1976 - THE BIG BUS, pretty silly stuff but fun

The first non stop atomic powered bus traveling from New York to Denver is threatened with sabotage in this very silly but funny movie. 

The film actually beat the other disaster genre parody Airplane by 4 years even though Airplane gets all the credit for spoofing this kind of film.  The Big Bus was there first and in some ways is a funnier movie.

The cast of comedians in this film stomps through this film milking every joke for all its worth.

88 minutes

1920 - THE LAST OF THE MOHICIANS, another good silent film

The Indians are all played by white guys, there is the usual eye rolling silent acting, and they cut out major parts of the Cooper's book.  But this is still a very good version of The Last Of The Mohicians.

The directors are Maurice Tourneur and Clarence Brown.   Tourneur was the father of Jacques Tourneur and a good early silent film director.  Clarence Brown was a strong studio director and worked for MGM for many years.  These guys were craftsman in the best sense.  Tourneur and Brown took James Fenimore Cooper's boring book and cut it down to a decent little movie that emphasized the action and the love story between the native American and the white woman. 

A lot of the film was filmed on location at Yosemite National Park which gives it an authentic look.  The action scenes and fights are well directed and have some contemporary camera shots.

At 73 minutes this is an excellent well made early silent film with good action, beautiful on location scenery and good storytelling.

1932 - THE BLUE LIGHT, Riefenstahl's story of romantic fatalism is one of the most beautiful films I have ever seen.

None of the stills on this post will do justice to The Blue Light one of the most beautiful black and white films I have seen.  The director/star Leni Riefenstahl had at her disposal some of the top German technicians working in their film business at that time.  This group managed to find a way to film subtle shades of gray throughout the film to achieve incredibly beautiful visual effects 

The Blue Light is a very simple story about a mountain girl who has discovered the secret of a mysterious source of glowing light from a mountain near her home.  The villagers in the small town beneath the mountain have already lost 4 men who have attempted to follow her to discover her secret.  They also believe she is a witch who has entranced these men to their death.  Admittedly the story is a little thin, but it does allow the filmmakers to stage some incredible mountain climbing scenes.

In this film, Riefenstahl is very carefully photographed to make her seem almost a creature from another dimension.  I suppose you could label this film a uber fascist fairy tale, with this emphasis on this pure untouched creature interacting with her rugged environment, that theme is strongly interwoven into the narrative.

Leni Riefenstahl will always be a controversial filmmaker.  Her association with Hitler and the Nazi party followed her to her death.  Her degree of involvement with the Nazi's has been subject to a lot of speculation, but if her naivety about the Nazis was as real as she claims, her association with them probably still made her a dangerous person since she helped to propagate their Aryan fantasy.  She always acted the role of the misunderstood artist her entire life.

The film has a strong Teutonic theme running throughout it.   It's possible Riefenstahl was attempting to create a myth much like Fritz Lang's Die Nibelung Saga.  Leni Riefenstahl always thought epic when she filmed, look at Olympia.

86 minutes.

Still an impressive film, one of the most beautiful I have seen.  The Blue Light shows how very talented filmmakers working with 1930's equipment and filming in black and white, can equal or even surpass a lot of films shot in color and widescreen.

2004 - BROADWAY - THE GOLDEN AGE, semi interesting documentary

Rick McKay an enterprising fellow, bought himself a camera and on his own and with literally no camera crew put together this documentary on Broadway's supposed "golden years" roughly the period between the 1940's through the 1960's. 

McKay amazingly got a lot of Broadway performers to speak with him.  People like, Bea Arthur, Elizabeth Ashley, Carol Burnett, Carol Channing, Ben Gazzara, Robert Goulet, Uta Hagen, Julie Harris, Martin Landau, Angela Lansbury, Shirley MacLaine, Patricia Neal, Jerry Orbach, Jane Powell, Hal Prince, John Raitt, Chita Rivera, Gena Rowlands, Eva Marie Saint, Stephen Sondheim, Maureen Stapleton, Elaine Stritch, Tommy Tune, Gwen Verdon, Eli Wallach and Fay Wray.  Pretty impressive.

McKay also dug up a number of TV and film clips of some of the shows along with archival footage of New York and the theater district.

So what did I learn from watching this?  Mainly that the good old days are gone.  The older Broadway stars understandably long for a time when they were the center of attraction and the world seemed focused on their little niche of the entertainment business.  The creative talent is also gone, people like Richard Rogers, Jerome Robbins, George Abbot etc.  The theater has also worked hard to price itself out of affordable existence with their audiences.  Some ticket prices are now in excess of $400.00

Broadway - The Golden Age, is not a comprehensive history of Broadway but an entertaining overview of American theater if you have an interest in such things.

1926 - MOANA, Flaherty's study of Savaii Island in Samoa is boring but it wasn't his fault

Robert Flaherty had a big success with his film Nanook of the North.  Paramount wanted to repeat that success and hired Flaherty to film another docudrama in the Pacific south seas.  Paramount was looking for another Nanook of the North only this time on a tropical island.  Flaherty traveled to Savaii Island in Samoa and was pretty much screwed as soon as he arrived.

Instead of finding an island culture untouched by western civilization.  Flaherty found that Christian missionaries had already established themselves on Savaii Island and had changed a lot of the island's customs and traditions.  To start with the missionaries had gotten the islanders to start wearing clothes and abandon their traditional dress or lack of dress as it were.  Flaherty further came to realize that the Savaii islanders actually got along with each other pretty well and there was not much in the way of dramatic conflict to photograph.  

Forced to reconsider his approach, Flaherty paid the Savaii Islanders to reenact the customs and traditions that were quickly vanishing.  Flaherty filmed scenes of people fishing, picking coconuts out of palm trees, catching crabs and making clothes out of tree bark. Interesting but kind of dull stuff.

Flaherty also needed an action climax like the snowstorm in Nanook, but lacking this he instead choose a ritual tattooing of a young male to be his exciting ending.  However this was not exactly thrilling either. Watching the tattooing being done to the boy is also pretty boring,  however it does look like it really really hurts. 

Moana is kind of a disappointment, it has some spectacular photography and some very pretty scenery but the lack of  action makes it pretty slow going even at 65 minutes.  Paramount was extremely disappointed with the film and made Flaherty reedit it into something shorter.

Moana is almost a warmup for Man of Aran.  The shots of the ocean crashing into the island and Flaherty's insistence on having people actually canoeing around in dangerous ocean waves are repeated in Man of Aran.   Flaherty's focus on a typical island family is an approach he repeated as well in Man of Aran.

An interesting film, unfortunately pretty dull.

1986 - NIGHT OF THE CREEPS, space/zombie/horror/comedy

The things I like:

• 1980's hair thing going on with the cast.
• Lack of CGI special effects, everything is mostly mechanical effects
• Space parasite slugs eating the brains out of college guys turning them into dangerous zombies.
• 1980's hair thing going on with the cast.
• B-movie actor Tom Atkins as a suicidal police detective.
• The flamethrower.
• Space aliens.
• Very gratuitous nude shower scene with the female cast.
• The mowing the zombie with a lawnmower gag.
• "Chicks in their underwear" as John Candy liked to say.

Night of the Creeps tries to mix humor with horror but sometimes it just doesn't work.  I get that an audience needs a little tension relief during a horror film but this film tends to get a little stupid.  One scene where the girl is breaking up with her zombie boyfriend is pretty lame.

The film will probably never be the cult classic the filmmakers appeared to be hoping for.  However it's a decent time killer.  It's actually pretty tough to make a film mixing horror and comedy and get that mixture just right without it tipping over into the excess of overly campy and outright silly.

A nice try.

88 minutes.

1955 - THE KENTUCKIAN, actors probably shouldn't direct and produce as well

Not very much to say about this film.  Burt Lancaster was the star, director and producer for what is supposed to be a "slice of Americana."

The story is about a frontiersman from Kentucky who along with his son are traveling to Texas.  They have a series of almost interesting adventures.

Burt Lancaster did all the right things as producer, he hired a good photographer, Bernard Herrmann composed the music and he shot a lot of it on location in Cinemascope.  Lancaster also hired A. B. Guthrie Jr, who was a specialist in writing stories about the American frontier.  Guthrie had written Shane but his work on The Kentuckian wasn't up to the quality of that film. 

Lancaster probably took on more that he should have for this film.  His direction is pretty uninspired, none of the scenes blend together very well.  Lancaster put together a good cast but he didn't seem to know how to get good performances out of anyone.  Everyone is a little to broad and hammy with their acting and the stilted dialog they had to recite didn't really help. 

Lancaster must have known he had no talent for direction, he never tried it again.

104 Americana minutes.

1999 - SWEET AND LOWDOWN, is about a jazz musician but it's really about Woody Allen vs. Sean Penn

Woody Allen started to disconnect with his audience in the 1990's.  Allen is a funny guy but his humor had always been for a fairly specialized crowd.  As he drifted into drama he seemed to lose touch with the humorous side of his personality.  He can still put together technically funny scenes, but it now seems like he mostly goes through the motions.

Woody Allen's dialog has a certain cadence to it which he expects the actors to perform in a certain way.  This ends up with the actors in his films frequently sounding like Woody Allen, with his halting neurotic vocal delivery.  This was most evident in Celebrity where Kenneth Branagh completely parroted Woody Allen's acting style to a ridiculous degree.

Sean Penn is too strong an actor to play Allen's game and he takes the character of a jazz guitarist who happens to be a real jerk and makes it his own.  Penn does the best job possible with the disappointing dialog and situations in this film and he is the best reason to watch Sweet and Lowdown.

Incredibly, the actor Samantha Morton won an Academy Award for her portrayal of the Chaplin like mute girlfriend who sticks with him through his ups and down.  An "oh come on" acting job.

Sweet and Lowdown is as close as anyone will get to Woody Allen's explanation of his less than sterling personal behavior.  The jazz guitarist Emmet Ray is portrayed throughout the film as a brilliant musician and artist and this seems to be the justification and excuse for his mistreatment of the devoted mute girl and the people he works for.

Sweet and Lowdown never really has much of a story and just completely peters out towards the end. The film does have excellent photography and production design, Woody Allen films always look great.

The film's very unsatisfying conclusion has Emmet Ray recording a series of "brilliant pieces of music" and then vanishing from the public.  Another Woody Allen wish fullfillment? 

The running time is 95 minutes.

2009 - LOGORAMA, 1937 - THE OLD MILL, 1933 - A NIGHT ON BALD MOUNTAIN, three animated shorts

Three animated shorts made in three different styles.

Logorama is now up on YouTube.  It won a lot of awards and it's well made and clever.  Logorama takes all of the American advertising logos the filmmakers can think of and sticks them into a fast moving story about master criminal Ronald McDonald running amock.  I thought the whole was a little to slick.

This short was made by some French guys, and exactly why they felt they had to pick apart American advertising is a puzzle to me.  I find it hard to believe that Europeans aren't equally saturated with enough of their own advertising logos to satirize. 

The Old Mill is one of those Disney animated shorts that is easy to make fun of.  It has the usual bunch of frolicking cute Disney types of animals.   Probably more important as an example of the Disney animators and artists refining their skills with short cartoons before they transitioned into their 1940's features.  This cartoon looks great, with very careful attention paid to the color and the Disney artists getting more skilled with their multi-plane camera which created a pseudo 3D effect. 

Probably the outstanding animated short I viewed this weekend was A Night On Bald Mountain, animated by Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker.  Their amazing animation technique was called the pinscreen.  This demanding setup was literally a board full of about one million pins that were pushed in an out to create images with varying degrees of black and white contrast.  A Night On Bald Mountain took two years to complete

Alexeieff and Parker were artists in the pure sense.  With the exception of their commercials, all of their films were made only for themselves.  A Night On Bare Mountain is a very impressive "artistic achievement" in the best understanding of that over worked phrase.  Probably one of the best animated short films I have seen in a while.

1967 - THE DEVIL RIDES OUT, black magic vs. Christopher Lee

The screenwriter Richard Matheson adapted a book about a battle between white magic and black magic, someone at Hammer films had the great idea to get Christopher Lee, who usually played their bad guys and make him the hero in this one. 

Christopher Lee is a pretty dapper fellow in this film playing the Duc de Richleau who along with his associate Rex van Ryn (talk about cool names) are a version of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson if Holmes and Watson battled the occult instead of Dr. Moriarity.  They certainly have a tough adversary in the actor Charles Gray who plays the wizard Mocata (another cool name). Overall, the film has a very good cast.

Along with Richard Matheson, The Devil Rides Out has Hammer's best horror director, Terence Fisher. Terence Fisher was a smart enough director to know that having people recite magic spells at each other could get kind of boring.  He made sure to add plenty of action to keep the film interesting.  For a 1960's film on a low budget, the special effects are pretty decent.

The beginning of the film feels a little rushed and expects the audience to accept almost immediately the presence of black magic in the modern world but the acting, dialog and the staging of the scenes are so good you can embrace the story almost immediately. 

The final black magic assault on Christopher Lee and his friends in their protective circle actually works up quite a bit of tension. 

Another good example of a very good film made by very talented people on a modest budget.

 Probably only the subject of witchcraft would tend to put an audience off.

96 minutes.

1977 -CROSS OF IRON, Peckinpah's very mixed bag of a war film

Unlucky enough to come out around the same time as Star Wars which probably killed every serious film that year, Sam Peckinpah's Cross of Iron was doomed by it's cliche ridden script.  It's to bad because the film has some excellent battle scenes and an interesting point of view for a World War II film

 

Peckinpah had a screenplay from an old Hollywood writer named Julius J. Epstein.  Epstein had written Casablanca along with other Warner Brothers films.  His story was about a German Army unit in World War II fighting along the Russian front.   Having a war film with this point of view was interesting unfortunately the screenplay was a pile of cliches.  There were the good Germans, the evil Nazi Germans and James Coburn's character Sergeant Steiner who was the tough but war weary soldier.  

The film had a good cast.  James Mason was a "good" German general who gave his usual expert performance.  David Warner was the cynical philosophical German Captain commenting on the action and lamenting on the state of humanity in war.  One of the few actual German actors in the film Maximilian Schell,  gave a very broad performance as the evil German Colonel.   Schell really hammed it up as the bad guy and he  seemed right out of an old 1940's war movie, probably a character Julius Epstein had written at Warner's.

It was surprising that Peckinpah didn't recognize the problems with the screenplay, before he was a director he had been a decent screenwriter.  Then again Sam Peckinpah could never make a film with out having some kind of conflict going on.  He was usually fighting with his producers or battling his own chemical dependency problems in most cases it was both. 

As with just about any Peckinpah film, the action scenes are outstanding.  Peckinpah was probably the only director who understood how to film action in slow motion.  He had a special technique of inter-cutting the slow motion action with other angles which always gave his scenes a kinetic look.

Unfortunately for the rest of the film,  Peckinpah couldn't match this high quality of work.

Running time, 133 minutes.

1980 - THE BLUES BROTHERS, would be a pretty entertaining film if The Blues Brothers weren't in it

Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi were considered the pinnacle of hip in cultural comedy in the 1970's and 80's.  Watching their mediocre performances in The Blues Brothers leaves me scratching my head as to what they were all about 20 years later.

Aykroyd took their two Saturday Night Live characters Jake and Elwood Blues and along with the director John Landis developed them into a large scale musical/comedy film.  Aykroyd's idea of having two white guys dressed in black suits and wearing sunglasses is supposed to be the ultimate in hipster cool.  Landis must have seen that Belushi and Aykroyd doing this extended SNL sketch wouldn't hold up for a two hour film so he loaded the film with large scale car chases and building destruction sight gags to keep the audience interested. 

The guest stars in the musical numbers were famous black performers like Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Cab Calloway and James Brown.  They are just OK performing their numbers,  Landis shoots them in his usual pedestrian fashion which doesn't really spotlight their performances.  The choreography and staging of their numbers isn't much better. Some numbers use professional dancers on a soundstage, which looks pretty phony even by the standards of a musical filmed on a sound stage.  Other numbers have non dancers actually performing on the streets of Chicago and since they can't dance those numbers look pretty poor. 

Then there are the two stars of The Blues Brothers, John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd.  I would never argue that Belushi and Aykroyd couldn't be funny, but something about their movies always rang a little hollow.  Once Belushi stumbled onto his Blutto character from Animal House, he  repeated that character in a couple of films until it got completely tiresome.  Belushi tried to move away from the Blutto character in a couple of films.  However his actual performing skills outside of sketch comedy seemed pretty limited.  Dan Aykroyd probably had more of a commitment to this project and an acting career in general but he's not really much better.

The real problem with the stars of The Blues Brothers is that they can't sing or dance.  It's uncomfortable to watch a musical where the leads can't perform their featured songs.  John Landis must have been aware of this.  He doesn't let them sing with any of the musical guest stars and he doesn't feature very much of their dancing.  What worked as a short SNL sketch looks pretty amateurish in a feature film.  It's embarrassing to watch people like Aretha Franklin, or James Brown interact with these two untalented white guys.  The whole thing comes off like Belushi and Aykroyd are doing them a favor by letting them perform for them. 

Once again John Landis directs yet another film like it was a people mover at an airport. He's efficient and gets you where you want to go, but it's really not much of a ride.  Landis always seems afraid to get his camera in close to the action.  He wants to show everyone in the audience what a hot shot he is because he was able to film on location in Chicago and actually wreck all the buildings and cars that he can lay his hands on even if it doesn't have any dramatic value.

Landis just lacks a sense of zany humor.  His idea of funny is to have hundreds of cops shoot at the Blues Brothers and constantly miss them, the joke apparently being that two guys in black suits that stand out like sore thumbs can't be hit by hundreds and hundreds of bullets.

Landis loads his film up with his usual stunt casting.  Twiggy shows up for a bit.  Frank Oz, the voice of Yoda, is in the film.  Carrie Fisher is in a completely useless role as a woman trying to kill The Blues Brothers with a rocket launcher and even Steven Spielberg got dragged into this.

You can however take a little pity on Landis since he had to deal with Belushi's pretty serious drug problems, something he refers to in the "making of" feature on the DVD.

So what is the reason to watch The Blues Brothers?  It's the car chases.  This is probably one of the few films where car chases were filmed on a massive scale.  Demolishing a real shopping mall with real cars and the amazing amount of cars crashed on an Illinois freeway and in Chicago is something to see.

The cost to actually do something like this is now completely prohibitive.  No studio could afford this type of indulgence today.

Running time, 133 minutes, written by Dan Aykroyd and John Landis.

1934 - EARL CARROLL'S MURDER AT THE VANITIES, asks the question, who the hell is Earl Carroll?

OK, Earl Carroll was a Broadway songwriter and producer who staged musical revues in New York and Los Angeles.  Apparently he was known for hiring lots of pretty chorus girls and dressing than in costumes that showed as much skin as possible.  Carroll was known for forcing women to audition for parts in his revues in the nude. Apparently a real classy guy.

Since having near naked women wasn't going to be enough to sell the film to the public,  Paramount decided to make a film of Earl Carroll's Vanities but must have realized that they needed to actually have a plot in the film.    Exactly why Paramount decided on a musical murder mystery will in itself probably always remain a mystery.

The director who had to deal with this mess was a studio guy names Mitchell Leisen.  He does a good job orchestrating the rather ridiculous musical numbers with the murder mystery.  Leisen also had to cope with some strange casting choices.  Jackie Oakie is the stage manager who is in a friendly rivalry with Victor McLaglen as the cop trying to solve the murders.  McLaglen usually played dumb Irish soldiers for John Ford, but in this picture he looks rather dapper in his tux and bowler hat.  Oakie was always an actor who didn't know how to keep himself under control, but he's not to bad in this film.

The main lead in the film is some Danish crooner named Carl Brisson who struggles to act about as much as he struggles to sing.  Brisson actually worked with Hitchcock on a couple of his silent films.

Probably what the film is known for today if it's known at all are a couple of the musical numbers.

The first "Sweet Marijuana" is kind of a ridiculous song with stereotypical dancers in flamenco costumes singing about how marijuana puts them to sleep!

The other number is some bizarre version of the Hungarian Rhapsody.  The number starts out with Liszt singing about how he would someday like to see his composition performed properly.

It then turns into an orchestral performance of the rhapsody, which then turns into Duke Ellington and his orchestra performing a swing version of it.

All of this foolishness ends with a Liszt lookalike coming out with a machine gun killing everyone.

 

When all is said and done and the murder mystery is solved and the chorus girls have put their clothes on.   Murder At The Vanities is pretty stupid stuff even for 1934.

Written by Carey Wilson, Joseph Gollomb, Sam Hellman and Jack Cunningham.  The running time is 89 minutes.