Calling all Classic Film Lovers!

I don't feel that Hughes was a particularly good person, but I find it hard to completely label him an ass given that he was straight-up mentally ill. He kind of fell into the hole that a lot of the very rich do if they become mentally ill, where more people were eager to take his money and indulge him than try to get him help.

I don't know that he could only have been American. If he'd been British nobility with comparable wealth, he probably would have been able to get away with about as much as he did.

Its debatable how useful mental illness is as an excuse if you don't actively seek treatment despite knowing you have a problems and that other people could pay a price, especially if you are a man of power with responsibilities. Hughes made his neuroses the problems of RKO Studios and inflicted that on his own staff and others.

Hughes destroyed RKO Studios...the most interesting and creative of the Big 7 Studios. Now it's true that RKO was going through tough times before Hughes came in, but it was still standing, still had good stuff and lots of potential. He instead wrecked everything there. He was a huge Mccarthyite, privately an anti-semite and a paranoid scumbag. He had a good Mask of Sanity and he was quite charming and charismatic, and he had to have been those things for him to have the reputation he had.

Nicholas Ray wanted to make a film about Hughes himself...because he really knew the guy, maybe even where the bodies were buried.

Hughes actually got off to a pretty good start as a movie producer. Two Arabian Knights, Scarface, Hell's Angels. Made Jean Harlow a star. Not too shabby.

Anyway, I'm re-watching Nanook of the North and I swear it's even more disturbingly racist the second time around.

edited 30th Nov '16 3:31:59 PM by jamespolk

Hughes early start falls under the principle of the stopped clock is always right once a day.

Actually, he and Hawks didn't get along very well at first, and Hawks had to connive Hughes into getting him support Scarface. So it's not really his baby at all.

How do you get from that to The Conqueror?

edited 30th Nov '16 3:59:13 PM by Aldo930

Hughes apparently suffered a mental breakdown after a plane crash in Beverly Hills in the 1940s. He took a lot of pills to recover and that did a number on his mental health, never in the best shape to begin with.

More obviously, Hughes was just not serious. He was a dabbler and he did the movie thing seriously once, did it well, and tried to do something else and got bored.

The movie making business is a business and it depends time, energy and application. It's that whole line, "Everyone has one good novel in them, I'm looking for the second."

I forgot The Racket, another early Hughes project that is also pretty good, one of the first gangster movies.

So, 1927-32 or so, pretty good record. After that, not so much. I watched The Outlaw years ago and holy cow it was godawful. Jane Russell had magnificent breasts but it turns out that great as they were they weren't enough to build a whole film around. I think one can enjoy The Conqueror on a So Bad, It's Good level. It's fun to see John Wayne struggle with that dialogue. But The Outlaw, ugh, that was a real chore to sit through.

Funny story about that... Apparently during the production of The Outlaw, Hughes told somebody: "We're not getting enough production value out of Jane's breasts!"

Make of that what you will.

Dude had his priorities. He famously built a special brassiere on engineering principles for Russell to use.

There's also the insanity of Jet Pilot, the movie that he forced/tortured Sternberg to make.

Yeah. THAT bra. Jane promptly threw the thing in a skip the last I heard.

So I'm watching that Blonde Crazy movie that Long Tall Shorty liked so much, and good God, Ray Milland looked so so young. I think that's why it took a few more years for him to get rolling in Hollywood. Dude had to age into his face.

Even in 1937's Easy Living(6 years later), he's got major baby face.

Hey, did you like the movie? It has some pacing issues, but it's still plenty of fun.

edited 2nd Dec '16 4:45:36 AM by LongTallShorty64

I'm done with it now, and I didn't understand the ending. Why did Milland's character betray Cagney? If there's $30,000 missing and it's not found in Cagney's pocket doesn't Milland go to jail?

Liked it before that Plot Hole, though. Have to enjoy any film with a half-naked Joan Blondell.

Yeah, I don't understand the ending much either. From what I remember, Milland's had somehow implicated Cagney's Bert because...jealousy?? Didn't he build up the frame-up for a while? I don't know maybe it was one of those "moral" endings where we have to put a "bad" guy in jail even if Milland's character is much more bad.

edited 2nd Dec '16 5:28:23 AM by LongTallShorty64

I was lost.

1. If Milland really did steal $30,000, he goes to jail when Cagney is shown to not have it.

2. If Milland didn't steal any money, then it was obviously an elaborate scheme to get Cagney in prison...when Joan Blondell hadn't even seen him for over a year and there was no obvious reason for Milland to do so.

And in either case, Milland has to explain to the cops how he knew that James Cagney would be coming out of his office window at a particular time with the contents of the safe.

So there's that. There's Joan Blondell, doing a Bath Kick. And there's the Bibles from the Dead scam with...uh, good luck swastikas.

Overall, I enjoyed it.

I honestly wish they did more movies together. They had fantastic chemistry.

Made a page for William A. Wellman's Midnight Mary. What a great film. I've never been much of a Loretta Young fan, but she's outstanding in this film. It's also great for having really great pacing for a pre-code film. Watch it. You won't be disappointed.

Purely by accident I found another good Howard Hughes production...

...The Front Page! Namely, the original, pre-Gender Flip version, which is excellent as well.

I gotta watch that version and the Wilder one, too.

Apparently, the producers of Petrified Forest wanted to cast Edward G.Robinson as Duke Mantee, a part that Bogart originated on the stage. Bogart was not yet a box-office draw, but Leslie Howard, his co-star in the stage version who was cast in the film version, was a big deal. Howard refused to do the film unless Bogie got to play Mantee. The film started things rolling for Bogart, and Bogart was apparently grateful to Howard for the rest of his life, going so far to name his daughter (Leslie Howard Bogart) after him.

The Billy Wilder directed version of The Front Page is my favorite; His Girl Friday has the better Hildy Johnson, but the Wilder Front Page has the better Walter Burns. That's getting a little outside the timeframe for this thread, though.

Howard was a cool guy. He apparently went undercover for the British Allies and tragically died in a plane crash on one of his missions. But that's only a rumour. If it's true, that's pretty cool.

I also don't understand the dislike he gets for Gone with the Wind. He was definitely miscast, but he's not atrocious. He's a good actor in the classical sense for the majority of his films.

It's probably more dislike for Ashley Wilkes, who's kind of insufferable. I'm probably biased though, in that I find most of the characters in Gone With the Wind insufferable (except Rhett Butler; I kinda like him).

Scarlett is horrible, but that's what makes her interesting; she's a rare female anti-hero.

Wilkes was a bookish wimp in the book and mad slightly more dashing because of Howard.

edited 7th Dec '16 6:25:08 PM by LongTallShorty64

It is rare to find a female anti-hero. It's rare to them to allow a female character to even be unsympathetic.