Calling all Classic Film Lovers!

Not really. There's a lot of "horror of war" type stuff. I don't know, maybe there were anti-American or anti-capitalist flicks that hasn't stood the test of time because they weren't as good.

Just remembered another one, Nine Days of One Year—also no Commie propaganda. I guess that while America was peeing our pants over the Red Scare, the actual Reds were too busy putting their wrecked country back together.

edited 27th Aug '16 4:09:28 PM by jamespolk

There were some anti-capitalist propaganda films in the USSR. I recall an animated version of Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird that altered the material to have an anti-capitalist message. (It was produced in 1970, so it's past our cutoff date, but it's the only example that comes to mind.)

edited 27th Aug '16 4:11:04 PM by Aldo930

I have heard it said that, in practical terms, the West really had little to fear from Soviet Russia, as they had their hands full just keeping themselves going.

No doubt. That country was wrecked in a way we can't even begin to imagine.

I meant Soviet Epic in that it was big gargantuan and packed, not that it was commie propaganda.

In any case, Leo Tolstoy would not have fit well with the Communists since he had anarchist Christian ideas, which makes King Vidor closer to him in sentiments since he had similar religious ideas. The Soviet cinema in the 20s was mostly experimental and concerned with modernism and new experimentation, the idea was that art be as revolutionary as the state. That changed under Stalin in the 30s through the mid 50s.

Anti-capitalist propaganda never really came in because the Communists knew that their movies wouldn't have much of a market in Western nations so it would be unlikely to be seen by people living under capitalism to whom such movies would be most useful. So they basically made movies about socialism and all the good stuff underneath it or historical films or science-fiction, or in the case of Boris Barnet some wonderfully lyrical comedies. Later they did literary adaptations. When Stalin died, and Khruschev's that began, you had a window for freedom of expression and it mostly dealt with Soviet memories of the war, rebuilding and struggling, and from that came Tarkovsky's early films, Marlen Khutsiev's wonderful slice of life films, and Mikhail Romm's Nine Days In One Year. Also Grigori Kozintsev's literary adaptations, especially Don Quixote which I really really love.

Eisenstein struggled with that since he had bold plans to adapt Marx's Das Kapital for film but it was too expensive and experimental and besides why should the Soviet Union have to know about capitalism and its evils, we are living in socialist paradise, comrade! He also planned to make a science-fiction film, The Glass House which he saw as a left-wing response to Metropolis and the schema anticipates J G Ballard's novel "High-Rise". Eisenstein when he came to Hollywood planned to do genuinely anti-capitalist films for Paramount Studios, and Paramount was initially interested, and Eisenstein wanted to adapt "Sutter's Gold" (an oil pioneer's story) and "An American Tragedy" (which ended up being made by Josef von Sternberg and it's really underrated and very good). It didn't pan out because some right-wing unionists called out Hollywood for recruiting a "commie Jew" and chased him out (I can only imagine what they would have done had they learned he was gay as well).

Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, if you really know about Russia and Soviet Union, is a crucial film, since he really showed the kind of mentality that led to Stalinism there. It's a really incredible film.

How the hell could you adapt Das Kapital into a movie?

Well if anyone could it's Eisenstein. It would obviously involve taking Intellectual Montage Up To Eleven.

If you've seen his films, he was getting more sophisticated in putting images and ideas together to express a philosophy and idea. Like October, you have the famous montage of "The Gods", where Eisenstein cuts between different images of Gods and altars, getting more and more grotesque, expressing in images the idea that "Religion is the opium of the masses", even if individually each image is simply one deity separate from the other. So I think Das Kapital could potentially have gone further with that.

In The General Line, his last silent film, Eisenstein was using a lot of sexual imagery to promote the idea of collectivized farming. So he was getting quite complex already. But then sound came in, and that led to a total change to the film industry and Eisenstein had to think of a new style and approach, which can be seen in Ivan the Terrible where it's basically a moving icon painting, where every gesture, and movement has these internal rhymes and rhythmic background detail.

So I watched Bride of Frankenstein tonight and enjoyed it quite a bit - mainly due to Dr. Pretorius. If it's true that James Whale directed Ernest Thesiger to play him like an over-the-top, bitchy, aging gay man, by God, does it show...

I couldn't watch the sequence with the blind hermit without expecting it to end with "I was gonna make espresso!"

edited 27th Aug '16 8:12:34 PM by Aldo930

They used to show all those classic black and white 30's Frankenstein and Dracula movies late night on the BBC, for years. I lost count of the times the fucking things gave me nightmares when I was young. Didn't stop me watching them though. To this day Karloff's still my favourite Frankenstein's monster, and Lugosi is my second favourite Dracula after Louis Jordan. (Sadly Jordan was the Drac in a tv series made long after our cut-off date, and yeah, tv, so doesn't count even if it was made in that period.)

If you really want some Young Frankenstein flashbacks, you should check out Son of Frankenstein. It amazed me, watching that movie, how many scenes were only changed slightly for the Mel Brooks film.

Sadly, that's just about the only reason for watching Son of Frankenstein. It and The Ghost of Frankenstein are the truly dull entries in the Frankenstein series. Only thing they really have to recommend them is Bela Lugosi's performance as Igor Ygor.

edited 28th Aug '16 4:49:12 AM by RavenWilder

Made a page for Harold Lloyd film Movie Crazy, which is a lot of fun, and for my money is easily the best Lloyd talking film, probably because Constance Cummings is a more interesting leading lady than he ever had.

But there was one moment that really puzzled me which I couldn't tell was a joke or not. There's an Eek, a Mouse!! scene. A lady at a night club climbs on a chair and then starts hiking up her skirt when she realizes a mouse is crawling up her leg. She reveals her garter belt—which held two spoons.

Was that supposed to be a joke, that the lady was stealing spoons from the nightclub? Or did women back in the day use garters as an alternate Victoria's Secret Compartment? I'm really not sure. It's pretty quick, the camera doesn't linger on the spoons, which makes me think it's not supposed to be a gag. But it's hard to tell.

I do recall from Some Like It Hot that Sugar hid booze in her garter belt which seems pretty convenient, and it was probably very common to hide stuff there.

edited 29th Aug '16 9:18:07 AM by LongTallShorty64

Anybody like the Martin and Lewis films?

And has recommendations?

edited 30th Aug '16 6:51:01 PM by LongTallShorty64

The only one with either of them I've seen is The Nutty Professor.

So maybe watch that.

If I was French I might be able to give you better recommendations.

edited 30th Aug '16 3:59:31 PM by Aldo930

Martin and Lewis films are an acquired taste, one I never really acquired. TBH, they're much better off in films where they appeared separately.

Dean Martin in particular is really good in westerns, surprisingly enough. And he's done a lot of them that fit in our thread's purview. This one in particular rocks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_Bravo_(film)

The French have thing for them?

I've only seen Martin in Bells Are Ringing, and he was charming as hell.

Edit: Oh, and in Kiss Me, Stupid.

edited 30th Aug '16 7:14:42 PM by LongTallShorty64

I recommend Frank Tashlin's Artists and Models, one of the best movies of The '50s and to my mind, best movie about comic books, and also the ultimate Martin and Lewis movie in terms of personalities, banter, comedy. It's got Anita Ekberg too for jamespolk.

I've always found Jerry Lewis's classic comedy persona deeply, deeply offputting, but Anita Ekberg might help me get through it.

____

Made a creator page for Myrna Loy.

It's a pretty well-known stereotype that French people love Jerry Lewis and consider him a genius.

The French considered many American artists from popular culture geniuses. Jerry Lewis is the most well known of them all publicly. Better known than Howard Hawks, Raoul Walsh, Creator/samuelFuller and Nicholas Ray.

And Lewis is a terrifically inventive film-maker. The Nutty Professor is a masterpiece, and The Patsy and The Ladies Man'' are also interesting films.

It's become a stereotype about Jerry Lewis because, frankly, that's obvious to anyone who's seen anything he was ever in.

Still, the French seem to take some arts more seriously than we do here in America - comics are considered an art over there, after all.

I now have to find Artists and Models, incidentally.

That's one French stereotype I had no idea about.

I'm sorry, I just don't think I could listen to Lewis making that voice for 90 minutes.

Then find yourself a copy of Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla. The only thing worse than Jerry Lewis is imitation Jerry Lewis. You'll be begging for the real thing in seconds.

The French were fascinated with visual arts in a big way since the 19th Century, it was the place of Impressionism and Photography and later cinema. So everything came together there. They also loved American culture and took writers like Poe and Melville seriously long before Americans did. So the cinema followed, and the French critics at Cahiers du Cinema were ideally located and intellectually qualified to make daring cases for American cinema as high art.

To the French, Jerry Lewis is the heir of Chaplin and Keaton, doing in sound and colour what they did in silent and black-and-white. He also had qualities that they appreciated. Namely that Lewis' movies didn't have a plot, with the exception of The Nutty Professor, they were quite self-referential and fourth-wall breaking, technically quite adept and had a lot of weird gags that revolved around mass media. So it fit in well with stuff they cottoned on to intellectually.

But at the same time, the stereotype about the French loving Jerry Lewis is kind of a lame joke. The truth is at his height, Lewis was far more popular in America than he ever was in France. He was almost bigger than Elvis. Inevitably he fell out of limelight by the late 60s and 70s, and controversy over that clown holocaust movie. The French and Europeans tend to be more loyal as a fanbase that's all.