by Dean | Jun 18, 2015 | General
A screwball item, The Bride Came C.O.D. (1941) is stale in several ways and obtuse in several others, but you could certainly do worse for sight gags and one-liners.
It tells of a charter pilot (James Cagney) hired by a tycoon to keep the latter’s daughter (Bette Davis) from marrying an unsuitable man. The grand prevention requires the use of an aircraft. . . The best thing here is Davis, fully committed to her role. Now classy, now sexy, she is also necessarily and beautifully buoyant. As for Cagney, he was ever the cheerful man’s man; it’s no surprise that he finally became a political conservative.
Cover of The Bride Came C.O.D.
by Dean | Jun 15, 2015 | General
An elderly couple visit their grown son and daughter and widowed daughter-in-law in Tokyo Story (1953), the great classic Japanese film directed and co-written (with Kogo Noda) by Yasujiro Ozu.
The couple’s children are harmless people who are nevertheless not as generous and attentive to their parents as they ought to be. The daughter-in-law, Noriko, is generous and attentive. Work and immediate family prevent the son, a doctor, and the daughter, a beautician, from experiencing the loneliness and isolation consistently imposed on the characters who have had, or are having, these life-enriching realities stripped away from them. The parents are among these characters, and Noriko is too. With scant opportunity to genuinely love her husband before he died in the war, she remains idiosyncratically loyal to the man but also secluded and not really living. On this particular subject—loneliness and isolation—Tokyo Story, though a quiet film, is shattering.
(In Japanese with English subtitles)
Cover of Tokyo Story – Criterion Collection
by Dean | Jun 14, 2015 | General
I saw the film version of The Humbling (2014)—Philip Roth’s novel, which I reviewed on this site—on DVD the other day. Barry Levinson directed the picture imaginatively and Al Pacino is extraordinary as the malfunctioning great actor who gets involved with the strange lesbian (Greta Gerwig), but the undertaking would have been better had the film been a little more faithful to the novel.
Buck Henry and Michael Zebede wrote the script, and I disesteem Henry’s attempts at arch comedy. For a transsexual character, the ex-lover of Gerwig’s lesbian, to be tossed in is pointless, and the tragic ending is more garish, less believable, than Roth’s ending. The film could have been a memorable success, but in truth it is too eccentric to even register as something disturbing and important.
by Dean | Jun 10, 2015 | General
Joss Whedon filmed, with a contemporary setting, Much Ado About Nothing, a 2013 release.
In writing about a stage production of Shakespeare’s comedy, John Simon averred that “Much Ado is a shrewd play in which comedy and near-tragedy chase each other like a kitten and its tail until they are revealed to be the same organism: the scheme of things as they are.” This organism is not perfectly created by Whedon; the scheme is not quite communicated. It would have helped had he refrained from using a good deal of rueful music, although this alone would have been insufficient.
Even so, the movie is meritorious, with a shrewdness of its own (but just not a thorough shrewdness). Up to a point it’s Shakespeare as a 1960s art film, shot in black and white, and an unforced, unself-conscious Shakespeare it is. It is frequently funny and, thanks to Whedon, not over-sensual. Alexis Denisof, dignified without arrogance, is exactly right for Benedick, and Amy Acker is an intelligent Beatrice with some skill in physical comedy. Both are impeccable, as are Nathan Fillion (Dogberry) and indeed most of the other histrions. Much Ado is an alloyed, but not sorely alloyed, treat.
by Dean | Jun 7, 2015 | General
The Doris Day mode continued as late as 1968, the year of The Graduate, with Dean Martin and Stella Stevens in the romantic comedy, How to Save a Marriage (and Ruin Your Life).
Eli Wallach is superb as a fiftyish man who cheats on his wife. His buddy David Sloane (Martin) thinks he has proof that the adulterer’s mistress (Ann Jackson) is fickle, so he tries to save Wallach’s marriage by making advances to her. But he does so to the wrong girl (Stevens), not the one involved with his friend.
Not far behind Wallach, Stella Stevens is lively and endearing—and drop-dead beautiful. Martin, on the other hand, is inadequate, but Jackson and some others aren’t. They’re authoritatively comic. Fielder Cook’s directing is not quite good and not quite bad, notwithstanding, despite unsatisfying characterization, Marriage contains dollops of wit and some tasty humor. It’s flawed but entertaining. In addition, mainly a family pic, it’s hardly sexy at all, released only a year before such films as Goodbye Columbus and Last Summer, with their naked bodies, appeared.
