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carrobin

Posted: Sat Oct 18, 2014 3:46 pm

Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 7795 Location: NYC

I like Liam Neeson, but I hate anti-wolf movies. And that was pretty obviously going to be an anti-wolf movie.

This morning I was watching the Dr. Kildare flick--TCM is running them on Saturdays at the moment, and although I'd rather see detectives than doctors, the casting is worth a look. (Although Red Skelton seems an odd choice for a hospital orderly.) There was a scene in which Kildare and Gillespie inform a distraught young woman that she can never have children because she has "pickled herself" in alcohol after years of drinking--though she doesn't seem to be an alcoholic and she insists that she'll never take another drink. The blatant propaganda (not to mention the arrogance of the medical males) was so offensive that I wondered if anyone took it seriously--but considering the time, they probably did. Alcoholic females shouldn't have kids, but plenty of them do, unfortunately for the kids.

Syd

Posted: Sat Oct 18, 2014 5:19 pm

Site Admin Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 12921 Location: Norman, Oklahoma

TCM is showing "Lili" on Tuesday morning, 1:00 a.m. CDT (so 2:00 EDT).

_________________
I had a love and my love was true but I lost my love to the yabba dabba doo, --The Flintstone Lament

carrobin

Posted: Sat Oct 18, 2014 10:37 pm

Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 7795 Location: NYC

Tomorrow (Sunday) afternoon TCM is showing a couple of Hitchcocks, "Saboteur" and "Marnie," as well as Mel's "High Anxiety," which I've been looking forward to.

billyweeds

Posted: Sat Oct 18, 2014 11:32 pm

Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 20618 Location: New York City

Syd wrote:

TCM is showing "Lili" on Tuesday morning, 1:00 a.m. CDT (so 2:00 EDT).

I now own the movie, but may record it anyway. It's a cinematic miracle with a spectacular performance in the title role by Leslie Caron.

bartist

Posted: Sat Oct 18, 2014 11:39 pm

Joined: 27 Apr 2010 Posts: 6958 Location: Black Hills

Love HA - all the Hitchcock parodies including the famous newspaper scene. It's no coincidence that the main character of HA is "Richard Thorndyke."

_________________
He was wise beyond his years, but only by a few days.

carrobin

Posted: Mon Oct 20, 2014 1:18 pm

Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 7795 Location: NYC

Sorry about the misinformation above--TCM was showing "Foreign Correspondent," not "Saboteur." They had run a promo for "Saboteur," so I got confused--and I've already seen "FC" several times, so I wasn't interested. It was great to see "High Anxiety" again, though--there were several good jokes I didn't catch back when I last saw it, 20+ years ago.

I just found this online, from a New Yorker alert--an excerpt from a book I'm very tempted to jump right to Amazon for. This guy's New York fantasies ignited by movies of his childhood are so akin to mine that I wish his apartment were next door to my apartment and we could watch Netflix together. (Though he's a good bit younger; I was nearly 40 when I saw "Ghostbusters"--and already living near Sigourney Weaver's neighborhood.)

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2014/10/why_the_mundane_activities_of_adult_new_yorkers_in_ghostbusters_and_the.single.html

billyweeds

Posted: Tue Oct 21, 2014 6:03 am

Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 20618 Location: New York City

carrobin wrote:

TCM actually is showing Saboteur, however, I think sometime today.

The New York I got from the movies was different from the vision in this very perceptive piece. I lusted after the city limned in Laura, Miracle on 34th Street, Woman's World, etc.--all those (interestingly, all) 20th Century-Fox movies that made Manhattan seem the quintessence of sophistication, mystery, and excitement, where baseball games were always played in the afternoon on weekdays, where men all wore fedora hats, and where every move you made was scored to that "Street Scene" "Manhattan Towers" "Rhapsody in Blue" kind of music.

Of course, I wouldn't have really liked that Manhattan, seeing as how I almot never wear a hat, wouldn't have time for weekday baseball, and provide my own soundtrack. But it's why I wanted to live here and still do.

billyweeds

Posted: Tue Oct 21, 2014 6:07 am

Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 20618 Location: New York City

bartist wrote:

Love HA - all the Hitchcock parodies including the famous newspaper scene. It's no coincidence that the main character of HA is "Richard Thorndyke."

I was convinced I'd seen HA and didn't like it. But just to be sure, I started to watch it, realized I'd never seen anything but brief clips, and wound up loving it. IMO it's better than anything Brooks ever did except the incomparable Young Frankenstein. I LOL'd more at HA than most movies I've seen recently. Interesting, though, the Hitchcock parody aspect of it was perhaps the least successful element. The most successful was the performance by Cloris Leachman, who manages to do a riff on her Nurse Blucher from YF without copying herself in the slightest. Leachman (still kickin') is a true national treasure.

carrobin

Posted: Tue Oct 21, 2014 9:30 am

Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 7795 Location: NYC

I did watch "Saboteur" last night and loved it. Like Billy with "High Anxiety," I thought I had seen it before, just didn't remember much about it. Turns out I had only seen clips of the Statue of Liberty climax. The rest was all new to me--and there were many bits that reminded me of other Hitchcock films, yet to come.

"High Anxiety" had some subtle jokes that I hadn't caught, or more likely, I hadn't seen many Hitchcock films at the time we had it for our film class. (And my favorite Brooks film remains "The Producers," which he told us at the class he still considers his best film. Most directors would name their most recent film when asked that question--but he named his first.)

As for that New Yorker article, I think my first impressions of NYC were actually from TV, especially "Private Secretary" with Ann Sothern. It made me want to live in New York and work in an office and live in an apartment and have a nice boss and wacky friends. (When I was in the second grade, we had a film at school about New York, and I still remember being astonished by the fact that people lived here--in houses! All crowded together with steps in front! Till then I had thought people worked in offices in New York, but they lived somewhere else. But then we got a TV set...)

gromit

Posted: Fri Oct 24, 2014 10:09 am

Joined: 31 Aug 2004 Posts: 9010 Location: Shanghai

Haven't watched a movie in a while.
I was watching some old Simpsons Seasons.
And more recently Alfred Hitchcock Presents Season 5.
Maybe I'm not in tune with AHP at the moment, but most of the twists seem fairly tame and minor. Still most of them are fairly solid/enjoyable short films.
So far my favorite is Man From The South (poor title really), starring Steve McQueen and Peter Lorre, based on a Raoul Dahl story. It has a nasty little edge to it, while everyone acts quite polite.
Niele Adams, McQueen's real-life wife at the time, has a striking look and is quite good in a supporting role. And the pairing of Lorre and McQueen is interesting.
Edit:Here's a link to the Dahl short story.

The other one I'd rec is The Blessington Method, in which Dick York plays an agent of a firm which bumps off old people, who in the future year of 1980 now tend to live til 125, which can be a nuisance. It's kind of fun to see a 1959 take on the future (1980). And Dick York is quite good at these kinds of Tv plays.

_________________
Killing your enemies, if it's done badly, increases their number.

bartist

Posted: Sun Oct 26, 2014 9:36 am

Joined: 27 Apr 2010 Posts: 6958 Location: Black Hills

Liked the dystopian How I Live Now, with the little "Atonement" monster all grown up as an American visiting her cousins in the English countryside, falling in love while WW3 cuts loose.

Plays fast and loose with the teen romance cliches, letting the darker aspects of youth alienation reflect in the larger world.

BTW, does Ms. Ronan have a knickname that can be spelled?

_________________
He was wise beyond his years, but only by a few days.

Syd

Posted: Thu Oct 30, 2014 6:29 pm

Site Admin Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 12921 Location: Norman, Oklahoma

A couple of Clara Bow films:

In Parisian Love, she is one of a trio of Apaches (the French countercultual movement of the 20s) who are petty thieves. One of their victims, Henri Marcel (Lou Tellegen), a rich scientist, doesn't react as expected, and recognizes one of the thieves (Armand, played by Donald Keith) as one of his students. The other male thief tries to stab Marcel, but the good thief stops him, and gets stabbed himself, but disarms his partner. The partner is killed in a police shootout, and Marie (Bow), who was lookout, runs off, and is believed shot and bleeding to death, though as near as I can tell, she wasn't injured at all.

Marcel takes in Armand, who has blood poisoning, and nurses him back to health, and decides, successfully, to set Armand on a honest and less dangerous path, with better women than Marie. Due to a miscommunication, and a newspaper story that says one of his accomplices died in the shootout and the other is probably dead, he thinks Marie is dead. Meanwhile, Marie decides to get even with Marcel for rescuing Armand from crime and her by marrying Marcel.

Odd film. Interestingly, there is more chemistry between Tellegen and Keith than between either and Clara Bow, and there definite homosexual tones, especially on Marcel's part. Bow is erratic, and sometimes overacts. Not a great film by any means, but certainly watchable, with a memorable Apache dance near the beginning, and a decidedly odd resolution. (6 of 10)

Down to the Sea in Ships is a 1922 film that is most notable for its authentic whaling scenes and a breakthough (though superfluous) role by Clara Bow as a teenage stowaway. A Quaker whaling magnate wants to marry his daughter (Marguerite Courtot) off to a man who is (1) a Quaker, and (2) a whaling man, in hopes to produce a grandson who will carry on the tradition of killing cetaceans. The odious Siggs seems to fit the bill, although he is secretly half of a plot to steal the ships and go hunting for gold. (He is also half-Asian; the film has some casual racism). Allan Dexter and the daughter love each other, but he is neither a Quaker or a whaler. However, he's willing to convert and whale. Bow, is Dot, the magnate's granddaughter by a son and daughter-in-law who died at sea. Dexter is kidnapped by men working for Siggs' partner, with hopes to have Dexter lost at sea. [Why this is necessary when Dexter wants to prove himself is unclear.] Bow stows away to be near the guy she has a crush on and hopes of becoming a whaler herself. She looks and acts about 14 but was actually a few years older.

EDIT: The film was actually made by a whaling association way before the days of Greenpeace, so we see the capture and butchering of a dead whale, we're seeing the real thing, as we probably are later when Dexter spears a porpoise. This and the depiction of Quaker austerity are the best things in the film, though Bow has her moments. The romantic subplot is overwrought, culminating in a race against time to get to the chapel to rescue the girl from a fate worse than whaling. (5.5 of 10)

_________________
I had a love and my love was true but I lost my love to the yabba dabba doo, --The Flintstone Lament

Syd

Posted: Thu Oct 30, 2014 6:49 pm

Site Admin Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 12921 Location: Norman, Oklahoma

In Berlin Express (1948), a group of travelers, including one American (Robert Ryan), one Brit, one Frenchman, one Russian, two Germans (Paul Lukas and Fritz Kortner) and Frenchwoman (Merle Oberon) are on their way to Berlin when one of the Germans is killed. It turns out that he was on his way to Berlin to a conference to peacefully reunite Germany which was obviously successful since Germany has never been divided since 1948. However, the peacemaker is not dead. He has, however, earned the wrath of a Nazi underground who thinks the only way to reunite Germany is through war, a capital idea considering how the last two wars worked out for Germany. So our international crew has to cooperate to get him to the conference safely. Oberon plays his secretary, and has a funny scene where she fends off suitors of various nationalities by answering them in different languages and pretending she doesn't understand them.

An okay movie marred by a narration serving to point out the obvious. The really interesting thing about the movie is that it was shot on location in the British, American and Soviet occupation zones, with the cooperation of the occupying forces, and is unsparing in showing the bombed-out cities of Frankfurt and Berlin. The foolish underground is reduced to plotting in the basement of a brewery whose above-ground floors are ruins. This is also a good example of a movie that could only have been made at that specific time, when there was still a chance the occupying forces would allow for a reunited Germany.

Jacques Tournier directed, and it does look good.

_________________
I had a love and my love was true but I lost my love to the yabba dabba doo, --The Flintstone Lament

gromit

Posted: Fri Oct 31, 2014 2:23 am

Joined: 31 Aug 2004 Posts: 9010 Location: Shanghai

I never heard of Down to the Sea in Ships.
Kind of a clunky title there.
I'd like to see more Clara Bow films.

I'm sure I've mentioned it before but Jacques Clouseau's first film, The Silent World (1956) really shows how far environmentalism and conservation has come. When they want to inventory the sea animals in an inlet, they simply toss in a stick of dynamite and then tally up the dead creatures that float to the top!

Also, their ship accidentally runs over a smallish whale. They decide they should do the humane thing and kill it so it doesn't suffer too much. Debatable. But then when the sharks arrive to eat the dead whale, the crew goes into a frenzy and starts whacking and gaffing and killing and maiming the sharks. It's pretty shocking, as the narration coolly asserts that sharks are bad and getting what they deserve, or somesuch.

I'm pretty sure those two scenes are the reason that this seminal film is not available outside of shoddy public domain versions. Louis Malle was one of the cameramen.

_________________
Killing your enemies, if it's done badly, increases their number.

bartist

Posted: Fri Oct 31, 2014 9:00 am

Joined: 27 Apr 2010 Posts: 6958 Location: Black Hills

Cousteau, a few years after that film, had changed his thinking and become far more a champion of marine conservation. Clouseau was the clumsy detective who drove Herbert Lom insane.

_________________
He was wise beyond his years, but only by a few days.

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