1934 - HOLLYWOOD PARTY, bizarre mess of a comedy and musical

No director has screen credit and the actual film credits are at the end not the beginning of the picture which must mean something about this thing.

The film is loaded with character actors and comedians, but the essential story is about the actor Jimmy Durante currently starring in a series of Tarzan like films, who needs to start wrestling real lions in his films for more realism.  Durante decides to throw a big Hollywood type party in order to impress a man who owns real African lions.  Kind of an amazing plot even for a comedy.

Well anyway all of these people show up for Durante's big party which involves elaborate musical numbers and some mediocre and very strange songs.  The Three Stooges have a small part, along with a host of other comics.  MGM hired Walt Disney to contribute a color cartoon and have Mickey Mouse appear for a few minutes.  The whole thing is really a surreal hodgepodge of stuff.  

The film is really about Jimmy Durante a vaudeville comedian who always made jokes about his large nose and  had a really overbearing personality, the guy was always on and never seemed to know how and when to restrain himself. 

Durante is an interesting contrast to Laurel and Hardy who also appear in a short comic sketch involving cracking raw eggs.  The sketch isn't particularly funny, but Laurel and Hardy know when to shut up and use their body movements and faces to make this situation seem funnier than it is. 

The film lost money when it was released, it was just to weird for an audience, watching it today I can certainly say that it is very weird all right,  76 minutes of weirdness.

1941 - WESTERN UNION, a Fritz Lang Western?

If you are looking for signs of the personality of the great German director Fritz Lang, better keep looking.  Lang was an auteur in the purest sense of the word, but this was strictly a studio project all the way.  

Fritz Lang was always a difficult person to deal with.  He had an explosive Teutonic temperament and Hollywood tended to steer away from him like he was a plague carrier.  Lang attempted to show he could be a team player, so he signed a 3 picture deal with 20th Century Fox and tried to behave himself.

For whatever reason, Daryl F. Zanuck assigned Fritz Lang, one of the acknowledged masters of noir and suspense films and a man who practically invented modern science fictions films with Metropolis and Woman On The Moon, to make a film about the building of the Western Union telegraph service across the American west. 

If Western Union doesn't look or feel like "ein Fritz Lang film," it's still a very enjoyable and fast paced film coming in at around 90 minutes.  Western Union was filmed on location in the painted desert in early 1940's technicolor which gives it an interesting if slightly unreal look to it. 


The film has the benefit of being a very classy studio production.  There is an exciting forest fire sequence towards the end of the film and an equally exciting shoot out in a barber shop of all places.  The film also has an interesting plot twist involving the hero and the villain.

A highly professional and enjoyable film.

90 minutes, written by Robert Carlson.

2010 - BABIES, not as god awful as it could have been

Took my spouse to a film last night.  She had her choice between Survival of the Dead or Babies.  My short review follows below. 

Four babies are followed in the first year of their lives.  One in Mongolia, one in San Francisco, one in Tokyo and one in some hell hole in Africa.  The film has nice photography and no narration.  That's about it.

The babies in Mongolia and Africa are more interesting to follow than the babies in the westernized societies of Tokyo and San Francisco.  Some of the scenes look kind of staged to me particularly the ones involving animals.  The babies appear to have been picked for their cuteness. 

 The filmmakers have clearly edited out all of the boring and not so cute kid stuff.  There are no scenes of endless loads of laundry being done.  There are also no scenes of the homes constantly being messy.   The babies never seem like a handful.

In short, this film is as unreal as Solaris.

1971 - THE AMERICAN WEST OF JOHN FORD, documentary by Ford's grandson

Another day another mediocre documentary on an old Hollywood director. This film was produced by John Ford's grandson, Daniel Patrick Ford. The American West of John Ford is a tightly scripted overview, of Ford's western films. It offers no new insights into Ford and the old director rehashes the same old war stories he has told before, for the camera.

John Wayne, James Stewart and Henry Fonda participate in the documentary and narrate different parts of it as well. On location in Monument Valley, Wayne pretend acts a scene supposedly being directed by Ford and sings his praises.

Back in Hollywood Stewart and Fonda sit with Ford and discuss the films they were involved in with him. James Stewart's films with Ford were disappointing for the most part. Ford and Fonda had a somewhat tense working relationship that ended with Ford hitting Fonda during the filming of Mr Roberts. None of this comes up since this isn't a film that examines Ford the filmmaker but more of a best hits tribute to a man who was 2 years away from dying at the time this film was made.

Like most of his contemporaries such as Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks and Billy Wilder the older generation of filmmakers always seemed reluctant to speak about the artistic merits of their films.This contrasts amusingly today with directors like Quentin Tarantino who can't shut up about their films. 

 

Written by David H, Vowell and Ford's grandson Dan Ford, the running time is 52 minutes.

1953 - UGETSU or Tales of Midnight and Rain, a classic Japanese film with supernatural elements

An acknowledged classic Japanese film that let the world know that Japan actually had other talented filmmakers besides Akira Kurosawa. The director Kenjo Mizoguchi and probably more importantly the cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa created a moody brilliantly photographed film.

The story is a pretty simple one. Two Japanese peasants trying to achieve fame and fortune have a series of adventures before returning home.

Ugetsu is good to look at, the black and white photography and some of the traveling shots and lap dissolves are amazing. Unfortunately the story leaves a lot to be desired. Reduced to it's most basic elements Ugetsu is basically a version of The Bluebird, with the morale being "happiness is in your own back yard."

The real creative force on this film was Miyagawa a man who left his mark on a lot of important Japanese films, Rashomon, Sansho the Bailiff, Yojimbo, Tokyo Olympiad and Floating Weeds. Kazuo Miyagawa even after retirement continued to work, and was still shooting a film at the age of 91.

 94 minutes.

1958 - HORROR OF DRACULA, Hammer's epic retelling of the Dracula myth with a cast of 10 maybe 13 people tops.

Hammer studios continued to remake the classic horror films that Universal studios had such good luck with during the late 1950's and early 60's.  After Curse of Frankenstein, Hammer  brought out their version of Dracula.  This was a seriously scaled down  Dracula  with the screenwriter Jimmy Sangster and the director Terence Fisher making some big changes to the original Bram Stroker story.

This downsizing may have been for the better, even by the late 50's, the Dracula legend had been really beaten to death in film.  There does seem to be a continued fascination with Count Dracula, the undead creature running around sucking the blood out of women and being defeated by the ultimate symbol in Christian culture, the Cross, etc.

Zipping along at top speed, the focus is on Peter Cushing's Dr. Van Helsing.   Cushing is no ancient academic but almost an occult James Bond character racing around the countryside chasing Dracula.  Cushing always contributed a lot to any film he was in, he was a major supporting character in the first Star Wars film.

Christopher Lee played Dracula so much he finally got sick of the role and refused to even discuss it in interviews but there is no denying that he is very good in the part.  Besides, it takes a lot of screen presence to not look stupid running around in a cape.

Hammer Studios was always the low budget British production company.  The weren't about to sink a ton of money into yet another version of the Dracula story.  Probably by necessity Sangster and Fisher had to streamline the story to fit with the film's modest budget.  Coming in around 80 fast paced minutes this is a very modest but enjoyable film.

Another good example of a small studio employing talented people to freshen up an over exposed property.

82 entertaining minutes.

1965 - RED LINE 7000, Howard Hawk's "worst" film isn't crap but it's not so hot either

While waiting for John Wayne to become available for El Dorado, Howard Hawks decided to film a story about NASCAR racers and their women.  Red Line 7000 failed with the critics and the audience.  Everyone felt that Hawk's was completely out of touch with the contemporary audience, even Hawks himself thought he blew it. 

Red Line 7000 had two big problems, the story by Howard Hawks himself and some pretty poor acting by a lot of the cast. 

Hawk's film was about the romantic complications of three racers and their girlfriends.  One girl thinks she is bad luck and won't become romantically involved with any racer.  Another is an inexperienced virgin when it comes to men.  James Caan played a driver who won't be involved with a "used" woman.  This film was essentially a 1930's film with some updating for the 1960's crowd.  The whole story however was very outdated for the 1960's.

The acting is not so great either.  Hawks hired some very inexperienced good looking actors, but with the exception of James Caan and some of the supporting cast, they were pretty bad.  Hawks always fancied himself a Svengali when it came to working with young actors, particularly women, but he  didn't have the touch here.  All the women look really good but Hawks directed them to talk in really low voices imitating Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep and To Have and Have Not.

One actor in particular, Gail Hire who was apparently a former model, is pretty poor.  She had the added bad luck of having to do the standard song usually found in a Hawk's film.  Hire's rendition of Nelson Riddle's song "Wildcat Jones" with go-go dancing waitresses is one of the film's extremely ridiculous but unintentionally hilarious low points.  

To further add to the problems in the film, Hawk's filmed a lot of 2nd unit racing footage which had some spectacular crashes in it but didn't match very well with the rear projection scenes of the racers in their cars that were inserted into the footage.  Nelson Riddle's music didn't help much either, Riddle was a great arranger and wrote a couple of cool songs like "Route 66" and the original "Batman" theme, but inspiration seemed to be lacking this time.

Still the film does perk along pretty well.  The car crashes are pretty cool and the women do look good. An interesting antique of a film from a director who had a good run of films almost his entire career.

Hawks had a lot better luck with John Wayne and Robert Mitchum in his next picture.

1959 = DONALD IN MATHMAGIC LAND, Walt Disney educator whether you want it or not

Not content to just produce animated films and lame live action comedy's which usually starred Fred MacMurray or later on Kurt Russell, a part of Walt Disney always wanted to educate the public.  A typical result in 1959 was something like this Donald in Mathmagic Land.

 

During World War II, Disney made a lot of money making training films for the armed forces.  Walt Disney also always had a need to enrich and enlighten the general public.  So it was not unusual to end up with a film like this.  A mishmash of animation and education with the unsubtle message in this case that "math is fun."

This isn't a bad short film.  Donald in Mathmagic Land is well made with some interesting animation and kind of cool looking surrealistic backgrounds. 

I remember being paraded into our grade school gymnasium, where we were subjected to a 16mm film of this short.  I didn't remember a thing about it at the time. What I do remember was that it got me out of class for about an hour or so.

I doubt the message that "math is fun and interesting," made much of an impression on a bunch of unruly grade school children back in the 1960's.  But it killed an hour or so on a Friday afternoon while kids and teachers were waiting for the weekend to begin.

1914 - THE WISHING RING: An Idyll of Old England, a little charmer of a comedy

For an early silent picture, The Wishing Ring was a pretty delightful film to watch.  From the opening scene of a chorus of women prancing in front of a Proscenium stage to the final tracking shot, the director Maurice Tourneur showed a pretty deft touch with the actors and the gentle humor of the story.

A young girl thinks she has purchased a magical ring from some gypsies and uses it to fix the relationship between a rich land owner and his son.

This little piece of whimsy only about about an hour long, but considering some of the more recent love stories I have sat through, seems a lot more realistic and contemporary than a lot of love stories.  These types of films are still extremely hard to do.

Maurice Tourneur was a strong visual director and he was also  smart enough to know not to pad out this story with a lot of irrelevant detail.

54 minutes.

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1966 - FAHRENHEIT 451, Truffaut's only but interesting Science Fiction film

Fahrenheit 451 was Francois Truffaut's only shot at an English language film.  The studio, the critics, the public and Truffaut himself were all disappointed with the finished film.  Watching this film 44 years later it looks pretty good to me. 

 

Universal Studios interfered throughout the film with Truffaut's ideas for his adaptation of the Bradbury book.  However Truffaut was a pretty tough guy and stuck to his principals facing down the wrath of the money men.  American studios throughout film history have always wanted to hire the hot foreign filmmakers then typically become frustrated with them when they don't conform to their studio notes.

The whole idea of hiring a person like Francois Truffaut is for him to make a "Truffaut" type film. Why employ Francois Truffaut in the first place if you don't want him to make his kind of film?  Truffaut was hardly some sort of artsy filmmaker screwball like Goddard.  He may have been an art house film director, but he was also a successful commercial director in France. 

Truffaut had his problems with the cast, his lead actor Oscar Werner  didn't get along at all during the filming.  Julie Christie was in her prime playing a double role as Werner's wife and a school teacher who lived down the street but that concept really didn't seem to come off.

Nicholas Roeg did his usual good job with the photography and Bernard Herrmann coming off being fired by Hitchcock for his Torn Curtain music, wrote one of his best scores for this film.  The film also had a lot of exciting montage scenes, Truffaut wasn't a film scholar for nothing.

Fahrenheit 451 is essentially a fable about a totalitarian society attempting to control it's citizen's by banning the reading of books.  The firemen in this film actually are firemen as they race around the countryside burning books.   The firetruck looks like a child's toy and Truffaut has a lot of little jokes  like having a fire pole where the firemen slide up instead of down.

The film was criticized at the time for being boring and undramatic, but the critics missed the point.  The whole idea in the film was that this was a society where thought and emotion was being repressed.  These concepts were dramatic enough and didn't need any more over wrought emoting which might have slid the who thing into some sort of weird science fiction melodrama. 

This film has been called Truffaut's attempt to make a Hitchcock like film, but the final scene in the snow with the book people is all Truffaut.   Hitchcock could have never achieved an ending scene like that.

 112 minutes.

2002 - ROAD TO PERDITION, graphic novel and film

The Road To Perdition exists in 2 forms, a graphic novel and a film directed by Sam Mendes for Steven Spielberg's production company.

The graphic novel is a grim 300 page story about a hit man working for a Midwestern crime boss who along with his son is seeking revenge for his wife's death after the crime boss's son kills her.  The graphic novel is told from the point of view of the 12 year old as the hit man goes on a robbery and killing spree to get back at the crime boss.

The comic book panels are drawn very dramatically and the story has a lot of killing in it but since the pictures are in black and white the reader is sparred looking at some lurid violent images.  There is very little dialog in the graphic novel.  It's a quick read.  Some attempt is made at characterization, but for the most part it's just a series of pictures of people getting shot in the head.  

I'm not sure what Spielberg exactly saw in this story?  Perhaps the attempt to tell a story about a father and son and cast it as an American tragedy was the appeal.

The film is certainly a very good looking production.  The director Sam Mendes was still pretty hot having won and academy award for American Beauty.  The cinematographer Conrad Hall was one of the best technicians in Hollywood, he had achieved legendary status working during the 1960's and 1970's.  Tom Hanks and Paul Newman were the big stars.  The film had major award winner slobbered all over it.

Unfortunately the basic hollowness of the story defeats the film.  The graphic novel had to be changed and expanded especially in the second half of the film. You can't have two big stars like Tom Hanks and Paul Newman in a film and not have them appear together occasionally.  New scenes were written for them to do their acting stuff which really brought nothing to the story.  Another addition in the film is to create a creepy killer, who likes to take pictures of his victims after he kills them, ho hum.

Even with all the technical and artistic ability on hand, The Road To Perdition is an empty uninvolving film.  Another disappointment from Sam "the Man" Mendes.

1965 - BLINDFOLD, entertaining spy/comedy/ thriller could have used a little more of a Hitchcock touch

The working definition of a decent time killer of a movie.  The writer/director Phillip Dunne was a veteran screenwriter from the 20th Century Fox Daryl F Zanuck years.  In 1965 working for Universal,  Dunne knocked out this comedy/spy thriller as a quasi Hitchcock type of film.

Dunne took a story by Lucille Fletcher about a psychiatrist who is literally blindfolded by the United States government and taken to treat a psychotic scientist. The scientist is being pursued by enemy agents who are trying to kidnap him.   The psychotic scientist also has a very pretty sister played by Claudia Cardinale who is about as necessary to this plot as a snowball in hell, however she looks really good.  

Phillip Dunne was a very witty guy and he wrote enough screenplays to know how to knock out something like this in his sleep.  If nothing in the movie is outstanding it's at least entertaining and very smooth.

Dunne cast Rock Hudson as the psychiatrist and in what I can only presume is a very inside Hollywood joke about Hudson, he makes him a guy who has relationship issues with women.  That said, Rock is a decent light comedian and he generally gets the job done.


Claudia Cardinale is gorgeous and if Phillip Dunne can't really write much of a character for her he's smart enough to have her run around in a leotard towards the end.  

1930 - STURME UBER DEM MONT BLANC or Storm Over Mt Blanc

David Lean almost drown some of his cast shooting the big storm scene in Ryan's Daughter.  But when it came to putting actors in peril, Lean looked like a pussycat compared to what the director Arnold Fanck did to his cast in Sturme uber dem Mont Blanc.

Fanck is so intent on his vision of portraying heroic German men and women pitted against the forces of nature that he risked their lives at times to get the most spectacular mountain climbing photographic compositions that he could achieve.  

Once again future director Leni Riefenstahl stars for Fanck.  She's part of a love triangle between a scientist living on Mt. Blanc and a musician who are both infatuated with her.  The last third of the film has Leni trying to rescue the scientist who is slowing freezing to death on Mt. Blanc during a big storm  after losing his gloves.  The dramatic elements to the film are pretty weak and the love story is not really developed very well, but the film is really about Fanck demonstrating his skill capturing the beauty and danger of living and climbing on a mountain.  

Riefenstahl's has kind of an interesting character in a film that's pretty weak on character development.  When the film starts, she is shown in an observatory apparently working as some kind of astronomer.  She tells her leading man that she is not your stay at home and bake cookies for her husband type of woman.  Of course that all changes later and any attempt at her being an early feminist ends when the love triangle plot kicks in.

Arnold Fanck and his film team photographed some of the most incredible images of Mt. Blanc and the surrounding area that I have every seen.  Fanck had a very strong visual sense throughout the film   photographing landslides and snow storms in incredibly dramatic ways.  Even in the scenes in the observatory where Riefenstahl works, Fanck makes the telescope seem like a very powerful and forbidding instrument. 

If Franck had to risk the lives of a few actors and stuntmen in an avalanche or snowstorm, so be it.  The morale of the story seems to be, don't go outside in a snowstorm and lose your mittens.  

This film is a pretty impressive achievement in film making.