by ·Comments Off on White Heat (1949, Raoul Walsh)

Cagney and his dimwitted men rob a train and kill a lotta guys then hide out, but boring cop John Archer (Destination Moon) and his men are closing in, so Cagney confesses to a different, non-fatal job as an alibi for the train heist and goes to jail for a little while. “A very good friend of mine… me!” sounds like an Odenkirk line.

The cops want more on Cagney so they send Large-faced Eddie “Rock Around the Rockpile” O’Brien to jail as a mole to gain his trust. Rivalries in jail then prison break, while outside Big Ed steals his girl Virgino Mayo (Walsh’s Colorado Territory the same year) and they kill Cagney’s beloved Ma (Margaret Wycherly, fake mystic of The Thirteenth Chair). This is the movie where Cagney is a mother-obsessed seizure-prone psychopath, but I don’t find him any more psychotic than most movie gangsters. The cops track him to the next job with newfangled radio equipment – trapped in a burning building he’s made it, ma, top of the world.

by ·Comments Off on Woman in the Window (1945, Fritz Lang)

Edward G is a murder professor, and while his family vacations without him, he’s invited out by titular woman Joan Bennett who likes how he gazed at her painting, then he kills her ex-bf in self-defense when the guy barges in. Having studied murders extensively, Ed knows to go home for his car then return to hide the body. The girl doesn’t know his name and he plans to disappear from her life, but his huge face gets published in the newspaper due to a job promotion, then she looks him up, followed by the dead guy’s blackmailer buddy Dan Duryea, completing the Scarlet Street cast.

L-R: woman, window

The recent Amy Adams movie with the same title is a trauma-remake of Rear Window, not of this – and studying crimes while covering up having committed crimes makes this the original Juror #2. Some sweet camera moves, the movie works when Joan is around and it dies when all the men get together. It has a decent doom-ending (she fucks up taking care of Duryea but he’s killed in a police shootout outside, and she calls the professor with the good news too late as he overdoses on meds) then blows it with a cornball it-was-all-a-dream second ending.

the fatal glass of beer?

by ·Comments Off on The Big Steal (1949, Don Siegel)

Mitchum and Greer had costarred in Out of the Past a couple years earlier, teamed up here because her ex ripped them both off. William Bendix of The Blue Dahlia and Lifeboat is the army guy after Mitchum for the stolen money, turns out he’s in cahoots with the ex. Everyone flees to Mexico and runs into The Inspector General (Ramon Novarro, very good, starred in the 1925 Ben-Hur). Siegel just getting started in a long fruitful career, still a decade out from making the dire-looking Hound-Dog Man.

by ·Comments Off on The Shop Around the Corner (1940, Ernst Lubitsch)

Besides Jimmy Stewart the main thing I love about this movie is that they kept the Hungarian character names and signage when adapting for Hollywood. The boss thinks Jimmy is sleeping with his wife and fires him, but fellow salesman Joseph Schildkraut was the cheater, and the boss’s suicide is foiled by the errand boy. This all leads to some holiday season personnel-shuffling in the shop, and in the final couple seconds, romantic penpals Margaret Sullavan and Jimmy finally get together. The boss was the actual Wizard of Oz the year before, the cheater won an oscar for The Life of Emile Zola, and the errand boy followed-up with Ford and Hitchcock movies.

by ·Comments Off on The Big Sleep (1946, Howard Hawks)

Bogart Marlowe is hired by wealthy recluse with two daughters: wild Carmen and tough Lauren Bacall. Bookseller Dorothy Malone helps him spot a gambler who’s thought to be involved, but the gambler turns up dead, and so does another guy, then Bacall brings up a new blackmail plot, then yet another guy gets killed, and finally Marlowe helps the cops wrap it up and all is finished.

But it can’t be finished – there’s still a half hour left and I haven’t seen Elisha Cook Jr. yet. Here he is, offering to sell info about another plot – all this time Bacall has been covering for evil landlord Eddie, whose thug Bob Steele poisons Elisha. Bogart Marlowe liked Elisha (who wouldn’t?) and takes this one personally, goes to Eddie’s hideout and blasts those fuckers instead of informing his cop friends.

Nerd Dorothy:

Bacall and Eddie:

Elisha, in over his head:

by ·Comments Off on The Wolf Man (1941, George Waggner)

Watched in solidarity with WOLFtober. To their writeup I’ll add that I enjoyed the fact that werewolves can be killed with a silver bullet… or by hitting them with a stick. It’s also good when Lon Jr. comes home to dad Claude Rains’s castle at the beginning, dad’s got a new lens for his telescope and Lon’s like “I happen to dabble in telescope repair.”

Waggner had acted in The Iron Horse. Writer Curt Siodmak is best known as being Robert’s idiot brother, and due to remakes he’s got credits on a Benicio Del Toro movie and on next year’s version made by the Invisible Man Remake guy. Love interest Evelyn Ankers showed up in Frankenstein & Dracula & Invisible Man movies over the next three years, and police chief Ralph Bellamy went on to be the antichrist’s doctor.

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.