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Post by Ish Kabbible on Sept 8, 2016 15:12:16 GMT -5
So, Rob Allen. Which movies did you see and what did you think? Sigh... not a single one. What I think is, my life is too busy. That deserves this
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Post by Rob Allen on Sept 8, 2016 15:18:57 GMT -5
Sigh... not a single one. What I think is, my life is too busy. That deserves this You've been saving that for the right moment, haven't you?
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Post by Hoosier X on Sept 8, 2016 16:33:45 GMT -5
I've not yet subjected myself to Exodus. It's on TCM from time to time, and I usually think about watching it for a few seconds. I'll get to it someday.
I enjoyed The Juggler with Kirk Douglas. Douglas is a former circus juggler who survived the concentration camps and he's trying to move to Israel, but the process is a bit much for his wild, restless nature. So he he's roaming Palestine without his papers. And he gets into a bit of trouble.
John Banner plays a tourist. Yes, THAT John Banner, Sgt. Schultz from "Hogan's Heroes."
It also has Beverly Washburn as a little girl. You may remember her as the slightly-less crazy sister from Spider-Baby. She was also in a "Star Trek" episode and a bunch of other stuff.
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Post by Ish Kabbible on Sept 8, 2016 22:08:03 GMT -5
Peter Lorre Struts His Stuff Crime And Punishment (1935) Peter Lorre, Edward Arnold, Marian Marsh Directed by Josef Von Sternberg An updated adaptation of Dostoevsky's 1866 classic into the Great Depression. Mind you, I never read the original novel nor, I believe, ever seen the other motion picture attempts on this tale. I surmise this version is a relatively close re-telling. It just has that authentic feel to it and much of the dialogue sounds as if lifted straight from the pages. Sternberg's moody and shadowy camera work seems perfect as well. Peter Lorre, a top-of-his-class graduate specializing in criminology lives in abject poverty. With his family in desperate straits as well, he murders and robs a cruel pawnbroker. He feels his training will prevent leaving any foolish clues behind of his crime. Edward Arnold is the Chief Inspector, aware of Lorre's reputation as a criminologist and asks him to help solve the murder mystery. Lorre is given the chance to exhibit a wide array of emotions and personalities and does so with aplomb. At first he's rather timid and subservient. Desperation drives him to murder. He becomes haughty, aggressive and superior when thinking he'll get away with this crime. Guilt begins to creep in-especially when an innocent man is arrested instead. Peter Lorre gives one hell of a performance Marian Marsh as the young girl Lorre helps out is a beauty. Edward Arnold also is quite memorable in playing a cat-and-mouse game with Lorre to break him psychologically and confess. I saw this from a DVD put out by Millcreek. Years ago, this was a company I always avoided. Most of their releases were poor prints of public domain films. They also put out plenty of 50-films-for-$10 collections where half the films were of unwatchable print quality and the other half were just plain bad movies. Maybe they upped their game because this print was quite good. Absolutely no extras like a trailer, but still a fine DVD
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Post by Hoosier X on Sept 9, 2016 0:11:06 GMT -5
"Crime and Punishment" is a very long and intricate book. I love it! One of the better long books in the world of literature! It has several groups of people that Raskolnikov runs around with. The movie ignores several of the storylines and focuses on his family and the police inspector.
The movie version with Peter Lorre is great! I remember when I read the novel, I thought "Wouldn't Peter Lorre make a great Raskilnikov?" And a few weeks later, the 1935 version of Crime and Punishment was showing at the American Cinematheque in Hollywood! Of course I went!
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Post by Ish Kabbible on Sept 9, 2016 0:49:59 GMT -5
Guy Williams Is....Zorro .....Lost In Space......Captain Sindbad Captain Sindbad (1963) Guy Williams, Pedro Armendariz, Heidi Bruhl, Abraham Sofaer Evil despot (Armendariz) forcing the Princess to marry him while she yearns for Sindbad, silly wizard, rubberized monsters, swordplay, castles and dungeons yada yada yada Guy Williams is a dashing hero, Pedro Armendariz is evil looking with a clean shaved head and twirly mustache, Abraham Sofaer has the biggest eyes this side of Marty Feldman. The special effects are third rate compared to Ray Harryhausen's Sinbad and this film is even more juvenile and hokey. But if you like this sort of thing, then you'll like this.
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Post by Hoosier X on Sept 9, 2016 9:52:22 GMT -5
TCM was showing a bunch of movies about education, like Goodbye Mr. Chips (which I saw three or four years ago) and The Blackboard Jungle (which I've never seen in its entirety, and suddenly seems like a glaring blind spot). I DVRed The Corn Is Green (1945) because it's a Bette Davis movie I've never seen. Davis plays an English woman who inherits a house in rural Wales and decides to start a school for the mostly illiterate coal miners and their children. The local people are apparently born and raised in the mines and are only let out at night so they can wander the countryside and sing hymns in the Welsh tongue. Nigel Bruce is the wealthy landowner who doesn't like the idea of educating the miners. They're happy with things as they are. A little education and they might find out they have the vote, and they might start using it! But he comes around when Bette turns on the charm and learns that he's easily manipulated. This is John Dall's first movie. He plays a young miner who has a little education because he learned at home from his parents before his father and 42 brothers were killed in a mining accident. Bette inspires him to study for a scholarship to Oxford! There are numerous thrilling scenes where he is conjugating Latin verbs! This movie gets a lot of points for being WEIRD! I found it to be watchable but a bit strange, so I wouldn't recommend it for anyone who doesn't have a taste for the peculiar when it comes to 1940s movies. It will be a treat for Bette Davis completists and for those movie fans who just can't see enough movies about Welsh coal miners.
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Post by Hoosier X on Sept 9, 2016 10:47:17 GMT -5
TCM also showed a movie called Bright Road (1953) as part of its education theme. This is a movie about an all-black elementary school. Dorothy Dandridge is a first-time teacher. Harry Belafonte is the principal. Dorothy becomes very concerned about a student who isn't interested in school and has to repeat several grades. She doesn't think he's dumb, he's just very dispirited by the world. He is very interested in nature though, and he draws things he sees. And he also keeps bees in his backyard and sells the honey. So after several trials and tribulations where his little girlfriend dies of viral pneumonia and he gets in fights and he won't do his homework, he saves the day when bees invade the school and he knows to capture the queen and he leads the bees outside and into the woods. And then the movie is over. It gets as many points for being short as it does for being kind of weird. I DVRed it because I've never seen a Dorothy Dandridge movie. She's very pretty. She gets a lot of points for Bright Road for keeping a straight face. I still want to see Carmen Jones. And I also saw a Max Linder movie. Linder was one of the biggest stars in the world around 1910 to 1915 or so. He was a French comic actor who made a bunch of short films in France. He came to the U.S. about 1920 and made a few films. TCM showed Seven Years Bad Luck (1921) and I DVRed it because I've never seen a Max Linder movie. Charlie Chaplin cited Linder as a major influence, and boy, it is quickly obvious how true it is! Linder is a wealthy and pretty worthless socialite, but he otherwise has a lot of the Tramp's twitchy, flirty characteristics. (And Linder looks a lot like the actor who plays Howard Stark on the show "Agent Carter." Which makes a very weird kind of sense when you realize that Howard's son Tony is played by Robert Downey Jr., who played Chaplin in the 1990s.) In Seven Years Bad Luck, the servants break the mirror. The scheming valet gets the cook (who has a moustache and a vague resemblance to Linder) to stand on the other side of the mirror and imitate Linder's actions so he doesn't know the mirror is broken. Linder's character is an alcoholic (in the ho ho, what-a-funny-drunk style of early cinema) and he has a bad hangover, so the valet convinces him that he looks a little different than usual because he had a bad night. And so you see where the Marx Brothers probably got the germ of the idea for the mirror scene in Duck Soup. And this is no slur on the Marx Brothers. The Linder version is a very very funny scene, both the actors are great, and it is worth seeing. But the Marx Brothers turned it into one of the funniest things ever on film. And it's highly likely that Linder got it from vaudeville or the British music hall tradition. The rest of the movie (it's about an hour long) is very amusing at times, but it's no Duck Soup.
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Post by Rob Allen on Sept 9, 2016 17:53:39 GMT -5
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Post by Hoosier X on Sept 10, 2016 18:57:59 GMT -5
I walked the dogs this morning and I ran some errands and I played pool with my nephew for a while, so now it's time to take my afternoon rest time and watch one of these movies on the DVR. The most likely candidates are:
Fiesta (1947) - Ricardo Montalban is a matador who just wants to write music, but it's the family tradition to fight the bull! Well, he runs off without telling anyone where he's going. So his sister - Esther Williams - dresses up like him and goes into the ring and fights the bull. (As you may have guessed there's a lot of bull in this movie.) This goes on for months and no one in Mexico notices the lumpiest matador in matador history.
I love this movie! It's hilarious! And despite my love for The Wrath of Khan, this is my favorite Ricardo Montalban movie.
That Touch of Mink (1962) - With Doris Day and Rock Hudson. And Gig Young. And Audrey Meadows. And John Astin. I saw this about a year ago and I thought it was pretty bad for so many reasons. But I think about it a lot. The more I think about it, it strikes me that this movie might be Cary Grant's best chance at being in a famously bad cult film. Joan Crawford has Trog. Bette Davis has ... well, pick one. I'll go with Bunny O'Hare. Olivia de Haviland has Swarm. So why shouldn't Cary Grant have one if there's a single candidate that just about fits the bill? I nominate That Touch of Mink. I've been wanting to see it again and judge it on its own terms rather than shackling my critique with quaint, bourgeois notions of "good," "common sense" and "misogyny."
Helen of Troy (1956) - It's been a while since I saw this and I've kind of been wanting to see it again for quite some time. Fifteen years or so? It looks interesting. But I think that if it had been any good, I'd remember it better.
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Post by Hoosier X on Sept 10, 2016 20:09:44 GMT -5
I picked Fiesta, mostly because it's been on the DVR for several weeks and I just wasn't in the mood for That Touch of Mink.
Fiesta is as good as I remember. Maybe even better. I'm not to the part where Esther Williams dresses as a matador yet. I'd forgotten that Cyd Charisse is in it! She just danced with Montalban to "La Bamba"! It's wonderful!
Ole!
It reminds me why she's my favorite dancer from the movies. Eleanor Powell is also pretty great, but Cyd was lucky enough to be in better movies.
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Post by Hoosier X on Sept 11, 2016 11:55:36 GMT -5
I watched the first hour of Helen of Troy (1956) last night, gave up and went to bed, then watched the second hour this morning. The second hour is a lot better than the first ... but that's not saying much.
I expected a lot better from director Robert Wise. He directed The Day the Earth Stood Still, among many others. But Helen of Troy is mostly pretty boring. I thought I'd seen it, but now I'm not sure. It's very rare that I don't remember anything at all from a movie I've seen before, but this one is so dull that I might have watched it late at night 15 or 20 years ago and dozed off a lot so that now I just don't remember it.
Rossana Podesta is OK as Helen. She looks like Drew Barrymore.
But the movie spends the whole first hour on how Paris and Helen met and fell in love, and then escaped to Troy one step ahead of her husband Menelaus. (The actor playing Menelaus looks like Rod Steiger a little bit, especially with all the facial hair. And I amused myself by thinking how much more entertaining the film would be with Steiger in ANY of the roles.) So we get to see scenes with Paris arguing with brother Hector (Harry Andrews, of all people) about the intentions of the Greeks, then Paris going to Greece on a diplomatic mission, and he gets swept off the ship during a storm and he washes ashore near a farmhouse where Helen is living with the peasants and taking a break from the palace. (One bright spot of the first hour is Brigitte Bardot as Andraste, Helen's slave. She makes the most of her few scenes.) And so on and so forth for the first hour when they finally flee to Troy.
Stanley Baker is Achilles, all glarey and angry and red-faced, like a FOX News commentator. Cedric Hardwicke is Priam.
It's a little better in the second hour, but it's still a rather uninspired version of some events from the Iliad and then the Trojan Horse.
I'd recommend pretty much any other movie about the Trojan War. You got The Trojan Horse (1961) with John Drew Barrymore as Odysseus. And Troy (2004) with Brad Pitt as Achilles and Diane Kruger as Helen. They're both highly entertaining.
With a more serious tone, there's The Trojan Women (1971) with Katharine Hepburn as Hecuba and Genevieve Bujold as Cassandra.
Then there's also the French and Saunders segment where they're making fun of the 2004 movie. Dawn French is Helen! And Jennifer Saunders is ... Troy?
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Post by Deleted on Sept 11, 2016 16:20:17 GMT -5
I need to see Captain Sinbad before I die and I know that I will enjoy it. I just loved the way Ish wrote it up.
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Post by Hoosier X on Sept 11, 2016 21:13:31 GMT -5
Here's a bit of a heads-up for anyone who has TCM and is even a little bit curious about Japanese films of the 1960s:
TCM is showing two classic Japanese films tonight, very late, check local listings for times.
First is Hara-kiri (1962), a film that blew me away when I saw it for the first time a few years ago. I'm looking forward to seeing it again. I'm thinking of making a Top Ten Favorite Japanese Films list and Hara-kiri is a shoo-in to make it.
The other film is Samurai Rebellion (1967), which I've never seen, but it's by the same director and it's called Samurai Rebellion, so I'm thinking that there's a great chance that it's better than average. The same director also made Kwaidan, which isn't showing tonight, but I suggest that everyone should look for it and see if it's showing anywhere during the Halloween season.
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Post by Hoosier X on Sept 12, 2016 12:43:28 GMT -5
In Panic Room (2002), Jody Foster plays a bad mommy who lets her daughter grow up to hang out with (and eventually become) a smug, sparkly, rather tedious vampire. Two years ago or so, I saw parts of Panic Room (2002), a movie about a mom and her daughter who rent a gigantic New York townhouse where they are soon menaced by three men looking for a large amount of money hidden in the panic room. From what I saw, it looked pretty good, so I've been wanting to see it ever since. I like Kristen Stewart a lot, largely because she ROCKED IT as Joan Jett in The Runaways, but I've also liked some of her other movies as well. So it was very nice to see her doing such a great job as the somewhat snotty 12-year-old daughter in Panic Room. It was on Sundance a few weeks ago, so I DVRed it and I was finally able to watch the whole thing. In addition to Jodie Foster (great as usual) and Kristen Stewart, we also get some good to great performances from Forrest Whittaker, Jared Leto and Dwight Yoakam. And it's pretty good. I have a few quibbles here and there, but David Fincher is one of those somewhat over-rated directors (like Christopher Nolan or Zack Snyder) from whom you expect a certain amount of stupid moments, and Panic Room didn't really have much to complain about. Kristen Stewart comes awful close to stealing the show in a lot of the early scenes, but she's performing with Jodie Foster, and then Forrest Whittaker, Jared Leto and Dwight Yoakam all show up, so she doesn't quite get away with it. Nice try, Kristen! But she is still pretty awesome as an insolent but not completely charmless teen. Surprised you, didn't I? You thought I was going to review another Bette Davis movie from the early 1930s. What is she this time, the beekeeper's mistress?
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