1956 - BHOWANI JUNCTION, George Cukor makes a David Lean film

A biracial woman of Indian and English descent is assigned to an important railway terminal in India around the period of England's departure from India.  She attempts to come to grips with her racial identity and becomes involved with three different men.

George Cukor directed Bhowani Junction and F.A. Young, David Lean's cinematographer on Lean's super epics is in charge of the photography. The film stars Ava Gardner who does very well as the mixed blood Indian woman.  Stewart Granger is the British officer who falls in love with and he's OK in the traditional Hollywood leading man British soldier type of role.

 

Cukor's staging of the large scale crowd scenes is very impressive.  For a director primarily known for working with more intimate films he had a complete understanding staging scenes in the wide screen format.  The scenes at a passive resistance rally were very impressive. Cukor was one of the first directors to work with Cinemascope and actually knew what he was doing with it.

 

Ava Gardner was never considered a great actress and was known more for looking good than anything else she did, but here she seems to be actually working at creating a character.

 

Unfortunately the script tends to rush her from one situation to another and finally the problem the story runs into is in the last third of the film.  Gardner's jumping from boyfriend to boyfriend happens so quickly that by the time she becomes involved with Granger she seems like a slut.

For all the work that was put into the look of Bhowani Junction it's unfortunate that more time wasn't spent on working out the structure and story problems in the script.   Bhowani Junction is a disappointment in certain parts of the film.  Still it’s a good film.

The film was written by Sonya Levine and Ivan Moffat, the running time is 110 minutes.

2009 - INVICTUS is a good TV movie

You better really like rugby if you watch this film because there is a whole lot of it played towards the end.

Invictus is really about Nelson Mandela assuming the presidency of South Africa he inspires the white guy rugby team to win the world championship and unite the people for the greater good of the nation.

Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon get the job done, they do a good job with their South African accents and they are both very sincere.  Clint Eastwood also gets the job done, he sets up his scene, gets his shots moves on to the next scene gets his shots moves on to the next scene gets his shots, etc.  Not exactly exciting film making but it is serviceable.

 

Invictus is like ordering a hamburger at a restaurant.  A hamburger is a boring thing to order but you know if you order it the restaurant can't really screw it up when they cook it for you.

134 minutes, written by Anthony Peckman.

 

2009 - AVATAR intelligent presentation of a stupid film

James Cameron is about the same age as me, he has some sort of adolescent fantasy about living in a primitive world, screwing a hot chick with a fabulous body and tail to add to the kink factor a little bit and become the mighty warrior who rides dragons. 

James Cameron has also seen a lot of movies, Dances with Wolves, The Hurricane, Run of the Arrow, and Bird of Paradise to name a few.  All of these films feature white people interacting with a simpler native culture that lives in harmony with nature.

James Cameron also knows how to put a film together.  His film is immersive in it's detail and imagination.  It looks good, it sounds good, the action and special effects scenes are up to his usual very high standards.   Everyone has criticized the dialog and plot of this film, but Avatar is like watching Henry the V compared to something like Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith,

 

James Cameron gets to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to show everyone his adolescent fantasies.

I get to annoy my wife with my adolescent fantasies.

Written by James Cameron, the running time is 162 minutes.

2009-WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE, tiresome little brat meets really big Muppets

Arty pretentious video and film director teams with an equally arty pretentious writer to adopt a little kid book that was about 30 pages long.  I guess I'm not really sure what audience they made this for.

 

In the good old days someone would have bought this and hired Bill Melendez or Chuck Jones or those Rankin and Bass guys to adopt it into a 30 minute TV special for some network.  It would have been promoted as a special holiday classic.

 

Vince Guaraldi would have written 3 or 4 songs and his trio would have knocked them out in one or two recording sessions.  The whole thing would have been done on the cheap and probably have been rather painless.

 

The budget was 100 million dollars the film made 75 million.  A predictable failure.

101 very long minutes, written by Spike Jonze and David Eggers.

1931-DIRIGIBLE, Frank Capra action director

The writer Frank Wead (who was played by John Wayne in the Wings of Eagles) wrote this action/adventure story about a United States Navy blimp flying to the rescue of some arctic explorers trapped at the South Pole.  Frank Capra directed this film with a very high degree of talent and intelligence at the start of this best period.

 

Capra tells the story at a fairly brisk pace and for the most part moves things along from one exciting situation to another.  Capra's photographer, Joseph Walker who worked with Capra on almost all of  his famous Columbia films, photographed the film with lots of style, the scenes at Lakehurst with the navy men working with the blimps are very well lit and photographed.  The flying scenes with the blimps contain actual on location photography, combined with rear projection, models and miniatures.  It's all edited and blended together very effectively, at times the special effects still look very impressive.

 

Probably the most tiresome parts of Dirigible are the scenes with Fay Wray as the wife of the daredevil pilot who doesn't want him to fly anymore.  This type of character was already a cliche even in the early 1930's.   Capra didn't seem very comfortable with the dialog and situation, he must have been aware that this junk slowed down the picture.  These scenes are somewhat compensated by Fay Wray who is very easy to look at.  The fact that this type of female character still shows up in films today says a lot about the way Hollywood still views women.

 

It might have been interesting to see what type of action films Capra would have made, had he continued to work in this genre.  Instead Capra went on to make his social problem and humanitarian pictures, Mr Smith Goes To Washington, Mr Deeds Goes To Town, Meet John Doe and Lost Horizon.

Dirigible is a very impressive film for an early sound film.

100 minutes of no Capra corn.

2005 - STAR WARS EPISODE III: REVENGE OF THE SITH, finishing up the series

Did not like this film.  It took me 4 years to finally watch the concluding film in the first trilogy.  Everyone has taken shots at the low quality of this since it first came out so there is not much more to add.  It seems the film's two biggest issues are the dialog and the acting. This is my 2 cents.

The dialog:

I don't believe what I'm hearing! Obi-Wan was right... you've changed! You have turned to the dark side! 

Army or not, you must realize, you are doomed.  

And then there's this love banter between Anakin Skywalker and Padme:

 You are so... beautiful.

 It's only because I'm so in love.
 No, it's because I'm so in love with you.
 So love has blinded you?
 Well, that's not exactly what I meant.
 But it's probably true. 

The cast was another problem.  Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman and Samuel L Jackson look like they want to be somewhere else.  Portman's part was particularly humiliating, she's stuck playing the traditional simpering female waiting around for her husband to come home.  Hayden Christensen, the big acting discovery, the person the whole movie should revolve around seems to be unable to generate any chemistry with any member of the cast.  If your main character is so uninteresting and bland, it's hard to work up much interest in his emotional conflict or the film he is in.  

It was almost like George Lucas's casting sense, the one that had worked so well in American Graffiti and The first Star Wars trilogy movies had deserted him completely.

Not wasting any more time thinking about this moving on.

140 long minutes.

1945 - THE TRUE GLORY

Garson Kanin and Carol Reed supervised this World War II documentary, which starts with the Normandy invasion by the Allies and ends with the fall of Berlin. 

The documentary takes film footage from combat cameramen and supplements it with voice over narrations from soldiers, sailors, clerks, generals, nurses etc.  The goal was to provide an overview of every aspect of the invasion.

Besides the involvement of Garson Kanin and Carol Reed,  Paddy Chayefsky was one of the writers and Russ Meyer of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and Vixen! fame was one of the photographers.

 

The film is only 85 minutes long and in many ways gives the viewer a better sense of World War II then the 14 hour Ken Burns PBS documentary and without the pledge drive breaks.

1970 - THE LITTLE THEATER OF JEAN RENOIR, Renoir's final film is really bad

Jean Renoir's final film is depressing in it's awfulness.  Renoir wrote three short stories, and added a musical interlude with Jeanne Moreau performing a music hall song.

The first story is based on Hans Christian Andersen's,  The Little Match Girl.  Renoir has updated the story to the present and has retold the story making it about an elderly homeless couple who freeze to death on a cold winter night, lots of fun.

The second story is just completely strange.  A woman wants a perfectly waxed wood floor in her apartment.  She buys an electronic floor polisher, and brings about the death of her first husband  by making the floor really slippery.  This episode is presented as a quasi musical with people breaking out into song frequently and badly.

Jeanne Moreau performs her musical interlude, and she must have done it as a favor to Renoir because it contributes nothing to the film and is not particularly well sung.

The third story is about a middle aged man married to a younger woman who realizes she is cheating on him.  He decides to live in a "menage a trois" arrangement with her lover.  This one probably had possibilities, but the story has no resolution and just kind of stops it's as if Renoir didn't know how to end it.

Renoir was always good with his actors, but the performers here are pretty broad with lots of hammy overacting.  The first two stories were shot in a studio and they sure look it,  there was absolutely no feeling for their settings.  Renoir appears to be attempting to achieve some kind of European whimsy, but the film comes off as amateurish in the best Ed Wood tradition.

The Little Theater of Jean Renoir has a lot in common with Hitchcock's final film Family Plot.  They are embarrassing to watch and would probably have been better left unmade.

100 minutes.

1962 - WINTER LIGHT Ingmar Bergman's film of a Lutheran pastor's crisis of faith

Probably around the late 1960's or early 1970's Ingmar Bergman turned into kind of a film joke.  His films were showing repetition in the themes and the emotional crisis his characters tended to find themselves in.  Ingmar Bergman had come to represent a parody of a certain type of dour Swedish film.

But when Bergman was in control of his material most filmmakers couldn't come close to telling a serious story like he could.

Winter Light was the second film in his "trilogy of faith."  In a period of a few hours, a Lutheran minister suffering from the flu,  questions his profession, his belief in the lack of God's existence and inadvertently contributes to the suicide of one of his parishioners.  Pretty heavy stuff for an 80 minute film.

 

But, Bergman has carefully worked out his story and the emotional peaks and lows of the story do not contain any of the obscurity and tiresomeness of his later films. Winter Light is not really a film questioning God's existence. It is a character study about one man's inability to reach out emotionally.  Tomas Ericsson,  the pastor of the small church is a complicated character who's doubt and anger regarding the existence of God may possibly be an excuse to deal with his failure as a human being.  Questioning his belief in God allows him to ignore his own failings.

 

The acting is at an extremely high quality and technically the film is very well made.  For a film with a very small cast and and using a small country church as the main setting, the film, is very well staged and directed.  Sven Nyquist photographed the film in black and white with the light and compositions carefully worked out.

The overused word masterpiece can be applied to Winter Light.

1960 - HELLER IN PINK TIGHTS, 1962 - SOMETHING'S GOT TO GIVE, two odd films from George Cukor

Lots of cheesecake in this post.

The director George Cukor got himself mixed up in a couple of odd projects in the early 1960's.

HELLER IN PINK TIGHTS, was Cukor's only western in his long career.  Cukor is way out of his comfort zone with this film.  He usually directed sophisticated comedies and stage adaptations.

The film is about the adventures of a group of touring actors in the wild west.  The film features a blond Sophia Loren and Anthony Quinn as the actor/manager of the company.   This is a very good looking film with careful color control and beautiful photography.  Sophia Loren does better with the comedy aspects of the story than the dramatic scenes.  Quinn is pretty good in his part.

The appeal for Cukor must have been the idea to tell a story about actors and acting.  Cukor always felt his strength was working with actors in his films.  He seemed uncomfortable with the shootouts and fights in the film.

Unfortunately the script doesn't appear to have been carefully figured out in spite of the involvement of Dudley Nichols a writer who had worked with John Ford on some of his best films. Still,  Heller In Pink Tights is a well made entertaining film made and acted by professionals.

SOMETHINGS GOT TO GIVE,  Cukor was unlucky enough to get involved with Marilynn Monroe in what was her final unfinished film.  Monroe had recently had surgery and had dropped a considerable amount of weight, so she looked pretty good.  Unfortunately she was up to her usual erratic behavior. Between her mental and physical health problems she worked worked 12 of the 35 days into the production schedule costing 20th century Fox about 2 million dollars.

Cukor became so exasperated with her behavior that he recommended the studio fire Monroe and replace her with another actress.  Fox instead fired Cukor and gave Monroe a raise.  The plan was to restart the film with a different director in a couple of months.  Instead Monroe died of a drug overdose 2 months later.

Someone got the bright idea to assemble all of the available film into a somewhat coherent story.  The resulting 40 minute film shows that the film world did not lose a comedy masterpiece.  Dean Martin was her costar and he seems OK, but Monroe is pretty bad in her completed scenes.  She's supposed to be the mother of two young children, but her scenes with them look more like she wants to molest them than parent them.

Monroe was a decent comedian but you would find it hard to believe watching this film.  The surviving pieces of this film look like it would have been another bland cookie cutter comedy that Fox made in the early 60's and late 50's, something like Gentlemen Prefer Blonds or How To Marry a Millionaire. George Cukor clearly had his hands full with this mess.

Something's Got To Give is available in 4 parts on Youtube.

1960 - THE COLTER CRAVEN STORY John Ford's TV western

Sometime's the careers of famous directors have interesting little episodes.

Wagon Train was a popular television series starring Ward Bond, a character actor from the 1930's and 40's.  Bond was discovered by John Ford around the same time as John Wayne.  Ford, Wayne and Bond became close friends and legendary drinking buddies.  They were known to go on long drinking benders in Mexico between films.

Ward Bond was also a hard core anti communist right wing nutcase, he was known to be a major player in the harassment of liberal actors during the anti communist blacklist years in Hollywood.  Ward Bond was apparently not a very nice guy.   What a Roosevelt Democrat like John Ford saw in Bond is anyone's guess.

In the late 1950's Ward Bond had found success as a television star in Wagon Train, John Ford who wasn't working much was invited by Bond to film an episode of Bond's series.

Ford knocked out his episode of Wagon Train in 7 days, apparently shooting enough footage to make a short film.  The producers of Wagon Train weren't use to an irascible character like Ford and edited the episode down to the standard TV series length.

Ford turned The Colter Craven Story into a chance to indulge himself in his usual filming antics.  He loaded the cast up with his favorite actors and even persuaded John Wayne to appear in a short sequence.

In, The Colter Craven Story Ford tells the story of an alcoholic doctor still coming to grips with the horrors of the Civil War, particularly the Battle of Shiloh.  In an attempt to sober him up Bond tells the doctor about another man who had to face his personal demons,  that man turns out to be Ulysses S Grant.

The Colter Craven Story is not uninteresting, but it is disappointing.  Ford basically films the episode like a conventional TV show, he does manage to inject some mood and atmosphere during the Battle of Shiloh sequence, but for the most part this TV episode is nothing special. Ford also loaded The Colter Craven Story up with lots of clips from his 1950 film Wagonmaster, which also starred Ward Bond,  a cost saving measure for TV shows during this period.

Ward Bond always a heavy drinker, had been taking a lot of amphetamines while filming the Wagon Train series to keep up with the hectic demands of the TV schedule.  He suffered a major heart attack and died before The Colter Craven Story was aired.

Running time 53 minutes, written by Tony Paulson.

2009 - THE BLIND SIDE, white woman fantasy about a black football player but not that kind of fantasy.

Affluent rich southern couple living in Atlanta take a big scary black football player into their home.  They help him get a good education while turning him into a star football player.  This is all supposedly based on a "true" story.   The movie is poorly written and directed and photographed like a TV show  Not a good movie but a moderately entertaining one.

"If a large number of people like something it is probably of low quality" to quote the famous musician Sun-Ra.  This is the working definition of that saying.  You get it all in this movie, the Rocky like training sequences, the cute wise beyond his age nine year old boy, high school cheerleaders and Sandra Bullock wearing really tight clothing. 

Sandra Bullock looks great and although she is never going to perform in Medea, she delivers the goods for the audience.  At least Bullock brings a little sincerity to her performance unlike Meryl Streep who has decided to actually stop acting in her movies. 

This is a feel good Lifetime channel Christmas movie, overall pretty stupid and kind of racially insulting.

1961 - THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM the 2nd in Corman's Edgar Allen Poe series

Roger Corman's close but no cigar adaptation of this Edgar Allen Poe story.  For a film with really bright bright colors, Corman managed to work up a lot of atmosphere with the creepy castle, hidden passages and of course the thunderstorm stuff he sticks in the film. 

Probably the real auteur of The Pit and the Pendulum,  is the screenwriter Richard Matheson who had to take a Poe story which as I recall is about 4 pages long or so with no plot or characters and flesh it out for about 80 minutes not an inconsiderable achievement.  Matheson was probably one of the most important fantasy/science fiction writers in entertainment, he wrote for the original Twilight Zone series and the original Star Trek series.  He was also the writer for one of Spielberg's better films Duel.  Matheson was the original author of I am Legend, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Somewhere in Time, The Night Stalker, and let's not forget to throw in an episode of The Girl From UNCLE.

Truth be told the acting is not so hot.  Most of the performers sound pretty stiff and stilted  the exception being Vincent Price who overacts pretty shamelessly.

Obviously everything leads up to the famous slice the guy in half with the razor sharp pendulum scene at the end of the film and it's still pretty effective for an early 60's film. 

Corman's about three years away from making his artsy fartsy Poe films,  The Masque of the Red Death and The Tomb of Ligela.

85 minutes.

1966 - THE WILD ANGELS, Roger Corman's well made biker film

Roger Corman's anti-establishment film is about sticking it's middle finger up at southern California society for 90 minutes or it's a metaphor of what happens when the id is unleashed.  Whatever it is, this is a very well directed and photographed film.

 

Anti heroes to the nth degree, the Hell's Angels aren't above picking a fight with a group of Hispanics just to show how racist they are or having an all out orgy during a church funeral.  The rampant display of Nazi symbols and memorabilia they wear throughout the film contributes to their scary anti everything persona.

 

With the exception of Bruce Dern who's  dead for half of the film, the acting is not so hot.   Peter Fonda and Nancy Sinatra are probably a little to clean cut to be hanging out with this bunch but at least Fonda's got the snear down and the image of him and Sinatra riding down the road is iconic.  He summons up the film's theme in his speech at Bruce Dern's funeral:

"We want to be free! We want to be free to do what we want to do! We want to be free to ride. And we want to be free to ride our machines without being hassled by The Man. And we want to get loaded. And we want to have a good time! And that’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna have a good time. We’re gonna have a party."

The funeral orgy in the northern California church is something to see, Corman shoots it close with a hand held camera in wide screen.  It gives the whole scene an interesting unsettling effect.   Another bizarre scene has Fonda caressing his bike while on the soundtrack you can hear two cats screwing.

From the beginning of the film with Fonda riding his bike past a series of ugly oil well pumps covering the California landscape to the existential ending, this is possibly one of the best films made about the 1960's.  Written by Charles B Griffith the running time is 93 minutes.