funnystrange.com

June 25 movie: New Orleans. I could talk about the plot, but if you've ever heard of this movie then you know there are two reasons to watch it: Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday. They have secondary roles and the movie lights up whenever they're on screen. Armstrong plays the bandleader at the nightclub where most of the action takes place, and Holiday plays Armstrong's sweetheart and (surprise, surprise) the white family's maid. They do three songs together, plus Armstrong sings "Dixie Music Man" and Holiday does part of a song by herself.

Okay, so the movie is a fictionalized telling of the closing of the red light district in New Orleans in the late teens, the migration of musicians to Chicago, and the resulting introduction of jazz to white audiences. Unfortunately, in this version King Oliver (Louis Armstrong early mentor, who brought him to Chicago) doesn't exist. Instead of King Oliver, Armstrong's mentor is a white guy who calls himself "The King of Basin Street." Oliver was dead by that point so I guess they felt free to steal his name and use it to inject white people into the story of early jazz.

On the bright side, Armstrong plays with an all-star band and introduces them by name during the movie: Kid Ory, Zutty Singleton, Barney Bigard, Red Callendar, Charlie Beal, and Lux Lewis. Woody Herman and his band also make an appearance.

If you want to see just the good parts of this movie, follow the links below:
Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans
The Blues are Brewing
Dixie Music Man
Farewell to Storyville

June 24 movie: Too Many Crooks. Wasn't I just complaining about misogynist old movies? Too Many Crooks was the perfect antidote. A bumbling crime gang lead by George Cole keeps trying to steal from Terry-Thomas, a pennypinching womanizer who keeps all his money in a safe to hide it from the British taxmen.

The crooks try to kidnap Terry-Thomas's daughter for ransom, but they accidently kidnap his wife (Brenda de Banzie) instead. Terry-Thomas, being pond scum, laughs in the crooks' faces, tells them he's well rid of the old ball and chain, and encourages them to kill her.

When the wife finds out about this, she spends about five minutes crying her eyes out, then beats up the gang (using mad skillz she learned in the military during the war), declares revenge on her husband and leads the gang on the first successful crime spree of their careers.

I found Too Many Crooks utterly hilarious. The funniest scene comes late in the movie, when Terry-Thomas faces an exasperated magistrate for a series of charges, and offers increasingly ridiculous explanations for each.

June 22 movie: The Wheeler Dealers. Funny early 60s movie starring James Garner as a Texas entrepreneur just this side of a con artist, and Lee Remick as an ambitious young stock analyst struggling against sexism on Wall Street.

Enjoying a movie like this depends a lot on your point of view. From today's perspective, The Wheeler Dealers is astoundingly offensive.* But compare it to an earlier movie like Front Page Woman and you can see that huge progress has been made. Men still consider it an affront that a woman would dare to have a job, much less be good at it. But in The Wheeler Dealers that's a bad thing. And the hero helps the heroine win, rather than sabotaging her career.

I wasn't crazy about the ending, but up until the last ten minutes or so it was great. Mr. Howell from Gilligan's Island plays the boss trying to fire Remick for not having a Y chromosome, and John Astin plays a sleazy district attorney.

*here's an example:
Garner: "I'm not used to smart girls."
(voice in my head, imagining Remick's next line): Later, loser. I'm outta here.
Remick: "Really? (bats eyes) You think I'm smart?"

June 21 movie: My Favorite Wife. Seven years after Irene Dunne's disappearance at sea, her husband Cary Grant has her declared dead so he can remarry. That very day, Dunne returns from the dead. Dun-dun!

I thought I loved this movie, but when I sat down to watch it I remembered what I don't like: the reprehensible way Grant treats his second wife, Gail Patrick. Patrick does a valiant job of making the character so unlikeable that the audience won't mind seeing her totally humiliated. Unfortunately it doesn't change the fact that she's a victim who never did anything wrong, and is treated like dirt from beginning to end.

The only acknowledgement of how unfair this is comes near the end, when Patrick bloodies Grant's nose and Dunne tells him, "you did have it coming." Grant seems to treat the bloody nose as a small price to get rid of the shrieking harpy, who he had promised to love and cherish three days before.

Okay, I'm getting myself worked up. Let this write-up serve as a reminder to me, not to watch this movie again.

Jun 19 movie: The Best Man. I greatly enjoyed this 1964 political drama about presidential candidates struggling for the nomination. Henry Fonda stars as a man who seems inconceivable as a presidential front-runner: a liberal intellectual who quotes Bertram Russell, is an avowed atheist, refuses to lie to further his campaign and has a British wife. (When I found out the script was written by Gore Vidal this made much more sense.) Cliff Robertson is the villain, a sleazy muckraker who rose to power by inventing a Communist threat. I guess a combination of Nixon and McCarthy, or maybe Johnson and McCarthy. Lee Tracy is wonderful as the ex-president whose endorsement will hand the nomination to whichever candidate gets it.

The best thing about the movie was the depiction of a convention that meant something. I've never seen a political convention that wasn't pure theater. I do my best to avoid convention coverage for that reason. It was really interesting to see the candidates jockeying for position at a convention where the nomination hasn't been decided in advance. Do conventions serve any purpose now besides a massive pep rally?

ETA: I forgot one excellent line from the movie. Tracy's ex-president asks Fonda's character whether he believes in God. Fonda says no, and that he isn't willing to pretend for the candidacy. Tracy replies, "The world sure has changed since I was politicking. In those days you had to pour God over everything, like ketchup."

June 17 movie: Bombay 405 Miles. This was described as a mediocre movie with a killer soundtrack, and that's pretty much accurate. The music by Kalyanji/Anandji did indeed kick ass. It was amusing to see how many actors we recognized, even though we haven't seen that many 70s Bollywood movies. The stars were Zeenat Aman (my Bollywood girlfriend, who sadly has little to do here), Pran, the guy who starred in Qurbani, and some other guy. The villain was the bad cop from Qurbani. The movie also featured DSP-saab from Don, and Mac Mohan, and the girl who does the first dance number and then gets killed in Don also has a small part. There must have been a small group of actors who appeared in movies together over and over.

I really like Pran. I put his movie Half Ticket (also starring famed playback singer Kishor Kumar) in my queue.

June 11 movie: The Awful Truth. I love this movie. Cary Grant and Irene Dunne have such good chemistry. But why, oh why, does Ralph Bellamy never get the girl?

June 10 movie: The Man in the Iron Mask. The 1939 version starring Louis Hayward, Joan Bennet and Warren William. I haven't read the novel so I can't comment on whether this is a faithful interpretation or not. The plot does seem complicated enough, and dark enough, to be true to Dumas. Alan Hale costars as Porthos, though he gets little to do.

June 7 movie: The Wonder Bar. Al Jolson stars as Al Wonder, owner of a fashionable Paris night spot called the Wonder Bar. I think this movie was also part of the gay series on TCM. There's one scene where a couple are dancing and a man asks to cut in. The woman thinks he wants to dance with her, but he pushes her out of the way and starts dancing with the man. Al Jolson rolls his eyes, throws one hand up in a flamboyant gesture and yells "Woo!"

The most cringe-inducing part of the movie is a lengthy blackface number, in which Jolson's blackface character dies and goes to blackface heaven. Which is populated by blackface angels and little blackface cherubs. And a mule. It's pretty horrible.

June 5 movie: Broadway Melody. This 1929 musical isn't a great movie by the standards of even five years later. But it's well worth watching as an example of the earliest days of talkies.

They showed this on TCM as part of their series this month on gay images in the movies: the costume designer is clearly supposed to be gay. They've got an author introducing the movies, and he points out that the character is the object of ridicule, but is also acknowledged as being good at his job. So it's a mixed bag I guess.

June 3 movie: Spirited Away. After The Wizard of Oz, TCM showed Spirited Away. This movie is simply delightful from beginning to end. Miyazaki has such a talent for portraying different ages of childhood, creating a whole world that behaves the way it appears to a child.

TCM showed the movie dubbed, luckily we have the DVD. So we popped it in and watched it with subtitles. I'm not as violently opposed dubbing with animated movies as I am with live action. Dubbing isn't as disruptive with animation, because the voices and faces aren't nearly as mismatched. And the dubbing Disney did for the Ghibli movies is pretty good. Still, if I have the choice I'll choose subtitles.

June 3 movie: The Wizard of Oz. They're doing a new family movie feature on TCM every Sunday evening, hosted by the guy who does Spongebob's voice. I'm really glad they're doing this. It seems like a nice way to introduce kids to classic movies. I fondly remember watching movies every Sunday evening on The Wonderful World of Disney with my family when I was a kid.

As probably the best-loved classic family movie of all, The Wizard of Oz was a great way to start this series. While watching, Georg and I commented that we were both terrified by this movie when we were little. I remember being particularly upset by the part where the witch is holding Dorothy prisoner and Toto gets away, leaving Dorothy behind.

June 3 movie: Suddenly. I really enjoyed this thriller about a plot to assassinate the President, which starred Frank Sinatra, Sterling Hayden and James Gleason. Sinatra in particular is very good, playing an uncharacteristic part. They said in the intro that Sinatra was horrified to learn that Lee Harvey Oswald had watched this movie just prior to assassinating JFK, and that Sinatra used his own money to get Suddenly out of circulation because of this.

June 3 movie: Betrayed. This was a decent WWII spy movie starring Clark Gable, Lana Turner and Victor Mature. But no lion! This may be the first Victor Mature movie I've ever seen where he doesn't wrestle a lion.

June 2 movie: Going Hollywood. Marion Davies vehicle featuring Bing Crosby. Like all Marion Davies vehicles, it's not very good. Bing has several good songs though.

June 1 movie: Ransom. Not the remake with Mel Gibson, although I have seen that. This was the original, with Glenn Ford. The basic plot is the same: a rich man's son is kidnapped for ransom, and instead of paying the ransom, he offers the money as a bounty on the kidnapper's head.

The interesting thing is that this action is portrayed as a gutsy move, in the Glenn Ford version that is. I can't remember about the Mel Gibson version. Anyway, this is shown as a daring gamble, and the naysayers who urge him not to do it are shortsighted cowards. But they're right and the movie is wrong. Ford's gamble is stupid and arrogant. His logic is that paying the ransom doesn't improve his chances of getting his son back (this is stated as a fact in the movie; I have no idea if it's true, or was true at the time). So he might as well forget the ransom and use the money for another purpose that might increase the odds of getting his boy back. But this totally wrong. His TV statement about the ransom/bounty is a giant, public "Fuck you" to a criminal whose only way to fight back is to hurt Ford's child. That would lower the odds far more than they would be improved by bringing in random bounty hunters. It really makes no sense at all that this would work.

May 31 movie: High Plains Drifter. This was not as successful, for me, as Once Upon a Time in the West. It had some interesting ideas (the thing about painting the town red was just brilliant) & was enjoyable in places. But. I found everyone in the movie so unpleasant that I couldn't root for anyone. For example, the hero begins the movie by encountering a rude woman and shutting her up by dragging her into a barn and raping her. That was so extremely off-putting to me that the movie simply never recovers.

Of course I don't think Eastwood is suggesting that an uppity woman not only deserves to be raped, but will probably enjoy it. Yet, that is exactly what happens in the movie. Perhaps he was trying to convey the idea that what the hero suffered (in flashback) has damaged him to the point where he's no better than the bad guys. And I have to say, I kind of don't want to watch a movie like that.

May 30 movie: Once Upon a Time in the West. Wow. What a movie. I had seen clips before, but had never seen the whole thing through. It's amazing, from beginning to end.

This movie comes up a lot in discussions of why pan and scan is a bad thing. And with good reason. At first I watched for shots that would be ruined by pan and scan. After about five minutes, I realized that the every scene is so grand, big, and fills the frame so well, that it made more sense to look for shots that wouldn't be ruined by pan and scan.

I kind of feel like all the talk about the wide aspect cinematography isn't quite fair. Because it makes it sound like that's the movie's main attribute. Which isn't true at all. It's beautiful to look at, and it's also a fantastic movie. A huge, epic Western. Henry Fonda is incredible. It's kind of scary how good he is at playing pure evil, and how shocking that must have been to audiences who had only seen him play heroes. The other principals -- Charles Bronson, Claudia Cardinale and Jason Robards -- are also excellent.

May 29 movie: Stalag 17. Over and over I say that I'm not going to let myself fall this far behind in the movie list. And then I do it again. Sigh.

So, I said before that I never miss an opportunity to watch Stalag 17, and I meant it. It was a nice way to wrap up War Movie Weekend on TCM.

May 28 movie: When Eagles Dare. I remembered this as being a fun WWII action movie in the tradition of, if not quite as good as, The Guns of Navarone. This time Georg and I watched it together and it seemed like a hundred flaws jumped out at me that I had never noticed before. The most obvious problem is too much talking. Richard Burton especially spend lots of time Dr. Evil fashion, explaining to everyone what just happened and why and what he's going to do about it. Georg pointed out that this isn't actually a problem in itself, rather a symptom of a bigger problem: the plot is so complicated and arbitrary that no one could follow it if Burton wasn't constantly stopping the movie to explain it to us. It really doesn't make sense, and the twists come out of left field, with no foundation.

So I was a bit disappointed with this movie. Ah well, I'll just wait for The Guns of Navarone to come around on TCM again.

May 28 movie: Command Decision. I really enjoyed this drama about Clark Gable as a WWII general fighting politics and making difficult, unpopular decisions. In other words, killing a lot of people in pursuit of a critical mission. Which is an uncomfortable message given the current situation, but the context was quite different then. Van Johnson was given high billing, but his part was actually pretty small.

May 27 movie: The Conqueror. Oh, lordie, this movie was bad. John Wayne stars as Temujin, leader of the Mongols and future Ghengis Khan. Wayne goes gaga for Tartar princess Susan Hayward. Because Tartar princesses were known for their blue eyes and red hair. Agnes Moorehead also stars as Wayne's mother. The Conqueror is every bit as bad as you might imagine. Wayne talks in such an extreme version of his trademark drawl that he sounds like a caricature of himself. And the dialogue. My god. Here's a typical line: "I feel this Tartar woman is for me, and my blood says, take her. There are moments for wisdom and moments when I listen to my blood; my blood says, take this Tartar woman." It's all that bad.