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 Hamlet (1948, Laurence Olivier)

Opens unpromisingly with text onscreen accompanying a narrator, but then we get a castle in the mist, the camera roaming to show off its fancy sets. I don’t think “this is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind” is from the original text.

Hamlet’s first monologue is in partial voiceover, a really good portrayal of someone tormentedly talking to themself. Elsewhere Ophelia narrates Hamlet’s wordless visit to her room, and he performs every word she’s saying in flashback-pantomime, a bit overkill. The zoom inside Hamlet’s head before “to be or not to be” was also odd. I would understand if other versions cut the scene where Hamlet gives long-winded direction to the actors before the play (and so they do). There are only two women in the movie and he throws both of them onto the floor. Hamlet gets kidnapped by pirates before the finale, did I dream this?

HAM-let:

Queen, King, Ophelia, Laertes:

Won best picture over The Red Shoes, a travesty, and Olivier got actor, but at least John Huston beat him for director. The king-uncle was in Went the Day Well and Disney’s Treasure Island, the queen in John Huston’s Freud movie, Horatio in The Projected Man, Polonius in The Mummy, and Laertes in that movie’s sequel/reboot The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb. Speaking of mummies, we get Peter Cushing as the silly-ass courier, also officiating the swordfight. Ophelia is Jean Simmons of Guys and Dolls, Estelle in Great Expectations, soon to be seen in The Big Country.

The actors:

The duel:

The Peter Cushing:

by ·Comments Off on It’s a Wonderful Life (1946, Frank Capra)

Jimmy Stewart throws away his dreams to run his dad’s bank while his brother Harry is off being a war hero. Uncle Billy (Thomas Mitchell of every great movie in 1939) loses a bunch of money, putting the bank at risk of takeover from evil rival Potter (Mark of the Vampire star Lionel Barrymore). Jimmy tries to kill himself but angel Clarence (The Invisible Man scientist Henry Travers) saves him, shows him that Harry and Billy and his wife Mary (Donna Reed of Scandal Sheet) and the guy at the drugstore (HB Warner, DeMille’s Jesus) would’ve all been ruined without him (Potter would be fine). The townspeople contribute to pay Jimmy’s bank’s debts and he’s newly happy to be alive. Good movie while watching, the moment it’s over I always get annoyed by it again.

by ·Comments Off on More Frank Tashlin Cartoons

A follow-up 14 years later.

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Porky in the North Woods (1936)

Porky’s wildlife refuge is an animal paradise, but an illegal french trapper invades, mutilates the forest creatures then whups porky’s ass, so the forest army fights back. The commentary guy knows all the song snippets Carl Stalling is playing and tears up listening to them.

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Porky’s Poultry Plant (1936)

Such fast cutting as chicken farmer Porky hops into a prop plane to defend the chicks from hawks. Tash’s first WB cartoon. Comm says original Porky voice actor Joe Dougherty brought his actual speech impediment to the role before Mel Blanc took over… structural ripoff of Disney’s Silly Symphonies but more modern and violent… Tashlin is described as a “rumpled unsociable fellow.”

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Now That Summer is Gone (1938)

Less-fun musical picture, a squirrel who loves gambling loses the family acorn supply to a grifter – his dad in disguise, teaching him a lesson. Writer Fred Neiman’s only credit before leaving the cartoon game (I dutifully wrote that down from the commentary, but who is Fred Neiman?).

Kosher acorns:

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Puss n’ Booty (1943)

Back to black & white… the cat has eaten a pet bird and hidden the evidence so the family orders a new canary. After a prolonged cat & bird game, the bird eats the cat – good twist – remade with Tweety & Sylvester in 1948. The Jerry Beck commentary mainly wants to tell us exactly which animators worked on which shots.

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I Got Plenty of Mutton (1944)

WWII meat shortages… Hungry wolf in cabin tries making bone broth, steams a single pea, then goes after the sheep since the sheep dog is off at war. Dressing as a sexy sheep to fool the protective ram backfires, the ram keeps chasing him even after revealed as a wolf, and 15 years before Some Like It Hot.

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Brother Brat (1944)

Today’s tough women in the warplane-riveting workforce need someone to watch their horrific kids while at work, so Porky is enlisted. Baby Butch torments a cat, wrecks the house, and almost murders Porky with a cleaver – I’m not sure what the wartime lesson is here.

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The Lady Said No (1946)

This is… not a Looney Tune, it’s a Daffy Ditty… a stop-motion musical about a sexual harasser in Mexico. He takes the girl who only says no to a restaurant, then she says no to him going back to his old life, and no to birth control, and he’s distraught to find himself a father of a hundred babies. Replacement animation with moving camera, impressive work for a silly little movie.

by ·Comments Off on The Body Snatcher (1945, Robert Wise)

Following up Curse of the Cat People, it’s clear that Wise didn’t have a firm handle on things yet. The whole aspect that this is Scotland in the 1800s is very weak, while the plot is just the Burke and Hare story but set two years later, so the characters being murdered keep redundantly mentioning the more famous murders.

Karloff is the local snatcher, bringing bodies to medical school for Dr. Henry Daniell (Kirk Douglas’s brother in Lust for Life). Lugosi plays an idiot foreigner who gets killed shortly after the singing homeless girl. The doctor gets spooked and dies in a rainy carriage crash, and that’s the end of that. I think the last Val Lewton horror I’ve got left is Bedlam, another Karloff period piece, oh boy.

Frilly doctor is standing pig-center:

Frank vs. Drac:

by ·Comments Off on Les Parents Terribles (1948, Jean Cocteau)

Cocteau was briefly prolific as a filmmaker after the war and Beauty and the Beast – this came out a couple months after The Two-Headed Eagle, then Orpheus premiered just over a year later. It’s got smooth camera and nice lighting, if that’s what you’re looking for, but feels too stagy.

Belle and the Beast are back, human and in love, but his overprotective parents are out to stop their marriage. Marais’s dad (Marcel André) is having an affair with his own son’s belle, to teach them a lesson or something, worrier mom (Yvonne de Bray of Eagle) has health problems, and aunt Leo (fashion icon Gabrielle Dorziat) is either helping or fouling everything up. Everybody’s overdoing it until mom can’t take it anymore and does herself in.

The Most Manipulative Family of All Time:

The two sides of Aunt Leo:

by ·Comments Off on Drunken Angel (1948, Akira Kurosawa)

Doctor Takashi Shimura (lead of Ikiru just four years later) is a drunken gruff pain in the ass, treating ingrate criminals and helpless local youths who won’t stop drinking the swamp water. He tries convincing young gangster Toshiro Mifune (in his first AK film) that his TB diagnosis is serious and to keep himself healthy. As an American viewer it takes a while to realize that both the doc and gangster are blunt and rough in an un-Japanese way.

AK didn’t have his regulars yet, so he borrows a Mizoguchi actor as the doc’s sober schoolmate who runs a respectable practice, and a Naruse actress as the doc’s assistant, hiding out from the gangster she used to be involved with. When that gangster returns to town, he gets his own theme song. Extremely anti-yakuza overall – wonder if the studio got threats. With the stagey acting from the doctor and rough condition of the film print, it feels a decade older than it is, but probably belongs in the pantheon, unlike the last classic Criterion disc I watched.

by ·Comments Off on Man Hunt (1941, Fritz Lang)

Oh yes, it’s time to revisit the Lang films. After directing a couple of American West mythology stories, he got a hell of a screenplay with this one. Closely based on a 1939 novel about a hunter’s “sporting stalk” of an unnamed dictator, John Ford’s screenwriter Dudley Nichols did a find-and-replace to insert the name Hitler, this started filming in March 1941 and was opening wide in June.

Walter Pidgeon (wartime drama Mrs. Miniver, later Forbidden Planet) is our hunter, his monocled nazi captor after the pretend assassination is George Sanders from the previous year’s two Hitchcocks. Sanders wants Pidgeon to sign a confession saying the British government sent him, using this to justify war. Failing that, they hunt Pidgeon all the way to Britain after he escapes on a boat.

Tale of two hunters:

Hilarious cabin boy helps him escape, full of “I say, my word, rather” Britishisms. I didn’t know he was Roddy McDowall, but sensed right off that it was someone important. As soon as Pidgeon lands in Britain he hears a Chumbawamba song, which is accurate to my own experience. He gets out of a street-level chase by abducting Cockney Joan Bennett – extremely pretty, but whose awful accent cripples the movie for a while. Wonder if it’s meaningful that her name is Jerry (also a British term for Germans). She finally grows on you, and Lang obviously liked her, casting her in three more movies.

Presumed dead after a subway fight where Pidgeon third-rails the thug holding his passport, Pidgeon hides in a cave in the woods to wait out the hunt, so he won’t be a threat to others – but too late, the baddies track him and bring the arrow-shaped hat pin of the poor murdered girl who loved him. Pidgeon makes an absurd bow and arrow using the pin and his belt, kills Monocle Nazi Sanders with it, and gets grievously injured so we can see Joan again via fever-montage. Finally provoked into admitting that he did intend to kill Hitler after all, he heads to Germany to finish the job.

Dave Kehr:

These are Nazis as observed by someone who knew them intimately. In fact the chief villain of Man Hunt, a Gestapo officer who calls himself Major Quive-Smith, wears Lang’s trademark monocle. Lang was also known for using his own hands for close-up shots, and the finger on the trigger of Pidgeon’s gun may well have been his own.

Twink:

by ·Comments Off on Colorado Territory (1949, Raoul Walsh)

A darker remake of High Sierra; all the characters here are worse, corrupt and quicker to turn on each other. Virginia Mayo very good, always looks like she has secret access to a well-equipped powder room in the dusty abandoned church where they’re hiding out, and bolder than Ida Lupino, gets killed along with Joel “Bogie” McCrea when he runs into the high sierras (err, the rockies).

Doctor Henry Hull is recast here as the girl’s dad, and Dorothy Malone (Written on the Wind) doesn’t just turn Joel down, she tries to turn him in for the reward money. Joel isn’t released from jail – he’s sprung by “the old man” who pairs him with two assholes for a train robbery. Tough guy Reno (Destination Moon star John Archer) and smart guy Duke (James Mitchell, also in Joel’s Stars in My Crown) get themselves hanged, and I think the traitor cop gets shot. All different dialogue, and just as good.

L-R: smart guy, tough guy, Mayo