1941 - THE WOLF MAN, classic Universal horror film is pretty lame

The Wolf Man probably has a higher reputation than it deserves.  This is mostly bargain basement Universal horror movie stuff with a better cast than usual which really doesn't help the case.

Pretty standard stuff, Lon Chaney Jr. is bitten by Bela Lugosi playing a gypsy with a werewolf curse who naturally turns into a werewolf himself.  A lot of time is spent with psychological explanations of Chaney's conditions but all the kids in the theater knew he really was under a curse, blah, blah, blah. blah.

Pretty indifferently made, the direction by George Waggner is strictly by the numbers almost TV style direction.  This isn't surprising considering Waggner finished his career directing lots of TV shows.  The cast does what but they can but it's pretty much a going through the motions kind of film.

The film has a nice foggy atmosphere since it was shot on nice foggy sets with the nice fog making machine they always liked to use at Universal for these things.

71 minutes.

1975 - THE WIND AND THE LION, is sort of a low rent El Cid or Lawrence of Arabia

Writer/director and macho man of the Hollywood 70's film crowd that includes Spielberg, Coppola and Lucas, tried his hand at an old fashioned adventure film.

The Wind and the Lion is the story of an American woman and her two children who are abducted by Arab bandits.  Looking for an issue to hang his presidential campaign on, Theodore Roosevelt uses the kidnapping to influence public opinion.

The film has action and scenery.  Milius sticks enough humor in it just in case anyone thinks all this war mongering is to be taken seriously which it isnt.  However I kind of suspect deep down John Milius takes all this very seriously. 
 

As far as the acting goes, Sean Connery brings his usual strong presence to the role of the Arab chief.  Brian Keith plays Theodore Roosevelt as a blustering type A personality that everyone seems to think he was.  Candice Bergen is her usual blond self.

In interviews,  Milius comes off as a big blustering right wing loud mouth more full of hot air then actual opinions.  The Wind and the Lion is the same thing a big epic wanna be David Lean film full of hot air.  The film is like John Milius.

119 minutes.

1960 - EYES WITHOUT A FACE, classic French horror film is still pretty intense.

A plastic surgeon with a seriously disfigured daughter, experiments on beautiful young women by removing their faces and attempting to graft them onto his daughter's face. 

Expecting the worst with that subject matter, I was surprised that this turned out to be the horror classic everyone for years has claimed it to be.  All the archetypes are here, the mad scientist, the mad scientist's assistant, the beautiful women being experimented on.  Eyes Without a Face is really an old 1930's Universal horror film updated for the 1960's and given a very classy treatment by the director Georges Franju. 

Franju really walked the line between gruesome and tragic with his production team.  On the writing credits were Boileau-Narcejacv the writers than had worked with Clouzot on Les Diaboliques and had written the original story for Hitchock's Vertigo.  The cinematography was by Eugen Schüfftan who had worked on Lang's Metropolis.  Franju had some major talent backing him up when he made this film.  

Franju directs

Probably as influential as everyone says it is, this is an extremely well done film considering the subject matter.


88 minutes

1988 - SUNSET, supposed Hollywood comedy is not really a comedy, actually not really anything.

Sunset was a film sold as a comedy from writer/director Blake Edwards which starred Bruce Wlllis and James Garner.  The film is not funny, it's actually kind of an episode of Edward's old Peter Gunn detective series padded out. 

The film is about the supposed friendship between silent screen cowboy star Tom Mix (whose life would probably make a more interesting film) and Wyatt Earp.  Mix and Earp become involved in a murder mystery in old Hollywood.  Garner's OK as Wyatt Earp, Bruce Willis smirks his way through another film.

For some reason Blake Edwards got himself the reputation as a comedic auteur mostly because he wrote and directed his own films.  Edwards was a pretty mediocre filmmaker who fancied himself some sort of keeper of the traditional comedy heritage of Hollywood.  What this mostly translated into was a lot of bad films with a lot of bad slapstick in them,  his Pink Panther films can be a major ordeal to sit through.

For some other reason,  Blake Edwards the supposed admirer of old Hollywood comedians, has a Charlie Chaplin like figure as his bad guy.  He's played by Malcolm McDowell who usually specializes in sadists and killers, nothing to subtle there.  I'm not sure what Charlie Chaplin did to deserve this kind of treatment.  Edwards based his career around cribbing old routines from silent comedians like Chaplin.   

A real oddball of a film.

103 minutes.

1963 - SAMMY GOING SOUTH, excellent adventure film set in Africa.

Sammy Going South is a very good children's adventure film told from an adult point of view which probably limited it's appeal to a family audience.  This is a film about a child on a trek through Africa to find his Aunt,  his last living relative.  Sammy Going South is also an unusually intelligent film extremely well directed by Alexander MacKendrick who was a very good director with a lot of bad luck.

Had I not been so busy trying to be a wiseguy with my review of True Grit, Sammy Going South would make an excellent comparison of the acting abilities between the two young leads in each of those films.

In True Grit, Hailee Steinfeld gives a perfectly fine performance as the young girl whose father is killed.  She knows her lines, hits her marks and is perfectly acceptable.  But her performance seems cold and mannered.  Steinfeld has all the skill of a seasoned TV soap opera performer, she is competent and knows how to get the job done if not really able to find an emotional core to her performance, reliable and uninspired.
 
The performance of Fergus McClelland as Sammy in Sammy Going South is much more interesting. Throughout the film he comes off as a deeply disturbed child, something that would have resulted from a child who lost his parents in a war.  Clearly Alexander MacKendrick must have worked very carefully with this young boy to achieve this level of believably.  By the end of the film it's probably not unreasonable to assume this is a kid with big emotional problems.
  

Alexander MacKendrick was able to get a real feel for Africa in this film.  Most films about Africa usually make it look like some big grassy plain with a lot of wild animals running around.  Sammy Going South manages to give the viewer a sense of how big this country actually is. 

Also in the cast is the legendary actor Edward G. Robinson as a colorful diamond smuggler.  I was expecting the worst and was prepared to see a character actor really ham it up.  But low and behold Robinson gives a careful controlled performance that doesn't overwhelm the film.  Very impressive. 

118 minutes

1988 - THE DEAD POOL, a Dirty Harry movie in name only.

Clint Eastwood gives a John Wayne like performance (goes though the motions) in this entertaining but really routine and actually pretty poor Dirty Harry film. 

Why was this film even made?  Probably because Warner Brothers wanted another film with the character Dirty Harry and no Dirty Harry with out Clint Eastwood.  Eastwood in turn didn't seem to care about the cop film genre anymore  but wanted to make films that interested him.  His follow up to The Dead Pool was Bird  probably his reward for making this film.

Also, it's probably safe to make the assumption that Republican Clint wanted to take a few pot shots at the liberal media, the liberal Hollywood establishment and liberal film critics since they seem to be the main targets on The Dead Pool list.

This is really lame film making of the highest order.  The gun battles are lame, the acting is lame and the psycho nut killer is lame.

 However, there are a few compensations.  You get to see Jim Carrey murdered and there is a funny car chase with a police car and a little model car loaded with explosives racing around the streets of San Francisco.  Eastwood also gets to use a big honking gun phallic symbol thing at the end of the film.

91 minutes.

1988 - THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST, could have used a few more jokes.

A long haul of a film about Jesus from Martin Scorsese.  This was a personal project for him and it got him into a lot of trouble,  as he focused on the more secular aspects of the life of Christ.  This was pretty unfair criticism of The Last Temptation of Christ.  Scorsese certainly didn't turn the film into some sick sex and drugs fest.

A more fair criticism would have been was that the film was really boring.

The film does sort of follow the life of Christ.  But there are a lot of scenes of people aimlessly wandering around the desert for what seems like very little purpose.  A lot of the theological arguments in the film could have been just as easily played in a Caribou or Starbucks with a bunch of seminary students having coffee rather than having people standing around in the middle of nowhere.

There are a few laughs to be had with the casting of the film.  William DaFoe and Harvey Keitel with their New York accents are Jesus and and his good buddy Judas.  Judas spends a lot of time yelling at Jesus to do the right thing and get on with this Messiah business instead of sitting around drowning in all his angst ridden doubt about himself.  Their scenes together are like listening to a couple of Yankees fans argue about the baseball season.

The fact that Scorsese got funding at all for such a hot button film is a tribute to his ability to get it made at any cost. Unfortunately the film probably wasn't worth his time or the amount or crap he took over it.

If you want to read about the life of Christ, I would recommend the Gospel According to John, it's the shortest book in the New Testament.


164 minutes.

1999 - eXistenZ, David Cronenberg's follow up to Videodrome.

Very weird science fiction from David Cronenberg it picks up where he left off with his theme of technology literally merging with a human body.  A video game developed by Allegra Geller is the latest in gaming technology, it completely immerses the player into the gaming experience.  A group called the "Realists" are attempting to stop this emerging technology and kill her.

Cronenberg gets to pursue his usual fascination of having icky living things infecting the body and transforming it.   Cronenberg went down this road one before with James Woods and creepy blond Deborah Harry in Videodrome.  This time he has Jud Law and creepy blond Jennifer Jason Leigh going through the same motions.  Both of these films are very well acted.

Videodrome was a ground breaking science fiction film, eXistenZ is a little less this time but it's still very interesting.  Besides the weird body merge technology thing and the slimy creatures that are featured throughout this film.   Cronenberg also has the multiple realities inside realities thing going on that Inception got all of the credit for last year.  Thinking it over now, this was a very engrossing film.

"I'm feeling a little disconnected from my real life. I'm kinda losing touch with the texture of it. You know what I mean? I actually think there is an element of psychosis involved here"

97 minutes.

2003 - HULK, See the epic battle between the big green monster and a poodle!!

What was anyone thinking when they decided to turn the Hulk into a Ingmar Bergman like family tragedy?  Most of the film's  running time is taken up in exploring the issues of the parent child relationship, before the Hulk has his epic battle with some enraged dogs, in particular a hulk like snarling poodle.

Hiring arty director Ang Lee and his partner the Columbia University professor James Schamus to focus on the tortured inner psychological turmoil of the main characters was really going to pack the teenagers in.  Casting Jennifer Connelly the star of Requiem for a Dream and The House of Sand and Fog was kind of a dumb choice for a popcorn film.  Nick Nolte got to play the mad scientist father of Bruce Banner by channeling the actor George Zucco.

Ang Lee mimicked  the visual style of a comic book with a split screen technique throughout the film.  The problem was that everything moved so fast it was difficult to follow the action with all the jumping around between the split screens.  I know the Hulk is a comic book looking figure, but the CGI character in this film looks even more phony than usual.  In the comic, the Hulk gets around by jumping enormous distances, in the film this looks very silly.

The biggest miss in the Hulk, is that nothing happens. The first large scale action piece is literally halfway into the running time of the film. That's a hell of a lot of time sitting around waiting for the Hulk to start wrecking stuff.

Marvel knew they blew it with this version of the Hulk, they reworked the film in 2008 and turned it into a more conventional comic book movie making sure lots of stuff got destroyed throughout that film.

138 minutes.

1973 - SCHLOCK, silly John Landis comedy spoof of grade B movies.

Schlock the missing link has shown up in a small California town.  The police are in hot pursuit as they try to stop his reign of terror in this very silly film with a lot of tiresome  shoveling food in the ape man's mouth jokes.

This is the first film from John Landis and it has a lot of funny stuff in it.  Rick Baker the makeup artist did the gorilla suit and the film has jokes and references from other classic films particularly 2001: A Space Odyssey, Frankenstein and Abbot and Costello's In Society.  You have to have a pretty good appreciation of cult and old movie to get most of the jokes.  Then again at times the humor is so stupid it's hard to believe Landis even went there with some of the silly stuff he put in it.

Even at the start of his career this was a typical Landis picture.  Schlock has his fascination with slapstick scenes of violence and things getting wrecked.  Landis also seems to have a real thing going about having cops shoot lots and lots of bullets as can be seen in The Blues Brothers, Beverly Hills Cop III, Into the Night, and just about any other John Landis film. 

Schlock is probably one his better films, but you can see the seeds of his comedy downfall even at the start of his career.  His tendency to beat a joke to death, his uneasy mix of violence and humor and his inability at times to understand when a situation is more stupid than funny.

80 minutes, written by John Landis.

1939 - DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK, big technicolor epic is kind of boring.

During the Revolutionary War, the British use the Indians to attack the settlers in the Mohawk valley in this Daryl F. Zanuck technicolor production which was directed by John Ford.

This was the year Ford directed three films, Stagecoach, The Grapes of Wrath and Drums Along the Mohawk, which is probably the least remembered of these three. 

This was John Ford's first film in technicolor and it had extensive on location filming in Utah.  Ford had lots of problems with the weather and apparently the big production sapped his enthusiasm for the film.  It kind of shows in the finished product.  

Drums Along the Mohawk is enjoyable as a big budget old fashioned technicolor Hollywood film, but that's about it.

103 minutes

2006 - THE GOOD GERMAN, attempt at a Casablanca/The Third Man type of thriller with some dirty stuff thrown in.

The director Steven Soderbergh, has loaded up The Good German with lots of film making skill and style.  Soderbergh is a big admirer of Carol Reed's The Third Man.  He even repeats a few of the shots from that film.  However Soderbergh is stuck with a story that just isn't very interesting. 

George Clooney stands in for Humphrey Bogart or Joseph Cotton or Ronald Reagan.  Clooney wanders around post war Berlin looking for his lost love the too skinny Cate Blanchett.  Blanchett's the wife of some German Nazi rocket science guy who the Americans want to help them with their rocket program.

 The Good German is reminiscent of films like, The Quiller Memorandum, The Kremlin Letter, Funeral in Berlin and The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.  One of those "dirty side of the spy game," films where the good guys aren't really any different from the bad guys and everyone is a corrupt bastard.  Besides having that in common all of these films usually had completely incomprehensible plots and The Good German stays true to this formula as well.

Soderbergh's a great director, with an independent streak.  He makes interesting films that certainly aren't the usual Hollywood pap.  Unfortunately he also makes interesting films that just don't have much of an appeal to the general public. 

The Good German is nothing if not downbeat, it's also not The Third Man.

105 minutes.

1934 - THE BLACK CAT, strange and incoherent horror film

The Black Cat is another Universal horror film from the 1930's that is fairly well regarded for a film in that genre.  It has two of Universal's greatest horror stars.   Boris Karloff as Hjalmar Poelzig, the leader or a cult of devil worshipers  and Bela Lugosi as Dr. Vitus Werdegas,  Poelzig's nemesis.

Edgar G. Ulmer wrote and directed The Black Cat and to say it is a confusing film is an understatement.  The film has something to do with Lugosi trying to find out what happened to his wife and how Karloff is involved with her disappearance.  The film really seems to be about Ulmer indulging himself in filming lots of strange scenes but not really figuring out how to tie them all together with a story that makes sense.

The Black Cat is also an interesting study in the acting abilities of Bela  Lugosi and Boris Karloff.  Lugosi was primarily known for his interpretation of Dracula.  He certainly had the look down for that character. But as an actor he left a lot to be desired.  His Hungarian accent is as thick as mud and his acting is not so hot.  He borders on campy eye rolling hysteria throughout most of the film.   His limited range as an actor was a problem for him throughout his career.

Boris Karloff on the other hand, gives a very smooth and subtle performance as the cultivated sadist Poelzig.  His underplaying is very effective compared to Lugosi.  Like Lugosi, Karloff was stuck in the horror genre his entire career, but he always brought authority and conviction to his roles. 

If The Black Cat is a confusing mess of a film it's certainly a fascinating mess.  The sets are very cool and Karloff makes an interesting villain, whether he is mummifying his old girlfriends, torturing his wife or leading his devil cult in some kind of satanic mass.  Lugosi was not much of an actor but he certainly has a commanding presence.  Ulmer also has one amazing scene of a subjective camera wandering around Karloff's dungeon which is I hate to use the word but will is,  "poetic."

65 minutes.

1969 - GIDGET GROWS UP the art of the made for TV movie and Karen Valentine all in one post.

Karen Valentine is Gidget in Gidget Grows Up, a sterling example of what was called the made-for-TV movie of the week genre that was quasi popular during the 1960's.

Vivacious Karen Valentine was what passed for a TV personality/actor in the late 1960's, she smiles and bubbles her way through the role of Gidget Lawrence who drops out of school and decides to advance the cause of world peace by getting a job as a tour guide at the United Nations.  She gets involved in a non-sexual relationship with an older man but ends up back with her old boyfriend the "Moondoggie" who is now a captain in the Air Force.

The thing about toothy Karen Valentine was that she essentially gave the same performance in about everything she ever appeared in on TV.  If you needed a perky actress Valentine was your go to person. The peppy Karen Valentine is what is charitably known as an actor with a "limited range."

There seems to be a lot of nostalgia for made for TV movies, and there were a few a good ones like Duel, and Brian's Song.   But for every That Certain Summer, TV audiences with sit mind numbingly in front of their screens and watch, The Over the Hill Gang, The Feminist and the Fuzz, But I Don't Want to Get Married and The Over the Hill Gang Rides Again, all films that struggled to rise to the level of at least mediocrity.  You could probably count the number of good TV movies on one hand and not have to use two of your fingers to count with.

 Gidget Grows Up is what is called a "gentle comedy."  A film that  doesn't go for big laughs but is supposed to make you feel good.  On that level it's pretty awful.  One has to be interested in the trails and tribulations of a tour guide for God's sake and zesty Karen Valentine was always one of the most unsexy actresses on TV even wearing mini skirts.  The film loads up the cast with a bunch of has been actors like Bob Cummings, Paul Lynde, Nina Foch and Warner Anderson who do what they can but its a lost cause. 

No one was ever going to think Gidget Grows Up was some kind of masterpiece or even a decent entertainment, but it gives you a pretty good idea of what passed for mindless TV junk in the late 1960's and early 70's  before people had the Internet to waste time on.

75 minutes, written by John McGreevey, unsurprisingly he wrote a lot of TV shows.

1941 - CITIZEN KANE, some random thoughts.

A few random thoughts about Citizen Kane.

Obviously the most noticeable aspect of the film is the photography of Greg Toland.  Toland used a process called deep focus or as he called it "fixed focus."  Toland kept the f stop of the camera down allowing him to keep everything in focus. This really overly simplifies Toland's contribution to the film.  The photography in Citizen Kane hasn't dated one bit in 70 years and can certainly match anything being done today.

Orson Welles made his name in radio drama, he understood how to use sound to tell a story.  The sound recording and the use of sound and dialog as transitions between scenes is almost as important as the photography.  The creative use of sound as an editing tool still seems unparalleled in film.

Bernard Herrmann's first score for films was also trendsetting.  Herrmann had gotten his start in radio drama so he understood when and when not to use underscoring to develop the drama.  Herrmann primarily used the leitmotif approach in Kane,  small musical phrases mostly played between scenes.  No smothering the film in syrupy music like Max Steiner or Herbert Stothart.

Welles directs and rehearses himself in the musical number

Finally there is Orson Welles.  A man who was possessed of a tremendous ego to put it mildly.  Charleton Heston considered him one of the few geniuses he had ever worked with but also commented on the strange streak of self destructive behavior that he possessed.  It was as if Welles couldn't or wouldn't control himself.  He antagonized the head of almost every Hollywood studio,  the same people who would have to finance his films.

Welles was born to make films and if Welles felt that he "started at the top and worked himself down" he still made some very interesting pictures during his life. 

I had to do it.

In 1971, the critic Pauline Kael attempted to shift a lot of the credit for Citizen Kane to the co-writer Herman J. Mankiewicz.  Mankiewicz was a screenwriter who was usually involved with light comedies and was probably responsible for a lot of the clever and amusing lines in Citizen Kane.

Kael provoked a mini critic war between herself and some of Welles's biggest supporters.

Looking back now it's difficult to see how Kael could have come to the conclusion that an alcoholic screenwriter like Mankiewicz deserved much of the credit for Citizen Kane.  It was almost like she hadn't ever seen an Orson Welles film.

119 still dazzling and impressive minutes.

1928 - NOAH'S ARK, silent religious allegory made on a spectacular scale

The story of Noah's Ark is used to illustrate the evil ways of modern man and a lot of stuff gets wrecked in this very impressive Warner Brother's production.

A big film for the studio.  Daryl F. Zanuck who was in charge of the production and the director Michael Curtiz used just about everything they knew about film making when it came to mounting this production.

Noah's Ark appears to have been conceived as an attempt to copy the success of Cecil B. DeMille's 1923 production of The Ten Commandments.  DeMille's film, had used a long prologue to tell the story of Moses and the Israelites escape from Egypt.  The Ten Commandments were used to dramatize the sins being committed in the modern world.

Noah's Ark shows that Zanuck and Curtiz had carefully studied DeMille's film and then attempted to out do it.  Their film opens with a modern story and then travels back into time to show how the story of Noah and the flood correspond to modern life. 

Michael Curtiz one of Hollywood's best directors filmed the story with his usual dazzling technique.  Curtiz used his skill with composition and editing to move the story along at top speed.  Noah's Ark has an amazing flood sequence towards the end of the picture that really pushed the boundaries of special effects.  The flood disaster was apparently a little too exciting, four extras were killed during the filming of this sequence.

The film features a couple of popular silent stars, George O'Brien and Dolores Costello.  O'Brien was a leading man of the 1920's and had done a lot of work for John Ford, he was sort of an early version of John Wayne.  Dolores Costello a major silent film star of the 1920's, was considered one of the great beauties of the silent screen, the woman certainly knew how to take a close up. 

Noah's Ark is really an impressive film.  Besides the flood sequence there is a spectacular train wreck and a World War I battle scene all filmed with tremendous skill.  Curtiz was a director who knew how to put a film together, there's not a dull moment in the entire picture

100 minutes.

1964 - CIRCUS WORLD, hugh Samuel Bronston production with John Wayne

Wanna be circus drama like The Greatest Show On Earth has spectacular set pieces and a spectacularly poor script.

John Wayne is the head of a wild west show type of circus on tour in Europe.  Wayne is searching for his long lost love who just happens to be Rita Hayworth who has a daughter who just happens to be Claudia Cardinale who Wayne just happens to be raising as his adopted daughter.  Well it's not Eugene O'Neill exactly it's more like Barbara Cartland.

Circus World was directed by the old pro Henry Hathaway and filmed in 70mm.  More importantly it was produced by Samuel Bronston a man who when it came to film thought very big as in, King of Kings, 55 Days at Peking, The Fall of the Roman Empire and El Cid.  Bronston was a producer known for his "creative" financing.  Circus World was the end of the road for him as the film was a big flop.

The film is entertaining nonsense, with a couple of very cool set pieces.  A ship tips over in a harbor and since this is a Bronston production it's a real ship.  There is also a spectacular fire sequence, where it looks like John Wayne was almost  burned at one point.

This gigantic film production is a fun time waster with a 9 million dollar budget when 9 million dollars bought a lot of bang for a film production buck.

John Wayne plays John Wayne as usual.

135 minutes