What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

[Fading Fast]

I've only seen Joe E. Brown in small roles in two movies: Some Like it Hot (1959), and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963). Would you suggest I watch The Circus Clown if I can find a copy somewhere, or would I be better off selecting some of his other movies? Or should I just not bother? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Just curious.

I'd say skip him altogether. The only reason I watched this movie is because a friend of mine asked me to participate in a project he has going on another forum where he and I review what he calls neglected films. I've done it for a few years and it has definitely expanded my movie knowledge, but sometimes I get stuck watching movies I'd normally turn off in five minutes.

I respect that Joe E. Brown has some talent, but my God do I not enjoy his movies. If you really want to try one out, then yes, I'd go with "Circus Clown" as it's one of his less obnoxious efforts and Patricia Ellis is insanely adorable.

 

[Harp]

Last nite, I took EngProf's suggestion and tuned in several Seabiscuit documentary tuber offerings,
catching brief supremely dressed trackside elegance displayed Basil Rathbone and James Stewart.
''Gentlemen rankers out on a spree; Damned From Here To Eternity,'' as put Rudyard Kipling. And later,
while surfing, came upon a Heddy Lamar interview circa 1970s, wherein she praised costar Jimmy Stewart's on set kindness and professionalism.

Golden nuggets that glisten like diamonds.

 

[Fading Fast]

Two Weeks in Another Town (1962) with Kirk Douglas, Edward G. Robinson, Claire Trevor, Daliah Lavi, and George Hamilton


It's close at times, but Two Weeks in Another Town falls short of being a really good movie and stands more as a neat collection – almost a curio – of famous actors shot on location in Italy – all in beautiful color. It's equal parts travelogue, movie, and Hollywood navel gazing.

Kirk Douglas plays a washed-up, alcoholic actor who gets asked by a famous director, played by Edward G. Robinson – who himself is trying to regain his former touch – to fly to Italy to help him complete a movie on time. He and Douglas were once a successful movie-making team.

Once there, there's no role for Douglas other than to supervise dubbing, but just being in the orbit of a movie set is lifting Douglas' spirits. Those spirits, though, get shot down when his ex-wife, played by Cyd Charisse, shows up looking glamorous and s*xy, married to a wealthy man.

Douglas, fresh out of a "rest home" (high-end rehab for its day), came to Italy for redemption, but got a ******-flat career boost and his ex thrown in his face. Nevertheless, he's a handsome man with a thin patina of Hollywood glamour still on him, so he is attractive to many women.

One in particular is Daliah Lavi, playing the young and ridiculously s*xy girlfriend of the movie's temperamental young star, played by George Hamilton. She switches teams mid-movie, giving Douglas a boost, which is furthered when a sick Robinson asks Douglas to direct in his place.

Douglas takes the reins, speeds up production, sets Hamilton on a good course, and is lauded by almost everyone – it's the movie's best sequence. But Robinson's shrew of a wife, played with venom by Claire Trevor, poisons Douglas to Robinson: "He's stealing 'your' movie."

This sets Douglas off on a bender into the climax, which is not quite what you expect, but you'll want to see it fresh. After that, there's a brief epilogue as both the movie and the movie within the movie wrap.

Douglas and Robinson were huge stars for a reason; they can carry mediocre material along on their talent and screen personality, which Robinson, in particular, has to do a lot of here. Somehow, the story, a reasonably good one, never quite gels.

While Robinson is doing the yeoman's work of keeping the material moving forward, Douglas adds true sparkle as the man is clearly committed to his role. Depressed, excited, or pensive, Douglas is an actor who makes sure you know it, and it works well in this one.

He lights up even more in his scenes with Lavi, a very pretty young woman who shrinks a bit opposite Douglas, personality-wise, but youth and beauty are great assets to fall back on, which Lavi does in several form-fitted and revealing outfits.

Hamilton, a hit or miss actor, misses until the last few scenes, but he, like Lavi, has ample reserves of youth and beauty to carry him through. Charisse, aging out of her youth and beauty phase, doesn't do much but wear expensive clothes and jewelry to taunt Douglas.

Who truly deserves note is Trevor, playing Robinson's vicious wife who tears him down brick by emotional brick, but woe be the person other than her who tries to do that. They have a badly broken relationship – they communicate by yelling – but somehow it works for them.

The last star of the movie is – and she's a big one – Italy itself. This is not the war-torn mid-century Italy of a Rossellini picture, but the glamorous expat community, recovering-with-gusto Italy of The Talented Mr. Ripley – you'll want to time travel back to this version of Rome.

Hollywood usually makes very good takedown-of-itself movies – heck, Douglas and director Vincente Minnelli, the director here, made an outstanding one ten years earlier in The Bad and the Beautiful – but somehow this one just stumbles along as okay.

Maybe a tweaking of the script, maybe something got lost in editing, or maybe this is all it had, but you can't help feeling that Two Weeks in Another Town was close to being a much better movie than it turned out to be.

For fans of the stars, the director, or post-war Italy – or the awesome-sounding and looking 1960 Maserati 3500 GT that Douglas' character drives (at high speeds) – it's still a fun film, even better the second time when you can focus on the eye candy and not its average plot.

 

[Harp]

^ Another excellent review old boy.

Always loved Kirk, film fixture actor of boyish fascination with world seen Hollywood film prism.

And Cyd Charisse aged quite splendidly. Her sensual striptease in The Silencers opening credit roll
easily matched ingenue Rita Moreno's leggy youthful West Side Story dancing.

Italy gave boyhood Gina Lollabrigida and Sophia Loren. I visited the Acropolis whilst a teenager, and stood
near the Erectheion where Sophia stood in the film, Boy On A Dolphin. The hell with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.

 

[Fading Fast]

The Life of Oharu (1952) a Japanese film


What is worse than being a prostitute? Aging out of being a prostitute without any money saved. Worse still, trying to hide your age to keep working – at least that is the answer offered in director Kenji Mizoguchi's classic tale of feudal-era Japan, The Life of Oharu.

The real lesson of the film is that you don't want to be a woman...or a man in the feudal era. Other than the lords, the average men and women always seem anxious and worried. It's pretty much a Hobbesian world – solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short – for just about everyone.

Oharu is a fifty-year-old prostitute at the opening who, through flashbacks, we see had a Candide-like life. After being raised in a noble house, she has an affair with a man of lower status, resulting in her entire family being banished. But then the Candide "magic" kicks in.

A lord with a barren wife chooses Oharu to be the mother of his heir, which works out fine when Oharu gives birth to a boy. Hurray for Oharu, but also buh-bye, as she's not needed anymore. Unfortunately, back at the old homestead, dad has racked up a large debt.

So he sends Oharu to be a courtesan (a high-priced call girl), but she fails and comes back, yet again, penniless. Now she's sent to be a lady's maid to a wealthy woman, but the woman becomes jealous of Oharu once her courtesan past is revealed and it's buh-bye again.

A brief and happy marriage follows until her husband is killed by highway robbers – a real thing in that era. Another attempt at prostitution fails as does an attempt at becoming a nun (she visits both ends of the spectrum) and, finally, a climax you probably didn't anticipate.

The opening scenes of prostitution tell you this one probably does not end well, but it's quite the journey back to that opening. You can stretch the film into our idiotic modern politics, but no matter how "oppressed" a modern woman feels, to compare herself to Oharu is contemptible.

Women were owned by their fathers, husbands, or anyone they were sold to. Squawk, and a crack on the head or worse followed. Work was what you were told to do when you weren't having forced s*x – and you'd do all this, minus the s*x, in binding clothes and poor shoes.

Director Mizoguchi doesn't shy from his tale at all with relentless shots of Oharu suffering on the road – travel was awful – or cowering in a room waiting for the next bad thing to happen. Early on, she has some fight, even spirit, in her, but events slowly beat that out of her.

At one point toward the end, Oharu is a beggar on the streets singing a dirge like the old blues singers in the South and your first thought is her pain is real and she – just about the hardest way possible – has earned the right to sing about it.

Mizoguchi's style is slow and atmospheric, letting the era soak in while you absorb the time and place. His sets are not an exact duplicate of feudal-era Japan, but they take you out of present day. Also, like many Japanese directors of that era, there is little Hollywood speed or bombast.

Oharu is played by noted Japanese actress Kinuyo Tanaka who had a long and successful career working with Mizoguchi and a few other notable directors. The biggest challenge she has here is being forty-three, but having to look anywhere from seventeen to fifty.

Her youth and beauty is her ticket early, and while she's a nice-looking forty-three-year-old, you get confused when men are falling all over themselves to sleep with her. She was probably chosen for her talent and fame, but a younger woman would have fit the role better.

Another odd thing is that the movie is less depressing than it sounds. Yes, parts are horribly depressing, but Mizoguchi tells his tale almost objectively as one of "life goes on" rather than "look at how awful it is." Most life was awful then, so in a way, it was a smart directorial decision.

The Life of Oharu is acquired-taste viewing. Slow-moving, thematic 1950s Japanese period films don't grip you by the collar and draw you in; instead, they say, "Look at this world and these people and decide if all of it captures your attention."

There is a lot of real life here to do just that if you're willing to look for it in a movie quite different from what we're used to today.

 

[Fading Fast]

The Tarnished Angels (1957) with Dorothy Malone, Robert Stack, Rock Hudson, and Jack Carson


Sic Transit Gloria Mundi


William Faulkner does not do happy and he certainly didn't do happy in The Tarnished Angels, a Douglas Sirk-directed adaptation of Faulkner's novel The Pylon, set in the world of barnstorming flyers during the Depression.

Robert Stack plays a WWI fighter ace who never found a place for himself in civilian life after the war. Instead, he – along with his wife, played by Dorothy Malone, their young boy, their one sad suitcase for all three, and their mechanic – travel around the country to different air shows.

He should get a job as a real pilot or find something else to do because barnstorming for a middle-aged married man with a kid is pathetic, especially when your aging wife is your "parachute girl": she jumps out of the plane (in a skimpy costume) as part of Stack's show.

We meet the family, plus Jack Carson playing the mechanic, at a dusty "flying circus" where a reporter, played by Rock Hudson, immediately sees that there is a bigger story here than the modest one his paper sent him to cover. Hudson senses the despair engulfing Stack's "crew."

They're a family, but only arranged as they are (past events leave the boy's paternity undecided between Carson and Stack) because Stack lost the dice game he played with Carson, so he took on the responsibility and married a pregnant Malone. Hallmark won't be adapting this one.

There is a story arc about Stack crashing the first day of the circus, so he needs a plane to compete in the upcoming "big" race for the prize money and penumbra of glory, but he has nothing of value to sell or trade for a plane...or does he? That's answered in the cruel Act III.

Until then, through Hudson's or Malone's eyes, we see this dysfunctional family dysfunction a bit more. The pressures of poverty and s*x weigh heavily: Carson is still carrying a torch for Malone, Hudson is lighting one, and a fat, bald man with a plane for rent wants s*x with her.

How that quadrangle works out is the climax. What plays out until then are the themes of poverty, despair, and an inability to let past glory go and just get on with living. Faulkner's writing and a strong cast create believable characters struggling under the yoke of these pressures.

Stack is, as Bruce Springsteen notes in his song "Glory Days," the guy who can't give up on his, well, glory days. He's bitter and takes it out on his wife, Malone, and his mechanic, Carson. He's only bad to his son in a neglectful way; he even, on occasion, tries to be a good father.

Faulkner is too talented a writer and Sirk too smart a director to make Stack a cardboard villain, so his scenes of kindness with his son help to round him out. He also shows his wife some kindness until the next three scenes, when he doesn't. It's the old saw about abused spouses.

Carson, though, is more lost than Stack. This airplane mechanic is living a life on nothing but a weird hero worship of Stack and a pointless lust or love for Malone – leaving no room for him to become a fully grown man. Carson, unobtrusively and sadly, beats on in the background.

Hudson, the reporter, gives one of his best performances as a young guy who walks into the middle of this broken family and tries to understand while also falling in love with Malone. His comments and observations are perceptive, but Stack and Malone don't want to hear them.

Watch for Hudson's speech toward the end when he tells off his editor by summarizing the real story of Stack's life, not the "World War I heroic fighter ace" story that the editor wants to print. It's a powerful scene that codifies the movie.

That leaves us with Malone, the effective star of the picture. She is perfectly cast as she looks a bit older than her thirty-three years, but in a "look at the hard life I lead" way, where her innate beauty and s*x appeal are still quite strong under the crow's feat, dyed blonde hair, and dust.

This story is her story: the tale of how a young girl fell for a WWI fighter ace and it all went slowly but enervatingly wrong from there. Her pilot hero is a vain, selfish man who's drained the youth and spirit out of his once-vibrant wife, leaving her a vagabond in her own marriage.

There is a scene toward the end when Malone is physically and emotionally empty, but she knows she has to continue living for her son. You can see her willing her psyche and body to keep going, despite there being no fuel left in the tank. It's raw acting talent at its best.

Douglas Sirk is known for his midcentury full-force Technicolor weepers, but here he shows he can work in black and white and turn the melodrama down, but the personal trauma up. Set in the Depression, Sirk smartly captured that era's despair by showing stark material poverty.

The Tarnished Angels, despite being made under the Code, is not family friendly. It's an adult look at adult dysfunction wrecking one after another life – lives of those who chose to be human bowling pins – all for the vainglory of one sad man. It's not easy watching, but it is engaging.

 

[Fading Fast]

The Girl Said No (1930) with William Haines, Leila Hyams, and Marie Dressler


No really does mean no, except in this movie, which even from a 1930s perspective of cultural norms is obnoxious and offensive. It starts and ends with the male lead, William Haines, who was a huge star in the late silent era.

Haines' screen brand was to be a spoiled and pushy guy who gets knocked down a few pegs and learns from it, but in The Girl Said No his old personality keeps coming back. This leaves the movie with no real reason for being other than to watch Haines behave obnoxiously.

He plays the son of indulgent upper-middle-class parents who let him party and spend recklessly. Not unrelatedly, he's loud, abrasive, conceited, and pushy; he has friends, but you wonder why. He's the guy who will break your new golf club intentionally and think it's funny.

The "plot" has him falling in love with the secretary, played by Leila Hyams, of a manager at the bank where he worked before getting fired for irresponsibility. A job his father, naturally, went out of his way to get him.

Haines' courting approach to Hyams is a toxic mix of pushing himself on her, pleading with her, insulting her other admirers, and being obnoxious in general. Has that ever worked in the recorded history of courting?

Highlighting this insane approach, there are a couple of restaurant scenes where Haines, trying to get Hyams, creates chaos and causes soup to intentionally be spilled on people he doesn't like – one being Hyams' date. It's slapstick, not funny, and goes on forever.

Had Hyams shot him, a jury would have acquitted her. You have to pity Hyams here for having the unenviable task of trying to strike a reasonable balance with a crazy person. Another "plot" wrinkle is that Hyams' boss wants to marry her, which drives Haines insane with jealousy.

There's one more twist which should have reshuffled the deck, but as noted earlier, it only did temporarily. Haines' dad dies suddenly leaving the family in financial trouble, so Haines briefly acts responsibly, gets a modest job, and does his best to be "the man of the family."

He might even have won Hyams over, as she likes the new "normal person" him, but it doesn't stick. After he makes the most of a break – kudos to him – success goes screaming up to his head and out comes the old obnoxious Haines whom you had hoped was dead and buried.

The rest is the climax that you'll want to see fresh (if for some reason you choose to watch this giant ball of idiocy), but know that Haines' behavior toward Hyams would not only get him arrested today, but it would have in 1930 as well.

Hyams acquits herself well in a role that has no real win for the actress, as she has to keep Haines at arm's length, but also appear somewhat interested in him "underneath it." If your daughter brought Haines home, you wouldn't shoot him, you'd shoot her for utter stupidity.

A note has to be made about Marie Dressler's small but impactful role as a wealthy investor to whom Haines tries to sell some bonds. Dressler, in her sixties and looking every year of it, would soon become a huge star, as her talent and screen presence appealed to Depression Era audiences.

Here she manages to own a scene despite Haines' noisy, scenery-chewing efforts. It's all but an acting class in how becoming the character and not acting like one makes all the difference. But alas, Dressler's in all of one scene and then you're left with more Haines.

In real life, Haines – an openly g*y man at a time when that was not acceptable, who reinvented himself as a hugely successful interior decorator after his acting career ended – is much more interesting than the character he plays here.

Filmed nearly a hundred years ago, it's not surprising that cultural tastes and norms have changed, but still, you watch a movie like The Girl Said No (a great title that sounds modern) and marvel at how far into orbit movie extremes could be.

Real culture, just like today, is not as "out there" as movies sometimes portray it, as no office would have let this buffoon in and no normal girl would be interested in him. Heck, as noted, he'd have been arrested, even back then, several times.

Just like with Joe E. Brown movies (another obnoxious Depression Era screen "hero"), unless the style appeals to you or there's something else of interest in the picture, if a movie has William Haines in it, it's probably a smart move to watch something else.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I always thought of Haines in these kinds of roles as being MGM's idea of Harold Lloyd's character, except unappealing and not funny.

 

[pitchblack]

LA confidential surprisingly

 

[Harp]

^ William Faulkner and Dorothy Malone. Never read book, nor saw flick for some inexplicable reason.

Faulkner as recall serves, joined the fledgling Royal Canadian Air Force during WWI; so there's some background here for post war psychological development, a literary trait technique that Hemingway
also used along with F. Scottie in a lean compact style.

First World War authorship made deep impression, grade school through grad school and beyond.
And the older I've grown this became all the more profound; especially looking at film studio struggles
over such as Gatsby that bequeathed Fitzgerald such a bad rap. Hemingway tripped often enough as evident his frankness personified The Sun Also Rises. Faulkner adds mix by unapologetic full boil stir over open flame truth kettle. I heartily recommend his classic last, The Reivers, done right by filming with eminently capable Steverino; who delivers as always just the absolutely right deft touch sureness as writ.

 

[Fading Fast]

The Vice Squad (1931) with Paul Lukas, Judith Wood, Kay Francis, and Rockliffe Fellowes


Today's shorthand for precodes is "s*x –" s*x that the Motion Picture Production Code banned on screen after 1934. But precodes were much more than s*x, as seen in The Vice Squad, where the real sin is police corruption, another subject the Code would, at best, tiptoe around.

Paul Lukas plays a foreign diplomat in New York City who – doing the honorable thing to protect a woman who did a very dishonorable thing – ends up losing his position and having to work incognito as a "stool pigeon," a man who all but entraps prostitutes for the vice squad.

Lukas, once a wealthy and highly respected man, is now just scraping by while his old society clique – including his society girlfriend, played by Kay Francis – does not know what happened to him. He's living in a tenement and going to seed.

He tries to get out of the arrangement, but the vice cop, played by the absurdly named Rockliffe Fellowes, who knows about the dishonorable thing, holds it over Lukas' head every time Lukas tries to free himself.

Fellowes and most of the vice squad come across as nothing more than bullies, using entrapment to pad their arrest and conviction records. The film argues that policing grants enormous power to individuals – power that demands both personal integrity and independent oversight.

Deeply demoralized at his miserable and dishonorable existence, Lukas attempts s*icide, but is saved by a young woman, played by Judith Wood. Wood also selflessly nurses Lukas back to health and then makes a play for him, but he feels he would only bring her down.

Fast forward and the tables have turned as Wood is in trouble – she's being falsely accused of prostitution by Fellowes, but only Lukas can get her off. Yet doing so would expose his disreputable, shabby existence to his old crowd and girlfriend, whom he just reconnected with.

That old girlfriend, played by Kay Francis before she became a top star, tells him she won't stand by him if he exposes his seedy past for all to see (she's not the girl you keep). In a classic Hollywood ending, Lukas has to choose between integrity (helping Wood) and desire (Francis).

Look for the final courtroom scene where you see Lukas, a man of honor, forced to throw everything away to save his integrity – to do the right thing for Wood. Mainly through facial expressions, you watch this entire inner drama play out in Lukas with agonizing transparency.

It's 1931 and having not been restored, the film's quality is spotty. Also, Hollywood was still learning about talkies, so the technology is wonky, directing uneven, and dialogue often forced. But it doesn't matter as the movie has three things: a good story, Lukas, and Wood.

Wood, who would soon drop out of Hollywood, has the looks, youth, and talent a leading lady needs, but alas, she's just another beautiful blonde who never realized her potential in 1930s Hollywood (calling out Mae Clarke, Constance ***mings, Patricia Ellis, Sally Eilers and others).

Lukas did realize his potential with an Oscar Award winning performance in Watch on the Rhine (1943) and success on the stage and, later, television. Not quite a tier-one leading man, he is well respected as an "actor's actor" who played a variety of interesting characters.

The last thing The Vice Squad has going for it is its story. It's contrived, too convenient, and often obvious, but you won't care as the moral conflict it builds to and the sincerity Wood and Lukas brings to it washes away all of those other sins.

Today, if you say precode, the first thought is dirty ooh la la, but that's a modern misconception. The real value of precodes like The Vice Squad is their frank look into the debased or corrupt corners of society – like dishonest cops – before all that disappeared from the screen.

 

[The Connector]

La Antena (2007), by Esteban Sapir.
A near-silent black-white movie, reminding the early 20th century movies like Fritz Lang ''Metropolis''.
A dystopian movie about a city that lost its voice, its freedom of speech except one woman and her child.
A movie against fascism of the authorities.
From the description...
''This near-silent black and white film from Argentina tells the story of a city that has lost its voice, stolen by Mr. TV, and the attempts of a small family to win the voice back. Similar in design to early German expressionist films.''

 

[The Connector]

Metropolis was mentioned here only because of its technical similarities.
I could say that John Locke is more present here rather than Berkeley.
Sadly, in today's world, lots of places living dystopian situations.
Some parts of Arts and Culture can identify them.
I think you can excuse what Esteban Sapir want to say with the movie. At least you can try.
Also, cancel culture can easily say someone that is a way to defend against offensive practices like racism. And its good that exists.
Your solipsist bluntness is nothing than a way to say that you are against some or all of the above.

 

[Fading Fast]

Lady in Distress (AKA A Window in London) from 1940 with Michael Redgrave, Sally Gray, Patricia Roc, and Paul Lukas


Sometimes the most important thing about a movie is simply that it exists. Lady in Distress has a very talented cast, which gives it value today, but it also caught a moment in history – day-to-day life in the British Empire – one second before a world war would change it forever.

It's not nostalgia and it's not propaganda; it's just a regular movie made, by happenstance, at the perfect moment. A moment so perfect that its on-location shooting captured the construction of the "new" Waterloo Bridge.

The most attractive-looking, financially struggling newlyweds ever – played by Patricia Roc and Michael Redgrave – live in a modest London flat, but hardly ever see each other because he works the day shift as a steam-crane operator and she, the night shift at a hotel switchboard.

One morning, on his way to work on the underground, he sees a murder happening in the window of an apartment that backs up to the tracks (the underground goes above ground in spots). He hops off at the next stop, grabs a policeman, and finds the apartment.

A washed-up married vaudevillian team, played by Paul Lukas and Sally Gray, who were rehearsing a scene with a fake dagger explains what Redgrave saw, but Gray, whose husband is right there, and Redgrave, whose pretty wife we already know, exchange meaningful looks.

It doesn't help that Lukas is almost twice Gray's age and is an arrogant, bullying husband whom any smart woman would leave on the spot. From here, the movie veers in several oddish directions as it has to obfuscate the key unspoken event: Gray and Redgrave have an affair.

One thread follows Lukas and Gray as they have something of a comeback chance in a new show. But instead of being humble to the director, Lukas is, of course, bullying. He is on the brink of costing them their seemingly last chance just as they are down to their last dollar.

Gray is furious; she's put up with and sacrificed a lot, but she is still willing to put all that behind them if they can just get the career ship back on course. Lukas' middle-aged bullying arrogance only makes Redgrave's pleasant youthfulness that much more attractive to Gray.

Redgrave, meanwhile, seems to be having a midlife crisis in his twenties as he has a lovely wife who works hard at her job and at trying to keep house, but he is running around behind her back with a married woman. Yet, somehow, you don't believe he's just a serial cheater.

Roc then makes a minor mistake on the switchboard and, in that wonderful English slang, "gets the sack." But since her husband is working all day and running around with Gray at night, she can't immediately tell him because she never sees him.

The last piece of the pre-climax puzzle has a producer offering Gray a contract with good career opportunities and pay, but separate from her husband. It's not quite A Star Is Born, but that's where Gray can see it going and she knows that would kill her cripplingly insecure husband.

These disparate threads then all get smashed together incredibly quickly and only marginally believably in the fast-moving Act III. It has to move fast as the entire movie takes all of an hour, but it is an absorbing if uneven hour delivering a not-expected finale.

Two things save this effort, and it's certainly not its convoluted plot: the actors and its Britishness. Somehow, in this small-budget, short-runtime picture, the producers got four very talented and appealing leads.

Redgrave is handsome and charming in a slightly goofy way that makes you not believe the worst of him even when he's behaving badly. You could say the same about Gray, but at least her spouse gives her repeated reasons to be unfaithful – still wrong, but real life and all.

Sally Gray is also ridiculously attractive in that wonderfully English, blonde aloof way. She's got a rockin' body to match her very pretty face and gorgeous hair. There must be a reason why she never made her way to a full Hollywood career, as you know Hollywood came knockin'.

Patricia Roc is no slouch in the looks or talent department either and plays the one truly decent person in this love "quadrangle." You wonder, too, why she didn't have a bigger career, but she is also one of those actresses whom you see pop up now and then once you recognize her.

Paul Lukas did have an impressive Hollywood career for all the reasons you see here: he's engaging, believable, and can take modest lines and scenes and make them seem more important. He can switch from being likable to hateful on a dime, yet is convincing at both.

Watch for any of the one-on-one scenes of Gray and Lukas and you'll believe the camera caught an unhappily married couple in private. The reverse is true of Redgrave and Roc, except when he starts cheating as he then becomes reticent with her.

In addition to the talented cast, especially for us today, is the picture's terrific English vibe: the proper diction of the switchboard operators, the wonky flats, the active newspaper culture, and the historically famous advertising signs – Bovril, Guinness, etc. – in Piccadilly Circus.

In a wonderful moment of history meets cinema, Redgrave's character is working on the new Waterloo Bridge, which was being built at that time with footage shot right on the construction site. It's a movie acting, almost by chance, as a time capsule of a major historical event.

Lady in Distress is not a picture of cinematic importance, but it is close to a hidden gem because four quietly talented actors captured normal life in a country on the brink of a world-changing and Empire-ending war.

It's a brief glimpse into everyday life right before everything would be reset. It's better than a documentary as there's something oddly "lived in" about the film that formal documentaries, with their focus on details and authoritative voiceover, often lose. It feels like a real peek at history.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Driving Miss Daisy (1989).

Mh. The original tone probably works better.

 

[amonr4]

disclosure day. Wasn’t a bad movie after all.

 

[Harp]

Your solipsist bluntness is nothing than a way to say that you are against some or all of the above.

Idealism accords its own value objectively, irrespective singular theft claim pretense; which is what I oppose through whatever medium. You are right though to state that I can give Sapir a chance with La Antena.

 

[Harp]

Sally Gray is also ridiculously attractive in that wonderfully English, blonde aloof way. She's got a rockin' body to match her very pretty face and gorgeous hair.

View attachment 793275

''It is in my power now to keep this soul of mine free from any vice or passion...''---Marcus Aurelius

As Elvis once remarked in Las Vegas, ''that girl can raise the dead.''

Waterloo Bridge with Vivien Leigh and Robert Taylor is also a definite must see film.

 

[Fading Fast]

Eat Drink Man Woman (1994) directed by Ang Lee


There's always a generation gap; the only real questions are how big it is and how it is navigated. In Eat Drink Man Woman, the 1990s Taiwanese gap is pretty big and it's navigated through repressed feelings and food – similar to the way it's handled in many cultures.

A widowed father of three young women – an observant Catholic and schoolteacher, a successful airline executive, and a college student and fast-food worker – is also a famous chef who's retired in part because he's lost his sense of taste. Life, as we know, is not fair.

Director Ang Lee uses the traditional Chinese Sunday dinner – here, the father prepares an elaborate meal that everyone attends – to frame the story because it is the one time the entire family is in one place talking, eating, relaxing, fighting – basically, being a family.

Otherwise, the family looks like an American family, with everyone running here and there focused on their own lives and problems. The father is the center of gravity, but the girls exert strong pull as they both break away and bend the family in their direction.

The oldest, the schoolteacher, has a strong passion for Christianity, which is, of course, different from traditional Chinese values and beliefs. It's a "safe space" for her to break away in. She also claims a college breakup turned her off relationships. She's no joy to spend time with.

The youngest daughter is, in ways, the one most distant as working at Wendy's is the culinary antithesis of everything her father stands for. Still, their relationship is polite, almost friendly, but not close. She needed a mother, but got a nice, yet distant father and a fast-food job.

The real rub comes from the middle daughter who inherited her father's culinary talents, but he bans her from the kitchen because he wants a better life for her, believes professional cooking is a man's field (it was in Taiwan at that time), and feels threatened by her talent.

The above plays out with Lee showing engaging scenes of the father skillfully preparing food – prawns hitting a skillet with hot oil in it shouldn't look this beautiful – or more mundanely getting his sleepyhead daughters up to start the day. It's modern Taiwanese life in the 1990s.

It is as if Lee anticipated all the cooking shows that would come a decade or so later when the internet and streaming took off. Here, the food preparation is gorgeous as we watch long loving scenes of a talented man making Sunday dinner for his quietly splintering family.

Some of the foods are familiar like the dumplings, stir fry, or steamed eggs with shrimp that have you wanting to start nibbling on your TV screen. One has to assume delivery orders from Chinese restaurants went up when this one hit video stores back in the day.

Other foods – like "the whole stuffed chicken wrapped in lotus leaves, encased in a thick layer of mud or clay, and baked until the clay hardens into a shell that must be cracked open with a hammer" (credit Google AI for that description) – are works of art.

There are other subplots and characters, but the one you want to watch for is the father's relationship with the neighbor's six-year-old daughter. When he learns her mom is too busy to make her lunch, he steps in and prepares elaborate dishes that turn her into a lunchroom star.

It's a sweet relationship that also turns a few more keys later. All of these relationship setups eventually turn keys that see the family, over several months, undergo a series of life-altering changes that force the generation gap to evolve and, sometimes, even be addressed.

The father and middle daughter stand out, yes, because the script focuses on them, but also because they are talented. They both can convey strong feelings with facial expressions and body English, traits necessary in a culture that values surface politeness.

Lee, who has had success over many years and in different genres, clearly knew the story he wanted to tell. Having lived in America himself for years, he understood the universal struggles of the generation gap lurking right beneath the surface particulars of Taiwan.

Eat Drink Man Woman has had international success for just that reason – families in all cultures share the challenge of bridging the generation gap and most use food as an emotional emollient.

After two hours of watching one family try to navigate a particularly wide gap without a mother to play the traditional bridging role, but with a father who uses elaborate meals as his means of communicating, you come away (maybe) a bit wiser, but definitely a lot more hungry.

 

[Fading Fast]

Is My Face Red from 1932 with Richard Cortez, Helen Twelvetrees and Zazu Pitts


Hollywood in the 1930s churned out many movies about the newspaper business, which, along with radio, was the social media and internet of its day.

Away from the true standouts, like The Front Page, most of them just blend together. Still, you couldn't be a male or female lead back then without having worked for a newspaper in one or several pictures.

Richard Cortez gets his chance at a newspaper role in Is My Face Red. Cortez plays a Walter Winchell-like reporter who writes a popular column that traffics in salacious details about the foibles of the rich and famous.

Cortez is loud, brash, cocky and obnoxious, all things that you guess he was even before success went to his head.

A lot of his "inside dope" comes from his taken-for-granted girlfriend of five years, a Broadway chorus girl played by Helen Twelvetrees.

The main and thin story in this one has Cortez witness a real murder in which the killer threatens Cortez’s life if he prints the story, which the arrogant Cortez does to further his career.

The other storyline has Cortez kinda falling for a spoiled society girl whom he gives the engagement ring he had just taken from Twelvetrees to get remounted. That seriously coldhearted act rightfully knocks Twelvetrees off her heels.

The reason the stories sound so thin in Is My Face Red is because Cortez is supposed to carry the entire movie on his personality and screen presence, like Warren William or Lee Tracy would have in the role.

Cortez unfortunately isn’t that magnetic and, in fairness to him, his character is neither a hero nor a villain here, but just a vain, selfish man whose bad behavior is more boring than rousing.

The other thing meant to energize the movie is the excitement of a newspaper business fervent for headlines and scoops.

The movie does a little better here, in part, because of Cortez' smarter-than-him secretary played by Arline Judge, who fully has Cortez' number, and in part, because of the paper's switchboard operator played by tired, nasally and unawarely sarcastic Zazu Pitts.

Twelvetrees' charm also helps the picture along, but you keep wondering what this bright and beautiful young woman sees in conceited Cortez. Five years is a long time not to wake up.

The climax is neither dramatic nor character changing, but instead ties a neat bow on a story that didn't deserve one.

Is My Face Red is at its best when it's just showing the sleazy newspaper business being its sleazy self. But even with able assists from all the female leads, Cortez and the weak story just don't have enough to carry this one successfully over the finish line.