by Dean | Feb 5, 2019 | General
The silent flick, Safety Last! (1923), begins with a scene suggesting that Harold Lloyd (as The Boy) is in a prison cell waiting to be hanged for an unknown crime, but, no, it’s just a sight gag. Harold is simply at a railroad station. Yet an approaching hanging, if it were real, would be just one more scrape the amiable but aggressively fighting comic figure would have to survive.
All the nerd wants to do is raise enough money in the big city to marry The Girl (Mildred Davis), for there is prosperity in the big city. Yes, but there’s poverty as well—it exists for Harold and his roommate. The demands of money-making tasks keep Lloyd in mad tumult. Even a skyscraper must be conquered.
Comedic movies of the 1930s were good because they were interesting. Comedic movies of the 1920s were good because they were funny. (Those of the 1930s [e.g. Duck Soup] could be funny too.) And the physical comedians were delightfully talented. Safety Last! was written by Hal Roach and a couple of others, with Lloyd as an uncredited writer. Lloyd did not direct it. Mainly he was the great actor, a perfect linchpin performer. Incidentally, I now wish to see some 1930s Harold Lloyd films.
by Dean | Feb 1, 2019 | General
Audie Murphy was a war hero, but a charmless and very limited actor—too limited as a leading man. Still, the 1953 Gunsmoke, which stars Murphy, is another enticing Old Hollywood Western adapted from an obscure novel.
Here, Reb Kittredge, Murphy’s character, is hired to kill a man (Paul Kelly) but ends up buying his failing ranch instead. He becomes the instrument for protecting the rancher’s interests. However, he himself needs protection from Johnny, a coldly practical friend of his who might find it necessary to gun Kittredge down, and from big Curly, who resents Kittredge’s liking for Rita (Susan Cabot), the woman Curly is wooing.
I like that the film is in color, but Nathan Juran‘s directing is certainly unspectacular. There is extensive drama, though, and a handful of nifty performances (by Jack Kelly, Donald Randolph, Jesse White). Cabot’s Rita could have been an interesting character—as interesting as Susan Cabot herself, with her horrible life—but there is no development of her.
by Dean | Jan 30, 2019 | General
I don’t know how much the French priest John Vianney in the old film, The Wizard of Heaven (1949), resembles the real John Vianney, who died in 1859, but I like and respect this atypical Marcel Blistene (director)-Rene Jolivet (screenwriter) achievement. Vianney, acted by Georges Rollin, is a devout, sanguine, legalistic clergyman trying to convert the people of Ars. I suppose those who do convert—and they’re definitely there—give up dancing, which the priest plainly hates.
Wizard is like a more supernatural Diary of a Country Priest (the film). Satan contemptuously speaks to Vianney, and a crippled boy is healed by God. Philosophical idealism leaves materialism in the dust. The movie’s theme is reformation in the interest of upholding the cause of the Divine. Sometimes, in fact, this is self-reformation.
(In French with English subtitles. The French title is Le Sorcier du Ciel.)
by Dean | Jan 24, 2019 | General
Like Scarlet Street, The Woman in the Window (1944) is an Edward G. Robinson-Joan Bennett collaboration directed by Fritz Lang.
At first I thought the film might be about what ensues from the fear of injustice, but, no, it’s just about itself. It is film noir with a nearly jokey ending, but it’s riveting. . . I called Scarlet Street “nice-looking,” and so is this: it’s good to see non-glossy black and white. Bennett looked like Hedy Lamarr, so she is gorgeous. Lang’s cast is one to relish.
by Dean | Jan 22, 2019 | General
The protagonists in the 1961 Italian film, La Notte (“The Night”), are a married couple—emphatically married. Disillusionment, the weary efforts to understand and console, the fearful concern over having caused pain, the unwillingness to part—these and other realities so frequently subsisting in matrimony are beautifully depicted by director Michelangelo Antonioni. Beyond this, the film raises the following questions: Do Western cultures really care about marriage? Do they care about anything? Why does it seem as though nothing of substance takes place in our busy but non-communal cities? (I’m thinking of the sequence in which the wife, played by Jeanne Moreau, strolls through Milan.)
The second half of this near-classic is somewhat too talky, but the movie as a whole is one of the most technically clever, resonantly made pictures I’ve seen.
(In Italian with English subtitles)
English: Michelangelo Antonioni at the premiere of “Jenseits der Wolken” “jenseits der wolken” at cinema odeon, Cologne. Deutsch: Michelangelo Antonioni bei der deutschlandpremiere des films “jenseits der wolken” am 29. oktober 1995 im kölner odeon-kino. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
