1926 - TARTUFFE by F.W. Murnau

Many a liberal arts college student has a tale of suffering through a French classics class. This usually required reading a series of boring plays by various French playwrights. If the student was half clever, he or she searched high and low for Cliff's Notes versions of the plays.

One play usually found in the Cliff's Notes was Moliere's Tartuffe. Tartuffe, is about a hypocrite pretending to be a pious individual. He manages to ingrate himself with a French aristocrat, converting the aristocrat to a type of austere fundamental Christianity. The play is about the attempts by the family of the aristocrat to expose Tartuffe to the aristocrat by revealing Tartuffe's true nature.

In 1926 a noted German silent film director F. W. Murnau did a short adaptation of the play. Murnau was a giant in the German film industry at the time. It appears he knocked this film out in between his  classics, The Last Laugh and Faust. This is a good quick film comedy which has a genuine cleverness to it. I particularly enjoyed the scene where Tartuffe, trying to seduce the wife of the aristocrat, taps on
 her breasts with his prayer book.

 

The film simplifies the play to it's main theme. Murnau was an actual film artist in the true definition of the word. Only 60 minutes long, the photography, composition and acting are staged by a man who knew what he was doing behind the camera.

1916 - 20000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA the silent version

The problem with silent movies isn't that they are silent, the problem is that they frequently are stupid. This is one of the first versions of the Jules Verne story and it's a mess.

 

The film is actually a mash up of 20000 Leagues Under The Sea, along with The Mysterious Island. The filmmakers also throw in a jungle girl, a revolution in an Indian Kingdom, and some sharks. The actor playing Captain Nemo is some white guy who is covered in deep brown makeup which is reminiscent of a blackface minstrel show performer, pretty uncool. Ditto the makeup job on the jungle girl who of course just happens to be Captain Nemo's long lost daughter, who was kidnapped by an evil British soldier who killed her mother and then sailed away with her where she ended up on the mysterious island with escaped civil war soldiers.

Probably one of the worst offenders for a silent film is explaining everything on a title card then showing the action, it's like watching the same scene twice only the second time it's played in over exaggerated pantomimes instead of performances. It's like watching mimes running amok in a movie. This is the standard storytelling technique used throughout thiz movie and it made watching this thing a real killer to get through it.

It appears they actually built some sort of submarine type ship and floated it on the ocean and there was also some underwater photography that must have been hard to photograph in 1916.

 

If silent movies have a reputation as being somewhat silly today this is the kind of film that gives them that reputation. D.W. Griffith was making fairly sophisticated films by 1916 so the excuse of film being a new medium to work in was no excuse in this case.

105 tedious minutes.

1993- IN THE LINE OF FIRE & 2002 - PHONEBOOTH two bland thrillers

Digging deep into the collection watched 2 thrillers this past weekend. In The Line Of Fire features Clint Eastwood as a secret service agent attempting to stop the assassination of the President of the United States, by the crazed, brilliant, ruthless, John Malkovich. Malkovich is a master of disguise even though all of his disguises still make him look like John Malkovich.

 

 His reasons for killing the President seem a little unclear with the exception of his sticking it to Eastwood who he has decided to mess with. Malkovich also has an unlimited supply of money which allows him to fly around the country, build improbable electronic devices that stop the Secret Service from locating him, and allow him to construct wacky weapons that can't be detected by metal detectors and scanners.

Clint also has a love interest played by Rene Russo. Russo was an older actress who usually got hired to play love scenes with aging male stars. As male actors moved into the later part of their careers, love scenes they played with younger actresses usually made the age difference look like the actresses were just out of after school day care programs. A producer would hire Rene Russo, who generally looked pretty good for a woman in her mid 40's, to make the love scenes look a little less creepy. Their relationship in the movie is probably the most interesting thing about this story, unfortunately that's only about 10 minutes of the film's running time, after which we get back to the business of Clint being Clint, and nailing the psycho assassin.

 

This isn't a bad film, it's just a bland one. Clint takes on the psycho, you get lots of action scenes, Clint wins in the end, movie over. 

Running time, 126.  Written by  Jeff Maguire

Which brings me to Phone Booth. Directed by Joel Schumacher, Batman and Robin, Batman Forever, a glitzy mainstream director and written by "B" movie veteran Larry Cohen of It's Alive, It Lives Again. This was a very improbable film about a man stuck in a telephone booth. If he leaves the phone booth he will be shot by a sniper hiding in a building nearby. The sniper torments the man over the phone while the police surround the phone booth and try to figure out what the hell is going on. This thriller is a very tall tale filmed with lots of Hollywood gloss, it's sharply edited and uses split screen techniques to keep the audience from being bored to tears because watching a guy talking on a telephone for about 81 minutes is nobody's idea of a good time.

 

Unfortunately the Hollywood gloss is what fails the film. This is the kind of junk that probably should have been directed by Larry Cohen himself. Cohen was a master of cranking out this kind of thing on a low budget, and this film needed a no frills low budget approach. A big disappointment for a film that should have been foolish fun.

1969 - HELLO DOLLY is complete blandness on a very large budget.

There is something about seeing a studio spend a huge bundle of cash on a train wreck of a film and watch it go  completely wrong. In the case of Hello Dolly, it's not so much a disaster as an example of utter lack of imagination or inspiration being pushed on moviegoers as entertainment.
 

20th Century Fox had made so much money with The Sound of Music they thought they had found a potential gold mine with big budget musicals. Having purchased the screen rights to Hello Dolly they proceeded to hire some of the top musical talent in Hollywood. The director was Gene Kelly, the choreographer Michael Kidd, the cinematographer Harry Stradling, and the associate producer was Roger Edens, all top artists and technicians from the golden MGM musical tradition.

Barbara Streisand was only 27 years old and apparently neurotic as hell. This was only her second film and she was forced to carry the entire film. Miscast from the start and teamed with Walther Matthau an actor who hated her guts and couldn't stand to be on the set with her unless absolutely necessary, you could hardly blame her for driving everyone on the production crazy.

Gene Kelly should have seemed the logical choice to adapt this film, but a closer examination of Kelly's career showed that he was actually a co-director on his two greatest successes On The Town  and  Singing in the Rain.  Kelly clearly didn't care for the mediocre material he was dealing with. Michael Kidd had worked with Kelly at MGM and was a noted choreographer. He had the dancers leaping and almost flying around the sets but its all overkill to watch the musical numbers. The production group also had the mysterious Roger Edens, whose name turns up on a lot of MGM's great musicals as the associate producer. It should have been a can't miss reunion of the famous Freed Unit from MGM. The problem may have been that this group was probably a little past their prime.

Gene Kelly directs Hello Dolly

Fox spent lots and lots of money on sets and costumes and it's all on the screen. Probably the gigantic production would have sapped the energy and talent out of any production team.  The film's remembered today because a piece of it appears in the film Wall-E.

 

The only interesting thing on the DVD is the special feature showing Kelly directing the gigantic 4th of July parade number. Here you get an idea of the massive nature of the movie with hundreds and hundreds of extras performing on a huge set built on the Fox backlot.

This feature is only 7 minutes long but in some ways, a lot more entertaining than the actual film.

 148 minutes, Ernest Lehman produced and wrote this thing.

1975 - LUCKY LADY, somebody forgot to clean the camera lens

20th Century Fox's big Christmas release for 1975.  How did Stanley Donen the director get mixed up in this mess?  His last couple of films had been disappointments but was he that desperate for work?

  A comedy/adventure tale about rum runners along the Mexican and Southern California coast, it had three big stars and a big budget. Geoffrey Unsworth the director of photography had photographed 2001: A Space Odyssey. What was the thinking behind having him shoot the film through a hazy filter to approximate the look of the 1920's?  The actors seem blurry and out of focus throughout the film. The viewer can hardly see the expensive art deco sets through all the fog.

 

   
Was Liza Minnelli  the right person to cast as a sexy tough girl cabaret singer that two men are in love with? The idea to have her play a Jean Harlow type means someone thought she was as sexy as Harlow.  Did anyone actually look at a picture of Jean Harlow and think Minnelli looks like Harlow?  Minnelli acts looks like she's on some kind of controlled substance through out the film.  Apparently the director Stanley Donen didn't have the guts to tell Minnelli that her performance stunk.
 

Burt Reynolds always wanted to be Cary Grant or Clark Gable but whenever he tried to do light comedy he always came off as a pathetic wimp.  Reynolds the big star of 1970's redneck car chase movies was way out of his element in Lucky Lady. The studio apparently paid Gene Hackman a lot of money to be in this thing. Hackman's the Spencer Tracy best friend role in this movie. He brings an intensity more suited to a Eugene O'Neill tragedy but at least he turns in a decent performance.  

  
The real behind the scenes evildoers of this movie were the writers, Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz. They had been associates of George Lucas before anyone figured out Lucas maybe had a little less  talent then Hollywood thought. They co-wrote American Graffiti, so the thinking must have been to get two contemporary writers to update a 1930's type of film.   However no one must have actually read the script before they gave the green light to make this film.   Had 20th Century fox had a magical crystal ball they would have found out that Huyck and Katz would go on to write the worst of the Indiana Jones films and  the notorious Howard the Duck.

Apparently the filmmakers shot three different endings for the movie because they couldn't figure out how to end it.

The running time is 118 minutes.

1939 - THE CAT AND THE CANARY, Bob Hope becomes a star

The third remake of the "murderer is on the prow in the scary house after the reading of the will" story. Paramount teamed Bob Hope with Paulette Goddard and added lots of humor to cover up the creakiness and melodrama of the original play. The film mixed comedy and scares in a professional approach that a major studio could bring to make an entertaining film out of dated material.

The director Elliot Nugent, was a Broadway playwright/actor/director who knew how to modulate and pace the performances of the actors to serve this material. By this film, Hope had perfected his cowardly smart ass personality, and his comments on the action throughout the film added to the fun. Paulette Goddard was very likable as the heroine being chased by a mysterious killer, and she did a good job of playing the "straight man" for Hope's comedy shtick. 

 

 Bob Hope isn't much remembered anymore, except as some weird golf playing Republican who appeared in some lame comedy specials on television in the 1960's. The TV specials usually involved him delivering a tired standup routine and then performing in some skits with an actress usually 20 years younger than him, it was all pretty embarrassing stuff. But in the 1940's, Hope was a very funny guy with killer comedic timing and the grace of a professional entertainer who had spent years acquiring the ability to deliver jokes through endless performances on stage, in movies and on the radio. Hope had an amazing physical and verbal dexterity with a joke or routine that is not really seen today. 

One of Hope's most famous accomplishments were his USO tours during World War II. He performed for servicemen over 150 times from 1942 to 1944 throughout the Pacific Theater of Operation. At times his USO show got very close to the actual fighting. He died at the age of 100 after a career which ranged from vaudeville to television. 

 

 Paulette Goddard was discovered by Charlie Chaplin and apparently had a long relationship with him, she starred in two of his films, Modern Times and The Great Dictator. She signed a contract with Paramount in the 1930's and went on to appear in some goofy films for Cecil B. DeMille. She did another horror/comedy with Hope, called The Ghost Breakers which was another big hit for the two of them. Her career petered out in the 1950's and incredibly enough she married Erich Maria Remarque, the author of "All Quiet on the Western Front". She died a very rich woman leaving 20 million dollars to New York University to fund an institute for European studies.

Written by Walter de Leon and Lynn Starling, the running time is 72 minutes.

MEGA SHARK VS GIANT OCTOPUS

From Writer/Director Jack Perez, Director of " Unauthorized Brady Bunch The Final Days", and "666: The Child". Starring Lorenzo Lamas and Debbie Gibson. Here's the You Tube link

1963 - ATRAGON vs.the latest 2009 - STAR TREK movie

Apparently this was the weekend for science fiction at my house.

 

Started with Atragon on Saturday, Toho's science fiction/fantasy made in 1963 about a flying submarine. The plot is about as far fetched as the submarine. An underwater kingdom called the Empire of Mu has decided it wants to take over the world, so it threatens the major cities of the world with destruction if the world doesn't comply. Meanwhile a legendary World War II Japanese submarine commander is building a futuristic submarine that can drill through underwater mountains, fly through the air and has a freeze ray as a weapon. The submarine is called Atragon.

The submarine commander still holds a grudge about the defeat of Japan after World War II and refuses to help fight the Empire of Mu and the Mu's monster, a snake like creature called Manda which is actually kind of cute and looks like the flying dog creature in The Neverending Story. The Mu's have a bunch of terrorists infiltrating the surface world and one of them kidnaps the sub commander's daughter which finally pisses him off and sends him into action.

 

This one's a lot of fun.

Written by Shinichi Sekizawa who is responsible for a lot of these Toho monster epics,  
The running time is96 minutes. 

Sunday evening, the family trekked to the new Star Trek movie which is basically known as, JJ Abram's Star Trek.

 

This is the reboot of the original series with the novelty being that the characters are all in their 20's and are in Star Fleet Academy learning to be astronauts or whatever they study at the Academy. The plot seemed equally as far fetched as Atragon.

A Romulean space miner in a spaceship that drills holes into planets appears to believe that Mr Spock is responsible for the destruction of his home planet. He goes through a black hole time warp thingy along with Mr Spock in order to change the course of history. Once back in time he decides to destroy Spock's home planet, Vulcan.  Lots of plot later, old Mr Spock trapped back in time, meets young Jim Kirk and helps young Kirk learn of his destiny to be the Captain of the starship Enterprise. Even more plot later, young Kirk and young Spock team up to fight the misunderstood but evil Romulean and save the earth from getting a big hole drilled in it.

The time travel stuff allows the writers to slightly change the characters, so we get things like young Kirk as a car stealing juvenile delinquent and young Mr. Spock and young Lt. Uhura falling in love. Young Scotty gets to have a Jar Jar like sidekick, and Leonard Nimoy gets to play old Spock as the Alec Guinness character from the original Star Wars film. One thing that never changes in all of this time traveling stuff is that young or old, Lt. Uhura is still a glorified telephone operator.

Are the films that much different? In 1963, Toho did every special effect with models and some rear projection work so while at times the special effects are effective at other times they look hilariously bad.  In 2009, almost every scene in Star Trek has some sort of optical computer trick to it and while computer effects have a leg up on old fashioned model work they also have their limits. Computer effects allow the actors to do death defying stunts that no normal or sane person could ever perform. There is a skydiving sequence which is pretty ridiculous, and the scene on the ice planet with the monsters chasing young Kirk wasn't much of a step up from Manda.

This isn't 2001 A Space Odyssey we're talking about here but both movies are harmless time killers.

127 minutes. Written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman.

2000 - My review of THE PATRIOT" while mostly sleeping through it

My son had the day off from school yet again and was looking for a movie to watch that night, we went through the pile and found The Patriot the Mel Gibson epic based on Revolutionary War hero Francis Marion aka "The Swamp Fox."

Since we were starting the movie at 10:30 at night it was looking pretty grim for my staying awake for the next 2 hours and 44 minutes. However, I can comment on the following: This is a Mel Gibson ego fest flick if ever there was one. It's all about Mel,  widower, father, fighter, deep thinker, you name it he's got it.

Mel's son, played by the finally deceased Heath Ledger gets kidnapped by the redcoats. It's Mel to the rescue shooting and tomahawking the British into a thousand pieces to free his son. He's very bloody after the attack but the blood is very artistically placed on him to make his hair and skin glimmer in the golden sun. Mel's a widower with a lot of kids (in real life Mel has a lot of kids) he takes them to visit his dead wife's sister who wears bosom enhancing wardrobes whenever she's around him and clearly has the hots for him, how could she not.

Mel forms a band of guerrilla fighters to fight the redcoats in the swamps of South Carolina, we have a somewhat ridiculous scene where Mel bluffs his way into the British fort to mess with General Cornwallis and his pet dogs, the dogs end up running away with Mel because he is so Mel. Mel has an evil bad guy he must fight who is much like the Wez from The Road Warrior except he's British instead of Australian.

The movie ends with Mel helping General Washington to win the Revolutionary War, the last shot is of Mel returning to his plantation with his new bride and the family, after all how could it not.

The director of this epic was Roland Emmerich who had previously made two Revolutionary War films, Independence Day and Stargate.

 164 minutes, written by Robert Rodat.

1991 - Werner Herzog's LESSONS OF DARKNESS

Herzog's film of the Gulf War oil fires filmed in 1991, appears to be aiming for something bigger than the standard documentary put out a fire thing. I would venture to guess it is some sort of hallucinatory vision of the end of the world set in a literally burning desert hell. The film is particularly effective when the oil fires are being photographed from a helicopter that slowly flies near them and in some cases even through them.

The background music consisted of Wagner, Mahler and Grieg. The music adds a deliberate grandeur to the fire imagery of the film reinforcing the "fires in Hell" theme. Herzog's only interview is with a woman who has seen her children die during the war and has lost the power to speak. I would assume that people living in hell don't get much of a chance to speak for themselves.

The film is about an hour long and is available on YouTube.

1966 - ARABESQUE the remake of CHARADE

During the 60's every actor had to make a spy flick, this is Gregory Peck's attempt. Greg's a college professor hired by a shifty Arab type played by an English actor of course.  Greg' has to decode a cipher of some kind which has some secret stuff on it..  The Arab is evil because he has a hawk for a pet that flies around the house attacking servants he is upset with. Sophia Loren an Italian of course plays a hot Arab beauty who may or may not be helping Peck solve the mystery of the cipher.  No one was going to cast an actual middle eastern actor to play opposite Caucasian Peck.

The director is the highly stylish and talented Stanley Donen who moved from 50's musicals to sophisticated love stories and thrillers in the 60's after the musical form had played itself out. Donen had made Charade with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn a few years earlier, and had done a pretty good job at making a Hitchcock type of light thriller. Probably hoping to hit pay dirt again, Donen reworked Charade as Arabesque, keeping the same basic "who can I trust" situation as he used in the first film. The problem for Donen was the realization that the script was pretty bad.

Gregory Peck was a professional, but he really wasn't known for his light comedy touch.   Sophia Loren is a great beauty but she wears some of the strangest outfits ever inflicted on an actress.

 To compensate for these problems, Donen and his cinematographer Christopher Callis, photographed the film with as many nutty camera angles as they could think of. There are shots underneath tables, through glass, under the water, fuzzy, distorted, you name it.   It's fun for a while but soon the realization sets in that there is nothing going on in the movie.

The movie is a harmless time killer assembled by professionals who tried to spin straw into gold and got pyrite instead.

Written by Julian Mitchell, Stanley Price and Peter Stone (under the alias of Pierre Marton).  The running time is 105 minutes.