Calling all Classic Film Lovers!

Tonight on Columbo...Oskar Werner, Martha Scott, and Gena Rowlands!

Back home from vacation which means I'm back watching stuff I've recorded off of TCM.

Mare Nostrum, a tragic silent romance about a Spanish sea captain who is lured by a Mata Hari and winds up aiding the Austrians and Germans, against his better judgment. Quite good, with a poetic Together in Death ending.

Recorded Three Coins in the Fountain, which, when I make the page, will fill in one of the last red links on the Academy Award page.

Three Coins in the Fountain, nominee for Best Picture of 1954. Very dated. Three secretaries looking for love; you can probably guess the gender politics from there. The boss fires secretaries if they date other employees. One secretary says another shouldn't date a playboy because she has to think about her "reputation". Very very dated. Jean Peters sure was pretty, though.

Much more enjoyed House of Usher, another stop on the National Film Registry. Roger Corman and American International Pictures getting artistically ambitious, shooting in color and Cinema Scope. Extremely creepy movie that I think got across the soul of the Poe story better than either of the other two adaptations on this wiki. Vincent Price at his best.

Am I the only person left in this thread? Bueller? Bueller?

Anyway...

Olympia, Leni Riefenstahl's documentary of the 1936 Olympic Games. I have two takeaways:

1. Much of the film is just shockingly beautiful cinematography. It is cinema's loss that Riefenstahl chose to prostitute her talents to the Nazis.

2. Leni Riefenstahl really enjoyed photographing muscular naked men.

I'm still here...

I saw Ride the Pink Horse but haven't had time to write up the wiki.

I found the characterisation a bit weak to be honest. And the plot wasn't strong enough to make anything have some serious stakes.

It's more one of those "looks great film noirs" but not much else.

Has some good cinematography though and the border town/Mexico setting was pretty ahead of the trend that would happen a few years later.

I Love You Again, starring William Powell and Myrna Loy in one of their non-Thin Man films. Powell is a boring drip of a suburban banker who gets whacked on the head, wakes up, and realizes he is actually a charming con artist. He's been living as the boring drip since he was whacked on the head nine years prior and suffered Easy Amnesia.

It's goofy, but fun, buoyed by the radiant charm of Powell and Loy. I still don't know how they managed to make the last Thin Man movie so bad.

Tonight on Columbo—Janet Leigh!

Edited by jamespolk on Aug 4th 2018 at 10:49:30 AM

I've to check that one out. It sounds right up my alley.

I recently rewatched the The Thin Man and, God, was there ever a screen couple with such amazing chemistry?

I think I've seen just about all the Powell and Loy films now except for The Senator Was Indiscreet which is actually Powell with a Loy cameo at the end. And no, no one's ever had better chemistry. Manhattan Melodrama is probably the best of their non-Thin Man movies.

Really? I've never watched it, mostly because I've stayed away from it because of the title

Mm it has Clark Gable as a gangster... I know what two movies I'm watching on my holiday.

Edited by LongTallShorty64 on Aug 5th 2018 at 7:51:47 AM

So I watched I Love You Again which was indeed fluffy but a lot of fun. I always get a kick out of movies about cons. Frank Mc Hugh gets a different part here as a drunk but coconspirator with Powell. When they were on the ship together, I got One Way Passage vibes but then the silliness came in.

I also saw another Loy-Powell film called Double Wedding where Powell is a bohemian artist who's trying to bring the stuffy, all business Loy to earth to make her realize she can't run her little sister's life. It's definitely a screwball: the ending is hilariously nuts.

Hilariously in one scene, Loy is so confounded by Powell that she baldly asks him if he smokes dope. Dope! In a film from 1937! I have no idea how they got away with this. Like, I've never seen a direct reference even in pre-codes! Will make a page promptly.

Edited by LongTallShorty64 on Aug 7th 2018 at 8:10:43 AM

Trivia: Double Wedding was the film Powell was shooting when he was distracted by the illness and death of Jean Harlow.

Riddle: Speaking of Powell and Loy films, how did Luise Rainer win an Oscar for The Great Ziegfeld?

Was she also in yellowface for that one too? Maybe that's it.

Watched The Snake Pit from 1948. Olivia de Havilland plays a paranoid schizophrenic at a psychiatric hospital. Her performance is really good (she was nominated for an Academy Award but lost), as are the others—patients and staff alike. I'm really not a fan of the All Psychology Is Freudian aspect that has dated this movie and others from that era (Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound and The Three Faces of Eve come to mind) terribly, however.

Recently, I've been watching some old foreign fantasy films; they're the craziest shit...

Take this Soviet thing from 1963:

There's some wonderful echoes of The 5000 Fingers Of Dr T in the set design here. Glorious insanity.

(The Mexican fairy tale films dubbed by K. Gordon Murray, incidentally, are wonderful as well, and are quite possibly the most insane films ever made for children.)

The Snake Pit to me is such a fascinating mish-mash. You've got De Havilland giving what is probably still one of the all-time best portrayals of mental illness. There's the depiction of shock treatment actually *working*, the only time I've ever seen that in film. And the ending where all the crazies are singing "going home, going home" is incredibly moving.

But yes, there's the archaic All Psychology Is Freudian story with the ending where De Havilland is just magically cured. Overall it's very much a example of transition in how people understand mental illness and how it's portrayed.

If you want wacky Russian fantasy films, try the silent Aelita, aka Aelita, Queen of Mars, one of the first feature-length sci-fi movies ever made.

All the teenagers on Reddit like to say "TIL" for Today I Learned.

TIL that Ingrid Bergman was in a Nazi movie.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Four_Companions_(film)

I'm gonna have to find that one.

Don't expect too much from it. Not every movie made under the Nazis were propaganda along the line of what Leni Reifenstahl did. Frankly, most weren't, the majority were fairly light comedies designed to distract the German population. More or less all movies starring Heinz Rühmann fall under this category (which is why those movies are to this day fairly beloved, even though I think outside of the Feuerzangenbowle he did his best work before and after the war).

Anyway, this particular movie is a little bit of an odd duck because it deals with a group of females starting their own business and the struggle they face in having a career but surprisingly while they all end paired up, it doesn't have a "females should focus on being mothers" message, despite that being the ideal the Nazis encouraged.

Still, the only reason anyone even remembers this movie at all is because of Ingrid Bergmann.

I don't expect much of it, I'm just amazed that Ingrid Bergman made a film for the Nazis and I didn't know about it until now. A cursory google search didn't turn up anything; I'll keep looking.

BTW, I learned that bit about Ingrid Bergman by watching a documentary called "Hitler's Hollywood" that's currently on Filmstruck. Pretty fascinating stuff.

Watched Olympia. As a documentary about the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, it's excellent. As a Nazi propaganda piece, its... not. Huh. I expected propaganda and got a documentary instead. Usually it's the other way around.

And yes, it's gorgeous.

Guess I have to watch Tokyo Olympiad next.

Riefenstahl was amazing at composing an image. And there's a lot of Olympic beefcake in the movie for anyone who likes that sort of thing.

Watching Father Goose, Cary Grant's next-to-last movie. Charming little romcom, although Charade is still the best late-period Grant.

Oh, believe me, it is a propaganda piece. It is deliberately drawing parallels between the leaders of the Nazi party and the athletes, implying that they all belong to a superior race, non-white athletes are cut out of the happenings as much as possible other than those they couldn't remove that easily (like Jesse Owens), and a lot of the events are carefully edited (for example the hockey game in which the German team scores again India? Yeah, they lost that one 1:8). Also, if you saw the 2006 version, that one is cut to remove a lot of the Nazi symbolic.

It is still a very important and influential movie, because a lot of the angles used in it were unique back then. Riefenstahl was certainly talented. But make no mistake there, her movies are propaganda, just particularly artful propaganda.

Edited by Swanpride on Aug 13th 2018 at 10:49:58 AM

Watched Manhattan Melodrama wherein Clark Gable is a gangster who's DA best friend, William Powell sends him to the electric chair.

Damn.

Edited by LongTallShorty64 on Aug 13th 2018 at 1:46:47 PM

I know it's meant to be propaganda, but it's not particularly effective. It works as a documentary, but not as propaganda.