WHAT SILENTS & PRE-CODES HAVE YOU SEEN LATELY?

[feaito]

Thank you Kingme and Alison....and the good thing about having musicals on DVD/Blu Ray is that we can revisit and play again our favorite musical numbers isolated as many times as we want to....I do that all the time with Kiss Me Kate, Silk Stockings, Good News, Les Girls, You Were Never Lovelier et al.

[charliechaplinfan]

You and me both, Fernando, I really should know all the choreography to some of my favourite numbers by now.

[feaito]

[feaito]

I revisited "Search For Beauty" (1934) a good precoder about a sports and health magazine and a health farm, in which a lot of attractive feminine and masculine bodies are at display, with Bob Armstrong, Gertrude Michael and James Gleason (who contribute with their skilled performances and experience with wisecracks and lots of fun) and Ida Lupino, Buster Crabbe and a host of athletes, who contribute with "healthiness" and beauty....the print is amazing.

[feaito]

I also revisited with my wife (who enjoyed it a lot) another "notorious" Paramount Precoder: "Murder at the Vanities" (1934), an amusing "whodunit" crime mystery backstage musical with Carl Brisson and Kitty Carlisle, Vic McLaglen as a festive policeman, Jack Oakie as Earl Carrol's press agent, Gertrude Michael (excellent as a nasty singer), Jessie Ralph and Duke Ellington & orchestra. Sexy and daring musical numbers with lots of flesh, most notably "Sweet Marijuana". An offbeat blend of entertainment!

[feaito]

Today I saw:

"The Great Lover" (1931) an interesting Precoder starring Adolphe Menjou as a famous, philandering Opera singer (Jean Baurel) whose heart is captured by a nice American soprano (Diana Page, played by Irene Dunne), whose career he guides to the top. No doubt Menjou's operatic voice was dubbed, but I do not by whom. Ernest Torrence is Menjou's valet and Neli Hamilton is his understudy and Dunne's first love. Olga Baclanova plays a temperamental Prima Donna, who is hopelessly in love with Monsieur Baurel. Entertaining.

"No Other Woman" (1933), a rags-to-riches soaper with Irene Dunne as Charles Bickford's devoted wife, willing to do anything for him, no matter if it affects her honor. Bickford plays an irresponsible "big boy" who does not value the woman he has with him until the very end. Eric Linden and Christian Rub are friends of the couple...Gwili André plays a sensationally alluring femme fatale who manipulates Bickford and J. Carrol Naish is her accomplice in her shady doings. Amusing, especially the trial scene, the best sequence in the film.

[feaito]

Today I saw fluffy trifle titled "Kiss and Make Up" (1934) starring Cary Grant as the doctor who runs a temple of Beauty in Paris, which has everything for the service of female beauty. Genevieve Tobin is his recent creation, his "masterpiece", a woman "so perfect" that he has to marry her in order to make sure that his Galatea won't lose her beauty. Helen Mack is his faithful secretary, hopelessly in love with him and funny Edward Everett Horton's Tobin's first husband. Handsome if quite silly film.

[Rita Hayworth]

Today I saw fluffy trifle titled "Kiss and Make Up" (1934) starring Cary Grant as the doctor who runs a temple of Beauty in Paris, which has everything for the service of female beauty. Genevieve Tobin is his recent creation, his "masterpiece", a woman "so perfect" that he has to marry her in order to make sure that his Galatea won't lose her beauty. Helen Mack is his faithful secretary, hopelessly in love with him and funny Edward Everett Horton's Tobin's first husband. Handsome if quite silly film.

I love this movie ... I have an affinity towards silly films and Kiss and Make Up is one of them! This is one of my sentimental favorites that Cary Grant did in career.

[feaito]

I agree Kingme, I always say there's no bad movie, the worst movie is no movie at all.... ....and in this film we have the chance of watching a different Cary Grant in an early stage of his career....and the film is quite amusing and handsome to look at.

[Rita Hayworth]

Your Welcome, feaito :!:

[Gary J.]

Once Grant got out from under the bosum of Mae West and before he met up with Leo McCarey, he set off at Paramount starring in a bunch of these minor comedies (THIRTY DAY PRINCESS (34), KISS AND MAKE-UP (34), LADIES SHOULD LISTEN (34)) that are rarely shown but were all pivotal in helping him develop that comic timing that he would base his career on. And his development moved along at a rapid pace. Within two years he would become an assured screen presence (SYLVIA SCARLETT (35), SUZY (36)). One year later he would suddenly appeared as one of the great screen farceurs (TOPPER (37), AWFUL TRUTH (37), BRINGING UP BABY (38) ).

Out of these early starring comedies, my soft spot has always been for LADIES SHOULD LISTEN (34), in which Grant's many romantic escapades are being eavesdropped by his apartment buildings' switchboard operator (Frances Drake). Frank Tuttle gives the comings and goings on a minor-Lubitsch touch (just like all Paramount comedies that were not actually directed by Lubitsch) and he even has Edward Everett Horton on board (although playing a jealous suitor and not Grant's manservant - drat it!).

[feaito]

Thanks for your insight Gary. "Ladies Should Listen" sounds like a film I'd like!

[feaito]

I have just finished watching "Love" (1927) which I taped off TCM years ago. Garbo and Gilbert are electric together, full of sexual tension, they ignite the screen with passion. The only drawback is that the film is accompanied by a live recording of an orchestra which included the laughs of an audience in the wrong places (shame). The scenes with Phillipe De Lacy and Garbo are most endearing and transmit the deep attachement and love between a mother and her son, even moreso than Garbo's scenes with Freddie Bartholomew in the 1935 version. The film is shown with its two endings: the happy one for American audiences and the sad one (for international distribution). Now I have only to watch "The Torrent" (1926) to have seen all of Garbo's extant MGM silents.

[knitwit45]

'Nando, what do you think of Woman of Affairs? This was my first Garbo silent, and it's still my favorite. In fact, it is one of my alltime favorites...any genre!

[feaito]

Nancy, I saw "A Woman of Affairs" (1928) last year and I liked it very much. In my opnion it's one of Garbo's best films. She and John Gilbert have a great chemistry, not as hot though as in "Flesh and the Devil" (1926) and "Love" (1927), where their mutual passion was very appaent, but they still ignited sparks on screen. Douglas Fairbanks Jr. was outstanding as Garbo's bitter brother. As Diana Merrick Garbo had some of her finest moments on screen and it's all too bad that she did not realize that she had beside her the man that respected and loved her dearly and could have made her very happy: the faithful character played by Lewis Stone. Very engrossing film.

Today I watched Evgeni Bauer's brilliant "After Death" (1915), a landmark Russian film, ahead of its time and as good as anything released in the world in that year or afterwards. Russian cinema before the Revolution was truly grand, not only in terms of technique, but of mise-en-scene, psychological approach to characters, pacing, storytelling, etc. It deserves to be rediscovered and compared favorably with Soviet cinema (more technique than heart IMO). In this film a secluded young man becomes infatuated with an artist, but is not able to demonstrate her feelings to her, who commits suicide believing her love is unrequited. Later her ghost/soul haunts the young man. I'd say that this film even has it surrealistic aspects. Amazing achievement, with Vera Karalli, the legendary ballerina of the Bolshoi Ballet and Serge Diaghilev's Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo, as its star.