What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

[Fading Fast]

Wasn't it Groucho in "Horsefeathers" who as Dean of a University said and I quote loosely:

"I'm going downtown to buy a couple of Football Players!"

Worf

Good one. It's pretty amazing, but the 1930s are chockablock with movies about how corrupted and corrupting college football was.

 

[EngProf]

Good one. It's pretty amazing, but the 1930s are chockablock with movies about how corrupted and corrupting college football was.

That has some great university and anti-university ideas in it.
The faculty meeting where Groucho sings a song "Whatever it is, I'm against it!" fits some faculty perfe

Good one. It's pretty amazing, but the 1930s are chockablock with movies about how corrupted and corrupting college football was.

That has some great pro-university and anti-university ideas in it.
The faculty meeting where Groucho sings a song, "Whatever it is, I'm against it!" fits some faculty perfectly.
So much so that our Dean of Engineering, who had a great sense of humor, devoted a regularly-scheduled faculty meeting to showing "Horse Feathers" in its entirety. No other business, just the movie... He was making a point.

 

[Fading Fast]

Son of India from 1931 with Raman Navarro and Madge Evans


This short precode packs a powerful interracial-relationship punch inside a smartly constructed story that reveals people were thinking hard about race relations and prejudices in the 1930s.

There are two ways to try to understand Son of India. You can think about it in the context of its day and the views and beliefs that were held about race then, or you can simply feel smug and superior by considering it in a modern-day context only.

Ramon Navarro plays the son of a precious jewels merchant. His life is selflessly saved by an Indian holy man who hid Navarro when bandits came to steal his father's jewels.

Later, an American tourist saves Navarro from a trumped-up charge of thievery. Navarro's father raised the boy to believe that gratitude is "the highest command of God and that no God will ever forgive a man who breaks the command of gratitude." The die is cast.

Years later, Navarro is himself a wealthy merchant of precious jewels when he meets a pretty American tourist, played by pretty Madge Evans. Soon the two begin a very tentative and cautious affair.

Both recognize the race prejudices of the time "forbid" their affair. The Indian community would not accept her any more than the white community would accept him, so their affair risks ostracism for both.

As in almost every inter-racial love-affair movie ever, the one thing we the audience see and care about is that the two lovers are sincere in their love - our sympathies are rightfully with them. Yet in 1930 it was not easy to say "it doesn't matter."

The water everyone swam in then was water where the races didn't intermarry. It's the game theory "everybody knows that everybody knows you don't do that" tenet, which controls behavior more than any written law ever could.

Evans and Navarro are ready to chuck their communities for love, but great pressure, in the form of outstanding debts of gratitude, comes down hard on Navarro. Evans is steadfast, but will Navarro crack under the emotional blackmail being put upon him?

As an actor, Navarro hasn't yet dropped all his silent film mannerisms, but here he creates an honorable and likable character who tries to do the right thing when there is no easy, or even clear, right thing to do. He's an appealing leading man.

Evans had already adjusted her acting style to talking pictures, making her portrayal of a woman who cares about love not race sincere and natural. She also delivers one of the money lines of the movie with powerful conviction:

"I'm a woman in love, that's what I am for the first time in my life, and I'll not allow any stupid prejudices to rob me of my happiness."

Son of India has an early talkie clunkiness to it, plus it is in need of a restoration, yet director Jacques Feyder told his risky-for-the-time story of an inter-racial couple with inspiring confidence.

Today, most of our "risky" movies are not risky at all as they align to the prevailing views and only fight prejudices of the past that are roundly denounced anyway by most people today. Feyder, conversely, was punching at the prevailing views of his time.

Son of India shows that race prejudice wasn't as "locked down" in the past as it is often argued today or a major studio, MGM, wouldn't have produced a picture challenging the accepted ideas on inter-racial couples.

Maybe it didn't go far enough, but that's easy to say today. The movie's existence alone is its value, as major social change doesn't come about in a flash of new thinking; the ideas behind radical change always have a long gestation period.

 

[GHT]

View attachment 647364
Son of India from 1931 with Raman Navarro and Madge Evans


This short precode packs a powerful interracial-relationship punch inside a smartly constructed story that reveals people were thinking hard about race relations and prejudices in the 1930s.

There are two ways to try to understand Son of India. You can think about it in the context of its day and the views and beliefs that were held about race then, or you can simply feel smug and superior by considering it in a modern-day context only.

Ramon Navarro plays the son of a precious jewels merchant. His life is selflessly saved by an Indian holy man who hid Navarro when bandits came to steal his father's jewels.

Later, an American tourist saves Navarro from a trumped-up charge of thievery. Navarro's father raised the boy to believe that gratitude is "the highest command of God and that no God will ever forgive a man who breaks the command of gratitude." The die is cast.

Years later, Navarro is himself a wealthy merchant of precious jewels when he meets a pretty American tourist, played by pretty Madge Evans. Soon the two begin a very tentative and cautious affair.

Both recognize the race prejudices of the time "forbid" their affair. The Indian community would not accept her any more than the white community would accept him, so their affair risks ostracism for both.

As in almost every inter-racial love-affair movie ever, the one thing we the audience see and care about is that the two lovers are sincere in their love - our sympathies are rightfully with them. Yet in 1930 it was not easy to say "it doesn't matter."

The water everyone swam in then was water where the races didn't intermarry. It's the game theory "everybody knows that everybody knows you don't do that" tenet, which controls behavior more than any written law ever could.

Evans and Navarro are ready to chuck their communities for love, but great pressure, in the form of outstanding debts of gratitude, comes down hard on Navarro. Evans is steadfast, but will Navarro crack under the emotional blackmail being put upon him?

As an actor, Navarro hasn't yet dropped all his silent film mannerisms, but here he creates an honorable and likable character who tries to do the right thing when there is no easy, or even clear, right thing to do. He's an appealing leading man.

Evans had already adjusted her acting style to talking pictures, making her portrayal of a woman who cares about love not race sincere and natural. She also delivers one of the money lines of the movie with powerful conviction:

"I'm a woman in love, that's what I am for the first time in my life, and I'll not allow any stupid prejudices to rob me of my happiness."

Son of India has an early talkie clunkiness to it, plus it is in need of a restoration, yet director Jacques Feyder told his risky-for-the-time story of an inter-racial couple with inspiring confidence.

Today, most of our "risky" movies are not risky at all as they align to the prevailing views and only fight prejudices of the past that are roundly denounced anyway by most people today. Feyder, conversely, was punching at the prevailing views of his time.

Son of India shows that race prejudice wasn't as "locked down" in the past as it is often argued today or a major studio, MGM, wouldn't have produced a picture challenging the accepted ideas on inter-racial couples.

Maybe it didn't go far enough, but that's easy to say today. The movie's existence alone is its value, as major social change doesn't come about in a flash of new thinking; the ideas behind radical change always have a long gestation period.

As reviews go, they don't get much better than that. Fair, carefully considered, tolerant and informative. I enjoyed reading your assessment.

 

[Fading Fast]

High and Low a Japanese movie from 1963


It doesn't do it justice to simply call this incredible movie "film noir" as it has impressive elements of a crime drama, a psychological thriller, an ethical dialectic, and social commentary, with each taking center stage at times without any dominating.

More than anything else, High and Low is a series of morality tales and philosophical questions wrapped inside a kidnapping story.

The one big question it raises and leaves for you to answer is if being rich is a moral crime, especially if there are poor around you. It implicitly asks: if you follow the laws of your country, work hard, succeed honestly and become rich, have you in some way stolen from the poor?

Economists' answers to this question usually fall into two broad camps – the same two camps that seem to divide everything. While that question is the movie's philosophical backbeat, a few moral dilemmas and a fantastic police-procedural story drive its plot and tension.

It all opens with a business meeting where we learn a shoe tycoon has leveraged himself to the hilt trying to take over the company he's a minority shareholder in, but then he gets a call that his son has been kidnapped. The ransom demand will bankrupt him, but he's prepared to pay.

It turns out, though, that the kidnapper made a mistake and took the tycoon's chauffeur's son, but the kidnapper still demands the same ransom from the tycoon. This sets up moral dilemma number one: Should the tycoon bankrupt himself for his chauffeur's son?

With the police called in and a smart young detective heading up the investigation, this question gets fleshed out in an amazingly thoughtful way, as the tycoon's life, business and financial security are not simply dismissed as unimportant in an all-out effort to save the boy.

Once that decision is gut-wrenchingly made, the movie becomes an incredibly gripping police drama as the detective heads up an immense team trying to find the kidnapper. The police are impressively modern, skilled, detailed and devoted.

You come away with one thought: It would be very hard to successfully kidnap someone if the Japanese police are committed to finding you, as everything from a tiny sample of scraped paint to an infant's almost comical drawing is smartly leveraged as clues.

The climax doesn't let the tension drop as the search for the kidnapper reveals Japan's seedy world of dope addicts and dealers with an honesty that American films were still a decade away from showing on screen.

Finally, in more of a 1950s crime-drama/capital-punishment-analysis style, the closing scene (no spoilers coming) is a raw examination of the original question about the morality of wealth and poverty living side by side. The question is not answered, but it is powerfully raised.

Based on the 1959 novel King's Ransom by Ed McBain, High and Low is a good story, but what makes this movie great - and it is great - is the acting, the skilled directing by Akira Kurosawa, and the 1960s Japaneseness of it.

Tatsuya Nakadai, a major star, plays the head detective as a thoughtful man who has the skills to inspire others, but also the ability to investigate the clues himself. He is such a competent professional that you'll want him cloned and made the head detective, well, everywhere.

It is an engaging performance that centers the movie as Nakadai's character sits between the tycoon, played by Toshirô Mifune, who plays his businessman like an angry samurai, and Tsutomu Yamazaki, who plays the kidnapper like a ruthless but smart sociopath.

None of this would matter if director Kurosawa hadn't captured, in beautiful black-and-white cinematography, a stark and captivating portrait of 1960s Japan.

He portrays a country that has regained much of the confidence it lost in WWII, but one that is also dealing with all the challenges societies face as rapidly growing wealth is earned by those most driven, talented and lucky.

From Mifune's house on the hill, high above the poverty of the city it overlooks, to the despair of the drug addicts in Japan's version of Needle Park, Kurosawa uses his camera to advance the story and highlight the moral dilemmas raised – though all with distinctly Japanese characteristics.

Japan's unique and deeply held beliefs about honor, respect, saving face, and legal protection for personal property frame a story that challenges all of those values. A boy's life is on the line because a warped anger at the rich creates a scenario where only a rich man can save the boy.

There is so much story, philosophy and raw human emotion at work in High and Low, that it takes several viewings to absorb it all. This is a feature, not a bug, though, in this smartly complex picture that never forgets the first rule of moviemaking: entertain your audience.

To the first question: is High and Low film noir, neo noir, a crime drama, an ethical exploration movie or a psychological thriller – the answer is yes.

 

[Fading Fast]

The Great Man from 1956 with José Ferrer, Dean Jagger, Keenan Wynn, Joanne Gilbert, Ed Wynn and Julie London


Sometimes great movies hide in plain sight, as The Great Man does year after year. It's not obscure and gets good reviews, but it never comes up in discussions of top films or even in discussions about the best movie exposés of the broadcast industry's corrupt cynicism.

Citizen Kane and A Face in the Crowd are regularly noted, but with less fanfare, this José Ferrer co-written, directed, and starred-in effort cedes little to its famous brethren. It is, possibly, even more effective in its relentless reveal of the broadcast industry's arrant hypocrisy.

The picture opens with the death of "The Great Man," a beloved national radio personality we never meet. We learn about him, though, as Ferrer's character, a hard-boiled journalist, is assigned the task of creating and broadcasting the network's one-hour radio eulogy special.

The movie advances on two tracks from here as we see Ferrer investigate the Great Man, while his agent, played with vicious smarminess by Keenan Wynn and the network head, played by Dean Jagger, jockey for control of Ferrer as the Great Man's possible replacement.

It is no real surprise that the "beloved by America" Great Man turns out to be a louse - a selfish, conniving, manipulator of people and abuser of women. It's the old tale of the public image not aligning, at all, with the private person.

Ferrer rolls this story out through his investigation as he learns the dirt about the Great Man in interviews. Watch for the scene where Ed Wynn (yes, Keenan's father) plays the Great Man's first boss and reveals an ugly side of his former employee – it's an acting tour de force moment.

This is a movie full of impressive scenes and performances like that, including one with Julie London playing an alcoholic singer whom the Great Man kept in his stable of women. He helped her career, but also destroyed her self respect. London's performance is gripping.

While Ferrer is learning all the dirt on the Great Man, Keenan Wynn is trying to advance Ferrer's career, but only if he has complete control over Ferrer. Keenan Wynn, though, might have met his match in the network's head, Jagger, who plays the control game at a highly skilled level.

Jagger and K. Wynn’s battles feel like you are a fly on the wall at genuine C-suite meetings, where the gloves come off and ruthless, smart men pull hard on the sinews of authority, money, and control.

Tucked into all this brutal cynicism and jockeying for power is the wonderful relationship between Ferrer and his secretary, played by Joanne Gilbert. It's clear these two have worked together for a long time and developed a deep mutual respect and friendship.

They have an office rhythm that's hard to capture on screen, but they did it here. Yet we so dislike the idea of these relationships today, that we've all but eliminated the word secretary. Yes, there were often many things wrong with those relationships, but not always.

This is one of the not always. It's the warmest and nicest thing in a hard-boiled movie that will wear you down. Look for the scene where Gilbert tries to take a nap in Ferrer's office; it perfectly reflects the nuances of real life that can make a day feel silly and alive.

Gilbert also sees the picture's central conflict playing out slowly and painfully in her boss' inner conflict. Ferrer is going to face a come-to-Jesus moment deciding whether to play ball and give a fluff-piece eulogy or shock the audience with the truth that his reporting has discovered.

Playing ball means career advancement and big money for Ferrer, but it also means dumping his journalistic integrity in the garbage can. There's a neat, as we would say today, meta-twist to the conflict's resolution, just know that people in positions of power get there for a reason.

Though Ferrer wore many hats in the production, he didn't make it a vanity project; instead, he assembled a strong cast and let the story, not his ego, drive the movie.

The result is The Great Man is a great movie about greed, character, corporate power and the ruthless manipulation of public opinion driven by the tightly controlled creation of "personalities," all amplified by the near monopoly the broadcast industry had on reaching the public back then.

The internet and social media have broken that monopoly, so now we have many popular "personalities," tailor made for every subculture. It's more "democratic," but somehow it doesn't feel any better.

 

[Julian Shellhammer]

View attachment 647796
High and Low a Japanese movie from 1963


It doesn't do it justice to simply call this incredible movie "film noir" as it has impressive elements of a crime drama, a psychological thriller, an ethical dialectic, and social commentary, with each taking center stage at times without any dominating.

More than anything else, High and Low is a series of morality tales and philosophical questions wrapped inside a kidnapping story.

The one big question it raises and leaves for you to answer is if being rich is a moral crime, especially if there are poor around you. It implicitly asks: if you follow the laws of your country, work hard, succeed honestly and become rich, have you in some way stolen from the poor?

Economists' answers to this question usually fall into two broad camps – the same two camps that seem to divide everything. While that question is the movie's philosophical backbeat, a few moral dilemmas and a fantastic police-procedural story drive its plot and tension.

It all opens with a business meeting where we learn a shoe tycoon has leveraged himself to the hilt trying to take over the company he's a minority shareholder in, but then he gets a call that his son has been kidnapped. The ransom demand will bankrupt him, but he's prepared to pay.

It turns out, though, that the kidnapper made a mistake and took the tycoon's chauffeur's son, but the kidnapper still demands the same ransom from the tycoon. This sets up moral dilemma number one: Should the tycoon bankrupt himself for his chauffeur's son?

With the police called in and a smart young detective heading up the investigation, this question gets fleshed out in an amazingly thoughtful way, as the tycoon's life, business and financial security are not simply dismissed as unimportant in an all-out effort to save the boy.

Once that decision is gut-wrenchingly made, the movie becomes an incredibly gripping police drama as the detective heads up an immense team trying to find the kidnapper. The police are impressively modern, skilled, detailed and devoted.

You come away with one thought: It would be very hard to successfully kidnap someone if the Japanese police are committed to finding you, as everything from a tiny sample of scraped paint to an infant's almost comical drawing is smartly leveraged as clues.

The climax doesn't let the tension drop as the search for the kidnapper reveals Japan's seedy world of dope addicts and dealers with an honesty that American films were still a decade away from showing on screen.

Finally, in more of a 1950s crime-drama/capital-punishment-analysis style, the closing scene (no spoilers coming) is a raw examination of the original question about the morality of wealth and poverty living side by side. The question is not answered, but it is powerfully raised.

Based on the 1959 novel King's Ransom by Ed McBain, High and Low is a good story, but what makes this movie great - and it is great - is the acting, the skilled directing by Akira Kurosawa, and the 1960s Japaneseness of it.

Tatsuya Nakadai, a major star, plays the head detective as a thoughtful man who has the skills to inspire others, but also the ability to investigate the clues himself. He is such a competent professional that you'll want him cloned and made the head detective, well, everywhere.

It is an engaging performance that centers the movie as Nakadai's character sits between the tycoon, played by Toshirô Mifune, who plays his businessman like an angry samurai, and Tsutomu Yamazaki, who plays the kidnapper like a ruthless but smart sociopath.

None of this would matter if director Kurosawa hadn't captured, in beautiful black-and-white cinematography, a stark and captivating portrait of 1960s Japan.

He portrays a country that has regained much of the confidence it lost in WWII, but one that is also dealing with all the challenges societies face as rapidly growing wealth is earned by those most driven, talented and lucky.

From Mifune's house on the hill, high above the poverty of the city it overlooks, to the despair of the drug addicts in Japan's version of Needle Park, Kurosawa uses his camera to advance the story and highlight the moral dilemmas raised – though all with distinctly Japanese characteristics.

Japan's unique and deeply held beliefs about honor, respect, saving face, and legal protection for personal property frame a story that challenges all of those values. A boy's life is on the line because a warped anger at the rich creates a scenario where only a rich man can save the boy.

There is so much story, philosophy and raw human emotion at work in High and Low, that it takes several viewings to absorb it all. This is a feature, not a bug, though, in this smartly complex picture that never forgets the first rule of moviemaking: entertain your audience.

To the first question: is High and Low film noir, neo noir, a crime drama, an ethical exploration movie or a psychological thriller – the answer is yes.

As Chairman Kaga might say, "If my memory serves me..." , does the film end with a young man semi-addressing the camera with an emotional speech about how other people need to wake up to the needs of the underprivileged?

 

[Julian Shellhammer]

Returning from brief break in FL posting, here are some random notes about the most recent movies enjoyed by The Missus and myself.

The Falcon in San Francisco (1945) directed by Joseph H. (Gun Crazy) Lewis, featuring Tom Conway as the titular free-lance sleuth, Edward (Timothy the circus mouse) Brophy as chuckle-inducing sidekick Goldie Locke, Rita Corday as a young lady surrounded by suspicious-acting nannies and butlers, and Robert Armstrong as a business owner who has a mysterious past. Ostensibly on vacation in Baghdad by the Bay, Conway and Brophy get caught up in murders, deceit, and eventually smugglers. Perhaps I dozed, but it seems some plot points were left unexplained.

The Sisters (1938) about turn-of-the-century sisters Bette Davis, Anita Louise, and Jane Bryan, who suffer through unhappy relationships and emotional turmoil. Errol Flynn is the love interest and eventual husband of Davis, but he is no dashing gallant here, rather a newspaperman with drinking issues. We also experience the San Francisco Earthquake, and somehow the sisters end up with some sort of happiness. This was a soap opera all ramped up.

Gabriel Over the White House (1933), with Walter Huston, Karen Morley, and Franchot Tone, directed by Gregory La Cava.
Will somebody explain to me what is happening here? Huston is a glad-handing professional politician who gets elected to the presidency and promptly a.) ignores the Depression, b.) ignores nation-wide gangsterism, and c.) delves deep into cronyism. He drives the presidental car recklessly, crashes, seems near death, and wakes up a solemn, focused, transformed human.

Listen, in the course of the story he gets both houses of Congress to shut themselves down, hands out orders and makes laws, creates a "Federal Police" out of parts of the Army, tries gangsters in court-martials, shoots them with military firing-squads, bullies world leaders to pay to the US their war debts, and other remarkable things.
In case you haven't see this, the ending will be left for you to process. IMDb says William Randolph Hearst produced the movie; studio head Louis B. Mayer held the release until after Hoover left office. Are we to conclude that only an authority with dictatorial powers could straighten out the nation?

Worf? Trenchfriend? Fading Fast?

 

[Fading Fast]

As Chairman Kaga might say, "If my memory serves me..." , does the film end with a young man semi-addressing the camera with an emotional speech about how other people need to wake up to the needs of the underprivileged?

Yes, as that is part of the kidnapper's final speech from prison.

 

[Fading Fast]

Gabriel Over the White House (1933), with Walter Huston, Karen Morley, and Franchot Tone, directed by Gregory La Cava.
Will somebody explain to me what is happening here? Huston is a glad-handing professional politician who gets elected to the presidency and promptly a.) ignores the Depression, b.) ignores nation-wide gangsterism, and c.) delves deep into cronyism. He drives the presidental car recklessly, crashes, seems near death, and wakes up a solemn, focused, transformed human.

Listen, in the course of the story he gets both houses of Congress to shut themselves down, hands out orders and makes laws, creates a "Federal Police" out of parts of the Army, tries gangsters in court-martials, shoots them with military firing-squads, bullies world leaders to pay to the US their war debts, and other remarkable things.
In case you haven't see this, the ending will be left for you to process. IMDb says William Randolph Hearst produced the movie; studio head Louis B. Mayer held the release until after Hoover left office. Are we to conclude that only an authority with dictatorial powers could straighten out the nation?

Worf? Trenchfriend? Fading Fast?

I saw it a long time ago, so my answer is from a distant memory, but yes, I believe it is the "good dictator" fantasy argument that some indulge in: It is the belief that the "right" strongman will fix all the problems that our "muddled" democracy can't handle. Of course, once all that power is aggregated in one person or office, what happens when a not good person - a Mao, Stalin, Castro, Chávez, Hitler, and on and on - takes over is never addressed.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Hearst and Mussolini were mutual admirers, and I think the Duce is the model for this picture. These were still the days when an entire series of articles by Mussolini could be published -- to considerable acclaim -- in the Saturday Evening Post, because, you know, he made the trains run on time...

 

[Worf]

Returning from brief break in FL posting, here are some random notes about the most recent movies enjoyed by The Missus and myself.

The Falcon in San Francisco (1945) directed by Joseph H. (Gun Crazy) Lewis, featuring Tom Conway as the titular free-lance sleuth, Edward (Timothy the circus mouse) Brophy as chuckle-inducing sidekick Goldie Locke, Rita Corday as a young lady surrounded by suspicious-acting nannies and butlers, and Robert Armstrong as a business owner who has a mysterious past. Ostensibly on vacation in Baghdad by the Bay, Conway and Brophy get caught up in murders, deceit, and eventually smugglers. Perhaps I dozed, but it seems some plot points were left unexplained.

The Sisters (1938) about turn-of-the-century sisters Bette Davis, Anita Louise, and Jane Bryan, who suffer through unhappy relationships and emotional turmoil. Errol Flynn is the love interest and eventual husband of Davis, but he is no dashing gallant here, rather a newspaperman with drinking issues. We also experience the San Francisco Earthquake, and somehow the sisters end up with some sort of happiness. This was a soap opera all ramped up.

Gabriel Over the White House (1933), with Walter Huston, Karen Morley, and Franchot Tone, directed by Gregory La Cava.
Will somebody explain to me what is happening here? Huston is a glad-handing professional politician who gets elected to the presidency and promptly a.) ignores the Depression, b.) ignores nation-wide gangsterism, and c.) delves deep into cronyism. He drives the presidental car recklessly, crashes, seems near death, and wakes up a solemn, focused, transformed human.

Listen, in the course of the story he gets both houses of Congress to shut themselves down, hands out orders and makes laws, creates a "Federal Police" out of parts of the Army, tries gangsters in court-martials, shoots them with military firing-squads, bullies world leaders to pay to the US their war debts, and other remarkable things.
In case you haven't see this, the ending will be left for you to process. IMDb says William Randolph Hearst produced the movie; studio head Louis B. Mayer held the release until after Hoover left office. Are we to conclude that only an authority with dictatorial powers could straighten out the nation?

Worf? Trenchfriend? Fading Fast?

I reviewed "Gabriel Over the White House" before. Said to be one of FDR's faves. I couldn't understand the schizophrenic nature of the plot/script any more than you could. You save America by shredding the Constitution (which you claim to love), declare Martial Law, eliminate all political dissent and still consider it America when done? Yeah, I didn't get that either. What can I tell you. And I won't even mention how this "fantasy" still resonates with many today.

Worf

 

[Edward]

That has some great university and anti-university ideas in it.
The faculty meeting where Groucho sings a song "Whatever it is, I'm against it!" fits some faculty perfe

That has some great pro-university and anti-university ideas in it.
The faculty meeting where Groucho sings a song, "Whatever it is, I'm against it!" fits some faculty perfectly.
So much so that our Dean of Engineering, who had a great sense of humor, devoted a regularly-scheduled faculty meeting to showing "Horse Feathers" in its entirety. No other business, just the movie... He was making a point.

Sounds fun. I sat in a meeting today where a few folks sought to find problems and complain about something we have to do. The joke of it is that the decision, I'm pretty sure, has already been made at the top level, way beyond our department, and our head of department I'm pretty sure knows this (but won't have been told the outcome) yet is expected to go through this whole getting our opinion based on only a small disclosure (the decision involves a building location and they're not allowed to tell us where it is...).

As chair of the exam board, I have several colleagues every exam session (three per year these days) spend time emailing to complain about being expected to fill in a form. They could fill in ten forms in the time they email to whine about one...

 

[Fading Fast]

No Questions Asked from 1951 with Barry Sullivan, Arlene Dahl, Jean Hagen, Howard Petrie and George Murphy


In movies, insurance companies are much more interesting than they are in real life. In noirland, in particular, they often sit somewhere between the cops and bad guys, willing to deal as long as they stay technically within the law.

In No Questions Asked, Barry Sullivan plays a middling lawyer in an insurance company. He has, though, a pretty girlfriend, played by Arlene Dahl, who flat-out tells him she has no interest in being poor or middling. At least give her points for honesty, points she'll later lose.

Sullivan then stumbles into an opportunity to save his company money and get paid a nice bonus for himself by making a deal directly with the crooks who stole some furs. The insurance company gets the furs to return and it pays the crooks a lot less than the price of the coverage.

Sullivan takes his bonus check to Dahl, like a kid with a straight-A report card, but she has just married a rich man. Most men, at this point, would move on, realizing gold-digger Dahl is not the girl you want to marry, but not Sullivan.

Ignoring the advice of the nice girl in the office, played by Jean Hagen, who pines for him, Sullivan sees a business opportunity to become rich and get Dahl back by becoming an independent "broker" between criminals and insurance companies.

As a lawyer, he knows where the legal line is and sets his business up to be just inside of it. His "brokering" company grows quickly, making Sullivan rich and prominent, but not quite beloved.

The police, especially the local inspector, played by George Murphy, don't like his business one bit. It makes the police look bad and, Murphy believes, it encourages crime as the crooks now know they have a "legal" fence in Sullivan.

The last piece of the puzzle is an eccentric mobster, played by Howard Petrie, who sells his stolen goods through Sullivan. He, with his henchmen, then execute a brazen jewelry heist at a theater, knowing they'll have Sullivan to sell the jewels to.

That is the reasonably complicated setup, which we only learn in a flashback, as the movie opens with Sullivan on the run from the police narrating how he got here. Yes, it has a strong echo of another noir set in insurance land, Double Indemnity.

It only gets much more complicated as the picture moves into the third act. The theater jewelry deal goes badly. Then with the police tailing Sullivan closely, Dahl and her husband try to double-cross Sullivan who was still trying to win greedy Dahl back. Some men never learn.

This is film noir under the Motion Picture Production Code, though, so eventually we know all the bad people will pay for their bad acts, but you need a scorecard to keep it straight. Also, Sullivan sits right on the line of probably immoral, but not criminal, so does he have to pay?

Sullivan as an actor is a step below the top men of noir, but he more than adequately carries this B-movie. He lacks that something special that is in a Robert Mitchum or Robert Ryan, but he has a complexity to his mien and cragginess to his face that works well in noir pictures.

Dahl is good as a gold digger cum femme fatale as her avarice seems to grow by the frame. Still, she, like Sullivan, doesn't quite have the look or inner something that makes someone a top-tier noir actor.

Jean Hagan, though, has that special noir ingredient. Having already played the saddest girlfriend ever in noirland in The Asphalt Jungle, she returns for another round of unrequited love. This time, in No Questions Asked, she plays Sullivan's dishrag, while he pines for Dahl.

Look for the scene where Hagen meets her rival, Dahl, face to face. Hagen's a bit drunk and very sad, but she tries to put on a brave face. It's an unusual-for-noir romantically heartbreaking moment in which Hagen completely owns the scene, even when her back is to the camera.

There is a lot of quirkiness packed into this eighty-minute effort, including cross-dressing criminals, a neat test of who is my truly loyal girlfriend and a complete moonshot of a criminal who trains to hold his breath underwater. It's a busy movie.

No Questions Asked flopped on its release. That's surprising as it is a solid low-budget noir near the peak of the genre's popularity.

It checks many noir boxes with its good guy goes bad over a gold-digging woman, oddball crooks, loyal hack driver, cops always one step behind and cheap sets of dark, neon-lit streets, but it didn't sell at the time.

Regardless of why audiences balked back then, today it's a reasonably enjoyable watch. Plus, it's another trip through the fascinating world of insurance companies in noirland, which is one planet removed from insurance companies on earth.

 

[Edward]

I reviewed "Gabriel Over the White House" before. Said to be one of FDR's faves. I couldn't understand the schizophrenic nature of the plot/script any more than you could. You save America by shredding the Constitution (which you claim to love), declare Martial Law, eliminate all political dissent and still consider it America when done? Yeah, I didn't get that either. What can I tell you. And I won't even mention how this "fantasy" still resonates with many today.

Worf

Goodreads.com has this to say of Tweed:

Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Frederic Tweed (MC) was a British Army officer and novelist.He was commissioned into the Lancashire Fusiliers. He was awarded the Military Cross in World War I and at the age of 26 was named the youngest lieutenant colonel in the British Army at the time. He became a political adviser to David Lloyd George from 1927 until Tweed's death from a stroke. Tweed was primarily famous for his novels among which were Blind Mouths and Rinehard.

As a British military officer of his time (and one used to British politics, with a very different constitutional structure and no defining, written constitutional instrument), he may well have viewed the office of POTUS rather differently than an expert in US constitutional law might.

I've just looked up Amazon to see if there are copies of the original novel, but it appears to be unavailable and long out of print. I do wonder whether it was a satire translated to playing as straight on screen. A sort of opposite Starship Troopers, if some interpretations of the latter's sourced material are to be believed.

 

[Fading Fast]

As the Earth Turns from 1934 with Jean Muir, Donald Woods, David Landau, Arthur Hohl and Dorothy Appleby


As the Earth Turns is a soap-opera-style, slice-of-life look at farming in rural Maine in the 1930s. Its classic theme of rural-versus-city life plays out among a few intertwined multi-generational families.

Farming is hard. Farming in Maine is harder with its brutally long, cold winters and short, hot summers. Today, farming is still hard, especially for family- not corporate-owned farms, but back in the 1930s, before modern technology, farming in Maine was almost a hair-shirt life.

Three families are the focus here, with David Landau playing the head of the most successful farm. He remarried after his first wife passed, bringing his new wife and her teenage daughter from Boston to live with his existing family, which includes his daughter, played by Jean Muir.

The blended family has a very modern feel, with the new wife and daughter not taking to farm life, creating a rural-city divide within the family. The second family, headed by Landau's brother, played by Arthur Hohl, has a less successful farm because Hohl is lazy.

The third family are Polish immigrants who just bought an adjacent farm because their son, played by Donald Woods, has a passion for farming. He convinced his parents to give up his father's tailoring business to move to the farm with him.

Why any immigrant family, who made the incredibly difficult journey to come to America and had established themselves in Boston, would agree to become rural farmers is one for the books. The family should have shipped Woods back to Poland and stayed in Boston.

With that setup, the movie is a look at the hardships of farming, the stresses and strain of maintaining a marriage on a farm and, for the kids, the challenges of finding friends and romantic interests in a sparsely populated rural community.

Winters are brutally cold and lonely; the soil is tough to work; rain doesn't come when you need it; essential animals get sick and die; and the market price of your produce often collapses when you have a good harvest.

Some still take to the life like Landau, Muir and Woods; while others, like Landau's new wife and daughter, the latter played by Dorothy Appleby, hate it. Love it or hate it, it's an isolated life that makes finding a mate for the young adults hard.

You need a scorecard to keep track of all the players and the interconnections between the families, but the key relationship is Muir and Woods, who should, but don’t immediately, find each other because Muir is too practical and reticent.

Her hesitancy, especially after a huge farming setback for Woods, leads him into the conniving arms of Appleby, who wants to find any way she can to get back to the city.

As those three quietly tangle, the older adults also tussle as Landau's new wife hates the farm life and resents that Landau helps his lazy brother out because it adversely impacts her lifestyle.

Landau is outstanding as the tough but not-mean farmer trying to make his farm work and keep his at-odds family together. Had he not passed away at the age of fifty-six in 1935, Landau would have had another decade or two of success in movies.

Muir is equally impressive playing the young, kind and pretty girl who naturally takes to farm life. She understands and accepts its hardships and flourishes in the challenge. Woods, her obvious suitor, is unfortunately bland, but Muir has enough spark to keep it interesting.

Appleby deserves mention, too. Her performance as the unhappy and scheming girl is believable, as she doesn't overplay her character. She's realistically selfish, not cartoonish. When she moves in on Woods, you'll hate her, but you won't stop watching her.

All of these normal personal trials – financial, blended families, finding love, finding friendship, facing the elements, choosing a career – are dramatically amplified on a farm owing to its isolation and the, sometimes, suffocating closeness of a family living and working together.

Taking place over one year, As the Earth Turns explores these hardships and the isolation of rural farming. Additionally, it highlights the city-versus-rural divide the entire country was facing then as the changing supply of jobs inspired kids to leave farms for work in factories and offices.

It also shows, the way authors like Edith Wharton and John Steinbeck did in some of their stories, that all the personal challenges of finding love, maintaining a marriage, raising kids and caring for relatives happen, with no less passion, to every generation on farms.

While As the Earth Turns may not reach the heights of a classic, its talented cast and Warner Bros.' top-tier production value elevate what could have been a simple drama into an engaging tale of rural farming.

Today, it stands as a vivid time capsule, capturing a way of life that was once integral to America, but has since faded into history. That tie to the past helps the film’s portrayal of rural life, with all its hardships and beauty, resonate even more poignantly with a modern audience.

 

[Fading Fast]

Supernatural from 1933 with Carole Lombard, Vivienne Osborne, Randolph Scott, Alan Dinehart and H.B. Waner


For fans of horror-movie history, Supernatural is one not to miss. For fans of old movies in general, it's still an okay picture, due more to the stars than story, though. Either way, it's a short movie with impressive production qualities that has, now, been beautifully restored.

A serial killer, who murdered three of her lovers, is on death row. Vivienne Osborne plays this murderess with a pitch-perfect sociopathic calmness. She was betrayed to the police by her fourth lover, a charlatan psychic, played by Alan Dinehart.

A doctor, played by H.B. Warner, convinces the police to let him experiment on Osborne's body after her execution because he has a theory that her murderess' spirit will leave her body and enter another to continue killing. He's using "mitogenic rays" to test his theory.

Dinehart, the fake psychic, after reading about an heiress, played by Carole Lombard, whose brother just passed away, reaches out to Lombard to help her "connect" with her dead brother's spirit via a séance.

Lombard, bereaved, agrees despite the warnings from her square-jawed and pragmatic boyfriend, played by Randolph Scott, that Dinehart is a huckster.

The two threads – Dinehart's seance, impressively done with wires and other fakery, and Warner's nutty experiments – soon come together when at a second séance, we see, with decent special effects, Osborne's spirit leave her dead body and enters Lombard's.

From here the movie is Lombard, possessed by Osborne, trying to exact revenge on Dinehart. At the same time, the hero of our story, Scott, tries to save Lombard from committing murder, while also trying to free her soul so they can be together.

You don't watch Supernatural for its scintillating or believable plot. A horror-genre fan watches it to see horror-genre pioneer director Victor Halperin follow up his early, self-financed, horror effort, White Zombie, now with the backing of a major studio.

Paramount put an impressive budget behind this effort. The sets are incredibly natural as several feel like they were filmed on location in a New York City tenement and a second-hand shop. Dinehart's fake seance is also well filmed as it lets us in on his impressive tricks.

The special effects are modest by today's standards but smartly done in a restrained style, especially for the time. There's nothing campy about seeing Osborne's soul leave her body and enter Lombard. The same can't quite be said for the "mitogenic rays."

Paramount also assembled an impressive cast with Lombard giving her all to a difficult role. She has to play the almost-out-of-her-mind grieving sister early on and then the woman possessed by a murderess' soul later. It's asking a lot of a young actress still learning her craft.

Osborne, though, despite having a much smaller role, almost drives the picture as her portrayal of a black widow is chilling and, in the context of the picture, believable. In 1933, one would have predicted a bigger Hollywood career for her than she ultimately had.

Scott has the unenviable role of being the voice of reason and the man almost always a step or two behind the plot, but he's handsome and sincere, which is pretty much what the part calls for.

Beautifully restored, Supernatural is an enjoyable visual experience that shows the care and thought Halperin and Paramount put into this early horror-genre picture. Plus, it's a fun peek at two stars, Lombard and Scott, early in their careers.


N.B. Being a precode, Supernatural shows Dinehart, as he's seducing a now-possessed Lombard, put his hand firmly on her breast. Yes, his hand is over her dress, but it's not subtle, and it's not something viewers would see in movies once the Motion Picture Production Code was enforced a little over a year later.

 

[Fading Fast]

Plucking the Daisy from 1956 with Brigitte Bardot and a cast of others you probably won’t notice – thanks to Brigitte Bardot.


Plucking the Daisy is a silly little French screwball comedy that has three notable features for 1956: Brigitte Bardot scantily clad but not naked, other attractive women briefly naked, and an early 1960s-style mocking of conventional values almost a decade ahead of schedule.

Every sex goddess has her own brand, with Bardot's being a confident youthful spirit that says sex is healthy and fun. Conversely, Marilyn Monroe had a certain girlish innocence to her overt sexuality that, combined with a little teasing naughtiness, created a playful frisson.

Bardot, however, is more straightforward: she knows she’s got it, she’s comfortable with it, and she doesn't think it’s naughty at all. Others might think it's naughty, as in Plucking the Daisy, but that's on them. Her brand of sexuality is guilt-free, but not wanton.

Here, Bardot plays the daughter of a pompous general who worries too much about what others think. When he learns his daughter has written a slightly salacious book under a pseudonym, he tries to send her off to a convent.

Bardot, though, hops on a train to Paris instead and joins her brother in the City of Light, as he's already escaped their father's bullying pomposity. Once there, the screwball chaos kicks up with Bardot first having trouble just finding her brother.

She is helped by a young newspaperman, played by Daniel Gélin – men, for some reason, are always willing to help Bardot. Yet to survive, Bardot sells a rare book from the museum where her brother is an assistant (she thought it was her brother's book).

It's all silliness now as Bardot needs money to replace the book or her brother will get fired, so she enters a striptease competition – you can't make this stuff up. Meanwhile, she's falling in love with Gélin, who works at a newspaper whose city room doubles as a makeout retreat.

There are several twists along the way that eventually sees a masked Bardot advancing in the striptease competition, Gélin falling for the masked Bardot, but not knowing it's her, and the climax coming when the final stripstease competition takes place back in Bardot's hometown.

The cherry on the sundae is Bardot's oh-so-proper father agreeing to be a judge in the striptease competition, which would mean judging his own daughter performing au naturel in front of him – again, you can't make this stuff up.

That's a rough outline of the plot, but Plucking the Daisy, then and now, is not about its plot at all. It's about three things in this order: Bardot, Paris and naked women.

It's a cliché, but the camera simply loves Bardot. Everyone else fades a bit when she's in a scene. Even other very pretty women seem to glow less the closer they get to the sex goddess. Bardot, for her part, is neither coquettish or conceited; blithely confident is as good a description as any.

She's aware she has a God-given sexual allure, but says, "it's not my fault and I'm neither going to aggressively flaunt it nor pretend it's not here: I'm going to live my life as I want and let others obsess over my looks." It's a powerful use of a powerful beauty.

The City of Light, too, shines here as director Marc Allégret captured the post-war metropolis in beautiful black and white. The street scenes and iconic shots, like those of the banks of the Seine, make mid-century Paris look like the most wonderful place in the world to live.

Also easy on the eyes are the naked women in the movie. French cinema in 1956 was clearly different from American cinema as there are a few brief scenes of topless women and naked women shot from behind. It's tame by today's standards, but quite ooh la la for the mid 1950s.

This surprising titillation was at the forefront of the movie’s subversive theme, which mocks old standards of social, cultural, and religious probity, represented here by Bardot’s pretentious father.

That filial rebuke became a standard movie pose worldwide in the 1960s. But the French got a jump on that cinematic sexual and cultural revolution with movies like this one, which for all its screwball silliness, shows a young generation uninterested in the values of its parents.

Today, the fun in Plucking the Daisy is seeing Bardot just before she became an international icon and seeing Paris, because it's always fun to see Paris. The screwball plot quickly grows tiresome, but you can always turn the sound off and just look at Bardot.

While you're doing so, you can't help noticing pretty Paris and the quite early look at the coming "youth revolution," which adduces that all major social change has a longer gestation period than we tend to remember.

Bardot as noted went on to become a sexual and cultural icon, making it fun to see her here on the brink of global stardom. It's a silly movie, but a heck of a Bardot curio.

 

[Fading Fast]

Fear from 1954, a German Film


It's hard to separate the, at the time, scandalous personal lives and marital woes of director Roberto Rossellini and his wife, star Ingrid Bergman, from this tale of infidelity, but a movie should stand on its own, which Fear does well, though not brilliantly.

Bergman here plays the head of a German pharmaceutical company, where her much older husband is a prominent research scientist. Bergman has been having an affair with a handsome younger man, but she wants to break it off before her husband finds out.

Her husband is suspicious, but if she can make a clean break, all should be well in their otherwise wealthy, almost idyllic life, with their two young children. Affairs, though, are always so much easier to start than to finish. The obstacle for Bergman is the boyfriend's former girlfriend.

The girlfriend, played with a fear-inducing ruthlessness by Renate Mannhardt, is angry that Bergman stole her boyfriend. Mannhardt's revenge is blackmail by threat of exposure, delivered with a Glenn Close from Fatal Attraction combination of crazy and maniacal focus.

That is the setup where, for most of the movie, Bergman is scrabbling hard to get money to Mannhardt to keep her quiet, so that her husband doesn't find out. Look for the scene where Bergman asks her domestic staff to lend her money on the spot to pay off Mannhardt.

Bergman and her husband are about to go away for the weekend when Mannhardt shows up demanding money – the woman's demands are ferocious. This has Bergman frantic to give her money to go away before her husband notices. The tension leaps off the screen.

Bergman's performance is incredible in this scene. She's harried, frightened, and desperate, but tries to remain calm in front of the staff and her husband; a husband who has an inkling something isn't right. Whatever life should be like, this isn't it.

After a few more brutal scenes like that, and with Bergman's husband's suspicion increasing owing to a ring Mannhardt all but ripped off of Bergman's finger, the movie pivots hard in the climax that you want to see fresh, but know a lot changes quickly.

Here too, look for Bergman's performance in the scene when she's finally had enough. She might have been cheating on her husband, but one doubts there's a viewer not rooting for her against the relentlessly vicious Mannhardt by this point.

Rossellini films all this fear – and it is fear – in beautiful black and white and in an upper-class world where everything is so neat and pretty that you can't believe Germany lost a war less than a decade ago.

The juxtaposition of Bergman's gorgeous world of opulent homes, luxury cars, and an office that even looks inviting, against her arrant terror of exposure, sends the same message all affairs-ending-in-blackmail movies (see countless film noirs) send: the affair isn't worth it.

A few different endings were filmed, with the one that made it to the main German version often criticized. But that only matters if the ending matters to you. The real impact in Fear is the fear Bergman lives with throughout; the ending shown is clearly just one possible outcome.

In real life, Bergman and Rossellini's seven-year marriage began and ended in affairs, so the two knew of what they spoke, which probably added to the verisimilitude of this effort.

You can nitpick this or that, the ending especially deserves scrutiny, but Fear got two big things very right: it is visually engaging from the first frame to the last, and no one walks away thinking, "I want to have an affair."

 

[Fading Fast]

Holiday from 1930 with Ann Harding, Mary Astor, Robert Ames , William Holden, and Hallam Cooley


This 1930 version of Holiday, being so early in the "talkie" era of Hollywood, is stagey and technologically inchoate compared to the better-known 1938 version. Yet, on its own and even in comparison, the 1930 picture is an engaging movie with an interesting cast.

The 1938 version benefits from the eight years of a learning curve Hollywood had in between, making it more fluid, more "like a movie," than the 1930 version. Yet, the two movies' pluses and minuses almost net out making neither one the clearly better picture.

The story in both, based on a 1928 stage play, is almost the same. A young woman from a very wealthy and socially prominent New York City family meets and becomes engaged to a young man while on a ten-day vacation. He has no idea her family is immensely rich and important.

When they return to New York, the woman's free-spirited sister is excited about the engagement, but her father is measured as, of course, "we need to know more about this boy." The boy, while a successful up-and-coming banker, has unconventional ideas about work and money.

He plans to work just long enough to save the money needed to take a few years off and "find himself." The sister thinks this is a grand idea; his fiancée thinks it's "unusual;" and dad thinks it is unacceptable. It's just a construct, though, to pit conventional values against bohemian ones.

As the story plays out, the sisters learn a lot about each other as the engaged one pushes her fiancé to drop his unconventional thinking, while her sister cheers him on, which sets the sisters against each other. Dad never wavers, so eventually there's a climactic showdown.

There are, of course, a few side stories echoing the movie's main theme: a sensitive brother forced to work in the family business who turns to drink as the work is crushing his soul, and a pair of married cousins who are all in on the "work and make more money" approach to life.

With the same story and, often, the same dialogue, the differences in the two movies lie in the cast, directing, and the noted technology. Director George Cukor brings a screwball joie de vivre to the 1938 version; whereas, Edward H. Griffith keeps his earlier effort stolid and stagey.

With Cukor kicking things up and the improved technology, the 1938 version will feel more familiar and polished to modern audiences, but the biggest differences come down to the cast.

Mary Astor, in the earlier version, playing the engaged sister, brings greater nuance and appeal to the role than does Doris Nolan playing the same character in the later version.

A note has to be made about how poorly written the Astor/Nolan role is, as the character is presented early on as someone nice and understanding of her sister's view, but later she becomes a shrew-like defender of her father. It feels inconsistent and weakens the story.

As to the patriarch himself, Henry Kolker's portrayal of the stern father has a more rounded feel in the later version than does William Holden's in the earlier one. In that one, Holden plays the father like a union boss in a tuxedo.

That leaves us with the crucial role of the bohemian sister, which couldn't have gone to two more different actresses. In 1930, the serene actress Ann Harding plays the liberal sister as a beaten-down young woman looking to find some fresh air to breathe.

In the 1938 version, Katherine Hepburn plays the sister like a cage lioness pouncing on any opportunity to wound her enemies and escape prison. Harding's performance is introspective; Hepburn's is a showy full-force gale.

Despite all these fun comparisons, the story is so similar that you often feel like you're watching the same movie, which also means you're seeing the stage play's same flaws. It is a fun soap opera, but the embedded bias is so obvious, it is more like propaganda.

Not all rich people are cold and singularly focused on accumulating ever more money, while stuffing life into a set of tiresome social rituals. Nor are all liberal thinkers kind, free spirits who don't care about money or status, but that's how it is presented in both versions of Holiday.

Both versions of the movie are also entertaining fluff, with the latter version benefitting from the noted improved moviemaking prowess. The earlier version, handicapped as it is by technology, nearly equals the 1938 version because of Astor and Harding.

The fun today is simply the "lab experiment" these two versions of Holiday offer us to see the advances Hollywood rapidly made with the introduction of sound and the distinct ways a role can be interpreted by different actors.

The movies are both good, with the comparison being the real kick for old-movie fans.


N.B. Another fun connection between the two versions is that the actor Edward Everett Horton plays the same character, a friend of the free-spirited sister, in both versions, with his role expanded a bit in the later one.