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Post by Hoosier X on Oct 25, 2017 12:27:17 GMT -5
I'm a really big Louise Brooks fan, so I was happy to find the 1931 film God's Gift to Women on YouTube. Brooksie isn't in it that much, but she is prominent in one scene that's very amusing, fighting with two other women (including Joan Blondell) over who is going to take care of the film's protagonist when he's sick in bed. I was also pleased to see that it's directed by Michael Curtiz, who directed Casablanca and The Adventures of Robin Hood! Along with Brooksie and Blondell, you also get the wonderful Margaret Livingston and the beautiful Laura la Plante as some of the other girlfriends of the hero, played by Frank Fay. He's supposed to be descended from Don Juan and thus irresistible to women. Fay is not very convincing in the role. His butler is played by Alan Mowbray, and he makes the most of his few lines. Mowbray played this type of role a lot, and I think he would have made a great Jeeves if anybody in the 1930s had ever decided to make a Jeeves and Wooster movie that wasn't utter crap. Despite Frank Fay not being a convincing Casanova, he's still an amusing actor despite being miscast, and I found the film to be a lot of fun and, at 72 minutes, it doesn't ever get a chance to overstay its welcome. The great cast is a huge plus, and you can almost always count on director Curtiz for an entertaining movie even if the premise is kind of silly.
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Post by Prince Hal on Oct 25, 2017 13:19:18 GMT -5
"Old German Movies" department Yesterday, I watched Fraulein Else, a 1929 silent film from Germany starring the wonderful Elisabeth Bergner. Bergner is another one of those 1930s actresses I love so much. She was a big star in Europe in her time. She left Germany in the 1930s to flee the Nazis because she was Jewish and probably also partly because they were Nazis. In England, she starred as Rosalind in the Shakespeare play As You Like It, which is where I first came across her because it's one of my favorite Shakespeare plays. Laurence Olivier plays Orlando. I instantly fell in love with her energy and her personality. I've heard that the movie flopped because British audiences didn't like her accent.
Bergner also made Escape Me Never in the U.S., for which she was nominated for an Oscar for Best Picture. In Fraulein Else, Bergner is Else, a young woman in her late teens, I think, it's hard to tell because Bergner is very petite and looks as young as 15, but she was 32 when she made this movie. But Else could be a little older. She's playful and doesn't seem to have any interest in the young men around her at St. Moritz, so I was under the impression that she was 14 or 15. While Else is vacationing in St. Moritz with her aunt and her cousin, Else's father suffers a terrible financial setback when the Viennese stock exchange collapses. Else's mother writes to Else with the bad news, and asks Else to ask Herr von Dorsday, an old business associate of her father, for a huge loan to cover the losses. Else finally works up the courage to make the request, but Herr von Dorsday makes a rather inappropriate suggestion for services he would like as a "favor" to himself in exchange for the loan. I liked "Fraulein Else" a lot. Bergner is great, as always. I especially like the scene where Else is following Dorsday through the halls and salons at the St. Moritz resort, trying to get his attention at the same time she is trying to work up the nerve to ask him for money. She had blown him off twice before when he had talked to her in the lobby and asked her to have dinner with him as an old friend of the family, so she's a little embarrassed. But it's so different from any silent German film I've ever seen that I'm not sure what to say to people about whether they'd like it or not. The film spends a lot of time setting up the plot, so you get to see lots of scenes of Else's father going from one bank to another to get more credit to cover his losses, and then a lot of time is spent on the dad crying in his office and being tended to by Else's mother. By the time von Dorsday makes his improper suggestion to Else, there's only about ten minutes left in the movie. So pacing is a bit of a problem. It's available on YouTube, so it's easy to see for anybody who's curious. (As You Like It and Escape Me Never are both on YouTube as well.) There's lots to like (The sets, the animals!) about this version. (Lots to cringe at, too.) And, yes, Bergner's accent does get in the way of enjoying her performance. It's a little like watching Abba singing in English phonetically. But, when your husband (Paul Czinner) is the director, you sometimes get the plum roles!
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Post by Hoosier X on Oct 25, 2017 23:49:15 GMT -5
TCM showed The Arizonian, a western from 1935, and I had to watch it because Richard Dix is SO AWESOME and I've never seen this one. It's not that he's such a great actor, but he's such a great performer. Like Lon Chaney, Victor Mature or Russell Crowe, I don't really believe his characters, but I do find them immensely entertaining. The Arizonian was a lot better than I thought I had any right to expect. Louis Calhern (from Duck Soup, The Asphalt Jungle, Annie Get Your Gun and Julius Caesar) is the corrupt sheriff and you know he's a really bad guy because later in the movie, HE SHOOTS WILLIE BEST IN THE BACK! That is a bad bad BAD person! I don't think I've ever seen Bela Lugosi do anything that bad, except maybe when he kicked Angelo Rossitto off the running board in The Corpse Vanishes. The showdown at the end is great. Richard Dix knows that Louis Calhern is a bad bad BAD man who must be stopped, so Richard Dix leads his brother and the outlaw-turned deputy into the smoke (the bad guys had set the jail on fire) with guns a-blazing to take on the crooked sheriff and about seven bad guys from his little gang. The Arizonian is a lovely little gem of a Western, but to really enjoy it, you probably have to have seen lots of cheesy 1930s Westerns to see where this one's coming from.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 26, 2017 9:45:59 GMT -5
Psycho will be on tomorrow night on TCM 5pm Pacific and 8pm Eastern Time. I haven't seen this movie for awhile and it's one of my favorites Janet Leigh movie and also starred Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates.
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Post by Hoosier X on Oct 26, 2017 11:26:32 GMT -5
Pretty Poison will be showing on TCM very soon. I think it's tonight. Pretty Poison is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
Anthony Perkins is a pyromaniac who gets a job at a factory in a small town and he has plans of burning the place down. He meets a high school girl - played by Tuesday Weld - and he starts an affair with her, getting her involved in the plan by telling her that he's a secret agent investigating subversives at the factory.
The scene where Perkins realizes that he's not the crazy one is priceless.
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Post by Hoosier X on Oct 26, 2017 11:32:09 GMT -5
I forgot to mention this about Fraulein Else.
Karl Freund was the cinematographer. He went to Hollywood and was the cinematographer on the Bela Lugosi version of Dracula. And he directed The Mummy (with Boris Karloff) and Mad Love.
He was also the cinematographer on bunches of episode of I Love Lucy. And also Key Largo!
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Post by Deleted on Oct 26, 2017 12:54:07 GMT -5
Pretty Poison will be showing on TCM very soon. I think it's tonight. Pretty Poison is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. Anthony Perkins is a pyromaniac who gets a job at a factory in a small town and he has plans of burning the place down. He meets a high school girl - played by Tuesday Weld - and he starts an affair with her, getting her involved in the plan by telling her that he's a secret agent investigating subversives at the factory. The scene where Perkins realizes that he's not the crazy one is priceless. It's on after Psycho tomorrow night ...
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Post by Hoosier X on Oct 26, 2017 19:51:18 GMT -5
Today I watched Mockery (1927), a Lon Chaney Sr. movie that I had never heard of before. Chaney is a Russian peasant during the Russian Revolution and he has some adventures with a Russian countess as they fend off rampaging Bolsheviks and rebellious peasants. The handsome guy that the countess loves (and this makes Chaney jealous, of course) is played by Ricardo Cortez. He was the cinema's first Sam Spade in the 1931 version of The Maltese Falcon, which TCM sometimes shows as Dangerous Female. This is the version with Dwight Frye in the Elisha Cook Jr. role. Ricardo Cortez is also the main gangster in the obscure 1936 film The Walking Dead. It features Boris Karloff in the title role and Edmund Gwenn as the most soft-spoken mad scientist you've ever seen. And also Marguerite Churchill from Dracula's Daughter. And it's directed by Michael Curtiz. It's a bizarre mixture of horror and gangster films, and I've always liked it a lot. Cortez is also in the low-budget film I Killed that Man, which I own on DVD and watch from time to time, mostly because of Joan Woodbury, but also because it's kind of crazy. And Mack Swain has a small role in Mockery. Swain is most famous for his key role in one of the most famous movies of the silent era - The Gold Rush. Mack Swain is the guy who gets trapped in the cabin with the Tramp and hallucinates that Charlie has turned into a chicken! I liked Mockery well enough, and it's got enough going on for Lon Chaney completists, but it's not must-see for the general film buff.
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Post by Hoosier X on Oct 26, 2017 20:04:19 GMT -5
And I forgot to mention that Benjamin Christensen, the director of Mockery, is the same guy who directed the 1922 film Haxan, also known as Witchcraft Through the Ages.
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Post by Jesse on Oct 27, 2017 11:33:36 GMT -5
THX 1138 (1971) TCM played a bunch of classic dystopian movies last night and this is the only one I hadn't seen before. Impressive directorial debut with an eerie mood, great casting and interesting social commentary. The visuals at times are both disturbing and awe inspiring as is the bleak world building. The story is set in a future dystopia where human are devoid of emotions, self expression and sexuality are banned, while computers run everyone's day-to-day lives. After a man stops taking his mandatory daily sedatives, he impregnates his roommate, gets convicted of being a deviant, then escapes becoming a fugitive in order to find her. It ends with a suspenseful chase sequence that has plenty of tense moments.
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Post by codystarbuck on Oct 27, 2017 20:30:35 GMT -5
THX 1138 (1971) TCM played a bunch of classic dystopian movies last night and this is the only one I hadn't seen before. Impressive directorial debut with an eerie mood, great casting and interesting social commentary. The visuals at times are both disturbing and awe inspiring as is the bleak world building. The story is set in a future dystopia where human are devoid of emotions, self expression and sexuality are banned, while computers run everyone's day-to-day lives. After a man stops taking his mandatory daily sedatives, he impregnates his roommate, gets convicted of being a deviant, then escapes becoming a fugitive in order to find her. It ends with a suspenseful chase sequence that has plenty of tense moments. Lucas was deeply in awe of the French New Wave, with that one; but, it is one of his more striking films, visually, and one where he really seems to be reaching for something more. He's a young turk here and he has a statement to make, something that was progressively lost, in his work. The dvd is a pretty nice package. He did some of his customary tinkering; but, mostly just expanding the look of the underground city, to give it more scale. It actually enhances the film, unlike the Star Wars changes. His commentary track is pretty insightful and there are a couple of featurettes that are quite interesting. One is contemporary, which shows some of the preparation and filming. There is a woman, who has a minor role, who talks about her impending head shaving and she acts like it will be a unique and interesting experience; but, you sense she is trying to convince herself. When her head is actually shaved she breaks down in tears. I can't remember if the dvd has the full student version or just clips, as it was originally a student project, at USC, which won Lucas a bunch of awards and attention from Coppola and Hollywood. Much of the filming was done at the newly or under-construction San Francisco BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) terminals, which gave it that futuristic look. Meanwhile, this is the film that gave us the word "wookie," which came from an ad-lib, during dialogue looping, during the climactic chase sequence. The film would also end up as an easter egg in Lucas other work. It is John Milner's license plate number, in American Graffiti and Princess Leia's cell block number, on the Death Star. Queen famously referenced the film, in the video for "Calling All Girls." I t used to get a bit of airplay, in the early days of MTV (when we first got it, with our cable system, in 1982).
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Post by Deleted on Oct 28, 2017 6:31:47 GMT -5
Psycho starring Janet Leigh, Martin Balsam, and Anthony Perkins was unbelievable and a classic Hitchcock Movie that I really enjoyed seeing and unfortunately; I couldn't watched Pretty Poison afterwards because I had to go to a Birthday Party for a dear friend and regretted not setting the DVR in time.
Been watching a lot of movies on TCM of lately.
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Post by Prince Hal on Oct 28, 2017 9:44:16 GMT -5
Psycho starring Janet Leigh, Martin Balsam, and Anthony Perkins was unbelievable and a classic Hitchcock Movie that I really enjoyed seeing and unfortunately; I couldn't watched Pretty Poison afterwards because I had to go to a Birthday Party for a dear friend and regretted not setting the DVR in time.Been watching a lot of movies on TCM of lately. Check TCM On Demand, Crusader; it may be on of the available titles now.
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Post by Jesse on Oct 28, 2017 9:50:13 GMT -5
Pretty Poison (1968) I forgot I had already seen this before I set the reminder timer but it was still interesting to rewatch it. A delusional young man gets out of a mental institution and starts a relationship with a high school girl but quickly gets in over his head after she murders a night watchman and then her own mother. It was kind of interesting watching Anthony Perkins play CIA and Tuesday Weld gives an exceptional performance as her character gets creepier throughout the film.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 28, 2017 10:50:05 GMT -5
Psycho starring Janet Leigh, Martin Balsam, and Anthony Perkins was unbelievable and a classic Hitchcock Movie that I really enjoyed seeing and unfortunately; I couldn't watched Pretty Poison afterwards because I had to go to a Birthday Party for a dear friend and regretted not setting the DVR in time.Been watching a lot of movies on TCM of lately. Check TCM On Demand, Crusader; it may be on of the available titles now. I just checked and it's not there on my TCM on Demand yet, but I have a friend who is a Tuesday Weld fan and he might loan me his DVD and I've haven't heard from him - via e-mail yet. Thanks for the tip.
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