1967 - THE HONEY POT Mankiewicz's final shot as writer/director

The writer/director Joseph L Mankiewicz never really got it together after the Elizabeth Taylor Cleopatra film mess he got himself into in 1963. It was 1967 before he completed and released another film.

 

 The Honey Pot looks like it was intended to be a classy comedy/murder mystery with an all star cast. The film is a mash up of ideas and supposedly witty dialog and supposedly clever situations, not terrible, not very good. The Honey Pot was shot on location in Venice but not a lot of work was put into using the locations in an interesting way. Most of the action takes place on sets built at Cinecitta studios in Rome.

A seriously decent all star cast which was probably attracted to this film because of Mankiewicz's considerable reputation and that is about the only reason to sit through this thing. Even a pro like Rex Harrison seems to be hamming it up as he tries to bring some interest to the film.

Joseph L Mankiewicz ended his career partially redeeming himself by directing Sleuth with Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine. He was smart enough to go out on a can't miss film with two good actors in a film adaptation of a successful Broadway play. Mankiewicz saw the handwriting on the wall for his career and retired.

 125 minutes

1945 - STRANGE HOLIDAY, financed and suppressed by General Motors

Arch Obler is either the poor man's Rod Serling or Rod Serling is the poor man's Arch Obler. Obler was a noted radio writer and producer who moved into film with varying degrees of success. During the 1940's Obler was as highly regarded as Orson Welles when it came to radio dramas. He wrote, produced and directed his own films and he also produced and directed one of the first 3D films.

Obler was not unlike Rod Serling in that he had a lot of half assed liberal ideas rolling around in his brain that he wanted to share with the world. The format of his radio dramas allowed him to spew out all his deep thoughts to the American public. Hired by General Motors during World War II to make a morale boosting film for it's employees, Obler presented GM with a Twilight Zone type of story about an every day American who returns from a fishing vacation to find that the United States has been taken over by the Nazis.

Obler delivered his film to GM and was told that General Motors would be withdrawing their support for his film. An angry Obler purchased the film back and along with the actor Claude Rains released it independently. The reasons for General Motors withdrawal from the film are still unclear. Obler claimed that General Motors was continuing to do business with the Nazi's during the war.

Obler may not have been that far from the truth. Apparently into mid 1941, General Motor's Opel division did design and build transport vehicles for the Nazi's.

STRANGE HOLIDAY is mostly a heavy handed propaganda piece of some historical interest. It's not unlike one of the more lame episodes of the TWILIGHT ZONE.

61 minutes.

1932 - SHANGHAI EXPRESS-Dietrich-Von Sternberg

Marlene Dietrich is iconic for a reason and the Shanghai Express shows why. She is carefully shot by photographer Lee Garmes and the director Josef Von Sternberg. Every camera angle has been planned for the maximum effect of presenting her when she is on screen which is almost the entire movie.

But this film is more than a portrait gallery of Dietrich. Marlene Dietrich actually could act, she has a sly sense of humor throughout the film. Clive Brook plays the traditional "stiff upper lip" British soldier in love with her and at first he seems pretty stiff but as the film goes on he becomes the emotional center of the film.

Jules Furthman who frequently worked with Howard Hawks was an expert at putting together stories with good dialog and this film has some amusing and memorable lines.

Josef Von Sternberg showed what a good filmmaker could do with an interesting story, strong actors and a strong visual sense.

80 minutes.

2003 - THE FLOWER OF EVIL Happy families

Claude Chabrol the " French Hitchcock" takes a look at a Bourgeoisie French family with a lot of secrets.  The mother and father are a couple who remarried after their respective spouses (who were brother and sister) have died. 

The mother has political ambitions and is neglecting her spouse as she runs around making phony promises to the voters. The father has some sort of shady pharmaceutical business going on and secretly despises his wife's run for mayor. Their children are cousins (or half cousins or brother and sister or half brother and half sister) and are having a semi secretive incestuous affair. Even the family's saintly old Aunt has a big secret she's been hiding in her past.

Chabrol very subtly rips apart their respectability and shows the rotten moral core of the family.

Chabrol opens the film with a dead body then flashes back to show how the body got there. He also stages a scene with people trying to move the body around. Hitchcock would have taken a scene like this and shoot it with plenty of fancy camera angles and editing to create a showy moment for one of his films. Chabrol just shoots the scene in a fairly straightforward manner which emphasizes how difficult it is to just plain drag a dead body around the house.

Hitchcock's films could sometimes be full of set pieces with the characters stuck in the plot only to move around to the next set piece. Claude Chabrol can do the suspense stuff about as well as Hitchcock but he builds his films around his characters, something Hitchcock always seemed to struggle with.

104 minutes, written by Caroline Eliacheff, Louise L. Lambrichs and Claude Chabrol.

1951 - Budd Boetticher's BULLFIGHTER AND THE LADY Extended Director's cut?

John Wayne produced Budd Boetticher's story about a young American played by Robert Stack who is taught "the ways of the bullfighter" by Gilbert Roland playing the old bullfighter pro. Stack falls in love with a Mexican senorita but violates her code of honor and has to redeem himself. You can pretty much write this story. This film has lots of entertaining macho bullshit about what it means to be a man, learning the code of the bullfighter and junk like that.

Boetticher delivered a 2 hour film which John Wayne thought was to long. Duke called in his old drinking buddy John Ford, who proceeded to help cut about 40 minutes out of it. The cuts were made with Boetticher's approval in order to increase the commercial viability of the film. The film has been restored to it's original length. It looks like most of the stuff that got cut out were the scenes involving the testing of the young bulls to see if they would be suitable for fighting. Interesting stuff but a little repetitive after a while.

The acting is pretty good, Robert Stack is Mr. Intense throughout the film and actually performs some of his own bullfighting stunts. In repeated scenes he gets knocked over a lot by some young but mean bulls. A lot of the film appears to have been photographed on location in Mexico and there is a genuine atmosphere of sleaziness throughout the film.

The movie reminds me of Hemingway's bullfighting book Death in the Afternoon.

 124 minutes.

1960 - THE 3 WORLDS OF GULLIVER is 1/3 of Johnathan Swift

Ray Harryhausen and Charles Schneer didn't make films with social satire in them so doing a version of Gulliver's Travels seems like a weird idea for their next film after The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.

Harryhausen's given interviews in which he stated that Columbia Studios was looking for a quick follow-up to The 7th Voyage of Sinbad to cash in on that film's success. Apparently the script for The 3 Worlds Of Gulliver was available. The other problem for Harryhausen and Schneer was that they also needed something that didn't require a lot of time consuming stop motion animation. The 3 Worlds Of Gulliver is a film full of a lot of optical effects.

The first part of the film which is about Gulliver's adventures in Lilliput actually sticks pretty closely to the book. Most of the plot is left intact. However one funny change from the book is the scene where Gulliver puts out the fire in the King's palace by peeing on it. In this film Gulliver spits wine all over the palace which was equally gross. 

The movie start to fall apart when Gulliver ends up in Brobdingnag the land of the giants. From here the plot turns into a science vs ignorance thing with Gulliver matching wits with the king's sorcerer. Gulliver does battle with a giant stop motion alligator and he and his wife(?) end up escaping from the giants and returning to England.

 

 

Since this was a children's film nobody was going to film the last part of Gulliver's Travels where Gulliver cracks up and spends the rest of his life living by himself and talking to horses. The film is just OK, the first part is clearly the best. The optical effects for a film made in 1959 still look pretty good.

 

Bernard Herrmann's music has to do a lot of work to keep the whimsical fantasy element of the film on track. 

Written by Arthur A. Ross and director Jack Shea, the running time is 100 minutes.

1949 - THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS David Lean reworks Brief Encounter

One of the few David Lean films that is not especially well known. Lean reworked the script and took over direction from Ronald Neame the future director of The Poseidon Adventure which pretty much finished off their long friendship. 

 

Yes that's David Lean driving the boat.

 

Lean used a complex flashback structure to tell the story of a woman,  Ann Todd who cheats on her husband. The very British actor Ann Todd was a woman Lean eventually left his wife for and had a pretty intense relationship and marriage with.

Ann Todd looks good in any film I've ever seen her in.  But she always acted like she had a corn cob up her butt. Not a lot of fun at a party, much less a woman to have a wild affair with. Claude Rains probably gives the best performance in the film as the pissed off husband, as pissed off as a husband can be in one of these "stiff upper lipped" British dramas.

 

The film is well made and good looking. David Lean always knew how to put a film together, but it's kind of a minor story compared to Great Expectations or Oliver Twist or even In Which We Serve,  Still an excellent example of superior film making from a superior director.

Running time 95 minutes. Written by Eric Ambler, Stanley Haynes, David Lean and H. G, Welles!

1924 - PARIS ASLEEP or THE CRAZY RAY or PARIS QUI DORT

Rene Clair's science fiction comedy is kind of a disappointment. The basic plot and themes have been copied to many times. A mad scientist has invented a device that puts Paris in a state of suspended animation. A group of people unaffected by this device run amock in Paris indulging their every whim. The scientist is convinced to shut the freeze ray off and things return to normal.

The views of Paris from the Eiffel tower are fun to look at and you get some good shots of 1920's Paris traffic. I enjoyed a couple of the scenes of the group ransacking Paris.

One joke shows the Mona Lisa shoved into the back of their car like it was just a cheap print from a Target superstore. 

Otherwise that's about it.

35 minutes.

1930 - DeMille's amazing sex musical MADAM SATAN

 A wife discovers her husband is cheating on her with a night club singer. She decides to humiliate him by dressing up as a character at a masquerade party known as Madam Satan.

 

The masquerade party happens to be on a dirigible which gets struck by lightening. The dirigible races out of control and breaks in two. The partiers in full costume, parachute out of the dirigible to save their lives and that's the normal stuff in this film.

Here is an excellent example of DeMille the filmmaker indulging his fantasies and fetishes in the very public forum of a film musical. The women are basically dressed in lingerie or strange bizarre costumes throughout the film. The musical numbers are dadaist in their conception and execution. The "Cats on the Catwalk" production number with the costumed party people hopping their way up a catwalk dressed as pussycats is a very very strange thing to see. Then there is the electric man production number (see above picture). Apparently this goofball doing his so called dance routine as a bolt of electricity was a major influence on Agnes DeMille who went on to choreograph Oklahoma.

It's easy to use the word "heightened reality" but is seems to fit a film like this.

I've seen a lot of DeMille films, but I've never seen a film like this one. A stunning film.

 116 minutes. Written by Jean MacPherson DeMille's mistress.

2009 - AWAY WE GO with this piece of s**t comedy

Smarmy piece of miserable self important junk about a couple of pathetic losers about to have a baby. They travel all over the United States to find friends or relatives that will support them after their baby is born. They should have taken the seven million dollar budget for this film and used it for toilet paper, it would have at least provided relief for a few people. I can't even begin to convey the facile tone and shallowness in these characters and their situations. This smug and supposedly funny but in reality unfunny film is borderline offensive in it's condescending attitude to almost every character these people visit. Their final revelation, "there's no place like home. " The filmmakers apparently needed to stoop to stealing from The Wizard of Oz for their homespun morale .

Written by two American writers who apparently lived in a part of the United States only seen in a Mary Worth comic (go ahead and google that reference). This film was directed by Sam Mendes, the British theatrical director who had previously made American Beauty, Jarhead, and Revolutionary Road. Mendes has absolutely no feeling for or any idea about what American culture is even about.

 98 minutes.

2009 - Woody Allen's WHATEVER WORKS

Preparing for the worst I watched the latest Woody Allen film last night. It's another comedy about an older man involved with an extremely younger girl and I expected the yuck factor to be extremely high. I was surprised to find this was one of his better recent comedies. Larry David plays Boris Yelnikoff, Allen's typical neurotic New York intellectual Jew who's full of lots of misanthropic opinions about the human race and generally a real downer to be around. David's character is an exaggeration of this typical Allen character and I have to believe this was intentional. Allen even has him talking at the audience with the people in the movie around him thinking he is very crazy. 

Into his life comes a southern beauty contestant, Melodie St. Ann Celestine who he gets involved with and eventually marries. Eventually Melodie's conservative christian parents show up to rescue her. By the end of the film the parents are embracing living in New York and Allen has weaved in various romantic complications with all of his characters to satisfying conclusions. 

 

A Woody Allen film with a rare happy ending. The Woody the old curmudgeon seems to be locating his sentimental streak as he gets older.

 

As usual Woody Allen wrote the film, the running time is 92 minutes.

1957 - Nigel Kneale's THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN is more interesting Science Fiction from an interesting writer

 The writer of The Quatemass Experiment, Nigel Kneale updated his TV drama for Hammer films aoub an expedition to the Himalayas mountains in sear of he Yeti or Abominable Snowman.

 

 This is not your typical Hammer horror film. The stars are Forrest Tucker from F Troop actually acting for a change and Peter Cushing as a British botanist. 

Probably to much dialogue in this film and the actors running around on studio sets, don't look very cold.   But this is a very interesting film. Nigel Kneale has a lot of intriguing ideas going on in this film.  Are the Yeti from outer space or are they part of a species that is slowly dying out and hiding from mankind?   The Yeti may possibly be the next evolutionary species to take over the planet after mankind has destroyed themselves.  Lots of interesting stuff to mull over.

 

A good example of a low budget film from Hammer films that actually has some interesting ideas for a change.  A very good film.

1961 - ONE TWO THREE the film that drove Cagney into retirement

Billy Wilder's follow up to The Apartment, was the very topical comedy for 1961 about the Cold War crisis in Berlin. One Two Three was James Cagney's final main starring performance excluding some supporting work he did towards the end of his life. Wilder and his writing partner I.A.L. Diamond packed a lot of jokes into the film some good, some bad, some funny and some mighty lame. Wilder kept the pace fast and ramped in up into a frenzy of verbal and physical action towards the end of the film.

 

James Cagney the old pro had to hold it together. Cagney liked the movie but didn't care for Wilder very much. Billy Wilder was a pretty exacting filmmaker, he never allowed any actor to deviate from the written word in his script. Actors were expected to show up say the words and not question the director. No creative contribution allowed from anyone else.

 

Most critics talk about the 1960's showing a hardening in Wilder's comedy technique and it's definitely here in One Two Three. Wilder's belief that human beings are basically scum combined with the now outdated topicality of the story and jokes with the exception of Cagney make, One Two Three somewhat of a disappointment.

 

 

115 minutes.

1957 - BEGINNING OF THE END as riffed by Mystery Science Theater 3000

My son dragged this up from the basement. This is the Mystery Science Theater version of Beginning of the End with the funny commentary. The comedians are funny but it was pretty easy to take shots at this little movie.

Anything made by Bert L Gordan would be fair game for this crowd. There is something funny and kind of touching about a low budget science fiction movie about giant grasshoppers where they stick a photo behind ordinary grasshoppers to make them look like they are giants hopping through Chicago. The stock footage of soldiers battling superimposed grasshoppers in a forrest does have a interesting surreal quality to it as well. Peter Graves is the scientist hero and you know that because he wears a white smock which was the calling card for all 1950's movie scientists. He has an assistant who is a deaf mute for some reason and you know that guy is going to be grasshopper food.

Cook a frozen pizza have a few beers and enjoy.