Other Men's Women (1931)

 William Wellman, Joan Blondell, James Cagney

Mary Astor is sad.

I always thought that Wellman's over-the-top melodrama was a symptom of mediocrity.  Maybe it's not.  Even films like Night Nurse which I think even Wellman would admit are absurd still manage to be gripping.  I spent the entirety of this one on the edge of my seat, which is odd, because it's nothing special, I guess.  It's not an especially good plot, at least not in the conventional way, not in the way in which Hitchcock would craft it.  It's exciting because the characters are interesting, and when we put the characters together, we know that interesting things will happen, although we're not quite sure what.  It reminds me of of Stolen Kisses a little bit, a movie with very good talent, but one where Truffaut was too busy with the Langlois Affair to make his rushes (he thinks the picture was better for this, and he was probably right).  'Character development' is too broad and shallow a term for what I'm trying to get at here, but too many of the films which have beeen popular in the recent past -- Armageddon, The Usual Suspects, Boondock Saints, The Dark Knight, all seems hopelessly 'autistic' -- again, for want of a better term.

I got spoiled on Mary Astor seeing her in Meet Me in St Louis.  I thought she couldn't act!  I was annoyed that she was fat, which is a pretty shallow reaction, but then I thought her role was kind of insulting too.  But she's pretty solid here, in fact, I liked her a lot.

This must have been one of Joan Blondell's first movies, and she quickly became a major star.  And then, inexplicably disappeared.  Maybe, like so many of my favorite actors, she was only attractive to audiences when she was very young and youthful and vibrant.  I don't know.

I'm not really sure what happens exactly, but it goes something like this.  There are this two guys.  They work for a railroad.  One guy is always hitting on waitresses and offering people sticks of gum.  He says, "have a chew on me".  The other guy, his best friend, is married to Mary Astor.  Somehow, they all end up living in the same house, and Mary Astor and the gum-chewer end up falling for each other.  Much male posturing and a few fist fights ensue and the main character gets very drunk with Joan Blondell.  Then James Cagney shows up, but he doesn't dance.  Then a bridge collapses, but I won't tell you how.  Then they all live happily ever after.

Other Men's Women is weird and slow, and it took me like two or three tries to learn how to watch this one, but it was well worth it.  The past was a very different place.  They had a lot more railway lines for one thing.  Railway car seems a much more efficient way to get around.  Back in the fifties, the automobile companies purposely removed a lot of this very useful and energy-efficient infrastructure so that kids like me would be broke from having to fork over a large chunk of our incomes for gas.  Now that was smart.

Shadow of a Doubt (1943)

Joseph Cotten, Teresa Wright
Hitchcock

I've said this before, elsewhere, but I can never shake the feeling that Hitchcock is ever-so-subtly mocking his actors.  At least in his American movies.

Shadow of a Doubt takes place in an idyllic Southern California town.  Joseph Cotten, uncle Charlie, is a serial murderer.  His face is often cast in shadow to show us that HE'S HIDING SOMETHING.  Teresa Wright is younger Charlie, and, when big Charlie comes to visit, she's the one who gets wise to him.

"AND IT'S ALL MENTAL!!!"
Chill out, Teresa.

In another absolutely inexplicable choice of casting, MacDonald Carey, who was one of the main characters in Days of Our Lives for years and years, plays Teresa's love interest.  Hitchcock had good taste in actors; generally speaking, his lead actors tend to be pretty solid; take Cary Grant, his favorite leading man, for instance.  MacDonald Carey just so... smarmy.  Ugh.  Teresa Wright is another odd choice; she tends to play ingenues with overactive thyroids, and she annoys the crap out of me.

Check out this dialogue:

Teresa: Mrs. Henderson, do you believe in telepathy?
telegraph operator : Well, I ought to. That's my business.
Teresa: Oh, not telegraphy. Mental telepathy. Like, well, suppose you have a thought, and suppose the thought's about someone you're in tune with, and then across thousands of miles, that person knows what you're thinking about and answers you, and it's ALL MENTAL!!

Which wouldn't be so bad if Wright didn't all but shriek the last bit.

There's another scene where big Charlie brings little Charlie into a seedy bar and it turns out the waitress is an old friend.  Big Charlie tells little Charlie that they are the same, and little Charlie recoils.  Then big Charlie launches into a strange, philosophical rant.

"I didn't expect to find you in here"
although she can't be more than a year older than Charlie,
Louise is already callous and disillusioned.

..."You think you know something, don't you? You think you're the clever little girl who knows something. There's so much you don't know, so much. What do you know, really? You're just an ordinary little girl, living in an ordinary little town. You wake up every morning of your life and you know perfectly well that there's nothing in the world to trouble you. You go through your ordinary little day, and at night you sleep your untroubled ordinary little sleep, filled with peaceful stupid dreams. And I brought you nightmares. Or did I? Or was it a silly, inexpert little lie? You live in a dream. You're a sleepwalker, blind. How do you know what the world is like? Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know, if you rip off the fronts of houses, you'd find swine? The world's a hell. What does it matter what happens in it? Wake up, Charlie. Use your wits. Learn something."

Oh Hitchcock, you pessimist, you.

My Man Godfrey (1936)

Carol Lombard, William Powell

"and everywhere I went, everyone was Godfrey"
Carole Lombard plays a daughter to a wealthy industrialist who takes in
 a 'forgotten man' (Powell) to play butler to her dysfunctional family.

I hate it when I show people my favorite old movies, and they respond with, "that was cute".  I have force-fed My Man Godfrey to a grand total of three people and, when the ordeal was over, they all admitted that they all liked it, but also thought it 'naive'.

Which is not really fair.  In order to properly understand screwballs, it's important to give them some context.  A few weeks ago, I was (inevitably) drawing comparisons between the 2010's and the 1930's.  And then I wondered what sort of movies people watched during the Depression.  For some reason, I associated film noir with the Depression, but instead, people were watching movies like this one, escapists fantasies about wealthy dilettantes, with plenty of brilliant Irving Berlin song-and-dance numbers for icing on the cake.  Occasionally, someone would make a serious film in an attempt to provide some relevant social commentary, notable examples being Capra's Meet John Doe and Mr Deeds Goes to Town.  My Man Godfrey is an inspired blending of the two. The very first scene is set in a shanty town, and while, in typical screwball comedy most of the story unfolds in the rarefied mien of the rich and famous, unlike other films in the genre, every now and then we take a break from the absurdity to hear Powell do some 'serious thinking'.

And because of this, Godfrey has aged very well, while those Astaire and Rogers movies seem frivolous and corny in hindsight.  And if these films do seem 'naive', that's more an unfortunate sign of our own times when everyone is so cynical and obsessed with their own inflated self-importance than any fault of these great little films.

Godfrey is in the public domain; you can watch in on youtube here.

They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969)

Jane Fonda
directed by Sidney Pollack

Fonda and Sarrazin, defying our expectations

It's hard to watch really old movies for too long.  The dialogue and acting was better during the days of the studio system, but I find I can't relate to the characters so well.  1969 was a while back too, but it's still a refreshingly modern change from my usual fare.

Jane Fonda can be wooden, but intellectually she's solid. She always knows where she's going, even she's not the most expressive gal on the planet.  I've always enjoyed her work.  I especially liked her costar, pretty boy Michael Sarrazin.

Novels can be silly which is why I've stopped reading them.  I realize this one is trying to be provocative and emotional and dramatic, but it's still silly.  If the main character wanted to commit a crime, he could have been a little smarter about it.  Jane Fonda seemed angry, not unhappy, but then again, as I've mentioned before, I've never really thought she was a very good actress (she just picks good movies!).

By the end, I wonder why I'd even bothered watching this film. It left me feeling cheated and depressed.  Frankly, there are plenty of times I've wanted to "get off the carousel"; I've been angry and bitter like Fonda before, but then I go and try to find things to make me happy.  No, I don't think this is a world where we should be having children.  What's Pollack's point?

The way he tied it all into one big metaphor at the end was pretty cool.

rant: THANK YOU ROGER EBERT!!

Kathryn Bigelow is my favorite modern director.
Not only does she have a unique visual style all
of her own, but her movies are all but soft-core man
porn.  Ralph and Keanu and that other guy, mmm...

I was trying to dig up this link to all these new French films which I'd been meaning to see.  Instead I came upon Roger Ebert's blog post on the best films of the last decade.

He puts Synechdoche, New York at the top of the list, which is a film I admit I didn't understand.  It might have been too conceptual for me.  To quote,

Those who felt the film was disorganized or incoherent might benefit from seeing it again.

Yeah, pretty much.

But the thing is, with Kaufman, at least, I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.  He's conceptual, but it's honest.  It comes from the heart.  He's not trying to awe us with his brilliance or 'author-ness'; rather, it stems organically from who he is.

He's probably too far ahead of our time. Years later we'll all look back and say, "ah, I get it now".

And thank you, Roger Ebert, for putting The Hurt Locker at its rightful place at the top of the list.  Hurt Locker was a very, very good movie.  Bigelow has a done a lot of very, very good movies, only a couple of which I have seen.  She is a very good director.  Years later we will look at her work and finally realize her brilliance.

Juno and Me and You and Everyone We Know were also very good, right on Mr Ebert.

But, ugh, Minority Report?  And you forgot There Will Be Blood and La Vie en Rose!  But, as once quipped Joe E Brown... nobody's perfect. :)

Reading this list does indeed make me feel very good.  Of course, it's nothing to equal the great number of films which I love from the 30's and the 40's and the 70's, but all these movies are very good; I have good memories of watching them in the theater with good friends.  Or with myself, in some happy, quiet hour.

Contempt (1963)

Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli
directed by Jean-Luc Godard

Bardot and Piccoli have a much-needed relationship chat.

I like films which are visually arresting, provocative, kind of jump at you. This is one of those.  I've always disliked Godard, simply because he seems to be a not-very-nice person, and this comes across in his films, but all the stuff he did in the sixties was very good.

The CinemaScope photography is very beautiful, and there are a lot of random montages of statues of Greek gods, and the landscape of Capri.  Piccoli and Lang drop a lot of lines which seem symbolical, but which are ultimately nothing but fluff.  The pseudo-intellectual discussion in the middle stopped me in my tracks a second as I tried to imagine what Lang really meant, and what Godard was really trying to say, but it turned out to be nothing very important at all, nothing but some silly rationalizing for some pretty silly behavior.  Generally speaking, it's a superficial movie; aesthetically pleasing, but not very deep.

It often seems to be that 'the point' of Godard is to piss us off.  He makes some pretty absurd statements about American businessmen in the first twenty minutes.  And then, Piccoli's writer character, Javal, does some pretty silly things, which the film community still argues over to this day.  The trouble is, it's not sensible, and there's not 'a point'.  Godard is playing with our emotional reactions in a crude way; we're supposed to feel certain things, but we're not supposed to understand the film as a logical whole.  It's a weird medium between thinking a little, but then not too much.  I've wondered sometimes if Godard weren't mocking the literati elite; you could pontificate about this one for hours, and yet not say anything really meaningful.

Bardot turns in the best performance of the lot.  She's a much better actress than we give her credit for; we're too often distracted by her status as a sex symbol.

It's a frustrating movie at times, but perhaps this is on purpose.  Unlike many film critics, I think that attempting a big-budget, "American" style production was a brilliant decision on Godard's part; it emphasizes his strengths as a remarkable visual storyteller.  Perhaps under-appreciated upon it's release, Contempt has been enjoying a deserved second look from cinephiles over the past couple of years.

Rope (1949)

James Stewart, Farley Granger
Hitchcock

colonel mustard in the observatory with...

I can never shake the sense that Hitchcock is mocking his actors.  Especially when he hires dopes like Farley Granger, of all people.  I can't figure out what Jimmy Stewart was doing in this movie either; he was cast completely against type, and some of his dialogue totally freaks me out.  Here's an excerpt:

Stewart : After all, murder is - or should be - an art. Not one of the 'seven lively', perhaps, but an art nevertheless. And, as such, the privilege of committing it should be reserved for those few who are really superior individuals.
other guy : And the victims: inferior beings whose lives are unimportant anyway.
Stewart : Obviously. Now, mind you, I don't hold with the extremists who feel that there should be open season for murder all year round. No, personally, I would prefer to have..."Cut a Throat Week"... or, uh, "Strangulation Day"...

Only an ass would have a conversation like this, and Jimmy Stewart is never an ass.  That one threw me for a loop.  Of course, it's meant as a joke, but even in that context, he sounds like an ass

I thought Rope was boring as all fuck.  The antagonist is just your run-of-the-mill psychopath so enamored of himself that he has no insight into others' motivations. I could have spit out Stewart's final speech in a face-off with any devotee of Nietzche (although it seeems that it's Ayn Rand who is all the rage these days).

of course, the worst part of all is that I can't even find a decent screenshot

The good news is, I got to watch it on youtube, for free, and in high-definition too.  This is because Rope is in the public domain.  I like to think that Hitchcock got so pissed off by the popularity of certain works of pseudo-fiction by a certain Ayn named Rand that he purposefully forgot to renew the copyright in an idealistic bid to even marginally reduce the number of idiots on the planet.

Yes, youtube user @starlicense, Farley and Brandon were probably gay for each other, but that's kind of missing the point; wouldn't you agree?