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LongTallShorty64 Frumpy and grumpy Since: Apr, 2015 Relationship Status: What is this thing you call love?
Frumpy and grumpy
#1201: Aug 9th 2016 at 10:33:30 AM

Made a page for pre-code Blonde Crazy, starring James Cagney and Joan Blondell.

"It's true that we had a gentleman's agreement, but unfortunately, I am no gentleman."
Aldo930 Professional Moldy Fig/Curmudgeon from Quahog, R.I. Since: Aug, 2013
Professional Moldy Fig/Curmudgeon
#1202: Aug 9th 2016 at 10:45:02 AM

Speaking of James Cagney, anyone ever seen One, Two, Three? Billy Wilder directed it, and I hear tell it's pretty funny.

"They say I'm old fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast."
JulianLapostat Since: Feb, 2014
#1203: Aug 9th 2016 at 10:50:34 AM

It's a movie unlike another, with James Cagney Unbound and at his most Cagney-esque. But Wilder's best late movie is The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (also best holmes movie).

It's super-hilarious and would be a good balance with Ninotchka (written by Wilder).

edited 9th Aug '16 10:51:08 AM by JulianLapostat

LongTallShorty64 Frumpy and grumpy Since: Apr, 2015 Relationship Status: What is this thing you call love?
Frumpy and grumpy
#1204: Aug 9th 2016 at 11:30:29 AM

Just watched my first Laurel & Hardy short, Big Business. I liked it a lot, but was really excited to see that it was directed by Leo McCarey and has George Stevens as the cameraman!

"It's true that we had a gentleman's agreement, but unfortunately, I am no gentleman."
JulianLapostat Since: Feb, 2014
#1205: Aug 9th 2016 at 12:16:41 PM

Leo Mccarey is a really underrated film-maker. The man who invented Cary Grant, who built his persona. He started out doing shorts for Laurel and Hardy, worked with Harold Lloyd on his sound film, shot Duck Soup and then became the least prolific major film-maker of his age. But Ruggles Of Red Gap, Make Way For Tomorrow, Love Affair, and also Good Sam a true masterpiece, and I have to say, but My Son John is also a great movie, best anti-commie propaganda movie ever made because it's the most emotional and self-revealing.

Robbery Since: Jul, 2012
#1206: Aug 9th 2016 at 5:31:41 PM

Billy Wilder also directed the excellent Double Indemnity and co-wrote the script with Raymond Chandler (who apparently just hated Wilder to bits).

I enjoyed Dick Powell's turn as Phillip Marlowe in Murder My Sweet. He's not a conventional choice for Marlowe, but he embues the character with a kind of world-weary, sarcastic grace.

edited 9th Aug '16 5:32:14 PM by Robbery

LongTallShorty64 Frumpy and grumpy Since: Apr, 2015 Relationship Status: What is this thing you call love?
Frumpy and grumpy
#1207: Aug 9th 2016 at 6:57:19 PM

That's a really good way to describe how he plays the character.

edited 9th Aug '16 6:57:57 PM by LongTallShorty64

"It's true that we had a gentleman's agreement, but unfortunately, I am no gentleman."
LongTallShorty64 Frumpy and grumpy Since: Apr, 2015 Relationship Status: What is this thing you call love?
Frumpy and grumpy
#1208: Aug 10th 2016 at 9:13:12 AM

[up][up] I thought that Make Way for Tomorrow tried really hard to make you feel sad, but hitting us with wave after wave of bad things happening to the older couple just felt a tad bit contrived.

On a completely different topic, I'm currently reading a book about John Gilbert. I mostly have mixed feelings, because i thoughy MGM had solely screwed him over, but he contributed a lot to his demise, and MGM didn't purposely screw him over, but they didn't help him much either. He was sinking and they didn't bother to throw a lifesaver. So he kind of screwed himself over more than anything. If he were to change his contract and say go to Paramount I think they would've utilized him better. Imagine him in a Lubitsch film; a match made in heaven.

edited 10th Aug '16 9:28:11 AM by LongTallShorty64

"It's true that we had a gentleman's agreement, but unfortunately, I am no gentleman."
JulianLapostat Since: Feb, 2014
#1209: Aug 10th 2016 at 10:15:42 AM

MGM in general was fairly ruthless to old silent stars, especially those with failure. Poor Buster Keaton is an example.

I think what you described about Make Way for Tommorow is interesting in light of the Japanese movie Tokyo Story (that is now #1 on Sight and Sound's director list as greatest movie of all time), which was inspired by it. That movie takes the same tearjerker premise but makes it more bleak, more understated but just as tearful.

jamespolk Since: Aug, 2012
#1210: Aug 10th 2016 at 11:26:13 AM

John Gilbert, of course, made a life enemy in Louis B. Mayer. And while all those old tales of Mayer sabotaging the recording of Gilbert's voice are nonsense, the studio was only too eager to cut bait on Gilbert once he went south. I have never seen His Glorious Night but of course as is well known, it inspired the opening part of Singin' in the Rain. I did catch Gilbert's second talking film, Devotion, on TCM years ago and it was pretty dismal. It did not help matters that MGM at the time was trying out Lionel Barrymore as a director, and Barrymore 1) was a crap director and 2) had a drug problem at the time.

So, you know, if those movies had been good and huge hits, Gilbert probably would have kept chugging right along—Greta Garbo, Laurel and Hardy, Joan Crawford, and Ronald Colman all segued from silents to sound without missing a beat. But for a guy like Gilbert, the first one's a stinker, and the second one's a bomb, and pretty soon they're writing him off as a lost cause and chucking their worst scripts at him. And Gilbert plunges into severe alcoholism which makes everything worse. Even when Gilbert writes his own story and gets it made into a genuinely excellent film—Downstairs—it's too late.

Buster Keaton actually got off to an excellent start at MGM with The Cameraman, which everybody forgets; that one ranks up with all the great films he made as an independent. Doughboys was OK. The talkie films Keaton was making at MGM actually made more money than the silent masterpieces he made by himself; Keaton's box office was always sluggish. And Keaton, like Gilbert, crawled into a bottle.

Lillian Gish made one talking film at MGM, I think. It was called One Romantic Night and oh my god it sucked. Just awful. Gish was painfully wooden. Her films hadn't been doing very well at the box office for a while, actually, so again MGM cut her loose as soon as they could.

jamespolk Since: Aug, 2012
#1211: Aug 10th 2016 at 11:28:20 AM

Re: post #1201—now I want to see Blonde Crazy. Always liked Joan Blondell. She always had this cheerfully slutty sexiness. I like her better than Jean Harlow, who had the same kind of vibe.

LongTallShorty64 Frumpy and grumpy Since: Apr, 2015 Relationship Status: What is this thing you call love?
Frumpy and grumpy
#1212: Aug 10th 2016 at 12:25:22 PM

[up] It's actually a pretty good film. The best part of it is Blondell and Cagney's chemistry. It does have a tacked on moral ending even if it was from the pre-code, but overall, entertaining. Blondell is a definite highlight.

"It's true that we had a gentleman's agreement, but unfortunately, I am no gentleman."
RavenWilder Since: Apr, 2009
#1213: Aug 11th 2016 at 8:15:30 PM

Lately I've been watching a lot of classic Westerns (including The Ox-Bow Incident, Once Upon a Time in the West, Fort Apache, The Wild Bunch, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance). And, as I usually do after I finish watching something, I checked out the TV Tropes pages for these movies, and found that all of them were described as Revisionist Westerns or Deconstructions. I've seen the same labels applied to a lot of other Westerns I've enjoyed (High Noon, The Searchers, The Dollars Trilogy . . .)

That got me wondering: what are some good examples of the original, non-deconstructive Westerns that all these other Westerns are supposed to be reacting against?

edited 11th Aug '16 8:17:33 PM by RavenWilder

jamespolk Since: Aug, 2012
#1214: Aug 11th 2016 at 9:06:38 PM

Stagecoach is a pretty good example of a Western played straight.

The Iron Horse, also by John Ford.

Then of course there are all the many many B-Movie westerns.

edited 11th Aug '16 9:55:14 PM by jamespolk

Robbery Since: Jul, 2012
#1215: Aug 11th 2016 at 9:56:41 PM

You find that happening in a lot of genres...they get deconstructed to the point where it becomes difficult to think of "constructed" examples.

JulianLapostat Since: Feb, 2014
#1216: Aug 12th 2016 at 12:13:55 AM

If by "straight" Western you mean influential and popular ones then it has to be Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, Red River, Rio Bravo, High Noon, Shane. But generally if you look at the best Westerns in that genre, you will actually find more outliers than norms. I especially recommend Delmer Daves' films: ''The Hanging Tree, Broken Arrow, 3:10 to Yuma" because he was one of the few film-makers of that time who did research and provided an accurate look at life there.

There is also some pretty stupid notions among movie buffs to contend with. Like many people think Sergio Leone deconstructs Westerns...he does no such thing. His movies are actually even more macho/stupid than the Hollywood Westerns. It looked serious and different because it had a rawer low-budget look and looser censorship norms (because it was an Italian export) but his movies are basically fairy tales in a Western landscape, there's no sense of history, (about Native Americans, Western Expansion) and GBU which is set during the American Civil War is more about some gold buried underneath a grave than about slavery. Compare that to Samuel Fuller's Run of the Arrow. Fuller by the way pioneered the whole close-up to "beeg eyes" which everyone associated with Leone, he did that in Forty Guns (which Leone stole). But this is actually true of many of the so-called "revisionist Westerns" where for all its percieved "edginess" there was not a lot of politics in it, Peckinpah especially is guilty of this.

Having said all this, classic Westerns are generally not "revisionist", I would say it has Unbuilt Trope. There are genuine deconstructionist Westerns in this time however, none moreso than Johnny Guitar. I'd also make a case for Ford's unjustly forgotten Cheyenne Autumn his final Western. It's flawed and a little weak but it's basically a Western with a Hyperlink Story, a plot with very little action and it slowly takes apart the foundation of what the Western genre means from the inside. There's also this amazing interlude where James Stewart plays Wyatt Earp in a Darker and Edgier manner, a mea culpa by Ford for glorifying him in My Darling Clementine.

TamH70 Since: Nov, 2011 Relationship Status: Faithful to 2D
#1217: Aug 12th 2016 at 7:43:35 AM

The American comedian, Rich Hall, did a really good evisceration of the whole" Leone is a great western director" myth in his documentary on the Western in general, "Rich Hall's How the West Was Lost". Most of the Westerns covered in the documentary are part of the era that this thread covers - everything from "My Darling Clementine" to "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance", but his most searching stare at a movie is when he's dealing with "The Searchers".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00c4zvh

I'm sure it's available to buy legit somewhere so no hookey links, sorry.

RavenWilder Since: Apr, 2009
#1218: Aug 12th 2016 at 7:46:17 AM

I always found the claim that Sergio Leone's Westerns (and Spaghetti Westerns in general) were more realistic than their American counterparts to be pretty ridiculous. Those movies seem to be the ones that took gunfighting and Quick Draw contests to superhuman levels, made pretty much every character a professional outlaw, and upped the body count to absurd levels. I think it might be a case of people mistaking "cynical" for "realistic".

Still some damn great movies, though.

edited 12th Aug '16 7:54:25 AM by RavenWilder

JulianLapostat Since: Feb, 2014
#1219: Aug 12th 2016 at 8:44:45 AM

Generally a lot of people who don't see Westerns assume that Leone was revisionist and John Ford was classical, or that he was edgy, when he wasn't. I think the only great Leone movie was the last one, which is not a Western. But the thing about him was that he was overpraised and celebrated for stuff he didn't do. Like obviously his movies borrow from Yojimbo (and yes it borrowed its plot from Dasheill Hammett but Leone also borrowed the visual look and aesthetic from there, which is pure Kurosawa) but the thing is the laconic badass man-with-no-name character was all Eastwood. When he signed up for the part, the original script had a lot of lines of dialogue and the character was more Eli Wallach. Eastwood insisted that they cut out most of the lines and his performance forced them to do it, and even in GBU, he basically told Leone to give most of his lines to Tuco.

The curious thing about the Western was that it's popularity came in turns. It was quite popular in the silent era, but it fell out of fashion in the Depression until Stagecoach arrived...heh. The true Golden Age was immediately after the war, from then until the end of the 60s. I always found it interesting that Film Noir and The Western were both truly popular in the same era. They are seen as being opposites in terms of what they represent, Noir being enlightened, westerns being romantic, noir being modern/liberal/sexy while westerns are backward/conservative/prudish.

The Searchers is actually darker than most noir. It's on the surface a hero-villain good guy-bad guy story in bright Technicolor and sunshine but the tone and style makes it feel like it's something out of the Bible as is the language ("As sure as the turning of the earth"). It's quite violent for its time and what it implies (rape/mutilation/scalping) goes further than even Noir innuendo. And you know I can't think of another Hollywood movie where the protagonist is openly atheistic like Ethan Edwards, and actually just dismissive of Christianity ("By what you preach, none"...i.e. I am not Christian) and pretty much never repents ("That'll be the day"). And there is actually no real redemption at the end, just this empty feeling, because ultimately the villain dies like a chump, ironically by the guy who was a pacifist, the Arch-Enemy rivalry never reaches catharsis and the hero "wanders between the winds". This is quite aside from the fact that no other Western has characters being as openly racist as they are, and condemned for the same, in this movie because the censorship and directors were hypocritical enough to know that is just not cool, even if they weren't going to do anything much about it.

Robbery Since: Jul, 2012
#1220: Aug 12th 2016 at 9:19:59 AM

Yeah, in The Searchers they build Ethan to the point where you genuinely don't know what he's going to do at the end. A very dark, and complex character; one critic called him a "poet of hate" and I have to say I agree. The film manages to be extremely grim and dark, but somehow (probably, as [up] points out at least in part because it's visually bright and shiny) not oppressively so.

Leone was more often about style and atmosphere. As for realistic...well, his films look quite a bit dirtier and sweatier than Ford's smile

JulianLapostat Since: Feb, 2014
#1221: Aug 12th 2016 at 9:33:53 AM

That's more because he made it on the cheap. He shot them on Spanish deserts in Spain, and he also had cheaper film stock while Ford's films were shot on Technicolor with Dye process, and worked on with BNC Mitchell cameras, so it has a raw, dirty look to it that paradoxically, in cinema, conveys poverty/despair/hopelessness and so conveys authenticity rather than poor and weak stage design. It's part of the authenticity of low-budgets. When Leone had a budget, like in his last movie he liked to be as lush and glossy as the best of them.

There are other issues with Leone, I mean people complain about women in classic westerns but it's still better than Leone's films which are pretty bad on that front. And even Ford had complex women characters, like Laurie and Debbie in The Searchers, neither of whom are quite what they seem like, the former who seems very sweet at first has a nasty streak later on, while the latter is smarter and more sensitive than you believed.

TamH70 Since: Nov, 2011 Relationship Status: Faithful to 2D
#1222: Aug 12th 2016 at 10:34:38 AM

[up]That's Hall's main point about Leone in his documentary, which I kinda think you folks should track down.

edit

[down]yep, that's the one.

edited 12th Aug '16 11:16:06 AM by TamH70

RavenWilder Since: Apr, 2009
#1224: Aug 12th 2016 at 10:56:34 AM

See, when I first saw The Dollars Trilogy, it never occurred to me to think of them as realistic at all, sweatiness and griminess of the characters not withstanding. They were pretty clearly designed as larger-than-life operatic pieces.

And I'll say this: any director who can make a riveting climax out of three guys staring at each other for six minutes straight, that guy has got some serious chops.

P.S.

This is quite aside from the fact that no other Western has characters being as openly racist as they are, and condemned for the same, in this movie

I'd say Blazing Saddles has The Searchers beat in that regard, but that's from after the time frame this thread is talking about.

Though John Ford's earlier Western, Fort Apache, probably goes even further in presenting the warring Indian tribe as the good guys fighting against a bigoted and corrupt U.S. government. It's telling that, in an era when the Production Code required all villains and criminals be punished by the end of the movie, the Apache leader Cochise was allowed to kill dozens of U.S. cavalry soldiers and leave the movie both alive and with dignity.

edited 12th Aug '16 11:06:19 AM by RavenWilder

JulianLapostat Since: Feb, 2014
#1225: Aug 12th 2016 at 11:48:23 AM

I am not saying Leone is entirely bad...his final film is genuinely great, but his Westerns are weak, relevant in its time and context but not as impressive to us today. And you know even GBU, without Ennio Morricone that movie would be nothing. And I don't mean that in the sense that Psycho is nothing without Bernard Herrmann kind of hyperbole, but I mean literallly nothing. It's basically music video saved by good actors and stirring and catchy music.

Glad that you mentioned Fort Apache which is one of Ford's best films and obviously foreshadows The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance with the finale where after everything Owen Thursday despite getting his soldiers killed and starting a pointless war gets an undeserved Historical Hero Upgrade and that expression where John Wayne has to stand and tell that lie, is just incredible acting (and yeah, Wayne doesn't get credit as an actor even if he's good...politically he's indefensible of course). It's amazing that movie came out just few years after Raoul Walsh's pro-Custer hagiography with Errol Flynn. Ford of course changes the names but it's obviously Custer.

We talk a lot about Ford, and he's obviously important, but there are other great Western film-makers. Anthony Mann especially who really pushed for harsher/more violent/more expressionism in his Westerns and revived James Stewart's career after the war let's not forget by making Mr. Smith and George Bailey into an action hero (that makes Jimmy Stewart the original Liam Neeson, a legit actor turned action star). Or Samuel Fuller's crazy westerns, like his I Shot Jesse James where you blatant homoeroticism for its time, and made on a B-Movie budget. And of course there's also some cool movies by Jacques Tourneur, everyone remembers him for the Val Lewton movies but he did Canyon Passage (one of the great westerns and beautiful technicolor), Wichita (also a Wyatt Earp movie, and an anti-gun ownership message ahead of its time). I also love this movie Way of the Gaucho which is a Western but set in Argentina with Gauchos and knife wielding dudes on the Pampas instead of cowboys.


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