by ·Comments Off on The Lost Weekend (1945, Billy Wilder)

Ray Milland, even younger than in The Big Clock and hardly looking like his X-Ray self – supposedly quit drinking a week ago and is acting outraged that anyone would suspect him of falling off, while he’s busily hiding bottles around the apartment. Looking crazed and desperate from the start, he steals the maid’s money and hits the town, staying at the bar late enough that his brother and wife leave on their planned trip without him. Ray is so happy with his booze – why would anyone deprive him of this?

A half hour in, he starts flashbacking, and even in his happy (but still drunken) past he’s being rude to his girl when they first meet at the opera. Meanwhile, present-day Ray is running low on booze and needs more people to rob or precious objects to pawn. The movie’s not completely miserable, Wilder adds levity, but all addiction stories end up the same way. Of course “The Drinking” by Robbie Fulks came to mind – can’t think of any other country songs about getting drunk but there’s probably one or two. The Miklós Rózsa soundtracks on both of these Wilder movies are good, and they look great at least. Winner of all the oscars except score, which is only forgivable because Rózsa lost to himself for Spellbound. At the first Cannes festival this joined the 11-way tie for best picture, one of which was somehow not Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast.

by ·Comments Off on Five Graves to Cairo (1943, Billy Wilder)

German and British forces and some chaotic individuals are shacked up together in an understaffed desert hotel in Egypt, like a WWII Dragon Inn. The Five Graves are where Rommel’s archaeologist friend buried advance supplies for the nazis to take Cairo. Escaped British soldier masquerading as hotel worker Franchot Tone (Phantom Lady) hopes to use his position to kill Rommel (Erich von Stroheim), but his captured compatriots instruct him to escape with the map details to foil the African campaign. During the escape, our guy steals a gun from a loud Italian general (Fortunio Bonanova, actually Spanish) and kills handsome, talkative Lt. Peter van Eyck (billionaire of 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse). Local girl Anne “Eve” Baxter stays behind and takes the blame, and gets executed. It’s dark, but these are Necessary Wartime Sacrifices (see also: This Land Is Mine). Wilder’s second or third feature (depending who’s counting) is good, with the best Rommel you could ask for.

Eve and hotelier Akim Tamiroff:

A noirish Tone:

by ·Comments Off on Macbeth (1948, Orson Welles)

A difficult story to film, but major film artists keep trying for some reason: Bela Tarr, Joel Coen, Polanski, Kurosawa. Welles turns in one of the crazier versions, the actors having a great time with their Scottish accents then lipsyncing (very well) their own performances on an abstract paper-mache stage. The opening 8-minute overture over black would be impressive if it wasn’t big symphonic 1940s music.

Lady M would not become a star, but had decent parts in Ford and Lang films and voice roles in major Disney movies. Mac’s destroyer Macduff is Dan O’Herlihy, Bunuel’s Robinson Crusoe. Heir resurgent Malcolm is Roddy McDowall, unrecognizable from either Planet of the Apes or Fright Night. Mac’s short-lived witch-prophesied friend Banquo and the late King Duncan are original Welles Mercury players. The Joseph McBride commentary is much better than the Tim Lucas, from what I played of ’em.

Jonathan Rosenbaum:

Welles’ approach to the material is wildly neo-primitive and so expressionistic that one can never be entirely sure whether the action is taking place in interiors or exteriors; the same ambiguity persists in the spoken text, where off-screen internal monologue and on-screen external speech often seem only a breath apart. The witches’ foaming, bubbling cauldron and Macbeth’s equally unstable consciousness are the closest we can get to any continuous sense of location, and the unabashed B-movie artificiality of the sets confirms that Welles wanted to draft something closer to a charcoal sketch than a finished canvas.

by ·Comments Off on Journey Into Fear (1943, Norman Foster)

My movie watching is outpacing my progress on the James Naremore book, so I don’t know the whole deal with Norman Foster and this Mercury Theater production, but it stars all my Kane and Ambersons buddies and is obviously a part of the big Welles picture. Annoyed to discover that there’s a longer reconstructed version with ten extra minutes that played MoMA a decade ago, but which never came out on video, so I watched the dull censored version, and it was still pretty great.

The Kane Boys:

An assassin is after arms dealer Joe Cotton, but this was during WWII so we’re supposed to be rooting for the arms dealer, not the assassin. Turks and Russians and nazis are involved, Cotton is sent undercover on a small ship but the assassin is also onboard (very nicely introduced via his skipping turntable). Now we get to meet all the other passengers and try to sort out their loyalties in time to save Cotton’s life.

Major Ship Captain Amberson:

Orson is apparently an ally, Major Amberson great as the ship’s captain, Agnes not great with a French accent, Dolores del Rio hot as a dancer in a catsuit. Cotton (a married man!) gets pushed around by everyone, has no plan or confidence, is overly insecure about the dancer, then when they arrive on shore he escapes a kidnapping attempt through actual quick thinking and defeats the assassin during a rainy rooftop struggle.

Remade in the 1970s with Sam Waterston, assassin Ian McShane, Shelley Winters in the Moorehead role, and some crazy additional cast (Zero Mostel, Vincent Price, Stanley Holloway).

by ·Comments Off on The Stranger (1946, Orson Welles)

Edward G arranges for a desperate nazi to escape prison so he’ll lead them to the big man. Eddie (just after Scarlet Street) gets knocked out and loses the trail of his guy (K Shayne of a Boetticher noir), so he doesn’t see Orson Welles strangle Shayne in the woods, decides to hang around this Connecticut town until more leads turn up.

When your old nazi friend drops in on your wedding day:

Orson is so confident in his new wife Loretta Young (oscar winner the following year) that he admits to killing the “little man,” then when she doesn’t take this news well, he plots to murder her too. Eddie helps tie up loose ends but it’s Loretta who shoots Orson before he’s stabbed by the town clock (my second movie this month to end in a big clock). Clockworker Richard Long is Loretta’s brother, appeared with Orson the same year in Tomorrow Is Forever. The beginning of Welles’s dubbing problems, which would last the rest of his career.

Also rewatched Magnificent Ambersons on the new blu, and learned some Welles tidbits. Simon Callow explains the musical structure of the original cut very convincingly, making a case for what was lost when the studio recut the film. Apparently Pearl Harbor was bombed on the last day of filming, then Orson disappeared to Brazil to shoot It’s All True on the studio’s dime during editing. I just got derailed by a couple other books, but trying to get to the James Naremore biography.

by ·Comments Off on The Big Clock (1948, John Farrow)

Ray Milland is a bad husband to Maureen O’Sullivan, working for toxic boss Charles Laughton. When the boss threatens to fire and blacklist Ray from the publishing industry if he leaves for a long-delayed honeymoon, Ray responds by standing up his wife and getting drunk with some strange girl (Rita Johnson, Ray’s fiancee in The Major and the Minor). Coincidentally the strange girl is the boss’s mistress, whom the boss murders that same night, calling in his cleaner Steve (Human Duplicator George Macready) and his top crime investigator Ray (still 15 years away from acquiring his X-RAY EYES).

Ray runs around finding clues that all point to himself, while everyone he met that night is being generous to him and his wife, understandably, is not. Bringing together the two greatest movies of the past decade, Laughton is terrific as the wicked publisher, and he’s inordinately proud of his clockwork device. Fighting his way out from the big clock, Ray incapacitates the henchman, and to everyone’s horror, he stops the big clock. The boss runs off shooting in a frenzy and falls down an elevator shaft.

The Big Sleeves:

Remade once with Yves Montand, again with Kevin Costner. The producer later wrote a pile of James Bond movies, the DP had recently shot three great Preston Sturges films, and the director and lead actress had recently produced Mia.

by ·Comments Off on Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947, Hans Richter)

Occasionally returning to the Vogel book – after the Nazi section I skipped, a “Secrets and Revelations” round-up of bonus films closes part two “The Subversion of Content.” This is what got me watching Salesman (“an inevitable indictment of the commercialization of religion”) and now this and the Herzog.

Different episodes corresponding to customers of a dream consultant. Restrained surrealism, attempts at dream logic, but the look and voices and pace are all off. I don’t think Americans in the 1940s were able to do dreaminess, with one big exception. Vogel calls it “ambitious,” and at least it’s that.

All dialogue dubbed, or rather narrated. Framing story of man-without-qualities Joe who opens a dream consulting business as an excuse to cram together dream imagery in a style I’d call Shabby Cocteau. Also full of poetry, but the basic kind that keeps rhyming art with heart. One episode is just spirograph animations. Four-ish minutes are devoted to shots of a mobile. I can’t slam the songs – “prefabricated heart” sung by a pair of mannequins was pretty good.

by ·Comments Off on Citizen Kane (1941, Orson Welles)

Kane’s death, then newsreel segment on him, then the news editor asking the reporter to find out more, seek the rosebud angle. So meek reporter William Alland (producer of 1950s monster movies) goes to see washed-up widow Dorothy Comingore (of Three Stooges shorts), who sends him away, then he finds his way into a chronological backstory with the help of others. Kane’s mom inherits a gold mine by chance, sends son away from an abusive dad to boarding school with rich guardian George Coulouris. The reporter meets boring old school friend Joseph Cotten and delightful newspaperman Everett Sloane, who tell of Kane’s takeover of the paper and his political aspirations. Kane’s run for governor is destroyed when rival Ray Collins reveals Kane’s affair with showgirl Dorothy while he was married to Ruth Warrick. Now that we’re caught up with her backstory, the reporter returns to Dorothy for his interview, but never finds his rosebud.

Rewatching for the first time in a long while… thought about listening to the four audio commentaries and watching the docs and reading two or three books on Welles, but the year’s almost over and I’ve got lists to make.

Lights & Mirrors:

by ·Comments Off on Some Cartoons watched in late November

Plane Crazy (1928, Ub Iwerks)

The whole barnyard pitches in to build Mickey a rubber-dog-powered airplane, but it explodes immediately, so he sticks a propeller and a turkey tail on a jalopy to get some real power. After terrorizing everyone during takeoff, including some sweet first-person views that might account for this movie being on Jerry Beck’s list, he gets Minnie in the air in order to sexually harass her, but she ditches him mid-flight.

–
Balloon Land (1935, Ub Iwerks)

No spoken words in the Mickey, this one’s got singing. In a world where everyone/thing is made out of balloons except for the dreaded Pincushion Man, who threatens to pop our dim heroes who wander into the woods. He follows them into town and goes on a mass murder frenzy until the armed forces fight back with tree sap and knock him off the edge of the world. The young couple gets away with bringing grave peril into town since the only witness who could’ve fingered them was killed.

–
Music Land (1935, Wilfred Jackson)

Princess Violin of Symphony island and Prince Alto Sax of Jazz island have a tryst which starts a war, until the opposing sides chill out and hold a wedding instead. Great character design in this one, with the voice of each character “spoken” by the instrument it represents.

–
Mother Goose Goes Hollywood (1938, Wilfred Jackson)

Just a string of parodies of movie actors ending in a full-cast dance-off. Gross Katharine Hepburn blackface gag, good Marx Bros and Cab Calloway.

–
A Wild Hare (1940, Tex Avery)

The original Elmer vs. Bugs mind-game cartoon. Lost an oscar to The Milky Way.

–
Bugs Bunny Gets the Boid (1942, Robert Clampett)

Now a well-established character, Bugs faces off against a dim vulture (condor?), the bird version of Elmer. The buzzard’s voice was a parody of a well-known ventriloquist dummy, created by Edgar “father of Candice” Bergen, whose other well-known ventriloquist dummy was parodied in Mother Goose Goes Hollywood.

–
Screwball Squirrel (1944, Tex Avery)

Having co-created Bugs, Daffy and Porky, Tex fell out with the Looney producers and moved to MGM, where he appears to have created new versions of Bugs/Daffy (squirrel) and Elmer/Buzzard (dog) to torment with even wilder gags. Full of fun meta jokes, far beyond Screwy talking to the audience – the action hitches when a turntable playing the music score skips, he pulls back the screen to see what happens in the next scene, he interrupts the iris-out to extend the action. Has the same ending as The Palm Beach Story.

–
Baseball Bugs (1946, Friz Freleng)

Bugs in invincible trickster mode plays every position at once, singlehandedly takes on an entire baseball team – some good gags and frantic energy.

–
The Big Snooze (1946, Arthur Davis)

Fed up with being tormented, Elmer rips up his contract with the cartoons and goes off to take a peaceful nap under a tree. Bugsy Krueger takes sleeping pills and invades Elmer’s dreams, feminizing him and setting wolves after him, terrifying him into rejoining the chase. One of the shorts Bob Clampett left unfinished when he quit the studio and moved to Screen Gems, where he created Beany and Cecil.

–
Tweetie Pie (1947, Friz Freleng)

Another Clampett castoff, redesigned by Freleng. Sylvester (here named Thomas) is chasing an bird outside in the snow, which is then adopted by the cat’s owner. Dig the rube goldberg contraption. Ends with the bird just pummeling the cat with a shovel. The first Warner short to win an oscar (vs. a George Pal puppetoon).