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Singin’ in the Rain (1952)

Jan20

Directors: Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly
Writers: Adolph Green and Betty Comden
Starring: Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor, Debbie Reynolds, and Jean Hagen

Z-Baby says: Some of it is funny, and some of it is boring. (Donald O’Connor’s solo, Make Em Laugh, was the part that made Z-baby laugh the most.)

Semicolon Mom says: I thought all the singing and dancing was fascinating. The story was thin and hokey, but story is not the main point of the movie. In fact, the movie within the movie practically screamed that the point of the musical, at least to the producers and directors of Singin’ in the Rain, is to shoehorn in all the song and dance numbers you can and work the plot around the dancing. Dialog is optional.

Ha! IMDB says, “The script was written after the songs, and so the writers had to generate a plot into which the songs would fit.”

We enjoyed listening to Z-baby chuckling at the movie almost as much as we enjoyed the movie itself.

IMDB link to Singin’ in the Rain.

1939: Movies

Nov23

1939 was the Year of Great Movies. In fact, motion picture historians and fans often call 1939 “the greatest year in the history of Hollywood.”

August: The Wizard of Oz premiers at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Los Angeles, California. The movie, based on L. Frank Baum’s book, stars Judy Garland as Dorothy. The film studio MGM almost deleted Ms. Garland’s famous song, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” from the movie because they thought it was too long and that it was degrading for her to be singing in a barnyard. The song went on to win many awards, including an Academy Award for Best Song in 1939.

October: Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, starring my favorite actor, Jimmy Stewart, premiers in Washington, D.C. The movie tells the story of a young man from the midwest who accidentally gets appointed to the U.S. Senate. There he comes into conflict with a bunch of cynical and crooked politicians, and he heroically sustains a filibuster (back when a filibuster was real) in the Senate to fight for the cause of honesty and the rule of law.

December: Gone with the Wind premiers in Atlanta, Georgia, of course. What a movie! If you’ve never watched Gone With the Wind, you’ve missed about the best movie Hollywood ever made. Gone With the Wind won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture. The music in this video of clips from the movie is called Tara’s Theme.

Other films of 1939: Ninotchka with Greta Garbo, Dark Victory starring Bette Davis, Stagecoach, directed by Jon Ford and starring John Wayne, Wuthering Heights with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon.

The Movies of January 2011

Jan31

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Semicolon review here.

Stone of Destiny. Recommended by HG at The Common Room. I enjoyed this movie based on a true incident in 1950 when four Scots student stole the Stone of Scone from Westminster Abbey and returned it to Scotland from whence it came back in the thirteenth century.

Bright Star. Also recommended by HG at The Common Room. Based on the life, romantic entanglements, and death of Romantic poet John Keats. This one was a little too sad and hopeless for my tastes; I think I’m developing a prejudice against all Romantic poets. They were all so emo, which I guess was the point.

Les Miserables in Concert. An old favorite that we enjoyed together as a family.

Celtic Thunder: Christmas. We didn’t get this one until after Christmas, but we watched (and swooned) and sang along anyway.

The urchins watched other things, too. They (we?) watch too many movies. I’m working on that issue.

100 Movies of Summer: North by Northwest (1959)

Jul14

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Writer: Ernest Lehman
Starring: Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, and Martin Landau.

Karate Kid says: The movie had a fairly interesting plot, but I didn’t like it that much because it didn’t confuse me. I thought it was predictable.

Betsy-Bee says: The movie wasn’t really scary, but it got my attention when the suspenseful parts came.

Z-baby says: It was about a guy getting mistaken for somebody else. He got drugged and arrested, and they were chasing him.

Mom says: I like North by Northwest because I like Cary Grant. And some of the scenes are unforgettable: Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) running through the corn fields to get away from the crop duster assassin, Thornhill and Eve Kendall climbing around on Mt. Rushmore, the flirting on the train and the meeting in the woods.

Some lovely dialog, too:

Thornhill: In the world of advertising, there’s no such thing as a lie. There’s only expedient exaggeration.

Roger Thornhill: The moment I meet an attractive woman, I have to start pretending I have no desire to make love to her.
Eve Kendall: What makes you think you have to conceal it?
Roger Thornhill: She might find the idea objectionable.
Eve Kendall: Then again, she might not.

Roger Thornhill: What’s wrong with men like me?
Eve Kendall: They don’t believe in marriage.
Roger Thornhill: I’ve been married twice.
Eve Kendall: See what I mean?

Roger Thornhill: I don’t like the games you play, Professor.
The Professor: War is hell, Mr. Thornhill. Even when it’s a cold one.
Roger Thornhill: If you fellows can’t whip the VanDamm’s of this world without asking girls like her to bed down with them and probably never come back, perhaps you should lose a few cold wars.
The Professor: I’m afraid we’re already doing that.

IMDB link for North By Northwest
Screen shot gallery for North by Northwest.
Buy North by Northwest at Amazon.

100 Movies of Summer: Unforgiven (1992)

Jul12

Director: Clint Eastwood
Writer: David Webb Peoples
Starring: Clint Eastwood, Morgan Freeman, Gene Hackman, RIchard Harris, Jaimz Woolvett, Frances Fisher

Mom says: When writing about the movie Red River, I said, “Dunson shoots or threatens to shoot a few men in cold blood basically for just getting in his way or challenging his authority, and that part was rather shocking to my youngest (and to me).” Now that I’ve seen Unforgiven, Red River would be a walk in the park.

Unforgiven is a western about cowboys and gunslingers, too. The movie begins with a shocking scene of graphic violence when a cowboy cuts up a prostitute’s face because she says something he doesn’t like. It get worse after that. I lost track of the body count towards the end. The language is crude, profane, and socially unacceptable. None of the characters is really very likable or sympathetic.

But what really bothered me were all the moments when I felt as if I were left hanging. I kept asking over and over again, “What the heck was that?” Why did Clint Eastwood’s character, William Munny, suddenly decide to leave his kids and go kill somebody after eight or nine years of peaceful pig-farming? Why did his friend Ned go with him? What was the significance of Little Bill’s bad carpentry? Comic relief? Or was he living in a shaky house, metaphorically speaking? Why were the prostitutes so vengeful and willing so spend so much money to get revenge? Why were two cowboys held responsible for the knife cutting when only one of them did it? What happened to the journalist fellow? Why was he in the movie at all? Why couldn’t Ned shoot at the critical moment? Why could Will shoot at all of the critical moments? Was the point of the movie that people never really change? If so, why does the Kid seem to learn from his violent act that he’s not really a killer at all?

Maybe the point of the movie was that people are crazy and unfathomable and don’t follow the movie western formulas. Although I easily can believe that, I don’t want to think about the fact that I inhabit a world in which violence and murder are so easy for some, the “unforgiven”, and so shattering and unrepeatable to others (the forgiven?). If the goal of the movie was to make me think and to turn movie conventions on their heads, Unforgiven was successful. I just don’t want to spend much time thinking about what the creators of this movie gave me to ponder–mostly a lot of unanswered questions and raw, violent brokenness and spiritual emptiness.

Key quote:

The Schofield Kid: [after killing a man for the first time] It don’t seem real… how he ain’t gonna never breathe again, ever… how he’s dead. And the other one too. All on account of pulling a trigger.
Will Munny: It’s a hell of a thing, killing a man. Take away all he’s got and all he’s ever gonna have.
The Schofield Kid: Yeah, well, I guess they had it coming.
Will Munny: We all got it coming, kid.

I don’t recommend this movie for children (rated R), and I actually felt uncomfortable with my 13-year old watching it. He lost interest fairly quickly, though. Adults who are interested in the western genre might find the movie has “redeeming qualities.” Not my favorite, but it did make me think.

IMDB link to Unforgiven.
Buy Unforgiven at Amazon.

100 Movies of Summer: Anatomy of a Murder (1959)

Jul8

Director: Otto Preminger
Writer: Screenplay adapted by Wendell Mayes from the novel by John D. Voelker
Starring: Jimmy Stewart, Lee Remick, Ben Gazzara, Eve Arden, Arthur O’Connell, George C. Scott

Mom says: The actors in this movie were of particular interest:

Jimmy Stewart is always good. The unassuming, but brilliant, country lawyer who outsmarts the big city sophisticates has become a cliche, but my man Stewart does the role with panache and credibility.

Lee Remick plays a beautiful and enigmatic young wanton, Laura Manion, and she has the allure to pull it off. She may be one of the most beautiful actresses I’ve ever seen. She was offered the role after first choice Lana Turner had a disagreement with director Otto Preminger.

Duke Ellington did the musical score for the movie, and he makes a cameo appearance.

George C. Scott plays prosecuting attorney, Claude Dancer. (Isn’t that a great name for a prosecutor? I wonder if it’s from the novel.) I couldn’t place him. I knew I knew him, but in this movie he’s so young. I just didn’t associate him with grizzled old Patton.

Ben Gazzara is, of course, Paul Bryan, the fugitive in Run for Your Life. In Anatomy of a Murder, Gazzara is Lt. Frederick Manion, on trial for shooting the man who raped his lovely young wife. He’s not a sympathetic character.

The movie keeps you guessing to the end. Did he or didn’t he? Was he justified? Was he insane? I thought it was a very cynical movie. Nothing is as it seems. No one can really be trusted. Defendants don’t really get exonerated as they do in Perry Mason, but rather they get off on a technicality or a mistaken doubt on the part of the jury.

Maybe that’s the way the world really is, but I prefer tales of innocence vindicated or guilt revealed and punished. I can see why it’s a good movie. Lee Remick, especially, gave a brilliant performance. The story reminded me of the perennially popular novels of John Grisham, right down to the jaded view of justice and the courtroom drama. But Grisham is more hopeful somehow.

The only hopeful thing about this movie was Jimmy Stewart’s indefatigable and irrepressible attitude. You just can’t keep a good man down.

I read the first chapter of Anatomy of a Murder by (Judge) John D. Voelker here. I might like to read the rest of it someday and compare it to the movie.

Link to Anatomy of a Murder at IMDB.
Buy Anatomy of a Murder at Amazon.

100 Movies of Summer: Adam’s Rib (1949)

Jul6

Director: George Cukor
Writers: Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin
Starring, Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy

Brown Bear Daughter says: Good movie. Very feminist, which is not necessarily a bad thing. However, the feminism was sort of undermined in the end when Spencer Tracy fakes tears in order to get Katherine Hepburn back, saying later that he only did what all women do. Ehhh.. I guess I think the wife (the one on trial) was sort of crazy, and I don’t believe that someone of the male sex is actually more likely to be exonerated from such a crime.

Mom says: Not bad, but I think neither the feminists nor the traditional marriage crowd would be completely pleased with this story of husband and wife who are both lawyers litigating against one another in the same court case. She says the woman who shot her adulterous husband should be acquitted because a man who did the same thing to his wife and her lover would be exonerated. He says the law is the law, and people shouldn’t be allowed to go around waving and shooting loaded guns at each other. I’m on his side.

However, when the characters in the film go on to argue about the nature of marriage itself, I’m not so sure I’m with Mr. Tracy/Assistant DA Adam Bonner nor with Ms. Hepburn/Amanda Bonner. He says something to the effect that marriage is not meant to be a competition and implies that defense attorney Bonner isn’t “fighting fair.” She says at the end of the movie that “there’s no difference between the sexes. Men, women, the same.” Nonsense. If it’s legal and the judge allows it, it’s fair in the courtroom. And of course there’s a huge difference between the sexes, thank the Lord.

According to IMDB, the movie screenplay was “inspired by the real-life story of husband-and-wife lawyers William Dwight Whitney and Dorothy Whitney, who represented Raymond Massey and his ex-wife Adrienne Allen in their divorce. After the Massey divorce was over, the Whitneys divorced each other and married the respective Masseys.” Adam’s Rib is comedy, so you can guess that the ending

IMDB link to Adam’s RIb

100 Movies of Summer: Double Indemnity (1944)

Jun24

Director: Billy Wilder
Writers: Screenplay by Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler from the novel by James M. Cain
Starring: Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson

The entire movie is narrated by insurance salesman, Walter Neff, as he confesses into a dictaphone the terrible crime he has been led to commit. His partner in murder is Phyllis Dietrichson, a blonde bombshell who’s unhappily married to a grouchy and jealous oil executive, Mr. Dietrichson (we never learn his first name). Neff and Phyllis deserve each other, but Phyllis comes across as the more ruthless and cruel of the two. (According to IMDB, Barbara Stanwyck was the first choice to play Phyllis, but she was unnerved when seeing the role was of a ruthless killer. When she expressed her concern to Billy Wilder, he asked her, “Are you a mouse or an actress?” ) It was bit disconcerting at first watching the father of My Three Sons play a cad and a murderer, but Fred MacMurray was quite convincing in the role.

This is one of the few 1940’s movies I’ve seen that could give Hitchcock a run for his money. It’s well-plotted, the dialog is snappy and not too hokey, and the ending is good. I highly recommend this one to fans of Hitchcock and of film noir in general. Wilder plays with the lighting and camera angles with a finesse that made me a believer in his directorial skills. Barbara Stanwyck, by the way, is absolutely beautiful, a lot prettier than most of the other actresses of her day.

My urchins learned from this movie the meaning of the term “double indemnity” and the lesson that crime never pays. At least, I think that’s what they learned.

Walter Neff: Who’d you think I was anyway? The guy that walks into a good looking dame’s front parlour and says, “Good afternoon, I sell accident insurance on husbands… you got one that’s been around too long? One you’d like to turn into a little hard cash?”

Ummm, yeah, that’s who she thought you were, sucker.

The novella by James Cain was based on a “1927 crime in which a married Queens woman, Ruth Brown Snyder, persuaded her lover to kill her husband Albert after Albert had just recently taken out a large insurance policy with a double indemnity clause.” Ms. Snyder was executed at Sing-Sing on January 12, 1928 for the murder of Albert Snyder. Her accomplice, a corset salesman, also received the death sentence.

Has any one here read the Cain novel? Better or worse than the movie? Or just different?

IMDB link to Double Indemnity.
Buy Double Indemnity at Amazon.

100 Movies of Summer: Red River (1948)

Jun23

Directors: Howard Hawks and Arthur Rosson
Writers: Borden Chase and Charles Schnee
Starring: John Wayne, Montgomery Clift, Joanne Dru, and Walter Brennan

Karate Kid says: This movie was about some cowboys on a cattle drive. They live next to the Red River, which is the river that makes up the border between Texas and Oklahoma. They owned the Red River Ranch, and decided to take their cattle to somewhere they could sell it. On their way, they will have a stampede, an ambush, and even a mutiny!

Mom says: I liked this one better than I did The Searchers, but the ending was lame. The writers were drawing on the imagery of herd behavior in which dominant males fight for leadership of the group. There are two young “bucks” on the cattle drive, Matt and Cherry. Then, there’s Dunson, the old but strong leader of the drive, who is also conservative and set in his ways and determined to be obeyed and feared, no matter what the cost. The tension between these three, but mostly between Matt and Dunson, who is Matt’s mentor and father figure, makes the movie go. But then, at the end, although Matt’s love interest, Tess Millay, has a great scene in which she tells them both off for acting like idiots, the tension just sort of drains off into anti-climax.

Still, it’s a good movie to watch with your kids if you’re learning about the cattle drive/cowboy era of U.S. history or if you just like cowboy movies. Dunson shoots or threatens to shoot a few men in cold blood basically for just getting in his way or challenging his authority, and that part was rather shocking to my youngest (and to me). The stereotype of savage Native Americans was still there, but not as prominent as it was in The Searchers. In Red RIver, the Indians are not characters, and the Indian attack is just a plot device to place another obstacle in the way of the cattle drive and give the hero a chance to be heroic. The one Native American character who is on the cattle drive with the cowboys is a part of the comic relief, not very believable or interesting.

IMDB link to Red River.
Buy Red River on Amazon.

100 Movies of Summer: Ninotchka (1939)

Jun22

Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Writers:Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder
Starring: Great Garbo, Melvyn Douglas, Ina Claire

Synopsis: Comrade Ninotchka, a Soviet diplomat, comes to Paris to work out the details of the transfer of some jewels to the “Soviet people.” At first, she is all business, cold ad without human emotion, only interested in being a good apparatchik and serving the people. After she meets Leon, a lawyer representing the Russian princess who also has a claim to the jewels, Ninotchka fals in love and changes into a real woman.

Mom says: According to IMDB, “Greta Garbo did not wear any makeup for her scenes where she is the stern envoy.” She also did not show any emotion or do any acting. Glamorous, yes. But if she can act, I couldn’t tell it from this movie. Then, the script itself was flawed, too. It required her to change from a robotic Communist automaton to a real woman on the strength of one pratfall by her suitor, Leon. I couldn’t see what made Leon show any interest in Ninotchka in the first place, other than physical beauty. Garbo plays the first part of the movie with no feelings whatsoever, and so is completely unbelievable. Then, in the second part where she falls in love the change is so sudden that I couldn’t believe in it either.

All of the urchins found this one boring and somewhat odd.

Just after watching this movie, I read some P.G. Wodehouse, Very Good, Jeeves, a collection of short stories in which Jeeves as usual saves the day. In one of the stories an adolescent boy (who is staying in the same house with Bertie and Jeeves) is infatuated with Greta Garbo:

I clutched the brow.
“Jeeves! Don’t tell me Thos is in love with Greta Garbo!”
“Yes, sir. Unfortunately such is the case. He gave me to understand that it had been coming on for some time, and her last picture settled the issue. His voice shook with an emotion which it was impossible to misread. I gathered from his observations, sir, that he proposes to spend the remainder of his life trying to make himself worthy of her.”

I either need a different introduction to Garbo, or I need to get inside the mind of a thirteen year old boy. Never mind. Strike the latter idea. The mind of a thirteen year old boy is not a place I could ever want to inhabit.

IMDB link to Ninotchka.
Buy Ninotchka at Amazon.