TopBilled
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From Agee on September 15, 1945:
William Wellman and the others who are responsible for STORY OF G.I. JOE obviously did not regard their job as an ordinary one. They undertook a great subject. It is clear that they undertook it in a determination to handle it honestly and to make a masterpiece.
In a film so excellent there are so many things to honor. The picture contains, for instance, the first great triumphs of the kind of anti-histrionic casting and acting which I believe is indispensable to most, though by no means all, kinds of greatness possible to movies. It would be impossible in that connection to say enough in praise of the performance of Bob Mitchum as the Captain and Freddie Steele as the Sergeant, or of Wellman for his directing and, I suppose, casting of them.
It is also the first great triumph in the effort to combine fiction and documentary film. That is, it makes most of its fiction look and sound like fact.
I imagine that some people, better educated than the infantrymen in STORY OF G.I. JOE, will wish to point out that for all its courage and intelligence as far as it goes, the film is not, in the sense they understand it, an indictment of war. Nobody is accused, not even the enemy. Though every foot of the film is as full an indictment of war as I ever expect to see.
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Completely disagree.
I have a feeling Fred will concur when I say that MR. SKEFFINGTON is categorically *not* THE ENCHANTED COTTAGE.
In SKEFFINGTON, Bette is miscast because she is not gorgeous enough. In THE ENCHANTED COTTAGE, Dorothy McGuire is miscast for the exact opposite reason, because she is too gorgeous to play an ugly duckling.
She and Bette should have switched movies/roles.
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You're welcome. I am obviously quoting him from that book. These writings are all in the public domain now.
I was excited when I looked ahead at TCM's schedule through February, because Agee wrote about many of the MGM and Warners films that are scheduled in the near future. So I have mapped it out and I will be timing these posts in a way that coincide with the actual TCM broadcasts.
On days, when TCM is not showing any films from the 40s (and yes, there are days like that)...I am going to use essays from Agee that focus on Paramount or Universal films that probably won't get on TCM's schedule.
This series will run till December 31, 2012. I have something planned for each day! In 2013, I will probably rerun some of them according to TCM's schedule at that time. Eventually, I want to branch out and get to Bosley Crowther in another thread...and yes, Hedda Hopper, because I love reading her, too!
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From Agee on October 14, 1944:
She is an English noblewoman of the Restoration, and lovely to look at, at that. Her husband is no sacksuited dollar-chaser but a London fop. Her country refuge is a whackingly beautiful mansion on the Cornish coast. Her lover, a local pirate who loves life and lives it as he likes, is more of a composite.
None of the unusually resourceful Technicolor or wax-fruit dialogue conceals the fact that this is really just a sordid, contemporary middle-bracket flirtation. But it is told in those terms with the gloves off. And every cowardly emotion and creepy desire and sniveling motive is caught red-handed.
As the life of this party Joan Fontaine has a prettiness and vivacity which I had not suspected of her. She also develops, in place of any believable semblance of erotic or emotional passion, a sort of excitement which I find appropriate to the story.
As she conducts her discreet little coastal cruise along the coves and peninsulas of adultery, she never once suggests a woman in love or even in confusion; but she does constantly suggest a Vassar girl on a picket line.
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I really liked THE IMMORTAL SERGEANT...it spoke right to my old romantic heart.
Also, THOSE ENDEARING YOUNG CHARMS got me in the gut...I have lived that kind of relationship, and probably if I had seen what Laraine Day goes through in this picture, I would've avoided all the drama!
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>I would like several early talkies like Dynamite (1929) because it looks really interesting and has an early appearance of Joel McCrea and Russ Columbo!
The channel does not play nearly enough Joel McCrea. Many of us TCM cinemaddicts write post after post about this. There is even a thread where the most die-hard of fans are campaigning for him as Star of the Month.
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From Agee on October 14, 1944:
In many ways DOUBLE INDEMNITY is really quite a gratifying and even a good movie, essentially cheap I will grant, but smart and crisp and cruel. The James Cain story, under Billy Wilder's control, is to a fair extent soaked in and shot through with money and the coolly intricate amorality of money; you can even supply the idea, without being contradicted by the film, that among these somewhat representative Americans money and sex and a readiness to murder are as inseparably interdependent as the Holy Trinity.
But the picture never fully takes hold of its opportunities, such as they are, perhaps because those opportunities are appreciated chiefly as surfaces and atmospheres and as very tellable trash.
It is proper enough, for instance, that Barbara Stanwyck should suggest a greatly coarsened Esquire drawing and that her affair with MacMurray should essentially be as sexless as it is loveless. Her icy hair and teeth and dresses are well worked out toward communicating this idea.
In Wilder's apparent desire to make it clear that nymphs are cold he has neglected to bring to life the sort of freezing rage of excitations which such a woman presumably inspires in such a fixer as Walter Neff. Wilder has not made much, either, of the tensions of the separateness of the lovers after the murder, or of the coldly nauseated despair and nostalgia which the murderer would feel.
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Yes, Sarris began to advance the auteur theory in the early 60s. He is married to film critic Molly Haskell. Sarris was usually seen as a rival to Kael, and she would attack the auteur theory in her writings.
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>Maybe TCM could reassign all the people who work in their i-phone Apps. department, and have them monitor and maintain the master volume control for the TV channel, and keep the sound volume at a steady output level?
Sounds like a splendid idea to me!
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Yes, Bogdanovich's roots were in journalism. He was influenced by Cahiers du Cinema. He also cites Orson Welles as having played a huge part in his transition to directing.
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Well, I think Bosley Crowther probably deserves his own thread and so does Pauline Kael. These are the greats, along with Agee, when it comes to classic film criticism.
When reading some of Agee's essays, I have found it interesting that he sometimes digresses and plugs a movie star, a director or a producer. He has a tendency to go a bit Hedda and Louella, but it is usually because he has sought these people out for interviews because he believes they are making cinema the best it can be.
I cannot help but think what he would say about films and artists that have come along or really blossomed after his death. For instance, in one column, he interviews Geraldine Fitzgerald. This is in the mid-40s after she has ended her contract with Warners. I think it would've been fascinating to have him interview her again in the 60s after she appears in THE PAWNBROKER. He seems to predict that she will go on to do even greater things, and of course, that is exactly what happened.
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I really notice it when a film ends, and we get to the part where they announce the next three films. If I have happened to doze off, the sudden change in volume wakes me up every time.
Edited by: TopBilled on Nov 13, 2011 2:07 PM
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You're right, Val...this is a great film, and it should be shown as originally intended by the artists.
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Thanks SansFin for the feedback (I remember your story of how you created your screen name!).
I enjoy reading the Program Challenge submissions, so that won't change. As for this thread, I think it is necessary to curb a lot of the negativity on these boards about TCM's current schedules. Of course, the real programmers can do what they please (within budget) and they do not have to listen to anyone. LOL
However, I do think that TCM, like any business, values feedback from its customers. If presented to them in a non-threatening, non-hostile way, then I think something very positive can come from this.
Quite frankly, the programming needs some improvement. I submit for evidence the fact that THE FARMER'S DAUGHTER airs in January, when it really should air during the 31 Days of Oscar. If they are doing it by geographic region, then surely, they could put this with MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON.
But alas, I digress, and it once again sounds like I am being too critical. LOL
One thing you said about TCM reacquiring rights-- I am going to have disagree with you. I do not think that just because they had a film once in the past that they can easily get access to it again. Sometimes the rights change or the price goes up to borrow or lease something. For example, I have not seen RUGGLES OF RED GAP since it aired about two or three years ago. My guess is that we may not see it again for some time. And I bet we won't see SKIPPY again either, till the cows come home.
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*James Agee* was different than Bosley Crowther and some of the other film critics of his day. He would sometimes reference Crowther and other contemporaries, but for Agee it was a deep-rooted concern that cinema was not always reaching its fullest potential. This is what drove his reviews and what makes many of them so memorable.
Like Francois Truffaut would later do, he moved from criticism to actual filmmaking (collaborating with John Huston on THE AFRICAN QUEEN and writing the screenplay for THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER).
Some of his reviews are one sentence long (and rather clever) and some go on for pages. I will either condense or serialize the longer excerpts.
His essays occurred from about 1941 to 1950, so there is a cornucopia of information about classic 40s cinema-- he covers Hollywood extensively, but he also likes foreign film (British, French and Russian in particular). Plus, he reviews almost every WWII documentary that the U.S. government and its allies produced during the war years. I will post one per day, and I wiill try to mix it up by genre, so it does not get too predictable.
Whenever possible, I will include a photo of the film being mentioned. And I will also try to coincide as many of these with actual broadcast dates on TCM.
I started yesterday on Fred's thread about MR. SKEFFINGTON. Later today, I will post another Agee gem.
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I am going to begin a separate thread that is devoted to James Agee's film criticism. I think message board visitors will really enjoy this!
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It's a telling sign (to me at least) that a film in which the male character's name appears in the title becomes a film more about the female subject shows how Davis was allowed to dominate studio projects. This can be either good or bad. In this case, it is tres mal because she is miscast.
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Before I started this thread, I did a search of all forums back to January 2010. The only thing I found that could be close to this was one called Programming Ideas.
http://forums.tcm.com/thread.jspa?messageID=8522015
When I read it, it was clear that it was a thread about the TCM cruise (I do not know how that exactly relates to programming).
I am aware of the Programming Challenges, but that seems more like a game to me. And while I appreciate reading the submissions, I think that sometimes the contestants are trying to be clever and I do not think they are actually writing schedules that would realistically work for TCM...namely, because they are not taking into account TCM's budget or the Time Warner library which gets the most airplay. For instance, a programming challenge submission that relies heavily on Universal horror or rare Paramount films from the 1930s may be very fun and may be a dream schedule for many, but that is just not going to be a reality on TCM, because it would cost too much to acquire the rights to all those films at once.
So my goal here is to stick mainly with what is being offered through the Warner Archives and films that come to us from Sony, which seems to be the one outside studio that works most closely with TCM (and kudos to them for that).
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From film critic James Agee:
It is another of those pictures in which Bette Davis demonstrates the horrors of egocentricity on a marathonic scale; it takes her just short of thirty years' living and two and a half hours' playing time to learn, from her patient husband (Claude Rains) that "a woman is beautiful only when she is loved" and to prove this to an audience which, I fear, will be made up mainly of unloved and not easily lovable women.
Miss Davis, Director Vincent Sherman, and several others put a great deal of hard work and some that is good into this show, and there are some expert bits of middle-teens and 1920s New York atmosphere. But essentially MR. SKEFFINGTON is just a super soap opera, or an endless woman's-page meditation on What to Do When Beauty Fades. The implied advice is dismaying: hang on to your husband, who alone will stand by you then, and count yourself blessed if, like Mr. Rains in his old age, he is blinded.
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>How about a night of The Letter films including the 1982 tv movie starring Lee Remick? Somehow I never saw that one and I am a BIG Lee Remick fan.
Good idea. The Eagels version of THE LETTER could also be used in an evening of films from works by Somerset Maugham. Lots of ways to program it on the schedule.
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Fred,
I found a great comment by critic James Agee about this film. I have some errands to run but when I come back online later, I hope to quote it for you. I think you will find it most interesting!
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I think it is too easy to gripe about what we don't like...and it is more of a challenge (and potentially more fun) to come up with suggestions that would improve a classic movie channel. For purposes of this thread, I am going to focus mainly on titles are available through the Warners Archive and titles that TCM seems to have less trouble acquiring (such as those from the Columbia/Sony library).
This was my first suggestion, and I would certainly love to see this schedule show up in primetime during the coming year (in this order):
_Suggestion Number 1_
JEANNE EAGELS (1957)...Columbia...Kim Novak, Jeff Chandler
THE LETTER (1929)...Paramount (Warner Archives)...Jeanne Eagels, Herbert Marshall
THE LETTER (1940)...WB...Bette Davis, Herbert Marshall
My guess is that when Warners remade THE LETTER with Bette Davis, they bought it from Paramount and that is why it is now available within the Warner library.
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This is a quick note to smileys:
I tried to send a little note to you (translation: an olive branch slash peace offering) but it said your inbox was full and it did not send.
I think I put you on 'ignore' long ago and I have not read your many recent posts to me, but I think it's best that we allow one another to have divergent points of view about the channel and its services. Of course, we are not all going to see it the same way.
This is the only direct note I will write to you. Again, I think it is best if we write more proactive posts about classic movies and if we feel critical of TCM or any other cable channel, perhaps we can constructively offer suggestions for improvement.
I am going to start a new thread in a few moments with programming ideas. I hope the TCM programmers read and use the ideas if they are good ideas that can be easily implemented. I do not think anyone should chime in on the new thread to start fights or disrespect another person's suggestions. I repeat, let's be more proactive. Thanks.
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Hilarious, SprocketMan! Yes, thank goodness we do not get a newly discovered director's cut of SEVEN DAYS IN MAY.
February Schedule & 31 Days of Oscar
in General Discussions
Posted
Wanted to add that VOICE IN THE WIND is on the schedule for February 6th. This film has a good reputation and seems rather unique. It stars Francis Lederer and was made by United Artists. I can only hope it's a decent print.
http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/94898/Voice-in-the-Wind/