WHAT FILMS HAVE YOU SEEN LATELY?

[RedRiver]

Olivier's RICHARD III is a good adaptaion. Not exactly exciting cinema. But good Shakespeare.

[JackFavell]

It's my favorite of his Shakespeare movies. He's funny!

[charliechaplinfan]

I've seen two Jimmy Cagney movies recently that I've never watched before, both from later on in his career. The first one Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, he plays a similar sort of character to his early gangster roles at Warner's and has most in common with White Heat. It was a fine film noir, featuring a steller cast of suppoting actors including Ward Bond as the crooked police chief. The movie that really gave me goosebumps was Shake Hands With The Devil set in 1920 in the Ireland in the midst of the troubles, Cagney is an Irish surgical professor and along with Cohen this must be the role of his career, without saying too much, he uncoils with the character and what you first think he is isn't what he ends up as. Jeffrey Hunter stars too with another stellar supporting cast, one of the best movies I've seen for a while.

[RedRiver]

I'd really like to see "Kiss." WHITE HEAT era gangster film. Sounds good to me.

[feaito]

I watched "Miranda" (1948) with the lovely Glynis Johns. In this film Miranda is more naïvely coquettish than mischievously, flirtatious -as I perceived her in the sequel "Mad About Men" (1954). Maggie Rutherford is very funny, but I think that she had more screen time in MAM. The men interested in Miranda are Griffith Jones (a doctor), John McCallum (a painter) and David Tomlinson (the chauffeur) and their mates are respectively Googie Withers (a lovely actress who was McCallum's wife in real life, but who plays Jones' wife in the film), Sonia Holm and Yvonne Owen. The film is in B&W. Entertaining and naughty, the latter especially due to the movies' last scene! ....

I also saw the MGM film "Man-Proof" (1938) and odd film which I thought was a going to be a comedy due to its cast (Myrna Loy, Franchot Tone, Roz Russell, Walter Pidgeon and Nana Bryant), but which turned to be a drama. Based on a book titled "The Four Marys" by Fannie Healip Lea, the plot deals with Loy's unrequited love for Pidgeon. Russell is the affluent heiress Pidgeon marries and Tone is a journalist who's pal of Loy's mother, a writer (Nana Bryant). The film has horrible reviews at imdb.com and did not do well at the BO in its day, but in spite of not being altogether succesful, it manages to keep one's interest, due to the good dialogue between the principals; I felt it was sort of ahead of its time concerning its "existentialist" approach. Another oddity: Rita Johnson and Ruth Hussey (the other two "Marys"?) appear listed on the credist as part of the supporting cast, but did not appear in the film (on imdb.com it reads: "scenes deleted").

[JackFavell]

Gosh I never knew that, Fer! I love both Rita and Ruth. too bad they were cut out, what a disappointment for a rising starlet.

I too liked Man-Proof, despite not quite knowing where it was going. But I do like Loy so much that it almost wouldn't matter what movie she was in. I prefer some of her more dramatic films, like Test Pilot for instance. She's flawless as far as I'm concerned and tops my list of favorites because she can be dramatic while underplaying to an extraordinary degree. She never seems full of herself as an actress, and that means I can't get enough of her.

I actually like Walter Pidgeon here even though he has a very tough role to carry. And Roz also could have been very starchy or not sympathetic, but she carried off her scenes without being cloyingly sentimental. I liked the twist and turns. I was surprised at the movie, it's an odd one, but not in a bad way.

[MikeBSG]

I saw "Zero Dark Thirty" (2012), directed by Kathryn Bigelow, tonight on the big screen.

It is a well-made movie, but I can see why it didn't win the Oscar. It is rather a cold and aloof film that doesn't give you the emotional attachment you expect from a typical Hollywood film.

Oddly enough, I came out of the theater thinking of the original "Total Recall." In that film, at about the halfway point, Arnold Schwarzenegger is confronted by a pudgy middle-aged guy who tells him all of his adventures are not really happening and that Arnold needs to stop now or else he will just go crazy. The second time you see the movie, you realize that the pudgy guy was telling the truth.

In the middle of "Zero Dark Thirty," Jessica Chastain is confronted by her pudgy middle-aged superior who tells her that her quest for Osama Bin Laden is pointless, that the guy has been out of the picture so long that he might as well be dead already and that people should be working on unraveling al-Qaeda plots in the US involving youth radicalized by the internet. Chastain threatens to go over his head, so her boss lets her do what she wants, and she gets Bin Laden, but after the recent events in Boston, it seems like her boss could say "I told you so."

Of course, in real life, as opposed to movies, nobody is ever completely right. Still it was interesting to see a film that deals with current events and can be read differently because of current events than when it first came out. That won't be true of the bulk of movies released this year.

[feaito]

Gosh I never knew that, Fer! I love both Rita and Ruth. too bad they were cut out, what a disappointment for a rising starlet.

I too liked Man-Proof, despite not quite knowing where it was going. But I do like Loy so much that it almost wouldn't matter what movie she was in. I prefer some of her more dramatic films, like Test Pilot for instance. She's flawless as far as I'm concerned and tops my list of favorites because she can be dramatic while underplaying to an extraordinary degree. She never seems full of herself as an actress, and that means I can't get enough of her.

I actually like Walter Pidgeon here even though he has a very tough role to carry. And Roz also could have been very starchy or not sympathetic, but she carried off her scenes without being cloyingly sentimental. I liked the twist and turns. I was surprised at the movie, it's an odd one, but not in a bad way.

Your thoughts reflect very much mine WEN. How sad this film has such a bad reputation.

[The Ingenue]

Well, "Man-Proof" gets at least three votes here. I like it a lot.

Concerning Rita and Ruth: I wonder at that "scenes deleted" notation at the IMDb, for both actresses are still in the film, though just barely. You can glimpse them at the wedding, flanking Myrna as bridesmaids:



And, judging by voices, I'd say they are the two who sweep Roz away to change her dress after the ceremony. Given their billing in the opening credits, do you think there'd been other scenes filmed with them? Or did M-G-M really expect us to know them despite brims and bows? ( Look at how Myrna's hat is styled above, with its bow tied at an angle that frames rather than crowds her face. )

If there were more scenes filmed, this clothes-conscious girl can't help but wonder: What Dolly Tree gowns were lost in the cutting?

Edit:--Looks like a bad day for visibility. The site hosting my screen capture is on the fritz. Here's hoping the image shows up for you.

[JackFavell]

I can see the photo, thanks for posting it!

I can't imagine MGM would think we would recognize either of them, since at this point each actress had only made two movies. Hussey would get star billing 2 years later in Within the Law, a remake of Joan Crawford's PAID, and Johnson would appear in that film as second lead.

[feaito]

Carrie, Thanks for that image! And I'm glad you are fond of the film.

When I saw those two bridesmaids screaming and running around Roz I thought..."they might be them", but all the scenes were too quickly and they wore these huge hats, thus I did not recognize them...still I think they might have had more scenes. The title of the book source of the movie "The Four Marys" lead me to think that there are 4 feminine characters (pals?) in the original story...Anyone is familiar with the book?

[MikeBSG]

Yesterday I watched "Bloody Mama" (1970) directed by Roger Corman.

I liked it. (But then, when haven't I liked a movie about the rural desperadoes of the 1930s? Oh yes. "Public Enemies.")

The film is a bit disjointed, but it has an energy that keeps the action barreling along. In some ways, Corman presents the Barker gang as an equivalent of the counterculture of the time when the movie came out. (I had to think that when Ma Barker has her sons sing "I Didn't Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier," Corman was making a comment on Vietnam.) But then, surprisingly, the movie changes direction when the gang kidnaps a businessman played by Pat Hingle. Hingle is the surprisingly strong (and not mocked) spokesman for traditional values, and in some ways it is the encounter with him (as opposed to the increased police activity) that is presented as destroying the gang.

I would say "Thieves Like Us" is better than "Bloody Mama," but Corman's film stands above Aldrich's "The Grissom Gang" if only barely. ("Grissom Gang" has some scenes that are brilliant and some that just fail to work for me.) I haven't seen John Milius' "Dillinger" since 1975, so I can't comment on that one here.

[JackFavell]

You've made me want to run through all those films again, Mike. Very interesting.

[RedRiver]

I even like PUBLIC ENEMIES. It's not as good as DILLINGER. But I enjoyed it.

[JackFavell]

I watched The Man in the White Suit and The Ladykillers with my daughter this weekend. She understood all the things I love about these movies.

EALING SPOILERS

It was special. She leaped ahead of the story in MITWS, catching the spirit of it totally - telling me that "if they put the suit into production, they'd only have to make one for each person and everyone would be out of a job" before they said anything about this in the film. I was so proud! It's a bit philosophical for a 12 year old, but she got it, totally. She especially enjoyed the sound of the machine, and I think she was touched by Alec Guinness' sad and brilliant performance, and the love affair between him and Joan Greenwood. I'm not sure if she caught how starchy and inflexible the character really is, but I think she did see the artist or scientist as an anarchic and destructive presence in society, as well as a visionary. It's a deep film and I was pleased that she liked it. I wasn't sure she was going to.

The Ladykillers had some laugh out loud moments for us both. It's so pleasant watching with someone who hasn't seen it. It points up things that I sometimes forget to watch for on repeated viewings. In fact, at the final section, from the moment the train gate drops, there was a rolling laugh that just bubbled up from both of us...a very contagious one, especially when Mrs. Lopsided hears with disbelief that the police don't want the money back, just as the robbers said. I laughed till I cried watching this last scene build up and when I looked over at Alice she was laughing so hard her head was thrown back on her pillow on the couch. That and the gasp when she realized that all the members of the gang were gone made it so worth watching.

What a master Alexander MacKendrick was of the prolonged, augmented chase! the ever more complicated comedy of accident and mistake. His comedy is a Rube Goldberg invention, growing and getting more and more complex and elaborate as it wends its merry way. "If HE didn't do THIS, then THAT wouldn't have happened..." What starts out small inflates into the most magnificent joke ever... There is something so perfectly calculated in his direction, he KNEW what you would be thinking as an audience at any given moment while watching his films, and was unafraid of dangling things out just a little longer - it sweetens the payoff to an untold degree. He had unerring instincts for lengthening a laugh out for the proper amount of time...then hitting you with the final coup de grace, as it were, at just the right moment. There is nothing more satisfying. We are all in on the joke in his films for the joke is life. The Cosmic Joke is really what MacKendrick was after. As human beings we can't fail to see the humor and the tragedy of it all.