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Aldo930 Professional Moldy Fig/Curmudgeon from Quahog, R.I. Since: Aug, 2013
Professional Moldy Fig/Curmudgeon
#1851: Feb 9th 2017 at 7:28:25 PM

I think it was the fact that the fascist, authoritarian governments were gone that inspired these countries to go to new heights in film - all the good ideas were repressed and the people who were calling the shots had ideology on their minds.

For example: Mussolini's idea to revitalize the Italian film industry and bring it back to the heights it had in the silent era was Scipio Africanus, a historical epic which not only had a propagandistic intent (conflating Rome's takeover of Carthage with Mussolini's takeover of Ethiopia) but was poorly made as well (in the finished film you can see telephone poles in the background and people wearing watches under their togas).

No wonder the Italian film industry didn't really get back to those heights until he was gone.

edited 9th Feb '17 7:29:23 PM by Aldo930

"They say I'm old fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast."
JulianLapostat Since: Feb, 2014
#1852: Feb 9th 2017 at 7:50:37 PM

That's not entirely fair to Mussolini.

You know who invented Cinecitta studios...yep, Il Duce. You know who founded the world's first film festival at Venice, the man they call Benito. Mussolini also founded Europe's first film school, Centro Sperimentale whose alumni included Michelangelo Antonioni (who travelled to France during World War II to serve as Assistant Director to Marcel Carne's Les Visiteurs du Soir). Mussolini's son Vittorio was the editor of one of Italy's leading film journals and included Rossellini, Desica, Visconti, and Cesare Zavattini (screenwriter of Bicycle Thieves and other movies).

Most of the popular films during the Fascist era were the white telephone films, and during the Mussolini era you had the likes of Max Ophuls making La signora di tutti in Italy.

So freedom from fascism is a necessary condition certainly but not a sufficient one. And not all dictators are equal. Mussolini was not bad for cinema the way that Hitler and Stalin were for instance. I mean the Soviet avant-garde of the 20s died when Stalin went into collectivization in The '30s. Lenin and Trotsky more or less said, "Have fun kids and break a leg and go nuts" and early Stalin when he was still not consolidating his hold on society let that continue but around 1934, just before The Purge that ended...and only Sergei Eisenstein managed to make great movies but under very special circumstances and then when Stalin died and Khruschev came you had Tarkovsky, you had Parajanov, Larissa Shepitko, The Cranes Are Flying and so on. Likewise, there weren't many good German films after World War II ended...like the best German language film between say 1934 - the year of The Testament Of Doctor Mabuse and The Thousand Eyes of Doctor Mabuse (both by Fritz Lang), was Germany Year Zero made by the Italian Roberto Rossellini. And German cinema didn't recover until just after 1967.

Aldo930 Professional Moldy Fig/Curmudgeon from Quahog, R.I. Since: Aug, 2013
Professional Moldy Fig/Curmudgeon
#1853: Feb 9th 2017 at 7:53:19 PM

Mussolini may have been a big movie lover, but during his reign Italian cinema was in an artistic slump; there's not a lot of people who'd deny it, and he didn't do much to change that preconception.

It was only after the war and when Mussolini's body had been desecrated that Italian cinema came back to the prewar heights that il Duce had tried to get it to.

(Mussolini had some interesting ideas for films: he wanted to make a big production of Verdi's Rigoletto starring, of all people, Laurel and Hardy.)

edited 9th Feb '17 7:55:19 PM by Aldo930

"They say I'm old fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast."
JulianLapostat Since: Feb, 2014
#1854: Feb 9th 2017 at 8:09:32 PM

What prewar heights? I mean during the Silent era, the likes of Pastrone made some interesting films like Cabiria but I don't think there was ever a pre-Mussolini Golden Age. The general opinion among scholars is that Roberto Rosselini's Rome, Open City was the start of Italian Cinema's Golden Age which continued midway into The '70s (a stopping point being mooted is when Pier Paolo Pasolini got whacked).

Mussolini was terrible for Italy and the world as a whole, I am not denying it but the fact is Italian Fascism had a cultural legitimacy that Nazi Germany and Stalinism for that matter did not have. I mean famous Italian artists, great writers like D'Annunzio and Pirandello were fascists, as were Italian avant-garde futurismo. Even Benedetto Croce backed Mussolini in those crucial years though he started dissenting later on. Whereas most great German artists and film-makers were exiles and anti-Nazis...and Stalin murdered a good number of Soviet intellectual greats like Isaac Babel, Osip Mandelstam and Vsevolovod Meyerhold. Most of the film-makers and actors were spared but some of the people in charge of the overall industry got purged. I mean after Stalin died, Eisenstein's name became mud in USSR because they saw him, not without justice, as Stalin's stooge who stood by while friends and collaborators like Babel and Meyerhold got purged and lifted not a finger.

Of course the irony of this cultural and intellectual legitimacy which Mussolini had is that Italy's people is the only one to have risen and toppled its dictator while the Germans didn't do the same to Hitler and more or less had to be bribed by America into accepting democracy (as did Imperial Japan's military establishment most of whom got a slap on the wrist and went unpunished as Masaki Kobayashi documented in his movies of The '50s) and the Soviet peoples cried tears at Stalin's funeral, only for Khruschev cowardly ordered the destruction of Stalin's statues when he had been a loyal collaborator and official whacking people during Stalin's purges. So there's this amazing disconnect between politics, culture and public sentiment and you have to wonder how much of this arthouse era cinema of La Film Artistique of The Fifites and The '60s was genuine intellectual commitment and engagement and how much was just being opportunistic.

jamespolk Since: Aug, 2012
#1855: Feb 9th 2017 at 8:09:42 PM

Vittorio De Sica started directing during the later Mussolini years, but I haven't seen any of his wartime films.

I'd imagine that German cinema of the era is generally so bad because almost all of the great artists had been killed or driven away. One can imagine an alternate universe where Billy Wilder and Fritz Lang stayed in Germany and made films that might have been even better because they weren't made under The Hays Code. Although maybe they'd have gone to Hollywood anyway as Murnau and Lubitsch did.

I've never seen a single Russian movie made in the 1930s and 1940s that wasn't directed by Sergei Eisenstein. Would love to get the chance.

Aldo930 Professional Moldy Fig/Curmudgeon from Quahog, R.I. Since: Aug, 2013
Professional Moldy Fig/Curmudgeon
#1856: Feb 9th 2017 at 8:14:44 PM

[up][up] Relative heights, really; I've heard that Italian cinema enjoyed a high reputation in the silent era and Mussolini wanted to get that high reputation back.

"They say I'm old fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast."
jamespolk Since: Aug, 2012
#1857: Feb 9th 2017 at 8:20:14 PM

[up]Cabiria is quite good. Somewhat handicapped by the girl Cabiria being a useless Pinball Protagonist, but still quite good. Perfectly obvious how D. W. Griffith and later Fritz Lang took inspiration from it.

JulianLapostat Since: Feb, 2014
#1858: Feb 9th 2017 at 8:47:32 PM

One important film of The '30s for Italian cinema is Alessandro Blassetti's 1860. And of course Max Ophuls made La Signora di Tutti in Italy at this time and that's a masterpiece.

He was from Austria, he made movies in Berlin, he made an excellent film called Liebelei in 1932 (huge favorite around the world, influential on Vincente Minnelli and The Red Shoes opening is a homage to it). Then the Nazis came and he went on the run (because he was Jewish) and he went first to Paris, made movies in Holland, France and Italy, then came to Hollywood made four movies there and returned to France in The '50s and died after making some flat out masterpieces there. His son Marcel Ophuls is an important French documentary film-maker.

You know had it not been for Hitler, Germany could have been the superpower of the Twentieth Century in the Western World. All the key scientists of the 20th Century were German (Einstein, Heisenberg, Planck, Pauli, Schrodinger, Oppenheimer, Braun), in The Twenties they had the greatest cinema in the world after Hollywood. the most influential playwright of the modern era in Bertolt Brecht, the school of modern architecture in Bauhaus which became international style, and then the Nazis chased out all the great talent, well most of them. (Heisenberg stayed back and worked on Hitler's atomic program which admittedly did not get far but not for lack of trying as did Von Braun. Von Braun by the way was a huge fan of Woman On The Moon by Fritz Lang and he and his scientists borrowed the countdown from that movie, which he carried with him to NASA when the Americans decided to hide the fact that he used slave labor from concentration camps for the rockets. Lang was quite proud that he invented the countdown.

I mean the American popular culture we have today is German. Like compare Hollywood movies of The Twenties with German cinema of The Twenties. Hollywood was making comedies, melodramas, serious historical stuff while Germans were making spectacles, horror film, fantasy film, science-fiction with special effects and so on. King Vidor's The Big Parade is today closer to a European art movie when at the time it was the movie which built MGM while Germany's Metropolis is the model for all pablum science-fiction of today even if Fritz Lang hated that movie. And of course Lang made the first Serial Killer movie with M.

edited 9th Feb '17 8:48:51 PM by JulianLapostat

RavenWilder Since: Apr, 2009
#1859: Feb 9th 2017 at 9:23:12 PM

No wonder the Italian film industry didn't really get back to those heights until he was gone.

Post-WWII Italian cinema reached a height? When I think about Italian movies from the mid-20th Century, all that come to mind are shoestring budget productions that chased whatever was a fad at the time and tried to trick moviegoers into thinking their films were sequels to other, more popular movies. Not that some Italian filmmakers didn't make great movies during that time period, but from what I've heard it was hardly the best environment for it.

JulianLapostat Since: Feb, 2014
#1860: Feb 9th 2017 at 9:36:15 PM

Post-World War II was the era of Neorealism...Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, Vittorio De Sica and later Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni and Bernardo Bertolucci, Pier Paolo Pasolini, in addition you had genre film-makers Dario Argento, Sergio Leone, Mario Bava, you had commedia all'italiana. It's about the greatest cultural explosion in Italy since The Renaissance and the Golden Age of Italian Opera.

These movies were global box-office sensations, influential on fashion and culture, and they were emblems of Italy's Economic Miracle (Il Boom). La Dolce Vita was 'the' film about celebrity, one character Paparazzo, a photographer who keeps taking photographs non stop is the source for the word paparazzi and it was a huge hit.

And I don't know about shoestring budgets...Only Rome, Open City was really cheap (it was made with film stock bought on the black market). But Paisa was Italy's most expensive film, and that record was broken by The Bicycle Thief. The reason is that these movies were shot on location and it was more expensive to shoot on location than on movie sets until the development of better cameras and portable sound recording tech by the end of The '50s. The film stock couldn't accomodate the use of light and real conditions on sets and it cost a lot of money. Most of the Italian films of this time were dubbed in post-production with no recording of direct sound until the modern era, and also because of the dialect issues. Rossellini's Paisa's final section in the Po Valley was a rare case of using direct sound and it cost a lot of money. I mean that's the irony, Italian Neorealism was cited as being realistic and it pointed to a cinema outside Hollywood but it was funded by Americans, made at top dollar, distributed by Hollywood studios and it more or less pointed the way towards a future that it would not be a true part of.

By the end of The '50s you had cameras like the Eclair which could be portable and record light on real-locations as well as cameras in studios, and you had the Nagra Sound Recording system which was used by the French documentary film-maker Jean Rouch. Without these innovations modern independent cinema and low-budget film-making would simply not become possible. But it was French New Wave that embodied that and Italy's genre-film-making. Italian cinema by that time became the center of lush, stylized and polished productions, stuff like The Leopard.

edited 9th Feb '17 9:38:59 PM by JulianLapostat

Karaya457 Von Richthofen from Boomer Sooner Since: Jan, 2017 Relationship Status: [TOP SECRET]
Von Richthofen
#1861: Feb 9th 2017 at 9:43:12 PM

Don't forget Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci for revolutionizing the entire western genre with their work. (I know it's 60's, but you can't bring up Italian film without mentioning the two elephants in the room) The original Django is a classic.

edited 9th Feb '17 9:47:56 PM by Karaya457

I'm just talking about me sitting on this empty, God-forsaken airfield near Lille, with only two planes left, two pathetic bangers!- Pips
JulianLapostat Since: Feb, 2014
#1862: Feb 9th 2017 at 9:58:03 PM

I did mention Leone above...but I certainly wouldn't call them elephants because as far as Italian cinema goes, spaghetti westerns in general and Leone in particular is well the Michael Bay of the Golden Age. And I don't know if Leone really revolutionized the Western...Sam Peckinpah did that better. and he was influenced by Akira Kurosawa who was inspired by John Ford.

Practically everything in Leone's films was done before in The '50s by Americans. Samuel Fuller made Forty Guns (starring Barbara Stanwyck) which had the Extreme Close-Up "Beeg Eyes" and as for extreme violence, you have Anthony Mann (called Tin Can DeSade by Manny Farber). The Americans went further dealing with Native American relations in (The Searchers, Broken Arrow (1950), Run of the Arrow) gender (Johnny Guitar) and race (Sergeant Rutledge). None of Leone's Westerns dealt with Native American issues or race, and as for gender, he was pretty much a macho-guy.

TamH70 Since: Nov, 2011 Relationship Status: Faithful to 2D
#1863: Feb 9th 2017 at 11:08:37 PM

"Sergio Leone reinvented the western to the same extent that Sergio Valente reinvented blue jeans. In other words, he just found a way to make them really, really cheap. He found cheap exploitable film crews in Spain, and he found a cheap exploitable actor in Clint Eastwood. In fact a Sergio Leone film is pretty much like putting a closed-circuit television in a sweatshop and just letting it run. He created a style that was instantly a parody of itself. It had nothing to do with the American west: the real nor the mythological one. At the beginning of the film we're introduced to three characters: the Good, the Bad, the Ugly. This saves the actors the chore from having to actually convey the qualities through acting. Throw in a few quasi-Marxist musing about class struggle and basically you have a Sergio Leone film." &

From "Rich Hall's How the West Was Lost", one of the American comedian's excellent BBC 4 documentaries. And if you strip away the mythologizing and Ennio Morricone's music from those films, I personally think there's nothing inarguable about any of that. The man knows his Westerns, and he knows how to break them down into their fundamentals. Is he a troper?

& Full disclosure: found that quote on a thread on 4chan, but it wasn't attributed.

JulianLapostat Since: Feb, 2014
#1864: Feb 9th 2017 at 11:41:21 PM

The one really great spaghetti western is The Great Silence which is a "white western" in the mould of The Far Country and "Day of the Outlaw" but it goes further and does stuff Hollywood couldn't do back in The '50s.

I don't think Leone's westerns are entirely without virtues and Leone did make one genuinely great film, his last film, which was not a Western (and even then that's a remake of The Roaring '20s and other thirties gangster films, but that's being snide).

Of course you know Leone can't even take credit for the one major original element in his films...Clint Eastwood himself. The screenplay for Leone's films originally had a lot of dialogue for the main character, but Eastwood insisted that most of the dialogue be given to other actors and he more or less built "The Man With No Name" himself. He kept insisting that Eli Wallach get more lines and so on because he felt the character he was playing would work better if he talked less and if less about him was known.

I will admit that his westerns are accessible to audiences in a way stuff like Johnny Guitar or even The Searchers and Stagecoach are. The reason is that his movies more or less insist that westerns are solely about men and violence, and it revolves around torture and action sequences. Other Hollywood westerns even when they have violence do in fact have women, they do deal with townbuilding, civilization and other stuff. A film like Canyon Passage by Jacques Tourneur, to my mind better than all of Leone's westerns combined gets no say even if it's more beautiful, just as violent and has characters who are just as amoral. It's shot in gorgeous technicolor as well, that literally brings tears to my eyes and some of the best images of rain outside of Kurosawa and Mizoguchi.

jamespolk Since: Aug, 2012
#1865: Feb 9th 2017 at 11:48:21 PM

I think most people would grant that there was a flowering of output in Italian cinema after the war. De Sica, Fellini, Rossellini, Pasolini, all those guys. Some great product was coming out of Italy.

Now I find myself wanting to watch Scipio Africanus.

JulianLapostat Since: Feb, 2014
#1866: Feb 10th 2017 at 12:11:18 AM

Martin Scorsese said that the cinemas that mattered most to him were American, British and Italian...of course he loves Japanese cinema also, some Brazilian films also...also some Egyptian and French movies, and he's a huge devotee of Russian and Soviet Cinema. German cinema surprisingly is not something that's big for him. He likes Lang and Murnau but he talks a lot less about German cinema than others.

But Italian cinema between 1945-1978 or so was a purple patch with few equals. Modern cinema begins with Roberto Rossellini who was called "The father of the French New Wave" by François Truffaut and whose movement inspired Satyajit Ray in India, and film-makers in Brazil, in Iran and around the world.

jamespolk Since: Aug, 2012
#1867: Feb 10th 2017 at 12:34:46 AM

Has anybody seen any Stalinist cinema? I've seen the Eisenstein films, and Earth which was from 1930 before the purges, and Man with a Movie Camera from 1929 which is super-trippy, and a 1920s Russian serial called Miss Mend. That's it. I'd be curious to see more of Uncle Joe's movies from the time period after the late 1920s when he really consolidated his power.

JulianLapostat Since: Feb, 2014
#1868: Feb 10th 2017 at 1:08:47 AM

There's Schors and Chapaev, and Mark Donskoi's Lenin trilogy was well regarded in The '30s. Stalinist cinema is associated with socialist realism and that was the doctrine from 1934-1954, enforced by Stalin's notorious cultural commissar Zhdanov. Technically these movies are not bad, but it's kind of dry and soulless. The actors do their best and its worth watching for some of the performers. The early 30s had the good stuff: Barnet (by the bluest of seas, outskirts), Kuleshov (The Great Consoler), Pudovkin (The Deserter), Dovzhenko (Ivan, Aerograd), Vertov (Enthusiasm Sinfoniya Donbassa). All are masterpieces.

Also a very underrated movie by Aleksandr Medevedkin called Happiness. Chris Marker of La Jetée fame made a film called The Last Bolshevik where he focused on Medvedkin but gradually shifted to discuss cinema in the Stalin era and a broader discusssion of the Soviet Union as a whole. And he documented how film-makers were stifled in that time. Stalin was a obsessive movie buff. He'd see all the latest soviet stuff and personally censor and comment on stuff he liked/disliked. He was rather obsessed with visual images and publicity, being a major Slave to PR and if Stalin entered America and worked in a capitalist movie business he'd be a pretty good producer...I'm just saying.

Stalin valued the USSR movie industry so much that no film-maker or major artist fell victim to the purge while the intellectual and general writing community were brutally persecuted. Sergei Eisenstein worked on a project called Bezhin Meadow with Isaac Babel, the famous short story writer. Babel fell a victim of The Purge and the basic policy of the purge by the NKVD was that you go not only after the person you think he's guilty but you go after their family, their friends, their general acquantainces, last known person they met..."Not Making This Up" Disclaimer. That's how Nikolai Yezhov the guy behind the most brutal phase of the purges operated. The reason Babel fell victim wasn't what he wrote, wasn't his sympathies, it was the fact that he associated with people by mistake and attended some social gatherings he shouldn't have, and was just tangential to it. And because of that, everyone Six Degrees Of Separation from Babel should also have been a victim, either whacked or sent to The Gulag, but Eisenstein got spared probably by Stalin's own directive since he fixed general quotas on execution limits and in his words "excesses are not permitted".

And Eisenstein had huge problems. He was a homosexual (and Stalin had made homosexuality illegal after Lenin decriminalized it). Not only that it was fairly well known in the gossip mill that when Eisenstein went to Mexico to make "Que viva Mexico" he had sex with Mexican boys and was caught at a customs toll with pornographic drawings which made backer Upton Sinclair pull the plug on that project sending him in disgrace. He should have been purged for that, and in fact the guy who produced Bezhin Meadow Boris Shumyatsky a brownnoser got purged. So it's a mystery how Sergei dodged the bullet. Then Aleksandr Nevsky was an anti-Nazi propaganda movie, that should have made Eisenstein a victim of "premature antifascism" since it was made released and screened and then shelved after Stalin signed the M-R Pact with Hitler and put in theaters only after Operation Barbarossa. And it was only then that Eisenstein dared to pitch a movie on Stalin's hero Ivan the Terrible, Part I was a hit. Part II got shelved and was only released after Eisenstein and Stalin''s death in the Khruschev Thaw. And Part III got shut down mid-production.

RavenWilder Since: Apr, 2009
#1869: Feb 10th 2017 at 1:25:35 AM

I will admit that his westerns are accessible to audiences in a way stuff like Johnny Guitar or even The Searchers and Stagecoach are. The reason is that his movies more or less insist that westerns are solely about men and violence, and it revolves around torture and action sequences. Other Hollywood westerns even when they have violence do in fact have women, they do deal with townbuilding, civilization and other stuff.

See, that's what I think is so great about Leone's Westerns: they abandon the pretense that Westerns are a form of historical fiction, and instead treat them as a genre set in its own world with its own rules. A piece of historical fiction set in the Old West might be expected to deal with themes related to that time and place, and feature the sorts of characters you'd likely find living there. But Westerns are different; they draw at least as much from pop-culture mythology as they do from any sort of history, and films like A Fistful of Dollars or The Good, the Bad and the Ugly embrace that fact. They don't try to pretend that these characters or events could have happend in the historical Old West; they're quite clearly fairy tales about superhuman gunslingers battling over treasure in a lawless wasteland.

It's like the difference between musicals where some of the characters are professional singers, so periodically you'll see them performing a song on stage, and musicals that fully embrace the idea of a musical world where people break into song-and-dance numbers on a whim. The former is more grounded in reality, but the latter is able to take the thing that drew people to the genre and enhance it to phantasmagorical levels.

JulianLapostat Since: Feb, 2014
#1870: Feb 10th 2017 at 1:49:05 AM

See, that's what I think is so great about Leone's Westerns: they abandon the pretense that Westerns are a form of historical fiction, and instead treat them as a genre set in its own world with its own rules.

That kind of statement can be made about any movie. All movies to some extent operate by a certain amount of rules, either of the genre or ones it makes itself. The Western by Hollywood aren't necessarily realistic Historical Fiction. Like John Ford's The Searchers is set in Texas but the film is shot in Monument Valley Utah which is a tiny landscape and most of the movie is having the characters circle a single valley and limited scenery over-and-over again. It's actually way more abstract and unrealistic than Leone's films which is shot in the Spanish desert and clearly goes about trying to distinguish and mark certain settings differently.

A piece of historical fiction set in the Old West might be expected to deal with themes related to that time and place, and feature the sorts of characters you'd likely find living there. But Westerns are different; they draw at least as much from pop-culture mythology as they do from any sort of history, and films like A Fistful of Dollars or The Good, the Bad and the Ugly embrace that fact.

Well the thing is The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is set in The American Civil War so it's not entirely mythological. And the movie more or less depoliticizes that highly and extremely political conflict. And Leone's films aren't as abstract as you make it out to be...they more or less use the Old West and themes of that time and place to tell a story of three violent psychopaths with vaguely Homoerotic subtext and sadistic torture. And ultimately drawing from "pop-culture mythology" more or less means making the same kind of Western crap over and over again. Let's not forget that Leone didn't want to make these films...they were all commercial assignments and the film he really wanted to make was Once Upon a Time in America. He never had these grand ideas and plans that people project on to his films. He was saving that for his last film.

RavenWilder Since: Apr, 2009
#1871: Feb 10th 2017 at 2:41:22 AM

Most movies are highly unrealistic in one aspect or another, but they generally try to avoid seeming unrealistic and limit themselves to either Acceptable Breaks from Reality or things that your average moviegoer is probably not going to pick up on. The Searchers may use Monument Valley for all its exteriors, but most people aren't going to notice that (not on first viewing, anyway), especially if they're not familiar with what the Texas wilderness is supposed to look like.

By contrast, Leone's Westerns are very in-your-face with their over-the-top departures from reality. You don't need to have been anywhere near a gun in your life to know that a gunfight isn't going to go down anything like the ritualistic standoffs in these movies, and many events and side-characters are quite deliberately ludicrous for comedic effect.

True, the movies are still set in real times and regions, but in about the same way something like Beauty And The Beast is set in 18th Century France: more aesthetic than anything else. The American Civil War in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly? Change the color of the uniforms and take out one or two references to Generals Lee and Grant, and it could be almost any war.

jamespolk Since: Aug, 2012
#1872: Feb 10th 2017 at 7:01:46 AM

Made a page for Fanny, which featured old Charles Boyer, old Maurice Chevalier, and a young and lovely Leslie Caron.

My favorite part of it was the liberal use of Gaussian Girl. I think it was every closeup of Caron. It was amazing—there was this little blemish above her right eyebrow, like a chicken pox scar, that you could see in the medium shots. In the close ups, it disappeared.

LongTallShorty64 Frumpy and grumpy Since: Apr, 2015 Relationship Status: What is this thing you call love?
Frumpy and grumpy
#1873: Feb 10th 2017 at 8:51:07 AM

February 11

Wherein the Hs begin:


edited 10th Feb '17 8:53:45 AM 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
#1874: Feb 10th 2017 at 8:59:02 AM

I've made a page for Cabin in the Sky. It was Vincente Minnelli's directorial debut. The film has issues...but I still liked it. It has more plot than Stormy Weather, but the songs and numbers are better in the Stormy Weather. Either way, it's interesting and Ethel Waters is all kinds of endearing. Lena Horne plays The Vamp and, good god, does it make you wish she was the vamp in every film made. She's wonderful.

edited 10th Feb '17 11:09:02 AM by LongTallShorty64

"It's true that we had a gentleman's agreement, but unfortunately, I am no gentleman."
JulianLapostat Since: Feb, 2014
#1875: Feb 10th 2017 at 9:25:56 AM

Visually it's good, musically its great (Duke Ellington in the club at the end) and like any "All-black musical" it's major value and importance is simply its existence as a document and record for African-American art and talent. It also applies to King Vidor's Hallelujah!, Carmen Jones and Porgy and Bess among others, which are all at various levels quite well made and Vidor's and Preminger's film is in filmic terms impressive.

Those movies are the ultimate Golden Mean Fallacy...it's Hollywood Liberals saying, "We aren't racists and we think African Americans and their music and culture which we all love since we go there to hang out should be on our screens", the producers will go "You want us to get lynched in the South, you want them to say this industry is owned by Jews, and out the ones among you who are gay and commie, and bring the government down on us...make a movie that we can sell without offending anyone".

So you have segregation in movies as well, with African-Americans being minor and supporting players in general Hollywood movies relegated to servant roles or as lounge singers in club while African-Americans can only be protagonists in movies entirely populated by them...i.e their ghetto. So yes I would say these movies are racist but I would say it's a product of real-world societal racism more than that of the film-makers who are making flawed attempts to do as good as they can in their circumstances. There are exceptions...Joseph L. Mankiewicz made No Way Out one of Sidney Poitier's first films in 1949-1950 and that's a stone-cold masterpiece where Sidney is The Hero...you have Raoul Walsh's Band of Angels which is tainted by the "lost cause" but you have Sidney Poitier as a major character and he's Clark Gable's son. Douglas Sirk of course subverted the best with Imitation of Life a Lana Turner vehicle he made into a Juanita Moore film deconstructing the "black maid" character you saw in many of these movies including roles played by Moore in earlier films.


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