Was able to finally scratch a German Lilian Harvey/Willy Fritsch musical off the list with an early one thanks to the Murnau transfer of Three from the Filling Station aka Die Drei von der Tankstelle, (1930). It is utterly contemporary with the Hollywood musicals of the era - sound recording has some interesting mixing going on and curious overdubbing with about 3 songs they pound into your skull over the course of an hour and a half. Story is a piffle about 3 friends who are wiped out financially in the crash so they start their own gas station and are torn apart when Lilian (yes, it's one of those films where the characters happen to have the same name as their stars) flirts with all three on their separate shifts. Direction is strictly by the book for the time by Wilhelm Thiele, who later fled Germany for probably obvious reasons to a career in Tarzan movies and Lone Ranger shows, although the editing shows the briefest glimpses of Soviet style flourishes that are sorely missed through the rest of the film.

Things really only take off when Harvey gets on screen and she only really gets to let go with her dancing in a couple of spots, notably with a 'finale' that looks like it might be a reintegrated find from the restoration, that starts with a surreal bit of breaking the fourth wall hinting at what was to come in my all time favorite Lilian Harvey film, her positively lunatic I Am Suzanne, for Fox in '33.

Probably for specialist interests only, not sure I'd drag the kids through it.

Three Sundays To Live (1957): Kieron Moore is a bandleader at a club. His girlfriend is rich, beautiful Jane Griffiths. Life is good, until Sandra Dorne walks into the club when he's alone and asks him to help her brace the club owner for a job -- she'd worked for him earlier. He walks into the boss's office, only to discover him shot. Moore tries to go to see what's going on. A man hiding out of sight slugs him, another puts the murder weapon in his hand. When he wakes and tries to get help, the police are already there. They arrest him. They don't believe his story. Miss Dorne moved to America and died in a bus crash years earlier. All too soon, he's in prison, waiting for his death sentence to be executed.

It's a nice script by Brian Clemens, directed by Ernest Morris, both early in their careers -- Clemens' third script, Morris' second feature -- and inclined to be ambitious. The actors are likewise anxious to do well and give good performances, although Miss Griffiths doesn't have as much to do as she might. Balance that with the Danziger brothers producing as cheaply as they could get away with, and you have a decent little second feature, even if the wrap-up is a little brusque and well-mannered. I don't imagine the audience noted. They were probably anxious to see the main feature, or hit the water closets before heading home.

Bob

drednm wrote: ↑

Fri Aug 02, 2019 1:54 am

Paul Penna wrote: ↑

Fri Aug 02, 2019 1:41 am

drednm wrote: ↑

Fri Aug 02, 2019 1:31 am

Watched Swept from the Sea on Amazon Prime.

Did you view this via their ad-supported IMDb TV service? If so, how many, how often and how long were the ads?

Nope. Watched it on my big screen via my streaming Amazon Prime. No ads.

I ask because I see its Amazon Prime options only as either free-with-ads ("Included with your IMDb TV channel") or a $2.99 rental.

Paul Penna wrote: ↑

Fri Aug 02, 2019 2:35 pm

drednm wrote: ↑

Fri Aug 02, 2019 1:54 am

Paul Penna wrote: ↑

Fri Aug 02, 2019 1:41 am

Did you view this via their ad-supported IMDb TV service? If so, how many, how often and how long were the ads?

Nope. Watched it on my big screen via my streaming Amazon Prime. No ads.

I ask because I see its Amazon Prime options only as either free-with-ads ("Included with your IMDb TV channel") or a $2.99 rental.

It's playing fine here without ads, despite the warning. I'm a Prime member, if that's any difference.

Beautiful film.

Rick

Odd..... I didn't see it say anything about ads. Guess I didn't look that closely. It was free with Prime. Surprisingly stunning and relevant to boot. Had never heard of it.

Rick Lanham wrote: ↑

Fri Aug 02, 2019 3:50 pm

It's playing fine here without ads, despite the warning. I'm a Prime member, if that's any difference.

Thanks, I'll give it a try.

Following on from watching Marcia Mae Jones in STREET CORNER, I played the 'Jailbreak' ['55] episode of 'I Married Joan', a series I'd never watched before. In this agreeable spoof of women's prison films, Joan Davis is persuaded to go undercover to give a report on condition to husband Jim Backus, who is on the Board of Governors. Whilst among these hard-boiled ladies she manages to get her uniform swapped over so as to cause extra confusion. Quite lively, with a decent quota of laughs from a lady of whom we were robbed far too soon.

I'll Be Your Sweetheart (1945): The credit reads "Introducing Michael Rennie" in his eighteenth movie. He and Peter Graves -- the English one, not the American one -- simultaneously come up with the idea of fighting the pirate music publishers at the turn of the 20th Century, by matching their sixpenny prices for sheet music and courting a singing Margaret Lockwood. Her singing is done by Maudie Edwards. The pirates, led by Garry Marsh, drop their prices to tuppence, while debates on enforcing copyright go on in Parliament and Moore Marriott as songwriter George Le Brunn dies in poverty, leaving widow Muriel George an estate of less than two pounds.

This Gainsborough musical, directed and co-written by Valentine Guest, reminds me a great deal of the nostalgic Betty Grable musicals of the period. True, it's black & white. True, there are only a couple of songs by Le Brunn, and three more by his contemporaries, with a further three supplied by Guest and a collaborator. Still it fits neatly into the genre, with some good, if stagebound choreography and a great sequence set in contemporary Blackpool.

Miss Lockwood gets top billing, followed by Vic Oliver, in what I think of as the Jack Oakie role, to Rennie's John Payne and Miss Lockwood's Grable. It was Oliver's last feature film, released the year his marriage with Sarah Churchill ended. Although I am not as familiar with the music-hall tunes of the era as their American contemporaries, there is obviously a great deal of fondness for them in this movie, giving it a patina of sincerity that is very pleasant.

Derek B. reported on this movie at viewtopic.php?f=4&t=2131
Ed Lorusso in 2016 at viewtopic.php?t=21553&start=450
and earlytakiebuffRob last October at viewtopic.php?f=4&t=25411&start=1770

Bob

Three of a Kind (1936): Richard Carle doesn't want his daughter, Evalyn Knapp, marrying Bradley Paige, because he's a lazy confidence man and Bradley Page besides. Meanwhile, Chick Chandler gets a thousand-dollar bonus from Carle's laundry, and quits to enjoy a bit of the high life. He gets evening clothes and buys Miss Knapp's car, stolen by con man Berton Churchill and his daughter, Patricia Farr, leaving Miss Knapp to be picked up by Chandler in her stolen car and taken to a resort, where all them them pretend to be each other, except for Carle.

It's certainly an appealing outline for a screwball comedy, but director Phil Rosen can't get them up to speed for the insanity to roll. Churchill, in his deliberate manner, has the best pacing; Miss Farr starts out too slow, although she improves by the end, and Miss Knapp seems to be channeling Myrna Loy, but without any snap.

It's a puzzlement, because all of these performers have shown themselves to be capable farceurs in other movies. I imagine the problem lies in a combination of slowing down the performances to bring the movie up to decent second-feature length, concerns over the audience understanding what was going on, and lack of rehearsal time. Rosen directed nine other Poverty Row movies that year. That couldn't have helped. The result is an amusing, but far less interesting a movie than it should have been.

Bob

A poster of Highly Dangerous (1950) was prominently displayed in several scenes in The Player, so I had to watch it. The film is highly enjoyable. Plot has Margaret Lockwood as a British entomologist who is recruited by an intelligence group to g to Albania (or some such country) to check on a secret program that's using bugs as agents for delivering deadly diseases. At first she refuses because she has a vacation in Torquay planned, but as she listens to a radio serial (it's 1950) about a patriotic superhero and his sidekick, she changes her mind and goes. There she meets a cruel police chief (Marius Goring) and a wily reporter (Dane Clark) who knows the local ropes. Story has her picked up by the local cops and injected with nasty truth serum, but she babbles a lot of junk from the radio serial. After she's released she teams up with the reporter and they make a plan to crash the secret facility and steal some bugs. But the effects from the serum don't quite wear off and she goes in and out of reality, sometimes spouting radio talk.

Certainly an unusual story with a nice flair for lighter moments. It's also nice to see a woman in a part that most likely was written for a man (of course that's a guess). Lockwood is excellent and Clark is always better than I remember his being. There's also Naunton Wayne, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Jill Balcon, and Gladys Henson. The ending is quite a lark when the bugs they've smuggled in England need to be fed ... NOW!

Fuefukigawa aka The River Fuefuki (1960): This is the saga of a family of farmers, some of whom become distinguished soldiers and even generals. It begins the evening when one of their numbers comes home, having captured an enemy general, earning great praise. That night, his nephew is born, as is the son of the local daimyo. We don't follow the nobleman, but the farmer, as he grows up, is persuaded not to run off to war by getting him a wife, has sons and daughter, and.... well, 'persists' is the best word I can think of, while other men in his family go to war and die, while the women move to town, and go mad, while the river Fuefuki flows outside the house that everyone refers to as an 'insect trap.'

Keisuke Kinoshita's movie is an epic, but it breaks the rules, by being an anti-war epic. It's shot in wide screen, with an aspect ratio of 2.35:1, but it's not shot in color, color is shot through it, in tints and tones and what looks like Handschlegel effects, and gels that color part of the screen like airbrushed clouds. This is the war of the samurai class, so these splashes of color suggest old scrolls. However, that's during battles, and the aftermath. When it's just the peasants, and no one is dying, it's all black and white. Back when this was made, black & white was the film of reality. Color was for fantasy, or perhaps madness. Over all, it's saying "We could do this sort of movie straight and make the Big Bucks. That's not we want to do."

There's quite a cast, and Kinoshita and his regular cameraman, Hiroshi Kusuda, know how to fill that wide, wide screen. The samurai sequences are shot as well as anything that Kurosawa did, but his sequences lack Kurosawa's bravado.... and his humor. Kurosawa's samurai might be stupid, but they are always noble. There are no crippled mothers in Kurosawa, so far as I can recall, hobbling along as fast as a mounted army, begging her sons to come home. There are no samurai killing themselves so they won't suffer the agonies of burning to death, while priests sit calmly. There are no silk merchants burned to death because they dare to be rich in Kurosawa's films.... although perhaps he and his collaborators might write it so they deserve to die for other things. Because they are not samurai, they are merchants, and so they are evil.

Well, Kurosawa's family was a samurai family. I have no idea about Kinoshita's family. In 2019, this looks like going well overboard to make a point. Given the popularity of samurai movies when it was made, I'm not sure.

Bob

oldposterho wrote: ↑

Fri Aug 02, 2019 4:28 am

Was able to finally scratch a German Lilian Harvey/Willy Fritsch musical off the list with an early one thanks to the Murnau transfer of Three from the Filling Station aka Die Drei von der Tankstelle, (1930). It is utterly contemporary with the Hollywood musicals of the era - sound recording has some interesting mixing going on and curious overdubbing with about 3 songs they pound into your skull over the course of an hour and a half. Story is a piffle about 3 friends who are wiped out financially in the crash so they start their own gas station and are torn apart when Lilian (yes, it's one of those films where the characters happen to have the same name as their stars) flirts with all three on their separate shifts. Direction is strictly by the book for the time by Wilhelm Thiele, who later fled Germany for probably obvious reasons to a career in Tarzan movies and Lone Ranger shows, although the editing shows the briefest glimpses of Soviet style flourishes that are sorely missed through the rest of the film.

Things really only take off when Harvey gets on screen and she only really gets to let go with her dancing in a couple of spots, notably with a 'finale' that looks like it might be a reintegrated find from the restoration, that starts with a surreal bit of breaking the fourth wall hinting at what was to come in my all time favorite Lilian Harvey film, her positively lunatic I Am Suzanne, for Fox in '33.

Probably for specialist interests only, not sure I'd drag the kids through it.

The Comedian Harmonists are in this - do they do more than just sing?

Tomboy (1940): The title refers to Marcia Mae Jones' character, but the movie is about second-billed Jackie Moran. He's an orphan, living and working on the farm of his aunt, Clara Blandick, and his mean uncle, George Cleveland. Jackie wants to get an education and make something of himself, maybe a lawyer. Cleveland, however, is mean, calls him lazy -- he isn't -- whips him and tells him he can't go to school. Miss Jones comes to this rural community with her father, ex-Cubs pitch Grant Withers, and the two youngster bond quickly, as Withers and the teacher, Charlotte Wynters quickly become sweet on each other.

It's directed by Robert F. MacGowan, who was for fourteen years the principal director of Our Gang. The movie is sweet, but rather simplistic in terms of character. Nice people are very nice. Mean people are purely mean, and the dialogue is overlarded with baseball slang for Withers, who gives a good, laid-back performance nonetheless.

Bob

FrankFay wrote: ↑

Sat Aug 03, 2019 12:00 pm

oldposterho wrote: ↑

Fri Aug 02, 2019 4:28 am

Was able to finally scratch a German Lilian Harvey/Willy Fritsch musical off the list with an early one thanks to the Murnau transfer of Three from the Filling Station aka Die Drei von der Tankstelle, (1930).

The Comedian Harmonists are in this - do they do more than just sing?

They play singing bartenders in the nightclub scene but beyond a brief number and slinging a couple of drinks for the principals, not really.

boblipton wrote: ↑

Sat Aug 03, 2019 1:24 pm

It's directed by Robert F. MacGowan, who was for fourteen years the principal director of Our Gang. The movie is sweet, but rather simplistic in terms of character. Nice people are very nice. Mean people are purely mean, and the dialogue is overlarded with baseball slang for Withers, who gives a good, laid-back performance nonetheless.

Bob

I've always appreciated Grant Withers, but I find it with a smile I look at your characterization of his performance - which I've never seen - because of his rather over-the-top performances in the Mr. Wong movies made at the same time! Some consider his performances in that series a detriment. I've got 30 of his films back to 1927, and I've always thought him a good example of a journeyman Hollywoodite of the Golden Era. The guy, counting TV appearances, has about 200 acting credits; not bad, no doubt kept him eating well.

A very pleasing film, MY PAL THE KING ['32] has the child monarch of a mythical kingdom [Mickey Rooney] at the mercy of his grasping courtiers. When Tom Mix's Wild West Show turns up, the two strike up a friendship, with Tom showing 'Charles V' a thing or two about democracy! He then comes to the rescue when Rooney and his kindly tutor are abducted....

MY PAL THE KING is apparently the only record we have of Mix's real-life Wild West Show, which he continued with full-time when he packed in film acting. Universal knew how to economise, and some of the sets appear to be those used in ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT ['30] or perhaps THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME ['23]. There certainly seems to have been some recycling of some of ALL QUIET's uniforms, no bad thing in itself. Also along for the ride are James Kirkwood [the villainous courtier], Noel Francis, Paul Hurst, and of course Tony! Possibly abridged, this is nevertheless a lively, action-filled entertainment, which could possibly have uses a couple of songs to complete the amiable mixture of different genres. Most enjoyable.

Been watching a number of Edgar Wallace mysteries. These were little programmers of only an hour or more or less which were introduced as a sort of series of minor films in 1961 in the UK, then used in America in ever so slightly truncated versions of just less than an hour for a television series of mysteries for several seasons. There is a release by StudioCanal of seven DVDs of these shows. I'm currently watching Volume 4. I've watched the following over several nights:

"Locker Sixty Nine" (1962) with Eddie Byrne, Paul Daneman, Walter Brown, Penelope Horner, Edward Underdown, and others.

"Death Trap" (1962) with Albert Lieven, Barbara Shelley, John Meillon, Mercy Haystead, Kenneth Cope, and others.

"The Set Up" (1963) with Maurice Denham, John Carson, Maria Corvin, Brian Peck, Anthony Bate, and others.

"Incident at Midnight" (1963) with Anton Diffring, William Sylvester, Justine Lord, Martin Miller, Tony Garnett, Philip Locke, and others.

"The £20,000 Kiss" (1962) with Dawn Addams, Michael Goodliffe, Richard Thorpe, Anthony Newlands, Alfred Burke, Mia Karam, Ellen McIntosh, and others.

I love these little films. They're all done so well, and at just less than an hour are great entertainment. Look at the main stars: superb entertainers who continued through fifty years in many cases. You'll figure many out before the ending, or you'll watch the baddie(s) set themselves up and see the resolution (as in a Hitchcock), but you won't be bored. I promise. Some of them are just plain clever, especially "The Set Up", for example.

I've watched twenty-five or thirty of these over the years, and I'm completing my collection of volumes of these. Still have two volumes to go after this one. Each volume has three discs and each disc contains between five to seven films. Great stuff. Wallace's books were turned into films early on in the twentieth century, but this series was like a creme de la creme to the memory of the master crime writer.

For young Americans who are not familiar with Edgar Wallace: he sold over 50,000,000 copies of his various books over his lifetime. He wrote over 170 novels alone! He died in 1932 rather suddenly of undiagnosed diabetes. Many, many, many films have been made of his books. They may not be masterpieces of writing, but they're a lot of fun, and the films are wonderful entertainment.

R Michael Pyle wrote: ↑

Sat Aug 03, 2019 8:54 pm

Been watching a number of Edgar Wallace mysteries. These were little programmers of only an hour or more or less which were introduced as a sort of series of minor films in 1961 in the UK, then used in America in ever so slightly truncated versions of just less than an hour for a television series of mysteries for several seasons. There is a release by StudioCanal of seven DVDs of these shows.

Two of my favorite things about these: seeing so many veteran and often soon-to-become veteran Brit actors, and when not-infrequent location shooting gives us nice time-capsule views of 50s and 60s London. You're right, they're very well-made.

The Suspect (1944): Charles Laughton's son moves out of the house, and Laughton moves out of the room he has shared with his wife, Rosalind Ivan. She's a shrill shrew, and he's glad to have a couple of doors separating them, except when she has at him in the halls and downstairs. He begins an innocent relationship with Ella Raines, but calls it off when his wife refuses to give him a divorce. That, however, is not enough for Miss Ivan. She has found out about Miss Raines, and she is going to make a public spectacle. So Laughton kills her.

Matter improve immensely, and soon he has married Miss Raines.... and a good thing too, because Police Inspector Stanley Ridges concludes that Laughton is a murderer. The only problem -- from Ridges' perspective -- is he has no proof.

Robert Siodmak's turn-of-the-century thriller has the advantage of several fine actors: not only Laughton, of course, but the under-rated Ella Raines, with Rosalind Ivan as a nasty piece of work. Nastiest of all is that expert in cold-featured evil, Henry Daniell. He's a decayed aristocrat who beats his wife, doesn't work, sneers at everyone and blackmails Laughton. No wonder meek and kindly Mr. Laughton is driven to murder!

Bob

Play Up the Band (1935) is a mess of a movie but quite fascinating for a couple of things. Plot has a band sponsored by a local industry going to London to compete in a contest. Stanley Holloway plays the band leader and soloist. A subplot has the company owner's wife (Amy Veness) having a string of pearl stolen at a charity bazaar. Betty Ann Davies plays Holloway's niece and the leader of an all-girl swing band and she's sort of engaged to the son of Veness and husband. There's also an "American" couple posing as French nobility and they are the real thieves. The plot isn't very good but it does give Holloway the chance the sing/talk two long numbers that are quite good. One is "The Ghost of Hampton Court Maze" and the other is "Sweeney Todd." The film also offers one of the last views of the famed Crystal Palace, which burned down in 1936. The American accents of the thieves is really badly done. It's all dubbed and the actors do a horrendous job trying to mouth their lines in time with the speech. Woof.

Dry Rot (1956): Three not-too-bright bookies -- Ronald Shiner, Brian Rix and Sidney James -- decide to fix a race. They get a terrible horse and set it up to be a long shot, to bring in the punters, and lose. While waiting for the race, they set up in a house run by Michael Sheply and Joan Haythorne. The house is falling apart with dry rot, and supplied with many secret passages, as well as young lovers, a maid-of-all-work played by Joan Sims, and French farceur Christian Duvaleix, with frequent visits by policewoman Peggy Mount.

Director Maurice Elvey is completely out of his depth. I regret to say this, because I am fond of a lot of his work, but there are too many experts in farce pulling in all sorts of directions -- not to mention the horse, who pops up at the most inconvenient moment. For farce to work well, it has to run like clockwork, with a plot that seems to run out of control, until the finale, when everything comes together. That doesn't happen here. Instead, there are dangling plots -- we abandon the young lovers at the racetrack -- for a chaotic chase by the police of the three bookies atop a ladder on a firewagon driven by Duvaleix. The story falls apart in the need for yet one more laugh. It's a pity for such a talented cast and crew.

Bob

A Matter of WHO (1962): An oil geologist is returning to England with his bride, Sonja Ziemann. He collapses on the plane, and the wheels of the airline's health services creak slowly into action. It's smallpox! This makes it a matter for the World Health Organization, and their crack London investigator: Terry-Thomas?

Yes, it's Terry-Thomas, and it's a serious movie, as he investigates with the geologist's partner, Alex Nicol. The trail is a complicated one, involving a Russian plutocrat, a yacht in Nice, a plane crash in Switzerland, and two other smallpox victims in Europe who seem to have no connection to Miss Ziemann's husband. Nicol is suspicious of Miss Ziemann. What is she doing with his partner, a man he describes as "wet behind the ears when it comes to women"?

It's not entirely a mystery. Terry-Thomas is what one might describe as an eccentric bureaucrat and keeps things light and informative. It's a good mystery, too, as I settled on what turned out to be a red herring.

Bob

R Michael Pyle wrote: ↑

Sat Aug 03, 2019 8:54 pm

Been watching a number of Edgar Wallace mysteries. These were little programmers of only an hour or more or less which were introduced as a sort of series of minor films in 1961 in the UK, then used in America in ever so slightly truncated versions of just less than an hour for a television series of mysteries for several seasons. There is a release by StudioCanal of seven DVDs of these shows. I'm currently watching Volume 4. I've watched the following over several nights:

Is there a link to the volumes online?

You're right about Edgar Wallace. Way too many books/stories, and he churned them out so swiftly that most of them are inevitably sloppy (in places, if not in entirety), but they are very enjoyable. Some of them manage to be ingenious and farfetched at the same time -- a not inconsiderable feat!

Jim

The Dock Brief aka Trial and Error (1962): Peter Sellers is a lawyer who has waited years for his first case. He gets it in the form of Richard Attenborough, who admits that he killed his wife, Beryl Reid because she wouldn't run away with the boarder. In Attenborough's cell, they brainstorm trial strategies in fantasy. Then they go up to the actual trial.

It's an absolute trifle of a movie, little more than a two-man show about the inanity of the law. That's hardly surprising, given that it's derived from a play by John Mortimer, best remembered for his many judicial mysteries, and the TV series Rumpole of the Bailey, based on them. Sellers and Attenborough attempt to evoke the sort of movie that might have been made were Laurel & Hardy to make one, although one without anything in the way of physical slapstick.

Bob

Jim Roots wrote: ↑

Sun Aug 04, 2019 12:59 pm

Is there a link to the volumes online?


Jim

Just go to Amazon.com or Amazon.UK, the Brit version. They're listed separately, volume by volume, all seven. They're in PAL, so you'll need a Region 2 player. And, yes, they're very much worth it!

I've seen all seven listed together on sale before, but it's been some time.

Now, if you're talking about a streaming somewhere on-line, sorry, I don't know. I've never streamed anything yet...

Most of the books I've read of late have been for interviews I'm going to do on the podcast— hey, at least it gets something off the pile and into my hands— but I picked up a novel a while back for a light read, A Man Called Ove by a Swedish author, Fredrik Backman. It's a lightly heartwarming story, a beach read with particulars to Sweden but a universal bent, about the cranky old neighbor in a housing development, the kind of guy who thinks everyone else is an idiot; as we learn his story, he is forced— mostly by his own sense that things need to be done right, and if everyone else is an idiot, that means he'll have to do it— to engage with his younger and multicultural neighbors. I suppose you could read that as something about the white man's burden and so on, no doubt there are pieces in Swedish attacking it for that, but I took it in a more down to earth way, as the sort of fellow in his own household who has to do everything because he's surrounded by idiots. (Not really, but I will say that any guy of a certain age will recognize something of himself in Ove.)

It's a very funny book, both in Ove's/the author's sarcastic asides, and in some of the tales (Ove comes to a break with an old friend who he liked despite the fact that he was a Volvo owner when Ove drove Saabs, but then the friend bought a BMW—how can you have anything to do with such a person!). There was a movie made in 2015, and it was nominated for the foreign language film Oscar, and its star, Rolf Lassgård, is Ove to a T—but the movie is not as funny as it should be, alas. It needs a Coen Bros. visual quirkiness to it, the ability to regard, say, the 8 months pregnant Iranian woman who bangs on Ove's door for help as a sort of exotic bird at first, and it doesn't have it. It touches on many of the no doubt famous-in-Sweden anecdotes of the book, but misses some of the more crucial ones to the characterizations—notably, everyone always wonders why Ove's vivacious late wife fell for him, and there's a scene in the book where he and her father bond over fixing cars, and then you understand why she values Ove's taciturn hypercompetence and determination that things just work as they should in life, and is prepared to compensate for what he lacks as part of a couple. As it is, she comes off like a lottery ticket he won for no clear reason. (Ida Engvoll is a lottery ticket the movie won; when she smiles, the movie grins as wide as Gwynplaine.)

Anyway, it's a pleasant and sweet movie, but the book is all that and caustically hilarious, too, in drawing this type that we all know. The story is that Tom Hanks has optioned it for an American remake, and one hopes that the Coen Bros., or someone with a similarly sharper comic bent than director Hannes Holm, ends up directing the American version. The type certainly exists here.

R Michael Pyle wrote: ↑

Sun Aug 04, 2019 3:42 pm

Jim Roots wrote: ↑

Sun Aug 04, 2019 12:59 pm

Is there a link to the volumes online?


Jim

Just go to Amazon.com or Amazon.UK, the Brit version. They're listed separately, volume by volume, all seven. They're in PAL, so you'll need a Region 2 player. And, yes, they're very much worth it!

I've seen all seven listed together on sale before, but it's been some time.

Now, if you're talking about a streaming somewhere on-line, sorry, I don't know. I've never streamed anything yet...

I don't stream either, so no trouble there. Unfortunately my player is not region-free. Thanks anyway.

Jim

One can hardly imagine a more perfectly noir opening than that of Frank Borzage’s Moonrise (1948): three men, seen only from below the knees, one of them wearing the genre’s iconic white trench-coat, walk resolutely through puddles of pouring rain to … a scaffold! … followed by a shadow-play of a hanging, then a cut straight to a traumatized baby in his crib staring at the shadow of a hanged man, which turns out to be … his own doll, hanging from the ceiling (for reasons never explained).

Surely the film can only go downhill from there? Especially a film directed by Borzage, the master of sentimental and uplifting silents, his career now in the doldrums of talkie failure after a briefly successful transition period. His optimistic perspective is not only out of favour with critics and moviegoers alike, it’s also the exact opposite of the kind of world-view that identifies film noir.

Surprisingly, Borzage captures the doom-and-gloom and world-is-closing-in pulse of noir in a manner that should be respectfully described as effortless. In hindsight, one sees that his Panglossian silents were actually rife with noir tropes; it’s just that we seldom really noticed them because he was always anxious to reassure us that things would work out for the best. In Moonrise, he doesn’t. He makes us know throughout that his anti-hero is doomed. The best this fated guy can hope for is the best that he gets.

Dane Clark plays the son of the hanged man, bullied all his life until he snaps and kills his chief tormenter. In classic noir style, he rubs the corpse’s nose in it (not literally) by stealing the latter’s bereft fiancée. The local sheriff, possibly the only “decent” and compassionate sheriff of a Southern hick town to be found in 20th century cinema, slowly circles in on Clark as the lead suspect in the murder. And that’s as far as I’ll go in telling the tale.

Clark is quite young but far from inexperienced; this is, however, his first starring noir, and he appears unsure how to handle it. His character is unpleasant, but you know why, you know what torments he has lived with since he was that terrified baby in the crib, so you try to sympathize with him. But Clark doesn’t have the kind of face or presence that makes him easy to draw your compassion, at least not at this stage of his development as an actor.

You really struggle to accept the idea that Gail Russell’s sought-after hick-town hottie would be willing to put up with Clark’s brutality – emotionally, physically, and psychologically. You tell yourself that’s the kind of crap women had to accept back in that era, and she does put up some resistance; but it’s still too distasteful for a modern audience. Russell works hard to be credible, and she is, but the relationship between them is flat and forced and never persuasive.

Allyn Joslyn is the humane sheriff and Rex Ingram is perfect as a reclusive Black father-confessor: two extremely unconventional Southern characters. Lloyd Bridges, wearing a Joan Crawford jacket with shoulders two miles wide, is the snarling, egotistical rich-kid who pounds on Clark. Harry Morgan, avec cheveux, is a wonder as an intellectually limited and mute young man: you would never guess he had such depths of characterization if you only knew him from television.

An excellent film, although not recommended without some reservations. My wife found it slow, lacking in tension, and with a subdued finale that did not satisfy her expectation of catharsis. I disagreed on all points. So, YMMV.

Jim

I watched something last night for the first time in quite a while: "Thank Your Lucky Stars" (1943), actually starring Eddie Cantor, Dennis Morgan, Joan Leslie, S. Z. Sakall, and Edward Everett Horton, with guest stars John Garfield, Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, Alan Hale, Willie Best, George Tobias, Ruth Donnelly, Alexis Smith, Olivia de Havilland, Dinah Shore in her debut on film, Errol Flynn, Ida Lupino, Jack Carson, Hattie McDaniel, Mike Mazurki, and about any other Warner Brothers film actor and actress of the period!! This was made to support the troops, a wartime charity show, the Cavalcade of the Stars. Some of the songs are really stinko, some are wonderful! The skits generally are pretty good. It's a good way to see what was popular culture in 1942-3. Skits range from Bette Davis singing - and Errol Flynn sort of singing - to great musical numbers. Fascinating black skit that some are going to say is racially tipped, but still is really the best thing in the show. Glad I re-visited. I watched it for Bogart. He's okay, though a little stagy. I'll leave it at that.

My cousin and I saw Once Upon A Time In Hollywood (2019) and I was pleasantly surprised. It's Tarrantino's best movie at least since Jackie Brown (1997), and it was a pleasure to see a movie set in a past era where people acted and thought like people who lived in the time.

Now, back to our older cr*p.

A Kiss For Corliss aka Almost A Bride (1949): Shirley Temple tries to make her boyfriend angry by writing in her diary about her imaginary affair with David Niven. Later, when she's pretending to have amnesia, her father and David Niven find out and proceed to torture everyone.

It's a sequel to Miss Temple's 1945 vehicle, Kiss and Tell, in which she plays Corliss Archer, a fifteen-year-old girl created in a short story by F. Hugh Herbert. Miss Archer's sixteenth year of life lasted from 1943 through 1956 on the radio, and 1951, 1952, 1954 and 1955 on syndicated television. In all, five actresses performed the role, plus however many did in the stage play in 1943.

This was Miss Temple's last motion picture feature, and her most poorly received. It's episodic nature and idiotic plotting explain why. This was the period of time when America began to look upon teen-agers as a separate demographic, and all the old, stupid chestnuts were pulled out of the ashes for this one.

Bob