King Vidor and George Cukor didn't find their directorial careers terminated because of their inability to stick to a budget or a shooting schedule or to hand in a cut of realistic theatrical length. John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock—it was possible to make art within the studio system. Von Stroheim couldn't do it because he couldn't color within the lines. And it was a goddamn shame because he was a master.
I know this isn't the most popular opinion but it's always seemed to me that he wasn't a victim of Irving Thalberg so much as he was a victim of his own lack of discipline.
And for that matter I've seen Greed and it is a freaking masterpiece at 140 minutes or however long it is. I didn't watch that film and think "Goodness, I wish this was five hours long."
The funny thing is that the film scholar Bill Krohn investigated Hitchcock's productions over the years and he found out that the majority of his films went overschedule and overbudget mostly because Hitchcock liked to shoot-in-sequence going against standard procedure. Hitchcock avoided it because he wasn't advertising himself as an artist the way Stroheim (and his disciple Sternberg) was and Hitchcock was quite conscious promoting a certain myth about how in-control he was of his own productions, likewise he had stars and cultivated good relations with them and his movies made money, so he pretty much had his insurance there.
Stroheim was definitely a difficult taskmaster and he had poor social skills, and I guess we should be grateful for the films we have, but I cannot side with Thalberg or anybody else against him because it's not like Stroheim wrote another script for them to say yes too only to be surprised with the content. They all knew they were signing up for naturalistic, raw movies about class, sex, money and power. Stroheim was immensely influential of course, on Vidor, Sternberg, Hitchcock, Lubitsch (up to a point), Max Ophuls, Douglas Sirk, Jean Renoir and Orson Welles (that scene of Susan's close-up after she commits suicide with her face looking raw and puffy is pure Stroheim).
And again Stroheim came in the 1910s, at that time what he was doing wasn't excessive because D. W. Griffith was like that. You had multi-part silent films and Greed was to be released in 2 parts (which was denied) as was The Wedding March (which was allowed). Diptychs were also common in Weimar Cinema (which is not hollywood granted but thanks to the international silent film nature, it played in the same fashion stateside).
edited 6th Aug '16 8:15:48 AM by JulianLapostat
Never seen any Laurel and Hardy. Where's the place to begin and what makes them different from Lou and Costello?
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I'm also a Harold Lloyd fan. I think he's underrated compared to his peers.
edited 6th Aug '16 11:15:12 AM by LongTallShorty64
"It's true that we had a gentleman's agreement, but unfortunately, I am no gentleman."Start with Sons Of The Desert or maybe one of their shorter films - Beau Hunks, say.
It's a very different type of comedy than Abbott and Costello.
"They say I'm old fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast."Laurel and Hardy were actually funny. They'd done hundreds of comedy films between them as separate entities before they paired up for their first team-up movie, so they were experienced on-screen comic actors. They were both masters of comic timing, with Stan Laurel usually being the slapstick guy and Oliver Hardy being the straight man, but this wasn't a universal pattern.
And for all the time he spent being the ditz on-screen, Stan Laurel wrote and pretty much directed most of the duo's work.
edit
Here's the duo's wikipedia page as a bit of a primer on them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurel_and_Hardy
edited 6th Aug '16 1:09:02 PM by TamH70
I think it has to be with the chemistry, timing, and performance of the two in the bit performing it. If you don't have the first and the latter down, in my opinion, then the piece just falls flat on its proverbial ass. Hilariously, ironically, exemplified by stick-in-the-mud Skinner and hotheaded Chalmers' botched attempt during a bit at a PTA fundraiser.
(Even though the movie is past the cutoff date of the thread, but the director isn't) When I looked on the back of the Superman II box I just got, I found myself surprised (yet again) at the fact that just fourteen years earlier from that film's release date, Richard Lester directed A Hard Day's Night. Dude's got talent.
Speaking of L&H, I just made a work page for Way Out West.
Also made a creator page for Mickey Rooney the other day. I had no idea his personal life was that dysfunctional.
edited 7th Aug '16 12:51:45 PM by jamespolk
Made a work page for The Country Girl. Grace Kelly won an Oscar for some serious Large Ham.
Overall, I'd agree that The Country Girl hasn't aged well and is very very Oscar Bait-y...but Bing Crosby is pretty amazing as a jittery alcoholic. Playing Against Type, indeed.
I always like when actors play against type especially of the song and dance variety. There's a movie called Black Hand where Gene Kelly plays some sort of hoodlum.
Did Fred Astaire do any gritty roles? For some reason, I have a feeling he didn't.
"It's true that we had a gentleman's agreement, but unfortunately, I am no gentleman."Yeah, Murder, My Sweet.
"It's true that we had a gentleman's agreement, but unfortunately, I am no gentleman."

Laurel and Hardy fan here, though I also love Harold Lloyd. That man was a master of stuntwork and physical comedy. All three men's work used to be shown in heavy rotation in anthology clip shows on the BBC for years.