Calling all Classic Film Lovers!

Wednesday, February 15

Remakes and adaptations:

• Little Women (1949) — In Technicolor!
• Lolita (1961) — Stanley Kubrick version of this 1955 novel.
• The Long Voyage Home (1940) — John Wayne on a ship!
• Look for the Silver Lining (1949) — A movie musical about a Broadway star.
• The Lost Patrol (1934) — Boris Karloff is a non-villain role?!!
• The Lost Weekend (1945) — Billy Wilder won Best Picture with this film. Ray Milland stars.
• Love Affair (1939) — The less popular original starring Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne and directed by Leo McCarey. Remade with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr by McCarey again.
• Love Me or Leave Me (1955) — Doris Day and James Cagney star.
• Lust for Life (1956) — Kirk Douglas plays Vincent Van Gogh in this biopic. Don't confuse it with Iggy Pop!
• Madame Bovary (1949) — Jennifer Jones as Emma Bovary.

edited 14th Feb '17 12:36:21 PM by LongTallShorty64

Are the two Little Womens right after each other?

What were they both nominated for, anyway? And which one is the better version?

edited 14th Feb '17 12:36:36 PM by Aldo930

Yup, they are. The '49 version was nominated for Best Production Design and has stars from The '50s: Elizabeth Taylor, Janet Leigh, and June Allyson.

The '33 version was nominated for Best Screenplay/Writing. And has George Cukor directing and Katharine Hepburn and Joan Bennett.

I haven't seen either, but the general consensus is that the 1933 version is superior. They put a lot of effort in that one.

RKO house-style versus MGM house-style; they go about it differently, for sure.

edited 14th Feb '17 12:57:15 PM by LongTallShorty64

The funny thing is that Kitty Foyle is indisputably a Chick Flick, with Ginger Rogers as a career girl having to choose between two handsome, adoring suitors. It's Bridget Jones' Diary in 1940, really. Of course the Bridget Jones movies aren't exactly enlightened.

The women-voting thing is part of a little prologue independent of the main story. But there's another part later—one of Kitty's suitors comes over on a date, but refuses to take her anywhere, so they just play cards in her living room. Later he says that was his test to make sure she wasn't a Gold Digger. When one of Kitty's roommates comes out with her makeup face on the guy says he's seen better specimens in a glass jar.

And he's the good guy, the suitor that the audience is supposed to root for. The other guy is a rich trust fund baby who gets engaged to Kitty and then dumps her because her family doesn't want him marrying a lower-class girl. Then he comes back after he's married and wants her to be his mistress.

It's pretty appalling frankly, but it did win Ginger that Oscar.

Boy, that truly sounds more sexist than usual. But her career tanked after that Oscar, or is that just how it looks retrospectively? Because I can only think of two 40s films with Ginger: the aforementioned film and The Major and the Minor. And then nothing.

I'll Be Seeing You with Joseph Cotten and teenaged Shirley Temple is pretty good. The Other Wiki thinks she did ok by herself in the 1940s but I haven't seen any of those other movies listed.

A pretty interesting vid on the Hollywood musicals (and a French film or two) that the recent La La Land references.

Ginger Rogers was personally quite conservative and her mother Lela Rogers was notorious in Hollywood for being a famous wingnut.

So it's not that out of character at all.

But in any case even actresses as outspoken as Katharine Hepburn had to play some sexist roles, as many feminist actresses have to do to today. The agent more or less tell them, "You can make money, be independent and have a career in life but to do that you have to portray women imprisoned by the conventions of society and patriarchy...that's the Faustian contract".

Hepburn remember was branded "Box-office poison" in the Thirties because a few of her films centered on her like Sylvia Scarlett or Bringing Up Baby weren't doing well. Actresses had to work twice as hard to be half as good.

I prefer La La Land when it was called New York, New York or for that matter Mitchell Leisen's 1937 Swing High Swing Low starring Fred MacMurray and Carole Lombard. That's one of those movies that could have been made in the pre-code almost but managed to slip in after the guard towers had been erected. It's a really good story about couples and relationships.

edited 14th Feb '17 11:21:17 PM by JulianLapostat

February 16

Many M's and magnificents:

• Madame Curie (1943) — Starring Greer Garson. She was nominated for Best Actress.
• Madame X (1929) — All-talking picture! Lionel Barrymore directed this film. Ruth Chatterton stars as a prostitute whose son tries her for murder. People complained that another film starring Chatterton, Frisco Jenny, was too much like this movie.
• The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) — Orson Welles film. Nominated for four awards and won none.
• Magnificent Obsession (1954) — Douglas Sirk melodrama with Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman. She was nominated for Best Actress.
• The Magnificent Yankee (1950) — Directed by John Sturges. Biographical film about Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.
• A Majority of One (1961) — Drama about racial prejudice with Rosalind Russell and Alec Guiness.
• The Maltese Falcon (1941) — Classic Film Noir and a remake of the 1931 version. Directorial debut of John Huston, starring Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor and a slew of great character actors: Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet, and Elisha Cook Jr. Nominations for Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (Greenstreet), and Best Adapted Screenplay.
• The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) — Alfred Hitchcock's remake of his 1934 version with Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day.
• The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) — A Western with Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, and a huge supporting cast. Nominated for Best Costume Design.
• Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) — Saddest xmas movie? Has some classics sung by Judy Garland.
• Merrily We Live (1938) — A comedy with Constance Bennett and Brian Aherne. It has similarities to My Man Godfrey. Five nominations.

edited 15th Feb '17 10:29:05 AM by LongTallShorty64

M is a happy letter in the alphabet. So many masterpieces there...Liberty Valance and Meet Me in St. Louis and of course the eternally Magnificent Ambersons.

You know The Magnificent Ambersons and Meet Me in St. Louis are more or less the same kind of story. A midwestern town is ruptured by modernity and progress. Welles' movie deals with what happens when you don't deal with progress while Minnelli's movie has this kind of ironic Happy Ending that isn't at all happy but kind of allows people to have that easy nostalgia for the past, and the safe and stable nuclear family.

Ida Lupino!

February 17

More M's:

• The Merry Widow (1934) — A little Ernst Lubitsch operetta with Maurice Chevalier and Jeannette MacDonald. It won Best Art Direction.
• A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935) — Warner Brothers film with Olivia de Havilland, James Cagney, Mickey Rooney, and Dick Powell. It won for Best Cinematography and Film Editing.
• Mighty Joe Young (1949) — More King Kong! It won the award for Best Visual Effects.
• Mildred Pierce (1945) — Joan Crawford is the titular character in this classic Film Noir and Ann Blyth as the evillest child in cinema. Crawford won Best Actress.
• Million Dollar Mermaid (1952) — Ester Williams shines in this water musical. Nominated for Best Cinematography- Colour.
• Min and Bill (1930) — Marie Dressler won Best Actress and revived her career after being a vaudeville star who, after success, became homeless.
• The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima (1952) — Supposed to be a re-telling of the appearance of Our Lady Fatima in Portugal. It has John Gilbert look-a-like, Gilbert Roland.
• The Miracle Worker (1962) — Anne Bancroft won Best Leading Actress and Patty Duke won Best Supporting Actress.
• Mister Roberts (1955) — Comedy drama full of some of the decade's best or past decade's best actors: Henry Fonda, Jack Lemmon, William Powell, and James Cagney. Lemmon won Best Supporting Actor.
• Mogambo (1953) — Remake of Red Dust. Somehow the two female leads are replaced (Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly), but the male lead stays the same (Clark Gable). Directed by John Ford, and both Kelly and Gardner were nominated for their roles.
• Monsieur Verdoux (1947) — Charlie Chaplin is a bigamist serial killer! Not surprisingly, it wasn’t well received in America. Nominated for Best Writing/Original Screenplay.

edited 16th Feb '17 10:04:25 AM by LongTallShorty64

Made pages for the following today...(a personal record me thinks).

Bigger Than Life, Nicholas Ray's 1956 masterpiece.

And two creator pages for Max Ophuls and, amazingly of all, James Mason who I was amazed did not have a creator page.

Also a Creator page for Leo McCarey

I feel compelled to note that you missed a LOT of James Mason works.

And technically I should not mention this here as it is not a Live Action Film, but anyone who is a fan of James Mason owes it to themselves to seek out the 1954 animated short film version of The Tell-Tale Heart, which features Mason reading the story over the action. He knocks it out of the park.

edited 16th Feb '17 6:02:27 PM by jamespolk

I second it as well. One of UPA's best shorts, next to Gerald Mc Boing Boing and The Unicorn In The Garden.

You are right, it's just that I didn't know how much of Mason was there.

I didn't even know about the Tell-Tale Heart but I mentioned he was a famous voice-over artist.

And I didn't know that Five Fingers had a page. It wasn't on Joseph L. Mankiewicz's creator page until I just added it today after seeing you place it on Mason's page.

Mason worked with a lot of great film-makers: Ray, Ophuls, Kubrick, Hitchcock, Reed, Mankiewicz, Powell and I am sure I am forgetting someone.

I made a page for The Hasty Heart, which is not all that interesting but does feature Ronald Reagan in a movie that is not terrible. There aren't many of those.

Gonna have to go back and look over James Mason's filmography, there's a lot to talk about.

You know, looking at James Mason's filmography, it's odd that he appeared in two films based on Jules Verne's works in the 50s...

Apropos of nothing. It's just kinda weird.

edited 16th Feb '17 6:54:57 PM by Aldo930

Well Jules Verne's science-fiction had romance, adventure and a certain European elegance, qualities that Mason represented well. So he's a good fit.

He was a real romantic actor. In the original sense, he was a Byronic Hero and quite sinister and smooth, and a major sex symbol besides. About the only time he played a straight leading man is Max Ophuls Caught but Ophuls had him play a doomed Irishman in The Reckless Moment, a guy who falls in love with the woman he's sent to blackmail.

And of course he played the Flying Dutchman next to Ava Gardner in the zany adventure/fantasy pandora and the flying dutchman

James Mason was good at playing villains. Pretty much a natural Evil Brit. The bad guy in the 1952 The Prisoner of Zenda, the bad guy in North By Northwest, the evil pervert Villain Protagonist in Lolita...

He's more a Byronic Hero in Lolita, a pervert who is too romantic and cultured for America and he ends up being outfoxed by a little girl and a proto-Trumpian vulgarian like Quilty. I always saw that film as Stanley Kubrick explaining why he left America. He couldn't handle the Quiltys anymore.

Mason played villains but in The '40s and The '50s he would often be leading man who are of a romantic type. Odd Man Out, The Reckless Moment are among the most notable. And of course Bigger Than Life by Nicholas Ray is him playing the kind of part that Breaking Bad gets attention for...incredibly intense performance and a perfect companion film to Rebel Without a Cause.

Humbert Humbert abused a child, let's not call him a Byronic Hero.

edited 17th Feb '17 9:50:24 AM by jamespolk

Hmmm...Byronic Hero are those who stretch the boundaries of morality, decency and general values. It's not glorifying him to call Humbert one...the character is a romantic at heart. Lord Byron wrote a poem Don Juan that mostly amounts to whitewashing a famous character who in the original Spanish play and Mozart opera Don Giovanni was a rapist and sexual predator. Romanticism has a lot of dark and messy stuff. Like the German romantic Heinrich von Kleist wrote a story Die Marquise von O...(made into a film by Rohmer) about a woman who more or less marries and falls in love with a man who raped her while she was unconscious. And of course you have Goethe's Faust who does some outright evil and weird stuff.The point about romanticism is that such evil people are at the least interesting in a society and culture that is generally vapid and without values and is supremely repressive.

So rape apology or glorifying sexual abuse is not outside of romantic archetypes and ideas.

In a weird sense, the novel by Nabokov is actually less romantic than the movie. And part of that has to do with casting James Mason. In the novel's Humbert is written from his point of view and he's a total liar and Unreliable Narrator who is justifying his evil. But in the film by Kubrick because it's outside, objective you kind of see all the characters presented as how Humbert narrated it. Most important of all, by casting Mason as Humbert, you have an actor who is as handsome, elegant and seductive as Humbert imagines himself to be. So in some sense the movie is validating his pretensions.

And Kubrick's film is very sympathetic to Humbert. The censorship means that he couldn't touch on the pedophilia so he instead dialed up the satire on Americana that is there in the book, mocking Stepford Suburbia, Conspicuous Consumption and the general naivete which Americans use to disguise the ugliness. And within that, Kubrick does identify a little bit with Humbert, especially at the end when he finds out that Lolita never cared for him, manipulated him throughout and was actually far wiser and realistic than he ever was.

February 18

The end of the M's and the beginning of the Ns:

• The Moon is Blue (1953) — Otto Preminger's controversial film due to the use of the words "sex" and "virgin." Unexciting movie even if it has David Niven and William Holden. Nominated for Best Editing and Best Actress.
• Morning Glory (1933) — Drama with Katharine Hepburn and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Hepburn won Best Actress.
• Mourning Becomes Electra (1947) — From a play. It has Rosalind Russell, Michael Redgrave, and Kirk Douglas. I’m sure it's as pretentious as it sounds. RKO's biggest disaster; it flopped big time.
• Mrs. Miniver (1942) — William Wyler's first foray into WWII movies. This has Greer Garson and Teresa Wright. It won six Oscars.
• The Music Box (1932) — A Laurel and Hardy film! It won the Academy Award for Best Short Film.
• The Music Man (1962) — It's a musical. It won Best Musical Score. What a surprise!
• Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) — The original where Clark Gable mutinies against Charles Laughton. It won Best Picture.
• Ninotchka (1939) — Garbo Laughs! Fantastic Ernst Lubitsch film, fantastic Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett script, and fantastic chemistry between Greta Garbo and Melvyn Douglas. Nominated for 4 Oscars, but alas, it was the year of Gone with the Wind.

edited 17th Feb '17 4:30:16 PM by LongTallShorty64