November 19 movie: The Lady Eve. I've said before how much I love this movie. I even already mentioned the presence of Charles Coburn, Eugene Pallette and Eric Blore, three supporting actors I love in everything they do. I think my favorite scene this time was when Barbara Stanwyck makes up a lengthy series of imaginary past lovers to shock Henry Fonda, punctuated by sound effects from the train they're riding on. It's comedy gold.
November 18 movie: Man's Favorite Sport? This is one of those hostile romantic comedies from the early 60s. Rock Hudson plays a fishing expert who works for Abercrombie & Fitch. Apparently before it was the place for half-naked gay college students, it was the place for fully clothed gay fishing experts. Paula Prentiss plays the promotions director for a fishing tournament who strong-arms Hudson into competing. Trouble is, he's a fraud who doesn't know how to fish! Dum-dum! Also there's a guy working for the tournament who pretends to be a Native American by acting out the worst stereotypes imaginable. This movie was very not funny. About the only thing I can compliment is the opening credits.
November 18 movie: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Alicia, you are safe! Georg said pretty much everything I would have said about the movie, so I'll just talk about the moviegoing experience instead.
It's been a long time since I've seen a movie in a theater that crowded. We had to sit way down in front, in the section without stadium seating. Is there a term for the opposite of nosebleed seats? Maybe neck pain seats, because that's definitely what we had by the end of the movie. On the bright side, the audience was remarkably not rude. Once the movie got going the talking pretty much stopped.
The trailers pretty much ranged from "meh" to "suck." Except the "Superman Jesus" trailer which was a big dose of "huh?" I swear to god, the trailer ends with Superman flying up to the heavens, surrounded by a holy glow, while a booming voice talks about saving the people of Earth by sending his only son to them. It's freaky.
Interesting trivia: Brandon Routh, the actor who plays Superman, got started on the soap opera One Life to Live about 4 years ago. He played Seth, the boyfriend of good girl Jessica. Except really he was the secret boyfriend of Jessica's long lost twin Natalie, and was helping Natalie plot against Jessica. Anyway, the scuttlebutt at the time was that Routh was fired because he refused to go along with plans to make the character bisexual, which to my knowledge would have been the first bi love triangle on daytime. Seth was recast but they ditched the storyline anyway. There were a couple of ho-yay scenes of another guy hiding in the bushes while Seth and Jessica made out, leering and both of them, and then the whole thing was dropped. I can't even remember if Seth moved away or just faded off the canvas. Anyway, besides the whole gay thing Routh's acting wasn't very good. You may be thinking "bad for a soap? Wow, that's bad." But what I really mean is that soaps demand a certain style of acting that he wasn't able to do. Who knows, he might be great as Superman.
November 17 movie: I Married a Witch. Veronica Lake plays a witch who in the seventeenth century curses Fredic March and all his descendants to be unhappy in love. Then she comes back in the present day -- well, the 1940s -- and while tormenting March's descendant (also played by March), falls for him. I greatly enjoyed this very funny movie, which was the inspiration for the TV show Bewitched.
November 14 movie: Hard to Get. Olivia de Havilland plays a spoiled hieress who tries to stiff a gas-station worker (Dick Powell) at an "auto camp" (like a motel). When Powell makes her clean rooms to pay for the gas, she decides to get back at him by pretending to be a maid and tricking him into tangling with her father. It's kind of like The Richest Girl in the World, except in that movie Miriam Hopkins was a decent girl who just wanted to be loved for herself. Not a vicious brat who wants to hurt people for daring to assume the rules apply to her too.
November 13 movies: It Happened to Jane. Doris Day plays a widowed lobster fisherwoman living in a small Maine town, who sues a huge railroad company owned by Ernie Kovacs, doing his best Charles Foster Kane impersonation to play the "meanest man in the world." Jack Lemmon plays Day's love interest, a lawyer in the small town who's passionate about bettering his world through politics.
The movie was funny, very funny at times, but it just didn't work for me. Lemmon is badly miscast, Day is so squeaky clean you could scrub a floor with her, and by the end of the movie I was so sick of salt-of-the-earth New Englanders and their homespun wisdom I wanted to scream. What I wouldn't give for urbane sophisticates trading quips over champagne cocktails!
November 13 movie: Bataan. It wasn't just war movies last weekend; it was depressing war movies. I watched this one because of the cast, which included Robert Taylor, Robert Walker and Desi Arnez. According to Robert Osbourne this was the first Hollywood movie to show an African American soldier who is the equal of the other soldiers. He didn't have much personality, but at least he wasn't a horrible step-and-fetchit stereotype.
November 12 movie: They Were Expendable. I think they were showing war movies last weekend because of Veteran's Day. This was a movie about PT boat captains in the Philippines, starring John Wayne and Robert Montgomery. I love Montgomery but generally dislike Wayne, so this was kind of a wash for me.
November 12 movie: Hell is For Heroes. This is one of the darker, more gritty war movies I've seen. I recorded it because Bobby Darin was in it. He doesn't look anything like Kevin Spacey. Actually, in this movie he looked like the guy who played Carmine in Laverne & Shirley. Steve McQueen and James Coburn are also in it. And a very young Bob Newhart provides some comic relief before things go all to hell. I didn't recognize him but Georg walked through the room while Newhart was saying funny stuff on the phone. Apparently that was his schtick.
November 11 movie: Nothing Sacred. This was a deranged movie with Carol Lombard as a young woman from a small town in Vermont who pretends to be dying of radiation poisoning. Fredric March is the NY reporter who needs a big story to revive his career, so he brings her to the big city where all Manhattan falls in love with the brave dying girl. We're supposed to sympathize with Lombard when she tries to extricate herself but can't, but it wasn't clear to me why she made up this horrible lie in the first place. I didn't enjoy this movie because I couldn't get over the premise. It's hard to root for someone who would do such a thing, even if she is Carol Lombard.
One funny thing: the publisher of March's newspaper is named Oliver Stone. This yields the hilarious line "I can't stand that phony Santy Claus Oliver Stone slobbering and drooling over me!"
November 10 movie: Come Live With Me. A very silly screwball comedy with Hedy Lamarr and Jimmy Stewart. Lamarr is an Austrian refugee facing deportation, who pays starving writer Stewart to marry her so she can stay in the country. Stewart of course falls in love with her, but she's busy getting it on with a wealthy, older publisher. Who does she end up with? Well if you've ever seen a screwball comedy, you don't have to ask.
I enjoyed this very much except for 2 things: Stewart's "salt of the earth" grandma, who speaks only in proverbs, and these creepy cartoons in the closing credits of Lamarr and Stewart with the bodies of fireflies. Eek.
November 10 movie: Crossroads. Suspense movie with Hedy Lamarr and William Powell being blackmailed by Basil Rathbone. Why did Basil Rathbone always play the villain? Well I guess he wasn't the villain in those Sherlock Holmes movies.
November 11 movie: To Be Or Not To Be. A screwball comedy about the Nazi invasion of Poland sounds freaky. And, it is kind of freaky. But Ernst Lubitsch, Carol Lombard and Jack Benny somehow manage to make it funny. Lombard and Benny play Polish actors trying to trick a Nazi spy into giving his information on the Polish underground to them instead of to the Gestapo. The wonderful comedic actor Sig Ruman has a big supporting role. I had to look up his name but I've seen him in tons of movies & you probably have too. He usually plays a cheerful but not-too-bright German. He was Sgt. Schultz in Stalag 17, which was of course the inspiration for Sgt. Schultz in Hogan's Heroes.
November 8 movie: North by Northwest. Speaking of movies with a gay subtext. Was it Hitchcock's birthday or something? TCM must have showed 20 of his movies.
Isn't it weird how it's easier to write about a bad movie than a good one. I don't have much to say about North by Northwest except that it's an excellent movie, and if you haven't seen it you really should. It's probably Hitchcock's most blatant use of a macguffin. I mean that scene at the airport where the government man tells Cary Grant that James Mason is in "buying and selling." "Buying and selling what?" asks Grant. "Oh, let's say government secrets." He's basically saying right in the script that it doesn't matter what the macguffin is; it's just the thing that drives the plot.
November 6 movie: How to Murder Your Wife. Forget Gigli, this was the worst movie ever made. Or at least, the worst movie I saw last weekend. It was without a doubt the most mysogynist movie I've ever seen. And that includes Boys Night Out and A Guide for the Married Man. I wouldn't have minded that if it had been funny like A Guide for the Married Man.
Jack Lemmon stars as an inveterate bachelor/newspaper cartoonist, who lives with his butler Terry-Thomas. Lemmon gets super drunk one night and wakes up the next morning married to the girl who jumped out of the cake, a sexy Italian woman who speaks no English. She proceeds to ruin his life by cooking him fattening foods, watching TV in bed, and girling up his space age bachelor pad. So he plots her murder -- in the cartoon only, of course. Unfortunately he always photographs himself acting out his cartoon stories and uses the photos to draw the cartoons. And witnesses see him acting out the murder (with a dummy), and his poor wife disappears at the same time, and so he's charged with murder. Instead of proving his innocence on the stand, he gives a speech explaining that women are so hateful that any man who could get rid of his wife without consequences would do it in a heartbeat. He is instantly acquitted by the all-male jury and carried out of the courtroom on their shoulders. He goes home, discovers his wife waiting naked in bed, and decides he loves her after all. The End. Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy, doesn't it?
The one funny thing about this movie is the huge gay subtext running through it. The relationship between Lemmon and Thomas is totally gay, and when Lemmon winds up married, Thomas walks out in a huff to go work for another bachelor. All the men in the movie, all of them, dislike and avoid women. They don't even hate their wives and screw their mistresses; they just want to be away from women. At one point the wife sneaks into the locker room of Lemmon's all-male club. How do you think a bunch of guys in the 60s would react to a super-sexy woman in their locker room? I think she'd be lucky to get out alive. But these guys squeal and hide like eighth grade girls who found a boy in the girl's bathroom. Women are just plain icky to these men.
November 6 movie: Shadow of a Doubt. I had never seen this all the way through before, and I'm really glad I did. I think it's one of Hitchcock's best movies. Casting Joseph Cotten as the villain was brilliant. He has an air of decency about him that makes it even more chilling when he's revealed as a killer. I remember reading that Hitchcock tried to do the same thing with Suspicion but the studio interceded. They said that movie audiences wouldn't accept Cary Grant as a villain so Hitchcock had to rewrite the ending and make Grant innocent. Fie on them, I say.
November 6 movie: Confessions of a Nazi Spy. I'm not sure whether this or Gigli was the 3rd worst movie I saw last weekend. I think Gigli was probably worse because this had Edward G. Robinson. On the other hand, Gigli had Christopher Walken, even if only for a few minutes. And I never felt totally bored during Gigli as I did a couple of times during Confessions of a Nazi Spy. I can't decide.
Anyway this was a 1939 movie about Nazi spy rings in the US. I guess it was a propanganda piece to get Americans riled up against the Nazis in anticipation of the war. They used a docudrama style with the movie, although I don't think it was based on actual people. Except in a general sense that there were indeed German spies in the US at that time.
One problem with this movie is that the Germans are such idiots they're overcome either by their greed or their stupidity. And the ones who aren't stupid are easily defeated by the super FBI skills of G-man Edward G. Robinson. Taking this movie too seriously might make you wonder why the Nazis were ever a threat. But the real problem is that Robinson doesn't appear onscreen until 45 minutes in. I would have enjoyed it more if he had been in it more.
In any case, this was interesting as a historical moment but I can't recommend it as a movie. Although it did yield the hilarious line, said in all sincerity: "German cooking: the best in the world!"
November 6 movie: The Richest Girl in the World. This was a fun screwball comedy with Miriam Hopkins and Joel McCrea. Hopkins plays the title character, Dorothy Hunter (loosely based on Barbara Hutton I believe). The premise is that Hopkins routinely changes places with her secretary to avoid the public eye. McCrea falls for her thinking she's the secretary. Then Hopkins decides to find out which he loves more, her or the money, by encouraging him to woo the heiress. Who is actually the secretary (played by Fay Wray). My description is confusing but it makes perfect sense if you're watching the movie.
November 5 movie: Portrait of Jennie. This is a strange movie, and I love it. By strange I mean atmospheric and melancholy rather than weird. Although it is a little weird. The two stars, Joseph Cotten and Jennifer Jones, are amazing. She has to portray so many ages, from a little girl to a grown woman, and she does it effectively without relying on modern makeup techniques.
November 5 movie: Charade. I took a break from the bad movies to watch something wonderful. The chemistry between Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn is amazing, and her clothes are even more amazing. The movie is exciting and suspenseful too; I didn't even mind James Coburn's horrible Texas accent.
November 5 movie: Tomorrow, the World! This was the second worst movie I saw last weekend. It was about an American family, headed by Fredric March, who adopt a German boy during the war. (I missed the first few minutes so I don't know how the boy got to the US.) The boy is a vicious little Hitler Youth; before the movie is over he beats up the other kids; finds out that one girl's father is in a prisoner of war camp in Germany and threatens to have her father killed; writes anti-semitic messages outside the school about his Jewish teacher (who's also March's fiancee); tries to steal state secrets from March; and when his adoptive sister catches him in the act, brains her with a fireplace poker & nearly kills her.
March calls the police on the little Nazi, but the teacher tells the boy how since he has no friends, his adoptive sister planned his birthday party, paid the other kids to come and bought all the presents, including borrowing a year's allowance to get him the night-vision watch he wanted. The kid breaks down and cries, so they decide he's human after all and he can stay with them.
This movie was made during the war, but I think after the tide had turned for the Allies. Everyone in the movie seems to have known that we were going to win. March talks several times about the German kid being a test case for how to deal with Germany after the war: if they can get through to the Hitler Youth kid, then they can get through to the German people. The message seems to be that the German people were monsters, but if we went into hock to buy them friends and nice things, they'd see the error of their ways. As Georg said, that's the Marshall Plan right there.
November 5 movie: The Mask of Dimitrios. This thriller starring Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre was nothing to write home about, but they are such a great pair that I'll watch anything with them in it. The best line was from Lorre: "He was my friend! Well, not my friend, but he was a nice man!"
November 4 movie: Gigli. I recorded this to see if it was true when people called it the worst movie ever made. Well, it wasn't. Worst movie ever, my eye. It was bad, to be sure: I've never liked Ben Affleck, his John Travolta imitation was awful, and he had negative chemistry with J.Lo. Also the kid with Rain Man Syndrome was beyond annoying, and in general the tone of the movie was weirdly off. That said, Gigli wasn't the worst movie I saw last weekend. It might not even have been in the bottom 3.
November 3 movie: From Dusk Till Dawn. When this movie came out, I had the idea in my head that it was the ultimate scary, gory horror film that I should never, ever watch. Well I was either much more squeamish then, or the people who told me about it thought I was. It wasn't scary at all. It was gory, but not too much. My friend Jason P. didn't like it because it was silly, but that's exactly why I did like it. I thought it was silly good fun. I think the Netflix DVD package perfectly set my expectations by describing the movie as a parody of 60s Mexican horror films. With that in mind, I enjoyed it immensely.
Georg and I watched the commentary together and I have to say, it wasn't a very good commentary. It was basically two old friends (Tarantino and Rodriguez) sitting around chatting for two hours & congratulating themselves for being so clever. There were a few interesting tidbits here and there; for instance Tarantino said the stuff at the beginning, about the hostage, was there to make us see the Gecko brothers as truly bad people, not just roguish bad boys. Well, if that was the goal then they failed, mainly due to casting George Clooney. It's impossible for him to be anything but a rogish bad boy. And good thing too: I don't think I would have enjoyed the movie nearly as much if both brothers had been creepy and villainous like Tarantino's character.
October 30 movie: Blackmail. This was Britain's first talkie, directed by Hitchcock. They started out filming a silent movie and switched mid-stream to sound, which led to some interesting techniques (like crowd scenes with a general babble of noise, but no sync sound). The star (Annie Ondra) didn't speak English, and they didn't have the technology to dub in new dialogue, so Ondra had to silently mouth the words while someone else stood off camera and spoke her lines.
There were a lot of common threads in the plots of Blackmail and Sabotage. Both feature a young woman driven to kill a very bad man, and a detective who loves her and tries to protect her, but she insists on confessing, but plot twist in the final moments erases evidence of the crime and she gets off scot free. Sorry, I just gave away the ending of both movies. But you know the good guys aways win in Hitchcock movies.
October 30 movie: Sabotage. Based on a Joseph Conrad novel, Hitchcock remade this movie in Hollywood as Saboteur. I haven't seen the remake but this was pretty good. I recorded it because it starred John Loder, although I read that Hitchcock didn't want Loder, and reduced the part to move focus away from him. That's too bad; I like John Loder.
Anyway, this movie is about a German saboteur in London. It's pretty dark; one thing in particular I was surprised to see in a movie from that era. (Don't read this if you're planning to watch the movie: the saboteur tricks his stepson into delivering a bomb, but the boy is delayed and the bomb blows up in his lap, killing everyone on a bus including the boy, the old lady sitting next to him, and the old lady's puppy. Yes, a puppy! I think it would have been more horrifying if he had skipped the puppy. That was just overkill.)
October 29 movie: The Lady Vanishes. They did a big feature on early Hitchcock a couple of weeks ago. I watched four, of which this was the best. It's about a young lady on a train trying to figure out what happened to a missing woman, who seems to have never even been there at all. If you saw the ads for that recent Jodie Foster movie, where her daughter disappears from a plane, it's basically the same. Even down to the proof of the missing person's existence being written in the condensation on a window.
It's not a perfectly crafted Hitchcock movie: for instance I figured out a big plot twist the instant the prop appeared on screen. But still, I enjoyed this a lot.
October 26 movie: The Old Maid. Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins star in a retread of several Davis movies. There's Now, Voyager with Davis as dowdy "Aunt Charlotte," raising a child that sort of is hers and sort of isn't. Then there's Old Aquaintance, with a lifelong, difficult friendship between Davis and Hopkins. At the time I remember thinking of a third Davis movie, but I can't remember it now. Oh yeah! Georg Brent dying and leaving behind a child out of wedlock brings in The Great Lie. All three of those are better movies than this, unfortunately.