WHAT FILMS HAVE YOU SEEN LATELY?

[charliechaplinfan]

Today I watched Crisis with Cary Grant, Paula Raymond, Signe Hasso, Jose Ferrer and Gilbert Roland. Cary plays a doctor who is kidnapped to perform brain surgery on a South American dictator, the plot twists and turns, the country is fictious, the country is unruly and under marshall law under the command of President Farrago played by Ferrer. Cary gets to see both sides of this country from his gilded cage in the palace to the outside, the people play on his conscience but he has an oath as a doctor to do his best. Some brilliant and quite chilling scenes, especially the dummy run of the operation with Farrago watching.

I spotted Gilbert Roland but missed Ramon Navarro and Antonio Moreno, perhaps Moreno was the doctor who helped Cary? Navarro I know know was the General. Signe Hasso was chilling and made me think of Eva Peron, perhaps this is who she is modelled on? Thinking of how Evita wolud later die it's fact repeating art in a creepy way.

One thought that crept up on me, aren't Gilbert Roland and Cary Grant the men who aged the best on screen? They are both beautiful and relatively youthful whatever their actual age.

[MikeBSG]

Yesterday I had the good fortune to see "The Mill and the Cross" (2010) on the big screen.

The film is a "re-enactment" (sort of) of the painting of Breughel's "The Way to Calvary." It is a different kind of film, and I probably didn't have all the art background needed to enjoy it fully.

However, it had a heck of a cast: Rutger Hauer, Michael York, and Charlotte Rampling. I can't tell you how much I enjoyed seeing Rutger Hauer again. He looks like John Huston's younger brother. He sold the film for me. I wouldn't want every film to be like "The Mill and the Cross," but it was a refreshing change of pace.

[charliechaplinfan]

I've watched 2 minor films from the Cary Grant cannon. The first an entertaining aviation film called Wings in the Dark starring Myrna Loy as a stunt flyer who is admirer of Cary's character, who is an ace pilot and is trying to design a technique were a pilot can fly blind. Disaster strikes when he makes coffee for Myrna, he's blinded and goes to live in the country where Myrna comes to his rescue with a guide dog called Lightening and some love and attention and gives him money on the pretence that he's selling the stories he's writing. When Myrna goes to complete a flight from Moscow to New York against his advice and gets lost in the fog he goes up in his plane to bring her down but then intends to fly off into the distance and commit suicide as he can't bear to be blind. Clever Myrna scotches his plan and everything ends happily ever after. Cary gives a good performance as the blinded flyer, especially when being introduced to Lightening, Myrna is good as the stunt flyer, very convincing.

The next movie Big Brown Eyes although I couldn't work out how the title related to the film. It starred Joan Bennett, Cary Grant and Walter Pidgeon and was directed by Roaul Walsh but despite all this it lost it's way a little bit. It felt that it was over edited or chopped up a bit because the story was quite a good one, I felt too that the leads weren't allowed to develop very much within their characters. I can think of far worse ways of spending a couple of hours.

[RedRiver]

WINGS IN THE DARK sounds cute, if over the top. Great stars, I'll say that!

[JackFavell]

I've got Big Brown Eyes up next in my rental, there was a discussion of it over at TCM's boards, and it sounded like fun.

I am on a Raoul Walsh kick lately, and he can be highly variable, but there is usually something I come away from each of his movies liking. He's an odd duck, sometimes he could have a great film and then shoot himself in the foot, so to speak, by using the wrong actor/actress or not working the script enough, or simply by veering off in a weird direction. When he's on, like in What Price Glory, Sadie Thompson, High Sierra, The Roaring Twenties, The Strawberry Blonde, White Heat, well, there's no one who could match him. He's way up in the clouds.

[RedRiver]

I absolutely agree about Walsh. The winners you mentioned, along with OBJECTIVE BURMA, THEY DIED WITH THEIR BOOTS ON, and the indefinable STRAWBERRY BLONDE, give credit to an inventive filmmaker. But like a lot of creative artists, he liked to experiment. It didn't always pay off!

there was a discussion of it over at TCM's boards

Oh, good. The next time I'm in the mood to be drawn and quartered, I'll check it out.

[JackFavell]

Haha! The people having that discussion aren't the type to pull out the artillery when chatting about movies. Luckily, there are a handful left.

I can't believe I forgot They Died With Their Boots On. I went back already and amended the oversight of Strawberry Blonde, which may just be my favorite Walsh movie.

Till I change my mind again.

[ChiO]

Don't forget PURSUED (1947). Along with DAY OF THE OUTLAW (De Toth 1959), it is proof that a Western can be a film noir..

[charliechaplinfan]

It didn't feel like a Walsh movie to me and there was an attempt to put a touch a screwball humour in there but it didn't fit anyone's character. This is the film that Cary made after Sylvia Scarlett, it's like seeing an actor who has begun to emerge finally blossom into Cary Grant in Sylvia Scarlett but then take a backstep in Big Brown Eyes, he does a good bit of business throwing his voice, I'd love to know if that was a talent he had or whether it was achieved in the editing. I don't dig Joan Bennett as a blonde, for some people just one change creates a whole new persona, that's what I feel about Joan Bennett, once she became a brunette she found her style. My guess is that Walsh's view was probably somewhat different to the finished product and it got tampered with in the editing but perhaps someone more fimilar with his work would know more.

Wings In The Dark is definetly worth a look, I coludn't help think of Howard Hughes when I watched it.

[CineMaven]

I'm loving "EACH DAWN I DIE" and think Cagney and Raft make a swell team. Cagney gives a fine performance. Not such a tough guy...but he can take it. It's the ending that I like the best. How when they bust through and Cagney has his arms up and head bowed...Raft saying goodbye to Cagney for the last time...and when Cagney steps out into the fresh air, grabs Bryan's hand and shakes his head...love it. The way they walk off...the swell of the Warner Brothers music. Just great. I love that ending...and the ending into the fog of "Marked Woman" and the ending of "The Best Years of Our Lives" their kiss and the slow fade out.

I just love movies!! Give me a fade-out, anytime.

[JackFavell]

I don't know about Cary throwing his voice, but I do know that Walsh was completely a studio man. He was independent, but in the end, what the studio wanted, the studio got.

It is very possible that someone else edited the film post production, since Walsh's schedule was hectic to say the least. He would already be moving on to the next film... 2 weeks is the longest stretch of time he ever experienced between pictures, at the height of his career. Many films he worked on were not his own projects, he was always brought in by the studio to "fix" other director's films that had gone awry.

He was lackadaisical about most of his films. He liked the process more than the finished product, generally speaking - he loved going to work on a new film, figuring out the logistics of action sequences and the banter between the leads, but was surprisingly less interested in storyline as a whole, or post production. He found out early not to care to much, or go for the artistic. The movies he poured his heart and soul into were generally not successful, and in the silent era he found himself crushed by the failure of his most artistic films. After that, he always joked about his pictures, and acted as if they were nothing special.

The Big Trail did badly at the box office, and was the last film he really tried to create from beginning to end as an expression of his artistic vision. Frankly, I think The Big Trail is far better than Cimarron, which won Best Picture in 1931, a year after the remarkable achievements of The Big Trail, which was the first sound film made outdoors and on location. That must have burned.

High Sierra and The Strawberry Blonde were probably his most heartfelt films in the sound era. But he never openly showed his sensitive side again when discussing or working on a picture.

[charliechaplinfan]

Your explanation fits with what I felt about Big Brown Eyes, I've seen High Sierra, a film I love, I haven't seen Strawberry Blonde but I'm thinking I should.

[MikeBSG]

This afternoon I watched "Ride With the Devil" (1999), directed by Ang Lee.

It deals with the Bushwacker vs. Jayhawkers aspect of the Civil War in Missouri and Kansas. I thought it was better than the Coen Brothers' "True Grit," but I wasn't that keen on this film. Tobey Maguire was only okay as the lead character. (I had trouble picking him out in the crowd.) Jewel didn't really impress me as the leading lady. I would have liked the film to have been more taut. At 2 hours and 19 minutes it was too long. (I liked "The Assassination of Jesse James," which clocked in much longer. That film didn't drag in spots.)

[knitwit45]

Mike, believe it or not, the tensions between MO and KS are, to a degree, still simmering. I've lived in both states, and the disdain held by some residents of each state for the other is long standing.