Calling all Classic Film Lovers!

Thanks for that. I'm gonna try.

Say, that reminds me. There's a movie from 1932 called The Dark Horse, in which a brainless dolt gets elected governor of his state after he hires a deeply cynical campaign manager. The deeply cynical campaign manager disguises his candidate's idiocy by teaching him a few meaningless platitudes. And the dolt candidate is also a lech who chases after the manager's ex-wife.

So, you know, fiction.

Has what I will bet is the earliest example of Strip Poker ever, and one of the earliest examples of Bette Davis ever.

Old Hollywood is too Optimistic.

Take Citizen Kane, a businessman who runs a political campaign on populist anti-corruption schemes who loses politically as a result of a minor scandal...and who finally gets undone because of his relations to women...even A Face in the Crowd a slick populist PR host gets derailed because of his relationship with women...totally overtaken by reality.

In real-life they would have gotten elected anyway....Gabriel Over the White House is the order of the day.

It's pretty crazy how relevant these old movies can be.

I want to watch The Dark Horse now.

edited 12th Nov '16 7:59:57 AM by LongTallShorty64

If nothing else, they demonstrate that, while we may have short memories, stuff like this has happened before.

As our discussion of The Birth of a Nation (1915) a few threads back shows, the stuff tackled in those films, that distinct mentality is still there and earlier film-makers being that they grew up and shared that mentality themselves were uniquely positioned to explore and deal with it, albeit to a level that they did not intend and a meaning that they did not hope to signify.

I think it's interesting that there are not many right-wing film-makers and artists today than they were in the past. Today's film-makers are mostly left-liberal-center by a significant draw. That might change in the future of course and how of course it doesn't matter what the film-maker's politics are so long as the PR, producers and others have a say.

But in the Golden Age you had many right-wing and talented and excellent film-makers: D. W. Griffith, King Vidor, Cecil B. DeMille, Leo Mccarey, William Wellmann. Then you have the strange case of Frank Capra who made films that were embraced and liked by liberals and had a reputation for being liberal even in Hollywood but was personally a conservative anti-FDR who had a bust of Mussolini in his office. Capra crafted the whole narrative you see in countless American films, "little guy" against "the system" and the appeal of that narrative crosses political boundaries as you see in life. Capra worked with liberal and leftist screenwriters during the Depression when such ideas were in the American mainstream and right-wingers had to toe the mood of the times. The later generations of Hollywood film-makers were firmly leftist and liberal, counter-cultural but that meant that they often presented a perspective and view of American life and society that did not quite round up to what most of the country felt. Someone like John Ford who started out liberal and voted for FDR, Adlai Stevenson, then JFK but eventually stumped for Richard Nixon is an example, of course these days I imagine almost any liberal would pray for 4 more years of Nixon (tout est pardonné as they say) since he was still part of the social democrat consensus.

Likewise you have the fact that Film Noir has replaced The Western as the most popular old-movie genre among young film buffs but Westerns were far more successful and widely seen then Noir in the Golden Age. Films Noir were often B-Movie, genre cookie cutter pieces that don't get me wrong they are great and everything but they weren't representative of the audience's tastes of that generation. I think the The Western (Rural) versus Film Noir (Urban) is a major part of that.

edited 12th Nov '16 10:35:59 AM by JulianLapostat

It's important to note that being right wing in 1930 and being one now are very different. There's been a big shift since Nixon.

Well it's not too big a shift. Being right-wing back then meant anti-immigrant, racist, pro-rich. The difference is that some parties who were pro-immigrant back then were also racist (like the Democrats, especially in the South) and some who were anti-racist were also pro-rich (like the Republicans, i,.e. Northern Liberals). Being far-right meant hitting all three. Those divisions in a sense began in the 30s when FDR reformed the Democrat party and started getting black votes in cities.

True equality on all lines was promoted by the Communist Party of the United States of America, which went down South during the Depression and organized black voters, and basically placed the foundations of the civil rights, women's rights, union movements and others. That's why they were so popular with Holywood leftists and liberals. It's a gray situation of course, the same party and same guys standing up for the Scottboro boys and promoting inter-racial harmony also looked the other way at what Stalin was doing back in USSR. And ultimately that compromised them and made them vulnerable but the CPUSA was significant in that many of its policies and ideas were taken over by Roosevelt and the New Deal precisely to keep the Commies out of the mainstream.

I actually expect an explosion of interest in media studies and film history in the coming years. Mass media was always big business in American history, as big as US Steel and Big Auto, but even US Steel and Big Auto never put a man in the white house. Now no one can say that films don't matter, movie history doesn't matter and the media doesn't affect our lives.

After all Donald Trump's favorite film is Citizen Kane:

...and the joke is Kane lost, but Trump won in life. So in a way Orson Welles' satire of the American Dream, the tragedy and irony of it has become Dated History because it was grounded in an America where the institutions wouldn't allow that to happen. Joseph Cotten's whole speech, "You talk of the people as if they owe you" is not applicable or useful anymore.

King Vidor made Our Daily Bread, the closest thing to Communist propaganda ever made in the United States.

He also made The Fountainhead later on, which admittedly Ayn Rand hated in his defense.

And no Our Daily Bread is not communist propaganda. The whole idea of the film is urban people going to rural communities seen as "the real America" (which by the way it's not, it's no more real than any other part of America and a good deal fake besides), and they are led by a charismatic leader and father...who openly insults Native Americans saying that the land didn't belong to them. Our Daily Bread merely reflects the decade of the 30s and how serious economic issues were that even right-wing artists had to acknowledge it or lose respect of its audience. It basically says that Americans should claim land for themselves, that the government won't help them and the land belongs to them by right...a communist-left idea is all about government intervention and land reform, distribution of wealth and property. Government intervention is not presented positively in American movies of that time with exception of The Grapes of Wrath (where you have a New Deal bureaucrat who looks suspiciously like FDR) and much later Elia Kazan's Wild River which glorifies the Tennessee Valley Dam (a project that Reagan once hoped to repeal). Kazan of course became part of the anti-communist left. If you want pro-communist propaganda, check out Salt of the Earth, the only American movie of the 50s to be actually financed by CPUSA.

Vidor was politically on the right, now that doesn't mean he's without contradictions. He was initially a Red Scare guy but he broke from the Motion Picture Alliance. He also started the Directors Guild of America, a major Hollywood union (albeit historically far more moderate and centrist than WGA and SAG...though ironically the SAG eventually became a platform for its right-wing anti-communist president, Ronald Reagan), and his films have powerful roles for women and quite critical of patriarchy and sexual repression. His film An American Romance is a paean to Big Capital and US Steel (and visually stunning) but it ends with the capitalist hero bowing to the demands of unionization. And of course Rand hated his film Fountainhead, mostly because the movie is about sexual hysteria rather than objectivism. Let's not forget he made Hallelujah! which at the time was quite daring, technically and content wise, and its empathetic and admiring of African-American people but its profoundly limiting and again the problem is the country and rural black is proud pure and nice while the ones who are in the cities (migrated north) are neurotic idiots. Vidor always paints cities as bad and rural towns and villages as good (and we know that categorization was a huge factor in this election), the exceptions are An American Romance, Street Scene and maybe The Big Parade.

Actual liberal film-makers in old Hollywood include, say Delmer Daves. A Repubican in the Laguardia/Rockefeller mold who opposed Mccarthyism, worked with blacklistees and inserted actual communist talking points in his movies. Like Pride of the Marines a film which inspired William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives has a scene where soldiers and veterans at a hospital after the war ends discusses the GI Bill and they wonder if it will cover everyone or only a few and they want a more robust wealth redistribution scheme, with one soldier lamenting that latinos will get ahead of them...to the consternation of a disabled latino voter in the same room as him. His film Broken Arrow (1950) is the first pro-Native American film and it also reconstructs Ulysses Grant's reputation after decades of being sullied by Confederates. Samuel Fuller and Otto Preminger were also major liberals, with the former making openly anti-racist films and the latter doing more than anyone to destroy censorship in American movies.

The biggest mystery to suss out is Alfred Hitchcock's politics. His wife voted for Eisenhower and he became a US citizen before North By Northwest was released and he criticized the Cold War, and worked with blacklistees but if there's a film-maker who is truly apolitical then it is Hitchcock.

Our Daily Bread isn't communist? What do we call it when a group of people renounce profit and private property and work together for the common good, with everything belonging to the group as a whole?

Religious, Political and other messianic cults...self-sustaining communes. And so on. Look I am not saying it doesn't read as some form of socialism but I don't think it's necessarily communist-leaning or that it's beyond the imagination of a right-winger to create this movie.

Communism in both theoretical and practical sense is about a lot of things beyond simply "sharing stuff together". It's about social development. It's a predominantly urban ideology...i.e. cities/factories/technologies/buildings, it supports industrialization and it is internationalist. It appeals to the urban working classes rather than the rural peasant and its main idea is to make villages into towns-cities and bring the peasant to the city, provide education/health/travel to the rural peasantry and free them from backward traditions. Our Daily Bread is about a commune of urban citydwellers going to the countryside and lapsing back to an atavistic rural life. They lapse back at first to a hunter-gatherer economy which Marx did say was Primitive Communism but at the end of the film they create agriculture again and with agriculture you have the birth of monarchies, feudalism, oligarchy, empires and so on and so forth, until industrialization arrived providing democracy and killing the aristocracy. With Communism obviously going further in the development ladder. Our Daily Bread has small groups going outside creating a system and community as a form of a camping trip, with no model of development to offer the rest of society, i.e. rest of America, or for that matter the whole world. It follows many similar ideas of socialism in the 19th Century in England and USA of self-sustaining rural communities in the wild.

The economy in Our Daily Bread is communal, barter and agriculture based. It relies on the special skills of farmers and great physical labour to till the land to irrigate the land...rather than them using tools and tractors for greater productivity and efficiency. So it's not communist at all. Check out Eisenstein's The General Line which tackles a similar plot and theme to see how communists actually approached this.

Yeah, folks were doing all the stuff you mentioned centuries before Engels and Marx crapped out that horrible book. And ripped off their ideas for a large part of their program.

In the American context, I can fully understand why people see Our Daily Bread as socialist. Today, a man described by Noam Chomsky as a New Dealer in the FDR-Eisenhower mould called himself a socialist in primary elections because that's how legitimate social-democrat goals have fallen to the side, and the Red Scare was a big part of why that happened, but even after that Eisenhower still allowed the New Deal and decided not to repeal it (as Joseph Mccarthy who he supported in campaign, argued).

But in the 20s-30s onwards that was not so. You didn't have such a clean divide, such polarization and so on. And people in America felt anger and upset about social inequality in all kinds of ways. It also must be emphasized of course that addressing social inequality among whites was not as controversial as it was addressing over the race divide...that was, and still is, supremely controversial. The other ways film-makers got around it was of course a general anger against the system which was something Frank Capra liked doing, and that could go many ways...it could be read as liberal but it also meant a general anger against whoever was in charge regardless of their values and ideas. it took Elia Kazan in A Face in the Crowd to explore that particular "Man versus the system" mentality because it was based on the fact that Budd Schulberg, who wrote the screenplay, was inspired by how many popular American comics and media personalities in the 30s were seen as liberal by many people but were actually conservative in private life and conservative in their actions.

Ultimately its about money and The Man Is Sticking It to the Man...Hollywood had a huge audience then, a bigger one than today with TV and Internet siphoning it away, and bosses had to make different kinds of films for that. They may not care about the politics much but the people sure as hell do, so they would hire people of different political ideas and beliefs, see if they can give the people what they want. Now of course Our Daily Bread was actually an independent film and it was no blockbuster, but Vidor nonetheless felt he had to make a film about this sentiment and mentality that was in the air, regardless of where his final sympathies went.

All I can say is that I've watched Our Daily Bread and I've watched some actual Soviet propaganda films, and there are distinct similarities. I think Stalin would have liked Our Daily Bread. It's about the formation of a collective farm for cripes' sake. I think it's a great movie, easily the best of King Vidor's talking films, but it is what it is.

Stalin happened to like American cowboy films as a matter of fact.

Vidor was definitely an admirer of Soviet films and Our Daily Bread is inspired by Eisenstein and Pudovkin. Which isn't surprising by the way, The Battleship Potemkin was such a sensation that Hollywood smuggled a print before general release and screened it. David O. Selznick, no Bolshevik he, screened it privately by projecting it on the bed sheet. Many Americans admired Soviet films and Eisenstein was briefly invited to Hollywood at this time, he got chased out by an anti-semitic right-wing union guy.

The thing is Hollywood at least the elites within Hollywood were quite savvy with European films for a mix of mercantile and artistic reasons. It's a cliche that gets forgotten but there is something about great art that really does cross political, cultural and language barriers. A right-winger if he is talented can make a movie a left-wing or liberal can admire and vice-versa.

King Vidor for instance greatly inspired Italian neorealism and was actually far more admired in Europe than in America in the 20s-30s. Vittorio Desica once said that Bicycle Thieves was a remake of The Crowd and Roberto Rossellini said the same about Hallelujah! which like many postwar European films was shot on location with non-professional casts (though Vidor went further with sound recorded on location). Vidor was also a big influence on 30s French cinema and unbeknownst to him because Japanese cinema only came to global attention after the war...but Yasujiro Ozu also admired him and considered him (along with Lubitsch) to be his favorite film-maker.

I actually wouldn't say Our Daily Bread is Vidor's best sound film...I'd rank the little known The Stranger's Return made the next year above it. I also admire Hallelujah, this totally forgotten masterpiece The Wedding Night. I also think An American Romance is one of the most beautiful films ever shot in Technicolor and it would have been better had it not faced Executive Meddling from MGM (Vidor was so upset about it, he packed up his bags, his office and quit MGM, the company built on the success of The Big Parade). I also think very well of The Fountainhead and I feel that Beyond the Forest is not only not as bad as its reputation indicates, it is in fact a masterpiece and one of the greatest Film Noir ever made with one of the best performances by Bette Davis (even if she hated the movie because of how Vidor pushed her).

I don't think there's too many people with me on this, but I feel that one of the most underrated composers of film music in Hollywood was the great Leroy Shield, who made the scores for Hal Roach's films truly memorable:

(This is not the actual music itself; this is a recreation. The original soundtracks don't exist.)

Made a page for Brute Force. A surprisingly violent noir. I can't see the video.

edited 15th Nov '16 1:27:09 PM by LongTallShorty64

I watched High Sierra last night which I liked very much. I know it's Bogart's breakout performance, and he's great, but Ida Lupino is really good, too.

It shows up for me.

Maybe it's blocked in your country.

That's what I suspected.

Great movie, one of the starting point of noir. Roy is truly tragical, and Bogart gave his character a lot of depth. The year before Walsh made another film with Bogart and Lupino, 'They Drive by Night'. Never seen, but I've read very good reviews.

Damn, just read the synopsis and it sounds great. Gonna watch it.

My fave Bogart noir is the western-twinged "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre". /inaudible muttering about how Bethesda screwed with that love of the film with that shitty expac for New Vegas that was supposedly themed around it ensues...

Reason I love it so much is the acting from all the main cast. In particular Bogart is eerily convincing as the murderous sleazebag who's humanized more by his greed than if he discovered his hidden good side.

Ah, yes... "We don't need no stinking badges!"