My April movie-viewing (many comedies)
May 02 '05 (Updated Aug 14 '08)
The Bottom Line Pleasant surprises: Down to the Sea in Ships,
It's Love I'm After
Even more than usual, Turner Classic Movies was my main supplier of old movies to watch, as it showed many comedies ("April's Fools"). Chronologically, these started with some
Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle movies:
The Knockout (1914, 1.5 stars) in which Arbuckle attempts to impress his girlfriend by enrolling for a boxing match. Charlie Chaplin appeared as a referee who was hit more than either of the fighters and was slightly more funny than Arbuckle and the Keystone Cops..
The Rounders (1914), directed by Chaplin, 2 stars) in which Chaplin and Arbuckle go on a drinking binge.
Mabel and Fatty's Wash Day (1915, directed by Arbuckle, 2 stars) in which henpecked husband Arbuckle's innocent friendship with a married woman (Mabel Normand) leads to chaos—with laundry strewn about.
Wished on Mabel (1915, directed by Normand, 2.8 stars) a mildly amusing comedy of a park loiterer/thief (nor Arbuckle).
Fatty's Tintype Tangle (1915, directed by Arbuckle, 2.4 stars) has more pratfalls plus jealous husbands (and Arbuckle as a henpecked one).
Fatty at Coney Island (1917, directed by Arbuckle, 3.4 stars). Trying to evade his wife (Agnes Neilson) at the beach, Arbuckle first buries himself in the sand and later, when told to "get a tent" by the man renting bathing costumes, steals that of a large woman with fairly funny results (though "Some Like It Hot" it ain't). Buster Keaton, with some facial expressions (before becoming "the Great Stone Face," he mugged—and even cried) has a significant supporting role, and nearly as many falls as Arbuckle. It also has the Keystone Cops falling all over themselves and documentation of Coney Island as it was in 1917.
Leap Year (1921, directed by James Cruze, 1.4 stars) An unfunny feature-length farce, the first movie of any length I saw with Arbuckle (and the last he completed before his star was eclipsed: the movie was not released because of the "orgy"/"murder" scandal, though Arbuckle was exonerated. In the movie, he played a spoiled heir-in-waiting with three fiancées plus the nurse he really wanted to marry. Few of the pratfalls are funny, though there is one flip into bed that is.
And a Great Leap forward by one of Arbuckle's costars:
Our Hospitality (1923, starring and directed by Buster Keaton, 5 stars) is probably my favorite Keaton movie. I think that "The General" is more profound with more impressive cinematograhy. Both have great sequences of trains (very narrow-gauge in "Hospitality"), and "Hospitality" has a love interest closer to seeming like a human being (Natalie Talmadge) than in any of the other Keaton silent movies. (I also watched the hilarious but suspect-of-racism end of "The Navigator.")
Sherlock Jr. (directed by and starring Buster Keaton1924, 4.3 stars) has a hilarious chase scene and a pretty funny sequence of the theater projectionist (Keaton) climbing into the screen and being thrown with each cut from scene to scene. The framing romance (with Kathryn McGuire and caddish rival Ward Crane) is routine. (I was much more enamored with this movie the first time I saw it, many years ago.)
I thought the VHS version that I saw of "Spione" (Spies1928, directed by Fritz Lang, 2.6 stars) was too long. There is a DVD version that is an hour longer. Lang aficionado that I am, I'd rather watch his WWII spy movie Ministry of Fear again rather than seek out the longer version of "Spies," having found the streamlined version implausible and boring (in the middle; it starts fast and ends satisfyingly).
Pardon Us (1931, 2.3 stars), the first Laurel and Hardy sound feature, runs only 56 minutes, but still drags often, particularly in extended musical numbers (in a prison movie!), but has some moments of inspired lunacy. I was expecting the worst when they went into blackface, but there wasn't anything particularly offensive.
Blessed Event (1932, directed by Roy Del Ruth, 3.4 stars) was intended for James Cagney, but became a vehicle for the kind of exploitative cynic Lee Tracy played in a succession of films (of which the best were the publicist he played in "The Half-Naked Truth" with a semi-dressed Lupe Velez and the publicist he played for a "Bombshell" as put-upon as Jean Harlow who played the title role and a publicist from a drunkard actor not unlike John Barrymore in "Dinner at Eight").. There is a running animosity between the gossip-monger Tracy played in "Event" and the crooner not unlike Dick Powell that Dick Powell played . The ending is a mushy redemption of the rogue..
Blondie Of The Follies (1932, directed by Edmund Goulding, 3.2 stars) is a pre-Code representation of a woman from a working-class background finding a sugar daddy and becoming a show girl (reversing the usual order of being picked out of a chorus line and debauched). Marion Davies is plucky and likable in the title role. Although not primarily a comedy (and not at all a musical), Davies gets to do a parody of Greta Garbo partnered with Jimmy Durante doing a parody of John Barrymore (in "Grand Hotel," which Goulding had just directed) that is very funny. Meanwhile, Bille Dove does something of a Garbo number as the used-up and discarded plaything of playboy Robert Montgomery.
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (directed by Fritz Lang in 1932, on the even of the Nazi takeover of power, 4 stars) begins and ends well, and I especially like the echo of "Metropolis" of the rising waters. The beginning, when the audience has no idea who is lurking and then in grave peril is gripping, but there's too much middle, .... and, alas, the German people did not heed the warning against Hitler.
Fog over 'Frisco (1934, directed by William Dieterle, 3.7 stars) is of special interest to any San Franciscan for showing the city before the bridges were built. Much of the movie takes place on Nob Hill (the least changed part of the city), but there is a major chase across downtown to China Basin (not "Bullit," but with footage form longer ago). It also has Bette Davis in her amoral blonde party girl phase, and Margaret Lindsay as the good girl (the stepsister how is the apple of their father's eye). It has a lot of plot packed into 68 minutes with multiple romances, a criminal syndicate, bankers, newspapermen, and the police. The i's are eventually dotted with little panache, but has its moments (especially with Davis and a kidnapping). It also shows that Howard Hawks was not the first to use overlapping dialogue in "My Girl Friday."
Swing Time (1936, directed by George Stevens, 4.5 stars) is one of the two best Astaire-Rogers movies (I prefer "Top Hat" from the year before). The last dance number on an ultra-art deco set with a pair of curved stairways is phenomenal, not just for what the two do, but that there are only two cuts (in "Moulin Rouge" or "Chicago" there would be at least 50). The second bananas (Victor Moore) are funny. Although "Swing Time" has "The Way You Look Tonight" as its leitmotif (first sung within the movie by Astaire), I think there is too much singing. And as much as I love the dance number with Astaire dancing to three silhouettes of himself (they go off on their own at one point, bewildering him), even in tribute (to William "Mr. Bojangles" Robinson) there is something very creepy about blackface (there's also a stereotyped black valet).
Stand-In (1937, directed by Tay Garnett, 3.2 stars) is a bit of screwball comedy that turns into something of a protest movie (and a fantasy of a workers' revolution in Colossal Studios). Leslie Howard plays an ultra-serious, arrogant number cruncher who needs to be jolted (as he was more wittily the next year in "Pygmalion"). The movie business and Joan Blondell supply the jolt, and Blondell carries the movie. (Humphrey Bogart plays a noncomic part as a movie producer who is set up to be fired and then has a comic scene, though it's only a sight gag.)
It's Love I'm After (1937, directed by Archie Mayo, 4.4 stars) has too much Shakespeare-declaiming by Leslie Howard, but then he is playing a big-time ham. He's not as funny as John Barrymore or Richard Dreyfuss playing ham actors, and has a predictable plot to overcome. However, he is aided by a real comedian playing his dresser, Eric Blore as Digges, who specialized in bird calls when he was part of a vaudeville act (and continues to do them to signal to his employer). As Howard's perpetual fiancée Bette Davis get to chew up (and pile up) some scenery, and Olivia de Havilland plays an ingenue infatuated by the Great Actor and believing he can do no wrong. Davis, de Haviland, and Howard are not names that would pop up on any list of comic actors from the Hollywood golden age of screwball comedies, but their iconic roles in dramas and melodramas increases the enjoyment of this movie for those who are familiar with the larger body of their screen work. (Davis became a star torturing Howard in "Of Human Bondage" in 1934; Davis, Howard, and Bogart had been in "The Petrified Forest" the year before "It's Love"; de Haviland beat out the competition for Howard in "Gone with the Wind" two years later, etc.) The eternally bright-eyed but flustered Spring Byington is also on hand to add to the fun. BTW, it's de Haviland who is after love (wanting to play Juliet to Howard's Hamlet (he appears as both Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet with Davis playing Ophelia and Juliet). Davis is seeking a wedding band. Howard and Digges Blore trying to be helpful (with comically disastrous results). "It's Love" is definitely funnier than "Stand-In."
That Certain Woman (1937) a four-hankie weepie, directed by Edmund Goulding, 3.2 stars) in which Bette Davis is prim and noble, and smokes not a single cigarette, as the upper-class bigot played by Donald Crisp dominates Henry Fonda, playing his playboy son in love with Davis. Davis could do noble ("Dark Victory," also directed by Goulding, the end of "Jezebel" with Fonda the next year), but when she was selfish she was generally more entertaining (The Letter, The Little Foxes, etc.).
Granny Get Your Gun (1940, 3.1 stars) was not a musical. Whether it is a comedy or a melodrama, I couldn't tell. I thought that either a comedy or a western written by Perry Mason creator Erle Stanley Gardner was odd, but it devolved into a whodunit (a rather obvious suspect) and the original story had had the reassuringly Gardner title "The Case of the Dangerous Dowager." The "detectives" are a salty old woman (Minerva) who made her fortune mining and her attorney (Nate) who has not had a case in twenty years. The duo were played by May Robson (an Australian-born actress who played many elderly relatives of leads and was nominated for an Oscar as "Apple" Annie in Frank Capra's "Lady for a Day) and Harry Davenport (a face and voice even more recognizable to aficionados of 1930s movies than Robson, he was a cofounder of Actors' Equity; he played Dr. Meade in "Gone with the Wind").
Her Cardboard Lover (1942, directed by George Cukor, 3 stars) was a less-than-inspired 1930s screwball romantic comedy that fell particularly flat with wartime audiences. Robert Taylor's comic timing was surprisingly deft and George Sanders was honing his cad persona. Norma Shearer refused to play her age and was a better "straight man" than comedienne. Still, the movie has its moments, including a young Chill Wills as a judge and Taylor in Shearer's satin pajamas and bunny slippers., plus others of Taylor rousing Sander's (easily-roused) disgust. Pretty-boy Taylor and the refusing-to-age Metro star Shearer were better together in the rescue from the Nazi/romance "Escape" (1940).
Almost entirely in French, featuring the Molière Players, who were French actors in England during the Nazi occupation of France, Bon Voyage was directed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1944. It is very, very talky, very predictable and makes "Topaz" and "Torn Curtain" seem suddenly better, even though it is all over in 26 minutes.(1.5 stars)
Conflict (1945, directed by Curtis Bernhardt, 4 stars) features one of the many battles of wits on screen between Humphrey Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet. In this outing, Greenstreet played an amiable psychiatrist, Bogart an engineer who wanted to trade in his nagging but chicly-dressed wife (Rose Hobart) for her younger, seemingly sweeter sister (Alexis Smith in some very unflattering get-ups). A psychological twister more than a thriller (and not a noir, though the daytime pawnshop and empty apartment scenes relate to the doubts and fears in dangerous peril-filled cities of noirs), it kept me uncertain about what was going on, even though I noticed the most important clue registering.
A whaling-ship movie about all-male family-making, Down to the Sea in Ships (directed by Henry Hathaway, 1949, 4.4 stars) depends on the young Dean Stockwell, who delivered one of his best performances as the grandson of a hidebound ship captain. The part was well suited to the strengths (stubbornness and sentimentality) of the frequently hammy Lionel Barrymore. The least showy of the parts was taken by Richard Widmark, showing his range. There are some alarming crises (making for some stirring action sequences) and splendid cinematography from Joe MacDonald (who also shot Widmark in very different kinds of roles in "Pickup on South Street" and "Yellow Sky").
Ill-Met by Moonlight (American title: "Night Ambush"; the final collaboration between "the Archers": Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, 1957, 3 stars) looks very good but is oddly unengaging and unsuspenseful. It involves two undercover British officers (Dirk Bogarde and David Oxley) working with partisans on Crete (for which the Alps and the Côte d'Azur stood in) to kidnap the German paratrooper commandante (Marius Goring), which they do rather easily (in the only "action" sequence, a simple and brief one), and get him across the island to a rendezvous point where he can be taken to Egypt by submarine. This is also accomplished without much difficulty (though protracted screen time), with a lot of flippant humor (much of it condescending to the Cretans). The proceedings lack the tension of the raid in "The Guns of Navaronne" or "Desert Rats," though there some of the officer civility between the German general and the British officers on the latter is on view. A few years later, Mikis Theodorakis produced a more interesting score for another movie about a Brit on Crete ("Zorba, the Greek").
The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse begin and ends impressively. Fritz Lang's last movie (1960, 3.8 stars) warned of the surveillance society that increasingly is ours. Like that of "The Testament of Dr. Mabuse" its warning was not heeded. (The movie was not really released in the US. The DVD restoration and commentary track are superb—I'd give them 5's).
Men Who Made the Movies, The: Howard Hawks (1973, 2005, written and directed by Richard Schickel, 4.8 stars) has great clips and stories already familiar to me from the auteur of speed (with interviews in the vicinity of his grandson's motorcycle racing).
Nashville (directed by Robert Altman, 4.8 stars) with another fascinating Altman commentary track (and an interview), a very satisfying DVD of a brilliant movie that could have been a bit shorter.
The 1978 film, directed by Martin Scorcese, of the (1976) last concert performance by The Band, The Last Waltz , seems to me undistinguished cinema, interspersed with mostly dull stories told by the members of the group, though the last half hour strikes me as marvel-filled. (3.3 stars for me; more for Band fans)
"O Que É Isso, Companheiro?" (Four Days in September, 1997, directed by Bruno Barreto, 4.3 stars) is a dramatization of the kidnapping of the US ambassador to Brazil in 1969. It has a splendid low-key performance by Alan Arkin, and is so even-handed that it frustrates viewers who want to hate either the state terrorists or the infantile leftist kidnappers or the agent of US imperialism (or more than one of the above).
A Place Called Chiapas (1998, directed by Nettie Wild, 3.6 stars) is an earnest documentary about the Zapatista rebellion in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas that began in 1994 (with the signing of NAFTA and the ending of any pretense at land reform, the primary issue of the 1910-20 Mexican Civil War that ended with an "institutionalized revolutionary party" that governed until after the movie was made), and is still not resolved (though a cease-fire continues). Although I have spent weeks in Chiapas, I was almost always confused about where the footage was shot. Still, some of the sequences capture the surrealness of "the first postmodernist revolution" that began in a town named Realidad (reality!). Taking a page from the Karl Rove playbook (or is the Negroponte one?), the right-wing paramilitary terrorists call themselves Paz y Justicia (Peace and Justice). The government denied the existence of the thugs it was supporting. There is some lugubrious narration, the cat and mouse Q&As with Sub-Commandante Marcos and with the Bishop of San Cristobal de las Casas are more fun.
Goya en Bordeaux (1999, written and directed by Carlo Saura, 3.3 stars) is psychologically opaque but spectacularly filmed by the great cinematographer Vittorio Storaro.
Krámpack (known in the US as Nico and Dani, 2000, directed by Cesc Gay, 4.3 stars) is a Spanish-language movie about 16 year-old males confused about sexuality and trying to fake a boldness that is all façade. I saw it some years back in Spanish without subtitles and missed some nuances, though the dialogue is less important than the body language, particularly that of the title characters, who were played by Jordi Vilches and Fernando Ramallo, respectively. Made before Y tu máma, tambien, it prefigured that Mexican film in sending hormonally overloaded adolescents to a beach, providing a more experienced woman, and in the explorations of sexuality chilling the previously close friendship of the boys.
Forever Ealing, a 2002 Channel 4 documentary, marking the centenary of the Ealing Studio includes Googie Withers, John McCallum, John Mills, and others reminiscing; plus Martin Scorcese talking about "Dead of Night" and "The Lavender Hill Mob,'" Stephen Frears about "The Man in the White Suit," "Terry Gilliam about The Ladykillers," John Landis about "Kind Hearts and Coronets," "plus various clips from those and some other movies (most notably "Trouble Brewing," "The Cruel Sea" and "Scott of Antarctica"). There is no discussion of the great BBC miniseries shot there later (such as "The Singing Detective," "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy") and very little about the silent era. The newest incarnation of the studio had returned to making movies for theatrical release, starting with the quite unnecessary remake of "The Importance of Being Earnest." It is unfortunate that Alec Guiness was not interviewed before he died, since he was the star of most of the best remembered films of the post-WWII golden age of Ealing. 4 stars?
"He ni zai yi qi" Together (2002, directed by Chen Kaige, who plays a significant part as Professor Yu, and whose wife plays another important part, that of the neighbor Lili) is very fluid visually, very romantic musically, and contains excellent performances, especially from Liu Peiqi as a father who wants to do everything he can to allow his son to succeed and Tang Yung as a soulful violin virtuoso.
Cold Mountain (2003, directed by Anthony Minghella, 4.4 stars) seems to have disappointed some fans of the book (as almost all adaptations of big novels do). I don't think that it needs to have run as long as it did, but I find the images and the three leading performances excellent. (Unlike Chris Rock, I don't think Jude Law is too ubiquitous. Perhaps he meant Orland Bloom?) The nearly-3-hour-long movie has a commentary track plus a whole additional disk of extra features. It's definitely "elephant" rather than "termite" art, but does that explain the hostility of some to this and other Minghella movies? Also, Civil War movies other than "Gone with the Wind" have been box-office disappointments (including Ang Lee's often compelling Ride with the Devil).
Super Size Me (2004, 4 stars) ran too long, largely ignored how processed (with sugar) most food for sale in American grocery stores is, and seemed to me to cheat by stopping exercise as well as bingeing for 30 days on nothing but what MacDonald's sells (so that the weight gain in partly what he ate, partly a major reduction in exercise). I wanted to see his triglyceride number changes, and some of Morgan Spurlock in the first week off his all-MacDonald's diet, but the movie also made me want to sell my MacDonald's stock and buy some Phillip Morris. Oh, yes, and to get more exercise. Wasn't that one of my other New Year's resolutions? And last year's? and the year before...
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Well, another of my New Year's resolutions has lasted four whole months, following the frustrating effort to recall all the movies that I saw in 2004.
Again, listing led to writing a few sentences and writing a few sentences led to some express reviews I never would have written had I not been compiling the list, and a few express reviews outgrew their containers. The previous months' lists: January, February, and March.
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