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February 22 movie: The Heiress. The month before the Oscars is always slim pickings on TCM, at least for my tastes. Every movie is either super depressing, way too recent to be on TCM, or I've already seen it a dozen times.

This one is in the "super depressing" category. I didn't know beforehand that it was based on a Henry James novel (Washington Square) but that explained a lot. Olivia de Havilland plays a homely, awkward young woman who lives under the thumb of her cold, distant, rich father. She meets and falls in love with Montgomery Clift, whom her father suspects of being a fortune hunter. Does true love win out? Remember this is Henry James and you'll figure it out.

De Havilland is amazing. Her transformation -- first a lonely wallflower, then daring to love, finally having all warmth and compassion crushed out of her -- was magnificent, if not easy to watch. Not many actresses were willing to be so unglamorous. The father is excellent as well, giving sympathy to a part that could have been a cardboard villain. I read that there's a recent version of Washington Square that's truer to the book and goes into more depth with the father. I might get it from Netflix. Then again, maybe I should rent something cheerful instead.

February 21 movie: The Castle of Cagliostro. It's interesting to see how Miyazaki approaches movies for different age groups. We speculated that this one was aimed at teenage boys: the hero is a happy-go-lucky crook, and a female spy shows up who mentions having had a sexual relationship with the hero. The plot is a bit romancey -- he rescues a princess from a forced marriage to an evil count -- but the romance is downplayed in favor of the ripping adventure story. We enjoyed it quite a bit, though (like Cowboy Bebop) it suffered a bit from clearly belonging to a series that we hadn't seen. Not that the movie was hard to follow. Just that I could tell I would have enjoyed the interactions better if I'd been following the characters.

February 20 movie: The Blind Swordsman's Revenge. I think this was one of the better Zatoichi movies so far. Zatoichi avenges the murder of his massage teacher, and rescues the teacher's daughter (along with all the other women) from a brothel where she is being held prisoner. He also befriends a single dad who runs crooked dice games, and convinces the man that a more honest career would set a better example for his preteen daughter. Unfortunately, in the final scenes we see the father clumsily practicing swordplay. As ideal careers go for single fathers, I don't think sword-for-hire is much better than crooked dealer.

February 19 movie: Marie Antoinette. Years ago, before we had a DVR, I was watching this movie on TCM one night while Georg was out with some friends. He came back just at the end, and while he was was telling me about his evening I missed Norma Shearer's big tearful final speech. Ever since I've been watching TCM's listings, waiting for them to rerun Marie Antoinette so I could see the ending. Well they finally did on Friday, and I watched the movie on Saturday. And dang if they didn't screw up their schedule and start the movie a couple of minutes late, causing the DVR to cut out just before Norma Shearer's tearful final speech! Argh!

Now I'll never find out what Marie Antoinette said right before they executed her. Because I'm not sitting through this movie a third time. It wasn't bad, but not worth three viewings. Shearer's Marie Antoinette is kind, devoted to her husband and though largely ignorant, concerned about the poor in her own way. We all know that the real Marie Antoinette never said "let them eat cake," but this figure of benevolence was a bit much. The only interesting characters were the deliciously nasty Duke of Orleans and John Barrymore as Louis XV, but neither one is on screen long enough.

February 19 movie: Gambit. Mid 60s crime movie with Michael Caine and Shirley MacLaine. I recorded this because I was hoping it would have a mod sensibility, a la The Italian Job or The Ipcress File. It didn't, but I still enjoyed the movie. Caine and MacLaine had good chemistry in this story about a crime caper that succeeds, then fails, then succeeds. It's funny and actually suspenseful at times. I was annoyed in advance at MacLaine's casting as "a Eurasian," but her character was only supposed to be 1/4 Chinese so it was more believeable than Sean Connery as the most hirsute Japanese man ever. (Which I still have nightmares about.) Even if I hadn't enjoyed the movie, Gambit was worth it for this line alone: "Why is it that people who follow people always end up fingering trinkets?"

I'm sure no one will blame me for falling so far behind in my movie write ups. I'm going to blow through these pretty quickly to get caught up.

February 6 movie: The Abominable Dr. Phibes. It was kind of depressing to see Joseph Cotten and Vincent Price, both tremendous actors, in a piece of junk like this. They both give it their all and I appreciate that they never behave like they're too good for the material. But really, this movie is sad. Price especially looks like utter hell. With the Bible-themed serial murders, this could have been an inspiration for Se7en. And trashy as it was, I'm a thousand times happier watching The Abominable Dr. Phibes.

February 6 movie: Finding Nemo. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this sweet, funny movie. And I'm probably the last person in the world to see it, so I don't have much else to say.

February 6 movie: Intermezzo: A Love Story. Young piano player Ingrid Bergman falls in love with musical genius Leslie Howard, they run away together, and eventually she gives him up so he can go back to his family. Yawn. I only watched this because it was Bergman's first movie in English.

February 9 movie: Fight, Zatoichi, Fight! Zatoichi feels responsible for a young mother's death (she's accidently killed by bad guys who were gunning for him) so he offers to take her infant child to its father. The kid is pleasantly quiet, and therefore better for Zatoichi to play off than the annoying boy in Zatoichi Challenged. I struggled to remember anything about this movie, but I don't think it was the movie's fault.

February 10 movie: Gaslight. Charles Boyer slowly convinces his wife Ingrid Bergman that she is insane, while detective Joseph Cotten tries to help her. This is an excellent movie but I found it a bit difficult to watch Boyer mentally torturing Bergman.

February 11 movie: Guru. I thought this was going to be really funny, but actually it was juvenile and sex-obsessed, and also not that funny. It's about an Indian guy who comes to the US to get rich, befriends a porn star and asks her to teach him how to be a porn actor. She complies by telling him all kinds of goofy sex-related new age mumbo jumbo, which he turns around and repeats to Park Avenue types as "the guru of sex," at a tidy profit. Plus she's getting married to a fireman she doesn't really love, but it's okay because he's secretly gay. Which the family priest knows and is totally fine with. The priest has also seen the porn star's work. There were a couple of Bollywood numbers, but that alone couldn't save this movie.

February 15 movie: Lover Come Back. The second Rock Hudson / Doris Day movie has them as rival advertising people, but the basic premise (Hudson lying to Day about his identity while she throws herself at him) is the same. Robert Osborne called this funnier than Pillow Talk, and it may have been, but I found the deception more off-putting. Because Hudson wasn't just degrading Day, he was also destroying her career. What does that say about me, that I find the professional betrayal more offensive than the personal? Tony Randall is in both, playing basically the same character, but Pillow Talk has one unassailable advantage: Thelma Ritter in amazing performance as Day's wise-cracking maid. Lover Come Back has Ann B. Davis instead, which is no contest.

February 15 movie: Cowboy Bebop. This was pretty good. I think it would have made more sense if I had ever seen the series. The music was a disappointment, after having heard so much about the fabulous Cowboy Bebop soundtrack. Maybe the Japanese release had better music; we saw it on IFC, dubbed.

February 16 movie: Finding Nemo. Came home from Stoneline while Georg was watching this and caught the second half with him. Still sweet, still funny, I still don't have anything to say about it.

February 16 movie: The Time Machine. I love this movie. The 60s version with Rod Taylor, not the horrible remake with Guy Pierce. The thoughtful tone is so well suited to sf. I wish more movies would take that approach rather than being stupid overblown explodo-fests.

February 19 movie: The Hulk. Speaking of stupid overblown explodo-fests! Oh lordie this movie was lame. Lame! I'm not familiar with the original Hulk backstory, so I don't know how much they messed with it. But I have to ask one thing: why the heck does the Hulk jump like that? Did he do it in the comic? Even if he did, they should have dropped because it made him look ridiculous. We called him the Hippity Hoppity Hulk.

February 19 movie: Hollywood Canteen. This silly but very fun movie suggests that a GI (Robert Hutton, a Jimmy Stewart lookalike) could go to the Hollywood Canteen and in the space of a week win the love of a B movie star (Joan Leslie). The Canteen was a real place, a nightclub for WWII military men to socialize with movie stars. According to the movie it was Bette Davis' brainchild, although the movie also made it seem as though major celebrities did everything from serving sandwiches to washing dishes, so I'm not entirely sure about its accuracy. Anyway this was hardly great art, but it was fun to see all the stars. Peter Lorre and Sidney Greenstreet have a nice little scene, intimidating a guy who danced too roughly with one of the Andrews Sisters. And Alan Hale is in it! He stands at the door and welcomes the millionth visitor to the canteen (Our Hero, of course).

February 5 movie: The Ipcress File. This was a nice counterpoint to Bond: Michael Caine plays a spy, and a good one, but one who doesn't really want to do it, and who lives and works in a much grittier world. The movie is super cool, even without the glamorous settings of the Bond movies. There's a great scene where Caine runs into his boss at the grocery store, and then lectures the boss on the value of the finer things (i.e. the champignon really are worth the extra money over the plain old button mushrooms). I think Bond would be down with the sentiment, but I can't see Bond cooking his own meals, much less doing his own shopping, not to mention arguing with M in the supermarket while their carts keep banging into the aisles.

As Lisa mentioned, the movie featured some very silly mind control. Which did not detract from my enjoyment. You just have to accept that anything high-tech in a 40 year old movie is going to look dated, and move on. And besides, while the technology itself was dated, the way the characters dealt with it wasn't at all. No cheap gimmicks like making a computer blow up by asking it "why?" (a low to which which my favorite show of the era, The Prisoner, did stoop).

February 5 movie: On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Between this and the early Connery movies, I finally get the Bond thing. It's not just the presence of Diana Rigg, although that helped a lot. In the good ones the plots and supervillains and sex-crazed girls are still silly, but the right star can pull it off. Roger Moore just wasn't "rico suave" like Sean Connery and George Lazenby, and Moore's movies were way too campy. (Can I interject how hard it is for me to type "George" with an e? I drop the e every single time.)

It's too bad Lazenby never did anything after this movie. Well according to IMDB he did a lot, but all crap. Some Hong Kong movies, a bunch of Emmanuelle movies, even a stint on General Hospital in 1982. That was around the time I started watching GH, but I don't remember his character. He must have been on very briefly, because there's another character now with the same first name. And they never reuse first names of characters with any import. That's one of the reasons so many soap characters have stupid names: they used all the normal names decades ago. But then again, lots of real kids are being given stupid names these days so maybe they're just following the trend.

Anyway. Lisa pointed out, and I wholeheartedly agree, that Clive Owen strongly resembles Lazenby. Both of them have cleft chins so deep they look like butts. I've only seen a couple of Owen's movies -- Croupier and Gosford Park -- but he seems like he'll be a good choice for Bond. I read that the next Bond movie will be another go at Casino Royale. Coincidentally, Lisa and I decided we should watch the original Casino Royale next. The Clive Owen version isn't even listed on IMDB yet so I guess it will be awhile before it comes out.

February 4 movie: The Farmer's Daughter. Loretta Young plays a young Swedish woman who takes a job in the home of wealthy political insiders, and somehow ends up running for Congress herself, against the candidate handpicked by her employers. This was a funny movie with an odd combination of a sweet romantic story and a cynical political story, and a great cast: Ethel Barrymore, Joseph Cotten, Charles Bickford. I heard that they originally wanted Ingrid Bergman to play the Loretta Young character, but Bergman thought that playing a Swedish woman in a light comedy wouldn't be enough of an acting challenge.

Barrymore plays the widowed matriarch, Cotten is her son, and Bickford is the family butler and Barrymore's closest confidant. But here's the weird thing. I've always thought that Bickford and Cotten look a lot alike. So much so that I used to get them confused. So what was the deal with the casting? Was I supposed to think that maybe Bickford was secretly Cotten's father? Because that's what I was thinking the whole time. It put a totally different spin on the movie.

February 4 movie: The Corn is Green. Bette Davis plays a schoolteacher in a Welsh mining town who teaches basic literacy to the unwashed masses, and helps one brilliant student (John Dall, the villain in Rope) get into Oxford. Dall's Welsh accent was terrible, but at least he tried. Davis' character wasn't Welsh, and her voice is always a bit affected so she didn't really have to speak differently.

This could have been an interesting story about preserving cultural identity vs. self-improvement, but they gloss over that pretty quickly. After a brief and easily overcome period of negativity, no one in the village is threatened or resentful that Dall stops working in the mine, starts talking differently and dressing differently from the rest of them. Which is not to say that I wanted to see the villagers trying to keep him down. Just that I think it would be more natural to see some suspicion when a member of a close-knit community isolates himself from the rest, as if "bettering himself" means "not one of us anymore."

It reminds me of that Monty Python sketch about the playwright whose son wants to be a miner. The playwright is angry and accuses his son of behaving like he's too good for the London theater community.

So was Old Mother Hubbard Welsh or something? Because at the end of the movie the old ladies in the village dress up in their best clothes to celebrate Dall getting into Oxford. And I swear to god they looked just like Old Mother Hubbard. That pointy stove-pipe hat and the big dress with the white ruffled collar and the big buckle.

February 3 movie: The Paradine Case. Lesser Hitchcock movie with Gregory Peck as a lawyer who falls in love with his client, a woman accused of murdering her husband. This is really sad, but I saw the movie three days ago and I can't remember whether she really did it or not. Goes to show how unmemorable the movie was. There were some nice Hitchcock moments, like one where a witness enters the courtroom and the camera follows him walking behind the defendant, while she tries to see him out of the corner of her eyes without moving her head. It's hard to explain but it was a nice shot.

I just read on IMDB that Selznick really screwed with the movie, insisting on actors that Hitchcock didn't want and demanding extensive changes, even reshooting part of the movie himself. Maybe it would have been a better movie without all those changes.

February 2 movie: Smilin' Through. This was a fairly silly movie starring Norma Shearer and Leslie Howard. Howard plays a bitter old man whose true love was murdered by a jealous rival on their wedding day. Shearer plays the ghost of the murdered girl, who shows up now and then to tell Howard how happy they'll be when he dies too. Thanks, ghost, for keeping the poor guy chained to your memory for his whole life! Good to know you have his best interests at heart! Shearer also plays an orphaned niece living with Howard as his ward. She falls in love with the son of the man who killed Howard's fiance, and Howard is a total bastard about it. Until the very end when he finally sees the light and gives the young couple his blessing, then immediately drops dead and rejoins his ghost fiance.

I hate to say this, but the more Norma Shearer movies I see, the less I like her. She more or less plays the same character in every movie; she just doesn't have the range of someone like Bette Davis to keep bringing me back again and again. I do like Leslie Howard but he wasn't so convincing as an old man. Probably I judged him unfairly because of just having seen Kind Hearts and Coronets.

February 1 movie: The Merry Widow. I've fallen so far behind in writing up movies that I'm having a hard time remembering the details. But I'll do my best.

I watched this because Jaime Weinman, whose culture blog I love, wrote about it the day before they showed it on TCM. I wonder if that was a coincidence or if he knew it was on TCM's schedule? Anyway he was mainly writing about the impact of the Hayes Code on the movie, which was made just before they started enforcing the code, but came out right after. Apparently the basic plot wasn't changed at all, but many trivial and seemingly pointless edits were made to accommodate the code. For example, "Danilo (Maurice Chevalier) says: 'Let's go upstairs, to the private dining room.' In the cut version, with a jump cut, this becomes: 'Let's go... to the private dining room.'" Since they do go to the private dining room, which features a bed rather than a dining table, it's hard to see why mentioning its location upstairs was the problem.

On the other hand, one of Weinman's comments mystified me when I read it: "Danilo greets each of the "Maxim girls" individually. One line is cut: when he asks one of them: 'Do you still cry when you love someone?'" Why on earth would this make a difference? But on seeing the film it made a little more sense. First because Maxime's is clearly a whorehouse, and second because his tone of voice when saying the line makes it sound like he's talking about the noises she makes during sex.

Anyway it was a good movie, very funny. There was one hilarious scene where the King catches Chevalier in the Queen's bedroom, and they all pretend to be having a pleasant conversation so the servants won't catch on. Except they don't actually talk about anything, just mumble gibberish at each other.

January 30 movie: King Solomon's Mines. Adventure movie based on an H. Rider Haggard story and starring Stewart Granger and his hair! Alas, this was the first major Hollywood role for Granger's hair, and it only made a few appearances. It spent most of the movie hiding under one of those safari hats. When the hair does appear, it's a mere shadow of the massive pompadour it would someday be.

Oh, and Deborah Kerr was also in the movie, playing basically the same role as Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen, but with much less gusto. The real star was the African landscape. Beautiful scenery and convincingly scary thrills, notably a stampede that nearly tramples the adventurers. There was a spider early on that was so phony it could have wandered in from Mystery Science Theater, but after that they did a great job with the animal effects. Another nice touch was using no soundtrack music except that provided by the African people they meet along the way. I have no idea how realistic their portrayal of African communities were, but at least they seemed to be aware that people in different parts of Africa would have different cultures and speak different languages.

I couldn't see Granger as Allan Quatermain without imagining him decades later as the aging opium addict in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comic (the less said about the movie, the better). I've never read any H. Rider Haggard but I did read a book once (Evil Sisters by Bram Dijkstra) about negative portrayals of women in late 19th century science and literature, and early 20th century film. As I recall Dijkstra spent a lot of time on Haggard. According to Dijkstra, Haggard treated Africa as dark, mysterious, nonrational, capricious, and dangerous as a symbol of his (Haggard's) negative view of femininity, which is apparently lying in wait to snap its vagina dentata and rob men of their virile essence or something.

It's been a long time since I read that book, and I may be seriously misrepresenting it. But I do remember thinking that Dijkstra's point was a lot more convincing when he wrote about scientists who did explicitly claim that women were parasites who used sex to sap men of their life essence and intelligence through their semen. (No I'm not making that up.) But even there, I don't remember Dijkstra convincing me that this was mainstream thought at the time, or just a few wackos. And I really wasn't sold on Dijkstra's idea of late 19th century literature as rife with male authors conflating brown people with women, treating both as gaping maws of evil.

I do remember that Alien 3 came out around the time I read Evil Sisters and seemed to fit in pretty well with Dijkstra's thesis. The hero is a woman, but not all that womanly: Ripley looks quite masculine with her lean body and shaved head. On the other hand the alien is a wet, squooshy, unstoppable reproductive machine. Heck, its face kind of looks like a vagina dentata. And the tagline for the movie was "The Bitch is Back," but the alien is the bitch, not Ripley. But maybe this is one of those ideas that you see everywhere just because you're looking for it.

Well, this is a really long digression. I guess if I have a point, it's that I couldn't see Dijkstra's thesis at all in the movie version of King Solomon's Mines. Just a fun adventure movie. Which of course doesn't mean anything. He was writing about a book, not a movie adaptation made decades later.

January 30 movie: The Usual Suspects. The only other time I'd seen this movie, I didn't know the big twist. Actually, I didn't even know there was a big twist, but Georg called while I was watching it (he was still living in NY at the time) and I told him what I was watching, and he said something about "the 'who is Keyser Soze' secret," and then I knew to look for it, and it was fairly late in the movie so almost everyone was dead, which made it pretty obvious who it was -- of the two who were left, it was the one they weren't pointing you towards.

This time I wondered how the movie would hold up if you know the secret already. Pretty well actually. The movie is tight and holds together well enough that there's more to enjoy than just figuring out who it is. There were a few clues early on (one that my friend Peggy pointed out to me, in a very early scene the person in question holds a cigarette the way they do in Eastern Europe, and another time he kind of smirks when no one is looking at him) but nothing that made me feel stupid for not figuring it out sooner. In a way, the knowledge that all the flashbacks were just spinning yarns makes the bulk of the movie seem kind of pointless, but I still enjoyed it.