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Post by Hoosier X on Apr 3, 2020 20:40:37 GMT -5
I DVRed this off TCM and I finally got around to watching it this morning. It's an early sound film called "They Learned About Women" from 1930. And it features the famous vaudeville team Van and Schenck transitioning from the stage to the movies. I know about Van and Schenck from these two short films: "Chinese Firecrackers" "Stay Out of the South" Joe Schenck played the piano. Gus Van was famous for his dialect humor (let's call it that). They were very famous vaudevillians after World War I. And after the coming of sound to the movies, they transitioned to films with "They Learned About Women." Sadly (or not!), it was their last film because Joe Schenck died of a heart attack at the age of 40 before they made another film. One thing you'll notice about Van and Schenck is how often they use racial or ethnic stereotypes for their humor. That seems to have been a major feature of vaudeville. It was very racist. If vaudeville was still a thing, Van and Schenk would have been the official vaudeville team of the Trump campaign. "They Learned About Women" is about a couple of baseball players who are also a vaudeville team! As soon as the baseball season is over, they rush off to the vaudeville circuit! Bessie Love plays Joe Schenck's girlfriend, but he starts running around with some floozy! And things happen. And the team, the Blue Sox, end up in the World Series against the Bears! That doesn't matter. What matters is all the songs and all the hilarious dialect humor! Don't those foreigners talk funny!? Ha ha! And one of their fellow ballplayers is Jewish! And several of them are Irish! Opportunities for hilarity abound! (And as often as not, the idea that the joke is supposed to be funny is funnier than the joke! (And I'm not sure it wasn't intended that way in a few scenes.)) The song about the difference between Daugherty, Dougherty and Dockery is pretty funny. At first. in the last verse, Daugerty's daughter marries a Jew and the song goes slightly off the rails. The song right after that is about an Italian guy who doesn't like skinny women and all the dieting, and he wishes his wife would stop, because a skinny girl's no good to a wop. Think of every word you know that rhymes with wop and you'll hear it in this song because the songwriter loved the word wop. Instead of making whoopee, the Italian guy in the song wants to make little woppees. I'M NOT KIDDING! This is followed by a number titled Harlem Madness and I was a little apprehensive. But it wasn't done in blackface! All the performers were real black people! Some would consider it a missed opportunity. This film goes back and forth from being offensive and bad to actually being pretty funny. The baseball players are rude and obnoxious and some of the insults are pretty funny. There's this New York vibe to the players and the crowd and the passersby that's often very amusing. And Bessie Love is our Hollywood angel! It's easy to see why she was such a big star for a time. I don't have any idea who to recommend this to. Are you curious about vaudeville and what it was like in its uncensored form? I doubt you'll get anything that's as close to the vaudeville stage as Van and Schenck. Do you like the weirdness of sound film in its infancy? This is a good example. Is racist humor your bag? There's a couple of good examples here. Do you want a unique cinema experience? This is the movie for you! In all fairness, I have to say that I was never bored with this movie and I didn't have any trouble watching it in one sitting. It met my minimum standard for entertainment. Van and Schenck were actually great entertainers (as far as that goes), even if they look weird and stiff and offensive to a modern audience.
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Post by Prince Hal on Apr 4, 2020 14:45:26 GMT -5
Hoosier X, I caught part of this the other day on TCM, and I was as compelled as you were to watch. Everything you said was right on. The way the two partners tossed Bessie Love back and forth between them (metaphorically) was also nutty. And that baseball game at the end. Nobody could throw a pitch or swing a bat half as well as a kid playing tee-ball. The stuttering Irishman and his partner who kept hitting him with the rolled-up newspaper must have been another vaudeville team. They laid on the ethnic humor, too. And the bizarre look on the one guy's -- was it Van's - face at the very end when his buddy regained consciousness at home plate. How weird was that?
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Post by Hoosier X on Apr 4, 2020 15:57:13 GMT -5
Hoosier X, I caught part of this the other day on TCM, and I was as compelled as you were to watch. Everything you said was right on. The way the two partners tossed Bessie Love back and forth between them (metaphorically) was also nutty. And that baseball game at the end. Nobody could throw a pitch or swing a bat half as well as a kid playing tee-ball. The stuttering Irishman and his partner who kept hitting him with the rolled-up newspaper must have been another vaudeville team. They laid on the ethnic humor, too. And the bizarre look on the one guy's -- was it Van's - face at the very end when his buddy regained consciousness at home plate. How weird was that? Yeah, that was Gus Van at the end. With his face all full of wistful portent. I’m glad you posted and said you saw “They Learned About Women.” I was afraid I dreamed it.
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Post by Prince Hal on Apr 4, 2020 16:55:43 GMT -5
Hoosier X , I caught part of this the other day on TCM, and I was as compelled as you were to watch. Everything you said was right on. The way the two partners tossed Bessie Love back and forth between them (metaphorically) was also nutty. And that baseball game at the end. Nobody could throw a pitch or swing a bat half as well as a kid playing tee-ball. The stuttering Irishman and his partner who kept hitting him with the rolled-up newspaper must have been another vaudeville team. They laid on the ethnic humor, too. And the bizarre look on the one guy's -- was it Van's - face at the very end when his buddy regained consciousness at home plate. How weird was that? Yeah, that was Gus Van at the end. With his face all full of wistful portent. I’m glad you posted and said you saw “They Learned About Women.” I was afraid I dreamed it. "Wistful portent." "Wistful" may be one of the prettiest words in the English language. Yeah, we were in that fever-dream together.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 5, 2020 2:51:33 GMT -5
So that Kurosawa marathon on TCM on the 1st wasn't a Kurosawa marathon per se, it was a Toshiro Mifune marathon celebrating what would have been his 100th birthday. I watched the first film from the Marathon this evening, Drunken Angel, 1948, co-written and directed by Kurosawa. Mifune plays Matsunaga, a member of the Yakuza who has tuberculosis, but is resistant to treatment form the local doctor, and things get complicated when an old mentor returns as arrival for his territory. Mifune is at best co-lead in this as the doctor, played by Takashi Shimura is the actual central character around which this film's story revolves. I have only seen a handful of Kurosawa films (started with Seven Samurai, then Yojimbo and a few others) and this was a bit unlike any of the ones I had seen. I wasn't expecting a jazz-based musical number in the middle of it that is for certain, and the dream sequence when Matsunaga smashes open a coffin to discover himself inside who then rises to chase him was a bit more surreal than I was expecting based on previous Kurosawa films I had experienced, and it put me more in the mind of a film like Bergman's Seventh Seal than what I had experienced from Kurosawa before. The film itself is gorgeous, especially the cinematography. There were shots I just wanted to pause and let the image sink in, in particular some of the establishing shots of the town where the town buildings are reflected in the cesspool of a swamp at its center. It's a technique I have seen used quite well in comics before, but this film predates many of those comics, so my mind wanders to wonder whether it is simple parallel development along similar lines, whether one influenced the other, or whether they both owe a debt of influence to an even earlier work. I also find when I watch a subtitled film, I pay a lot more attention to the tone, timber, and inflection of the dialogue, garnering meaning and emotional weight from that since the words themselves are incomprehensible to me outside of the subtitles. The rhythm of delivery is also interesting, but since I am not very familiar with the everyday rhythms of spoken Japanese, it's harder to interpret any clues that the rhythm would normally give form a language you are familiar with, so you start looking for delivery of dialogue that breaks the rhythm so as to stand out, to take cues when the emotional thrust of the dialogue is changing-when the pattern is harshly broken either from the words feeling sharper or the volume and pitch increasing clues you to a change in the emotional state of the character delivering it for example, but if the rhythm gets slower or softer it also signals a change of some sort. But it draws the focus on the actual vocal performance into sharper focus despite the language barrier. Sometimes we get passive or even lazy as the viewer when we understand the words that we miss a lot of the nuances of the vocal performance that provide cues to another level of the story, theme or character. Overall I quite liked this. It felt very noirish, and fit well with a lot of the crime fiction I have been consuming lately. Matsunaga is very much the "doomed to come to a bad end" kind of character common in noir thrillers, his shortcomings preventing him from pulling himself out from the hole fate digs for him. This film is part of the Criterion Collection, and the version TCM showed was the Criterion cut, which I need to track down at some point to add to my library (I currently only own the Criterion cut of Yojimbo). Let's see what else this marathon has to offer. -M
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Post by Hoosier X on Apr 11, 2020 22:22:56 GMT -5
I know there's more than a few Bogart fans around here, so as I came across a rare Bogart film (on TCM) that I've not yet seen, I thought I'd say a few words about it. TCM has it listed as "One Fatal Hour" but IMDB has it listed as "Two Against the World." It's from 1936 and Bogart is manager at a radio station. It's only 54 minutes long so it's not hard to watch. But it's not very good, sad to say. The station Bogart works for calls itself "The Voice of the People," and it's a sensationalist, lowest-common denominator type of station, appealing to the basest instincts of the common people. Bogart feels a little conflicted about it, but the pay is very good, so he keeps on doing what the boss wants. His secretary has a crush on him, and she drinks a lot, both because of her unrequited love and to cover her disappointment at what Bogart does for a living. The owner wants the station to write and broadcast a multipart radio play based on an old murder, wherein a showgirl named Gloria Pembrook killed her husband. She was exonerated because the jury decided it was self- defense, but the radio station is going to present it as a morality play and the writer definitely has an agenda to put her in the worst light. Well, Gloria Pembrook is still around. She changed her name, married into a banking family (her husband knows all about her past) and as the play is about to start broadcasting, Gloria's daughter is about to get married into a fine New York family. The radio-play writer finds out who she is … and things go downhill … for everybody! … from there. If this sounds familiar, it's because it rather loosely follows the same plot as Five-Star Final, a 1932 newspaper film with Edward G. Robinson in the Bogart part and Boris Karloff as one of the unscrupulous investigators. It's a heckuva lot better than One Fatal Hour or Two Against the World or whatever you want to call it. Still, it's only an hour long and I didn't find it hard to watch despite some eye-rolling moments. Bogart is very good, and there's some pretty good performances from several character actors who I recognize from bunches of films from the 1930s and 1940s, even though I couldn't name them. So I'm not recommending it but I'm also not going to say you don't need to see it. If you're a big Bogart fan, it might be worthwhile to watch it just to see that even this early in his career, Bogart could carry a minor film that wasn't really very good and he could make it worth watching just by being there. (I feel the same way about Bette Davis.)
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Post by Hoosier X on Apr 15, 2020 19:03:46 GMT -5
Well, I couldn't think of a better way to celebrate Easter than to have a Jerry Lewis marathon. I noticed last week that Tubi had added a bunch of Jerry Lewis movies I've never seen. I couldn't decide which to watch first! (I watched At War With the Army last week.) So I decided to watch three in one day and see how it went. I watched The Caddy (1951), which has a lot of great moments and a lot of stupid ones. "The Gay Continental" is a fun musical number. Also, Donna Reed is in it! Then I watched "That's My Boy!" (1953), which is just bad. Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin graduate high school and start college together. Ugh. So bad. And then I watched "The Sad Sack" (1956), which occasionally works, mostly because of the great cast - Lewis, David Wayne, Phyllis Kirk and Peter Lorre - but it's far too frequently a bit of a chore to watch. And not enough Peter Lorre! That's too much Jerry Lewis. I spoke to Clark, one of my friends from high school, over the phone the day before. He used to love Jerry Lewis, and he ended up watching The Sad Sack the same time as I did. We were texting each other and making fun of it all through the film. The funniest thing was when he texted "Now I understand why my dad always hated it when I was watching Jerry Lewis." I know Clark's dad, and that made me bust out laughing. I am not surprised that Charlie wasn't a Jerry Lewis fan!
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Post by Hoosier X on Apr 15, 2020 19:06:21 GMT -5
Then this morning I watched "Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart to Hades" (1972), a movie which can't help but gather up a lot of extra points just from the title.
Turner Classic Movies has been showing the Lone Wolf and Cub film series on Sunday nights. I've seen the first and the third. They are awesome!
It makes me wish the libraries were open so I could start reading the manga!
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Post by brutalis on Apr 16, 2020 8:00:40 GMT -5
Easter Sunday was my Fun and Frothy Frivolity with Fred day. Watched Easter Parade from 1948 where Fred proves he can turn anyone (in this case Judy Garland) into a dance star after being jilted by his former partner Ann Miller whom he was in love with. Plenty of light humor and fun creative dance numbers.
After Easter Dinner I sat back and digested my meal while watching 1968's Astaire musical Finian's Rainbow. Here teamed with Petula Clark as his daughter, Fred the lovable Irish rogue has run away to Rainbow Valley in the fictional state of Missitucky to bury and hide his stolen pot of Leprechaun gold. Of course the Leprechaun (Tommy Steele) can't be far behind and Finian's daughter finds love in America with Don Francks the con artist (a man in much the same spirit of her father) trying to help the poor townsfolk find their riches in a business of growing tobacco. Keenan Wynn is a bombastic bigot of a Senator who is turned black and learns to change his ways and thoughts from the experience. Gorgeously crafted 9 acres set to create the town, Astaire age 69 returned to dance and star after a 11 year finale in Silk Stockings and Francis Ford Coppola as director, Steele a precociously humanized Leprechaun and Clark showing she can do more than just sing provide a splendid movie which while somewhat dated and silly manages to entertain and educate.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 16, 2020 12:43:17 GMT -5
Another from the Kurosawa/Tifune marathon on TCM... Stray Dog (1949) Noirish crime story of a rookie cop who has his gun pickpocketed on a bus and his efforts to track down the gun with the aid of a veteran cop before the trail of carnage becomes too great. It's another strong Kurosawa film. Some great characters, poignant moments, and beautifully filmed. If you like other Kurosawa films, or are a fan of noir of crime stories, you will definitely enjoy this, but worth checking out even if you are not a fan of any of those.And so far, the films are 2 for 2 in having song and dance numbers... -M
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Post by Hoosier X on Apr 16, 2020 22:54:24 GMT -5
Another from the Kurosawa/Tifune marathon on TCM... Stray Dog (1949) Noirish crime story of a rookie cop who has his gun pickpocketed on a bus and his efforts to track down the gun with the aid of a veteran cop before the trail of carnage becomes too great. It's another strong Kurosawa film. Some great characters, poignant moments, and beautifully filmed. If you like other Kurosawa films, or are a fan of noir of crime stories, you will definitely enjoy this, but worth checking out even if you are not a fan of any of those.And so far, the films are 2 for 2 in having song and dance numbers... -M Kurosawa is my favorite filmmaker and I’ve seen all his movies after about 1946. Stray Dog is a GREAT nourish crime thriller! Unfortunately, it kind of gets lost, overpowered by Kurosawa’s filmography of world classics! It’s been a while since I saw it and I’ve been meaning to watch it again some day.
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Post by brutalis on Apr 17, 2020 7:50:19 GMT -5
As i came in from work MoviesTV Network for their Thursday Noir had the 1958 Murder by Contract starring Vince Edwards coming on so I started recording to watch it later. Guess what? I got hooked and sat down and watched it anyways. This is a slick piece of film in which Edwards oh so casually becomes a contract killer. The movie begins with him "interviewing" for the position and his quiet, smart reserved manner strikes the employer as having possibilities. He makes Edwards "wait 2 weeks" as part of a test and then calls to give him an assignment. Which he fulfills and with casual business like flair using his wits to begin racking up the kills, all without using a gun. Edwards is sent to Los Angeles by his "boss" to kill Billie Williams. Most of the movie is Edwards languidly enjoying the California sun as he tests the 2 men assigned to assist him. Edwards then finds out the hit is for a woman, not a man which upsets him greatly as he doesn't like murdering women as they are too complicated and nervous where as men are predictable and routine driven.
He still tries to do his assignment, failing several times and thinking the woman is a jinx and he wants to quit, but his partners remind him that quitting or failure isn't an option. Finally through some clever arrow work setting a fire at the woman's home he shoots her with a rifle from across the hills circumventing the police protection she is under. Thinking his job is done Edwards goes to leave and find out that he failed to kill Billie Williams, it was instead a female police officer he mistook for being her. The 2 men are given orders from the higher up boss to eliminate Edwards for his failure. He instead kills them both and calls the boss telling him to double his fee as he wasn't informed of the kill being a woman which complicates things.
Edwards manages to sneak in and knock out the office watching over Billie and he poses as the officer and intends to strangle her as she plays the piano, but he just can't get control of himself and fails as the next shift comes driving in and as he tries to escape through a drain tunnel (how he snuck in) the police shoot in gas canister's to smoke him out. Instead Edwards starts shooting out of the tunnel and the police begin firing away and he is shot up and we see his grasping hand through the smoke as he expires.
This is one quiet, intelligently written little film with a cheap shoestring budget which manages plenty of style, substance and wit and part of the fun is seeing Ben Casey as a smooth, cool smarter than the average killer. Recommended!
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Post by Jesse on Apr 29, 2020 12:40:51 GMT -5
Nightbreed (1990) If you haven't watched the Director's Cut of this film you are doing yourself a disservice (which is currently free to watch on TUBI). This may be one of the best collections of practical special effects and body horror ever, and is arguably writer and director Clive Barker's magnum opus. I really need to start reading his novellas.
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Post by brutalis on May 6, 2020 8:25:18 GMT -5
Thanks again to GritTV I watched a western that to the best of my memory I have never seen before. 1957's Joel McCrea and Barbara Stanwyck in Trooper Hook. McCrea is a Cavalry Sgt. who is tasked with delivering Stanwyck (who is a white woman captured by and wife with a son to Apache Chief Nanchez) back to her husband. Along the way she is met with scorn and hatred from most everyone except for Trooper Hook and a young cowboy (Earl Holliman) while riding a stage coach back to her husband. Nanchez escapes from the Cavalry and is tracking them down to reclaim his son but is forced to retreat for the time being due to Hook threatening to kill the boy.
Nanchez continues to follow as Hook and Cora finally reach her husbands ranch. After 9 years missing she might as well be dead since her husband has no use for and hates her child and only wants her back. As she rushes to leave with Hook and her son, her husband threatens to kill them all as she "belongs" to him when Nanchez attacks. All jump into a buckboard to escape with Cora's husband in the back shooting at the Apache's and as he is shot dead he manages to kill Nanchez. As Hook, Cora and her son ride on hook tells her that his enlistment is up i four months and that if she is willing to wait then she will have him. They ride into the sunset with Hook slipping his arm around...
What an incredible movie for it's time in portraying hatred, ignorance and greed while showing much respect and honor of the captured woman's predicament and the Indian way of life. Pretty amazing considering that this is a B budget movie with strong heartfelt and emotional impact providing an interesting and moving story.
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Post by Prince Hal on May 7, 2020 10:54:32 GMT -5
Thanks again to GritTV I watched a western that to the best of my memory I have never seen before. 1957's Joel McCrea and Barbara Stanwyck in Trooper Hook. McCrea is a Cavalry Sgt. who is tasked with delivering Stanwyck (who is a white woman captured by and wife with a son to Apache Chief Nanchez) back to her husband. Along the way she is met with scorn and hatred from most everyone except for Trooper Hook and a young cowboy (Earl Holliman) while riding a stage coach back to her husband. Nanchez escapes from the Cavalry and is tracking them down to reclaim his son but is forced to retreat for the time being due to Hook threatening to kill the boy. Nanchez continues to follow as Hook and Cora finally reach her husbands ranch. After 9 years missing she might as well be dead since her husband has no use for and hates her child and only wants her back. As she rushes to leave with Hook and her son, her husband threatens to kill them all as she "belongs" to him when Nanchez attacks. All jump into a buckboard to escape with Cora's husband in the back shooting at the Apache's and as he is shot dead he manages to kill Nanchez. As Hook, Cora and her son ride on hook tells her that his enlistment is up i four months and that if she is willing to wait then she will have him. They ride into the sunset with Hook slipping his arm around... What an incredible movie for it's time in portraying hatred, ignorance and greed while showing much respect and honor of the captured woman's predicament and the Indian way of life. Pretty amazing considering that this is a B budget movie with strong heartfelt and emotional impact providing an interesting and moving story. I stumbled across this on TV a few years ago and agree with you completely. Solid, somewhat subversive and strong acting from a couple of pros and a great cast of character actors. Like Cooper and Wayne, McCrea always looked quite at home on horseback. Original story was by "Shane" author Jack Schaefer.
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