slaytonf

Who are they? Do I see Laurel and Hardy?

Yes, but the faces! The faces!

Just the last shot. Don't matter where it's from.

Just so I don't get a lot of guff.

And besides, you can't cut monkey on the bias.

Jean Harlow

More courage and genius.

Two frail individuals off into a very big and indifferent world. And yet, I do not feel afraid for them. The best embodiment of the American Dream there is. So naturally the man who made it was excised from the country by a dirty trick.

A life of prodigality, of both things and people, capped by a brobdingnagianly prodigal death. A rejection of materialism certainly most disturbing to contemporary audiences. Heyyy. . . .waaaaitaminit. That's more than one shot!

All right, I'll list all the caveats. I haven't read any of Traven's seafaring work. I'm not a seafarer myself. Now consider Youth, and N***r of the Narcissus. Those are really good. I mean really good.

Most movies end with neither a bang nor a whimper. There are a bunch of movies that have memorable endings. You can take your pick. But some movies have truly remarkable endings. I don't mean in terms of plot, or last line, or how a character is packed up, and packed off. I mean the last shot being mesmerizing or astonishing in its effect. Josef von Sternberg is a highly regarded director whose work, mainly with Marlene Dietrich, a visual panoply, astounds, delights, and entertains the eye. One of my favorite moments of his comes at the end of Morocco (1930). Miss Dietrich, as Amy Jolly, walks off into the desert with the women camp-followers. She has surrendered to her love for Tom Brown, giving up her power (sex-based) over men-and women--liberating herself. It's a frequent theme in Sternberg's work, where a woman capitulates, and in doing so, conquers her man: Sternberg holds the shot with a fixed camera, no music save for the soldiers' bugle and drum march, for an absurdly long time, about one minute twenty seconds. Few directors would have had the courage, or genius to do it. In The Light That Failed (1939), William Wellman dramatizes Kipling's story of Dick Heldar (Ronald Colman), his career as artist destroyed by blindness, his last and crowing masterwork destroyed by its vindictive model, who seeks out a British military action in Africa. Friends of his grant his request to be put into a cavalry charge, where he is of course killed by a volley of gunfire. The last shot shows his friends running up to his body: His horse comes out of the distance, like his muse, or the spirit of art, puzzled at his absence, in search of its cause. It is a shot you'd expect in a picture by Fellini or Renoir, but Wellman creates a moment unique for a Hollywood movie. No more haunting, exalting, and disturbing image exists in American cinema.

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Random thoughts, with no particular association or point in mind: Ability is often confused with virtue. If someone is good at something, they are admired as human beings as well as for their accomplishments--completely without justification. I imagine there is some kind of superstitious thinking involved in this. It is advantageous, especially if one seeks to be successful in a career like movie acting, to present oneself in as positive a light as possible. I wonder if there were any actors who took the opposite track, creating a public persona intentionally worse than they really were.

I've also wondered about how bad that movie looks. Early Technicolor movies like Becky Sharp (1935), or Nothing Sacred (1937) might be excused by the newness of the system. But Life With Father was shot in 1947.

I hate to use such a hackneyed saying, but it is true with Miss Dvorak. Most of the movies she was in were indifferent at best, but she was always great in them. Two others that are really good are The Strange Love of Molly Louvain (1932), with Lee Tracy, directed by Michael Curtiz--and added bonus of Evalyn Knapp. And Heat Lightning (1934) that features one of Aline MacMahon's best roles, directed by Mervyn LeRoy. Check out also A Life of Her Own (1950), a wretched pseudo-pot-boiler set in the modeling industry in which Miss Dvorak plays a washed-up model/mistress headed for a bad end. Her climactic scene is one so god-awfully written it would have been intolerable to watch had it not been performed by her. Upcoming movies include Crooner (1932), and I Was an American Spy (1951). *sigh*

Looks like an angle to get people to visit a Website.

Hey, c'mon. Nice cars!

I agree. I'll shoot it.

Wiliam Wyler made him look good. That may have been his asset. He was malleable, so good directors could fashion him as they would. Lacking that, his performance was lacking.

Perhaps because he wasn't a very good actor. David Lean made him look good.

There was this, also: http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/88730/Ruby/

Hello, Dargo. Just popped back into this space-time continuum. So good to read your reassuring words. Now I feel better. Hoping not to be too blunt, judging from this thread, I'd not be channeling dear Mr. Artie. So to pass the time enjoyably until something better comes along, you can't beat the great Cannonball:

If you mean this: then, as I said, it is a shot from Viva Maria! (1965).

How did I remember that? A scary thought just occurred to me. Could it be my whole life has been controlled by elements I have internalized from Laugh-In? Noo, noooo. . . . . .