Yep, Red-Headed Woman is pretty fantastic. Harlow slutting it up everywhere, Harlow going topless (it's a Freeze-Frame Bonus but it totally happens), Harlow getting away clean with everything. And then there's how Harlow, uh, gets turned on by being hit in the face.
Which makes a neat segue to the film I'd like to talk about today. We've talked about The Pre Code Era at length on this forum. What's the sleaziest film made before the Code? Well it might be Call Her Savage in which Clara Bow forgoes a bra, cavorts with a Great Dane, and goes hooking to feed her baby. Might be Baby Face in which Barbara Stanwyck literally sleeps her way to the top. Might be Red-Headed Woman.
But I think it's actually a film that I just watched and am about to make a work page for called Smarty. This is a Joan Blondell vehicle that has Blondell in lingerie and revealing dresses from start to finish. It has lines like "You make me impotent—with rage" and "What an interesting lot of things one would see if ceilings were made of glass". But the main theme of the movie is how, um, men should hit their wives to keep them in line. It actually has lines like
"A good sock in the eye is something every woman needs at least once in her life."
and
"If he'd really loved me, he'd have hit me long ago."
Blondell's character is a pretty transparent masochist who wants Warren William to dominate her and divorces him because he isn't sufficiently dominant. The Happy Ending comes when William, who has finally gotten in touch with his inner caveman, literally rips her dress off (leaving her in a negligee), slaps her across the face (provoking a look of orgasmic glee), and tells her that if she ever gives him any lip again he'll knock her into next week. Then he throws her onto the couch, she gives him bedroom eyes, and the last line of the movie is
"Tony, hit me again."
Someone asked about Heimatfilme...here is the long explanation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heimatfilm
In short, those are movies set somewhere in the countryside, with a mixture of soap opera and fairy tale elements thrown in. Usually they are about lovers who come together eventually and peppered with a lot of shots of mountains and wood. Kind of like Sound of Music, but without the singing, unless it's folk music, naturally. They are basically Kitsch in movie format (and largely unwatchable, unless you really love landscapes).
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I actually kind of want to see this one now.
The filmed equivalent of a Heino album, then? (With maybe some shots of people in lederhosen slapping each other?)
The Sound Of Music would indeed probably be an apt comparison to these. (Funnily enough, the German-speaking world was the only place in the world where it flopped...)
Either that or the Lawrence Welk show. Or even any filmed version of Heidi.
edited 21st Mar '16 2:48:54 PM by Aldo930
"They say I'm old fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast.""I actually kind of want to see this one now."
I have to admit, it was so horribly, horribly wrong that I enjoyed it. Here's a review at precode.com.
@Aldo Yeah, Lederhosen turn up once in a while, if they happen to be the proper local gear, but they are not mandatory.
I have a pretty good idea why Sound of Music flopped in Germany. For starters, it is a piss pour portrayal of the time and the place it is supposed to set in. But above all, Heimatfilme were for the Germans back then an escape, a way to forget the destruction surrounding them and what lead to it. The last thing they wanted was said reality turning up in one.
I'd heard it was because the Germans objected to the whole Nazi thing, but apparently the German version ends the story before the Nazis even show up. I guess we may never know.
I always find it interesting to learn about foreign film movements you never hear about in America. Even if they're the corniest thing on this Earth.
"They say I'm old fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast."It's really fascinating, and I guess depressing, how Germany in the 20s was the place for interesting, provocative films, and then the Nazis came in, sending all the writers and filmmakers to America, and basically killing German filmmaking.
I suppose it does make sense that people, after the devastation of war, wanted their films to be light and full of simple solutions, and it seems that the Heimatfilme movement lasted for a long time to fulfill that need.
edited 22nd Mar '16 8:21:11 AM by LongTallShorty64
"It's true that we had a gentleman's agreement, but unfortunately, I am no gentleman."There were a lot of light films, musicals and such, before the Nazis came to power and well through the war years. Even The Blue Angel is partly a musical - they didn't have Marlene Dietrich in there for nothing, after all.
I can't recall where I read this, but a lot of UFA's pre-war successes were remade in the 50s - never being half as good as the original, of course.
edited 22nd Mar '16 7:04:57 AM by Aldo930
"They say I'm old fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast."Which is why the New German Cinema movement
had to happen in the 60's and throughout the following two decades - it was a 'fuck you' to Germany's then recent past and the cultural stagnation that had ensued after the war.
Something similar happened with music in the 70's as well (what the Anglo press calls 'Krautrock'), even if the music sought (successfully, I might add) to distance itself from the Anglo-American music (while some New German movies looked to the British New Wave and Hollywood).
edited 22nd Mar '16 8:14:28 AM by Quag15
I wonder about the German cinema. There seem to be more movies made than it used to. Nothing which would get international acclaim (unless it involves Hitler), but a wide variety of different movies dealing with German themes...from the problems on out schools to the life of Pina Bausch. (Pina is btw one of the best use of 3D I have ever seen).
I have to admit I find Nazi cinema fascinating. It was just so goddamn weird. It wasn't any good, as Leni Riefenstahl was just about the only person of any talent left in Germany and she only made one fictional narrative (Tiefland, which I haven't seen). But it was very weird. I haven't seen very many. The Nazi Titanic is bizarre. TCM ran the 1943 Munchausen several years ago. Douglas Sirk worked in Germany until 1937; I found La Habanera available on You Tube just the other day but I didn't watch it.
Triumph of the Will, of course, inspired the medal ceremony at the end of Star Wars.
One of the most interesting pictures made under the Nazis was Kolberg, which Goebbels intended to be Germany's answer to Gone With The Wind and may have inadvertently helped the Allied war effort.
"They say I'm old fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast."
Oh yes, Goebbels was pulling soldiers off the front in freaking 1945 as the Red Army was on its way in order to make his movie. That one was available on You Tube as well but didn't have English subtitles.
Man, a lot of people got out of Germany. Folks like Lubitsch and Murnau and Dietrich and Karl Freund had come to Hollywood before the Nazis. Fritz Lang and Billy Wilder got out in 1933. Lang told a BS story about leaving in a hurry after Goebbels offered to make him head of the German film industry.
Not only that... while people were starving in the cities Goebbels had detained boxcars full of salt to serve as snow for the film. When the German army was running out of ammunition, all the factories were turning out blanks for the film. The whole story is in the Medved Brothers' Hollywood Hall of Shame.
"They say I'm old fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast."![]()
Well, the movie scene belonged to the art scene in Germany, which not only had a lot of Jewish members, but also had a tendency towards communist ideas. Those who went early had the right idea. Some of the others weren't so lucky. At best they were living under eagle eyes of the regime. Heinz Rühmann for example was forced to divorce his Jewish wife (in exchange he got protection for her) and spend the war time making "feel good" movies - those kind of movies which were not necessarily propaganda, but helped to distract the population by being non-critical and funny. And he was one of the lucky ones.
edited 22nd Mar '16 9:50:07 AM by Swanpride
I've wanted to see Kolburg for years, ever since I saw a clip on it in, I think, an episode of the documentary series, "The World At War". Apart from it's hideous origins, is it any good as a movie in terms of plot, acting, script and so on? I've a sort of soft spot for any depiction of a fight against that arrogant Corsican artillerist whose name I will not mention, but the Nazis are worse so...
It isn't. It really isn't.
If you "like" it, though, don't forget Scipio Africanus, Mussolini's attempt at revitalizing the Italian film industry, which has such precise attention to detail that telephone poles are visible in the background and you can clearly see people wearing watches under their togas!
"They say I'm old fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast."Recently I watched two classic films:
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington - I admit, I expected this movie to be funny, but it ended up becoming far more serious and political. It actually was pretty relevant too, because there has been a major filibuster in my country's congress over a law.
Yojimbo - Yeah, it was surprising how Western this movie felt. I watched first 30 minutes of A Fistful of Dollars and the similarities was very clear.
edited 23rd Mar '16 1:06:50 PM by dRoy
Continuously reading, studying, and (hopefully) growing.

Just watched Red-Headed Woman which was just a pile of sleaze—-and I loved it!
"It's true that we had a gentleman's agreement, but unfortunately, I am no gentleman."