Calling all Classic Film Lovers!

Really enjoyed that one although it was odd to see Bette Davis of all people be completely wasted in a movie.

Is there an earlier example of Going Cold Turkey? I can't think of one.

To my knowledge, no. It's rare.

Edit: I do remember watching Heroes for Sale where the protag. has an opiate addiction and goes cold turkey because he's put in jail. But we never see the withdrawal symptoms while he's in jail.

edited 27th Jun '17 11:49:16 AM by LongTallShorty64

Three on a Match would pre-date it by a year anyway.

Bah! You're right!

Made a page for Perry Mason programmer The Case of the Curious Bride because Errol Flynn is in it for two minutes. Also, I kind of like Warren William.

Warren William is the man. I like him in a lot of precodes. Too bad he fell off the map after them.

Saw Where the Sidewalk Ends. Great Film noir that reunites Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney. Andrews is a brutal cop who is haunted by his father's criminal past and covers up the accidental murder of Tierney's awful husband.

edited 28th Jun '17 7:02:50 PM by LongTallShorty64

Another Boris Karloff-Val Lewton horror film: Isle of the Dead. Karloff and company are stuck on a small island with The Black Death to keep them company. Very moody and creepy in classic Lewton style.

Saw another Preminger film starring Gene Tierney: Whirlpool. People have said that this is like another sequel to Laura which, frankly, I don't see. This one was interesting because Tierney is used as a scapegoat for murder through hypnoses. I liked Sidewalk better though.

edited 3rd Jul '17 3:16:14 PM by LongTallShorty64

TCM is running pretty much the entire Hitchcock catalogue over the next few weeks. I just downloaded a silent called The Ring, which does not have a Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl, but is about boxing.

There's also a lot of silents running this week. I'm looking out for Flesh and the Devil and the Ronald Colman films they're showing.

edited 9th Jul '17 2:19:03 PM by LongTallShorty64

Flesh and the Devil is great. I think that Garbo wasn't a very good actress in talking films, frankly; she could look all European and sensual but when she had to deliver dialogue and convey emotions with words, ugh. But in silents she was great and she was never better than that one.

Once decided not to make a page for The White Sister because I couldn't understand why Gish didn't quit the whole nun thing when Ronald Colman showed up alive. Audrey Hepburn did in The Nun's Story!

Made a page for one of the Hitchcock silents I watched, The Ring, chose not to for the other one, Downhill. Downhill has another version of the upside-down POV shot later seen in Notorious, but otherwise, the movies didn't feel all that Hitchcockian. Didn't even have creator cameos! And that surprised me b/c I'd seen The Lodger before and that film showed the Hitchcock formula in place right from the get-go.

edited 10th Jul '17 6:01:23 AM by jamespolk

I saw The White Sister for the first time last week and I adored it. I spent the whole movie hoping against hope that she wouldn't go back on her vows in the end - even for Ronald Colman TCM has introduced me to some real "nun positive" gems over the years (anyone remember Come To The Stable?). I've added the novel which White Sister was based on to my reading list - no Ronald Colman in the book, of course, but nothing's perfect.

edited 10th Jul '17 4:57:07 PM by Tarlonniel

Well, if you want nun-positive classic movies...

• The Bells of St. Mary's
• Lilies of the Field

Or The Sound of Music I guess, although that one does have the main character leaving the nunnery.

edited 11th Jul '17 5:51:54 AM by jamespolk

I saw Flesh and the Devil, and I agree with you about Garbo. I've never seen her so...alive. The language barrier really stiffened her up. The only speaking-role where I love her, and her woodenness works, is Ninotchka. This film was really great. It's funny to see John Gilbert in top billing, but he was at the top of his game in 1926. The cinematography is also spectacular: the romantic cigarette scene and the beautiful snow sequences are just dreamy. The only thing I wished was the the vampish Garbo didn't die at the end.

On the Ronald Colman front, I saw The Winning of Barbara Worth which was overall interesting but, boy, was it thin. It relied heavily on archetypes (the beautiful lily of the desert, rich outsider falling in love with her, tough dude of the desert is jealous, the greedy Big Bad banker, etc.). The lack of character development and rather crude plotting is, I think, what makes people dislike silents, or at least, judge all of them as this. But as the film above showed, it's not always that way: there's still a lot of nuance in all the pantomime. This also was Gary Cooper's first starring role. And he's pretty, I guess. He's never been a great favourite of mine, but it was cool seeing him in a silent, but I think his talents went to better use in talkies.

edited 11th Jul '17 6:24:14 PM by LongTallShorty64

Cooper, of course, also has a small part in Wings.

I guess it's a mark of Garbo's charisma that despite that thick accent and the woodenness, she didn't miss a beat and worked another decade in talkies. Wonder what she would have been like in a talking Swedish film?

The Winning of Barbara Worth

I dunno, it might be thin, but it's not because it's a silent. It could have been made five years later with hardly any change, except Gary Cooper would have been the hero that got the girl. And Ronald Colman wouldn't have been in the movie, probably, what with his accent.

Watched the King Vidor version of War and Peace. Didn't make a separate page for it, but it was surprisingly good. I still think the Russian version, which I did split off into another page, is better, but the Vidor WaP is better than most of the epic garbage of the 1950s. I'm tempted to say it's my favorite Vidor talkie after Our Daily Bread.

In other news which no one else cares about, of late I've taken an interest in short films. I've been making work pages for films which either 1) got a nomination for the Academy Award For Best Live Action Short Film, or 2) are on the National Film Registry. Today I made a page for the Little Rascals short film Pups Is Pups.

Of the short films that I've watched from the classic era, I think my favorites are:

• Jammin' the Blues — a blues concert
• Meshes of the Afternoon — deeply bizarre experimental film
• Siege — documentary film of the 1939 siege of Warsaw which qualified for both 1 and 2 of my criteria above

edited 13th Jul '17 4:31:46 PM by jamespolk

Wow. Siege looks really interesting.

Watched the first hour of West Side Story, and my God, I hated it. Maybe it's my general low tolerance for musicals. But that first scene when the two rival gangs are spinning and dancing and twirling and prancing—awful, awful, awful. I couldn't stop thinking about that Norm Macdonald sketch.

https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/cobras-andamp-panthers/n10911?snl=1

Almost my exact reaction except I only lasted about 4 minutes into the movie when I turned it off and watched something else.

Well, I finished.

It gets somewhat better. Natalie Wood makes it better, because Natalie Wood makes everything better—even if she is horrifically miscast as a Puerto Rican.

But it's still not very good. The "Jets"—the white gang—are filled with a bunch of horrible actors and the movie is just excruciatingly bad every time they're on screen. And they're on screen a lot. I did find myself interested in this movie as a particularly subtle example of early 1960s racism while trying to be Fair for Its Day. Both gangs are made out to be bad like the Montagues and the Capulets, but really it's the Jets persecuting immigrants. And oh yeah, they almost rape Rita Moreno.

Just not a good movie. That it won the Oscar doesn't surprise me, as god knows the Academy has honored some turds in its day, and this movie still isn't nearly as bad as Gigi or Cavalcade or the all-time champion for worst winner, Cimarron.

But what does surprise me is that it's on the Roger Ebert Great Movies List. I'm scared to read that review.

It's highly regarded by a lot of people...including Michael Bay.

I'm a huge fan of musicals and of Shakespeare, but I've only seen West Side Story once, many years ago. I was expecting a closer adaptation of the play and came away disappointed. I remember loving the music, but I can't remember much about either the dancing or the acting. I guess they must've seemed pretty average. Maybe I'm just not into Jerome Robbins's style.

edited 14th Jul '17 6:47:44 PM by Tarlonniel

I though it was pretty good, but it didn't quite meet my expectations. I too expected it to be more like Romeo and Juliet. I kept thinking about how they could've made the movie better, which is usually not a good sign.

I did really like some of the songs, namely "America" and "Gee, Officer Krupke"—the two satirical/social commentary ones. A couple of years later, I came across the lyrics to the stage version of "America". They were nowhere near as good as the movie version; the stage version is basically about all the reasons America is better than Puerto Rico, whereas the movie version is more about the reasons America isn't all it's cracked up to be (if you're Puerto Rican).