buy time to find a way to win him back.

After inviting the girlfriend and her mother to spend a few days with her and her husband at a weekend house party (another popular Depression-era rich-people thing), Astor stumbles on a plan to make Aims jealous. She pretends an English Barron, John Halliday, that she befriended on her trip home, is really her boyfriend. [Writer's note, my girlfriend of twenty-plus years would not invite my new girlfriend and her mother over for the weekend other than to have them pick up my now dead body.]

The rest of the movie plays out as expected as Aims becomes less enthusiastic about getting a divorce when he sees his wife is interested in another man - and another man is interested in her. A bunch of small twists have to happen first before the inevitable, but you know where it is going almost from the beginning.

It's neither good nor bad because the story is fine but obvious, while Hollywood's skills at making talkies were yet to be perfected. Plus, the movie is in need of a restoration (and a soundtrack). It also doesn't help that the wrong people get together at the end as (mild spoiler alert) Astor should have let her self-absorbed bore of a husband leave when she had the chance.

But you don't watch this one for the story; you watch it for Mary Astor. It's a young as heck Ms. Astor before the next ten years of enduring horribly greedy parents, horribly greedy husbands (three) and too much booze, casual sex and exposure (her private sex diary became public in a salacious divorce trial) turned this twenty-five-year-old, lithe, pretty young thing into the tough-as-nail, almost-manly, thirty-five-year-old Brigid O'Shaughnessy of 1941's *The Maltese Falcon*.

N.B. Talented and enjoyable John Halliday puts in his typical strong-and-understated performance as the English Barron who should have wound up with pretty Mary.


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## Vecchio Vespa

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 56422
> 
> *High Fidelity* from 2000 with John Cusack, Iben Hjejle (pronounce "Eebin blah, blah, blah") and Jack Black
> 
> Having recently read the book *High Fidelity* by Nick Hornby (comments here:  #856 ), I was on the outlook for the movie, which I had seen before, but I wanted to watch it anew now having read the book.
> 
> The book is good in a fluffy, capturing-a-cultural-moment way. The movie also captures the period, the 1990s, pretty well, but the lead actor, John Cusack, misses the mark.
> 
> Cusack's character in the book, Rob, is a bag of neuroses and insecurities that cripple him emotionally. As a result, he has an inability to form stable and lasting relationships with women. One bad breakup even leads to his dropping out of college. He agonizes over decades-old minor mistakes and slights that most of us would quickly forget while he covers up his self-doubt with erratic outbursts of anger and ego.
> 
> Rob is not a strong, confident man. But Cusack, in the movie, comes across as a big, good-looking guy who is more annoyed with life than insecure about it. His physical presence and demeanor speak conviction not self-doubt. Even when he's saying the diffident words of the book's character, you don't believe it.
> 
> A man whose entire being reads confidence playing an insecure man just doesn't work, which is a shame as the rest of the movie is reasonably enjoyable and captures the book pretty well.
> 
> The plot (using that word generously) is Rob reflecting on all his failed relationships and, now, in his thirties trying to take stock of his life as the owner of a just-getting-by record shop. He is also deciding if he wants to commit to his girlfriend that just left him, but isn't really gone.
> 
> The fun here is the 1990s cultural representation, like Rob's "indie" record shop, which perfectly captures that type of store. It's in an old and dilapidated building and has a disheveled and dusty atmosphere with vinyl records displayed in beat-up wood bins. Its staff of slightly disaffected young men are condescending to even their customers about their musical tastes.
> 
> Rob's former girlfriends, whom we meet when he does a self-help tour of his past dating life, are also a 1990s mix of women in their thirties from that time. Some are as messed up as Rob and some have their act together, seemingly, like normal people who have all but forgotten a guy they had a relationship with five, ten or twenty years ago.
> 
> The climax determines if Rob will continue to surf through his days more as an observer than a participant in his own life or will commit to a career he cares about (being a DJ) and a woman he loves (and who is way too good for him).
> 
> Lopping off a half hour from its nearly two-hour run time would have helped as stories need more heft and plot to last that long. If you were in your thirties in the 1990s (my hand's raised), then you'll enjoy the cultural touchpoints and the relationship foibles and angst well captured by *High Fidelity*. However, when a lead actor's mien and physicality refute the words of his character, the movie is going to struggle to find its center as *High Fidelity* does.
> 
> N.B. There's a scene toward the end (minor spoiler alert) where self-absorbed Rob's proposal to his girlfriend is egotistically all about him. Yet, proving to be, possibly, the only (gorgeous) woman on earth who would bother to understand this man, his girlfriend Iben Hjejle, in a wonderful bit of subtle acting, turns the scene around by exposing his self-centeredness without undermining his confidence. He should marry this woman if she's stupid enough to have him.
> 
> Here's the scene:


The movie that taught me to dislike Jack Black. Probably Cusack at the peak of his "being John Cusack" phase.


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## Fading Fast

TKI67 said:


> The movie that taught me to dislike Jack Black. Probably Cusack at the peak of his "being John Cusack" phase.


I'm not that familiar with Cusack's work, but that sounds like a spot-on description to me. It was Cusack playing Cusack not the character.


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## Vecchio Vespa

Fading Fast said:


> I'm not that familiar with Cusack's work, but that sounds like a spot-on description to me. It was Cusack playing Cusack not the character.


He played pretty much that same role in Must Love Dogs, Serendipity, and, America's Sweethearts. I loved him in Grosse Point Blank.


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## Fading Fast

*Killer's Kiss* from 1955 with Jamie Smith, Irene Kane and Frank Silvera

According to TCM's *Noir Alley* host Eddie Muller, *Killer's Kiss*, director Stanley Kubrick's first movie effort, was done on less than a shoe-string budget. He notes the future famous director, working with a thin story and no Hollywood help or experience, was learning as he filmed and edited.

If you go in expecting a complex and expensive Hollywood effort, you'll probably be disappointed, but if you go in open to seeing what would come to be known as an "indie" film, you're in for a treat.

Shot in black and white on the street of New York City with, seemingly, whatever was going on in the background often captured on film, the movie is, first, a stunning time capsule of the City in 1955.

From the chaotic lights, hustle and energy of Times Square to the desolate cobblestone avenues of the Lower East Side, you feel as if you're on the streets with the actors.

Kubrick might have been learning, but he understood how to frame a shot. Look for the scene toward the end where female lead Irene Kane walks up the long flights of steps to the taxi dance hall. It's a poignant moment of "less is more" cinematography.

I'm not in agreement with Muller's criticism of the story as its "thinness" comes across as Hemingwayesque in a stripped-to-its-essentials way (think, *A Clean Well-Lighted Place*). At just over an hour, the movie feels like a smartly filmed short story that gives you only what you need to care about the characters and their plight and leaves it up to you to fill in the rest.

Heading-to-Palookaville boxer Jamie Smith spies an attractive, young blonde woman, Irene Kane, in the apartment across the alley from his depressing one-room rental. Later, he comes to her aid when she's being attacked by her manager and somewhat boyfriend, low-level mob boss Frank Silvera.

From here, the story is an awful, kinda, love triangle as Smith and Kane, a dispirited taxi-dancer, begin to fall for each other in a two-broken-people-coming-together way. None of this sits well with Silvera who susses out that the young lovers are planning to leave the city together.

He then employs his connections and henchmen to try to break them up in a fast-moving last half hour that includes a mistaken rubout, a tense chase through desolate early morning streets, a violent axe fight in a creepy and empty mannequin factory and a pathetic attempt by Silvera to win Kane back, at gunpoint mind you, with alternating threats and pleas.

Kubrick uses the architectural marvel of Penn Station - beautiful yet filthy, like its home city was becoming at that time - to bookend this little gem of a movie that wonderfully captures the gritty side of New York.

With the classic resonating voice of a train conductor announcing arrivals and departures, we wait with Smith, right to the last minute, to see if Kane will join him or not in the escape: to see if this modern day Romeo and Juliet will have a more-propitious ending than their literary progenitors.

N.B. As noted by Muller, long-time TCM fans will recognize several scenes in *Killer's Kiss* from TCM's promo clip *Open All Night*. I always wondered if several of those incredible noir moments - a bored ticket-booth operator, a fatigued blonde undressing, dispirited taxi-dancers at work - were even from movies, as I'd never seen them in one. Little did I know, all this time, they were "hiding" in Kubrick's wonderful noir curio.


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## Fading Fast

*The Shining Hour* from 1938 with Joan Crawford, Melvin Douglas, Robert Young and Margaret Sullivan

At an hour-and-fifteen-minutes long, this A-list MGM production rips along at a Warner Bros. pace, while packing a lot of melodrama into its short runtime.

New York City nightclub dancer Joan Crawford (just starting her looks' transition from pretty ingenue to lived-life-hard middle-aged woman), disgusted with her cynical Cafe Society world, agrees to marry a wealthy Midwesterner, Melvin Douglass. Despite telling Douglass she likes but doesn't love him, he pushes for marriage and a life with his family on their expansive farm.

Once there, Crawford and her husband's married brother, Robert Young, immediately develop sparks. However, the brothers' sister, and family matriarch, takes an instant dislike to Crawford, firing off put-downs her way at every chance. Meanwhile, Young's wife, the cute-as-all-heck Margaret Sullivan, slowly realizes she's losing her husband to Crawford.

Before TV shows like *Dallas* and *Dynasty*, they had movies like *The Shining Hour* where wealthy families, for no logical reason, all live under one roof enduring daily familial hate and machinations.

Heck, with all the cheating, subterfuge, mean comments and cocktails, *The Shining Hour* could have been a "lost" episode from either one of those TV shows. Upping the soap-opera quotient, like in those shows, are several financial entanglements and much sexual intrigue between the family and its employees.

The two most impressive things in *The Shining Hour *are the number of sub stories they fit into this seventy-five-minute effort and that they somehow, kinda sorta, stayed within the borders of the Motion Picture Production Code.

It's nothing more than a serviceable and quick soap opera lifted up by top-tier acting talent, but it's enjoyable enough for its modest aspirations and short time commitment.


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 56746
> 
> *The Shining Hour* from 1938 with Joan Crawford, Melvin Douglas, Robert Young and Margaret Sullivan
> 
> At an hour-and-fifteen-minutes long, this A-list MGM production rips along at a Warner Bros. pace, while packing a lot of melodrama into its short runtime.
> 
> New York City nightclub dancer Joan Crawford (just starting her looks' transition from pretty ingenue to lived-life-hard middle-aged woman), disgusted with her cynical Cafe Society world, agrees to marry a wealthy Midwesterner, Melvin Douglass. Despite telling Douglass she likes but doesn't love him, he pushes for marriage and a life with his family on their expansive farm.
> 
> Once there, Crawford and her husband's married brother, Robert Young, immediately develop sparks. However, the brothers' sister, and family matriarch, takes an instant dislike to Crawford, firing off put-downs her way at every chance. Meanwhile, Young's wife, the cute-as-all-heck Margaret Sullivan, slowly realizes she's losing her husband to Crawford.
> 
> Before TV shows like *Dallas* and *Dynasty*, they had movies like *The Shining Hour* where wealthy families, for no logical reason, all live under one roof enduring daily familial hate and machinations.
> 
> Heck, with all the cheating, subterfuge, mean comments and cocktails, *The Shining Hour* could have been a "lost" episode from either one of those TV shows. Upping the soap-opera quotient, like in those shows, are several financial entanglements and much sexual intrigue between the family and its employees.
> 
> The two most impressive things in *The Shining Hour *are the number of sub stories they fit into this seventy-five-minute effort and that they somehow, kinda sorta, stayed within the borders of the Motion Picture Production Code.
> 
> It's nothing more than a serviceable and quick soap opera lifted up by top-tier acting talent, but it's enjoyable enough for its modest aspirations and short time commitment.


Your perfectly nuanced analogies have convinced me...I must see that movie. After all JR Ewing was my spiritual business management mentor and Bobby was my social mentor.....or perhaps I just had the hots for Victoria Principle. Now I'm off to find a copy of The Shining Hour! The promise of 75 minutes of family stye internecine warfare is too darned rich to resist. It just might prove the perfect instrument for honing my emotional sword to an ever finer edge in preparation for the next family reunion. Bwahahaha! What evil lurks in the heart(s) of men,,,,and women? The Shadow knows.

Seriously, thanks for another great review. 

PS: Is Joan Crawford using a small fishing creel for a purse? :icon_scratch:


----------



## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> Your perfectly nuanced analogies have convinced me...I must see that movie. After all JR Ewing was my spiritual business management mentor and Bobby was my social mentor.....or perhaps I just had the hots for Victoria Principle. Now I'm off to find a copy of The Shining Hour! The promise of 75 minutes of family stye internecine warfare is too darned rich to resist. It just might prove the perfect instrument for honing my emotional sword to an ever finer edge in preparation for the next family reunion. Bwahahaha! What evil lurks in the heart(s) of men,,,,and women? The Shadow knows.
> 
> Seriously, thanks for another great review.
> 
> PS: Is Joan Crawford using a small fishing creel for a purse? :icon_scratch:


From memory, I think it was a basket with knitting needles, but my memory is vague on it. Joan Crawford, and I know you know this, is the woman to the far left. Also, check out Robert Young's (yes, that Robert Young, standing to the far right) sport coat. It is a beautifully tailored herringbone.


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> From memory, I think it was a basket with knitting needles, but my memory is vague on it. Joan Crawford, and I know you know this, is the woman to the far left. Also, check out Robert Young's (yes, that Robert Young, standing to the far right) sport coat. It is a beautifully tailored herringbone.


Indeed, as you say, "Joan Crawford is on the far left" and the gal with the woven basket in hand is Fay Bainter. Clearly I should stay off this site until I have finished my second mug of Joe in the wee hours of the AM! LOL.. :meme:


----------



## Fading Fast

*She Had to Say Yes* from 1933 with Loretta Young, Lyle Talbot and Hugh Herbert

Behold the pre-code in all its glory: showroom models for a clothing company double as the nighttime "entertainment" for out-of-town clients with the problem being the women have become so greedy and hardcore about it, the men are turned off.

So, the firm tries to recruit comely women from its secretarial pool to "entertain" the men on the assumption they'll be less impersonal and mercenary. If that's not enough, one senior executive whores out his fiancee, yes, his fiancee, to close a deal with a big commission in it for himself. But it gets better, he's two timing his fiancee while she's out at night "working" for him. All this was on screen in 1933.

The title didn't oversell the movie. Surprisingly, though, the company's owner makes a big point to the secretaries that they absolutely don't have to do this as it won't affect their job security to say no. To be sure, there are a hundred things still wrong with this, but it is interesting that the message, "you don't have to do this," was presented as sincere.

Possibly the most underrated actress of the pre-code era, Loretta Young - lithely and delicately beautiful - is the woman asked to answer the call to duty by her two-timing fiance. In a pre-code girl-power move (see enough pre-codes and you'll see plenty of girl power as women, often, didn't take this nonsense sitting down), Young turns the tables on the two-timing fiance and one of the out-of-town clients. It's a wonderful "don't screw with me" moment.

There is a honest love story wrapped inside all of this brutal inhumanity, which maybe was necessary to get it passed the state censor boards (many states had censor boards in the pre-code era that studios worried about). It also provides some relief for the audience from the exhausting non-stop hawking of human flesh going on in *She Had to Say Yes*.

But even that flicker of decency was presented in a pre-code package as a no-longer-innocent Loretta Young, in complete control of everyone now, kills the Hallmark moment of her desperately apologizing new suitor's proposal:


> Desperate suitor: "Will you forgive me [for doubting you at one point] and marry me? I'm terribly sorry"
> 
> Young: "I assume it's just a matter of choosing the lesser evil" [one man over another]
> 
> Suitor: "Then you will marry me?"
> 
> Young: "Of course, silly"


What followed that? Being late at night, the excited young man tells Young they'll go to the Justice of the Peace in the morning and turns to leave. But, Young stops him and, with a seductive look, whispers in his ear. He then picks her up and carries her off to the bedroom.

My guess, "take me now," was her short susurration. And with that, another pre-code movie fades to credits.


----------



## Fading Fast

*The African Queen* from 1951 with Katherine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart

Some movies are all but unbelievable, almost silly when examined closely, yet, like *The African Queen*, they still work marvelously. At the start of WWI, the brother half of an English brother-sister Christian missionary team in Africa is killed by invading Germans leaving his sheltered, middle-aged sister, Katherine Hepburn, stranded.

Along comes working-class captain, Humphrey Bogart, of the sad, little and dilapidated riverboat, African Queen. A regular supplier of the mission, he comes to assist when he learns of the attack only to find a shattered and isolated Hepburn all but helpless.

Despite a clear class difference between the educated and proper Hepburn and dirt-under-his-nails Bogart, it is Bogart who initially takes charge shepherding numb Hepburn onto his boat as her only chance of survival. Even while doing so, Bogie is sincerely deferential to Hepburn's putative class superiority. Meanwhile, Hepburn is ostensibly respectful, but also obliviously condescending to Bogie showing the power of class distinction in the Empire at that time.

Initially, Hepburn sits queen like under a sun umbrella as Bogie exhausts himself keeping his rickety boat going. But Hepburn emerges from her shock and, showing her English grit, hatches a crazy plan - including makeshift torpedoes and an all but suicide trip downriver - to use the diminutive African Queen to sink the large and forbidding German warship controlling this strategic waterway.

Rational Bogie tries to talk Hepburn out of this insanity, but her force of will and his class deference breaks his resistance. Soon, these two middle-aged oddballs are heading downriver in the least threatening looking boat ever to plot an attack on a warship. With its persnickety boiler, a frail tiller and a general rot that argues against it even staying afloat, it would appear the German Navy should have other things to worry about.

The joy in this one is less the moonshot plan than the chemistry between patriotic and well-meaning-but-obstinate Hepburn and I-just-want-to-live-to-see-tomorrow and carefree Bogie cohabiting for days on a tiny boat. As Hepburn rolls up her sleeves and works (and gets dirty) versus just dreaming up crazy plans and Bogie shows surprising mechanical and boating skills and courage (between periods of drunkenness), their class divide fades into mutual respect and then, believable, sexual attraction.

Kudos to director John Huston for making a very not-Hollywood movie that has the audience rooting hard for these two lost souls to, not only succeed in their cockamamie plan, but overcome their own resistance to romance. A sexual awakening in two reticent middle-aged people is a tricky business, but Huston, Hepburn and Bogart are up to the challenge.

Showing an intimate understanding of the material, Huston resolves both the crazy attack plan and the love story in a masterful climax that leaves the audience smiling at the whimsy and joy of it all. Is it believable, ehhhh, but it's a heck of a movie anyway.

N.B. Look for the moment when hope is all but lost and missionary Hepburn turns to the power of prayer - a prayer God answers in a very different way than requested by Ms. Hepburn. This happy agnostic enjoys a time when Hollywood would still make a movie with a positive Christian message. Cliched as it is, when the sun broke through the clouds symbolizing God's resolve, a tear might have formed in someone's eye; I'm not saying it did, just saying, it might have.


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 56844
> 
> *The African Queen* from 1951 with Katherine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart
> 
> Some movies are all but unbelievable, almost silly when examined closely, yet, like *The African Queen*, they still work marvelously. At the start of WWI, the brother half of an English brother-sister Christian missionary team in Africa is killed by invading Germans leaving his sheltered, middle-aged sister, Katherine Hepburn, stranded.
> 
> Along comes working-class captain, Humphrey Bogart, of the sad, little and dilapidated riverboat, African Queen. A regular supplier of the mission, he comes to assist when he learns of the attack only to find a shattered and isolated Hepburn all but helpless.
> 
> Despite a clear class difference between the educated and proper Hepburn and dirt-under-his-nails Bogart, it is Bogart who initially takes charge shepherding numb Hepburn onto his boat as her only chance of survival. Even while doing so, Bogie is sincerely deferential to Hepburn's putative class superiority. Meanwhile, Hepburn is ostensibly respectful, but also obliviously condescending to Bogie showing the power of class distinction in the Empire at that time.
> 
> Initially, Hepburn sits queen like under a sun umbrella as Bogie exhausts himself keeping his rickety boat going. But Hepburn emerges from her shock and, showing her English grit, hatches a crazy plan - including makeshift torpedoes and an all but suicide trip downriver - to use the diminutive African Queen to sink the large and forbidding German warship controlling this strategic waterway.
> 
> Rational Bogie tries to talk Hepburn out of this insanity, but her force of will and his class deference breaks his resistance. Soon, these two middle-aged oddballs are heading downriver in the least threatening looking boat ever to plot an attack on a warship. With its persnickety boiler, a frail tiller and a general rot that argues against it even staying afloat, it would appear the German Navy should have other things to worry about.
> 
> The joy in this one is less the moonshot plan than the chemistry between patriotic and well-meaning-but-obstinate Hepburn and I-just-want-to-live-to-see-tomorrow and carefree Bogie cohabiting for days on a tiny boat. As Hepburn rolls up her sleeves and works (and gets dirty) versus just dreaming up crazy plans and Bogie shows surprising mechanical and boating skills and courage (between periods of drunkenness), their class divide fades into mutual respect and then, believable, sexual attraction.
> 
> Kudos to director John Huston for making a very not-Hollywood movie that has the audience rooting hard for these two lost souls to, not only succeed in their cockamamie plan, but overcome their own resistance to romance. A sexual awakening in two reticent middle-aged people is a tricky business, but Huston, Hepburn and Bogart are up to the challenge.
> 
> Showing an intimate understanding of the material, Huston resolves both the crazy attack plan and the love story in a masterful climax that leaves the audience smiling at the whimsy and joy of it all. Is it believable, ehhhh, but it's a heck of a movie anyway.
> 
> N.B. Look for the moment when hope is all but lost and missionary Hepburn turns to the power of prayer - a prayer God answers in a very different way than requested by Ms. Hepburn. This happy agnostic enjoys a time when Hollywood would still make a movie with a positive Christian message. Cliched as it is, when the sun broke through the clouds symbolizing God's resolve, a tear might have formed in someone's eye; I'm not saying it did, just saying, it might have.


At risk of being identified as one needing to get a life, I must tell you I have viewed the movie The African Queen at least five times...it is one of my favorites, for sure! And you, my friend are a truly gifted story teller and wordsmith. Your review of this iconic movie is the absolute best literary synopsis of this film that I have seen. It is well written, flows naturally, builds to an emotional climax and leaves the reader with a need, yes need, to watch the movie...again! Thank you......I think?


----------



## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> At risk of being identified as one needing to get a life, I must tell you I have viewed the movie The African Queen at least five times...it is one of my favorites, for sure! And you, my friend are a truly gifted story teller and wordsmith. Your review of this iconic movie is the absolute best literary synopsis of this film that I have seen. It is well written, flows naturally, builds to an emotional climax and leaves the reader with a need, yes need, to watch the movie...again! Thank you......I think?


I'm blushing, thank you for your very kind comments.

As your multiple viewings attest - it's a heck of a movie. I will watch it the next time it's on to try to start to catch up to you.


----------



## Fading Fast

*One More Tomorrow* from 1946 with Dennis Morgan, Ann Sheridan, Alexis Smith, Jane Wyman and Jack Carson

Halfway through *One More Tomorrow*, I couldn't stop feeling an odd deja vu as I was pretty sure I had never seen this movie, but somehow, the story felt familiar. Then it hit me, it is a reworked-for-the-Motion-Picture-Production-Code version of the outstanding 1932 pre-code movie *Animal Kingdom *(which a quick trip to Google confirmed).

*Animal Kingdom* is the story of a man who has an artist girlfriend that, in pre-code fashion, he sleeps with as they spend time at each other's apartment. His wealthy and proper father wants him to marry a socially acceptable woman, which in a moment of weakness, he does.

In the 1932 version of the story, while the man is fond of his new wife, she, like his father, is conventional and concerned with "society;" whereas, he had more fun with his "not respectable" bohemian girlfriend whom he misses. The rest of the movie is watching the man decide if he's willing to settle for an okay marriage or if he'll blow it all up to be with his former girlfriend. It's an adult movie that handles sex, relationships and hard decisions in a mature, nuanced and, even to us today, modern way.

But fourteen years later, with the Motion Picture Production Code in control, the adult elements of the story had to be altered - no casual sex, no sleepovers, no honest discussion of a man having to choose between a nice-but-passionless marriage and an avant-gaurd girlfriend.

Instead, Dennis Morgan is the liberal scion of a wealthy industrialist who invests in a floundering leftist magazine in part, to thumb his nose at his conventional father (that he uses his father's "tainted" money to invest doesn't seem to bother him).

He then falls in love with the periodical's photographer, free-spirit Ann Sheridan. She, ultimately, rejects his offer of marriage believing she wouldn't fit into his society family. Morgan, on the rebound, marries gold-digging society woman Alexis Smith.

The rest of the movie, in the 1946 version, is watching Morgan slowly realizing his wife is a social-climbing manipulative shrew who only married him for his money and position.

That, along with an off-the-shelf subplot about Morgan's liberal magazine potentially exposing a defence-contract scandal involving his Dad's friends, sparks the movie's climax where Morgan has to choose between his "values" and his "social position." Yawn. You know long before Morgan does what he's going to do.

A mature story from 1932 about a man torn between two decent women became a cardboard story in 1946 about good liberals and artists fighting evil businessmen and snobby society types. Even written to make the Dad look bad, I had more sympathy for Morgan's father who seemed to truly love his son than Morgan who came across as another rich liberal kid willing to denounce his Dad, but still (sometimes) take his money.

A genuine and moving love-triangle story from 1932 lost its excitement when it was desexed and turned into a flat good-versus-evil narrative to meet the demands of the Motion Picture Production Code and Hollywood's liberal lean. *One More Tomorrow* argues that not every story could be harmlessly nipped and tucked to fit the code.

N.B.1. Despite a dull story, there is some witty dialogue that felt "added in," which probably is what happened as the Epstein Brothers - the guys who wrote much of Casablanca's memorable humor - were brought in as writers on this one.

N.B.2. Ann Sheridan, known as the "Oomph Girl" for her sexual allure, is, in truth, only average pretty for Hollywood, but her appeal comes from her being smart, funny and in on the joke. Few can deliver a sarcastic aside faster and with humor, not asperity, better than Ms. Sheridan. The below clip is from a different movie, but watch Ms. Sheridan absolutely destroy George Raft with the line at the end in *They Drive By Night*:


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## Fading Fast

*Merry Wives of Reno* from 1934 with Guy Kibbee, Margaret Lindsay, Glenda Farrel and Frank McHugh

This is not a good movie, but - but there are no buts - this is not a good movie. Even some of the better talents from Warner Bros stable couldn't stand this one up on its hind legs. Other than some time-travel fun for us today plus a look at Reno's divorce system in its heyday, there's just not much here.

Two wives, owing to misunderstandings with their husbands, head off to Reno for divorces with said husbands fast on their heels trying to change their wives' minds. The misunderstandings - a mix up about overcoats - is too silly to set this entire event in motion, but even that is further confused by another couple involved where the husband has a sheep with him for, one guesses, comic relief.

After this circus lands in Reno, the confusion continues as the women stop and start divorce proceedings time and again depending on if they believe their husbands' excuses and apologies at that moment or not. Thrown into the mix is a hotel bellboy, Frank McHugh, who has a side business doing everything for the guests from getting them into card games to, umm, satisfying the women. In the end, most of the problems sort of work out, but you really don't care much at that point.

Almost everybody is miscast in this one. Talented Guy Kibbee is one of the husbands in trouble because he's a womanizer. This is ludicrous as he's fat, bald and older looking than his fifty years - young women aren't falling for this guy. The lovely Margaret Lindsay is out of her element as an angry wife in a screwball comedy and even outstanding Frank McHugh seems uncomfortable playing a slicker-than-heck schemer who is also the hotel's resident Lothario.

It is neat to see how Reno's economy - including hotels filled with women trying to establish residency and office buildings chocablock with divorce lawyers - is set up to handle a good chunk of the country's divorce business back then. Also, there's some neat 1930s cars, trains and architecture, but it's not enough as, even at just over an hour, this entire effort drags.


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## Fading Fast

*The Last Flight* from 1931

"Isn't he just sorta wasting himself?"

"On the contrary, he's trying awfully hard to get hold of himself."

*The Last Flight *is an incipient "talky," but it's also an early and powerful movie instantiation of PTSD veterans or, as these Great War former servicemen were known then, "the lost generation."

Four airmen with physical and mental injuries face returning to civilian life at the end of the war. The army physician who signs their release papers sends them off with kind wishes and advice, but can offer no ongoing support. Turning to a fellow doctor, he describes these men as "spent bullets" who were "taught to kill not live."

The men make their way, not home, where they'd have to "adjust" to civilian life, which they know intuitively they can't do, but to Paris. They hide their anguish behind a front of partying and a devil-may-care attitude. With various combinations of eye tics, burnt hands and thousand-yard stares, these broken men support each other as best they can as they drink their days away.

Along the way, they meet cute, flighty, but sensitive Nikki, played by Helen Chandler (a wonderful slip of attractiveness). They "adopt" her into their group, not for sexual pursuit, as that's too much for these men right now, but as a faint flicker of what women and pre-war life used to mean to them.

This character-study not plot-driven movie has a Hemingwayesque feel as the group spends its days in an alcoholic haze taking trips here and there for no reason until finally winding up in Portugal. There, climatic trips to a bloody bullfight and a carnival shooting gallery bring back the horrors of war, shattering their fragile stability.

While these men wear tailored suits, go to nice bars and have physical injuries that are tamped down for the movie audience, as was done then, *The Last Flight* is a powerful and heartbreaking study of a World War I version of what would come to be called post traumatic stress disorder.

These physically and mentally damaged men truly are, as noted by the army doctor, spent bullets moving with whatever is left of a flagging forward trajectory they no longer fully control. We tend to think it is only more-modern movies that are willing to take on provocative issues, but *The Last Flight* was made ninety years ago in the insanely valuable and too-short pre-code era.


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## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 57052
> 
> *The Last Flight* from 1931
> 
> "Isn't he just sorta wasting himself?"
> 
> "On the contrary, he's trying awfully hard to get hold of himself."
> 
> *The Last Flight *is an incipient "talky," but it's also an early and powerful movie instantiation of PTSD veterans or, as these Great War former servicemen were known then, "the lost generation."
> 
> Four airmen with physical and mental injuries face returning to civilian life at the end of the war. The army physician who signs their release papers sends them off with kind wishes and advice, but can offer no ongoing support. Turning to a fellow doctor, he describes these men as "spent bullets" who were "taught to kill not live."
> 
> The men make their way, not home, where they'd have to "adjust" to civilian life, which they know intuitively they can't do, but to Paris. They hide their anguish behind a front of partying and a devil-may-care attitude. With various combinations of eye tics, burnt hands and thousand-yard stares, these broken men support each other as best they can as they drink their days away.
> 
> Along the way, they meet cute, flighty, but sensitive Nikki, played by Helen Chandler (a wonderful slip of attractiveness). They "adopt" her into their group, not for sexual pursuit, as that's too much for these men right now, but as a faint flicker of what women and pre-war life used to mean to them.
> 
> This character-study not plot-driven movie has a Hemingwayesque feel as the group spends its days in an alcoholic haze taking trips here and there for no reason until finally winding up in Portugal. There, climatic trips to a bloody bullfight and a carnival shooting gallery bring back the horrors of war, shattering their fragile stability.
> 
> While these men wear tailored suits, go to nice bars and have physical injuries that are tamped down for the movie audience, as was done then, *The Last Flight* is a powerful and heartbreaking study of a World War I version of what would come to be called post traumatic stress disorder.
> 
> These physically and mentally damaged men truly are, as noted by the army doctor, spent bullets moving with whatever is left of a flagging forward trajectory they no longer fully control. We tend to think it is only more-modern movies that are willing to take on provocative issues, but *The Last Flight* was made ninety years ago in the insanely valuable and too-short pre-code era.


"The Last Flight." Your well written, insightful review has convinced me this is a movie well worth watching. Thanks!


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## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> "The Last Flight." Your well written, insightful review has convinced me this is a movie well worth watching. Thanks!


I was very impressed with it, but it does have an early '30s style and clunkiness that takes a bit of adjusting too. But once you do, the movie is quite powerful. I hope you enjoy it.


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## Fading Fast

*Jeanne Eagles* from 1957 with Kim Novak, Jeff Chandler and Agnes Moorehead

Prior to this movie, these are the major things I knew about 1920's stage-and-early-screen-star Jeanne Eagles (1890-1929):

She was arrestingly beautiful
She had major drug and alcohol problems
The one performance I saw of hers, 1929's *The Letter*, was captivating even with her substance abuse all but on display (she died later that same year)
After seeing this 1957 movie and having a sense that it played fast and loose with the facts, I read the Jeanne Eagles Wikipedia page (knowing Wikipedia has its issues, but still, the outline of the biography is probably somewhat close to reality).

As is Hollywood's wont, it created its own Jeanne Eagles story inside the broad sketches of her life. Watching the movie, even without knowing her bio until afterwards, you could feel the "Hollywood treatment" as the story fit too neatly into a typical fifties' Hollywood "star succumbs to substance abuse" template.

In the movie, Eagles, played with gusto by Kim Novak, jumps from carnival "actress" to major Broadway star in one big leap. In real life, Eagles seemed to have worked her way up through both the theater and Hollywood. It happened quickly, but not as in the film, in one giant jump when she "steals" a role from an aging alcoholic actress (the foreboding was heavy handed).

Real-life Eagles' was married and divorced twice; whereas, fictional Eagles married and divorced once, but all the while carried a torch for the one true love of her life, good-guy Jeff Chandler. It's a nice Hollywood story, but apparently not true.

Eagles' alcohol and drug abuse is presented lightly in the movie as, yes, an alcohol issue, but the drugs are "prescribed" by a shady doctor, which makes movie-version Eagles almost a victim. No lighters, spoons, syringes and needle tracks in this movie. In real-life, Eagles seemed an early version of Keith Richards' chosen "booze and pills and powders" lifestyle.

Even Novak, who maybe looks, ehhh, a bit like Eagles, misses the one key Eagles physical feature - her early heroine chicness. Eagles, at least later in her short life, had that drug-user wan fragility that became oddly popular in the 1990s, but healthy-as-heck Novak, despite heavy dark eyeliner, simply looks vibrantly sanguine.

If you accept that the movie only brushes against the real Jeanne Eagles biography now and then, it's okay for what it is: a 1950s-style rise-and-fall morality tale stamped out of Hollywood's assembly line. In another five years, Hollywood would show more ugly reality in its drug- and alcohol-abuse movies, but in the mid '50s, most, like *Jeanne Eagles*, were handled with a gentler touch.

Maybe a 1920s stage and film star is too remote for a modern audience. And God knows, it's not as if present-day Hollywood hasn't saturated us with substance-abuse tales, but there might be a new period movie waiting to be made from the Jeanne Eagles story.

Ms. Eagles herself.


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## Fading Fast

*Sinner's Holiday* from 1930 with James Cagney and Joan Blondell

At one hour in length on the dot, you look back and wonder how they jammed so much plot into sixty minutes, but Warner Bros. pre-codes, in particular, did that.

A matriarch who runs a penny arcade in a Coney-Island-style amusement park tries to keep her adult kids - two boys and a girl - on a short leash, but she clearly has a favorite, and weak spot for, younger son James Cagney.

Unfortunately, somewhat unbeknownst to momma (she sees no evil when it comes to son Cagney), he's rum running out of the arcade next door while romping around with arcade worker Joan Blondel - no favorite of momma's. Thrown into this mix is momma's daughter who is dating (and denying it to momma) a ne'er-do-well arcade roustabout with too-high an opinion of himself.

With the police poking around the amusement park looking for the bootleg operation they know is there but can't quite find and Cagney, maybe, shorting his mob boss, it's all about to explode and, then, does. A murder, a dead body stuffed in an arcade, a planted gun and a false alibi leads to a lot for the police to sort out all in less than a quarter of an hour, but Warner Bros. never saw multiple plot entanglement it couldn't address in mere minutes.

Poor momma has to come to terms with who her favorite son really is and who her daughter is really dating. After that emotional moment, it's back to running the penny arcade as, well, it's the Depression and the business has to open.

The real fun in this pre-code is not the plot, but the time travel to an early thirties amusement park (even if only to a Hollywood-set version). Also revealing of the period, the man dating momma's daughter acts with exaggerated (for the day) homosexual mannerism that seemed to slip into a lot of thirties movies. One assumes those gestures flew past many viewers, but were delivered, with a wink-and-a-nod, for those in the audience who got it.

Finally, this is Cagney's film debut and the first movie he'd do with regular partner Joan Blondel. Cagney is still perfecting the "Cagney persona" here, but you can see it forming. His rapid body movements and warp-speed-dialogue delivery are a bit herky-jerky, but within a few movies, full-blown Cagney would burst to stardom. It's fun to see him just before all that is about to happen.


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## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 57188
> 
> *Sinner's Holiday* from 1930 with James Cagney and Joan Blondell
> 
> At one hour in length on the dot, you look back and wonder how they jammed so much plot into sixty minutes, but Warner Bros. pre-codes, in particular, did that.
> 
> A matriarch who runs a penny arcade in a Coney-Island-style amusement park tries to keep her adult kids - two boys and a girl - on a short leash, but she clearly has a favorite, and weak spot for, younger son James Cagney.
> 
> Unfortunately, somewhat unbeknownst to momma (she sees no evil when it comes to son Cagney), he's rum running out of the arcade next door while romping around with arcade worker Joan Blondel - no favorite of momma's. Thrown into this mix is momma's daughter who is dating (and denying it to momma) a ne'er-do-well arcade roustabout with too-high an opinion of himself.
> 
> With the police poking around the amusement park looking for the bootleg operation they know is there but can't quite find and Cagney, maybe, shorting his mob boss, it's all about to explode and, then, does. A murder, a dead body stuffed in an arcade, a planted gun and a false alibi leads to a lot for the police to sort out all in less than a quarter of an hour, but Warner Bros. never saw multiple plot entanglement it couldn't address in mere minutes.
> 
> Poor momma has to come to terms with who her favorite son really is and who her daughter is really dating. After that emotional moment, it's back to running the penny arcade as, well, it's the Depression and the business has to open.
> 
> The real fun in this pre-code is not the plot, but the time travel to an early thirties amusement park (even if only to a Hollywood-set version). Also revealing of the period, the man dating momma's daughter acts with exaggerated (for the day) homosexual mannerism that seemed to slip into a lot of thirties movies. One assumes those gestures flew past many viewers, but were delivered, with a wink-and-a-nod, for those in the audience who got it.
> 
> Finally, this is Cagney's film debut and the first movie he'd do with regular partner Joan Blondel. Cagney is still perfecting the "Cagney persona" here, but you can see it forming. His rapid body movements and warp-speed-dialogue delivery are a bit herky-jerky, but within a few movies, full-blown Cagney would burst to stardom. It's fun to see him just before all that is about to happen.


Paraphrasing a line from Jerry McGuire, "You had me at the mention of James Cagney!" Anything with James Cagney in it is worth watching and Sinner's Holiday is on my list.


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## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> Paraphrasing a line from Jerry McGuire, "You had me at the mention of James Cagney!" Anything with James Cagney in it is worth watching and Sinner's Holiday is on my list.


He's still getting his acting sea legs in this one, but even so, he's got an insanely powerful movie presence.


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## Fading Fast

*Murder, My Sweet* from 1944 with Dick Powell, Claire Trevor (above left, revealing a lot of leg) and Anne Shirley

Powell as Marlow (sniffing the air): "Is that you?"
Ann Shirley: "Is what me?"
Powell: "That nice expensive smell."

It took until this, probably my third viewing in thirty years, to finally appreciate *Murder, My Sweet*. It doesn't have the insane perfectness of *The Maltese Falcon*, the prurient bookshop scene from *The Big Sleep* or Edward G. Robinson picking Fred MacMurray apart stitch by stitch in *Double Indemnity*, but it does do just about everything film-noir right.

Powell wears the Phillip Marlowe private investigator role with weary comfort and a wonderful balance of cynicism and fatigued morality, the only honest philosophical combination adulthood leaves a sentient being.

Hired to find an ex-con's former girlfriend, Powell's investigation morphs into a ride-along for the payoff of a stolen jade bracelet, which results in the murder of a bag man. This leads him to a wealthy and broken family comprising an older husband, a young straying wife, Claire Trevor, and her angry adult stepdaughter, Ann Shirley.

It's another entry in the popular noir subgenre of rich people living in mausoleum-like mansions. Oftentimes, as in *Murder, My Sweet*, these families have too many pretty and, umm, "unsatisfied" young women with nothing to do so they get themselves involved with dandy men and murder (see *The Big Sleep* and *Born to Kill* amongst others).

As Powell continues to dig by instinct in the dark, almost everybody tries to hire, fire, pay off, beat up or kill him (sometimes all five) anytime he gets close to the truth. Nobody, save maybe, the two-steps-behind-it-all police, wants the real story coming out.

But since Powell has the noir-era PI code requiring a private investigator or lawyer (see Perry Mason), who takes on a client, to stay with that client no matter how dishonorable the client may be, he just keeps getting up, brushing himself off and going back in for more. It's a code of personal integrity, not charity, which is why it feels foreign to us today.

After a bunch of head bonking and gunfire, a lot of sexual tension in the Powell-Trevor-Shirley love triangle, a few rough police interrogations and too many lies to keep track of, Powell unravels this murder, jewel-heist and unrequited-love mystery and makes off with the not-guilty woman.

It's a solid noir ride from beginning to end as nobody is totally honest, some are horribly dishonest, sex is used as a weapon, often by the women, streets are dark and wet, men carry guns and truncheons and you know whom you are rooting for, but not always why. It took me a few viewing, but now I fully appreciate the noir wonderfulness of *Murder, My Sweet.*

N.B. 1. Claire Trevor, a noirland regular, might have broken the land-speed record for aging as she goes from middle-aged seductress in this one to withered alcoholic four years later in *Key Largo*.

N.B. 2. While it only appeared briefly in the movie, check out, below, the insane Art Deco grill on the wonderfully named 1931 Isotta Fraschini (which sounds to me more like an Italian cinema sex goddess than a car).


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## Fading Fast

*Leatherheads* from 2008 with George Clooney, Renee Zellweger, John Krasinski and John Price

If I'm not the target audience for this movie, I don't know who is. Yet, that is the problem as *Leatherheads* feels like a movie designed to appeal to me - a fan of Classic Hollywood movies from the thirties and forties - instead of being a modern period movie that is simply well done.

In the twenties, aging football star, George Clooney, in the incipient days of the NFL when the game's survival is still in question, recruits John Krasinski, a college star (the popular football league of that era) and WWI hero, to save the professional league. Just as Krasinski signs up, star reporter Renee Zellweger pursues rumors Krasinski's war record is fabricated.

Clooney, Zellweger and Krasinski quickly form a love triangle amped up by Clooney's career being threatened by the younger Krasinski. Thrown into the mix are a cookie-cutter corrupt agent, John Price, a hard-as-nails newspaper editor, a drunk reporter and a bunch of football player caricatures, meaning all the elements are here for a fun, lighthearted movie.

But that's the hitch as it all feels constructed to mimic the screwball romcoms of the thirties - think *Bringing up Baby* or *His Girl Friday*. *Leatherheads* is almost a checklist of those older movies: love triangle, check; fast witty dialogue(well, kinda), check; cardboard bad guys, check; comic relief character, check; wacky chases and getaways, check; happy ending (not a spoiler as you just know this from the beginning), check.

It's not bad as the story is serviceable, the actors talented and the period details insanely enjoyable; it just has no heart. It feels reverse engineered from a dissection of its thirties antecedents.

Maybe it could have overcome all that if for a second you believed that Clooney and Zellweger or Krasinski and Zellweger are in any way, shape or form attracted to each other, but in that triangle, only Clooney and Krasinski seemed to have any genuine connection.

Perhaps director Clooney should have asked Robert Redford to have taken the reins as Redford seems to have a firmer hand than Clooney at making period movies redolent of Classic Hollywood without having them slide into weak parody. Still, *Leatherheads* is worth the watch for the incredible twenties clothes, trains, architecture and early football ephemera alone.


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## Fading Fast

*Beauty and the Boss* from 1932 with Warren William, Marian Marsh, Charles Butterworth and David Manners

"We were all wrong, you see. You're a girl of the evening whom I only met, unfortunately, in the daytime."

- Warren William firing his secretary so he can keep her as a mistress.

I have no doubt the romcom goes back to the old nickelodeons, but we can date the modern "talkie" movie version of them at least as far back as *Beauty and the Boss* in 1932.

All the basic elements of the romcom are here. A man and a woman who have no interest in having a meaningful relationship with anyone are thrown together at work. He's a hard driving businessman who treats women as playthings and she's a serious secretary with no time for romance. Then, after a bunch of misunderstandings and denials of true feelings, they finally come together right at the last minute when it looks like all hope is lost.

It's a ridiculous formula that has been incredibly successful for, again, in talking pictures, ninety years because it's fun as heck to watch unfold. Warren William is the businessman with no time for romance and Marian Marsh is the cute, serious and frumpy-dressed whizbang secretary who makes William's work life incredibly efficient.

She's indifferent, at first, to his peccadilloes and he sees her as nothing more than an office machine. But as their feelings slowly grow, Marsh, for reasons she doesn't understand immediately, becomes perturbed about William's "dating" habits. When she starts to intentionally muck-up his personal life, he is mildly annoyed, but neither one of these two has yet to recognize what is happening - as in any good romcom.

After that, it's what would become more standard romcom stuff: he tries harder to enjoy his frivolous relationships but becomes angry when they no longer please him, while she shows interest in other men trying, without fully realizing it, to make him jealous. A bunch of other nonsense also goes on about mixed up business meetings and men and women chasing each other around a restaurant with Marsh escaping in a waiting horse-drawn carriage. To this day, romcoms love horse-drawn carriages.

As in any successful romcom, this one works because you like the characters and are rooting for them to get together. Playing to what would become formula, she's cute as heck and he's a handsome bumbling idiot without her. In an early scene where she arranges his merger meetings, Marsh's acting is impressive as she delivers dialogue like machine-gun fire with William, her boss, struggling just to keep up. You know, right then, who the smarter one in this relationship will be.

It all happens in just over an hour, but in the 1930s, Warner Bros. could probably have condensed *War and Peace* to just over an hour without dropping too much story. Proving how *Beauty and the Boss* set the formula for so many romcoms to come, the ending has William dictating a letter to unaware Marsh asking her to marry him. Different versions of the surprise dictated-letter-proposal have popped up in numerous romcoms ever since.

It's silly, predictable and a bit clunky (it's an early talkie), but also great fun to see a quick romcom that, even in 1932, already had many of the key elements of its genre in place. Jennifer Aniston and Meg Ryan might or might not know it, but their hugely successful careers in the 1990s as romcom stars owe more than a hat-tip to Marian Marsh in *Beauty and the Boss*.

N.B. Speed Drill: Look for William's insanely cool Art Deco office / note the pre-MeToo moment where William fires his secretary, pays her a large severance and, then, sets her up as his mistress as he explicitly won't mixed business and pleasure / catch the always enjoyable Charles Butterworth tossing off lines like this as a compliment to Marsh's genuine business talents, "The Barron's [William's] other secretaries were fast too, but not around the office."


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## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 57350
> 
> *Beauty and the Boss* from 1932 with Warren William, Marian Marsh, Charles Butterworth and David Manners
> 
> "We were all wrong, you see. You're a girl of the evening whom I only met, unfortunately, in the daytime."
> 
> - Warren William firing his secretary so he can keep her as a mistress.
> 
> I have no doubt the romcom goes back to the old nickelodeons, but we can date the modern "talkie" movie version of them at least as far back as *Beauty and the Boss* in 1932.
> 
> All the basic elements of the romcom are here. A man and a woman who have no interest in having a meaningful relationship with anyone are thrown together at work. He's a hard driving businessman who treats women as playthings and she's a serious secretary with no time for romance. Then, after a bunch of misunderstandings and denials of true feelings, they finally come together right at the last minute when it looks like all hope is lost.
> 
> It's a ridiculous formula that has been incredibly successful for, again, in talking pictures, ninety years because it's fun as heck to watch unfold. Warren William is the businessman with no time for romance and Marian Marsh is the cute, serious and frumpy-dressed whizbang secretary who makes William's work life incredibly efficient.
> 
> She's indifferent, at first, to his peccadilloes and he sees her as nothing more than an office machine. But as their feelings slowly grow, Marsh, for reasons she doesn't understand immediately, becomes perturbed about William's "dating" habits. When she starts to intentionally muck-up his personal life, he is mildly annoyed, but neither one of these two has yet to recognize what is happening - as in any good romcom.
> 
> After that, it's what would become more standard romcom stuff: he tries harder to enjoy his frivolous relationships but becomes angry when they no longer please him, while she shows interest in other men trying, without fully realizing it, to make him jealous. A bunch of other nonsense also goes on about mixed up business meetings and men and women chasing each other around a restaurant with Marsh escaping in a waiting horse-drawn carriage. To this day, romcoms love horse-drawn carriages.
> 
> As in any successful romcom, this one works because you like the characters and are rooting for them to get together. Playing to what would become formula, she's cute as heck and he's a handsome bumbling idiot without her. In an early scene where she arranges his merger meetings, Marsh's acting is impressive as she delivers dialogue like machine-gun fire with William, her boss, struggling just to keep up. You know, right then, who the smarter one in this relationship will be.
> 
> It all happens in just over an hour, but in the 1930s, Warner Bros. could probably have condensed *War and Peace* to just over an hour without dropping too much story. Proving how *Beauty and the Boss* set the formula for so many romcoms to come, the ending has William dictating a letter to unaware Marsh asking her to marry him. Different versions of the surprise dictated-letter-proposal have popped up in numerous romcoms ever since.
> 
> It's silly, predictable and a bit clunky (it's an early talkie), but also great fun to see a quick romcom that, even in 1932, already had many of the key elements of its genre in place. Jennifer Aniston and Meg Ryan might or might not know it, but their hugely successful careers in the 1990s as romcom stars owe more than a hat-tip to Marian Marsh in *Beauty and the Boss*.
> 
> N.B. Speed Drill: Look for William's insanely cool Art Deco office / note the pre-MeToo moment where William fires his secretary, pays her a large severance and, then, sets her up as his mistress as he explicitly won't mixed business and pleasure / catch the always enjoyable Charles Butterworth tossing off lines like this as a compliment to Marsh's genuine business talents, "The Barron's [William's] other secretaries were fast too, but not around the office."


Sounds like an entertaining/interesting , yet also familiar plot. It's on the list, but last evening SWMBO and I popped our DVD copy of North by Northwest in the player. and spent the evening with Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint and James Mason. Every time we watch the movie, I can't make up my mind what most impresses me...the classic styles, the mediocre acting that comes off so well it thrills us every time, the $2 ticket Roger Thornhill gets for Drunken and Reckless Driving, Eve Kendall being seduced by the CIA to spy on her boyfriend after they told her he was an international spy and suspected murderer. and the list goes on and on.

However I am pleased to report that my wife and I have had the past good fortune to visit the the location that the airplane chase scene in the movie takes place; the intersection of routes 30 and 41 in Northern Indiana. The 360 degrees of cornfields and the intersection are still there, but with great big reinforced concrete cloverleafs planted in the middle of it all. One never tires of the classics, but this one always leaves me with the unrequited desire to visit Mount Rushmore and explore the wooded areas at the top of the monument...some day it's going to happen! LOL.


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## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> Sounds like an entertaining/interesting , yet also familiar plot. It's on the list, but last evening SWMBO and I popped our DVD copy of North by Northwest in the player. and spent the evening with Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint and James Mason. Every time we watch the movie, I can't make up my mind what most impresses me...the classic styles, the mediocre acting that comes off so well it thrills us every time, the $2 ticket Roger Thornhill gets for Drunken and Reckless Driving, Eve Kendall being seduced by the CIA to spy on her boyfriend after they told her he was an international spy and suspected murderer. and the list goes on and on.
> 
> However I am pleased to report that my wife and I have had the past good fortune to visit the the location of the airplane chase scene in the movie takes place; the intersection of routes 30 and 41 in Northern Indiana. The 360 degrees of cornfields and the intersection are still there, but with great big reinforced concrete cloverleafs planted in the middle of it all. One never tires of the classics, but this one always leaves me with the unrequited desire to visit Mount Rushmore and explore the wooded areas at the top of the monument...some day it's going to happen! LOL.


Watching "North by Northwest," and those other "big" Hitchcock movies are like visiting with old friends. It's great that you and your wife can enjoy those together.


----------



## Fading Fast

*Breakfast at Tiffany's* from 1961 with Audrey Hepburn, George Peppard, Patricia Neal, Buddy Ebsen and Mickey Rooney

TCM's current series, *Reframed: Classic Films in the Rearview Mirror*, discusses the racism, sexism, prejudices and stereotypes in movie history. It's been a smart and honest approach so far that doesn't elide the ugliness, but does recognize that, effectively, it's a part of these movies that can't be effaced, nor TCM argues, should it.

If you want to watch these movies, you can't avoid seeing these odious period cultural norms (some of which were already dated at the time as culture moves forward haphazardly). For *Breakfast at Tiffany's*, the TCM discussion rightly points out the terrible, racist and insulting character of Mr. Yunioshi played by Mickey Rooney. His portrayal of a buck-toothed, bumbling and immature Japanese man is awful, insulting and cringe worthy.

The truly crazy thing about Mr. Yunioshi is his character fits neither the sophisticated style, nor the forward-looking social commentary, of *Breakfast at Tiffany's*. Sadly, it's just an awful and demeaning part of an otherwise outstanding film.

Having seen *Breakfast at Tiffany's* more times than I'll admit unless under extreme interrogation methods, my relationship with this movie is like visiting with a life-long friend. Each time, I focus on a different aspect of the movie as I have long since absorbed the plot.

For newbies, the plot is Audry Hepburn, as Holly Golightly - a young New York City partier, socialite wannabe, gold digger and courtesan - having her confidently cynical approach to life disrupted by her upstairs neighbor, George Peppard.

He, like Holly, makes his living from wealthier New Yorkers who, no other way to say it, pay to have sex with these very pretty people. While Peppard is weary of his demimonde lifestyle and immediately sees the value of real love with Hepburn, it takes Hepburn the length of the movie - as her various marry-someone-rich plans continue to fall through - to see its value too.

The story is a good one, but what captured my attention this viewing is *Breakfast at Tiffany's* style. Though being, at times, sad, morose and bleak, every scene, even the most dispiriting, is visually appealing. Bus depots, the NYC Public Library, police stations and even strip clubs are all stylishly beautiful in *Breakfast at Tiffany's*. Despite Hepburn's and Peppard's problems, you want to live in this world (if it would have you).

When a depressed Ms. Hepburn, suffering from a case of what she calls "the mean reds," sits on her window sill, with one foot resting on the fire escape singing the melancholy *Moon River*, she's in jeans and a grey sweatshirt with her wet hair wrapped in a towel, yet she looks fantastic.

A five-and-dime store never appeared more attractive and color coordinated than the one where Hepburn and Peppard don and then abscond with plastic Halloween cat and dog masks. It's not the disheveled Woolworth of my youth, but like a store designed by Andy Warhol at the height of his Pop Art powers.

The wardrobes - where one assumes half or more the movie's budget was spent - are a trip though early sixties cool with Hepburn wearing the best little black dress (not the famous opening-scene evening gown) possibly of all time. She has so many wardrobe changes that several of them take place on screen and serve to advance the plot (see Hepburn preparing to go to Sing Sing or in the cab after her time at the local precinct).

But she's matched outfit change for outfit change by Peppard's cougar-provided sartorial splendor (note his insane closet). Even said cougar, Patricia Neal, strikes a style note. She sweeps in and out of scenes while treating Peppard like the kept man he is, but with so much over-the-top style you kinda like her, or respect her, or are scared of her, or something, but you are aware of her panache.

Even at the end, when all pretense is stripped away and the two lovers, broke, spiritually broken and soaked to the bone, are standing in a garbage-strewn alley (has garbage ever looked so artfully arranged?), with a wet cat pressed between them, their world is still visually enticing.

None of this even touches on the other style icon of the movie, New York City itself. Maybe that can be the focus on my next viewing. Director Blake Edwards had a style vision for this movie that carries so consistently from scene to scene that it serves as a narrative technique. Yes, there's an engaging story, talented acting and much pain and sorrow, but *Breakfast at Tiffany's* is also an insanely beautiful trip through early-sixties New York City from the opening to closing shot.

TCM deserves Kudos for its honest, unvarnished look at movies like *Breakfast at Tiffany's*. But being blunt, it's also a self-preservation effort by TCM to get in front of woke cancel culture as its survival depends on these movies being "acceptable" viewing. TCM has one product - old movies - so it can't afford for them to be the next thing tossed on this unforgiving generation's bonfire of the vanities.

N.B., I live three blocks from Holly Golightly's apartment building in NYC. It's still there and looks reasonably similar to how it did in the movie, umm, not that I, uh, err, walk by it often just to look.

The "mean reds."









A Pop Art Five and Dime.









Early '60s cool.









Best LBD ever.









She (far right) is paying him (far left) to sleep with stylish her and she (middle) knows it.









I'm not much for "Hollywood" kisses, but this is a darn good one. 









And the apartment today.


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 57420
> 
> *Breakfast at Tiffany's* from 1961 with Audrey Hepburn, George Peppard, Patricia Neal, Buddy Ebsen and Mickey Rooney
> 
> TCM's current series, *Reframed: Classic Films in the Rearview Mirror*, discusses the racism, sexism, prejudices and stereotypes in movie history. It's been a smart and honest approach so far that doesn't elide the ugliness, but does recognize that, effectively, it's a part of these movies that can't be effaced, nor TCM argues, should it.
> 
> If you want to watch these movies, you can't avoid seeing these odious period cultural norms (some of which were already dated at the time as culture moves forward haphazardly). For *Breakfast at Tiffany's*, the TCM discussion rightly points out the terrible, racist and insulting character of Mr. Yunioshi played by Mickey Rooney. His portrayal of a buck-toothed, bumbling and immature Japanese man is awful, insulting and cringe worthy.
> 
> The truly crazy thing about Mr. Yunioshi is his character fits neither the sophisticated style, nor the forward-looking social commentary, of *Breakfast at Tiffany's*. Sadly, it's just an awful and demeaning part of an otherwise outstanding film.
> 
> Having seen *Breakfast at Tiffany's* more times than I'll admit unless under extreme interrogation methods, my relationship with this movie is like visiting with a life-long friend. Each time, I focus on a different aspect of the movie as I have long since absorbed the plot.
> 
> For newbies, the plot is Audry Hepburn, as Holly Golightly - a young New York City partier, socialite wannabe, gold digger and courtesan - having her confidently cynical approach to life disrupted by her upstairs neighbor, George Peppard.
> 
> He, like Holly, makes his living from wealthier New Yorkers who, no other way to say it, pay to have sex with these very pretty people. While Peppard is weary of his demimonde lifestyle and immediately sees the value of real love with Hepburn, it takes Hepburn the length of the movie - as her various marry-someone-rich plans continue to fall through - to see its value too.
> 
> The story is a good one, but what captured my attention this viewing is *Breakfast at Tiffany's* style. Though being, at times, sad, morose and bleak, every scene, even the most dispiriting, is visually appealing. Bus depots, the NYC Public Library, police stations and even strip clubs are all stylishly beautiful in *Breakfast at Tiffany's*. Despite Hepburn's and Peppard's problems, you want to live in this world (if it would have you).
> 
> When a depressed Ms. Hepburn, suffering from a case of what she calls "the mean reds," sits on her window sill, with one foot resting on the fire escape singing the melancholy *Moon River*, she's in jeans and a grey sweatshirt with her wet hair wrapped in a towel, yet she looks fantastic.
> 
> A five-and-dime store never appeared more attractive and color coordinated than the one where Hepburn and Peppard don and then abscond with plastic Halloween cat and dog masks. It's not the disheveled Woolworth of my youth, but like a store designed by Andy Warhol at the height of his Pop Art powers.
> 
> The wardrobes - where one assumes half or more the movie's budget was spent - are a trip though early sixties cool with Hepburn wearing the best little black dress (not the famous opening-scene evening gown) possibly of all time. She has so many wardrobe changes that several of them take place on screen and serve to advance the plot (see Hepburn preparing to go to Sing Sing or in the cab after her time at the local precinct).
> 
> But she's matched outfit change for outfit change by Peppard's cougar-provided sartorial splendor (note his insane closet). Even said cougar, Patricia Neal, strikes a style note. She sweeps in and out of scenes while treating Peppard like the kept man he is, but with so much over-the-top style you kinda like her, or respect her, or are scared of her, or something, but you are aware of her panache.
> 
> Even at the end, when all pretense is stripped away and the two lovers, broke, spiritually broken and soaked to the bone, are standing in a garbage-strewn alley (has garbage ever looked so artfully arranged?), with a wet cat pressed between them, their world is still visually enticing.
> 
> None of this even touches on the other style icon of the movie, New York City itself. Maybe that can be the focus on my next viewing. Director Blake Edwards had a style vision for this movie that carries so consistently from scene to scene that it serves as a narrative technique. Yes, there's an engaging story, talented acting and much pain and sorrow, but *Breakfast at Tiffany's* is also an insanely beautiful trip through early-sixties New York City from the opening to closing shot.
> 
> TCM deserves Kudos for its honest, unvarnished look at movies like *Breakfast at Tiffany's*. But being blunt, it's also a self-preservation effort by TCM to get in front of woke cancel culture as its survival depends on these movies being "acceptable" viewing. TCM has one product - old movies - so it can't afford for them to be the next thing tossed on this unforgiving generation's bonfire of the vanities.
> 
> N.B., I live three blocks from Holly Golightly's apartment building in NYC. It's still there and looks reasonably similar to how it did in the movie, umm, not that I, uh, err, walk by it often just to look.
> 
> The "mean reds."
> View attachment 57411
> 
> 
> A Pop Art Five and Dime.
> View attachment 57412
> 
> 
> Early '60s cool.
> View attachment 57413
> 
> 
> Best LBD ever.
> View attachment 57414
> 
> 
> She (far right) is paying him (far left) to sleep with stylish her and she (middle) knows it.
> View attachment 57415
> 
> 
> I'm not much for "Hollywood" kisses, but this is a darn good one.
> View attachment 57416
> 
> 
> And the apartment today.
> View attachment 57419


As you note, I too have watched Breakfast At Tiffany's (more than) a few times and have greatly enjoyed the experience each and every time. I must tell you I greatly admire and am somewhat envious of your ability to dive so deeply into the movie(s), evaluating the experience in such detail and sharing it with your readers in a way that is at ones fascinating, educational and makes the movie under review, so much more enjoyable for the rest of us. A truly great review, as always! 

PS; Every time Hollie GiLightly lights up another cigarette, I cringe thinking of the damage it could do to that beautiful singing voice of hers. Just saying....


----------



## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> As you note, I too have watched Breakfast At Tiffany's (more than) a few times and have greatly enjoyed the experience each and every time. I must tell you I greatly admire and am somewhat envious of your ability to dive so deeply into the movie(s), evaluating the experience in such detail and sharing it with your readers in a way that is at ones fascinating, educational and makes the movie under review, so much more enjoyable for the rest of us. A truly great review, as always!
> 
> PS; Every time Hollie GiLightly lights up another cigarette, I cringe thinking of the damage it could do to that beautiful singing voice of hers. Just saying....


Thank you so much for your very kind comments. I enjoy sharing these movies with everyone.

It's so hard to watch all the smoking in these old movies. I am just old enough to have, as a kid, seen the end of the "everyone smokes" era (the '70s) and, even still, can't believe how much smoking went on.

It's so nice that, other than occasionally on the street, you no longer even run into smoke accidentally.


----------



## Fading Fast

*Late Spring* from 1949, a Japanese movie with English subtitles staring Chishû Ryû and Setsuko Hara

A small budget can be a forced gift to filmmakers as it often requires them to focus on storytelling, character development and capturing beautiful, simple moments. Director Yasujiro Ozu leverages all of these to produce a gem of a movie in *Late Spring*.

Twenty-seven-year-old Noriko lives at home with her widowed professor father Shukichi. While she does most of the housekeeping, it is a surprisingly modern relationship where her father will help at times around the house while giving her a lot of space to live her life. If she doesn't like something, she speaks up and he takes notice.

But overall, they just have a comfortable, well-oiled-machine existence where they are glad to see each other at the end of the day. However, everyone around them - aunts, friends, business associates - wonders why pretty twenty-seven-year-old Noriko isn't married. As much as you want to tell them all to mind their own business, their point - what will happen to Noriko as her father ages - can't simply be dismissed.

Shukichi sees the problem, while Noriko doesn't want to hear about it. After a close male friend of Noriko - he seemed like he could have been "the one" for her - marries another woman, an aunt arranges a meeting with an eligible young man.

When that man asks Noriko to marry him, indirectly through family, the way arranged marriages were done at that time in Japan, Noriko faces a crisis. She sees the logic of marrying this good man, but doesn't want to give up her happy existence with her father.

Shukichi, who will lose his daughter since the bride is, generally, "absorbed" into her husband's family, creates a touching fiction about a woman he's considering marrying to encourage his daughter to marry. That's it; that's the plot and it makes for an engaging, heartfelt and beautiful film.

There is a wonderful low-key love and understanding in this father-daughter relationship that director Yasujiro Ozu reveals with poignantly "small" gestures. When Noriko and Shukichi take the train into the city, he offers his seat to her, but she says no as she knows her aging father will be more comfortable sitting. Equally touching is when dad quietly brings Noriko toast and tea as he senses her hurt after learning her close male friend has become engaged to another woman. These gestures are subtle yet quite moving.

Yasujiro uses a similar "simple" technique of letting the camera alone comment on the reality, struggles and beauty of post-war Japan such as filming, from an inbound train, a crowded, but recovering, industrial center with many large American companies amidst the smaller (for the moment) Japanese ones. Later, during a family trip to Kyoto, Yasujiro lets the camera show the beauty of "old" Japan as it quietly pans stunning ancient temples set amidst gorgeous rolling hills and cherry blossom trees.

It's 1949 and Japan is a recovering country with many signs of American influence, presented here in a positive light. The short scene of Japanese children, clad in American uniforms, playing baseball is a fun example. But the heart and soul of this movie is a moving father-daughter relationship where neither wants their world to change, but both know time will not allow it to stand still. *Late Spring *is a love letter to the end of that phase of their lives. It's sad, heartwarming, but hopeful and, just maybe, a metaphor for Japan and its evolving relationship with its American "parent" in 1949.


----------



## Vecchio Vespa

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 57420
> 
> *Breakfast at Tiffany's* from 1961 with Audrey Hepburn, George Peppard, Patricia Neal, Buddy Ebsen and Mickey Rooney
> 
> TCM's current series, *Reframed: Classic Films in the Rearview Mirror*, discusses the racism, sexism, prejudices and stereotypes in movie history. It's been a smart and honest approach so far that doesn't elide the ugliness, but does recognize that, effectively, it's a part of these movies that can't be effaced, nor TCM argues, should it.
> 
> If you want to watch these movies, you can't avoid seeing these odious period cultural norms (some of which were already dated at the time as culture moves forward haphazardly). For *Breakfast at Tiffany's*, the TCM discussion rightly points out the terrible, racist and insulting character of Mr. Yunioshi played by Mickey Rooney. His portrayal of a buck-toothed, bumbling and immature Japanese man is awful, insulting and cringe worthy.
> 
> The truly crazy thing about Mr. Yunioshi is his character fits neither the sophisticated style, nor the forward-looking social commentary, of *Breakfast at Tiffany's*. Sadly, it's just an awful and demeaning part of an otherwise outstanding film.
> 
> Having seen *Breakfast at Tiffany's* more times than I'll admit unless under extreme interrogation methods, my relationship with this movie is like visiting with a life-long friend. Each time, I focus on a different aspect of the movie as I have long since absorbed the plot.
> 
> For newbies, the plot is Audry Hepburn, as Holly Golightly - a young New York City partier, socialite wannabe, gold digger and courtesan - having her confidently cynical approach to life disrupted by her upstairs neighbor, George Peppard.
> 
> He, like Holly, makes his living from wealthier New Yorkers who, no other way to say it, pay to have sex with these very pretty people. While Peppard is weary of his demimonde lifestyle and immediately sees the value of real love with Hepburn, it takes Hepburn the length of the movie - as her various marry-someone-rich plans continue to fall through - to see its value too.
> 
> The story is a good one, but what captured my attention this viewing is *Breakfast at Tiffany's* style. Though being, at times, sad, morose and bleak, every scene, even the most dispiriting, is visually appealing. Bus depots, the NYC Public Library, police stations and even strip clubs are all stylishly beautiful in *Breakfast at Tiffany's*. Despite Hepburn's and Peppard's problems, you want to live in this world (if it would have you).
> 
> When a depressed Ms. Hepburn, suffering from a case of what she calls "the mean reds," sits on her window sill, with one foot resting on the fire escape singing the melancholy *Moon River*, she's in jeans and a grey sweatshirt with her wet hair wrapped in a towel, yet she looks fantastic.
> 
> A five-and-dime store never appeared more attractive and color coordinated than the one where Hepburn and Peppard don and then abscond with plastic Halloween cat and dog masks. It's not the disheveled Woolworth of my youth, but like a store designed by Andy Warhol at the height of his Pop Art powers.
> 
> The wardrobes - where one assumes half or more the movie's budget was spent - are a trip though early sixties cool with Hepburn wearing the best little black dress (not the famous opening-scene evening gown) possibly of all time. She has so many wardrobe changes that several of them take place on screen and serve to advance the plot (see Hepburn preparing to go to Sing Sing or in the cab after her time at the local precinct).
> 
> But she's matched outfit change for outfit change by Peppard's cougar-provided sartorial splendor (note his insane closet). Even said cougar, Patricia Neal, strikes a style note. She sweeps in and out of scenes while treating Peppard like the kept man he is, but with so much over-the-top style you kinda like her, or respect her, or are scared of her, or something, but you are aware of her panache.
> 
> Even at the end, when all pretense is stripped away and the two lovers, broke, spiritually broken and soaked to the bone, are standing in a garbage-strewn alley (has garbage ever looked so artfully arranged?), with a wet cat pressed between them, their world is still visually enticing.
> 
> None of this even touches on the other style icon of the movie, New York City itself. Maybe that can be the focus on my next viewing. Director Blake Edwards had a style vision for this movie that carries so consistently from scene to scene that it serves as a narrative technique. Yes, there's an engaging story, talented acting and much pain and sorrow, but *Breakfast at Tiffany's* is also an insanely beautiful trip through early-sixties New York City from the opening to closing shot.
> 
> TCM deserves Kudos for its honest, unvarnished look at movies like *Breakfast at Tiffany's*. But being blunt, it's also a self-preservation effort by TCM to get in front of woke cancel culture as its survival depends on these movies being "acceptable" viewing. TCM has one product - old movies - so it can't afford for them to be the next thing tossed on this unforgiving generation's bonfire of the vanities.
> 
> N.B., I live three blocks from Holly Golightly's apartment building in NYC. It's still there and looks reasonably similar to how it did in the movie, umm, not that I, uh, err, walk by it often just to look.
> 
> The "mean reds."
> View attachment 57411
> 
> 
> A Pop Art Five and Dime.
> View attachment 57412
> 
> 
> Early '60s cool.
> View attachment 57413
> 
> 
> Best LBD ever.
> View attachment 57414
> 
> 
> She (far right) is paying him (far left) to sleep with stylish her and she (middle) knows it.
> View attachment 57415
> 
> 
> I'm not much for "Hollywood" kisses, but this is a darn good one.
> View attachment 57416
> 
> 
> And the apartment today.
> View attachment 57419


A wonderful review of a wonderful movie. I wish Mr. Yunioshi could have been edited out of it. The city in that era, the style of the time, and the music are iconic. It is odd that another movie of that general time and place that I love, also a movie with a dark side, is The World of Henry Orient, and it, too, is stained by some awkward and unnecessary treatment of racist stereotypes. But when I watch it it brings back a flood memories of the city at that time.


----------



## Fading Fast

TKI67 said:


> A wonderful review of a wonderful movie. I wish Mr. Yunioshi could have been edited out of it. The city in that era, the style of the time, and the music are iconic. It is odd that another movie of that general time and place that I love, also a movie with a dark side, is The World of Henry Orient, and it, too, is stained by some awkward and unnecessary treatment of racist stereotypes. But when I watch it it brings back a flood memories of the city at that time.


Thank you. As you note, the time travel is wonderful. I haven't seen "The World fo Henry Orient," but will keep an eye out for it now.


----------



## Vecchio Vespa

Fading Fast said:


> Thank you. As you note, the time travel is wonderful. I haven't seen "The World fo Henry Orient," but will keep an eye out for it now.


I hope you happen across it. I would love your take. I was about the same age (as the kids in the movie)/when we lived in Manhasset. Taking the LIRR to town and terrorizing the east side were always fun.


----------



## Fading Fast

*Possessed* form 1947 with Joan Crawford, Van Heflin, Raymond Massey and Geraldine Brooks

In her post-War movies, Joan Crawford was put in nearly every combination of a bad relationship or bad marriage imaginable. Sometimes, she's the aggrieved party and sometimes she's the "witch" from hell. Other times, she's just cracker-house crazy.

Most of these movies aren't that believable, but are pretty good soap operas. Crawford is usually too old for the role, but powers through it anyway by dint of presence and talent. Plus, her movies made money.

*Possessed* starts out pretty good as a confused Crawford is found wandering the streets of LA in an almost trance-like state (similar to Ida Lupino in 1943's *The Hard Way* - everything is recycled). She eventually is taken to a mental ward where we learn what happened to her through flashbacks revealed under analysis.

It's a boldly self-assured mid-century psychoanalysis on display here where mental "diseases" are confidently diagnosed and tied neatly together with their symptoms. The field of psychiatry only learned later what it didn't know. But in the mid twentieth century, psychoanalysis, at least in movies, is amazingly precise.

Crawford, we discover, had been a nurse to oil tycoon Raymond Massey's invalid wife. She was also having an affair with a younger man, Van Heflin, who's a playboy that she took seriously despite his warning her not to.

When Heflin breaks off the affair because Crawford keeps hounding him to marry, she agrees to marry Massey on the rebound. Massey's invalid wife and Crawford's patient had, by this point, committed suicide. Even when Crawford tells Massey she doesn't love him, he still pushes for marriage. (Pro tip: do not marry someone who outright tells you they don't love you.)

Complicating matters, Heflin is an engineer now in Massey's employ. Further complicating matters, he begins having an affair with Massey's daughter, Geraldine Brooks, now Crawford's stepdaughter (hey, it's a soap opera). Greatly further complicating matters, Heflin, who wouldn't marry Crawford, asks Brooks to marry him.

Crawford, whose character only had until now, at best, a tenuous grip on reality, starts to spiral out of control when she sees her former lover and, now, step daughter engaged. She (for no good reason) begins to believe she killed Massey's first wife. She (understandably) also fantasizes about killing her stepdaughter.

I guess it's a good job of acting by Crawford, but somewhere along the line it becomes a bit too much to really believe as everyone around her seems to miss her obvious spiral into crazy-town until it's too late.

Despite that, and too many coincidences, the movie still touches you as we've all known a woman (or man) deeply unable to accept being dropped by a boyfriend (or girlfriend). It's the heart and soul of the movie and it's powerfully poignant to see, especially when it's ramped when Crawford's former lover becomes engaged to a much-younger woman. That has the potential to make someone go nuts, like it does Crawford here.

Most of these post-war Crawford soap operas are worth the watch if you're in the mood for overly complicated and only marginally believable stories with a lot of backstabbing, broken hearts, salaciousness and, often, murder. On most days, sadly, I usually am.


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 57523
> 
> *Possessed* form 1947 with Joan Crawford, Van Heflin, Raymond Massey and Geraldine Brooks
> 
> In her post-War movies, Joan Crawford was put in nearly every combination of a bad relationship or bad marriage imaginable. Sometimes, she's the aggrieved party and sometimes she's the "witch" from hell. Other times, she's just cracker-house crazy.
> 
> Most of these movies aren't that believable, but are pretty good soap operas. Crawford is usually too old for the role, but powers through it anyway by dint of presence and talent. Plus, her movies made money.
> 
> *Possessed* starts out pretty good as a confused Crawford is found wandering the streets of LA in an almost trance-like state (similar to Ida Lupino in 1943's *The Hard Way* - everything is recycled). She eventually is taken to a mental ward where we learn what happened to her through flashbacks revealed under analysis.
> 
> It's a boldly self-assured mid-century psychoanalysis on display here where mental "diseases" are confidently diagnosed and tied neatly together with their symptoms. The field of psychiatry only learned later what it didn't know. But in the mid twentieth century, psychoanalysis, at least in movies, is amazingly precise.
> 
> Crawford, we discover, had been a nurse to oil tycoon Raymond Massey's invalid wife. She was also having an affair with a younger man, Van Heflin, who's a playboy that she took seriously despite his warning her not to.
> 
> When Heflin breaks off the affair because Crawford keeps hounding him to marry, she agrees to marry Massey on the rebound. Massey's invalid wife and Crawford's patient had, by this point, committed suicide. Even when Crawford tells Massey she doesn't love him, he still pushes for marriage. (Pro tip: do not marry someone who outright tells you they don't love you.)
> 
> Complicating matters, Heflin is an engineer now in Massey's employ. Further complicating matters, he begins having an affair with Massey's daughter, Geraldine Brooks, now Crawford's stepdaughter (hey, it's a soap opera). Greatly further complicating matters, Heflin, who wouldn't marry Crawford, asks Brooks to marry him.
> 
> Crawford, whose character only had until now, at best, a tenuous grip on reality, starts to spiral out of control when she sees her former lover and, now, step daughter engaged. She (for no good reason) begins to believe she killed Massey's first wife. She (understandably) also fantasizes about killing her stepdaughter.
> 
> I guess it's a good job of acting by Crawford, but somewhere along the line it becomes a bit too much to really believe as everyone around her seems to miss her obvious spiral into crazy-town until it's too late.
> 
> Despite that, and too many coincidences, the movie still touches you as we've all known a woman (or man) deeply unable to accept being dropped by a boyfriend (or girlfriend). It's the heart and soul of the movie and it's powerfully poignant to see, especially when it's ramped when Crawford's former lover becomes engaged to a much-younger woman. That has the potential to make someone go nuts, like it does Crawford here.
> 
> Most of these post-war Crawford soap operas are worth the watch if you're in the mood for overly complicated and only marginally believable stories with a lot of backstabbing, broken hearts, salaciousness and, often, murder. On most days, sadly, I usually am.


Great review of a movie that sounds to be well worth watching....actually sounds good enough to have a DVD copy in one's personal video library. Jeez Louise, it's coming close to the point were a larger DVD storage cabinet will be needed, LOL.


----------



## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> Great review of a movie that sounds to be well worth watching....actually sounds good enough to have a DVD copy in one's personal video library. Jeez Louise, it's coming close to the point were a larger DVD storage cabinet will be needed, LOL.


Thank you. Do you keep your DVDs (and CDs) in their original cases? About ten years ago, we moved ours to books with "sleeves" (see pic and link below) and it reduced the space they took up by ~90%. It was a project, but well worth it.

Also, with streaming, we've stopped buying DVDs and CDs as most of it is out there on our two streaming services, Amazon and Netflix or, for music, on the free ones like Pandora. And even if not, for a small one-time rental fee, we can usually watch what we want.

Hence, we save a bunch of money a year and still pretty much have access to everything. That said, I respect that some people want to own the item and have it in their personal library.









ref=sr_1_6


----------



## Fading Fast

*Flower Drum Song* from 1961 with Nancy Kwan, James Shigeta, Jack Soo, Benson Fong, Kam Tong and Miyoshi Umeki

*Flower Drum Song* is Rat Pack style meets an Americanized view of 1960s San Francisco's Chinese community seen through a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical filter with an overlay of everything that is the wonderful Nancy Kwan.

I'm not the target audience for this movie as, after *The Sound of Music* and Fred Astaire movies, my passion for musicals falls off a cliff. Yet, despite only a few of the song-and-dance numbers capturing my attention, the rest of *Flower Drum Song's* crazy kitsch made for a fun couple of hours of light entertainment.

A Chinese father and daughter, Kam Tong and Miyoshi Umeki, arrive illegally in San Francisco to honor a marital contract made years ago in China that promised Miyoshi to, now, fully Americanized nightclub owner Jack Soo. But Soo is dating and stringing along Nancy Kwan who wants to get married.

Kam and Moyoshi stay at wealthy and traditional Chinese patriarch Ben Fong's house where Miyoshi meets Fong's playboy son James Shigeta. Miyoshi immediately falls in love with him, but Shigeta, fully Americanized, denies the attraction he obviously feels as he rejects the "old" ways of arranged marriages, especially as his father clearly favors this relationship.

Thrown into the mix is Shigeta's younger brother who is a more American boy than *Father Knows Best's* Bud Anderson. Pushing for the old ways are several aunts and sisters, except for the one who has become Americanized herself. Most fun, super Nancy Kwan, realizing that she might lose Soo to Miyoshi, begins dating Shigeta and quickly ropes him into engagement to make Soo jealous. Don't worry, it's somewhat easier to follow on screen.

It's really a silly and innocent sixties romcom full of mix-ups and misunderstanding - think a Doris Day and Rock Hudson movie - set in San Francisco's Chinatown with a lot of singing and dancing. After a bunch of lightly hurt feelings, a few on-again-off-again engagements and some reshuffling of partners, at the end, as you knew would happen all along, the right people get together and all is good.

By today's standards, there are a lot of things wrong with the representation of Chinese culture, but there's also this: the movie's message is that all people are alike under their surface and cultural differences with the same dreams, wishes, desires and fear.

If you keep score of this stuff, all the light-hearted joking made over old Chinese customs is easily offset by all the jokes about American cultural silliness. None of it is meanspirited and, by standards of its day, it was pretty respectful to everyone. I loved that the Chinese kids raised in America can easily out-American everyone else.

*Flower Drum Song's *style is pre-hippies-sixties exaggerated cool, the sets are obvious, the Technicolor is too amped up and the song-and-dance numbers will either appeal to you or not, but if you just go with it, it kinda sorta works...or not. On another day, I probably would have turned it off, but it was just the nonsensical escape I needed on the day I watched it. Little of it is real, but it is fun.

Super Nancy Kwan in* Flower Drum Song*.

__
Sensitive content, not recommended for those under 18
Show Content


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## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> Thank you. Do you keep your DVDs (and CDs) in their original cases? About ten years ago, we moved ours to books with "sleeves" (see pic and link below) and it reduced the space they took up by ~90%. It was a project, but well worth it.
> 
> Also, with streaming, we've stopped buying DVDs and CDs as most of it is out there on our two streaming services, Amazon and Netflix or, for music, on the free ones like Pandora. And even if not, for a small one-time rental fee, we can usually watch what we want.
> 
> Hence, we save a bunch of money a year and still pretty much have access to everything. That said, I respect that some people want to own the item and have it in their personal library.
> 
> View attachment 57525
> 
> ref=sr_1_6


What follows is how I am presently storing my DVD's:

















The ring binders you suggest will surely save a whole lot of storage space! Thanks for the suggestion.


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## Vecchio Vespa

eagle2250 said:


> Great review of a movie that sounds to be well worth watching....actually sounds good enough to have a DVD copy in one's personal video library. Jeez Louise, it's coming close to the point were a larger DVD storage cabinet will be needed, LOL.


Does anything like a cinematic version of Spotify exist?


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## eagle2250

TKI67 said:


> Does anything like a cinematic version of Spotify exist?


Streaming services abound, but DVD acquisitions are just one of many collections with which I have burdened myself. Books, clothes, shoes/boots, firearms, knives, Eagle Art, fitness paraphernalia including really old Indian Clubs and medicine balls, and the list goes on and on...can be found secreted within my hoard! Mine is not a storage problem as much as it is an addiction to collecting problem. I've been thinning the hoard since we relocated from just under a 4000 square foot nest to 2200 square feet and no basement! LOL.


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## Fading Fast

*The Great Lie* from 1941 with Bette Davie, George Brent and Mary Astor

"Was it a nice wedding?"

"Ooh, the usual thing, 'do you,' 'I do,' 'kiss the bride,' 'have some cake'."

- Bette Davis describing her wedding to George Brent

As is the wont of code-era movies, two people, George Brent and Mary Astor, who think they are married, find out, owing to some technicality with the license, they aren't. So, they get a do-over and can either remarry or say "phew!" Brent, after less than a week married to mean and selfish Astor, says "phew" and races out to marry his true love, Bette Davis.

That one event would be the soap-opera highlight of most people's lives and would be their "wow-'em" dinner-party story for the next forty years. But Warner Bros. was just getting revved up.

Astor, smarting from the publicly embarrassing loss of her husband to Davis, informs Davis that she's carrying Brent's baby (they were married for a week, after all) and intends to use the baby to steal Brent back from her. That fires things up a bit.

We're not done though. Brent, an independently wealthy flier, without knowing about the baby, takes a high-level war job in Washington and is lost flying in Brazil. After a failed search effort, he's declared dead.

Ms. Astor, with Brent now gone, is much-less interested in keeping his baby. She agrees to secretly give it up to Davis in return for, get ready for it, money.

After hiding out together during Astor's pregnancy - think living with your worst enemy in isolation for four or five months - Davis goes home saying the baby is hers while Astor returns to her single life without looking back.

Three months later, Brent walks out of the jungles of Brazil and returns to Davis who lets him believe she's the mother of their baby. All is going well for the couple - Brent loves both Davis and his son - until Astor blows into town dropping sarcastic hint after hint to Brent about the true mother of his baby right in front of Davis.

Privately, Astor informs Davis that, once again, she plans to steal Brent back using the baby as her leverage. This woman has no scruples.

Had I'd been on the murder-trial jury, I'd have voted to acquit Davis. But Davis somehow decides not to kill Astor and, instead, confesses the entire tale to Brent. Astor, then, tells Brent she's taking the baby and wants him to come with her. Does Brent give up his son or his wife?

The ending you can probably guess, but otherwise, you'll just have to watch this fun, ridiculous soap opera to see what happens.

N.B. #1 If you do see it, look for Bette Davis' double slap delivered with cool efficiency to hysterical Mary Astor; it belongs in the top-five of all movie-slaps*.

N.B. #2 While Mary Astor does more than yeoman's work as the bitch ex-wife from hell, it still seems like Davis' usual sparring partner in these types of movies, Mariam Hopkins (see *The Old Maid* or *Old Acquaintance*), should have been in the role. Maybe she was tired of taking the, seemingly, obligatory slap from Davis in these movies.

* Sadly, I couldn't find a GIF of the slap - it belongs in a GIF - but I did find this clip. For best effect, start watching at 3:50 in:


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## Vecchio Vespa

eagle2250 said:


> Streaming services abound, but DVD acquisitions are just one of many collections with which I have burdened myself. Books, clothes, shoes/boots, firearms, knives, Eagle Art, fitness paraphernalia including really old Indian Clubs and medicine balls, and the list goes on and on...can be found secreted within my hoard! Mine is not a storage problem as much as it is an addiction to collecting problem. I've been thinning the hoard since we relocated from just under a 4000 square foot nest to 2200 square feet and no basement! LOL.


I know there are streaming options, but the thing about Spotify is that it has pretty much everything...Country Joe, Mose Allison, Scriabin...


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## eagle2250

TKI67 said:


> I know there are streaming options, but the thing about Spotify is that it has pretty much everything...Country Joe, Mose Allison, Scriabin...


Thanks for a great suggestion, my friend. I will make good use of this new understanding.


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## Fading Fast

*What Every Woman Knows* from 1934 with Helen Hayes, Brian Aherne, Donald Crisp, Lucile Watson and Madge Evans

"I'm six years older than he is. I'm plain and I have no charm. I shouldn't have let him marry me. I'm trying to make up for it."

- Brutally honest Helen Hayes discussing her marriage.

Ordinary-looking-and-almost-freakishly-petite Helen Hayes is on a path to spinsterhood in *What Every Woman Knows*. So her three well-meaning-but-bumbling brothers offer to pay for a poor young man's, Brian Aherne, education in return for his agreeing to marry Hayes once he graduates.

Set in Scotland and even with tongue in cheek, there are a thousand things wrong with this negotiation based on today's values, but it's still a fun scene where Hayes is, effectively, tossed onto the pile of chips in the center of the table and pulled out a few times. Then, Hayes herself, kinda liking the idea of being married to the young man in question, throws herself back in to seal the deal.

Despite the generally light tone, the movie turns serious at several points preventing this charming effort from slipping into farce or slapstick. Once Aherne has completed his studies, Hayes offers to let him out of the pact, but he bluntly states that a bargain is a bargain and marries Hayes even though he doesn't love her. Both, in their own way, did the stand up thing.

Hayes, clearly in love with Aherne, becomes the woman behind the man as his political career catches fire owing, mainly, to her efforts, which she hides even from her clueless husband. A career move to London has Hayes continuing to surreptitiously direct his political future, but Aherne - now exposed to a superficially more elegant and sophisticated class of women - begins to stray (enter pretty Madge Evans).

In a movie that thankfully avoids many cliches, Aherne, contemplating leaving Hayes, doesn't treat her like an annoying obstacle. He truly struggles with the fact he married her as part of a bargain and she's been a good wife even as he fell in love with another woman. Hayes, too, struggles with the morality of holding a man by obligation and not of his free will.

The resolution has, of course, Hayes, unnoticed, moving the chess pieces around so that Aherne sees what he'd be giving up and what he'd be getting were they to divorce. Despite landing where you'd expect it to, this is no Hallmark movie as its surface charm has real-life grit just beneath.

Putting our 2021 indignation aside allows us to see this 1934 movie is subversive for its day as most of the men are either strutting peacocks, like Aherne, or harmless bumblers like Hayes' well-meaning but foolish brothers. Whereas, most of the women are smart and shrewd operators who quietly run things off stage. This low-budget effort, which seems almost simple, punches well above its moral and intellectual weight class.

N.B. Look for Lucille Watson playing Hayes' cagey and wise London mentor as this old-pro stage actress made an incredibly smooth transition to "talkies." In *What Every Woman Knows*, she provides a combination of verve and gravitas to her few crucial scenes. Oh, and yes, she's another woman who is smarter than the bloviating men in this one.


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## Howard

On Netflix there is this new comedy called "The Upshaws", it stars Kim Fields & Mike Epps.


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## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 57739
> 
> *What Every Woman Knows* from 1934 with Helen Hayes, Brian Aherne, Donald Crisp, Lucile Watson and Madge Evans
> 
> "I'm six years older than he is. I'm plain and I have no charm. I shouldn't have let him marry me. I'm trying to make up for it."
> 
> - Brutally honest Helen Hayes discussing her marriage.
> 
> Ordinary-looking-and-almost-freakishly-petite Helen Hayes is on a path to spinsterhood in *What Every Woman Knows*. So her three well-meaning-but-bumbling brothers offer to pay for a poor young man's, Brian Aherne, education in return for his agreeing to marry Hayes once he graduates.
> 
> Set in Scotland and even with tongue in cheek, there are a thousand things wrong with this negotiation based on today's values, but it's still a fun scene where Hayes is, effectively, tossed onto the pile of chips in the center of the table and pulled out a few times. Then, Hayes herself, kinda liking the idea of being married to the young man in question, throws herself back in to seal the deal.
> 
> Despite the generally light tone, the movie turns serious at several points preventing this charming effort from slipping into farce or slapstick. Once Aherne has completed his studies, Hayes offers to let him out of the pact, but he bluntly states that a bargain is a bargain and marries Hayes even though he doesn't love her. Both, in their own way, did the stand up thing.
> 
> Hayes, clearly in love with Aherne, becomes the woman behind the man as his political career catches fire owing, mainly, to her efforts, which she hides even from her clueless husband. A career move to London has Hayes continuing to surreptitiously direct his political future, but Aherne - now exposed to a superficially more elegant and sophisticated class of women - begins to stray (enter pretty Madge Evans).
> 
> In a movie that thankfully avoids many cliches, Aherne, contemplating leaving Hayes, doesn't treat her like an annoying obstacle. He truly struggles with the fact he married her as part of a bargain and she's been a good wife even as he fell in love with another woman. Hayes, too, struggles with the morality of holding a man by obligation and not of his free will.
> 
> The resolution has, of course, Hayes, unnoticed, moving the chess pieces around so that Aherne sees what he'd be giving up and what he'd be getting were they to divorce. Despite landing where you'd expect it to, this is no Hallmark movie as its surface charm has real-life grit just beneath.
> 
> Putting our 2021 indignation aside allows us to see this 1934 movie is subversive for its day as most of the men are either strutting peacocks, like Aherne, or harmless bumblers like Hayes' well-meaning but foolish brothers. Whereas, most of the women are smart and shrewd operators who quietly run things off stage. This low-budget effort, which seems almost simple, punches well above its moral and intellectual weight class.
> 
> N.B. Look for Lucille Watson playing Hayes' cagey and wise London mentor as this old-pro stage actress made an incredibly smooth transition to "talkies." In *What Every Woman Knows*, she provides a combination of verve and gravitas to her few crucial scenes. Oh, and yes, she's another woman who is smarter than the bloviating men in this one.
> View attachment 57740


Well said, my good man. Your impressions of the movie are persuasive in convincing the reader that this film is well worth watching, just considering it's instructional value alone! It is on my list to be watched.


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## Fading Fast

*Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf *form 1966 with Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, George Segal and Sandy Dennis

*Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf* answers the never-asked-by-anyone question: what would a kitchen-sink drama look like with an overlay of pseudo college intellectualism?

It's answered, though, in *Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf's* two-plus hours of history professor Richard Burton and his wife, the college president's daughter, Elizabeth Taylor, emotionally tearing into each other relentlessly, mercilessly and spitefully all in one looooooong drunken night from hell.

Along for the ride, and collateral damage, are young and new-to-the-college biology professor George Segal and his waif-like wife Sandy Dennis who "stop by'' for an introductory drink (welcome to the college guys). Why this couple didn't immediately take stock of the situation in that house from hell and say their thank you and goodbyes quickly is the real mystery of this movie.

Burton and Taylor's twenty-plus-year marriage has more than its share of emotional baggage and grievances: his career hasn't measured up to her and her father's expectations; his first (and only) book was selfishly kiboshed by her father; her father's money supports their lifestyle; their sex life is broken or non-existent and the core injury at the center of it all is the mysterious fate of their "son."

Fueled by a double-digit consumption of cocktails, Burton and Taylor rip into each other's psychological scar tissue, push every one of their emotional buttons and rehash every marital slight in round after round of battles that cycle through passive aggression, open hostility and, sometimes, physical violence.

Burton and Taylor expertly and with bad intent draw Segal and Dennis into this dysfunctional angerfest. As the night drags on, we eventually learn the younger couple has its own, and often similar, challenges: a marriage based on a lie, emasculating money issues (sound familiar), alcoholism (sound familiar) and sexual problems (sound familiar). And this is the up-and-coming couple with promise.

Taking place mainly in Taylor and Burton's clutter, unkempt and run-down Victorian (symbolism anyone) and with only four main characters, the movie feels very much like the Edward Albee play it is based on, which, for a movie, requires a lot of the actors.

The actors bring it. Taylor, Burton, Segal and Dennis are up for this demanding effort with each delivering an impressive performance including a vicious scene of Segal and Taylor cheating with Burton and Dennis left to furtively watch and listen (it's brutal).

By the time director Mike Nichols (who handles family dysfunction with a little more humor and hope in *The Graduate*) brings us to the big reveal about Burton and Taylor's son, there's so little left in anyone's emotional tank that it feels anticlimactic.

*Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf *is smart, well acted, skillfully directed and emotionally impactful. Still, your experience with this movie comes down to whether or not you want to see lives torn open with all their emotional baggage exposed, analyzed, mocked and left raw.

N.B., Taylor and Burton, as the older couple, are supposed to be about fifteen or so years older than Dennis and Segal and they easily look it. But proving how hard she lived her real life, Taylor, in actuality, is all of two years older than Segal.


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## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 57839
> 
> *Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf *form 1966 with Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, George Segal and Sandy Dennis
> 
> *Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf* answers the never-asked-by-anyone question: what would a kitchen-sink drama look like with an overlay of pseudo college intellectualism?
> 
> It's answered, though, in *Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf's* two-plus hours of history professor Richard Burton and his wife, the college president's daughter, Elizabeth Taylor, emotionally tearing into each other relentlessly, mercilessly and spitefully all in one looooooong drunken night from hell.
> 
> Along for the ride, and collateral damage, are young and new-to-the-college biology professor George Segal and his waif-like wife Sandy Dennis who "stop by'' for an introductory drink (welcome to the college guys). Why this couple didn't immediately take stock of the situation in that house from hell and say their thank you and goodbyes quickly is the real mystery of this movie.
> 
> Burton and Taylor's twenty-plus-year marriage has more than its share of emotional baggage and grievances: his career hasn't measured up to her and her father's expectations; his first (and only) book was selfishly kiboshed by her father; her father's money supports their lifestyle; their sex life is broken or non-existent and the core injury at the center of it all is the mysterious fate of their "son."
> 
> Fueled by a double-digit consumption of cocktails, Burton and Taylor rip into each other's psychological scar tissue, push every one of their emotional buttons and rehash every marital slight in round after round of battles that cycle through passive aggression, open hostility and, sometimes, physical violence.
> 
> Burton and Taylor expertly and with bad intent draw Segal and Dennis into this dysfunctional angerfest. As the night drags on, we eventually learn the younger couple has its own, and often similar, challenges: a marriage based on a lie, emasculating money issues (sound familiar), alcoholism (sound familiar) and sexual problems (sound familiar). And this is the up-and-coming couple with promise.
> 
> Taking place mainly in Taylor and Burton's clutter, unkempt and run-down Victorian (symbolism anyone) and with only four main characters, the movie feels very much like the Edward Albee play it is based on, which, for a movie, requires a lot of the actors.
> 
> The actors bring it. Taylor, Burton, Segal and Dennis are up for this demanding effort with each delivering an impressive performance including a vicious scene of Segal and Taylor cheating with Burton and Dennis left to furtively watch and listen (it's brutal).
> 
> By the time director Mike Nichols (who handles family dysfunction with a little more humor and hope in *The Graduate*) brings us to the big reveal about Burton and Taylor's son, there's so little left in anyone's emotional tank that it feels anticlimactic.
> 
> *Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf *is smart, well acted, skillfully directed and emotionally impactful. Still, your experience with this movie comes down to whether or not you want to see lives torn open with all their emotional baggage exposed, analyzed, mocked and left raw.
> 
> N.B., Taylor and Burton, as the older couple, are supposed to be about fifteen or so years older than Dennis and Segal and they easily look it. But proving how hard she lived her real life, Taylor, in actuality, is all of two years older than Segal.


My friend, you should have been a film critic...your reviews are that good and the review above is no exception! As have you, I've seen the film "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" a few times. I cannot honestly say it is an enjoyable experience, but it is more like watching an evolving train wreck, sorta like that poster showing an old steam engine freight train slowly rolling of a collapsing bridge. It may not be enjoyable, but it is fascinating and we just cannot look away....that's the Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf viewing experience from my perspective. Thank you for another great review!


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## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> My friend, you should have been a film critic...your reviews are that good and the review above is no exception! As have you, I've seen the film "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" a few times. I cannot honestly say it is an enjoyable experience, but it is more like watching an evolving train wreck, sorta like that poster showing an old steam engine freight train slowly rolling of a collapsing bridge. It may not be enjoyable, but it is fascinating and we just cannot look away....that's the Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf viewing experience from my perspective. Thank you for another great review!


Thank you for the kind words. I could not agree more about WAOVW as it is engaging, but emotional draining viewing. I'm glad I saw, but doubt I'll ever sit through it again.

Kudos, this is wonderful imagery and metaphor, "...sorta like that poster showing an old steam engine freight train slowly rolling of a collapsing bridge."


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## Peak and Pine

^^
Have never seen the film, but I have a tale.

In my first year in school in NYC I joined the drama club and the director, friends with a young playwright who had had some success off Broadway, gave me and two others tickets to a preview, essential a dress rehearsal, of the playwright's first effort on real Broadway, a matinee at the Billy Rose theater first row balcony, best seats in any house. Lights go down, curtain goes up on blackness for a full five minutes. The sparce audience murmurs, then somewhere on stage a small crash and a flash of light, a lamp's been knocked over. Then still in darkness, the first spoken words: _Jesus H. Chir-ist!_. And then for the next two hours all hell breaks loose, and I will never, ever forget what I witnessed that day in a small, live theater with a handful of others. The first Broadway show I ever saw, I was 17, have seen dozens since and nothing, ever has had the effect of seeing Uta Hagan, Arthur Hill, George Grizard and Melinda Dillon (nothing Googled here, the memory of this is that strong), do what they did live in front of me, before the critics were allowed in, before it was deemed the equal of _Death of a Salesman_, before it was a movie. It was so arduous, so strenuous that on the twice-a-week days that the evening performance was preceeded by a matinee, Ms Hagan couldn't do both and a stand-in was used. Once the final curtain banged down and the house lights went up, my two friends and I stumbled out of the theater, went to McSorley's and got drunk.


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## Fading Fast

PSA: For noir fans, TCM has two really good ones coming up this afternoon (Eastern Time).

"Detour" (comments here:  #560 ) at 3pm









Followed by "Gun Crazy" (Comments here:  #388 ) at 4:15pm


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## Fading Fast

*Test Pilot* from 1938 with Clark Gable, Myrna Loy and Spencer Tracy

Even under the restrictive Motion Picture Production Code, some genuine and intense movies, like *Test Pilot*, were made.

Clark Gable is a hard-drinking, hard-living, womanizing star test pilot at a time when that career all but equaled early death. With his best friend and mechanic, dour Spencer Tracy, these returning World War I vets bounce around the country in the 1920s testing new planes and trying to break records while spending more than they make.

It's all fun and games until Gable has to make an emergency landing in Kansas where he meets whip-smart and super-cute farm-girl Myrna Loy. After the flirting and denial, they marry and, with Tracy in tow, move to New York where Gable continues his test-pilot career.

The movie now subtly shifts focus from Gable to Loy, a woman in love with a man who goes off to a job everyday that could easily kill him. Despite, most of the time, putting up a brave face, the pressure is slowly breaking Loy.

But Loy gets that she's no match for Gable's true love - flying. She knows she doesn't have to compete with another woman for his affections, but worse, she has to compete with the entire blue sky. She knows if she makes him choose, either way, she'll lose, as to take away the sky would be to kill the man.

So, day after day, week after week, she smiles outwardly while dying inside. When another test pilot is killed in a crash, she cracks a bit, but has no choice but to buck up one more time or lose her husband. So, once again, out comes the smile. When Tracy compliments her on her fortitude, her answer, "It's easy to be gallant when you're doomed," reveals the desperation of her mental state.

Movies then, and even now, are often about the pre-marital dance - the chase - or the post-marital stress - the affair. But in *Test Pilot*, Loy and Gable's marriage is engaging because we see a good marriage stressed to the limit by external forces. As in *The Thin Man* series, Loy manages to make marriage not the goal of life, but the fun and exciting thing in life itself.

*Test Pilot* is engaging because it asks a powerful question: how do you survive - how do you hold up mentally - when you love someone who chooses to tempt fate every day?

All this takes place amidst fantastic flight scenes that are still pretty captivating today, but must have been amazing in 1938. The wrap up is too easy, but audiences even then could tell when the Motion Picture Production Code was at work.

N.B. #1 When Clark Gable is at his worst and just mugging it for the camera (which he does from time to time), he's still a rich man's Robert Taylor.

N.B. #2 Under the code, many things were verboten to show on screen, but having too many drinks and wearing too few bras were allowed. QED, Gable for the first and Myrna Loy for the second in *Test Pilot*.


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## Fading Fast

*The Flirting Widow* from 1930 with Dorothy MacKaill and Basil Rathbone

Watching a "talkie" from 1930 is a bit like driving a car from 1910: you need a different approach and it takes more work, but it can be a heck of a lot of fun.

*The Flirting Widow* still has silent-movie tics, is in need of restoration and feels more like they play it's based on than a movie. But if you push through all that, it provides a solid just over an hour of entertainment driven by the verve and chemistry of early talky stars Dorothy MacKaill and Basil Rathbone.

MacKaill is the unmarried oldest-of-three daughters of a wealthy family where the father won't let the younger daughters marry until MacKaill marries (a rule he follows more in word than deed).

When cute-as-heck MacKaill first appears, she's dressed in manish clothes with a boy's short haircut, signally, though never said, she's probably not interested in marrying a man. Owing to her father's "rule," this is quite the problem for the middle sister who's itching to marry her boyfriend.

With everyone pressuring MacKaill to marry effete and boring-as-heck family friend Raleigh to solve the problem (if I had a daughter and she brought Raleigh home, I'd shoot one or both of them), she makes up a fiancé in the military whom she says just deployed to India. The family then pressures her to write him a letter (yes, her family is annoying), so she mails Colonel "John Smith" a love note.

Having solved that problem for all of one second, MacKaill then puts a death notice in the paper to extricate herself from the engagement to her made-up colonel. But MacKaill can't catch a break as her letter, by chance, finds a real Colonel John Smith, Basil Rathbone, in India.

Worse for MacKaill, Rathbone, a few weeks later, shows up at her house masquerading as a friend of Colonel John Smith in order to learn what the heck is going on. He quickly susses out what MacKaill did and then mischievously spends the rest of the movie trolling her in front of her family.

You can pretty much guess what happens from here: two hints, MacKaill's earlier gender-bending getup was a feint and Rathbone's goading is covering up his real feelings. Sure, the movie is old, dated and clunky, but Rathbone teasing MacKaill feels modern, real and, most importantly, you believe the two stars had fun filming it. It takes a little adjusting to, but these early talking pictures can still deliver entertainment today.

N.B. Dorothy MacKaill is my favorite "lost" early movie star as she had it all - looks, acting talent and whatever it is that makes someone a star. Check out *Safe in Hell* (comments here: #27097) to see full-throttle MacKaill completely driving a movie. 









.


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## Fading Fast

*Bullitt* from 1968 with Steve McQueen, Jacqueline Bisset, Robert Vaughn and Simon Oakland

"You're living in a sewer Frank, day after day."

- Jacqueline Bisset to boyfriend detective Steve McQueen

It's taken me into the double digits of viewings to just about put all the pieces of *Bullitt's* plot together. I'm almost there; I only have one or two plot loose ends to tie up in the next couple of viewings. Meanwhile, Jacqueline Bisset summarized the movie's theme nicely for us in all of nine words.

In the thirties, pre-code movies introduced audiences to the seedy side of life, then the forties and fifties leverage film noir to showed us society's dirty laundry, but by the second half of the sixties, films like* Bullitt* put it out there directly for us to wallow in.

*Bullitt's* plot folds in on itself a bunch, but goes something like this: a self-aggrandizing politician's key mob informant is killed while in protective custody, putting high-level pressure on police detective McQueen to explain what supposedly went wrong on his team's watch. But nothing is as it appears.

We then see McQueen methodically follow small clues to hunt the killers down while ignoring intense political strong-arming to "just play along," even when he's repeatedly offered career advancement and protection if he'll simply sweep up as told.

The entire plot, though, is a Hitchcock Macguffin (a device to advance the story so you can see characters you care about do a bunch of interesting stuff) to highlight one man - detective Frank Bullitt, whom McQueen brilliantly portrays as excruciatingly laconic.

It's often said McQueen set the pattern for the taciturn, mission-driven detectives that would follow in his wake for the next fifty years (although, Glen Ford did an earlier version of it in 1953's *The Big Heat*, comments here:  #574 ), but McQueen really did it better than every single one of them.

McQueen isn't sparing in words because he's just "that cool" or he is singularly focused on his goal - as most of the subsequent "McQueen-style" detectives play it. He's sparing in words because he's broken in some deeply human way.

When McQueen doesn't respond to questions or emotional pleas, his non-response comes across as that of a man who simply doesn't know how to respond, how to express what he feels or how to connect to other human beings. His eyes convey hurt, sadness and confusion with his inability to express those emotions averring that something broke this good man in a bad world. It's an impressive display of subtle-yet-powerful acting.

Despite being the star, it feels as if McQueen says the fewest words of any of the major characters, which only diminishes what they say as all the gravitational pull in this one comes from McQueen's presence. It doesn't hurt that this is a strikingly stylish movie with no one more nonchalantly stylish than McQueen.

The attempted copycatting is embarrassingly obvious in descendent movies like Sylvester Stallone's vanity project *Cobra*, where his clothes and car wear and drive him. But in *Bullitt*, McQueen is so comfortable in his ridiculously cool turtleneck, sport coat and chukkas, while driving his fastback Mustang, you only really notice all those details in the second or third viewing.

Smartly, McQueen (also the producer) isn't afraid to show his character as a normal, vulnerable person, a point often lost in those later copycat movies. Right after the opening scene, McQueen is all but pulled out of bed by a very early in the day visit from his work partner. Here, in an unguarded moment, we see him not as an aloof cop, but as a man who is cold in the morning and simply trying to wake up.

When we later see McQueen ready to go, his cool doesn't feel forced as we understand this guy: He, like all of us, puts his public armor on simply to survive the day.

Yes, *Bullitt* has the greatest movie-car-chase scene ever - where the hunter-prey dynamic brilliantly shifts early on - but the rest of the movie is almost cheated by the near perfectness of that scene as Jacqueline Bisset is correct, the real story here is Frank Bullitt living in a sewer-like world.

Maybe the only way to survive in a sewer is to be a bit broken. It's McQueen's perfect portrayal of broken Frank Bullitt, not one fast car chasing another fast car, that makes this movie a classic. Heck, McQueen's portrayal is so perfect, we often believe McQueen was that cool in real life, and maybe he was.

N.B. Not printable here, but Google "star star lyrics" to see how The Rolling Stones memorialized McQueen's super-cool ability to have women provide him with sexual favors while they fought for his attention. McQueen's public persona and movie characters - including a love of cars, motorcycles, speed and women - combined to create the star's image.


----------



## Fading Fast

*The Barretts of Wimpole Street* from 1934 with Norma Shearer, Charles Laughton, Fredric March and Maureen O'Sullivan

*The Barretts of Wimpole Street* unfolds like a car slowly shifting through gears. It begins in first as an interesting-enough look at a famous Victorian family where infirm poetess Elizabeth Barrett (Browning comes later) and her eight siblings live in fear of their tyrannical father, Charles Laughton, who forbids any of his children to marry (or have fun).

The family is light and joyful when father Laughton is not around, but is reduced to abject fear when he enters a room. Through outright intimidation, mixed with emotional and financial blackmail, he keeps his adult children at home and ostensibly respectful, but deeply resentful underneath.

Elizabeth, Laughton's favorite and the only child he shows marginal kindness too, is suffering from some unknown ailment that keeps her all but bed ridden. Despite that, she is the spiritual center of the family, along with her scene-stealing English Springer Spaniel, Flush*. The other siblings huddle in her room to escape from their redoubtable father.

The movie shifts into second gear when poet and playwright Robert Browning, Elizabeth's pen pal till now, appears and begins to surreptitiously court Elizabeth, whose health, not unrelatedly, begins to improve. Simultaneously, sister Henrietta, played vivaciously by super-cute Maureen O'Sullivan, secretly courts an army captain. Neither daughter has much hope with father Laughton's no-marriage edict in effect, but their passion for love tries to push through.

Quickly slipping into third gear, several powerful confrontations take place as Laughton all but forbids Browning from visiting while he outright dismisses Henrietta's captain and also forbids her from seeing him. Laughton, trying then to explain himself to Elizabeth (something he wouldn't even bother to do with Henrietta), presents a man who has wrapped his selfish desire to keep his family around him inside some disingenuously noble effort driven by his religious passion.

It's a mishmash of rationalizations and slippery justifications delivered with skill by an actor who intuited "method acting" a few decades before it would become famous. Changing, with ease, from cruelty - he threatens to throw Henrietta out on the street penniless if she sees her beau again - to stilted empathy toward Elizabeth, Laughton delivers a tour-de-force performance.

*The Barretts of Wimpole Stree*t shifts into overdrive toward the end as Laughton thunders with rage and declamations of moving the family to the isolation of the country to stop all the affairs and, horror, fun his family is having in London. (Spoiler alert if you don't know the Barrett-Browing love story). Her hand forced, Elizabeth plots an escape and elopement, which will be a dagger right through her father's heart.

With the movie's engine now flatout, the siblings, sans eloping Elizabeth and with a surface sympathy hiding barely contained glee - the Germans call it schadenfreude - convene to see Laughton's response when he reads Elizabeth's note informing him she has left to marry Browning. It's a money moment that's been building since the movie's first scene when a happy family gathering turned to one of cowering and dread upon the arrival of Laughton.

Kudos to director Sidney Franklin for slowly but powerfully building the pace and drama of the movie scene by scene. He engages the viewer lightly at first, but brings him or her to the edge of his or her seat by the final scene. It's a wonderful, even if exhausting, ride.

N.B., *The Barretts of Wimpole Street,* with its 19th Century Romanticism, is tailor made for Norma Shearer's silent-screen mannerism. Combined with Laughton's dominating performance and O'Sullivan's light-and-sunshine interpretation of Henrietta, T*he Barretts of Wimpole Street* is an actor's movie from 1934 that still delivers punch after punch in 2021.

* This is our dog Finn's, an English Springer Spaniel himself, favorite movie as he thinks Flush is really the star. Despite my discussing the merits of *Citizen Kane* and *Casablanca* with him, there is no moving him on this point.


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## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 58220
> 
> *The Barretts of Wimpole Street* from 1934 with Norma Shearer, Charles Laughton, Fredric March and Maureen O'Sullivan
> 
> *The Barretts of Wimpole Street* unfolds like a car slowly shifting through gears. It begins in first as an interesting-enough look at a famous Victorian family where infirm poetess Elizabeth Barrett (Browning comes later) and her eight siblings live in fear of their tyrannical father, Charles Laughton, who forbids any of his children to marry (or have fun).
> 
> The family is light and joyful when father Laughton is not around, but is reduced to abject fear when he enters a room. Through outright intimidation, mixed with emotional and financial blackmail, he keeps his adult children at home and ostensibly respectful, but deeply resentful underneath.
> 
> Elizabeth, Laughton's favorite and the only child he shows marginal kindness too, is suffering from some unknown ailment that keeps her all but bed ridden. Despite that, she is the spiritual center of the family, along with her scene-stealing English Springer Spaniel, Flush*. The other siblings huddle in her room to escape from their redoubtable father.
> 
> The movie shifts into second gear when poet and playwright Robert Browning, Elizabeth's pen pal till now, appears and begins to surreptitiously court Elizabeth, whose health, not unrelatedly, begins to improve. Simultaneously, sister Henrietta, played vivaciously by super-cute Maureen O'Sullivan, secretly courts an army captain. Neither daughter has much hope with father Laughton's no-marriage edict in effect, but their passion for love tries to push through.
> 
> Quickly slipping into third gear, several powerful confrontations take place as Laughton all but forbids Browning from visiting while he outright dismisses Henrietta's captain and also forbids her from seeing him. Laughton, trying then to explain himself to Elizabeth (something he wouldn't even bother to do with Henrietta), presents a man who has wrapped his selfish desire to keep his family around him inside some disingenuously noble effort driven by his religious passion.
> 
> It's a mishmash of rationalizations and slippery justifications delivered with skill by an actor who intuited "method acting" a few decades before it would become famous. Changing, with ease, from cruelty - he threatens to throw Henrietta out on the street penniless if she sees her beau again - to stilted empathy toward Elizabeth, Laughton delivers a tour-de-force performance.
> 
> *The Barretts of Wimpole Stree*t shifts into overdrive toward the end as Laughton thunders with rage and declamations of moving the family to the isolation of the country to stop all the affairs and, horror, fun his family is having in London. (Spoiler alert if you don't know the Barrett-Browing love story). Her hand forced, Elizabeth plots an escape and elopement, which will be a dagger right through her father's heart.
> 
> With the movie's engine now flatout, the siblings, sans eloping Elizabeth and with a surface sympathy hiding barely contained glee - the Germans call it schadenfreude - convene to see Laughton's response when he reads Elizabeth's note informing him she has left to marry Browning. It's a money moment that's been building since the movie's first scene when a happy family gathering turned to one of cowering and dread upon the arrival of Laughton.
> 
> Kudos to director Sidney Franklin for slowly but powerfully building the pace and drama of the movie scene by scene. He engages the viewer lightly at first, but brings him or her to the edge of his or her seat by the final scene. It's a wonderful, even if exhausting, ride.
> 
> N.B., *The Barretts of Wimpole Street,* with its 19th Century Romanticism, is tailor made for Norma Shearer's silent-screen mannerism. Combined with Laughton's dominating performance and O'Sullivan's light-and-sunshine interpretation of Henrietta, T*he Barretts of Wimpole Street* is an actor's movie from 1934 that still delivers punch after punch in 2021.
> 
> * This is our dog Finn's, an English Springer Spaniel himself, favorite movie as he thinks Flush is really the star. Despite my discussing the merits of *Citizen Kane* and *Casablanca* with him, there is no moving him on this point.


Another great review, as expected. I particularly enjoyed the anecdote sharing Finn's assessment of the movie. Frankly, having watched the movie in question, I do believe Finn's assessment is spot on. We occasionally find ourselves watching movies wioth our Grand Dog (the grand kids dog) Sully, an aging black German Shepard. The beast will lie before the TV quietly until a barking dog comes on the screen and then Sully gets up and starts barking back at the intruder, protecting his pack of humans...I suppose! LOL. :crazy:


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## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> Another great review, as expected. I particularly enjoyed the anecdote sharing Finn's assessment of the movie. Frankly, having watched the movie in question, I do believe Finn's assessment is spot on. We occasionally find ourselves watching movies wioth our Grand Dog (the grand kids dog) Sully, an aging black German Shepard. The beast will lie before the TV quietly until a barking dog comes on the screen and then Sully gets up and starts barking back at the intruder, protecting his pack of humans...I suppose! LOL. :crazy:


Finn sometimes does that, and sometimes is "above" such pedestrian dog behavior.

If you really want to have a complex conversation with your dog, talk to him or her about Lassie. Finn won't admit it, but he is torn as he has species pride in Lassie, but breed envy. Sometimes, when he does something bad or stupid, I tell him that Lassie would never do that - that really gets his goat.


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## Fading Fast

*Ladies in Retirement* from 1941 with Ida Lupino, Edith Barrett, Isobel Elsom, Elsa Lanchester and Louis Hayward

*Ladies in Retirement* is a solid entry in the subgenre of movies set in isolated country houses populated with eccentric family members where somebody needs money in a hurry. Unfortunately, though, the wealthy old lady (it's usually an old lady), who has all the money, doesn't want to part with it. Therein lies the problem and, possible, motive for murder (cue ominous music).

The house in these movies, often, is old and eerie with a bunch of dark nooks, creepy furniture and a dungeon-like basement. Basically, the setting advertises that something bad will eventually happen here. In addition to the eccentric family members, there's normally an oddball staff with, at minimum, a sassy young maid and an older gent who serves as a general caretaker. Finally, a few quirky village characters come by regularly to round out the cast.

In *Ladies in Retirement*, the story pivots around deadly serious housekeeper, Ida Lupino, who needs a home for her two older and genuinely daffy sisters, Edith Barrett and Elsa Lanchester. Otherwise, the state is going to put them in an asylum.

Lupino convinces her employer, Isobel Elsom, to let them come and stay for a bit, but after a few days with these two wackjobs in her house, wealthy eccentric Elsom tells Lupino her sisters have to go. When Lupino bucks her, Elsom then tells Lupion all three of them should leave.

What to do? What to do? Next thing we know, Elsom has gone on a trip and left Lupino in charge of the house, or has she? Lupino tells the maid and villagers that story, but she tells her sisters she's secretly bought the house.

Things go along, awkwardly, like this for a bit and then Lupino's scammer "nephew" (he's really a more distant relative), Louis Hayward, shows up looking for a place to hide out as he's absconded with money from his job at a bank (it's a heck of a family). Like all skilled scammers, he immediately senses that something is wrong in the house and begins noodling around.

He also hits on the maid as, in these stories, there's usually a, umm, horny young maid. Here, it's Evelyn Keyes, who is willing to do almost anything for the only youthful man to cross her path in a long time.

Also thrown into the mix are a few nuns from the local convent who stop in occasionally on some neighborly errand, but really to inject some Christian conscience into the story. That sets us up for the climax and denouement.

Did Lupino, who plays this one wound tighter than a drum, off the old lady so that she could provide a home for her spun-out-into-orbit sisters or did the old lady truly go on a trip with the incriminating clues pointing to murder really just explainable coincidences? As in most good mysteries, the answer is less interesting than the build up, but still, you'll want to see for yourself how it all plays out.

N.B. For some reason, 1937's *Night Must Fall*, which has a similar story to *Ladies in Retirement*, gets more attention from old-movie fans. Yet, *Ladies in Retirement* offers an equal or, maybe, greater amount of murder, mystery and dysfunction, while its director, Charles Vidor, keeps things moving along at a faster pace than in *Night Must Fall*.


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## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 58415
> 
> *Ladies in Retirement* from 1941 with Ida Lupino, Edith Barrett, Isobel Elsom, Elsa Lanchester and Louis Hayward
> 
> *Ladies in Retirement* is a solid entry in the subgenre of movies set in isolated country houses populated with eccentric family members where somebody needs money in a hurry. Unfortunately, though, the wealthy old lady (it's usually an old lady), who has all the money, doesn't want to part with it. Therein lies the problem and, possible, motive for murder (cue ominous music).
> 
> The house in these movies, often, is old and eerie with a bunch of dark nooks, creepy furniture and a dungeon-like basement. Basically, the setting advertises that something bad will eventually happen here. In addition to the eccentric family members, there's normally an oddball staff with, at minimum, a sassy young maid and an older gent who serves as a general caretaker. Finally, a few quirky village characters come by regularly to round out the cast.
> 
> In *Ladies in Retirement*, the story pivots around deadly serious housekeeper, Ida Lupino, who needs a home for her two older and genuinely daffy sisters, Edith Barrett and Elsa Lanchester. Otherwise, the state is going to put them in an asylum.
> 
> Lupino convinces her employer, Isobel Elsom, to let them come and stay for a bit, but after a few days with these two wackjobs in her house, wealthy eccentric Elsom tells Lupino her sisters have to go. When Lupino bucks her, Elsom then tells Lupion all three of them should leave.
> 
> What to do? What to do? Next thing we know, Elsom has gone on a trip and left Lupino in charge of the house, or has she? Lupino tells the maid and villagers that story, but she tells her sisters she's secretly bought the house.
> 
> Things go along, awkwardly, like this for a bit and then Lupino's scammer "nephew" (he's really a more distant relative), Louis Hayward, shows up looking for a place to hide out as he's absconded with money from his job at a bank (it's a heck of a family). Like all skilled scammers, he immediately senses that something is wrong in the house and begins noodling around.
> 
> He also hits on the maid as, in these stories, there's usually a, umm, horny young maid. Here, it's Evelyn Keyes, who is willing to do almost anything for the only youthful man to cross her path in a long time.
> 
> Also thrown into the mix are a few nuns from the local convent who stop in occasionally on some neighborly errand, but really to inject some Christian conscience into the story. That sets us up for the climax and denouement.
> 
> Did Lupino, who plays this one wound tighter than a drum, off the old lady so that she could provide a home for her spun-out-into-orbit sisters or did the old lady truly go on a trip with the incriminating clues pointing to murder really just explainable coincidences? As in most good mysteries, the answer is less interesting than the build up, but still, you'll want to see for yourself how it all plays out.
> 
> N.B. For some reason, 1937's *Night Must Fall*, which has a similar story to *Ladies in Retirement*, gets more attention from old-movie fans. Yet, *Ladies in Retirement* offers an equal or, maybe, greater amount of murder, mystery and dysfunction, while its director, Charles Vidor, keeps things moving along at a faster pace than in *Night Must Fall*.


My friend, you have done it again...Ladies in Retirement is on my must watch list! Thanks.


----------



## Fading Fast

*Tunes of Glory* from 1960 with Alec Guinness, John Mills and Susannah York

*Tunes of Glory* is a bit slow out of the gate, but it's well worth staying with this intense drama about a battle of wills for control of a Scottish regiment during the post-WWII peace.

Alec Guinness is the major who worked his way up through the ranks to become the regiment's acting colonel during WWII, but he is passed over for permanent appointment after the war. Instead, third-generation academy man John Mills is given the commission with Guinness remaining a major now reporting to Mills.

It's as awful and untenable a situation as it sounds. Guinness is a soldier's soldier who is a drinking buddy with most of his officers, but he also has a vicious cruel streak, which he seems to justify because he, himself, had to succeed the hard way.

Mills, who spent most of the war as a POW - and admits quietly at one point that he "never really came back -" is uncomfortable around the men in his command, a situation aggravated by his efforts to restore the order and discipline that Guinness let slip.

Initially, our sympathies are with Guinness as, despite his flaws, he is the more affable of the two men and, as noted, worked his way up through the ranks. But as we watch him vindictively undermine Mills' attempt to acclimate to his new command, and as we learn more about the family pressures and expectations Mills has been under his entire life, our sympathies begin to shift.

It's easy to feel smug and dismissive about the pressures and problems of the "privileged," (it's a not-pretty tic of our modern culture), but you can't help where you were born. Expectations can be a heavy burden to carry through life whether we want to acknowledge it or not. It's also easy to forget that not everyone who pulls himself up by his bootstraps is a great guy.

This is where director Ronald Neame shines as, after setting us up with a boilerplate view of who's the good guy and who's not, he flips our sympathies around a few times.

First, a drunk and angry Guinness strikes a corporal who is covertly dating Guinness' daughter, Susannah York. Now that Mills has his enemy right where he wants him, he has to decide if he is going to court martial Guinness. After leaning that way initially, he hesitates as he truly struggles with finding the right thing to do.

When a contrite and apologetic Guinness convinces Mills to give him a second chance with the promise that "this time," he'll work with Mills to make his command a success, we assume the movie is about over as both men have "grown" through experience.

But there's one more major flip to come with tragic results that takes the story and movie to another emotional level. After having all our comfortable assumptions and expectations blown apart, we're left reflecting on two men who are neither all good nor bad, but like most people in real life, land somewhere in between.

When we learn Guinness' and Mills' personal stories in a way that we rarely do with people in our own lives, we become more forgiving of their faults...up to a point. *Tunes of Glory* leaves you thinking about, and a little uncomfortable with, your own beliefs, assumptions and snap judgments about people. It's hard to ask for more from a movie.

N.B. Guinness and Mills, under the talented directing of Robert Neame, deliver outstanding performances where you can see them thinking and feeling simply from facial expressions and eye movements - the way you can in real life, but not always in movies. *Tunes of Glory*, which clearly influenced 1992's *A Few Good Men*, deserves to be more well known today.


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 58476
> 
> *Tunes of Glory* from 1960 with Alec Guinness, John Mills and Susannah York
> 
> *Tunes of Glory* is a bit slow out of the gate, but it's well worth staying with this intense drama about a battle of wills for control of a Scottish regiment during the post-WWII peace.
> 
> Alec Guinness is the major who worked his way up through the ranks to become the regiment's acting colonel during WWII, but he is passed over for permanent appointment after the war. Instead, third-generation academy man John Mills is given the commission with Guinness remaining a major now reporting to Mills.
> 
> It's as awful and untenable a situation as it sounds. Guinness is a soldier's soldier who is a drinking buddy with most of his officers, but he also has a vicious cruel streak, which he seems to justify because he, himself, had to succeed the hard way.
> 
> Mills, who spent most of the war as a POW - and admits quietly at one point that he "never really came back -" is uncomfortable around the men in his command, a situation aggravated by his efforts to restore the order and discipline that Guinness let slip.
> 
> Initially, our sympathies are with Guinness as, despite his flaws, he is the more affable of the two men and, as noted, worked his way up through the ranks. But as we watch him vindictively undermine Mills' attempt to acclimate to his new command, and as we learn more about the family pressures and expectations Mills has been under his entire life, our sympathies begin to shift.
> 
> It's easy to feel smug and dismissive about the pressures and problems of the "privileged," (it's a not-pretty tic of our modern culture), but you can't help where you were born. Expectations can be a heavy burden to carry through life whether we want to acknowledge it or not. It's also easy to forget that not everyone who pulls himself up by his bootstraps is a great guy.
> 
> This is where director Ronald Neame shines as, after setting us up with a boilerplate view of who's the good guy and who's not, he flips our sympathies around a few times.
> 
> First, a drunk and angry Guinness strikes a corporal who is covertly dating Guinness' daughter, Susannah York. Now that Mills has his enemy right where he wants him, he has to decide if he is going to court martial Guinness. After leaning that way initially, he hesitates as he truly struggles with finding the right thing to do.
> 
> When a contrite and apologetic Guinness convinces Mills to give him a second chance with the promise that "this time," he'll work with Mills to make his command a success, we assume the movie is about over as both men have "grown" through experience.
> 
> But there's one more major flip to come with tragic results that takes the story and movie to another emotional level. After having all our comfortable assumptions and expectations blown apart, we're left reflecting on two men who are neither all good nor bad, but like most people in real life, land somewhere in between.
> 
> When we learn Guinness' and Mills' personal stories in a way that we rarely do with people in our own lives, we become more forgiving of their faults...up to a point. *Tunes of Glory* leaves you thinking about, and a little uncomfortable with, your own beliefs, assumptions and snap judgments about people. It's hard to ask for more from a movie.
> 
> N.B. Guinness and Mills, under the talented directing of Robert Neame, deliver outstanding performances where you can see them thinking and feeling simply from facial expressions and eye movements - the way you can in real life, but not always in movies. *Tunes of Glory*, which clearly influenced 1992's *A Few Good Men*, deserves to be more well known today.


It has been my good fortune to watch Tunes of Glory perhaps twice in the past, but it has been awhile. I have also more recently watched A Few Good Men on more than one occasion and have watched or simply listened to that animated exchange between Colonel Nathan Jessup and Lieutenant JG Daniel Kaffee more times than I would care to admit. However, my superficial viewing approach has perhaps clouded my observational acumen and I have missed the tie-in, you reference, between these two great movies. I will schedule a viewing of both in my near future in an attempt to correct this abridgement of my cinematic understanding. Thanks for a great review.


----------



## Fading Fast

*The Whistle at Eaton Falls* from 1951 with Lloyd Bridges, Dorothy Gish, Ernest Borgnine and James Westerfield

"It doesn't take a sales manager to sell to the Navy, you're the low bidder or you're sunk."

- Doubleday Plastics' sales manager explaining to his new boss the brutal competition for government contracts.

This is not your average Hollywood movie about business. While it has plenty of Hollywood hokum and platitudes, and it's uneven as heck, it still has its moments where it takes an honest look at business and unions.

A plastics manufacturing company in a New Hampshire town is losing business and needs to automate (bring in new machines) to reduce costs and compete, but that will also lead to layoffs.

After the owner dies in a plane crash, his widow - in a moment of inspiration or idiocy - puts the head of the union, Lloyd Bridges, in charge of the company, which forces management to see the union's viewpoint and vice versa.

Bridges, after immediately promising not to cut any jobs, very quickly sees that there are no greedy owners living off of fat profits, but instead he's in charge of a company deeply in debt and losing money every day.

If there isn't profit in what the company sells, the payrolls won't be met (union contract or not), the bank loans won't get repaid, the business will fail, all jobs will be eliminated and the owner will be wiped out. Bridges looks at everything to save jobs, but realizes he needs to automate - the plan in place when he took over - or everyone will lose his or her job.

The union itself is split between the pragmatists who believe Bridges and realize that saving some jobs is better than saving none, but there's also a small militant faction who, against the evidence, believes management is lying and obdurately argues for no compromise.

Thrown into the mix is a mendacious former senior manager who is trying to buy the company on the cheap, lay everyone off, strip it of its patents and equipment, while dangling enough money in front of the owner's widow to allow her to maintain her lifestyle.

Not too many punches are held back as a temporary shutdown of the plant quickly reveals the visceral hardship the workers face trying to buy food and make their car and mortgage payments with only unemployment benefits coming in.

Yet, reopening the plant is no easy hurdle. Bridges and his head of sales, trying to do just that, bid below the factory's cost on a government contract in hope they'll find "cost saves" later. They still lose out to even lower bidders.

Hate management all you want, what would you do? Be as anti-union as you want, but most in the union offered to compromise even though, for those who would lose their jobs, it would mean almost certain poverty.

The rest is Hollywood happiness (spoiler alert) as a new patent discovery allows the company to bid lower on a huge contract. With the extra business, it can afford to automate, which reduces workers per shift, but it then hires those workers back as the company adds two more shifts to meet the growing demand.

Despite the fairytale ending, the value in the movie is the real stuff in the middle when both labor and management are forced to see there are no easy answers. It's also refreshing as most of the people in management and the union aren't portrayed as the cardboard evil characters their antagonists aver. For Hollywood, it's a reasonably honest look at business and labor.

N.B. Despite being 1951, the company has a smart female treasurer who, as opposed to today, is respected for her talent without a bunch of brouhaha "celebrating her gender." The same goes for the union where it is a female worker who takes the lead rallying the men to "man up" (paraphrasing, but that was her meaning) when a small faction tries to use force to override the legitimate outcome of a union vote. Nothing was ever as one-way as a post-it-note view of a period often makes it appear.


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## Fading Fast

*It Happened Tomorrow* from 1944 with Dick Powell, Linda Darnell, Jack Oakie and Edward Brophy

In *It Happened Tomorrow*, a late-1800s newspaper reporter, Dick Powell, after expressing a desire to see the future, is given a copy of the next day's paper by the publisher's apparition-like "archivist." Yes, the plot foreshadows a couple of future *The Twilight Zone* episodes.

Instead of immediately going to the race track or a brokerage firm, like any normal greedy person would, Powell uses his knowledge of the future to boost his career by "scooping" the next day's news. He also leverages his new prescience to impress a potential girlfriend, Linda Darnell, who, coincidentally, is part of an uncle-niece psychic act.

But as happens in these types of stories, his plans go awry with only trouble ensuing. Powell loudly announces that he's going to be present at a yet-to-happen theater ticket-booth holdup, which results in, yes a scoop, but also, the police believing he's part of the gang that held up the theater.

Powell then spends a chunk of the movie proving his innocence while trying to convince Darnell and her skeptical uncle that he's not a crook or a nutcase. With that somewhat accomplished, he now decides to use his knowledge of the future to make a bunch of money at the racetrack so that he and Darnell will have a nest egg to start their life together.

However, as before, things don't work out well. First, though, there's the movie's best scene where one of the track's bookmakers, played by the wonderful character actor Edward Brophy, goes from cockily taking Powell's action to, after Powell has several winners in a row, all but pleading with him to take his business to another bookie. There's no gambler ever who hasn't fantasized about having that kind of day at the track.

Again though, no good comes from this as Powell learns from the same newspaper where he's getting all the winning horses, he will die tomorrow. That will take the shine off even a great day at the racetrack (which is hard to do). Later, as would eventually become a stock plot device for these types of stories, his winnings are stolen from him.

All of these ups and downs happen inside a screwball-comedy construct with a lighthearted tone. You can probably see the end coming (it's only a spoiler alert if you've never seen a romcom-with-a-message movie before) as Powell and Darnell learn it's love not money that is really important to achieve happiness.

It's a serviceable movie whose story feels a bit choppy, which probably reflects the seven different writers who worked on the screenplay - too many cooks in the kitchen and all that. There's no reason to seek this one out, but if it happened to be on, there are worse ways to spend an hour and half. Plus, it's fun to see an early version of an idea *The Twilight Zone* TV show would explore from a few different angles, just a decade and half or so later.


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## Fading Fast

*The Ten Commandments* from 1956 with a cast that includes almost every actor in Hollywood at the time

"His God, is God"
- Rameses

It's not often the theme of a three-plus-hour Biblical extravaganza can be summed up in four words, but leave it to a beaten Egyptian pharaoh to succinctly explain the defining meaning of the Moses story.

*The Ten Commandments* is an odd mix of Hollywood kitsch and Biblical tale that pings from silly to sublime, sometimes, from scene to scene. The bold Technicolor detracts from the solemnity of the subject (as a kid, I first saw it on a black-and-white TV, which is partly why it seemed more serious to me then). Still, when the narrative limns closely to the Bible, the cheesiness of the production fades as the power of the story takes over.

Having been raised without religion and only having read the Bible as an adult (in some updated English version), the movie seems to, generally, follow the Moses tale in the Old Testament, but I defer to anyone with even modest biblical knowledge.

Despite being a mashup of an overblown Hollywood production and Biblical story, and with a lot of 1950s movie-making excess on display, the film still engages throughout its runtime. Perhaps because it has impressive source material (although, Moses didn't get a writing credit) and a ton of story to get through, scenes just keep speeding by.

Sometimes it seems that the production almost overwhelmed famed director Cecil B. Demille, but he managed to somehow corral a cast of thousands, a rambling story with subplots all over the place and a crazy number of special effects to deliver an epic.

The core conflict - the battle of wills and theology between Rameses (Yul Brynner) and Moses (Charlton Heston) - frames the movie right down to the two powerful men wanting the same woman, Queen Nefretiri, played by Anne Baxter exuding an all-consuming lust, often, unrequitedly for Moses.

As Moses's path takes him from Pharaoh's son to a slave, his gradual evolution to prophet parallels Rameses rise to the throne as an Egyptian god on earth (but the god thing in Egypt is hard to keep track of as they had a lot of them back then).

Even though, here, the Egyptian palaces look a bit like modern-day over-priced luxury furniture "galleries'' (a lot of empty space between overwrought items), the power of the Egyptian Empire is impressive for its day (it's 1300 BC or thereabouts), making Moses' attempt to free his people more daunting.

But Rameses keeps losing out to God-made, Moses-prophesized miracle upon miracle. After derisively dismissing Moses' pronouncement that hail and darkness will come at noon, you see the confidence drain out of Rameses as hail begins to rain down, well, at noon.

When Moses warns Rameses that the first-born son of every Egyptian will be killed, and it happens, Rameses has had enough. In disgust, defeat and fear, he doesn't so much free the Israelis as gives up and lets them leave.

Nefretiri, angry because Moses has scorned her (heaven has no rage and all that), goads Rameses to change his mind when she all but tells him he has a small, umm, staff compared to Moses. So inspired, or shamed, Ramses leads the Egyptian army in pursuit of the fleeing Israelis.

When a wall of fire and a parting sea that, then, unparts and destroys Rameses army ends his pursuit effort, he returns to his palace a beaten man who has seen the power of the one God and utters the defining words, "His God, is God."

All that's left is, well, the really big Old Testament stuff. Moses ascends Mount Sinai where God writes the Ten Commandment in his own hand (it's a cool scene). Carrying the sacred tablets, Moses comes down to see, in the mere forty days he's been away, many of the Israelis have lost faith, are living wantonly and praying to a golden calf.

Let's pause here for a second. After God performed ten miracles to free the Israelis from Egypt and created a wall of fire while parting the sea to ensure their escape, they lost faith after forty days. Really? Seeing those events with my own eyes would have been enough to make me a believer for five lifetimes.

In disgust, Moses throws the Tablets with the Commandments at the offending calf, the Israelis wander in the desert for forty years and, finally, see the promised land as Moses is about to die. Whatever your faith, it's a powerful story that draws you in despite all the wacky 1950s movie-making silliness going on around the core Biblical tale.

N.B. Look for the scene where non-believer (in the Egyptian gods) Rameses, having just lost his young son, prays to the Egyptian god of darkness to bring his son back. It is a moving moment of a man now looking for faith, but who fails to find it in his own religion. Later, at the parting-of-the-sea event, he is convinced he has seen the one God, yet he can't acknowledge his new belief to his subjects. It's a powerful commentary on the eternal challenges of faith and identity.


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## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 58682
> 
> *The Ten Commandments* from 1956 with a cast that includes almost every actor in Hollywood at the time
> 
> "His God, is God"
> - Rameses
> 
> It's not often the theme of a three-plus-hour Biblical extravaganza can be summed up in four words, but leave it to a beaten Egyptian pharaoh to succinctly explain the defining meaning of the Moses story.
> 
> *The Ten Commandments* is an odd mix of Hollywood kitsch and Biblical tale that pings from silly to sublime, sometimes, from scene to scene. The bold Technicolor detracts from the solemnity of the subject (as a kid, I first saw it on a black-and-white TV, which is partly why it seemed more serious to me then). Still, when the narrative limns closely to the Bible, the cheesiness of the production fades as the power of the story takes over.
> 
> Having been raised without religion and only having read the Bible as an adult (in some updated English version), the movie seems to, generally, follow the Moses tale in the Old Testament, but I defer to anyone with even modest biblical knowledge.
> 
> Despite being a mashup of an overblown Hollywood production and Biblical story, and with a lot of 1950s movie-making excess on display, the film still engages throughout its runtime. Perhaps because it has impressive source material (although, Moses didn't get a writing credit) and a ton of story to get through, scenes just keep speeding by.
> 
> Sometimes it seems that the production almost overwhelmed famed director Cecil B. Demille, but he managed to somehow corral a cast of thousands, a rambling story with subplots all over the place and a crazy number of special effects to deliver an epic.
> 
> The core conflict - the battle of wills and theology between Rameses (Yul Brynner) and Moses (Charlton Heston) - frames the movie right down to the two powerful men wanting the same woman, Queen Nefretiri, played by Anne Baxter exuding an all-consuming lust, often, unrequitedly for Moses.
> 
> As Moses's path takes him from Pharaoh's son to a slave, his gradual evolution to prophet parallels Rameses rise to the throne as an Egyptian god on earth (but the god thing in Egypt is hard to keep track of as they had a lot of them back then).
> 
> Even though, here, the Egyptian palaces look a bit like modern-day over-priced luxury furniture "galleries'' (a lot of empty space between overwrought items), the power of the Egyptian Empire is impressive for its day (it's 1300 BC or thereabouts), making Moses' attempt to free his people more daunting.
> 
> But Rameses keeps losing out to God-made, Moses-prophesized miracle upon miracle. After derisively dismissing Moses' pronouncement that hail and darkness will come at noon, you see the confidence drain out of Rameses as hail begins to rain down, well, at noon.
> 
> When Moses warns Rameses that the first-born son of every Egyptian will be killed, and it happens, Rameses has had enough. In disgust, defeat and fear, he doesn't so much free the Israelis as gives up and lets them leave.
> 
> Nefretiri, angry because Moses has scorned her (heaven has no rage and all that), goads Rameses to change his mind when she all but tells him he has a small, umm, staff compared to Moses. So inspired, or shamed, Ramses leads the Egyptian army in pursuit of the fleeing Israelis.
> 
> When a wall of fire and a parting sea that, then, unparts and destroys Rameses army ends his pursuit effort, he returns to his palace a beaten man who has seen the power of the one God and utters the defining words, "His God, is God."
> 
> All that's left is, well, the really big Old Testament stuff. Moses ascends Mount Sinai where God writes the Ten Commandment in his own hand (it's a cool scene). Carrying the sacred tablets, Moses comes down to see, in the mere forty days he's been away, many of the Israelis have lost faith, are living wantonly and praying to a golden calf.
> 
> Let's pause here for a second. After God performed ten miracles to free the Israelis from Egypt and created a wall of fire while parting the sea to ensure their escape, they lost faith after forty days. Really? Seeing those events with my own eyes would have been enough to make me a believer for five lifetimes.
> 
> In disgust, Moses throws the Tablets with the Commandments at the offending calf, the Israelis wander in the desert for forty years and, finally, see the promised land as Moses is about to die. Whatever your faith, it's a powerful story that draws you in despite all the wacky 1950s movie-making silliness going on around the core Biblical tale.
> 
> N.B. Look for the scene where non-believer (in the Egyptian gods) Rameses, having just lost his young son, prays to the Egyptian god of darkness to bring his son back. It is a moving moment of a man now looking for faith, but who fails to find it in his own religion. Later, at the parting-of-the-sea event, he is convinced he has seen the one God, yet he can't acknowledge his new belief to his subjects. It's a powerful commentary on the eternal challenges of faith and identity.


I've seen The Ten Commandments, but alas, it was the color version, watched on a color TV. However, it was several decades ago and the 'old man's' memory is fuzzy and getting fuzzier every day. LOL. I am always impressed with the lucidity of your written comments and most impressed with the insightful details you manage to consistently include in your reviews.

Regarding your understanding(s)/interpretation of the Bible, you have nothing to worry about. My late, sainted Mama always insisted we be in Church every Sunday morning and over the years I've read several versions (to include The Revised Standard Version, The New English Version and The New International version, A Leadership Bible and Life Application Bible, with copious notes on how to apply scriptures to our leadership challenges at work and to situations we encounter in our lives, respectively) of the Bible cover to cover. The Leadership Application Bible accompanied me throughout most of my 42 years of full time work and was in my Tech Order bag for each of my 408 nuclear alert tours in the Minuteman II weapon system. Perhaps the most understandable of the Bible versions I have read was "The Book of God," a novelized version of the Bible written by Professor Emeritus Walter Wangerin, Jr. of Valparaiso University. It helps tie it all together in one's mind. My point is, I suspect your scriptural understanding is as valid as any others might claim theirs to be. Religion/Spiritual growth seems to be a lifetime undertaking. I'm still waiting for that big white light to illuminate telling me I understand it all! LOL.

Thank you for another great review!


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## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> I've seen The Ten Commandments, but alas, it was the color version, watched on a color TV. However, it was several decades ago and the 'old man's' memory is fuzzy and getting fuzzier every day. LOL. I am always impressed with the lucidity of your written comments and most impressed with the insightful details you manage to consistently include in your reviews.
> 
> Regarding your understanding(s)/interpretation of the Bible, you have nothing to worry about. My late, sainted Mama always insisted we be in Church every Sunday morning and over the years I've read several versions (to include The Revised Standard Version, The New English Version and The New International version, A Leadership Bible and Life Application Bible, with copious notes on how to apply scriptures to our leadership challenges at work and to situations we encounter in our lives, respectively) of the Bible cover to cover. The Leadership Application Bible accompanied me throughout most of my 42 years of full time work and was in my Tech Order bag for each of my 408 nuclear alert tours in the Minuteman II weapon system. Perhaps the most understandable of the Bible versions I have read was "The Book of God," a novelized version of the Bible written by Professor Emeritus Walter Wangerin, Jr. of Valparaiso University. It helps tie it all together in one's mind. My point is, I suspect your scriptural understanding is as valid as any others might claim theirs to be. Religion/Spiritual growth seems to be a lifetime undertaking. I'm still waiting for that big white light to illuminate telling me I understand it all! LOL.
> 
> Thank you for another great review!


Thank you, I very much appreciate your kind comments about the review and your insight and perspective on the Bible.

It's a heck of a movie with a lot of kitsch, but when it hits a serious Bible note, it inspired.

I've thought about the Rameses quote, "His God, is God," since this recent viewing as it is so well written and impactful.


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## Fading Fast

*Primrose Path* from 1940 with Ginger Rogers, Joel McCrea, Mamie Adams and Henry Travers

"We live, not as we wish to, but as we can."
- Meander, Greek Poet, 342 - 290 BC

How they somehow snuck this one past the censors is the first question. Ginger Rogers plays the daughter and granddaughter of prostitutes (that "word" is never spoken, but it is clear what they are/were - grandmother is "retired"). Why this very good movie isn't more well known is the second question.

Rogers' mother, Mamie Adams, is a decent woman who does what she has to, to put food on the table for, not only daughter Rogers and herself, but also her ten-year-old daughter, alcoholic husband, Miles Mander, and her complaining mother.

Dad, Miles Mander, is an educated man who can translate Greek, but is now a broken alcoholic. Yet, wife Adams is the philosophical one who understands without resentment that some people are put on this earth to provide for others who can't. It's a thoughtful view of a broken family living in wrong-side-of-the-tracks Primrose Path.

Daughter Rogers (who looks adorable in her tomboy clothes while she's softly grifting to augment the family's modest income) meets nice guy Joel McCrea who owns a diner/gas station with his dad, the wonderful Henry Travers. Later, she tells McCrea she ran away, so as to hide her background from him while she kinda maneuvers him into marrying her.

After they marry, all is going well with the happy young couple. Along with McCrea's Dad, Travers, they run the diner/gas station. But then, Rogers' mother just happens to pop into the station one day. With the cat out of the bag, Rogers then has to take McCrea to meet her family.

There he realizes what Rogers' mom and grandmother do/did for a living and that her dad, instead of being the scholar Rogers implied he was, is a drunk. McCrea feels duped and bolts from the house and Rogers.

Rogers desperately tries to save her marriage, but McCrea's pride is having none of it despite his really wanting to take her back. Here is where real Motion Picture Production Code subversion sets it as the prostitute stuff was just a warm up.

Dad Travers tries to get his son to see that sometimes people lie for reasons that aren't easy to understand nor should you blindly condemn them. Meanwhile, Rodgers' super-cool prostitute mom tells her daughter to denounce the family if it will help her get a truly good-guy husband back.

What? Lying is okay and not just in service to a greater good, but also because, sometimes, decent people are too weak to admit everything in their past? And it's okay to toss your sketchy family overboard if they are more of a hindrance than a help to a better life?

This is a lot of realpolitik family stuff that doesn't fit inside the usually obdurate Motion Picture Production Code, but there it is. Maybe the censors were drunk the night they approved this one. Drinking seems to be one vice the code overseers were pretty much okay with.

For modern audiences, the "shock" value of* Primrose Path* is tame or not even there anymore. The joy today is Roger's pitch-perfect performance as the girl from the very wrong side of the tracks trying to make something of her life.

Equally impressive is Mamie Adams as the believably not-bitter prostitute just trying to hold her family together. Rounding out the strong cast is McCrea's dad, Henry Travers, who sees what really matters amidst the messiness of everyday life.

Somehow, RKO Radio Pictures studio, in the tightly circumscribed movie world of 1940, got a movie made about a prostitute's daughter marrying a man under false pretense where the prostitute mother is portrayed as a hero and Roger's deception is dismissed as understandable. God only knows how this one made it to the theaters in 1940.


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## Fading Fast

*I Want to Live!* from 1958 with Susan Hayward, Simon Oakland, Virginia Vincent and Theodore Bikel.

This movie is a fictionalized version of real-world events.

*I Want to Live!* opens in a smokey jazz club where an old, heavy-set man serves his much younger "girlfriend" a boiler maker and then aggressively puts his arm around her. Okay, got it, this is not Rick's Cafe Americana, nor is this a regular Motion Picture Production Code movie.

Movies were changing by the late fifties as filmmakers kept pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable. Jazz, too, was making its impact helping instill an edgier and more-stylish look and sound to films like *I Want to Live!*

Susan Hayward plays a party girl prostitute (at least sometimes) and general grifter who is dishonest, immoral and slatternly. She's a female character rarely shown on screen since the Motion Picture Production Code took hold in the mid thirties and almost never shown this graphically (or, as later in the movie, sympathetically).

After she is charged with committing a violent murder, it's breaking with all we've been taught by motion pictures for the past several decades when we are led to believe she is innocent. (My, admittedly, limited internet research into the real-world version of this case brought this claim into question, but for the sake of the movie, we'll just go with it.)

With a long rap sheet, including perjury, and two other criminals she's run with fingering her, Hayward is found guilty and sentenced to death. From here, the cool "jazzy" style of the movie gives way to a quasi-documentary approach as we see Hayward kinda, sorta mature into a fighter to have her death sentence overturned.

Aided by a surprisingly engaged court-appointed attorney, a crusading psychiatrist and a journalist who's switched to her side mid-story, Hayward mounts a series of appeals that gives her hope even as she slowly grinds through the penal system toward the gas chamber.

All movies are propaganda (not my original thought at all) with *I Want To Live's!* goal being to put you in the place of someone falsely convicted of murder who's now facing the death penalty. Good for it as people have been falsely convicted and put to death by our judicial system, so it should be challenged.

But movies could also be made showing a guilty person found innocent who then kills again. Or a movie could be made about violent, not-remorseful killers who take multiple lives, are rightfully convicted and whose death sentence brings some solace to the victims' families. Maybe their death even deterred others from killing. Or movies could be made showing a guilty murderer sentenced to "life without parole" who kills again in prison or who is later paroled and kills once released (both have happened).

But the propaganda in this one is - as is Hollywood's wont - to show an putatively innocent person unfairly facing the death penalty. Hayward plays her character consistently inconsistent. Quick to temper and regularly irrational, she can also approach a situation thoughtfully and calmly, but usually only after she's tried, several times, yelling and screaming to get her way.

As the movie climaxes, director Robert Wise brilliantly juxtaposes Hayward's all-over-the-map emotional humanity and desperate desire to live against the almost languid but methodical preparations of the gas chamber attendees.

*I Want to Live!* is effective and chilling, but other than pushing your emotional buttons, it doesn't solve the eternal justice challenge of how to balance not letting the guilty go free versus not convicting the innocent. Real-life justice isn't found in black-and-white absolutes no matter how much a movie impacts us emotionally.

N.B. In addition to *I Want to Live's! *beautiful fifties black-and-white cinematography and wonderful time travel, the cast of, mainly, second-tier actors is outstanding even if it's made up of faces you know (often from TV shows a decade later), but names you can't quite remember.


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## Fading Fast

*Of Human Bondage* from 1934 with Bette Davis, Leslie Howard, Kay Johnson and Frances Dee

It is painful, truly painful, to watch how horribly cockney waitress Bette Davis treats deeply in love with her and handicapped (club foot) medical student Leslie Howard time and time and time again.

Sure, Howard should have snapped out of it, but the heart sometimes won't stop. Davis, though, isn't using her heart when she continues to twist Howard into knots, sometimes for material gain and, sometimes, more cruelly, just for sport.

When you despise, deeply despise, a character who feels real, something powerful is happening on the screen. Young Bette Davis delivers a tour de force performance as the selfish, merciless, yet also, self-destructive girl from the wrong side of the tracks who almost ruins sensitive and kind medical student Leslie Howard.

Howard's club foot makes him, in the language of the day, a cripple. Shy around women, something clicks in Howard's head and heart when he sees Davis waiting tables.

Her rudeness and indifference to him only fuel his passion more. When she dates another man, it drives him crazy. When she laughs in his face or tells him she has no feelings for him - even mocks him for being a "cripple -" he just absorbs the blows and keeps coming back.

When she goes off with another man, he pines for her even when he finally meets a nice woman who genuinely cares for him. Obsession is not rational.

It gets worse. When the man she went away with impregnates and abandons Davis, Howard ignores his kind girlfriend and supports Davis and her child, despite her still not willing to even date him.

When she, then, leaves him for his best friend and, later, returns discarded, he all but bankrupts himself to help her once again. When she wrecks his apartment and burns the last bonds he has for his medical school tuition (he has to drop out), he seems finally over her, but not really.

Even after all that, and now dating yet another very nice woman, when Davis shows up with tuberculosis, he ignores his new girlfriend to come to Davis' aid once more. It's awful, but oddly believable.

Howard, late in, acknowledges his obsession is without reason, but he can't stop. When his club foot is surgically corrected, it seems like it will be his epiphany moment - he's now no longer a "cripple -" but it isn't.

Based on W. Somerset Maugham novel (good source material doesn't hurt), *Of Human Bondage* is a brutal portrayal of the destructive power of an unhinge love obsession, especially when the object of that obsession viciously and mercilessly wields that power against its victim. Sure, there's a lesson here: don't become obsessed with a horrible person. Now, tell that to the person who's obsessed and see well it works.

N.B. The scene where Howard is trying to study his medical school book, but all he sees is Bette Davis on the pages is, literally, taken right out of Victor's Hugo 1831's *Hunchback of Notre Dame*. Almost everything has an antecedent somewhere.


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## eagle2250

Another detailed and informative review.... a very interesting read, for sure. It kinda reminds me of an amorous quest of my own during my days in high school. As the singer Dion and The Belmonts aptly told us so many years ago, "why must I be a teenager in love?" I was a grappler, wrestling at 123 pounds and had the hots for a cheerleader who only dated football players. Being an average love sick teen, I signed up for football and became a 123 pound tackling dummy for a year. During that year I kept asking the young beauty out and she kept saying no. It turned out she no only dated just football players, but apparently only those players she had the hots for! And there we have it...Betty Davis and her attitude, all over again. Fortunately, unlike Leslie Howard in "Of Human Bondage," my testosterone highs were not that discriminating and I quickly turned my attention a half dozen or more other young wenches who had caught my eye!. Emotionally I healed fairly quickly, but I have been left with a lifelong distaste for 'playing' the game of football. LOL.


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## Fading Fast

*The Bachelor Party *from 1957 with Don Murray, E.G. Marshall, Jack Warden and Carolyn Jones
*

The Bachelor Party* is a 1950s noir-style film with a kitchen-sink drama overlay, but its characters are average Americans, not gangsters, conmen, molls, corrupt politicians or people on the mental edge. Back then, the country embraced noir with its shady characters, but judging by this film's obscurity, 1950s America wasn't ready to have its regular men's and women's angst and insecurities exposed raw on film.

But that is exactly what happens in *The Bachelor Party*. Filmed in black and white and shot on location in New York with its gritty and grimy streets, subway and bars, we follow a few "average" young men trying to force fun out of a bachelor party, but instead they begin to offer up their dark thoughts and feelings.

It's not cheery, but it is real. If you've ever been out on a night where a bunch of guys are trying to have a good time, but it just isn't coming together, so it takes a turn toward frustration and introspection, you'll recognize that night in *The Bachelor Party*.

Five guys from "bookkeeping" at the same company go out after work to have a bachelor party for the one getting married the next day. It starts okay at the first bar - drinks, jokes, camaraderie - but a sort of ennui and sadness sets in after they go back to one guy's apartment to watch porn films (yup, this is not a "wholesome 1950s" movie).

Even though it's early, nine-thirty or so, the party is at risk of breaking up as the married guys talk about getting home to their sick kids or going to their night-school classes, while the one bachelor in the group tries to rally them to the next bar.

He succeeds, but the ongoing dispiriting vibe and additional alcohol bring out more complaints. The guy getting married tells a sad tale about how he was pressured by his family and fiance to propose, but doesn't really, truly want to get married. One of the married guys reveals that his doctor wants him to move to a warm dry climate for his asthma, but he can't as he needs every dollar of his salary to keep his kid in college.

The young married guy going to night school admits he's burned out and resentful of his wife as he feels trapped at twenty five, especially as she just told him she's pregnant. And they all fear that "IBM machines" will replace them (and, in time, they'd be right).

As the night drags on, the gripes and disaffection grow. The groom walks away from, without having touched, his friends-provided prostitute (yup, this is not a "wholesome 1950s" movie). He then admits to one of his buddies he's a virgin, but since his wife is a widow, he's afraid he'll disappoint her sexually.

Later, the one with the newly pregnant wife stops home for additional cash only to get into an argument with his wife about her having an abortion. The word isn't used, but there is no doubt what they are discussing.

Finally, at the last bar at three in the morning, the bachelor who has kept the party going all but admits he goes out so much because he gets painfully lonely at home by himself night after night.

As if all this isn't enough, there's a small side story about an intellectual bohemian, piquantly played by Carolyn Jones. She admits to one of the guys she's just met and agreed to go to bed with that she sleeps around because she can't stand to be alone at night. (No, she and the lonely bachelor don't "find each other." It's definitely not "that" kind of movie.)

No one is a crook, gangster, deranged killer, etc., - your typical noir characters. These are regular people, some of whom you'll recognize, adjusted for 1950s norms, in your co-workers and friends today. It's real; it's raw; it's demoralizing and it's a look at America you didn't often see in a 1950s movie theater.

There is a Motion Picture Production Code happy ending slapped on in the last two minutes, but audiences easily saw through that. *The Bachelor Party's* real achievement happens in the other ninety minutes when it gives America a not-pretty view of five regular guys in Manhattan.


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## Fading Fast

*The Truth about Cats and Dogs* from 1996 with Janeane Garofalo, Uma Thurman and Ben Chaplin

This is either a terrible movie or a bad-but-okay movie as, at times, I couldn't stand it, but at other times, I found it mildly amusing. I think I liked it more when I first saw it twenty-plus years ago.

It's an awkward riff on the Cyrano de Bergerac story where Ben Chaplin mistakes ditzy model Uma Thurman for smart-but-plain-looking radio-talk-show-host Janeane Garofalo. He's attracted to Garofalo's brains and Thurman's looks - sigh.

The girls then allow the mistake to continue in a kinda-sorta plan to get Chaplin to fall in love with Garofalo, but of course, he falls in love with Thurman as that is whom he believes he's dating (plus, she's Uma freakin' Thurman). This, naturally, causes a rift between Garofalo and Thurman as, shocker, both girls now want Chaplin.

Yes, that's the story and it is as stupid as it sounds. Most movies ask you to suspend reality to some extent, but *The Truth About Cats and Dogs*, often, asks you to be an idiot. (I'm ignoring the syllogism about being an idiot and still watching the movie.)

Yet, darn it, just when I was fed up with *The Truth About Cats and Dogs *and about to shut it off, some cute scene or funny dialogue exchange would keep me watching, despite the movie being a series of cliches.

Thurman is only "dumb" because she's so beautiful she's never had to develop her mind - sigh. Garafalo is a vet because animals don't care what you look like and she's a radio host because your viewers can't see you - sigh again. Thurman's last boyfriend abused her because she has no self esteem. Garafalo lives with a cat and too many candles to avoid having a personal life that she believes will be filled with rejection.

It's ridiculous, but Garafalo, Chapman and Thurman are good in their roles and the movie has its fun parts wrapped inside all its stupidity. Thurman's sincere-but-clueless attempts to improve her mind - as when she struggles, with dictionary in hand, to read just one page of a philosophy book - is a hoot. I'd almost like to say I just hated the movie, but have to admit, irritated as I was at times, I did watch the entire nonsensical thing and chuckled occasionally while doing so.


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## Fading Fast

*The Paradine Case* from 1947 with Gregory Peck, Alida Valli, Ann Todd, Charles Laughton, Charles Colburn, Ethel Barrymore and Louis Jordan

The pieces of this Hitchcock movie are better than the whole, which might be why it's generally considered one of the master director's middling efforts.

But some of those pieces are outstanding, as is the incredibly talented cast with the one weak choice of Gregory Peck, a fine actor otherwise, in the lead.

Ostensibly, the story is about a young, beautiful woman, Alida Valli, accused of killing her older, blind and wealthy husband with Peck brought in as her brilliant defense attorney.

Yet, it is really about Peck becoming so besotted with Valli he risks his marriage and professional objectivity. This, in turn, means he's risking his personal life and career all over his platonic "affair" with Valli (she's being held in jail the entire time he knows her).

That is also the story's weakness as Peck's "falling in love" with Valli, pretty much at first sight, is never convincing. Valli is just too cold; beautiful, yes, but chilly. Peck, meanwhile, seems more angry with Valli for disturbing his thoughts than in love with her. The entire movie balances on this weak pivot.

If you just go with it, though, you get all these wonderful scenes and relationships. Ann Todd, Peck's arrestingly beautiful and smarter-than-him wife, immediately senses what is going on and tries to give her struggling husband room and time for his dumb mental infidelity to burn itself out. I'm firmly against physical violence, but kept hoping Todd would just punch her stupid husband in his face.

You also get Charles Colburn as Peck's friend and legal mentor having an incredible_ tête-à-tête_ with his whip-smart young daughter who sees Peck's descent into idiocy before Colburn.

Equally engaging is the scene where bullying Charles Laughton, the judge in the case, belittles his perceptive but browbeaten wife. She, also, comes across smarter than her "brilliant legal mind" husband. Say what you will of sexism from that era, but almost every woman is smarter than every man in *The Paradine Case*.

When the movie finally shifts to the climatic courtroom scenes, the drama is solidly engaging. Peck's crafty defense convincingly shows that the butler did it (well almost, the husband's aide, Louis Jordan). But then (spoiler alert), Valli, his client, destroys her own defense by confessing to the murder. This exonerates Jordan, whom she now acknowledges has, all along, been her lover (this is a dagger right through Peck's lovesick heart).

After that, it's all clean-up as Valli is off to the hangman, while Peck assumes his career and marriage is all washed up. But once again, it's his wife, super Ann Todd, to the rescue.

Here's when you know you have received more than you deserve in life. Ann Todd agrees to marry you. Ann Todd is your good loving wife. You then act like a complete *ss to Ann Todd over an infatuation with another woman. But when it's all over, understanding Ann Todd takes you back, not because she's weak, but because she's strong and accepts your weaknesses. Ann Todd deserves better. Roll credits.

N.B. A rule of murder mysteries: never trust the rich woman (pathologically aloof Valli, in this case) who sleeps in an overly ornate room with an elaborate headboard that includes a large narcissistic portrait of herself.


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## eagle2250

Another rather splendid review in which you clarify the competing logic's and strategies in the film, helping your reader to make an informed decision on whether or not the movie, The Paradine Case is one to be searched out and watched, or perhaps skipped over to accommodate more pressing viewing priorities. Realizing you caution that this is not one of Hitchcock's best efforts, I find myself drawn in by the incredible acting talents of Gregory Peck. Consequently, I found a You Tube presentation of this film and watched the first 17 minutes and 38 seconds (Peck has finished telling the vixen in distress that he will be taking her case and that this will just be a brief skirmish for the Royal Marines!), before returning to AAAC to complete my efforts with the brotherhood. Afterwhich, I will return to You tube and watch the rest of the movie!


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## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> Another rather splendid review in which you clarify the competing logic's and strategies in the film, helping your reader to make an informed decision on whether or not the movie, The Paradine Case is one to be searched out and watched, or perhaps skipped over to accommodate more pressing viewing priorities. Realizing you caution that this is not one of Hitchcock's best efforts, I find myself drawn in by the incredible acting talents of Gregory Peck. Consequently, I found a You Tube presentation of this film and watched the first 17 minutes and 38 seconds (Peck has finished telling the vixen in distress that he will be taking her case and that this will just be a brief skirmish for the Royal Marines!), before returning to AAAC to complete my efforts with the brotherhood. Afterwhich, I will return to You tube and watch the rest of the movie!


That's great - I'm glad you found it and look forward to your thoughts on it.


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## Fading Fast

*Our Very Own* from 1950 with Ann Blyth, Jane Wyatt, Farley Granger, Ann Dvorak and Natalie Wood

TV was less groundbreaking than it appears when you realize that most of what TV would eventually do in its first thirty or forty years had already been done in the movies.

B movies, going back to the 1930s, were often quite similar to what would become TV-style dramas or soap operas by the 1960s. Equally ahead of TV, serial stories were quite popular in the 1930s and 1940s where audiences would come back week after week to see the next "installment" of these, mainly, kid-oriented pictures.

In the 1940s and 1950s, there were many low-budget movies that were the antecedents of the 1970s TV *After School Special. *In those efforts, a "challenging" issue relevant to kids or young adults was highlighted and addressed in an edifying manner.

*Our Very Own* is a 1950 movie version of a 1970s *After School Special* with the seventeen-year-old daughter of a comfortable and loving middle-class family accidentally discovering she was adopted. As was a common practice then, the parents had kept the adoption secret from the daughter, so the discovery is a crisis moment for the daughter and parents.

Until then, Ann Blyth is a "normal" teen worried about her boyfriend, Farley Granger, excited about her dress for graduation and regularly doing battle with her younger sisters, the youngest being twelve-year-old Natalie Wood.

When she learns she was adopted, all that gets pushed aside as she immediately knows she wants to meet her "real" mother. This is a dagger right through the heart of her adoptive mom Jane Wyatt (warming up for her future role on *Father Knows Best* as one of TV's perfect 1950s mothers).

After a trip to biological mom, Ann Dvorak - nice but rough around the edges and struggling financially - and a conversation with her best friend whose mom died when she was a baby, Blyth comes to the only conclusion the script allows: she is darn lucky to have been adopted by such nice people.

The movie ends with class vice president Blythe giving a graduation speech about the value of citizenship and a heartfelt admonition to her fortunate fellow students to feel gratitude to their parents and country.

It's easy to be snarky and cynical about these movies, especially today when any pride in one's country is mocked by many (at least in America; although, those same people probably respect and understand it when practiced in other countries). It also doesn't help that, as is the wont of these movies, the messaging is heavy handed and obvious.

Sure, better writing would help and some of the thinking doesn't align to today's unforgiving standards, but heck, somebody, somewhere was trying to do some good. Which means, kids then probably felt like kids in the 1970s did about those *After School Specials.*

My friends and I used to sometimes watch and, of course, openly mock them, but also, maybe only quietly to ourselves, learn something from them as well. For us today, *Our Very Own* is also pretty good time-travel to the cars, clothes, architecture and norms (seen through a Hollywood filter) of the day.

N.B. In academic "game theory," the "crowd watching the crowd" is a big deal as it's one of the ways a culture signals its norms and practises (and, in today's vernacular, memes) to its members. One wonders if movies like *Our Very Own* didn't both reflect and help create the teenage culture of the 1950s.

Parties, music, dancing, necking, dress, speech, attitudes toward parents and school are all very 1950s "teenager" in the movie. At a time when entertainment hadn't split into a million silos like today, these geared-toward-teenagers movies probably had a pretty powerful "crowd watching the crowd" effect.


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## Fading Fast

*The Nuisance* from 1933 with Lee Tracy, Madge Evans, Charles Butterworth and Frank Morgan

Once again, behold the pre-code: Successful ambulance-chasing lawyer Lee Tracy makes up false claims from whole cloth, hires fake witnesses, has a corrupt doctor, Frank Morgan, alter examination records and x-rays and suborns perjury. Today's tort lawyers could take notes. Yet, Tracy is not presented as a really bad guy despite the stunning fraud.

At one point, Tracy is negotiating a settlement with a streetcar company's lawyer over damages for an accident victim, literally, as the injured man dies in front of them. Without missing a beat, all that changes is the two men start arguing over a much-higher figure. I'm not proud of myself, but I was laughing out loud at their ruthless indifference.

Lee Tracey, at this moment, was MGM's answer to Warner Bros'. James Cagney and Pat O'Brien. Tracy, just like those Warner Bros. stars, is talking so fast in* The Nuisance*, the dialogue struggles to keep up.

Also like Warner Bros. MGM, at least for this instant, didn't flinch from calling out Germany and Hitler. Check out this exchange, and remember it is 1933:

German immigrant: "All good doctors are Germans"

Charles Butterworth as a pragmatic American: "I understand all that's been changed since Hitler got elected."

And how respected was Prohibition in 1933? Tracy has a bootlegger on call, a well-stocked bar at home and the local drug store all but openly sells booze from behind the counter. The "Noble Experiment" had become the national joke.

Back in the plot of *The Nuisance*, the streetcar company, tired of writing out big checks to Tracy's clients, hires super-adorable Madge Evans to masquerade as a client of Tracy to document and expose his corruption.

Just as she starts to make real progress, she - you know it's coming - begins to fall for Tracy as he does for her. Tracy and Evans have good chemistry and even better banter, but it's a tough square to circle in a relationship when you're about to sell out your boyfriend.

All that's left is a bunch of misunderstandings, hurt feelings, wounded pride, recriminations and, finally, Tracy and Evans trying to top each other in self sacrifice to prove their love after first saying horrible things to each other. You know, basic last-minute romcom stuff.

But since it's still pre-code 1933, the closing scene has Tracy assuring his now wife Evans he's reformed, while in the next breath, he's setting up a new big-money fraudulent claim. What does Evens do? She basically shrugs. For about four years, from 1930-1934, the pre-code movies refuted every wholesome narrative subsequent movies, produced under the code, would attempt to portray for the following thirty years.

An inside-Hollywood N.B. While made at MGM, this is a Warner Bros. movie in spirit as it shows illegal activity in an all but favorable light. Additionally, there's the aforementioned speed-talking Tracy doing his best Cagney/O'Brien and the very Warner Bros.' swipe at Hitler.

Finally, Charles Butterworth, as Tracy's amoral sidekick, is MGM's answer to Warners Bros. character actors like Frank McHugh. But proving you can never do things as well as the master, *The Nuisance *runs for an hour and twenty three minutes; warp-speed Warner Bros would have wrapped it up in an hour and five without losing any story.


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## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 59934
> 
> *The Nuisance* from 1933 with Lee Tracy, Madge Evans, Charles Butterworth and Frank Morgan
> 
> Once again, behold the pre-code: Successful ambulance-chasing lawyer Lee Tracy makes up false claims from whole cloth, hires fake witnesses, has a corrupt doctor, Frank Morgan, alter examination records and x-rays and suborns perjury. Today's tort lawyers could take notes. Yet, Tracy is not presented as a really bad guy despite the stunning fraud.
> 
> At one point, Tracy is negotiating a settlement with a streetcar company's lawyer over damages for an accident victim, literally, as the injured man dies in front of them. Without missing a beat, all that changes is the two men start arguing over a much-higher figure. I'm not proud of myself, but I was laughing out loud at their ruthless indifference.
> 
> Lee Tracey, at this moment, was MGM's answer to Warner Bros'. James Cagney and Pat O'Brien. Tracy, just like those Warner Bros. stars, is talking so fast in* The Nuisance*, the dialogue struggles to keep up.
> 
> Also like Warner Bros. MGM, at least for this instant, didn't flinch from calling out Germany and Hitler. Check out this exchange, and remember it is 1933:
> 
> German immigrant: "All good doctors are Germans"
> 
> Charles Butterworth as a pragmatic American: "I understand all that's been changed since Hitler got elected."
> 
> And how respected was Prohibition in 1933? Tracy has a bootlegger on call, a well-stocked bar at home and the local drug store all but openly sells booze from behind the counter. The "Noble Experiment" had become the national joke.
> 
> Back in the plot of *The Nuisance*, the streetcar company, tired of writing out big checks to Tracy's clients, hires super-adorable Madge Evans to masquerade as a client of Tracy to document and expose his corruption.
> 
> Just as she starts to make real progress, she - you know it's coming - begins to fall for Tracy as he does for her. Tracy and Evans have good chemistry and even better banter, but it's a tough square to circle in a relationship when you're about to sell out your boyfriend.
> 
> All that's left is a bunch of misunderstandings, hurt feelings, wounded pride, recriminations and, finally, Tracy and Evans trying to top each other in self sacrifice to prove their love after first saying horrible things to each other. You know, basic last-minute romcom stuff.
> 
> But since it's still pre-code 1933, the closing scene has Tracy assuring his now wife Evans he's reformed, while in the next breath, he's setting up a new big-money fraudulent claim. What does Evens do? She basically shrugs. For about four years, from 1930-1934, the pre-code movies refuted every wholesome narrative subsequent movies, produced under the code, would attempt to portray for the following thirty years.
> 
> An inside-Hollywood N.B. While made at MGM, this is a Warner Bros. movie in spirit as it shows illegal activity in an all but favorable light. Additionally, there's the aforementioned speed-talking Tracy doing his best Cagney/O'Brien and the very Warner Bros.' swipe at Hitler.
> 
> Finally, Charles Butterworth, as Tracy's amoral sidekick, is MGM's answer to Warners Bros. character actors like Frank McHugh. But proving you can never do things as well as the master, *The Nuisance *runs for an hour and twenty three minutes; warp-speed Warner Bros would have wrapped it up in an hour and five without losing any story.


The Nuisance...a well written and informative review! An ambukance chaser story is generally a fast mover and is usually fun to watch. I'm convinced...The Nuisance is well worth the sacrifice of an hour+ of my attention and remaining life energy!


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## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> The Nuisance...a well written and informative review! An ambukance chaser story is generally a fast mover and is usually fun to watch. I'm convinced...The Nuisance is well worth the sacrifice of an hour+ of my attention and remaining life energy!


I think you'll like it. It rips by, but since it is a very early movie, it has those early 1930s movie tics. Yet, once one gets used to the era's style, it's easy to appreciate and be entertained by these films.

Did you finish "The Paradine Case" yet? If/when you do, I'd love to hear what you thought about it.


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## Fading Fast

*The Sandpiper* from 1965 with Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Eva Marie Saint and Charles Bronson

I have to stop watching Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor movies as they aren't very good, at least the four or so I've seen (one was okay). But like driving by an accident scene, once I take a quick look, I continue watching. To be fair, they made eleven movies together, so I might just not have seen the good ones yet.

In *The Sandpiper*, Taylor is a "free-spirited" artist who has been kinda sorta homeschooling her (in the language of the day) illegitimate nine-year-old son. After the boy has a few incidents with the law, the state intercedes and places him in a nearby Episcopalian school run by Reverend Richard Burton.

This is the setup for the Reverend, representing traditional culture and values, to "clash" with Taylor, representing late-'60s-hippie culture and values. It's also the setup for Burton, married for twenty-plus years to nice wife Eva Marie Saint, to have an affair with Taylor.

Problematically, Elizabeth Taylor is playing a free-spirited twenty-something year old, but she's actually thirty something and looks closer to forty something. This isn't being picky or mean-spirited, as much of the movie pivots on several middle-aged men lusting after her youth and beauty. If an actress is representing the youth movement of a time, the actress should herself look youthful.

The story itself is painfully dated with both sides of the cultural divide coming across as cliched and two dimensional. Much of the dialogue feels like speeches from this very political period masquerading as conversation. A problem many screenwriters in our very political modern times also have.

Rather than making the audience sympathetic to their affair, Burton and Taylor are unlikable characters in a small way. They don't do great evil, just selfish little things that hurt others. I don't think it was the intent, but instead of their affair looking like some great love, it comes across as shabby and self-absorbed. Instead of making the "new" free love look liberating and fresh, it looks immature and narcissistic.

Hollywood was trying to show traditional Christian morality banging (ha-ha) into the flower-power generation. But *The Sandpiper* is too heavy handed, plodding and miscast to be anything more today than just a dated melodrama. It does have some beautiful scenic shots of the California coast though.

N.B. #1 In addition to Taylor, another awkward casting decision is Charles Bronson as Taylor's hippie artist friend. Even with long hair and a counterculture wardrobe, nothing about Bronson's mien reads bohemian.

N.B. #2 The titular sandpiper is a wounded bird that Taylor nurses back to health, refuses to cage (so that it learns trust) and then sets free. Got it - see the heavy handed symbolism? Sigh.


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## eagle2250

Indeed The Sandpiper plot has its challenges and the casting was.....was.....well is was just wrong with a couple of the characters, but I've got to say, from a sartorial perspective, Richard Burton sported a number of noteworthy men's styles throughout the movie and I think it was that great wardrobe of his character that helped persuade the lovely Ms Taylor to so readily jump into bed with him. As a young man, if I had experienced as many internal conflicts and incurred the oppressive guilt that The good Reverend felt over engaging in the bed sheet tango with such a young lovely, I think I would have declared myself celibate and stuck to that pledge! It has been a long time since I watched this film you reviewed and this is the best my memory can do today! LOL. Thank you for another great review.


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## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> Indeed The Sandpiper plot has its challenges and the casting was.....was.....well is was just wrong with a couple of the characters, but I've got to say, from a sartorial perspective, Richard Burton sported a number of noteworthy men's styles throughout the movie and I think it was that great wardrobe of his character that helped persuade the lovely Ms Taylor to so readily jump into bed with him. As a young man, if I had experienced as many internal conflicts and incurred the oppressive guilt that The good Reverend felt over engaging in the bed sheet tango with such a young lovely, I think I would have declared myself celibate and stuck to that pledge! It has been a long time since I watched this film you reviewed and this is the best my memory can do today! LOL. Thank you for another great review.


You're spot on, Burton's wardrobe was very Ivy influenced - it looked great.


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## Fading Fast

*Metropolitan* from 1990

Writer and director Whit Stillman's low-budget debut film about the fears, insecurities and, maybe, hopes of a group of college-age, went-to-the-right-schools-and-have-the-right-last-names New Yorkers is enjoyable and witty even if a bit self conscious.

Like most of us, my upbringing has almost nothing in common with these upper-class kids, but the film's smart writing and sincere-if-uneven acting sympathetically draws you into their world.

It's a world these kids know is past being on the wane and is almost over. Instead of the clear advantage being of their class once offered, it is now almost a burden as the doors don't open the same way and their putative "privilege" is looked down upon, but the expectations for those within their world haven't changed.

They aren't facing poverty or failure in the sense of those words to you and me, but what for them is failure: a life of mediocrity. We can sneer, but you can't pick your start in life and the implied pressures and expectations these kids face are real, at least to them.

All of this comes out as we follow a small clique of Upper East Side scions during their Christmas break's march through the balls, receptions and after-parties of the "debutante" season - a symbol of their anachronistic fate.

The movie shines when these young adults informally gather before or after the formal parties in one of the ridiculously nice Park Avenue apartments of their never-present parents. Here, these smart, articulate and pseudo-worldly kids discuss their fears, sometimes mockingly, sometimes sincerely as they know their post-college world looms.

If there is a story in this slice-of-life, talkfest-analysis movie, it's the "love lives" of this group who seem to date amongst themselves, sleep with each other and, like almost all young kids everywhere, passionately feel the joys and pangs of early love and heartbreak.

There's the cocky kid who has it all figured out, the shy one, the go-along-get-along one, the "outsider," the jock, the intellectual, etc. Like Stillman as a writer and director, these were all but unknown actors at the time who had various skill levels.

Yet, it is their inchoate acting talents, a combination of hesitancy and bravura, that work perfectly for the roles of alternatively diffident and confident college kids trying to segue into adulthood.

While that well-tread territory wasn't new even back in 1990 - the 1930s and every subsequent decade have plenty of coming-of-age movies - the added fun here is the time travel to that era's much-improved-from-the-1970s New York City.

Back then, I had just moved to the city out of college. While I only tangentially knew some of these types of kids from work, Stillman captures the feel of the city and the attitude of those kids at that time incredibly well.

A chatty, almost plot-less movie about a bunch of rich kids bemoaning their fate shouldn't work, but it does because the emotions, passions and postures of the kids feel real and, well, at an hour and half in length, they don't overstay their welcome.


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## eagle2250

Indeed the agonies of unrequited love are a raw reality at all socioeconomic levels of society. The really rich folks just get to experience them while dressed a bit more elegantly than most of us! A very thoughtful and well written review, as is your style, my friend!


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## Fading Fast

*Looking for Mr. Goodbar *from 1977 with Diane Keaton, Tuesday Weld, Richard Gere and William Atherton

*Looking for Mr. Goodbar* is definitely an entry in "The Most 1970s Movie Ever" contest with its pot, drugs, porn, orgies, cigarette smoking, Ruffino, Jimmy Carter, muggings, disco, battleground New York City and lots of hair.

Diane Keaton's young school-teacher character is torn trying to reconcile her traditional Irish Catholic upbringing with the new freedom of the 1970s. Fair or not, many in that era dealt with a lot of guilt attempting to jettison all they were taught growing up while working (and that seems like what it was for many) to enjoy the new culture around them.

It's hard to appreciate today, but the gap between that generation's parents and kids, owing to the late 1960s cultural revolution, was massive. Today's gap is an inch wide compared to what happened back then.

Parents who believed in religion, sexual abstinence before marriage, not using drugs, etc. - even if they fell short of these ideals, they were still their strived-for values - saw their kids, not just break these taboos in the shadows, but openly and gleefully flaunt them. The intergenerational stress was off the charts.

Keaton's character represents all of this when she moves out of her parent's house (no more "our house, our rules") into a dive apartment in NYC where she tries to embrace the sex, drugs and disco nightlife of the era.

Greatly complicating matters for Keaton psychologically is that she has congenital spinal scoliosis (painfully corrected in childhood with surgery and a year spent in a body cast), which has convinced her she shouldn't have children.

Perhaps lost in all the 1970s excess of the movie, that disease seems - more than free love and more than giving a big middle finger to her father and the Catholic Church - the real reason Keaton is almost always angry when it appears she should be happy. All her emotions are off as even her fun appears joyless (like many experienced in the 1970s).

While the dominant narrative around the movie is women's sexual (and other) liberation,* Looking for Mr. Goodbar *is also about a woman living dangerously on the edge. I'll stand shoulder to shoulder with anyone fighting for freedom for women to have equal opportunities in every single thing, but when men or women choose to exercise those freedoms in personally dangerous and, honestly, stupid ways, they risk paying a price.

Regularly bringing random men you just met in bars in NYC back to your apartment, many who are drunk and on drugs, late at night is not a statement of freedom, but of (choose) stupidity, a pathological need for risk or some suicidal tendency. Ditto constantly taking random drugs given to you from strangers at parties or bought from unknown dealers in bars or on the street.

Despite all that, Keaton's character is engaging and sympathetic. Her passion as a teacher for hearing-impaired children seems so much more real to her true self than her touching-a-hot-stove nightlife. When you see her falling into the 1970s sex-drug vortex, you hope she'll eventually spin out to something stable.

(Spoiler alert). But it's not to be. It's been argued that her gruesome murder at the end was "punishment" for a woman attempting sexual freedom. Maybe it felt that way at the time, but at least today, that looks like a politicized reification of a complex character in a complex time. I saw it more as a warning about a dumb and dangerous lifestyle; more a coda for the excesses of the 1970s than a rebuke of sexual and other liberations.

*Nota Bene section*:

N.B. #1 How many cigarettes must Keaton have smoked that even her Hollywood-capped-and-cared-for teeth have a yellowish tint?

N.B. #2 It turns out Richard Gere wasn't born the day he starred in *American Gigolo* as there is an even younger Gere here playing a similar character.

N.B. #3 I met Richard Gere about ten years ago at a small business breakfast. He came across as a genuinely nice guy.

N.B. #4 Annie Hall would be horrified with Keaton's character in* Looking for Mr. Goodbar.*

N.B. #5 What sort of meta time warp is it that seeing NYC in *Looking for Mr. Goodbar,* with all its street grit and hustle, reminded me of the NYC presented in HBO's recent 1970s period show *The Deuce*?


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## Vecchio Vespa

We watched Uncorked the other night. A young man (Mamadou Athie) works in the Memphis barbecue restaurant run by his father (Courtney B. Vance). Father wants son to take over the business, but son wants to become a sommelier. The tension is appreciable, but mom, played by Niecy Nash, deals with it beautifully and directly, and the protagonist starts a relationship with Sasha Compere who is a wonderfully mature and self assured woman. A few sad and quirky characters drift through the film, including a wealthy oenophile with a Harvard degree and his own daddy issues, played well by Matt McGorry. 

The film is a fun wine flick but not in the same league on wine matters as Sideways or Bottle Shock. It deals very beautifully with the father/son dynamic and the challenges of pursuing something like becoming a sommelier if you are not wealthy, it also provides an interesting glimpse into black family dynamics but it barely skims the added challenges that must surely be presented for a black man trying to break into the world of the sommelier.


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## Fading Fast

*The Legend of Bagger Vance* from 2000 with Will Smith, Matt Damon, Charlize Theron, Bruce McGill and Joel Gretsch

Charm and whimsy are hard to build a movie around, especially if you don't want to end up with a treacly mess on your hands. But it works in *The Legend of Bagger Vance* because part of director Robert Redford's brand is doing period films with charm and whimsy that know their limits.

Who wouldn't want super cool, kindly and insightful Will Smith as a guardian angel? While Will Smith anchors the charm and whimsy here, an equally talented cast moves this two-hour effort about a mythical Depression-era golf match along with enchanting ease.

Charlize Theron, the wonderfully named southern-bell-with-grit Adele Invergordon, facing bankruptcy as her deceased father's luxurious golf resort struggles to stay afloat in the 1930s, hits upon the idea for an all-star golf match.

The challenge is she needs to convince her estranged husband, former young golf phenom, Matt Damon to be the local star player joining famous golf champions Bobby Jones and Walter Hagen.

Damon, a World War I vet, suffering from what we'd come to know is post traumatic stress disorder, hasn't played golf or, well, with his estranged wife, Theron, since returning from the Great War. Yet, without his participation, the creditors won't support Theron's Hail Mary to save her resort.

In one of the movie's highlight scenes, Theron offers herself up to a mildly drunk and dispirited Damon in return for his agreeing to play in the tournament. But Damon, knowing he's lost his golf swing - sure it's a metaphor for his post-war life and sex drive - rejects a beguiling and disrobing Theron. Wait, what? Yup, she had to put her dress back on and leave untouched.

Enter Will Smith as Bagger Vance, the ethereal philosopher caddie. Playing Damon's conscience and spiritual advisor, Smith forces Damon to confront his demons and decide if he's ready to fight to get his golf swing and, by proxy, his life back.

With the tournament now on, Smith deftly guides Damon through the emotional preparation for play as well as offering real caddie advice. The movie could have coasted from there into a quick match focused on Damon's resurrection.

But Bobby Jones, played with professional cool by Joel Gretsch, and Walter Hagen, played with perfect zeal by Bruce McGill, take the movie up another notch.

The tournament becomes a metaphor for different approaches to golf and life itself with Jones representing the consummate and methodical professional; Hagen, the gambler player making great errors and great saves; and Damon, the underdog comeback story of a man finding his way in life again.

(Spoiler alert) Sure it's a well-crafted adult fairy tale, but as Damon reclaims his swing, you can't help cheering him on. When he and Theron re-unite afterwards dancing under the stars, you feel happy.

Charm and whimsy, as noted, can overwhelm a movie, but with Redford at the helm, wonderful source material (a novel by Steven Pressfield) and a talented cast, *The Legend of Bagger Vance* strikes a balance that leaves you smiling.

N.B. The movie is 1920s and 1930s eye candy from beginning to end. The cars, clothes, architecture and other period details are beautiful, which, combined with Redford's directing, make the era look prettier than it probably ever really did.


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## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 60691
> 
> *The Legend of Bagger Vance* from 2000 with Will Smith, Matt Damon, Charlize Theron, Bruce McGill and Joel Gretsch
> 
> Charm and whimsy are hard to build a movie around, especially if you don't want to end up with a treacly mess on your hands. But it works in *The Legend of Bagger Vance* because part of director Robert Redford's brand is doing period films with charm and whimsy that know their limits.
> 
> Who wouldn't want super cool, kindly and insightful Will Smith as a guardian angel? While Will Smith anchors the charm and whimsy here, an equally talented cast moves this two-hour effort about a mythical Depression-era golf match along with enchanting ease.
> 
> Charlize Theron, the wonderfully named southern-bell-with-grit Adele Invergordon, facing bankruptcy as her deceased father's luxurious golf resort struggles to stay afloat in the 1930s, hits upon the idea for an all-star golf match.
> 
> The challenge is she needs to convince her estranged husband, former young golf phenom, Matt Damon to be the local star player joining famous golf champions Bobby Jones and Walter Hagen.
> 
> Damon, a World War I vet, suffering from what we'd come to know is post traumatic stress disorder, hasn't played golf or, well, with his estranged wife, Theron, since returning from the Great War. Yet, without his participation, the creditors won't support Theron's Hail Mary to save her resort.
> 
> In one of the movie's highlight scenes, Theron offers herself up to a mildly drunk and dispirited Damon in return for his agreeing to play in the tournament. But Damon, knowing he's lost his golf swing - sure it's a metaphor for his post-war life and sex drive - rejects a beguiling and disrobing Theron. Wait, what? Yup, she had to put her dress back on and leave untouched.
> 
> Enter Will Smith as Bagger Vance, the ethereal philosopher caddie. Playing Damon's conscience and spiritual advisor, Smith forces Damon to confront his demons and decide if he's ready to fight to get his golf swing and, by proxy, his life back.
> 
> With the tournament now on, Smith deftly guides Damon through the emotional preparation for play as well as offering real caddie advice. The movie could have coasted from there into a quick match focused on Damon's resurrection.
> 
> But Bobby Jones, played with professional cool by Joel Gretsch, and Walter Hagen, played with perfect zeal by Bruce McGill, take the movie up another notch.
> 
> The tournament becomes a metaphor for different approaches to golf and life itself with Jones representing the consummate and methodical professional; Hagen, the gambler player making great errors and great saves; and Damon, the underdog comeback story of a man finding his way in life again.
> 
> (Spoiler alert) Sure it's a well-crafted adult fairy tale, but as Damon reclaims his swing, you can't help cheering him on. When he and Theron re-unite afterwards dancing under the stars, you feel happy.
> 
> Charm and whimsy, as noted, can overwhelm a movie, but with Redford at the helm, wonderful source material (a novel by Steven Pressfield) and a talented cast, *The Legend of Bagger Vance* strikes a balance that leaves you smiling.
> 
> N.B. The movie is 1920s and 1930s eye candy from beginning to end. The cars, clothes, architecture and other period details are beautiful, which, combined with Redford's directing, make the era look prettier than it probably ever really did.


My friend, the two of us seem to have similar tastes in the movies that we choose to watch. I have seen The Legend of Bagger Vance, two times, I think, but having read your well written and arguably perfectly organized review of the movie, I find myself motivated to see it again. I think it is the background comments that you add, throughout your review that amp up one's interest in watching it again. Thanks for another great review.


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## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> My friend, the two of us seem to have similar tastes in the movies that we choose to watch. I have seen The Legend of Bagger Vance, two times, I think, but having read your well written and arguably perfectly organized review of the movie, I find myself motivated to see it again. I think it is the background comments that you add, throughout your review that amp up one's interest in watching it again. Thanks for another great review.


Thank you very much for your kind comments. This was my second viewing as I had seen it on cable close to when it was released. I found it incredibly enjoyable. It's a beautiful movie without all the loud noice and gratuitous sex and violence of many modern movies. If time allowed, I could watch it again today.


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## Fading Fast

*The Unfaithful* from 1947 with Ann Sheridan, Lew Ayres, Eve Arden, Zachary Scott and John Hoyt.

*The Unfaithful* is a good movie that could have been much better if it had decided what kind of movie it wanted to be. Instead, it's a little bit noir, a little bit crime drama, a little bit soap opera with a tiny bit of mystery wrapped in. It's all just a little bit too much for its straightforward plot.

With her husband away on business, happily married Ann Sheridan is attacked by a man in her home late one night and she kills the intruder. The initial police investigation is reasonably consistent with her story of self defense against an unknown burglar, but a few loose ends dangle.

Immediately after the murder, Sheridan's lawyer, Lew Ayres, is approached by an art dealer offering to sell him a sculpture of Sheridan - at a very high price - which, he tells Ayres, was made by the dead man who, we learn, was an artist.

Ayres immediately gets the implication of this threatened blackmail, but at times, the movie acts as if the audience wouldn't have connected those simple dots. But we get it; Sheridan had an affair with the artist while her husband, Zachary Scott, was fighting overseas. She met Scott two weeks before they married and he shipped out.

The bulk of the movie from here is watching Sheridan, with some help from lawyer Ayres, trying to keep the affair a secret from her husband, while the police investigation, led by a young and well-cast John Hoyt, slowly grinds toward the truth.

Playing on in the background is the social aspect of the murder as most of Scott and Sheridan's middle-class friends happily wallow in the rumors and salacious implications ("she killed her lover - teehee"). No "friend" does the schadenfreude routine better than Eve Arden, who blows in and out of scenes with a verve and cynicism that leaves everyone flat in her wake.

Arden didn't quite have the Hollywood looks to be a leading lady, but she did carve out a heck of a niche as a character actor, usually playing the friend or sidekick with a sharp tongue and loose morality. Here, she comes across as Sheridan's frenemy, but you think there's more to her and are rewarded later on for believing so.

When all the details of the murder eventually spill out, as they always do, Sheridan's husband is shocked, society is (happily) rocked and Sheridan is arrested for murder. After a darn good trial - smartly filmed in quick, impactful snippets - (spoiler alert) Sheridan is acquitted, but her marriage wrecked.

(One more spoiler alert) It takes Ayres as the insightful lawyer and Arden as the, deep down, better friend than most to get Sheridan and Scott to see that (God knows how this got passed the censors) one mistake made by a newlywed, under the extreme stress of years of war-time separation, does not negate an otherwise happy marriage.

Perhaps so much went on, on the home front, when the men were away fighting, the usually hidebound Motion Picture Production Code realized it needed to excuse some behavior to save a lot of marriages. That or the censor was asleep when *The Unfaithful* was being previewed.

It's a good movie with solid acting that would have been even better if it had picked one or two styles to go with - noir, crime-drama, mystery or soap opera. Despite that, as with most Warner Bros. movies from the era, the studio packed a lot of story into a reasonably short time. Even with its flaws, *The Unfaithful *moves by quickly and enjoyably.


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## eagle2250

^^
I'm intrigued. I have not yet seen the Unfaithful, But I soon will correct that oversight. Your review has once again convinced me to add to my viewing schedule!


----------



## Vecchio Vespa

Good on Paper (Iliza Schlesinger)...standup comedienne encounters Mr. Perfect who pursues becoming her boyfriend. The perfection is feigned. Hilarity and thoughtfulness ensue. Margaret Cho is over the top good.


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## Fading Fast

*A Damsel in Distress* from 1937 with Fred Astaire, Joan Fontaine, George Burns and Gracie Allen

Sign: Do Not Finger Art Objects.

Gracie Allen: Well I don't blame Art, if I was Art, I'd object too.

Even under the code, stuff slipped by the censors.

Overall, I like Fred Astaire movies, but each one is a high-wire act betting that the magic and whimsy and dancing will overcome the silly plots, unbelievable situations and wash-rinse-repeat storylines. All that gets harder to do without, as in* A* *Damsel in Distress*, Ginger Rogers or a co-star of equal dancing talent.

To make up for the missing Ms. Rogers, *Damsel* has the comedy team of George Burns and Gracie Allen, whom I've always kept at arm's length. But to be fair, they are pretty good here filling in Rogers' gap. (Any comment Gracie?)

Also filling in for Rogers is Joan Fontaine looking insanely cute and doing her best, but she's no dancer. In the one number she does with Astaire - that there is only one duet says it all - she almost looks pained, as most humans would dancing opposite Fred freakin' Astaire on screen.

Burns and Allen have more numbers with Astaire and while Allen struggles like Fontaine to hold her own with the master hoofer, Burns looks pretty smooth and comfortable dancing with Astaire. But even these movies need some kind of plot to hold it all together.

The plot here, which is the same plot in half or more of the Fred Astaire movies, is Astaire pursuing some pretty woman who may or may not like him. Then, owing to a series of mix ups, they each think the other is seeing someone else at crucial times.

Throw in some love foils, parents who get in the way, a bunch of silly contretemps and all hope is lost until a last minute save. You know, it's a Fred Astaire movie.

In *A* *Damsel in Distress*, Astaire is a successful American performer traveling in London who accidentally meets and falls in love with the daughter, Joan Fontaine, of a Lord.

That's followed by all the usual just-noted Astaire-movie confusion and mix ups. Burns and Allen were the only thing that held the movie together between the mostly good-not-great solo Astaire dance numbers, which missed a talented partner like, say, oh I don't know, Ginger Rogers.

*A Damsel in Distress* starts one level above farce and slowly slips until it's in full-farce mode by the last third or so. There's enough good stuff to just overcome its many weaknesses, but that's less an endorsement of the movie than of Astaire, with an earned assist to Burns and Allen.


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## ran23

Joan Fontaine was one of my customers back in the early 2000's. 'coke bottle glasses' then.


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## Fading Fast

ran23 said:


> Joan Fontaine was one of my customers back in the early 2000's. 'coke bottle glasses' then.


Any good Fontaine stories?


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## ran23

She passed in 2013, probably just a year or two before I was there. I didn't recognize the name until I went downstairs and all her movie posters were in the halls. Not too far from her house was another I was let into. Adams? when I went into the darkroom, large Ansel Adams prints were everywhere. One more? Large white house, but Betty White wasn't in that days.


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## Fading Fast

*The Sea Wolf* from 1941 with Edward G. Robinson, Alexander Knox, John Garfield, Ida Lupino and Barry Fitzgerald

"Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven"

- John Milton *Paradise Lost*

How is this movie not better known? It is a gem of a psychological and philosophical drama wrapped inside a good "cruel captain commanding a ship of outcasts and criminals" story set in the early 1900s.

_The_ _Ghost_, Captain Edward G. Robinson's eerie San Francisco-based clipper ship, which seems to only sail in fog, takes on an additional hand, John Garfield, wanted by the police, just before leaving port. Once at sea, it then picks up two survivors of a wreck.

One survivor is Ida Lupino, an escaped convict; the other is Alexander Knox, a well-bred urbane professional writer. Garfield, Lupino and Knox quickly realize they are on some sort of ship from hell with a captain suffering from Nietzsche's Superman complex and a crew of cowed but violent, amoral men.

Knox, in one of the best roles of his career (ditto Robinson, Lupino and Garfield), immediately butts heads with Robinson, who can size men up and find their weaknesses with frightening alacrity.

Robinson dismissively sees Knox as his opposite, a man who makes his living sitting in comfort while typing out words; whereas, Robinson successfully captains his ship using physical violence and psychological intimidation over "inferior" men.

When these two debate the world, the philosophies get muddled a bit as Nietzsche, Freud, Darwin and Christianity are all kinda mixed up and mixed in. Knox represents the "civilized" moral man who believes in honest competition and charity. Conversely, Robinson is the might-makes-right-as-the-only-way-to-survive man.

Mocking Knox's "soft hands" (foreshadowing Quint making fun of Hooper's "city-boy hands" in *Jaws*), Robinson tells Knox he'll be a selfish and violent man by the time the voyage is over. Knox rejoins that his beliefs and character are not that malleable.

In Robinson's book-filled cabin, Knox and he debate the morality of rule by force - Robinson proffers the famous Milton quote about reigning in Hell being preferable to serving in Heaven. Knox responds with tenets of Christian kindness, brotherhood and fair play.

These two aren't going to find common ground. While Knox and Robinson argue round after round, Knox discovers Robinson suffers from crippling headaches and bouts of temporary blindness - the latter Robinson hides from his crew.

As they sail on, Garfield repeatedly tries to thwart Robinson with physical attacks, but he loses every time. Finally, Garfield and Lupino, the latter's natural delicateness looks outright fragile on this floating den of thieves, along with Knox, ask Robinson to be put off at the next port.

Robinson, who, on the _Ghost_, has created his own Hell in which to reign, has no intention of letting anyone off as he tries to break all three of his new "passengers."

After seeing Robinson cruelly drive the ship's alcoholic surgeon to suicide, Garfield leads a mutiny that almost works, but incredibly, Robinson retakes command. In a brilliant move of psychological warfare, Robinson lets all the mutineers off without punishment as if to say, "you still are no threat to me."

Further pushing the psyops, he punishes his own stool pigeon who helped him break the mutiny, the ship's cook, Barry Sullivan. Sullivan plays his evil-gnome role here to the hilt. Having never seen Sullivan in anything but kindly roles - sympathetic priest, sensitive horse trainer, understanding father - his turn here as a scary, pathological sycophant to Robinson is chilling and impressive.

But Robinson's reign is threatened as a more powerful ship, captained by his brother (a fascinating thread never developed), mortally damages _The Ghost_. In a last grasp at cruelty, Robinson - now all but blind, yet still stunningly in control - locks Garfield in a storeroom as the ship sinks, which forces Lupino and Knox to stay on board as they try to free him.

This sets up Knox and Robinson's final encounter. With the philosophies a bit scrambled again, Robinson asserts, to the end, his might-makes-right ideology, while Knox argues for kindness and compassion.

The outcome sorta gives the nod to Knox, but Robinson's impressive finish, despite being blind on a sinking ship, and a deception Knox has to make to win, results in a less-than-total philosophical victory for Knox.

*The Sea Wolf* is Warner Bros. at its best. Using its top-talent, an okay budget (Jack Warner rarely fully opened up the wallet like Mayer did at MGM) and strong source material (a Jack London novel), Warners delivers a tense psychological and philosophical action-adventure movie that forces you to think while it entertains. Why this gem isn't better known today is a mystery.


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 60981
> 
> *The Sea Wolf* from 1941 with Edward G. Robinson, Alexander Knox, John Garfield, Ida Lupino and Barry Fitzgerald
> 
> "Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven"
> 
> - John Milton *Paradise Lost*
> 
> How is this movie not better known? It is a gem of a psychological and philosophical drama wrapped inside a good "cruel captain commanding a ship of outcasts and criminals" story set in the early 1900s.
> 
> _The_ _Ghost_, Captain Edward G. Robinson's eerie San Francisco-based clipper ship, which seems to only sail in fog, takes on an additional hand, John Garfield, wanted by the police, just before leaving port. Once at sea, it then picks up two survivors of a wreck.
> 
> One survivor is Ida Lupino, an escaped convict; the other is Alexander Knox, a well-bred urbane professional writer. Garfield, Lupino and Knox quickly realize they are on some sort of ship from hell with a captain suffering from Nietzsche's Superman complex and a crew of cowed but violent, amoral men.
> 
> Knox, in one of the best roles of his career (ditto Robinson, Lupino and Garfield), immediately butts heads with Robinson, who can size men up and find their weaknesses with frightening alacrity.
> 
> Robinson dismissively sees Knox as his opposite, a man who makes his living sitting in comfort while typing out words; whereas, Robinson successfully captains his ship using physical violence and psychological intimidation over "inferior" men.
> 
> When these two debate the world, the philosophies get muddled a bit as Nietzsche, Freud, Darwin and Christianity are all kinda mixed up and mixed in. Knox represents the "civilized" moral man who believes in honest competition and charity. Conversely, Robinson is the might-makes-right-as-the-only-way-to-survive man.
> 
> Mocking Knox's "soft hands" (foreshadowing Quint making fun of Hooper's "city-boy hands" in *Jaws*), Robinson tells Knox he'll be a selfish and violent man by the time the voyage is over. Knox rejoins that his beliefs and character are not that malleable.
> 
> In Robinson's book-filled cabin, Knox and he debate the morality of rule by force - Robinson proffers the famous Milton quote about reigning in Hell being preferable to serving in Heaven. Knox responds with tenets of Christian kindness, brotherhood and fair play.
> 
> These two aren't going to find common ground. While Knox and Robinson argue round after round, Knox discovers Robinson suffers from crippling headaches and bouts of temporary blindness - the latter Robinson hides from his crew.
> 
> As they sail on, Garfield repeatedly tries to thwart Robinson with physical attacks, but he loses every time. Finally, Garfield and Lupino, the latter's natural delicateness looks outright fragile on this floating den of thieves, along with Knox, ask Robinson to be put off at the next port.
> 
> Robinson, who, on the _Ghost_, has created his own Hell in which to reign, has no intention of letting anyone off as he tries to break all three of his new "passengers."
> 
> After seeing Robinson cruelly drive the ship's alcoholic surgeon to suicide, Garfield leads a mutiny that almost works, but incredibly, Robinson retakes command. In a brilliant move of psychological warfare, Robinson lets all the mutineers off without punishment as if to say, "you still are no threat to me."
> 
> Further pushing the psyops, he punishes his own stool pigeon who helped him break the mutiny, the ship's cook, Barry Sullivan. Sullivan plays his evil-gnome role here to the hilt. Having never seen Sullivan in anything but kindly roles - sympathetic priest, sensitive horse trainer, understanding father - his turn here as a scary, pathological sycophant to Robinson is chilling and impressive.
> 
> But Robinson's reign is threatened as a more powerful ship, captained by his brother (a fascinating thread never developed), mortally damages _The Ghost_. In a last grasp at cruelty, Robinson - now all but blind, yet still stunningly in control - locks Garfield in a storeroom as the ship sinks, which forces Lupino and Knox to stay on board as they try to free him.
> 
> This sets up Knox and Robinson's final encounter. With the philosophies a bit scrambled again, Robinson asserts, to the end, his might-makes-right ideology, while Knox argues for kindness and compassion.
> 
> The outcome sorta gives the nod to Knox, but Robinson's impressive finish, despite being blind on a sinking ship, and a deception Knox has to make to win, results in a less-than-total philosophical victory for Knox.
> 
> *The Sea Wolf* is Warner Bros. at its best. Using its top-talent, an okay budget (Jack Warner rarely fully opened up the wallet like Mayer did at MGM) and strong source material (a Jack London novel), Warners delivers a tense psychological and philosophical action-adventure movie that forces you to think while it entertains. Why this gem isn't better known today is a mystery.


Several of the scenes you describe sound vaguely familiar....I may have watched the Sea Wolf at some point in my past...way back in my past, but I am really not sure. However, after reading your review, it seems a psychological imperative that I lay hands on a DVD of that movie or watch it through Amazon Prime as soon as it can be arranged. The review above has really got my interest revved up!


----------



## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> Several of the scenes you describe sound vaguely familiar....I may have watched the Sea Wolf at some point in my past...way back in my past, but I am really not sure. However, after reading your review, it seems a psychological imperative that I lay hands on a DVD of that movie or watch it through Amazon Prime as soon as it can be arranged. The review above has really got my interest revved up!


I was really impressed with this one, especially since I don't remember ever hearing about it. It's a really well-done movie that deserves more attention. I look forward to hearing your thoughts after you see it.


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## Vecchio Vespa

We watched two relatively new action/comedy flicks recently: This Means War and The Hitman's Bodyguard. In This Means War two government agents (Tom Hardy and Chris Pine) who masquerade as a travel agent and a cruise ship captain, compete for Reese Witherspoon, a product tester, in a very formulaic plot, but Reese's sister, played by Chelsea Handler, is a trip and makes it fun. In The Hitman's Bodyguard, Ryan Reynolds must get the hitman, Samuel "Leather jacket" Jackson, from England to the Hague to testify against the evil despot played by Gary Oldman. A ton of fun. Salma Hayak as SLJ's wife. Wow.


----------



## Oldsarge

Being one who much favors documentaries and 'educational' films over drama I still managed to come across "Wartime Farm" on Amazon Prime. It's an eight episode depiction of what it was like to be a British small farmer during WWII. Not only very interesting and educational from a historian's standpoint, there are lots and lots of '40's clothing and tweed. I am enjoying it immensely.


----------



## Fading Fast

*I Accuse!* from 1958 with Jose Ferrer, Leo Genn and Donald Wolfit

A long time ago, I read an account of the Dreyfus Affair. Based on that faulty memory (and a quick Google refresh), the story in *I Accuse!* seems consistent with the broad outlines of the facts, although Hollywood added its flourishes and twists to "improve" the story. The good news is, today, this miserable event is widely seen as a mark of shame on France and a cautionary tale about prejudice, such as, in this case, antisemitism.

In 1894, the French Jewish military officer, Henry Dreyfus, is knowingly unfairly court martialed for espionage because of antisemitism. Many in the military command wanted to get "the Jew." Also, it was a convenient "solution" to an embarrassing spy scandal for the military, which needed a fall guy.

Once the ball got rolling against Dreyfus, there was no turning back, so even as the evidence mounted over the years that he was innocent, the military dug in its heels through a few more court-martials over the next decade.

After spending five years in the hell that was Devil's Island prison and being found guilty at a second rigged court martial, Dreyfus accepted a pardon - an unpleasant compromise that kept him from going back to prison, but could have been construed as an admission of guilt. Fortunately, five years later, he was exonerated and reinstated in the military.

All along, his case was kept alive by his family, friends, several French intellectuals and members of the Press, which, eventually, turned public opinion mainly in Dreyfus' favor. The famous 1898 open letter *I Accuse! *to the President of France, published in a newspaper (and the title of the movie), is widely seen as an act of personal courage by its author Emile Zola and a turning point in the case.

Although dated by its wooden style, even by 1958 movie standards, *I Accuse! *still does a respectable job capturing the venality of the French military command and the ugliness of its antisemitism, while highlighting the heroism of Dreyfus, his family and his supporters.

Jose Ferrer plays Dreyfus as a wound-tight and pretty-aloof character, which seems consistent with historical accounts. But the real acting gem in this one is Leo Genn as Major Georges Picquart who risks his career to defend Dreyfus.

Also giving a strong performance is Donald Wolfit as General Auguste Mercier. Mercier never wavers in his known-to-him-from-the-start dishonest defense of the military's mendacious slandering of Dreyfus. That you hate him so much is a testament to his acting ability to humanize his evil.

Despite those strong performances, *I Accuse!* is not an actors' movie, but a historical-event effort whose lesson is, especially with antisemitism reportedly on the rise again in several countries, sadly still relevant today.


----------



## Fading Fast

*Libel* from 1959 with Dirk Bogarde, Olivia de Havilland, Wilfrid Hyde-White and Robert Morley

*Libel* is a good movie, with a good story and it's well acted, but it feels forced. After a decent start, you begin to sense yourself being manipulated by the writer and director. It's as if they thought they were so shrewd, they could craft a "smart" story, believable or not, and you'd just go along. They almost got away with it.

In post-war England, WWII-veteran Lord Mark Loddon played by Dirk Bogart, and his American wife, Olivia de Havilland, live in a five-hundred-year-old estate chockablock with family portraits and history. They seem to have the perfect life until Loddon is accused of being an imposter by a former POW buddy.

Since coming back from the war, Lord Loddon has suffered from headaches, large gaps in his memory and a recurring nightmare all compassionately attended to by wife de Havilland. But those symptoms would also be a great cover were Loddon an imposter.

Loddon's accuser believes that a third POW bunkmate and lookalike to Loddon - an actor who studied Loddon's mannerisms and family history when they were POWs - is presently masquerading as Lord Loddon.

When the story breaks in the press, the British tabloids have a field day, which forces Lord Loddon to bring a libel suit to clear his name. After all the usual pre-trial legal and public-relations machinations, the movie's long climatic trial begins.

Up until now, you're going along with the somewhat complicated, but entertaining story. Then, so many crazy twists happen and hard-to-believe details come out at the trial, it becomes just a bit too much hooey to hold together.

The acting is engaging as old pros Robert Morley as Lord Loddon's attorney and Wilfrid Hyde-White as the tabloid's lawyer match wits in that wonderfully understated way the British have, especially in court, of body slamming their opponents with equanimity and surface politeness.

That's the fun part - think *The Paradine Case* - but you're also asked to look past too many plot flaws, coincidences, reverse-engineered explanations for Lord Loddon's potential doppelganger and "surprise evidence" at trial. By the end, you've become cynical.

There are worse ways to spend an hour and forty minutes; several scenes in it are very good. Plus, suspending belief is pretty much part of almost every filmmaker-audience contract. Yet in *Libel*, the plot flimflam overwhelms by the end.

N.B. The location shots of London and its surrounds provide wonderful time travel to England in the 1950s.


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 61071
> 
> *I Accuse!* from 1958 with Jose Ferrer, Leo Genn and Donald Wolfit
> 
> A long time ago, I read an account of the Dreyfus Affair. Based on that faulty memory (and a quick Google refresh), the story in *I Accuse!* seems consistent with the broad outlines of the facts, although Hollywood added its flourishes and twists to "improve" the story. The good news is, today, this miserable event is widely seen as a mark of shame on France and a cautionary tale about prejudice, such as, in this case, antisemitism.
> 
> In 1894, the French Jewish military officer, Henry Dreyfus, is knowingly unfairly court martialed for espionage because of antisemitism. Many in the military command wanted to get "the Jew." Also, it was a convenient "solution" to an embarrassing spy scandal for the military, which needed a fall guy.
> 
> Once the ball got rolling against Dreyfus, there was no turning back, so even as the evidence mounted over the years that he was innocent, the military dug in its heels through a few more court-martials over the next decade.
> 
> After spending five years in the hell that was Devil's Island prison and being found guilty at a second rigged court martial, Dreyfus accepted a pardon - an unpleasant compromise that kept him from going back to prison, but could have been construed as an admission of guilt. Fortunately, five years later, he was exonerated and reinstated in the military.
> 
> All along, his case was kept alive by his family, friends, several French intellectuals and members of the Press, which, eventually, turned public opinion mainly in Dreyfus' favor. The famous 1898 open letter *I Accuse! *to the President of France, published in a newspaper (and the title of the movie), is widely seen as an act of personal courage by its author Emile Zola and a turning point in the case.
> 
> Although dated by its wooden style, even by 1958 movie standards, *I Accuse! *still does a respectable job capturing the venality of the French military command and the ugliness of its antisemitism, while highlighting the heroism of Dreyfus, his family and his supporters.
> 
> Jose Ferrer plays Dreyfus as a wound-tight and pretty-aloof character, which seems consistent with historical accounts. But the real acting gem in this one is Leo Genn as Major Georges Picquart who risks his career to defend Dreyfus.
> 
> Also giving a strong performance is Donald Wolfit as General Auguste Mercier. Mercier never wavers in his known-to-him-from-the-start dishonest defense of the military's mendacious slandering of Dreyfus. That you hate him so much is a testament to his acting ability to humanize his evil.
> 
> Despite those strong performances, *I Accuse!* is not an actors' movie, but a historical-event effort whose lesson is, especially with antisemitism reportedly on the rise again in several countries, sadly still relevant today.


I watched I Accuse on you-tube, yesterday. The experience was well worth the one hour thirty one minutes and 56 seconds it took to watch the show (LOL). Over all, I was struck by the incredible arrogance and self serving mentality of the French General staff, reminding me of the same characteristics showcased in the movie Paths of Glory, staring Kirk Douglas that was put out in 1957. In Paths of Glory, it might be remembered three soldiers were selected at random to be executed by firing squad, to atone for a failed attack on an enemy emplacement called the Anthill. In fact the attack failed because, as the pre attact estimates reflected, a 65% casualty rate was the morbid reality of the foolish endeavor (the aforementioned attack) . As I recall, the French command staff in an effort to cover up the ineptitude of the Colonel who had ordered the attack and prevent the French General Staff from suffering the political embarrassment of having backed the wrong pony in the scapegoat derby that had been the foil brought into play, was the primary objective of the most senior officers and politicians.

It is sad to get these all too frequent glimpses of the clay feet of the political leadership structures found throughout the world, then and even more so, now!

I sense the catalyst for bad behavior in I Accuse was at first antisemitism and in the end a combination of antisemitism and tragic level of egotism. In Paths of Glory it was pure stupidity and outrageous egotism that resulted in the three brave soldiers executed by firing squad.

At the end of both films the good guys won, but at what cost and why?

I Accuse...a great flick! Thanks for bring it to our attention.


----------



## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> I watched I Accuse on you-tube, yesterday. The experience was well worth the one hour thirty one minutes and 56 seconds it took to watch the show (LOL). Over all, I was struck by the incredible arrogance and self serving mentality of the French General staff, reminding me of the same characteristics showcased in the movie Paths of Glory, staring Kirk Douglas that was put out in 1957. In Paths of Glory, it might be remembered three soldiers were selected at random to be executed by firing squad, to atone for a failed attack on an enemy emplacement called the Anthill. In fact the attack failed because, as the pre attact estimates reflected, a 65% casualty rate was the morbid reality of the foolish endeavor (the aforementioned attack) . As I recall, the French command staff in an effort to cover up the ineptitude of the Colonel who had ordered the attack and prevent the French General Staff from suffering the political embarrassment of having backed the wrong pony in the scapegoat derby that had been the foil brought into play, was the primary objective of the most senior officers and politicians.
> 
> It is sad to get these all too frequent glimpses of the clay feet of the political leadership structures found throughout the world, then and even more so, now!
> 
> I sense the catalyst for bad behavior in I Accuse was at first antisemitism and in the end a combination of antisemitism and tragic level of egotism. In Paths of Glory it was pure stupidity and outrageous egotism that resulted in the three brave soldiers executed by firing squad.
> 
> At the end of both films the good guys won, but at what cost and why?
> 
> I Accuse...a great flick! Thanks for bring it to our attention.


You draw a great connect between the two movies. "Paths of Glory" is a gem of a film. I'm glad you enjoyed "I Accuse." It's a bit slow in spots and definitely an older style of film making (for the time), but still darn good.


----------



## Fading Fast

*Butterfield 8* from 1960 with Elizabeth Taylor, Laurence Harvey, Dina Merrill, Mildred Dunnock and Eddie Fisher

Every period has its take on "the fallen woman," which is closely associated with the always fun and overwrought Madonna-whore complex, both of which drive *Butterfield 8*.

In the lightly censored movies of the pre-code early 1930s, "the fallen woman" could often stand herself back up and go on living because, sometimes, that's what happens in real life. But once the Motion Picture Production Code was enforced in the mid-1930s, "the fallen woman" needed to be punished to have any shot at redemption, but usually, it was easier to just kill her off.

*Butterfield 8* was made at a time when the code was wobbling but still holding on, so its quasi prostitute, Elizabeth Taylor, is kinda, sorta sympathetic, yet still, punishment must be meted out.

Taylor plays a darker cognate to Holly Golightly from *Breakfast at Tiffany's*. She's a model slash partygirl slash early social media "influencer" (she gets paid to wear designer dresses to hot night spots so they will be noted in the next day's newspapers) who also, (the movie elides this a bit) sleeps with men for money.

Darker than Golightly how? When we first meet Ms. Taylor, she's waking up after having been railed by some guy who left in the early morning. So, disheveled and still wearing last night's makeup, she stumbles out of his bed wrapped in nothing but a sheet, looks for a cigarette, throws an empty pack on the carpet, finds a loose cigarette, lights up, inhales, starts coughing, pours herself a good-sized shot of whiskey and has the first drink of the day. Good morning.

Today, we take a more understanding and sympathetic approach to almost all human failings (except for the ones current day has deemed unacceptable). Yet back then, the heavy moral disapproval of "the fallen woman" (with a prostitute being about as far as you could fall) meant something, even if it all floated on a narrative of hypocrisy and inconsistency, just as a lot of what we believe today also floats on shaky narratives.

So, when upstanding businessman, Laurence Harvey, married to social-registry wife, Dina Merrill (the blonde Madonna in our story), falls in love with his girl-on-the-side Taylor (the brunette whore), all sorts of things get smashed up, starting with poor Dina Merrill.

Beyond being ridiculously attractive, Merrill is an unbelievably understanding wife who tries to give Harvey "space" to find his way back to her. Most women's definition of "space" in this case would be a bullet with their husband's name on it, but Merrill loves her husband and wants to save the marriage.

She believes marrying into her wealthy family - which gave Harvey instant status, wealth and a job with a fancy title at her family's firm - destroyed his self esteem. Harvey plays the "victim" role to the hilt. He angrily mopes his way through the movie as the aggrieved party because, well, his wife made his life too easy for him. We now have a winner in the "rich people's problem" contest.

Maybe Harvey really loves Taylor or maybe he just wants to spit in his wife's face, but Taylor believes she loves Harvey and sees him as the moral lustration she needs to scrub clean her past life of sin and debauchery.

Just as Harvey is about to ask his wife for a divorce so that he can marry Taylor - a do-I-leave-the-Madonna-for-a-whore moment - he comes face to face with Taylor's past. He knew about it, but to this point, had done his best to make believe it didn't exist. Yet he can't ignore, when in a bar, several men casually joke with him about his new "girlfriend" Taylor by saying, "welcome to the fraternity, we meet once a year in Yankee Stadium." Ouch.

Harvey, it turns out, belongs to that odd niche of men who knowingly fall in love with prostitutes - nothing wrong with that, everyone should find love where they can - but then begin to hate the object of their affections because she's slept with a whole lot of men. In logic, that's called a "category error," as Harvey is angry at something for being exactly what it is. It's like hating a top for spinning.

As the movie climaxes, Harvey, even when he breaks with Taylor, wrecks his marriage to Merrill. Taylor, meanwhile, leaves New York to start afresh with wholesome intent, this time, in Boston. But don't forget the Motion Picture Production Code which, basically, (spoiler alert) says, "The Whore Must Die!"

So, at the end of a silly and forced car-chase scene, where Harvey pursues Taylor in an attempt to get her back, she is killed as her very cute two-seater Sunbeam Alpine flies off the road. Taylor is dead; the Code is satisfied; Harvey is crushed and, unbelievably, wife Merrill is willing to take him back.

It's saponaceous melodrama on steroids with an overlay of fire and brimstone condemnation. But tucked inside and countering the "bad whore" narrative are Taylor's mother, the wonderful Mildred Dunnock, and Taylor's childhood best friend, Eddie Fisher, who provide a sympathetic view of Taylor's life.

The Code was buckling a bit in 1960, but it was not yet ready to let the whore live. However, in about a decade, the 1970s would bring a new and forgiving perspective to the prostitute.

N.B. *Butterfield 8* is wonderful time travel to early 1960s New York City from the Village to the fancy apartments of Fifth Avenue, including many of the bars, restaurants and nightclubs in between. There's even a neat moment where, in the background of super-lit-up-at-night Times Square, you can see a movie marquee advertising *Ben-Hur*.


----------



## Vecchio Vespa

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 61334
> 
> *Butterfield 8* from 1960 with Elizabeth Taylor, Laurence Harvey, Dina Merrill, Mildred Dunnock and Eddie Fisher
> 
> Every period has its take on "the fallen woman," which is closely associated with the always fun and overwrought Madonna-whore complex, both of which drive *Butterfield 8*.
> 
> In the lightly censored movies of the pre-code early 1930s, "the fallen woman" could often stand herself back up and go on living because, sometimes, that's what happens in real life. But once the Motion Picture Production Code was enforced in the mid-1930s, "the fallen woman" needed to be punished to have any shot at redemption, but usually, it was easier to just kill her off.
> 
> *Butterfield 8* was made at a time when the code was wobbling but still holding on, so its quasi prostitute, Elizabeth Taylor, is kinda, sorta sympathetic, yet still, punishment must be meted out.
> 
> Taylor plays a darker cognate to Holly Golightly from *Breakfast at Tiffany's*. She's a model slash partygirl slash early social media "influencer" (she gets paid to wear designer dresses to hot night spots so they will be noted in the next day's newspapers) who also, (the movie elides this a bit) sleeps with men for money.
> 
> Darker than Golightly how? When we first meet Ms. Taylor, she's waking up after having been railed by some guy who left in the early morning. So, disheveled and still wearing last night's makeup, she stumbles out of his bed wrapped in nothing but a sheet, looks for a cigarette, throws an empty pack on the carpet, finds a loose cigarette, lights up, inhales, starts coughing, pours herself a good-sized shot of whiskey and has the first drink of the day. Good morning.
> 
> Today, we take a more understanding and sympathetic approach to almost all human failings (except for the ones current day has deemed unacceptable). Yet back then, the heavy moral disapproval of "the fallen woman" (with a prostitute being about as far as you could fall) meant something, even if it all floated on a narrative of hypocrisy and inconsistency, just as a lot of what we believe today also floats on shaky narratives.
> 
> So, when upstanding businessman, Laurence Harvey, married to social-registry wife, Dina Merrill (the blonde Madonna in our story), falls in love with his girl-on-the-side Taylor (the brunette whore), all sorts of things get smashed up, starting with poor Dina Merrill.
> 
> Beyond being ridiculously attractive, Merrill is an unbelievably understanding wife who tries to give Harvey "space" to find his way back to her. Most women's definition of "space" in this case would be a bullet with their husband's name on it, but Merrill loves her husband and wants to save the marriage.
> 
> She believes marrying into her wealthy family - which gave Harvey instant status, wealth and a job with a fancy title at her family's firm - destroyed his self esteem. Harvey plays the "victim" role to the hilt. He angrily mopes his way through the movie as the aggrieved party because, well, his wife made his life too easy for him. We now have a winner in the "rich people's problem" contest.
> 
> Maybe Harvey really loves Taylor or maybe he just wants to spit in his wife's face, but Taylor believes she loves Harvey and sees him as the moral lustration she needs to scrub clean her past life of sin and debauchery.
> 
> Just as Harvey is about to ask his wife for a divorce so that he can marry Taylor - a do-I-leave-the-Madonna-for-a-whore moment - he comes face to face with Taylor's past. He knew about it, but to this point, had done his best to make believe it didn't exist. Yet he can't ignore, when in a bar, several men casually joke with him about his new "girlfriend" Taylor by saying, "welcome to the fraternity, we meet once a year in Yankee Stadium." Ouch.
> 
> Harvey, it turns out, belongs to that odd niche of men who knowingly fall in love with prostitutes - nothing wrong with that, everyone should find love where they can - but then begin to hate the object of their affections because she's slept with a whole lot of men. In logic, that's called a "category error," as Harvey is angry at something for being exactly what it is. It's like hating a top for spinning.
> 
> As the movie climaxes, Harvey, even when he breaks with Taylor, wrecks his marriage to Merrill. Taylor, meanwhile, leaves New York to start afresh with wholesome intent, this time, in Boston. But don't forget the Motion Picture Production Code which, basically, (spoiler alert) says, "The Whore Must Die!"
> 
> So, at the end of a silly and forced car-chase scene, where Harvey pursues Taylor in an attempt to get her back, she is killed as her very cute two-seater Sunbeam Alpine flies off the road. Taylor is dead; the Code is satisfied; Harvey is crushed and, unbelievably, wife Merrill is willing to take him back.
> 
> It's saponaceous melodrama on steroids with an overlay of fire and brimstone condemnation. But tucked inside and countering the "bad whore" narrative are Taylor's mother, the wonderful Mildred Dunnock, and Taylor's childhood best friend, Eddie Fisher, who provide a sympathetic view of Taylor's life.
> 
> The Code was buckling a bit in 1960, but it was not yet ready to let the whore live. However, in about a decade, the 1970s would bring a new and forgiving perspective to the prostitute.
> 
> N.B. *Butterfield 8* is wonderful time travel to early 1960s New York City from the Village to the fancy apartments of Fifth Avenue, including many of the bars, restaurants and nightclubs in between. There's even a neat moment where, in the background of super-lit-up-at-night Times Square, you can see a movie marquee advertising *Ben-Hur*.


How terribly sad to have crashed a Sunbeam.


----------



## Fading Fast

Vecchio Vespa said:


> How terribly sad to have crashed a Sunbeam.


Agree completely, it's a cute as heck car.










The crash scene itself:


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## ran23

It wasn't a Alpine or Tiger.


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## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> Agree completely, it's a cute as heck car.
> 
> View attachment 61337
> 
> 
> The crash scene itself:


Adding the audio visual support to you review is a nice touch, but while I can understand the motion picture production edict the that "the whore must die," I gotta tell ya, that vehicle crash was an extreme way to go! I'll add Butterfield 8 to my list of movies to be watched.


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## Fading Fast

ran23 said:


> It wasn't a Alpine or Tiger.


I know nothing about Sunbeams. IMCDB said it was an Alpine when I looked it up as I didn't know what it was when I saw the movie, but if you are a car guy, my money is on what you say.


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## Fading Fast

*Hard to Handle *from 1933 with James Cagney, Ruth Donnelly, Mary Brian and Claire Dodd

You just have to love the pre-codes. Cagney is a likable scammer in love with the daughter, Mary Brian, of fellow scammer Ruth Donnelly. Donnelly wants her pretty daughter to marry money, so Donnelly and Cagney butt heads all movie long, but at some level, they kinda like each other as only two scammers can.

Cagney is in full flower in this one, running one scam after another, but talking so fast even he's not sure half the time what he's saying. Matching him scam for scam and flimflam for flimflam is Donnelly who, literally, sells the furniture from her furnished rental apartment and then skips town.

Stuck in the middle of these two whirling dervishes of deceit is honest daughter Brian who wants to marry Cagney when he's down and out, but mother Donnelly will have none of that.

Then, when Cagney's on top, Brian is hesitant to marry him as she thinks money will change him, but Donnelly is shamelessly now all for the marriage. Cagney and Donnelly are probably the ones who should get married, but if these two hucksters did, quite possibly, a black hole would open up and swallow the earth.

After our two matchstick men move from West to East Coast, with daughter in tow - you have to "relocate" from time to time when you're in the "scamming" business - Cagney hits it big as a promoter of a Florida land deal. There is nothing more period-scam perfect than a Florida land deal. To be fair, Cagney, at first, isn't aware it's a scam, but he probably wouldn't have cared if he did.

Thrown into the mix at this point is pretty-as-all-heck Claire Dodd, the daughter of Cagney's land-deal partner, who seems to want Cagney mainly to prevent Brian from getting him.

With maybe fifteen minutes to go, everything rips to a head: Cagney is caught cheating with Dodd (he tried not to, but come on, when a pretty woman with an agenda comes to your hotel room at night with a bottle of liquor, things are going to happen), the land deal blows up, Cagney is arrested and Donnelly sets daughter Brian up to marry someone else.

But fear not as 1930s Warner Bros. never saw a hopelessly tangled plot it couldn't fix in ten minutes max, which is exactly what happens here in this it-all-turns-out-good movie. It's fun; it's fast; it's silly and there's this pre-code wonder to ponder: Cagney and Donnelly run a bunch of scams, they are never really punished and they are the heroes of the story.

One year later, with the enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code, that wouldn't be allowed. Darn it, though, movies are more fun (and more like real life) when you find yourself occasionally liking rapscallions like Cagney and Donnelly even though you know you shouldn't.

N.B., 1941's *His Girl Friday* is often noted as being the first movie to have overlapping speed dialogue, but *Hard To Handle*, and many other pre-codes were doing it a decade earlier.


----------



## Fading Fast

*Father of the Bride* from 1950 with Spencer Tracy, Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Bennett, Billie Burke and Leo G. Carroll

*Father of the Bride* is fluff that shamelessly plays to cliches and emotions, but if you're in the right mood, an A-list cast, fast-paced directing by Vincent Minnelli and a serviceable script moves it along seamlessly and entertainingly.

Spencer Tracy is the typical 1950s upper-middle-class father who's kinda clueless as to what's really going on with his kids. He is shocked into focus when daughter Elizabeth Taylor (the young, lithe version before hard living intervened in the next decade) casually announces she's engaged to a boy the family hardly knows.

From here, the script all but writes itself. After initial elation mixed with a little "what do we know about this boy" concern - mollified by meeting his family, who is exactly like Tracy's family - it's full speed ahead to the wedding planning.

Tracy assumes it will be a small, simple wedding. Hah! While daughter Taylor seems okay with this, mother Joan Bennett, who is still smarting a bit from her no-frills Justice-of-the-Peace elopement to Tracy twenty-plus years ago, is having none of this "small-wedding nonsense."

Now it's all Tracy worrying about the cost, Bennett ordering every wedding adornment under the sun, Taylor pinging back and forth between excitement and despair, upset either by her parents' bickering over the cost or some minor kerfuffle with her fiance.

Right on schedule, Tracy meets the snooty caterer/wedding planner, wonderfully played by Leo G. Carroll, who condescendingly explains why every cost save Tracy suggests is, yes, doable, if you want "that" kind of affair.

Shamelessly playing to all the over-priced wedding tropes, Tracy sees dollar signs next to every discussion or appearance of dresses, bridesmaid's gifts, champagne orders, guest lists, chauffeured cars, orchestras, invitations and on and on.

There's even the last-minute pre-wedding bride and groom fight with the heartwarming moment of Dad consoling his daughter (paraphrasing): "forget the cost, if you don't want to go through with this, Dad will make it all okay." But naturally, they do go through with it and, other than a few Hollywood-forced pratfalls, all goes well on wedding day.

It's one cliche after another, but it also works in a silly-movie way mostly because Tracy knows his role here - bluster a bit on the surface, but have a heart of gold underneath. If you do see it, look for the scene where he basically tries to pay his daughter off to elope and, then, shifts the blame for that idea to daughter Taylor when his wife catches wind of it. A husband's gotta do, what a husband's gotta do.

N.B. *Father of the Bride* is lighthearted fun about a family that can afford to waste money on a fancy wedding even if "Pops" doesn't want to. For a serious look at a family being, literally, torn apart over paying for a wedding it can't afford, see 1956's *A Catered Affair*. It's *Father of the Bride's* real-world working-class cognate, and a much better movie.


----------



## eagle2250

Last evening the wife and I popped a DVD of The Deer Hunter, starring Robert De Niro, John Cazale, John Savage, Meryl Streep, and Christopher Walken, into the DVD player. It was in the theaters back in 1978 It is the story of three friends, working in a Pittsburgh, PA, steel mill, who go off to (the Vietnam) war engaging in rather intense combat situations and surviving the combat and periods of captivity as POW's. Steve, Savages character, loses his legs and the use of his left arm; Nick, Walken's character, loses his mind and eventually his life, and Michael, De Niro's character, spends the final hour of the movie struggling to bring his friends back to "the World!" Nicky dies playing a final game of Russian Roulette, Steve deals with the reality that his young wife, whom he married just one day before leaving for the war, struggles to just look at his mangled body and Michael works to accept the reality that life will be forever different. It's a three hour movie that almost demands one take an intermission to recharge the snacking bowls and hit the head, but it is also an important one that has an important story to share with the viewer.. The Deer Hunter is a movie well worth watching!


----------



## Fading Fast

*Vertigo* from 1958 with Jimmy Stewart, Kim Novak and Barbara Bel Geddes

Let's get "The Greatest Movie Ever" thing out of the way first, since, for many years, *Vertigo* held that title according to one popular ranking. But that phrase means all but nothing as there is no linear, definitive movie meter or scale.

I'm happy to talk about my favorite movies, but that, like all this ranking stuff, is mainly opinion. I don't even think *Vertigo* is Hitchcock's best movie, but it is a heck of a picture.

I've enjoyed it more the last few times I've seen it since I no longer have the weight of thinking I'm watching "The Greatest Movie Ever" pressing on me. (That's the same reason why I now enjoy *Citizen Kane*.)

It's almost all spoiler alerts from here. At its core, *Vertigo* is a good-husband-kills-his-rich-wife story in a very creative way, but talk about a MacGuffin as, half the time during the movie, you forget that's the ostensible plot.

Instead, you have retired middle-aged detective Jimmy Stewart, retired because he suffers from vertigo, obsessing over his friend's rich wife, Kim Novak, in an almost creepy way. But then, Novak, with her odd preoccupation with a lookalike ancestor from a hundred years ago, is a bit creepy too.

These two are only thrown together when Stewart is hired by his old school buddy, Novak's husband, to find out what is going on with Novak. The husband claims he's worried that his wife's mania with her ancestor, who committed suicide at Novak's present age, is becoming a danger to herself.

For at least half the movie, you really don't quite know what is going on as the camera watches Stewart watching Novak who, oftentimes, sits watching a portrait of her ancestor before she goes off and does something crazy, like jumping into San Francisco Bay.

It's only after you know why this is happening that it truly holds your interest, which is why the movie is better on subsequent viewing. Because of the confusion, you don't even fully notice how casually Stewart begins an affair with Novak. This means he's having an affair with his friend and client's wife. The censors were probably as confused as everyone else when they let that slip by.

The only voice of reason in this one is Stewart's gal pal Barbara Bel Geddes whose unrequited love for Stewart goes from harmless and cute to painful and heartbreaking when she sees Stewart is obsessed with younger and prettier Novak.

Bel Geddes' unspoken plan seems to have been to get Stewart simply by being the last [wo]man standing in his life, but then Novak sweeps in and crushes Bel Geddes' hopes. It's clearly a theme Hitchcock enjoyed exploring as he tucked unrequited love into several of his movies.

But back in *Vertigo's* crazy town and after a big chunk of time spent on all the aforementioned watching, the movie's two threads - Novak's mystical-like fascination with her ancestor and her husband's pragmatic hiring of Stewart - come together.

Here, Stewart's vertigo - it's the title of the movie for a reason - prevents him from stopping Novak when she finally commits (or does she?) the suicide she's been toying with all along.

After that, Hitchcock whips up another round of suspense when Stewart, who is spiraling into depression with Novak gone, meets and begins dating a Novak lookalike.

He then obsessively and disturbingly starts making this woman dress and do her hair like Novak. The final Hitchcock twist, which does a good job of tying up a lot of still dangling threads, doesn't disappoint, but let's leave that unsaid if you haven't seen it.

The real plot and theme in this one - the only thing that is truly going on - is a man obsessing over a beautiful blonde woman. Everything else exists to advance or explore this thread.

Based on Hitchcock biographies, this is probably his most personal movie as obsessing over blonde women seemed to be his thing. If so, the master director took something close to his heart and covertly made it into a cinematic masterpiece.

N.B. I love black and white movies, but Hitchcock brilliantly uses color in *Vertigo* to advance its theme and deliver a ridiculously stylish movie. It's, thankfully, not the amped-up Technicolor of the day, but, at times, a slightly muted one that echoes the confused dream-like state of much of the picture. Yet, when needed, the color becomes crisp and sharp but never garish. Hitchcock was in complete control of every aspect of his movie-making efforts.

Black and white on blonde, this look doesn't happen by accident:


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 61591
> 
> *Vertigo* from 1958 with Jimmy Stewart, Kim Novak and Barbara Bel Geddes
> 
> Let's get "The Greatest Movie Ever" thing out of the way first, since, for many years, *Vertigo* held that title according to one popular ranking. But that phrase means all but nothing as there is no linear, definitive movie meter or scale.
> 
> I'm happy to talk about my favorite movies, but that, like all this ranking stuff, is mainly opinion. I don't even think *Vertigo* is Hitchcock's best movie, but it is a heck of a picture.
> 
> I've enjoyed it more the last few times I've seen it since I no longer have the weight of thinking I'm watching "The Greatest Movie Ever" pressing on me. (That's the same reason why I now enjoy *Citizen Kane*.)
> 
> It's almost all spoiler alerts from here. At its core, *Vertigo* is a good-husband-kills-his-rich-wife story in a very creative way, but talk about a MacGuffin as, half the time during the movie, you forget that's the ostensible plot.
> 
> Instead, you have retired middle-aged detective Jimmy Stewart, retired because he suffers from vertigo, obsessing over his friend's rich wife, Kim Novak, in an almost creepy way. But then, Novak, with her odd preoccupation with a lookalike ancestor from a hundred years ago, is a bit creepy too.
> 
> These two are only thrown together when Stewart is hired by his old school buddy, Novak's husband, to find out what is going on with Novak. The husband claims he's worried that his wife's mania with her ancestor, who committed suicide at Novak's present age, is becoming a danger to herself.
> 
> For at least half the movie, you really don't quite know what is going on as the camera watches Stewart watching Novak who, oftentimes, sits watching a portrait of her ancestor before she goes off and does something crazy, like jumping into San Francisco Bay.
> 
> It's only after you know why this is happening that it truly holds your interest, which is why the movie is better on subsequent viewing. Because of the confusion, you don't even fully notice how casually Stewart begins an affair with Novak. This means he's having an affair with his friend and client's wife. The censors were probably as confused as everyone else when they let that slip by.
> 
> The only voice of reason in this one is Stewart's gal pal Barbara Bel Geddes whose unrequited love for Stewart goes from harmless and cute to painful and heartbreaking when she sees Stewart is obsessed with younger and prettier Novak.
> 
> Bel Geddes' unspoken plan seems to have been to get Stewart simply by being the last [wo]man standing in his life, but then Novak sweeps in and crushes Bel Geddes' hopes. It's clearly a theme Hitchcock enjoyed exploring as he tucked unrequited love into several of his movies.
> 
> But back in *Vertigo's* crazy town and after a big chunk of time spent on all the aforementioned watching, the movie's two threads - Novak's mystical-like fascination with her ancestor and her husband's pragmatic hiring of Stewart - come together.
> 
> Here, Stewart's vertigo - it's the title of the movie for a reason - prevents him from stopping Novak when she finally commits (or does she?) the suicide she's been toying with all along.
> 
> After that, Hitchcock whips up another round of suspense when Stewart, who is spiraling into depression with Novak gone, meets and begins dating a Novak lookalike.
> 
> He then obsessively and disturbingly starts making this woman dress and do her hair like Novak. The final Hitchcock twist, which does a good job of tying up a lot of still dangling threads, doesn't disappoint, but let's leave that unsaid if you haven't seen it.
> 
> The real plot and theme in this one - the only thing that is truly going on - is a man obsessing over a beautiful blonde woman. Everything else exists to advance or explore this thread.
> 
> Based on Hitchcock biographies, this is probably his most personal movie as obsessing over blonde women seemed to be his thing. If so, the master director took something close to his heart and covertly made it into a cinematic masterpiece.
> 
> N.B. I love black and white movies, but Hitchcock brilliantly uses color in *Vertigo* to advance its theme and deliver a ridiculously stylish movie. It's, thankfully, not the amped-up Technicolor of the day, but, at times, a slightly muted one that echoes the confused dream-like state of much of the picture. Yet, when needed, the color becomes crisp and sharp but never garish. Hitchcock was in complete control of every aspect of his movie-making efforts.
> 
> Black and white on blonde, this look doesn't happen by accident:
> View attachment 61592


Kim Novak is a natural understated beauty who quite consistently shaded the other blond beauties with whom she might be compared, but alas, she abdicated that natural beauty to the misguided scalpels of plastic surgeons. Sadly, she looks a bit of a freak these days! I've enjoyed watching Vertigo on at least two occasions, but never quite understood it as well as I did after reading your review. I think I may have to watch it a third time looking through the lens of understanding provided by your review. Thank you for another great review.


----------



## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> Kim Nova is a natural understated beauty who quite consistently shaded the other blond beauties with whom she might be compared, but alas, she abdicated that natural beauty to the misguided scalpels of plastic surgeons. Sadly, she looks a bit of a freak these days! I've enjoyed watching Vertigo on at least two occasions, but never quite understood it as well as I did after reading your review. I think I may have to watch it a third time looking through the lens of understanding provided by your review. Thank you for another great review.


Thank you for your kind comments. I didn't understand it after two viewings either. I'm guessing this is my fourth or fifth time through and it took that many for me to finally "get it." It's also the first time I really enjoyed it as, at last, I knew what the heck was going on.


----------



## Fading Fast

*The Sellout*from 1952 with Walter Pidgeon, John Hodiak, Karl Malden and Thomas Gomez

*The Sellout* starts out as a solid entry in the early 1950s crime-drama genre. A crusading newspaper editor initiates an investigation into a corrupt local sheriff who runs his district like a shakedown fiefdom (think of the mob with policing power). While *The Sellout* is enjoyable overall, by the last quarter or so, it loses most of its grit as it becomes a two-dimensional good-guys-vs-bad-guys story.

Even so, its strong start combined with its impressive cast make it worth the watch. When newspaper editor Walter Pidgeon and a co-worker are hauled off to jail after a very minor traffic incident in sheriff Thomas Gomez' county, Pidgeon doesn't reveal his identity. He and his friend are roughed up in jail, face trumped up charges, and then ridiculously high bail is set for Pidgeon while his co-worker is sent to a work farm until his trial date.

Once out, Pidgeon starts the aforementioned newspaper campaign to expose the graft, extortion and malfeasance in Gomez's county. After Pidgeon accumulates an extensive dossier of corruption, the state's attorney general's office sends assistant AG John Hodiak down to pursue a criminal prosecution.

All of a sudden, though, Pidgeon disappears as do his records, while Hodiak struggles to get anyone to talk out of fear of reprisal from the sheriff. With the help of an honest local cop, a very young Karl Maulden, Hodiak keeps pushing hard, but struggles to get anyone who will speak on the record.

Up until now, about three quarters in, *The Sellout* is a solid B movie, but the last quarter is too black and white where bad guys like Gomez become cardboard versions of themselves, while the good guys start spouting aphorisms about justice and the constitution.

(Spoiler alert) The climatic courtroom scene - with Pidgeon returning to save the day - is too neatly wrapped up as a morality tale with the guys in the white hats winning and the guys in the black hats getting theirs.

Considering the number of similar movies produced in the postwar era (see 1951's *The Racket* or 1952's *The Captive City*) exposing local government and mob corruption, usually the two were mutual enablers, it had to be a big problem in the country.

A country that had just lost nearly three hundred thousand of its young men to free the world from megalomaniacal dictators bent on world domination, probably didn't have a lot of patients with local quasi-dictators who degraded freedom via graft and corruption protected by a government on the take.

Movies like *The Sellout*, imperfect as they are, still provide a neat window into postwar America. Plus the clothes, cars and architecture on display in crisp black and white is wonderful time travel for us today.


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## eagle2250

Another one of those great reviews. I began reading thinking "boy, I really like those old black and white films" and by the time I'd reached the end of your review, had concluded, "I'm really going to have to watch this one." As you suggest, perhaps The Sellout does just that and sells out, becoming a two dimensional showcase of good vs evil. However, isn't that what life is all about, whether we take our ques from reading and studying The Bible or from our life experiences and the evening news broadcasts? Life itself is all about good vs evil and that's ok. It maintains an essential tension that adds dimension and significance to our lives. That's my "windbag" way of saying I'll be looking for the movie, popping the popcorn and getting ready to watch another good movie. Thanks for another great review.


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## Fading Fast

*Dancing Lady* from 1933 with Joan Crawford, Clark Gable and Franchot Tone

The three most-common movies in the 1930s were a mobster's rise and fall, a newspaper's rise and fall and a Broadway show's difficult rise and probable fall.

A subgenre of the Broadway-show movie is the desperate-to-break-into-showbiz-ingenue story. Heck, it's hard to name a 1930s female star who wasn't in a I-want-to-break-into-showbiz movie (Katherine Hepburn alone did two, *Stage Door* and *Morning Glory*).

*Dancing Lady* is a serviceable pre-code version of the will-the-show-rise-or-fall movie mashed up with the young-dancer-desperately-trying-to-break-into-Broadway story.

Crawford is the ingenue pursued by nice playboy Franchot Tone who secretly funds a show to give Crawford her Broadway break. The director of the show, cranky and demanding Clark Gable, begins to fall for Crawford, and she, him, which sets up a by-the-numbers love triangle to spice up the standard 1930s plot.

Crawford likes Tone, but worries her humble background won't fly in his Park Avenue world. She wonderfully summarizes her self-believed inferior status to Tone via a diction distinction: I'm a "dems," not "those" girl.

Once she meets Gable, her passion for Tone wanes, but not only does Tone keep trying, Crawford plays along as she's smart and calculating enough to know that he could provide a financial lifeboat if her career fizzles.

Her real passion is reserved for bull-in-a-china-shop Gable who, in a typical can-we-keep-the-show-afloat move, plows all his personal money in to sustain it when Tone, trying to convince Crawford to marry him, covertly pulls his money out so her career will fail. If you've never seen one of these movies before, the conclusion might surprise you, but it's pretty standard stuff.

MGM threw almost everything it had at this pre-code. In addition to the three big-name leads, there are plenty of scantily clad women, plenty of sexual innuendo, plenty of expensive sets and plenty of elaborately choreographed numbers.

Pulling out all the stops, MGM also has The Three Stooges in here as stagehands doing, well, Three-Stooges-as-stagehands stuff. Finally, song-and-dance man Fred Astaire pops up to sing and, more importantly, dance with Crawford as she prepares for her big Broadway debut. Watching Crawford dance, even to this untrained eye, makes clear it's a good thing she can act.

Despite all the firepower and budget, the movie feels okay, but surprisingly "small," as if it was a B movie mistakenly given A-movie treatment. Heck, tight-fisted Warner Bros. would have taken out most of the frills, tossed in a few more plot twists (Warners loved more plot) and produced a better movie for half the money.

Still, it's fun to see Crawford and Gable being all youth and beauty especially since, in *Dancing Lady*, they are clearly having fun being all youth and beauty with each other.


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## Vecchio Vespa

ran23 said:


> It wasn't a Alpine or Tiger.


It sure looks like a '59 Alpine. If it isn't, I'd love to know what it is.


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## Oldsarge

The song of the youth I wish I had.


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## Fading Fast

*The Americanization of Emily *from 1964 with James Garner, Julie Andrews, James Coburn and Melvyn Douglas

"The first dead man on Omaha Beach must be a sailor."

"The first dead man on Omaha Beach is alive!"

This movie gets more enjoyable with every viewing. While the book is better (comments here: #8119), the movie stands nicely on its own.

It works well because it's a fun story about two American Naval officers, colloquially known as "dog robbers," who "take care" of their admirals by procuring food, liquor, luxury goods and, yes, women for their parties and pleasure. Yet tucked inside this movie about a superficial corner of the war is a complex morality tale about militarism, patriotism and the insanity of battle.

James Garner and Charles Coburn are the dog robbers for their Admiral, wonderfully portrayed by Melvin Douglas. These two officers are having a nice, safe and comfortable WWII in a luxurious London hotel redoubt (after the Blitz). They are surrounded by well-stocked storerooms and plenty of young English lasses happy to "be with" these handsome officers with access to all the things England has been doing without for several years now.

Garner, an actor with a great talent for playing likable rogues, meets war widow and military chauffeur Julie Andrews, looking ridiculously cute while proving she can act in a movie without singing. Andrews is prim, proper and, initially, as disgusted by good-time Garner as he is with "stuck up" her.

She sees his military featherbedding and proudly admitted cowardliness as morally contemptible. He sees her devotion to duty and pride in the military deaths of her husband, brother and father as ignorant sentimentality perpetuating a rah-rah view of war.

I've read the book once and have seen the movie, probably, half a dozen times and still am not sure of Garner's and, one assumes, the book's author, William Bradford Huie's philosophy. It seems to be denouncing the romanticizing and propagandizing of war, but is not really against war itself. Especially if the war is necessary, as it was in WWII, to, well, save the world.

Garner gives long speeches about how if the men who die fighting would ignore the "hero stuff" and push back against war, war would be hard to wage. It's less of a sincere blueprint to stop war than a cri de coeur against its glorification.

While Garner and Andrews fall in love arguing over the purpose of war, Garner's Admiral, the slowly cracking-up Douglas, hatches a crazy scheme to have a film made of the first man, a sailor, dying on the beach on D-Day. It's all part of his coldly calculating strategy to increase the Navy's standing when post-war budget cuts begin.

The sheer cynicism of his plan all but drives a usually fawning Garner to confront his Admiral, but he figures why risk his comfy situation for a principal. Yet when the spiralling into crazytown Admiral assigns Gardner to lead the filming on D-Day, Garner is now faced with being the cannon fodder he deplores or being hauled off to the brig.

From here, it's Garner looking for every angle to get out of his assignment, while Andrews, now confronted with losing another man she loves, deeply questions her previous views of honor and duty.

The end is hokey, but a ton of fun with everyone's morality getting spun in the centrifuge one more time. Garner and Andrews are so appealing that you can just enjoy the boy-chases-girl-then-girl-chases-boy story and let all the multi-layered morality slide by. At least that's becoming my preferred method for watching *The Americanization of Emily*.

N.B. The first line of the quote at the top is the genesis of the crazy plan of the Admiral's to glorify the Navy. The second line reflects the brass' chagrin when, with a publicity-driven memorial service all set, they discover their dead sailor is actually alive - don't you hate it when that happens?


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## eagle2250

A great movie and I really enjoyed your review. I can't claim to have read the book or to having seen the movie as often as you have experienced, but I have seen it twice and perhaps even three times. As I have observed in the past, I will have to see the movie at least one more time so as to view it through the lens of your review. Thanks again.


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## Fading Fast

*Keeper of the Flame* from 1942 with Spencer Tracy, Katherine Hepburn, Richard Whorf and Forrest Tucker

What happens when you start a movie with a *Citizen Kane*-style great-man buildup, but morph it into an off-the-shelf anti-Nazi/fascism WWII-propaganda effort? You wind up with a good movie that lets its audience down because it never delivers on its "Rosebud" promise.

Spencer Tracy is a noted foreign correspondent back in the States to cover the funeral of a famous American, Robert Forrest, who died when he drove his car off a just-collapsed-in-a-storm bridge located on his estate.

Forrest is presented as a "great man" who gave powerful speeches that inspired kids and adults to form clubs around the country in support of his ideas, which, at this point in the movie, while vague, sound "wholesomely" American. Forrest's resume checks all the boxes as he is a WWI hero, a successful businessman (when that was respected) and a well-known philanthropist.

We first sense, though, something is off when Tracy tries to gain access to Forrest's forbidding-looking mansion to interview his widow. He gets no farther than its imposing iron fence and gatehouse where he is turned away by the taciturn and suspicious groundskeeper.

From here, a stock mystery story takes over until the last twenty-or-so minutes. Tracy gains limited access to the mansion, meets the widow and is allowed to come back to do research for his book on Forrest, but the atmosphere is mistrustful and ominous.

In a series of visits, he encounters a hostile male cousin who might be having an affair with Hepburn, Forrest's surface-friendly but prickly secretary, the groundskeeper's child who believes he "killed" Forrest because he didn't warn him in time the bridge was out and Forrest's all but locked-away mother who thinks her son was killed by his wife Hepburn.

While all this is going on, in theory, Tracy and Hepburn fall in love, but you don't feel it. Despite their other successful romantic movie pairings - and a real life love affair - their famous chemistry doesn't click in this one. Part of the problem is Hepburn's character never finds its center. Instead, she pings back and forth between being a loving widow one moment to a murder suspect the next, but it comes off as inconsistent not mysterious.

The movie then shifts gears again when (spoiler alerts) we learn that Forrest was, à la Charles Lindbergh, trying to start a fascist front to take over America. Also, Hepburn didn't directly kill her husband, but committed a sin of omission by not warning him the fatal bridge was out when she could have.

This accomplished what she wanted - to stop his movement - but then she and the others on the estate attempt to cover up Forrest's true intentions believing it was better for the country that Forrest should be remembered as a "great American hero." Tracy rebuts this with a super-duper pro-American democracy speech about trusting the people to understand the real story because truth is the most-important American value.

After that, (one more spoiler alert) Hepburn is senselessly shot. One assumes the Motion Picture Production Code needed her dead since, technically, she did kinda kill her Nazi-sympathizing, traitorous husband.

As a *Citizen Kane* doppelganger, *Keeper of the Flame* is a big let down. As a murder-mystery-in-a-creepy-mansion movie, it's an ordinary by-the-numbers story. As a WWII propaganda film, it takes too long to get to its point and then shamelessly over sells it, even for propaganda.

Yet, despite all its faults, it's sort of okay as modest entertainment because Tracy is that good and several scenes work. It's just that, unfortunately, *Keeper of the Flame* tries to be too many things at once and fully succeeds at none of them.


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## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 62007
> 
> *Keeper of the Flame* from 1942 with Spencer Tracy, Katherine Hepburn, Richard Whorf and Forrest Tucker
> 
> What happens when you start a movie with a *Citizen Kane*-style great-man buildup, but morph it into an off-the-shelf anti-Nazi/fascism WWII-propaganda effort? You wind up with a good movie that lets its audience down because it never delivers on its "Rosebud" promise.
> 
> Spencer Tracy is a noted foreign correspondent back in the States to cover the funeral of a famous American, Robert Forrest, who died when he drove his car off a just-collapsed-in-a-storm bridge located on his estate.
> 
> Forrest is presented as a "great man" who gave powerful speeches that inspired kids and adults to form clubs around the country in support of his ideas, which, at this point in the movie, while vague, sound "wholesomely" American. Forrest's resume checks all the boxes as he is a WWI hero, a successful businessman (when that was respected) and a well-known philanthropist.
> 
> We first sense, though, something is off when Tracy tries to gain access to Forrest's forbidding-looking mansion to interview his widow. He gets no farther than its imposing iron fence and gatehouse where he is turned away by the taciturn and suspicious groundskeeper.
> 
> From here, a stock mystery story takes over until the last twenty-or-so minutes. Tracy gains limited access to the mansion, meets the widow and is allowed to come back to do research for his book on Forrest, but the atmosphere is mistrustful and ominous.
> 
> In a series of visits, he encounters a hostile male cousin who might be having an affair with Hepburn, Forrest's surface-friendly but prickly secretary, the groundskeeper's child who believes he "killed" Forrest because he didn't warn him in time the bridge was out and Forrest's all but locked-away mother who thinks her son was killed by his wife Hepburn.
> 
> While all this is going on, in theory, Tracy and Hepburn fall in love, but you don't feel it. Despite their other successful romantic movie pairings - and a real life love affair - their famous chemistry doesn't click in this one. Part of the problem is Hepburn's character never finds its center. Instead, she pings back and forth between being a loving widow one moment to a murder suspect the next, but it comes off as inconsistent not mysterious.
> 
> The movie then shifts gears again when (spoiler alerts) we learn that Forrest was, à la Charles Lindbergh, trying to start a fascist front to take over America. Also, Hepburn didn't directly kill her husband, but committed a sin of omission by not warning him the fatal bridge was out when she could have.
> 
> This accomplished what she wanted - to stop his movement - but then she and the others on the estate attempt to cover up Forrest's true intentions believing it was better for the country that Forrest should be remembered as a "great American hero." Tracy rebuts this with a super-duper pro-American democracy speech about trusting the people to understand the real story because truth is the most-important American value.
> 
> After that, (one more spoiler alert) Hepburn is senselessly shot. One assumes the Motion Picture Production Code needed her dead since, technically, she did kinda kill her Nazi-sympathizing, traitorous husband.
> 
> As a *Citizen Kane* doppelganger, *Keeper of the Flame* is a big let down. As a murder-mystery-in-a-creepy-mansion movie, it's an ordinary by-the-numbers story. As a WWII propaganda film, it takes too long to get to its point and then shamelessly over sells it, even for propaganda.
> 
> Yet, despite all its faults, it's sort of okay as modest entertainment because Tracy is that good and several scenes work. It's just that, unfortunately, *Keeper of the Flame* tries to be too many things at once and fully succeeds at none of them.


As always a very well written, honest and very thorough review. I am not absolutely certain, but I don't think I have ever seen The Keeper of the Flame and, based on your recommendations, I doubt that I will be adding this one to my list. Thanks again.


----------



## Howard

"Cuties", this film is about a bunch of 11-13 year old girls trying out for a twerking dance contest, to be honest I did not like this film cause I thought they over-sexualized the girls and made them feel like prostitutes, this film was not good, a thumbs down 👎


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## Fading Fast

*Wall of Noise* from 1963 with Ty Hardin, Suzanne Pleshette, Ann Conroy, Ralph Meeker and Jimmy Murphy

A woman who wants her former boyfriend back asking about his new girlfriend:

Former girlfriend: "What's 'she' like?"

Former boyfriend: "She's not a broad." [Ouch!]

Former girlfriend [hurt]: Oh, well then, umm, maybe you better let me out the back way? [Translation: Are you happy, you made me feel like a piece of garbage?]

The 1950s into the early 1960s was Hollywood's Golden Age of dramas, more accurately described as giant balls of soap-opera cheese. I say that as a fan.

Swimming in the wake of the big name, major-studio efforts like *Peyton Place* and *The Young Philadelphians* are the low-budget, let's-cash-in-on-the-trend pictures like *Wall of Noise*.

Not that they didn't already have me at early-1960s soap opera, but *Wall of Noise* is set in the world of thoroughbred racing - ooh! - with a story pivoting off a talented but moody horse, Escudero (translation: shield bearer). This ornery and powerful thoroughbred holds the dreams of several desperate people in his fast but fragile four legs.

Skilled, edgy, romance-novel handsome and financially broke horse trainer Ty Hardin pushes the good people out of his life - his model girlfriend, Ann Conroy, and best friend jockey - in his singular pursuit of race-track success where the only thing he puts before his career is the well being of his horses.

When a self-made construction titan, Ralph Meeker, hires Hardin to be his trainer, Hardin's luck looks to have changed. But Meeker's promises of autonomy for Hardin were just words further eroded when Hardin begins an affair with Meeker's beautiful, young but disaffected wife, Suzanne Pleshette (just once I want to see her in a movie without her hair puffed up into a giant bubble).

Pleshette represents the world of wealth and breeding that Hardin has never been a part of as thoroughbred racing is a mix of extremes with little in between. Almost everyone who tries to earn a living in it is either moving up or down in this fickle business, with only the very rich able to fund it as a hobby. The rest are just one bad season or, sometimes, one bad race away from ruin.

Pleshette, born to the "right" family, but just as its money was running out, married Meeker to give the up-by-his-bootstraps millionaire social shine while he became her lifeboat bank account. She's potentially risking it all for a fling with a volatile man with an empty bank account.

Enter Escudero, a horse Hardin buys at auction for Meeker, but then ends up owning himself, however, with borrowed money he can't pay back unless the horse wins. From here, it's all Hardin trying to hold on to Escudero as, under his care, the temperamental colt begins to run well.

With the ex-girlfriend hanging around and helping, Escudero's note holder circling, Pleshette selfishly waiting to see if he hits it big with the strapping colt and Meeker trying to break him, Hardin has pushed all his chips into the center of the table on Escudero's next race (for racing fans, it's a way-up-in-class stakes race).

A day before the big race, Hardin notices Escudero might be injured. Since horses can't talk, the bane of every trainer ever, Hardin has to discern by observation if there is an ever-so-slight tendon issue which would cause him to scratch (pull from the race) Escudero.

So now, the man of integrity with horses, who has everything riding on the race and really can't afford to wait for another opportunity with Escudero's note due, faces a difficult go-no-go decision. Run the horse and he wins - all is good. Run him and he is injured - all is lost, including Hardin's integrity, Pleshette, the horse himself and, maybe even, the former-girlfriends' respect and love.

The "wall of noise," the overwhelming roar from the grandstands when the horses race by in the homestretch, is a metaphor for a man deaf to anything but winning. Will Hardin succumb to the "wall of noise" or do the right thing by his horse? Sure, the story is a big ball of cheese, but it's supposed to be as that's the raison d'etre of these wonderfully saponaceous 1950s and 1960s movies. In that "genre," *Wall of Noise* is a low-budget gem.

Suzanne Pleshette's bubble hair.


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 62085
> 
> *Wall of Noise* from 1963 with Ty Hardin, Suzanne Pleshette, Ann Conroy, Ralph Meeker and Jimmy Murphy
> 
> A woman who wants her former boyfriend back asking about his new girlfriend:
> 
> Former girlfriend: "What's 'she' like?"
> 
> Former boyfriend: "She's not a broad." [Ouch!]
> 
> Former girlfriend [hurt]: Oh, well then, umm, maybe you better let me out the back way? [Translation: Are you happy, you made me feel like a piece of garbage?]
> 
> The 1950s into the early 1960s was Hollywood's Golden Age of dramas, more accurately described as giant balls of soap-opera cheese. I say that as a fan.
> 
> Swimming in the wake of the big name, major-studio efforts like *Peyton Place* and *The Young Philadelphians* are the low-budget, let's-cash-in-on-the-trend pictures like *Wall of Noise*.
> 
> Not that they didn't already have me at early-1960s soap opera, but *Wall of Noise* is set in the world of thoroughbred racing - ooh! - with a story pivoting off a talented but moody horse, Escudero (translation: shield bearer). This ornery and powerful thoroughbred holds the dreams of several desperate people in his fast but fragile four legs.
> 
> Skilled, edgy, romance-novel handsome and financially broke horse trainer Ty Hardin pushes the good people out of his life - his model girlfriend, Ann Conroy, and best friend jockey - in his singular pursuit of race-track success where the only thing he puts before his career is the well being of his horses.
> 
> When a self-made construction titan, Ralph Meeker, hires Hardin to be his trainer, Hardin's luck looks to have changed. But Meeker's promises of autonomy for Hardin were just words further eroded when Hardin begins an affair with Meeker's beautiful, young but disaffected wife, Suzanne Pleshette (just once I want to see her in a movie without her hair puffed up into a giant bubble).
> 
> Pleshette represents the world of wealth and breeding that Hardin has never been a part of as thoroughbred racing is a mix of extremes with little in between. Almost everyone who tries to earn a living in it is either moving up or down in this fickle business, with only the very rich able to fund it as a hobby. The rest are just one bad season or, sometimes, one bad race away from ruin.
> 
> Pleshette, born to the "right" family, but just as its money was running out, married Meeker to give the up-by-his-bootstraps millionaire social shine while he became her lifeboat bank account. She's potentially risking it all for a fling with a volatile man with an empty bank account.
> 
> Enter Escudero, a horse Hardin buys at auction for Meeker, but then ends up owning himself, however, with borrowed money he can't pay back unless the horse wins. From here, it's all Hardin trying to hold on to Escudero as, under his care, the temperamental colt begins to run well.
> 
> With the ex-girlfriend hanging around and helping, Escudero's note holder circling, Pleshette selfishly waiting to see if he hits it big with the strapping colt and Meeker trying to break him, Hardin has pushed all his chips into the center of the table on Escudero's next race (for racing fans, it's a way-up-in-class stakes race).
> 
> A day before the big race, Hardin notices Escudero might be injured. Since horses can't talk, the bane of every trainer ever, Hardin has to discern by observation if there is an ever-so-slight tendon issue which would cause him to scratch (pull from the race) Escudero.
> 
> So now, the man of integrity with horses, who has everything riding on the race and really can't afford to wait for another opportunity with Escudero's note due, faces a difficult go-no-go decision. Run the horse and he wins - all is good. Run him and he is injured - all is lost, including Hardin's integrity, Pleshette, the horse himself and, maybe even, the former-girlfriends' respect and love.
> 
> The "wall of noise," the overwhelming roar from the grandstands when the horses race by in the homestretch, is a metaphor for a man deaf to anything but winning. Will Hardin succumb to the "wall of noise" or do the right thing by his horse? Sure, the story is a big ball of cheese, but it's supposed to be as that's the raison d'etre of these wonderfully saponaceous 1950s and 1960s movies. In that "genre," *Wall of Noise* is a low-budget gem.
> 
> Suzanne Pleshette's bubble hair.
> View attachment 62088


Well, come on now....does he run Escudero? Who in fact makes the call, the owner or the Trainer? Does Escudero win or lose? Which guy does the ever-so-lovely Suzanne Pleschette end up with? Ironic methinks, a low budget movie about perhaps one of human kinds most expensive hobbies/addictions. Thank you, good Sir for another exceptional review. The crescendo or the readers excitement builds as you comment upon the progress of the film to what we can only guess is a satisfying orgasm of the activity on the silver screen, as we and left with no other option but to watch the movie to get answers to our list of never ending questions. LOL.


----------



## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> Well, come on now....does he run Escudero? Who in fact makes the call, the owner or the Trainer? Does Escudero win or lose? Which guy does the ever-so-lovely Suzanne Pleschette end up with? Ironic methinks, a low budget movie about perhaps one of human kinds most expensive hobbies/addictions. Thank you, good Sir for another exceptional review. The crescendo or the readers excitement builds as you comment upon the progress of the film to what we can only guess is a satisfying orgasm of the activity on the silver screen, as we and left with no other option but to watch the movie to get answers to our list of never ending questions. LOL.


As you guessed, I left you hanging as, if you do watch it, the fun is the anxiety building toward the climatic ending. Here's an embarrassing fact - I bought the book and will start it shortly. I want to see how it compared to the movie.


----------



## Fading Fast

*...And Justice for All* from 1979 with Al Pacino, John Forsythe, Jack Warden, Jeffrey Tambor and Christine Lahti

The 1970s looked broken, apparently, to those living through them if movies reflect something about how a society views itself. *Klute*, *Saturday Night Fever*, *Looking for Mr. Goodbar*, *Three Days of the Condor* and *...And Justice for All*, to name just a few, show a society coming apart at the seams.

In ironically named *...And Justice for All*, broken is the word that most comes to mind: judges - broken; defense attorneys - broken; ethics committees - broken; prosecutors - broken; criminals - broken; prisons - broken; broken, broken, broken, it's all broken.

Defense attorney Al Pacino knows how to play the system, but even he's breaking. As opposed to most Hollywood tales, Pacino is a regular good guy who bends his morality to fit the system, but tries not to let it break. He's no cardboard hero, just a man trying to do reasonably right in a very wrong system.

Since this is Hollywood, though, the movie focuses on innocent or not really bad people being falsely arrested or convicted and, then, broken by the system. These are the clients Pacino defends day in and day out.

A kid gets pulled over for a faulty tail light, his identity is mistaken for a murder suspect and, owing to a series of bureaucratic mistakes and a callous judge, he ends up dead. A cross-dressing man, guilty of a minor crime who should've been given parole, instead, owing to a defense attorney's error, receives a multi-year sentence. He kills himself his first week in prison (it's amazing he made it that long).

These are horrible stories that break your heart, but in real life, there are stories that pull in the other direction. The only one of those lightly touched on here is quickly and diffidently told. A defense attorney gets a murder suspect off on a technicality, despite knowing his client is guilty. Once freed, his client kills two children.

Of course, this tale, as opposed to the above stories, is only briefly discussed and not shown, which greatly reduces its emotional impact. It only focuses on the psychological distress it causes the attorney.

How come we don't see the murdered children happily playing before they are killed or their distraught parents afterwards? That would highlight how there are costs to the innocent when the system becomes too lenient - not a point Hollywood almost ever wants to make.

Okay, we know Hollywood has its bias as seen in the movie's main story of a (of course) conservative judge, John Forsythe, who hands down harsh sentences while constantly ignoring pleas for leniency. He is arrested on a rape and assault charge and then manipulates the broken system to all but ensure an acquittal for himself.

In one of those twists that only happens in movies, Judge Forsythe forces Pacino to be his defense attorney. As it is public knowledge that Pacino hates this judge, it serves to make Forsythe look innocent even before the trial begins.

From here, it's a full-throttled morality tale as Pacino, doing what he is morally obligated to do as a defence attorney, works within the system to build Forsythe's defence, while Forsythe arrogantly admits to Pacino he is guilty. Forsythe, doing an outstanding job in the role, seems to enjoy rubbing his guilt in Pacino's face (there's a 1970s metaphor in there somewhere).

But of course, a defense attorney's job is to defend his client, so Pacino goes into court, offers an iron-clad defense of Forsythe and then...breaks. In the movie's famous line - you know it even if you haven't seen the movie - a ranting Pacino, being admonished by the judge, screams out, "...this whole court is out of order!"

In seven words, Pacino delivers the movie's theme, its condemnation of the justice system and a pretty good summary of Hollywood's judgment of America in the 1970s. *...And Justice for all* is over-the-top, but still, it's well acted and fun-as-heck entertainment.

N.B. #1 Who came up with *...And Justice for All's* soundtrack, which is more like a cheesy 1970s TV-sitcom soundtrack than one for a major motion picture release?

N.B. #2 Could there be less chemistry between two actors supposedly in love than Pacino and Christine Lahti? Both are fine actors, but they generate not one spark of real passion the entire movie. Despite their relationship attempting to highlight the moral quandaries good lawyers face - she's on an ethics committee investigating Pacino - the movie would have been better if the entire relationship had been lifted out.


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 62234
> 
> *...And Justice for All* from 1979 with Al Pacino, John Forsythe, Jack Warden, Jeffrey Tambor and Christine Lahti
> 
> The 1970s looked broken, apparently, to those living through them if movies reflect something about how a society views itself. *Klute*, *Saturday Night Fever*, *Looking for Mr. Goodbar*, *Three Days of the Condor* and *...And Justice for All*, to name just a few, show a society coming apart at the seams.
> 
> In ironically named *...And Justice for All*, broken is the word that most comes to mind: judges - broken; defense attorneys - broken; ethics committees - broken; prosecutors - broken; criminals - broken; prisons - broken; broken, broken, broken, it's all broken.
> 
> Defense attorney Al Pacino knows how to play the system, but even he's breaking. As opposed to most Hollywood tales, Pacino is a regular good guy who bends his morality to fit the system, but tries not to let it break. He's no cardboard hero, just a man trying to do reasonably right in a very wrong system.
> 
> Since this is Hollywood, though, the movie focuses on innocent or not really bad people being falsely arrested or convicted and, then, broken by the system. These are the clients Pacino defends day in and day out.
> 
> A kid gets pulled over for a faulty tail light, his identity is mistaken for a murder suspect and, owing to a series of bureaucratic mistakes and a callous judge, he ends up dead. A cross-dressing man, guilty of a minor crime who should've been given parole, instead, owing to a defense attorney's error, receives a multi-year sentence. He kills himself his first week in prison (it's amazing he made it that long).
> 
> These are horrible stories that break your heart, but in real life, there are stories that pull in the other direction. The only one of those lightly touched on here is quickly and diffidently told. A defense attorney gets a murder suspect off on a technicality, despite knowing his client is guilty. Once freed, his client kills two children.
> 
> Of course, this tale, as opposed to the above stories, is only briefly discussed and not shown, which greatly reduces its emotional impact. It only focuses on the psychological distress it causes the attorney.
> 
> How come we don't see the murdered children happily playing before they are killed or their distraught parents afterwards? That would highlight how there are costs to the innocent when the system becomes too lenient - not a point Hollywood almost ever wants to make.
> 
> Okay, we know Hollywood has its bias as seen in the movie's main story of a (of course) conservative judge, John Forsythe, who hands down harsh sentences while constantly ignoring pleas for leniency. He is arrested on a rape and assault charge and then manipulates the broken system to all but ensure an acquittal for himself.
> 
> In one of those twists that only happens in movies, Judge Forsythe forces Pacino to be his defense attorney. As it is public knowledge that Pacino hates this judge, it serves to make Forsythe look innocent even before the trial begins.
> 
> From here, it's a full-throttled morality tale as Pacino, doing what he is morally obligated to do as a defence attorney, works within the system to build Forsythe's defence, while Forsythe arrogantly admits to Pacino he is guilty. Forsythe, doing an outstanding job in the role, seems to enjoy rubbing his guilt in Pacino's face (there's a 1970s metaphor in there somewhere).
> 
> But of course, a defense attorney's job is to defend his client, so Pacino goes into court, offers an iron-clad defense of Forsythe and then...breaks. In the movie's famous line - you know it even if you haven't seen the movie - a ranting Pacino, being admonished by the judge, screams out, "...this whole court is out of order!"
> 
> In seven words, Pacino delivers the movie's theme, its condemnation of the justice system and a pretty good summary of Hollywood's judgment of America in the 1970s. *...And Justice for all* is over-the-top, but still, it's well acted and fun-as-heck entertainment.
> 
> N.B. #1 Who came up with *...And Justice for All's* soundtrack, which is more like a cheesy 1970s TV-sitcom soundtrack than one for a major motion picture release?
> 
> N.B. #2 Could there be less chemistry between two actors supposedly in love than Pacino and Christine Lahti? Both are fine actors, but they generate not one spark of real passion the entire movie. Despite their relationship attempting to highlight the moral quandaries good lawyers face - she's on an ethics committee investigating Pacino - the movie would have been better if the entire relationship had been lifted out.


And Justice For All sounds like a movie to be added to my "must watch" list. During the 22 years I spent working with the Federal Govt. in a law enforcement capacity I was involved in a fair number of interactions with the courts and the US Attorney's offices. Reading your review of the movie that came out in 1979, it strikes me that not much has changed for the better of for the worse over time. Kinda sad, eh? 
Thanks for another great review!


----------



## Fading Fast

*The Mortal Storm* from 1940 with Margaret Sullivan, Frank Morgan, Jimmy Stewart, Robert Young and Robert Stack

*Mrs. Miniver* is my favorite upbeat WWII propaganda film. I get that it's propaganda, but for two-hours, England and the Miniver family are my heroes fighting to survive after getting knocked back on their heels by the evil Nazis.

*The Mortal Storm* is my favorite downbeat WWII propaganda film. Set in Germany, the half-Jewish, half-Aryan Roth family gets ripped apart by the Nazis, with one-hundred-and-ten-pound daughter Freya Roth, played by Margaret Sullivan, standing up to every Nazi she meets as the fascist state tries to grind her and her family into dust.

Based on the outstanding book of the same name by Phyllis Bottome (comments here: #7738), *The Mortal Storm* uses the fictional Roth family to show how a powerful state that puts itself ahead of the individual destroys personal freedom of thought and action leaving only automaton believers and enemies of the state (the remaining free thinkers).

After the Nazis come to power, Roth family pater and respected Jewish scientist Frank Morgan is arrested when he won't denounce his research on race (talk about being in the wrong field, at the wrong time and in the wrong place). His arrest is a huge embarrassment to his Aryan and party-member stepsons, while it places the rest of the family - his wife, daughter Freya and a younger son - at risk.

Old family friend and farmer Jimmy Stewart tries to help the Roths and another older Jewish friend, but he is no match for the growing-more-powerful-by-the-day state. All the horrors we now know too well are here in this 1940 movie: late-night arrests, concentration camps, gangs of party members randomly beating up Jewish people and any other "undesirables," citizens trying to leave being arrested or shot and fear permeating every action and relationship.

This daring-for-the-date effort by MGM mentions Hitler and the Nazis a few times early on, but then elides those names for most of the movie. It also leaves no doubt that it is the Jewish people who are being persecuted, but never actually uses the words Jew or Jewish. Despite these tentative steps, MGM deserves kudos for making a powerful anti-Nazi movie that worked against its German business interests.

Nothing is perfect as MGM was probably trying to hedge its German-market business risk with those moves, but the movie it made is so poignantly anti-Nazi, MGM movies were banned in Germany afterwards.

*The Mortal Storm* is, oddly, a visually beautiful movie (despite being mainly filmed on sets) where a small German town's attractive architecture, set against a pristine snow-covered landscape, serves to highlight the darkness of Nazism descending on this once peaceful village.

Despite its skillful handling of large themes, *The Mortal Storm* works so well because it personalizes those issues in characters we care about. Nazi evil and individual liberty are big philosophical ideas, but what really moves you in a film are the people: does tiny-but-fearless Freya, trying to flee across the border, escape the assassin's bullet fired by her once fiance and now Nazi officer Fritz Marberg (played frighteningly well by Robert Young)?

*The Mortal Storm* is an impressive, early entry in the anti-Nazi movie oeuvre that deserves more attention today than it receives, for both its timelessness and its influence on the large output of anti-Nazi movies that have riffed on its themes and techniques ever since.


----------



## Fading Fast

*The Case of the Velvet Claws* from 1936 with Warren Wiliam, Claire Dodd and Wini Shaw

*The Case of the Velvet Claws* is the first Perry Mason novel (comments on the book here:  #873 ), yet it is the third in the 1930s Warner Bros. Perry Mason movie series. Unfortunately, the series seemed to lose energy and focus by this entry.

Warren William is back as Mason and having as good a time as ever playing the celebrity lawyer cum sleuth with an exaggerated devil-may-care attitude. He's not the problem, but the Hollywood-altered script is.

While the crime-mystery plot from the book is pretty much the same in the movie (confusing as heck), for some reason, Warner Bros.' writers decided to marry off Mason and his smart, acerbic secretary Della Street.

In the book and earlier Mason movies, Della Street is a strong, whip-smart woman who helps Mason with his cases - finding clues, partaking in the investigation and making connections Mason sometimes misses - while calling him out on his BS or when his head gets a bit too swollen.

It's a wonderful dynamic that, for the day, portrays Della Street as an early independent female role model. Yet here, as a newlywed, she, for the most part, plays a complaining wife as Mason interrupts their honeymoon to solve a case. The real Della Street would have jumped in to help, possibly resulting in a William-Powell-Myrna-Loy type of married-couple dynamic a la *The Thin Man* Series.

With the lovely Claire Dodd as Ms. Street all but sidelined in this one (she does get in a few good zingers though), the movie feels flat especially with its too-complex plot and a bit too-much slapstick from the Warner Bros. team.

The plot itself is a "who killed the mean rich publisher of a salacious tabloid" story. Was it the publisher's young gold-digging wife (Mason's client), his playboy son, his business partner, one of the household staff or, even, Mason himself. It's so confusing, I doubt I'd have followed it if I hadn't already read the book.

But these movies aren't about solving the crime, they are about enjoying Mason and Street running all over the city, keeping the cops at bay, finding evidence, making up evidence (yup), confronting suspects and outwitting everyone in the end. The fun is the joie de vivre of it all.

*The Case of the Velvet Claws* is something modern audiences are familiar with, a movie series running out of energy as it ages. It's still okay, but you'd get more enjoyment reading the novel or watching one of the earlier Warner Bros. Mason movies instead.

N.B. In addition to Della Street, there is a female judge in this one who is respected by all, including Mason (whose number she clearly has). To be sure, especially during the era of the Motion Picture Production Code, women, sadly, were often shown in traditional roles with the men getting to do all the cool stuff. But as with Della Street and the female judge in this one, even under the code, some smart-and-strong-women roles found their way to the screen.


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 62378
> 
> *The Mortal Storm* from 1940 with Margaret Sullivan, Frank Morgan, Jimmy Stewart, Robert Young and Robert Stack
> 
> *Mrs. Miniver* is my favorite upbeat WWII propaganda film. I get that it's propaganda, but for two-hours, England and the Miniver family are my heroes fighting to survive after getting knocked back on their heels by the evil Nazis.
> 
> *The Mortal Storm* is my favorite downbeat WWII propaganda film. Set in Germany, the half-Jewish, half-Aryan Roth family gets ripped apart by the Nazis, with one-hundred-and-ten-pound daughter Freya Roth, played by Margaret Sullivan, standing up to every Nazi she meets as the fascist state tries to grind her and her family into dust.
> 
> Based on the outstanding book of the same name by Phyllis Bottome (comments here: #7738), *The Mortal Storm* uses the fictional Roth family to show how a powerful state that puts itself ahead of the individual destroys personal freedom of thought and action leaving only automaton believers and enemies of the state (the remaining free thinkers).
> 
> After the Nazis come to power, Roth family pater and respected Jewish scientist Frank Morgan is arrested when he won't denounce his research on race (talk about being in the wrong field, at the wrong time and in the wrong place). His arrest is a huge embarrassment to his Aryan and party-member stepsons, while it places the rest of the family - his wife, daughter Freya and a younger son - at risk.
> 
> Old family friend and farmer Jimmy Stewart tries to help the Roths and another older Jewish friend, but he is no match for the growing-more-powerful-by-the-day state. All the horrors we now know too well are here in this 1940 movie: late-night arrests, concentration camps, gangs of party members randomly beating up Jewish people and any other "undesirables," citizens trying to leave being arrested or shot and fear permeating every action and relationship.
> 
> This daring-for-the-date effort by MGM mentions Hitler and the Nazis a few times early on, but then elides those names for most of the movie. It also leaves no doubt that it is the Jewish people who are being persecuted, but never actually uses the words Jew or Jewish. Despite these tentative steps, MGM deserves kudos for making a powerful anti-Nazi movie that worked against its German business interests.
> 
> Nothing is perfect as MGM was probably trying to hedge its German-market business risk with those moves, but the movie it made is so poignantly anti-Nazi, MGM movies were banned in Germany afterwards.
> 
> *The Mortal Storm* is, oddly, a visually beautiful movie (despite being mainly filmed on sets) where a small German town's attractive architecture, set against a pristine snow-covered landscape, serves to highlight the darkness of Nazism descending on this once peaceful village.
> 
> Despite its skillful handling of large themes, *The Mortal Storm* works so well because it personalizes those issues in characters we care about. Nazi evil and individual liberty are big philosophical ideas, but what really moves you in a film are the people: does tiny-but-fearless Freya, trying to flee across the border, escape the assassin's bullet fired by her once fiance and now Nazi officer Fritz Marberg (played frighteningly well by Robert Young)?
> 
> *The Mortal Storm* is an impressive, early entry in the anti-Nazi movie oeuvre that deserves more attention today than it receives, for both its timelessness and its influence on the large output of anti-Nazi movies that have riffed on its themes and techniques ever since.


Great review. The Mortal Storm is on my 'to be watched' list of movies. This review was very thought provoking. As I read your comments I kept reflecting on the intra-family conflict you were describing and realized how similar it was to the contradictions that seem top be taking over our present day political environment and the familial conflicts seeded by those contradictions within our own family and so many others around us. I have an ongoing debate going on with our pastor regarding the Evangelical Christian communities penchant for holding up our former President as a rather pious example of a 'real christian'. If this gets any worse, it may be time to start looking for a new church to call home!


----------



## Fading Fast

*The Enemy Below* from 1957 with Robert Mitchum, Curd Jürgens and David Hedison

Why is this movie not better known and not more talked about? Sure, it's respected by those who do know it, but it seems to fly below the radar when great war movies are discussed.

Before *Das Boot*, before *The Hunt for Red October*, the deadly crazy chess match submarines and surface ships play was brilliantly portrayed in *The Enemy Below*. The claustrophobic camaraderie and psychosis of living in a submarine, *Das Boot's* raison d'être, and the captain-versus-captain meme of *The Hunt for Red October* are both here in this "small" 1957 effort.

Robert Mitchum is the new commander of a US destroyer in WWII that is located by a German submarine, captained by Curd Jürgens, in the South Atlantic. From that moment on, it's "go time" in this mortal chess match as Mitchum dodges the sub's opening missile attack, then, using sonar, navigational plotting, experience and instinct, goes on the offensive.

It's an incredibly tense battle that plays out very slowly for war, as the sub tries to hide, while the destroyer hunts and, occasionally, attacks using depth charges (providing surprisingly entertaining battle footage).

Can the sub stay submerged long enough and deep enough without its hull collapsing or its men breaking? Will the surface ship overplay its hand, run out of depth charges and switch perforce from predator to prey?

Owing to the almost lethargic battle pace of submarine hunting, there's plenty of time for reflection as Mtichum explains his reason for being in the Navy: having captained a civilian merchant ship, he wanted to go from being hunted to, at least sometimes, being the hunter. His command style is an understated approach that focuses on leading by laconically explaining his strategy and only asking of his men what is needed.

Jürgens, conversely, is a career Navy man in the pre-Nazi military tradition when it was a life of honor and loyalty. Something that could only happen with WWII a decade-plus in the past, he is portrayed as a decent man quietly derisive of the rah-rah Nazi political officer on board his submarine.

As the battle plays on, the tension on both vessels increases, forcing each commander to use all his experience and instinct. Jürgens makes the first successful strike prompting Mitchum to pull out all the stops in a taut final-battle scene that needs to be experienced without foreknowledge to be fully appreciated.

Maybe it won't hold up as well to subsequent viewings, but on a first pass, it seems like a somewhat overlooked gem of a war movie. Heck, it isn't until it's all but over that you notice there is not a single woman in the cast as, reflecting the era and the movie's sole focus, *The Enemy Below* is a man-versus-man war movie.

N.B. In addition to the already-referenced successor movies, it's clear the well-regarded episode, "Balance of Terror," from the original *Star Trek* TV series is a retelling of *The Enemy Below*, just set in space. As to those successor movies, the inspiring German singing scene to maintain morale in *The Enemy Below* was shamelessly copied in *The Hunt for Red October's* Russian singing scene - imitation, flattery and all that.


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 62576
> 
> *The Enemy Below* from 1957 with Robert Mitchum, Curd Jürgens and David Hedison
> 
> Why is this movie not better known and not more talked about? Sure, it's respected by those who do know it, but it seems to fly below the radar when great war movies are discussed.
> 
> Before *Das Boot*, before *The Hunt for Red October*, the deadly crazy chess match submarines and surface ships play was brilliantly portrayed in *The Enemy Below*. The claustrophobic camaraderie and psychosis of living in a submarine, *Das Boot's* raison d'être, and the captain-versus-captain meme of *The Hunt for Red October* are both here in this "small" 1957 effort.
> 
> Robert Mitchum is the new commander of a US destroyer in WWII that is located by a German submarine, captained by Curd Jürgens, in the South Atlantic. From that moment on, it's "go time" in this mortal chess match as Mitchum dodges the sub's opening missile attack, then, using sonar, navigational plotting, experience and instinct, goes on the offensive.
> 
> It's an incredibly tense battle that plays out very slowly for war, as the sub tries to hide, while the destroyer hunts and, occasionally, attacks using depth charges (providing surprisingly entertaining battle footage).
> 
> Can the sub stay submerged long enough and deep enough without its hull collapsing or its men breaking? Will the surface ship overplay its hand, run out of depth charges and switch perforce from predator to prey?
> 
> Owing to the almost lethargic battle pace of submarine hunting, there's plenty of time for reflection as Mtichum explains his reason for being in the Navy: having captained a civilian merchant ship, he wanted to go from being hunted to, at least sometimes, being the hunter. His command style is an understated approach that focuses on leading by laconically explaining his strategy and only asking of his men what is needed.
> 
> Jürgens, conversely, is a career Navy man in the pre-Nazi military tradition when it was a life of honor and loyalty. Something that could only happen with WWII a decade-plus in the past, he is portrayed as a decent man quietly derisive of the rah-rah Nazi political officer on board his submarine.
> 
> As the battle plays on, the tension on both vessels increases, forcing each commander to use all his experience and instinct. Jürgens makes the first successful strike prompting Mitchum to pull out all the stops in a taut final-battle scene that needs to be experienced without foreknowledge to be fully appreciated.
> 
> Maybe it won't hold up as well to subsequent viewings, but on a first pass, it seems like a somewhat overlooked gem of a war movie. Heck, it isn't until it's all but over that you notice there is not a single woman in the cast as, reflecting the era and the movie's sole focus, *The Enemy Below* is a man-versus-man war movie.
> 
> N.B. In addition to the already-referenced successor movies, it's clear the well-regarded episode, "Balance of Terror," from the original *Star Trek* TV series is a retelling of *The Enemy Below*, just set in space. As to those successor movies, the inspiring German singing scene to maintain morale in *The Enemy Below* was shamelessly copied in *The Hunt for Red October's* Russian singing scene - imitation, flattery and all that.


Well said, my friend. You have captured the focus of the film from so many different angles and have captured the essential character of the conflict as two men engaged in mortal combat, with their respective crews serving as extensions of the commanders senses and extremities as they struggle to gain advantage over and do finally vanquish their enemy. The movie captures the essence of command mindset and your comments regarding scenes in the movie capture the raging emotions found in a combat scenario. The commander(s) is(are) the one sitting on the couch with his/her Gameboy/XBox controllers being overly abused by their ever competitive hands and digits and the crews are the characters on the screen fighting and dying and frequently being scared shitless as the carry out the commanders orders. Indeed, war is as close to Hell as we mortals will ever get on this side of life, but sadly our governments frequently seem to be oblivious to that reality and we continue to further depersonalize combat. Consider our drone warfare efforts. The controllers of those drones are sitting in air conditioned comfort, frequently outside of the the field of combat operations, ordering the drones to target and destroy the "enemy below!"

As you imply, the enemy below should be recognized as one of the great war movies simply because, while most war movies showcase the fireworks and resultant carnage, The Enemy Below showcases the mental and emotional paths to that end. Than you for another great review.


----------



## Fading Fast

*The High Cost of Loving* from 1958 with Jose Ferrer, Gena Rowlands, Bobby Troup, Edward Platt and Jim Backus

The "happy 1950s" had plenty of not-happy movies made in that "good" decade. With the Motion Picture Production Code still holding on, many of these films had slapped-on happy endings, but audiences could easily see past that to the real concerns and fears raised in them.

*The High Cost of Loving* is a strong, if unknown, entry in these middle-class angst movies revealing Americans worried about their jobs, especially with all the money they owe. Proving that this was no one-off effort, versions of the same themes are addressed in *No Down Payment*, *Patterns*, *The Tunnel of Love*, *The Bachelor Party* and other 1950s movies.

*The High Cost of Loving* starts off charmingly where a "typical" suburban couple, Gena Rowlands and Jose Ferrer, begin their day in an almost choreographed routine as each has his or her role in getting the coffee started, orange juice poured, eggs cooked, bread toasted and table made all done in congenial silence as they also dress for work.

But on this morning, nine years into his marriage, Ferrer learns his wife might be pregnant, a possibility it seems both of them had given up on. They then leave for work together as he goes off to his mid-level corporate job, while she goes to her job at a small shop in town.

If you've ever wondered what Jack Lemmon's, from *The Apartment,* life would look like if he married and moved to the suburbs, the answer is he'd become Jose Ferrer in this movie.

With the happy baby news lifting his day, Ferrer then learns that he's been left out of a big-wig lunch at his recently bought-out company, which implies he's not on a path for promotion and might even be out of a job.

That suddenly shifts the movie into serious mode as Ferrer, stunned because he thought he was considered a high performer being groomed for promotion, contemplates losing his job with both a baby on the way and debt up the wazoo.

He, at first, keeps this news from his happy-about-being-pregnant wife as she reveals how the baby and his pending promotion (she doesn't know the truth yet) convinced her she was wrong having thought "the big parade had passed them by." There is no way Ferrer could have followed up that heartbreaking confession with his bad news right then and there.

Adding to his angst, he begins interpreting everything at work as confirmation he's going to be fired. With the pressure building, he finally confesses his fears to his wife.

In a very raw way, we see Ferrer go through the five stages of grief for his job, culminating in several emotional speeches about the insecurity of working in corporate America and the unfairness of it all. He bitterly asks his boss, "just where does the balance lie between my responsibility to the company and the company's responsibility to me?"

While the overall tone of the movie is light, these powerfully revealing scenes in the middle had to strike a chord with 1950s America or they wouldn't have made so many similar movies. (Very minor spoiler alert) With the aforementioned movie code still in control, everything works out in the end.

*The High Cost of Loving* is an, overall, light-hearted movie, but with a surprising vein of angst and fear. Just like 1950s audiences probably did, you leave kind of smiling, but also kind of disturbed as real life doesn't often have a Motion-Picture-Production-Code-provided "happy ending." 1950s nostalgia is just that because, as movies like this show, the 1950s is, like every decade, much-more complex than the shorthand future generations assign to it.

N.B. #1 Gena Rowlands is familiar to most of us as a strong, kind-hearted Southern grandmother, a role she seemed to play in every third romcom made in the 1990s. So, it's really fun to see her here, early in her career, playing a smart wife (and you won't miss this) rockin' a killer body.

N.B. #2 This punching-above-its-weight B movie comprises a lot of future TV stars in its engaging cast including Jim Backus (*Gilligan's Island*), Bobby Troup (*Emergency*), Richard Deacon (*The Dick Van **** Show*), Edward Platt (*Get Smart*) and bald-as-ever Werner Klemperer (*Hogan's Heroes*).


----------



## Fading Fast

*On Dangerous Ground* from 1951 with Ida Lupino, Robert Ryan and Ward Bond

*On Dangerous Ground* is two movie halves tied together by one character. It only kinda works as both halves are good, but both halves are also incomplete.

The first half is straight-up noir where weary police detective, Robert Ryan, chases down bad guys on dark, wet, shadowy streets. He's a man on the edge who lives alone in a depressing one-room apartment, has no life outside of his work and is becoming too violent on his job.

His partners and boss try to tell him he's losing it and that he needs some balance in his life, but he takes that advice as well as most people take advice. You expect the next scene to be him, literally, killing a suspect vigilantism style.

But instead, after roughing up one too many suspects, his boss, with pressure from above, assigns him to help with an out-of-town murder case in a small rural town in hopes it will clear Ryan's head a bit.

That's the big shift between the two halves of the movie as the next scene has Ryan driving across a snowy landscape on his way to the town. From here, the movie feels less claustrophobic and noirish as Ryan seems to be wound less tight in the open space. We don't know it yet, but our noir movie is about to become a rough-around-the-edges romance.

Now part of the search team for the murderer, Ryan meets a blind Ida Lupino living in an isolated house that seems, in some unknown way, connected to the murder. The hunt for the murderer is a Hitchcock Macguffin as you don't care at all about that, but you do care about Ryan and Lupino - both lost and damaged souls starting to connect.

When Ryan and a local helping with the search stay at Lupino's house for the night (they believe they are close to the killer and want to pick up the trail in the morning), we are supposed to believe Ryan and Lupino fall in love. They have good chemistry, but falling deeply in love in a few hours, as supposedly happens here, is a movie thing, not a real-life thing.

(Minor spoiler alert) Lupino pleads with Ryan to protect her mentally challenged brother, the murder suspect, from harm when he's captured, but try as he can, he's not able to. Yet, in the end, these two broken people get together.

At about eighty minutes, split almost evenly between the opening noir half and the second half romance, neither movie is given enough time to fully develop, while the link - Ryan moving from the city to the country - isn't strong enough to fully knit it all together.

Quirky noir director Nicholaus Ray explores similar themes - men on the edge who fall in love - in several other of his efforts (my favorite is *In a Lonely Place*, comments here:  #508 ). Yet in *On Dangerous Ground*, he just doesn't have enough film nor story to fully realize his ambitions. It's worth the watch, but more time, connection between the two movie halves and budget was needed.

N.B. If Ida Lupino is the female star, with top overall billing in the movie (even above Ryan), you expect her to get in the movie before it's half over, yet she doesn't show up until the second part of *On Dangerous Ground*. Pro tip: put your headline star in more than just the second half of the movie.


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 62851
> 
> *On Dangerous Ground* from 1951 with Ida Lupino, Robert Ryan and Ward Bond
> 
> *On Dangerous Ground* is two movie halves tied together by one character. It only kinda works as both halves are good, but both halves are also incomplete.
> 
> The first half is straight-up noir where weary police detective, Robert Ryan, chases down bad guys on dark, wet, shadowy streets. He's a man on the edge who lives alone in a depressing one-room apartment, has no life outside of his work and is becoming too violent on his job.
> 
> His partners and boss try to tell him he's losing it and that he needs some balance in his life, but he takes that advice as well as most people take advice. You expect the next scene to be him, literally, killing a suspect vigilantism style.
> 
> But instead, after roughing up one too many suspects, his boss, with pressure from above, assigns him to help with an out-of-town murder case in a small rural town in hopes it will clear Ryan's head a bit.
> 
> That's the big shift between the two halves of the movie as the next scene has Ryan driving across a snowy landscape on his way to the town. From here, the movie feels less claustrophobic and noirish as Ryan seems to be wound less tight in the open space. We don't know it yet, but our noir movie is about to become a rough-around-the-edges romance.
> 
> Now part of the search team for the murderer, Ryan meets a blind Ida Lupino living in an isolated house that seems, in some unknown way, connected to the murder. The hunt for the murderer is a Hitchcock Macguffin as you don't care at all about that, but you do care about Ryan and Lupino - both lost and damaged souls starting to connect.
> 
> When Ryan and a local helping with the search stay at Lupino's house for the night (they believe they are close to the killer and want to pick up the trail in the morning), we are supposed to believe Ryan and Lupino fall in love. They have good chemistry, but falling deeply in love in a few hours, as supposedly happens here, is a movie thing, not a real-life thing.
> 
> (Minor spoiler alert) Lupino pleads with Ryan to protect her mentally challenged brother, the murder suspect, from harm when he's captured, but try as he can, he's not able to. Yet, in the end, these two broken people get together.
> 
> At about eighty minutes, split almost evenly between the opening noir half and the second half romance, neither movie is given enough time to fully develop, while the link - Ryan moving from the city to the country - isn't strong enough to fully knit it all together.
> 
> Quirky noir director Nicholaus Ray explores similar themes - men on the edge who fall in love - in several other of his efforts (my favorite is *In a Lonely Place*, comments here:  #508 ). Yet in *On Dangerous Ground*, he just doesn't have enough film nor story to fully realize his ambitions. It's worth the watch, but more time, connection between the two movie halves and budget was needed.
> 
> N.B. If Ida Lupino is the female star, with top overall billing in the movie (even above Ryan), you expect her to get in the movie before it's half over, yet she doesn't show up until the second part of *On Dangerous Ground*. Pro tip: put your headline star in more than just the second half of the movie.


Good advice on the pro tip and thanks for another great review. However I must ask, is it a movie you would watch a second time and do you recommend it for others to watch?


----------



## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> Good advice on the pro tip and thanks for another great review. However I must ask, is it a movie you would watch a second time and do you recommend it for others to watch?


Good question. I wouldn't seek it out to watch it again nor would I recommend it, as there are so many other better movies. However, it isn't terrible, just not something I'd make any effort to see nor would I recommend someone else to.


----------



## Fading Fast

*Exodus* from 1960 with Paul Newman, Eva Marie Saint, Sal Mineo, Peter Lawford, Lee J. Cobb and a bunch of other impressive actors

The late 1950s into the 1960s was the era of the Hollywood epic: very long movies about major historical events with tons of stars and, usually, a sweeping love story at the center of it all. Not surprisingly, epic novels were also quite popular at this time.

*Exodus* was released smack in the middle of the epic movie's popularity. It's no *Doctor Zhivago* (my pick of the epic litter), but a solid entry, with a serviceable story, impressive cinematography and quality acting. Yet it never rises above being just a good movie.

Based on a Leon Uris novel of the same name and directed by Otto Preminger, *Exodus* is a professional effort through and through delivering an uneven, but overall, engaging story about the founding of the state of Israel. As historical fiction on a still contentious issue, we'll leave the politics alone and just focus on its value as a movie.

The first half is the story of how a ship of Jewish refugees, effectively, stranded in a port in Cyprus in 1948, led by Jewish rebel leader Paul Newman, tries to break a British blockade attempting to force the ship to dock and turn its passengers back over to the British. The Jews are trying to make Israel a fait accompli, while the British are trying to exit Palestine in a controlled and honorable way.

Newman's goal is to take the ship of refugees to Palestine to help in the founding of the Jewish state. Since England doesn't want a public relations' disaster on its hands, its superior military capabilities are checked in this battle of wills by the risk of world condemnation that would follow any tragedy.

The standoff evolves into a slow game of human chess - the refugees begin a hunger strike, the British offer the ship food and medicine - as the British politicians behind the scenes struggle to find a face-saving solution.

This is also when Newman meets young, blonde, Christian American war widow Eva Marie Saint who has taken an interest in adopting a Jewish refugee girl. But the refugee girl only wants to go with Saint to America if there is no chance she can reunite with her missing-for-years-and-maybe-dead father whom she believes might be in Palestine. This keeps Saint near the girl and, conveniently, Newman.

Newman and Saint give it their all, but they never develop the chemistry, the spark of passion, that is supposed to drive their personal relationship. A personal relationship that is buffeted from the start by geopolitical events and their very-important-at-that-time-and-in-that-place religious differences.

(Spoiler alert, I guess, but there was no other outcome possible if the movie was going to advance.) The first two-or-so hours ends with the British conceding and letting the ship go to Israel. As a movie moment, it is inspiring. Had the movie stopped there, it would have been an effective story, albeit, not an epic, so on we march.

Once in Palestine, the movie becomes the story of the formation of the Jewish state including Britain's increasingly untenable presence, the Jews' ramshackle preparations for independence, the UN vote for partition and the immediate attack by neighboring Arabs.

It's reasonably well done with Newman now leading the Jewish military effort while trying to unite the different factions of Jews within Israel. The shadow of the Holocaust looms large as does the schism statehood causes between the small number of Jews and Arabs that had been getting along.

The Newman-Saint love story advances mainly as a metaphor of how Jews and Christians (and maybe even Arabs) can find common ground since all people are really the same under their labels. When a love story becomes a parable, the love story on a personal level usually suffers, as it does here.

The first half of *Exodus* has a tight and engrossing narrative that builds to a powerful climax; the second half tries to do too much resulting in an somewhat unwieldy and less-satisfying story. It's still worth seeing once, but at over three-and-a-half hours, *Exodus* is a one-viewing-and-done epic.


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 62985
> 
> *Exodus* from 1960 with Paul Newman, Eva Marie Saint, Sal Mineo, Peter Lawford, Lee J. Cobb and a bunch of other impressive actors
> 
> The late 1950s into the 1960s was the era of the Hollywood epic: very long movies about major historical events with tons of stars and, usually, a sweeping love story at the center of it all. Not surprisingly, epic novels were also quite popular at this time.
> 
> *Exodus* was released smack in the middle of the epic movie's popularity. It's no *Doctor Zhivago* (my pick of the epic litter), but a solid entry, with a serviceable story, impressive cinematography and quality acting. Yet it never rises above being just a good movie.
> 
> Based on a Leon Uris novel of the same name and directed by Otto Preminger, *Exodus* is a professional effort through and through delivering an uneven, but overall, engaging story about the founding of the state of Israel. As historical fiction on a still contentious issue, we'll leave the politics alone and just focus on its value as a movie.
> 
> The first half is the story of how a ship of Jewish refugees, effectively, stranded in a port in Cyprus in 1948, led by Jewish rebel leader Paul Newman, tries to break a British blockade attempting to force the ship to dock and turn its passengers back over to the British. The Jews are trying to make Israel a fait accompli, while the British are trying to exit Palestine in a controlled and honorable way.
> 
> Newman's goal is to take the ship of refugees to Palestine to help in the founding of the Jewish state. Since England doesn't want a public relations' disaster on its hands, its superior military capabilities are checked in this battle of wills by the risk of world condemnation that would follow any tragedy.
> 
> The standoff evolves into a slow game of human chess - the refugees begin a hunger strike, the British offer the ship food and medicine - as the British politicians behind the scenes struggle to find a face-saving solution.
> 
> This is also when Newman meets young, blonde, Christian American war widow Eva Marie Saint who has taken an interest in adopting a Jewish refugee girl. But the refugee girl only wants to go with Saint to America if there is no chance she can reunite with her missing-for-years-and-maybe-dead father whom she believes might be in Palestine. This keeps Saint near the girl and, conveniently, Newman.
> 
> Newman and Saint give it their all, but they never develop the chemistry, the spark of passion, that is supposed to drive their personal relationship. A personal relationship that is buffeted from the start by geopolitical events and their very-important-at-that-time-and-in-that-place religious differences.
> 
> (Spoiler alert, I guess, but there was no other outcome possible if the movie was going to advance.) The first two-or-so hours ends with the British conceding and letting the ship go to Israel. As a movie moment, it is inspiring. Had the movie stopped there, it would have been an effective story, albeit, not an epic, so on we march.
> 
> Once in Palestine, the movie becomes the story of the formation of the Jewish state including Britain's increasingly untenable presence, the Jews' ramshackle preparations for independence, the UN vote for partition and the immediate attack by neighboring Arabs.
> 
> It's reasonably well done with Newman now leading the Jewish military effort while trying to unite the different factions of Jews within Israel. The shadow of the Holocaust looms large as does the schism statehood causes between the small number of Jews and Arabs that had been getting along.
> 
> The Newman-Saint love story advances mainly as a metaphor of how Jews and Christians (and maybe even Arabs) can find common ground since all people are really the same under their labels. When a love story becomes a parable, the love story on a personal level usually suffers, as it does here.
> 
> The first half of *Exodus* has a tight and engrossing narrative that builds to a powerful climax; the second half tries to do too much resulting in an somewhat unwieldy and less-satisfying story. It's still worth seeing once, but at over three-and-a-half hours, *Exodus* is a one-viewing-and-done epic.


I have seen Exodus at least twice and now, having read your review, I understand and appreciate the movie more than I ever did before. My friend, you really have a knack for keying in on the issues and giving the various scenarios a detailed look that clarifies the picture (pun intended) for other viewers. Well done, Sir!


----------



## Fading Fast

*The Bribe* from 1949 with Robert Taylor, Ava Gardner, Vincent Price, Charles Laughton and John Hodiak

Until now, I'd only really known the mid-'50s-to-early-'60s Ava Gardner of the Sinatra era. There's nothing wrong with that Ava Gardner: well fed, well proportioned, ridden hard and put away wet a few times, but still ready to go.

However, *The Bribe* shows us there is an earlier version, a lithe version, a fresher version, albeit even then, with a few wear marks. But still, this version makes you forget, not only Sinatra, but (horrors) Mickey Rooney and only think about fun, frolic and Ava Gardner.

Surprisingly, I like *The Bribe* more than TCM's Noir Alley host and fanboy Eddie Muller, which hasn't happened before. Yes, as he says, the story rolls out slowly, even too slowly, but it's a pretty good story, which becomes better as, later on, Charles Laughton gets more screen time. And there's always Ava Gardner to look at until the pace picks up.

Special government agent Robert Taylor is sent undercover to investigate a ring trafficking in stolen government airplane engines (that is one boring MacGuffin) working out of a small island off the coast of Latin America.

Once in this tropical o̶a̶s̶i̶s̶ hot, humid and claustrophobic backwater, Taylor meets Gardner, a singer in smokey room (hat tip to Journey), married to John Hodiak, a ring member, but Gardner doesn't know that about her husband yet. Taylor also meets the ring's head man, oleaginous Vincent Price, who claims to be an investor. Immediately suspicious, Taylor spends the first half of the movie trying to connect Hodiak and Price to the smuggling ring.

The plot pivot is Taylor falling for Gardner and vice versa as Hodiak, a drunken failure of a husband, gives Taylor the opening to be the sincere, understanding friend to Gardner, "What's a nice girl like you doing in a marriage like this?"

We'll fast forward through a lot of plodding investigation and flirting and canoodling between Taylor and Gardner to the final quarter of the movie where Taylor has the ring kinda figured out. But he also wants Gardner for himself and doesn't know how she fits in, if at all. Basically, he wants to bust up the ring without also busting up his chance with Gardner.

In the background, until now, is the ring's fix-it factotum, fat, shady Charles Laughton (stealing every scene he's in by dint of talent and presence). On Price's orders, he tries to bribe Taylor to look the other way as the ring is about to move a big shipment of airplane engines through.

Laughton's passive aggressive offers and feigned indifference is what acting is all about. It's early "method acting" before it was called that, but good acting is also just good acting.

When Laughton discovers he can't bribe Taylor with money, he tries to bribe him with Gardner, carrot and stick like, either offering her up as the prize if Taylor will play along or threatening to tie her to her corrupt husband so she'll go down with the ring if he won't. It might have taken most of the movie to get here, but Laughton's negotiating scenes with Taylor are intensely engaging and worth the slow buildup.

After that, the conclusion - including poison, murder, a doublecross, a few gunfights and a bunch of dead bodies - whips by. It's a slow, slow, slow, slow, then fast, faster movie with (spoiler alert) Gardner and Taylor the only two left standing (at least until they can be alone).

Every complaint TCM's Muller has is true: *The Bribe* moves along slowly for too long, Taylor and Gardner don't give off any sparks and the story is off the shelf, but with Laughton driving the last quarter of the movie, it quickly becomes captivating. Plus, Ava Gardner alone, at her youth and beauty peak, makes it worth the watch.


----------



## Vecchio Vespa

Not a movie per se but a miniseries that totaled only three hours and was watched as if it were a movie, The Chair. Sandra Oh is the newly named chair of the English Department at a fictitious Ivyish school, an institution of white male dinosaurs who are driving down enrollment and a few new voices from younger people of more diverse backgrounds who are just what the students are wanting. The core conflict of the series is free speech, and for one who was an English major in the days of the free speech movement, the world has changed. Holland Taylor has a fun roll. Bob Balaban is a great character who captures what I detested about grad school. 

It is on Netflix.


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 63145
> 
> *The Bribe* from 1949 with Robert Taylor, Ava Gardner, Vincent Price, Charles Laughton and John Hodiak
> 
> Until now, I'd only really known the mid-'50s-to-early-'60s Ava Gardner of the Sinatra era. There's nothing wrong with that Ava Gardner: well fed, well proportioned, ridden hard and put away wet a few times, but still ready to go.
> 
> However, *The Bribe* shows us there is an earlier version, a lithe version, a fresher version, albeit even then, with a few wear marks. But still, this version makes you forget, not only Sinatra, but (horrors) Mickey Rooney and only think about fun, frolic and Ava Gardner.
> 
> Surprisingly, I like *The Bribe* more than TCM's Noir Alley host and fanboy Eddie Muller, which hasn't happened before. Yes, as he says, the story rolls out slowly, even too slowly, but it's a pretty good story, which becomes better as, later on, Charles Laughton gets more screen time. And there's always Ava Gardner to look at until the pace picks up.
> 
> Special government agent Robert Taylor is sent undercover to investigate a ring trafficking in stolen government airplane engines (that is one boring MacGuffin) working out of a small island off the coast of Latin America.
> 
> Once in this tropical o̶a̶s̶i̶s̶ hot, humid and claustrophobic backwater, Taylor meets Gardner, a singer in smokey room (hat tip to Journey), married to John Hodiak, a ring member, but Gardner doesn't know that about her husband yet. Taylor also meets the ring's head man, oleaginous Vincent Price, who claims to be an investor. Immediately suspicious, Taylor spends the first half of the movie trying to connect Hodiak and Price to the smuggling ring.
> 
> The plot pivot is Taylor falling for Gardner and vice versa as Hodiak, a drunken failure of a husband, gives Taylor the opening to be the sincere, understanding friend to Gardner, "What's a nice girl like you doing in a marriage like this?"
> 
> We'll fast forward through a lot of plodding investigation and flirting and canoodling between Taylor and Gardner to the final quarter of the movie where Taylor has the ring kinda figured out. But he also wants Gardner for himself and doesn't know how she fits in, if at all. Basically, he wants to bust up the ring without also busting up his chance with Gardner.
> 
> In the background, until now, is the ring's fix-it factotum, fat, shady Charles Laughton (stealing every scene he's in by dint of talent and presence). On Price's orders, he tries to bribe Taylor to look the other way as the ring is about to move a big shipment of airplane engines through.
> 
> Laughton's passive aggressive offers and feigned indifference is what acting is all about. It's early "method acting" before it was called that, but good acting is also just good acting.
> 
> When Laughton discovers he can't bribe Taylor with money, he tries to bribe him with Gardner, carrot and stick like, either offering her up as the prize if Taylor will play along or threatening to tie her to her corrupt husband so she'll go down with the ring if he won't. It might have taken most of the movie to get here, but Laughton's negotiating scenes with Taylor are intensely engaging and worth the slow buildup.
> 
> After that, the conclusion - including poison, murder, a doublecross, a few gunfights and a bunch of dead bodies - whips by. It's a slow, slow, slow, slow, then fast, faster movie with (spoiler alert) Gardner and Taylor the only two left standing (at least until they can be alone).
> 
> Every complaint TCM's Muller has is true: *The Bribe* moves along slowly for too long, Taylor and Gardner don't give off any sparks and the story is off the shelf, but with Laughton driving the last quarter of the movie, it quickly becomes captivating. Plus, Ava Gardner alone, at her youth and beauty peak, makes it worth the watch.
> View attachment 63147


While the movie may start at a slow roll, it seems to have several things going for it...Ava Gardner, Robert Taylor, Charles Laughton, Vincent Price and it is filmed in black and white! This is a movie I have not seen, but thanks to your review, I am going to correct that oversight. Thanks for another great review.


----------



## eagle2250

Having come upon a remastered copy of the American Graffiti DVD at the Barnes and Noble store in the afternoon, last night found Mrs Eagle and I enjoying a viewing of the movie. American Graffiti is a coming of age yarn about a group of boy and girls on the cusp of manhood/womanhood and one last nocturnal fling before they get on with their lives. 

Directed by George Lucas, Ron Howard, Richard Dreyfuss, Harrison Ford, Cindy Williams, Mackenzie Phillips and Suzanne Summers serve as our memes on this ride through the last night of youth, with the legendary Wolfman Jack providing top cover through his broadcast over the airwaves of the musical favorites of that period. As the action plays out on the legendary strip our heroes and heroines cruise throughout the night. 

Now I must ask, who among us, growing up during that period didn't cruise the local strip...hoping for amore, driving around but in fact "looking for love in all the wrong places!" "Those were the days, my friends; we thought they would never end," but the rows of corn growing ever higher in the midst of our increasingly desperate pick-up lines..."hey sweet cheeks, riding is easier that walking"...OMG, I'm still blushing remembering that one! Our strip was a circuit around a 'sub-shop and gaming arcade on the north end and a Dairy Queen on the South end in Jersey Shore, PA. LOL, I think I may have joined the USAF to avoid/escape the embarrassment of those earlier local escapades The corniness of my earlier efforts to find love may have made it very difficult for a successful local hunt and hence, I subsequently met the future Mrs Eagle in a land far, far away, called Michigan! 

My suggestion, watch the movie, it is a good one.


----------



## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> Having come upon a remastered copy of the American Graffiti DVD at the Barnes and Noble store in the afternoon, last night found Mrs Eagle and I enjoying a viewing of the movie. American Graffiti is a coming of age yarn about a group of boy and girls on the cusp of manhood/womanhood and one last nocturnal fling before they get on with their lives.
> 
> Directed by George Lucas, Ron Howard, Richard Dreyfuss, Harrison Ford, Cindy Williams, Mackenzie Phillips and Suzanne Summers serve as our memes on this ride through the last night of youth, with the legendary Wolfman Jack providing top cover through his broadcast over the airwaves of the musical favorites of that period. As the action plays out on the legendary strip our heroes and heroines cruise throughout the night.
> 
> Now I must ask, who among us, growing up during that period didn't cruise the local strip...hoping for amore, driving around but in fact "looking for love in all the wrong places!" "Those were the days, my friends; we thought they would never end," but the rows of corn growing ever higher in the midst of our increasingly desperate pick-up lines..."hey sweet cheeks, riding is easier that walking"...OMG, I'm still blushing remembering that one! Our strip was a circuit around a 'sub-shop and gaming arcade on the north end and a Dairy Queen on the South end in Jersey Shore, PA. LOL, I think I may have joined the USAF to avoid/escape the embarrassment of those earlier local escapades The corniness of my earlier efforts to find love may have made it very difficult for a successful local hunt and hence, I subsequently met the future Mrs Eagle in a land far, far away, called Michigan!
> 
> My suggestion, watch the movie, it is a good one.


It's been decades since I've seen this one, but you've convinced me, I'll now be on the look out for it.


----------



## Fading Fast

*Unholy Partners* from 1941 with Edward G. Robinson, Edward Arnold, William T. Orr, Lorraine Day and Marsha Hunt

What would a pre-code-in-spirit movie about mob corruption and tabloid journalism duking it out in the Roaring Twenties look like if made under the Motion Picture Production Code? Well, funny you should ask, as MGM took a swing at answering that question with *Unholy Partners* in 1941.

Right after WWI, tabloid editor and returning soldier Edward G. Robinson launches a newspaper with the backing of mob boss Edward Arnold. The partnership has a twisted morality as Robinson will print staged pictures and stories he's all but created, but refuses to buckle to pressure from Arnold to withhold unfavorable stories about the mob. Apparently, you can be a little bit pregnant.

Serving as Robinson's conscience is both his young WWI buddy and cub reporter, William T. Orr, and his secretary and right arm, Loraine Day (never looking better). Whenever Robinson gets out over his ethical skis, this pair reminds him that there is something called morality.

The movie clicks along with Robinson and Arnold continually throwing sharp elbows at each other as their joint paper becomes more successful, making Arnold more inspired to leverage its influence for his mob's benefit. Simultaneously, the success of the paper makes Robinson want more independence from his corrupt partner Arnold.

Driving the confrontation we know is coming, Arnold is forcing pretty, young Marsha Hunt to sleep with him (that takes a little reading between the code's lines to see, but it's happening) to protect her father from a gambling debt he owes to Arnold.

Trying to help Hunt by getting leverage over Arnold, Orr, who's smitten with Hunt, uncovered corruption in an Arnold-owned insurance company. In the climatic scene, Arnold and Robinson face off over the ownership of the paper that Arnold now needs to print false stories to protect his corrupt insurance business.

(Spoiler alert) Arnold and Robinson fight, both go for the gun and down goes Arnold. If this was pre-code-movie world, when this movie should have been made, it would have been over except for Orr now getting the pretty girl and Robinson marrying pining-for-him Day, while the tabloid paper goes on to further shady success. You know, a good healthy end to a pre-code movie full of messy morality.

But since it's 1941, MGM had to force an awkward ending to tie up all the immoral loose ends. (Spoiler alert again) So, ethically challenged Robinson, after giving a long boring speech about morality, dies in a silly plot twist about a transatlantic record-breaking flight, leaving Day, Orr and the paper to carry on without him. Sigh.

N.B. By 1941, Hollywood had exhausted just about every imaginable story combination of Edward G. Robinson, Edward Arnold, newspapers and the mob.


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 63239
> 
> *Unholy Partners* from 1941 with Edward G. Robinson, Edward Arnold, William T. Orr, Lorraine Day and Marsha Hunt
> 
> What would a pre-code-in-spirit movie about mob corruption and tabloid journalism duking it out in the Roaring Twenties look like if made under the Motion Picture Production Code? Well, funny you should ask, as MGM took a swing at answering that question with *Unholy Partners* in 1941.
> 
> Right after WWI, tabloid editor and returning soldier Edward G. Robinson launches a newspaper with the backing of mob boss Edward Arnold. The partnership has a twisted morality as Robinson will print staged pictures and stories he's all but created, but refuses to buckle to pressure from Arnold to withhold unfavorable stories about the mob. Apparently, you can be a little bit pregnant.
> 
> Serving as Robinson's conscience is both his young WWI buddy and cub reporter, William T. Orr, and his secretary and right arm, Loraine Day (never looking better). Whenever Robinson gets out over his ethical skis, this pair reminds him that there is something called morality.
> 
> The movie clicks along with Robinson and Arnold continually throwing sharp elbows at each other as their joint paper becomes more successful, making Arnold more inspired to leverage its influence for his mob's benefit. Simultaneously, the success of the paper makes Robinson want more independence from his corrupt partner Arnold.
> 
> Driving the confrontation we know is coming, Arnold is forcing pretty, young Marsha Hunt to sleep with him (that takes a little reading between the code's lines to see, but it's happening) to protect her father from a gambling debt he owes to Arnold.
> 
> Trying to help Hunt by getting leverage over Arnold, Orr, who's smitten with Hunt, uncovered corruption in an Arnold-owned insurance company. In the climatic scene, Arnold and Robinson face off over the ownership of the paper that Arnold now needs to print false stories to protect his corrupt insurance business.
> 
> (Spoiler alert) Arnold and Robinson fight, both go for the gun and down goes Arnold. If this was pre-code-movie world, when this movie should have been made, it would have been over except for Orr now getting the pretty girl and Robinson marrying pining-for-him Day, while the tabloid paper goes on to further shady success. You know, a good healthy end to a pre-code movie full of messy morality.
> 
> But since it's 1941, MGM had to force an awkward ending to tie up all the immoral loose ends. (Spoiler alert again) So, ethically challenged Robinson, after giving a long boring speech about morality, dies in a silly plot twist about a transatlantic record-breaking flight, leaving Day, Orr and the paper to carry on without him. Sigh.
> 
> N.B. By 1941, Hollywood had exhausted just about every imaginable story combination of Edward G. Robinson, Edward Arnold, newspapers and the mob.


I think I've seen this one, but I'm just not sure. Alas, memories fade, but as I read your excellent review, I kept having what I think were deja-vue moments. I will add this one to my list...just to be sure!


----------



## Fading Fast

*The Family Way* from 1966 with Hayley Mills, Hywel Bennett and John Mills

*The Family Way* is a lighter version of an English kitchen-sink drama about a young newlywed couple who are unable to consummate their marriage as a lack of privacy, they live with his parents, causes "performance" issues for him.

Of course he, Hywel Bennett, doesn't want anyone to know, but his family, friends and neighbors slowly kinda sorta suss out what is not going on in the newlyweds' marriage. Wife Hayley Mills is as understanding as could be, but even she recommends they see a marriage counselor, which he refuses as he doesn't want to tell his problem to a stranger. But, secretly, he does go to see one.

What we have now is a shy young man, with an horribly embarrassing performance issue, summoning up the courage to talk to a professional. It's the 1960s in England, so one expects the counselor to be a elderly, serious-looking man.

Instead, he walks into the office and the counselor is an attractive young woman. Effectively, our in-his-late-teens hero has to tell a pretty woman he can't get it up. Life can really suck on a bad day.

Perhaps feeding into this problem, Bennett, his mother tells us, has always been a sensitive boy whose passion for reading irritates his working-class father who's angry his son isn't "more of a man." We later learn, the father himself seems to have some repressed homosexual leanings, which, it is implies, fuels his "tough guy" persona.

The real fun and point, though, of *The Family Way* is watching the secret slowly leak out to both families and the neighbors in this small town.

In a priceless scene when the couple's parents, all normal-for-their-day sexually repressed men and women, try to discuss "the problem" amongst themselves. They do so without ever really saying what is going on or using any descriptive words. The conversation goes on humorously awkward like this:

Girl's mother: I had a heart to heart with Jenny (the young wife).

Boy's mother: She didn't give you any details?

Girl's father: There wouldn't be any, would there?

The neighbors are less discrete, which fuels the climax as Bennett rightfully accuses Mills of telling someone "their secret." She did tell her mother and from there it just spreads until their "problem" becomes the subject of over-the-back-fence gossip.

There are a few other things going on - a travel agent embezzled their honeymoon funds, which is why their marriage began in his parents' small and thin-walled house. Also not helping things is Bennett's still-living-at-home, studdly motorcycle-racing brother who takes too much of an interest in now-frustrated Mills. But the crux and humor in this one is why "nothing" is happening in this marriage.

In *The Family Way* we do see some real day-to-day problems of the working class and how even the newlyweds' parents' marriages are far from perfect, but the general tone is humorous enough to make it, overall, a fun movie.

N.B. #1 While it was probably risque at the time, the one short scene where we see Hayley Mills' plucky bare bottom, compared with today's ubiquitous and graphic sex scenes, is more cute than racy.

N.B. #2 When the parents have their big confab, the possibility that Bennett is (using the language of the day) "queer" comes up, prompting one parent to say, effectively (and paraphrasing), "so what if that's what he is, that's what nature wanted." Once again, we see the past was not as closed-minded nor black and white on issues as it's often portrayed.

N.B. #3 Britain's 1960s socialist government doesn't come across as ruthless and dictatorial, but bureaucratically indifferent to those it serves and grossly inefficient in its efforts to help, in this case, a young couple find a place to live.


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 63354
> 
> *The Family Way* from 1966 with Hayley Mills, Hywel Bennett and John Mills
> 
> *The Family Way* is a lighter version of an English kitchen-sink drama about a young newlywed couple who are unable to consummate their marriage as a lack of privacy, they live with his parents, causes "performance" issues for him.
> 
> Of course he, Hywel Bennett, doesn't want anyone to know, but his family, friends and neighbors slowly kinda sorta suss out what is not going on in the newlyweds' marriage. Wife Hayley Mills is as understanding as could be, but even she recommends they see a marriage counselor, which he refuses as he doesn't want to tell his problem to a stranger. But, secretly, he does go to see one.
> 
> What we have now is a shy young man, with an horribly embarrassing performance issue, summoning up the courage to talk to a professional. It's the 1960s in England, so one expects the counselor to be a elderly, serious-looking man.
> 
> Instead, he walks into the office and the counselor is an attractive young woman. Effectively, our in-his-late-teens hero has to tell a pretty woman he can't get it up. Life can really suck on a bad day.
> 
> Perhaps feeding into this problem, Bennett, his mother tells us, has always been a sensitive boy whose passion for reading irritates his working-class father who's angry his son isn't "more of a man." We later learn, the father himself seems to have some repressed homosexual leanings, which, it is implies, fuels his "tough guy" persona.
> 
> The real fun and point, though, of *The Family Way* is watching the secret slowly leak out to both families and the neighbors in this small town.
> 
> In a priceless scene when the couple's parents, all normal-for-their-day sexually repressed men and women, try to discuss "the problem" amongst themselves. They do so without ever really saying what is going on or using any descriptive words. The conversation goes on humorously awkward like this:
> 
> Girl's mother: I had a heart to heart with Jenny (the young wife).
> 
> Boy's mother: She didn't give you any details?
> 
> Girl's father: There wouldn't be any, would there?
> 
> The neighbors are less discrete, which fuels the climax as Bennett rightfully accuses Mills of telling someone "their secret." She did tell her mother and from there it just spreads until their "problem" becomes the subject of over-the-back-fence gossip.
> 
> There are a few other things going on - a travel agent embezzled their honeymoon funds, which is why their marriage began in his parents' small and thin-walled house. Also not helping things is Bennett's still-living-at-home, studdly motorcycle-racing brother who takes too much of an interest in now-frustrated Mills. But the crux and humor in this one is why "nothing" is happening in this marriage.
> 
> In *The Family Way* we do see some real day-to-day problems of the working class and how even the newlyweds' parents' marriages are far from perfect, but the general tone is humorous enough to make it, overall, a fun movie.
> 
> N.B. #1 While it was probably risque at the time, the one short scene where we see Hayley Mills' plucky bare bottom, compared with today's ubiquitous and graphic sex scenes, is more cute than racy.
> 
> N.B. #2 When the parents have their big confab, the possibility that Bennett is (using the language of the day) "queer" comes up, prompting one parent to say, effectively (and paraphrasing), "so what if that's what he is, that's what nature wanted." Once again, we see the past was not as closed-minded nor black and white on issues as it's often portrayed.
> 
> N.B. #3 Britain's 1960s socialist government doesn't come across as ruthless and dictatorial, but bureaucratically indifferent to those it serves and grossly inefficient in its efforts to help, in this case, a young couple find a place to live.


Sounds like a movie that will be fun to watch, but I must caution others regarding rule #7 in the Eagles Crib, "if one is old enough to get married, one is also old enough to live independently." Recall if you will the wisdom of John Irving's Cider House Rules, "It is because even a good man can not always be right, that we must have rules!" Just thinking.....


----------



## Fading Fast

*People Will Talk* from 1951 with Cary Grant, Jeanne Crain, Finlay Currie, Hume Cronyn, Walter Slezak and Sidney Blackmer

Whimsy and mysticism are hard to pull off in a movie because, pushed too far, they become sentimentality or nonsense. *People Will Talk* pulls whimsey and mysticism off, despite a few stumbles, owing to the incredible appeal of its actors.

The most appealing of those actors is, no surprise, lead Cary Grant. Grant can absolutely act, but his movies are really more about the joy that is being Cary Grant on screen. Here, as a kind doctor with a holistic view of treating the patient, Grant has never been more joyous.

He's the medical-school professor whose classes students fight to get into just as the sick covet a spot in his avant-garde medical clinic, which treats "people not illness."

Grant also conducts the school's orchestra with verve and merry even when he's playfully admonishing the musical skills of his best friend and double bass player Walter Slezak. Their wonderful relationship is one of spirited persiflage on the surface with a deep respect and admiration underneath.

At the same time Grant's inspiring students, conducting music and healing the sick, his nemesis, perfectly played by his bitter and jealous colleague Hume Cronyn, is leading a witch hunt against Grant (echoing the era's anti-communist witch hunts).

While Grant is Granting his way through life with a mysterious friend and assistant, Finlay Currie, at his side, Cronyn is hiring private investigators to find any dirt he can on these two.

Grant is too busy teaching, doctoring and pursuing a love interest - a clinic patient, Jeanne Crain, who is pregnant and not married - to worry about Cronyn. In his pursuit of near-suicidal Crain (being pregnant out of wedlock was a big deal back then), Grant visits her family farm owned by her morally hidebound father.

There, he also meets her wonderful uncle, Sidney Blackmer, a man who openly admits he's failed at life, but has such a friendly nature, that Grant and Crain ask him to live with them after they marry.

The juxtaposition of Crain's successful-but-stubborn father and her failed-but-kindly uncle is really the movie's theme in a nutshell: people fall into two categories, the narrow-minded, selfish and judgmental (Crain's father and Cronyn) and the free-spirited, accepting and compassionate (Grant, Slezak and Blackmer). It's an unfair and overly simplistic view of people in real life, but a fun indulgence in the movie.

Now married, Grant and Crain have an inviting home where friends like double-bass-player Slezak drop by, play with the greatest model train set-up ever and just enjoy each other's company.

But irritant Cronyn - you know the type, he's the guy worrying (riffing on H. L. Mencken) somewhere, someone might be enjoying himself - brings Grant up on charges before the school's administration oversight board.

The movie gets both muddled and less believable at this climatic meeting. There it's revealed Grant and his odd sidekick Currie have checkered pasts whose incomplete and vague explanations the oversight board too easily accepts. (Minor spoiler alert) Grant is fully exonerated while weaselly Cronyn gets put in his place; it's that kind of movie.

*People Will Talk's* charm is a little too easy and a little too much, but it's so infectious, you look past its hokeyness and just enjoy the camaraderie and spirit of Grant's world. You know that world doesn't really exist, but for about two hours, Cary Grant makes you believe it just might.


----------



## Fading Fast

*Come Next Spring *from 1956 with Ann Sheridan, Steve Cochran and Walter Brennan

A man who abandoned his wife and young daughter seven years ago when he was an alcoholic returns to make amends to them plus his son. He didn't know his wife was pregnant with his son when he skipped town (actually, their farm).

It's a good twist on the Tolstoy quip about there only being two stories, one of which is "a stranger comes to town*." In this case, the stranger is the now not-drinking husband.

Set in 1920s Arkansas, the period details and attempt at authenticity are better than your average 1950s period-movie effort of throwing a few old looking things on the set and moving on. It's not a modern affair where they'd bring in historical dust, but still.

Ann Sheridan, middle aged, showing it and looking great, is the woman who soldiered on when her, then, ne'er-do-well, always-drunk husband left the family flat. All alone, she kept the farm going and raised her mute daughter and son.

When husband Steve Cochran returns, the kids seem pretty excited, the townsfolk are mixed and Sheridan is emotionally distant, but pragmatically accepting in a "I take what life throws at me" way.

The different responses to "the stranger's" return is the movie's highlight, but also has it peaking early. We are all wondering if on-the-wagon, contrite and willing-to-pay-his-dues Cochran is for real or only scamming.

He slowly builds everyone's trust by working hard on the farm, accepting Sheridan's rules (stay on, but no nooky for now), helping out in the community and turning the other cheek more than once when goaded by those who don't want to forgive.

When we finally see understandably distant Sheridan give a little ground, you can't help but feel good at the redemption and reunion story - children need their dad, a wife needs her husband, and vice versa.

But there's still about a third of the movie to go and *Come Next Spring* loses its early tension and subtlety as it slips into "Hallmark movie" mode. First, the guy who's been trying to push Cochran's buttons not only gets what's coming to him, but sees the light and becomes Cochran's friend.

(Spoiler alerts, I guess) The townsfolk then pitch in to help Cochran's family recover from a tornado followed by the big conclusion that has everyone searching for the lost mute daughter who went to find her dog's puppies (it's a cute as heck scene when she finds them).

After a treacly rescue - which also results in the daughter's muteness being cured (uh-huh) - all ends with a happily reunited family and town embracing its prodigal son.

The excellent beginning and middle, the reasonable period verisimilitude and the top-notch acting (a hat tip to the always excellent Walter Brennan as Cochran's buddy) make *Come Next Spring* a pleasant, feel-good hour and a half of movie viewing even with its weak final third.

* The full Tolstoy quote is, "All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town."


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 63521
> 
> *Come Next Spring *from 1956 with Ann Sheridan, Steve Cochran and Walter Brennan
> 
> A man who abandoned his wife and young daughter seven years ago when he was an alcoholic returns to make amends to them plus his son. He didn't know his wife was pregnant with his son when he skipped town (actually, their farm).
> 
> It's a good twist on the Tolstoy quip about there only being two stories, one of which is "a stranger comes to town*." In this case, the stranger is the now not-drinking husband.
> 
> Set in 1920s Arkansas, the period details and attempt at authenticity are better than your average 1950s period-movie effort of throwing a few old looking things on the set and moving on. It's not a modern affair where they'd bring in historical dust, but still.
> 
> Ann Sheridan, middle aged, showing it and looking great, is the woman who soldiered on when her, then, ne'er-do-well, always-drunk husband left the family flat. All alone, she kept the farm going and raised her mute daughter and son.
> 
> When husband Steve Cochran returns, the kids seem pretty excited, the townsfolk are mixed and Sheridan is emotionally distant, but pragmatically accepting in a "I take what life throws at me" way.
> 
> The different responses to "the stranger's" return is the movie's highlight, but also has it peaking early. We are all wondering if on-the-wagon, contrite and willing-to-pay-his-dues Cochran is for real or only scamming.
> 
> He slowly builds everyone's trust by working hard on the farm, accepting Sheridan's rules (stay on, but no nooky for now), helping out in the community and turning the other cheek more than once when goaded by those who don't want to forgive.
> 
> When we finally see understandably distant Sheridan give a little ground, you can't help but feel good at the redemption and reunion story - children need their dad, a wife needs her husband, and vice versa.
> 
> But there's still about a third of the movie to go and *Come Next Spring* loses its early tension and subtlety as it slips into "Hallmark movie" mode. First, the guy who's been trying to push Cochran's buttons not only gets what's coming to him, but sees the light and becomes Cochran's friend.
> 
> (Spoiler alerts, I guess) The townsfolk then pitch in to help Cochran's family recover from a tornado followed by the big conclusion that has everyone searching for the lost mute daughter who went to find her dog's puppies (it's a cute as heck scene when she finds them).
> 
> After a treacly rescue - which also results in the daughter's muteness being cured (uh-huh) - all ends with a happily reunited family and town embracing its prodigal son.
> 
> The excellent beginning and middle, the reasonable period verisimilitude and the top-notch acting (a hat tip to the always excellent Walter Brennan as Cochran's buddy) make *Come Next Spring* a pleasant, feel-good hour and a half of movie viewing even with its weak final third.
> 
> * The full Tolstoy quote is, "All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town."


Reading your review, I find myself wanting to see Come Next Spring, but the list of movies to be watched is getting a bit long...it might be quite awhile until I can catch up with it, but we all do like a happy ending! Thank you for the detailed and enjoyably readable review.


----------



## Vecchio Vespa

Last night we watched The Thomas Crown Affair, the original with McQueen and Dunaway. The Legrand score is marvelous, as is the cinematography. It is far darker than the Brosnan/Russo remake. Jack Weston is terrific. Time well spent.


----------



## eagle2250

Vecchio Vespa said:


> Last night we watched The Thomas Crown Affair, the original with McQueen and Dunaway. The Legrand score is marvelous, as is the cinematography. It is far darker than the Brosnan/Russo remake. Jack Weston is terrific. Time well spent.


I've seen the original, but do not recall ever watching the remake. Clearly, I'm going to have to correct that oversight! LOL.


----------



## Fading Fast

*The Taking of Pelham One Two Three* from 1974 with Walter Matthau, Robert Shaw, Martin Balsam, Jerry Stiller, Julius Harris and Hector Elizondo

Subway motorman [annoyed that someone is talking to him]: "What do you want?"

Hijacker [authoritatively]: "I'm taking your train."

Subway motorman[bemused]: "You're taking my train?"

*The Taking of Pelham One Two Three* succeeds because it is an action movie that understands, even in an action movie, the thing that matters is if you care about the characters.

Four men hijack a subway train - this was an era of airplane hijackings - demanding a one-million-dollar ransom in return for the hostages on the train. The hijackers have a well-thought-out plan, but no complicated hijacking ever went according to the plan.

Hijacking a subway train is such a not-expected thing it takes the transit authority and NYPD a bit to grasp what is really happening. But once they do, you watch a very 1970s New York City team come together in a very 1970s New York City way to try to stop the hijackers.

That is part of *The Taking of Pelham One Two Three's* charm; it is a totally "New York City in the 1970s" movie. For the day, the City's technology is impressive, but the organization still has an ad hocness to it as transit police lieutenant, Walter Matthau, transit police officer, Jerry Stiller, and NYPD inspector, Julius Harris, seem to take control of the situation by default and without almost any senior oversight.

Today, there would be a special team called in with extensive protocols and communication procedures to follow, but in 1970s New York City, those available just rolled up their sleeves and went to work trying to solve the problem.

When we do see the mayor and his administration, it's a bumbling mess of insecurities, infighting and political calculation that, owing to the City's depleted finances, struggles to raise the one-million-dollar ransom. It's a reasonable representation of New York City's government in the 1970s.

As the ransom money is being raised, though, there's an engaging scene at the New York Federal Reserve Bank where you see the employees scramble like mad to sort and bundle the fifty- and hundred-dollar bills demanded by the hijackers.

In this movie and in this New York City, it's the regular grunts - the cop, the transit dispatcher, the Federal Reserve employee - who are the heroes as their leaders can't shoot straight. Every movie reflects its time.

Back on the hijacked train, leader Robert Shaw, cold and calculating, works with his partner, comically schlubby ex-motorman Martin Balsam, to execute on their plan - control the train and negotiate with the transit authority - while the other two hijackers watch the passengers. You're vested in these guys, but you never want them to win.

Walter Matthau puts in one of his best career performances as the weary New York Police lieutenant leading the City's response. He uses a combination of instinct and street smarts to negotiate with the hijackers. He's no PhD-trained "hostage negotiator;" he's just a guy doing his job. Matthau is all seat-of-the-pants cunning and on-the-fly strategy inside a tired, gruff wrapping. He is New York City in the 1970s.

While Matthau is hesitant to use force, NYPD officer Stiller is ready to start shooting almost immediately - also a pretty common New York City attitude in the crime-riddled Gotham of that day. Matthau devotes a decent amount of energy holding Stiller back, but by the end, Matthau has rightfully earned Stiller's respect.

As the hijacking moves along, almost in real time, the hijackers appear to have the upper hand - the money is on the way, the cops are staying back and the hijackers are about to execute on their escape plan. It's good; it's tense and it's almost believable as action movies hadn't yet morphed into the comic book, CGI fest-of-exaggeration they've become.

*The Taking of Pelham One Two Three* climaxes with several good action scenes as an all but out-of-control subway train speeds along underground, while the cop cars race all over the city above ground, smashing into a bunch of things and people, as they try to keep up. That culminates in an excellently low-key shootout followed by the denouement as Matthau and Stiller do some old-fashioned police legwork to hunt down the last hijacker and the money.

It's what an action movie should be: a good plot with good action, but most importantly, people you become vested in. *The Taking of Pelham One Two Three* has more soul to it than ten modern action pictures. Plus you get to time travel to 1970s New York City's grimy-but-pulsating-with-energy streets and subways.

N.B. Look for the wonderful Scrooge McDuck moment when hijacker Martin Balsam rolls around on his bed with the ransom money.


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 63633
> 
> *The Taking of Pelham One Two Three* from 1974 with Walter Matthau, Robert Shaw, Martin Balsam, Jerry Stiller, Julius Harris and Hector Elizondo
> 
> Subway motorman [annoyed that someone is talking to him]: "What do you want?"
> 
> Hijacker [authoritatively]: "I'm taking your train."
> 
> Subway motorman[bemused]: "You're taking my train?"
> 
> *The Taking of Pelham One Two Three* succeeds because it is an action movie that understands, even in an action movie, the thing that matters is if you care about the characters.
> 
> Four men hijack a subway train - this was an era of airplane hijackings - demanding a one-million-dollar ransom in return for the hostages on the train. The hijackers have a well-thought-out plan, but no complicated hijacking ever went according to the plan.
> 
> Hijacking a subway train is such a not-expected thing it takes the transit authority and NYPD a bit to grasp what is really happening. But once they do, you watch a very 1970s New York City team come together in a very 1970s New York City way to try to stop the hijackers.
> 
> That is part of *The Taking of Pelham One Two Three's* charm; it is a totally "New York City in the 1970s" movie. For the day, the City's technology is impressive, but the organization still has an ad hocness to it as transit police lieutenant, Walter Matthau, transit police officer, Jerry Stiller, and NYPD inspector, Julius Harris, seem to take control of the situation by default and without almost any senior oversight.
> 
> Today, there would be a special team called in with extensive protocols and communication procedures to follow, but in 1970s New York City, those available just rolled up their sleeves and went to work trying to solve the problem.
> 
> When we do see the mayor and his administration, it's a bumbling mess of insecurities, infighting and political calculation that, owing to the City's depleted finances, struggles to raise the one-million-dollar ransom. It's a reasonable representation of New York City's government in the 1970s.
> 
> As the ransom money is being raised, though, there's an engaging scene at the New York Federal Reserve Bank where you see the employees scramble like mad to sort and bundle the fifty- and hundred-dollar bills demanded by the hijackers.
> 
> In this movie and in this New York City, it's the regular grunts - the cop, the transit dispatcher, the Federal Reserve employee - who are the heroes as their leaders can't shoot straight. Every movie reflects its time.
> 
> Back on the hijacked train, leader Robert Shaw, cold and calculating, works with his partner, comically schlubby ex-motorman Martin Balsam, to execute on their plan - control the train and negotiate with the transit authority - while the other two hijackers watch the passengers. You're vested in these guys, but you never want them to win.
> 
> Walter Matthau puts in one of his best career performances as the weary New York Police lieutenant leading the City's response. He uses a combination of instinct and street smarts to negotiate with the hijackers. He's no PhD-trained "hostage negotiator;" he's just a guy doing his job. Matthau is all seat-of-the-pants cunning and on-the-fly strategy inside a tired, gruff wrapping. He is New York City in the 1970s.
> 
> While Matthau is hesitant to use force, NYPD officer Stiller is ready to start shooting almost immediately - also a pretty common New York City attitude in the crime-riddled Gotham of that day. Matthau devotes a decent amount of energy holding Stiller back, but by the end, Matthau has rightfully earned Stiller's respect.
> 
> As the hijacking moves along, almost in real time, the hijackers appear to have the upper hand - the money is on the way, the cops are staying back and the hijackers are about to execute on their escape plan. It's good; it's tense and it's almost believable as action movies hadn't yet morphed into the comic book, CGI fest-of-exaggeration they've become.
> 
> *The Taking of Pelham One Two Three* climaxes with several good action scenes as an all but out-of-control subway train speeds along underground, while the cop cars race all over the city above ground, smashing into a bunch of things and people, as they try to keep up. That culminates in an excellently low-key shootout followed by the denouement as Matthau and Stiller do some old-fashioned police legwork to hunt down the last hijacker and the money.
> 
> It's what an action movie should be: a good plot with good action, but most importantly, people you become vested in. *The Taking of Pelham One Two Three* has more soul to it than ten modern action pictures. Plus you get to time travel to 1970s New York City's grimy-but-pulsating-with-energy streets and subways.
> 
> N.B. Look for the wonderful Scrooge McDuck moment when hijacker Martin Balsam rolls around on his bed with the ransom money.


I've seen the most recent remake of the movie, staring John Travolta as the bad guy, but I have not seen the original or the late 1980's version of the movie.. Your review seems to fit with the latest remake and it does incite an interest in seeing the original to compare it with the latest version of the story. Well done, my good man!


----------



## Vecchio Vespa

eagle2250 said:


> I've seen the original, but do not recall ever watching the remake. Clearly, I'm going to have to correct that oversight! LOL.


While it is not as cinematically leading edge, does not have that fabulous score, and is much more upbeat, it is really a kind of fun flick.


----------



## Fading Fast

*Angel Face* from 1953 with Jean Simmons, Robert Mitchum, Herbert Marshall, Barbara O'Neil and Leon Ames

Moral of the story: Stay away from the crazy girl, even if she's pretty.

There are a lot of very good noir movies, like *Angel Face*, that are a notch below the great ones, but are still incredibly engaging pictures.

Robert Mitchum is an ambulance driver who meets Jean Simmons on an emergency call to her father and stepmother's home. Did the rich stepmother try to kill herself by leaving the gas on in her bedroom fireplace or was it attempted murder?

Wealthy, refined and pretty Simmons, with crazy eyes and a haunting mien, immediately pursues Mitchum with a single mindedness that flatters his ego while she also tempts his greed with an offer to find financing for the auto-repair shop he wants to open.

Pretty much cheating on his regular girlfriend, Mitchum begins dating Simmons. Shortly after, he accepts Simmons' job offer to be her parents' chauffeur, so as to be close to Simmons and the potential financing for his garage.

But Simmons is playing a different game. She's convinced herself she and her novelist father, Herbert Marshall, both of who are living off his wealthy second wife, Barbara O'Neil, are being abused and degraded by the wife.

Director Otto Preminger does an excellent job of leaving you unsure about everything: is Simmons reasonable, wrong or insane; is Mitchum a bit of a rogue but a good guy or a truly bad guy; is the stepmother evil or misunderstood?

Then it all speeds up and gets much more serious. Simmons' father and stepmother are killed when their car, with the gear shift oddly in drive, shoots backwards out of their driveway and down the steep abutting ravine.

*Angel Face* now shifts to trial mode where the state tries to prove Mitchum and Simmons plotted together to kill her father and stepmother for their money. Preminger continually keeps you guessing, not only about the trial outcome, but where the real guilt lies.

(Spoiler alert) After a full acquittal for both of them, Simmons confesses her guilt to her attorney (wonderfully played by Leon Ames): she did it all in a mad attempt to kill her stepmother and keep Mitchum for herself (her father was collateral damage).

Ames explains that double jeopardy - you can't be tried for the same crime twice - makes her confession moot (challenge, since her confession would be new evidence, but it's a movie, so you just go with it and I'm not a lawyer anyway).

(A final spoiler alert) There's one more twist, echoing *The Postman Always Rings Twice*, when a guilt ridden Simmons kills Mitchum and herself the same way she killed her father and stepmom - another car goes backwards over the ravine. It's a tough house for automobiles.

*Angel Face* is a wonderfully moody noir mystery with engaging characters and suspense that holds up right to the end. It should be better known today.

N.B. At one point, Mitchum tells pretty but mentally atilt Simmons, "...look, I don't pretend to know what goes on behind that pretty little face of yours - I don't 'want' to. But I learned one thing very early. Never be the innocent bystander - that's the guy that always gets hurt." Or he could have just followed the eternal rule of dating noted at the top: Stay away from the crazy girl, even if she's pretty.


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 63841
> 
> *Angel Face* from 1953 with Jean Simmons, Robert Mitchum, Herbert Marshall, Barbara O'Neil and Leon Ames
> 
> Moral of the story: Stay away from the crazy girl, even if she's pretty.
> 
> There are a lot of very good noir movies, like *Angel Face*, that are a notch below the great ones, but are still incredibly engaging pictures.
> 
> Robert Mitchum is an ambulance driver who meets Jean Simmons on an emergency call to her father and stepmother's home. Did the rich stepmother try to kill herself by leaving the gas on in her bedroom fireplace or was it attempted murder?
> 
> Wealthy, refined and pretty Simmons, with crazy eyes and a haunting mien, immediately pursues Mitchum with a single mindedness that flatters his ego while she also tempts his greed with an offer to find financing for the auto-repair shop he wants to open.
> 
> Pretty much cheating on his regular girlfriend, Mitchum begins dating Simmons. Shortly after, he accepts Simmons' job offer to be her parents' chauffeur, so as to be close to Simmons and the potential financing for his garage.
> 
> But Simmons is playing a different game. She's convinced herself she and her novelist father, Herbert Marshall, both of who are living off his wealthy second wife, Barbara O'Neil, are being abused and degraded by the wife.
> 
> Director Otto Preminger does an excellent job of leaving you unsure about everything: is Simmons reasonable, wrong or insane; is Mitchum a bit of a rogue but a good guy or a truly bad guy; is the stepmother evil or misunderstood?
> 
> Then it all speeds up and gets much more serious. Simmons' father and stepmother are killed when their car, with the gear shift oddly in drive, shoots backwards out of their driveway and down the steep abutting ravine.
> 
> *Angel Face* now shifts to trial mode where the state tries to prove Mitchum and Simmons plotted together to kill her father and stepmother for their money. Preminger continually keeps you guessing, not only about the trial outcome, but where the real guilt lies.
> 
> (Spoiler alert) After a full acquittal for both of them, Simmons confesses her guilt to her attorney (wonderfully played by Leon Ames): she did it all in a mad attempt to kill her stepmother and keep Mitchum for herself (her father was collateral damage).
> 
> Ames explains that double jeopardy - you can't be tried for the same crime twice - makes her confession moot (challenge, since her confession would be new evidence, but it's a movie, so you just go with it and I'm not a lawyer anyway).
> 
> (A final spoiler alert) There's one more twist, echoing *The Postman Always Rings Twice*, when a guilt ridden Simmons kills Mitchum and herself the same way she killed her father and stepmom - another car goes backwards over the ravine. It's a tough house for automobiles.
> 
> *Angel Face* is a wonderfully moody noir mystery with engaging characters and suspense that holds up right to the end. It should be better known today.
> 
> N.B. At one point, Mitchum tells pretty but mentally atilt Simmons, "...look, I don't pretend to know what goes on behind that pretty little face of yours - I don't 'want' to. But I learned one thing very early. Never be the innocent bystander - that's the guy that always gets hurt." Or he could have just followed the eternal rule of dating noted at the top: Stay away from the crazy girl, even if she's pretty.
> View attachment 63842


.....but, but who's left to inherit all that money? Could I sign on as a long lost, but close relative? Which State did this occur in? I've got to figure out any complications to pursuing an 'off-chance' inheritance! LOL. In any event, Angel Face is definitely on my list of movies to be watched. Thanks for another riveting review.


----------



## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> .....but, but who's left to inherit all that money? Could I sign on as a long lost, but close relative? Which State did this occur in? I've got to figure out any complications to pursuing an 'off-chance' inheritance! LOL. In any event, Angel Face is definitely on my list of movies to be watched. Thanks for another riveting review.


I think they had a dog; otherwise, I think you have a shot.


----------



## Fading Fast

*Heat Lightning* from 1934 with Aline MacMahon, Preston Foster, Ann Dvorak and Lyle Talbot

This gem of a pre-code B Movie should be better known, but perhaps has been eclipsed by its subsequently famous cognate, *The Petrified Forest*. All of the latter's themes are here in *Heat Lightning* and explored in rawer form with a feminist angle as was often the wont of the pre-code era.

Two sisters, a still-young, but world-weary older one, Aline MacMahon, and the younger one, Ann Dvorak, run an isolated motor court (gas station, diner and spartan lodge) in the Mojave desert.

MacMahon was a party girl in a big city who was played hard and tossed aside by a former boyfriend, so she's retreated into her role as an asexual auto mechanic/motor-court owner in greasy overalls. MacMahon tries to prevent her cute sister, Dvorak, from repeating her mistakes with men.

The younger sister is a good kid, but like any late teen, she wants to go out and have fun, in this case, with a local bad boy, which has Dvorak seeing a dangerous echo of her own failed youthful romance.

Into this family drama, coincidentally, drives MacMahon's old boyfriend, Preston Foster, and his buddy, Lyle Talbot. We quickly learn they are on the lam from a jewelry-store holdup and murder, the latter, which only Foster committed.

You can feel the physical heat between MacMahon and her old boyfriend as it's clear that sexual passion was a big part of their former relationship. Foster's sudden appearance shatters MacMahon's desert armor of sexual abstinence, which has her now scrambling to rebalance herself.

Driving right into the middle of this passion storm are two bejewelled Reno divorcees who, like the ex-boyfriend and his buddy, are stuck spending the night. Upping the drama, Foster, now that he's seen the women's jewelry, plots to steal it.

What follows is a defining evening as young-sister Dvorak sneaks out to be with her bad-boy date. Meanwhile, Foster flirts MacMahon into bed, but as she learns later, only to distract her so he and his partner can steal the jewels the divorcees have stored in the diner's safe.

We're now fifty minutes into this sixty-minute movie and everyone's world has been rocked as the young daughter (we think) slept with the bad boy who is now cold to her when he drops her back at the diner (cow, milk, free - lesson learned). Hurt and tearful, she walks in to see Foster leaving her big sister's bed - yup.

But there's more (spoiler alerts from here on out), MacMahon, still freshly glowing, dreamily walks into the diner only to learn she's been played by Foster again as he's forcing his partner to break into the diner's safe. In a girl-power moment, 1934 style, MacMahon gets a gun and shoots Foster dead in cold blood. That's one way to handle it.

She then lets the partner get away because he wasn't trying to break into her safe. She now, also, shows empathy to her younger sister as she gets that you can't just lock your passions and urges away and call it a life.

Marvel at the pre code. In an hour, we watched a world-weary woman get sexually played by the same man who played her in the past, so she shoots him dead. At the same time, her late-teen sister appears to have slept with a guy for the first time who proceeds to all but ignores her as he dumps her back at the diner and drives off.

The cold-blooded shooting will be dismissed legally since the dead man was stealing from MacMahon's safe at the time, but the message is clear: he was shot for manipulating this woman emotionally and sexually one too many times. Pre-code justice was also okay with letting the partner escape as he had only held up a jewelry store, but didn't kill the guard or emotionally abuse a woman.

None of this would be allowed a year later when the Motion Picture Production Code was enforced and a year after that when *Heat Lightning's* same themes were explored in a similar construct in 1936's *The Petrified Forest*.

In that code-handcuffed, but still outstanding effort, the sex has been reduced to kisses and the criminals are all either killed or arrested. It's a powerful movie for other reasons, but it lacks the raw carnal passion and realpolitik justice of *Heat Lightning*.

N.B. Amidst all the other things going on, it's still worth noting the "girl power" meme in *Heat Lightning* of two women running a successful motor court with one of them doubling as the gas station's mechanic. History is rarely as black and white as it's often portrayed.


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## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 63873
> 
> *Heat Lightning* from 1934 with Aline MacMahon, Preston Foster, Ann Dvorak and Lyle Talbot
> 
> This gem of a pre-code B Movie should be better known, but perhaps has been eclipsed by its subsequently famous cognate, *The Petrified Forest*. All of the latter's themes are here in *Heat Lightning* and explored in rawer form with a feminist angle as was often the wont of the pre-code era.
> 
> Two sisters, a still-young, but world-weary older one, Aline MacMahon, and the younger one, Ann Dvorak, run an isolated motor court (gas station, diner and spartan lodge) in the Mojave desert.
> 
> MacMahon was a party girl in a big city who was played hard and tossed aside by a former boyfriend, so she's retreated into her role as an asexual auto mechanic/motor-court owner in greasy overalls. MacMahon tries to prevent her cute sister, Dvorak, from repeating her mistakes with men.
> 
> The younger sister is a good kid, but like any late teen, she wants to go out and have fun, in this case, with a local bad boy, which has Dvorak seeing a dangerous echo of her own failed youthful romance.
> 
> Into this family drama, coincidentally, drives MacMahon's old boyfriend, Preston Foster, and his buddy, Lyle Talbot. We quickly learn they are on the lam from a jewelry-store holdup and murder, the latter, which only Foster committed.
> 
> You can feel the physical heat between MacMahon and her old boyfriend as it's clear that sexual passion was a big part of their former relationship. Foster's sudden appearance shatters MacMahon's desert armor of sexual abstinence, which has her now scrambling to rebalance herself.
> 
> Driving right into the middle of this passion storm are two bejewelled Reno divorcees who, like the ex-boyfriend and his buddy, are stuck spending the night. Upping the drama, Foster, now that he's seen the women's jewelry, plots to steal it.
> 
> What follows is a defining evening as young-sister Dvorak sneaks out to be with her bad-boy date. Meanwhile, Foster flirts MacMahon into bed, but as she learns later, only to distract her so he and his partner can steal the jewels the divorcees have stored in the diner's safe.
> 
> We're now fifty minutes into this sixty-minute movie and everyone's world has been rocked as the young daughter (we think) slept with the bad boy who is now cold to her when he drops her back at the diner (cow, milk, free - lesson learned). Hurt and tearful, she walks in to see Foster leaving her big sister's bed - yup.
> 
> But there's more (spoiler alerts from here on out), MacMahon, still freshly glowing, dreamily walks into the diner only to learn she's been played by Foster again as he's forcing his partner to break into the diner's safe. In a girl-power moment, 1934 style, MacMahon gets a gun and shoots Foster dead in cold blood. That's one way to handle it.
> 
> She then lets the partner get away because he wasn't trying to break into her safe. She now, also, shows empathy to her younger sister as she gets that you can't just lock your passions and urges away and call it a life.
> 
> Marvel at the pre code. In an hour, we watched a world-weary woman get sexually played by the same man who played her in the past, so she shoots him dead. At the same time, her late-teen sister appears to have slept with a guy for the first time who proceeds to all but ignores her as he dumps her back at the diner and drives off.
> 
> The cold-blooded shooting will be dismissed legally since the dead man was stealing from MacMahon's safe at the time, but the message is clear: he was shot for manipulating this woman emotionally and sexually one too many times. Pre-code justice was also okay with letting the partner escape as he had only held up a jewelry store, but didn't kill the guard or emotionally abuse a woman.
> 
> None of this would be allowed a year later when the Motion Picture Production Code was enforced and a year after that when *Heat Lightning's* same themes were explored in a similar construct in 1936's *The Petrified Forest*.
> 
> In that code-handcuffed, but still outstanding effort, the sex has been reduced to kisses and the criminals are all either killed or arrested. It's a powerful movie for other reasons, but it lacks the raw carnal passion and realpolitik justice of *Heat Lightning*.
> 
> N.B. Amidst all the other things going on, it's still worth noting the "girl power" meme in *Heat Lightning* of two women running a successful motor court with one of them doubling as the gas station's mechanic. History is rarely as black and white as it's often portrayed.
> 
> View attachment 63874


There is a lot to be learned from today's movie review;
First, "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned!"
Second, we 'real men,' should never, ever think it a good idea to teach our women to shoot a thunder stick. It could blow back on you!
Third, live the Golden Rule, "do onto others as we would have them do on to us." Otherwise, it could blow back on you!
And fourth, don't never, ever get intimate with a woman wearing Bib-overalls. There are far too many pockets in which to hide a handgun!

As always, a great review that sets the hook in the minds of potential future viewers. Add to that that is in black and white...I like that...and the movie being "pre-code" offers the promise more than just suggestions of promiscuity. Heat Lightening is on my list of 'must be watched!' Thank you.


----------



## Vecchio Vespa

Last night we watched a Netflix movie, The Laundromat. The cast features Meryl Streep, Gary Oldman, Antonio Banderas, David Schwimmer, Sharon Stone, and a bunch of others with whom you are likely already familiar. Excellent flick about the Panama Papers.


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## Fading Fast

*And God Created Woman* from 1956 with Brigitte Bardot

*And God Created Woman* is a love letter to a very young Brigitte Bardot. I had that thought before learning, after the movie, director Roger Vadin was Bardot's husband at the time. Instead of jewelry, a car, clothes or a vacation, Vadim gave his wife a starring role in a film as a gift. Not bad.

There are the lithe beautiful women of the world, like Grace Kelly or Audrey Hepburn, and then there are the amped up everything women, like Marilyn Monroe or Sophia Loren. Bardot is firmly in the latter group.

Sure, there is a story here, and it's surprisingly okay (compared to most of John Derek's all but unwatchable love letters on film to his wife Bo twenty years later), but you watch this movie to see Bardot being Bardot.

From the opening shot of her sunbathing nude (other than a very brief side shot of her bare bottom, she's clothed, albeit scantily, throughout) to her final dance scene in her unbutton-up-to-there dress, it's all about seeing Bardot. It wouldn't work if she was just beautiful; it works because her youthful joy sparkles on film.

Eighteen-year-old orphaned Bardot is fostered by a family - a mom and three sons - in Saint Tropez. Bardot is oddly spoiled and acts ungrateful to her foster family. What mom with three sons ranging in age from early teens to mid twenties thought bringing this sex-on-steroids woman into her family was a good idea is a question for the ages.

In addition to dating the oldest son, Bardot is pursued by a wealthy middle-aged businessman who is also trying to buy the fostering family's failing boatyard. But when the mother, finally fed up with Bardot's attitude, is about to send her back to the orphanage (can you even do that with an eighteen year old?), the middle son surprisingly steps up and marries her.

Oddly, now is when the love triangle - quadrangle - really kicks in as the older brother, the one Bardot seems to really love, becomes angry that he didn't marry her when he had the chance, while the wealthy businessman continues to circle both Bardot and the family's boatyard.

The rest of the movie is waiting for the marriage to break. Bardot, showing more insight than most of the others, recognizes that she makes bad decisions. Yet, like many eighteen-year olds, she can't help herself and she knows she can't.

Bardot gives her marriage a chance while the middle son tries his best, but Bardot is too full of life and sexuality to settle down at eighteen. The marriage does break in expected and unexpected ways with a surprisingly cool outcome, but you'll want to see that end for yourself.

While *And God Created Woman's* surface and subliminal lust was scandalous for its time, today it doesn't shock, but it still works because of Bardot's evergreen sensuality. The movie is also neat time travel to San Tropez in the 1950s. It's not a great movie, but there are worse ways to spend an hour and a half than watching Bardot's youth and beauty lift off the screen.


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## Fading Fast

*The Miracle of Morgan Creek* from 1943 with Betty Hutton, William Demarest, Eddie Bracken and Diana Lynn

_Farce: a comic dramatic work using buffoonery and horseplay and typically including crude characterization and ludicrously improbable situations._
- Definition from *Oxford Languages*

Farce is not my thing, so I have to work a bit to appreciate movies like *The Miracle of Morgan Creek*, which is a farce on steroids.

During WWII, Betty Hutton, a nice but flighty young woman, in a night of drunken craziness, marries a soldier she doesn't know, consummates the marriage that evening, then wakes up the next morning to find that he's gone.

She also doesn't remember his name, but remembers she used a false name, she's now forgotten, on the marriage license, she's now lost. So, effectively, she can't find the soldier or proof of her marriage.

Okay, that's not a really big deal as it can all just be "forgotten" (who cares if there's a meaningless marriage license floating out there with a false name on it). She can just move on with her life - we all have a night or two in our lives, assisted by intoxicating beverages, we'd prefer to forget.

Except, Ms. Hutton has a small problem; yup, shortly afterwards, she discovers she's pregnant and not in a time when single moms were embraced by small-town morals.

While Hutton tries to keep this, umm, "news" from her cranky constable father, William Demarest (who was born looking forty and, then, aged in real time from there), she and her younger sister, Diana Lynn (the only person in the movie with a brain), try to scheme their way out of this mess.

Enter Ms. Hutton's childhood admirer, bumbling and stuttering (it was a different time and that was acceptable humor, especially in a farce) Eddie Bracken. This milquetoast is only too happy to marry the way-out-of-his-league girl of his dreams, Hutton, even after he learns of her condition - every prize comes with a price.

With that set up, the rest of the movie is a series of increasingly frantic pranks, pratfalls and misunderstandings as Hutton and Bracken, with an assist from Lynn, try to annul Hutton's mysterious one-night marriage. The next step in the plan is for Hutton and Bracken to get married, so that everything will be made "right" before Hutton's pregnancy shows.

Writer/director Preston Sturges, though, is not going to let everything be made right before everything is, first, made a lot more wrong. The attempted "fix it" marriage falls apart at the Justice of the Peace. When Bracken tries to right the ship, he ends up in jail charged with, amongst other things, bank robbery. Not helping at all, Demarest, his future father-in-law, is his jailer.

More crazy farce stuff ensues: A fake escape attempt, an intervention by the governor, Hutton's family is run out of town, a cow wanders through their new kitchen and (spoiler alert), at Hutton's madcap delivery, doctors and nurses run around unglued as she gives birth to sextuplets, which becomes international news.

Despite all the stars and crazy stuff going on, the gem in this movie is younger sister Diane Lynn. While everyone and everything is falling apart, time and again, she keeps her head, comes up with the best plans, eye rolls her Dad when he goes off the handle and placates her not-bright big sister Hutton. She's the enjoyable normal amidst the three ring circus.

You either go with all the antics (which is hard for me) or turn off the movie. If you go with it, you begin to see, under all the crazy, smart social and political commentary about the hypocrisy of our surface morals and the dirty dealings of insider politics.

A couple of other good messages from the movie are, one, we need to be more understanding of people's failings, as everyone has them, and, two, life can be fun if we all would just loosen up a bit.

While ridiculous on the surface, the underlying story - a woman pregnant out of wedlock - was very real and serious for its time. Maybe that's part of writer and director Preston Sturges' genius. By wrapping a big taboo of the era inside a farce, he was able to get *The Miracle of Morgan Creek* past the sensors, while making the taboo itself seem nonsensical and mean spirited.


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 64052
> 
> *The Miracle of Morgan Creek* from 1943 with Betty Hutton, William Demarest, Eddie Bracken and Diana Lynn
> 
> _Farce: a comic dramatic work using buffoonery and horseplay and typically including crude characterization and ludicrously improbable situations._
> - Definition from *Oxford Languages*
> 
> Farce is not my thing, so I have to work a bit to appreciate movies like *The Miracle of Morgan Creek*, which is a farce on steroids.
> 
> During WWII, Betty Hutton, a nice but flighty young woman, in a night of drunken craziness, marries a soldier she doesn't know, consummates the marriage that evening, then wakes up the next morning to find that he's gone.
> 
> She also doesn't remember his name, but remembers she used a false name, she's now forgotten, on the marriage license, she's now lost. So, effectively, she can't find the soldier or proof of her marriage.
> 
> Okay, that's not a really big deal as it can all just be "forgotten" (who cares if there's a meaningless marriage license floating out there with a false name on it). She can just move on with her life - we all have a night or two in our lives, assisted by intoxicating beverages, we'd prefer to forget.
> 
> Except, Ms. Hutton has a small problem; yup, shortly afterwards, she discovers she's pregnant and not in a time when single moms were embraced by small-town morals.
> 
> While Hutton tries to keep this, umm, "news" from her cranky constable father, William Demarest (who was born looking forty and, then, aged in real time from there), she and her younger sister, Diana Lynn (the only person in the movie with a brain), try to scheme their way out of this mess.
> 
> Enter Ms. Hutton's childhood admirer, bumbling and stuttering (it was a different time and that was acceptable humor, especially in a farce) Eddie Bracken. This milquetoast is only too happy to marry the way-out-of-his-league girl of his dreams, Hutton, even after he learns of her condition - every prize comes with a price.
> 
> With that set up, the rest of the movie is a series of increasingly frantic pranks, pratfalls and misunderstandings as Hutton and Bracken, with an assist from Lynn, try to annul Hutton's mysterious one-night marriage. The next step in the plan is for Hutton and Bracken to get married, so that everything will be made "right" before Hutton's pregnancy shows.
> 
> Writer/director Preston Sturges, though, is not going to let everything be made right before everything is, first, made a lot more wrong. The attempted "fix it" marriage falls apart at the Justice of the Peace. When Bracken tries to right the ship, he ends up in jail charged with, amongst other things, bank robbery. Not helping at all, Demarest, his future father-in-law, is his jailer.
> 
> More crazy farce stuff ensues: A fake escape attempt, an intervention by the governor, Hutton's family is run out of town, a cow wanders through their new kitchen and (spoiler alert), at Hutton's madcap delivery, doctors and nurses run around unglued as she gives birth to sextuplets, which becomes international news.
> 
> Despite all the stars and crazy stuff going on, the gem in this movie is younger sister Diane Lynn. While everyone and everything is falling apart, time and again, she keeps her head, comes up with the best plans, eye rolls her Dad when he goes off the handle and placates her not-bright big sister Hutton. She's the enjoyable normal amidst the three ring circus.
> 
> You either go with all the antics (which is hard for me) or turn off the movie. If you go with it, you begin to see, under all the crazy, smart social and political commentary about the hypocrisy of our surface morals and the dirty dealings of insider politics.
> 
> A couple of other good messages from the movie are, one, we need to be more understanding of people's failings, as everyone has them, and, two, life can be fun if we all would just loosen up a bit.
> 
> While ridiculous on the surface, the underlying story - a woman pregnant out of wedlock - was very real and serious for its time. Maybe that's part of writer and director Preston Sturges' genius. By wrapping a big taboo of the era inside a farce, he was able to get *The Miracle of Morgan Creek* past the sensors, while making the taboo itself seem nonsensical and mean spirited.


.....but, but where's the social justice. What about the poor, deprived, drunken and loosely wrapped soldier, who went off to war and will apparently never know he has sired six little crumb snatchers running around Morgan Creek looking for their biological father. Does the movie unravel any of the mysteries and vagaries of fact with which the movie presents us? LOL, I don't think I will add this one to my list. Great review, but my fevered mind would not tolerate the unanswered questions.


----------



## Fading Fast

*Tall Story* from 1960 with Jane Fonda, Anthony Perkins, Ray Walston, Marc Connelly and Anne Jackson

What would a 1950s-era mashup of a battle-of-the-sexes movie with an innocent college movie look like? Enter, *Tall Story*.

Big man on campus Anthony Perkins is an earnest basketball star and scholar. Jane Fonda is the coed who came to Custer College to meet and marry Perkins - with no compunction about using subterfuge.

*Tall Story* is wholesome and silly, like a Rock Hudson-Doris Day movie, but set in a college and filmed in black and white. One doubts a movie like this was taken seriously at the time, but seen as goofy escapism, then or now, it's okay entertainment.

The fun "twist" in this one is while Jane Fonda is radar locked on target Anthony Perkins, he's kinda oblivious, at first, to her overtures. Equally fun is Fonda all but roping in two of her professors, Ray Walston and Marc Connelly, kinda against their will, to assist in her campaign to win Perkins' affections.

After Fonda talks the professors into seating her next to Perkins in their classes - yes, it's that kind of movie - she just keeps coming at Perkins until he begins to notice her. Yet, he's really focused on "the big game" against a traveling Russian team.

It's all hijinks - she wrangles a job babysitting for one of the professor's kids to, again, get close to Perkins; they have their first kiss after a discussion of fruit flies mating (she's the aggressor); he gets so distracted by her that he fails his ethics test and loses his eligibility to play in "the big game."

More hijinks ensue: the college president (with his eye on the alumni money that follows sports' victories) tries to "not pressure" the professor to allow Perkins to take a make-up exam; the Russians try to bribe Perkins to not play and Perkins breaks up with Fonda when he discovers she had a plan to "catch" him.

If you've seen a few 1950s battle-of-the-sexes movies and a few 1950s college movies, you've seen all the pieces of this one just arranged differently in other movies. You also know that after a few more catastrophes, that really aren't catastrophes, all will work out in the end as it does here.

The actors, especially Walston and Connelly (and Walston's pleasantly put upon wife, Anne Jackson, who is clearly smarter than her professor husband) seem to be having fun in their roles, which makes the silly plot tolerable. Although, you know you're getting old when you enjoy the comic relief of the middle-aged college professors as much as the youthful pulchritude of stars Fonda and Perkins.

Don't seek *Tall Story* out, but if you stumble upon it one day and you're in the mood for a cute, mindless 1950s movie with some appealing actors, it's an acceptable way to spend an hour and half (just don't admit to anyone you watched it).


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 64124
> 
> *Tall Story* from 1960 with Jane Fonda, Anthony Perkins, Ray Walston, Marc Connelly and Anne Jackson
> 
> What would a 1950s-era mashup of a battle-of-the-sexes movie with an innocent college movie look like? Enter, *Tall Story*.
> 
> Big man on campus Anthony Perkins is an earnest basketball star and scholar. Jane Fonda is the coed who came to Custer College to meet and marry Perkins - with no compunction about using subterfuge.
> 
> *Tall Story* is wholesome and silly, like a Rock Hudson-Doris Day movie, but set in a college and filmed in black and white. One doubts a movie like this was taken seriously at the time, but seen as goofy escapism, then or now, it's okay entertainment.
> 
> The fun "twist" in this one is while Jane Fonda is radar locked on target Anthony Perkins, he's kinda oblivious, at first, to her overtures. Equally fun is Fonda all but roping in two of her professors, Ray Walston and Marc Connelly, kinda against their will, to assist in her campaign to win Perkins' affections.
> 
> After Fonda talks the professors into seating her next to Perkins in their classes - yes, it's that kind of movie - she just keeps coming at Perkins until he begins to notice her. Yet, he's really focused on "the big game" against a traveling Russian team.
> 
> It's all hijinks - she wrangles a job babysitting for one of the professor's kids to, again, get close to Perkins; they have their first kiss after a discussion of fruit flies mating (she's the aggressor); he gets so distracted by her that he fails his ethics test and loses his eligibility to play in "the big game."
> 
> More hijinks ensue: the college president (with his eye on the alumni money that follows sports' victories) tries to "not pressure" the professor to allow Perkins to take a make-up exam; the Russians try to bribe Perkins to not play and Perkins breaks up with Fonda when he discovers she had a plan to "catch" him.
> 
> If you've seen a few 1950s battle-of-the-sexes movies and a few 1950s college movies, you've seen all the pieces of this one just arranged differently in other movies. You also know that after a few more catastrophes, that really aren't catastrophes, all will work out in the end as it does here.
> 
> The actors, especially Walston and Connelly (and Walston's pleasantly put upon wife, Anne Jackson, who is clearly smarter than her professor husband) seem to be having fun in their roles, which makes the silly plot tolerable. Although, you know you're getting old when you enjoy the comic relief of the middle-aged college professors as much as the youthful pulchritude of stars Fonda and Perkins.
> 
> Don't seek *Tall Story* out, but if you stumble upon it one day and you're in the mood for a cute, mindless 1950s movie with some appealing actors, it's an acceptable way to spend an hour and half (just don't admit to anyone you watched it).


Another very thorough and informative review...artfully written, well organized and quite helpfully detailed. But alas, as a matter of principle, I do not watch anything with Jane Fonda in it. Hell, I won't even re-watch Barbarella! Now that's a pretty serious commitment, methinks. LOL.


----------



## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> Another very thorough and informative review...artfully written, well organized and quite helpfully detailed. But alas, as a matter of principle, I do not watch anything with Jane Fonda in it. Hell, I won't even re-watch Barbarella! Now that's a pretty serious commitment, methinks. LOL.


You'll got no argument at all form me about your choice - I get it.

On a more fun topic, did you notice Perkin's white bucks and chinos in the pic?


----------



## Fading Fast

*Human Desire* from 1954 with Glenn Ford, Broderick Crawford and Gloria Grahame

You, Broderick Crawford, mouth off to your boss and lose your job. You then beg your wife, Gloria Grahame, who knows an influential man in the town, to ask him to get your job back for you. She does, but you find out she had to sleep with the man in return.

So, you kill the man in front of your wife, blackmail your wife into keeping quiet and, then, try to go back to living a normal life with her. It doesn't work. It's just too much to sweep under the emotional rug.

Into this mess walks Glen Ford, a returning Korean War vet who is damaged from battle more than his surface "normal" would have you believe. He falls in lust, maybe love, with Grahame, but the outlook for these two is not good.

Famed director Fritz Lang, like all famed directors, made some just okay movies, like *Human Desire*. It's a fine by-the-number noir that also serves as a lagniappe for railfans, but it's no classic.

Ford returns from Korea to his old job as a train engineer where one of his bosses is assistant rail yard manager Crawford. After Crawford murders the man who slept with his wife, Grahame turns to Ford trying to find a way out of her now prison-like marriage. Her backstory, then, slowly dribbles out.

Grahame's character lies so much in this one, though, by the end, you really don't know the truth. Even Ford, in love/lust with her, finally gives up trying to get the truth out of her.

Grahame was or wasn't abused growing up by a father figure - possibly the same man she asks to get her husband's job back. She married Crawford believing or not he was a good man who would treat her well. Crawford did or didn't abuse her physically and mentally owing to his irrational (or, maybe, rational) jealousy.

What you are left with is a bunch of people you, ultimately, don't like. Crawford is a bully, probable wife abuser and murderer. Graham is an uber manipulator of men to the point of being a sociopath. She also is an accessory after the fact to one murder and tried to manipulate Ford into killing her husband. Ford is an accessory after the fact to the same murder and walked right up to the line and stopped before killing Crawford.

All the "human desire" underlying the murder and contemplated murder is because everyone wants to sleep with Graham or is consumed with jealousy that someone else did. Graham is an attractive woman, but too much of this story pivots on men wanting to go to bed with her.

The small gift wrapped inside this one is the incredible 1950s train and rail yard scenes of the era's huge diesel trains moving through switches, roundhouses, towns and the countryside during train travel's final heyday in America. We also see the proud men who kept them moving: men like Crawford and Ford who had (what they thought were) secure jobs with good pay where they saw the rewards of their physical work in tangible results.

Lang understands the noir genre well giving us plenty moonless nights, shadows, alleys, seedy bars, cigarette smoke (noir's oxygen), lust, love, hate, murder and, ultimately, lives wrecked for reasons that aren't worth it. You know, good noir stuff. *Human Desire *doesn't add up to a classic, but it's an entertaining hour and a half of humans behaving badly, oftentimes, while riding on cool trains.


----------



## Fading Fast

*Obsession* (aka *The Hidden Room*) from 1949 with Robert Newton, Sally Gray, Naunton Wayne and Phil Brown

Many post-war British films are clever, well-crafted, small-budget affairs. A large subset of these, like *Obsession*, are mystery and/or crime dramas as the British seem to have mystery/crime drama spun in their storytelling DNA.

Also, England's studios' small budgets at that time required engaging stories as they couldn't entertain the audience with Hollywood-like elaborate special effects, expensive on-location shots or large casts.

*Obsession*, with its handful of characters, mainly indoor settings and a lot of dialogue, is right in the sweet spot of the low-budget, smart British crime drama. A well-to-do doctor plots an elaborate murder of his wife's lover while a scripted-out-of-central-casting equanimous Scotland Yard superintendent pursues the case with polite British persistence.

The doctor, Robert Newton, channeling his inner Dumas, kidnaps his wife's American paramour, Phil Brown, and keeps him chained up in a cellar room. Newton is waiting to see if the police, investigating Brown's disappearance, are suspicious of him, before killing Brown.

This sets up a lot of wonderfully engaging tension and, even, macabre humor as Newton plays cagey/dumb to his wife, Sally Gray (think beautiful, aloof English blonde), who believes, but without proof, her husband has killed her lover.

An equally tense, yet oddly lighthearted at times, dynamic develops between captor and captive. Newton and Brown have an almost playful banter when Newton has his daily visits to bring chained-to-a-wall Brown his food and water.

Drumming on quietly, almost in the background, is superintendent Naunton Wayne who just keeps popping by the doctor's house or office to clear up one point or another about Brown's disappearance. He is suspicious of the doctor, but without evidence, all he can do is noodle around hoping something will come up.

(Spoiler alert) As always is the case, it's the little things that get you. Here, it's the doctor's wife's lost dog stumbling into Brown's cellar prison and an incidental American colloquialism tossed off by very-British Nauton that catches the always-thinking superintendent's attention.

You know all along Scotland Yard is going to get its man; it's the plodding investigation followed by the "aha" moment for the superintendent that is the fun in this one.

It's all wonderfully understated in that uniquely British way. Almost no one runs, shoots, fights, shouts loudly or cries - even in a long, drawn-out potential murder. Instead, everyone tries to do his or her thing - commit the perfect crime, solve the perfect crime, expose your spouse committing the perfect crime or escape from the perfect-crime's prison - without raising a fuss.

*Obsession* is simply a good solid hour and half of British crime-drama entertainment. Fans of *Foyle's War* and the too-many-others-to-count modern British movies and TV crime-drama stories will appreciate an early version of a genre at which, to this day, the British continue to excel.

N.B. Not particularly salient to the plot (away from some symbolism), the doctor has an incredibly elaborate model train layout in his basement. If you like model trains, this is a cool one to see.


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## Vecchio Vespa

Not a movie, just Apple TV series. We are really enjoying The Morning Show. It is dark and complicated. Also enjoying Ted Lasso, exhibiting the most comedic creativity I have seen since 30 Rock or Schitt's Creek.


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 64452
> 
> *Obsession* (aka *The Hidden Room*) from 1949 with Robert Newton, Sally Gray, Naunton Wayne and Phil Brown
> 
> Many post-war British films are clever, well-crafted, small-budget affairs. A large subset of these, like *Obsession*, are mystery and/or crime dramas as the British seem to have mystery/crime drama spun in their storytelling DNA.
> 
> Also, England's studios' small budgets at that time required engaging stories as they couldn't entertain the audience with Hollywood-like elaborate special effects, expensive on-location shots or large casts.
> 
> *Obsession*, with its handful of characters, mainly indoor settings and a lot of dialogue, is right in the sweet spot of the low-budget, smart British crime drama. A well-to-do doctor plots an elaborate murder of his wife's lover while a scripted-out-of-central-casting equanimous Scotland Yard superintendent pursues the case with polite British persistence.
> 
> The doctor, Robert Newton, channeling his inner Dumas, kidnaps his wife's American paramour, Phil Brown, and keeps him chained up in a cellar room. Newton is waiting to see if the police, investigating Brown's disappearance, are suspicious of him, before killing Brown.
> 
> This sets up a lot of wonderfully engaging tension and, even, macabre humor as Newton plays cagey/dumb to his wife, Sally Gray (think beautiful, aloof English blonde), who believes, but without proof, her husband has killed her lover.
> 
> An equally tense, yet oddly lighthearted at times, dynamic develops between captor and captive. Newton and Brown have an almost playful banter when Newton has his daily visits to bring chained-to-a-wall Brown his food and water.
> 
> Drumming on quietly, almost in the background, is superintendent Naunton Wayne who just keeps popping by the doctor's house or office to clear up one point or another about Brown's disappearance. He is suspicious of the doctor, but without evidence, all he can do is noodle around hoping something will come up.
> 
> (Spoiler alert) As always is the case, it's the little things that get you. Here, it's the doctor's wife's lost dog stumbling into Brown's cellar prison and an incidental American colloquialism tossed off by very-British Nauton that catches the always-thinking superintendent's attention.
> 
> You know all along Scotland Yard is going to get its man; it's the plodding investigation followed by the "aha" moment for the superintendent that is the fun in this one.
> 
> It's all wonderfully understated in that uniquely British way. Almost no one runs, shoots, fights, shouts loudly or cries - even in a long, drawn-out potential murder. Instead, everyone tries to do his or her thing - commit the perfect crime, solve the perfect crime, expose your spouse committing the perfect crime or escape from the perfect-crime's prison - without raising a fuss.
> 
> *Obsession* is simply a good solid hour and half of British crime-drama entertainment. Fans of *Foyle's War* and the too-many-others-to-count modern British movies and TV crime-drama stories will appreciate an early version of a genre at which, to this day, the British continue to excel.
> 
> N.B. Not particularly salient to the plot (away from some symbolism), the doctor has an incredibly elaborate model train layout in his basement. If you like model trains, this is a cool one to see.


Obsession sounds like a good yarn and certainly one to be added to the list of those to be watched. I much prefer those movies in which the actors/acting provides the entertainment, rather that just a melange of good special effects to overwhelm ones viewing senses. You didn't say say if Phil Brown survives his period of confinement, or not. Perhaps that is a question to be answered only through watching the movie?

Once again, thanks much for a great review!


----------



## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> Obsession sounds like a good yarn and certainly one to be added to the list of those to be watched. I much prefer those movies in which the actors/acting provides the entertainment, rather that just a melange of good special effects to overwhelm ones viewing senses. You didn't say say if Phil Brown survives his period of confinement, or not. Perhaps that is a question to be answered only through watching the movie?
> 
> Once again, thanks much for a great review!


When I can, I try to leave the conclusion out of the review so that it can be enjoyed fresh when watching the movie. Sometimes I have to include it or the review won't really make sense.

When I do note the conclusion, I try to put in a "spoiler alert" if someone wants to avoid knowing it. I ignore all that for movies like "The Wizard of Oz" or "Casablanca," as I assume anyone who has even a modest interest in old movies has seen those and other famous ones like those.

I'm with you on special effects, etc. Just give me a good story with good characters. Today's over-the-top CGI, etc., turns me off. To be sure, sometimes special effects are impressive and some movies - like a Bond flick - only work with them, but in general, just give me a good story with interesting characters...and pretty women.


----------



## Fading Fast

*Petticoat Fever* from 1936 with Robert Montgomery, Myrna Loy and Reginald Owens

This silly little movie would have worked well as a pre-code effort. But under the Motion Picture Production Code's narrow view of sex, it's hard to tell the story of a man living in isolation as a radio operator in Alaska who lusts after the first woman who shows up even though she's accompanied by her fiance', Reginald Owens.

Effectively, how do you tell a story about sex, lust and cheating without showing any real sex, lust or cheating? Hollywood's mostly unsatisfying answer was, after enforcement of the code in 1934, to turn movies about sex, lust and cheating into "screwball comedies."

The audience was, somehow, supposed to accept that men and women would do silly, stupid things - a bunch of pratfalls and other goofy nonsense - to substitute for their frustrations and to signal the audience that sex is what this is really about. At its best, this formula kinda worked, see *Bringing up Baby*, but most of the time, the adults just look like idiots.

Thus, when sex-starved Robert Montgomery all but loses his mind when Myrna Loy and her fiance', Reginald Owens, crash land near his Alaskan radio-operator outpost, we're supposed to see Montgomery's silly antics as an indication of his passion for Loy.

The rest of the movie - on cheap sets that don't try very hard to convince you anyone is really in Alaska - is Montgomery doing ever-more-dopey things to separate Loy from her fiance'. Eventually, fiance' Owens gets wise to Montgomery and tries to get the heck out of there with Loy as quickly as possible.

There's a twist toward the end about Montgomery's gold-digging girlfriend from two years ago showing up when she's discovered Montgomery recently inherited a title and money, but it's really just another "screwball" antic to muck up Montgomery's efforts to win over Loy.

Montgomery, Loy and Owens are professional and appealing-enough actors to produce a few good scenes and moments, but even their talents can't rescue this dull movie. Also not helping our enjoyment of the movie today is some insulting period-typical stereotyping of Eskimos.

Had *Petticoat Fever* been a pre-code movie, Montgomery's pent-up passion and Loy's deep-down indifference to her fiance', would have resulted in some harsh realpolitik bed hopping and hurt feelings, especially with all of them cooped up in that claustrophobic little shack. That would have been a much better movie about real life, lust and love, but the Motion Picture Production Code, sadly, said "not on our watch" to that approach.


----------



## Fading Fast

*The Misfits* from 1961 with Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, Eli Wallach, Montgomery Clift and Thelma Ritter

*The Misfits* could have been titled *Broken People* as the movie is about four already broken people painfully breaking some more.

There are Marilyn Monroe scholars; I am not one. What I know about Marilyn is what one learns simply by having lived on earth the past fifty or so years, so all comments below are presented with that caveat.

From a screenplay by Monroe's husband at the time, Arthur Miller, *The Misfits* plays out like a roman a clef of Monroe's life and struggles. Write what you know goes the timeless advice to authors. Miller seems to have taken that to heart as this poignant movie appears to be the playwright's analysis of his wife.

Her character, a woman who just got a Reno divorce - with seemingly nowhere to go, nothing to do and heartbroken over another failed attempt at love - meets a couple of tired, struggling-themselves cowboys, Clark Gable and Eli Wallach.

These two lost men with surface bravado are trying to stand tall in a world that has no more use for them. In young-for-them Marilyn, they see, what: their lost youth, a last opportunity for love, someone even they can help?

This all sounds like Marilyn's sad life and failed marriages. No one marries Marilyn; they marry their image of Marilyn (Rita Hayworth's famous line, "men go to bed with Gilda, but wake up with me," comes to mind). While Gable and Wallach both vie for Monroe's affection, for most of the movie, neither sees past her blondeness or body, another echo of Marilyn's real life.

*The Misfits* is also a retelling of the legend of John Henry: the famous steel-driver of tunnel construction who competes with just his hammer against the new steam-powered drill. He hammers ferociously in the challenge and wins, only to die of exhaustion immediately afterwards.

Gable, Wallach and younger, but equally lost cowboy Montgomery Clift take Marilyn along on a "mustanging" trip, where they use an old plane, truck and, finally, ropes to corral and capture mustangs for sale to a knacker.

Mustanging is all but over as a way of life by the early 1960s, but it's all these men really know as dignity, pride or stubbornness prevents them from taking a much-derided "job for wages" (you know, the thing most of us do every day to earn a living).

In *The Misfits'* climatic mustanging scene, these fading-away men try to rope a pathetically small herd. Only Marilyn sees the futility and useless cruelty of it all. Yet her pleas for mercy are answered with, effectively, a price tag of sex from Gable and Wallach. Men, as always, want something from Marilyn, even men the world has all but discarded.

It takes the youngest and most-damaged cowboy, Clift, to do the right thing and free the horses in exchange for nothing. Gable then goes full John Henry trying to retrieve them, but like Henry, his victory has no meaning - mustanging and hammering tunnels by hand is over.

Arthur Miller penned a melancholy tale of lost souls seemingly inspired by one of the 20th century's most-famous lost souls, Marilyn Monroe. There are lessons here about adapting to a changing world and valuing yourself not through others, but this is not really a movie about lessons.

It's a movie about three men and one woman who can't find themselves in the world for many reasons. Whether that is their fault or not, *The Misfits* is still a very sad story.

N.B. Look for talented Thelma Ritter as Marilyn's friend and confidant. Ritter adds something good to every movie she's in.


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 64587
> 
> *The Misfits* from 1961 with Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, Eli Wallach, Montgomery Clift and Thelma Ritter
> 
> *The Misfits* could have been titled *Broken People* as the movie is about four already broken people painfully breaking some more.
> 
> There are Marilyn Monroe scholars; I am not one. What I know about Marilyn is what one learns simply by having lived on earth the past fifty or so years, so all comments below are presented with that caveat.
> 
> From a screenplay by Monroe's husband at the time, Arthur Miller, *The Misfits* plays out like a roman a clef of Monroe's life and struggles. Write what you know goes the timeless advice to authors. Miller seems to have taken that to heart as this poignant movie appears to be the playwright's analysis of his wife.
> 
> Her character, a woman who just got a Reno divorce - with seemingly nowhere to go, nothing to do and heartbroken over another failed attempt at love - meets a couple of tired, struggling-themselves cowboys, Clark Gable and Eli Wallach.
> 
> These two lost men with surface bravado are trying to stand tall in a world that has no more use for them. In young-for-them Marilyn, they see, what: their lost youth, a last opportunity for love, someone even they can help?
> 
> This all sounds like Marilyn's sad life and failed marriages. No one marries Marilyn; they marry their image of Marilyn (Rita Hayworth's famous line, "men go to bed with Gilda, but wake up with me," comes to mind). While Gable and Wallach both vie for Monroe's affection, for most of the movie, neither sees past her blondeness or body, another echo of Marilyn's real life.
> 
> *The Misfits* is also a retelling of the legend of John Henry: the famous steel-driver of tunnel construction who competes with just his hammer against the new steam-powered drill. He hammers ferociously in the challenge and wins, only to die of exhaustion immediately afterwards.
> 
> Gable, Wallach and younger, but equally lost cowboy Montgomery Clift take Marilyn along on a "mustanging" trip, where they use an old plane, truck and, finally, ropes to corral and capture mustangs for sale to a knacker.
> 
> Mustanging is all but over as a way of life by the early 1960s, but it's all these men really know as dignity, pride or stubbornness prevents them from taking a much-derided "job for wages" (you know, the thing most of us do every day to earn a living).
> 
> In *The Misfits'* climatic mustanging scene, these fading-away men try to rope a pathetically small herd. Only Marilyn sees the futility and useless cruelty of it all. Yet her pleas for mercy are answered with, effectively, a price tag of sex from Gable and Wallach. Men, as always, want something from Marilyn, even men the world has all but discarded.
> 
> It takes the youngest and most-damaged cowboy, Clift, to do the right thing and free the horses in exchange for nothing. Gable then goes full John Henry trying to retrieve them, but like Henry, his victory has no meaning - mustanging and hammering tunnels by hand is over.
> 
> Arthur Miller penned a melancholy tale of lost souls seemingly inspired by one of the 20th century's most-famous lost souls, Marilyn Monroe. There are lessons here about adapting to a changing world and valuing yourself not through others, but this is not really a movie about lessons.
> 
> It's a movie about three men and one woman who can't find themselves in the world for many reasons. Whether that is their fault or not, *The Misfits* is still a very sad story.
> 
> N.B. Look for talented Thelma Ritter as Marilyn's friend and confidant. Ritter adds something good to every movie she's in.


I have viewed the movie, The Misfits, at least twice in the past and not surprisingly can report that your review is spot-on on every count. The Misfits is indeed a sad, but also a somewhat riveting picture, almost like watching a disaster slowly unfolding before your eyes, something hard to watch, but form which you seem not to be able to look away. The movie includes some very worthwhile life lessons for us to benefit from. Thanks for another great review.


----------



## Fading Fast

*No Regrets for Our Youth*, a Japanese movie with English subtitles from 1946 with Setsuko Hara and Haruko Sugimura

Beginning in the 1930s and moving through the war years, there is a lot of Japanese inside baseball in *No Regrets for Our Youth* that is beyond my surface knowledge of Japan's history from that period.

In the early 1930s, as Japan's militaristic and nationalistic leaders increased their power, they began to limit academic freedom at the country's universities.

*No Regrets for Our Youth* asserts a number of students and professors protested this circumscription resulting in some professors being fired and some students being kicked out of the university. A few of those students continued their protests in the streets, many of whom were then arrested and given sentences of several years.

We see this play out at one Kyoto University through the lives of a law professor and his loyal students who, when the movie opens, are enjoying an idyllic university experience of pure intellectual pursuit driven by a thirst for "true" knowledge.

Also, idyllic, at least for the all-male student body, is the law professor's in-her-early-twenties and cute-as-heck daughter, Setsuko Hara. Hara often participates in the informal discussions the students have at the professor's house.

Hara, of course, loves the most-rebellious student, Haruko Sugimura, but he's more into his ideology and protests than women (clearly, he does not have his priorities straight). After he is arrested, she considers her mother's admonitions to marry a "safer" man, but doesn't as she pines away for Sugimura.

Hara, unhappy and searching, leaves home in bored frustration (learning how to arrange flowers just doesn't cut it for this girl). She explains to her parents that she needs "something more important to do with her life than just getting married."

A few years later, Hara is living in Tokyo where she meets a released-from-jail and apparently reformed Sugimura. But as they begin an affair, she learns his reform is just a front as he's leading an underground resistance movement against Japan's militarist government.

After living together for a while, Sugimura and Hara are arrested. She's briefly imprisoned so that the government can pressure her to provide evidence against Sugimura, which, despite intense interrogation, she doesn't do. Sugimura then dies in prison, sending Hara into a downward emotional spiral.

In a kind of solidarity with her dead lover, Hara goes to live with his poor farmer parents who are shunned in their community because of their son's anti-government actions. Hara works the land with her de facto in-laws as a way to show her continued support for Sugimura and his struggle for freedom.

Echoing Sugimura's philosophy, Hara keeps herself going through the grueling physical labor and social ostracism of these war years with the belief that one day Japan will come to revere the freedom fighters it now despises.

When the war ends, the formerly dismissed professors return to the universities to teach the now re-embraced philosophy of individual rights and academic freedom. Hara, no longer an outcast, stays on in the village to work the land as a way of restoring Japan's honor.

It's a pretty obvious message, in this 1946 movie, from Japan to itself that it, too, needs to return to honest work and respect for human rights to reclaim its place amongst the honorable nations of the world.

Movies often are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Japan in 1946, understandably, wanted to put a lot of distance between its present-day self and its militarist actions and aspirations of just a few years prior.

A tale of two idealistic, fighting-for-freedom star-crossed lovers who, by resisting Japan's WWII jingoistic government, sacrificed everything for their beliefs was probably just the story Japan wanted to hear about itself at that time.

For us today, *No Regrets for Our Youth, *despite its very small budget and its desperate need of restoration, is an engaging story on its own and a wonderful window into Japan in 1946.


----------



## Fading Fast

*A Woman Rebels* from 1936 with Katherine Hepburn, Herbert Marshall, Elizabeth Allan and Donald Crisp

"Don't you think that dependent myth about women is one that men created for their own pretension?"

- Katherine Hepburn in *A Woman Rebels*

Even under the Motion Picture Production Code "controversial" movies, now and then, seemed to sneak by the era's tight censorship to make it to the big screen. In *A Woman Rebels*, Hepburn's mid-Victorian-era character has sex out of wedlock and then raises her daughter as a single parent, albeit, under the subterfuge that she's raising the baby of her now-deceased sister and brother-in-law.

As if all that isn't enough to fill 1936's theater lobbies' fainting couches, Hepburn goes on to edit a liberal women's magazine advocating for women's rights including the opportunity to be educated, work and vote just like men.

How come the villagers didn't storm the theaters with pitchforks and flaming torches? Probably because the code was more the reflection of one man's narrow views on "morality" than the broader views of 1930s (and 1940s, and 1950s) America.

It also probably helped that *A Woman Rebels* was set in England in the 1800s, which gave it a fig leaf of "period drama," but any sentient being could see how its arguments slid right into the social and cultural debates of the 1930s. Ideology is *A Woman Rebel's* strength because its story, away from its message, is only okay.

Katherine Hepburn is the sheltered daughter of a wealthy Victorian widower, Donald Crisp, who raises his two daughters to see their role in the world to be subservient to their future husbands. After a childhood of fighting this circumscribed upbringing, Hepburn moves to Italy with her now-married sister, but not before having an affair with a married man.

After the sister and her husband die - sometimes a writer just has to advance his bigger plot - Hepburn returns to England with her "sister's baby." After being rejected from every job she applies for because she's a woman, Hepburn gets hired at a liberal woman's publication, where she eventually becomes editor advocating, as noted, for women's rights.

Chugging alongside this narrative is Hepburn's longtime affair with senior diplomat, Herbert Marshall, who wants to marry Hepburn. She refuses for a couple of decades - yes, he's that persistent - without telling him it's because she's afraid if the true story of her "sister's baby" ever came out, it would wreck his career.

Eventually, the story comes spilling out because Hepburn's daughter, now a young adult, begins dating - get ready for it - the son of her biological father (the man a young Hepburn had an affair with all those years ago). Of course, Hepburn's daughter had no way of knowing whom she was dating.

The soap opera ramps up from here - Hepburn is named as a correspondent by her former lover's wife, a public scandal ensues, the daughter learns the truth and initially rebukes Hepburn. After that, it's a too pat and too happy ending.

That's unfortunate, but *A Woman Rebels* is not about its soap-opera story. It's really just a period stalking horse used to slip a movie advocating for women's rights past the censorship board. The good news is it succeeded, but its weak story hurt its box office and, thus, the megaphone for its message.

N.B. By advocating for women's rights, *A Woman Rebels* achieved something simply by being made and shown in 1936. Yet it makes the same mistake many modern movie producers, directors and writers make when they are so focused on their political message that they forget to make an entertaining movie. That's why many of today's political movies, just like *A Woman Rebels *in 1936, end up having very small audiences.


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 64771
> 
> *No Regrets for Our Youth*, a Japanese movie with English subtitles from 1946 with Setsuko Hara and Haruko Sugimura
> 
> Beginning in the 1930s and moving through the war years, there is a lot of Japanese inside baseball in *No Regrets for Our Youth* that is beyond my surface knowledge of Japan's history from that period.
> 
> In the early 1930s, as Japan's militaristic and nationalistic leaders increased their power, they began to limit academic freedom at the country's universities.
> 
> *No Regrets for Our Youth* asserts a number of students and professors protested this circumscription resulting in some professors being fired and some students being kicked out of the university. A few of those students continued their protests in the streets, many of whom were then arrested and given sentences of several years.
> 
> We see this play out at one Kyoto University through the lives of a law professor and his loyal students who, when the movie opens, are enjoying an idyllic university experience of pure intellectual pursuit driven by a thirst for "true" knowledge.
> 
> Also, idyllic, at least for the all-male student body, is the law professor's in-her-early-twenties and cute-as-heck daughter, Setsuko Hara. Hara often participates in the informal discussions the students have at the professor's house.
> 
> Hara, of course, loves the most-rebellious student, Haruko Sugimura, but he's more into his ideology and protests than women (clearly, he does not have his priorities straight). After he is arrested, she considers her mother's admonitions to marry a "safer" man, but doesn't as she pines away for Sugimura.
> 
> Hara, unhappy and searching, leaves home in bored frustration (learning how to arrange flowers just doesn't cut it for this girl). She explains to her parents that she needs "something more important to do with her life than just getting married."
> 
> A few years later, Hara is living in Tokyo where she meets a released-from-jail and apparently reformed Sugimura. But as they begin an affair, she learns his reform is just a front as he's leading an underground resistance movement against Japan's militarist government.
> 
> After living together for a while, Sugimura and Hara are arrested. She's briefly imprisoned so that the government can pressure her to provide evidence against Sugimura, which, despite intense interrogation, she doesn't do. Sugimura then dies in prison, sending Hara into a downward emotional spiral.
> 
> In a kind of solidarity with her dead lover, Hara goes to live with his poor farmer parents who are shunned in their community because of their son's anti-government actions. Hara works the land with her de facto in-laws as a way to show her continued support for Sugimura and his struggle for freedom.
> 
> Echoing Sugimura's philosophy, Hara keeps herself going through the grueling physical labor and social ostracism of these war years with the belief that one day Japan will come to revere the freedom fighters it now despises.
> 
> When the war ends, the formerly dismissed professors return to the universities to teach the now re-embraced philosophy of individual rights and academic freedom. Hara, no longer an outcast, stays on in the village to work the land as a way of restoring Japan's honor.
> 
> It's a pretty obvious message, in this 1946 movie, from Japan to itself that it, too, needs to return to honest work and respect for human rights to reclaim its place amongst the honorable nations of the world.
> 
> Movies often are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Japan in 1946, understandably, wanted to put a lot of distance between its present-day self and its militarist actions and aspirations of just a few years prior.
> 
> A tale of two idealistic, fighting-for-freedom star-crossed lovers who, by resisting Japan's WWII jingoistic government, sacrificed everything for their beliefs was probably just the story Japan wanted to hear about itself at that time.
> 
> For us today, *No Regrets for Our Youth, *despite its very small budget and its desperate need of restoration, is an engaging story on its own and a wonderful window into Japan in 1946.


A great review, but a tough movie to watch. I found a UTube offering of the original movie, but it was in Japanese...didn't even have sub-titles. I watched perhaps 20 minutes of it to get a sense of the filmography.....struck me as a bit of a slow mover. Based on the impressions conveyed in your review I will watch the whole movie, if I can find an English speaking version or at least a production with English subtitles.


----------



## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> A great review, but a tough movie to watch. I found a UTube offering of the original movie, but it was in Japanese...didn't even have sub-titles. I watched perhaps 20 minutes of it to get a sense of the filmography.....struck me as a bit of a slow mover. Based on the impressions conveyed in your review I will watch the whole movie, if I can find an English speaking version or at least a production with English subtitles.


Kudos to you, without subtitles, I doubt I would have made ten minutes. With subtitles and a willingness to let the movie "grow" on you, I think you'll really enjoy it.


----------



## Fading Fast

*A Place in the Sun*from 1951 with Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, Shelley Winters and Raymond Burr

It all comes down to this: guilt in the heart versus guilt in deed. Everything in *A Place in the Sun* really exists to magnify that one question: thought versus action.

Young, poor and poorly educated Montgomery Clift, raised by Evangelists, is given a modest job in his wealthy uncle's large manufacturing concern. Despite being warned not to date the female employees, especially since he is related to the owners, Clift begins an affair with mousy factory girl Shelley Winters.

Clift, despite being almost cripplingly shy, manages to make an impression on his uncle who begins to promote him inside the company, while introducing him to "proper" society outside of work.

Enter into Clift's life, Elizabeth Taylor, the daughter of a wealthy industrialist and leader of the young, fast set. They quickly fall in love: she's attracted to his shy outsider aura, which is so different from the capped-toothed boys of her world, while she is his, well, place in the sun.

She is breeding, wealth, looks, connections and society; everything he's never had. The darnedest thing has happened though, Winters is pregnant. It turns out the factory mouse is tenacious and she's not letting go of Clift one bit.

As Clift tries to put off Winters (think bull and bullfighter), Taylor and he fall deeper in love as Clift's uncle offers him a management role. With everything he's wanted right in front of him, Winters digs in, now, demanding Clift marry her.

What to do, what to do? Slowly, almost by accident, Clift begins to contemplate murder. It's not an excuse, but Winters has become so shrewy and demanding that she inadvertently pushes him toward it.

It all comes down to an isolated moment, in a rowboat, on a lake, at night. Clift doesn't bonk Winters (he was thinking about it, though), but the boat accidentally goes over and she hits her head. In this pivotal moment (think the jouncing of the tree limb in *A Separate Peace*), does Clift try to save her or not? It's also an eerie premonition of Chappaquiddick.

(Spoiler alert) Clift is found guilty and sentenced to death. In his cell, about to take his final walk, Clift is still struggling with his potential guilt. The priest then asks him if, when he was in the water and maybe had an opportunity to save Winters, whom was he thinking of?

The priest goes on, "Were you thinking of the other girl [Taylor]? Then...in your heart was murder." From a religious point of view, maybe true, I guess; from a legal point of view, that is probably closer to manslaughter.

*A Place in the Sun* is all about guilt in the heart versus guilt in deed, but it tosses the question back to the viewer: did Clift commit murder, manslaughter or something else because he wanted his place in the sun?

N.B. #1 This deeply sad movie is made sadder by the fact that, other than for a set of unique circumstances, Clift would have gone through life as a moral, law-abiding man.

N.B. #2 Nineteen-year-old Taylor is a slip of a beautiful young girl in *A Place in the Sun*. This begs the question, what did she do to herself in the next nine years that made twenty-eight-year-old Taylor, in *Butterfield 8*, look closer to forty. She must have done some hard living in her twenties.


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## Fading Fast

*Johnny O'Clock* from 1947 with Dick Powell, Lee J. Cobb, Nina Foch, Ellen Drew, Thomas Gomez and Evelyn Keyes.

There are a surprising amount of very good, but not-well-known movies "out there." I found *Johnny O'Clock* on the Movies! channel (with painfully long commercials, but the DVR pretty much solved that problem).

It's a bit of a quirky, yet solid noir that colors inside the genre's lines, but executes its story and characterizations so well, you don't mind the "haven't I seen this story in other movies before" feeling.

Johnny O'Clock, played by Dick Powell, is the smooth gangster who is a junior partner in a gambling casino. He's the guy with the cool clothes, flashy car, hotel penthouse apartment and pretty girls with blonde hair.

Out of the shoot, he's being pursued by police inspector Lee J. Cobb - smart, relentlessly persistent and morally offended by the Powells of the world. Cobb is both Powell's foil and the Greek chorus as he keeps popping up at key times to ground the story and to remind us, and Powell, that gangsters usually don't live long lives.

The story - only sometimes a bit hard to follow - is basic: another junior partner in the casino is trying to squeeze Powell out by playing up to the senior partner, Thomas Gomez.

Gomez and Powell go way back and act like friends, but in a wonderfully nuanced performance, we see that Gomez - heavy and (his description of himself) "greasy -" harbors a deep immigrant-inspired jealousy of super-smooth Powell.

Increasing the pressure, the business relationship of the three partners is squirreled by too many overlapping women - Ellen Drew, Nina Foch and Evelyn Keyes (all looking incredible) - causing a lot of hurt feelings and passion for revenge amongst the men.

Refreshingly, none of the women are cardboard molls or accessories, as each has a strong personality and backstory that makes this noir movie a relationship-driven drama. For its day and genre, it includes a strong woman's angle.

With Powell's position being challenged, the rest of the movie is Powell trying to hold on, people getting knocked off, "business" alliances shifting and women switching men or having affairs, all while inspector Cobb continues his metronomic efforts to bring the whole lot of them down.

Director Robert Rossen didn't go hard-core noir - so you don't get too many shadows, rainy nights, dark alleys, etc. - yet, the brighter screen doesn't diminish from the sense that Powell's is not a good world to be in.

It ends how it has to end (minor spoiler alerts) with a big confrontation between the partners, which is less about dollars than women, as stealing a man's money is one thing, but stealing his girlfriend cuts deeper.

Then it's a few shootouts, a police chase and Powell forced to choose between a woman, money and freedom - the cool guy with the fancy suits finally has to pay the piper.

Some movies are enjoyable because of their originality, others, like (the stupidly named) *Johnny O'Clock*, are enjoyable because they bring fresh life to an old story with smart execution and well-drawn, engaging characters. There's nothing really new in *Johnny O'Clock*, but you care about what happens to the people in it, which is the one thing almost all good movies have in common.

N.B. Nina Foch is one of my favorite lesser-known Golden Era actresses. She never truly hit it big, but pops up time and again in smaller roles bringing a cool verve. Look for her in one of the best movies about business ever made, *Executive Suite*, where she plays the quintessential executive secretary.


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## Fading Fast

*She Couldn't Say No* from 1940 with Eve Arden and Roger Pryor

Before television, going to the movies was a different experience than today. You'd go to see, yes, the main feature, but also a newsreal, maybe a cartoon and/or a serial short and, if a "double bill," a B movie as well. It all ran in a continuous loop where people often came in, in the middle, watched all the way through until the loop got back to where they came in and, then, they left.

It was, oddly, a version of old-style TV before TV. You could kill an evening watching a variety of shows of varying quality, but your options were limited. Understood that way, the B movie can be seen as the forerunner of the 1960s-1990s TV drama: an hour-long show with simple plots where the fun was seeing some actors you like and not being particularly challenged.

That's where a movie like *She Couldn't Say No* comes in. It's an hour long with a simple plot that you pretty much figure out in the first ten or so minutes. From there, you're just letting the light entertainment float by as you laugh at the occasional joke, enjoy the actors and feel good that you were "right" about where it was going all along.

Eve Arden is a lawyer quietly pining away for her lawyer boss, Roger Pryor, whom she hopes will notice and marry her one day. They then end up on the opposite sides of a case where an older woman is suing an older man for a breach of promise over an eight-year-old proposal of marriage. Arden hopes all Pryor needs is some spark, like a marriage-proposal lawsuit case, to make him realize he wants to marry her.

That's the set up and you kinda know, as the case is argued, Arden's boss will see the parallels to his life with Arden. Being a light-hearted movie (spoiler alert), once all the misunderstandings are straightened out in court, the older couple happily reunite, which is the cue for Pryor to realize he wants to marry Arden: gift, wrapping paper, ribbon, bow, done.

For perpetual character/supporting actress Eve Arden, it's fun to see her in a lead role, even if only in a B movie that asks her to carry all its silliness on her back, which she does with verve and ease. Arden's performance shows she had everything needed to be a leading lady except, unfortunately, enough leading-lady looks. That's why she was a supporting actress in A movies or a star in B movies like *She Couldn't Say No*, the 1930s and 1940s equivalent of a TV drama.


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## Fading Fast

*Saboteur* from 1942 with Robert Cummings, Otto Kruger, Priscilla Lane and Norman Lloyd

In *Saboteur*, Hitchcock does propaganda and does it darn well in a story that rips across the country from a military airplane factory in California, to the launch of a battleship in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, to a climatic good-guy-versus-evil-Nazi fight to the death on the Statue of Liberty.

It opens with the sabotage of a West Coast airplane factory where all-American laborer Robert Cummings is falsely accused of the crime. He escapes police custody, picks up girl-next-door Priscilla Lane and, then, goes in search of the real saboteur.

Cummings and Lane discover a Nazi sabotage ring operating at a high level in American society, headed up by the urbanely slimy Otto Kruger. (In real life, Kruger was born in Toledo Ohio, but he was cast quite often as the evil Nazi; Shakespeare wasn't always right about the name-and-rose thing.)

Cummings and Lane move from west to east, sometimes fleeing the Nazi cabal, sometimes in its capture, but always running from the police who still think Cummings is the factory saboteur.

Once east, Cummings and Lane get captured again by the Nazi ring, but use that time to learn its plan to blow up a Navy ship about to be launched. It's a few more close escapes, a last minute dash to the Navy Yard, following by the final chase scene to the very symbolic Statue of Liberty where Nazi evil, at least this sleeve of it, meets its death.

It's good straight-forward Hitchcock shot through with WWII propaganda. A couple of times, all action stops so that Cummings and Kruger can debate the strengths of the competing systems. Kruger avers, "The competence of totalitarian nations is much higher than ours [sarcastically referring to his cover as an American]. They get things done."

Cummings retorts, not with nuance, but with blunt simplicity, "The world's choosing up sides; we'll fight and we'll win." Sometimes nothing beats a matter-of-fact approach. There are plenty of other obvious metaphors - a German child smashing a brand new toy and Lane's grandfather discussing the need for trust in your fellow American - as subtlety is not propaganda's metier.

Cummings and Lane are well cast in this one - it might be Cummings' best role - as their (for that time) all-American good looks and unabashed virtue, versus Hitchcock's usually more complex heroes, has an American innocence perfect for this effort. Of course, America will win with clean cut, sincere kids like these fighting all those shady looking Nazis. Hey, propaganda is, what propaganda is.

Many consider *Saboteur* an okay but not great Hitchcock movie and that's probably true, but only because the great Hitchcock films set the bar so high. Taken on its own terms, it's a darn good action-adventure spy thriller with a bunch of wholesome American war propaganda woven in when that was all but a movie requirement.

N.B. *Saboteur* is basically a dry run for Hitchcock's later masterpiece *North by NorthWest*. In both movies, an innocent man is falsely accused, goes on a cross-country quest, with a blonde in tow, to prove his innocence, only to wind up defending America against an evil adversary in a fight to the death atop a national monument. Hitchcock had an impressive talent for refining his own efforts in his subsequent films.


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## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 65286
> 
> *Saboteur* from 1942 with Robert Cummings, Otto Kruger, Priscilla Lane and Norman Lloyd
> 
> In *Saboteur*, Hitchcock does propaganda and does it darn well in a story that rips across the country from a military airplane factory in California, to the launch of a battleship in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, to a climatic good-guy-versus-evil-Nazi fight to the death on the Statue of Liberty.
> 
> It opens with the sabotage of a West Coast airplane factory where all-American laborer Robert Cummings is falsely accused of the crime. He escapes police custody, picks up girl-next-door Priscilla Lane and, then, goes in search of the real saboteur.
> 
> Cummings and Lane discover a Nazi sabotage ring operating at a high level in American society, headed up by the urbanely slimy Otto Kruger. (In real life, Kruger was born in Toledo Ohio, but he was cast quite often as the evil Nazi; Shakespeare wasn't always right about the name-and-rose thing.)
> 
> Cummings and Lane move from west to east, sometimes fleeing the Nazi cabal, sometimes in its capture, but always running from the police who still think Cummings is the factory saboteur.
> 
> Once east, Cummings and Lane get captured again by the Nazi ring, but use that time to learn its plan to blow up a Navy ship about to be launched. It's a few more close escapes, a last minute dash to the Navy Yard, following by the final chase scene to the very symbolic Statue of Liberty where Nazi evil, at least this sleeve of it, meets its death.
> 
> It's good straight-forward Hitchcock shot through with WWII propaganda. A couple of times, all action stops so that Cummings and Kruger can debate the strengths of the competing systems. Kruger avers, "The competence of totalitarian nations is much higher than ours [sarcastically referring to his cover as an American]. They get things done."
> 
> Cummings retorts, not with nuance, but with blunt simplicity, "The world's choosing up sides; we'll fight and we'll win." Sometimes nothing beats a matter-of-fact approach. There are plenty of other obvious metaphors - a German child smashing a brand new toy and Lane's grandfather discussing the need for trust in your fellow American - as subtlety is not propaganda's metier.
> 
> Cummings and Lane are well cast in this one - it might be Cummings' best role - as their (for that time) all-American good looks and unabashed virtue, versus Hitchcock's usually more complex heroes, has an American innocence perfect for this effort. Of course, America will win with clean cut, sincere kids like these fighting all those shady looking Nazis. Hey, propaganda is, what propaganda is.
> 
> Many consider *Saboteur* an okay but not great Hitchcock movie and that's probably true, but only because the great Hitchcock films set the bar so high. Taken on its own terms, it's a darn good action-adventure spy thriller with a bunch of wholesome American war propaganda woven in when that was all but a movie requirement.
> 
> N.B. *Saboteur* is basically a dry run for Hitchcock's later masterpiece *North by NorthWest*. In both movies, an innocent man is falsely accused, goes on a cross-country quest, with a blonde in tow, to prove his innocence, only to wind up defending America against an evil adversary in a fight to the death atop a national monument. Hitchcock had an impressive talent for refining his own efforts in his subsequent films.


I've seen the movie Saboteur several times and have watched North by Northwest on at least a few more occasions that that. I am somewhat ashamed to say I never made the connection between the two movies, and must applaud your ability to do so. In your consistently excellent reviews you always display such great insights throughout said reviews. Reflecting on my exposure to both films, I think that North by Northwest was the more entertaining and somewhat easier to watch, while Saboteur proved to be a darker and more ominous presentation of an earlier and very similar story line. Thanks for another great review.


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## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> I've seen the movie Saboteur several times and have watched North by Northwest on at least a few more occasions that that. I am somewhat ashamed to say I never made the connection between the two movies, and must applaud your ability to do so. In your consistently excellent reviews you always display such great insights throughout said reviews. Reflecting on my exposure to both films, I think that North by Northwest was the more entertaining and somewhat easier to watch, while Saboteur proved to be a darker and more ominous presentation of an earlier and very similar story line. Thanks for another great review.


I agree, "North by Northwest" is "funner" and easier to watch. While it gets serious here and there, it's more of a "come along with us for this enjoyable ride" movie. "Saboteur," made during WWII, had to take its subject matter more serious I guess.

If you really want to see Hitchcock "remaking" a Hitchcock film, he made "The Man Who Knew Too Much" in 1934 and, then, made it again in 1956.


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## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> I agree, "North by Northwest" is "funner" and easier to watch. While it gets serious here and there, it's more of a "come along with us for this enjoyable ride" movie. "Saboteur," made during WWII, had to take its subject matter more serious I guess.
> 
> If you really want to see Hitchcock "remaking" a Hitchcock film, he made "The Man Who Knew Too Much" in 1934 and, then, made it again in 1956.


Thanks for the suggestion. I will run down copies of The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1934 and 1956 editions and will put them on my to be watched list. It should prove to be a lot of fun for an avowed Hitchcock fan!


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## Fading Fast

*Midnight Lace* from 1960 with Doris Day, Rex Harrison and John Williams

"I want to make a Hitchcock movie also," said too many directors around the time Hitchcock was banging out one 1950s mega hit after another.

Director David Miller even hired Hitchcock alumni actors Doris Day and John Williams (who is everything a Scotland Yard police inspector on film should be) to give it a Hitchcock feel. But *Midnight Lace* never comes close to Hitchcockian levels as the story isn't strong enough and Miller's directing lacks the master's touch.

Wealthy English banker Rex Harrison's new, young American wife, Doris Day, begins receiving threatening anonymous phone calls. Harrison, while always tied up at work - a major client is suing and accounting has uncovered a high-level embezzlement scheme - immediately takes his wife to Scotland Yard.

There, Inspector Williams begins an investigation, but also notes that, oftentimes, these callers are just reasonably harmless thrill seekers. As in a good Hitchcock, there are several suspects: a handsome contractor working on the apartment building next to the Harrisons, a nearby neighbor who appears helpful and a mysterious man, maybe, watching Day.

As time goes by, Day becomes more frantic, but isn't able to produce evidence as the calls never happen when anyone else is around. Then, her behavior seems to become erratic as she claims she was pushed in front of a moving bus that stopped just in time, but nobody at the crowded stop saw her pushed.

*Midnight Lace* now shifts into psychological-Hitchcock mode as Day is taken to a psychiatrist and even begins to question her own sanity. After that, it's more threatening anonymous calls, fear and self doubt as the movie grinds (not speeds) to a conclusion that asks its audience to forgive a lot of plot flaws and questionable actions. (Spoiler alert) Harrison is behind it all as a way to cover up that he is the embezzler at his office. It's a clunky and not believable conclusion.

*Midnight Lace* has too much movie resting on too thin a story. Hitchcock knew that if the story was thin, the characters had to engage you, yet here you only kinda care about them and less, not more, as the story plods on.

While John Williams is wonderful as ever, Rex Harrison is professional and Doris Day gives her all as a woman in distress, even talented actors can only do so much with mediocre material. *Midnight Lace* is a Hitchcockian wannabee that never really gets out of first gear.


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## eagle2250

Another insightful and refreshingly honest review, as these are the qualities that incite me to so look forward to your next review. Thank you for that. Based on your recommendations, I will not be adding this one to my list of movies to be watched.


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## Fading Fast

*Sound of the Mountain* from 1954, a Japanese movie with English subtitles

A father-in-law in a placid but loveless marriage forms a bond with his daughter-in-law whose husband is having an affair.

*Sound of the Mountain* packs a lot of human drama, hurt and emotion in a not-at-all-melodramatic package. Reflecting the Japanese culture of surface calm and outward respect, almost everything happens at the second derivative level, making the conflict more impactful for its subtlety.

Setsuko Hara is the polite daughter-in-law who does most of the housework for her husband and in-laws, despite her husband, Ken Uehara, all but openly having an affair. She's sweet to the point of simple, which might be why her husband has turned away from her as he seems to thrive on danger and strife.

Not helping their relationship is "Hara's inability" to conceive, despite it being several years into the marriage. Hara desperately wants a child, but so far it's a no go, leaving her depressed and, perhaps, partially explaining why Uehara has turned away from his wife.

Sô Yamamura, the family patriarch and Hara's father-in-law, finds emotional affection in his relationship with Hara that he doesn't find in his relationships with his quietly nagging wife, cheating son or always-complaining daughter who blames him for her failed marriage.

The two nice people in this family have found each other, but have nowhere to go with their bond as this isn't a television soap opera and the father-in-law is not going to carry on an affair with his son's wife. You almost believe Hara would, but not in a tawdry way, but because she is so desperate to be genuinely loved.

What Yamamura does do, though, is try to help Hara by steering his son back to her, but the son is cold and selfish. Yamamura even reaches out to the son's mistress, but that only gets messy as (spoiler alert) he learns the mistress has just been discarded by son because - get ready for it - she's pregnant with his baby and won't have an abortion. The son kicked her and pushed her down the stairs for horribly obvious reasons. Yamamura is quickly losing all respect for his son.

As all this drama unfolds, docile Hara mysteriously goes to the hospital for a day, which (spoiler alert) we later learn was to have an abortion. Stunningly, this simple, sweet and gentle woman, who passionately wants a baby, realized she does not want to have a baby with her cruel husband. Hara, we learn, has more steel to her than we thought.

In an American movie, all the above would play out amidst much yelling and screaming with accusations flying left and right. However, in this Japanese family, it's all discussed in hushed tones where almost everyone seems embarrassed to even be talking about it.

Clearly, all the passions, emotions and drama are there, but the cultural approach to family conflict and struggles is starkly different in Japan than in the West.

In a Western movie, Hara and her father-in-law might have an affair, but in post-war Japan that is a bridge too far. Instead, we see these two hurt soles struggle to find a way to console each other in a culture that provides little space for them to truly embrace their feelings and compassion.

*Sound of the Mountain* works because it is real. There are no special effects, no forced drama, no easy resolutions, just life playing out in its, often, painful way inside a family that seems outwardly normal. Director Mikio Naruse uses a light touch that lets the camera show more than tell what is happening in this impactful story of one family quietly being ripped apart.


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## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 65739
> 
> *Sound of the Mountain* from 1954, a Japanese movie with English subtitles
> 
> A father-in-law in a placid but loveless marriage forms a bond with his daughter-in-law whose husband is having an affair.
> 
> *Sound of the Mountain* packs a lot of human drama, hurt and emotion in a not-at-all-melodramatic package. Reflecting the Japanese culture of surface calm and outward respect, almost everything happens at the second derivative level, making the conflict more impactful for its subtlety.
> 
> Setsuko Hara is the polite daughter-in-law who does most of the housework for her husband and in-laws, despite her husband, Ken Uehara, all but openly having an affair. She's sweet to the point of simple, which might be why her husband has turned away from her as he seems to thrive on danger and strife.
> 
> Not helping their relationship is "Hara's inability" to conceive, despite it being several years into the marriage. Hara desperately wants a child, but so far it's a no go, leaving her depressed and, perhaps, partially explaining why Uehara has turned away from his wife.
> 
> Sô Yamamura, the family patriarch and Hara's father-in-law, finds emotional affection in his relationship with Hara that he doesn't find in his relationships with his quietly nagging wife, cheating son or always-complaining daughter who blames him for her failed marriage.
> 
> The two nice people in this family have found each other, but have nowhere to go with their bond as this isn't a television soap opera and the father-in-law is not going to carry on an affair with his son's wife. You almost believe Hara would, but not in a tawdry way, but because she is so desperate to be genuinely loved.
> 
> What Yamamura does do, though, is try to help Hara by steering his son back to her, but the son is cold and selfish. Yamamura even reaches out to the son's mistress, but that only gets messy as (spoiler alert) he learns the mistress has just been discarded by son because - get ready for it - she's pregnant with his baby and won't have an abortion. The son kicked her and pushed her down the stairs for horribly obvious reasons. Yamamura is quickly losing all respect for his son.
> 
> As all this drama unfolds, docile Hara mysteriously goes to the hospital for a day, which (spoiler alert) we later learn was to have an abortion. Stunningly, this simple, sweet and gentle woman, who passionately wants a baby, realized she does not want to have a baby with her cruel husband. Hara, we learn, has more steel to her than we thought.
> 
> In an American movie, all the above would play out amidst much yelling and screaming with accusations flying left and right. However, in this Japanese family, it's all discussed in hushed tones where almost everyone seems embarrassed to even be talking about it.
> 
> Clearly, all the passions, emotions and drama are there, but the cultural approach to family conflict and struggles is starkly different in Japan than in the West.
> 
> In a Western movie, Hara and her father-in-law might have an affair, but in post-war Japan that is a bridge too far. Instead, we see these two hurt soles struggle to find a way to console each other in a culture that provides little space for them to truly embrace their feelings and compassion.
> 
> *Sound of the Mountain* works because it is real. There are no special effects, no forced drama, no easy resolutions, just life playing out in its, often, painful way inside a family that seems outwardly normal. Director Mikio Naruse uses a light touch that lets the camera show more than tell what is happening in this impactful story of one family quietly being ripped apart.


Another excellent review offering readers insight into the personalities of the characters and the all too common motivations that drive them forward though their respective lives. Your representations of the nature of Japanese and Western reactions to the domestic dynamics incorporated in the Sound of The Mountain are spot-on, in my opinion. I will add this one to my list of movies to be watched and will begin a search to locate a source for same.


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## Fading Fast

*Mogambo* from 1953 with Clark Gable, Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly

"They got the fire down below"
- Bob Seger

*Mogambo* is about one thing, lust. That's it; that's what *Mogambo* is about.

Ava Gardner is the rough-and-ready pretty brunette girl who actually sleeps with the boys in high school; Grace Kelly is the blonde ice-princess the high school boys fantasize about sleeping with because they know it's never going to happen.

High school is over, but deep in the heart of Africa, Gardner and Kelly are still in their respective roles as they vie for safari leader Clark Gable's attention.

Gardner arrives first at Gable's safari company's camp. Gardner is, if not a prostitute, then a "fun" girl with a reputation (when all this stuff still meant something) who clearly has been kicked around. She lands on Gable's doorstep because her male "friend," who was going to meet her there, never showed up and she's broke.

After grumbling about her being there, loneliness, lack of options, liquor and nighttime leads to Gable sleeping with her. Yet when the next boat comes by, Gable pushes Gardner on it even though she wants to stay with him. Despite his outward gruffness toward her, he did have a fleeting thought about keeping her.

But off she goes on the same boat that brings blonde, prepossessingly beautiful, refined and married Grace Kelly and her scientist husband who booked a safari with Gable so that he can study gorillas. Exit Gardner and enter Kelly, except Gardner's boat breaks down and she's back at the camp later that same day.

The rest of the movie is a lust triangle with Gardner and Kelly cat fighting over King Gable as Gable lusts after the "new" one - the blonde goddess, Kelly. There's also this, Gardner is one of the most beautiful women on earth, so she had to be thinking, "are you freakin' kidding me" when into some remote African village walks Grace Kelly to steal her man.

Playing out nearly every boy's high-school fantasy, Gable goes after the flaxen-haired ice princess who finally acknowledges and succumbs to her carnal passion when she sleeps with Gable behind her husband's back.

Gardner is the "gets the joke" girl with plenty of miles on her odometer, but she's right for crude Gable. Yet, now she's on the outside looking in. Meanwhile, Gable and Kelly, as neither realizes how much they aren't a long-term fit, plan to tell her husband about their affair, have Kelly get divorced and then get married. What a mess. None of this makes sense.

(Spoiler alert) Then it all explodes. Kelly walks in on Gardner and Gable alone in his tent; nothing was happening, but Kelly isn't buying it, so in a fit of jealousy, she shoots Gable (just a flesh wound). Quick-on-her-feet Gardner concocks an on-the-fly cover story that saves Kelly's marriage when Kelly's husband appears. Even bleeding, self-centered Gable takes note of Gardner's generosity.

(One more spoiler alert) All that's left is a very well-done cute scene of Gardner coming back to Gable as the big dope realizes she is the one for him. Somehow or other, in *Mogambo*, MGM, with director John Ford at the helm, despite the strict Motion Picture Production Code, made a two-hour movie about three people lusting after and sleeping with each other.

N.B. By today's standards, much of the African footage is problematic, but looked at from a 1953 perspective, it's pretty impressive cinematography of Africa that could give any nature documentary of its day a run for its money. Director Ford also didn't miss the opportunity to use all this nature - including the mating rituals of the animals - as a powerful metaphor for the arrant carnal desire that drives everyone and everything that happens in *Mogambo*.


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## Fading Fast

*Fourteen Hours *from 1951 with Paul Douglas, Richard Basehart, Barbara Bel Geddes and Howard Da Silva

A man, Richard Basehart, walks onto the ledge outside his high-floor hotel room in New York's Wall Street district, setting off fourteen harrowing hours of police and psychiatrists trying to talk or pull him back in, while a crowd below and a febrile press create a circus-like atmosphere to Basehart's, now, public anguish.

Taxicab drivers throw money into a betting pool guessing on the time he'll jump; office workers give up their lunch breaks to watch events unfold; huge WWII spotlights are brought in to shine on Basehart at nightfall; a young man and woman in the crowd start a romance and a divorcing couple at their lawyers, seeing, right outside their lawyer's window, what really matters in life, decide to give their marriage another try.

Today, there would be a special police unit called in with well-established policies, procedures and protocols, but in 1951, the police handle it as best they can with first-on-the-scene traffic cop Paul Douglas, sitting on the ledge with his head out the window, immediately bonding with Basehart.

Douglas is an atypical leading man as he has "regular guy" looks and demeanor, but the screen presence to carry a movie. Ostensibly about Basehart on the ledge, the real story in *Fourteen Hours* is how an "average Joe," using a mixture of common sense, compassion and some (unacceptable to many today, but normal for the era) harsh admonishment, keeps Basehart engaged and not jumping, for hours and hours.

Even the psychiatrists, in a rare moment of humility, quickly realize Douglas is the man for the job, while they stay in the background researching Basehart's family and medical history. Once they have those details, the psychiatrists then run them through the era's dominant Freudian-Oedipal-Complex calculator to get the answer they expected: he hates his father and wants to sleep with his mother.

Okay, this is 1951, so they don't really say that, but that's the message the psychiatrists concoct as they decide Basehart is on the ledge because he's angry at his father for divorcing his mother. A mother, according to these same doctors, for whom he's never fully lost his "normal" teenage-boy romantic feelings (ick).

This, in theory, also explains why Basehart can't commit to his cute-as-heck girlfriend, Barbara Bel Geddes. Whatever, today we also have our condescensions and biases that we bray are unassailably logical and moral, yet some will look no less silly in seventy years.

While the psychiatrists massage the facts to fit their theories, each time they send out a family member to talk with Basehart, things get worse or, at least, not better. That leaves the real work in trying to save Basehart to Douglas.

(Spoiler alert) Douglas' good guy, beat cop, loving husband and father persona - along with his honest admission to Basehart that everyone gets scared in life at times - finally throws the right switch in Basehart's head.

(One more spoiler alert) Yes, there's a dramatic last minute rescue, but it's the example of Douglas' simple but good life that gives Basehart the will to live. The implied message is that every life, no matter how seemingly mundane, is important, significant and worth fighting for.

It's a good message, but the magic in* Fourteen Hours* is less the message than seeing regular-guy Paul Douglas, by "just doing his job," save the day.

N.B. #1 I've worked in buildings like the one used in the movie - big, tall, old pre-war offices in New York City's financial district. What's hard to appreciate today, with our hermetically sealed modern office buildings, is that these pre-air-conditioning-era edifices had very large windows, without screens, that opened all the way. You viscerally felt the height, so much so, just sticking your head out one of those opened windows a bit could give you vertigo.

N.B. #2 The wife part of the divorcing couple that reconciles is twenty-two-year-old Grace Kelly, in her movie debut, looking more beautiful than anything and anyone else ever put on earth.


----------



## Fading Fast

*After Office Hours* from 1935 with Clark Gable, Constance Bennett, Billy Burke and Henry Travers.

Despite having an A-list cast, at just over an hour and ten minutes and with a slapped-together wash-rinse-repeat plot, this is more like a well-executed B movie...and that's a compliment. Studios needed "product" for their theaters and there's nothing wrong with an entertaining piece of fluff like *After Office Hours *filling that bill.

Clark Gable (like almost every leading man in the 1930s did at some point) plays a hard-driving newspaper editor who will lie, cheat and steal to "get the story," all the while never losing his charming smile. The fly in Gable's ointment is when his society-publisher owner occasionally asks him to "lay off" one of the Mr. or Mrs. Highfalutins he's lambasting.

When Gable pursues a cheating-wife story, which involves aristocratic friends of both the paper's owner and its dilettante music critic, Constance Bennett, she and the owner pressure Gable to drop the story.

At this point - ten minutes in - regular moviegoers all but know what will happen: Gable and Bennett will fall for each other, deny it, argue over the story and, eventually, after a big fight about a sleazy thing Gable does to "get the story," have a last-minute reconciliation following some event that shows Gable is, deep down, a good guy.

Yup, that's what happens and it's reasonably entertaining especially with Henry Travers as Gable's go-to guy at the paper and Billy Burke playing the same high-strung, put-upon society mother she plays in, at least, fifty movies throughout the 1930s.

Also enjoyable for us today are the movie's cool Art Deco cars, offices, apartments and restaurants, plus an insanely neat houseboat (you want to live in this thing). Combined with its serviceable murder-mystery story, *After Office Hours'* sixty-plus-minutes of runtime flies by.

The "studio system" produced some of the greatest movies ever made, but it was also a factory that could churn out perfectly acceptable Fords, umm, short, fun and entertaining little movies like *After Office Hours*.


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 66495
> 
> *After Office Hours* from 1935 with Clark Gable, Constance Bennett, Billy Burke and Henry Travers.
> 
> Despite having an A-list cast, at just over an hour and ten minutes and with a slapped-together wash-rinse-repeat plot, this is more like a well-executed B movie...and that's a compliment. Studios needed "product" for their theaters and there's nothing wrong with an entertaining piece of fluff like *After Office Hours *filling that bill.
> 
> Clark Gable (like almost every leading man in the 1930s did at some point) plays a hard-driving newspaper editor who will lie, cheat and steal to "get the story," all the while never losing his charming smile. The fly in Gable's ointment is when his society-publisher owner occasionally asks him to "lay off" one of the Mr. or Mrs. Highfalutins he's lambasting.
> 
> When Gable pursues a cheating-wife story, which involves aristocratic friends of both the paper's owner and its dilettante music critic, Constance Bennett, she and the owner pressure Gable to drop the story.
> 
> At this point - ten minutes in - regular moviegoers all but know what will happen: Gable and Bennett will fall for each other, deny it, argue over the story and, eventually, after a big fight about a sleazy thing Gable does to "get the story," have a last-minute reconciliation following some event that shows Gable is, deep down, a good guy.
> 
> Yup, that's what happens and it's reasonably entertaining especially with Henry Travers as Gable's go-to guy at the paper and Billy Burke playing the same high-strung, put-upon society mother she plays in, at least, fifty movies throughout the 1930s.
> 
> Also enjoyable for us today are the movie's cool Art Deco cars, offices, apartments and restaurants, plus an insanely neat houseboat (you want to live in this thing). Combined with its serviceable murder-mystery story, *After Office Hours'* sixty-plus-minutes of runtime flies by.
> 
> The "studio system" produced some of the greatest movies ever made, but it was also a factory that could churn out perfectly acceptable Fords, umm, short, fun and entertaining little movies like *After Office Hours*.


Based on your excellent and directly worded review, I can only conclude that After Office Hours is a movie best avoided. Thank you for preserving the positive potential for a one hour and ten minute block of the rest of my life!


----------



## Fading Fast

*A Face in the Crowd* from 1957 with Andy Griffith, Patricia Neal, Walter Matthau and Lee Remick

*A Face in the Crowd* is Andy Griffith's movie as the vagabond "country boy" personality - plucked from obscurity by a local radio show producer, Patricia Neal - whose insincere homespun populism propels him to the top of the television world where his power extends into the upper echelons of Washington.

Writer Bud Schulberg and director Eli Kazan's movie is an early warning of the risks of the cult of personality (which has existed as long as humans have had personalities) leveraged by television's reach. Griffith, here, is a cruder and louder cognate to Burt Lancaster's portrayal of the cold and vicious J.J. Hunsecker in *The Sweet Smell of Success*.

All the things we've come to expect in this type of story are here as a cagey raw talent strikes a chord with the public, which creates a sadly symbiotic feedback loop: The public hears what it wants to hear about itself as the personality becomes immensely rich, powerful, egotistical and, ultimately, self destructive.

Griffith gives a career performance as the captivating modern-day TV tent preacher who is personally despicable, but publicly likable and captivating. He yells, screams, bullies and threatens everyone off stage/screen as he builds a media empire. Yet on stage/screen, his false sincerity - a mix of everyman yokel and "uneducated smarts -" connects with much of the public who sees itself in this "honest, simple" man.

The hidden gem in this movie, though, is Patricia Neal as the woman behind the man. She not only can't control her creation, she can't control her physical and emotional passion for him even though she knows who he is.

She's a strong, smart, independent woman (in a not obnoxiously forced modern way) who builds Griffith's cult of personality and, then, kinda falls for it herself. Her complex and contradictory characterization is believable and deeply engaging. She's too intelligent to be sucked in by Griffith, but she is.

Walter Matthau, one of Griffith's young, smart, Ivy-league staff writers, is also Griffith's foil. He's quietly in love with Neal and suffers as he watches Neal pine for Griffith even when Griffith marries a bimbo cheerleader (played with zeal by Lee Remick).

Matthau keeps reminding Neal of Griffith's hypocrisy, egomania and, at times, vicious meanness. Yet Neal, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, like Doctor Frankenstein, believes she can control and improve her creation. She has about as much success as that nineteenth-century Swiss doctor did.

For every screeching bravura of Griffith, Neal matches it with a nuanced facial expression showing hurt or love or confusion - it's possibly her best performance. It also oddly echoes her breakthrough performance eight years earlier as the enigmatic Dominique Francon in Ayn Rand's *The Fountainhead*.

In that effort, Neal is pulled between several men, one who, like Griffith, derives his power from his ability to manipulate public opinion via the major media outlet of that day, the newspaper. In that happier tale, the ultimate hero is a man of genuine ability who ignores public opinion, confident his integrity and true talent will be recognized.

There's no similar happy ending in *A Face in a Crowd* as Matthau, in the movie's coda, predicts, not only the now exposed-as-a-fraud Griffith will have a second act, albeit on a smaller scale, but that new Griffiths will rise in his place. He's right, but Rand had a point too: men and women of ability have found a way to thrive, despite the always present media-promoted snake-oil salesmen.

N.B. There is a lot of code-puncturing dialogue in *A Face in the Crowd* as when Griffith - who bangs just about anything in a skirt that moves - cynically dismisses Neal's sexual hesitancy with this humdinger: "You cold-fish respectable girls, inside you crave the same thing as the rest of them." The Motion Picture Production Code didn't die all at once; it was death by a thousand cuts.


----------



## Fading Fast

*Bullets or Ballots*form 1936 with Edward G. Robinson, Barton MacLane, Humphrey Bogart, Joan Blondell, Louise Beavers and Frank McHugh

Warners Bros. studio squeezed every possible plot variation it could out of the gangster business in the 1930s. It mixed and matched up its formidable stable of stars and character actors - Cagney, Robinson, Bogart, O'Brien, Sheridan, Blondell, McHugh, Raft and many others - in the roles of gangsters, cops (crooked and the other kind), gun molls, politicians (crooked and the other kind) over and over again - and it worked.

Warner Bros. had a few clunkers along the way, but also it made several classics. Many more were simply good serviceable gangster pictures such as *Bullets or Ballots*. Even under the goody two-shoes Motion Picture Production Code, these movies often showed the corrupt sinews amongst the mob, police and politicians that allowed "the rackets" to thrive.

*Bullets or Ballots *does a good job of revealing the inner workings of the mob as we see how the street thugs push pinball machines on resisting shop owners or how the mob controls the wholesale food markets, taking a cut on every single item sold. Resist and your business is wrecked and, possibly, you'd be killed.

Equally revealing is *Bullets or Ballots'* look into the actual handling and accounting of the mob's physical money, which is done at the "garage." On the second floor of a large parking garage, behind thick locking metal doors, a small army of gangsters, looking more like accountants than mobsters, sit at desks and tables adding up the day's receipts ($310,000 per week for the pinball-machine racket alone, ~$6,000,000 in 2021 dollars).

Tally sheets are checked, cash is bundled, managers review the work and the big bosses stop by for "the daily count." Having worked in a Wall Street back office in the 1980s, when a lot of transactions were still physical, you see many similarities to an honest business.

But honest businesses don't have large furnaces in the accounting department to burn the day's records and they don't ship the money out in nondescript suitcases bound for safe deposit boxes in and out of the country.

*Bullets and Ballots'* variation on the gangster story is the police plan to have honest high-profile detective, Edward G. Robinson, publicly kicked off the force, which leads to him switching sides and working for the mob. His word is so well respected by both sides, the mob accepts him into its top brass based on his claim to be ready "to start looking out for number one."

The head mob guy, Barton Maclane, who reports into a small cabal of the mob's true top bosses, embraces his old friend Robinson, but number-two guy, Humphrey Bogart, is suspicious that Robinson has really turned.

Robinson, of course, didn't turn, but is working undercover to smoke out the cabal members. Hint, the cabal comprises a few very top businessmen, police and politicians who, effectively, run the mob by providing protection, at the highest levels, for its illegal activities.

Robinson quickly gains power as he introduces the numbers game to the mob. As portrayed here, the numbers racket, to date, is made up of a bunch of small local games not under mob syndicate control.

Robinson takes them all over, which brings in huge revenue and gives him instant mob street cred. At the same time, a police crackdown on other syndicate activity starts cutting into Bogie's parts of the business, which hurts his standing in the mob.

A good morality conundrum tucked inside the larger story has Robinson squeezing out his long-time friend, Joan Blondell, who runs a small numbers racket, with Louise Beavers, up in Harlem.

As a cop, Robinson looked the other way regarding her business - not right for a lawman, but life is messy. Yet when he goes undercover in the mob, he has to push her out to maintain his cover. She feels betrayed and he feels like a fink.

(A few spoiler alerts). After Bogie knocks off top guy MacLane, he has the mano-a-mano showdown with Robinson that's been coming all movie. After that (which doesn't quite go as you'd expect), it's a Motion Picture Production Code approved ending that audiences, even back then, probably understood didn't fit with the rest of the movie's mob-police-government tangle of muddled morality.

*Bullets or Ballots* isn't a classic, but it's a darn good example of Warner Bros., at the top of its game, churning out a solid mob movie with plenty of real world grit, graft and other illegal shenanigans. Aided by its perfect cast, fast pacing, wonderful 1930s gangster argot and, as always with Warner Bros. a lot of plot and action, its eighty-two minutes of run time speeds by.

N.B. #1 When the government shut down the mob's numbers racket, it rebranded it "the lottery." Ever since, the government has run it for itself with much worse payouts for its, overall, low-income players. Effectively, the government pushed the mob out, took over and kept more of the money for itself - a mob-like move.

N.B. #2 When the government came for the cigarette racket, it just took a giant cut in perpetuity (called "the Settlement"). It still lets the tobacco companies run the racket mainly because the optics of having the government own and run the cigarette business (as it does "the lottery") would be terrible. But in truth, the government is a "silent" partner with Big Tobacco - it's a very *Bullets or Ballots* partnership.


----------



## Fading Fast

*The Collector *from 1967 [French with English subtitles]

You can't get much more "French cinema" than *The Collector*. Three young, good-looking people with money in their pockets spend their summer vacation at a villa on the French Riviera being all angsty, while having pseudo-intellectual discussions about the meaning of their existence instead of having fun. What a waste of youth, looks, money and the French Riviera.

Two friends, Patrick and Daniel, borrow a third friend's villa for their summer vacation only, upon arrival, to discover cute-at-heck Haydee is also staying there. Two American guys would be outwardly pumped; two British guys would be politely pleased; but our French guys are unhappy their planned solitude is being disturbed. As noted, it's a very French movie.

Patrick, who has an angsty French (sorry for the redundancy) girlfriend back in Paris, narrates, which allows us to hear his overwrought philosophy on, one, his desire for solitude, two, the cause of sexual tension in the villa with Haydee there (here's the real cause of the tension: the two guys want to sleep with her) and, three, all the reasons he doesn't want to sleep with Haydee (which is just one big lie, but he takes it very seriously).

Haydee, who fully understands the value of advertising, spends half the movie in a very tiny bikini. She also parties her nights away in town, ending most evenings in bed with a different guy. Meanwhile, less well-drawn Daniel just looks sadly pissed off all the time while spouting odd circular logic about why or why not he or Patrick should or should not sleep with Haydee.

The rest of the movie is watching everyone look bored while jockeying for position in some odd French game of philosophical and sexual intellectual advantage. Finally, Haydee and Daniel sleep together, but instead of it being fun, it's just a springboard for more long disaffected conversations about what their bed bouncing did or did not mean.

There's a small side story about Patrick using Haydee to help him get an investor for his art gallery (using, as in asking her to have sex with the potential investor). Since no one really says what they mean or says anything clearly or tells the truth, you don't really know for sure what happened (best guess, nothing happened).

Haydee, herself, seems indifferent to it all, which highlights she is either a melancholy enigma or a young pretty girl posing as a melancholy enigma to give the impression of being something more than just a young pretty girl (I'm going with the latter).

After about an hour and half of this, the movie ends with (spoiler alert, I guess) Patrick not sleeping with Haydee, which maybe means he was faithful to his girlfriend (not sure he or the girlfriend even care) or maybe means he intellectualized himself out of some fun vacation slap and tickle with coltish Haydee.

*The Collector *(Haydee is a "collector" of men - a French intellectual way of saying "slut," it seems) is the greatest advertisement for not overthinking things. You're young, good looking, on vacation and there's a pretty girl who'll sleep with you, to everyone, but a French intellectual (in a movie anyway), there are no dots left to connect: sleep with the girl and call it a good vacation.

*The Collector's* cinematography of the French Riviera is pretty in a very 1960s cultural-upheaval way. The villa the characters stay at is beautiful on the outside, but inside looks more like it had been used as a makeshift prison and then abandoned than an upscale vacation home - maybe it's a metaphor for something, but who cares. Despite all its French waste-of-time angst and over intellectualizing, there are worse movies, but you absolutely have to be in just the right mood to somewhat enjoy this one.

N.B. Since this is 2021, please understand that the above comments about the French are directed at the sleeve of French cinema that indulgences in these types of angsty, pseudo-intellectual and depressing movies and not at the French people in general. And, some of it is tongue-in-cheek.


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 67345
> 
> *The Collector *from 1967 [French with English subtitles]
> 
> You can't get much more "French cinema" than *The Collector*. Three young, good-looking people with money in their pockets spend their summer vacation at a villa on the French Riviera being all angsty, while having pseudo-intellectual discussions about the meaning of their existence instead of having fun. What a waste of youth, looks, money and the French Riviera.
> 
> Two friends, Patrick and Daniel, borrow a third friend's villa for their summer vacation only, upon arrival, to discover cute-at-heck Haydee is also staying there. Two American guys would be outwardly pumped; two British guys would be politely pleased; but our French guys are unhappy their planned solitude is being disturbed. As noted, it's a very French movie.
> 
> Patrick, who has an angsty French (sorry for the redundancy) girlfriend back in Paris, narrates, which allows us to hear his overwrought philosophy on, one, his desire for solitude, two, the cause of sexual tension in the villa with Haydee there (here's the real cause of the tension: the two guys want to sleep with her) and, three, all the reasons he doesn't want to sleep with Haydee (which is just one big lie, but he takes it very seriously).
> 
> Haydee, who fully understands the value of advertising, spends half the movie in a very tiny bikini. She also parties her nights away in town, ending most evenings in bed with a different guy. Meanwhile, less well-drawn Daniel just looks sadly pissed off all the time while spouting odd circular logic about why or why not he or Patrick should or should not sleep with Haydee.
> 
> The rest of the movie is watching everyone look bored while jockeying for position in some odd French game of philosophical and sexual intellectual advantage. Finally, Haydee and Daniel sleep together, but instead of it being fun, it's just a springboard for more long disaffected conversations about what their bed bouncing did or did not mean.
> 
> There's a small side story about Patrick using Haydee to help him get an investor for his art gallery (using, as in asking her to have sex with the potential investor). Since no one really says what they mean or says anything clearly or tells the truth, you don't really know for sure what happened (best guess, nothing happened).
> 
> Haydee, herself, seems indifferent to it all, which highlights she is either a melancholy enigma or a young pretty girl posing as a melancholy enigma to give the impression of being something more than just a young pretty girl (I'm going with the latter).
> 
> After about an hour and half of this, the movie ends with (spoiler alert, I guess) Patrick not sleeping with Haydee, which maybe means he was faithful to his girlfriend (not sure he or the girlfriend even care) or maybe means he intellectualized himself out of some fun vacation slap and tickle with coltish Haydee.
> 
> *The Collector *(Haydee is a "collector" of men - a French intellectual way of saying "slut," it seems) is the greatest advertisement for not overthinking things. You're young, good looking, on vacation and there's a pretty girl who'll sleep with you, to everyone, but a French intellectual (in a movie anyway), there are no dots left to connect: sleep with the girl and call it a good vacation.
> 
> *The Collector's* cinematography of the French Riviera is pretty in a very 1960s cultural-upheaval way. The villa the characters stay at is beautiful on the outside, but inside looks more like it had been used as a makeshift prison and then abandoned than an upscale vacation home - maybe it's a metaphor for something, but who cares. Despite all its French waste-of-time angst and over intellectualizing, there are worse movies, but you absolutely have to be in just the right mood to somewhat enjoy this one.
> 
> N.B. Since this is 2021, please understand that the above comments about the French are directed at the sleeve of French cinema that indulgences in these types of angsty, pseudo-intellectual and depressing movies and not at the French people in general. And, some of it is tongue-in-cheek.


Reading your review, I found myself struck by the possible reality that The Collectors may be a higher brow, French version of that classic American film, "American Pie 2" Graduation and prom night are history and a year later the gang goes off to someone's beach house and spends the week partying and cooking out, with individual cast members taking turns falling into periods of reflection on the past year, considering the dreams that were lost and the very few that were realized. Stiffler is still the coarse, hound dog he was in the first movie in the series and actor Sean Murray, as Paul Finch goes about refining his self image of an international man of mystery and "love machine" persona, with the ever randy Jeanine Stifler, Eric Stifler's mom as the continuing object of his affections. Sean must have grown through that phase, as now he is Special Agent Tim McGee on the NCIS TV series. While the story lines in the two movies may be similar, I think the pace of American Pie 2 may have been a bit faster...and funnier.

Thank you for another great review.


----------



## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> Reading your review, I found myself struck by the possible reality that The Collectors may be a higher brow, French version of that classic American film, "American Pie 2" Graduation and prom night are history and a year later the gang goes off to someone's beach house and spends the week partying and cooking out, with individual cast members taking turns falling into periods of reflection on the past year, considering the dreams that were lost and the very few that were realized. Stiffler is still the coarse, hound dog he was in the first movie in the series and actor Sean Murray, as Paul Finch goes about refining his "love machine" persona, with the ever randy Jeanine Stifler, Eric Stifler's mom as the continuing object of his affections. Sean must have grown through that phase, as now he is Special Agent Tim McGee on the NCIS TV series. While the story lines in the two movies may be similar, I think the pace of American Pie 2 may have been a bit faster...and funnier.
> 
> Thank you for another great review.


I dropped out of the "American Pie" series post the first one, as, after the "This one time at band camp..." line, I figured the series didn't have much more to offer, but with your above comments, I'll give AP2 a shot the next time it rolls around on cable.


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 67131
> 
> *Bullets or Ballots*form 1936 with Edward G. Robinson, Barton MacLane, Humphrey Bogart, Joan Blondell, Louise Beavers and Frank McHugh
> 
> Warners Bros. studio squeezed every possible plot variation it could out of the gangster business in the 1930s. It mixed and matched up its formidable stable of stars and character actors - Cagney, Robinson, Bogart, O'Brien, Sheridan, Blondell, McHugh, Raft and many others - in the roles of gangsters, cops (crooked and the other kind), gun molls, politicians (crooked and the other kind) over and over again - and it worked.
> 
> Warner Bros. had a few clunkers along the way, but also it made several classics. Many more were simply good serviceable gangster pictures such as *Bullets or Ballots*. Even under the goody two-shoes Motion Picture Production Code, these movies often showed the corrupt sinews amongst the mob, police and politicians that allowed "the rackets" to thrive.
> 
> *Bullets or Ballots *does a good job of revealing the inner workings of the mob as we see how the street thugs push pinball machines on resisting shop owners or how the mob controls the wholesale food markets, taking a cut on every single item sold. Resist and your business is wrecked and, possibly, you'd be killed.
> 
> Equally revealing is *Bullets or Ballots'* look into the actual handling and accounting of the mob's physical money, which is done at the "garage." On the second floor of a large parking garage, behind thick locking metal doors, a small army of gangsters, looking more like accountants than mobsters, sit at desks and tables adding up the day's receipts ($310,000 per week for the pinball-machine racket alone, ~$6,000,000 in 2021 dollars).
> 
> Tally sheets are checked, cash is bundled, managers review the work and the big bosses stop by for "the daily count." Having worked in a Wall Street back office in the 1980s, when a lot of transactions were still physical, you see many similarities to an honest business.
> 
> But honest businesses don't have large furnaces in the accounting department to burn the day's records and they don't ship the money out in nondescript suitcases bound for safe deposit boxes in and out of the country.
> 
> *Bullets and Ballots'* variation on the gangster story is the police plan to have honest high-profile detective, Edward G. Robinson, publicly kicked off the force, which leads to him switching sides and working for the mob. His word is so well respected by both sides, the mob accepts him into its top brass based on his claim to be ready "to start looking out for number one."
> 
> The head mob guy, Barton Maclane, who reports into a small cabal of the mob's true top bosses, embraces his old friend Robinson, but number-two guy, Humphrey Bogart, is suspicious that Robinson has really turned.
> 
> Robinson, of course, didn't turn, but is working undercover to smoke out the cabal members. Hint, the cabal comprises a few very top businessmen, police and politicians who, effectively, run the mob by providing protection, at the highest levels, for its illegal activities.
> 
> Robinson quickly gains power as he introduces the numbers game to the mob. As portrayed here, the numbers racket, to date, is made up of a bunch of small local games not under mob syndicate control.
> 
> Robinson takes them all over, which brings in huge revenue and gives him instant mob street cred. At the same time, a police crackdown on other syndicate activity starts cutting into Bogie's parts of the business, which hurts his standing in the mob.
> 
> A good morality conundrum tucked inside the larger story has Robinson squeezing out his long-time friend, Joan Blondell, who runs a small numbers racket, with Louise Beavers, up in Harlem.
> 
> As a cop, Robinson looked the other way regarding her business - not right for a lawman, but life is messy. Yet when he goes undercover in the mob, he has to push her out to maintain his cover. She feels betrayed and he feels like a fink.
> 
> (A few spoiler alerts). After Bogie knocks off top guy MacLane, he has the mano-a-mano showdown with Robinson that's been coming all movie. After that (which doesn't quite go as you'd expect), it's a Motion Picture Production Code approved ending that audiences, even back then, probably understood didn't fit with the rest of the movie's mob-police-government tangle of muddled morality.
> 
> *Bullets or Ballots* isn't a classic, but it's a darn good example of Warner Bros., at the top of its game, churning out a solid mob movie with plenty of real world grit, graft and other illegal shenanigans. Aided by its perfect cast, fast pacing, wonderful 1930s gangster argot and, as always with Warner Bros. a lot of plot and action, its eighty-two minutes of run time speeds by.
> 
> N.B. #1 When the government shut down the mob's numbers racket, it rebranded it "the lottery." Ever since, the government has run it for itself with much worse payouts for its, overall, low-income players. Effectively, the government pushed the mob out, took over and kept more of the money for itself - a mob-like move.
> 
> N.B. #2 When the government came for the cigarette racket, it just took a giant cut in perpetuity (called "the Settlement"). It still lets the tobacco companies run the racket mainly because the optics of having the government own and run the cigarette business (as it does "the lottery") would be terrible. But in truth, the government is a "silent" partner with Big Tobacco - it's a very *Bullets or Ballots* partnership.


A great review from so many angles. I have not yet seen Bullets or Ballots, but trust me, it is on my list of must be watched movies. Thanks.


----------



## Fading Fast

*The Yellow Rolls-Royce* from 1964 with Rex Harrison, Ingrid Bergman, Omar Sharif, George C. Scott, Shirley MacLaine and Art Carney

The idea sounds great on paper: let's make a movie about an item, like a coat or a car, and show how it impacts the lives of its various owners over time. But instead, we see the difference between theory versus practice, as the two movies made on this premise - 1942's *Tales of Manhattan* and *The Yellow Rolls-Royce* - are both uneven efforts.

Both are also saved by their actors. Edward G. Robinson gives a powerful performance in *Tales of New York* and Rex Harrison and Ingrid Bergman, with others, hold a wobbly *The Yellow Rolls-Royce* up by dint of acting talent. *The Yellow Rolls-Royce* also gets a lift from accomplished writer Terence Rattigan's uncharacteristically uneven screenplay that still delivers moments of strong emotional impact amidst, well, a lot of schmaltz.

The car in question, a 1931 Rolls-Royce Phantom II - a cross between a military tank and a rolling luxury men's club, but painted yellow - starts life as a birthday gift from a middle-aged English Lord, Harrison, to his younger wife.

Ostensibly, they have the perfect marriage and life - true love, wealth, peerage and a winning race horse - but when Harrison, at the races with his wife, discovers her canoodling with a younger man in the Rolls' ample back seat, his world is shattered.

Driving back to the house after the "event -" effectively, Harrison is riding in the bed his wife cheated in - they both acknowledge divorce is out of the question owing to their position in society. So Harrison, with a British stiff-upper lip, carries on, but when his face cracks a few times, you feel his pain.

A few years later, in the schlockiest of the three vignettes, gangster George C. Scott buys the Rolls to drive his gum-smacking fiance, Shirley MacLaine, around Italy on vacation. With Scott's factotum, Art Carney as chauffeur - nicely playing the role, atypically for him, lowkey - the tour drags on until Scott has to go back to New York for a few weeks on business.

MacLaine then meets a young Italian photographer, falls in love - has a knee-knocking session in the back of the Rolls - and is torn between love and gangster money. But when Carney reminds her there is no breaking the engagement with mobster Scott, she sacrifices her Italian boyfriend's respect for her to save his life. It's a good moment in an otherwise weak Guys-and-Dolls segment.

Finally, the now less-than-pristine Yellow Rolls is bought in 1941 by wealthy American socialite Ingrid Bergman who blithely drives the car into Yugoslavia just ahead of the German invasion, imagining her American passport and connections make her invulnerable.

Along the way, she picks up Yugoslavian freedom fighter, Omar Sharif, who sees Bergman as a selfish, spoiled, rich American. Once in Yugoslavia, the Germans invade and Bergman - playing to the American stereotype of the time - drops the haughty airs, rolls up her sleeves and drives the Rolls herself to ferry resistance fighters around.

Sure, it's ridiculous, but still, watching Bergman at the wheel, barrelling down a mountain road with the resistance fighters hanging off both sides of the yellow Rolls as a German Stuka screams down and strafes them, you're rooting for her. And, yes, she and Sharif have "a moment" in the, by now, well-broken-in back seat of the car.

That's it and it's not great; although it's good in parts, but with a lot of cheesiness in between. There probably is a truly entertaining movie to be made about some physical item - a car, a coat or something - passing through several generations of owners, but it hasn't been made yet.


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## Fading Fast

*The Gangster* from 1947 with Barry Sullivan, Akim Tamiroff, Belita and Harry Morgan

Father: "A man's in trouble, we must help him."

Daughter: "No, let him pay for his sins."

If you go into *The Gangster* expecting a shoot-'em-up mob movie, you are going to be disappointed, but if you're in the mood for a mob parable with plenty of broken love stories woven in, this is your movie.

Barry Sullivan heads up a local boardwalk mob - mainly protection and numbers - but begins letting his control slip as he, in his damaged way, has fallen in love with actress/dancer wanna-be Belita (yup, like Cher, she's known by one name - nothing is new). He gives her everything - fancy apartment, jewels, furs, etc. - but is unable to trust anyone, so he acts cold and suspicious even toward her.

His always-nervous second, Akim Tamiroff, Greek-Chorus like, keeps warning Sullivan that another mob is trying to move in on him. Yet, Sullivan, with well, Greek hubris, believes he is untouchable, especially with the local politicians putatively in his pocket.

While the above narrative - a mob boss taking his eye off his business owing to a very, very blonde femme fatale - rolls on, a series of broken love stories plays out in Sullivan's typical-of-the-period 1940s local mob "headquarters," the boardwalk's ice-cream parlor. Candy shops, tobacco stores, barber shops and ice-cream parlors were some of the most interesting places in the 1930s and 1940s, especially their "back rooms."

In *The Gangster's* ice-cream parlor, a local accountant, John Ireland, who has embezzled money from his wife's father's business, spends most of the movie begging Sullivan and Tamiroff for a loan (to cover the embezzled funds before they are discovered), but these guys have been down this road with Ireland before, so it's no dice. Ireland's kind, but now, despairing wife knows her husband is a failure, but loves him anyway. It's a heartbreaking vignette of the old story of a good woman in love with a not-good man.

Bravado soda jerk, Henry Morgan, presents himself as a ladies man, but in truth, is desperately looking for love. He seems to find it with an older woman, yet, he is so wrapped up in his own image, he undermines his one chance at happiness by being unable to turn off his public persona even when alone with her. These are not young lovers, which leaves you feeling their last chance is slipping away.

Tamiroff, himself, is married to a hypochondriac he so loves, he indulges her endless doctor visits for mysterious illnesses. There is no cynicism or bitterness in his love, just kindness and affection.

Oddly but wonderfully playing the moral conscience of all this is eighteen-year-old ice-cream-parlor cashier Joan Lorring. Her youthful black-and-white morality is too rigid for real life's nuances and greyness, but serves to highlight all the compromise, lies, cheating and crooked dealing she sees everyday in the underworld-front ice-cream parlor. The exchange quoted at the top between her and her father, reveals a man who understands that life is rarely as ethically stark as his young daughter believes.

After unraveling all the above broken love stories, director Gordon Wiles pulls the plot back to Sullivan, his failing relationship with Belita and his crumbling mob empire. While the story of a mob boss neglecting his highly competitive business plays out pretty much as expected - the Greek Chorus, as usual, is right - there is one well-done final plot twist that will knock you back.

*The Ice-cream Parlor* would have been a better name for this odd mix of melodrama and film-noir gangster picture. Especially since the actual theme of *The Gangster* is how much real life, all driven by love, goes on amongst these seven or eight people loosely tied together by this one ice-cream parlor. But *The Gangster*, as a movie title, probably had much better box-office draw than *The Ice-cream Parlor*.

N.B. #1 Film noir needs on-location shooting to truly capture the grit, grime and verve of city streets. *The Gangster* loses noir points for its obvious sets, sometimes awkwardly framed against a background of stock footage of real street scenes. My kingdom for a location budget.

N.B. #2 Belita was a Sonja Henie type who found her way to Hollywood via ballet and, like Henie, ice-skating, but never became the major star that Henie did. However, at least in *The Gangster*, the value of her impressive legs was not lost on one Hollywood director.


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## Fading Fast

*Crazed Fruit* from 1956, a Japanese film

*Crazed Fruit* starts as an insightful but light commentary on the bored, rich youth of 1950s Japan that transitions, almost imperceptibly at first, into a destructive love-triangle tale fueled by deceit and biblical-level betrayal - and all in under an hour and a half.

When we meet the two late-teenage brothers Masahiko Tsugawa and Yujiro Ishihara, they are leaving for a summer vacation at their parents' beach house. The older one, Ishihara, is experienced with women, wine and song, but his only slightly younger brother, Tsugawa, is shy and innocent.

At the seaside community, they hang with a group of similarly bored, well-off, well-educated and disaffected teenagers. Like their rebellious-American-teen-spiritual cognates of that period (think *The Wild One* or *Rebel Without a Cause*), their dismissive comments say it all: "old ways are out," "we're not buying what they're selling," "Japan is a two-bit country," "it's a wasteland for the young," "we'll find our own way to live," "bored will be our creed."

As in America, for many, this is rebellion with a safety net as it all takes place from the comfort of their parents' upper-middle-class lifestyle and bankbook. All these kids are spending the summer, often unchaperoned, at their parents' very nice vacation homes. They have boats, sports cars and plenty of pocket money to spend their days water skiing and sunbathing and evenings going out to amusement parks and nightclubs.

1950s Japanese teen culture looks very similar to 1950s American teen culture (including the Hawaiian influences) with, naturally, Japanese characteristics. But as with older teenage boys everywhere, chasing girls is their main passtime. When younger brother, Tsugawa, meets a pretty and seemingly innocent young girl, Mie Kitahara, their chaste puppy love is made fun of by the more-experienced boys.

Then it all changes. One evening, when he's out nightclubbing with friends, older brother Ishihara sees Kitahara and she's with...wait for it...her American husband. Now the right thing to do is to tell your younger brother before he gets further involved.

Older brother Ishihara decides on another plan, which is to start sleeping with Kitahara who we now know is not even remotely innocent or sweet. Well, this is a big mess. Worse, proving the heart can be insanely stupid, Ishihara - who knows Kitahara's sordid morality - begins to fall in love with many-notches-on-her-bedpost Kitahara.

It's a brutal love triangle with a dotted fourth line to Kitahara's blind-to-it-all husband. (Spoiler alert) By the time it all spills out, as it always does, Ishihara is, against all better judgement, deeply in love with Kitahara, so much so, he deceives his brother right to the end when he tries to run away with Kitahara.

(More spoiler alerts) Younger brother Tsugawa, having, along the way, lost his virginity to Kitahara (she's the Energizer Bunny of sex in this one), is also deeply and innocently in love with Kitahara. Now it's a Cain-and-Abel moment over the love of a harlot.

The ending of *Crazed Fruit*, which you want to see fresh, is powerful and shocking even in a movie that has already shifted from a light-hearted story about spoiled teens to a tale of biblical-like brother betrayal amidst Eve-like temptation.

Bored, spoiled rich kids and teenage love going horribly wrong are themes familiar to almost any modern culture, so kudos to writer Shintaro Ishihara and director Ko Nakahira for making an outstanding film of universal and timeless appeal. A film, one assumes, that also had to be deeply shocking to culturally reserved 1950s Japan.

N.B. For us today, *Crazed Fruit* is also wonderful time travel to Japan's upper-middle-class teen culture of the 1950s. The American influences are everywhere from the dress (very Western, including baseball caps and Hawaiian shirts, which were the craze in America at that time, too) to the seaside amusement park the kids visit with its large American signs like "Play Land," "The Casino," and "Try You Luck."


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## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 68149
> 
> *Crazed Fruit* from 1956, a Japanese film
> 
> *Crazed Fruit* starts as an insightful but light commentary on the bored, rich youth of 1950s Japan that transitions, almost imperceptibly at first, into a destructive love-triangle tale fueled by deceit and biblical-level betrayal - and all in under an hour and a half.
> 
> When we meet the two late-teenage brothers Masahiko Tsugawa and Yujiro Ishihara, they are leaving for a summer vacation at their parents' beach house. The older one, Ishihara, is experienced with women, wine and song, but his only slightly younger brother, Tsugawa, is shy and innocent.
> 
> At the seaside community, they hang with a group of similarly bored, well-off, well-educated and disaffected teenagers. Like their rebellious-American-teen-spiritual cognates of that period (think *The Wild One* or *Rebel Without a Cause*), their dismissive comments say it all: "old ways are out," "we're not buying what they're selling," "Japan is a two-bit country," "it's a wasteland for the young," "we'll find our own way to live," "bored will be our creed."
> 
> As in America, for many, this is rebellion with a safety net as it all takes place from the comfort of their parents' upper-middle-class lifestyle and bankbook. All these kids are spending the summer, often unchaperoned, at their parents' very nice vacation homes. They have boats, sports cars and plenty of pocket money to spend their days water skiing and sunbathing and evenings going out to amusement parks and nightclubs.
> 
> 1950s Japanese teen culture looks very similar to 1950s American teen culture (including the Hawaiian influences) with, naturally, Japanese characteristics. But as with older teenage boys everywhere, chasing girls is their main passtime. When younger brother, Tsugawa, meets a pretty and seemingly innocent young girl, Mie Kitahara, their chaste puppy love is made fun of by the more-experienced boys.
> 
> Then it all changes. One evening, when he's out nightclubbing with friends, older brother Ishihara sees Kitahara and she's with...wait for it...her American husband. Now the right thing to do is to tell your younger brother before he gets further involved.
> 
> Older brother Ishihara decides on another plan, which is to start sleeping with Kitahara who we now know is not even remotely innocent or sweet. Well, this is a big mess. Worse, proving the heart can be insanely stupid, Ishihara - who knows Kitahara's sordid morality - begins to fall in love with many-notches-on-her-bedpost Kitahara.
> 
> It's a brutal love triangle with a dotted fourth line to Kitahara's blind-to-it-all husband. (Spoiler alert) By the time it all spills out, as it always does, Ishihara is, against all better judgement, deeply in love with Kitahara, so much so, he deceives his brother right to the end when he tries to run away with Kitahara.
> 
> (More spoiler alerts) Younger brother Tsugawa, having, along the way, lost his virginity to Kitahara (she's the Energizer Bunny of sex in this one), is also deeply and innocently in love with Kitahara. Now it's a Cain-and-Abel moment over the love of a harlot.
> 
> The ending of *Crazed Fruit*, which you want to see fresh, is powerful and shocking even in a movie that has already shifted from a light-hearted story about spoiled teens to a tale of biblical-like brother betrayal amidst Eve-like temptation.
> 
> Bored, spoiled rich kids and teenage love going horribly wrong are themes familiar to almost any modern culture, so kudos to writer Shintaro Ishihara and director Ko Nakahira for making an outstanding film of universal and timeless appeal. A film, one assumes, that also had to be deeply shocking to culturally reserved 1950s Japan.
> 
> N.B. For us today, *Crazed Fruit* is also wonderful time travel to Japan's upper-middle-class teen culture of the 1950s. The American influences are everywhere from the dress (very Western, including baseball caps and Hawaiian shirts, which were the craze in America at that time, too) to the seaside amusement park the kids visit with its large American signs like "Play Land," "The Casino," and "Try You Luck."


Tell me Crazed Fruit comes with sub-titles or with Englis dubbed in and I will commit to hunt it down and watch it...as soon as I can find a cheap copy (DVD, VHS, Cable, etc.) and watch it with great interest. It is available on Amazon for $54.95 (for a used copy, no less). Hopefully You Tube will come through with Crazed Fruit on their agenda! Was Kitahara's conduct driven by an immoral character or perhaps a sense of overwhelming guilt over her having married an American soldier? I sense the emotional currents in this one run ever so deep....yes, no? Great review, BTW.


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## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> Tell me Crazed Fruit comes with sub-titles or with Englis dubbed in and I will commit to hunt it down and watch it...as soon as I can find a cheap copy (DVD, VHS, Cable, etc.) and watch it with great interest. It is available on Amazon for $54.95 (for a used copy, no less). Hopefully You Tube will come through with Crazed Fruit on their agenda! Was Kitahara's conduct driven by an immoral character or perhaps a sense of overwhelming guilt over her having married an American soldier? I sense the emotional currents in this one run ever so deep....yes, no? Great review, BTW.


Thank you.

It had English subtitles as my Japanese falls off a cliff after three to four words. 

Kitahara seemed more like a young girl who had married too soon and still wanted to have teenage fun and not be a married woman. There was a small subtext of Japanese disdain for American husbands, but it wasn't a big part of this story. Also, she seemed to really like having sex with different men - not a bad thing in and off itself, except when you're married to one man and in a committed relationship with another.

If you can find it for a reasonable price like <$5, it's well worth it.


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## Fading Fast

*Edge of Darkness* from 1943 with Ann Sheridan, Errol Flynn and Walter Huston

As with so many things, the term _propaganda_was bent, even broken, by Nazi Germany. Originally, the word had a neutral connotation and meant the spreading of one's views and ideas, but by the time the Nazis were done with it, it became a derisive word meaning a dishonest or deceitful promotion of one's viewpoint.

Yet, propaganda can, or at least used to be able to, serve a noble purpose as seen in the many Hollywood WWII propaganda movies, which supported the Allies' war effort, promoted democracy and inspired hope the world over.

*Edge of Darkness* is one such positive propaganda effort. Set in a small fishing village in occupied Norway during WWII, there is an uneasy modus vivendi between the Norwegian citizens and the German garrison. When the movie opens, Errol Flynn and Ann Sheridan are leading an aborning underground Norwegian resistance movement.

While most of the Norwegian citizens are with them, a few are "Quislings" (traitors) such as the owner of the local cannery who just wants to keep his profits flowing, Sheridan's brother who lacks the fortitude of character to resist and a polish woman who keeps company with a German officer as she just wants life to be "nice" again.

There are also those who aren't collaborating, but who don't want an active resistance. Sheridan's father, the town's doctor, played by Walter Huston and the town's priest both want to avoid "useless" loss of life. Right or wrong, they have a point arguing that German reprisals aren't worth it (the Germans kill multiple Norwegians for every German soldier that is killed). They believe that Norway should just wait out the German occupation.

The resistance itself is waiting for a shipment of arms from England who supposedly is supplying the entire Norwegian coast so that a coordinated uprising can take place at one time. Meanwhile, tensions in the town increase as the German commander claps down by shutting the cannery and shipping out to Germany most of the food and other necessities of daily life.

*Edge of Darkness* captures the fear and humiliation of being occupied even if most of the characters are archetypes and the dialogue speechy. But fitting the somber tone of the movie and their roles as serious resistance leaders, Flynn and Sheridan keep their star personalities in check.

After Sheridan is brutally raped and beaten by a German soldier - this is no soft-touch *Mrs. Miniver* propaganda movie - Flynn and many others in the movement want to launch the attack. Yet calmer heads, led by Sheridan, prevail as the resistance members decide to wait for the coordinated effort. At several critical turns in *Edge of Darkness*, women are fighters and leaders (the past was never as black and white as is often believed today).

(Spoiler alert) When the attack comes, everyone, including the old men and women and the former fence sitters, join in the dramatic and bloody battle that sees most of the town and most of the garrison wiped out. In the closing scene, Flynn and Sheridan lead the remaining resistance fighters into the surrounding woods where they will stage guerilla raids on the newly arriving German troops.

*Edge of Darkness* is propaganda at its best. The world was, well, on the edge of darkness, with large and small democratic countries back on their heels as evil totalitarian regimes advance. Movies like these draw stark but not unfair lines while encouraging and inspiring the free people of the world to support the war effort however they can.

*Edge of Darkness'* director, Lewis Milestone, is famous for being the director of one of the most passionately anti-war films ever made, 1930's *All Quiet on the Western Front*. By subsequently directing the pro-military, pro-resistance film *Edge of Darkness*, he effectively embodied the well-known quote (sometimes mis-attributed to John Maynard Keynes), "When the facts change, I change my mind, what do you do, sir?"

Sitting in the safety of a movie theater in America in 1943 or your home in 2021, Milestone's *Edge of Darkness* forces you to ask yourself the same question Milestone clearly asked himself: what would I do? Maybe that's propaganda, but any movie that can challenge you so directly, even nearly eight decades after it was made, is also art.


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## Fading Fast

*Macao* from 1952 with Robert Mitchum, Jane Russell, William Bendix, Gloria Grahame, Thomas Gomez and Brad Dexter

Even ten years after its release, you can still feel *Casablanca's* influence all over this RKO-Howard Hughes effort suffering from too many cooks in the kitchen (several writers, three directors and endless Hughes tinkering).

While *Casablanca* was able to overcome its too-many-chefs challenge, *Casablanca* was a moon shot; in *Macao*, all you end up with is some good parts of a never-fully-engaging story.

Robert Mitchum, Jane Russell and William Bendix meet on the boat to Macao carrying, like expats everywhere, aliases, legal issues, baggage and/or chips on their shoulder.

Once in Macao, all three get mixed up with a shady local nightclub and casino operator, poorly-cast-and-wooden Brad Dexter (he's no Bogie from *Casablanca*), plus a crooked cop on his payroll, Thomas Gomez, and Dexter's gal factotum, Gloria Grahame (outshining star Russell in the looks department).

It's a not-complicated story made unnecessarily confusing inorder to add mystery and intrigue. Dexter is wanted by the US authorities, but is openly hiding in Macao, because it doesn't have an extradition treaty with the US.

Bendix is an undercover cop trying to force Dexter out of Macao. He uses both Mitchum - who is a persona non grata in the US for, maybe, killing a guy who was snaking his girl - and Russell - a nightclub singer who's been knocked around a bit - to help lure Dexter to Hong Kong. The hook is a stolen jewel Dexter is trying to fence in Hong Kong, which unknown to Dexter, the police already have in its possession.

After a lot of running around *Macao* (on sets shot against on-location background footage, sigh), some bed hopping, Russell and Mitchum fighting while falling in love, a few murders, plenty of smoking, gambling and head bonking, (spoiler alerts) Dexter gets flushed out of Macao, the US gets its man and Mitchum gets Russell.

*Macao* is *Casablanca* after a turn or two in the food processor: desperate foreigners in an exotic local with corrupt officials, malleable laws, a nightclub/casino, rigged gambling (is there any other kind?), fenced jewelry, plenty of heavies, many cocktails and nobody, rightfully, trusting anybody.

At eighty minutes in runtime, *Macao* is serviceable enough entertainment, but it's just too much echoing of *Casablanca*, without the famous movie's soul, to be anything more. Howard Hughes bought a studio and, then, almost never let his top talent make a picture without him mucking it up. I guess it's an example of "his money, his rules," which is fine from a legal perspective, but not a great formula for filmmaking.

N.B. A Jane Russell speed round: One, in her, I see the best looking man in drag ever (Howard Hughes and many others, obviously, felt differently, especially about her breasts, which get ample camera time in *Macao*); two, you can hardly listen to her version of *One for My Baby* without Sinatra's later and iconic version eclipsing it in your mind and, three, I bet she didn't have to act to show her script-called-for antipathy toward better-looking Gloria Grahame.


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## Fading Fast

*High Barbaree* from 1947 with Van Johnson, June Allyson and Thomas Mitchell

*High Barbaree* is a post-WWII movie that sees faith - not necessarily religion, but faith - as a way to survive and, maybe, even take something positive away from the war experience. It's post-war propaganda done with good intent.

A shot-down navy pilot, Van Johnson, tells his life story to his one surviving crewmate as they pass the days drifting in their lost and floating seaplane. Johnson had a typical childhood (if you accept that an idyllic Midwest childhood, in a nice house, with loving parents, plenty of food, good medical care and a college education was typical of growing up in Depression-era America).

This early "normal" childhood was spent, Tom-Sawyer like, with his best friend, the girl next door, romping around the countryside and planning their future: he was to become a doctor, she; a nurse. A fun uncle, a sailor, pops in from time to time to tell tales of his adventures and a place called "High Barbaree," a "lost" island of simple paradise.

But then the girl next door's family moves away and we jump forward to Johnson's early pre-war adult life where he's left medical school, "takes too long for too little reward." Instead, he is now a successful young executive in an airplane manufacturing company owned, not coincidentally, by his fiance's father.

His childhood friend, June Allyson, who's become a young nurse as planned, re-enters his life, effectively, to remind him of their childhood dreams, including his desire to become a physician. As happens in the magic of movies, a tornado blows in, isolating Johnson and Allyson in the storm-damaged and, now, almost doctor-less community where he uses his aborted medical training to help victims. You can see where this is going, right?

But before the happy ending, Allyson and Johnson get separated at the start of the war, which brings us back to Johnson and his crewmate floating in the Pacific without water or much hope of rescue.

While Johnson recounts his above noted life story to his crewmate, they are also trying to sail (with parachutes rigged to catch and direct the wind) their floating plane to "High Barbaree" based on where Johnson's uncle told him it was.

The island of "High Barbaree" is the idea that keeps them fighting to survive. It's utopia or paradise or heaven or Shangri-La or whatever you call the place of your dreams.

(Spoiler alerts for the next two paragraphs) When they arrive at "High Barbaree's" location and don't see the island, Johnson's skeptical crewmate gives out - he never really believed - but Johnson, even with his confidence rattled, still has hope as he passes out.

Just over the horizon is the rescue ship, captained by Johnson's uncle (this movie is unapologetically sentimental), that saves Johnson's life and reunites him with Allyson. Next up, Johnson marries Allyson and resumes his study of medicine.

*High Barbaree* is shameless in its idealized portrayal of pre-war America, of it's belief in the power of faith (or dreams, or prayer) and in its arrantly happy ending. What Johnson and all of us learn is "High Barbaree" isn't a physical place, but a state of mind, a belief in a good future that Johnson was only able to find by never truly losing faith through all his struggles in war.

There are much more realistic post-war movies, like *The Best Years of our Lives *or *Till the End of Time*, which show the immense physical and psychological challenges many returning veterans faced. Yet there is also a place for simpler and happier tales of faith and hope. *High Barbaree* does a respectable job delivering just such faith and hope from its pleasant little corner of post-war-movie propaganda.


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## Fading Fast

*The Hustler*from 1961 with Paul Newman, George C. Scott, Piper Laurie and Jackie Gleason

This is what a movie should be. Paul Newman is a talented, cocky, young pool hustler who possesses top-tier professional skills, but is still an amateur at the strategy and hustle of the game at that level.

*The Hustler* is two wonderful hours of watching Newman get educated in the psychology, the human-versus-human game playing, of both pool and life. Physical skills will only take you so far; the greats play an even better mental game. As Newman learns this, he wrecks one woman and nearly wrecks himself.

After we see Newman hussle a few good pool players, he chooses to go up against the reigning king of pool, Minnesota Fats, played with wonderful nuance by Jackie Gleason giving not one hint of Ralph Kramden. Their forty-hour match requires skill, endurance and a deep understanding of the game.

Newman has more skill, less endurance and less understanding of the game of pool than Gleason, who turns a large loss half way through into a large win by wearing Newman down physically, but even more so, mentally.

When Newman wakes up the next day broke and hungover in his hotel room, he walks out on his longtime manager and wanders into a bus stop to store all his worldly possessions in one locker. In a scene out of an Edward Hopper painting, Newman sits next to the only other customer in the bus stop's large coffee shop in the pre-dawn hours.

Piper Laurie seems as lost as Newman with her sad eyes, slight limp and, as we quickly learn, drinking problem. After a little "yes-no" back and forth, these two broken and lost people begin an affair with Newman moving into Laurie's dilapidated apartment.

While they experience some of the joy and fun of new love, the apartment is heavy with each other's emotional baggage and failure. Laurie is fighting the bottle while struggling as a writer; Newman is emotionally shattered from his crushing defeat against Gleason. Yet somehow, these two are good together when their demons don't have them lashing out at each other.

Newman, in a self-destructive attempt at reviving his pool career, overplays his hand in a game and is beaten up by the players who see they were hustled. With both thumbs now broken, Newman hits rock bottom.

Enter George C. Scott - gambler, manager, manipulator, mob boss (maybe) - who witnessed Newman's defeat at the hands of Gleason. He offers to manage Newman for a seventy-five percent cut! You pay for a manager that can bring you back from the gutter and get you into the high-stakes games.

After saying "no," Newman's first thought is always the wrong one, he and Scott, with Laurie in tow, go on the road to begin Newman's rehabilitation. Laurie, while unable to fix her own problems, sees clearly both Newman's shortcomings and Scott venality, but "the men" dismiss her.

Newman, in his first real outing under Scott and losing, lashes out at the people trying to help him, deeply wounding Laurie and alienating Scott. Back at the hotel with Newman absent, a late-night showdown between Laurie and Scott ends tragically. (Spoiler alert) After Scott seduces a drunk and emotionally spinning Laurie into bed, she kills herself in his bathroom. She needed kindness, but was physically used and mentally abused by both men.

In the movie's climax (more spoilers), Newman shows up at the poolhall asking for another showdown with Gleason; this time he wins. Yes, the cocky kid has learned how to play all aspects of the game and, maybe, even life, but at the cost of Laurie's life.

In a final showdown with Scott, he seems to win the battle as he keeps the money he took off of Gleason - no cut for Scott - and is allowed to walk out of the poolhall unharmed, but loses the war as Scott bans him from big-time pool.

With its grimy and smoke-filled pool halls, shabby tenement apartments and everybody hustling everybody else (except for Laurie, who deserved better), 1960's *The Hustler* is the pool-hall cognate of 1957's *The Sweet Smell of Success*. Both are tales of venal people, living in a seedy world, where the few decent human beings get used and discarded.

*The Hustler's* director Robert Rossen probably saw *The Sweet Smell of Success*, but he might not have, as movies reflect their times. By the late 1950s, Hollywood had sussed out that America was ready for an unvarnished look at its darkest corners. A look not presented in a traditional noir package where the bad people eventually get punished, but a much-worse world, where, as in *The Hustler,* it's the good people who lose.


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## Fading Fast

*Rafter Romance* from 1933 with Ginger Rogers, Norman Foster, George Sidney and Robert Benchley

After the Motion Picture Production Code was enforce in 1934, you can understand why silly "screwball" comedies got made as Hollywood was trying to solve the unsolvable: how do you make movies about sex when the code only allows for sex in marriage and, then, still doesn't even like much said about it. But why make a pre-code screwball comedy?

The ridiculous premise in *Rafter Romance* is that two tenants - a man, Norman Foster, and woman, Ginger Rogers - are forced by their limited funds to share an attic apartment where they never meet as each one gets the apartment for a strict twelve hours a day (he works nights, she; days).

This silly idea came from their, basically, kind landlord who has been carrying each one of them for several months because he doesn't have the heart to throw them out.

The landlord is a wonderful example of pre-code movies' willingness to take a reasonably honest look at the variety of ethnicity in America that would be all but scrubbed out once the code was enforced.

In *Rafter Romance*, a very ethnically Jewish landlord, George Sidney, is allowed to be a very ethnically Jewish landlord. Sidney and his wife use one after another Yiddish words (James Cagney would be proud*). It's not an ugly stereotype, as he is a kind man who gives his tenants too much extra time to pay their rent.

Back in the silly story, Rogers and Foster begin playing meaner and meaner pranks on the other in their shared apartment. Eventually, they come to loathe each other even though they've never met.

Yet, not knowing who the other is, they meet outside the building by accident and start dating. It's almost an early version of *Shop Around the Corner*, which is an early version of *You've Got Mail*. Everything has antecedents.

From here, it's all a bunch of goofy pratfalls and misunderstandings, including even dumber side stories about Rogers' boss, Robert Benchley, hitting on Rogers (not acceptable today, but he really comes across as harmless) and Foster, an aspiring artist, having an older female patron looking for him to be more gigolo than painter.

*Rafter Romance* ends as expected with, after more misunderstandings and hurt feelings, Rogers and Foster getting together because they really do love each other.

Once the code was enforced, this kind of silly movie would be an understandable effort to overcome censorship. Yet, there is no reason to make this fluff when, for a brief (pre-code) four years in the early 1930s, Hollywood was allowed to make adult movies about sex, affairs, love, cheating, romance and heartbreak.










* In 1931's movie *Taxi*, Irish James Cagney, who, in real life, had grown up in an ethnically mixed NYC Lower East Side neighborhood, wonderfully serves as translator for an Irish cop trying to understand an "old world" Jewish man speaking Yiddish. Cagney, clearly having real fun, speaks warp-speed Yiddish with the Jewish man. It's a wonderful scene of early and honest multiculturalism.

Cagney speaking Yiddish in Taxi:


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## Fading Fast

*Finishing School* form 1934 with Frances Dee, Ginger Rogers, Billy Burke and John Halliday

A "finishing school" was a place where late-teenage women from "proper" families went to get a little bit of real education, while learning upper-class social norms and manners (one can't imagine these schools even exist anymore). As presented here, the school couldn't be more snobbish, but even if exaggerated by Hollywood, it's hard to see how these places wouldn't be pretentious and precious.

Using the school almost as a foil, the movie has some surprising grit and realism as most of the girls who attend see it as a joke. They mock the teachers and oh-so-mannered headmistress, while making fun of the few girls who take the school seriously.

One of the girls, clearly "nouveau riche," tries to hide that fact from the other girls, but her "less refined" manners keep giving her away, Because she's faking it, the other girls constantly needle her about it as kids at regular schools treat anyone exaggerating or faking it. Had the girl been honest about her background, you believe she'd have been accepted by most of the other kids.

The school's sub-rosa motto is appearance over substance. So, when Frances Dee, a new student, starts dating a boy "not of her class," the headmistress works with Dee's mother, Billy Burke (playing yet another ditzy, wealthy and put-upon mother) to break up the affair. The snobbish upper class circles its wagons in a hurry.

The boy Dee is dating is a medical intern working as a hotel waiter to support himself. He is unacceptable to these stuffy, pretentious women as he's simply not of the "right class."

However, Dee's father, John Halliday, the guy who makes all the money so that his wife can be a snob and his daughter can attend this silly school (Dad was against it), has no issue with his daughter dating a "regular" decent guy, as long as he's good to her.

That's the setup and, pretty much, the entire story in this short (seventy-three minutes), fast-moving affair. While the politics isn't shouted out, especially by modern-day Hollywood standards, the message is very Depression Era: the social-registry class is playing a nonsensical insular game of elitism with its stupid finishing schools, while the rest of the country is trying, very hard, just to make a living.

*Finishing School* is nothing more than a B movie from a B studio (RKO), but Frances Dee's performance as a girl torn between her heart and a combination of filial and institutional pressures is engaging and realistic. In the end, it's fun to see her, with an assist from her father and boyfriend, bring down the too-please-with-themselves snobs.

N.B. Look for a very young and on-the-cusp-of-stardom Ginger Rogers (far left in pic at top) as Frances Dee's roommate; you can't miss Roger's screen personality. Plus, she's rockin' one heck of a twenty-three-year-old body.


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## Fading Fast

*The Brothers Rico* from 1957 with Richard Conte, Dianne Foster and Larry Gates

"Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in."

- Michael Corleone in *The Godfather: Part III*

Long before Al Pacino uttered that famous mob-movie phrase, Richard Conte (Barzini from *The Godfather*) found out just how hard it is to stay out in 1957's *The Brothers Rico*.

Having "retired" from the mob, married and now running a successful wholesale dry cleaning business in Florida, Conte, is "asked" by the big mob boss to find one of Conte's brothers (there are three brothers Rico in all - and all were/are in the mob) who is rumored to be ready to turn state's evidence.

The big boss tells Conte that he just wants to get his brother safely out of the country so that he can't testify. Conte doesn't really want to get involved, but agrees to do this one last job to help his former boss and his brother. Plus, he really couldn't say no since you're never really "out."

Conte's search for his brother brings him back to his old NYC neighborhood where we meet his traditional Italian immigrant mother and grandmother and learn that the Rico boys started in the mob as young kids. Conte, though, was only a mob accountant, never in on the rough stuff - which, we'll learn, is tomayto-tomahto to the mob.

From New York, Conti flies to California where his brother is hiding out on a farm. On a stopover in Phoenix on the way, he meets the West Coast mob boss, wonderfully played by Harry Bellaver, and his second in command, Rudy Bond.

These two laid-back mob guys are the gem tucked inside this excellent movie. Wearing cowboy hats and bolo ties, they are a fantastic blend of New York mob tough and West Coast chill. You can't help almost liking them even though they are killers.

When Conte learns, what the viewer knew all along, the mob has no intention of letting his brother get away, the West Coast boys deliver the message to him with a cold equanimity that boils down to another *Godfather* quote: "It's not personal Sonny, it's strictly business."

With his brother dead, Conte goes rogue from the mob trying to escape the country with his wife and money. After a classic showdown between Conte and his old boss, the Motion Picture Production Code slaps a reasonably happy ending on the movie. One doubts audiences were buying that ending then anymore than they would today.

*The Brothers Rico* is an outstanding inside-baseball mob picture. It's so inside there are almost no police or government officials involved. All the conflict is mob versus mob as the big boss struggles to enforce discipline.

The most-famous mob movie of them all, 1972's *The Godfather*, wasn't an immaculate conception; it was, as we see here, the culmination of decades of impressive mob movies like *The Brothers Rico*.


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## Fading Fast

And the Christmas movie-watching season has begun.

*
Miracle on 34th Street* from 1947 with Edmund Gwenn, Maureen O'Hara, John Payne and Natalie Wood

*Miracle on 34th Street* boldly goes to the core of our modern Christmas, the Santa Claus story, and asks the one question that matters: real or fake / belief or disbelief / miracle or lunacy?

Maureen O'Hara, Macy's manager in charge of the Thanksgiving Day Parade, the parade that ends with Santa driving his sleigh of reindeer down Broadway to kick off the Christmas season, is a firm nonbeliever. This war widow is raising her young daughter, Natalie Wood, to be a "rational" thinker and not believe in "nonsense" like Santa.

Enter Kris Kringle, Edmund Gwenn, a last-minute parade substitute for the unfortunately inebriated Santa originally slated to drive the sleigh. Gwenn is so believable as Santa, that Macy's hires him to be its store Santa for the holiday. Gwenn "feels" to others like the real Santa, believes he is Santa and cheerfully dismisses doubters like O'Hara and daughter Wood.

With O'Hara's next door neighbor - young, handsome, single lawyer, John Payne, a firm believer in Christmas - as his ally, Gwenn tries to bring some Christmas spirit to the non-believing O'Hara and Wood household.

Gwenn/Santa is a hit with the kids and parents at Macy's, even striking a blow against commercialism as he encourages Macy's to send customers to other stores for items if Macy's doesn't have what they want. It's a confused meta-business message, but a nice sentiment for Macy's to project at the holiday.

Gwenn, unfortunately, encounters resistance at Macy's from the store's therapist (really, they had those at one time?) who believes Gwenn is a dangerous and delusional old man.

Gwenn's cheerfulness, kindness of heart, sincere belief in his identity and general good will, along with some perfect Christmas-magic moments, like his speaking the native tongue, Dutch, of a lonely adopted war refugee, has O'Hara and Wood questioning their dismissal of Christmas.

Just as they are starting to believe, the store's therapist manages to get Gwenn committed to Bellevue prompting Payne to jump in as Gwenn's lawyer, leading to a trial to determine if Gwenn is really Santa.

The local political machine, supporting the trial judge, doesn't want a ruling "against" Santa (that's bad for vote getting). In response, the judge, to the exasperation of the prosecutor, allows his ruling to turn on whether or not Payne can show Gwenn has been "officially" acknowledged as Santa.

In the movie's money moment, the Post Office delivers to Gwenn, at the courtroom, mail sack upon mail sack of letters to Santa; hence, putting the Post Office's imprimatur on Gwenn as Santa. The gavel comes down and Gwenn is ruled to be the real-deal Santa. All cheer as true-believer-all-along Payne and no-longer-doubting O'Hara get together.

The beauty of writer Valentine Davies and writer/director George Seaton's movie is the wonderful balance they strike in having Gwenn seem like both the true incarnation of Santa for kids and the representation of the Christmas spirit for adults. This adult, though, votes with the kids.

Why there even is a question makes no sense, but nonbelievers gotta do their thing, so movies like *Miracle on 34th Street* gotta do theirs by proving that Santa Claus and Christmas are real. It's hard to imagine a better Santa than Edmund Gwenn, just as it's hard to imagine a movie with more Christmas-perfect whimsy than *Miracle on 34th Street*.


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## Fading Fast

*The Notorious Landlady* from 1962 with Jack Lemmon, Kim Novak and Fred Astaire (not dancing)

Fred Astaire meeting, for the first time, the notorious landlady and arresting beauty Kim Novak, who's been hounded by the police and press over her missing husband:

Astaire (understatedly): Your photographs don't really do you justice.

Novak (more understatedly): Well, the lighting's not terrible good in police stations.

Astaire (even more understatedly): Yes, I'm sure.

Done as a comedy with a little drama mixed in, *The Notorious Landlady* too often drifts into farce. Had writers Blake Edwards and Larry Gelbart, with director Richard Quine, made a drama with a little less comedy, they'd have made a better movie.

*The Notorious Lady* does answer the question of what would Jack Lemmon's character from the 1960 movie *The Apartment *be like if he left the insurance business, went into the diplomatic service and was stationed in London.

Career civil servant Lemmon, seemingly wearing the same period "corporate" wardrobe (grey sack suits, white pin-collar shirts and skinny dark ties) as in *The Apartment*, is an up-and-coming diplomat who just received a plum appointment to London.

After being warned by his boss, Fred Astaire, to keep his personal and professional life clean, he rents an apartment in the house of, unbeknownst to him, a notorious American, Kim Novack, rumored by the press and neighbors to have killed her husband.

Immediately smitten by super-adorable Novak, Lemmon jumps to her defense when boss Astaire notes she is a bad choice of a landlady for a young man looking to rise in the service.

Lemmon (he's got his priorities right) proceeds to get closer to Novak, who periodically behaves in a suspicious maybe-I-did-kill-my-husband way, while Scotland Yard follows both of them, often reporting back to Astaire on their activities.

Astaire, initially looking to fire Lemmon for this indiscretion, meets and becomes so smitten with Novak (see the opening quote at the top), he ends up partnering with Lemmon to try to prove her innocence.

It's a not-bad story, which unfortunately, often relies on silliness, pratfalls and screwball comedy. There's too much, "who has the poison," things accidentally being lit on fire, hiding in rooms behind curtains and other such goofiness detracting from the "did she or didn't she off her husband" good core story.

Just when you are getting engrossed in anything - Novak and Lemmon's relationship, his on-the-ropes career or her mysterious behavior - a Keystone Cop routine breaks out to undermine the drama.

Even in the movie's penultimate climatic scene - a courtroom appearance by Lemmon and Novak to determine if she actually did kill her husband - there's too-much slapstick weakening the tension.

More challenging, the final big scene, where they chase down the bad guys (two old women in this case), is full-force farce with people running around in a style familiar to 1920s movie audiences.

Novak, Lemmon and Astaire are talented-enough actors to keep this sometimes enjoyable effort afloat. It's not that *The Notorious Landlady* is a bad movie, but you can't help thinking, if they had just turned the dial toward more drama and less comedy, they'd have made a much better picture.


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## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 70125
> 
> *The Notorious Landlady* from 1962 with Jack Lemmon, Kim Novak and Fred Astaire (not dancing)
> 
> Fred Astaire meeting, for the first time, the notorious landlady and arresting beauty Kim Novak, who's been hounded by the police and press over her missing husband:
> 
> Astaire (understatedly): Your photographs don't really do you justice.
> 
> Novak (more understatedly): Well, the lighting's not terrible good in police stations.
> 
> Astaire (even more understatedly): Yes, I'm sure.
> 
> Done as a comedy with a little drama mixed in, *The Notorious Landlady* too often drifts into farce. Had writers Blake Edwards and Larry Gelbart, with director Richard Quine, made a drama with a little less comedy, they'd have made a better movie.
> 
> *The Notorious Lady* does answer the question of what would Jack Lemmon's character from the 1960 movie *The Apartment *be like if he left the insurance business, went into the diplomatic service and was stationed in London.
> 
> Career civil servant Lemmon, seemingly wearing the same period "corporate" wardrobe (grey sack suits, white pin-collar shirts and skinny dark ties) as in *The Apartment*, is an up-and-coming diplomat who just received a plum appointment to London.
> 
> After being warned by his boss, Fred Astaire, to keep his personal and professional life clean, he rents an apartment in the house of, unbeknownst to him, a notorious American, Kim Novack, rumored by the press and neighbors to have killed her husband.
> 
> Immediately smitten by super-adorable Novak, Lemmon jumps to her defense when boss Astaire notes she is a bad choice of a landlady for a young man looking to rise in the service.
> 
> Lemmon (he's got his priorities right) proceeds to get closer to Novak, who periodically behaves in a suspicious maybe-I-did-kill-my-husband way, while Scotland Yard follows both of them, often reporting back to Astaire on their activities.
> 
> Astaire, initially looking to fire Lemmon for this indiscretion, meets and becomes so smitten with Novak (see the opening quote at the top), he ends up partnering with Lemmon to try to prove her innocence.
> 
> It's a not-bad story, which unfortunately, often relies on silliness, pratfalls and screwball comedy. There's too much, "who has the poison," things accidentally being lit on fire, hiding in rooms behind curtains and other such goofiness detracting from the "did she or didn't she off her husband" good core story.
> 
> Just when you are getting engrossed in anything - Novak and Lemmon's relationship, his on-the-ropes career or her mysterious behavior - a Keystone Cop routine breaks out to undermine the drama.
> 
> Even in the movie's penultimate climatic scene - a courtroom appearance by Lemmon and Novak to determine if she actually did kill her husband - there's too-much slapstick weakening the tension.
> 
> More challenging, the final big scene, where they chase down the bad guys (two old women in this case), is full-force farce with people running around in a style familiar to 1920s movie audiences.
> 
> Novak, Lemmon and Astaire are talented-enough actors to keep this sometimes enjoyable effort afloat. It's not that *The Notorious Landlady* is a bad movie, but you can't help thinking, if they had just turned the dial toward more drama and less comedy, they'd have made a much better picture.
> 
> View attachment 70131


A great review of a movie I have not yet seen, but you have determined the Notorious Landlady to be a bad movie. So many questions remain unanswered.....do Astaire and Lemmon clear the good ladies name? Do either of these silver screen horn dogs get the girl? What was the catalyst for Novak's screen husbands death? Should we sacrifice a few hours of our lives to watch this movie or should we laugh with joy, realizing that we have avoided wasting these hours of life energy on a movie that should have been left stored in the can.. Inquiring minds want to know! What say you. LOL.


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## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 68823
> 
> *High Barbaree* from 1947 with Van Johnson, June Allyson and Thomas Mitchell
> 
> *High Barbaree* is a post-WWII movie that sees faith - not necessarily religion, but faith - as a way to survive and, maybe, even take something positive away from the war experience. It's post-war propaganda done with good intent.
> 
> A shot-down navy pilot, Van Johnson, tells his life story to his one surviving crewmate as they pass the days drifting in their lost and floating seaplane. Johnson had a typical childhood (if you accept that an idyllic Midwest childhood, in a nice house, with loving parents, plenty of food, good medical care and a college education was typical of growing up in Depression-era America).
> 
> This early "normal" childhood was spent, Tom-Sawyer like, with his best friend, the girl next door, romping around the countryside and planning their future: he was to become a doctor, she; a nurse. A fun uncle, a sailor, pops in from time to time to tell tales of his adventures and a place called "High Barbaree," a "lost" island of simple paradise.
> 
> But then the girl next door's family moves away and we jump forward to Johnson's early pre-war adult life where he's left medical school, "takes too long for too little reward." Instead, he is now a successful young executive in an airplane manufacturing company owned, not coincidentally, by his fiance's father.
> 
> His childhood friend, June Allyson, who's become a young nurse as planned, re-enters his life, effectively, to remind him of their childhood dreams, including his desire to become a physician. As happens in the magic of movies, a tornado blows in, isolating Johnson and Allyson in the storm-damaged and, now, almost doctor-less community where he uses his aborted medical training to help victims. You can see where this is going, right?
> 
> But before the happy ending, Allyson and Johnson get separated at the start of the war, which brings us back to Johnson and his crewmate floating in the Pacific without water or much hope of rescue.
> 
> While Johnson recounts his above noted life story to his crewmate, they are also trying to sail (with parachutes rigged to catch and direct the wind) their floating plane to "High Barbaree" based on where Johnson's uncle told him it was.
> 
> The island of "High Barbaree" is the idea that keeps them fighting to survive. It's utopia or paradise or heaven or Shangri-La or whatever you call the place of your dreams.
> 
> (Spoiler alerts for the next two paragraphs) When they arrive at "High Barbaree's" location and don't see the island, Johnson's skeptical crewmate gives out - he never really believed - but Johnson, even with his confidence rattled, still has hope as he passes out.
> 
> Just over the horizon is the rescue ship, captained by Johnson's uncle (this movie is unapologetically sentimental), that saves Johnson's life and reunites him with Allyson. Next up, Johnson marries Allyson and resumes his study of medicine.
> 
> *High Barbaree* is shameless in its idealized portrayal of pre-war America, of it's belief in the power of faith (or dreams, or prayer) and in its arrantly happy ending. What Johnson and all of us learn is "High Barbaree" isn't a physical place, but a state of mind, a belief in a good future that Johnson was only able to find by never truly losing faith through all his struggles in war.
> 
> There are much more realistic post-war movies, like *The Best Years of our Lives *or *Till the End of Time*, which show the immense physical and psychological challenges many returning veterans faced. Yet there is also a place for simpler and happier tales of faith and hope. *High Barbaree* does a respectable job delivering just such faith and hope from its pleasant little corner of post-war-movie propaganda.
> 
> View attachment 68825


Excellent review of a movie I have not yet seen, but based on your comments I have added it to my 'must be watched' list. I am intriqued by the promise of a movie based on the working of one's mind and heart, rather that on the efforts of their hands and unsettled emotions! Take care and have a great weekend.


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## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> A great review of a movie I have not yet seen, but you have determined the Notorious Landlady to be a bad movie. So many questions remain unanswered.....do Astaire and Lemmon clear the good ladies name? Do either of these silver screen horn dogs get the girl? What was the catalyst for Novak's screen husbands death? Should we sacrifice a few hours of our lives to watch this movie or should we laugh with joy, realizing that we have avoided wasting these hours of life energy on a movie that should have been left stored in the can.. Inquiring minds want to know! What say you. LOL.


Even when it was over, I was on the fence. I enjoyed Novak's, Lemmon's and Astaire's performances, but the story was too silly for me to really like the movie. I'd only watch it if you enjoy those stars a lot and have two hours you don't mind killing watching silly material.


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## Fading Fast

*Captain Horatio Hornblower*from 1951 with Gregory Peck, Virginia Mayo and Robert Beatty

*Captain Horatio Hornblower* is swashbuckling fun. In the 1930s, Hollywood put out some of the best swashbucklers of all time, with stars Errol Flynn, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and others creating iconic "pirates" and "captains" that still work as fun action-adventure movies today.

In 1951, Gregory Peck picked up the swashbuckling baton from that earlier era to deliver a classic seafaring adventure in *Captain Horatio Hornblower*. Historical accuracy and realism are not these movies' stock in trade; instead, they loosely riff on some kinda-sorta history so that the hero has battles to win, a maiden to rescue, bad guys to defeat and wrongs to right.

That's it. You watch these movies to escape for a few hours to a fun world where heroes are good, villains are bad, maidens are pretty (and often smart and fearless themselves) and after a bunch of near escapes, harrowing battles and dangerous missions, it all works out in the end.

Set in the early 1800s, British Naval Captain Horatio Hornblower is on a mission to supply a Latin American leader fighting the Spanish in hopes that France, Spain's ally, will divert resources from its war with England to help its ally, Spain.

That is the one confusing thing in this otherwise straightforward movie. Once you get over that hump - Peck as Hornblower has to capture the same ship (which is larger and better armed than his) twice as the diplomatic alliances shift - the politics calm down.

It's easier to only pretend to be following the geopolitical machinations while you just enjoy the battles - large wooden sailing ships firing cannonballs at each other, forts firing down on the same ships, sailors boarding listing enemy vessels to engage in hand-to-hand combat, including captain-versus-captain sword fights, and other neat swashbuckling stuff.

Captain Peck gallantly, brilliantly and bravely does it all with a bit more seriousness than his 1930s captain cognates, but still with his tongue a bit in cheek. His men at first think he's aloof and hard driving, but after leading them successfully in battle time and again - shrewdly out maneuvering the enemy, fearlessly risking his own life and showing great concern for his wounded men - they become the most loyal crew in naval history.

The same change of heart can be seen in *Captain Horatio Hornblower's* version of the blonde maiden, Virginia Mayo, playing Lady Barbara Wellesley who becomes an unwanted passenger on Hornblower's ship from Panama back to England.

Having rescued her from possible capture by the Spanish, his surface gruffness initially irritates Mayo, who he thinks is spoiled. Yet, after a few adventures where she sees his captaining talent and compassion for his men and he sees her roll up her noble sleeves to nurse the wounded, these two fall in love.

He's married, she's engaged to an admiral and it's an early 1950s movie, so other than a lot of heavy sighs, one "passionate" kiss and a bunch of talk about how much they mean to each other, nothing happens on all those lonely nights at sea.

(Spoiler alert, kinda, as you know these two will eventually get together.) After they return and she marries her fiance, Peck learns his wife had died in childbirth while he was at sea. Later, Mayo's husband is killed in battle, so fortunately, it only took two deaths for these kids to get together.

*Captain Horatio Hornblower* is formulaic fun at its best. The handsome, brilliant, kind, generous and smart captain outsmarts his country's enemies (several times), earns the everlasting loyalty of his crew, captures the beautiful maiden's heart and does it all with heroic style. By the end of the decade, movies like *Hornblower* would be out of step with that period's morally messier but more-realistic movie zeitgeist, which makes this 1951 effort one of Hollywood's Golden Era's last pure-fun swashbucklers.


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## Oldsarge

How many of us with fond memories of Ghostbusters are salivating in anticipation of taking grandchildren to Ghostbusters: Afterlife? It shows no indication of any interesting men's fashion but it looks like a rollicking good story.

"The walls of the 53rd Precinct were_ bleeding_."


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## Fading Fast

*Five and Ten* from 1931 with Marion Davies, Leslie Howard, Richard Bennett and Douglas Montgomery

*Five and Ten *is another pre-code examining real life issues in a fast-moving early "talkie" that highlights how much life hasn't changed from generation to generation as most of this story could be (and has been) retold by modern day Hollywood.

A five-and-ten-cent chainstore tycoon (think Woolworth) from humble beginnings in the Midwest moves his family to New York City where they are snubbed socially. He and his son don't care, but his wife and daughter feel it acutely. It's an early version of a _nouveau riche_ family not being accepted by "society," a story Hollywood has been telling ever since there's been a Hollywood.

Once in New York, the bored and ignored wife starts having an affair, while the father, oblivious to his family's problems, digs into business (he wants to build a skyscraper headquarters - the Woolworth's thing again). The sensitive, family-peace-keeper son tries to please his father by going into the business, something he clearly isn't cut out for. The daughter, Marion Davies, keeps trying to push her way into a society that doesn't want her.

Davies then meets bad-boy-of-the-Four-Hundred-set and struggling architect Leslie Howard. Despite his being engaged, she takes a hard run at him, in part, because he represents "society" and, in part, because she truly connects with him.

She badgers her father into hiring Howard to be one of the lead architects on his skyscraper - she plays to win - and just keeps hanging around Howard trying to outlast the fiance. As is common in pre-codes, you like Davies and Howard, despite neither being a particularly moral person: Davies is trying to break up an engagement, while Howard keeps pushing Davies for some action on the side.

In one of the movie's cutest, but revealing, scenes, Davies and Howard spar about having an affair. She (paraphrasing) says he needs to "switch firms" (drop the fiance) and he says he wouldn't do that without first sampling the new firm's product (bow chicka wow wow). They are, effectively, having a version of the "why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free" battle 1930s style.

Darn it, though, you're rooting for these two rapscallions to get together. Unfortunately, a combination of a misunderstanding (Davies is tricked by Howard's fiance into sounding like a social climber, which she kinda is, but she truly loves Howard too) and the pull of his social class has Howard marrying the fiance he no longer truly wants.

The movie, then, as was usual for the time, speeds to a conclusion that has (spoiler alerts for next two paragraph) Davies' mother threatening to leave her tycoon husband, while the son tries to save the family with a dramatic suicide attempt.

After that, as you knew would happen, in the final scene, as Davies is sailing away to "clear her head in Europe," Howard shows up to tell her he's getting a divorce. A happy ending ensues and the credits roll.

For 1931, when "talkies" were still new and clunky, *Five and Ten* is well done and very watchable today with themes and a story that have never gone away. *Crazy Rich Asians* riffed on it just a few years back and *Downton Abbey* used the same basic class divide for its original plot conflict.

N.B. #1 Today's "gender" advocates would probably need a fainting couch as Davies sometimes uses her "feminine wiles" to get Howard, but she doesn't come across as weak. She's a determined woman who goes after what she wants basically on her terms. In real life, whether our modern politics like it or not, we all compromise. Once you accept that, you see that Davies is a smart, ambitious woman who keeps blasting past the men that tell her to stop.

N.B #2 Yet again, we see how Prohibition had become a national joke by this time as people are drinking cocktails left and right in *Five and Ten *with fully stocked private bars in almost every (upper class) home. If you do see it, look for Howard's insanely cool Art Deco "bachelor pad," which contains a really neat bar hidden behind a sliding door.


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## Fading Fast

*Here's to the Young Lady* from 1949, a Japanese movie with English subtitles

One assumes post-war Japanese movie studios didn't have much money, so they were forced to produce low-budget efforts. This stripped-down film making only works, as in *Here's to the Young Lady,* if driven by a good story and engaging characters, because there is no money for elaborate special effects or other frills.

Long before there were movies, they have been telling stories about people from different classes falling in love. The story keeps getting told because it's an eternal challenge and an engaging narrative.

In *Here's to the Young Lady,* up-by-his-bootstraps, now-wealthy auto-repair-shop owner Shûji Sano is set up with a young upper-class woman, Setsuko Hara. Initially, he can't believe his good fortune that this woman who is "out of his class" would deign to go out with him.

Soon after they meet, though, he learns her father is in jail: he was the fall guy for a business fraud that he unwittingly fronted with his good name. This has all but wiped out his once prosperous family who is now reduced to selling off their furniture to survive, but worse, a note is soon coming due on their house.

Despite now understanding that he's been set up to be the family's financial lifeboat, Sano is so (understandably) smitten with Hara, that he continues courting her. It's their dating that brings the charm to this movie as she introduces him to ballet and classical music, while he introduces her to boxing and cursing at dumb drivers.

But his "crude" manners jar gentle Hara, further stoking Sano's class insecurity. If he likes you, he'll slap you on the back, or if he wants something, he'll yell across the room, both anathemas to Japan's refined upper class.

From here, we watch Sano trying to reconcile his frustration at knowing Hara is only willing to marry him because he can rescue her family financially (which will be part of the marriage agreement) with his genuine feelings of affection for her.

At one point, he heartbreakingly tells Hara that he doesn't care about her family's need for his money, if only he believed she truly loved him. She seems to be struggling with filial duty (the family really needs this money), some genuine feelings for Sano, as he is a kind and generous man, and her upbringing, which makes his manners and outlook uncouth to her.

There is also an obviously metaphorical side story about Sano's younger brother, whom Sano acts like a father to, wanting to marry a woman below his class. Ironically, Sano, who doesn't see the analogy at first, opposes the match.

*Here's to the Young Lady* is, effectively, a glossed-up romcom as Sano and Hara really are falling in love, but need to see past the obstacles - money and class - standing in their way.

All the usual romcom stuff is here, just adjusted for 1949 Japanese culture. Her family acts cordial to Sano, but Hara's slightly daffy grandmother lets the cat out of the bag. During a family tea, she, not realizing who Sano is, says, in front of him, how sad it is that Hara has to marry, effectively, this bumpkin.

(Spoiler alert, but not really as you can feel throughout that a happy ending is coming.) Just like any good romcom, toward the end, all seems lost for these two lovers - Sano pays off Hara's family's loan, but he calls off the engagement. Then, Hara breaks out of her cultural handcuffs and, unladylike, races to the train station (Sano is leaving on a trip to heal his broken heart) to confess her, now, true love for him.

*Here's to the Young Lady* is stilted and hokey at times and in desperate need of a restoration. Yet its straight-forward story telling, appealing characters - you can't help rooting for these two - and wonderful time-travel to post-war Japan make it a quirky and enjoyable little film.


----------



## Fading Fast

*It's a Wonderful Life*from 1946 with James Stewart, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore and Henry Travers

*It's a Wonderful Life's* rights lapsed into the public domain from 1974 until 1993, so for many years at Christmastime, it was played endlessly on TV. It was shown so often, it turned into a joke as viewers burned out on it.

No longer in the public domain and having avoided it for a few decades, one is able to look at *It's a Wonderful Life* anew, and it holds up pretty darn well. Its economics are all but nonsense - standard Hollywood and director Frank Capra cardboard anti-business hokum - but its spirituality is inspiring. Its exposition of one man's life is surprisingly thoughtful and poignant.

James Stewart as George Bailey grows up in the small town of Bedford Falls dreaming of travel, adventure and big cities. His father runs the beloved but perpetually struggling Building and Loan - the town's small bank alternative to its only other bank owned by the greedy and mean Mr. Potter, played with Scrooge-like exaggeration by Lionel Barrymore.

Everytime George is close to getting out of Bedford Falls, something - his father's stroke, a bank run, his injured ear - prevents his escape. He turns down business opportunities out of town to keep his necessary-to-the-community bank going. Soon enough, he marries girl-next-door Donna Reed and settles down to keeping the bank alive while he and Reed have a bunch of kids.

George is a good guy who helps his neighbors and customers with their problems while, ironically, providing the funds for others, like his brother, to leave town. Despite a few bank crises, with the community's support, he keeps it all together until one Christmas Eve when his uncle accidentally loses the bank's cash reserves just as a bank examiner arrives (I know, but it's a movie).

Stewart is now facing the bank being closed and, even, being arrested because of the missing funds. At home that evening, his old house is falling apart, his gaggle of kids are being annoyingly rambunctious and one is not feeling well. After a small meltdown there, he walks out only to get into a bar fight and car accident later.

With his world crumbling around him, George, holding a personal pity party standing on a bridge, contemplates suicide. He believes everyone would be better off without him as he is "worth" more dead than alive because of his life insurance policy. Enter the wonderful Henry Travers as George's bumbling guardian angel sent from above to save George.

He grants George his wish to have never been born and then, riffing like all heck on *A Christmas Carol*, shows George what charming Bedford Falls would be like if he, George, truly hadn't been born.

The town having been, effectively, taken over by the greedy Mr. Potter has become a seedy honky tonk. Several of the people whom George had saved with a kind last-minute loan or gift or other help are now drunkards, embittered or impoverished. His wife is a spinster librarian (still looking Donna Reed adorable, though) and his kids have never been born.

Seeing all this, George begs his guardian angel to have his life restored. Now back, George is happy to see the town he had grown to hate and hugs his wife and children with a renewed love.

Being a Frank Capra movie, and this still being Christmas Eve, the townsfolk come to the Bailey's house with whatever money they can dig up to save George and the bank. It's a Capraesque moment of treacly happiness that works because, heck, George is a good guy and you share in his redemption. 
*
It's a Wonderful Life* is outstanding movie propaganda with a darker vibe than its reputation would have you believe. Even though the characters are cartoons and the business and financial constructs are ludicrous, the Christmas spirit endnote is so infectious, you don't care.


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 71345
> 
> *It's a Wonderful Life*from 1946 with James Stewart, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore and Henry Travers
> 
> *It's a Wonderful Life's* rights lapsed into the public domain from 1974 until 1993, so for many years at Christmastime, it was played endlessly on TV. It was shown so often, it turned into a joke as viewers burned out on it.
> 
> No longer in the public domain and having avoided it for a few decades, one is able to look at *It's a Wonderful Life* anew, and it holds up pretty darn well. Its economics are all but nonsense - standard Hollywood and director Frank Capra cardboard anti-business hokum - but its spirituality is inspiring. Its exposition of one man's life is surprisingly thoughtful and poignant.
> 
> James Stewart as George Bailey grows up in the small town of Bedford Falls dreaming of travel, adventure and big cities. His father runs the beloved but perpetually struggling Building and Loan - the town's small bank alternative to its only other bank owned by the greedy and mean Mr. Potter, played with Scrooge-like exaggeration by Lionel Barrymore.
> 
> Everytime George is close to getting out of Bedford Falls, something - his father's stroke, a bank run, his injured ear - prevents his escape. He turns down business opportunities out of town to keep his necessary-to-the-community bank going. Soon enough, he marries girl-next-door Donna Reed and settles down to keeping the bank alive while he and Reed have a bunch of kids.
> 
> George is a good guy who helps his neighbors and customers with their problems while, ironically, providing the funds for others, like his brother, to leave town. Despite a few bank crises, with the community's support, he keeps it all together until one Christmas Eve when his uncle accidentally loses the bank's cash reserves just as a bank examiner arrives (I know, but it's a movie).
> 
> Stewart is now facing the bank being closed and, even, being arrested because of the missing funds. At home that evening, his old house is falling apart, his gaggle of kids are being annoyingly rambunctious and one is not feeling well. After a small meltdown there, he walks out only to get into a bar fight and car accident later.
> 
> With his world crumbling around him, George, holding a personal pity party standing on a bridge, contemplates suicide. He believes everyone would be better off without him as he is "worth" more dead than alive because of his life insurance policy. Enter the wonderful Henry Travers as George's bumbling guardian angel sent from above to save George.
> 
> He grants George his wish to have never been born and then, riffing like all heck on *A Christmas Carol*, shows George what charming Bedford Falls would be like if he, George, truly hadn't been born.
> 
> The town having been, effectively, taken over by the greedy Mr. Potter has become a seedy honky tonk. Several of the people whom George had saved with a kind last-minute loan or gift or other help are now drunkards, embittered or impoverished. His wife is a spinster librarian (still looking Donna Reed adorable, though) and his kids have never been born.
> 
> Seeing all this, George begs his guardian angel to have his life restored. Now back, George is happy to see the town he had grown to hate and hugs his wife and children with a renewed love.
> 
> Being a Frank Capra movie, and this still being Christmas Eve, the townsfolk come to the Bailey's house with whatever money they can dig up to save George and the bank. It's a Capraesque moment of treacly happiness that works because, heck, George is a good guy and you share in his redemption.
> 
> *It's a Wonderful Life* is outstanding movie propaganda with a darker vibe than its reputation would have you believe. Even though the characters are cartoons and the business and financial constructs are ludicrous, the Christmas spirit endnote is so infectious, you don't care.


A great review of an iconic movie. I've watched and greatly enjoyed It's A Wonderful life on at least a dozen occasions, forcing the kids and grand kids to sit through at least half of those showings. Rumor has it we will be including it in this years list of holiday movies watched.


----------



## Fading Fast

*Cat Ballou*from 1965 with Jane Fonda, Lee Marvin and Nat King Cole

I am just not the audience for comedy westerns as I could tell this was a reasonably good one, yet I was, oftentimes, bored or put off by its silliness. As with screwball comedies in the '30s or college fraternity flicks in the '80s, some part of the movie-going public enjoys seeing farce on screen.

Set in the "Old West," the surface story in *Cat Ballou* is one of an innocent new schoolmarm, Jane Fonda as Cat Ballou, coming home after college to find her father's farm is going to be stolen from him by "the railroad."

Her dad is then killed by the railroad's hired gun, Lee Marvin, in one of his two roles in this one. Fonda, in response, forms a gang with her dad's old farmhand, a pair of cousins and Lee Marvin, in his second role, as a drunkard, former gunslinger whom Fonda found in one of the cowboy story books of the day.

After robbing a train, this ragtag "gang" splits a bit as Marvin goes on to the big showdown with his evil doppelganger brother (the man who shot Fonda's father), while Fonda has a showdown of her own with the railroad baron who gave the order to have her father killed.

That's the story, but this movie is really about the antics along the way. It's about Nat King Cole (he is the best part of this one) and Stubby Kaye coming in like a Greek Chorus to sing the theme song periodically.

It's about the comedy of watching drunk Marvin try to shoot straight or the sarcasm of Ballou's Native American Indian farmhand's spot-on commentary about how poorly his people have been treated (note, it's 1965, meaning our current young generation isn't the first one to be angered by or expose America's inconsistencies).

It's also about Fonda maybe falling in love with one of the cousins in *Cat Ballou's* weakest storyline. But it's also about Fonda, a hot star at the time, looking cool wearing a gun and holster slung over tight pants while being a badass leading a gang.

I get it and I don't. I get that this kind of farce or "send up" is to be taken tongue in cheek, but *Cat Ballou* felt to me like a really good ten minute *Saturday Night Live* skit that went on, without anywhere nearly enough funny material, for an extra hour and twenty minutes.


----------



## Fading Fast

*The Night Holds Terror* from 1955 with Jack Kelly, Vince Edwards, Hilda Parks and John Cassavetes

With a small budget and only a few second-tier actors, *The Night Holds Terror* feels more like a TV movie than a motion picture, but it's a reasonably good TV movie.

Billed as noir, but more crime drama with noir elements, the straightforward story has a man, Jack Kelly, picking up a hitchhiker, Vince Edwards (TV's future Ben Casey) with everything then going horribly wrong for Kelly.

The hitchhiker, after brandishing a gun, has Kelly pull over so his other two gang members, John Cassavetes and David Cross, can catch up. They rob Kelly, but are angered because he only has ten bucks on him.

As will happen several times, the criminals then plan on the fly and accept desperate-to-stay-alive Kelly's offer to sell his car and give them the money. But that necessitates some cumbersome banking, which holds up the money until tomorrow. So it's off to Kelly's house where his unsuspecting wife and two kids are waiting for him.

The movie now segues to the standard crooks-holdup-with-the-victim's-family script: tensions run high, the crooks fight amongst themselves, one crook comes on to the (good-looking) wife, a few escape plans by the family are abandoned or fail, neighbors inconveniently knock on the door and the phone rings a bunch, causing much stress.

By next morning, after getting the car money, the crooks plan, again on the fly, to demand a ransom for Kelly after they learn his father owns a chain of grocery stores.

This ad-hoc move follows the standard kidnapping script: money is demanded, the police are covertly called and phone lines are tapped, while the kidnappers fight, worry about the death penalty and fantasize about getting away with the money (you're not even sure they really believe that's possible). At the same time, the cops trace phone lines and connect small clues, while the wife and kids worry about daddy.

It's nothing special, but it has its moments as the small budget and not-well-known actors gives the film an intimacy, since there's not much to distract you. It could easily have been reverse engineered into a stage play.

At an hour and half in length (what would be a two-hour TV movie with commercials), it drags a bit here and there. Yet it mainly holds your attention, especially when the cops and phone company's efforts at tracing a call from the kidnappers takes you on a trip through state-of-the-art 1955 communications technology, all with the clock ticking.

I wouldn't search for *The Night Holds Terror*, but if it pops up, its serviceable story, plus its fun mid-1950s time travel, makes it an okay watch. Surprisingly, though, John Cassavetes - an actor who can certainly own a scene and create a memorable character - walks through this one without much spark or energy.


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 71805
> 
> *The Night Holds Terror* from 1955 with Jack Kelly, Vince Edwards, Hilda Parks and John Cassavetes
> 
> With a small budget and only a few second-tier actors, *The Night Holds Terror* feels more like a TV movie than a motion picture, but it's a reasonably good TV movie.
> 
> Billed as noir, but more crime drama with noir elements, the straightforward story has a man, Jack Kelly, picking up a hitchhiker, Vince Edwards (TV's future Ben Casey) with everything then going horribly wrong for Kelly.
> 
> The hitchhiker, after brandishing a gun, has Kelly pull over so his other two gang members, John Cassavetes and David Cross, can catch up. They rob Kelly, but are angered because he only has ten bucks on him.
> 
> As will happen several times, the criminals then plan on the fly and accept desperate-to-stay-alive Kelly's offer to sell his car and give them the money. But that necessitates some cumbersome banking, which holds up the money until tomorrow. So it's off to Kelly's house where his unsuspecting wife and two kids are waiting for him.
> 
> The movie now segues to the standard crooks-holdup-with-the-victim's-family script: tensions run high, the crooks fight amongst themselves, one crook comes on to the (good-looking) wife, a few escape plans by the family are abandoned or fail, neighbors inconveniently knock on the door and the phone rings a bunch, causing much stress.
> 
> By next morning, after getting the car money, the crooks plan, again on the fly, to demand a ransom for Kelly after they learn his father owns a chain of grocery stores.
> 
> This ad-hoc move follows the standard kidnapping script: money is demanded, the police are covertly called and phone lines are tapped, while the kidnappers fight, worry about the death penalty and fantasize about getting away with the money (you're not even sure they really believe that's possible). At the same time, the cops trace phone lines and connect small clues, while the wife and kids worry about daddy.
> 
> It's nothing special, but it has its moments as the small budget and not-well-known actors gives the film an intimacy, since there's not much to distract you. It could easily have been reverse engineered into a stage play.
> 
> At an hour and half in length (what would be a two-hour TV movie with commercials), it drags a bit here and there. Yet it mainly holds your attention, especially when the cops and phone company's efforts at tracing a call from the kidnappers takes you on a trip through state-of-the-art 1955 communications technology, all with the clock ticking.
> 
> I wouldn't search for *The Night Holds Terror*, but if it pops up, its serviceable story, plus its fun mid-1950s time travel, makes it an okay watch. Surprisingly, though, John Cassavetes - an actor who can certainly own a scene and create a memorable character - walks through this one without much spark or energy.


Excellent review, as is your style. Your words have persuaded me to add The Night Holds Terror to my list of 'must be watched' movies. Thank you for that.


----------



## Fading Fast

*Compulsion* from 1959 with Dean Stockwell, Bradford Dillman, E.G. Marshall and Orson Welles

*Compulsion* is one of several movies based upon the famous Leopold and Loeb murder case when, in 1924, two young men from "good" socially prominent Chicago families kidnapped and killed a fourteen year old boy to prove their intellectual superiority (or something incredibly stupid like that).

The crime became a national sensation, especially when star attorney and famed death-penalty opponent Clarence Darrow agreed to defend the boys. His defense resulted in a life-in-prison sentence for both.

While Loeb was murdered in prison, "life in prison," as so often happens, turned out not to be for life for Leopold who was released after thirty-three years. "Life in prison" are just words on pieces of paper, or fairy tales, as a future generation, as we see time and again, can change the sentence.

Judging the movie solely on its own version of the story, *Compulsion* is engaging and poignantly disheartening from its first frame to its last. The boys, played by Dean Stockwell and Bradford Dillman, are arrogant from beginning to end with only Stockwell showing the occasional crack of remorse, but only somewhat and only occasionally.

Books have been written on these young men's psychological makeup, but what we see in *Compulsion* are two college-aged boys who knew, without a doubt, what they were doing was wrong. Yet they did it anyway as they firmly believed they should be above the law because of their "superior intellect."

Set against that arrant arrogance are the mere mortals, the newspaper men and the police, who methodically follow the clues to the boys and match wits with these self-anointed Nietzsche "Supermen."

It is one of the men of "average" intellect, district attorney (and outstanding actor) E. G. Marshall, who outwits the geniuses. Even then, though, the boys seem more confused than humbled when they realize they didn't pull off "the perfect crime" and that a mere "cop" had caught them.

The movie then shifts into trial mode with the community, out for blood, braying for a good double public hanging to avenge the death of the innocent young victim. Into this firestorm walks *Compulsion's* fictionalized version of Clarence Darrow, Orson Welles.

Welles proceeds to take the movie away from everyone else as you watch even this staunch death-penalty opponent struggle to reconcile his intellectual views with both the heinous nature of the crime and the thoroughly despicable young men he is tasked to defend.

Whatever side of the death-penalty debate you fall, Welles gives a stunning performance as a man who, clearly, hates that his principals require him to fight to spare the lives of these two detestable young men. He makes his case with bile as he seems to be arguing with his own conscience as much as with opposing counsel.

The verdict in *Compulsion*, the same as in the real-world Leopold and Loeb trial, was life in prison. No one in that courtroom, that city or, probably, the country was satisfied as there is no way a courtroom can provide a satisfactory answer to the senseless murder, a murder for sport, of a young boy.

While Alfred Hitchcock's take on Leopold and Loeb, 1948's *Rope* (comments here: #542  ), seems to get more attention, *Compulsion* is the better movie. Compared to *Rope*, *Compulsion* not only hewed closer to the real-life story, it fleshed out the story's two big themes - the moral legitimacy of "the Superman" and the justice of the death penalty for a particularly heinous and premeditated murder - more thoughtfully than Hitch's effort did.


----------



## Fading Fast

*Rendezvous* from 1935 with William Powell, Rosalind Russell, Lionel Atwill and Binnie Barnes

There's nothing wrong with mashing up a romcom with a spy caper; it just takes a harmonizing of tone and style. Unfortunately, *Rendezvous*' attempt feels more like two separate movies showing at the same time than a well-integrated effort.

It's 1917 and genius-cryptographer William Powell tries to hide his identity from the military because he wants to fight at the front and not be stuck in an office deciphering enemy messages.

Just before shipping overseas, he meets slightly daffy but cute Rosalind Russell whom he tells, in confidence, he's the cryptographer for whom the military has been looking. Having immediately fallen for Powell, Russell informs her uncle, the Assistant Secretary of War, who Powell is, so that the army will keep him near her in Washington.

That sets the movie on a bifurcated course. Powell takes over an Army cryptography department in need of an "unbreakable" code for use in a crucial allied ship rendezvous. While that is handled with spy-war seriousness, the other path of the movie has goofy Russell, ignorant of the importance of Powell's work, unintentionally and repeatedly, messing up his covert efforts as she clumsily pursues him romantically.

The espionage story is a pretty good by-the-numbers effort involving a Washington-based German spy ring that extends to Mexico, a beautiful blonde German Mata Hari who pursues Powell (and infuriates Russell), some neat WWI cryptography and spy technology and a reasonable amount of fist fights, gun fights, late-night secret meetings and double and triple agents.

But the Russell-Powell love thread is, well, a hot mess. Russell plays it like a full-on screwball comedy, silly pratfalls and all, while Powell seems to have intuited that won't work in this movie, so he plays the romcom stuff lower than low key. Whether Russell just didn't get it or she was badly directed, she's never been more out of step in a movie.

Since the romcom sleeve does not work, thankfully, the movie is more spy story than love story. With solid efforts by Lionel Atwill as an unintentionally compromised British cryptographer and Binnie Barnes as the seductive enemy spy, the movie is a pretty good espionage tale.

It's just a shame that the romcom element wasn't harmonized in style and tone to the espionage element or MGM would have had a darn-good movie on its hands with *Rendezvous*. Instead, it feels as if you're watching a decent spy story that gets oddly interrupted from time to time with clips from a romcom that happens to have the same actors in it.


----------



## Fading Fast

*The Browning Version*from 1951 with Michael Redgrave, Jean Kent, Wilfrid Hyde-White and Nigel Patrick

Writer Terence Rattigan specializes in showing the agonizing pain of "ordinary" lives of quiet failure. In Rattigan's *The Browning Version*, a middle-aged teacher (a "master"), Michael Redgrave, at an English boys school is leaving owing to a heart condition requiring him to take a less-demanding position elsewhere.

We see in Redgrave's final days at the school that he is out of touch with his students. They know he is a brilliant scholar, but they also see him as an aloof disciplinarian, who, to their eyes, is devoid of human emotion and sympathy.

The oleaginous headmaster, perfectly portrayed by Wilfrid Hyde-White, says all the right things to and about Redgrave, but is obviously happy he is leaving even as it becomes clear Redgrave has, without recognition, helped the headmaster improve the school's curriculum.

In a final parting shot, the headmaster tells Redgrave his request for a pension exception owing to his illness - he is short the required number of years for eligibility - has been denied by the School Board.

Worst of all, Redgrave's younger wife is carrying on an all but open affair with a bachelor science teacher at the school. Even with that setup, Redgraves so perfectly fits the role of cold, distant and arrogant teacher that our sympathies initially lean with his antagonists.

Then a series of events reveals a more human and painful understanding of the man. One of the rare students he reached brings Redgrave a touching going away present. Redgrave then learns his nickname is "the Himler of the lower fifth" (his class) at the same time his wife's affair comes fully out in the open. These incidents cause Redgrave to think back to the beginning of his academic career.

Eighteen years ago, when Redgrave came to the school, he and his wife thought his talents as a scholar would lead to a successful teaching career. But he didn't have the personal skills to reach his students or interact with his peers, which caused him to pull in on himself and others to pull away.

Had he asked for help or had others offered it, perhaps he could have turned his career around, but instead, eighteen years later, we see an outwardly hardened, but inwardly broken man.

Clearly not helping is his status-conscious wife who, instead of trying to lift him up, belittles him at every opportunity. Redgrave himself is understanding seeing their failed marriage as equally his fault owing to his unsuccessful career. Maybe, but watching his wife constantly and viciously undermine his confidence and self respect leaves us less forgiving of her than Redgrave is.

Finally, we see Redgrave's deep hurt at his "Nazi" nickname as he thought he was a bit of a "comical" figure to his students and teaching peers, but did not think they viewed him as mean and heartless.

Processing all this information in his last remaining days at the school, Redgrave's epiphany moment comes, unfortunately, too late to save his career or marriage (the latter is better off not saved). Yet, in his final actions and parting speech, we see a man who could have been a better version of himself if he himself, his wife, his peers and his headmaster had tried to help him.

A common theme of writer Terence Rattigan's work is that many good people are broken because they are square pegs trying to fit into the rigid round holes of the British class system. A system which, with its social and cultural structure that admires conformity, quietly but ruthlessly ostracizes those who are unique or different or perceived as "not quite up to snuff."

In *The Browning Version*, we meet a seemingly cold and antisocial teacher who appears to "deserve" the scorn and disdain others publicly and privately feel toward him. But director's Anthony Asquith's powerful interpretation of Rattigan's play reveals a more nuanced and heartbreaking story of an awkward man whose potential is destroyed early by an inflexible system, an unforgiving wife and unsympathetic peers.

*The Browning Version* has no special effects, no bombast and only some melodrama. Instead, it's just a poignant tale about a fully drawn "regular" man whose life has sadly, quietly and unnecessarily failed.

N.B. Michael Redgraves' performance here is impressively nuanced and poignant, especially considering he is playing a man who keeps his emotions and, even, thoughts inside.


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 75597
> 
> *The Browning Version*from 1951 with Michael Redgrave, Jean Kent, Wilfrid Hyde-White and Nigel Patrick
> 
> Writer Terence Rattigan specializes in showing the agonizing pain of "ordinary" lives of quiet failure. In Rattigan's *The Browning Version*, a middle-aged teacher (a "master"), Michael Redgrave, at an English boys school is leaving owing to a heart condition requiring him to take a less-demanding position elsewhere.
> 
> We see in Redgrave's final days at the school that he is out of touch with his students. They know he is a brilliant scholar, but they also see him as an aloof disciplinarian, who, to their eyes, is devoid of human emotion and sympathy.
> 
> The oleaginous headmaster, perfectly portrayed by Wilfrid Hyde-White, says all the right things to and about Redgrave, but is obviously happy he is leaving even as it becomes clear Redgrave has, without recognition, helped the headmaster improve the school's curriculum.
> 
> In a final parting shot, the headmaster tells Redgrave his request for a pension exception owing to his illness - he is short the required number of years for eligibility - has been denied by the School Board.
> 
> Worst of all, Redgrave's younger wife is carrying on an all but open affair with a bachelor science teacher at the school. Even with that setup, Redgraves so perfectly fits the role of cold, distant and arrogant teacher that our sympathies initially lean with his antagonists.
> 
> Then a series of events reveals a more human and painful understanding of the man. One of the rare students he reached brings Redgrave a touching going away present. Redgrave then learns his nickname is "the Himler of the lower fifth" (his class) at the same time his wife's affair comes fully out in the open. These incidents cause Redgrave to think back to the beginning of his academic career.
> 
> Eighteen years ago, when Redgrave came to the school, he and his wife thought his talents as a scholar would lead to a successful teaching career. But he didn't have the personal skills to reach his students or interact with his peers, which caused him to pull in on himself and others to pull away.
> 
> Had he asked for help or had others offered it, perhaps he could have turned his career around, but instead, eighteen years later, we see an outwardly hardened, but inwardly broken man.
> 
> Clearly not helping is his status-conscious wife who, instead of trying to lift him up, belittles him at every opportunity. Redgrave himself is understanding seeing their failed marriage as equally his fault owing to his unsuccessful career. Maybe, but watching his wife constantly and viciously undermine his confidence and self respect leaves us less forgiving of her than Redgrave is.
> 
> Finally, we see Redgrave's deep hurt at his "Nazi" nickname as he thought he was a bit of a "comical" figure to his students and teaching peers, but did not think they viewed him as mean and heartless.
> 
> Processing all this information in his last remaining days at the school, Redgrave's epiphany moment comes, unfortunately, too late to save his career or marriage (the latter is better off not saved). Yet, in his final actions and parting speech, we see a man who could have been a better version of himself if he himself, his wife, his peers and his headmaster had tried to help him.
> 
> A common theme of writer Terence Rattigan's work is that many good people are broken because they are square pegs trying to fit into the rigid round holes of the British class system. A system which, with its social and cultural structure that admires conformity, quietly but ruthlessly ostracizes those who are unique or different or perceived as "not quite up to snuff."
> 
> In *The Browning Version*, we meet a seemingly cold and antisocial teacher who appears to "deserve" the scorn and disdain others publicly and privately feel toward him. But director's Anthony Asquith's powerful interpretation of Rattigan's play reveals a more nuanced and heartbreaking story of an awkward man whose potential is destroyed early by an inflexible system, an unforgiving wife and unsympathetic peers.
> 
> *The Browning Version* has no special effects, no bombast and only some melodrama. Instead, it's just a poignant tale about a fully drawn "regular" man whose life has sadly, quietly and unnecessarily failed.
> 
> N.B. Michael Redgraves' performance here is impressively nuanced and poignant, especially considering he is playing a man who keeps his emotions and, even, thoughts inside.


A very well written review, providing the reader with a real understanding of what is behind a failed academics inability to reach his vocational potential. I am left with the impression that character Redgrave has been his own worst enemy and the anchor brake on his career....perchance a lesson that could be valuable to all of us.


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## Fading Fast

*Her Highness and the Bellboy* from 1945 with Hedy Lamarr, Robert Walker and June Allyson

*Her Highness and the Bellboy* is a silly little fairytale of a movie. The plot, which has been recycled since they've been making movies, is about a princess, Hedy Lamarr, from some unnamed European country, who wants to marry a "commoner" for love, as opposed to marrying, as was expected of her, some boring royal guy for the good of her country.

Lamarr, trying to escape the pressure to make the "right" marriage, takes a trip to New York City in search of the man, a "commoner," she once loved but gave up. There, she befriends bellhop Robert Walker. Walker, when not working, takes care of his friend, June Allyson, a sickly young woman whose doctor tells Walker that, with enough love, Allyson will get better.

With that set up, the rest of the movie plays out as expected. Walker mildly neglects Allyson as he falls for Lamarr. Lamarr, unintentionally, encourages Walker while she really just wants him to help find her former lover, an everyday newspaper man (just go with it; it doesn't have to make much sense).

After an hour plus of relatively harmless misunderstandings, cringe worthy slapstick and obvious twists and turns, the movie comes to the expected climax. First, it looks like (if you have no insight), Walker will abandon Allyson for the princess, whom he mistakenly thinks wants to marry him, while Lamarr will choose royal responsibility over true love.

As in any good fairy tale, though, at the last minute, Walker sees the light and chooses his infirm girlfriend (who is miraculously cured by his love) over the Princess, which encourages Princess Lamarr to choose the commoner newspaper man as she casually abdicates (yup).

Message delivered: it is worth giving anything up - a princess or a country - for true love. Lamarr, Walker and Allyson almost have enough charm to pull this fluff off, but *Her Highness and the Bellboy's* script lacks enough wit and whimsy to keep you engaged in a story you have all but figured out in the first five minutes.

That said, you can just spend the movie staring at Hedy Lamarr as she does have a fairytale princess' beauty. Plus, it's fun to see an early version of a plot Hollywood is still using to this day.


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## Fading Fast

*Three Secrets* from 1950 with Eleanor Parker, Patricia Neal, Ruth Roman and Edmon Ryan

Despite sharing the lead with two other women, *Three Secrets* is Patricia Neal's movie. It's a B-picture melodrama, but she gives it grit and gravitas with an outstanding performance.

A plane crashes on a remote mountain top. A military spotter plane takes pictures revealing that a five-year-old boy is the sole survivor. The challenge is how to rescue him before he succumbs.

A famous mountain climber is brought in to lead a team up the 12,000 foot peak, while a media frenzy ensues at the mountain's base.

With the boy's parents, apparently, casualties from the crash and, since authorities discovered, the family has no relatives, the boy, Johnny, if rescued, will be an orphan.

Through flashbacks, we then learn Johnny was adopted and that one of three women - all who converge on the mountain - is his biological mother, but the adoption agency won't release that information.

Five years after giving up their babies, each woman is struggling with that decision and what it means if Johnny survives and if she is the mother.

Through further flashbacks, we learn the women's backstories. Eleanor Parker had a quicky affair with a soldier on leave and, then, at her mother's urging, to save her "reputation," went away to have the baby and, quietly, give it up for adoption.

The second woman, Ruth Roman, had an affair with a wealthy man who dumped her and, then, tried to pay her off when she told him she was pregnant. In a fit of rage, she kills him, is sentenced for manslaughter and, then, gives the baby up for adoption from prison. She has since served her sentence and been released.

The third woman, Patricia Neal, is a successful international journalist married to a sportswriter who comes to resent her lack of interest in a traditional home and family (note the riffing on *Woman of The Year*).

Five years ago, Neal came back from Europe as a famous war correspondent wanting to restart her marriage. After she throws herself sexually at her now emotionally distant husband, he, in a quietly brutal scene, tells her he no longer "wants" her - ouch. It's one of those moments that justifies a lot of mundane movie watching.

They briefly give it a try anyway, but she soon flies off on assignment again and he divorces her. Now overseas, she realizes she's pregnant and comes back to the States to find him remarried. She never tells him she's pregnant and gives the baby up for adoption. Right or wrong, Neal makes big decisions with speed and conviction - she's no ditherer.

Five years ago, these three women met, on the same day, at the same adoption agency, as they gave up their babies. Owing to the plane crash, they've now met again at the foot of the mountain. Based on the facts reported in the paper and their personal adoption stories and timelines, each is in anguish wondering if it is her child up there.

Patricia Neal is covering the story for her paper, while the other two came to the mountain out of a sense of responsibility. Yet it is Neal who pulls the three together amidst the chaos. This no-nonsense woman also has time to outsmart, out think and out report the men - she's a firecracker.

After a harrowing climb by the rescue team, the report from the top of the mountain comes down that the boy, Johnny, is okay. But what will these women, one of who is the mother of the now parentless boy, do?

Once again, it is Neal to the rescue. She bullies (yup, bullies) her male editor into blasting past adoption agency rules and any laws to find out which one is the mother. There's still one more plot twist to go, but while it's advertised a bit in advance, let's leave it there for those who haven't seen the movie.

To appreciate *Three Secrets*, one has to accept that words and phrases like "normal family," "illegitimate baby" and "reputation" were powerful memes back then. Wrong, yes, but they were the water society swam in, leaving these single and pregnant women, in the 1940s, with baleful life decisions to make.

The story is contrived, the budget shoestring and the acting uneven (Eleanor Parker all but sleeps through her role), but Patricia Neal and Edmon Ryan, as her newspaper reporter frenemy, along with the always outstanding directing of Robert Wise, elevate *Three Secrets* well above its material.

N.B. #1 For Hitchcock fans, it's neat when you realize the center of the plot of this story, a kid being rescued off a mountain, is just a macguffin. We often forget about the boy because we're absorbed in the movie's real focus, the lives of the three women.

N.B. #2 If Patricia Neal in real life was half as smart, half as no-nonsense and half as decent (without any fanfare) as her screen persona is here and in other movies - and if she was half as beautiful in person - she's the one you marry if by grace of God she'll have you.


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## Mike Petrik

Nice review once again, FF.
That said, I for one think that the most vulnerable people in our society have paid a heavy price for the decline of traditional sexual mores, mores that indeed were enforced in part by a sense of shame (another concept in disrepute). A society that values sexual morality so highly that human transgressions cannot be forgiven is quite a terrible thing, but so is a society that defines sexual morality so thinly that only mutual consent matters. The combination of a 50% divorce rate and a 40% illegitimacy rate has generated profoundly serious human casualties. I realize that this may not convince you or others -- and that is fine -- I've no wish to hijack the thread. But I just wanted to say for the record that not all the phrases you list as "wrong" are universally accepted as "wrong," even today.


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## Fading Fast

Mike Petrik said:


> Nice review once again, FF.
> That said, I for one think that the most vulnerable people in our society have paid a heavy price for the decline of the traditional sexual mores, mores that indeed were enforced in part by a sense of shame (another concept in disrepute). There is a difference between a society that is unforgiving -- quite a terrible thing -- and a society that believes there is nothing to forgive -- equally terrible. The combination of a 50% divorce rate and a 40% illegitimacy rate has generated profoundly serious human casualties. I realize that this will not convince you or others -- and that is fine -- I've no wish to hijack the thread. But I just wanted to say for the record that not all the phrases you list as "wrong" are universally accepted as "wrong," even today.


Mike,

Thank you for your thoughtful comments. I think we'd quickly be over the AAAC political line if we went on, but I think you and I'd be closer on this topic than it appears.

FF


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## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 76211
> 
> *Three Secrets* from 1950 with Eleanor Parker, Patricia Neal, Ruth Roman and Edmon Ryan
> 
> Despite sharing the lead with two other women, *Three Secrets* is Patricia Neal's movie. It's a B-picture melodrama, but she gives it grit and gravitas with an outstanding performance.
> 
> A plane crashes on a remote mountain top. A military spotter plane takes pictures revealing that a five-year-old boy is the sole survivor. The challenge is how to rescue him before he succumbs.
> 
> A famous mountain climber is brought in to lead a team up the 12,000 foot peak, while a media frenzy ensues at the mountain's base.
> 
> With the boy's parents, apparently, casualties from the crash and, since authorities discovered, the family has no relatives, the boy, Johnny, if rescued, will be an orphan.
> 
> Through flashbacks, we then learn Johnny was adopted and that one of three women - all who converge on the mountain - is his biological mother, but the adoption agency won't release that information.
> 
> Five years after giving up their babies, each woman is struggling with that decision and what it means if Johnny survives and if she is the mother.
> 
> Through further flashbacks, we learn the women's backstories. Eleanor Parker had a quicky affair with a soldier on leave and, then, at her mother's urging, to save her "reputation," went away to have the baby and, quietly, give it up for adoption.
> 
> The second woman, Ruth Roman, had an affair with a wealthy man who dumped her and, then, tried to pay her off when she told him she was pregnant. In a fit of rage, she kills him, is sentenced for manslaughter and, then, gives the baby up for adoption from prison. She has since served her sentence and been released.
> 
> The third woman, Patricia Neal, is a successful international journalist married to a sportswriter who comes to resent her lack of interest in a traditional home and family (note the riffing on *Woman of The Year*).
> 
> Five years ago, Neal came back from Europe as a famous war correspondent wanting to restart her marriage. After she throws herself sexually at her now emotionally distant husband, he, in a quietly brutal scene, tells her he no longer "wants" her - ouch. It's one of those moments that justifies a lot of mundane movie watching.
> 
> They briefly give it a try anyway, but she soon flies off on assignment again and he divorces her. Now overseas, she realizes she's pregnant and comes back to the States to find him remarried. She never tells him she's pregnant and gives the baby up for adoption. Right or wrong, Neal makes big decisions with speed and conviction - she's no ditherer.
> 
> Five years ago, these three women met, on the same day, at the same adoption agency, as they gave up their babies. Owing to the plane crash, they've now met again at the foot of the mountain. Based on the facts reported in the paper and their personal adoption stories and timelines, each is in anguish wondering if it is her child up there.
> 
> Patricia Neal is covering the story for her paper, while the other two came to the mountain out of a sense of responsibility. Yet it is Neal who pulls the three together amidst the chaos. This no-nonsense woman also has time to outsmart, out think and out report the men - she's a firecracker.
> 
> After a harrowing climb by the rescue team, the report from the top of the mountain comes down that the boy, Johnny, is okay. But what will these women, one of who is the mother of the now parentless boy, do?
> 
> Once again, it is Neal to the rescue. She bullies (yup, bullies) her male editor into blasting past adoption agency rules and any laws to find out which one is the mother. There's still one more plot twist to go, but while it's advertised a bit in advance, let's leave it there for those who haven't seen the movie.
> 
> To appreciate *Three Secrets*, one has to accept that words and phrases like "normal family," "illegitimate baby" and "reputation" were powerful memes back then. Wrong, yes, but they were the water society swam in, leaving these single and pregnant women, in the 1940s, with baleful life decisions to make.
> 
> The story is contrived, the budget shoestring and the acting uneven (Eleanor Parker all but sleeps through her role), but Patricia Neal and Edmon Ryan, as her newspaper reporter frenemy, along with the always outstanding directing of Robert Wise, elevate *Three Secrets* well above its material.
> 
> N.B. #1 For Hitchcock fans, it's neat when you realize the center of the plot of this story, a kid being rescued off a mountain, is just a macguffin. We often forget about the boy because we're absorbed in the movie's real focus, the lives of the three women.
> 
> N.B. #2 If Patricia Neal in real life was half as smart, half as no-nonsense and half as decent (without any fanfare) as her screen persona is here and in other movies - and if she was half as beautiful in person - she's the one you marry if by grace of God she'll have you.


I agree with Mike Petrick's assessment that the above is a very detailed and typical of your work, another great review. Three Secrets has definitely been added to my watch list, but I find myself compelled to ask, what was the prison sentence she received on her manslaughter conviction. She gave birth to her baby in prison and now, the toddler on the mountain top is just six years old and she is out of prison at the base of the mountain. That doesn't seem like adequate penance for killing her lover in a fit of rage!.


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## Fading Fast

eagle2250 said:


> I agree with Mike Petrick's assessment that the above is a very detailed and typical of your work, another great review. Three Secrets has definitely been added to my watch list, but I find myself compelled to ask, what was the prison sentence she received on her manslaughter conviction. She gave birth to her baby in prison and now, the toddler on the mountain top is just six years old and she is out of prison at the base of the mountain. That doesn't seem like adequate penance for killing her lover in a fit of rage!.


Thank you for your kind comments. I think she might have received a ten-year sentence and was let out early, but I don't remember the specific reasoning given (or if I'm even right about the ten years). I think it had to do with her having hit him with a lamp in a moment of anger, so it wasn't even clear she was trying to kill him and not just hurt him. Plus, back then anyway, juries had sympathy for pregnant women. Also, it's a movie, so they made the story do what they needed it to do. It's a bit slow at first, but then gets going; it's well worth the free watch on YouTube.


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## Fading Fast

*Once a Thief *from 1965 with Alain Delon, Ann-Margret, Van Heflin, John Davis Chandler and Jack Palance

*Once a Thief* is an early entry in the "ex-con tries to go straight, but everything conspires against his good intentions and pushes him back to a life of crime" genre.

A detective, Van Heflin, who has it in for ex-con Alain Delon, keeps harassing him at work, which gets Delon fired. The paper-pushing bureaucracy at unemployment denies Delon's claim. His wife, Ann Margret, gets a job as a scantily clad cocktail waitress, which challenges his manhood as the breadwinner (different era) and his old crime buddies (including his brother and mobster Jack Palance) keep coming around trying to entice Delon to work on a big heist they are planing.

After opening with a cool jazzy montage and the above setup, the movie slides into crime-drama mode as Delon reluctantly agrees to join up with his old gang. Delon seems to genuinely love his wife and young daughter and, maybe, would have gone straight if it had been easy, but he seems more in his element - more like a Tarantino character - now back in his old "profession."

Wife Ann-Margret sees the writing on the wall, but what can she do? Van Heflin continues trying to arrest Delon mainly because he hates Delon for once having shot him. Delon seems oblivious to the writing on the wall others can see, so he plows ahead with the caper, which like all capers, goes well until, inevitably, it doesn't.

It's not critical to the story, but the heist is of a warehouse storing a million dollars in platinum (a Hitchcock macguffin, if ever). The heist might even have worked if not for the old saw about there being no honor amongst thieves.

Albino-looking and creepy-as-heck gang member John Davis Chandler kills one of the other members as the gang makes its getaway with his justification to the remaining members being, "one less to share in the cut."

Well, everyone can see where that logic leads, so the members turn on each other and the heist quickly unravels as Delon makes off with the platinum. (Spoiler alert) All that's left is Delon going to his nemesis Van Heflin for help when Chandler kidnaps Delon's daughter trying to force Delon to turn the platinum over to him.

When Delon sacrifices everything to save his daughter, the message is, maybe, this good kid never had a fair shot, but you don't really believe it. Instead, *Once a Thief* is just another crime drama that ends with a bunch of dead crooks.

N.B. #1* Once a Thief's* style, plot and dialogue - a blend of noir and '60s jazz - foreshadows movies by the Coen Brothers and Tarantino where criminals are well-drawn characters with moral complexity and real-life concerns, but who live in the crazy world of lawlessness. It works on its own as an average-good movie, but is also worth a watch for its adumbration of where crime movies would go in subsequent decades.

N.B. #2 The main reason I watched this one is Ann-Margret. But she's out of her element here as nothing about Ann-Margret reads gritty noir/crime-drama character. Through no fault of her own, real-life Ann-Margaret looks like a cartoon version of Ann-Margret as her overly full figure, cherub cheeks and mountain of strawberry-blonde hair shouldn't truly exist in the real world. It's why the only role that fully realized Ann-Margret is when she starred opposite Elvis in *Viva Las Vegas* because Elvis movies are real-life cartoons with actors playing carictures roles.


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## Fading Fast

*Peyton Place* form 1957 with Diane Varsi, Lana Turner, Lee Phillips, Hope Lange, Arthur Kennedy and LLoyd Nolan

The mid 1950s to the early 1960s is the Golden Age of soap opera / melodrama movies with the apotheosis of the genre being *Peyton Place*. If you like this type of movie [insert casual whistle with eyes looking around at the ceiling], there is none better.

It's all here: extramarital affairs, single young women kept by older married men, babies born to "widows" (who aren't really), domestic violence including a father raping his step daughter, murder, buried bodies (literally and figuratively), young kids buying "banned" books, doctors performing abortions marked down as appendectomies (or something "not abortion"), homes and families on the "right" and "wrong" side of the tracks, Oedipal Complex mothers messing up their sons' heads, clandestine nude swimming, rumors, gossip, alcoholism, suicide (gruesomely by hanging) and more.

All of that happens in pretty Peyton Place, a small, idyllic-looking New England town where the good people dress their best for Sunday church. Yet, as Lloyd Nolan, the town's doctor and conscience states, "We have half a dozen churches, which most of you attend and then don't practice the word they preach once you walk down the steps."

*Peyton Place* the movie comes from the giant, indulgent, entertaining but also very perceptive book by the same name (comments here: https://www.thefedoralounge.com/threads/what-are-you-reading.10557/page-401#post-2449613). The movie, like the book, works because, even if exaggerated, much of it rings true.

Books and movies like this shine a light on the worst and, sometimes, the best in us, which leaves out a lot of the everyday living people do inside the lines. You are not getting a balanced view in *Peyton Place*, but that doesn't make any of its story untrue, just know the lens has been intentionally directed to see the most sordid and hypocritical parts.

Focusing on a few of the town's young girls and boys, the movie tells its story mainly through their eyes in this coming-of-age tale. There are a lot of stories and plotlines to *Peyton Place*, so think of the movie this way: you can visit a "typical" New England town and watch its young grow up, with all those timeless challenges, from the 1930s into the 1940s, while their parents do all the bad and, sometimes, good things parents do while trying to maintain the outward appearance of respectability.

Looking back, movies like this were part of the, ultimately, successful effort to break down the massive social stigma of, ready-set-go: addictions, pre-marital sex, extra-marital affairs, single parents, abortion, divorce, kids being curious about sex, etc. Today, most of those things are no longer a source of shame, at least not nearly to the degree they once were. Heck, many are now celebrated.

But destigmatizing those things didn't mean they went away (for many, their occurrences have increased) or that some don't still create great personal and social problems, but at least they are more out in the open with many sympathetic to their challenges.

Those things that are still horrible - like domestic violence and rape - also, sadly, haven't been eliminated or even had their occurrences reduced, but they are, at least, no longer considered a source of shame for their victims.

These are serious and real problems, then and now, but you watch a giant ball of soap opera cheese like *Peyton Place* to wallow in all the dirty laundry and hypocrisy of society in a safe way.

Because, by the 1970s, the idea of "respectable" society had been so diminished and the restrictions on what could be shown or done in movies all but eliminated, soap-opera pictures mainly became depressingly gruesome and extreme affairs lacking any balance or hope.

It's why the soap operas of the mid 1950s to the early 1960s are the most engaging - there was still a respectable society with its hypocrisy and unfair taboos to confront and expose. It was a contradiction and tension that made for good storytelling. A contradiction and tension wonderfully, saponaceously and indulgently exploited in *Peyton Place*.


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## Fading Fast

*I Love Trouble* from 1947 with Franchot Tone, Janet Blair and Glenda Farrell

After Humphrey Bogart helped to define the noir private-investigator role in 1941's hit *The Maltese Falcon*, Hollywood did its Hollywood thing of spitting out copycat versions for years. Some were quite impressive, as when Dick Powell transformed his entire career by playing Philip Marlowe in *Murder, My Sweet*, but many were simply serviceable B-movie efforts like *I Love Trouble*.

Even in a B movie, Franchot Tone is an odd choice - weak chin, reedy voice, receding hairline - for a hard-boiled detective lead, but he has enough acting chops to do an okay job in the role. Probably realizing that Tone wasn't the ideal male lead, the studio added several very attractive women to the cast. Yet, two good B-movie stars do not equal one Mary Astor (*The Maltese Falcon*) or Veronica Lake (*The Glass Key*) - actresses aren't arithmetic.

Tone, though, gives it his all as the weary private investigator who is willing to get beat up a few times and risk going to jail to solve the case, the minimum requirements for a film-noir private investigator. Yet, when one pretty woman after another immediately falls for him, credibility is getting stretched a bit thin. Still, you kinda root for him to win, but what does that mean here?

Once you get past the only okay cast, you are left with an only okay story. As in many of these '40s noir-detective movies, the plot is too confusing to truly follow (an approach that reached its apotheosis in *The Big Sleep*).

In *I Love Trouble*, a wealthy (and cranky) husband hires Tone to dig into his missing, younger and pretty wife's past, which seems to be a bunch of changed identities as she moved through nightclub jobs in a few different states. There also is a stolen $40,000 in his wife's muddled history.

Thrown into this mix is a sister also looking for the absent wife as well as a former showgirl friend. At least, I think that's who they are, as I never fully sorted out everyone's connection. So, yes, you root for Tone, kinda, as you're never really certain who are the good guys and who are the bad guys in this one.

All the required noirish elements are here, though, including dark streets, Art Deco architecture, a blonde siren, cigarette smoke, thugs, heavies, truncheons, guns, cops who like and cops who don't like Tone, a couple of car chases and several dead bodies.

(Spoiler alert) It's not really a spoiler alert to reveal the climax, since many noir private-investigator movies end the same way. Tone assembles most of the suspects in his apartment to convince the always-a-step-or-two-behind police that he's innocent of all the murders while he exposes the real killer.

That's pretty much it. Cornell Pictures studio wanted to cash in on the noir private-investigator wave, so it brought together all the pieces of the popular sub-genre as best as its humble budget would allow. That resulted in an okay movie you should only watch if it happens to be on when you have an hour and a half to spare.

Eventually, Hollywood uses repetition to kill every goose that lays a golden egg (and then revives it later). It didn't do this to the noir private-investigator movie with *I Love Trouble*, but you could tell Hollywood was starting to get there.


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## Fading Fast

*Quai Des Orfèvres *from 1947

What an outstanding movie. Nobody can weave a love-triangle, a detective story and existential angst together in one film better than the French.

You really don't want to know too many details about *Quai Des Orfèvres'* plot ahead of time, as watching it unfold is part of the joy. It's well constructed and paced, with only a few holes.

Suzy Delair is a singer/performer with a jealous husband/accompanist, Bernard Blier. Delair is an innocent, but enthusiastic flirt trying to advance her career, in part, by flattering influential men, which drives her milquetoast-looking husband, Blier, insane with jealousy.

One night, Delair is at the home of a lecherous producer trying to get a film contract for herself when she takes offense at his unwanted advances. She cracks him over the head with a bottle of champagne, believes she's killed him and runs from the scene.

Unaware of that event, jealous husband Blier shows up later that night to confront the producer only to find him dead, so he runs from the house too. Lastly, Blier and Delair's friend, Simone Renant, after Delair tells her what she did, goes to the producer's house that same evening to retrieve a fur wrap Delair left behind and to obscure any incriminating-of-Delair evidence.

Renant is Blier's long-time friend, but she's also carrying an unrequited and somewhat hidden torch for Delair - God love the French. None of it is gratuitous; it's just real life.

From here, the plot is basically a crime drama as Louis Jouvet, a put upon, cranky, smart and bedraggled-looking police inspector, slowly and methodically drives what is now a high-profile murder investigation. Not helping Jouvet are his boss' demands for unrealistically fast results, while the press nips at Jouvet's heels.

The heart and soul in *Quai Des Orfèvres*, though, is not the very engaging investigation, but the personal relationships.

It's the mutual but misaligned love Delair and Blier have for each other. He can't see her flirtations are meaningless and she can't see how hurtful they are to him. They have a love many married couples would envy, but its gears keep grinding.

It's also the poignant and unrequited love Renant has for Delair, so much so, at one point, she tries to take the fall for Delair to keep her out of prison. That's some seriously unrequited love at work.

Finally, it is inspector Jouvet's love for his young son - we only know he came back from the colonies with him, but without the boy's mother. Jouvet is tender with the boy as we see him worry about his test grades or if he is warm enough when sleeping.

That the boy is black and Jouvet white is refreshingly unimportant to everyone. The relationship itself allows us to see Jouvet in a fuller and more-forgiving light when he, as he does often, browbeats a suspect.

The other beauty of *Quai Des Orfèvres* is its little nuances such as how, in a poor post-war France, it's quite common for people to wear their overcoats inside because, one assumes, there was, often, little heat.

Or it's the scary peek into French justice in the 1940s as we see the police conduct an aggressive investigation, but with warrants and lawyers for the suspects nowhere in sight.

It's also the well-paced and dense dialogue that includes several funny asides, which sound refreshingly like how people really speak. Yes, it's a movie, but after watching *Quai Des Orfèvres* you also feel like you've just spent time in 1947 France.

Lastly (minor spoiler alert), it's Blier, in moment of existential angst, attempting suicide in his jail cell from a combination of love for his wife (he wants to protect her) and lacking the will to go on without her. She might drive him blind with jealous rage, but she is also his reason for living.

*Quai Des Orfèvres* is one of those rare movie gems film buffs live for. We all know the "top-ten" or, even, "top-hundred films of all time" and we all have our personal "undiscovered" favorites that we watch over and over. Yet finding that wonderful movie you've never seen nor heard about (at least I hadn't heard about this one) is the exact moment a film buff waits, sometimes, years for.

Beautifully restored *Quai Des Orfèvres* is a cinematic treat: a love story cum crime story that is so real its intricate and well-constructed plot is less important than the humanity director Henri-Georges Clouzot so perfectly lims for us in this masterpiece.


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## Mike Petrik

FF —
Please don’t fade too fast. Your reviews are appreciated and enjoyed.


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## Fading Fast

*The Birds* from 1963 with Tippi Hedren, Rod Taylor, Jessica Tandy and Suzanne Pleshette

*The Birds *is an excellent movie without much of a plot. Basically, the entire story is a girl chases a boy while an old girlfriend, a mother and some birds get in the way.

Did Hitchcock make a movie starring his famous macguffin? From Wikipedia: "In fiction, a macguffin is an object, device, or event that is necessary to the plot and the motivation of the characters, but insignificant, unimportant, or irrelevant in itself."

Is Hitchcock trolling us in *The Birds*? Do you really care about the why of the birds or are they just the thing that Hedren and Taylor have to overcome so that they can be together?

Hedren is a spoiled socialite with a checkered sexual past (nude swimming in a fountain in Rome at a time when that was still shocking). Taylor's the pragmatic lawyer with an old-school mom, Jessica Tandy, who has no truck for Hedren's rich-girl antics.

In a crazy get-the-guy Hail Mary, Hedren uses a flimsy excuse about bringing some love birds to Taylor's younger sister, whom she doesn't even know, to drive forty miles to Bodega Bay to see a man she only briefly met once in San Francisco. Something is going very right in your life when lithe, blonde, beautiful and rich Tippie Hedren is using subterfuge just to be with you.

Once in Bodega Bay, while Hedren is trying to find reasons to keep seeing Taylor, she stumbles upon what she thinks are her real obstacles: Taylor's still-pining-for-him ex-girlfriend, Suzanne Pleshette, and Taylor's Oedipal-Complex mother, Jessica Tandy.

Then the bird attacks start. At first, it's a small isolated event here or there. Yet, eventually, the Bird Wars begin and gulls and crows mass and attack off and on, while Hedren's never-changed-once-during-the-weekend pale-green suit gets dirtier and, one imagines, riper over the following few days.

Hitchcock, though, knows how to do suspense and fear. In the first mass bird attack, we see Hedren sitting perfectly quaffed on a bench outside of a lost-in-time schoolhouse as the sounds of kids singing gently waft out. The camera keeps returning to Hedren as crows eerily mass on the monkey bars and overhead wires behind her; the dread builds as the background becomes ominously populated with birds.

Then comes the attack, which for the time was visually impressive, but today, the effect isn't too scary or realistic. After that, it's wash-rinse-repeat as we see the birds attack a few more times over the next few days (the in-town attack is pretty darn good action). Taylor, Hedren and the town slowly realize something more than "a few isolated incidents" is going on.

That's pretty much it though. It's cinematically impressive and engaging in that 1950s/1960s way Hitchcock mastered, but other than a few quick speeches, we never learn much more about the birds, nor do we really care because they're the macguffin.

At the end, as torn-and-frayed Hedren, Rod Taylor, his mother and his sister drive away from the bird hell of Bodega Bay, we're left with this slightly altered story: a girl chases a boy and some birds kill the girl's rival (ex-girlfriend Suzanne Pleshette) and cow the won't-cut-the-apron-strings mother, so the girl can get the boy.

Not shown in the movie, but as their car slowly leaves Bodega Bay, with Taylor and Hedren presumably on their way to matrimony, Hedren gives a discreet thank-you nod to the birds.


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 77539
> 
> *The Birds* from 1963 with Tippi Hedren, Rod Taylor, Jessica Tandy and Suzanne Pleshette
> 
> *The Birds *is an excellent movie without much of a plot. Basically, the entire story is a girl chases a boy while an old girlfriend, a mother and some birds get in the way.
> 
> Did Hitchcock make a movie starring his famous macguffin? From Wikipedia: "In fiction, a macguffin is an object, device, or event that is necessary to the plot and the motivation of the characters, but insignificant, unimportant, or irrelevant in itself."
> 
> Is Hitchcock trolling us in *The Birds*? Do you really care about the why of the birds or are they just the thing that Hedren and Taylor have to overcome so that they can be together?
> 
> Hedren is a spoiled socialite with a checkered sexual past (nude swimming in a fountain in Rome at a time when that was still shocking). Taylor's the pragmatic lawyer with an old-school mom, Jessica Tandy, who has no truck for Hedren's rich-girl antics.
> 
> In a crazy get-the-guy Hail Mary, Hedren uses a flimsy excuse about bringing some love birds to Taylor's younger sister, whom she doesn't even know, to drive forty miles to Bodega Bay to see a man she only briefly met once in San Francisco. Something is going very right in your life when lithe, blonde, beautiful and rich Tippie Hedren is using subterfuge just to be with you.
> 
> Once in Bodega Bay, while Hedren is trying to find reasons to keep seeing Taylor, she stumbles upon what she thinks are her real obstacles: Taylor's still-pining-for-him ex-girlfriend, Suzanne Pleshette, and Taylor's Oedipal-Complex mother, Jessica Tandy.
> 
> Then the bird attacks start. At first, it's a small isolated event here or there. Yet, eventually, the Bird Wars begin and gulls and crows mass and attack off and on, while Hedren's never-changed-once-during-the-weekend pale-green suit gets dirtier and, one imagines, riper over the following few days.
> 
> Hitchcock, though, knows how to do suspense and fear. In the first mass bird attack, we see Hedren sitting perfectly quaffed on a bench outside of a lost-in-time schoolhouse as the sounds of kids singing gently waft out. The camera keeps returning to Hedren as crows eerily mass on the monkey bars and overhead wires behind her; the dread builds as the background becomes ominously populated with birds.
> 
> Then comes the attack, which for the time was visually impressive, but today, the effect isn't too scary or realistic. After that, it's wash-rinse-repeat as we see the birds attack a few more times over the next few days (the in-town attack is pretty darn good action). Taylor, Hedren and the town slowly realize something more than "a few isolated incidents" is going on.
> 
> That's pretty much it though. It's cinematically impressive and engaging in that 1950s/1960s way Hitchcock mastered, but other than a few quick speeches, we never learn much more about the birds, nor do we really care because they're the macguffin.
> 
> At the end, as torn-and-frayed Hedren, Rod Taylor, his mother and his sister drive away from the bird hell of Bodega Bay, we're left with this slightly altered story: a girl chases a boy and some birds kill the girl's rival (ex-girlfriend Suzanne Pleshette) and cow the won't-cut-the-apron-strings mother, so the girl can get the boy.
> 
> Not shown in the movie, but as their car slowly leaves Bodega Bay, with Taylor and Hedren presumably on their way to matrimony, Hedren gives a discreet thank-you nod to the birds.
> 
> View attachment 77543


Another great review and this one features a favorite Hitchcock movie of mine. I've watched the Birds at least a half dozen times. I used to say I was fascinated by the movie because of Hitchcock's almost magical ability to create ascending levels of suspense in the mind of the viewer. However, at this point in life, I will admit my motivation for sitting through repeated viewings was as much to just ogle Tippi Hedren, as anything else.

Interestingly in my own life, while I have never been attacked by seagulls or crows, I did once come under attack by a gaggle of geese. Geese can really put one in a world of hurt pecking at you with those damn beaks of theirs and beating you up with their wings! LOL.

Seriously it is one of Hitchcock's best!


----------



## Fading Fast

*The Millionaire* from 1931 with George Arliss, Evalyn Knapp and David Manners

Yes, it's an early pre-code talkie which, often and in this case, means it doesn't have a soundtrack, needs a restoration and is a clunky effort overall, but *The Millionaire* is both fun time travel and a good, simple story with engaging characters.

If you can adjust your expectations to the limitations and style of early pre-codes, in *The Millionaire*, you get a quick, fun eighty-minute movie about the perils of retiring early; a story which Hollywood has been telling ever since. Also tucked inside *The Millionaire's* main tale is another Hollywood favorite, the "should I marry for love or money" story.

Auto magnate George Arliss is forced to retire by his wife and doctor for health reasons, but after a few months of "rest and relaxation," sixty year old Arliss is about ready to shoot himself from boredom. He stumbles upon a gas station up for sale and partners with a young mechanic to buy and run it, an effort Arliss keeps secret from his family and doctor.

His partner, David Manners, is a college educated architect forced to make a living as a garage mechanic in the Depression. Arliss' cute-as-heck daughter, Evalyn Knapp, and Manners begin flirting when she comes by the station to fill her car up. Arliss always hides when she does as neither Manners nor Knapp is aware of the other's relationship to Arliss.

Other than Arliss and Manners having to get even with a local businessman who tried a flim-flam move on them, the above is the story and it works in a simple, straight-forward way.

(Spoiler alert) You know from the start things are going to work out, it's just that kind of movie, so it's not really much of a spoiler alert to tell that, one, Arliss' health improves the more he works and, two, the station becomes a big success. Arliss and Manners then sell the station so Manners can start his own architecture business and marry Knapp.

The joy in this one is Arliss having fun as the former big auto company tycoon running a small, corner gas station. It's also fun to see his adorable daughter, who's not snobbish at all, happily dating "working-man" Manners, while rejecting the advances of the dull trust-fund kid from the "right class" who's chasing her.

*The Millionaire* is nothing special, but even today, it still entertains and, as noted, comprises two very early versions of stories - the downside of early retirement and why one should marry for love not money - Hollywood has been telling ever since. Plus, it's darn good time travel to 1930s America.

N.B. #1 If you do see it, look for the incredible cameo of a pre-stardom James Cagney playing a slick-talking insurance salesman. It's hard to think of anything more Cagney than a slick-talking insurance salesman. You can see the star he'll soon become.

N.B #2 In the great tradition of pre-codes and, really, code-era 1930s movies, lissome Evalyn Knapp proves once again a woman can wear a sheer dress without a bra.


----------



## Fading Fast

*The Turning Point* 1952 with Edmond O'Brien, William Holden, Alexis Smith and Tom Tully

The 1950 Estes Kefauver United States Senate Committee looking into organized crime has been the gift that just keeps giving to Hollywood. It even inspired the famous scene in *The Godfather: Part II* where attorney Tom Hagen gets to scream out "This committee owes [my client] an apology."

*The Turning Point* is one of Hollywood's early bites at the Kefauver apple. Attorney Edmond O'Brien returns to his hometown of Los Angeles to head up a government commission looking into organized crime in the city. With his pretty fiancee, Alexis Smith, at his side, he's the white knight coming home to clean up Dodge City.

He immediately meets his childhood friend, cynical newspaper reporter William Holden, who doesn't believe much will come from O'Brien's effort. The first hint of trouble for O'Brien appears when O'Brien's father, veteran policeman Tom Tully, is hesitant to take a position working for his son's committee.

Sitting on the other side of O'Brien is the local mob boss Ed Begley who has a tight grip on the city's criminal activity. He has enough people on his payroll, in the right places and on both sides of the law to protect his interests. With that setup, *The Turning Point* is a solid crime drama cum soap opera that packs a lot of punch into its eighty-five minutes.

(Spoiler alert - it happens early, but it's the key to the entire story). Reporter Holden confirms his suspicion that O'Brien's father, Tully, is a cop on mob boss Begley's payroll. Unaware of this, O'Brien keeps failing to find anything to stick on Begley.

At about the same time that Holden is outing Tully, he and Alexis Smith, after a little flirt fighting, begin an affair, shockingly for this period, based on not much more than they like each other and want to hop in the sack. Remember, Smith's fiance O'Brien and Holden were childhood friends.

(Spoiler alert) Holden, trying to help the friend he's (effectively) cuckolding, realizes that the only way O'Brien's committee can be successful is if O'Brien is told his now-dead father - the mob killed dad because he was too much of a liability - was on the take. Almost at the same time Holden tells O'Brien about his dad, Smith confirms to O'Brien his suspicions about her affair with Holden.

Talk about a bad day. Umm, your policeman father, who was a paragon of virtue to you, was on the take and your childhood friend is snaking your fiancee, but good news, you might have a new angle on how to bring down the mob.

O'Brien, oddly, does kind of take it all in stride and uses this new information to go after Begley and (spoiler alert) takes him down with Holden's help, but it costs Holden his life. These sacrifices aren't done or taken lightly as reflected in the tight and realistic dialogue of screenwriter Warren Duff.

Duff has his characters discussing the meaning of justice and honor and what citizens, politicians and the police should be willing to sacrifice for the good of society in a reasonably honest, natural and impactful manner. If only modern screenwriters would learn to pen dialogue and not speeches, so many modern movies wouldn't sound so preachy.

*The Turning Point* is tough stuff for 1952. In addition to one of the heros getting killed, the rackets are shown to be a well-organized syndicate running large illegal activities - numbers, bookmaking, loansharking, drugs, etc. - in part, by buying protection from the officers and politicians who are supposed to be protecting the people.

Yes, in this movie, the good guys win overall, but you don't really take a happy message away from *The Turning Point*. As with several other 1950s noirish crime dramas, what America saw in *The Turning Point* was a mob that had become more professional (versus the mob of the 1930s shoot-'em-up movies) and more corrupting of its police and politicians.

*The Turning Point's* biggest strength is its interpersonal relationships where deep betrayals seem, dispiritingly, to be part of the fabric of the times. But it also does a darn good job of connecting the dots to show how organized crime uses its ill-gotten gains to buy muscle and influence to protect itself. Some movies are good because they are different; others, like *The Turning Point*, are good because they do all the expected things of their subgenre very well.

N.B. For time travel, T*he Turning Point* is a heck of a trip to early 1950s Los Angeles, including the incredibly cinematic Angels Flight funicular, seedy apartment houses, government buildings done in inspiring classical architecture, dive bars and the period-perfect Grand Olympic Auditorium hosting a period-perfect boxing match.


----------



## Fading Fast

*Marty* from 1955 with Ernest Borgnine, Betsy Blair and Esther Minciotti

*Marty* is what most romcoms try to be: romantic stories that blend pathos and humor to reflect something like real life. Romcoms are too often formulaic and forced, but *Marty* is a believable tale of two romantically lost souls finding each other amidst the pressures and expectations of their Bronx, blue-collar, ethnic mid-twentieth-century world.

Thirty-four-year-old butcher Marty, Ernest Borgnine, lives at home with his immigrant Italian mother (she cooks big meals, goes to Mass each day and cleans her house all the time) as, even though he's the oldest child, he's the only one not married.

His Friday and Saturday nights are spent with his bachelor friends going to bars, dance halls or "hanging out" on popular street corners mainly in an attempt to meet "tomatoes," girls.

The boys all want to "score," while Borgnine's mom wants him to meet a nice girl, but we quickly see that chubby, average-looking Borgnine is struggling to do either and beginning to get frustrated by both his own failure and all the "advice" he's getting.

One night at a dance hall, he meets what is supposed to be an unattractive woman, Betsy Blair, who was, effectively, abandoned by her blind date. While everyone refers to Blair as unattractive, in one of the movie's few false notes, Ms. Blair is an attractive woman, but Hollywood's gonna Hollywood.

Borgnine and Blair have an immediate connection and spend the evening walking and talking for hours sharing many of their secrets, emotions, hopes and dreams. She even briefly meets his mother and his best friend as happens in these ethnic enclaves. It's a magical evening for both after years and years of romantic disappointment.

When they part, Borgnine agrees to call her the next day. Yet, when he gets home, his mother is down on her because mom recently realized, when Borgnine gets married, she'll be alone. Additionally, Borgnine's friends are down on her both because of her looks, "she's a dog," and because they don't think he should give up his "freedom."

Meanwhile, Blair has excitedly told her parents about Marty. You can feel the parents' relief and trepidation as they want this to be good, but are worried about how their daughter would face another letdown.

With his mother and friends discouraging him, plus some other pressures related to a relative coming to live with them and the possibility of buying the butcher shop he works in, Borgnine doesn't call Blair the next day. That evening, we see Blair silently crying as she watches TV with her parents. This is heartbreaking stuff.

(Spoiler alert) Just when you think this meant-for-each-other couple will miss their chance, Borgnine has a personal epiphany moment, pushes all the negative advice aside and, in the closing scene, calls Blair. You then know it will all work out.

*Marty* is a romcom with grit. You might not have grown up in a Bronx Italian neighborhood in the 1950s, but you know shy and insecure-around-the-opposite-sex men and women like Borgnine and Blair who spend a lot of tough and disappointing years not finding love as they get pushed and pulled by others advice. But when they do finally find somebody, the moment is romcom and real-life magic. Kudos to *Marty* for sensitively capturing all of that.


----------



## Mike Petrik

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 78111
> 
> *Marty* from 1955 with Ernest Borgnine, Betsy Blair and Esther Minciotti
> 
> *Marty* is what most romcoms try to be: romantic stories that blend pathos and humor to reflect something like real life. Romcoms are too often formulaic and forced, but *Marty* is a believable tale of two romantically lost souls finding each other amidst the pressures and expectations of their Bronx, blue-collar, ethnic mid-twentieth-century world.
> 
> Thirty-four-year-old butcher Marty, Ernest Borgnine, lives at home with his immigrant Italian mother (she cooks big meals, goes to Mass each day and cleans her house all the time) as, even though he's the oldest child, he's the only one not married.
> 
> His Friday and Saturday nights are spent with his bachelor friends going to bars, dance halls or "hanging out" on popular street corners mainly in an attempt to meet "tomatoes," girls.
> 
> The boys all want to "score," while Borgnine's mom wants him to meet a nice girl, but we quickly see that chubby, average-looking Borgnine is struggling to do either and beginning to get frustrated by both his own failure and all the "advice" he's getting.
> 
> One night at a dance hall, he meets what is supposed to be an unattractive woman, Betsy Blair, who was, effectively, abandoned by her blind date. While everyone refers to Blair as unattractive, in one of the movie's few false notes, Ms. Blair is an attractive woman, but Hollywood's gonna Hollywood.
> 
> Borgnine and Blair have an immediate connection and spend the evening walking and talking for hours sharing many of their secrets, emotions, hopes and dreams. She even briefly meets his mother and his best friend as happens in these ethnic enclaves. It's a magical evening for both after years and years of romantic disappointment.
> 
> When they part, Borgnine agrees to call her the next day. Yet, when he gets home, his mother is down on her because mom recently realized, when Borgnine gets married, she'll be alone. Additionally, Borgnine's friends are down on her both because of her looks, "she's a dog," and because they don't think he should give up his "freedom."
> 
> Meanwhile, Blair has excitedly told her parents about Marty. You can feel the parents' relief and trepidation as they want this to be good, but are worried about how their daughter would face another letdown.
> 
> With his mother and friends discouraging him, plus some other pressures related to a relative coming to live with them and the possibility of buying the butcher shop he works in, Borgnine doesn't call Blair the next day. That evening, we see Blair silently crying as she watches TV with her parents. This is heartbreaking stuff.
> 
> (Spoiler alert) Just when you think this meant-for-each-other couple will miss their chance, Borgnine has a personal epiphany moment, pushes all the negative advice aside and, in the closing scene, calls Blair. You then know it will all work out.
> 
> *Marty* is a romcom with grit. You might not have grown up in a Bronx Italian neighborhood in the 1950s, but you know shy and insecure-around-the-opposite-sex men and women like Borgnine and Blair who spend a lot of tough and disappointing years not finding love as they get pushed and pulled by others advice. But when they do finally find somebody, the moment is romcom and real-life magic. Kudos to *Marty* for sensitively capturing all of that.


Splendid review. Marty is one of my all time favorite films. A true gem.


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## Fading Fast

*Beg, Borrow or Steal* from 1937 with Frank Morgan, Florence Rice and Reginald Denny

Once you start to see these well-done B movies of Hollywood's Golden Era as 1960s-1990s TV shows before there were TV shows, you can enjoy reasonably entertaining, low-budget efforts like *Beg, Borrow or Steal*.

At just over an hour in runtime, a couple could pop out to see a newsreal, maybe a short and this movie as their entertainment for the evening, just like in the pre-Internet days when a couple might watch the news, a TV sitcom followed by a drama and then go to bed.

The actors in *Beg, Borrow or Steal* are mainly second-tier stars who you know, some by name, some just by face, but they feel familiar, similar to TV shows up through the 1990s. The plot is a by-the-numbers feel-good romcom that doesn't surprise, but does entertain. Think of *The Rockford Files* in the 1970s; you watched it because James Garner was likeable and the plot was easy and fun.

Here, Frank Morgan, most famous for his turn as the Wizard of Oz, is a charming rogue living in France. To "get by," he and his pals - the nicest rogues' gallery ever assembled - gamble (and cheat), scam a bit (at anything they can) and sell forged art (that they make).

It has a Tarantino feel without the menace as Morgan and his crew discuss their "business" and life problems as if being low-level crooks was just like any other line of work. Even amongst themselves, they lightly try to scam each other as, despite being true friends, it's just what they do. Their odd camaraderie is one of the most enjoyable parts of the movie.

When Morgan learns his daughter in America, Florence Rice (who looks a lot like 1990s star Bridget Fonda) is getting married, he boastfully offers up his non-existent chateau for her wedding assuming she'd never take him up on it. She does and it's all romcom hijinx, contretemps and cover-ups from there. Morgan scams the use of a chateau for a week and the wedding party is on.

The fun in this one is Morgan as a bubbling grifter with a kind heart who steals a bit to get by sans avarice and malice. Heck, you know he'd give, without hesitation, the proceeds from a forged-art sale, or his last dollar, to a buddy in need.

When he sees his daughter is engaged to a passionless man she respects but doesn't love, he quietly promotes her budding romance with the chateau's true owner who is a genuinely nice guy. You can guess the outcome from there. 
*
Beg, Borrow or Steal* is cute and silly with enough good scenes and lines to keep you entertained for its seventy-minute runtime, just like a good old-style TV show.


----------



## eagle2250

Fading Fast said:


> View attachment 78185
> 
> *Beg, Borrow or Steal* from 1937 with Frank Morgan, Florence Rice and Reginald Denny
> 
> Once you start to see these well-done B movies of Hollywood's Golden Era as 1960s-1990s TV shows before there were TV shows, you can enjoy reasonably entertaining, low-budget efforts like *Beg, Borrow or Steal*.
> 
> At just over an hour in runtime, a couple could pop out to see a newsreal, maybe a short and this movie as their entertainment for the evening, just like in the pre-Internet days when a couple might watch the news, a TV sitcom followed by a drama and then go to bed.
> 
> The actors in *Beg, Borrow or Steal* are mainly second-tier stars who you know, some by name, some just by face, but they feel familiar, similar to TV shows up through the 1990s. The plot is a by-the-numbers feel-good romcom that doesn't surprise, but does entertain. Think of *The Rockford Files* in the 1970s; you watched it because James Garner was likeable and the plot was easy and fun.
> 
> Here, Frank Morgan, most famous for his turn as the Wizard of Oz, is a charming rogue living in France. To "get by," he and his pals - the nicest rogues' gallery ever assembled - gamble (and cheat), scam a bit (at anything they can) and sell forged art (that they make).
> 
> It has a Tarantino feel without the menace as Morgan and his crew discuss their "business" and life problems as if being low-level crooks was just like any other line of work. Even amongst themselves, they lightly try to scam each other as, despite being true friends, it's just what they do. Their odd camaraderie is one of the most enjoyable parts of the movie.
> 
> When Morgan learns his daughter in America, Florence Rice (who looks a lot like 1990s star Bridget Fonda) is getting married, he boastfully offers up his non-existent chateau for her wedding assuming she'd never take him up on it. She does and it's all romcom hijinx, contretemps and cover-ups from there. Morgan scams the use of a chateau for a week and the wedding party is on.
> 
> The fun in this one is Morgan as a bubbling grifter with a kind heart who steals a bit to get by sans avarice and malice. Heck, you know he'd give, without hesitation, the proceeds from a forged-art sale, or his last dollar, to a buddy in need.
> 
> When he sees his daughter is engaged to a passionless man she respects but doesn't love, he quietly promotes her budding romance with the chateau's true owner who is a genuinely nice guy. You can guess the outcome from there.
> 
> *Beg, Borrow or Steal* is cute and silly with enough good scenes and lines to keep you entertained for its seventy-minute runtime, just like a good old-style TV show.


Beg, Borrow or Steal , based on your review, sound like a movie that would be a lot of fun to watch. It is on my list and hence, I am on the hunt for a conveniently available DVD. If you had not informed us that Frank Morgan was the man who performed as the Wizard in that iconic movie Wizard of Oz, I never would have recognized him, but the facial features never lie! Thanks for the heads up and thank you for another excellent review.


----------



## Fading Fast

*Side Street* from 1950 with Farley Granger, Cathy O'Donnell, Paul Kelly, James Craig and Jean Hagen

*Side Street* is a solid noir driven by Farley Granger making one awful decision after another. His reasoning is so terrible, you almost don't care if this not-bad guy is killed - life is cheap in this one anyway - just for being so stupid.

Granger and Cathy O'Donnell are soon to be parents living with her parents in New York City because Granger's gas station failed. Sure, living with your in-laws, even though these seem like okay ones, isn't great, but Farley's need for money doesn't equal Jean Valjean's.

As a part-time letter carrier, Granger sees an opportunity to steal a few hundred dollars. It's important to note that the money wasn't lying in the open, but he had to, one, enter an unoccupied office, two, get the fire ax from the hallway, three, use the ax to open a locked file cabinet and, four, stuff the money in his bag and leave quickly.

You know you are stealing when you do all that. Oh, and when he got to the money in the file cabinet, he saw it was $30,000 and not the expected few hundred dollars. Well, Granger appears to think, in for a penny, in for a pound, which stupidly ignores the fact that stealing big money puts the crime on a whole other level.

The stolen money, we learn, was extorted from a businessman who was having an affair with a pretty, young blonde, Adele Jergens, who shows up dead after she passes the money to the extortion ring leaders. That murder lands with homicide, which effectively puts Granger in the crosshairs of an extensive police investigation.

Granger, with his wife about to enter labor, concocts a story for her about getting an advance on a new job upstate and, then, gives her a few hundred dollars. Following that, he asks the local bartender to hold a wrapped package for him (containing the $30,000 - dear God) and, then, hides out in New York City as he tries to decide what dumb thing to do next.

The rest of the movie is the police, led by Paul Kelly with Charles McGraw (a Lawrence Tierney doppelganger) and the crooks who extorted the money, led by psychotic James Craig and his shady lawyer Edmon Ryan, trying to find Granger and the money.

When he realizes he's in way over his head, Granger tries to give the money back. But since he stole money that had been obtain by extortion - money that is now linked to a murder investigation - nothing is simple. Plus, the bartender already stole the money from Granger.

In classic noir fashion, the police do their methodical crime-investigation thing at a measured pace, while the thugs do their usual threatening and killing thing at a frenzied pace.

With iconic New York City as a backdrop, including some incredible overhead blimp shots, Granger runs all over the place trying to unwind the unwindable.

Along the way, he gets beat up a few times and, then, connects with Craig's gun moll, Jean Hagen (playing nearly the same brainless and devoted-to-a-psychotic-crook girlfriend she does in *Asphalt Jungle*).

Granger also manages to visit his wife in the maternity ward, where they have the obligatory "we love our baby and each other" moment, before the climax, where he, the money, the thugs and the cops all intersect in a wonderfully filmed car-chase scene.

*Side Street* is a classic noir at the height of the classic-noir period. With smart, deliberate cops, violent, unhinged crooks, a few shady characters and a regular guy sucked into a criminal vortex, all taking place in a major metropolis, it checks many of noir's boxes.

You'll have to decide, though, how you feel about Granger's character as he didn't make a small mistake, like finding a little money and not returning it, instead he clearly committed a crime and, then, compounded it with more real crimes and several crimes of stupidity. Sure, he got unlucky along the way, but he wasn't an innocent bystander either.

That's the moral challenge to sort out as you watch *Side Street*. (Spoiler alert) Hollywood decided it needed a happy ending, so the narrator avers that Granger won't pay too big a price for his colossal stupidity and will soon be reunited with O'Donnell and the baby. You might think a different ending is in order.


----------



## Vecchio Vespa

eagle2250 said:


> Another great review and this one features a favorite Hitchcock movie of mine. I've watched the Birds at least a half dozen times. I used to say I was fascinated by the movie because of Hitchcock's almost magical ability to create ascending levels of suspense in the mind of the viewer. However, at this point in life, I will admit my motivation for sitting through repeated viewings was as much to just ogle Tippi Hedren, as anything else.
> 
> Interestingly in my own life, while I have never been attacked by seagulls or crows, I did once come under attack by a gaggle of geese. Geese can really put one in a world of hurt pecking at you with those damn beaks of theirs and beating you up with their wings! LOL.
> 
> Seriously it is one of Hitchcock's best!


I, too, have watched it many times, mainly for Tippi but also her car, perfection on four wheels to go with her perfection on two feet. I also love the side story of her role in developing the nail salon industry here.


----------



## Fading Fast

*Dear Heart* form 1964 with Glenn Ford, Geraldine Page and Angela Lansbury

*Dear Heart* is an odd movie. It has some of the grit of *The Apartment*, as we see middle-aged businessman Glenn Ford have a quick affair with a blonde hotel candy-counter girl, even though Ford himself just got engaged.

But it also has some romcom lightness as Ford, against his will, begins falling for kind-and-goofy Geraldine Page. Thrown into this mix is Ford getting to know his fiancee's college-age son, where both are kinda looking for an instant father-son bond, but of course, that's not how life works.

Ford is an executive who's just been transferred to New York and is waiting for his fiancee, Angela Lansbury, to join him. The hotel he's staying at is hosting a postmaster convention where the goal of most of the men and some of the women is to see whose bed they can wake up in the next morning.

Just-engaged Ford meets sweet-and-ditzy Page whom he kind of likes, but doesn't really have time for as he's already trying to balance his fiancee, her son (the son's wacky "beatnick" girlfriend) and the fast-and-loose blonde he's banging.

But there's something about Page. You know she's spent her life being a kind of square peg trying to fit into life's harsh round holes, but she keeps at it with an enthusiasm that veers into kookiness. She's the one who buys the touristy nicknacks, picks up a plant to "decorate" her hotel room so that it feels more homey and keeps Ford's leftover sandwich with her as she knows he'll get hungry later.

Over the convention's few days, Ford's emotions bounce all over the place as he tries to convince himself he wants to get married, wants to be a father to a college-aged boy he's just met and that he no longer wants to have affairs. Meanwhile, Page, seeing her fate in the older, single postmistresses who have clearly given up on finding love, fights off depression with a, sometimes, forced happiness.

All of *Dear Heart's* crosscurrents gives the movie an awkward balance that doesn't fully work as its transitions in tone and shifting degrees of levity are jarring. Also, the characters are somewhat inconsistent, but darn it if you aren't rooting for good things to happen for Page.

When Ford's fiancee, Lansbury, shows up, it's decision time for Ford. Mainly by implication, Lansbury tells Ford it's okay if he continues to have affairs, she just wants him to be discreet. Her real reason for marrying him is to get out of her small town and to live an easy life as the wife of a successful executive.

(Spoiler alert) Lansbury's jarring comments spark Ford to reconsider everything, especially when, later, he sees awkward but sincere Page carrying her stupid plant and souvenirs through the lobby as she's checking out. More in an emotional roll of the dice than out of strong conviction, Ford breaks off his engagement. Then, as he and Page walk away arm and arm at the end, we assume they'll get married.

*Dear Heart* ends on that romcom note despite its circuitous path to a conclusion. It's hard to recommend this uneven and, often, nonsensical effort, but it has its good parts, including Page's moving performance. Plus, it's pretty good time travel to early 1960s New York City, with some cool scenes in, sadly, what was then, soon-to-become-demolished Penn Station.


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## Fading Fast

*The Secret Bride* from 1934 with Warren William, Barbara Stanwyck, Grant Mitchell and Glenda Farrell

At an hour in length, *The Secret Bride* is another 1930s wash-rinse-repeat movie (with A stars) that is pretty much the forerunner of the 1960s/1970s TV crime drama.

A district attorney, Warren William, elopes with the governor's daughter, Barbara Stanwyck, but before they can announce their marriage, the governor is accused of taking a bribe from a businessman he pardoned.

William and Stanwyck quickly decide to keep their marriage a secret as, otherwise, William would have to recuse himself from the investigation of his, now, father-in-law. Today, of course, we'd argue he should recuse himself immediately, but in this 1934 movie, good intentions trump everything else.

That's the "secret bride" angle, which, other than sounding good in the title, is not very important to the story: a story of a basic political frame-up that makes the governor look guilty, but - and you'll guess this early on - he isn't.

The rest of the movie is a crime-drama mystery as William, with an informal assist from Stanwyck, tries to find exculpating evidence for the governor even as the incriminating evidence against him mounts.

The political corruption story was a very popular 1930s plot. In *The Secret Bride*, as in most Warner Bros. efforts of that era, there are a lot of twists, deceptions, suicides, murders and police forensics (there's a neat state-of-the-art ballistics testing scene).

Just like today, publicly, we are all against conflicts of interest and playing fast and loose with the law. Yet when we see the good guys do it in a movie because they have to for justice to prevail, as William and Stanwyck do here, we're usually quite supportive.

(Spoiler alert) Also common in these 1930s crime-drama mysteries, all looks bleakest until a last minute deus ex machina saves the day. In *The Secret Bride*, the improbable solution comes in the form of Grant Mitchell, the nervous and diffident private secretary to the pardoned man. He provides exonerating evidence at the governor's impeachment hearing.

No one watched *Mannix* or *The F.B.I.* each week in the 1960s and 1970s to really, truly be surprised by the plot; one watched those shows to see a familiar story with actors one liked.

Warren William and Barbara Stanwyck were some of the 1930s actors the public liked to watch. In particular, William was his own brand in the early to mid 1930s playing roguish good and bad guys whom the public just enjoyed seeing on the screen.

Today, old movies like *The Secret Bride* are no better or worse than watching a rerun of a* Mannix* or *The F.B.I*. episode, with for us today, the added fun of time travel to the cars, clothes, architecture and norms of the 1930s.


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