CineSage_jr
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Posts posted by CineSage_jr
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And it's conveniently forgotten, or ignored, that the bullet with which the Jackal shoots the gendarme as he and Lebel (Lonsdale) break into the apartment isn't explosive, even though that's what the Jackal has been specifically using to try to kill deGaulle.
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Don't forget the giant pistol and hand hitchcock had built for the final shot in SPELLBOUND, in which Dr Murchison (Leo G. Carroll) turns the gun on himself (in POV) and pulls the trigger (accompanied by four hand-colored frames that flash red as the pistol discharges).
Then there's the matter of Marion Crane's POV of the shower head in PSYCHO. Though I don't think anyone's ever written about it, or commented on it, the only way Hitch could've gotten the shot of the water streaming on all sides of the camera without getting the lens wet was to build a giant shower head.
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One huge, glaring omission from your list, Celluloidkid: ACE IN THE HOLE. A work of uncompromising genius.
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The HUAC hearings had _everything_ to do with advancing the careers of the congressmen who sat on the Committee, men who invented a non-existent "crisis" and then claimed to have the "solution" for it. It's an ages-old practice, one we're seeing again with the current debate on illegal immigration.
Nonsense. The American Communist Party (CPUSA) was controlled by the Soviet Government during the era when it enslaved half of Europe and had intentions to try to take over the USA from within.
Jack?s statement in no way inferred what you claim. You are falsely accusing Jack of being something he isn?t. That?s exactly how the old commies worked, to try to make fellow Americans distrust one another. Your statement tries to make it seem like Americans who supported the USA and opposed the Soviet Government?s attempt to take over Europe and the United States were somehow wrong or like ?Nazis?. Shame on you.
The CPUSA wasn't "owned" or "controlled" by anyone. It got some laundered-money funding from Moscow, all right, but the Soviets got exactly nothing in return for their "investment." Most, if not all, of the Hollywood figures who flirted with Communism in the 1920s and '30s were not spies, Anarchists, saboteurs, or propagandists; they were _idealists_ whose disillusion with the society into which they were born or immigrated was forged by the rampant and institutionalized injustice they observed around them -- injustices which the right wing in this country is still trying, fang-and-claw, to perpetuate.
PS: As regards Jack's statement, the word you want is _implied_, not "inferred"; the sender implies, the receiver infers.
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Did Michael Lonsdale (the French police inspector) remind anybody else of Oskar Homolka?
It's _Michel_ Lonsdale. He's French, and had to learn his part phonetically, as he spoke very little English at the time. And, no, there's no resemblance to Oskar Homolka whatsoever.
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Tone was never much more than adequate in anything he ever did. And when he was cast as a Brit (as he was all too often), he was even less.
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I decided, rightly or wrongly, that a man's artistic and creative career should be a separate entity from his politics- I can't condone what he did, but to deny that he did this one thing right seems wrong to me. To deny someone an award that they won on the merits of their work based on politics would be as bad as say, denying someone a job based on their politics.
What about German symphony conductor Herbert von Karajan's unapologetic membership in the Nazi Party and support of its aims? Your above statement more than suggests that you permit him his political foibles, too.
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Gance, American second-unit director B. Reeves Eason and Heinrich **** should've gotten together, thrown back a few beers and discussed the most efficient ways to kill as many people as quickly as possible.
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I don't think there's any comparison, really. While one of Warners' better crime films of the period, HIGH SIERRA is not terribly remarkable. Bogart's "Mad Dog" Roy Earle, with his soft spot for gimpy girls and little dogs, is engaging, but not exactly a great character study.
SIERRA MADRE, on the other hand, is a sharp-edged study of the effects of greed on otherwise normal men, and one man in particular: Bogart's Fred C. Dobbs. Bogart had grown a lot as an actor between the two "Sierra" films; without the latter, I doubt that he'd have had the skills as an actor to tackle the role that finally earned him his Oscar, Charlie Allnut in THE AFRICAN QUEEN, or that whch helped define the latter part of his career, Capt. Philip Queeg in THE CAINE MUTINY.
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I'd hardly call Edward Fox "meek"; he's just not leading-man handsome, like his brother, James.
And I've always wondered whether, when the film was planned and made, Fred Zinnemann reasoned that audiences would only be drawn to the film if they had a rooting interest in the assassin, "Calthrop" (Fox). Zinnemann surely knew that "Calthrop's" target, French President Charles deGaulle, was roundly loathed outside France, and that many in the audience would be pulling for the assassin to succeed (even though history told them that he didn't, of course).
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Healthy food is "bleh" and "double bleh". It's more like grazing in a meadow than sitting down to a meal.
As a waiter tells Garbo, after she asks for all-vegetarian fare in NINOTCHKA, "This is a restaurant, madam, not a meadow" (screenplay by Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder and Walter Reisch).
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The Maltese Falcon: Wembley Forsby .45.
For Grand Hotel: I'm not going to pay 1000 Reichsmarks a night for a hotel room.
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Perhaps another reason for viewer ennui is the fact that Hollywood has also been pumping out a rash of anti-Iraq, anti-American films of late, including Redacted, Lions for Lambs, and In the Valley of Elah - all of which were box office disasters.
Equating films that take a position against the Iraq war with being "anti-American" is pure BS, whose odor any objective observer can smell from a mile away.
In any case, virtually every film Hollywood made about, or against the backdrop of, American history, including the Revolutionary War, the Civil War (THE BIRTH OF A NATION and GWTW excepted), and the voyage of the Mayflower, etc., from the mid-silent period to the present, was a box office dud, so the failures of the films you list cannot be chalked up to their political content, nor their respective quality. They were merely the wrong films, made and released at the wrong time, which is why most unsuccessful films fail.
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Twelve thumbs-up.
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We definitely need four separate threads to discuss our views of RASHOMON.
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SITUATION HOPELESS, BUT NOT SERIOUS. Besides Redford, there's the little matter of its also starring Mike Connors...and some guy called Alec Guinness as their German captor.
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Without a Cold War on which to turn, there is no story.
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thick eyebrows (but not as thick as I remember),
But with an appropriately lovely arch, which is far more critical in its framing of the eyes than mere thickness is in subtracting from a face's attractiveness.
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She was made to look ugly in the heiress...major success
Hardly; deHavilland was merely given a ruddy complexion, and an unflattering hairstyle, though one quite common and accurate for women of Catherine's day (the 1840s). Nothing was done to alter her features. Again, the point was that her thinking she was unattractive was enough to make her seem so, with the upshot being that she was a victim of her father's devious resentment. To have actually re-worked her appearence to make her genuinely physically unappealing would have the destroyed the whole purpose of the story.
It's much like DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE: I contend that the most accurate filmic version of Robert Louis Stevenson's story is actually Jerry Lewis's THE NUTTY PROFESSOR. Don't laugh (except at the film, of course): it's the only version that doesn't dwell on the phyical grotesquerie that one finds in the "straight" versions, such as the Frederic March, Spencer Tracy and Jack Palance (TV) films. Stevenson's story was about the duality of human nature, not physical transformations of a "normal" man into a sub-human. To the Lewis film I'd also add the "The Enemy Witnin" episode of the original Star Trek series, in which a malfunctioning transporter splits Captain Kirk into two Kirks, one savage, the other passive; eventually each half realizes that both personalities are needed to make a whole man, especially a starship captain, for whom a ruthless streak is an essential attribute for being an effective commander.
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Yes: Its original British title is ZEE AND CO.
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Incidentally, I actually saw "The Planet of the Apes," for the first time a couple of months ago, and I was struck about how clumsy it is. I mean it's one thing for this planet to be governed by sentinent apes, but the fact that they speak English and use the Roman alphabet should have been a big giveaway.
I don't recall the ape civilization using any written language in the film. Their speaking English was, for the time (pre-STAR WARS), an insurmountable hurdle, as the idea of a science fiction film using subtitles seemed out of the question.
What's far more glaring is the inconsisten technology: a society whose scientists have never seen a paper airplane, live in stone dwellings that don't even have glass in the windows, but that have semi-automatic rifles. To be fair, producer Arthur P. Jacobs's original concept, in keeping with author Pierre Boulle's novel, was for the apes to have a civilization roughly equal to 20th century humans' (including human-hunts by helicopters), but the film's scope had to be scaled back for budgetary reasons.
PS: the word is sentient, not "sentinent."
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Her portrayal of Melanie is a deep one, in some ways as deep as Vivien Leigh's Scarlett. Her goodness could have been played one dimensionally, but instead, we get a woman who is fanatically kind and devoted. She is almost obsessed - the first to give her jewelry, even her wedding ring to the Cause. There is something edgy about her portrayal that I find fascinating. I feel that she might go mad at any minute, and end up giving even the clothes she is wearing to someone she felt needed them more.... but then, as she gets to know Scarlett, she pulls herself back from the edge to handle more practical matters. The two make a superb team - each giving what the other lacks. I like their relationship very much. How hard it must have been to take the role in the first place, and then to watch from the background as others were given the spotlight!
Melanie performs a very specific function in the structure of GWTW: that of a yardstick against which to measure Scarlett. Scarlett's self-centeredness, selfishness and superficiality is all the more glaring when set against Melanie's tolerance. One can speculate that Melanie, herself, knew this to be true, and that she exagerrated her own virtues to make others aware that they should be very, very wary of her "friend."
I like her very much in Devotion, and her movies with Errol Flynn. But again, I like her best in a constrained role - that of Catherine Sloper in The Heiress. She is magnificent as the unattractive, spongy Catherine. Her longing for love is almost infantile, and yet, at the end, her hardness rivals that of Ralph Richardson. An absolutely riveting and brilliant performance.
Catherine's not unattractive (how do you make Olivia deHavilland, of all people, look unattractive?). The point is that her father, Dr Sloper, in subtly comparing her with his "perfect" wife (who died giving birth to Catherine, something for which the Doctor has never forgiven his daughter) has made her feel unattractive her whole life, to the point where she accepts it as a natural part of her existence. That lack of any assurance or self-regard is evident to any and all who meet or know her (also, they tend to defer to the father, anyway), making her seem unattractive, at once illusion and self-fulfilling prophecy.
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In Four Feathers there is a moment when, having gone blind in the desert, Richardson stumbles around eventually tripping over a tent pole. It is almost funny, and this lends a sickening quality to the scene. I am in awe of the actor who gave that performance.
This is a sequence-plot point totally missing from the 2002 remake. Besides that film's many (and almost fatal) flaws, the makers of the recent version failed to understand that Capt. Durrance's (Richardson) single-minded determination to return to duty despite his blindness establishes the very foundation of the peculiarly 19th Century British concepts of duty, honor and bravery, against which Harry Faversham's "cowardice" (for deigning to resign his commission on the very eve of his regiment's posting to the Sudan) is measured.
Beyond all this, Durrance's finally making his peace with his permanent sightlessness at the end of the film is the most poignant thing in it, conveyed in large part by Richardson's masterful performance.
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Sounds like PETER IBBETSON.
Day Of The Jackal
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There is nothing "meek" about Edward Fox in this movie- its a brilliant portrayal of a cold blooded killing machine.
Fox needed to be the sort who could blend in in a crowd, and take on various identities, as needed, without attracting attention. He was also obviously cast by Fred Zinnemann as a depiction of Hannah Arendt's famous turn of phrase, "the banality of evil."