Calling all Classic Film Lovers!

If people think it's too risqué, then nvm. I just thought that picture kind of captures Essence of Blondell, what with the fanservice and the goofy expression all at once.

And now that I wrote that first sentence, I wonder if the good folks at Apple will bring accent marks into American English. That would be bad.

It really does fit her persona perfectly... ah, well.

She does look like she's thinking "now where could my clothes possibly have gone?"

Reminds me of a similar photo of Blondell◊.

Blondell looks better in that chair photo.

... I'm sure there was a famous model who did that pose in the Sixties. One of the ones involved in the Profumo Affair. Did she rip the pose off of Blondell, one wonders.

The profumo incident is interesting because John Profumo's wife was an English actress Valerie Hobson who was the romantic lead in Kind Hearts and Coronets. And that incident and famous photograph inspired Sarah Miles character in The Servant by Joseph Losey, (US Blacklistee and Exile).

Her name was Christine Keeler. And I'd wager that the iconic Keeler photo was taken independently of the Blondell photo.

Watched the 1934 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much. Peter Lorre sure did make a fun villain.

He's great and made even greater by the fact that he learned all his lines phonetically.

That Lorre is good as the villain should come as no surprise considering how great he was in M.

Is there anything Peter Lorre was terrible in? I don't think so...

edited 13th Jan '17 8:31:10 AM by Aldo930

Oh it certainly wasn't a surprise, I just enjoyed the hell out of Peter Lorre.

He must have played good guys sometimes, but I swear I have never seen it once. M, Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Mad Love, Beat the Devil.

My continuing campaign to watch winners and nominees for Best Foreign Language Film has led me to Through a Glass Darkly.

I think I've found the Platonic ideal of the European art film where a bunch of people sit around in stark black-and-white photography and talk about the meaning of God and such.

Bergman codified that. That's actually why I am not a big fan of that film, much prefer Winter Light and The Silence or his 50s stuff like Summer with Monika and Seventh Seal. Bergman's better films came in the end of the 60s and in the 70s. But by then, that's outside the purview of this board. But I do like Through a Glass Darkly...I like Harriet Andersson a lot in general and that scene where she says God is a spider is amazing, it's melodrama, but it's also scary.

But you know that kind of film was done better by Carl Theodor Dreyer. Day of Wrath and Ordet and Gertrud. He made just four movies between 1930-1960, one per decade. And they have similar themes to Bergman: Have You Seen My God? (if so why's he silent, absent, does he have an excuse...or does he not exist). Bergman said that his so-called "Faith Trilogy" was really about losing faith, about stopping to look for God and that with that he resolved that issue and stopped seeking answers in God and faith for the rest of his career. Dreyer on the other hand kept searching.

Andersson was tremendous, but man, that film just seems ripe for a parody. And I've liked other Bergman films, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, and from out of our time frame Cries and Whispers and Fanny and Alexander. This one, through, I just wasn't feeling it.

Some Bergman movies don't hold up well...Smiles on a Summer Night, Wild Strawberries to some extent (it's still moving and well acted) and this one.

But then he made so many films so he could always bounce back. And some are underrated, like The Magician, Hour of the Wolf, The Passion of Anna, Skammen.

And from out of the timeframe, I am a huge fan of his English language film The Serpent's Egg even if it is disliked by others. It's one of the best films about Weimar Germany.

Sommarnattens leende doesn't hold up well? I'm going to strongly disagree with you on that one. It's a comedy, obviously, and the humour has aged just fine.

In general though, the dialogue in Bergman's movies is... well, it's very Bergman. It's stilted and unnatural. Frankly, it sounds ridiculous. It sounds just as off as Shakespeare does in a modern context.

Well, that depends. Are there or were there any Swedish actors who could deliver the dialogue with the same natural ease as Kenneth Branagh did with Shakespeare (minus the Large Ham, presumably)?

And I agree, Smiles of a Summer Night is worth a watch and has held up fairly well, which is often hard for certain humourous European movies.

edited 14th Jan '17 6:48:41 PM by Quag15

I am not saying it's an entirely weak film, it's just that I can see that it's a little too Renoirish...I can see the influences of Rules of the Game and Elena and Her Men on Smiles of a Summer Night.

Bergman's dialogue is definitely distinct and particular...but that's his style. He believed the human face was all important and essential. So that defined his movies...but I also think that a non-Swedish speaker like me kind of tunes out the unnatural-ness of the dialogue because we see it in subtitles.

That's something that does get Lost in Translation, because when art movies go abroad we tend to lose a lot of what the dialogues are trying to convey. I know for instance that Akira Kurosawa's movies recieved mixed reviews in Japan not only for being "too Western" but because Japanese audiences found the dialogues in his movies weird and stilted. And Ikiru is supposed to be quite weird in Japanese.

TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" lineup.

http://31days.tcm.com/schedule.pdf

I finally get to see "Woman in the Dunes"!

If TCM ever shows The Oscar again, somebody tell me.

That's the movie everybody should be watching instead of the real ceremony. It's a dozen times more entertaining.

Inasmuch as Branagh can be said to deliver Shakespeare's lines with natural ease, I'd say Max von Sydow can Bergman's (still, nobody would ever mistake either for being how they speak normally – though that may lie more in the words themselves than the delivery thereof).

Misunderstand me correctly, I do like the style. The best offender by far is Gunnar Björnstrand – every line he delivers sounds artificial, but in a way that makes for great comedic delivery and commands attention in dramatic scenes.

I can always go along with Bergman's style, it's just that I have to go along with it.

Watched It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

It wasn't very funny. Although I did enjoy Edie Adams in a tight dress. Also, Buster Keaton is supposed to be in that movie somewhere, and I was looking, and I never saw him.

EDIT: Turns out it was a VERY brief cameo. He's the attendant at the garage near the end of the movie.

edited 17th Jan '17 5:50:55 PM by jamespolk

I saw two Buster Keaton short films that I liked: The Goat and Sherlock, Jr.. Great stunts and special effects.

On another note, I'm super stoked that Bells Are Ringing (the best musical!) is being re-released after being unavailable for a long time.

edited 18th Jan '17 4:41:59 PM by LongTallShorty64

As Long Tall Shorty now knows I made a page for the Claudette Colbert version of Cleopatra. She was in three, count 'em, three Best Picture nominees that year.