Five Movies 1949-1977. Two Golden Age Foreign Classics, One Golden Age Hollywood Comedy, One Neglected Classic, and One Exhibition of Edgy Modern Nihilism

Abigail's Party (1977)


British teleplay, written and directed by a young Mike Leigh, whose work I have always found a little too relentlessly unflinching and vicious. This might be the most depressing movie I have ever seen that didn't involve child rape, or the Holocaust or something. I didn't know anything about it, apart from the blurb on the sleeve, which made it sound like a comedy in which working class British people drink too much with socially disastrous results. Based on this, I induced my wife to watch it with me. She did not find it uninteresting, though at several intervals she did ask "What is this?" and "Where are you finding these things?" It is a comedy, of sorts, though of an extremely uncomfortable variety. It is not uproarious.

This work is better-known in England than it is in the U.S., and seemingly well-regarded there. I guess it is the sort of thing they like, and it speaks to their uniqueness as a people. For all of its artistic and literary virtues, I see it still as a story about vulgar, animalistic people who are neither bright nor virtuous nor original with and to and around whom nothing good or positive happens. It is almost a ne plus ultra of spiritual nihilism.


My wife thought it was the kind of thing certain people at St John's would have gotten into on account of its ironic, passive-aggressive edginess and alienation. Perhaps.


The Hidden Fortress (1958)


Now we are back in the sunny days of the first flowering (in terms of popular success in the West) of the golden age of the great international directors, whose fame I suspect will continue on and occupy the position in the history of cinema that the famous novelists of the 19th century (Dickens, Twain, Austen, Balzac, Tolstoy, et al) do in the history of that genre, even if certain of their attitudes and concerns and even techniques become outdated or superseded. Everyone will still know them, better than they will most of their worthiest contemporaries, and will probably still like them to some degree because their films, especially the earlier ones, have many likeable qualities.

Kurosawa has at present perhaps the strongest cult following among this group, Bergman, Fellini, various other new wavers, et al, at least among important people. Maybe this is because he is not European. Sometimes it seems like it, that certain Western people want to respond to a vision that is more definitively other. I greatly admired Kurosawa's version of The Idiot, but that is to this point the only one of its films that has strongly resonated with me. There is a lot of fun and high spiritedness in this movie, and it conveys an optimism, about the direction of the art of cinema if nothing else that was characteristic of a lot of these celebrated foreign movies (though I think it picks up as well on certain other positive attitudes that were widespread in the later 50s even if brooding artistic types denied sharing in them). However, and this is about the third time I have watched it, my mind always wanders about during it, thinking about the terrain, and the sunlight on the rocks, and maybe the sweep of the vista in certain shots, and I lose track of the characters for minutes at a time. In truth, they are not as compelling to me. Of course, I have never been able to get through Star Wars either, large parts of the plot of which George Lucas has confessed to lifting from this movie. So there is something in the story that does not connect with me.


Edge of the City (1957)


I liked this one very much, perhaps because it is not especially well known, and thus a pleasant surprise for me (I had never heard of it before), though there is no especial reason for it not to be known at this point in time. It was the directorial debut of Martin Ritt, who went on to make many well-known films, the only one of which I have seen is  Hud, which however I also liked very much as an American movie with something of the atmosphere and sensibility of the European art films. This one has something of that as well. It also reminds me of Paths of Glory, which came out the same year. Sidney Poitier stars in what I think probably should be one of his more celebrated roles, along with John Cassavetes, who is one of those people the edgy art-film crowd always talks about but whom I had never managed to encounter until now. It has a lot to recommend it besides being a solidly made movie: New York in the 50s, even some of the redeeming aspects of America in the 50s, a jazzy contemporary soundtrack of the sort that was criminally underexploited at the time, Poitier's character is extremely likeable, though perhaps primarily to whitebread types, as some prominent studies by black writers have been dismissive of the character. One example given in the Wikipedia article on the movie calls the character a "colorless black" with "little ethnic juice in his blood", who acts in the tradition of "the dying slave content that he has served the massa". I think this is a little harsh (To be honest, I also find it humorous. Why I do, since I am sure it was not intended for me to find it so, I think is because there is something of truth in it, though only partial truth, and I am pretty certain the effect that the film inspired in the critic was entirely unintentional). The Poitier character does not seethe with anger every second that he is around white people, though I don't think he lacks ethnic juice, nor is he in a totally submissive role relative to any of the white characters, though perhaps this aspect was somewhat sugar-coated for 1957. In the first scene when his light-skinned wife, played by Ruby Dee, appeared, I thought for a moment that she was actually white; but I knew there was no way that would have flown at the time. In fact I have seen several claims that this was the first American movie to depict a genuine interracial friendship, and one of the reasons it did not make a lot of money or otherwise have much of a national impact was because the studio didn't even bother trying to show it in the south. There is a lot here that I found moving. There is an undercurrent of anger in it, but it is understated and low-key and allows for a lot of fine impressions to come through.

Not available via Netflix. I bought a cheap DVD (around $1.99) on the internet, well worth it.


Pather Panchali (1954)


I had seen this probably three times already, but not in ten or fifteen years, and as it is to me one of the greatest of all movies, I was glad for the excuse its coming up in my system afforded for seeing it again. I cannot say much about it beyond what has already been said a million times, that it is so moving because it is really a very simple, ordinary story out of which great secrets and other depths have been pulled. This is not the whole of art, but it is a substantial and in terms of power usually underdeveloped part of it.

The night after I saw the movie I had a dream about the toothless, ancient "Auntie" who is one of the more visually memorable characters in all of cinema. I am usually rushed in the morning but I took a couple of seconds to jot down what I could remember of it:


"Twice came across Auntie blocking road while driving, once legless body, second time just a head still breathing. Both times waited for another guy to move her out of the way, set her up on the side of the road. Second time she stared at me hard in disgust. I couldn't think of what else to do. I was in New Hampshire, not India..."


Adam's Rib  (1949)


One of the famous Tracy/Hepburn "battle of the sexes" comedies that judging by this don't appear to have dated very well. Since I usually love just about anything from this time I watched it through twice just to make sure, but I could not get into it. Besides the changes in the male/female dynamic in our day that have rendered most of the jokes stale when they are not actively wince-inducing, the writing and direction in general I did not find strong enough to be able to overcome the contrivedness of the plot and the artificiality of the situations, including the marriage. The screenplay was written by women, which I suppose was somewhat unusual at the time, though many famous female writers of the 20s and 30s, such as Dorothy Parker, Anita Loos, Lillian Hellman, Mary Chase (author of Harvey), etc, received paychecks from Hollywood during this era, so it wasn't completely unheard of.

The most interesting character in this movie to me is the Cole Porter-esque piano-playing, always tuxedo-clad song and dance man who lives in the apartment across the hall from Hepburn and Tracy. He is interesting mainly because he was a type who was a staple in these kinds of entertainments who has largely faded away. What was the cause of his demise? Rock and roll, perhaps, or television, or the decline of the cocktail party in general, or the movement towards music-playing among those who could do so as exclusively an instrument for self-aggrandizement rather than shared camaraderie and joie de vivre? Yes, I wonder.

Don't Call It a Comeback

As often happens around this time of year, I had a period of a couple of weeks where I could not get any kind of essay going. One day I was going to take up the subject of the particular types of monsters that are currently ascendant in our society and how there are things about them, in spite of their unopposable greatness and superiority, that still really are troubling, and another day I scribbled down an idea that I cannot remember or make out what it was now (it looks like "long camp" or "one camp" which signifies nothing to me). Then I was driving and in Florida for about ten days, and when I tried to log onto the site it would not let me because I was in an unusual location--evidently now you have to check in with Google when go on vacation, at least if you don't bring your own computer with you. And then while I was away a frozen pipe burst in the office requiring that room to be cleaned out. The carefully typed out manuscripts of my old attempts at writing that had been moldering there for years bundled in special gold paper clips, were finally destroyed at least.  I thought maybe I would even be permanently blocked from logging onto this site but now that I am home it is letting me in again.

It is still not my intention that the site become exclusively a record of movies I have watched. I do want to keep that record however and I have said before this is a convenient place to keep it.

That said, we are back to the 1930s now, which means I am pretty much going to like everything no matter what it is. I was not particularly amped beforehand to see any of these four I am reviewing today, yet I thought there were fine things about all of them.

The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)

This is a real classic, for what it is--and that seems to me nothing inconsiderable--it is perfect in just about every way. I do not think it would be possible to make a movie (or write a book, or a song) like this, in this kind of spirit, now even if one wanted to, which in spite of all the powerful arguments in favor of progressivism in the culture due to technology and the increasing dominance of fact and information in every facet of human endeavor, seems to me to be a real shame.

I suppose I should try to explain why I would say this. The movie pleases a part of the brain which is not usually stimulated in such a fashion in modern life. To begin with, it has one of the best casts of all time. Having been raised in the modern era, the presence of particular stars or actors rarely has struck me as being all that important to the interest of the movie, even when they are good (the late Philip Seymour Hoffman was one exception to this that I can think of offhand). But it is unusual that I see a performance and feel that this one actor has made the role or the part really special. Claude Rains (who plays the wicked Prince John here) almost always has this effect, and by himself is usually enough to make any movie he is in a matter of cinematic interest. Basil Rathbone is also an oddly compelling actor to watch perform. This is my first time seeing Errol Flynn, who plays  Robin Hood. He holds his own among this highly distinguished company, but my overall impression is still somewhat undefined. He was a major star at this time, though today his most characteristic movies (Captain Blood, et al) do not seem to me to be well-known today. The adjective most commonly used to describe his film persona is 'swashbuckling'. Swashbuckling carries with it an implication of roguish (but adult) fun, and the successful combating with people who on paper at least are as strong as one's self, all without apparent stress or worry regarding the outcome on the part of the swashbuckler. Olivia de Havilland, another of my favorite stars of this time, is one hand as Maid Marion. She is not required to do a lot other than look good (in a 1930s idea of 12th century dress), be cold to Guy of Gisborne, and provide encouragement and a reward to Robin Hood for continuous heroic deeds, but as almost the only female character in the movie, she does this well enough. (As an aside, Olivia de Havilland is still alive, aged 97. She was 22 when Robin Hood came out).

A second strength of this is that it has a great uncomplicated understanding of what is most broadly appealing in the source material and it goes with that above any other consideration, such that nearly every scene is its own satisfaction and hits the viewer's romantic susceptibility head on. The story flows almost effortlessly from the romantic setting of the forest to the early dramatic peaks of the confrontation in the castle and the archery tournament and back and forth all the way to the anticipated climax. But getting to the end or anywhere in the future is less the point in this movie than almost anything I have ever seen.

While today this would be considered a children's project, and any attempt at an adult interpretation would have to be sexed up considerably, this 1938 version seems to be directed at an amorphous general filmgoer who is composed of childlike and adult elements at the same time. Claude Rains and Basil Rathbone approach the material in the full adult personas of Claude Rains and Basil Rathbone. They aren't hamming it up for the kids or mailing it in and sneering at the earnest middlebrow American public. Even though their parts are funny and over the top and are to a certain extent meant to be, they took the execution of them most seriously.

This came with many bonus features, most of which I enjoyed, though this entailed spending a week or more considering this one movie. There was the regular commentary, which was by a film scholar named Rudy Behlmer, who had a congenial manner of talking and some sense of humor, which I liked, there was an hour long documentary on the history of technicolor which I found enjoyable (Robin Hood was not the first major technicolor movie--it was around the ninth or tenth--but it may have been the first really memorable one), there were some shorts from the 1940s, including one of Errol Flynn taking a yacht trip along the coast of Mexico and Jamaica (by way of the Panama Canal, though filming was forbidden there) with his scientist father, one of his many wives, and numerous of his colorful friends, including the archery expert who had consulted on Robin Hood. There was a (too brief) look at some scenes from the 1922 silent version of Robin Hood starring Douglas Fairbanks, which looks like a pretty good, as well as hilarious, movie in its own right. There was a blooper reel of 1938 Warner Brothers productions that was an staple at the studio's annual employee banquet. In short, quite a lot of good stuff of the sort that I have not seen before.

Apparently in the scenes where people are shot in the chest with arrows they really were shot with arrows. Of course they had on thick padding underneath, cork and other types of reinforcement, though it still seems rather dangerous to me (what if the archer was off a couple of feet and got you in the eye?) It was noted that the extras who took these arrow shots got paid an extra $50.

There were two directors credited on the film, William Keighley and Michael Curtiz, the latter of whom directed a number of famous movies, including Casablanca.

Captains Courageous (1937)

Another movie that was much more emotionally engaging than I had anticipated, and also featured a cast full of big names. Spencer Tracy appears yet again, though in a much younger incarnation than we have seen him yet, and is, as film performances go, more or less spectacular. I suspect this is the best role of his increasingly impressive career. Old Hollywood legend Lionel Barrymore is in the house as the captain of the fishing boat. Though by today's standards his management style is a series of negligence and wrongful death lawsuits waiting to be filed, we are supposed, I think, to recognize him as a serious and noble man at the end of the movie. Freddie Bartholomew, who played the kid, is genuinely obnoxious in the beginning but becomes quite affecting by the end. Mickey Rooney is also in it, though I don't think his presence adds much. But then I've never been able to like that guy.

This was directed by Victor Fleming, who is most famous for directing both The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind in 1939. He was obviously an able director of studio films.

The home base of the fisherman in this movie is Gloucester, Massachusetts, another place pretty close to where I live (probably 90 minutes) which I am reminded I have never been to. I have put on my list for the upcoming spring and summer. Whatever else there is to do, we can check out the famous fisherman monument (which is in the movie) and probably there are some atmospheric places to get seafood, even if the fishing industry is effectively dead there compared to what it had been well into my lifetime. I suspect there must be a few old ship captain's houses around, too. Those kinds of kinds of towns usually have enough interest to fill a day.

The story is from a Rudyard Kipling book. I believe Kipling wrote it during the time when he was living in Brattleboro. I also believe it is his only book that has an American setting. I have not read it, though it is on at least one of my lists, so I probably will someday.

The movie romanticizes and extols the humble life devoted to hard work and simple, honest pleasures, and contrasts it with the kinds of grotesque and empty excesses of a life too much cushioned by wealth. These fishermen are rough characters, sure, but they are at bottom good men who instinctively as it were knew exactly what the boy needed to flesh out his character. I was quite taken aback at the end when the fisherman donned ties and jackets upon arriving back on land and also by the highly civilized and almost genteel  personality of the captain's household. The modern day New England fishermen don't really seem to clean up like this, not that I know that many.

Follow the Fleet (1936)

Another 30s movie carried by the presence of brilliant superstars, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in this case. It is probably my least favorite of this set; however it has some pretty good songs in it and it seems, compared to other 30s musicals I have seen, to be more full and more like a real movie all around. That is to say that the plot, such as it is, tries to resemble the form of a plot,  and develop an identifiable structural framework. The plausibility of Fred Astaire's having joined the navy to get over the breakup of his partnership/nightclub act with Ginger, of his running dancing classes on board a battleship, and of his organizing and starring in a civilian stage show during his shore leave to pay for the restoration of the sailing sloop that had belonged to the father of Ginger and her sisters, are not important.

The decline of the song and dance man (and woman) as a major component of the movie and television entertainment scene over the last 40-50 years is really one of the more astounding developments in the history of these media.

The woman in the photo above is Harriet Hilliard, who played Ginger Roger's sister. She would become best known for marrying Ozzie Nelson, fathering Ricky, and playing herself on the iconic 1950s TV show starring the family.

Ruggles of Red Gap (1935)

Charles Laughton is the star of this, and of course we know all about him (as an actor). He apparently had the kind of sex life, heavy on the gay side and full of breathtakingly casual and borderline respectable encounters, that shocks the living daylights out of people like me who have never touched another person's body in any kind of risky or illicit or even mildly socially disapproved manner. That is to say, I am aware that he had this kind of side to him, and was not the distinguished and respectable European gentleman he often portrays in films 24 hours a day. It is important that I note this because this sensual and artistic life with its seemingly (at the highest levels) carefree and casual creativity and wit and fun is so foreign to me that I forget that it is a serious world that is very different from that known to me. Anyway, in these four movies we have definitely seen five of the better movie actors/performances of all time (Rains, Rathbone, Tracy, Astaire, and Laughton), five big names who may or may not be at that level in other films (Flynn, de Havilland, Barrymore, Rogers, Melvyn Douglas), besides much excellent work by the supporting players.

Ruggles of Red Gap is based on a novel by Harry Leon Wilson, which I had not known beforehand. I had actually read one of Harry Leon Wilson's books, Merton of the Movies, probably 20 years ago, and I have always thought it one of those good-natured, cleverly written books that is undervalued. Besides the similarity of the alliterative title, of which the author was apparently fond, Ruggles and Merton are similar kinds of stories. In both instances a young, or at least youngish, man migrates to the American west in the early 20th century--Merton to Hollywood to try to break into the movies, Ruggles as an English butler whose lord loses him in a poker game in Paris to the uncouth scion of a mining operation (who looks and dresses rather like Mark Twain) based in Red Gap, Washington. Some fish out of water hilarity ensues as the greenhorn adapts to his new surroundings, but eventually both Merton and Ruggles find their level, embrace the freedom of men in command of their own destiny that early 20th-century America, and especially the western parts of it, offers, and get the girl (even though we know enough now to suppose that Charles Laughton probably doesn't want the girl). There is some corn in it--the scene where Ruggles recites the Gettysburg Address to a teary-eyed audience in the saloon is a bit much even for me--but on the whole it is a satisfying, feel good kind of picture. It's also not available on Netflix, so I sprang for a $1.79 VHS copy.

My wife observed during one of the early scenes in Paris where two Americans spot each other in the road in front of a cafe and being whooping and hollering and snorting like cows and riding on each others' backs, to the extreme horror of the cafe patrons, that "unfortunately only the Australians act like this now."

Judgment at Nuremberg & Odd Man Out

Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)

I was not too excited at the prospect of another courtroom drama, more than three hours long, directed by Stanley Kramer, Hollywood's most earnest and socially committed liberal of the early 60s (whose films have been turning up in my program at a prodigious rate over the last year), and featuring a cast loaded with superstars signed up for a film which already promised to be more self-consciously important than most people raised in this cynical generation can stomach. In spite of a lot of what one would instinctively dread about this movie being in fact true--it does take itself very seriously, it is grandiose (it opens with a five minute "overture" during which Nazi music plays over a black screen with the word "Overture" spelled out in white), some of the big name stars are a bit too big for the roles they are asked to play, and overdo them--its sincerity and confidence in its importance, and maybe the importance of human existence, are genuine enough, and strong enough, to relegate these potential flaws to a rather minor status.

Stanley Kramer is not a master of subtlety or the small but telling detail, but he seems to have been one of the more sincere directors, and strongest in his beliefs, who ever worked in this country. This is no doubt his magnum opus. Inherit the Wind, which came out the previous year and which I found myself grudgingly admiring in many of its aspects, was a good warmup for this, as there are obvious similarities between the two. Nuremberg has more plotlines and characters and covers quite a lot of ground. One of the most important, and, relating to Kramer, characteristic parts of the movie is the ten minute interlude near the middle where he simply shows the actual documentary footage from the concentration camps, which evidently in 1961 had never been seen by the general public before, at least in the United States. I appreciate the way that it was done. It is not thrust or flung out at the audience demanding that it take in and acknowledge at once all the pertinent facts of the case, and feel viscerally a certain response that the artist or historian thinks you ought to feel but has not adequately prepared you to feel. Kramer is very strong on this preparation, and did not break out the footage until a critical moment arrives in the trial, when its impact will have some weight behind it, and not immediately invoke a purely shocking or emotional response. The effect is more "Can you believe this happened?" rather than "You didn't know this thing I have shown you was going on, well, now you can't plead ignorance anymore, so what do you intend to do, or at least emote, about it? Also feel free to squirm under my moral superiority," which is how I often experience the presentation of atrocities or injustices in films and other public forums.

Burt Lancaster is one of the many big names in this. There was a time, especially in the early 60s, when you could not keep him out of a classic film. I think this is the fifth time I have seen him, with 3 being in the '61-'64 period (the other two being The Leopard and The Train). I didn't recognize him until the movie was practically over, so believable was he as a dignified German. I guess that means he did a good job. Marlene Dietrich was back again,and gave the picture something it wouldn't have had otherwise. Maximilian Schell won the Oscar--he is notable to me as Maria Schell's brother anyway. They were Austrian. Austrians, as actors, directors, composers, etc., I probably don't need to tell you, were prominent, and very able, at all levels of Hollywood in the middle of the last century. The Austrians who came of age in the years just before World War I were one of the more artistically accomplished cohorts in the history of the world. And now they are extinct.

I am falling asleep--but I must finish this post tonight.

Judy Garland was in this, at age 39. She is not terrible in it, as some have written, but they really could have gotten someone else to play the part--they didn't need Judy Garland for it. I also think they may have given her an Oscar for this, which was ridiculous. I feel similarly about Montgomery Clift's appearance to what I do about Judy Garland's. He's not giving you anything you would not have gotten from a relative unknown. Spencer Tracy is the star, which I had not realized beforehand. I won't say that he was miscast, but that his persona seems strange in this setting. He plays his usual upstanding adult middle American role here, fundamentally decent, incorruptible, adhering to common sense and measured, all of which is good and well, but we're trying Nazis here, very brilliant and in many cases intimidatingly accomplished ones. Were amiable provincial judges like Spencer Tracy really who we sent to deal with these guys?

For all this, the movie does work. I think it is because it doesn't just care that the Nazis killed millions of people and got (sort of) punished for it, but it cares about the way that they were able to do it, by perverting the laws and all of the other institutions of society that might have been able to oppose it. And yes, we all sort of know this, but we probably don't spend as much time thinking coherently about it as we should, and the point that Stanley Kramer would make is that if we have any part of a working brain, we are responsible, even if we consider ourselves to be powerless nobodies without proper credentials for critique, for the perversion of these institutions and bulwarks of civilization in our own society; and I actually still believe this to be true, which probably accounts for why I am unable to be happy about anything going on in contemporary life.

Odd Man Out (1947)

This is a good movie, but I am on the clock, so my review is going to be choppy, and brief.

Postwar Britain--set in Northern Ireland, but I assume it was filmed in one of the London studios. Directed by Carol Reed, in one of his warmups for The Third Man, which came out two years afterwards. That time, for me, has in general an atmosphere that I find strongly appealing, at least for the purpose of watching movies, but the atmosphere in this--the relentlessly dreary weather, the darkness, the cold, the dingy houses and apartments and pubs--is really what makes the film. The plot is improbable, but it does not strike me as particularly important. Politics also,surprisingly, don't seem important. The main character, who is played by James Mason, is an IRA type, and the viewer, as well as many of the minor characters whom he encounters in the film, are sympathetic to him, and the police are undoubtedly the villians, but I certainly did not feel that the movie contained any kind of blatant pro-IRA message, nor can I believe any suggestion of one would have been permitted in 1947, the censors in Britain at that time being even more severe than they were in America. The IRA aspect provides a subject and a framework for the director and his assistants to undertake an artistic exercise. Later in life, James Mason apparently said that this was favorite among the films he had been in. I wonder why, given that in most of the movie he doesn't say or do much, drifting in and out of consciousness due to having been shot in the arm and at his most vigorous dragging himself from one hiding spot to another, usually wordless. That is what he felt however.

I watched this on VHS, though the place I ordered it from sent me a burned DVD of the movie as well. I enjoyed viewing it on tape. I cannot remember why. It does fill up the whole screen, or more of it, than most DVDs do.

Classic Movies 1950-1960

These are all well-established classics that a certain class of mind is supposed to like. There is another class of mind, that consisting of independent spirit or intelligence, which would probably not deign to bother with them, except to pick out their inanities. I do not belong to that class however.

I had seen all three of these before now, but only once, maybe twice in one instance, and all a long time ago.

Inherit the Wind (1960)

I don't love this movie, but I kept getting the nagging suspicion that it was better than I was giving it credit for. For one thing, I think I was letting myself be deceived by the circumstance that its sets reminded me of a television show of its period. Here are some of what I thought was good about it:

The screenplay is very good, despite being apparently didactic. It is an adaptation from a well-regarded play of the time, which (the time) had a definite strain of earnest concern for social justice and liberty about it. It is frequently intelligent, and thorough, while being lively enough to move the story along and keep the attention of viewers like myself, who like mild stimulation but are generally too tired/out of practice to give much mental exertion.

I saw Spencer Tracy again, and was more impressed with him than I was in Father of the Bride, which I had just seen a week or two before, because I thought he was more or less playing himself in that other movie, and would effectually be the same guy here; but he played a quite different guy, and rather subtly, such that I don't have any sense that one of these characters is more indicative of who he is than another.

It probably does not have to be noted, but Spencer Tracy's physique and overall look, for somebody who was a major star for three decades, is pretty amazing. The guy's upper body was mashed potatoes, and he always looked 10 or 15 years older than he actually was. When he did Father of the Bride, he was 50, about the same age as Brad Pitt and George Clooney are today (or, to make a more contemporary comparison, as Cary Grant was circa To Catch a Thief. On the other hand, Wilfred Brimley was an even older-looking 50 at the time of his career-making performance in Cocoon). He is 60 in this one. I used to thnk of 60 as old, but many 60 year olds nowadays prefer training for and running marathons to loading up on steak and martinis (Tracy is what 60 looks like when you focus on the latter). Even Philip Seymour Hoffman probably employs a personal trainer and dietician.

The great Frederic March played the William Jennings Bryan character, I suppose well. He is at least quite unrecognizable to me as Frederic March in his costume, the bald head especially.

Things that irritate me about this movie:

I have no particular love for Bible-thunping rural white southerners, but I thought the rather raw contempt poured out on them in this movie did not really do the filmakers much credit--it certainly did not add anything to the quality of the film. I realize that this came out as the civil rights era was starting to gain heat, and though there is no direct racial dimension in it, anti-southern sentiment among the mosr progressive social justice liberals--and Stanley Kramer was perhaps the most avowedly politically motivated major studio director of this time--was running high. Nonetheless, given the star power on display in the movie, and the extras showing the film being feted at gala celebrations in Berlin and Cannes, my class instincts kicked in with the feeling that this was not quite a fair fight, and while maybe at some level it was an honest representation of the reality on the ground, it was not an artistically worthy or fair one.

Gene Kelly--yes, the dancer, though at least they don't have him break into any numbers here--is not well cast as a cynical newspaper reporter who I believe is supposed to be H L Mencken. Having read even a little H L Mencken, I cannot imagine he was anything like the character depicted here, though one would assume most of the brain trust involved in the making of the movie would have been more familiar with his works than I am, or even known the man personally. My impression of Mencken is that he was a rather pitiless person towards people he considered inferior (pretty much everybody), who never smiled, and only laughed with people who had demonstrated some worth. Kelly plays the role as a kind of nihilistic, wisecracking, light person, which does not ring true to me.

Donna Anderson (this is not in the category of things that irritated me) is the token babe in this, and she has an appealing 1960 look, which is why I mention her. She went on to have a modest career in television, though not in any shows that I ever watched.

Paths of Glory (1957)

This was a St John's favorite. I think they showed it twice there, once as the regular Saturday night classic, and a couple of years afterwards as part of the Wednesday Kubrick series. It has a sensibility that fits comfortably there. Its time is close to the heyday of the College's modern era--I believe Jacob Klein himself was still the dean in 1957. It has a kind of classical spareness both of plot construction and in its sets and general style. Its themes are the sorts of things you can talk about at the bar afterwards without straining yourself or falling asleep, so that you feel you taking part in mental life to some degree. So needless to say my viewing, after about a 20 year interval, was heavily colored by these associations.

I had forgotten that one of the guys was chosen to be the sacrificial lamb from his platoon because, among other reasons, he was a 'social undesirable'. At times I feel like there are some people nowadays--perhaps even myself--could stand to gain by the sort of concentration upon self-improvement that the threat of being sentenced to execution because you are so repulsive to people might inspire.

An Adolphe Menjou sighting! He is in the cast as a cynical, weaselly, sybaritic French general (I think there are several redundancies).

I still don't really understand the part at the end where a terrified German girl is put in front of a pack of ravenous, wolf-whistling French soldiers and manages to subdue their raging boorishness by singing a melancholy song.

Conscripting armies to fight wars, especially wars like this where 75-90% of a birth cohort is killed, and the military leadership considers itself justified to make an example of conscript citizen-soldiers it considers not to be fighting with enough zeal by shooting them, is almost unthhinkable in the current state of society, on the mass scale of the 2 world wars especially. Aside from reticence about possibly being killed, huge segments of the present population simply don't regard the state as having authority over them to that degree. Power, yes, but power to which they are in a state of antagonism, not something to which they see themselves as owing a duty.

Sunset Boulevard (1950)

This is even more firmly ensconced in the Pantheon than the other two, so much so that many of the more highbrow or edgier iconoclasts on the internet take glee in knocking it down as much as they can, along with its similarly popular and acclaimed director, the great Billy Wilder, by whose creations they are decidedly unimpressed. I actually worship these people in a way, at least when they are obviously the sort of people who are cool and are successful with women, or are themselves desirable women hopelessly beyond my social reach, but unfortunately even when I am able to share their tastes I am unable to partake of what must be the exhilirating sharpness with which they savor their particular likes and especially their dislikes. Needless to say, I am a fan of Sunset Boulevard. Like other Billy Wilder films, it is fantastic (in the sense of being over the top in its storytelling and characterizations) and yet seems to me more like real life than a hundred other movies, and good ones too..

Quickly, some favorite dialogue bits:

JOE (upon Norma's declaring that he needs some new clothes): What's wrong with this shirt?

NORMA: Nothing, I suppose. If you work in a filling station.

That line kills me for some reason.

Near the end when Betty Schaffer comes to the house and discovers the truth about Joe:

BETTY: No, no. I haven't heard any of this. I never got those telephone calls. I've never been in this house...Get your things together. Let's get out of here.

JOE: All my things? All the eighteen suits, all the custom-made shoes and the eighteen dozen shirts, and the cuff-links and the platinum key-chains, and the cigarette cases?

I've never had nice clothes or accessories, and rarely think about wanting them, but I want them when I see them.

The Oscar for best actor in 1950 went to Jose Ferrer for Cyrano de Bergerac. I haven't seen that, so maybe it was the clear cut winner, but as, similar to Brando the next year in A Streetcar Named Desire, if not quite so dramatically, William Holden's role and presence is one of the more memorable performances in the history of the movies, I am thinking he probably would have been a deserving winner. Incidentally, Spencer Tracy was also nominated that year for Father in the Bride, another iconic role, but not I don't think in the same class as Joe Gillis. I like William Holden as a actor. He had that All-American midwestern charm combined with an unassuming studliness, a type which seems to have disappeared from the national scene in the last generation. He was apparently very good friends with Billy Wilder. This is noteworthy to me because Billy Wilder is one of the all time giants in his field and it is curious to know what kind of friends and intimates such people have. William Holden had some problems with alcohol such as we tend to frown on nowadays, most notably killing a person in a car accident while driving drunk. He also died at the age of 63 by falling onto the edge of a table while intoxicated in his apartment and bleeding to death, which is sad, really, but he had a little bit of an artistic flair about him, enough to be likable, and the possession of a restless and regularly unsatisfied soul often seems to be a prerequisite for attaining to this state.

Nancy Olson, who plays the fresh-faced aspiring screenwriter Betty Schaefer and represents to Joe the illusion of escape from the deformation of his soul that has been expedited by his taking up with Norma Desmond, was know as "Wholesome Olsen" in her high school days. That was in Wisconsin; in the 40s. That's pretty wholesome.

Doubtless this has been remarked upon before, but Norma Desmond is basically Don Quixote in drag and possessed of a massive fortune. The scene where she goes to the studio and is not able to be disabused of the conceit that she is still the greatest star in the world is reminiscent of various Don Quixote episodes, especially those in the second part where people begin to humor him by acting as if he were really the knight he claims to be.

Given Buster Keaton's current status in the very first rank of the Pantheon of the all-time greatest movie directors and actors, it never ceases to astound to see his cameo appearance with fellow washed-up, and at the time forgotten, silent film stars essentially playing themselves as Norma Desmond's old friends. In 1950 though the means of delivering old movies, to the extent people were even interested in seeing them, especially silent ones, was pretty limited, and film history as constituting some part of one's artistic education had not yet entered the general consciousness; which pretty much left Buster Keaton on the outside looking in, though he remained active and made guest appearances on venues like The Donna Reed Show, which would sort of be like Woody Allen appearing in a bit part on The Big Bang Theory, except that Keaton is normally considered now to be a major modernist artist, admired by Samuel Beckett and other cultural titans of the 20th century.

Contemporary Bonus: I watched Silver Linings Playbook because besides being much touted I knew it took place in Philadelphia and mildly deranged Eagles fans constituted a major part of the plot, and a decent Philadelphia-themed movie is pretty once in a generation event. I have to say it was very entertaining, though I would have liked more Inside Philly stuff and I think at some level the movie would have to be considered a failure because it purportedly is about rather dark subject matter, but I, and probably a lot of other people, came away from it thinking that maybe getting arrested and committed to a mental institution, taking a few years off to hang out at somebody else's parents' house (I don't want to live with my own parents), jogging, reading books, watching football games, visiting my zany Indian psychiatrist who really cares about me, and practicing dancing with a 23 year old babe who is also a mental health patient while I recover might be just what I need in my life at this time.

Regarding such Philly stuff as there was: They started strong by having the Bradley Cooper character carrying something around in an empty jar of Hellman's Mayonnaise, and I thought, this is going to be good, because Philadelphia people, for reasons which I have never understood though I too suffer from the affliction, cannot endure any other mayonnaise than Hellman's. I cannot bring myself to purchase another brand. I had to do the shopping for my son's camping trip with the scouts and they told me, 'just buy the store brand of everything' but I couldn't bring myself to put another brand of mayonnaise in the cart. The really odd thing about this is that most sophisticated people outside of the 215 think it is an absolutely terrible variation on mayonnaise. My wife thinks it is nasty stuff, but she has been to Philadelphia enough times to know that what I am talking about is real, and something deeper than taste. Apparently French mayonnaise is so incredible that normal people after having one bite are never able to stand the taste of Hellman's again. But this doesn't apply to people from Philadelphia.

I thought they got the Christmas scene at the house with the lights, the kind of food, the Frank Sinatra Christmas song in the background, pretty accurately. When you are a kid you assume everybody everywhere listens to Frank Sinatra Christmas albums, and Johnny Mathis and Nat King Cole and Perry Como and other people like that, but people in New Hampshire, for example, really don't. In general people in New England after they are about 25 don't seem to have popular music records or radio on obsessively in the background all the time, and especially at parties, like everybody I know did growing up. Sometimes my wife will let me put a record on when we have a birthday party or family guests, but the sound is put low and we always turn it off when it is time to eat or serve cake. The music in this movie was good in general. There was nothing in, other than the Sinatra, that was specific to Philadelphia life, but it was all things people would be into if it came on.

Things that were wrong: The most egregious error was when the Jennifer Lawrence character talked about a car broken down, 'on 76, near the King of Prussia Mall'. Though I-76 is the main east-west highway running out of Philadelphia, I have never heard anyone refer to it by its number. In town out to Valley Forge the road is always called the Schuylkill Expressway, after the river it runs alongside, at which point it joins with the Turnpike. Both the Expressway and the Turnpike predate the numbered Interstate highway system and everybody still refers to them by the old names. Most other state and U.S. roads are also called by their local names. I-95 is referred to by its number. This is nit-picking, but when somebody in a movie refers to something you have been on or heard spoken about a thousand times using a term for it you have never heard anyone use in real life, it is rather jarring. New Yorkers certainly wouldn't stand for it.

Also a real die-hard Eagles fan could never be friends with a Dallas Cowboy fan. The mindset and life experiences are too disparate for any real bond of intimacy to develop. I don't even think I could be in love with a woman who was in any way a serious Dallas Cowboy fan. This is extreme, because sometime in the early 90s I remember watching a TV show--I think it was Beverly Hills 90210--where one of the guy characters had to dump a gorgeous blue-eyed Aryan goddess he was dating because she revealed racist tendencies, and of course my reaction was, "Who cares?" If anything, I thought a girl who sincerely disliked blacks or Arabs or whomever could probably be counted on not to run off with one under my nose, and that seemed at the time not an unappealing thought to me. But a Dallas Cowboy fan, you know it would be doomed from the start.

I like the high school reading list he does, though he continually is frustrated by the endings of the books and hurls them through the window. A lot of the books he reads I never read either in high school or afterwards--Lord of the Flies, The Grapes of Wrath, whichever of the two early Hemingways he reads. I don't remember much which novels I read in school. A Separate Peace, I remember, and Great Expectations. David Copperfield had been the Dickens novel they had read at my school up to about 1980, when they changed it because David was too long. I'm guessing by now Dickens has been dropped from the curriculum altogether.

I've got to finish this post tonight, so my last points will be quick and un-expanded upon.

So let me get this straight. You go home and catch another man having sex with your wife in the shower and you beat him up, you get arrested? That doesn't sound very American to me.

Jennifer Lawrence does strike me as embodying some especially characteristic strain of this new generation of women (the millenials) that we are getting. It would take me at least an hour though to tease out what I mean by that, so I will leave it for another time.

Like many movies that crave mainstream approval nowadays, there are a lot of extraneous multicultural characters thrown in whose characters nor multicultural qualities are essential to the plot. The materialistic wife of Bradley Cooper's vaguely ethnic (Hispanic?) friend who was being driven to an early grave by stress had some reality as a character, but was completely extraneous to any story (then again, the story itself is largely extraneous to what is interesting about the movie). The Indian psychiatrist who turns into a face painting, insane Eagles fan on fall Sundays is a nice try, but a bit of a stretch, I think. It's clear they had no idea what to do with the black guy.

Generic Movie Post That Took 2 Weeks to Write

valour kinds say time have think begin country

The goal with these, rarely attained, is always economy.

Avatar (2009)

They should have made the movie about her.

My beautiful wife did not watch this movie with me, but she came and sat in the living room for a few minutes while it was on, in the midst of working on a project and observed, with an air of mild bemusement, "Wow. This is not a typical Bourgeois Surrender movie." "No", I admitted, my body rigid in equal parts embarrassment and perplexity at the direction the world has gone in since 1995, "That it is not."

This one came recommended from Roger Ebert's 2012  Movie Yearbook, which I picked up at a discount without realizing that it only rated movies from the years 2009-2011. So I will probably be seeing more movies from those three years, though this book is the last in order which I refer to. [Roger Ebert's death was announced while this post was underway, but I don't know what to say about such things. He appears to have had a fulfilling and fortunate professional life in writing and the arts, which seems to me a rare happiness]. In recent years Ebert began to display an extreme strain of contemporary liberalism that I had not noted him to have before and he evidently found this movie to have cast a great blow for the causes of environmentalism, anti-militarism, anti-greed, etc. Perhaps these attitudes were driving creative forces behind the movie but they made little impact on me.

All of the characters in this movie are alpha males, including the women and the tree-hugging natives of the planet Zoltran. Every sentence of dialogue is confrontational, challenging and conveys the attitude that the speaker has attained a perfect competence in his calling and overall superiority of person and that no one else is worthy of being spoken to with even basic respect. One suspects this is not merely how the director, famed egomaniac James Cameron, deals with people--dominant artists and leaders usually seem to have to be this way--but how he actually views the general nature of human relations, which is not reassuring to me.

It is worthy of notice (to me--maybe this trend has been in motion for a while) that after a long tradition of stories about beings from other planets being smarter/more technologically advanced/militarily superior than Americans--interestingly, extraterrestrial life never seems to make its way to Pakistan--the popular liberal imagination at least now envisions interplanetary conflict as the American military in concert with rapacious corporations on the offensive in distant reaches of outer space. It says a lot about the mindset of a lot of people at this cultural moment with regard to how powerful and uncontestable the big companies and the high-tech military, and the individuals who have high positions in these entities, are perceived to be.

What was the big deal about this movie again? The special effects? The story, apart from a few adultish trappings, was about at the level of something my children would have watched, minus the humor. I can be impressed by computerized special effects in a movie where I can see something that strikes me as imaginative, like A Bug's Life, for example. I didn't think the concepts here were very imaginative at all--as my wife pointed out after watching the movie for five minutes, several things were ripoffs of Star Wars, and even I did not notice anything particularly futuristic other than the alienating anti-human headquarters of the space station and the Michael Jackson oxygen chamber where your soul left your regular body and was transferred to that of a space-creature--and both of these appeared in the first five minutes of the movie.

The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1975)

Sometimes called The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser. Also sometimes called by a more literal translation of the German title, Every Man For Himself, and God Against All; but somebody must have decided they wanted to try to sell some tickets in America, so for purposes of commercial release, that title was scrapped.

This is a European art movie--from a "New Wave", no less--about a curious historical incident and set in the 1820s or 30s. It is predictable that I would imagine I liked it. It was a comfort after the unrecognizable depiction of existence that was Avatar.

The aesthetic is very much of its time. There are a lot of leisurely outdoor scenes in gardens and fields and orchards kind of after the Bergman manner. The whole movie is comparatively restrained and 'unbusy' for a Werner Herzog film. There is almost no dialogue at all for the first half-hour, and until about the halfway point of the movie Kasper Hauser himself does not speak in more than monosyllables, though people begin talking about him. The second half is composed of a series of short scenes, vignettes almost, that do good service in keeping up interest in the story while maintaining the enigmatic effect. It is great, but it is also very suited to my particular sensibility.

Being a German movie, it is not surprising that a logic professor is brought in at one point to investigate the development of Hauser's reasoning capacity. I had to replay the professor's question and answer a second time before I 'got' it, but I am satisfied at least that I did get its particular elegance. I rarely get anything like that anymore.

There was a commentary on this featuring Werner Herzog himself, who, not surprisingly, speaks English well.  It was not a great commentary though, as Herzog kind of went all over the place and the moderator, who sounded like a fairly callow American, was not especially effective at asking questions or guiding the conversation, indeed engaging Herzog in conversation at all. The typical exchange was what you might expect when you pair up an earnest and totally overmatched American with a vigorous and highly experienced European artist:

American Moderator: So what you are trying to show in this scene is how Kaspar has no preconceptions about anything that a normal person would take for granted as a basis of society?

Herzog: Actually no (or yes, then talks for five minutes on some entirely different topic).

I am trying to figure out what some of the formulas are for a good commentary. Some lapse of time, usually a  long one, seems necessary. If the commentary features people who were actually involved in the movie, they should either be retired or long past the phase of their career/life in which they made the film. The film should not require promotion, unless it is a plausibly good old movie of which the reputation has languished.

Good commentaries are able to reproduce something of the atmosphere and intelligent mindset which vitiated the film, assuming of course that the film is so vitiated. There has to be a good correlation between the intelligence of the commentator and that of the film. It also helps for the commentator to have a somewhat engaging conversational style. Scholars and critics especially tend to be hit or miss on these points. Directors for obvious reasons are usually strong on the first criterion, but some flail on the second. I cannot say that Werner Herzog was one of these flailers, but it would have been better if he had had somebody a little more up to the task of engaging with him and directing him in more focused channels. Actors and actresses are usually decent enough at conversing but their intelligence levels vary widely--by which I do not refer to their scores on IQ tests so much as things like sense of humor, ability to discern between things that are more noteworthy and interesting of observation than other things, and ability to tell a story/explain something that the typical video drone would not know about but might find curious.

Father of the Bride (1950)

If I were a normal, well-adjusted, forward-looking denizen of the present day, or were even consistent with my criticisms and dislike of nearly everything about that same present, I would be able to eviscerate this movie for its silliness, triviality, and almost unbelievable self-contentedness at its vulgar bourgeois materialism with a full heaping of (seemingly appropriate) self-satisfaction of my own. But predictably my apparently incurable sentimentality for almost any production of this time period won out and I found myself enjoying the movie against all of my better instincts, to say nothing of the wasted decades of attempted training of my intellect. I think it was Spencer Tracy's devotion to martinis and dogged consumption of the same, as well as the overflowing ash trays, all carried off in the unaffected manner of the time, that allowed me the freedom to enjoy myself. Also my wife, who doesn't care for most of the movies I get anymore, actually watched it with me and enjoyed it, and it is after all fun to have a good time with other people once in a while, if you can manage it. She pointed out that numerous items for this wedding in 1950 cost multiples of times in constant dollars what was spent on our own nuptials in 1997.

We haven't seen much of Spencer Tracy so far in this program of mine. He was, as his Wikipedia page asserts, one of the truly major stars of Hollywood's golden age. He is an interesting figure to me, but as there are a few other of his films coming up imminently, I will say more about him later.

Most capsule summaries of this movie mention as a big selling point that it features 'Elizabeth Taylor at her most beautiful'. I would say that she looked better in A Place in the Sun myself, but in any instance she generally looks better in newsreel/paparazzi footage from this time then she does in either of these movies. Not that I think she is ugly or anything, but I have never thought she was notably that much more desirable than thrity or forty other stars of her generation. Not that I know anything about the matter. Clearly she made men hungry--and the nearer they got to her the hungrier they became--in a way that even most beautiful do not quite do. Acknowledging all that, she was still a surprisingly minor presence in this movie, given all the hype about how beautiful she is supposed to be in it.

This was directed by Vincente Minnelli, who has been turning up a lot in these reports (The Clock, An American in Paris). He had a good run as a director, especially from around 1944 to '54. Mostly famous for his musicals, but he had, as a studio man anyway, the gift of touch or something. All three of his films that I have reviewed here have seemed from the critical point of view to suffer from some weakness or triviality but in the end impressed upon me some quality that made it impossible for me to dismiss them and indeed even inspired affection; though overall I have less affection for Father of the Bride than the others.




Despite all evidence to the contrary, even I don't really believe life was superior in 1950 to what it is now. Apart from the obvious abominations of the era, if I were actually forced to go back and live in it on a daily basis I would probably find it boring and stifling, especially if I had to live somewhere outside a major, New York-Los Angeles-London level city. It's not surprising to me that people drank a lot more than they do now. Still, there must have been something legitimately appealing about it compared to the present day, right? Something that is superior to life now? Let me try to think of a few possibilities.

1. There were far less people in jail at this time than there are now, both overall and per capita. This is well-documented. For most of the population there was much less of a police state/security atmosphere than what we are subjected to now as well. Even in New Hampshire, having a cop in public schools is de rigueur now. When I go back to Philadelphia there are security guards at the doors of supermarkets even in the inner suburbs. This at least hasn't come to northern New England yet.

2. I like the girls/music/literature/art of that era, most of which however I probably would not have been aware of had I lived at the time, and that obviously includes anything exciting that might have happened with the girls. I actually like the Girls of the 80s too, but even though I was actually alive in that era I might as well not have as far as socializing with any were concerned

3. I have mentioned in past posts that the bars/nightclubs/house parties of this time as depicted in movies look a lot more jovial than most of what I have known. St John's parties, like a lot of other things there, did often have a little bit of this retro feeling about them, which I obviously liked. Unfortunately I have to live the rest of my life in a more assertively post-1965 environment, which is a shame as far as partying goes at least.

This is not a point in favor of the 1950s but an aside regarding the sense I pick up sometimes in the present that back in those bad old days rapists and child molesters must have been running wild and commiting their crimes at will. This may have been so in some unfortunate cases but I am not certain that the volume of these kinds of crimes was any higher than it is now. Most older people I knew in the 70s and 80s, and by this I refer mainly to women, seemed to think children and girls were in much more danger of being subjected to these abuses and violences than had been the case when they were young. Also the general movement for women during the 60s and 70s was towards more freedom from parental/societal constraint in regard to relations with men rather than more protection from them. I know these are two different things, but they are probably not unrelated. One does hear and read the stories from this era of course about the extremely aggressive and brusque assaults (what we would call assaults certainly) that men would spring a la Mad Men upon women at cocktail parties or in offices. Those kinds of things obviously still go on today, but I am guessing among the professional classes anyway they are less frequent or are at least instigated by a much smaller number of men than formerly. Some men who would have behaved in this boorish way back in the 50s probably have actually become more enlightened in the matter of how to treat women appropriately, others probably would not be able to resist the temptation had they any longer enough power to safely risk nothing more in the attempt but a cold reception. Most men of course don't understand what they are supposed to do when no women seem to want anything to do with them at all, but obviously want all variety of pleasurable-sounding things from certain other men. One obvious response is to waste your life dreaming about being one of those winners and getting to do all the things the winners get to do with women, because let's face it, most of the time nothing else really matters. Indeed, the irony is that the less substantial and important and intelligent a person you are or become, the more your mind is probably taken up with sensualistic fantasies, because you literally have nothing else to think about...