Calling all Classic Film Lovers!

The only other example I can think of, and it might be a stretch, is Cathy from Wuthering Heights. Having not seen the Olivier/Oberon version, I can't say if they don't romanticize their relationship and play it as the unhealthy thing it is and show Cathy as ruthlessly awful.

edited 8th Dec '16 2:57:41 AM by LongTallShorty64

I've never liked Leslie Howard. He just had this mannered, fey style about him. Face that looked like he was in the last stages of TB. Never liked him, kind of cringe when he's on the screen, frankly. His casting in Gone with the Wind is a major problem. It's just laughable that any actress presented with Clark Gable and Howard would prefer Howard—and I realize that Scarlett doesn't really prefer Howard, she just doesn't know what she wants. But it still doesn't work due to Howard's lack of, well, any appeal at all.

Watched The Mask of Fu Manchu. I guess I'll make a page for it, for Karloff and Loy if nothing else, but man, it was just super duper racist.

I'm guessing Loy was in yellow face? Honestly, what was up with the studio thinking she was "exotic"?

Yup, Loy plays Daddy's Little Villain to Karloff's Fu Manchu.

Seriously, mega-racist.

Oh, boy.

If that's you're argument about Howard not being good for the role, who do you think would've worked? I remember seeing Melvyn Douglas as a possible Wilkes, and he could've competed with Gable any day—-in the looks department anyway.

That's a good question. Robert Montgomery?

Compare Paul Henreid in Casablanca—of course Ilsa's true love is Bogart, but you can see what she has with Laszlo.

Of course, that's just me. I've seen Leslie Howard in several films—Smilin' Through, The Petrified Forest, A Free Soul, Of Human Bondage—never liked him in any of them, honestly.

Robert Montgomery is an interesting choice.

Anyone got some good classic film recommendations for the holiday season?

Aside from the obvious ones?

Remember the Night is a good one with Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray.

Bachelor Mother has Ginger Rogers and David Niven and is funny.

The Shop Around the Corner is one of my favourite films, period. It has Jimmy Stewart.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is a nice depressing one, if you like that.

Is Meet Me in St. Louis too obvious?

edited 11th Dec '16 5:22:26 PM by LongTallShorty64

I saw the first remake of The Shop Around The Corner, In The Good Old Summertime, not too long back. The best thing about that one was the songs - and I do mean the songs, period; most of the songs in it were old hits of the ragtime era. It probably says something about me that I prefer Henry Burr's take on "Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland" over Judy Garland's...

(I saw it, incidentally, mainly because my sister recorded it. She wanted to watch it, and told my mother that it was "like Youve Got Mail". I hadn't the heart to tell her about The Shop Around The Corner.)

Meet Me In St Louis isn't too obvious, so I guess it counts.

edited 11th Dec '16 5:26:41 PM by Aldo930

You've Got Mail fills me with rage.

I've been wanting to see the Judy Garland remake. The songs do sound intriguing. And I always mix In the Good Old Summertime up with A Song Is Born because they're both musical remakes of non-musicals. Maybe also because Judy starred in A Star is Born.

edited 11th Dec '16 5:36:17 PM by LongTallShorty64

Again... it's the songs, period, as themselves, that kept me going through the picture. It's all old favorites that people in the audience would have recognized - "In the Good Old Summertime," "Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland," "Put Your Arms Around Me, Honey"... plus one or two that were rather obscure ("Play That Barbershop Chord," an old Bert Williams number).

Buster Keaton is also in it, actually, and he was one of the better parts of the film.

I haven't seen A Song is Born, but I have seen Ball Of Fire.

edited 11th Dec '16 5:36:18 PM by Aldo930

Ah, I see. Well, if you want actual story (and a great one), watch The Shop Around the Corner.

I've never been a great fan of Garland's voice, but I generally like her showmanship.

I've never seen A Song Is Born; I can't vouch for its quality.

Was Buster Keaton really that tiny or was everyone really tall in that movie?

edited 11th Dec '16 5:43:01 PM by LongTallShorty64

In addition to the above, try and track down a rare title by Leo Mc-Carey, the 1948 Good Sam starrting Gary Cooper and Ann Sheridan.

It's often been considered by critics to be a companion to It's a Wonderful Life, I personally think its pretty powerful and hlarious comedy, and a great film about marriage, and its maybe less sentimental than Capra's film even if it tells the same thing. I mean Capra's film goes for the tears, this movie makes it funny.

If you want to see Janet Leigh's breasts defy gravity you could always watch Holiday Affair.

The other fun thing about that movie is that they were trying to soften Robert Mitchum's image after he got busted for smoking marijuana. So he has a job as—a toy department salesman.

edited 12th Dec '16 2:57:52 PM by jamespolk

The breasts do sound tempting...

If I were the guy in charge of hiring for that department I certainly wouldn't hire Reverend Harry Powell.

Well Harry Powell wasn't Mitchum's most well known role and performance in that time, it was a flop after all.

Holiday Affair came out several years before The Night of the Hunter. But Mitchum still had a "tough guy" image at that point.

Mitchum was known for Wellmann's The Story of G. I. Joe one of his best performances and he plays a heroic character in that movie. Then Out of the Past was famous (that iconic line, "Baby I don't care" comes from that) and he appeared in Pursued by Raoul Walsh, another notable film (and a heroic role). Then obscure stuff like Nicholas Ray's The Lusty Men (Ray called Mitchum "The Mystic") another great performance.

I mean Harry Powell was very much Mitchum cast against type. He was a very underrated actor, alongside Robert Ryan and Richard Widmark who today film buffs see as major actors of the late 40s and 50s. By the end of the decade he was in Vincente Minnelli's Home from the Hill.

Made a page for Douglas Sirk's first American movie, Hitler's Madman.

It seems rather ironic that Douglas Sirk went from working under Nazis to making movies against them.

^I'm sure Julian Lapostat will be along to talk about this, but according to The Other Wiki Sirk lost custody of his son by his first wife when he chose to marry a Jew as his second wife. So he probably had a chip on his shoulder.

Sirk was against Nazism for sure but he had personal problems and entanglements that didn't make it easy for him to immediately take the Last Train out of Nazi Germany. The same was true of G. W. Pabst who stayed behind despite being on the left, because he had to provide for his family (at least that's what he told Lotte Eisner). Sirk also believed that Hitler and the Nazis would lose the next election. At the time it did seem possible. Hitler won a narrow victory and the Nazis didn't win a pure majority, it got into power via coalition with other conservative parties. So it was possible for a while to imagine that Hitler could be defeated next time. Even Fritz Lang left Germany only in 1934 after the Doktor Mabuse sequel was shelved. He also believed that maybe the Nazis wouldn't last long, and he could weather the storm. For Lang leaving Germany meant cutting off all ties from his old life and his friends, from his position as the Top Director in Germany, and basically having to start from rock bottom all over again. He did make that choice, and it took courage, but it wasn't one he came to easily.

For Sirk the ultimate reason was personal. He came from conservative family background and his first wife was very conservative and crazy in love with Sirk but then Sirk wanted something more and fell in love with Hilde Jary, a German Jewish girl and his first wife was If I Can't Have You… and denied Sirk permission to see his son, who she indoctrinated into a Nazi. Sirk stayed behind to try and save him, and that boy was a child star in Germany at the time, but there was a restraining order on Sirk to see him. Eventually Sirk had to give up and he and his wife escaped Germany by pretending to go scouting for a movie shoot in Italy, and then hiding with some nuns in a monastery and skedaddling first to Paris and then to America. Sirk's son of course eventually joined the Wehrmacht and died on the Eastern Front.

This was stuff so personal that Sirk never discussed this when he was alive. He told this to Jon Halliday, the interviewer and editor of Sirk on Sirk but he only published this part in the edition that came out after Sirk died, as per the director's intentions. One of his movies A Time to Love and A Time to Die which adapts a novel by Erich Maria Remarque (who also acts in the movie), made in 1958, is more or less his movie about his son.

Many of Sirk's movies, deal with parents and children having difficult relationships, with children turning out to be disappointments and parents burdened by guilt...a lot of that comes from personal trauma.