Calling all Classic Film Lovers!

I like The Vincente Minnelli Father of the Bride a lot. Has an amazing nightmare sequence there...and Spencer Tracy is excellent there (as he is in another Dad role in that time, The Actress by George Cukor which is maybe my favorite performance).

Gene Kelly was personally incredibly difficult to get along with, an inversion of Mean Character, Nice Actor. He was a workaholic tyrant and quite prickly. He and Stanley Donen broke up after they made It's Always Fair Weather because Kelly wanted to be his own genius and was trying to hijack credit. Donen of course went on and made successful films without Kelly whose solo works were...bad. So I would say his complaints about finding Berkeley difficult to work with, should be taken with more than a grain of salt. And Kelly is a great dancer/choreographer of course.

Fritz Lang on the other hand was genuinely difficult to work with. Most actors avoided working with him twice if they could help it. Spencer Tracy made Fury and hated it, Henry Fonda disliked making You Only Live Once. It is true that Lang tended to get along better with actresses...Sidney, Joan Bennett, Barbara Stanwyck (who Lang called "an angel"). Of course Marilyn Monroe was hard for him to work with on Clash by Night but Marilyn had her own baggage...

There's a trope page for Fury BTW.

I don't think anyone liked working with Marilyn Monroe.

Clash by Night also has a page.

Yeah, Gene Kelly wasn't the nicest guy to work with. I do like that he had no problem working with and promoting the talents of the Nicholas Brothers.

Marilyn Monroe was personally quite nice and friendly to co-stars but it took a lot for her to get in her element before the camera, but once she did, she was a real natural and a really good actress...Clash by Night shows that. I am thinking of that scene where her boyfriend who's clearly abusive forces her to stay and Lang stages a really long close-up on her face and the number of emotions there are incredible...and you just know from that their relationship is going to be abusive, even if the code and story don't go into it. It's that mix of fear, doubt, love in one shot.

Gene Kelly was I think someone who respected professionals and his peers better. Politically he was on the left, and anti-Mccarthy. So he had his redeeming moments but just because you are decent and progressive doesn't mean you are necessarily nice to work with. John Wayne was a dumb redneck as far as politics go, but he was quite nice personally...and of course on the set of a John Ford film, anyone could sympathize since Ford was "the only man who can make John Wayne cry".

Marilyn Monroe was a Method Actor, wasn't she? At least I've heard she flirted with the Stanislavski thingy.

Well the thing is she was a good actress before she took classes with Lee Strasberg's school of Method Acting (which is not the only school). The Method in fact ruined her and more or less led her to an early grave. It made her more mannered, more unmanageable and made her more overdetermined and that hard work led to an over-reliance on sleeping pills to compensate for her insomnia. And then one morning she overdosed...

Lee Strasberg is a deeply overrated acting teacher and more or less tarnished the Method Acting pioneered by Stanislavski, Kazan, Stella Adler and Harold Clurman. Stella Adler was the acting coach of Brando (and later Deniro). Strasberg was a pretty smart man, talented and canny about acting and quite good at getting basics but he ended up systematizing a process and that led to a very mannered method acting...which is where most of our stereotypes about the Method come from (best seen in Vincente Minnelli's Bells Are Ringing in Frank Gorshin's spoof character). He ruined Montgomery Clift, and he ruined Marilyn. Arthur Miller confessed as much in his autobiography and in an interview with Bogdanovich. And so did Marlon Brando.

I understand some biographers driven by snobism tend to see Marilyn's attempt at learning the Method as an attempt to "improve"...but that's the point, she didn't need improvement. She was a great screen actress, a great cinema actress, capable of being natural and empathetic before the camera. She had star quality. You see that in Clash By Night, in All About Eve, especially River Of No Return...(she worked with Otto Preminger, and he was a real piece of work)...which I think is her best performance and she holds her own with Robert Mitchum.

Marilyn Monroe was no doubt nice and friendly in person, but she was a problem to work with professionally, all insecurities and neuroses and of course, towards the end, she was taking lots of pills. There's this famous anecdote from Some Like It Hot when Sugar was supposed to stumble into Tony Curtis's room, open a drawer, and say "Where's the bourbon?", but Monroe couldn't remember those three words. So they wrote "where's the bourbon" on pieces of paper and put it in every drawer. It took 59 takes.

The end result was worth it...can you imagine Some Like It Hot without Marilyn?

Sometimes actors have to be difficult to get their role right and directors and others have to put up with that difficulty for the sake of the film. Marilyn was neither the first nor the last of her kind.

And the thing that anecdotes like that about Marilyn forgetting her lines is that they forget that film acting is entirely a separate discipline from stage acting. In stage acting hitting the marks, and saying the lines are essential Required Secondary Powers, in cinema what is important is being before the camera as if you are natural, as if the camera isn't there but acting and moving in accord with the camera. So actors tend to be caught in the cycle between being and playing...and sometimes simple lines can be forgotten when they get caught up in that.

The problem is that acting doesn't look like work, it doesn't look difficult so when we see anecdotes like that, we tend to automatically see this as a black mark against Marilyn, and yes it's true that she was not very professional and not entirely capable of compartmentalizing her life and her work, but what we forget is that given her background, circumstances and talents, it was very hard for her to do so and her good work as an actress is related to her flaws.

I mean you see the same things in the churlish ways people slag Marlon Brando, who also didn't learn lines...well 1) He started in Stage so he knew perfectly well how to do it, 2) Film is different from stage, it's shot out of sequence 3) saying the lines at the last moment via cue cards allows the likes of Brando to give a fresh reading as if he's saying it for the first time...those were tricks done by a guy who knew what he was doing.

February 9

We’ve got “G”s up the wazoo:

• G'Men (1936) — James Cagney learns to the ropes of becoming a G-Man (kind of like a modern FBI agent).
• Gaslight (1944) — Classic film version directed by George Cukor with Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer. It’s the film debut of Dame Angela Lansbury.
• The Gay Divorcee (1934) — Probably the best of the Astaire and Rogers films. Great songs and dancing as always.
• The Gazebo (1960) – The late Debbie Reynolds and Glenn Ford in this tale of a married couple being blackmailed.
• General Spanky (1936) – Hal Roach’s attempt to move the Our Gang kids to features; it was a failure. One of the funniest film titles I’ve found in a while.
• George Washington Slept Here (1942) – A Jack Benny comedy with the Oomph Girl herself, Ann Sheridan.
• Giant (1956) — An Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean film. One of the few films Dean was in.
• Gigi (1958) — A musical where we once again find the Leslie Caron and Maurice Chavalier Love Triangle. This film won a lot of Academy awards.
• Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933) — Another Berkeley film with probably the best opening for any musical. The songs are incredibly catchy and the musical numbers are awe-inspiring.
• Gone with the Wind (1939) — It's the grandaddy of all films, of all dramatic epics. It’s still the highest grossing film, adjusted for inflation. This film reflects the 1930s view of the South during the Civil War, for better or worse, and it is relatively tamer with the racial politics than the book which is saying a lot about how racist the book is. However, Hattie MacDaniel won the first Academy Award for an African American actress, paving the way for others to follow.
• The Good Earth (1937) – Great actor Paul Muni dons cringe-inducing yellowface in this drama about Chinese farmers.

edited 8th Feb '17 12:03:00 PM by LongTallShorty64

I know a guy who has a brick from the house in Giant. He went with a friend to the set when it was abandoned and the house was ruined, so they took one of the bricks back with them.

General Spanky got nominated for an Oscar?... In what category?

The fact is, the Little Rascals simply didn't transition to feature films the way Laurel and Hardy did. Not too long after this Hal Roach sold the property to MGM, and then it really went down the toilet...

It was nominated for best sound.

Man did I hate Gigi. Gigi made me angry.

Made a trope page for Bend of the River, a James Stewart-Anthony Mann western in which Stewart's leading a wagon train to Oregon. Pretty good, I like the angry 1950s Jimmy Stewart who kills people sometimes. Female lead was underdeveloped, though; The Naked Spur with Janet Leigh is a better Stewart-Mann western.

Anthony Mann rarely had very good female leads. Some exceptions: Barbara Stanwyck in The Furies (a good film but flawed but man it has moments of darkness, genius and horrible horrible violence), Janet Leigh of course, Sophia Loren in the two Epic Movie he made in the early sixties, Julie London in the non-Stewart Western with Gary Cooper, Man of the West and also surprisingly enough, Ruth Roman (the highly drab female lead in Strangers on a Train) in The Far Country.

The Stewart-Mann Westerns vary in quality: Winchester '73, The Naked Spur, The Man From Laramie are masterpieces while Bend of the River and especially The Far Country are flawed but interesting. The Far Country is a "white western" (i.e. set in a snowy landscape) and Stewart plays an especially ruthless individual in that movie. The ending is weak but has a certain irony.

Bend of the River is fascinating in that you have a Western town that we see being set up and we come back and see it become some new Sodom...it's the kind of follow-through you rarely see in hollywood, showing expectations and then following on the reality. I like it a lot.

February 10

• Good News (1947) — Comden and Green musical with June Allyson and Peter Lawford.
• The Gorgeous Hussy (1936) – Joan Crawford, Robert Taylor, and Lionel Barrymore.
• Grand Hotel (1932) – Greta Garbo’s famous line comes from this film. Star-studded event.
• Grand Prix (1966) – James Gardner in a racing picture.
• The Grapes of Wrath (1940) – Adaption of the John Steinback novel with Henry Fonda.
• The Great McGinty (1940) — Preston Sturges’ most biting social commentary?
• The Great Waltz (1938) — A period piece during The Gay '90s in Vienna.
• The Great Ziegfeld (1936) — Another Myrna Loy and William Powell film about the Ziegfield Follies owner.

edited 9th Feb '17 12:09:21 PM by LongTallShorty64

Most of those G movies are pretty good. Grand Hotel has always been a favorite of mine. Minus the Greta Garbo performance, that is—I don't think she was a very good actress in talking films and she's pretty stiff in this one. But otherwise it has a lot going for it, with a lovely young Joan Crawford and all the chemistry between the Barrymore brothers.

IIRC the film version of The Grapes of Wrath is pretty tremendous despite having to pull punches—no way they were getting that ending in a movie in 1940. But I haven't seen it in a long long time.

Didn't care for The Great Ziegfeld all that much, although William Powell is impossibly charming as always.

I've only seen two of the Stewart-Mann films now. Janet Leigh was so goddamn gorgeous it's ridiculous.

edited 9th Feb '17 4:45:03 PM by jamespolk

She was also an underrated actress. Psycho is a great movie but the greatness is entirely in the first section with her, the minute she dies, the movie is simply one long climax without a center.

Also brilliant in Touch of Evil and I'd argue The Vikings (opposite Tony Curtis, who she married).

I think all the Stewart-Mann Westerns are worth watching because there's a lot of interesting stuff in all of them. The man from laramie might be slightly off-putting because its a terrific movie and great, but the main character is Arthur Kennedy and Stewart is kind of a Protagonist Title Fallacy. The far country is maybe the darkest and bleakest movie. Manny Farber noted that the movie had a hopeless view of community and was a look at the extreme individualism of America at the time. But on the whole Winchester 73 and The Naked Spur are the best films. Mann was a great director but he really needed the right material. After that his next excellent western was Man of the West which had Gary Cooper and is also really violent, dark and bleak.

But you know I think Mann's best films are his non-Westerns. I think The Tall Target is his greatest. It's a black and-white Historical Fiction Film Noir set in 1860 about Pinkerton Agent Glenn Ford trying to prevent an assassination attempt on Lincoln on his way to the White House after winning the election. It's gorgeous black-and-white but it's really amazing and there's this incredible irony and a beautiful final image that conveys without putting into words that even if the Foregone Conclusion (i.e. Lincoln won't be assassinated before he takes office) holds, the tall target is living on borrowed time...

I also think Mann directed the greatest of the Hollywood Epic Movie - El Cid and The Fall of the Roman Empire. The only others that come close are Land of the Pharoahs and Joseph L Mankiewicz's Cleopatra.

edited 9th Feb '17 5:56:48 PM by JulianLapostat

Made a page for Kolberg, the bizarre Nazi Germany propaganda film from 1945. 1945! Here you have the Russians across the Oder, and Joseph Goebbels is spending his time and his government's money and 100,000 soldiers as extras, on a big expensive costume drama about the siege of Kolberg during the Napoleonic Wars.

It's completely crazy. I have to confess I've had a long fascination with Nazi cinema. So insane.

Goebbels wanted to make an epic film on the scale of Gone With The Wind, and thought the siege of Kolberg would make a good subject for one.

The film didn't really get off the ground until 1943, when everything started to go badly for the Nazis, and the message of resistance against the enemy was one Goebbels thought the German people needed to learn when the Allies came knocking.

Not too long after the film made its official premiere, in the one theater in Berlin that hadn't been bombed, the real town of Kolberg surrendered to the Russians. Rather ironic, no?

edited 9th Feb '17 6:34:29 PM by Aldo930

You have to admit that Goebbels was an effective Propagandist in that the German people never once lifted a finger against Hitler and the Nazis and kept on fighting till the bitter end. Though how much is that due to him or because of the failed July 1944 Assassination Plot (which we now know only made Hitler more popular) no one can tell.

From what I gather, Nazi Cinema avoided telling direct messages and more or less provided Bread and Circuses spectacle to the German populace to keep their minds away from reality. In some ways its like today's Blockbuster Movies, simple Black-and-White Morality and The Theme Park Version approach to story and conflict. Compare that to the films made by USSR/USA/UK, where John Huston made movies showing the war on the frontlines, UK had Humphrey Jennings, Michael Powell (stuff like The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp), and USSR had some amazing newsreels and stuff by Eisenstein like Ivan the Terrible which was too weird. The Germans were more or less trying to hide and deny the reality of war, while the other side were not doing that.

It's also interesting to compare it the films made in Occupied France, stuff like Jean Gremillion's The Sky is Yours (which was loved by both La Résistance and Les Collaborateurs), Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, and especially H-G Clouzot's Le Corbeau (which has an abortionist atheist doctor as The Hero who falls into entirely unironic romance with a prostitute...no way that movie could be made today). You also had Carl Theodor Dreyer making Day of Wrath in this time.

I also think of Japanese films, Kenji Mizoguchi's made 47 Ronin as a direct commission from authorities for Imperial Japan and yet he made a movie that is slow, talky and introspective rather than an action spectacle. In some ways the movie mirrors and sells the mentality that justified kamikaze attacks (suicide bombing runs by pilots) but it also questions that mentality, and delays it.

Kolberg certainly is visually sumptuous. I imagine it would look spectacular in a properly restored color version instead of the video that I just watched on the Internet Archive.

Can't speculate on what Berliners who were having to dodge bombs in February and March of 1945 might have thought if they managed to make it alive to a movie theater and watched Kolberg.

Why the Germans resisted to the end is interesting to talk about but beyond the scope of this thread. I do know that Julian Lapostat is correct above in stating that Goebbels largely avoided heavy-handed propaganda. There's The Eternal Jew, which I once watched to my regret, and Jud Suss which I might get around to watching one of these days but definitely will not make a work page for. But I've seen almost all of the short list of films we have on the Nazi Germany page and they are just so strange. There's an anti-Polish film called Heimkehr that is supposed to be quite good even while it's also horribly evil; maybe I'll see if that's available anywhere.

Münchhausen is the best one I've seen, light whimsy and pretty much free of Nazi awfulness. Maybe not surprisingly Douglas Sirk's La Habanera is pretty good as well.

Most people in Berlin probably never even saw it; the Nazi officials who did see it were forced to.

The UFA Münchhausen is an oddity in that it's free of propaganda, unlike the UFA Märchenfilme that the studio turned out in the late 30s.

I've already mentioned upthread the Japanese wartime version of The 47 Ronin, how strange I found it, how bizarrely it violates the Show, Don't Tell rule—making a film about the 47 Ronin that does not show the attack on Lord Kira's compound is just so weird.

On two different occasions TCM has ran a 1944 Japanese wartime film called Army that is absolutely fascinating. It was actually commissioned by the Imperial Japanese Army and was supposed to be a gung-ho celebration of martial virtues and patriotism and such. But the director, Keisuke Kinoshita, was an anti-war leftist who in fact would later go on and make explicitly anti-war films like Morning for the Osone Family and Twenty-Four Eyes.

Anyway. The ending to Army. The son is going off to fight in China, and it's supposed to be rousing and patriotic. But the movie has this long dialogue-free sequence at the end where the mother, who is sobbing with grief and fear at her son going off to the war, runs out of the house and struggles her way through the cheering crowd to get one last look at her boy. It's amazing, that he got that scene into a film that was produced and actually ran in Japan during the war.

It's interesting in that world cinema which came up after World War II more or less triggered among former enemies. Like the Italians went from being fascist stooges to Hitler to inspiring artists around the world with films by Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti (who fought in La Résistance and during the 40s made Ossessione in Mussolini's twilight years), Vittorio De Sica. Rossellini even became a member of the fascist party, for token reasons, to work in the industry. And yet they made movies glorifying the Resistance in Rome Open City, Paisan and others. The Bicycle Thief'' became a model for poverty row art movies (even if it was ironically funded by Selznick and was the most expensive film made in Italy at that time).

In the case of Japan, works by Akira Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, and Ozu among others were discovered by Donald Richie, an American GI stationed in Japan, who campaigned to get them shown internationally.

History works weirdly in some respects. One exception was India, where Satyajit Ray provided an early glimpse into post-colonial films with his movies.