1936-1985 (Rodolfo Nieto Commemorative Movie Post)

There were a lot of old ones in this group, so it should have been a good set for me, but it was just kind of so-so. 

Mildred Pierce (1945)

Well-regarded, noir-ish picture directed by Michael Curtiz, also notable for being one of the better known roles--she won an Oscar for it--of the legendary star Joan Crawford, who remains an object of some fascination in our time seemingly as much for her reputation for being a colossal pain in the ass as for her acting career, as her heyday as a star--and she truly was huge in her time--was the early 1930s, and other than Grand Hotel, most of her big starring vehicles are not widely known today. I was a little disappointed by this on the first viewing. Being right in my favorite era of Hollywood movies as well as knowing the regard a lot of film buffs had for it, I was expecting it to make more of an impression, but I don't remember much about it, and I didn't think much about it even after I had just seen it. Mildred Pierce is a single mother who becomes a tough and very successful restaurant owner. Her daughter is resentful of her social origins and is one of the most notorious villains of the noir period. Has some different themes. Maybe I'll see again another time in a more receptive mood.  

Julius Caesar (1953)

All-star black and white production of the Shakespeare play directed by Joseph Mankewicz and featuring Marlon Brando as Mark Antony, James Mason as Brutus, and John Gielgud (in his pre-Sir days, I believe) as Cassius. The whole presentation is very much in keeping with the earnest Great Books/mass college/theater as a fine art aesthetic of that postwar period, which is the background I come out of, so to me this is very much how I imagine the play should look and be acted according to my understanding of that time. According to Wikipedia MGM wanted to make the movie in color but the filmmakers (Mankewicz and the producer, John Houseman, who, yes, is also the famous actor) didn't want to make a spectacle, and also wanted audiences to infer a parallel with the recent Fascist movements, in particular the newsreels. As usual it was a good decision, especially in light of the ever shrinking provenance of the black and white era in the history of cinema. As often seems to be the case, there was a lot of fighting among the stars (in contrast to today of course, where everyone is always claiming to get along swimmingly and to love their fellow cast members). I never know how much I should care about those things or whether they are particularly relevant when watching a movie. This is as good of a mainstream version of one of the more watchable and accessible Shakespeare plays I think you are going to get.     

Gotcha! (1985)

Mid-80s young person comedy with a Cold War twist featuring the same director (Jeff Kanew) and one of the stars (Anthony Edwards) that had given the world Revenge of the Nerds the previous year. I don't remember this coming out, though I went to the movies often at this time, as well as heard about all the movies other people went to see that I missed. I was hoping that at the very least it would provide some unlooked-for morsels of 80s nostalgia, but it really didn't have anything I liked. It is unbelievable now that East Berlin and the rest of the Iron Curtain countries were closed off until after I was out of high school. The (very) little taste we get of Communist East Germany is the most interesting part of the movie to me, though this is the kind of film that can only depict the world behind the Wall (and most of that on our side of it, to be honest) in completely cartoonish terms. As in many Hollywood efforts of that era, there is a "Czechoslovakian" spy whose presumed nationality itself is taken to be a source of hilarity, and the character is given a Russian name that no Czech person actually has. This happened frequently enough that I almost want to assume it was done on purpose. A pretty lame movie all around. Even the mid-80s soundtrack was a miss, at least as far as original songs went. 

Night of the Hunter (1955)

Hailed by many critics as one of the very greatest films (as in top 50) of all time, I don't like it that much. It is artistic, and it is unsettling, and it is unique for its era, and I can kind of see what hardcore movie people love about it, and maybe if it hadn't been hyped so much its quality might have taken me by surprise. But I have to say, there was nothing about it that I particularly enjoyed, and since it ended I have not been overcome by any great desire to see any part of it again. It is famed for being the only directorial effort of the beloved Charles Laughton, a truly great actor and formidable all around artistic presence in his lifetime. He is the kind of towering figure from the past whose presence is, I sense, perhaps most strikingly missed in the present cultural environment. Anyway, he is lavishly praised for this movie.

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

I have no background in "horror" movies. I had no interest in them as an adolescent. I don't have any interest in them as a genre now, and even if some of them can be said to have genuine artistic quality or entertainment value, my true feelings would be to wish that the talent involved could have been deployed in a different kind of movie. That being said, I went into this cult classic with no pre-existing idea whatsoever of what it was going to be like, expecting to suffer dutifully through a half hour or so of gratuitous gore before giving it up, but to my surprise it had a lot to hold my interest. I still don't care for the overall premise too much, but the storytelling isn't bad, and a late 60s, black and white low budget indie film shot in Western Pennsylvania without special effects or other high-tech tricks where all of the clothes, cars, appliances, furniture, and so on are immediately recognizable to me from my earliest childhood is pretty captivating. At one point in the commentary when the victims are frantically boarding up the windows of the farmhouse (which looks a lot like the house I live in now) one of the speakers jokingly asked "Who has this many boards lying around their house?" But I actually do have that many. I thought the set-up of this movie was better than the resolution. They were probably running seriously low on money by the end of filming. 

The Milky Way (1936)

These last two movies were contained on the same DVD. By the time it arrived I had forgotten which was the one I was supposed to watch so I watched them both, especially seeing as neither one was much longer than an hour. They are very loosely connected in that both involve boxing, or at least have a plot that leads up to a boxing match. The Milky Way is supposed to be the better film, I think--it features Harold Lloyd in one of his more successful talking roles--but its particular humor, pretty much all of it, in fact, and this is the case with a lot of 30s movies, was lost on me. I did like Harold Lloyd's silent classic The Freshman from 1925, which has a ton of style and pointedly mocks some of the stereotypes and absurdities of college life, though with a romantic underpinning which makes it a lot of fun. The focus in this one is not as sharp, and the dynamics of boxing and street brawling and shady underworld characters are perhaps not as inherently amusing to us as they seem to have been to audiences in the 1930s, the films of which era frequently feature mild-mannered characters who find themselves in dilemmas where violence is not merely an option but the dominant way of life, so to speak, the social currency. Oh yeah, Adolphe Menjou is in this too.   

Kid Dynamite (1943)  

This was even more of a throwaway movie, the equivalent of a TV show really. Nonetheless I really liked it, because it's about teenagers set in 1940s New York City, and I have always loved those kinds of movies. This was part of an unbelievably long series of films (around 78 in total) featuring much of the same core of actors about a gang of kids, and presumably, as the series went on, young men, that ran under various incarnations, such as the Dead End Kids, the East End Kids, and the Bowery Boys, from the mid-30s until 1958 (!). Kid Dynamite was made during the East End Kids period, which ran from 1940 to 1945. The main character and leader of the gang, Muggs McGinnis (played by Leo Gorcey through almost the entirety of the series), is supposed, I think, to be a lovable Irish rogue type, but in truth he's really a pretty violent thug. Some of the other characters have a modicum of manners and are a little more endearing. I like the parts where the guys hang around the clubhouse and shoot pool and the girls dance to records. There's also a nice scene at a community dance hall. The girls are very pretty and sweet, even the ones who are supposed to be (mildly) "bad". At the end of the movie, it being wartime, three of the older boys, including Muggs, enlist in the Navy, and appear in uniform in the final scene. This part is heavy-handed and crudely jingoistic on a level that the classics of this era which people are mostly familiar with today, which are often considered jingoistic enough themselves, do not begin to approach. This class of film is definitely not going to be for everybody, but perhaps since they were not heretofore part of my consciousness combined with my general love for almost everything from this era, I kind of got a kick out of it, and was glad I saw it.

I was going to write here about my recent sluggishness and lack of interest in anything, including writing, including reading, including movies, including anything else, and wondering what I was supposed to do to revive interest in my life. But I feel better today so maybe I will put that essay off for now.