1957 - THE SMALLEST SHOW ON EARTH aka BIG TIME OPERATORS

This film is one of those modest British comedies that were popular in the 1950's.  Usually the studio that comes to mind is Ealing where you would find actors like Alec Guiness and Jack Hawkins in stories that usually emphasized a type of understated British humor.  Frankly a lot of these films weren't exactly laugh out loud funny it was always more like a minor chuckle.

The Smallest Show on Earth was not produced by Ealing Studios but it's a typical Ealing type of film.  A young couple played by the real life married team Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna inherit a run down movie theater complete with ancient staff played by Margaret Rutherford, Bernard Miles and Peter Sellers who is made up to play an old drunken projectionist.  The story involves Travers and McKenna's attempts to get the theater profitable so they can sell it to a more prosperous theater chain.  Let the quirky humor begin.

 

The audience gets lots of "screwing up film" jokes as the drunken projectionist pushes the wrong buttons to make the film go to fast or to slow or getting the dialog out of sync with the picture etc. 

This is a film made relatively early in Seller's career,  He was always the master of dialects and he does his usual impressive job playing Mr. Quill the alcoholic projectionist.  Margaret Rutherford was one of those actors you hired when you needed someone to play dotty old ladies.  Bernard Miles was kind of a mainstay of the British cinema, he appeared in a lot of films. Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna basically play a typical aka boring "working class" couple.

 

The director was Basil Dearden who was a good prolific director who was adept at filming comedies or dramas.  Douglas Slocombe who photographed the Indiana Jones films late in his career handled the cinematography.  The Smallest Show on Earth is for the most part an inoffensive time killer.

The film was written by William Rose, John Eldridge, the running time is a quick 80 minutes.

1939 - THE THREE MUSKETEERS, oddball musical/comedy version of this story

This is a strange but not exactly terrible version of the Alexander Dumas classic novel which has been turned into a film at least nine times.  This version adds some mediocre songs to the story and condenses a lot of the plot, but the story is basically still there, mostly.

Don Ameche the perennial lightweight comedian and actor under contract to 20th Century Fox plays D'Artagnan fairly well.  Ameche is almost unrecognizable with the wig and mustache and does a good job wit the sword fighting scenes.  Gloria Stuart who was "old Rose" in Titanic plays the Queen,  Lionel Atwell is De Rochefort, D'Artagnan's nemesis but the biggest change to this story is the inclusion of the comedy team called The Ritz Brothers.

Probably the best way to explain The Ritz Brothers is that they were the poor man's version of the Marx Brothers.  In this film they are the comedy and slapstick relief and are they ever the comedy and slapstick relief.  Not that there is much subtle behavior in slapstick but these guys really went for the goofiness.  They do have one good scene where they perform a dance sequence with pie tins strapped to their bodies.

 

This film was directed by Alan Dwan who was one of the early pioneers of Hollywood starting in the silent era and making the transition to sound films.  The  silent films were probably the high point of his career, he made fairly unexceptional sound films.  Dwan shoots most of the movie, particularly the musical sequences like he was just trying to keep the camera out of the way of The Ritz Brothers.

 

This version of The Three Musketeers is a fascinating contrast to the Richard Lester two part super production which also added a lot of humor to the story. Lester's complete version runs 213 minutes compared to this film which is under 80 minutes.

The Three Musketeers has a lot or writers for such a minor film, William A. Drake, Morris M. Musselman, Sam Hellman, Ray Golden and Sid Kulle.  The running time is 73 minutes.

1949 - COME TO THE STABLE, a film with Nuns in it.

A couple of very pushy nuns arrive in New England with plans to build a hospital.  During World War II their hospital in France was saved by the American Army although many soldiers died defending it. To atone for that tragedy they are now committed to building a hospital in a small New England town.  The trouble is that the land that they want is owned by a godless songwriter who would prefer the nuns would just go away.  So begins a battle of wills.

Come to the Stable could have been one sentimental mess of religious garbage but the writers and the director of this film seemed to have enough self control to spare the viewer from the worst.

 

Let's take a quick look at the cast.  Actor Loretta Young a "super catholic" in real life plays one of the nuns.  Young had an affair with Clark Gable on the set of The Call of the Wild which resulted in her giving birth to Gable's child.  Young had the baby placed in an orphanage and later adopted the baby even though she was the birth mother. Yes this is one of the subplots in the Coen Brothers film Hail Caesar

Celeste Holm plays the other nun, scene stealer Elsa Lancester is a painter of religious pictures and character actor Thomas Gomez is the bookie who helps Young raise the money to build the hospital, it's a decent cast.

Also in the film is Hugh Marlowe as the godless songwriter.  Marlowe was one of those working actors who turned up in a lot of films and TV shows.  I'm most familiar with Marlowe as  Dr. Russell Marvin the scientist who battles the space aliens in Ray Harryhausen's science fiction classic Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers.  A final casting note is the appearance of Dooley Wilson in a not insubstantial part.  Wilson is best known as Sam the pianist in Casablanca. 

 

 The director Henry Koster was an expert at this family entertainment stuff for most of his career. At the end of his career, he directed The Singing Nun, but that Nun movie turned out to be pretty terrible.

This film runs 94 and although I enjoyed it for the most part I certainly didn't want it to be a minute longer.  Come to the Stable was written by Oscar Millard and Sally Benson.

1984 - THE COTTON CLUB, Coppola's gangster musical

The version of The Cotton Club is called the encore version but I've seen the original film and there's really not much difference.  Coppola appears to have cut out all the actors playing 1930's celebrities and added more musical numbers.  Other than that it's basically the same film.

Clearly the plan of the producer Robert Evans was to get lighting to strike twice with another gangster epic.  To that end he hired Mario Puzo to write an original story about the famous 1930's Harlem jazz club that was essentially run by white gangsters.  Dissatisfied with Mario Puzo's story, Evans turned to his Godfather director and writer Francis Ford Coppola to rewrite the film and eventually direct it.  Robert Evans must have been really desperate since he and Coppola had feuded a lot during the making of the Godfather films

The film has a notorious backstory involving real life gangsters and murder but lets not get into that here, that story can be easily found all over the internet.  With Coppola in charge the budget shot up and he was able to wrestle final cut away from Evans.  The resulting film is beautiful to look at with the carefully recreated sets and costumes from that era.  The musical numbers are all extremely well done.  If there is an issue with this film it's kind of with the story.

For all the work Coppola and his production team put in on this film the main love stories are rather on the thin side.  Richard Gere is a trumpet player who falls in love with gangster Dutch Schultz's mistress played by a miscast and far to young Diane Lane who was  probably 19 years old when she appeared in the film.  She hardly seems like the tough 1930's broad who falls in love with Gere.  Gregory Hines and his brother Maurice are tap dancers who appear at the Cotton Club and Lonette McKee is a light skinned black woman passing for white who Gregory Hines falls in love with.  This would have made an interesting story line but it's barely touched upon.

 

For all the flaws in the story telling this is a very entertaining film.  Coppola succeeds in mixing the musical numbers with the gangster story line rather well.  As one critic pointed out, in retrospect this film with it's mixed genres was the one he was attempting to make with the disastrous One From The Heart.

The film was written by  Francis Ford Coppola and the novelist William Kennedy, the running time is 139 minutes.

1964 - THE WORLD OF HENRY ORIENT, a good film about adolescent girls

A charming film about a couple of adolescent girls caught up in a crush on a concert pianist played by a rather restrained Peter Sellers for a change.  This is a rare film that focuses on the kids rather than the adults who seem to have made a mess out of their own lives.  The director George Roy Hill did an excellent job handling the girls played by Merrie Spaeth (who grew up to become a Republican party hack) and Tippy Walker (who ended up involved in a year long affair with the 44 year George Roy Hill during her senior year in high school).  

The rest of the cast is pretty darn good.  Paula Prentiss a comedian who I guess had a decent career, is a married woman contemplating an affair with Sellers. Phyllis Thaxter plays Spaeth's divorced mother.  Tom Bosley and Angela Lansbury are the parents of Tippy Walker who have a very troubled marriage.  Lansbury was at this point in her career where she played a lot of bitchy and at times nasty women.  She's essentially the villain in this film.

It would be interesting to know how Peter Sellers ended up in this film.  For a big "ham" like him it's basically a supporting role. But even in a smaller part he's still a master of accents, he's definitely got the NYC sound down.

 

The film appears to have been mostly filmed in New York City.  It does seem to have a feeling for what it's like to be an adolescent girl growing up with some very flawed parents.  The film was written by Nora Johnson the daughter of veteran screenwriter Nunnally Johnson who contributed to the screenplay.  Dare I say Nora Johnson's female perspective probably contributed to the tone of this enjoyable film.

The film runs 106 minutes.

1981 - THE WOMAN NEXT DOOR, a story of obsessive love

Francois Truffaut's story is about a very obsessive love affair to put it mildly.  This film features two big French stars, a skinny Gérard Depardieu and Truffaut's love interest in real life, Fanny Ardant.  The film's basic plot is about these two people who were involved in an intense relationship six years earlier. Now married to different people, they find themselves  improbably living next door to each other in a small French town.  Of course they resume their affair two timing their respective spouses.   The film chronicles their descent into madness and death in their obsession with each other.

I'm not giving away the plot here since the film opens with an ambulance racing through the town from  which it can be easily surmised that this story will end in tragedy.  For the most part the film is well directed by Truffaut.  One of his strong points as a filmmaker was getting good performances out of his actors and employing his knowledge of film making technique to tell a story.

 

However it seems that while Truffaut knows how to present their intense love story it just doesn't seem like the characters are a twosome the viewer can feel much sympathy for.  It's seem clear that their relationship was basically about having sex since we never see or hear them talk about their emotions or feelings for each other.  It doesn't help that their respective spouses seem like very reasonable and for the most part nice people compared to them.  Their ultimate tragedy almost seems like a relief since we no longer have to seem them inflict emotional warfare on each other when they are not sliding into bed.

 

Sadly this was the second to the last film from Truffaut who died of a brain tumor about three years later.  His final film with Fanny Ardant was a silly Hitchcock like comedy thriller.  Still Truffaut's overall filmography is very impressive.

The film was written by Francois Truffaut, Suzanne Schiffman and Jean Aurel, the running time is 106 minutes.

1959 - NORTH BY NORTHWEST, on the big screen

Attended a revival of Hitchcock's North By Northwest, part of the Hitchcock at 125 celebration going on in our city.  North By Northwest is kind of a turning point in Hitchcock's career, in many ways  it's the summit of his talent as a storyteller.  His decline starts with his move to Universal studios from Paramount where for various reasons he seemed unable to capture the success of his Paramount films.  After this, he films Psycho and follows it up with the interesting but flawed The Birds.  However it's all downhill from this point.

Anyway here are some behind the scenes photos.

The film was written by Ernest Lehman, his only original film script.  Lehman was one of the prime movers of the film version of The Sound of Music which obviously made a bundle of money for him later in his career.

Hitchcock wasn't allowed to film much of the famous Mt Rushmore climax on location, so it was recreated at MGM studios. 

The crop duster scene was filmed in California not Illinois.  Film buffs have looked for the location for years but the area has been so built up with home construction since the early 1960's no one seems completely sure where it was filmed.

 

Another behind the scenes still from the Mt Rushmore climax.  Bernard Herrmann's score added a great deal to the excitement of this famous chase scene.

Contrary to popular belief Hitchcock's production team did film on location at Mt Rushmore before the Park Service banned him from the location.  No making fun of Mt Rushmore even for a Hitchcock film I guess.

 The last surviving member of the cast, Eva Marie Saint is 99 years old as of this date.

The running time on North by Northwest is 136 minutes but you would never know it the film really well paced.

1958 -THE ROOTS OF HEAVEN, is a failed attempt to say something about elephants.

It's hard to bring any enthusiasm to writing about a film that is a boring failure.  A bestselling novel by the author Roman Gary is turned into a mess of a film by the director John Huston.  If you are going to make a movie about saving African elephants from hunters,  Probably hiring  Huston who among other things was a big game hunter may not have been a great approach

This was filmed as an independent production from Darryl F. Zanuck.  Zanuck had stepped down from running 20th Century Fox and now acting as his own producer hired Huston to direct it.  But it appears Huston didn't bring a lot of interest or enthusiasm to the film. The story moves along from one boring scene to the next.  The novel of The Roots of Heaven was a metaphor for saving humanity but the end result of this film seemed more like a poor man's 1940's Tarzan movie with Tarzan leading an elephant charge against some evil African bad guys for some reason.

Apparently the film was the typical on location troubled production.  The temperatures during the days were over 100 degrees and the nights weren't much better.  The acting is not great nor is it terrible it just has that "phoned in" or is it "paycheck" approach to performing, nobody really seems to care. The water and the heat made a lot of the cast and crew ill with the exception of the big drinkers, Trevor Howard, Erroll Flynn and Huston who fortified themselves with booze

  

The film shot for five months on location then everyone stumbled back to Paris to finish the film so Zanuck could be with his current mistress Juliet Greco who appeared in the film where she mostly struggled to act.  Orson Welles is prominently featured in the credits but he was probably in the film a whole fifteen minutes.  In interviews John Huston had spoken about how he failed to make a decent film and would have liked to remake it.  But this was a case of just being a little to late for that.

The screenplay was by Roman Gary and Patrick Leigh Fermor, the running time is 126 minutes.

1957 - WILD STRAWBERRIES, Bergman’s classic film about old age

 In the film business when you're hot you're hot and Ingmar Bergman was burning up in the late 1950's.  He was entering one of the most creative periods in his career.  Smiles of a Summer Night and The Seventh Seal had been very successful for him.  The Virgin Spring and his "God Trilogy" were in his future.  Bergman had been thinking a lot about the passage of time and memory when he wrote the screenplay for this film.

 

Wild Strawberries is about an old physician Isak Borg, played by 78 year old director Victor Sjöström who is literally on a journey that causes him to recall his youth while traveling to relieve an honorary university degree.  Most of his memories are about the disappointments in life which he is now attempting to come to terms with as he reaches the end of his existence.

 

This is an extremely well made film.  The black and white photography by Gunner Fischer is excellent.  The performers are from Bergman's famous "stock company." Bibi Andersson, Ingrid Thulin, Gunnar Björnstrand and Max von Sydow in a small role as a gas station attendant of all things.  They are at their usual high caliber of acting for a Bergman film.

 

But the film is in many ways a tribute to Victor Sjöström.  Sjöström was one of the most important Scandinavian filmmakers dating back to the silent era.  Sjöström even for a time worked for MGM of all places.  He made a couple of masterpieces in America, The Scarlet Letter and The Wind with Lillian Gish before he returned to Sweden.  He was also a mentor to Ingmar Bergman at the beginning of his career.

Wild Strawberries is considered one of Bergman's masterworks and more importantly one of his most accessible films.  It held up very well on my current viewing.

Written by Ingmar Bergman, the running time is 91 minutes.

1980 - THE CHANGELING, haunted house film fairly well done.

Mr. Patton himself George C, Scott along with his wife Trish Van Devere star in a haunted house film.  Scott gives his usual really intense performance, he's not afraid of some ghost if anything the ghost should be afraid of him.

The gold standard for haunted house films is of course Robert Wise's film The Haunting.  The Changeling isn't quite in that league but it's a well done spook film.  The director Peter Medak knows how to apply all the standard scary stuff.  Creepy music, ghostly tracking shots, loud bumps in the night and naturally a scary thunderstorm during a seance. As always in fiction it's not about the usual cliches but how you deploy them.

 

The film stays fairly suspenseful and compelling for around the first half but sort of loses it's focus during the second part as Scott solves the reason for the haunting. There's a good confrontation between Scott and veteran actor Melvyn Douglas who more than holds his own when performing with Scott.  Douglas acted practically up until the time of his death at 80 years old, a remarkable career.

 

The Changeling is set in Seattle but was filmed in Canada as was usually the way back in the 1980's.  I suppose the producers had to take advantage of the tax breaks.

The film was written by William Gray and Diana Maddox, the running time is 107 minutes.

2023 - COUP DE CHANCE, Woody Allen at 87

This a minor but decent Woody Allen drama from a director who has had his ups and downs in his personal and professional life.  This film will be known as the one that Woody Allen shot in the French language after having his script translated.  Apparently this was the way he was able to get financing for this film.

Coup De Chance does rehash themes from Woody's previous dramatic films, betrayal, lust, retribution, etc.  Allen is an old hand at juggling his stories around to make interesting films even if his themes are the same.  The story is about a love triangle. A woman gets involved with an old school mate while her extremely jealous and as it turns out very dangerous husband becomes aware of what's going on.

 

As with all Woody Allen films, it looks great. Vittorio Storaro no spring chicken himself at age 83 photographed the film.  Storato had been associated with Coppola, Bertolucci and Argento so how could it not look good.  Frankly having Woody Allen's dialog translated into French almost works better for the film.  At times the characters in many of Allen's films could get mighty pretensious with the stuff that comes spewing out of their mouths about art and philosophy.  As usual in one of Allen's films the actors give good performances and this time in French.

At age 87 it's hard to believe Allen has many more films in him but if Coup De Chance is his last film it's not a bad way to end his career.

The was of course written by Woody Allen, the running time is 93 minutes.

2013 - THE LAST STAND, entertaining action film

This film was made in the later part of the career of Arnold Schwarzenegger after his successful run of action/science fiction films in the 1980's.  The big news was that this was the first American film from the Korean director Kim-Jee Wong who has a reputation for violent action films and intense extreme dramas from Korea.

Really there's nothing new here.  Arnold is a small town sheriff who along with his deputies has to take on a ruthless drug kingpin and his gang who are escaping from the FBI.  It all comes down to a violent showdown in Arnold's town.  The film is basically a western set in a modern environment,  kind of a contemporary version of High Noon with machine guns I guess.

Arnold brings his usual characterization to the film the loner who is a lot tougher than he seems. I can't say that Arnold would ever be considered an award winning actor but like John Wayne he knows his character and always plays it very well.

 

The director Kim-Jee Wong does a good job staging the action scenes the small town setting is a nice change of pace from the usual urban scene. The Last Stand is an entertaining action film which knows enough not to stretch the story out unlike the latest bloated films in this genre.  I'm calling you out, Indiana Jones, the Fast and Furious franchisee and the overlong Mission Impossible films.

The film was written by Andrew Knauer, the running time is 105 minutes.

1951 - STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, one of Hitchcock's best films

Saw this at a revival theater the other night, the 35 mm print was in excellent condition. This film is basically review proof.  Strangers on a Train was adapted from the novel by Patricia Highsmith which is even more perverse than Hitchcock's movie.

Robert Walker in the best performance and probably the best role of his career is the obviously gay villain Bruno Anthony who latches on to the unsuspecting Farley Granger and traps him into a murder plot.

 

This film is extremely well written and needless to say well made. This film marked the beginning of Hitchcock's association with Robert Burks the cinematographer who was really responsible for the "Hitchcock look, " for the next fourteen films.  Burks died in a house fire in 1968.  Hitchcock's films never looked so good again, a great loss.

Robert Burks

 Hitchcck's daughter Patrica shows up in a featured part along with the actor  Leo G. Carroll best remembered as Mr. Waverly in The Man From Uncle series.  Carroll must have been a favorite of Hitchcock's he appeared in 6 films.

It's well known that Raymond Chandler has a screen writing credit on this film but none of his material was used.  He apparently didn't get along with Hitchcock at all.

 

Hitchcock was unhappy with the actor Farley Granger as Guy Hanes, however he was wrong in this case Granger gives a very good performance. 

 

Again one of Hitchcock's best films, he was about to enter a run of 11 excellent films from 1951-1963.

The writing credits on the film are, Raymond Chandler, Czenzi Ormonde, Whitfield Cook and Hitchcok's wife Alma Reville who is uncredited.  The running time is 101 minutes

1974 - SISTER STREET FIGHTER aka Revenge of the Dragon

Definitely a big step up from the mediocre Return of the Street Fighter.  Sister Street Fighter stars Etsuko Shihomi as Tina  a martial artist searching for her brother an undercover cop attempting to locate the source of a heroin connection entering Japan  The heroin is actually hidden in women's wigs but that's another story.  Anyway as Estuko begins the search for her missing brother she runs up against a tough Japanese gang peddling the hair heroin.

Needless to say since this a Street Fighter film, there is lots of martial arts action.  Etsuko Shihomi  karate chops her way through the usual bunch of incompetent bad guys.  Sonny Chiba shows up in this film but this time he is not playing Terry Sugury but a martial arts instructor named Sonny Hibach. Of course when Chiba starts fighting he's back to his old tricks of ripping body parts out of his opponents.

 

Also featured in this film is Masashi Ishibashi as a bad guy called Hammerhead who is sent out to kill Etusko Shihomi.  This is Ishibashi’s third appearance  in a marital arts film that also has Sonny Chiba in it.  Chiba ripped out his vocal chords in the Street Fighter and yanked out more body organs in Return of the Street Fighter.  This time Etsuko Shihomi gets to finish him off in this film.  But I'll bet he shows up in the other Street Fighter films in this series.  Shihomi was also a skilled martial artist.

Well there's lots of action and blood.  The karate fights are entertaining and Etsuko Shihomi makes a good heroine, apparently in real life she was a trained martial artist, actress and a singer.  

The film was written by Masahiro Kakefuda and Norifumi Suzuki, the running time is 86 or 81 minutes depending on how much of the bloody fighting was cut out I suppose for different audiences.

2023 - ONE LIFE, a true but boring story

The inspirational true story of a man named Nicholas Winton.  Winton was a stockbroker in England just before World War II broke out.  He traveled to Czechoslovakia to help with the relocation of mostly Jewish children before the Nazi's attacked.  Working with a group of aid workers he was able to relocate over 600 children to England.  This is a moving story however this is not a good movie.

A dull and very plodding film.  The storytelling is strictly from the made for TV school of film making.  I suppose you could call it a "Lifetime" film made for the big screen.  I've seen this story before.  Richard Chamberlain did a version of a rescue story called Wallenberg: A Hero's Story  which was about a Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Jews during World War II and of course there's Schindler's List one of Spielberg's best films.  Not to make light of Winton's accomplishments but he was hardly the only person attempting to make a difference.

 

It's difficult to describe how such and underwhelming film could be made about Winton's life. He appears to be a genuinely good man. The film just doesn't seem to be able to explain what motivated him to save these children.  Winton's accomplishment's were generally unknown until he appeared on a crummy British reality show called "That's Life" which basically used his story for filler on one of their TV shows.  The film really doesn't make it very clear that Winton even at the age of seventy nine was still trying to bring attention to the plight of refugees fifty years later.  

 

What the film has going for it is a good cast with Anthony Hopkins and Johnny Flynn playing the older and younger versions of Winton.  Helena Bonham Carter is good as the young Winton's mother who was also instrumental in getting the children out of Prague.  Lena Olin, Marthe Keller and Jonathan Pryce (in a very small role) are also excellent.  I hate to be so critical of this well meaning film but Winton's story really needed a better storyteller.  There's a reason Steven Spielberg's Schilndler's List is one of the best films on the subject of the Holocaust, he is a very skilled filmmaker and had a great passion for this story.

The film was written by Lucinda Coxon and Nick Drake, the running time is 110 minutes.