1960 - THE GALLANT HOURS, interesting biography on Admiral Halsey with another great Cagney performance

A few weeks in the life of Admiral William Halsey who matches wits with Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto as he defends Guadacanal from the Japanese.

James Cagney and Robert Montgomery formed a production company to film the life of Admiral Halsey.  Montgomery served under Halsey during World War II and had moved behind the camera after working for John Ford in They Were Expendable.  Montgomery directed parts of that film after Ford was injured on set which spurred his interest in direction.

 Cagney felt that most of the directors he worked with were idiots and relished the idea to play something a little more understated than his usual flamboyant characters.

This was clearly an important film for both men.  The tone is very solemn and the sense of death hangs over most of the story.  A decision was made to not show any battle scenes and there is no Japanese bashing throughout the story.  To add even more gravitas, the background score is choral music.

Cagney and the rest of the cast a very good, but Robert Montgomery's direction is stagy, the characters move on and off screen more like they are appearing in a play then a film.  Still, this is a good film even though it's more a character study than a war film.   

Cagney and Montgomery

Halsey's defense of Guadalcanal was a high point in his navel career, unfortunately towards the ends of the war he made a series of screw ups which included sailing his fleet into not one but two typhoons.

115 minutes.

2006 - THE HOLIDAY, 1947 - LADY IN THE LAKE, 1951 - QUO VADIS...Three on the weekend

THE HOLIDAY-My wife and I took a road trip down to scenic south eastern Minnesota this Saturday. When we got back we were tired and vegged out in front of the tube that night. We ended up watching The Holiday on TBS. The plot is actually two stories. In the first story, the viewer has to decide who is prettier, Cameron Diaz or Jude Law. In the second story the viewer is forced to watch in horror as Jack Black is cast as the the romantic lead to Kate Winslet. Throw in a couple of cute kids and a colorful old geezer for no particular reason to make the movie drag on even more. This movie is full of tiresome inside movie jokes, no sale.

 136 minutes.


I had started Lady In The Lake a couple of weeks ago, so I finished it off on Sunday morning. This was one weird film. It's a movie made in 1947 by the actor Robert Montgomery using the camera as the main character. I guess they call it the subjective camera technique, as they said in the advertising "you are one of the characters". This movie was based on a Raymond Chandler story, and with all Raymond Chandler stories the mystery is so impossible to follow that by the end of the film I wasn't sure who had killed who and why they were killing anyone at all. This was an interesting failure but no sale.

 105 minutes

 

Finished off Sunday night with Quo Vadis a MGM spectacular. The odd thing about this movie was that it wasn't filmed in a wide screen process, so the movie looked great on our TV instead of the usual postage stamp size that you get with letterboxing. This is one of those ancient Romans persecute the Christians things. I enjoyed it a lot. The romantic leads Robert Taylor and Deborah Kerr were a couple of stiffs but I doubt they could have done anything with these characters anyway. However Peter Ustinov is great hamming it up as Nero and Leo Glenn is also pretty darn great as Petronius, the author of the Satyricon. His death scene is pretty darn great as well. You also get to watch the burning of Rome, Christians getting eaten by lions, Christians burned at the stake and a "cast of thousands" enjoying it all in the Coliseum you gotta love all that debauchery. Highly recommended.

 171 minutes.