1927 - THE CAT AND THE CANARY, a brillant horror comedy.

Take every old haunted house cliche and mix it with humor.  Hire Paul Leni one of Germany's best expressionist directors and you have a film that is a practically perfect genre piece.

The setup is the deceased relative in a spooky old house bit.  The family members have arrived for the reading of his will and one of them is a murderer who wants all the inheritance.  Even in 1927 this was a bunch of cliches but as they say it's not the story but how you tell the story.

 

A moving camera, witty title cards and a perfect blend of humor and scares really work here.  In some ways the fact that this is a silent film adds to the fun. The anachronisms that are silent films these days indirectly contributes to the stylish mood of this film. 

The Cat and the Canary is a lot of fun.


82 minutes.

2012 -LIFE OF PI, the kid on the lifeboat with the tiger epic.

I am relieved that I did not see Life of Pi in 3D there would have been only some many "tiger jumping out of the bottom of the lifeboat" 3D shots that I could have put up with after a while.  As it is this film really lards on the visual imagery with glowing fish, bright orange sunsets, and hurricane like storms all probably created or enhanced in the computer to overwhelm the already ADD movie going audience.

The Life of Pi appear to be a film that is trying to create a sort of mystical or fantasy like journey where Pi, the main character has a spiritual awakening about God or the Divine Power or "The Force."floating around on the Pacific ocean allows the viewer to be privy to lots of Pi's interior monologues which seem to consist of a lot of cut rate mystical mumbo jumbo.

Why was Tony the Tiger passed over for the part of Richard Parker?

This film was clearly a huge and expensive technical undertaking, all these computer generated animals do not come cheap and probably every scene has some type of visual enhancement to it.  The lead actor was not a trained professional and adding 3D to the mix probably complicated everything.

Life of Pi is OK however I don't think they really pulled this one off.  But, what do I know, this film is extremely successful with the movie going audience who seem to respond to the story, the religious stuff, and the special effects.  To me, Life of Pi is just a rehash of the insipid Jonathan Livingston Seagull although a lot better made.

127 minutes.

1951 - SUPERMAN AND THE MOLE MEN, or another hour out of my life I won't get back.

Had about an hour to kill and thought I would revisit an episode of the old Superman TV series that frightened me as a kid.  Superman and the Mole Men was a warm up for the old TV series.  The producer Robert Lippert made pictures cheap and fast so I kind of knew what to expect for production values.  Even taking that into consideration, this was pretty bad. 

Some oil company has drilled the deepest hole ever looking for oil and has accidentally opened up an underground world inhabited by little guys (the mole men)  who climb up out of the well hole and scare the crap out of everyone in a small town.  Superman conveniently shows up to sort this situation out.

I can't believe these mole men goofballs scared me as a kid particularity with their over sized ray gun which doesn't actually seem to do anything to anyone.  In fact it looks like they can barely hold this contraption up much less use it against the small town lynch mob trying to kill them. 

About the only thing this film has going for it is George Reeves.  He is about the only one who attempts to bring some depth to this silly film.  Reeves plays Clark Kent and he is hardly "mild mannered" in his secret identity.  His Superman also has a little spine to him and is not the overbearing goody two shoes that this super hero usually ends up sinking into.

Still Reeves is not a reason to watch this.

58 minutes.

1984 - MIKE'S MURDER, forgotten 80's thriller

Mike's Murder is a supposedly undiscovered and unappreciated film from the 1980's.  The film was written for the actor Debra Winger by the director James Bridges.  The film got reasonably good reviews but was dumped by Warner Brothers studio. 

The story is about a bank teller (played by Winger) and her relationship with her sometimes boyfriend Mike, a tennis instructor and small time cocaine dealer.  After Mike is killed, Winger attempts to find out what happened to him. 

The film has a nice feeling for Los Angeles.  Winger is very good if kind of subdued.  The mystery surrounding Mike is fairly interesting.  This is a good little thriller but nothing really out of the ordinary.

The film can probably be remembered as one of the few leading parts Debra Winger got while she was on a hot streak for about 4 or 5 years during the 1980's.  Winger was an interesting actress who couldn't sustain her career. 

109 minutes

1933 - HALLELUJAH I'M A BUM, forgotten 1930's musical from Rogers and Hart

You would think a film written by Ben Hecht, S. N. Berman, Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart would be better remembered.  However you don't see a lot of cabaret singers crooning songs from this film probably because the approach to presenting them was very unusual.

Rogers and Hart in addition  to writing the songs contributed to the dialog with "musical rhyming" scenes where the actors sang/spoke lengthy portions of the film.  This is sort of like a 1930's version of Les Miserables, except the songs and in particular the lyrics are a lot better.

The interesting cast included Al Jolson as the mayor of the Hobos, silent film comedian Harry Langdon as a Communist and Frank Morgan as the mayor of New York.  In one scene Morgan lies in his bed drunk repeating "there's no place like home" six years before TheWizard of Oz came out.

The film was directed by Lewis Milestone in his full moving camera and montage editing mode. A fascinating experimental film combining, sound, visual florish and music.

82 minutes.

2012 - PROMETHEUS, a reworking of the original Alien

The director Ridley Scott and the writer Damon Lindelof got a lot of crap for this film.  The science fiction film nerds were expecting some sort of epic prequel to Alien.  The end result was a reworking of the various scenes and situations from Alien in what was for the most part just another monster on the loose in the spaceship film.

 However it seems to me that Scott and Lindelof succeeded in exactly what they wanted to achieve,  a slick horror film with science fiction elements to it.  Almost every part of  Prometheus has a corresponding scene lifted from Alien.  The robot who gets his head torn off, the Alien face hugging monster, the creepy exploring of the Engineer's spaceship and even the actor Noomi Rapace running around the spaceship in her underwear in a clear tribute to Sigourney Weaver although Rapace is a very tiny woman compared to the Amazonian Weaver.

,

Prometheus is what it is,  an entertaining rehash of a classic film from a director looking for a popular hit with the audience.  The technical credits and special effects are of a very high caliber and Ridley Scott always knows how to make a film look very good.  The film is very easy to watch.  

This is slick mainstream commercial film making at it's best.  Something that Hollywood is very good at when they get it right.

124 minutes.

1962 - BATTLE BEYOND THE SUN, Battle? Sun?

Roger Corman picked up a Russian science fiction film called The Sky is Calling, hired Francis Ford Coppola to rework it for American audiences and the finished product was called Battle Beyond The Sun for some reason.  

The original film was about a race to Mars in the year 1997 between the Russians and the Americans.  Coppola got rid of this cold war type stuff and created two countries called North Hemis and South Hemis.

The spaceships from North Hemis and South Hemis end up on an asteroid instead of Mars where surprise, surprise they confront some goofy space monsters.

The special effects are fairly decent for an early low budget 60's film.  The film is short and nothing special,

75 minutes. written by Mikhail Karyhukov, Yevgeni Pomeshchikov,  Aleksei Sazonov this was after all originally a Russian film.

2012 - THE SAPPHIRES, is slick but entertaining.

Well here's an interesting idea for a film, dramatize the real life story of an Aboriginal singing group who toured in Vietnam during the war.  The film was co written by the son of one of the women in the group and the opening credits say inspired by the true story.  They should have put the word "inspired" in very large font because I doubt there was a whole lot of real life story that made it into this film. 

That said, this is a very entertaining film for what it is.  The film has lots of great old soul music, pretty appealing performances from the female cast, humor, a little social criticism and a secret audience pleasing weapon.

The secret weapon is the actor Chris O'Dowd as the burnout manager of the group.  O'Dowd basically steals the film and saves it with his funny and sly performance.  He helps keep the audience connected to all the improbable plot turns in the film and there are a lot of improbable plot turns in this thing.

The Sapphires is the kind of film you can take your date on.  Your wife/girlfriend will love the girl and love story parts and the boys in the theater can enjoy the shooting and explosions during the Vietnam scenes, something for everyone.

103 minutes

1940 - NO NO NANETTE, or who in the world is Anna Neagle?

Anna Neagle is the woman in the middle of the picture.  She was a very popular star in England during the 1930's and 40's.  She came over to America and appeared in crap like No No Nanette and a few other minor films.  She returned to England around 1942 and continued to have a successful career.

 

The audience attraction for Anna Neagle was as one of those "sunny" personalities in probably what were fairly light weight films.  In No No Nanette Neagle is a "goody toe shoes,"meddling in everyone's life.   A Mary Poppins fixer upper with a perennial cheery disposition, which becomes very grating after a while.

This film is based on a famous Broadway musical from the 1920's.  I am guessing that the plot of this version of No No Nanette has been considerably altered from the old Broadway play since the ending involves one of those whose on the sleek 1940's airplane farcical moments with the cast running all over the plane.  Not a whole lot of large sleeper planes were flying around during the 1920's.

No No Nanette has a few decent songs in it, such as "Tea for Two."  However you would hardly know it since the songs are sung almost as a throw a way for the most part.   Anna Neagle was a trained dancer early in her career and performs the title song in some sort of strange dream sequence  dressed up in a "Little Lord Fauntleroy" outfit while surrounded by a bunch of chorus girls, clearly her costume was meant to preserve her innocent but perky girl image in the film.

The film was originally two hours in length but cut by thirty minutes, no surprise there.

96 minutes, screenplay by Ken Englund.

1915 - THE CHEAT, early silent film from DeMille

The best of Cecil B DeMille's films are his silent ones.  In these films he literally ran amok with lots of unsubtle sexuality and at times sadism.  In the last 10 minutes he would stick in some hooky morality lesson to appease the censors but who was he kidding?

The Cheat is a very early DeMille film and doesn't exactly have a lot of his visual style but it does show the beginning of his technique. 

The most interesting aspect of The Cheat is the casting of Sessue Hayakawa as the oriental businessman who brands everything he owns.  In this case it's the wife of a businessman who steals money from the Red Cross in order to sustain her lavish lifestyle.  The wife also borrows money from Hayakawa who wants his pound of flesh and it's bring out the branding iron for her.   Hayakawa is remembered as the Japanese commander in The Bridge on the River Kwai, but in this film he's the dashing cad.

The Cheat is loaded with racism, sexism, misogyny and lots of sick stuff.  DeMille is clearly trying to get away with as much as he possibly can in this film.  He crams in a lot for a film that is under an hour

59 minutes

1926 - THE WINNING OF BARBARA WORTH, a large scale western epic

This is an epic silent western film from classy producer Samuel Goldwyn and director Henry King.  The film is well cast with Ronald Colman, Gary Cooper and silent actress Velma Banky in one of those romantic love triangles, he loves her, she loves another guy, the other guy thinks she loves the other guy, etc.  

The Winning of Barbara Worth has large scale production values and much of the film was shot on location on some hell hole Nevada desert location. Watching the film today you can't help thinking this was nobody's idea of a fun production. 

The end of the film features a spectacular flood sequence which is a good example of mixing models and optical effects integrated together.  The effects still hold up very well a film that is over 80 years old.

 

  As usual what shoves pictures like The Winning of Barbara to the back of the bus is it's status as a silent film.  But this is as good a film as anything John Ford directed.  The director Henry King was  a complete pro behind the camera and had a long run making successful entertaining films for 45 years.

89 minutes, written by Frances Marion.