by ·Comments Off on The Great Moment (1944, Preston Sturges)

Released the same month as Hail the Conquering Hero, Sturges at the top of his game with his regular comedy collaborators: Joel McCrea as the straight-man dentist, with appearances by Franklin Pangborn and Georgia Caine and Porter Hall, and yet another Betty co-lead – not Hutton or Grable but Field (of Renoir’s The Southerner). Twisting the concept of WC Fields as a big-nosed patient-hating dentist, McCrea empathizes with his patients and fights the establishment to advocate for painkillers in the form of ether. If that doesn’t sound like a madcap comic premise, well… it’s not… I’m sorry, this is just a dull historical drama. William “Muggsy” Demarest does liven up the movie in the second half, first as the doctor’s biggest failure (he has a bad reaction to the treatment and experiences an office-destroying war flashback then jumps out a second-floor window) then as his biggest advocate, following the doctor around and humorously/tediously proselytizing for ether treatment.

Betty gets mad after McCrea chased her dog with a bottle of ether:

So, what happened here?

Alessandro Pirolini in The Cinema of Preston Sturges:

Triumph Over Pain, Sturges’s original script for a movie that was re-edited and released by Paramount as The Great Moment. In the script (and in the original cut), Sturges had created a complex non-chronological flashback structure that shifted back and forth between flashback and framing story, with Lizzie Morton and Eben Frost taking turns both as narrator and narratee

Pirolini compares the original script to Terence Davies: “with the ultimate goal of portraying the act of remembering, instead of the events remembered … the studio’s re-editing was mainly intended to ‘correct’ the non-chronological order of flashbacks, in order to normalize the narrative structure.”

A normal patient in the pre-ether days:

James Curtis in Between Flops says the studio-proposed title was Great Without Glory, and the movie was butchered by Buddy DeSylva, a songwriter turned producer, who’d written “Button Up Your Overcoat” and co-founded Capitol Records. Curtis quotes Sturges: “My next picture is coming out in its present form over my dead body. The decision to cut this picture for comedy and leave out the bitter side was the beginning of my rupture with Paramount. They did the same thing to Hail the Conquering Hero, but through a last-minute maneuver I was able to get the picture back into shape. I was unable to do so in the case of The Great Moment. The dignity, the mood, the important parts of the picture are in the ash can.”

Muggsy fainting in the operating theater:

How is this helpful?

Stuart Klawans in Crooked but Never Common:

In 1938, amid a small wave of enthusiasm in Hollywood for tales of crusading scientists — The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936), Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet (1940) — Paramount bought the rights to a history of surgical anesthesia, Triumph Over Pain, by René Fülöp-Miller, and hired [Samuel] Hoffenstein to work up a biopic … Sturges kept it alive … and asked to take over from Hoffenstein as screenwriter … By the time Sturges had [The Palm Beach Story] in the can, the script for Triumph Over Pain had lain in his drawer for more than two years. He might easily have left it to die of suffocation. Instead, he lobbied Paramount to green-light Triumph Over Pain and began revising the script again in February 1942.
…
By late April 1943 the [recut] picture, now retitled The Great Moment, was ready for release.
But it wasn’t released. Neither was The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek. Paramount held them both back while Sturges finished shooting Hail the Conquering Hero. Mixed responses to the previews of the latter film, in late 1943, prompted DeSylva to subject it to a fate similar to that of Triumph Over Pain … When Paramount at last released The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, in January 1944, it immediately vindicated Sturges, becoming his greatest box-office hit. The next month brought further vindication: Paramount previewed DeSylva’s reedited Hail the Conquering Hero to a dismal response. When Sturges offered to return to Paramount to fix the picture, without salary, the studio could only say yes. But when Sturges subsequently appealed to DeSylva’s boss, Y. Frank Freeman, to let him do the same for Triumph Over Pain, the answer was a flat no.

by ·Comments Off on Le Samourai (1967, Jean-Pierre Melville)

I misremembered this as being more similar to Ghost Dog, which I also need to rewatch soon, but hopefully not as a memorial screening. For all his alibi setup, when Delon gets to the club he acts extremely suspicious and everyone notices him. Rounded up with some other suspects, he gets off because pianist Cathy Rosier says he’s not the man. Then his contract guys try to kill him, he goes in for revenge, then foolishly goes to see the girl again, where cop Heurtebise has set a trap.

Even when wounded and on the run, always take time to feed the birds:

by ·Comments Off on Pauline at the Beach (1983, Eric Rohmer)

The third of six “Comedies and Proverbs” after Aviator’s Wife and A Good Marriage. Arielle Dombasle returns from the latter, taking her niece Pauline (Amanda Langlet of A Summer’s Tale) on a beach trip, where they run into troublesome boys of various ages, all of whom would like to bed the ladies. Older family man Henri (Féodor Atkine of High Heels and Sarraounia) scores with Arielle but is suspected of being a pedo when he covers for young Sylvain (Simon de la Brosse of The Little Thief and Assayas’s Disorder), while windsurfer Pierre (Pascal Greggory of Gabrielle and La France) frowns from the sidelines.

A rare cinematic appearance from Bongo Fury:

Arielle & Féodor:

Pauline has got it figured out:

by ·Comments Off on Gods of the Plague (1970, Rainer Fassbinder)

Following Love is Colder and Katzelmacher, more crime plots with carefully composed scenes and actors with flat affect, though he’s beginning to allow Hanna Schygulla to be glamorous.

Harry Baer gets out of jail, sees all his people again, puts together a grocery store heist which goes bad because Hanna has tipped off the police inspector – in the meantime, every character sleeps with every other character.

Harry with Margarethe von Trotta and Günther The Gorilla:

by ·Comments Off on Vogel 12: Sharits/Breer/Kubelka Part 1

I found a whole bunch of shorts by three filmmakers covered in the “Straining Towards the Limits” chapter, this is going to take multiple viewings.

Paul Sharits:

Word Movie (1966)

Not even four minutes, but an intense structuralist flicker film. You can focus on the words flipping rapidly across the screen, or the stable letters in the middle of the screen (whether there’s a pattern or they’re spelling something out) or one of the two reverby voices reading flatly and alternating words with each other – but not any two of those things. I dig it.

–
Piece Mandala/End War (1966)

A few sex poses, flipped L-R, flickering with white fields then gradually adding new colors, with bookends of a pulsing dot and a sidetrack scene with a comic-suicidal guy. From what little I’ve seen, this does look like the work of someone who hung out with Yoko Ono.

–
Ray Gun Virus (1966)

Good one, just flickering color fields but not too aggressively edited, so you can pleasantly space out to it. That’s given you turn the volume way down, since my copy comes with a relentless rumbly mechanical sound. No point in taking screenshots of the flicker films, and of course watching these on TV is especially pointless to begin with. Artforum’s got an extensive Regina Cornwell article on the Sharits films.

–
Peter Kubelka:

Mosaik im Vertrauen (1955)

Mysterious montage of varied sources, I think he’s Rose Hobartting a bunch of euro narrative and news films. Is it on purpose that sometimes I can’t see at all what’s happening on screen?

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Adebar (1957)

One-minute shadow dancing music video with lots of freeze-frames.

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Schwechater (1958)

Looks like obsessively cut excerpts from some film scene, much of it with the contrast blown out.

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Robert Breer:

Form Phases 1 (1952)

Playful little line drawings based around acute angles, sometimes with color added

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Form Phases 2 (1953)

A dot becomes a line becomes a circle becomes a square becomes the background to a whole new series of shapes, and so on. Repeats and montages itself. One cool bit where the picture divides into identical overlapping translucent images which slide apart.

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Form Phases 3 (1953)

I think it’s watercolor drawings on clear glass filmed from below, the paintings appearing magically like in the Picasso movie, cool.

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Form Phases 4 (1953)

Back to the morphing-lines graphic design of parts 1+2 but more complicated, creating new rules around shape overlap and intersection and interaction.

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A Miracle (1954)

Very short one, the miracle is the pope juggling in a window, then falling to bits.

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Image by Images IV (1955)

More jaunty line/shape interactions, with a few new things. Brief flashes of photographic images (a hand, spectacles), and sound. Unfortunately the sound is mechanical noise, a la Ray Gun Virus but less annoying. It might even be the sound of the movie’s production tools, like in The Grand Bizarre.

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Cats (1956)

Another very short one, with sound credited to Frances Breer. The cats get deconstructed.

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unrelated bonus short that I couldn’t fit anywhere else:

Heavy Metal Parking Lot (1986, Heyn & Krulik)

“Are you fucked up?”
“Half and half.”

Outside a 1986 Judas Priest / Dokken show in Maryland. This show took place on May 31st, and setlist.fm says Judas Priest closed with a Fleetwood Mac cover. Some girls tell the cameraman that they’re going to Ocean City after this; maybe I saw ’em there. I think it’s really important to watch this on a traded VHS with your buddies while mocking the people onscreen, not on a laptop while eating lunch alone. We’re told that metal rules and punk sucks – guess I should watch Decline of Western Civilization Part 2 and see if that’s true.

by ·Comments Off on The Bikeriders (2023, Jeff Nichols)

Tom Hardy is the absolute best as a family man whose mind got warped by a TV viewing of The Wild One so he adopted a Brando voice/pose and formed a motorcycle club that provided a real good time for a group of empty-headed friends before it got too big for him to control. Jodie “The Last Duel” Comer is our entry point, being interviewed by Mike Faist (who has nothing to do here) about her relationship with Elvis Butler and the changing forms of the club.

Nichols’s dream project based on a photo book about the real club. Feels kinda flat, sorta what’s-the-point – if you’re going to make Rumble Fish then don’t hold back, just make Rumble Fish. At least it’s smart enough to cast The Bonnie Man as a bartender and to end strongly, and of course it’s better than Ferrari. Note that my options tonight were this Mike Faist movie where two sporting men who are deeply in love keep getting challenged, or Challengers.

some riders:
Michael Shannon, the director’s lucky charm
Damon Herriman (Charles Manson) as Hardy’s right-hand man
Emory Cohen (Brooklyn) wants to quit and become a cop
Toby Wallace (The Royal Hotel) shoots Hardy and takes over
Happy Anderson (The Standoff at Sparrow Creek) must have been the first challenger

other riders: Blueface from The Nice Guys, Karl Glusman of Noe’s Love, Boyd Holbrook of Dial of Destiny, and Norman Reedus of Cigarette Burns.

by ·Comments Off on Lifeline (1997, Johnnie To)

Mad Lau stars in a firefighting action film with choreography by Yuen Bun, whose Once Upon a Time in China sequel I just watched. Alex Fong Chung-Sun (The Iron Angels series) is the strict new boss feuding with his ex-wife. Ruby Wong is the female officer trying to put career first until her boyfriend starts poking holes in the condoms. And rookie Raymond Wong Ho-yin (Ruby’s fellow PTU cop) is just a rookie with an embarrassing dad. Mad tries to date suicidal doctor Carman Lee (hot traitor cop of Wicked City). Then all these personal dramas have to be set aside when the team, from a firehouse known for accidents and bad luck, is first on the scene to a massive warehouse fire set by arsonist Lam Suet, and the movie gets extremely, impossibly fiery.

by ·Comments Off on Once Upon a Time in China IV (1993, Yuen Bun)

Pre-credits scene has Vincent Zhao making some very un-Jet-Li awesome moves, then his name is splashed across the screen – good, they’re not trying to hide the new guy. It’s also the first sequel to start directly after the previous one – they’re still celebrating the end of the Lion King festival when friendly Governor Zhiwen Wang (currently of the Infernal Affairs TV series) shows up and they lion-dance together.

Foon, Clubfoot, and Yan are back in the mix, but 13th Aunt is replaced by (Katy guessed it) 14th Aunt: Jean Wang of Swordsman III and Iron Monkey the same year. New director Yuen doesn’t exactly revitalize the series here. The dubbing is bad, and despite having a subplot about a group using wires to appear to fly, the movie itself is full of unintentionally visible wires, especially in the heinous horse-punching scenes (yes, there’s more than one).

14th Aunt starts a newspaper but nobody in town knows how to read – so, technologically we’ve moved from still photography to motion pictures to the printing press. Anti-foreigner sword cult Red Lantern is menacing everyone, and the foreigners have equipped their lion suits with deadly weapons. The nice governor dies, it’s very sad, then Wong takes a measured bit of revenge before withdrawing to prep for the final(?) movie.

Chin Ka-Lok is angry, I’ve forgotten why:

Ze Germans:

by ·Comments Off on Red Rooms (2023, Pascal Plante)

Coolly obsessive Kelly-Anne camps outside the courthouse every night to attend a serial killer’s trial, along with very-uncoolly obsessive Clementine, who’s crushing on the killer. K-A bonds somewhat with Clem, as much as she can bond with anyone, since she’s a probable psychopath and we’re given little clue about her motivation. Her modeling job and her online gambling are all put at risk by the case, as she becomes a newsworthy attendee then a secret participant. She maybe has a change of heart at the end or maybe had a master plan all along, hard to tell. I thought of Serpent’s Path, with its torture/murder video producers destroying each other while manipulated by an outsider.