Calling all Classic Film Lovers!

Just wanted to say thanks for the suggestions.

Now, I think it is an undisputed fact that when the Marx Brothers moved to MGM the quality of their films got worse and worse.

The exception, of course, is this sequence, one of the best musical numbers from any of their movies:

It's certainly the catchiest I've heard from their movies.

@1001 - No worries. I hope you found something that you enjoyed in that lot. Or will, if you've not seen any yet.

Guys, I tried watching My Fair Lady, and I couldn't do it. I hated every second of it. Hepburn sounds beyond silly, the musical numbers feel bloated—-hell, the whole movie is—-, and I was bored to tears. The 1938 version is superior: Leslie Howard hams it up superbly and shows some human emotion near the end (I think he's a good actor), Wendy Hiller is hilarious and plays the role with grace and humanity (whereas Hepburn feels like a gross caricature), and I like the fact that it was set in the "present" times (1930s) instead of the Edwardian era. I have a love/hate relationship with musicals, and this is one of the reasons I dislike them, especially the ones from the 60s: overblown, bloated, and too much going on. I like my movies to be smaller.

On the other hand, I watched Bells Are Ringing which was a musical that was completely delightful. Judy Holliday never fails to charm. The musical numbers served the plot, they were surprisingly catchy, and I just loved it. Musicals: a rich tapestry.

Bells Are Ringing is one of my favorites too...Judy's first and only film in colour. The fact that she died a few years later hits me more than Rebel Without a Cause which also gains strength from the fact that the main cast died in all kind of sticky ways too.

Mostly, because Judy's film is about life, about loneliness, about problems and dealing with them with good cheer. It's one of the few musicals that deal with adults. It's about people living and working alone in a big city. Musicals in general are very community focused, hence the presence of family, friends and ensemble cast.

You know Vincente Minnelli was originally going to direct My Fair Lady.

You and me both.

I admit I have a soft spot for movie musicals of the late 20s and early 30s, which often aren't much but have pretty good songs.

30s musicals are pretty diverse compared to later. Like in the 30s you have Busby Berkeley numbers which are basically backstage dramas about Working-Class Hero stagehands and Starving Artist, they are actually quite realistic and the finale have these surreal musical numbers and formations, and those musical numbers are tonally rich, like I don't think you could get "Remember My Forgotten Man" in the 40s and 50s, you know song and dance about the downtrodden and forgotten.

But in the same decade you had Ernst Lubitsch whose musicals were essentially adult sex comedies. And then you had Astaire-Rogers which honestly I don't care for even if I generally prefer Astaire to Gene Kelly.

The musicals of the 40s and 50s are more generic...I mean there are great movies of course but they kind of all look the same and have the same kind of stories and narrative.

I'm surprised with how much more real 30s musicals feel, because of what you mentioned. They deal with the people behind the scenes, and how hard it is to put on a show. My musical watching also led me to Footlight Parade which dealt with exactly that, and had the usual backstage drama/romance and the final "the show went well" finish. I suppose it helps that these films were WB films who had their gritty, down-to-earth house style. Compare this with, let's say On the Town or an An American in Paris which is a lot of dancing (great dancing), and not much else. They're also MGM movies (I'm fairly certain), and are more glitzy in their approach.

I'm glad someone else feels the same way.

I also wanted to add that yes, Bells Are Ringing is great for all those reasons you mentioned, and only Judy could make it so funny and yet so heartfelt. It's so sad she died so young.

edited 16th Jun '16 9:29:54 AM by LongTallShorty64

My favorte part of Footlight Parade is the setup before the Shanghai Lil number. Backstage tussle between actor and director and we have reaction shots of shocked Oh, Crap! expressions from all around, and then you have a close-up of a hand saying "start the music" and just by seeing that we know it was Cagney the director. It's an incredible magic moment, and of course it's one of the few times Cagney shows his song-and-dance skills. I would say that the musicals of the 30s are less idealized, fantastic and pretentious. It was about, "Okay bub, we're going to sing and dance for a bit, if you have a problem, you can go see the other 60 movies playing in the theatre today" whereas the musicals in later decades were glossy, technicolor event pictures.

On the Town was shot on location in the real New York City, so it was pretty daring for the time, especially shooting on location with three-strip technicolor (i.e pure insanity). I actually think On the Town has an edge...you know these sailors on shore leave frolicking with these girls on the furlough and the end they're back on the ship, and three other sailors step down singing the song. The implications is that these relationships won't last...that the girls might move on, and the same kind of story will happen with another group of sailors. And Singin' in the Rain while a little dated I think (the misogyny with the Lina Lamont character mainly), also has that opening "Dignity...always dignity".

I also think The Pirate by Vincente Minnelli is a lot of fun. And Meet Me in St. Louis is great, although the best sequence there (the halloween one with Margaret O'Brien) is not musical. The Band Wagon is all about that, you know the 30s are over and it has a lot of nostalgia for the pre-war era, it's all about how Broadway has changed, you need to have fancy pretentious productions to compete with the movies (truer today than back then), and the final number this spoof of Film Noir in colour (which has lighting that is sexy enough to be Film Noir) that inspired Michael Jackson and looks ahead to High Concept musicals a la Sondheim.

But I think the richest and best musical is Groucho Marx's favorite movie, one he repeatedly showed his friends in private screenings, It's Always Fair Weather, it's basically Three Musketeers in post-war America and it's a sad movie about the end of friendships.

My favorite part of Footlight Parade is all the half-naked women. Good Lord.

Read that Olivia de Havilland article linked to on the prior page and I would not have guessed that a 100-year-old woman could be so annoying and insufferable.

"Nonetheless, she had seen up close and personal how cruel Hollywood could be."

What is that talking about? It's talking about her losing Best Supporting Actress to Hattie McDaniel. And the whole article poses her departure from Hollywood as some sort of principled rejection of Tinseltown. IIRC she kind of tanked her own career when she took a three-year movie hiatus, right at the peak of that career when she was still only 33 years old, to star in Broadway plays.

Anyway, I wouldn't have guess that a profile of a woman turning 100 could have been so irritating.

By the way, it's pretty great we've gotten this thread past 1000 posts with good discussion. Our discussion of all movies made before 1967 is now only 775 posts shy of that "Suicide Squad" movie that isn't even out yet! (But really, good job to all with the good discussions we've kept going.)

I always preferred Joan Fontaine to Olivia. Joan was in Suspicion, Rebecca, Letter from an Unknown Woman and in Lang's Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, she seemed to appear in better movies to me. And she also appeared in Ida Lupino's The Bigamist which was to be a case of Doing It for the Art since she respected Lupino for trying to break the glass ceiling for women directors. And she's also good in "From this Day Forward" a movie directed by HUAC-victim John Berry dealing with women in workplace.

De Havilland is great in The Heiress and The Strawberry Blonde'' and a few other movies, but she's one of those cases, where I can't really quite get why she was such a great star. I mean Katharine Hepburn, I saw Sylvia Scarlett and I could sense she was larger than life, same with Dietrich, Garbo and of course Ingrid Bergman, or Vivien Leigh who I always felt never appeared in enough movies to really do justice to her great talent.

edited 17th Jun '16 6:53:55 AM by JulianLapostat

Ha, I would have called out Katharine Hepburn as one of those actresses whose appeal I never really understood.

I think I'd take Olivia over Joan but I liked them both. I've never been a fan of Gone with the Wind but I think Olivia probably did deserve that statuette for taking the character of Melanie, who was incredibly flat and boring in Mitchell's terrible novel, and making her a fully rounded and interesting person in the film.

Also liked de Havilland in The Snake Pit. And Hold Back the Dawn which I guess TCM doesn't have the rights to. Although if I had to pick my favorite de Havilland performance it would be in Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte.

Something cool I came across recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUbt0sweIjI

This is a BBC documentary about a failed attempt to do I Claudius in 1937, the prodicution was cancelled when Merle Oberon, leading lady and wife of Alexander Korda (producer) had a serious injury via car accident. It stared Charles Laughton and it was directed by Josef von Sternberg, probably the last chance he ever had at a major production.

It's kind of interesting, the surviving footage shown there, and it's a cool glimpse of the behind-the-scenes process...and man that scene with Laughton's speech at the end is incredible, A real tragedy I think.

Quite a long time ago I got a DVD set of the I, Claudius BBC series. That doc was the only special feature. It certainly is one of the great Hollywood what-ifs.

Great Hollywood What-Ifs for me are:

1) Stroheim's 6 Hour 2-part Diptych of Greed.

2) Welles' original The Magnificent Ambersons.

3) George Cukor's A Star Is Born original version.

4) King Vidor's full An American Romance.

5) Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes

Internationally, I would add, among others, the never-completed third part of Ivan the Terrible.

The one problem with Footlight Parade was the lack of Ginger Rogers. Did she just not get cast for this one?

edited 17th Jun '16 2:08:40 PM by LongTallShorty64

I like how shamelesly silly the plots to all those musicals were. Footlight Parade has all those gargantuan musical numbers being staged as, uh, warm-ups for movies. OK then.

Yeah, I was wondering if that was an actual thing... Whatever. The silly plots are fun. I also like Joan Blondell and Cagney together. Saw them in another pre-code which was not great, but not horrible, called Blonde Crazy. It includes a young Ray Milland.

It's funny, but going back and reading PG Wodehouse, who wrote for stage musicals among many other things, you discover that musical theater has been using the same plots for a VERY long time. He loved musical theater, but also enjoyed poking fun at how very similar a lot of musicals were.

It's like if you become familiar at all with the Golden Age of Radio, you discover just how much TV writing borrowed from it, for a VERY long time. You only thought the tropes were old; turns out they're even older than you thought...

Finally got around to watching Black Narcissus (which has been discussed previously on this thread). It wasn't at all as risqué as I thought it would be. Perhaps my expectations were off, or perhaps I'm just not receptive enough to it.

Whatever else you think about the movie, it is is absolutely gorgeous. I wish Technicolor would make a major comeback, but oh well...

edited 21st Jun '16 1:21:59 PM by TompaDompa

Here's an interesting film that fits within the timeframe of this thread: 1963's The Sadist, a seemingly cheap exploitation film designed to mooch off the Charles Starkweather killings.

But what makes it different is that it is actually really, really good, and contains a great performance as the titular psychotic killer by none other than Arch Hall, Jr.

Maybe he should have stuck to playing psychotic killers instead of would-be teen heartthrobs?

Technicolor refers to two things. The original three-strip and the dye transfer process. The three-strip technicolor look made cameras big and unwieldy. It needed a lot of lights so it was fairly expensive. The three-strip technicolor ended by the early 50s at which point you had colour film stock of various kinds in different studios. Trucolor for Republic, as can be seen in Johnny Guitar, Eastmancolor (East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause), Warnercolor (some Vincente Minnelli movies, especially Lust For Life).

The dye transfer process though continued to function and it lasted in America till the 70s (The Godfather Part II is the last American film to use this process). A subsidiary in China continued to use it till the 80s, so you have a lot of gorgeous Chinese films from the late 80s that are the last technicolor films.

Well, Deborah Kerr doesn't get naked or anything (more's the pity). Everything is relative. As a product of its era, it is a pretty amazing examination of female sexuality and female sexual desire. And in fact it does look gorgeous in Technicolor.

Speaking of Technicolor, it's worth noting that even before the applications mentioned above, there was two-strip Technicolor, which dates to the silent film era. It was commonly used for a Splash of Color effect as it was even more expensive and cumbersome than later innovations, as can be seen in the costume ball sequence of the Lon Chaney Phantom of the Opera, but was used for at least two feature films, including The Black Pirate with Douglas Fairbanks.