Recently in Movies Category

February 5 movie: Gold Diggers of 1933. A friend was talking about wanting to watch pre-code movies, and I made a list of some of my favorites in 3 categories: Comedy, Drama and Sleaze. This was the top of the list of comedies.

There's so much to love about Gold Diggers of 1933. The crazy Busby Berkeley numbers, Aline MacMahon's raunchy humor, the sweet romance between Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler. It's also really interesting to see a comedy about the Depression, made while it was happening. To quote Roger Ebert, the characters in most movies (then and now) seem to be living on a stipend from God. The three women at the center of this movie are living hand-to-mouth while they try to get jobs in the theater. They share a dingy apartment so small the three of them sleep in one bed; dodge the landlady when rent is due; steal milk from the neighbors; and have pawned so many of their things, they have to pool their closets to come up with one outfit suitable to visit a Broadway producer. And they make jokes about it. And the jokes are funny!

One joke that I hadn't noticed before, which made me laugh out loud this time, is when Barney (Ned Sparks), the crochetey producer, decides his next show is going to be about the Depression. MacMahon asks if there's going to be any comedy in it, because that's what she does. "Comedy?!" Barney shouts. "I'll make 'em laugh at you starving to death! It'll be the funniest thing you ever did!"

Gold Diggers of 1933 is not what people typically think of as a "pre-code movie" because there's no actual sex. The movie could easily have been made under the code if they had just toned it down a little, removed the jokes about sex and drugs, made the costumes less revealing and the situations less suggestive. Still, it has a breezy openness about it which to me was the wonderful thing about pre-code movies. Anyone who thinks their generation invented sexual freedom (boomers, I'm looking at you) needs to watch this and learn.

February 5 movie: Flirtation Walk. Romantic comedy starring Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler. He's a military cadet and she's a general's daughter. It suffers from a lack of good supporting cast, lack of good songs, lack of Busby Berkeley, and lack of Ruby Keeler -- the movie is structured so she's not in it at all in Act 2. Really big mistake.

February 4 movie: The Bedford Incident. This was a Cold War movie about a US destroyer which catches a Soviet sub in illegal territory, and tries to force the sub out. Richard Widmark is the destroyer captain, a hard-nosed authoritarian who develops an Ahab-like obsession with the sub. Eric Portman is a German officer on board to advise Widmark. Sidney Poitier is a civilian reporter who asks a lot of questions and generally gets in Widmark's face in a way he's not used to, seeing as he's used to interacting only with men under his command. And Martin Balsam is a Navy doctor who comes on board with Poitier. This was an interesting psychological drama, and then it got really really dark in a way I wasn't at all expecting. I enjoyed it.

February 4 movie: Air Force. This was really good. An ensemble piece about a bomber crew who are on their way to Hawaii when the Pearl Harbor attack happens. They stay just long enough to refuel, then are sent to Wake Island -- this time arriving just before the attack -- then on their way to the Philippines, then finally Australia.

The movie starts slow, giving you a chance to get to know the airmen during their long flight. The characters really aren't characters, just thumbnail sketches of broad types. In fact they aren't even given names in the credits, just listed by their position in the bomber crew. Which is my only criticism of a fine movie. Even without complex character development the performances are good, with subtle emotion. The battle scenes are very well done, especially a scene in the Philippines where the crew are trying desperately to repair their plane and get it airborne before the Japanese overrun their position.

There's also an air battle from the gunners' point of view which reminded me very much of a battle scene on the Millenium Falcon in Star Wars. Those big guns swiveling back and forth. In fact, now that I think about it, I remember my dad watching Star Wars with me and complaining about those guns. He said that was World War II technology and it was ridiculous to see it on a space ship. If they had hyperdrive, they would surely have guided missiles. I guess George Lucas thought it looked cool. Maybe he had seen this movie.

January 30 movie: The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. This was really, really bad. First of all, Rachel Weisz' replacement could not act her way out of a paper bag. Seriously, there are no other dark-haired actresses with British accents? The guy playing Fraser's and not-Weisz' son is equally bad. And the plot is ludicrous. And Jet Li is the villain, and he spends most of the movie stomping around as a CGI mud creature. Here's a tip: when you have Jet Li in your movie, do not make him into a mud man which can barely move! Duh. Most irritating is that the Chinese characters all speak Chinese with subtitles at first, then switch to English late in the movie. No actually, most irritating is that there are no mummies in this movie. But the characters keep talking about mummies! I'm sorry, Jet Li's character is not a mummy. He's a mud man.

The only good thing I can say about this movie is that Michelle Yeoh is also in it, and she and Jet Li have a good fight scene.

January 30 movie: It Should Happen to You. Jack Lemmon's first movie! It was a vehicle for Judy Holliday, though Lemmon has a great part as her love interest. Really funny and sweet without being overly sentimental. Also stars Peter Lawford as a sleazy rich guy. His character made me kind of uncomfortable. In particular the scenes where he tries to force his way into Holliday's apartment were hard for me to watch. Like, if he had managed to get into the apartment he probably would have raped her. I think in the early 60s he would have been seen as an aggressive ladies man, but that's not how it came across to me. Of course he's just there to show Holliday that mild-mannered ordinary guy Jack Lemmon is a much better catch. Which he is!

January 30 movie: Road to Utopia. This was everything I hoped for. Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour in a silly comedy with great songs and lots of breaking the fourth wall. They didn't actually go to Utopia; instead the movie is set in the Yukon. My only disappointment: I was hoping for a song about Alaska for my Independence Day show, and there wasn't one. Alas!

January 29 movie: The Getaway. My birthday dinner was cancelled on account of snow, and to make up for it I got to pick the movie that night and Georg watched it with me. So we watched the original The Getaway with Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw. Directed by Sam Peckinpah, and I have to say it's not Peckinpah's best effort, nor McQueen's. It drags at times, and there are some serious logical flaws. On the other hand, there are good moments throughout. And the big set piece at the end, in the hotel, is classic Peckinpah.

The original was vastly superior to the Alec Baldwin/Kim Basinger version. Which almost goes without saying. You know, I just realized something -- both versions of this movie featured costars who were a couple in real life. Interesting coincidence. Also, I thought of two things about the remake which were better. First, the heavy in the beginning, the money man who sets up the robbery that goes bad, is played by James Woods in the remake. He's way too good at playing a sleazy, smug rich asshole.

Second, there's a part in the middle where they're on their way to El Paso, they're identified, they get away, go on to another town, are IDed again, have to abandon their car, flee on foot and end up in a garbage truck. In the remake this is condensed down to one action sequence in one town, which tightened up that part of the movie considerably.

As for the two bits in the remake I mentioned, with identifiable Joss dialogue. On the train, McQueen silently grabs the woman's bag and shoves it into the compartment. No dialogue. In the gun shop, the clerk never drops behind the counter and never says anything funny.

On the other hand, the part at the end with the old redneck is way, way funnier in the original. Because the old guy is played by Slim Pickins.

January 29 movie: I Was a Communist for the FBI. This was more what I had in mind. So over the top it was hilarious. The title says it all: Frank Lovejoy stars as an FBI agent working undercover as a member of the Communist party.

In this movie there are communists lurking under every rock. They twirl their handlebar moustaches, steeple their hands and murmur "Excellent" while plotting the overthrow of the US government. The Communist Party in the US is presented as being about the same as the Stalinist regime. Party members spy on each other constantly. When one party member objects to a violent tactic, another (an older woman) shrieks at her for being disloyal. And the party assassinates anyone who tries to quit.

According to the movie, the civil rights movement was a front for communists. In fact, the party leader explains that it's a fundraising tactic: they incite race riots, hopefully the rioting blacks kill somebody white, then when they get arrested the communists raise money for the "defense fund," except the communists keep the money. (Warning, this scene includes offensive terms for blacks.) Labor unions are also a front for communists, and in one scene, the communists start a riot at a strike, using lead pipes wrapped in Yiddish newspapers to beat the factory representatives, so the Jewish community will be blamed. Also, the communists have an army of schoolteachers infiltrating public schools. The teachers identify idealistic children and target them for indoctrination.

Everyone knows Lovejoy is a communist and he is universally reviled. His son disowns him, his brother beats him up at their mother's funeral, his neighbor tells him to stay away from the neighbor's son. Robert Osborne said that this movie was intended to placate HUAC, and the climactic scene, where Lovejoy finally gets to denounce the communists and vindicate himself, takes place at a HUAC hearing. After the hearing his son begs forgiveness for not trusting him, and he says he was proud of his son's intolerance. "Even when you hated me, I loved you for it." Just as with My Son John, there's no room in this world for differing points of view. You're either with us or against us, and anyone who's the tiniest bit liberal is either the dupe of communists, or being indoctrinated to become one.

The weird thing is that the movie accuses communists of cynically exploiting workers and minorities. But that's what the movie is doing. When the movie suggests that the civil rights and labor union movements were entirely driven by communist plots, it reduces the people in those movements to simpleminded puppets, unable to act on their own behalf.

I'm not an expert on this period of history, but I understand that the "red menace" wasn't invented out of whole cloth; there was a communist presence in the US, and some part of it had ties to the Soviet Union. And this movie is so far-fetched, so ludicrous, it makes that history seem less plausible.

January 28 movie: My Son John. I had heard about this movie and had never been able to see it before. It's an extreme example of early 50s anti-communist hysteria, a cautionary tale about a simple, salt-of-the-earth older couple (Helen Hayes and Dean Jagger) who realize that their son (Robert Walker) is a communist. Walker eventually confesses to being a traitor, although he's never accused of any actual wrongdoing. According to the movie, his crimes include:

• moving to the big city,
• not going to church anymore,
• using "two dollar words,"
• not playing football in high school,
• saying things like "our only hope is to learn to live with our fellow man. The globe is getting smaller. We must tear down our spite fences and love our neighbors," and "I love humanity. I love the downtrodden, the helpless minorities."
• wanting a "lasting peace,"
• having the apartment key of a woman who is arrested for being a communist.

The movie presents a world where all virtue resides in small towns, where people who don't fit in are suspect, where college is a recruitment ground for communism, where intellect and education are anti-American values which true patriots avoid. Early on the father tells Walker, "They tell us to be alert, and you talk like the people we're supposed to be alert against." And in the world of My Son John, the father is right. Walker is a bookish man with a dry sense of humor who doesn't like sports. Obviously he's a communist.

This movie made me sad. Not just because there are too many people who still think this way. Even worse, Robert Walker died during production of this movie. They had to piece his final scenes together with footage from other movies, mainly Strangers on a Train. Walker had real talent, and it's a damn shame that this is how his career ended.

My Son John is worth watching to understand the political climate of the early 50s -- a politician who said "Americans need to watch what they say and watch what they do" wouldn't have been condemned -- though I didn't enjoy the experience. And I strongly advise against reading the comments on IMDB, unless you're interested in lengthy discussions of whether disliking this movie makes you a pinko.

January 27 movie: Duchess of Idaho. Esther Williams and Van Johnson starred in several movies together. This is one of their lesser efforts. It does have a few things going for it:

• specialty numbers by Lena Horne, Connie Haines and Eleanor Powell;
• a dance contest where Johnson and Williams have to hold a potato between their foreheads. They win and Williams is crowned the titular Duchess of Idaho;
• a song called "Choo Choo Choo to Idaho." This was a real thrill because I'm working on a 4th of July show with a song for every state. There are a few states I didn't have songs for, and Idaho was one. Well, there's an instrumental called "Idaho." If I can, I really want to find a song with lyrics for each state. That leaves me with only a few states I still need songs for: New Hampshire, Nebraska, Arizona, Alaska, and possibly Maryland.

The really weird thing about the movie is that Mel Torme is in it, and he doesn't sing. Whaa?

January 27 movie: The Bride Goes Wild. Van Johnson is a famous children's author, also a drunken lecher. June Allyson is a prim and proper schoolteacher doing the illustrations for his latest book. A monster child was introduced, and I think he was supposed to be cute in an "ain't I a stinker?" way, but in fact he was unwatchable. He made me glad I don't have children. I shouldn't include this on the movie list because I didn't watch the whole thing. I didn't even get to the half-way point. I'm only writing it up so I remember not to watch it again.

January 25 movie: The Guns of Navarone. They showed this on The Essentials this past weekend. I have to say, I'm enjoying Alec Baldwin's stint on The Essentials much more than I expected to. I wonder how much he contributes to his dialogue. I assume there's a script of some kind; they're too articulate for it to be purely off the cuff. Still, Baldwin sounds like he's talking about the movies from an actor's perspective, and it's interesting to hear.

January 23 movie: The Getaway. Not the original with Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw; this was the remake, with Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger. What's that, you say? Why on earth would I watch a crappy remake instead of the classic original? That sounds so unlike me!

Well, I watched it because of an interview with Joss Whedon. It turns out that Joss' first job in Hollywood was writing looplines. Which means coming into a movie that's already been filmed and writing new dialogue to be added to over-the-shoulder shots where you can't see the actor's face. It's much cheaper than filming entire new scenes (which wouldn't even be possible in many cases). Apparently they do it all the time in the editing phase, if they're having trouble getting the movie to work. Sometimes they just need to add a few good lines, to make a movie funnier or give it snappier dialogue; sometimes they do more extensive work. Joss said that when they're trying to make the movie make sense, it's almost like adding narration.

So Joss' first Hollywood job was writing looplines, and one of his first projects was The Getaway. And the way he described it: "if you look carefully at The Getaway, you'll see that when people's backs are turned, or their heads are slightly out of frame, the whole movie has a certain edge to it," made it sound like almost another movie within the movie. A secret Joss Whedon film hidden inside a dumb 90s action flick? This I had to see.

Well, either Whedon oversold his impact on The Getaway, or I'm not as good at interpreting movies as I thought. Because I really didn't see it. It was still the same crappy movie when the actors' backs were turned as when you could see their faces. There were a couple of moments where I thought, okay, that's Joss. For instance, there's a scene where Baldwin is chasing a man on a train. The camera is behind Baldwin, and a woman jumps in front of him and asks him to help her put her bag away. He grabs the bag, shoves it into the overhead compartment, and then says "No problem" as he blows past her. The timing and the casual way he says the line, that was very Joss.

The most obvious example was a scene where Baldwin and Basinger are holding up a gun shop owner. Baldwin tells the guy to get down on the floor, and as soon as he disappears behind the counter he starts talking, "Right, I know the drill! Count to 100, okay, 1, 2, I need a new job! 3, 4..." That was the only example I noticed where the "face out of frame" dialogue is unconnected to the rest of the scene and also changes the tone of the scene. Before that line it's not a funny scene. Once the shop owner starts talking, well, it wasn't classic wit for the ages, but it clearly gets the point across that the viewer can relax, nothing bad is going to happen (at least, not to that guy).

I guess the fact that I only noticed it a couple of times, maybe is a sign of Whedon's skill. Because he managed to integrate the new looplines so well into the dialogue that was already there, it comes off as one whole.

January 22 movie: How to Save a Marriage and Ruin Your Life. The sleaziest of sleazy sex comedies, this starred Dean Martin, Eli Wallach, Stella Stevens and Anne Jackson. It was kind of like Pillow Talk, except much more ... well I was going to say misogynist, but the movie seems to hate men as much as it hates women. At first it was appalling and then it became hilarious because it was so awful. The fact that people thought this was funny, that's what's funny.

I'm being a little unfair -- the acting is good, the comedic timing is good, there are some genuinely funny moments. It's just that the humor is so, deeply fucked up. It makes you wonder how men and women ever managed to fall in love, if they disliked each other that much. If you thought How to Murder Your Wife, Boy's Night Out and A Guide for the Married Man were funny, well, first of all, I don't want to know you. Secondly, you should try to catch How to Save a Marriage and Ruin Your Life. You'll love it.

January 19 movie: Cast a Dark Shadow. This was really, really good. Dirk Bogarde stars as a sleazy opportunist who marries a rich older woman, kills her for her money but botches it up. It sounds like I've just given away a major spoiler, but no, that was the first 15 minutes of the movie. The performances are terrific, especially Bogarde -- he has this way of sounding all sympathy and caring, while throwing a look of pure contempt, which is just chilling -- and Margaret Lockwood as Bogarde's second wife, a hard woman who is more than his match. My only criticism is that in the second half of the movie, the plot was a touch obvious. More than a touch actually. There's a major plot "twist" which you can see coming a mile away. Still well worth seeing for the acting.

January 18 movie: Die, Die My Darling. Whoo-ee, talk about stinkers made by legendary actresses late in life. This was almost the final film role for Tallulah Bankhead. Who was actually more of a theater star than a film star, and was in hardly any movies. She's probably best known for Lifeboat, though my favorite is the Depression-era Faithless. Anyway, I read that as she reached a certain age, appearing on stage every day became too physically demanding. She was offered this script for a Hammer film (called Fanatic in England) and agreed to do it because other actresses like Bette Davis were doing cheap horror movies, why couldn't she?

Bankhead stars as a religious fanatic (thus the title) mourning the death of her young son. Stephanie Powers, the son's fiancée, visits Bankhead, they clash over religion and morality, and Bankhead decides that she has to protect her son's immortal soul by locking Powers in the attic and tormenting the sin out of her.

I think religious fundamentalism must be somewhat different in England. When you hear "crazy religious fanatic" in a Hollywood movie you expect a certain type of character, which Bankhead's Mrs. Trefoile was not. She reminded me a lot of the preacher in Cold Comfort Farm. Except that guy wasn't eeevvvill. But the habits, the way they speak and the way they read from the Bible, fairly similar.

January 18 movie: Finishing School. Another pre-code drama, this one stars Frances Dee as a new student at, you guessed it, a finishing school. It's a snooty place concerned not with providing a genuine education or building character in the students; just with appearances and the school's reputation.

Dee is dumped off at the school by her selfish, frivolous mother, Billie Burke (the most negative character I've ever seen her play). Dee is immediately corrupted by her roommate, smart-mouthed party girl Ginger Rogers. Rogers sneaks Dee out of school one weekend and takes her to a hotel party where some guy tries to rape her. She's rescued by Bruce Cabot, a medical student working as a hotel waiter. Dee and Cabot start spending time together, fall in love, and she gets pregnant. The finishing school headmistress (Beaulah Bondi) and Dee's mother are horrible about it, concerned only with how it will reflect on them, Dee considers suicide, then Cabot rides to her rescue. Did I mention this movie was pre-code? There's also a hilarious scene of Dee and Rogers rolling around on the floor of their bedroom, wrestling over a bottle of bathtub gin. The pre-code equivalent of a pillow fight I guess.

Even for a pre-code movie the morality of Finishing School is surprising. The only people who condemn Dee's pregnancy are the villains. Of course Dee and Cabot agree to get married at the end, but they don't express any regret about having sex first. I read reviews complaining that the plot was so vague as to be incomprehensible, though I don't think that's true. No one ever says the word "pregnant" but it's clear what they mean. I think to a 1934 audience it would have been completely obvious.

January 17 movies: Broadway Melody of 1936 and Night Nurse. Two that I never miss an opportunity to watch. Broadway Melody of 1936 is a silly bit of fluff, most worth watching for Buddy Ebsen's first movie role (and, I think, the only one for his sister Vilma). Night Nurse is a pre-code sleazefest starring Barbara Stanwyck, Clark Gable and Joan Blondell. Both are great fun.

January 16 movie: Battleground. I love this movie. Van Johnson leads a terrific ensemble of infantrymen during the Battle of the Bulge. This time I paid attention to James Whitmore who played the sergeant. It was a really good performance. All the actors are really good. My only complaint is that I wish the characters had had a little more depth instead of being the usual cast of cliches. It's still a great movie.