1992 - BILLY WILDER SPEAKS and speaks and speaks and speaks

Filmed by Volker Schlöndorff in 1992 and edited down from a 3 hour documentary. Wilder rehashes the same stories he has told about his films and himself many times before. Since Wilder lived to be 96 years old, he had a lot of time to get his version right.

   

Even at the age of 88 when this was film was shot, Wilder still carries on at great length about the problems he had working with Marilyn Monroe while filming Some Like It Hot. Humphrey Bogart doesn't come off much better when Wilder discusses Sabrina. For Wilder, time did not heal old wounds.  

 

 

Wilder was a prickly verbally abusive kind of guy. He always worked with a co-writer when preparing his films and usually these writers couldn't stand to work with him again. His longest partnership with writer I.A.L. Diamond supposedly survived because Diamond was pretty much a human doormat.

 

Billy Wilder also kept an experienced editor on set with him while filming. This was to ensure that he didn't miss getting all of the required shots he needed during a scene. He stopped doing this in the mid 1960's which interestingly enough is when his hot streak finally ended. None of this comes up in the interview, no idol criticizing allowed in this film.

A disappointing film, you're probably better off reading the biography On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Time of Billy Wilder.

71 minutes. 

1934 - The good old days in the South, John Ford's JUDGE PRIEST

Tough film to watch. The old south after the Civil War is a wonderful place where happy black people sit around sing spirituals and cook fried chicken for their white employers. Will Rodgers, the Garrison Keillor of his day plays folksy wise Judge Billy Priest. Sitting in his courtroom dishing out justice, Judge Priest solves the problems of a young southern couple thwarted in love because she comes from the "wrong side of the tracks." He also saves a wrongly convicted man from going to jail when he reveals that man to be a hero of the Confederacy.





The whole idea of a film celebrating the idealized southern lifestyle where blacks and whites know their place in a southern community is laughable. Towards the end of the film the town celebrates the southern Confederacy with a parade of waving Confederate flags thus entering a special fantasy world that ignores the whole reason the Civil War was ever fought.

John Ford was a director who usually needed to be kept somewhat under control or he would tend to run amok with lots of corny jokes and sentimental slop running throughout his films. Ford's famous visual style is not present in this film.

1959 - Jean Pierre Melville's DEUX HOMMES DANS NEW YORK

French director Jean-Pierre Melville lover of all things American, particularly film noir movies, had an opportunity in 1959 to film in New York.

 

 A true auteur in the real sense, Melville wrote, directed and edited everyone of his films. Also a real independent filmmaker, Melville financed and built his own studio. The film about two French newspaper reporters searching for a missing United Nations diplomat turned out to be a disappointment. Melville's story was not very interesting and he had a serious tin ear when it came to getting decent performances out of his American actors.

The on location filming in New York had a nice documentary look to it, but the film was spoiled by an obnoxious jazz score which sounded like a parody. Melville himself played one of the two reporters and wasn't too bad, unfortunately every time he jumped into a car to check out the next clue the music blasted out on the soundtrack to alert the viewer something was about to happen. A good filmmaker but apparently a real character. Melville was known for wearing sunglasses and a trench coat which made him look like a movie detective. Melville was also known for wearing a cowboy hat while directing to add to his aura of quirkiness.

Melville knew he had failed with this film. After taking a couple of years off to rethink his approach to filmmaking, Jean-Pierre Melville came back with a series of impressive crime films.

 85 minutes.

1940 - THE GHOST BREAKERS, Bob Hope's Night of the Living Dead

Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard's follow up to their hit film The Cat and the Canary. This is another comedy/thriller. The very Caucasian Goddard improbably plays the heiress to a spooky mansion near Cuba called Black Island. There are strange rumors of voodoo and a zombie is running around on the island to complicate things a little more. Hope goes along to protect her and solve the mystery. 

 

 

Bob Hope gets to toss off the one liners and Paulette Goddard does a decent job not playing her part as a whimpering frightened female. Probably the only uncomfortable part of the movie is the African American actor Willie Best as Hope's manservant. He's funny and saves the day but the racial stereotyping is tough to sit through.

 

  

 Coming in under 90 minutes the movie is entertaining if undemanding. 

 

 

 

Written by Walter DeLeon and Hope's uncredited gag writers, the running time is 83 minutes.

 

1928 - Male/Female relationships Von Stroheim's THE WEDDING MARCH

Von Stroheim's 1928 film is a love story about an impoverished Prussian Prince who falls in love with a lower middle class woman but is forced by circumstance to marry the daughter of a rich industrialist. The entire story was filmed with great detail and glowing photography, it's a sophisticated but perverted film. Although the Prince's love for the woman Mitzi appears to be genuine, the Prince is hardly a likable leading man in the traditional sense. Scenes throughout the film show the Prince spending time in a bordello and it's clear he has been sleeping with the chambermaid at his parent's home. Even the beginning of his love scene with Mitzi is played next to a statue of the crucifix.

The other major male character, the butcher, who is in love with Mitzi is deliberately photographed to look like a pig. His attempted seduction of her towards the end of the film involves lots of unsubtle symbolism with the camera cutting back and forth between the butcher and a live pig running around the butcher shop.

Both female characters have some sort of physical handicap throughout the film. Mitzi, after she first meets the Prince, breaks her leg and hobbles around on a crutch throughout most of the film. The other female character Cecelia, was born with a limp. These details further push Von Stroheim's theme of the exploitation of vulnerable women.

Originally a two part film, the conclusion of the story called The Honeymoon exists only in stills photos, an interesting intelligent film about corruption of the innocent.

1966 - EL DORADO Howard Hawk's self indulgent but highly entertaining western

The screenwriter Leigh Brackett, was so frustrated with Howard Hawks during the production of El Dorado, that she openly referred to the film as "Son of Rio Bravo." But by this point in his career, Howard Hawks was indulging himself to an unparalleled degree. Sticking just about every dumb western cliche and rehash of scenes from his previous films into El Dorado, Howard Hawks was artistically out of control and clearly didn't care.

 

The critics at the time were not impressed with the film and re watching it now it's easy to understand why.  Even the line readings of the actors incorporated some of the famous Howard Hawks overlapping dialog which he had used in his previous films. If Hawks wanted to indulge himself in a trip down memory lane, so be it.

It's interesting to compare the directors Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock at this point in their
careers. Hawks in his early seventies and Hitchcock in his late sixties were winding down their amazing careers with only a few more films left in them.

Their treatment of women in their films at this point in their lives is an interesting contrast between the styles and personalities of these men. Hitchcock pretty much spent the rest of his career sexually obsessing over the actress Tippi Hedren and thinking up inventive ways to stage creepy rape and murder scenes against women in his remaining films

Howard Hawks also had a thing for women and stuck lots of hot looking women in his last couple of films. However Hawks wasn't interested in raping or murdering them, he just had them looking good and talking smart. As he got older, John Wayne no longer wanted to play love scenes with younger women. Hawks made it a point of having Wayne perform with younger actresses to embarrass him.

Hawks cast Robert Mitchum to act opposite John Wayne. Having these two legendary actors and alcoholics play against each other was a great idea. Wayne usually tended to overwhelm most of the actors he played with. But Robert Mitchum had such a strong personality that at times Wayne almost looked like he was underacting. Mitchum recognized the film for what it was, a bunch of foolishness. His mugging and hamming throughout the film was very entertaining.

El Dorado was the the last film photographed by Hal Rosson. Rosson had a long career, he had photographed films like The Wizard of Oz, Singing in the Rain and parts of Gone With The Wind. El Dorado has lots of beautiful old style Hollywood photography particularly with the use of the color yellow to simulate the evening western sky.

Coming in 20 minutes shorter than Rio Bravo, Howard Hawks still had enough tricks left in him to make El Dorado a box office hit with the audience in 1966, but Hawks must have known that times were changing for his kind of film. Still, you could make the argument that El Dorado is a lot more entertaining in many ways than the very pretentious Rio Bravo.

1968 - FINIAN'S RAINBOW, a musical about the invention of the perfect menthol cigarette

At 2 hours and 20 minutes, Finian's Rainbow, is a musical about racism in the South with a magical leprechaun running around. It required several nights of viewing to sit through. 69 year old Fred Astaire was way past his prime and it was a little embarrassing to watch him perform some of the dance numbers. He still had a lot of grace and charm which compensated for his diminished skills as a dancer. 

 

 Tommy Steele as Og the leprechaun always seemed to be one of the most strident musical comedy performers in this history of musicals. He over performs every song in the Liza Minnelli tradition of clobbering the audience over the head to show how talented he is.  

 

 

 There are a lot of nice things about Finian's Rainbow. The score is really good with lots of decent and several very good songs. Petula Clark is also very good playing Astaire's daughter and sings the two best songs in the film. 

The producers wanted a younger director for this musical and hired Francis Ford Coppola to direct. He must have had his hands full with an aging star, an outdated story about sharecroppers living in racial harmony and non existent choreography. Working with a larger budget, the young director had previously only made small independent and cheap films. Coppola staged many of the musical numbers outdoors to bring some movement to the film. This was an approach that Astaire apparently didn't much care for.

 

 Compared to something like Hello Dolly, or Star, Finian's Rainbow at least has some charm to it. Unfortunately the movie was pretty outdated by 1968.

 141 minutes, written by Yip Harburg and Fred Saidy.

1971 - BIG JAKE, John Wayne Movie Pro

64 year old John Wayne has to do all the work in this western.   Bad guys have kidnapped Duke's grandson. Duke's got to get him back. Along with his estranged sons and his trusty Indian sidekick they take off after the bad guys. 

Will Duke succeed?   Get real.

Criticized at the time of release for having a lot of excessive violence in it. This was kind of surprising for a John Wayne movie. The final shootout actually had a Friday the 13th type of unstoppable killer chasing the little kid around. The film did not do particularly well with audiences.

Big Jake was the last appearance of Maureen O'Hara with Wayne, they had only one small scene together which was another disappointment. This movie has run on cable TV so many times that it seems better than it actually is. By this point in his career Wayne was pretty much going through the motions, but he was a pretty strong presence even in a mediocre film like this.

This is probably the type of movie that people think of when they think "John Wayne movie" but he really made better films than this.

1930 - EARTH, they make you watch films like this in film school .

Alexander Dovzhenko's 1930 film on farm collectivism was criticized by the Communist controlled Soviet government for being rigidly and excessively formalist. The Commies may be attempting godless destroyers of our democratic way of life, but as it turns out they were apparently pretty decent film critics.

 

 A story of a farming community that gets a government sponsored tractor to help increase it's output. The film contains endless shots of apples growing on trees, apples glistening in the rain, apples falling out of trees laying on the ground and then there's the series of wheat growing in the field scenes and after that the series of sunflowers growing in the fields. 

 

 With it's meticulous technique in photography and editing, this was hardly going to be a film that the hard working Ukrainian farmers would go to see at their local multiplex. 

 

Oleksandr Dovzhenko aka Alexander Dovzhenko must have been aware that his highly formalist film would have little audience appeal because he included a nude scene towards the end. To little to late.

 Written by Oleksandr Dovzhenko, the running time is 76 minutes.

2006 - X MEN THE LAST STAND is the future of movies

The future of movies will not be pretty because it's X Men The Last Stand.

 

Transformers Revenge of the Fallen is "the" summer family movie this year, more so than Pixar's Up. Concurrently all of the "adult" type films released in the last couple of month have flopped. In tough financial straits, Hollywood is looking for the golden goose. Hollywood thinks they have found it with Transformers Revenge of the Fallen. 

Transformers Revenge of the Fallen is just another version of X Men The Last Stand. 

 

 
Released in 2006 as part of the X Men trilogy. 20th Century Fox sold it as a wrap up of the story arc. The truth was that cheapskate studio Fox was no longer interested in paying the large salaries of the big cast. Bryan Singer had directed the first two films and had done a decent job but Singer left the franchise to direct Superman Returns,  which as it turned out didn't really work out all that well for him. Faced with a summer 2006 release date, the studio turned to legendary hack director Brett Ratner to take over the direction of the third film and get this sucker into the theaters in time. Fanboys, X Men comic book readers, and science fiction nerds whined that the untalented Ratner would ruin the conclusion of the series. They were right the finished movie was very lame but it also made a lot of money.
 

  

But Brett Ratner wasn't to blame for the movie. The truth was that Ratner never really directed the movie, the special effects department did. Every five minutes of the film had some sort of special effects sequence. As the movie went on, the effects just got more and more over the top. The actors were basically props for the ever increasing explosions, laser blasts and flying thru the air crap that ran throughout the film. In the end what the audience was left with was a movie full of pretty people stuck in some ridiculous action sequences. 

 

With an over engineered sound track and a lot of computer simulated explosions, the exhausted viewer probably returned home to medicate themselves with lots of alcohol to calm their nerves.  The success of this film and the horrible Spiderman 3 revealed the future of movies.   It would be lots of crappy cartoonish films coming at the audience in the years to come.

 

As if the movie wasn't annoying enough, X Men The Last Stand featured Ellen Page the grating star of Juno. Apparently the special effects department decided not to blow her up.  

 104 minutes, (BOOM).

1930 - CITY GIRL F.W. Murnau's American Period

Farm boy from Minnesota travels to Chicago. While in the Windy City he meets and falls in love with a waitress working at a diner. They impulsively get married, return to the farm where they are not well received by the farm boy's Christian Fundamentalist father. That's basically the story.

The director F.W. Murnau had filmed The Last Laugh in Germany. American film executive William Fox whose studio would later become 20th Century Fox, considered The Last Laugh the best film ever made. Fox brought Murnau over to Hollywood for two purposes, he let Murnau make any film of his choosing and he wanted him to teach his studio directors how to make better films.

 

City Girl contains scenes of strong lyrical beauty with beautiful shots of the farm fields and the couple running through them. It also has very emotional performances from a cast that actually look like people who would live on a farm. The composition and photography in each scene using light, shadow and set design is very impressive in the city and farm scenes.

Murnau's first American film Sunrise, is now considered one of the greatest films ever made, unfortunately it did not do very well with the audience which was overwhelmed with it's stunning technique. City Girl was Murnau's third American film and it got caught up in the transitional mess from silent to sound films. Fox screwed around with it, reedited it and released it in a version not approved by the director.

Still the film has a strong sense of atmosphere for the period and place and it's a very good film.

 

Written by  Marion Orth and Berthold Viertel, the running time is 89 minutes.

2009 - WATCHMAN, the extended Director's cut.

The world probably didn't need any version of the Watchmen when you get right down to it much less the extended director's cut but here it is.

 

I've read the graphic novel or comic book or whatever it's called, twice. I read it because it's been acclaimed as the best graphic novel or comic book or whatever written. Set in the 1980's, the graphic novel or comic book or whatever it's called, seems like a total period piece with it's criticism of Nixon and Vietnam. Does President Nixon still have that kind of resonance for the public anymore? After surviving eight years of Bush the younger as President, what's worse in a national leader ruthlessness
or stupidity?

 

The graphic novel was kicking around Hollywood for many years before Warner Brothers decided to sink a whole lot of money into it. Hoping for a repeat of that The Dark Knight kind of success, the studio was asking for and got a disaster. The problem was that the Watchmen stories are pretty outdated in the 21st century. A film that requires a knowledge of Richard Nixon and the culture of the 1980's and wants to mix it up with a critical look at the role of the superhero in our society seems like a lot to ask of a viewer looking for a couple of hours of entertainment. It's a very long film and a fairly violent film, the R rating made sure that the film would have a limited audience. The whole project probably should have been written off years ago.

Honestly the acting was not seem so hot. The character of the super heroine Silk Spectre was played by an actress named Malin Akerman. You can zip her up in a latex outfit but that doesn't make her a particularly sexy super heroine, you actually have to know how to act sexy. She's supposed to be the voice of humanity presenting the case to godlike superhero Dr Manhattan that the world is worth saving from nuclear war. She came off more like a shrill harpy.

 

Mixing the story lines of a murder mystery and the potential destruction of earth by nuclear war seemed pretty shaky. It was weak in the graphic novel or comic book or whatever it's called, and the film just makes it look even weaker. The old Space Ghost cartoons did a better job telling stories and they were at least short.

The whole idea of people dressing up as super heroes to rid the world of evil is really kind of stupid when you really think about it.

 The screenplay was by David Hayter and Alex Tse, the running time is 186 minutes.

1959 - OUR MAN IN HAVANA has a great Alec Guinness performance but movie is a little to smart for it's own good

A comedy thriller from Graham Greene and Carol Reed who had made The Third Man. This is a very clever spy film but probably a little to subtle for a mass audience entertainment.

 

British Intelligence needs an agent in Cuba. They recruit a vacuum cleaner salesman named Wormold to spy for them. Wormold is given a code name that ends in 005 amusingly enough and realizes rather quickly he doesn't have a clue what to do as a spy. He pulls out the Havana phone book, randomly picks some names out of the book and starts making up reports to send to British Intelligence in London. Soon "the other side" realizes the British have a new agent in Cuba and send an assassination team out to kill him and his list of agents. Remember this is a comedy.

Graham Greene and Carol Reed are top professionals. The dialog is good, the acting is very good and the on location filming in Cuba literally while the revolution was going on is pretty cool. However the film is so clever and subtle in it's tone and humor, it works against the enjoyment of the film. The understated nature of the story is kind of interesting to watch unfold and when the story gets serious and the violence comes it is kind of surprising.

Carol Reed always got great performances out of actors, apparently he was a director who actually liked his actors, unlike Hitchcock or David Lean. All the acting is good but this film has an amazing performance by Alec Guinness. Playing the vacuum cleaner salesman who goes from being a wimp to a cold blooded killer seems perfectly in character the way Guinness approaches the role.

 Love the name on that sign by the way.

111 minutes.

1972 - CABARET requires a high tolerance for Liza

Cabaret was loved by the critics when it was released in 1972. It starred Liza Minnelli as the likable gold digger Sally Bowles and Michael York who was portraying the original author of the stories, Christopher Isherwood. With a makeup job that makes her looks like one of the droogs from A Clockwork Orange, Cabaret featured the Academy Award winning performance of the very grating Liza.

The viewer better have a high tolerance for her over the top constantly on personality because it's the entire movie. She starts out at the peak of the emotional range and doesn't really scale it down for the rest of the film.  It's hard to top Joel Grey as the flamboyant Master of Ceremonies at the Cabaret but Minnelli succeeds brilliantly.

The movie's other major character, the bi-sexual writer who sleeps with Minnelli is supposed to be the original author Christopher Isherwood. He's in total shame when he reveals his homosexual encounter to Minnelli. Although it was 1972, the idea that his one sexual encounter with another male was the most horrible thing to ever happen to him now seems pretty silly. 

The filmmakers were so sure that Isherwood would like their adaptation of his stories and their portrayal of him they screened the film for him. Isherwood's only comment was "I never slept with a woman in my life."

Probably the best parts of the movie are the technical aspects of the film. The director Bob Fosse showed that he was beginning to understand how to put a movie together after the mess he made out of Sweet Charity. Having the legendary cinematographer, Geoffrey Unsworth who had filmed 2001: A Space Odyssey, shooting the film didn't hurt him one bit.

Cabaret is a film that takes the musical format and makes a strong statement on the evils of Nazi Germany 22 years after the end of World War II. Had Fosse lived longer perhaps he could have followed Cabaret with a musical on the evils of slavery, now that would have been a courageous movie.
 

 124 minutes, screenplay by Jay Presson Allen.