I recorded Havana Widows which just from the title sounds like a lot of fun, but I'm forcing myself to not watch anything but Filmstruck until it shuts down.
Now I've seen both it and its Shot-for-Shot Remake Algiers. This side of the two Psychos I don't know if I've ever seen two films that were more identical. I liked them both. It's probably because Charles Boyer was just as well cast in the remake as Jean Gabin was in the original. In retrospect it made me wish that Boyer had made more crime movies instead of so many costume dramas.
That's an interesting point of comparison to the two Psycho movies in that the 1999 Psycho was so appallingly miscast, Anne Heche and Vince Vaughn in two parts they never ever ever should have gotten. Hedy Lamarr wasn't all that great an actress but the female lead in Pepe Le Moko is kind of colorless as well.
I guess if you had to pick you'd pick Pepe Le Moko because of the Adaptational Alternate Ending that the censors forced on Algiers. It doesn't make Algiers a bad movie, it's very good, but Pepe Le Moko is a hair better on that account.
Movies to watch on Film Struck according to the AVClub.
Also an article of why Some Like It Hot is still hilarious.
Edited by LongTallShorty64 on Nov 22nd 2018 at 9:00:10 AM
"It's true that we had a gentleman's agreement, but unfortunately, I am no gentleman."Just watched the Murnau Faust.
A really wonderful German Expressionist take on Goethe, it is. Some of it was downright harrowing; particularly what happens to Gretchen after Faust kills her brother. (I still couldn't help but laugh at the effect for Gretchen's scream reaching Faust in the mountains, which seemed to be taken directly out of Forbidden Zone. Yes, it was the 20s, but it had to have looked silly even then!)
Oh yes. Emil Jannings' portrayal of Mephisto seemed to have lifted his fashion sense from Bela Lugosi's Dracula, 5 years before that film came out.
"They say I'm old fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast."Yes, just weird is all.
Of course, the way the film was lit Emil Jannings looked rather like what would have happened if Glenn Shadix
◊ played Dracula, but that's another story.
Gonna spend my last day with Filmstruck doing my best to go through Akira Kurosawa's wartime propaganda films.
It's 12:37 am on November 30 and, somehow, Filmstruck is still working for me.
Meh. I assume it will be non-functional by morning and as much as I like to make work pages I'm not gonna stay up all night long watching movies. Tomorrow I'm gonna start making pages for some more Kurosawa films—by the time I'm done the Akira Kurosawa page will be almost completely filled in. Watched a couple more Ozu films at the last minute, too. Then, finally, after a month I can finally go back to my poor stuffed DVR and start watching TCM content again.
Edited by jamespolk on Nov 30th 2018 at 12:40:34 PM
Sure enough, when I woke up it no longer worked, Screw you, AT&T. I probably should have stayed up all night watching Ozu movies, although Ozu movies are 100% the worst thing to watch when you are sleepy.
Anyway, time to start making work pages. Sanshiro Sugata is the first film Akira Kurosawa ever made. Unsurprisingly, it's pretty good! A callow young man sets out to master the art of judo, but has to get past his own callow youth-ness. Then he has to defeat the villain. Because this movie was made in Japan in 1943, the villain is the only person who wears a Western three-piece suit.
As far as debuts go, I wouldn't put it up there with Citizen Kane or Badlands but it's pretty solid. Kurosawa had been working for a while as a writer and assistant director, and it shows.
Edited by jamespolk on Nov 30th 2018 at 11:59:00 AM
Is it too early to talk about classic Christmas films?
I just watched one, in fact. The 1959 Mexican Santa Claus. (It is also my favorite Christmas film from the classic era, which either says more about me or those movies, I can't say which.)
"They say I'm old fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast."So that’s where all the Rankin Bass specials went this year.
Well, anything showing The Life And Adventures Of Santa Claus and The Year Without A Santa Claus isn’t all bad.
"They say I'm old fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast."I've always had a general indifference to xmas but, god, when Bing Crosby sings White Christmas... I also saw the film last year and actually thought it to be very sweet, in a good way.
BTW, jamespolk, you're doing the movie lords' work.
Edited by LongTallShorty64 on Nov 30th 2018 at 9:56:52 AM
"It's true that we had a gentleman's agreement, but unfortunately, I am no gentleman."
Thank you!
Kurosawa's second movie was The Most Beautiful. It's a propaganda flick about determined young women working their buns off in a precision lens factory. Various obstacles arise but all the young ladies redouble their efforts to make precision lenses for bomb sights and such.
I can't say that it was all that interesting, except that it was a little funky to see all these fresh-faced cheery young ladies swearing an oath to destroy the United States and Britain. Kurosawa married the female lead and they remained married until she died 40 years later.
As for Christmas movies, at least once a year I have to announce that The Shop Around the Corner is a goddamn masterpiece.
Edited by jamespolk on Nov 30th 2018 at 8:33:39 AM
I lovedThe Shop Around the Corner when I first saw it but didn't realize its greatness until I worked in retail.
Now I've gone back to my overburdened DVR and am watching a Joan Blondell pre-code film called Havana Widows. Reading up about it led me to this interview
with Blondell where she says Jack Warner complimented her "jugs" when they first met, and also that she once got a part when Carole Lombard was suffering from the aftereffects of a back-alley abortion. Pretty amazing stuff.
Akira Kurosawa's third movie was Sanshiro Sugata Part II, which was a sequel to his first movie. Again, I got a huge kick out of the anti-American propaganda. The first scene has some obnoxious American sailor berating and abusing a rickshaw boy, only for Sugata to come to the rescue. Later there's an arrogant American boxer that suffers a literal No-Holds-Barred Beatdown from Sugata—that is, no holds are barred, so Sugata can go all judo and fling the boxer around the ring.
But the best part came at the end when Sugata faces off against his enemy in a snowy mountain pass. There's a big fight in a blizzard. It was visually quite lovely, the first great Kurosawa action sequence.
The next Kurosawa film I watched before Filmstruck died was The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail, a frankly lesser effort made right at the end of World War II. A lord and his half-dozen loyal retainers are trying to escape across the border in disguise before they're caught by the lord's brother, who wants to execute him. It does have a pretty good scene where the lord's head bodyguard (Musashibo Benkei—we have some weird Japanese Useful Notes pages) is challenged to read out plans for a new temple (that's their cover story, they're supposedly monks raising funds), and does so by unrolling a blank scroll and making everything up off the top of his head.
The fifth Kurosawa film I watched was One Wonderful Sunday from 1947. I think that's where he really starts to come into his own. A young couple are in love but are too poor to get married; they meet on Sundays which is the one day they have off, but they only have 35 yen to amuse themselves for the whole day. The film follows them over the afternoon and evening as they experience various frustrations based on how poor they are in struggling post-war Japan, where the only people making money are black marketeers. Also has a quite startling Breaking the Fourth Wall / Clap Your Hands If You Believe scene.
I also watched Kurosawa's last film, Madadayo, but that one's 26 years past our cutoff.
Edited by jamespolk on Dec 3rd 2018 at 9:30:54 AM
Trying to think of what to watch now that Filmstruck is dead. Looked at Netflix. Unless I'm misreading or this website
is wrong, Netflix does not have one single movie made before 1942.
Netflix's classic film selection is so poor, it's embarrassing but I'm pretty sure they dont give a damn about preservation and bringing the classics to the new gen. just their by the numbers YA stuff that's a remake of a remake.
"It's true that we had a gentleman's agreement, but unfortunately, I am no gentleman."
