kingrat
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Posts posted by kingrat
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"Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'."
--Mary McCarthy (Kevin's sister) on Lillian Hellman
Unfortunately, Hellman, instead of ignoring this remark which Mary McCarthy made on the Dick Cavett Show, sued for libel. Hellman had money, McCarthy didn't.
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Tuesday has quite a number of good films:
**** TONK - This was one of the big hits of 1941. Clark Gable and Lana Turner make a great couple, and if you only know Lana from her Peyton Place/Imitation of Life later phase, you have no idea how beautiful she was and how much energy she brings to the screen.
THE UNFINISHED DANCE - Not well known, but usually liked by those who have seen it. Margaret O'Brien tries to ruin the performance of a rival of her dance teacher, but accidentally injures her seriously. This is a well-acted drama that tries to avoid sentimentality and mawkishness.
FRENCHMAN'S CREEK - Thoroughly entertaining film, but an awful print.
MY COUSIN RACHEL - The young and handsome Richard Burton has to decide if the enticing older woman (Olivia De Havilland) genuinely loves him or is trying to poison him for his money.
THE RITZ - I saw this years ago and still remember the name "Seymour Pippin." Rita Moreno is a lot of fun.
LA CAGE AUX FOLLES - The Mike Nichols remake, THE BIRDCAGE, has a great cast but plays the material as a sentimental drama with moments of comedy. The original is an all-out farce. You won't see many better adaptations of stage play to movie than the second half of LA CAGE, which mostly takes place in one set. Edouard Molinaro thoroughly deserved his nomination as Best Director.
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For Tom and others who may have shied away from the 1934 LES MISERABLES, directed by Raymond Bernard and lasting about four hours or so, I'll note that Harry Baur is a large, tall man, a very physical actor, and the film has plenty of action, so you're not just reading subtitles all the time. Raymond Bernard is a very good director, and the familiarity of the story helps, too. For those of you who are fans of THE WAGES OF FEAR, Charles Vanel (Yves Montand's driving companion) plays Inspector Javert.
It is conceived as a trilogy, perhaps inspired by the FANNY trilogy, and watching each of the three acts at a separate sitting is a convenient way to take it in. I prefer it to Richard Boleslawski's 1935 Hollywood version, although that is well worth seeing too, with Fredric March as Jean Valjean and Charles Laughton as Inspector Javert.
Because Swithin has mentioned that he was a friend of Miriam Margolyes, who plays Granny Mingott in Scorsese's THE AGE OF INNOCENCE, I'll note that she is even better than Helen Westley, who has plenty of fun with the role in the 1934 version.
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In a press conference today, Academy Award-winning Best Actress Brie Larson denied reports in the British press that she is "cheesed off" about people making jokes about her first name. She stated that she is proud of being named for a cheese and was inspired in her choice of career by Luise Rainer in THE GOUDA EARTH. If she could star with any Golden Age actor, it would be Cheddar Morris.
Future projects will include MASCARPONE ON THE HUDSON, CHEESE GOTTA HAVE IT, RICOTTA AND HIS BROTHERS, and EAST OF EDAM.
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The one that comes to mind first is EAST OF EDEN, but there must be many more.
ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS
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Once again I'm having trouble finding performances in the supporting actor category.
Best Actor of 1934:
Harry Baur, LES MISERABLES*
Michel Simon, L'ATALANTE
Clark Gable, IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT
William Powell, THE THIN MAN
John Barrymore, TWENTIETH CENTURY
Honorable mention: George Arliss, THE HOUSE OF ROTHSCHILD; W. C. Fields, IT'S A GIFT; Leslie Howard, OF HUMAN BONDAGE
Best Actress of 1934:
Aline MacMahon, HEAT LIGHTNING*
Claudette Colbert, IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT
Bette Davis, OF HUMAN BONDAGE
Myrna Loy, THE THIN MAN
Carole Lombard, TWENTIETH CENTURY
Honorable mention: Joan Crawford, SADIE McKEE; Irene Dunne, THE AGE OF INNOCENCE; Madeleine Renaud, MARIA CHAPDELAINE
Best Supporting Actress of 1934:
Fredi Washington, IMITATION OF LIFE*
Ruth Donnelly, HEAT LIGHTNING
Glenda Farrell, HEAT LIGHTNING
Helen Westley, THE AGE OF INNOCENCE
Louise Beavers, IMITATION OF LIFE
Synergy Award: Nick and Nora Charles and Asta
Bizarro Award for set design and art direction: THE SCARLET EMPRESS. Not many films give you that "drag queens on acid at the Liberace Museum" feeling, but this one does.
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Joe, there are a couple of other 1965 films to add to the noir list:
MIRAGE
RETURN FROM THE ASHES
MIRAGE is a belated classic noir, yet another version of the amnesia story, and one of the best. RETURN FROM THE ASHES has a European setting and reverses the sexes, with Maximilian Schell in the femme fatale role (or "homme fatal").
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Perhaps I ought to see DINNER AT EIGHT again before voting for Best Supporting Actor, which yet again seems like much the weakest category, but here goes:
Best Supporting Actor for 1933:
Jack La Rue, THE STORY OF TEMPLE DRAKE*
Edward Everett Horton, DESIGN FOR LIVING
Wallace Ford, EMPLOYEES' ENTRANCE
Franchot Tone, TODAY WE LIVE
I'm curious to see what will happen in 1934.
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The thought of a "kung-fu Elvira" puts a big smile on my face!
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Merle Oberon has more range than I would have thought, looking her most exotic as the wife of a French baron in FOLIES BERGERE DE PARIS, being quite convincing as an English aristocrat in BELOVED ENEMY, and equally convincing as a modern upper middle-class young woman in THE DARK ANGEL. For someone of her background to play an English aristocrat convincingly is a serious accomplishment.
FOLIES BERGERE DE PARIS has lots of close-ups of Merle looking exotic and beautiful. She holds her own against Maurice Chevalier, who has the double role of a baron and a nightclub entertainer who plays him on stage. Ann Sothern and Eric Blore add some comedy, and the dance director, Dave Gould, imitates Busby Berkeley in a couple of production numbers.
BELOVED ENEMY has its weaknesses, like not even explaining that the peace mission will ultimately divide Ireland, but if you like romantic dramas, this one fills the bill nicely, as Merle Oberon and Brian Aherne both look great and have good chemistry together. The story is loosely based on the Irish leader Michael Collins, though the romance is invented. The film has the belief that 1) getting to know people on the other side of a conflict may lead to a better understanding and less polarization and 2) that on the whole, peace is better than war. That will get no argument from me.
In some respects BELOVED ENEMY is an interesting contrast to John Ford's THE INFORMER, released in the previous year. Ford's film is simply pro-IRA, where the British are faceless villains, and even murder is acceptable if the IRA thinks it's right. It's interesting that the Legion of Decency did not protest against the unpunished murder of Gypo at the end of THE INFORMER, presumably because they sympathized with the Irish Catholics.
Henry Stephenson gives a memorable performance in BELOVED ENEMY as Merle's father, Karen Morley has some good scenes as a Irish woman who changes her mind about the struggle, and Donald Crisp is fine as an ideologue probably based on Eamon de Valera. It was surprising to see Jerome Cowan as Aherne's friend and to learn he didn't always play sleazy lawyers and other such roles. This was the first film directed by H.C. Potter, whose work in MR. LUCKY attracted my attention. MR. BLANDINGS BUILDS HIS DREAM HOUSE and THE FARMER'S DAUGHTER are probably his best-known films.
Merle Oberon received her only Oscar nomination for THE DARK ANGEL, and it can be recommended to people who like, say, RANDOM HARVEST, WATERLOO BRIDGE, ENCHANTMENT, and other wartime romantic dramas. She holds her own against Fredric March and Herbert Marshall, who play the two men in this romantic triangle. The three have been childhood friends, although Marshall is really too old to make this believable. In any event, all three have big scenes which they play well. Janet Beecher makes an impression as the sympathetic aunt of the two men, and the opening scene with the three friends as children is charming.
Gregg Toland photographed both BELOVED ENEMY and THE DARK ANGEL, and that is always a plus.
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Thank you for posting this, Holden.
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I believe the weighted voting system for Best Picture may have aided the win by SPOTLIGHT. Voters ranked the nominees 1-8, and no winner was declared until one film had a majority. One film was eliminated each round. THE REVENANT might have had a plurality on the first ballot, but it had high negatives as well as high positives. People who prefer the smaller, more human films like BROOKLYN, ROOM, or THE BIG SHORT probably ranked SPOTLIGHT above THE REVENANT. Of course this is speculation; perhaps SPOTLIGHT won on the first ballot.
My view of SPOTLIGHT is not unlike skimpole's. It's a good, solid, honest film, worth seeing if you can take the subject matter. I understand those who can't. It begins flatly, but after ten or minutes or so gets going once Billy Crudup appears on screen. The film has a long, slow build, and this pays off in the long run. I was very pleased that there's no tear-jerking, no banging the viewers over the head with a cast-iron skillet until they get the point. The filmmakers respect the intelligence of the audience and know that the material is powerful enough that we will be moved and appalled without manipulation. The cast is strong, with many fine performances in small parts.
SPOTLIGHT fully deserved the best original screenplay award, and it's a reasonable choice for Best Picture. I would have rated BROOKLYN or THE BIG SHORT higher, but am pleased that SPOTLIGHT won.
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For those of you who haven't seen LADIES THEY TALK ABOUT, you're going to enjoy the scenes in the women's prison. The characters are played more for comedy than for the grim kind of drama in CAGED. There are some really good bits by a variety of actresses.
ANN VICKERS, based on a Sinclair Lewis novel, is an interesting drama directed by John Cromwell. The film is not very long, and the themes flash by rather quickly. One would assume that Lewis developed them at greater length. Ann Vickers (Irene Dunne) is an idealistic prison reformer, and she has a child out of wedlock because of WWI, like Olivia De Havilland in TO EACH HIS OWN, and she has an affair with a judge (Walter Huston) accused of corruption. Irene Dunne and Walter Huston give solid performances, as you would expect. Sinclair Lewis must have been interested in younger women, given that ANN VICKERS, DODSWORTH, and CASS TIMBERLANE all include the older man/younger woman romance.
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I'm taping Trade Winds (1938).
A few notables:
Young Frankenstein (1974)
No Way Out (1950)
Cape Fear (1962)
are all worth checking out.
And Decline of Western Civilization (1981) is a very good punk rock documentary.
Lawrence, I'll bet you're going to enjoy TRADE WINDS. This one's not too serious, even though there's a mystery and a murder involved. There's also romance and comedy. This is the movie where you get to see Joan Bennett go from blonde to brunette as part of the plot. She looked so much better as a brunette that she stayed that way. There's also Fredric March as the detective pursuing Joan (in more ways than one), Ann Sothern stealing some scenes, and Ralph Bellamy with a chance to get a girl this time. TRADE WINDS started with home movies of the South Seas that Tay Garnett had taken. The plot was then built around them.
In addition to the movies that you and GPFan have recommended, I'll add THE IPCRESS FILE simply because if you want to see what tricks a director had available in 1965, Sidney J. Furie throws in all of them, if not more. There's Michael Caine, too, and a spy plot.
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I watched the intro to BLACK NARCISSUS to hear what Sister Rose had to say, started watching the first few minutes of the film yet again, and of course could not stop watching the whole movie. There may never have been more deserving Oscars than the one Jack Cardiff won for cinematography and the one Alfred Junge won for art direction for this film.
What Powell and Cardiff get, and what most contemporary directors and cinematographers do not, is that it is absolutely possible to have a shot of overwhelming beauty which nonetheless does not deflect our attention in the least from story, character, plot, theme, movement.
This time through, I particularly admired the music by Brian Easdale, which is full of excellent motifs and orchestral scoring. I loved the little bits of vocal shading Deborah Kerr used to give us the emotions behind the words. BLACK NARCISSUS repays as much attention as we want to give it. To mention only one small detail, we first see Sister Clodagh from the back as she is teaching her class. We don't see much of the Reverend Mother's face, either. Then when Sister Clodagh opens the door to the Reverend Mother's office, we see that Sister Clodagh is a young woman. Only then is there a cut to a close-up of the Reverend Mother so that we see that she is a very old woman.
Sister Rose's comment in the outro was priceless, mentioning that the Legion of Decency objected to Clodagh as a girl riding horseback with her boyfriend, and that one of the censors wrote that she should have been shown in an apron in the kitchen, helping her mother.
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Lorna, thank you for your write-up on Gladys George. I'm a huge fan of THE CRYSTAL BALL, and Gladys is first-rate in THE HARD WAY and THE ROARING TWENTIES.
Lawrence, thanks for writing about PROVIDENCE, which I will have to look for. Resnais tends to be what I call a "neck-up" director, and I tend to admire (somewhat coolly) rather than love LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD and HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR, but I really enjoyed MON ONCLE D'AMERIQUE and would recommend it if you haven't seen it. I didn't make it all the way through LA GUERRE EST FINIE (not bad, if I remember correctly, just not engaging).
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Lawrence, you're right, that's really strange. IMDB does not show Garfield as appearing in BETWEEN TWO WOMEN. BETWEEN TWO WORLDS would have been a good choice for the Garfield tribute, too. It's a fine film that deserves to be better known.
The extended TCM schedule clearly shows BETWEEN TWO WOMEN, however.
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BLACK NARCISSUS is one of the most beautiful films ever made. Highly recommended.
Tonight's "Condemned" series also features four films from 1933 that are also very much worth seeing:
THE STORY OF TEMPLE DRAKE - Based on Faulkner's SANCTUARY. Miriam Hopkins stars.
DESIGN FOR LIVING - Lubitsch comedy with Gary Cooper, Fredric March, Miriam Hopkins, and Edward Everett Horton
BABY FACE - One of the classic pre-Codes, with Barbara Stanwyck as the girl who's been used by men and starts using them to climb her way upward.
WILD BOYS OF THE ROAD - Jobless youths hop the rails in search of a better life.
In addition to Friday's Merle Oberon tribute, I want to recommend one of the John Garfield films which may not be as well known as some of the others:
NOBODY LIVES FOREVER - Excellent direction by Jean Negulesco includes some location shooting at the San Juan Capistrano mission. The film combines noir and romance. Garfield plays a con man just back from the war who decides his next mark will be a young widow (Geraldine Fitzgerald). Walter Brennan may have his best role ever as a world-weary con artist, a welcome change from the lovable old codgers he usually played.
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Merle Oberon was one of the most beautiful movie stars of the classic era. In some of her films she seems to rely more on her looks than her acting, but in others she gives quite creditable performances. For years I had seen very little of her work except WUTHERING HEIGHTS. I'm looking forward to catching up with some of her less familiar films.
I wish that DARK WATERS could have been included. This is a noirish Gothic or damsel in distress story, very well directed by Andre de Toth. Oberon plays an heiress, recovering from a shipwreck in which she lost her parents, who goes to the Louisiana bayous to stay with relatives she has never met. Franchot Tone plays her leading man, Thomas Mitchell and Fay Bainter play less sympathetic characters than usual, and Rex Ingram makes a strong impression in a small role.
Of the March 4 movies, I haven't seen BELOVED ENEMY, FOLIES BERGERE DE PARIS, or THE PRIVATE LIFE OF DON JUAN.
THESE THREE is a fine romantic drama based on Lillian Hellman's play THE CHILDREN'S HOUR, but without the lesbian theme. It works well on its own terms, with Merle Oberon and Miriam Hopkins as teachers, Joel McCrea as Oberon's fiance, and Bonita Granville as a malicious young girl.
Oberon received her only Oscar nomination for THE DARK ANGEL, a drama about childhood friends torn apart by World War I. Fredric March and Herbert Marshall co-star.
THE PRIVATE LIFE OF HENRY VIII has only a brief glimpse of Oberon, as Anne Boleyn, but is a very entertaining film, with Charles Laughton, Binnie Barnes, and Elsa Lanchester.
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Four 1933 movies will be shown tomorrow night as part of the "Condemned" series:
The Story of Temple Drake
Design for Living
Baby Face
Wild Boys of the Road
All four are very much worth seeing.
Bogie, I'm glad you mentioned Colleen Moore in THE POWER AND THE GLORY, because I had forgotten to. For those who haven't seen that movie, you may think you're watching a first draft of CITIZEN KANE.
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Bogey, the question of leading and supporting roles is a tough one, and one we'll be wrestling with in future years as well.
Just in terms of prestige, I'd guess that Dressler, Harlow, Beery, and John Barrymore would all have insisted on being in the lead category for DINNER AT EIGHT, but you have a good rationale for putting them in the supporting category. Rosalind Russell considered herself a star, and did not want a supporting actress nomination for PICNIC. She felt that category for should be reserved for those who were not stars.
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Jake, thanks for posting the results. This may have been the first time that the ranked voting for Best Picture affected the outcome, though we won't know for sure. Voters had to rank the Best Picture nominees from 1-8, and if no picture had a majority, the one with the lowest total was eliminated, and the second choices for those voters was then counted, and so on until one picture had a majority.
I would guess that THE REVENANT had a plurality on the first ballot--it won the Best Director and Best Actor awards, so it obviously had plenty of fans--but there were also voters who found it too long and too violent. The ranked voting system favored a film like SPOTLIGHT which may have had fewer first-place votes but fewer people who actively disliked it.
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Frank Capra also won his second Oscar for Best Director in 1938, and YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU was the second Capra film to take the top prize. When filmlover did his 1939 day by day thread a few years back, the whole theme of the story about the Oscars was all the second-time winners.
It can be difficult to figure out what should be considered a lead role and what should be considered a supporting role. Sometimes not--Rooney Mara has a lead role in CAROL, and is probably onscreen more than Cate Blanchett. Spencer Tracy's role in SAN FRANCISCO is definitely a supporting role. But sometimes it's a tough decision.
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One of my Internet movie buddies says he thinks that comedy is especially subjective, so that all you can say is that you find it funny or not. So I'm sympathetic to speedracer not being a Marx Brothers fan, even though I love them.
And Swithin, on this thread I think it's even safe not to like a certain actress who's a favorite of mine.
Tom, thanks for the information about PILGRIMAGE, which I will try to see, and Kay, thank you for telling us about your reaction to Frank McHugh in LILLY TURNER.
1931 postscript: thanks to the enthusiastic recommendations, I rented DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE from the local library and enjoyed Fredric March, Miriam Hopkins, and the direction of Rouben Mamoulian.
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Your Favourite Performances from 1929 to present are...
in Your Favorites
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I hadn't remembered that STAMBOUL QUEST was a 1934 film. Myrna Loy is sexy and fun, and George Brent is much less wooden than usual, possibly because of Myrna. I should have included this performance of Myrna's in the Best Actress list. 1934 was a fabulous year for her, with THE THIN MAN and MANHATTAN MELODRAMA. No more secondary roles as a Eurasian villainess.