What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

[Fading Fast]

Skippy from 1931 with Jackie Cooper, Robert Coogan, Willard Robertson and Enid Bennett


Skippy is a family drama or really a kids' movie, 1931 style, where the Depression isn't tucked away from the public. It's entertaining enough if you want to get an idea of what being a kid in 1931 was like; otherwise, it's tough sledding.

Titular Skippy, played by child star Jackie Cooper, is the only child of a wealthy doctor, played by Willard Robertson, who is the head of the town's Board of Health. Skippy's kind mom is played by Enid Bennett.

Skippy, like most kids, doesn't like doing what he's told, such as washing his face and brushing his teeth, but his real "bad behavior" is sneaking over to "Shanty Town," the poor part of town where his father fears he'll catch a disease.

Skippy, inappropriately dressed like Little Lord Fauntleroy, finds a sense of freedom in Shanty Town, playing with the ragamuffin kids in a way that contrasts sharply with his more solitary life in his upscale home.

While his father sees danger and disease, Skippy finds camaraderie and fun, highlighting the innocence of childhood amid socioeconomic disparity.

It is also in Shanty Town where he befriends Sooky, played by Robert Coogan. Sooky is worried he's going to lose his dog because his mom, who lives alone with Sooky, can't afford a dog license for him.

Of greater concern to all in Shanty Town is that they are being forced to move because the Board of Health, again, headed up by Skippy's father, is shutting it down, believing it is a breeding ground for disease.

The plot, and it's pretty straightforward, is Skippy trying to raise the $3 necessary for the dog license, which leads to a bunch of little kid money-raising efforts like breaking into a piggy bank, putting on a show with the neighborhood kids, and opening up a lemonade stand.

Skippy starts out worshipping his father as an important doctor who helps others, but as he learns about Shanty Town, he begins to question that view. It doesn't help that his dad is almost always too busy for him, even when he needs the money for the dog licence.

That plot summary doesn't do justice to the movie's real value, which lies in its ability to capture a child's point of view. You're with the kids when they break a window and run or use kid "logic" to not cross the railroad tracks by scooting through a drainage pipe that runs under them.

Whatever is happening to them, at that moment, is the most important thing in the world, but even at a young age, some develop sympathy for others, as Skippy does for Sooky and his mother.

The two worlds - the kids' and the parents' - as they usually do in kids movies, come together in the climax as Skippy's father finally sees what his edicts mean to the people of Shanty Town. It's heartwarming in a very obvious but effective way.

It's also a timeless lesson in the dangers of well-meaning but powerful bureaucracies as Skippy's dad becomes so focussed on data that he forgets his decisions impact real people. It's an evergreen lesson Washington and even local school boards need to learn today.

Kudos to Paramount Studios and the writers for not making all the Shanty Town residents good and kind souls, or all the rich people heartless and mean-spirited, as happens in many movies, both then and now.

The Shanty Town dog catcher and his kid are mean little bullies and Skippy and, eventually, his dad are shown in a positive light. In real life, one's bank account balance is not shorthand for one's character.

For us today, it's eye-opening just to see how truly free-range these eight-or-so-year-old kids were back then. They roam around their neighborhoods unsupervised all day, something shocking to modern generations.

Cooper, Coogan and many of the other child actors, already pros at the time, were able to show on screen the unique mannerisms, characteristics and thoughts of children. They were ably supported by the talented adult actors like Robertson and Bennett.

Skippy will only be your cup of tea if you like seeing long scenes of kids being kids. Today, it would be interesting to watch with your children to get their reaction to how kids grew up in the 1930s, when a radio was modern technology and "playdates" were spontaneous and unsupervised


N.B. Kids putting on a show (a stage play or musical review) to raise money is a stock storyline in many movies from the 1930s to the 1950s. To each his own, but I find it hard to not fast-forward through every single one of these scenes, and I very rarely fast-forward through any scene.

 

[Fading Fast]

September Affair from 1950 with Joseph Cotton, Joan Fontaine, Jessica Tandy, Francoise Rosay and Robert Arthur


The pieces are here for a classic Romantic-Era-style movie in September Affair, but slow directing, a believability issue and a muddled ending, perhaps required by the Motion Picture Production Code, leave you with only the pieces of a very good movie.

Joseph Cotton plays a wealthy American businessman, husband and father of a teenage son who meets a single woman, played by Joan Fontaine, while he is vacationing alone in Italy where Fontaine, an American concert pianist, is currently living.

They strike up a friendship as both begin a multi-legged trip back to the United States. While sightseeing together during a brief stopover in Naples, a romance blossoms. Paris might be the city of love, but Naples is doing a darn good job of it here.

They then just miss their flight out. When that plane crashes, a plane they are believed to have been on board, they are reported as dead. Now in love and very much alive, they face a decision.

Cotton is estranged from a wife who won't give him a divorce and Fontaine has few ties. So they make the completely idiotic and unbelievable decision to let the world continue to think they are dead, allowing them to start a new life together in Italy.

A couple of deus ex machinas and the help of Fontaine's close friend, played by Francoise Rosay, deal with the details of identity papers and money. Effectively, it's abracadabra and Cotton and Fontaine are living in a huge villa in Florence.

They are together, but both of their careers, perforce, are over as is Cotton's relationship with his son – ponder that for a moment. Back in the States, we see Cotton's wife, played by Jessica Tandy, and son, played by Robert Arthur, trying to adjust to the loss.

Cotton and Fontaine, who truly love each other, slowly realize that just loving each other isn't enough, especially when two impressive and challenging careers, plus ties to former family and friends, had to be jettisoned as the price of that love.

Tandy and Arthur, reeling from the loss, make a trip to Italy to follow up on a lead from Cotton's death. They don't suspect anything, but Tandy, who never appears to be the difficult woman Cotton implies she is, needs closure.

You know there is a reckoning coming, which is where the movie twists itself into knots trying to do right by everyone or right by the Motion Picture Production Code or right by some mysterious guiding light.

The only two legitimate outcomes to this story are Fontaine and Cotton saying "love at all costs" as Romantic-Era throwbacks or everything smashing up horribly as Tandy and Arthur - a boy whose father pretended to be dead - confront Cotton.

Either of those ending would have had an integrity, but the forced one presented muddles the entire effort, which is a shame as there is a lot of good in the movie.

Cotton and Fontaine are talented actors who create likable characters. Their scenes of two middle-aged people falling in love are charming. When, later, they are remorseful about all they gave up, but trying to hide it from each other, it's professional acting at its best.

Tandy is excellent in a role that is poorly defined by the writers. Is she a bitter wife or a misunderstood one? Kudos to her for doing an outstanding job trying to square the circle of her not-well-defined character. She's the unsung hero in this one.

The on-location shooting in Italy is beautiful. In 1950, the movie probably served as a travelogue for American audiences at a time when international travel was not yet common. Today, the footage is a wonderful time capsule of post-war Italy.

Director William Dieterle understands romance and creates some lovely intimate scenes, but he also lingers too long on some shots. His movie's runtime is, at least, a quarter of an hour greater than it needed to be, which prompts your mind to wander at times.

September Affair didn't have the courage of its convictions to either go all in on its classic Romantic-Era theme or to blow everything up. Instead, its "safe" conclusion leaves the viewer feeling cheated, feeling like the whole of the picture is worth a bit less than the sum of its parts.

 

[GHT]

https://www.nowtv.com/watch/the-music-of-buddy-holly...-2005/A5EK4nmp9qb64u5jFxvHs

More of a documentary than a film. One and a half hours of nostalgia. It features so many celebrities of that era, many of whom I was surprised had managed to avoid the grim reaper.

 

[Fading Fast]

Shanghai Express from 1932 with Marlene Dietrich, Clive Brooks, Anna May Wong, Warner Oland and Lawrence Grant.


Shanghai Express, one of several Marlene Dietrich collaborations with director Josef von Sternberg, uses a train journey from Peking to Shanghai as a metaphor for the personal journey that Dietrich and several of the other first-class passengers experience along the way.

The main story is about Dietrich's character, the notorious Shanghai Lily – a courtesan, a woman who "makes her living" by having "relationships" with wealthy men. On this train, though, is the one man she truly loved and lost, played by Clive Brooks.

Five years ago, Brooks, a British Army captain and surgeon, broke off their relationship for murky reasons. It is implied, though, that he doubted her faithfulness and was unwavering in his British sense of honor; so Dietrich was cast off to become the infamous Shanghai Lily.

When they meet here, it's clear neither has put the past completely behind them. Brooks is still angry; Dietrich is still hurt by his distrust of her. This is no leisurely train trip for five-year-old reminiscences and recriminations, however, as the train is traveling through civil-war-torn China.

Almost all the attention is on the first-class passengers, which include a Chinese courtesan played by Anna May Wong, a rigid English minister, played by Lawrence Grant, a seemingly wealthy Chinese man, played by Warner Oland, and several other "typical" rich Europeans.

Oland, it is soon revealed, is really the head of the rebel Chinese army. After one of his top commanders is removed from the train by the Chinese government, he later stops the train and detains all the passengers, looking to exchange Brooks for his commander.

Brooks was on the way to Shanghai to perform a life-saving operation on a top Chinese government official, so he's a powerful bargaining chip. While being held by Oland, he and Dietrich toss more recriminations at each other until Oland's threats become deadly.

Then Brooks and Dietrich get to show, through sacrifice, that they still love each other; but Brooks is too stubborn to admit it. Worse, events unfold in a way that, once again, make Dietrich look unfaithful.

While Brooks and Dietrich's little soap opera is playing out, poor Anna May Wong is facing her own challenges as Oland doesn't believe no means no. But since this is precode-movie world, Wong can dish out her own rough justice and walk away.

By journey's end, most of the white European passengers have come down a peg or two, or at least see that the condescensions they held toward the Chinese and toward women like Dietrich and Wong didn't align with the way events unfolded when lives were on the line.

Grant as the seemingly highbound minister makes the furthest personal journey as he, versus some of the other Europeans, is willing to admit his past prejudices were wrong. It's refreshing to see a movie where each ethnic group isn't portrayed as all good or all bad.

Today, though, the movie is most famous for its beautiful cinematography of Dietrich in particular – it won its one Oscar for its cinematography. Dressed in archly elaborate 1930s gowns and accoutrements, several of the close-up shots of the German star are now iconic.

Lit like an angel, despite her character's reputation, the movie at times is a love letter to Dietrich, who at thirty-one is at the peak of her arresting beauty. Dietrich aged incredibly well and could still turn heads in her fifties, but youth and beauty combined has a power of its own.

Brooks unfortunately is the movie's Achilles heel. Besides the fact that his face seems somehow hidden under his officer's cap, you never understand what Dietrich sees in this wooden, cold man whose sense of honor is real but inflexible.

Dietrich is not the warmest-looking human ever put on earth to start, so one feels that it would take some work to fire up her libido. One doubts very much that Brooks is up to the task. But as the saying goes, it's pointless trying to figure out what attracts one person to another.

Shanghai Express, despite its casting flaws, has aged well. It is still an engaging story with some contemporaneous history weaved in. Despite being shot all on sets in Hollywood, it offers a thoughtful look at China, while delivering a sharp elbow to upper-class England.

Shanghai Express is also a cognate to 1932's Grand Hotel, which beat out Shanghai Express for the Best Picture Oscar. And refreshingly, it displays a more balanced view of cultural difference than would be seen after the Motion Picture Production Code was enforced.

Today, film buffs come to see Dietrich famously framed by von Sternberg. Yet they can't help noticing that it's also a darn good movie that rips along at a precode fevered pace, while showing that prejudice wasn't nearly as rigid back then as we often believe today.

 

[Julian Shellhammer]

Man of the People (1937) with Joseph Calleia, Florence Rice, and Thomas Mitchell. Calleia grows up in a tough part of NYC, then later in life becomes an attorney in private practice. Mitchell heads up the local corrupt politics, for whom Calleia foregoes his noble legal aspirations, and takes to defending crooks and minions of Mitchell. Rice is from the well-to-do part of society, and her character is mostly for the romance angle. We see some gasp-inducing bad things done by bad guys in the context of rampant judicial bribery, but since it's 1937 things straighten out towards the end.

 

[Edward]

Recently I've been in and out of Paris a couple of times for work, travelling in the most civilised way - the Eurostar train service. Among other things, I've watched and rewatched, respectively, Operation Mincemeat and The World's End.

Operation Mincemeat (2021) is an excellent little piece about the eponymous British counter-intelligence operation to fool Hitler into believing the Allies were targeting Greece and Sardinia, rather than Sicily. (Oddly, a persistent popular belief exists now that connects this to D-Day rather than Sicily. How history becomes legend becomes myth....). It's a very tightly scripted and well played piece, with a real sense of period-believability. Had it not been shot in colour, I could well imagine it being mistaken for a much older film. The tension between Colin Firth, Matthew Macfadyen and Kelly Macdonald as a love triangle never acted upon reminds me somewhat of the never quite realised affair at the heart of Brief Encounter. It's an excellent film about an important part of the war that lacks the glamour of in-the-field operations. but carries the narrative beautifully, showing the importance of the office-bound war. Mark Gatiss does a fun supporting role as the louche brother suspected of being a communist spy. Simon Russell's performance as Churchill is fine, though perhaps an unusual choice in that he neither looks nor sounds anything like Churchill at any point. I wonder whether it was a deliberate effort to step away from imitation to make it more an 'acting' role. It doesn't detract from the whole, but it seems odd overall when so many other fine actors have produced a closer representation of the man on screen. This was a bit like having Kelsey Grammar play Elvis - great actor, great singer, unlikely to produce the sought resemblance to such an identifiable historical character.

The World's End (2013) is Simon Pegg & Edgar Wright's final act of their so-called 'Cornetto Trilogy'. Not a vintage-period piece, but it has themes that must be of interest to any thinking vintage enthusiast. Pegg plays Gary King, a man who is a pronounced sufferer from Tom Buchanan Syndrome. His life peaked for him on one night in 1990, when, as a teenager with his gang tried - and failed - to complete the Golden Mile, a pub crawl through their non-descript, commuter belt town in the South of England. The crawl involves twelve pubs, the final destination being The World's End. Gary manages to convince, with various acts of dishonesty (including lying about his mother having died - she actually phones during the course of the events) the gang in the present day to return and take the crawl on again. Unfortunately for them, this is the night that they discover the town (and, impliedly, the whole world) has been taken over by something of an invasion of the body snatchers who have targeted and replaced a handful of influential people world wide and are more or less running the planet - at least until alcoholic Gary and his former pals stumble on the truth and disrupt everything. It's a fun and silly sci-fi with references to the Midwich Cuckoos, Stepford Wives, Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, but at its heart it is also a meditation on the power, and danger, of nostalgia unchecked. Gary's friends have all moved on with their lives and made something of themselves, but Gary has been unable to move on, stuck forever trying to recreate the imagined glory of that one night in his teens. It's a classic piece of a bit of a silly b-movie type plot speaking to a greater truth, reminiscent of George Romero (who, indeed, was a huge influence on Wright and Pegg).

 

[Fading Fast]

Purple Noon from 1960 with Alain Delon, Marie Leforêt, Maurice Ronet and Bill Kearns


First, read the book The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith because it's very good and you get to form your own images of everything and everyone in your head.

Then watch Purple Noon to see how director René Clément interpreted the novel in 1960 cinema. Finally, watch The Talented Mr. Ripley to see how director Anthony Minghella did so in 1999.

Other than, one assumes, censorship that forced a different ending from the book, Clément's Purple Noon is reasonably faithful to Highsmith's story and a bit grittier than Minghella's later interpretation; the latter made post-war Italy look like the prettiest place on earth.

Not that Clément's post-war Italy isn't darn attractive, especially with a beautiful cast including Alain Delon proving a man can be prettier than even the beautiful Marie Leforêt.

Despite all this visual beauty, Purple Noon is still a murderous tale about a polished, psychotic grifter and a nasty, spoiled rich kid who take the concept of frenemies to a new level of spite and antipathy. The picture is effectively film noir in its soul, but it's too pretty to fit the genre.

Delon plays a poor boy bounder who is hired by a rich kid's dad to bring his prodigal son home to America from Italy. The son, a young man, played by Maurice Ronet, is living a sybaritic life with his quasi fiancée, played by Leforêt, whom he mentally abuses when he's bored or angry.

Delon befriends Ronet while stringing along Ronet's dad back in America with dissembling telegrams. Delon is attracted to Ronet's lifestyle and his fiancée. Ronet is sometimes friendly and sometimes nasty to Delon, but the poor boy puts up with it to stay in Ronet's wealthy orbit.

That is until he doesn't. It happens about halfway in, so maybe it's a spoiler, but after Ronet is particularly nasty to Delon, Delon kills Ronet, disposes of the body at sea, and then shows why Highsmith titled her novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, Delon's character's name.

After he murders Ronet, Delon goes full grifter, stealing Ronet's identity to make it look as if Ronet is still alive. This both covers up the murder and allows Delon to enjoy some of Ronet's lifestyle.

Delon shows an incredible talent for copying signatures and faking passports, but where he really shines is in thinking far ahead to put all the pieces of his elaborate deception in place. But the boy can also think on his feet, as he outwits the French police on the fly several times.

Delon's encounters with a particular French detective, played by Erno Crisa, are wonderful nail-biting scenes as the detective clearly suspects pretty-boy Delon, but he has no evidence. Delon, for his part, assumes a reserved innocence with the detective that requires nerves of steel.

Delon also outwits Ronet's friends and Leforêt, but one friend he can't outwit is an obnoxious, arrogant, but whip-smart nosy ba***rd, played by Bill Kearns. So Delon "disposes" of him the way many good film noir villains do: he bonks him hard on the head and dumps the body.

You'll get exhausted just keeping up with Delon as he dances all over Italy, spinning stories to the police, American Express agents, Ronet's friends, and, of course, Leforêt. It is the heart and soul of the book's story. The movie, though, adds visual beauty.

Italy might have been struggling to get back on its feet after WWII, but not where the rich expat Americans play, party, sun and sleep around. With everyone dressed in beautiful clothes, the film doubles as a travel brochure for Rome and Naples.

In the real world, even though Ronet was a rich ba***rd with a nasty meanstreak, you'd want Delon caught, convicted and punished for his murder. But in the world of movies, your morality wobbles as Ronet is hateful, and Delon is so handsome and passionate, you almost root for him.

It's this ability of Delon to do bad things, but still have you somewhat like him that takes Purple Noon to a higher level. Clément made a pretty and intelligent movie with beautiful cinematography, smart pacing and engaging scenes, but Delon makes the movie.

The man "grifts" the viewer as much as the characters in the story. Ronet is fine as the nasty rich kid, but he becomes a prop for Delon. Leforêt, though, is the other interesting character, as she projects a depth of thought and feeling that exceeds the role as written.

You, of course, don't have to read the book first or watch the 1999 version of the movie afterward to enjoy Purple Noon, but you might want to so that you can fully appreciate the rich texture and multiple layers of Highsmith's achievement.

Clémet's interpretation of her work, however, stands on its own as an engaging, appealing, and pretty, but also somewhat frightening look at a charming sociopath quietly menacing his way through Italy's young, rich American expat community.