1928 - THE CROWD King Vidor's story of ordinary people told on epic scale

Supposedly the greatest silent film ever made and one of the most impressive films I've seen lately. King Vidor had made a ton of money for MGM with his war film The Big Parade. Vidor was allowed to pick a topic for a follow up film. King Vidor decided to tell the story of an ordinary couple living in the big city. He had at his disposal all the resources of MGM to make his film.

John and Mary meet, fall in love, get married and have children. One of their children dies, John loses his job, and by the end of the film there is some question whether the marriage will survive. That's the whole film.

King Vidor's strong direction and careful attention to detail definitely made this domestic drama a special film. The character of John Sims is not a particularly likable guy and seems like kind of a loser. His wife Mary, puts up with a lot but seems committed to making the marriage work. Telling this kind of story in 1928 with actors who were not stars was fairly daring approach.

Vidor used lots of expressionistic camera work clearly influenced by UFA studios in Germany, but he was also able to stay focused on the family right through the bittersweet ending.

1960 - Original OCEANS 11 and the cult of the personality

A worthless movie. Peter Lawford found the story and actually wanted to make a serious movie out of it. Sinatra got involved and turned it into a in jokey party time for his flunkies and cronies AKA "The Rat Pack." 

 

Hoping to make some easy money, Sinatra gambled that he and his buddies were so cool and interesting the public would want to see them in a comic heist thriller. Warner Brothers ponied up the money. Lewis Milestone a reliable old director from the 1930's whose best days were behind him, signed up as producer and director of the film. Charles Lederer a veteran screenwriter who had written many Howard Hawks films certainly knew a thing about comedy and writing stories about men being men in a manly world, wrote the final screenplay.
 

Milestone had his hands full dealing with The Rat Pack. They were doing two shows a night and supposedly shooting the movie during the day. Sinatra never liked doing over 3 takes for a scene and there was always his legendary temper to deal with. One can only wonder what actual working actors like Richard Conti, Caesar Romero, Henry Silva and Norman Fell must have thought being a part of this goof off. For Milestone just trying to get a decent film out of this hodge podge turned out to be a chore.

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It's almost touching to see Milestone try to bring some stylistic flourish to Ocean's 11. His legendary tracking shots and rhythmically composed editing techniques provide some visual interest. Milestone was also the one who apparently thought up the famous twist ending for the film.

 

For all the wrong reasons and let it be proclaimed, this is an entertaining movie. There's no question that Sinatra, Dino, Sammy and Lawford are fun to watch. These guys were all top professional entertainers who had been around long enough to know what strings to pull on an audience.

Oceans 11 made money for Sinatra, he tried to repeat the formula with Sergeants 3 and 4 for Texas, but the public had had enough of Sinatra and his boys. As a reward Lewis Milestone went on to finish directing Mutiny on the Bounty after Carol Reed quit. On that movie he had to deal with an even bigger pain in the ass than Sinatra, Marlon Brando.

 127 minutes

1972 - THE BOY WHO TURNED YELLOW Powell and Pressburger's final film

For their final film collaboration, Powell and Pressburger ended up directing a low budget children's film, THE BOY WHO TURNED YELLOW. A film about as quirky as anything they ever did in their prime. The story is about a young boy who loses his pet mouse on a field trip to the Tower of London with his school class. Riding in the subway on the way home, he and the entire subway are transformed in the color yellow. It turns out some yellow being from outer space who travels through
electrical currents is responsible.

The yellow guy gets around on a pair of ski's and has a flashing light on the top of his head. The boy persuades the yellow guy to sneak into the Tower of London in search of his pet mouse.

The boy is captured by the beefeaters (eating beef sandwiches) and condemned to having his head cut off on a chopping block.

Powell and Pressburger, eccentric to the end.

55 minutes.

1959 - THE CRIMSON KIMONO another tawdry mess from Sam Fuller

Fuller's crime film about two detectives is one big mess. The story is about a stripper who is gunned down on a busy street of Los Angeles and since it's a Sam Fuller movie he literally had a stripper running down a busy street. The two detectives, one a Caucasian the other a Japanese American are assigned to solve the murder. The detectives actually live together in some sort of weird gay subtext which Fuller raises and then drops rather quickly.

Both of the detectives fall in love with a portrait painter who helps them solve the case. At this point the movie switches course and becomes the story of an interracial romance. The interracial romance causes the Japanese detective to turn into some kind of reverse racist and he attempts to beat his friend to death during a kendo match. The movie ends with a chase through a Chinatown parade where the Japanese detective shoots the killer of the stripper and simultaneously sees the error of his reverse racist ways.

This film was a total mess, but interesting.

 98 minutes

1969 - SWEET CHARITY another fricking 60's movie musical.

Universal spent 20 million bucks on Sweet Charity a film that made them 4 million dollars. They should have carefully thought through what they were getting mixed up with.

They hired the original Broadway director/choreographer Bob Fosse who was a talented guy but had never actually directed a movie before. Fosse fell in love with every weird camera angle he could think of. The film is loaded with slow motion shots, reversed film effects, still montages, hand held camera movements and just about any other faddish 60's camera technique he must have seen at his local foreign film art house. The constant zooming in and out and the bizarre film editing made the film an ordeal to sit through. Sweet Charity looks very dated now. The film was also shot in widescreen which means that when the camera moves in close on the dancers it cuts their legs off. Then of course if the camera pulls back. the the dancers look small. If you can't see dancers doing their dancing thing that kind of defeats the purpose of a musical.

Transferring a show like Sweet Charity from the stage into a movie is a lot trickier than you think. Bob Fosse clearly knew something about staging sexy bump and grind dance numbers, but in movies, long dance numbers can be a real killer to sit through. 150 minutes is a lot of time to watch people singing and dancing. Everyone dumps on The Sound of Music, but that movie is a lot more skillfully made than Sweet Charity.

Then there's the issue of the star Shirley MacClaine. Sweet Charity is the story of a dance hall hooker who is basically an innocent at heart. Shirley MacClaine was trained as a dancer and is certainly a professional. But her days of playing an innocent in the movies were pretty much over by 1969. She just wasn't the same likable actor when she first appeared in The Trouble With Harry. The intervening years had hardened her screen personality.

Fosse hops directs

Finally, who in their right mind ever thought people would want to go see a musical about a dance hall hooker. When Mommy and Daddy were looking for a film musical to take the kids too what were they going to pick, Mary Poppins or Sweet Charity?

149 minutes!

1965 - SIMON OF THE DESERT the meek will not inherit the earth

A holy man stands on a column for 6 years, 6 months and 6 days. As a reward for being so holy he gets a higher column.

 This is Luis Bunuel's  funny film about a very pious but extremely judgmental and very ridiculous holy man. Simon stands on his column, prays and fasts and  has not a word to say to anyone, unless it's to criticize their lack of spiritually. His followers mostly take it in stride but at times even the Brothers at the local monastery seem to find him tiresome. Finally, as a corrective, the Devil shows up to tempt him off his path of self righteousness.

This is almost a perfect film. My only criticism would be the ending of the film, where I think Bunuel didn't really know how to wrap it all up.  This film is amazingly based on the life of a holy man named Simeon Stylites who actually lived on a pillar for over 39 years.

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Silvia Pinal enjoys herself way too much as the Devil.

45 enjoyably blasphemous minutes.

1926 - MENILMONTANT Avant Garde slasher film

Watching Avant Garde films is always a challenge. Usually the non linear plot structure and the show off camera and editing effects tend to make these films look very silly and pretentious It's as if the filmmaker want's to announce to everyone his crap is art with a capital "A." Taking out of focus pictures and mixing it with shaky photography isn't really my idea of a good time. Menilmontant is kind of a nice exception to this kind of film.

There is actually a plot in this film. The parents of two sisters are brutally axe murdered and the sisters are forced to relocate to Paris They both get romantically involved with the same man. The film ends with a violent death. What made Menilmontant interesting to watch was the technique of the filmmaker Dimitri Kirsanoff. Even with his extreme editing and photography techniques, Kirsanoff kept the story of the relationship of the two sisters in focus. Admittedly the film was melodramatic but it was also very touching at times. Avant Garde films are rarely known for their emotional intimacy or character development. This film was an unusual exception.




The film is only 40 minutes long but it is very layered. Menilmontant uses technique in the service of the story for a change instead of the other way around. A very interesting accomplishment.
 

1958 - INVENTION FOR DESTRUCTION aka "The Fabulous World of Jules Verne"

Czech filmmaker Karel Zeman's science fiction film is based on at least three different Jules Verne books by my count and maybe even a fourth. Zeman doesn't use any of the stories from the books but takes some general concepts and ideas for this film which is about an inventor who is kidnapped and made to perfect a high explosive he has been working on. 

 

 

 

 An interesting looking film. Zeman mixes it all up. He has sequences of animation, which he blends with live performers and he superimposes ocean scenes over animations of a submarine moving underwater. The black and white photography also contributes to the look of the film. 

 

A lot of time and effort must have been put into the look of the film, the Victorian sets and illustrations are very charming, there is always something interesting to look at throughout the film. The performances are also fun, the villains aren't really horribly villainous and the hero is a stalwart soul who always acts in the proper and dignified manner of a gentleman. 

 

 

 

 Zeman apparently claimed that he only made his films for children, but the mood that he creates throughout the film would indicate possibly more of an interest in recreating a period in human history when technology was beginning to assert itself.

 

Running time 83 minutes, written by Karel Zeman, Frantisek Hrubin, Jiri Brdecka and Milan Vacha.

1926 - 3 BAD MEN, Big Big Big Budget John Ford Western

John Ford's 1926 film was his final western until 1939's Stagecoach. The story is about 3 outlaws taking care of a young woman after her father dies. The film has lots of corny comedy relief from the bad men but it also shows Ford's continuing development as a visual artist. One shot in particular is copied and used as the closing shot of The Searchers.

Ford is now carefully placing his characters against strong scenic backdrops to contribute to the visual flow of his films. By 1929, sound finally does away with silent film technique and it will take until 1935 for Ford to regain control of the visual aspects of his films and move away from the static early talkies.

  

For large scale epic film making the land rush sequence is something to see. The amount of preproduction work involved in this sequence must have been considerable. As usual this type of ambitious sequence is even more impressive when you consider that it was all actually staged without any kind of optical trickery. Stuntmen fly through the air, wagons crash and in one amazing sequence a baby is literally placed in front of a galloping row of wagons and horses. Try getting away with that today. 

Ford said that silent films were much harder work than sound films and after watching something like this you can see why. An impressive achievement with efficient story telling, the film runs about 90 minutes.

1964 - Peter Watkin's Historical recreation of Vietnam War set in Scotland CULLODEN

British filmmaker Peter Watkins was one angry leftist in 1964. The Vietnam War was escalating, the United States looked like an imperialist bully. How to express his anger? Watkins got the BBC to finance a reenactment of the 1795 Battle of Culloden which was the last battle fought on British soil. Essentially a civil war type conflict, Culloden had the superior English troops putting down a Scottish rebellion.

 

 

Watkins very clever idea was to film the reenactment as if it was being covered by a TV news crew. The film is photographed with hand held cameras in grainy black and white. A TV newsman interviews the participants in the battle and an omnipotent narrator fills the audience in on the general conflict. This was the standard technique for presenting war stories to people watching the Vietnam War in their living rooms.

This technique has been copied and spoofed so many times (Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Cops, Reno 911 etc) that it's kind of impressive that the film still looks strong in 2009. Even with the removal of the Vietnam War as an underlying subtext to the film, this is still a tough anti-war film.

69 minutes.

1960 - Lesbian Vampire Euro Trash: BLOOD AND ROSES

The pictures make it look more interesting than it is. This is junk that was classed up by some excellent photography from Claude Renoir, grandson of Pierre-Auguste Renoir. The director is Roger Vadim who believe it or not was part of the famous French New Wave group that included Truffaut, Goddard and Chabrol. Vadim was in the sub division of the New Wave that was dedicated to marrying beautiful women and the sticking them in pseudo porno crap that were pushed off as films of erotic artistic expression.

 

The plot was based on some ancient vampire story called Carmilla except it was modernized and set in Italy where I suppose the idea was to juxtapose the decadence of the Italian aristocracy with the corruption of a sexy lesbian vampire. Or was it just an attempt on Vadim's part to see how far he could get away with having his two leading ladies play kissy face with each other? Vadim's latest wife at the time, Annette Vadim played Carmilla. Carmilla is in love with her cousin an Italian Count who is in love with another woman who seems to be half brain dead. Carmilla gets possessed by the soul of an ancient lesbian vampire, who was released during a fireworks display at the Count's estate. It's pretty easy to guess where the movie goes from that point.

The only interesting part of the movie is a lengthy dream sequence which was clearly influenced by Cocteau.

A good example of the foreign film as nudie peep show masquerading as art during the 1960's.

87 minutes.

1944 - Hitchock's banned World War II film AVENTURE MALGACHE

Hitchcock's 2nd World War II propaganda short after Bon Voyage had him taking a screen credit this time. This short film was made as a tribute to the French Resistance but was never released in France.

 

This film has a complex story telling style. It alternates between scenes of actors putting on a play and a story of a resistance leader in a battle of wits with a local Vichey official. Many of the French in this film are shown as untrustworthy and willing to betray their own countrymen to the authorities. A more realistic view of the French during World War II then anyone was ready for, it was not the rah rah film the Allies thought they were getting from Hitchcock.

A film where Hitchcock had more interest than making a standard propaganda piece. As usual "truth is the first casualty" during a war. The French weren't ready to even begin to confront the truth about themselves and their disreputable involvement with the Germans until 1969 when Ophul's The Sorrow and the Pity was released.

30 minutes.

2009 - TERMINATOR SALVATION, is what it is

  The budget for Terminator Salvation was $200 million dollars. The movie has made $124 million dollars. This is what you get for $200 million dollars:

"Come with me if you want to live."

"If you point that at someone be prepared to use it."

"There's enough nuclear fission in there to level this whole complex."

"We're not your enemy the machines are."

"We have to find this guy. "

"You wanted to see me?"

"No! I won't leave you!" "Thanks to you, now they know we're here."

"What is it that makes us human? It's not something you can program. You can't put it into a chip. It's the strength of the human heart."

"There is no fate, but what we make."

Written by John Brancato and Michael Ferris, the running time, 115 minutes.

1979 - HARPYA this one's good for a few nightmares

Saw this on the DVD Savant website. I'm not even going to think about the psycho/sexual aspects of this short film. Enjoy.

1966 - GHOST AND MR CHICKEN asks the question. How stupid are small town people?

Universal made a series of Don Knott's movies for the Midwest "silent majority" crowd. They used the creative team from The Andy Griffith Show to ask the question. How big a bunch of boobs live in a small Midwestern town? The answer is apparently a big bunch of boobs live in a small Midwestern town. Don Knotts could play only one part, his Barney Fife deputy sheriff character. It was somewhat pushing it that people would want to sit through over 90 minutes of his silly sthick in a low budget feature.

At first the movie lumbers along for about 40 minutes with Knotts doing his nervous Nelly routine. Along the way are lots of nameless but familiar television supporting actors wandering around. Look, the guy who played Otis the drunk on the Griffith show is playing a drunk in this movie. Look, Dick Sargent, his claim to fame was being cast as the second Darrin on Bewitched, he's Don's boss.

But my personal favorite is an actor named Skip Homeier. Homeier usually played bad guys. He was in two of the lamest original Star Trek episodes, the one with the Nazis and that outer space hippies vs Captain Kirk masterpiece , The Way to Eden. Of course he plays the guy being mean to Don.

At the forty minute mark this movie really gets going. Knotts is a would be reporter who is tricked into spending the night in a haunted house. After a series of creepy encounters, including some now famous ghostly organ music by TV composer Vic Mizzy the movie kicks into high gear.

A small town chamber of commerce picnic has Knotts giving a funny speech on the meaning of bravery. This is followed by a libel trial featuring a parade of character witnesses which include his second grade teacher and an accountant the president of the local UFO group who informs the court that they held their last meeting on Mars. Can't forget to mention the ladies of the "Psychic Occult Society of Rachel," who vibrate themselves into unconsciousness every time they touch Knotts. Something pretty strange is going on in this movie. One amusing little joke is the casting of a woman called Joan Staley. She plays Don's very wholesome love interest. In a previous career she was a Playboy Playmate of the Month. That should have made Don even more nervous.