Watched Flicka Och Hyacinter (English title: Girl With Hyacinths), a Swedish film from 1950. The film starts with a young woman committing suicide, and her neighbours become curious as to why she did it, so they track down her acquaintances to try to piece it together. As a result, her life story is told in Flashbacks from other characters' perspectives. So the set-up is very similar to Citizen Kane. The flashbacks are told in Anachronic Order which makes it a bit difficult to keep track of the sequence of events, but I thought it worked in the movie's favour as it made me more engaged as I wanted to understand what had happened, in what order, and for what reasons. Also working in the film's favour is that all of the characters are interesting. Most of them are likeable, but even the ones that aren't (such as an alcoholic painter who is in general a complete fuck-up) are fascinating to watch. I heartily recommend watching it; it's a movie I think Needs More Love.
Watched Älskande par (English title: Loving Couples), a Swedish film from 1964. On IMDb, the plot is described thusly: "Three expectant mothers think back over their sex lives." Based on that description, I expected a sex comedy in the vein of Sommarnattens leende. Well, this is not that kind of movie. It's a drama, based on a controversial series of books (I found out afterwards). It's an okay film, but it's not what I was in the mood for, and I'm guessing that quite a bit was lost in the transition from seven books to a single two-hour film.
Watched a Fritz Lang double feature: The Woman in the Window (1944) and Scarlet Street (1945). The two films are often considered a set of sorts, sharing a director and the three lead actors (Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, and Dan Duryea) and being released in consecutive years. Some people say that the plots are similar as well, but I think that's overstating the similarities.
The Woman in the Window is about a man and a woman killing someone in self-defence, and then trying to cover it up because they figure nobody will believe them and assume that they murdered the man. The only problem is that they're terrible at covering their tracks, so they only get into more trouble. That's basically all there is to it, but it's a pretty good Film Noir.
Scarlet Street has several parallel plot lines and quite a few unexpected twists and turns, which I like—the latter is the same reason I think The Postman Always Rings Twice and Angel Face are way more interesting to watch than the average Film Noir. The basic outline of the plot is that an unscrupulous young couple mistake a middle-aged man who paints as a hobby for a professional artist, and decide to try to get rich by selling his (in reality not all that valuable) paintings without him finding it out. The aforementioned twists and turns and parallel plot lines mean that describing the plot like this really doesn't do the film justice, though. Anyway, I really liked it. I think it might be Fritz Lang's second-best movie, surpassed only by M.
Watched Jag Ar Nyfiken (English title: I Am Curious) a Swedish film in two parts: yellow and blue (the colours of the Swedish flag), released in 1967 and 1968 respectively. The film is told in a quasi-documentary style, by which I mean that it mixes apparently-unscripted content with scripted content and intentionally blurs the line between the two. The influences from the French New Wave are undeniable, with the film having quite a lot in common—both stylistically and in terms of content—with films such as Chronicle of a Summer, Contempt, and Masculin Féminin.
The film deals with several different issues, both then-current ones such as The Vietnam War and tourism to Francoist Spain, as well as timeless ones such as sex, religion, gender roles, and class society. The main way this is done is by interviewing members of the public to hear their views on the subjects (I think this is unscripted and the people were chosen at random wherever the film happened to be shot, but I can't be sure). Also shown being interviewed are Martin Luther King Jr. and future Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme. These interviews, and the commentary surrounding them, I really enjoyed watching (not least because it reminded me of Chronicle of a Summer, which I liked
). But we also get a fictional narrative about the interviewer's love life which I found terribly uninteresting and dull. This is somewhat mitigated by the blurring of the fourth wall, with the scripted content being periodically interrupted by showing the cast and crew preparing the shoot, the director giving instructions to the actors, and sometimes even do-overs of scenes we've already seen play out. All in all, I found it a fairly interesting watch, but I'm guessing the rewatch value is pretty much nil.
Watched Kvarteret Korpen (English title: Raven's End), a Swedish film from 1963. A young aspiring author lives with his mother and alcoholic father in an impoverished neighbourhood. It's a very downbeat film. Thinking back on it, I'm guessing the director was a fan of Italian Neorealism and films such as Bicycle Thieves and Germany, Year Zero. It's one of those "being poor and living in a low-income community sucks" type of movies, and I have to say that whatever novelty that concept originally had, it has worn off for me—it's an area where I am very susceptible to Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy. The father also really got on my nerves by somehow managing to be both a conceited asshole and a massive fuck-up. All of that being said however, the film did have some nice moments, such as the mother lamenting her lot in life (and I felt quite a bit of sympathy for her, considering her husband is just the worst) and the main character reflecting that "when you yell at the top of your lungs, people hear you but can't make out what you're saying" in response to a publisher telling him that his work is promising but unarticulated. Ceterum censeo Morbillivirum esse eradicandum.
Did anyone else watch any classic horror films for October?
I myself watched films like Freaks, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), The Black Cat, the classic Universal monster movies like Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), and The Invisible Man (1933), some Val Lewton films like The Leopard Man and I Walked with a Zombie, and Eyes Without a Face.
I loved all of them. I think the only one I didn't like was Murders in the Rue Morgue.
Trimming the hedges, one trope at a time.
TCM had a marathon that I caught part of - Freaks was unfortunately on too early and I missed it, but I saw Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), The Bad Seed (1956) and The Wolf Man (1941). For some reason they didn't show Lugosi's Dracula. I was very disappointed.
Watched Det stora äventyret (English title: The Great Adventure), a Swedish film from 1953. It depicts the animal life around a small farm over the course of a year. It starts out focusing almost exclusively on the animals, but increasingly, the humans living at the farm appear as well. I personally thought the humans were way less interesting than the animals, so I liked the beginning way more than the ending.
I was extremely impressed by the footage they managed to get of the presumably-wild animals. Some of the footage is really close-up. Nowadays one could simply leave a camouflaged digital camera there and wait for it to record something of interest, but that wasn't exactly an option with the film cameras of the 1950s. I don't know how one would direct fox cubs, otters, or a lynx, but they either managed to do so or had a lot of patience to get the footage they wanted/needed.
Ceterum censeo Morbillivirum esse eradicandum.
Watched Abel Gance's La Roue from 1923, the last movie I had left to watch of the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die. I didn't manage to get hold of the recently-restored seven-hour version, so I watched the four-hour version. That might actually have been for the best, as the film kind of drags for the first hour or so. After that it picks up however, and it's a pretty good film, even if it can't compete with Gance's later epic Napoleon.
Ceterum censeo Morbillivirum esse eradicandum.
Frumpy and grumpy
- I recently rewatched The Heiress from the last time I saw which was about 4-5 years ago. I didn't really like the movie then, but this time around, I loved the movie and especially loved the ending.
- The Great Lie: Bette Davis and Mary Astor star in this melodrama where they're in a Love Triangle with the same man and Astor is going to have his baby. It was pretty good even if a tad bit melodramatic.
I like The Heiress more every time I watch it. Seems like I'm always catching a new nuance in Olivia de Havilland's performance.
Frumpy and grumpy
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Since the initial rewatch, I've watched it another few times and can't get enough of the performances.
Just watched It's a Wonderful Life. Probably one of the best films ever. I love how it's not just a piece of feel-good piffle — it's also a story about frustration, loss, and unrealized dreams. Also love the "Pottersville" part of the film, which abruptly changes to a Twilight Zone episode by way of a film noir.
Trimming the hedges, one trope at a time.
Frumpy and grumpy
- My Foolish Heart: A melodrama starring Susan Hayward and Dana Andrews based on a story by J.D. Salinger. He hated the adaption so much that none of his other works have ever gone on the screen. I liked the movie; pretty good melodrama with a strangely mature look (for a 1940s film) of relationships. I really liked the portrayal of the father/daughter relationship in this film.
- Broadway Bill: I had no idea this existed until I randomly stumbled upon it. And it's a Capra film with Myrna Loy!! It was pretty good. Warner Baxter wants to race horses and we follow his ordeal as he tries to raise money for his horse to win the big race.
- Enchantment: This had a surprisingly sad ending for a "woman's picture" of the era. David Niven and Theresa Wright are quasi-siblings (she was their father's ward, think Wuthering Heights), but they don't end up together even if they love each other. Their story is told in flashbacks with a modern story of a Canadian soldier and a American volunteer falling in love and hopefully not making the same mistakes as Niven and Wright.
Edited by LongTallShorty64 on Jan 3rd 2021 at 5:59:54 AM
"It's true that we had a gentleman's agreement, but unfortunately, I am no gentleman."
Watched the 1932 film Thirteen Women, which is by some accounts the Ur-Example of the Slasher Movie. Apart from that historical tidbit, it is a fairly unremarkable movie.
A woman named Ursula seeks to kill the former members of a sorority by sending them forged horoscopes foretelling doom and then using her hypnotic powers to make the predictions come true to break the spirits of the skeptics so that they too will be susceptible to the hypnosis. As a concept, it's not too shabby—although the implication that astrology is hogwash but hypnosis is real is a bit weird.
The execution doesn't really live up to the premise, however. For one thing, the acting is pretty mediocre all-around. For another, the pacing is really odd. The first half-hour or so is basically all set-up, and the movie is only 59 minutes long. As a result, the first two-thirds or so of the movie feel slow, and the remainder feels awfully rushed, the ending in particular. I gather that fourteen minutes were cut from the original version, which may have contributed to this, but I can't imagine a 73-minute runtime being enough to fix the pacing of this film.
And then there's the elephant in the room. Ursula, played by Myrna Loy, is "half-Hindu, half-Javanese". A white person being cast as an evil Asian character with supernatural powers comes off as all kinds of racist, and the way the other characters talk about Ursula doesn't exactly help matters. To the film's credit, she does get a Motive Rant right at the end where she explains that she has suffered abuse and been treated horribly by white people because of her heritage and that she wants revenge on the sorority for not letting her "cross the color line", but it was too little, too late for me.
Ceterum censeo Morbillivirum esse eradicandum.
Rewatched Psycho for the first time. It's been more than ten years since I watched it the first time if I'm not mistaken. I found it to be simultaneously way better and way worse than I remembered it to be. I think it's worth noting that even before watching the film the first time, I knew of both major twists. Spoilers ahead, but I'm guessing that anybody who frequents this thread has most likely already watched this film.
I'll start off with a few things I appreciated more this time. The score by Bernard Herrmann very effectively sets the mood from the very start, and I think it's a shame that discussions about it tend to focus solely on the shower scene, which I personally don't think is the musical highlight of the film (that would be the opening credits). The cinematography is also gorgeous—I have previously lamented the demise of Technicolor (the technology is obviously terribly obsolete, but the look could be replicated, dammit!), but black-and-white cinematography is also way underused in modern mainstream films, sadly.
The acting is great, especially by Anthony Perkins. The scene where Norman has an extended conversation with Marion ("A boy's best friend is his mother", "We all go a little mad sometimes") is peak Hitchcock and definitely the highlight of the movie. At first it seems like Norman is just awkward and doesn't know how to flirt, but it gradually becomes more and more obvious that something is seriously wrong. He comes off as both emotionally stunted and labile. I don't think I appreciated when I was younger just how creepy and threatening he comes across in this scene without being openly hostile (though briefly appalled and offended at Marion's suggestion that he put his mother in a mental institution)—from Marion's point of view, this man is highly unpredictable and could conceivably turn violent at the drop of a hat. I don't quite know how to describe the impression I get, the kind of person he reminds me of. I guess I could say that he seems the type who would be susceptible to being radicalized and recruited to a violent extremist cause—if it were revealed that he was part of a zealous cult like Jonestown of the Manson Family, that wouldn't seem out of place to me—but he also gives off a distinctive lone wolf vibe. At any rate, he's very unsettling but not overtly malicious, which I think adds to the feeling of unease as it makes it very difficult to tell if he's just a victim of his mother's abuse or himself complicit in something sinister.
In fact, I rather enjoyed the entire first half of the film quite a bit more this time; I think I was basically just waiting for the shower scene the first time I watched it. Now, even though I obviously know about the Halfway Plot Switch, I find myself invested in the story that's set up with Marion and the stolen money.
And then the shower scene happens. It's... okay. I expected to like it more than I did. Part of it is that Seinfeld Is Unfunny, I'm sure—and I'm guessing I would have been way more impressed if I hadn't known what was going to happen—but watching it now, it's a bit difficult not to be distracted by the fact that it looks a bit silly by today's standards. She looks way more concerned with obscuring her breasts with her arm than fighting off her attacker, and the knife is very obviously only hitting the air. The later instances of violence/struggles (the staircase murder, Norman knocking out Sam, and the climax in the fruit cellar when Sam disarms "Mother") all have the same issue of looking a bit silly nowadays.
After that comes the investigation part of the film, which is not quite as interesting as the first half of the film. This is at least in part because the private detective, Arbogast, is not particularly likeable. I tend to like Dramatic Irony as a way to build suspense, but for some reason it didn't quite do it for me here.
The biggest issue I have with the film is however the Twist Ending. It just gets sillier and sillier the more I think about it. Suffice it to say that there is quite a bit of Hollywood Psych going on here. I cant help imagining what the Gollum-style conversations between Norman and "Mother" that we hear would have looked like if the movie hadn't deliberately obscured what was really going on. It also doesn't help that Perkins looks absolutely ridiculous at the climax with his haphazard "Mother" outfit and gleeful smile—if he weren't also wielding a knife, he would mostly remind me of a child playing games.
This might bother me a bit more than perhaps it should because I think the decision to have Mrs. Bates be Dead All Along (as a sidenote, I had completely forgotten that we actually find out about that before the climax) makes the story less interesting rather than more—either Norman covering up his mother's crimes (which is of course what the movie leads us to believe) or Norman committing the crimes at his mother's behest would have made for a more interesting character study of Norman and his relationship to his mother, and thus a more interesting story in general.
All of this is to say that I still liked the film, but found the rewatch value surprisingly low—apart from the aforementioned scene with Norman and Marion, which is simply great. I'm not particularly keen on watching the movie a third time, but I might just rewatch that one scene over and over again.
Ceterum censeo Morbillivirum esse eradicandum.
Frumpy and grumpy
- Watch the newly registered Outrage by Ida Lupino. I think it was really good! It tackled the subject of rape (without every saying that word, of course) rather well (or at least better than I would've expected from a 1950s film).
- So Proudly We Hail: This film bears a lot of resemblance to Cry 'Havoc' being about American Nurses in the Philippines. It's a little more on the sentimental side than Cry Havoc but the same message of sacrifice and fear comes through. Great performances from its cast too.
- Children of Divorce: I've been trying to watch more silent films and decided to go with some from Clara Bow's filmography. This one also has a young Gary Cooper. I thought it was a bit too melodramatic for my tastes, but it was a decent enough tearjerker.
I had a similar reaction to Psycho. I, too, knew what the twists were going in (you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who didn't, by now), and I was more interested in the first part of the film than the second. When I first saw the film, while I knew about the twists I did not know about the bait-and-switch structure until Marion took her shower. One of the problems with the shower scene, though, is the fundamental problem with relying on shock or novelty to drive a scene, which is that it can only be shocking or novel once. I felt the second half of the film turned into an exercise of "don't go in the barn," which even though I think Psycho may have originated that particular trope, being the originator doesn't forestall the reactions of an audience already inured to the works you've influenced.
Perkins definitely excelled at being creepy. I thought the ridiculousness of Norman's "mother-suit" was intentional. He's an emotionally stunted individual; I think his actions are supposed to appear childish.
Rewatched Rear Window for the first time. My initial viewing was in my early teens, I think. I appreciated the film way more this time. As with Psycho, spoilers ahead.
Before watching the film the first time, I had already seen the "Rear Window" Homage episodes of That '70s Show and The Simpsons, which I suspect may have contributed to my not being particularly impressed by the film. In those shows, it all turns out to have been some kind of wacky misunderstanding, and I think I somehow expected it to be like that for this movie too. So I guess I wasn't in the right mindset when I watched it back then.
One thing that made me apprehensive at first upon rewatch is that the main character Jeff (played by James Stewart) is not particularly likeable. In fact, he's rather a miserable jerk. It's really a bit difficult to see what his kinda-girlfriend Lisa (played by Grace Kelly) sees in him, and I kept thinking that she deserved to be treated way better than she was by him. That is to say, he starts off being a miserable jerk—there is some character development over the course of the film and he ends up being... well, less of a miserable jerk, at any rate.
Now let's get into the things I really liked. The general concept is, of course, brilliant. Telling a story from a fixed vantage point that is physically separated from the place where the "action" happens is quite clever. It would have been very easy to tell the same story from an omniscient (so-to-speak) point of view where the viewer is privy to information that the characters are not, but keeping the camera inside Jeff's apartment and thus making the audience feel like they're in Jeff's shoes is what makes the film so special. I seem to recall this being the main draw for me the first time I watched it, but I guess I just wasn't blown away by it. That may have something to do with my being so focused on the mystery aspect that I didn't really pay attention to the subplots, which I must say I loved this time round. The neighbourhood really feels alive as a result of all the minor subplots with the other tenants, and there's also some stuff that happens in Jeff's apartment that is more-or-less unrelated to the main investigation, most notably his relationship with Lisa. I also quite liked several of the side characters, especially Jeff's nurse Stella with her snarky, morbid sense of humour.
My favourite moment comes towards the end of the film, and combines all of the things I liked brilliantly. It's the culmination of one of the subplots—one of the other residents is making preparations to commit suicide. The thing is, this happens at the same time as our heroes make their move to get some physical evidence to prove that the murder they suspect was committed actually occurred. As a result, they are so preoccupied with their investigation that they barely even notice that anything is amiss. This makes for quite a tense viewing experience as we watch the progression of suicide preparations (getting pills, writing a note, and so on), helpless to do anything, just hoping that they'll catch on and intervene to stop the suicide attempt in progress.
Of course, there are some things that date this movie quite a bit. In terms of visuals, there's the double Special Effect Failure towards the end with obvious Undercrank when people rush into the courtyard followed by poor Chroma Key when Jeff falls out the window. Those things don't really bother me, I just roll my eyes at them and move on. A far more interesting way the movie has aged (not necessarily poorly, but definitely noticeably) is in how social mores have changed since the 1950s; how people were expected to act was quite a bit different back then, and that is evident in the way some characters react to what the others do. Some things remain the same, of course—a married woman leaving her wedding ring at home when going on a trip was considered such an abnormal thing for her to do that it was used as evidence that something was amiss, and I reckon that would still be borderline unthinkable to most people today—but other things have changed. The main difference that springs to mind is that Lisa staying at Jeff's apartment would hardly be something anyone would raise an eyebrow nowadays, yet it is treated as positively scandalous by the characters in the movie.
All in all, I really liked the film. It feels kind of silly to recommend a film which is already very highly regarded, but considering that I didn't enjoy it as much as I probably should have the first time, I'll recommend that anybody who is on the fence about watching it or who watched it long ago and wasn't overly impressed should give it a shot.
Ceterum censeo Morbillivirum esse eradicandum.
Professional Moldy Fig/Curmudgeon
I just rewatched The Black Cat, the old 1934 Universal film, and rewatching it again I was kind of struck by how much it basically follows the plot of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Right down to the character archetypes - the American couple is Brad and Janet, Lugosi is Dr. Scott, Karloff is Frank-N-Furter... Of course, the details are different. But they actually end in the same basic way.
I don't doubt it was intentional. Rocky Horror, after all, was a tribute to old horror films - Richard O'Brien would have known it. But when it hits you, man, it hits you.
Edited by Aldo930 on May 8th 2021 at 5:10:31 AM
"They say I'm old fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast."
Rewatched the first few Eon James Bond movies: Dr. No (1962), From Russia with Love (1963), Goldfinger (1964), Thunderball (1965), and You Only Live Twice (1967)—and then kept going, but the later ones don't fall under the purview of this thread, so never mind. I watched them with my wife who had never watched any James Bond movies. We made a few observations. Spoilers and whatnot ahead.
First off, these movies are subject to massive amounts of Values Dissonance, particularly when it comes to how women are treated and... let's just call it racially and/or culturally insensitive stuff. Some of it may be attributed to Fair for Its Day, but it gets really uncomfortable watching our supposed hero straight-up raping women on two separate occasions.
Something I really liked was Ken Adam's sets (he made sets for all of these films except FRWL). I don't think I've ever really appreciated set design as an art form until rewatching these films now. The sets make the films so much more classy than they would have been without them. I especially like the use of oblique angles and moving parts of scenery.
Dr. No was made on a rather low budget, and it shows—apart from the aforementioned gorgeous sets by Ken Adam, where they truly got their money's worth and then some. I don't really mind the low-budget approach, since I prefer it when Bond is more of a spy and less of an action hero.
The title character works really well as an off-screen villain. Throughout the first half of the movie, we don't see him at all, but we do see that his underlings are absolutely terrified of him (and Bond remarks upon this). This peaks with his voice-only introduction, wherein he calmly talks to Professor Dent (who is clearly extremely intimidated by him) while demonstrating that he is in absolute control of the situation. The sense of menace is very real in this scene. Unfortunately, it deflates rather quickly later in the movie once he appears on screen (in Yellowface...) and trades some okay-ish banter with Bond. I guess the banter was meant to make them both come off as clever and cool, but it had rather the opposite effect on me, I'm afraid.
In general, I think it's fair to say that the second half of the movie—when they are at Dr. No's island Crab Key—sees a sharp increase in quality visually and an equally sharp decrease in quality in terms of substance. One clear example of this is the character of Honey Ryder, the original Bond girl proper (not counting the two women in minor roles that Bond sleeps with earlier in the film). Ursula Andress is undoubtedly attractive, but the character turns out to be completely superfluous to the plot as she doesn't actually do anything (besides getting rescued by Bond at the climax). The outdoors scenery at Crab Key is also a lot more interesting to look at than the rather dull roads and buildings in the first half of the movie. The second half of the movie is also where we get those beautiful, beautiful Ken Adam sets. The events that take place there don't always make a whole lot of sense, however. Dr. No drugs Bond and Ryder for no apparent reason other than to demonstrate that he can, Bond escapes his cell via an air ventilation duct which somehow also transports water in bursts, and the nuclear stuff is kind of silly. Dr. No has an open pool reactor which can be made to explode within minutes by simply adjusting a single setting in the control room (seems like a serious design flaw—no safeguards or failsafes, apparently), and the movie completely glosses over the consequences of a nuclear reactor—which apparently leaks enough radioactive material to contaminate a significant portion of the island—going kaboom. Nowadays, post-Chernobyl, nuclear reactors exploding is generally regarded as a pretty big deal.
From Russia with Love has the best plot by far. Bond is an inherently reactive character; his goal is always to foil the bad guys' plans. A consequence of this is that the quality of the plot more-or-less directly depends on how good the villain's plan is, writing-wise. It doesn't have to be this way, of course—it would be perfectly possible to write a story where the initiative is all on Bond's side by having his mission be all about assassinations, extractions, heists, sabotage, espionage, and/or disinformation—y'know, typical spy stuff. That's not really the "Bond formula" though, so we need a villain with a good plan.
And boy do we have one in Kronsteen. His is a fairly low-stakes plan, but a very clever one. The plan is to trick a Soviet consulate worker into thinking that the Kremlin wants her to fake her defection by helping the British steal a MacGuffin. Assuming the heist is successful, SPECTRE will then kill everyone involved (while making the killings seem like the result of an internal conflict), take the MacGuffin, and sell it back to the Soviets for a large sum of money. The brilliance lies in the fact that this plan requires minimal direct involvement from SPECTRE which means minimal risk for them. They simply set things in motion with some disinformation, keep an eye on things to make sure that there are no unforeseen complications, and swoop in at the end to collect the MacGuffin. Almost all of the dirty work is done by their enemies—who don't even know that SPECTRE is involved. I also quite like the touch that the villains have a clear division of responsibilities—Kronsteen comes up with the plan, but he has no direct involvement in its execution, or even indirect involvement such as overseeing it or handpicking the people to carry it out. The reason is of course that that's not where Kronsteen's strengths lie—he's a strategist, not an operative or a commander.
The person who does have the skills to carry the plan out is Red Grant. I really like Grant, he's a very effective antagonist. He consistently gets the better of Bond—for most of the film, Bond has no idea he even exists, and when they finally meet face-to-face, Grant has Bond completely fooled into thinking he is somebody else. He keeps SPECTRE's plan on track mostly by killing potential Spanners in the Works, and nobody on either side is any the wiser. Granted, he does have the advantage of the British and Soviets both being unaware that SPECTRE is involved in the first place, but the way he is able to put that advantage to good use without giving the game away is very impressive. He's a very credible threat—it seems plausible that he actually could best Bond in the end and succeed in his mission—not because he's superhumanly strong (though he is certainly a very capable fighter), but because he is ruthlessly intelligent. When there is finally a confrontation between Bond and Grant, one gets the impression that it really takes all of Bond's wits to gain the upper hand for even a second in order to get the opening he needs. I'm always very impressed when stories manage to make opposing sides both seem genuinely clever and intelligent to make for a good battle of wits; that's really difficult to write successfully.
There were some things that really bothered me with the writing, however. A big one is that MI6's plan for stealing the MacGuffin involves bombing the Soviet Consulate in Istanbul. I'll say that again: the British Secret Service decided to bomb a Soviet diplomatic mission in a NATO country! I can't help feeling there should have been some pretty serious geopolitical consequences—imagine if the KGB had bombed a British diplomatic mission.
I'm also not a big fan of the whole Krilencu subplot. It doesn't have any lasting impact on the rest of the story whatsoever—Krilencu is introduced, fails to kill the heroes, and is then killed having accomplished nothing—and could have been cut if not for the fact that the movie would've been too short. Looking back on it, it's pretty clear that this subplot—and the visit to the Romani camp in particular—exists solely to shoehorn in an action scene and some, uh, "exotic" fanservice. The term Orientalism seems applicable here.
Goldfinger is the film where the previously mentioned "Bond formula" really crystallized. We get a Batman Cold Open wherein Bond carries out a mission unrelated to the main plot before the title sequence, a title sequence with a theme song sung by a famous artist, a visit to Q's lab, Bond defeating the villain in a game (golf, in this case) in one of their first encounters, ridiculous Punny Names like "Oddjob" and "Pussy Galore", a villain with a rather over-the-top plan, and a fairly large-scale battle between the good guys and bad guys serving as the climax.
Goldfinger's plan is an interesting one. Rendering the US gold reserve unusable with the help of a nuclear bomb is an idea that demonstrates some serious lateral thinking. It's certainly way more creative than just stealing the gold. Of course, one suspects that a nuke going off at Fort Knox would have some side effects that would not exactly be in Goldfinger's best interest, such as throwing the US into mayhem and possibly kicking off World War III.
The reason Goldfinger's plan is not stealing the gold is that the filmmakers acknowledged something that's a pet peeve of mine in fiction: gold is really, really heavy—it is almost twenty times more dense than water, and a standard gold bar weighs 12.4 kg (27.4 lb). Stealing it all would obviously not be feasible. The movie does still mess this up at times, however. For instance, Bond handles the "gold" bars like the much-lighter props they obviously are.
Thunderball is most well known for including a bunch of underwater scenes. This means that a significant portion of the runtime relies purely on visual storytelling, with no dialogue. I rather enjoyed these scenes, though my wife felt they dragged at times. I particularly appreciate how easy the final underwater battle scene was to follow thanks to the different factions being clearly visually distinguishable at a glance, since they are colour coded—not making opposing sides in action scenes easily distinguishable at all times is a mistake I see way too many movies make.
The evil plan in this movie is fairly straightforward: SPECTRE steals two nukes from NATO and demands a ransom. The way they get their hands on the nukes is to Kill and Replace a NATO pilot and have the imposter disappear with the plane carrying the nukes during a training exercise. The Kill and Replace part happens at some kind of health clinic or whatever, and James Bond just so happens to be staying there at the same time, so naturally he stumbles onto some clues. This was something I didn't like at all, as the oh-so-convenient coincidence really strained my suspension of disbelief. I think it would have been better to do what From Russia with Love did, i.e. show the villains carry out the initial steps of their plan and then introduce Bond, presenting him with a fait accompli. This would have required only minor changes to the script.
This film also has the first real Femme Fatale in a Bond film: Fiona Volpe. I quite like this character, and I kind of wish she had had a bigger role in the film (the same thing can be said for Felix Leiter, who makes his third appearance in this film). She demonstrates repeatedly that she's more clever than the people around her. For instance, she has to explain to Largo that killing Bond—who doesn't have much of a lead at this point—would reveal to the British that he was on the right track (that was pretty much what happened when SPECTRE killed Strangways in Dr. No, after all). She really dominates every scene she's in, which is perhaps most obvious in her introductory scene when she puts both Angelo—the aforementioned imposter pilot—and her fellow SPECTRE agent Lippe in their place for acting foolishly. She even manages to get the better of Bond after he has figured out that she's working for SPECTRE (because of her SPECTRE ring); he falls right into her Honey Trap regardless, and when he turns his back on her, she pulls a gun on him.
One thing in particular that I appreciate about the Honey Trap scene is that it's very clear that Fiona Volpe enjoys having sex in this scene. This is the first proper depiction of female sexuality in these films. Note that I say proper depiction—while we have previously seen women wanting sex (with Bond), we haven't seen any women enjoying sex. Because let's face it: women lusting after Bond in these films is part of the male fantasy. The fact that she clearly enjoyed the sex makes it even better when she tells Bond that their having sex changes nothing—she's not going to perform a Sex–Face Turn.
You Only Live Twice suffers from what is frankly some rather sloppy writing. One gets the impression that both the good guys and the bad guys are rather bad at what they're doing. The film starts off with MI6 faking Bond's death. It's not quite clear why they chose to do this, as they put a front-page obituary (or report of his death, at any rate) with his name and picture in the newspapers before sending him on a mission where he wears no disguise. I suppose his enemies will stop actively searching for him if they think he's already dead, but anybody who was familiar with him by name now definitely knows what he looks like as well, so the risk of being recognized as a spy should be even higher than it was. If he's such a high-profile person that it's motivated to fake his death, it would make much more sense to either radically alter his appearance and give him a new identity or retire him as a field agent entirely, and perhaps give him a desk job.
Anyway, Bond arrives in Japan, and he has no leads whatsoever. He doesn't even know where to start looking, and neither does either of his two contacts (one British, one Japanese) in Japan. They are just completely in the dark. Until SPECTRE assassinates Bond's British contact in Japan, that is. The assassination provides the lead Bond and his Japanese contact Tanaka need, so Bond goes to SPECTRE's front in Japan: Osato Chemicals. He uses a fake name, but is still immediately pegged as a spy... but not as James Bond, which is very strange since we later find out that these people are familiar with him by name and saw the reports of his death in the newspapers. So they attempt to kill him—poorly—and fail at it repeatedly.
Bond then goes reconnoitering in an autogyro in the hopes of locating SPECTRE's base of operations, and finds absolutely nothing. However, SPECTRE again gives him a lead where he had none, this time by sending a team of helicopters to kill him, which they of course fail to do. The action scene is admittedly pretty good. Now that Bond has a rough idea of where the villains must be hiding, the next step of his plan—or more accurately, Tanaka's plan—is for Bond to go undercover as a Japanese fisherman. To this end, Bond gets a wig and makeup to look more Japanese... suffice it to say that he is still very obviously Sean Connery. SPECTRE must also have been completely unfooled by this disguise, because there is a failed attempt on his life that very same night. Apparently, Bond and Tanaka don't realize that this means that they have been compromised, and within a day or two there is a second attempt on Bond's life. Somehow, Bond still doesn't realize that his cover is blown, because he keeps the charade up which includes a sham marriage. At this point, it almost makes more sense to assume that the whole "you must become Japanese" thing is just a practical joke that Tanaka is playing on Bond, and that he wants to see how far he can take it. Whereas I really liked the writing in From Russia with Love with regards to how clever both the villains and the heroes were, the writing in this movie is kind of embarrassing.
Also, it needs must be said that the logistics of SPECTRE's operation are ludicrously implausible. Being able to create a hollowed-out volcano lair of that size with nobody noticing is far-fetched as it is, but it utterly pales in comparison to their space program. They have a reusable rocket capable of precision vertical landing which they use to perform a stealth orbital rendezvous with an unsuspecting spacecraft sufficiently precisely to enclose the enemy spacecraft inside their own, and this is done so quickly that by the time the other spacecraft realises what's going on, it's too late to do anything about it. Even today, that would be considered an extremely advanced space program (especially for a covert enterprise), and this was in 1967. It is of course heavily implied that SPECTRE is bankrolled by Red China for all of this, but China didn't even launch their first satellite into orbit until 1970.
As a bonus, we also watched the two "unofficial" (non-Eon) Bond films from this era: Casino Royale (1954) (which I made a page for) and Casino Royale (1967). The former is rather okay but mostly forgettable, and the latter is outright garbage, complete disjointed trash. Ceterum censeo Morbillivirum esse eradicandum.
Watched The Pink Panther (1963). There are a couple of rather good gags—the Closet Shuffle especially—but on the whole it was pretty middle-of-the-road. The sexual politics (especially as they relate alcohol being involved) date the movie more than a tad, however. I've heard that the sequel, A Shot in the Dark, is supposed to be better. I guess I'll have to watch that one next.
Ceterum censeo Morbillivirum esse eradicandum.
Am I a weirdo?
Having watched both, I have to agree that A Shot in the Dark is the better film. It's a more focused comedy with the farcical elements played up (and obviously more focused on Clouseau).
Bigotry will NEVER be welcome on TV Tropes.
Some critics have speculated that, from the way Fleming writes him, Bond has some serious problems with women.
So I watched A Shot in the Dark as well. It was fine, I guess. I don't really find Inspector Clouseau all that amusing. I don't know if either movie is significantly better than the other. I will say that I absolutely love the Technicolor look of both films, however.
I've only read one of the James Bond books—Live and Let Die—and that was so long ago that I barely remember a thing about it. In these first few films, however, Bond is an absolute scumbag. Ceterum censeo Morbillivirum esse eradicandum.
Unbeugsame Klinge
I watch The Sea Chase several days ago, a movie about John Wayne as the captain of a freighter ship who gets on the wrong side of the Royal Navy at the start of WWII. It's an okay movie, but it's two hours long when it could have been ninety minutes.
Nach jeder Ebbe kommt die Flut.
Frumpy and grumpy
Watched a couple of cool noirs:
- Pickup on South Street: This is very 1950s in that it has "RED HYSTERIA'' all over it. But I liked it! It was a good thriller and I always like the criminals with a heart-of-gold angle in classic noirs. Thelma Ritter also killed it.
- The Set-Up: A Robert Ryan film where he's a washed up boxer who is unknowingly set up by his manager to lose a fight to an up-and-comer. Pretty cool mise-en-scene and very noir.
- Odds Against Tomorrow: A late period noir about racism! And Robert Ryan is the badie, again! The film is a great crime thriller too where you know everything is gonna go badly.
- Caught: A mild gold digger marries a rich man who she tries to love. But the issue is that he wants her like a piece of property rather than a wife. So she runs away to work in a doctor's office where she falls in love with one of the doctors. This is a full on melodrama in noir style, but I also thought it was very well done and no surprise since it's a Max Ophuls.
I have very vague memories of Pickup on South Street (I looked up when it was I watched it, and it turns out it was back in 2016), but I remember really liking it despite thinking the Red Scare element was a bit over the top. I seem to recall thinking Richard Widmark was good in it, but I might be mixing it up with something else since I've liked him in other films (e.g. Panic in the Streets).
Rewatched Strangers on a Train for the first time. It's been over a decade since I watched it, and I only really remembered the climax with some vague memories of one or two other scenes (though I recognised a few additional scenes upon seeing them), which made for an interesting experience since I knew where the movie was heading but couldn't recall how it got there. I watched it with my wife and a couple of friends, none of whom had watched the film before. Anyway, spoilers ahead.
The setup—two strangers who each have someone they want dead swapping murders—is really interesting. I feel like it would probably have made for an even more interesting story if they had both been on board with it but not trusted each other, but what we got worked too. The two strangers in this case are main character Guy Haines—who is stuck in an unhappy marriage—and Bruno Anthony, who wants his father dead. Bruno suggests that he could kill Guy's wife and Guy could kill his father in return, which Guy laughs off.
After the setup we meet Guy's wife Miriam. She's been unfaithful and is pregnant with another man's child (or as my wife pointed out, so she says—she's not visibly pregnant so she could be lying about that part for all we know). So she's asked for a divorce, but Guy has said no. Since then he has however met another woman—Anne Morton, a senator's daughter—with whom he wants a fresh start, so he has changed his mind. But now Miriam is refusing to get a divorce, for no other apparent reason than to make Guy miserable, and she uses the pregnancy to keep him from leaving her without getting a divorce (because leaving his pregnant wife to be with another woman would be a terrible look and thus make him a persona non grata in respectable society). Guy has plenty of reason to want her dead to go out of this situation.
We later see Miriam go on what appears to be a date with two men at the same time, and I'm sure the intended audience reaction is "what a hussy" (indeed, one character later refers to her as a tramp), but I felt like that was really unnecessary. She's a mean-spirited, scheming adulteress. That's reason enough to find her extremely unsympathetic—that she also happens to be promiscuous doesn't factor into it (though the implication from this scene that her infidelity is an unabashed ongoing thing does kind of make it a bit worse, I guess).
It is during this polyamorous date that Miriam is murdered by Bruno. This took me a bit by surprise; we see him shadowing her, but for a number of reasons I figured he was just reconnoitring in order to prepare for his murder. One reason is that I had vague recollections of a house being broken into at night (which turned out to be a completely different scene). Another is that they are at a very public place—an amusement park—where there are lots of potential witnesses. The third and perhaps most important is that these kinds of murders need to be coordinated with one's partner in crime such that they can establish a solid alibi for the time of the murder, and we know that Bruno and Guy hadn't done so. Anyway, the shot of the murder by strangulation reflected in Miriam's glasses on the ground was a stroke of genius. And then Bruno does something very odd: he takes Miriam's glasses with him when he leaves. The glasses are of course an incredibly incriminating piece of evidence and it didn't really make sense to me that he would take them. I consequently expected them to be important in this way later in the film, but it didn't really pay off like that.
Another important thing about this kind of murder is that pulling it off successfully hinges on there being nothing to connect the two parties. Contact should therefore be kept to a minimum, lest somebody figure out that they are working together. Bruno doesn't abide by this, he keeps contacting Guy trying to get him to kill Bruno's father to "return the favour", as it were. As a part of this, he provides Guy with a house key, a hand-drawn map of where in the house his father's room is, and a gun. Now because he didn't let Guy know when he was going to kill Miriam, Guy doesn't have a bullet-proof alibi and is therefore the main suspect seeing as he had a pretty clear motive. Accordingly, the police are keeping tabs on Guy, waiting for him to slip up (they of course have no real evidence that he did it, either). This means that Guy couldn't very well kill Bruno's father even if he wanted to, because the risk of getting caught would be very high since the police are already onto him (or so they think, anyway) and then they would both be screwed. It also means that staying in touch is quite risky since the already-suspicious police could catch on to the conspiracy. I was a bit disappointed that Guy didn't just tell Bruno this: they would have to wait until the investigation has cooled off before Guy could kill Bruno's father, and until then further contact would just mean additional risk of getting caught. If nothing else, this would buy Guy some time.
But Bruno doesn't back off, and eventually he inserts himself into the Mortons' social circle in order to force Guy's hand. This gives the audience more opportunity to glimpse a few insights into Bruno's character, as we get to see how he interacts with high society. He's a bit of a sycophant, is the word I suppose one would use. The most interesting bit is when he tells Senator Morton some absolute nonsense about "harnessing life force" ("It'll make atomic power look like the horse and buggy") which leaves the senator rather bemused. It's possible to interpret this as Bruno being profoundly full of shit and doing it for his own amusement, but I'm more inclined to interpret it as him actually believing what he says and being utterly delusional (which would fit nicely with the rest of what we know about him). He then goes on to talk to some other people, including discussing murder methods with a couple of older ladies, and because of his mental instability ends up causing a scene which results in Anne figuring out enough of what is going on for Guy to have to tell her all of it.
Guy eventually relents and tells Bruno that he'll kill his father for him. He doesn't intend to do so, but he says he will. So he slips past the police and goes to Bruno's family's house in the middle of the night to warn Bruno's father. It turns out that Bruno had figured out that Guy wasn't sincere about it, so Guy finds Bruno waiting for him—his father isn't even at home. Guy tells Bruno that he's never going to kill his father for him, returning the key and gun, and Bruno vows to get back at him. We noticed something I found to be quite interesting here: we heard Bruno disparaging guns as a murder method due to the noise when discussing with the ladies at the party, and he outright says that he won't shoot Guy as he leaves because "it might disturb mother". What's more, they have a rather large dog (a Great Dane, from what I can gather) in the house. And still, Bruno sent Guy a gun to kill his father with. Bruno says he got suspicious when Guy said he would kill his father the same night, which was after Bruno had already sent the gun. What this all adds up to is that Bruno never intended for Guy to get away with killing his father, he planned for him to get caught. It was always a set-up.
Bruno decides to plant some evidence at the scene of Miriam's murder to implicate Guy, which Guy catches on to. So we get a race against time as Guy has to get to the amusement park and stop Bruno while evading the police, and this is where we get the climax. The police arrive and accidentally shoot the merry-go-round operator dead (!), sending it out of control while Bruno and Guy fight over Guy's signature lighter which Bruno got off him when they first met. Eventually, Bruno is killed and Guy's name is cleared.
I thought it was interesting that neither the main characters nor the police really succeed in doing anything to help solve the situation—if anything, they just make it worse. In the end, resolving it all comes down to a couple of random bystanders—the guy who recognizes Bruno as the killer and the old man who stops the runaway merry-go-round (though the latter seems to cause about as much mayhem as it prevents).
On the whole, I thought the film was okay. As I said I liked the set-up, but I didn't particularly like how the plot unfolded There were definitely more interesting directions the story could have taken. The suspense is fairly middle-of-the-road for Hitchcock—it's certainly not bad, but it's nothing spectacular either. As for characters, most of them are pretty dull and uninteresting, including main character Guy Haines. When it comes to Bruno, the most I can say is that trying to get a grip on his psychological profile (to figure out what his deal is, so to speak) is interesting—his motives and actions aren't really. The only other character I really enjoyed watching was Anne's sister Barbara—a True Crime enthusiast avant la lettre—and that's more because she's amusing than interesting. The music wasn't memorable to me (it certainly doesn't compare to Psycho). Visually, it has its moments, though they are relatively few. I've already mentioned Miriam's murder, but there is one more instance of really effective visual storytelling. It's during a tennis game: we see a shot of the onlookers, and they are are of course looking back and forth to follow the game—all except Bruno that is, whose gaze is fixed on Guy. Chilling.
Ceterum censeo Morbillivirum esse eradicandum.
I watched Grand Hotel which I liked a lot. I admit that I'm never a huge fan of Greta Garbo's talkies (except Ninotchka), but even though she's over the top here, I still liked her.
Everyone else was at the top of their game. I really liked Joan Crawford in this film, too. It's also kind of funny (ironic?) that Lionel Barrymore is the drunk guy in this scenario while acting alongside John Barrymore. They had surprisingly good chemistry, too, which, come to think of it, I can't think of acting siblings that a) star in a movie together, and b) actually have good chemistry (I can only fantasize about a Olivia Dehavilland movie which also stars Joan Fontaine).
And, the dachshund, the dachshund was great!
"It's true that we had a gentleman's agreement, but unfortunately, I am no gentleman."