The Purchase Price (1932)

Barbara Stanwyck, George Brent
directed by William Wellman

she wants it, but he knows better.
it took forty years for movies to become this honest again.

A surprisingly good B-movie from solid early talkie stars Stanwyck and Brent.  Stanwyck is the nightclub singer who gets in a jam, so runs away to Sasketchewan as a mail-order bride to farmboy George Brent.  But the real drama lies in the post-marriage, surprising prescient battle-of-the-sexes between Stanwyck and Brent.  Not a great melodrama by any standards, but worth watching because it's old, and the subject matter is unusual.

Director William Wellman produced some pretty entertaining flicks back in the day, entertaining if only they were so inappropriate.  I had a good laugh with my friends the first time through Night Nurse (1931), which is also a very stupid movie, but funny for the same reasons.

It's interesting that, although Purchase Price was filmed during the depths of the Great Depression, there are no references at all to, "the state our country's in", indeed, it seems the only time you hear these statements in classic movies is, like, in Mr Deeds Goes to Town, probably in the context of a simple, everyman Joe decrying his countrymen's moral decay.  Healots!  A nice respite from those assholes on CNN and Fox who won't shut the fuck up about how bad our economy supposedly is.  Dedoimedo is probably right; it's probably a hoax by the one percent to get the rest of us to accept lower wages.  Fuck you, society.

This was such a nice movie.  Wellman could have chosen to have gone overboard, but he only does so when it's funny, and keeps it sweet and subtle when it counts.

Bleak Moments (1971)

Starring: Anne Raitt, Sarah Stevenson
Directed by Mike Leigh

what kind of mike leigh movie would this be without a good dollop of blubbering?

I once emailed a link to this movie to a guy after a really bad date.  X(

Bleak Moments is, I guess, not exactly a film, rather, I think it was a miniseries made for television.  It addresses poverty and hopelessness stemming from both economic constraints and personal shortcomings.  It's something like the Panic of Needle Park of mid-seventies Britain.

I'm going to go over quickly what I liked about it.

One of the major themes was isolation, how the characters often knowingly chose to isolate themselves, sometimes because it convenient, but also just out of protection, to get away from people they don't like. The two main characters, Sylvia and Hilda are both caretakers of disabled people; Sylvia of her retarded sister, and Hilda of her elderly mother. Obviously this is not extremely fufilling, and yet they seem to have a lot of difficulty in making new attachments. There are a lot of scenes where half of the runtime is filled by silence, all of the characters staring at each other, not sure of what to say. Most awkward of all is Sylvia's boyfriend of sorts Peter, who takes her out on a date to a laughably bad Chinese restaurant, and after spending the entire evening in almost complete silence, doesn't have the sense to drink the gin that Sylvia offers him.

Call me a depressive, call me a pessimist, but I much prefer watching this to some shiny and glamorous interpretation of life, say, like, Alexis Bledel's new flick Post Grad. I mean, watching someone talk that long about obtaining self-fufillment just makes me sick to my stomach. This seems so much more meaningful somehow, definitely much more true to life. I mean, people are awkward, and sexual situations are super-awkward. Most people are homely, aren't fantastically rich, and deal with the same personal stumbling blocks again and again and again.

In the end it comes down to what you want to watch a film for.  Melodramas can be tough, especially the 1970's realistic variety, but at least they're honest.

Wuthering Heights (1992)

Starring: Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes

This is got to be one of the most psychologically traumatic movies I have ever seen, right up there with Panic in Needle Park. The first time I watched it, I started blubbering about halfway through, and never stopped; the second time I watched it with some other people, and one of them left in the middle because it was "too f**ed up". I read the novel some years back, and as much as I can remember, this movie pretty much nails it. We also get the benefits of excellent actors Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, and a really super supporting cast whose names I have never seen again. This isn't a perfect movie at all; it moves through a very long story very quickly, and you have to be paying very close attention at all times to follow the plot. It is indeed very much a cliff notes of the novel. Sometimes the directing decisions seem a little weird, for example the placement of the "young Heathcliff" and "young Cathy" actors. However, I recommend this film highly.

While I was watching this with company I kept asking them questions about Heathcliff's actions and behavior. Each person had a different explanation for why he did the things he did from, "he's twisted and sick inside," to "he was treated like an animal all his life", to "he was devastated because Cathy never wrote to him". None of these people had ever read the novel, and yet these are the same mysteries my classmates and I were trying to unravel in eleventh grade english.

Ralph Fiennes (Heathcliff) and Juliette Binoche (Cathy) looking tortured.