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What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

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17,190
Location
New York City
"Third Finger, Left Hand" 1940 with Myrna Loy and Melvyn Douglas

Every so often, I watch a movie and I think, "they've run out of ideas;" this was one of those times.

Owing to the production code, every combination of confused, but basically, innocent dating and matrimony was tried in movies (lost wives or husbands, people acting like they are married or single when they weren't for some silly reason, everybody thinking his or her spouse is cheating on them when they weren't, etc.) and sometimes it just got stupid, like in this movie.

Here, Loy plays a very successful magazine editor (in a very large Art Deco office) who fakes having a husband that no one has ever met (not even once) - because he travels the world (uh-huh) - so as to deter male suitors at work and to prevent their wives from getting jealous of her (in this movie, anyway, that is averred to work).

It's funny, though, as I've seen several period movies where the woman is all but fired for getting married, but here it was given a job-security halo. This is not to make light of the genuine difficult situation career woman had in that day (it was hard, but many overcame it), but it is to make direct fun of the shifting assumptions movies made to justify their over-engineered plots.

With Loy's silly ersatz-marriage construct in place, Douglas' character enters as a struggling mid-west artist whose career Loy inadvertently hurts. They flirt/date a bit afterwards until he learns she is married (to her fake husband, but he doesn't know this) causing him to back away hurt. However, he then learns of her fake-husband scheme and - to take the silliness up several levels - decides to pose as her husband (remember, nobody has ever seen the husband) while showing up at her house to live.

Oh the hi-jinx. It's all too much plot architecture for not very witty dialogue and very little Loy-Douglas chemistry. Douglas is, IMHO, one shy of a true leading man, but an enjoyable actor as the number-two guy, etc. Here, he just doesn't have enough to convince you Loy is crazy about him or to cause you to forget all the plot nonsense going on. And that's the issue, a silly plot requires everything else to work - dialogue, chemistry, characters, etc. - which it doesn't here, so all you are left with is the thought: "They've run out of ideas."

Oh, and for all the vaunted MGM money and excess - and despite having top-name stars - this is a pretty low-budget affair with, mainly, cheap sets, obvious models and fake background shots. But at least Loy looks cute as heck.
 
Messages
12,941
Location
Germany
Watching "La Boum" right now on german free-tv and after that "La Boum 2".

Never seen the movies. Closing "gaps in education". Young fashion in 1980. :D

German synchro on french movies. Goofy, you know... ;););)
 

AmateisGal

I'll Lock Up
Messages
6,126
Location
Nebraska
The Boondock Saints. This is something of a cult classic, and since I've been a fan of Sean Patrick Flannery ever since his Young Indiana Jones days, I decided to check it out. It's...interesting. Willem Dafoe's character is by far the most fascinating in the movie and his performance is quite well done.
 

LizzieMaine

Bartender
Messages
33,715
Location
Where The Tourists Meet The Sea
The Boondock Saints. This is something of a cult classic, and since I've been a fan of Sean Patrick Flannery ever since his Young Indiana Jones days, I decided to check it out. It's...interesting. Willem Dafoe's character is by far the most fascinating in the movie and his performance is quite well done.

Bob Marley, who plays Detective Greenly in that film, is a wildly popular comedian in Maine, and plays our stage every summer. He's also a very nice guy, one of my favorite show-business people.
 

Benzadmiral

Call Me a Cab
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2,815
Location
The Swamp
The Magnificent Seven (the original one, not the recent one with Chris Pratt).

I'm not sure you can pack any more incredibly cool actors into one film as they did in this one. McQueen, Brynner, Bronson, Coburn...
And top-notch memorable lines.

McQueen's Vin Tanner: "We deal in lead, friend."
*
Harry Luck (Brad Dexter) (as he dies after coming back to the fight when he could have escaped): "I'll be damned. . . "
Chris Adams (Yul Brynner): "Maybe you won't be."
 

Benzadmiral

Call Me a Cab
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2,815
Location
The Swamp
American Pastoral, based on a novel by Philip Roth, about the effect of the late Sixties' civil unrest on an upper-middle class Jewish/Catholic family, with Ewan McGregor (who also directed), Jennifer Connelly, and Dakota Fanning. Very affecting -- somehow, it seems, Roth's novels make better films than you'd think they would, at least some of them. Nice details of the clothes and cars; McGregor is one of the few people who can really look good in a stingy-brim fedora.

Also on hand: Peter Riegert (famous for Animal House so many years ago) as patriarch Lou, the father to McGregor's character, and Valorie Curry, who played a lovely and memorable psycho in the TV The Following with Kevin Bacon a few years back.
 

Edward

Bartender
Messages
25,074
Location
London, UK
The Boondock Saints. This is something of a cult classic, and since I've been a fan of Sean Patrick Flannery ever since his Young Indiana Jones days, I decided to check it out. It's...interesting. Willem Dafoe's character is by far the most fascinating in the movie and his performance is quite well done.

Mn. I've treid to watch both that and the sequel. Couldn't get past the dreadful "Oirish" accents. Like somebosy set out to make a cross between The Untouchables and a Lucky Charms commercial.
 

AmateisGal

I'll Lock Up
Messages
6,126
Location
Nebraska
Mn. I've treid to watch both that and the sequel. Couldn't get past the dreadful "Oirish" accents. Like somebosy set out to make a cross between The Untouchables and a Lucky Charms commercial.

Haha! Okay, that description was pretty spot on. I doubt I'll waste my time on the sequel. The original was difficult enough! Though I admit I did laugh out loud several times.
 
Messages
12,005
Location
Southern California
Mn. I've treid to watch both that and the sequel. Couldn't get past the dreadful "Oirish" accents. Like somebosy set out to make a cross between The Untouchables and a Lucky Charms commercial.
Unless they're genuine--hiring an Irish actor for an "Irish" role, for example--I think accents in American movies are often a compromise of sorts that fall somewhere between authenticity and audience expectations. Over the years I've heard and read a number of comments from actors who said they were asked to either "tone it down" or "play it up" with regards to their accents and mannerisms because they were considered to be either "too ethnic" or "not ethnic enough".

And sometimes this is done for "practical" reasons as well. By his own account, when he was preparing for his role as IRA activist Martin Fallon in A Prayer for the Dying (1987), Mickey Rourke lived for two or three months with someone who was born and raised in Ireland for the sole purpose of studying his accent so he could "get it right". On the first day of filming Director Mike Hodges, who was born in the U.K., told Rourke to "tone down" the accent because no one on the set could understand what he was saying.
 

Edward

Bartender
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25,074
Location
London, UK
Unless they're genuine--hiring an Irish actor for an "Irish" role, for example--I think accents in American movies are often a compromise of sorts that fall somewhere between authenticity and audience expectations. Over the years I've heard and read a number of comments from actors who said they were asked to either "tone it down" or "play it up" with regards to their accents and mannerisms because they were considered to be either "too ethnic" or "not ethnic enough".

And sometimes this is done for "practical" reasons as well. By his own account, when he was preparing for his role as IRA activist Martin Fallon in A Prayer for the Dying (1987), Mickey Rourke lived for two or three months with someone who was born and raised in Ireland for the sole purpose of studying his accent so he could "get it right". On the first day of filming Director Mike Hodges, who was born in the U.K., told Rourke to "tone down" the accent because no one on the set could understand what he was saying.

Another one I heard was an actress who was a native Derry girl who got told by an American director to "do a Dublin brogue". She did her own Derry accent and he didn't notice the difference. (Let's just say that they're about as easy to mistake for each other as Texas and Boston.....).

Where it really grates, though, having been born and grown up in Northern Ireland, is when you get these American movies full of West Belfast IRA men with educated, Dublin accents; that's a bit like trying to pass Kelsey Grammar off as being from the Bronx. The weirdest thing is when some people get it right and others so very wrong in the same production - the NI set series of Sons of Anarchy was dreadful for that (and the fiddle-de-dee mural in the Sambel clubhouse, and - most egregious of all - the notion that an MC including patched members who identified as loyalists would run guns for the IRA). Pity, as that was otherwise a great show (and fun to see bits of Belfast I know well on screen too).
 
Messages
12,005
Location
Southern California
...The weirdest thing is when some people get it right and others so very wrong in the same production...
I think this depends on the abilities of the individual actors. I and many of my friends have been mimicking voices from television and movie characters since we were kids (not particularly well in most cases, but close enough to get a laugh), but I've known people who couldn't alter the sound of their voices or their pronunciation in any way. I tend to liken it to the ability to sing--some people can hit each note flawlessly, while others can't even come close.
 
Messages
12,005
Location
Southern California
Yesterday at 5:00 p.m. (Pacific Time) TCM began airing a 48-hour marathon of "jungle" movies. They started with the Tarzan movies starring Johnny Weissmuller, Lex Barker, and Gordon Scott, followed that up with the "Jungle Jim" movies also starring Weissmuller, and after that will start the "Bomba the Jungle Boy" movies starring Johnny Sheffield ("Boy" in the Tarzan movies). We've been watching them on and off throughout the day, and the extensive re-use of footage and plots make it very clear they were never intended to be watched back-to-back. :p
 
Messages
17,190
Location
New York City
Yesterday at 5:00 p.m. (Pacific Time) TCM began airing a 48-hour marathon of "jungle" movies. They started with the Tarzan movies starring Johnny Weissmuller, Lex Barker, and Gordon Scott, followed that up with the "Jungle Jim" movies also starring Weissmuller, and after that will start the "Bomba the Jungle Boy" movies starring Johnny Sheffield ("Boy" in the Tarzan movies). We've been watching them on and off throughout the day, and the extensive re-use of footage and plots make it very clear they were never intended to be watched back-to-back. :p

We watched a few off and on as well - especially enjoyed "Tarzan's Hidden Jungle" as Vera Miles' beauty lifted off the screen and her station wagon was cool as heck.
 
Messages
17,190
Location
New York City
"Run Silent Run Deep" 1958 with Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster

Somehow I had never seen this one (or seen it in its entirety) before. It's a solid effort, but in my personal ranking of submarine movies, it is, at best, in a distant third place behind "The Hunt for Red October" and "Das Boot."

Gable and Lancaster are outstanding despite a sometimes stilted script that does have a wonderful echo of "The Caine Mutiny" faintly heard in a few gripping scenes. Gable and Lancaster's interaction and the submarine crew's relentless drills are engaging - as is much of the crew's day-to-day interaction.

Where it feels a bit forced is in the overall story arc - Gable as a captain on a mission of personal revenge willing to ignore orders and recklessly risk his crew's lives - and in the insane number of coincidences - they run into the exact enemy ship they want to seemingly at will. Also, the battle scenes - owing to a budget that apparently allowed only for one real submarine, stock footage, a bathtub and some models - were simplistic (but also might unfairly be suffering from how much better special effects have become in the ensuing sixty years).

It's a solid movie well worth seeing for its two stars and a young Don Rickles (playing it straight in a small but good role) and for an uneven script that does have some intense and engaging moments. And I'm becoming a bigger and bigger fan of Robert Wise as a director as he seems to be able to deliver a decent movie in different types of genres with our without a budget.

Lastly, of the three sub movies I noted at the top, "Run Silent Run Deep" does take the top spot for its outstanding name (but I do want to put a comma between "Silent" and the second "Run").
 

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