Calling all Classic Film Lovers!

I eventually watched Le Trou; it aged very well indeed. It really feels like you are there if you don't think too much how your hands would bleed* if you repeatedly hit concrete with such MacGyvering tools, or about the sound effects. (I don't mean to complain, I was impressed).

(Although people in the 1940's were typically better at manual work than the average 2019 salaryman).

Edited by gropcbf on Jan 13th 2019 at 11:11:27 AM

Watched Arsene Lupin with the Barrymore brothers, John starring as the Gentleman Thief Arsène Lupin and Lionel being the detective tasked with catching him.

Pleasant little movie. Filled with lots of pre-Code suggestive dialogue from John Barrymore to Karen Morley. The Barrymore brothers had great chemistry onscreen together, as they also proved in Grand Hotel.

Watched Kismet, an "Arabian Nights" Days story with Ronald Colman as a beggar/thief in Baghdad who gets mixed up with the Caliph. It was OK. I think I would have liked it better with a different lead actress, but the lead was Marlene Dietrich and I've never been able to get on the Dietrich train.

Spent a while wondering who the actress that played Colman's daughter was, until I looked it up and found that she was Joy Page, who plays the Bulgarian refugee that Capt. Renault wants to take advantage of in Casablanca.

Gonna start next on The Fall of the Roman Empire, which to my surprise has a 100% Fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes. 3 hrs long!

Edited by jamespolk on Jan 19th 2019 at 11:46:22 AM

I adore Ronald Colman, but I can only stand Marlene Dietrich in small doses. On the whole I prefer the 1955 musical version.

I watched Artists And Models, the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis film, tonight. I hadn't realized that the film gets progressively more over-the-top as it goes on. By the end, when Dean and Shirley Mac Laine are trying to rescue Jerry from the Russian spies, it's gone nuts.

Also, I can't be the only one who thinks the Vincent the Vulture comics sound awesome.

(I loved Eddie Mayehoff as the boss who wants Dorothy Malone to make her comics incredibly bloody, and the little homicidal shitbag who puts the watercooler in Jerry's pants.)

Edited by Aldo930 on Jan 20th 2019 at 7:56:37 AM

It's almost that time again! TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" kicks off February 1, and I'll be noting good stuff on the daily schedule in advance.

February 1 starts the wacky themes off with stuff like "Janet Gaynor Best Actress Wins for Multiple Titles". They're running Street Angel and Sunrise, which anyone who likes silent movies needs to see. Then they run The French Connection and Taxi Driver under theme "The Grittiest Streets of New York".

The Fall of the Roman Empire was pretty good! My tolerance for Sword and Sandal is pretty limited—Ben Hur was boring, The Robe was an absolute turd—but this one was pretty good. It helped that there wasn't any Jesus stuff, and it helped that some really great actors were delivering the lines, folks like Christopher Plummer and James Mason and Alec Guinness, not Large Hams like Richard Burton. Also the tone is pretty dark, purporting to show the era when Rome turned away from the enlightenment of Marcus Aurelius to the bread-and-circuses debauchery of Commodus.

Second-best sword and sandal movie I've ever seen, behind Spartacus. Gladiator lifted a lot of plot from this movie, except that this Commodus is troubled and unstable as opposed to the seething psychopath Joaquin Phoenix played.

31 Days of Oscar, Feb. 2:

Thrillers. Panic in the Streets which I've never seen. Strangers on a Train which is one of Hitchcock's very best, even if "runaway merry-go-round" is a weird climax. After midnight, two movies about alcoholics—Days of Wine and Roses which just got inducted into the National Film Registry, and The Lost Weekend.

I watched a Mack Sennet short solely for the reason that it had a very young Carole Lombard in it. It's called Run, Girl, Run. It was pretty mediocre: a lot of cheap fat jokes, boring pratfalls, and all around pretty lowest common denominator comedy. Carole is perfectly fine, but sound couldn't come soon enough for her. I did find it interesting for a short film to focus on female athletes as I don't think I can name a film from the Golden Age that deals with female athletes.

I'll probably make a page for it because I've made almost all the wikis for Lombard's films.

Re-watching the 1935 version of A Midsummer Night's Dream. I guess this is the first Shakespeare movie of any note. Haven't watched the Pickford-Fairbanks Taming of the Shrew but I've heard it's bad, and a silent Shakespeare film is just pointless.

It's pretty good. Cagney and de Havilland are both charming, and even Dick Powell is less annoying than in all those musicals he was doing in that era. Main flaw is that it's overlong. There's a sequence in the latter half, after the four lovers go back to sleep in the forest, that is basically an extended ballet/dance scene, last forever, totally pointless. Otherwise I like the film.

31 Days of Oscar, Feb. 3:

One of the great films of the 1950s, Marty. The Way We Were on later in the day—I don't think I could watch five minutes of a Barbra Streisand movie. Later in the day they have the movies that got Hepburn and Streisand tied for best actress, The Lion in Winter and Funny Girl.

I found Marty so boring.

Once Streisand got that 70s perm, it went downhill.

But she's magnificent in What's Up, Doc? and The Way We Were.

I decided a needed a pre-code fix, so I watched Three Wise Girls. This was a really good movie. I think this is the best acting I've seen Jean Harlow do. Funny, witty script with a good story! Definitely recommend.

I have the worst time trying to remember the difference between Three Wise Girls and Three Smart Girls. As I type I can't remember which is which, but the pre-Code one with Jean Harlow is way better.

It's definitely not Three Smart Girls. That movie still haunts me.

I watched Shanghai Express and I liked it. Didn't really care for the Dietrich romance and was more enthralled with Anna May Wong's character and her story. I wish that was the main story. Anyways, it was still good.

The top lighting on Dietrich kind of got really noticeable near the end...like yeah, you're trying to make her look spiritual and youthful... I get it Von Sternberg.

Edited by LongTallShorty64 on Jan 28th 2019 at 9:58:41 AM

Wong definitely should have been in more movies. She is quite excellent in a British late-silent called Piccadilly.

Watched Disney's The Living Desert on the Internet Archive. It was entertaining, although the wildlife scenes were obviously staged—did people not notice stuff like that back then or did they just not care? I'd really like to see White Wilderness for the infamous lemming scene.

The Living Desert was the first nature movie which used that combination of nature pictures and music. That was quite inventive back then - I think the movie won an academy award for it.

Basically, yes, they noticed, but they didn't care because seeing this combination was just different and a lot of fun. Plus, there is the whole idea behind it. Most people thought that the desert is simply dead.

Edited by Swanpride on Jan 29th 2019 at 7:40:17 AM

31 Days of Oscar, Feb. 4:

• The 400 Blows. Talk about a Trauma Conga Line. Whenever the Criterion streaming service comes back I'm gonna have to finish the Antione Doinel series.
• The Children's Hour. Shirley Maclaine as a lesbian in 1961!
• Goodbye, Mr. Chips. Heck of a Tearjerker but it works for me. Robert Donat's Best Oscar win over Clark Gable was the only thing that stopped a Gone with the Wind sweep.
• Henry V. Olivier version. The Kenneth Branagh version is better.

I've always liked Goodbye, Mr. Chips, mostly because of Donat and his wonderful performance but Greer Garson is also wonderful in her small-ish role.

I realize that this flagrantly violates the "Live Action Film" title for this section of the forum, but I've been steadily working my way through the Best Animated Short Film list; I'm up to the late 1940s. I found that there's a short, 1946 Oscar nominee "Rippling Romance", that is now a lost film. Made me sad.

TCM's 31 Days of Oscar, Feb. 5:

Foreign Language Film day. One of my disappointments for this year's list, as every single film is something TCM has ran before that I've already seen. The good news at least is that most of them are stone-cold classics: Bicycle Thieves, Rashomon, Mon Oncle, Day for Night, The Battle of Algiers. When I watched The Walls of Malapaga it was an extremely washed-out public domain print, so bad that the white subtitles were almost impossible to read against a white background. Wondering how the version TCM runs will look.

They're also running Through a Glass Darkly. I don't like Ingmar Bergman all that much. Lots of crazy people staring off into space and talking about God. But that does give me an excuse to recommend a very funny 1968 short film called The Dove, which is a satire of Bergman movies, and which also was the screen debut of Madeline Kahn.

If you ever want to tackle the best animated movies, I covered most of the most important theatrical releases of the last century on my search for the best animated movie of this era.

That's a Columbia cartoon so you're not really missing much, but Columbia's the most major studio, I believe, that made cartoons which are now lost. (There are a few that only exist in black and white, and one that was recently found.)

Yes, I found an article or two when googling that indicated that there are a lot of Columbia cartoons missing; that just happens to be the only one with an Oscar nomination.

BTW, are we flexible enough to talk about stuff that isn't Live Action Film here?

Edited by jamespolk on Jan 30th 2019 at 5:17:37 AM

The topic tends to overlap sometimes...I mean when we discuss the Academy awards, we discuss all nominees and over in the animation category the "Disney/Pixar in general" discuss often features Disney's live action output, too (and their parks.

So I don't see a problem with it. Especially since I tend to punt The Adventures of Prince Achmed at every opportunity I get.

I see no issue in it.