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July 20 movies: A Trip to the Moon, For All Mankind. In honor of the moon landing TCM showed movies about the moon all day. In the evening they had Buzz Aldrin introducing them, which was nice. We watched two: first, the 1902 Méliès movie A Trip to the Moon is a delight. I had seen clips of it before, like the legendary image of the man in the moon with a rocket ship crashing into its eye. But I had never seen the whole thing before.

For All Mankind was a documentary made for the 20th anniversary of the moon landing. There was no narration, not even titles or captions; just the words of the astronauts themselves, from recordings during the missions and from later interviews. I've never been overly sentimental about space travel, yet I found it genuinely moving, for instance when the astronauts are talking to mission control while seeing Earth for the first time.
My favorite incident was how the astronauts were allowed to bring one cassette tape each, so they could listen to music. One was a country music fan, and had gotten Buck Owens and Merle Haggard to record songs especially for him to listen to on the flight. The movie played bits of both songs, and in a spoken intro Haggard said "I have one request: please take me outside." And he did; they showed the astronaut tucking the cassette into his space suit. In a way, Merle Haggard got to float in space.

Tonight we also watched a half-hour compilation of Walter Cronkite's coverage of the moon landing, thanks to the History Channel. (And thanks also to Georg who noticed that it was on and recorded it last night.) It was really, really interesting to hear the live coverage, what Cronkite was saying as it happened. For one thing, he didn't catch the second half of Armstrong's famous line "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." Cronkite complains audibly that he couldn't hear it and wanted to know what Armstrong had said. Also interesting was when they showed the conversation between Nixon and the astronauts, just after they put the flag up. For All Mankind eliminated Nixon from the story entirely: it showed Kennedy's speech promising to put a man on the moon, then nothing about presidents. I wonder if it just didn't fit into the movie, or if in 1989 Nixon was still too much of an embarrassment?
I was a baby during the moon landing -- I'm told that my mother held 6-month-old me up in front of the TV and told me to pay attention -- but Georg was old enough to stay up late and watch the coverage. Now I feel like I got to see a little bit of it too.

July 20 movie: Three Wise Girls. 1931 drama starring Jean Harlow as one of three women from a small town, trying to make it in New York. Being pre-code, there's a lot of sex. One of the friends is the kept woman of a married man, who tries to assault Harlow the first time he can arrange to be alone with her. Let's see, there's also a suicide attempt (maybe successful? Hard to tell). And Harlow and the friend have jobs as models in a department store, allowing for many scenes of them changing in and out of lingerie. There's a hilarious scene where the friend teases Harlow for wearing dowdy cotton bloomers. And one incredible scene where Harlow is wearing a slip and bending over to put on her stockings in extreme closeup. She keeps almost popping out of the slip, and it's really quite erotic in that pre-code way. I recommend this movie if you want a fleeting look at Jean Harlow's breasts. And really, who wouldn't?

July 20 movie: Hair. "Let it fly in the breeze, and get caught in the trees, give a home to the fleas in my hair." Oh, lordie! What a blast from the past. The world's cleanest dirty hippies beg, steal, take drugs, trespass, disrupt a private party and start a prison riot, while taking on racism, the sexual revolution and the Vietnam war. Those lovable scamps!

I didn't see the movie until I was in college but before the movie was even made my parents had the Broadway cast album. As a kid I listened to it enough to know the songs by heart forever -- I remember over a decade later finding out who Fellini, Antonioni, "and also his countryman Roman Polanski" are and being like, hey! Those guys from that song, they're actual people!

Warning, the songs are fiendishly catchy. I've got several of them bouncing around in my head right now. Good morning, starshine! The earth says hello! As far as the movie itself, what surprised me was how earnest and sincere it all was. It seems to me that if this movie were made today, it would be dripping with irony. Everything is dripping with ironic detachment, and an anti-war movie about youth culture would be especially so. This movie was totally without irony. As Georg pointed out, though the movie was made in 79, the play opened in 1968. It can't comment on the 60s counterculture because it was so much a part of it.

Embarrassing personal memory: I didn't know what the words in "Sodomy" meant so I looked them all up in the dictionary. Which was a laborious and ultimately unhelpful process. First of all, it took a while to figure out how to spell the words. And none of them were in my dictionary so I had to go for the grownup dictionary with tiny print. Then the definitions were circular and meaningless to youthful me (9? 10? Somewhere thereabouts). For instance, the definition of pederasty was "of a pederast." I'm still puzzled by that.

Forty years ago today. Jesus H. Christ in a chicken basket.

I'm all caught up on the movie list! First time in months.

July 18 movie: The Hill. Incredible drama directed by Sidney Lumet about a British military prison somewhere in the Middle East. Note this is not a prisoner of war camp; it's a military prison, for soldiers convicted of crimes. It's a brutal place where guards are free to do whatever they like to the prisoners, out of sadism, a misguided attempt to build character, or any reason at all. No one cares what happens to the prisoners, as long as no embarrassment is caused to the people in charge.

The titular hill is an artificial mound built of sand and rock in the middle of the camp, which prisoners are forced to run up and down in the blazing midday sun. The movie follows five new inmates at the prison and the guards' attempts to break them down. Sean Connery is great as the star, but I have to save the highest praise for Ossie Davis. He plays another inmate, and when his character is finally pushed too far, Davis steals the movie and never lets it go. His performance is electrifying. There's also very good work by Harry Andrews, Ian Bannen, Alfred Lynch, Roy Kinnear, Michael Redgrave and Ian Hendry. Everyone in the movie is great.

I read that the writer based the script on his actual experiences in a British military prison. That makes me feel a bit ill. (Really, not figuratively, it makes my stomach hurt to know this was based on reality.) It's a claustrophobic movie, not easy to watch but well worth it. Masterfully filmed to intensify the tension and make you feel like you're standing in 115° heat yourself. I have only one criticism: the volume ranges wildly from quiet speeched to VERY LOUD YELLING. More of the latter, though it shifts back and forth enough that I was constantly turning the volume up and down.

July 18 movie: Surfwise. Documentary about the Paskowitzes, a large family who dropped out of conventional life in the late 1950s, lived in a camper for decades, raised 9 children and surfed all the time. It was really interesting. At first it seems like a funny story about this cool family on a lifetime adventure. Gradually it comes out that the father was a violent, abusive control freak who forced his entire family to live out his bizarre ideas about the natural state of man, and then blamed them for not thriving in his grand experiment. Abject poverty, not enough food, not enough clothes, no education whatsoever, eleven people living in a 24 foot camper. What could go wrong?

One very telling moment in the movie comes when the subject of sex comes up. Several of the children talk about their parents' regular practice of having loud sex pretty much every night, right in front of the kids. (remember, 11 people in a 24 foot camper.) They described it as traumatizing. One of the sons describes his elaborate method of tucking and folding his ears in and pressing a pillow over his head, trying to block out the sound of his parents going at it. Then in a separate interview the father describes it as this fun, wholesome thing where he and his wife are expressing their healthy sexual urges while the kids sit around giggling. He clearly has no clue how his children actually felt.

I felt a little frustrated that the movie left so many questions about the wife unanswered. Why did she go along with this? How was she able to run such a household? Where did the money come from to buy what little food and clothing they had? Was this as difficult for her as it seems like it must have been? There are hints here and there -- for instance, a friend of the family says "Whenever you went to their camper, she was inside cleaning." One of the sons says he was the only one who ever helped their mother (though I think he means the only son who helped; I got the impression the one daughter did a lot of work). Then much later one of the children points out a family photo and says it's his favorite because "all of us were in the water, even Mom." Which seems to suggest that Mom didn't get to swim and play like everyone else did all the time. One of the children mentions almost off-handedly that by the time they were teenagers the mother was "beaten down" by it all. The father seems incredibly selfish, just up and decided to give up his career (he was a Stanford-educated doctor) so he could surf for the rest of his life, and threw the entire burden of caring for a huge family on his wife.

It comes off sounding a lot like those ultra-controlling patriarchal Christian marriages, where "the husband is the head of his wife as Christ is the head of the church." In the very beginning of the movie the wife says that for 10 years she was either pregnant or nursing or both, every single day. And the father says that he instructed her to behave like the apes do -- if gorillas nurse their children for two years, then she better nurse his children for two years. I don't think the patriarchal Christians are into imitating animal behavior, but this dynamic where whatever wacko notion the husband gets into his head, the wife has to obey without question -- that sounds just like them.

Maybe I'm making it sound like I didn't like this movie, and that's not true at all. I greatly enjoyed the movie; I just didn't like the father. It was really interesting to get a look at one of these domineering relationships which I've read about but (thankfully!) don't know anyone who is involved in one. I do have to say that the wife does not express this view of the relationship. She concedes that her husband can be difficult to deal with, that he was too harsh with the children and that "there were a lot of tears in the early years," but she seems happy with him. Then again, the daughter believes that her mother is able to remember the years in the camper as happy by blocking out a lot.

Jul 18 movies: Jazz Heroes: Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole. Not actually a movie, this was a TV series they were running on Ovation. We recorded a bunch and have watched these three so far.

Of the three, the Ella Fitzgerald special was the least enjoyable. First of all it was only a half hour, so there just wasn't enough time to get into any depth about anything. And what time they had was wasted on interviews with modern singers describing Ella's style and then singing in, I presume, what they considered to be Ella's style. Gee, it would have been nice if they'd played Ella herself singing. What a concept! When they did use clips of Ella's singing, they were always abbreviated and sometimes not appropriate for the story they were telling -- for instance when they said she had started out working with Chick Webb in the mid 30s, they played a clip of her singing much later. The arrangement and her singing were totally different from what she did with Webb. By the time the narrator repeated the old myth that Louis Armstrong invented scat singing, I was done with this program.

The Billie Holiday one was better because the interview subjects were people who had known Holiday. I especially enjoyed Carmen McRae who had been friends with Holiday. She told a hilarious story about how Holiday could drink her under the table any night of the week. And how McRae's birthday was the day after Holiday's, and every year she would spend Holiday's birthday drinking all night, and then miss her own birthday because she spent the whole day hung over from Holiday's celebration. A great story whether it's true or not.

All the interviews in the Nat King Cole show were with family members. As a result it was a very flattering, gentle look at Cole. Nothing at all about difficulties he'd had to overcome or problems in his life or career. Not really that much detail about his career now that I think about it. For instance they never even said the names of the other members of the King Cole Trio. Still it was nice to see his family talk about him, especially one of his brothers. At first I was surprised that any of his siblings was still alive, then I realized the interview was probably from the 80s. The best part about the Cole special was that they played not clips, but entire songs. I really appreciated that.

July 16 movie: The Boys are Back in Town. About a month ago we watched a DVD called Let's Hear It For the Girls, a collection of performance shorts featuring women. Well this was the male counterpart. There was more star power here -- I remember being frustrating that so many important female singers were missing from Let's Hear It For the Girls, and that wasn't a problem with The Boys Are Back in Town. Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, the Dorsey Brothers, Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Louis Jordan and Bing Crosby were all featured. Along with some lesser known musicians like Dick Haymes, Tony Pastor, Larry Clinton and even a couple I hadn't heard of.

July 13 movie: Bullets or Ballots. Edward G. Robinson, Joan Blondell and a very young Humphrey Bogart star in this crime drama. Robinson is a cop who goes undercover and pretends to have turned into a gangster, to try and bring down organized crime. Bogart is the most villainous of the gangsters and Blondell is Robinson's love interest. It's not a great movie, still worth it to me because of the stars. Edward G. Robinson was such a good actor. Robert Osborne said that he initially refused to do this one because he was tired of being typecast in gangster movies. In his private life I've heard that Robinson was a very intelligent man who loved reading and collected art.

(I have absolutely no idea what the title means. I don't remember anything about ballots in the movie.)

July 13 movie: A Bridge Too Far. Another movie I rented on Kevin's recommendation. It was really good! The story of Operation Market Garden, the Allied mission to capture a series of bridges in German territory, focusing on the bridge at Arnhem in the Netherlands. Do I have to worry about spoilers when it's a true story that everyone familiar with war history probably knows about? I'll just say that the title is "a bridge too far" and leave it at that.

The cast is spectacular. Sean Connery, Michael Caine, Dirk Bogarde, Robert Redford, Elliot Gould, Maximilian Schell, James Caan, Gene Hackman, Anthony Hopkins, Laurence Olivier, Ryan O'Neal, and Liv Ullman for starters. I even saw John Ratzenberger in a small part! He has one line: "Major, have we got any more information about those boats?"

Redford's part is not huge, but it reminded me why he's considered such a great actor. He has one incredible scene (one of many, many incredible scenes in the movie) where he has to lead a group of soldiers trying to cross a river in small open boats, under heavy fire, in broad daylight. They're paddling and they don't have enough oars, so some of the men are using their rifles to paddle. As they head out he starts muttering "Hail Mary, full of grace" repeatedly. Not the whole prayer, just the first line over and over. As he keeps saying it, it starts to mean all kinds of things: a plea, a curse, a battle cry, all in the repetition. Through it all you can hear him using the words to hold himself together, and desperately hoping it works. Almost pleading with himself to keep going. It's really pretty amazing that he could communicate so much with just five words.

July 12 movie: Persepolis. We saw this when it showed at the Carolina -- last year I think? -- and I wanted to watch it again because Iran has been so much in the news lately. It's an incredibly compelling autobiographical story about a woman growing up in Tehran. She's about my age, was a child during the 1978 revolution, lived through the religious repression of the 80s, then moved to Europe and experienced severe culture shock. It's very serious and also very funny.

It's kind of sad to admit this, but I learned way more about Iran from this movie than I ever did in school. I remember the hostage crisis when it was happening, but I don't remember learning much of any actual information about Iran. It was all the same kind of "they hate us for our freedom" bullshit being served after 9/11. I guess oversimplifying foreign conflicts and sanitizing our role in them isn't new.

July 10 movie: The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle. Fred and Ginger's last RKO movie together, it's the only movie of theirs I hadn't seen yet. I had heard it was a lesser effort for them, and that's definitely true. They were constrained by the biographical story and couldn't do one of the silly screwball comedies that worked so well for them. The latter half is sort of a war movie, with Vernon joining up in WWI and dying during the war. There's a lengthy sequence where Vernon wants to join up as soon as the war starts, but Irene talks him out of it because she wants to retire to a country house and raise kids and have a quiet normal life. And Vernon has to convince Irene that her desire for quiet and ... one could even say isolation is wrong. With the movie having been made in 1939, I shouldn't have been surprised to see this come up.

I read on Wikipedia that Irene Castle, who was still alive, was a consultant for the movie, and she got really pissed off because of changes they made to her life story. She particularly clashed with Ginger Rogers, who refused to cut or dye her hair, or to wear accurate costumes. Apparently Irene Castle had been quite the trend-setter in the teens, but Rogers insisted on wearing clothes in the style of 1939. I did recognize a costume in the movie that was based on one Castle wore in a photo in Wikipedia, but you can tell that it was cut very differently.

July 9 movie: The Little Princess. From King Solomon's Mines to this is a case of the sublime to the ridiculous if ever there was one. This movie is pure corn from beginning to end. Shirley Temple in full Technicolor, with Arthur Treacher, Ian Hunter, Cesar Romero, more phony Cockney accents than you can shake a stick at, and Queen Victoria! I adore it.

July 8 movie: King Solomon's Mines. I think this is Stewart Granger's best movie. Based on an H. Rider Haggard story, Granger plays a guide who takes Deborah Kerr and her brother into the interior of Africa. They're looking for Kerr's missing husband, who went in search of the titular mine.

It's an exciting movie, a great ripping yarn, and a gorgeous travelogue of Africa. Also interesting is the portrayal of African people -- it's the oldest movie I've seen which acknowledges that different regions of Africa have distinct communities with distinct languages and cultures. Near the end of the movie there is a breathtaking dance sequence which (according to Robert Osborne) was completely accurate to Watusi tradition, not Hollywood-ed up at all. Compared to Too Hot to Handle just twelve years earlier, with its extremely offensive scenes in the Amazon, it's almost amazing. Another really spectacular scene is the action sequence where the party is overrun by a stampede. I've watched that scene several times now and I'm still trying to figure out how they did it. It looks so real.

Visited one of my favorite blogs this evening and discovered this where the home page should have been: (click to enlarge)

I cannot be the only person who looked at that page, had a heart-stopping "oh shit!" moment of anxiety, and then thought, "Wait, this isn't my site. My code had nothing to do with this. Whew." Sadly, I've seen that error message (or one just like it) on my own pages many times.

July 6 movie: Who Was That Lady. This movie was horrible. Well, let me qualify that. If you like the ugly misogynist humor of the early 60s, you may like this movie. Tony Curtis plays a college professor caught kissing a student by his wife (real-life wife Janet Leigh). She walks out on him, because she's "insanely jealous," so Curtis turns to buddy Dean Martin for help. Martin concocts this ridiculous story that they're both members of the FBI, and the girl is a foreign agent Curtis has to spy on. Martin uses his job as a writer for a TV network to get a realistic-looking gun and ID card, and they convince the poor woman that her philandering husband is really a super agent protecting America.

I found both these characters so loathsome that when they get their comeuppance, it wasn't nearly enough. And then when they're forgiven and everything works out in the end? Made me want to throw something at the screen. And I enjoyed Boys Night Out. I don't know why, but I did. This movie, I couldn't stand. (Maybe it's the difference between James Garner and Dean Martin.)

It wasn't all bad. There's a funny scene at the end where Martin and Curtis wake up in the boiler room of the Empire State Building, see all the equipment and think they're on a foreign submarine, and decide to scuttle it. They open all the valves on the boilers and then start singing "God Bless America." And the title song, sung by Martin of course, is pretty good because it's so sleazy. The chorus actually goes "That was no lady, that was my wife!" I have it on an album somewhere, maybe I should play it next week.

July 6 movie: Cleopatra. The 1934 version with Claudette Colbert and Warren William as Julius Caeser. Also features Henry Wilcoxon, Joseph Schildkraut and C. Aubrey Smith (who looks ridiculous in Roman costume). Colbert is the reason to watch the movie, far and away. She is extraordinary. On the downside, movie includes the worst, most boring battle scenes I have ever seen in any movie. Just fast-forward over that part and get back to Claudette as quickly as possible.

One interesting note: Colbert was famous for favoring the left side of her face. She thought she looked much better on that side, and hated being shot in right profile or straight on. When she became a big success, she was able to demand that entire sets be designed so she could be filmed only in left profile. She had the nickname "the Dark Side of the Moon" because of this.

Well, Cleopatra was made before those days. The movie definitely favored the left profile, but there are a few close-ups of her in right profile. And you know what? She really does look different! Her nose is distinctly different on the right side. Georg says that I probably wouldn't have noticed if such a big deal hadn't been made of it, and he's right. Still, she does look different.

July 5 movie: The Greatest Show on Earth. I love this movie. Sure, it's an extended ad for the Ringling Brothers circus. Who cares? The cast is terrific: Charlton Heston, Cornel Wilde, Dorothy Lamour, Gloria Grahame, the luminous Betty Hutton, and Jimmy Stewart as a killer clown! Plus real life famous clowns playing themselves (the only name I recognized was Emmett Kelly.)

July 4 movie: 1776. What a delightful way to spend Independence Day. This was an early 70s musical about the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The stars were like a parade of TV from my youth: John Adams was the prickly chief of staff from St. Elsewhere; Thomas Jefferson was the White Shadow; the New York delegate (the one who's always abstaining) was on Hogan's Heroes; the South Carolina delegate was on Northern Exposure. Also Howard de Silva was very good as Ben Franklin.

The songs are fun. I particularly liked the one about what our national bird should be, and the call and response between John and Abigail Adams: "Saltpeter!" "Pins!" My impression is that the movie is fairly historical, though it distorts the role of John Dickinson, the Pennsylvania delegate who opposes independence. In the movie he's pure villain, a sneering manipulative jerk. My understanding is that in reality, he was well-liked.