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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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A Wild Hare (1940, Tex Avery)

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

by ·Comments Off on Blue Moon (2025, Richard Linklater)

Ethan Hawke showcase, playing a songwriter whose partner has found success with a different partner. He flails around his favorite bar, chatting with bartender Bobby Cannavale and random patron EB White, waiting for Margaret Qualley to show up (script is based on letters they wrote each other), but she mostly wants to meet ex-partner Rodgers, the man of the hour. Feels more filmed-theater than Nouvelle Vague, besides whatever effect they used to shrink Hawke so everybody will dwarf him, but I had a better time with this one.

by ·Comments Off on Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948, Charles Barton)

Having watched a Laurel & Hardy short this year and checked out some Three Stooges shorts, might as well revisit these guys, who I haven’t seen since I was eight. I can remember Abbott is the straight man from the “Hey Abbott!” cries in Looney Tunes, but in person he’s got nothing going for him except the name – I’d trade him in for a second Costello.

Hey Ma:

Costello is an idiot delivery boy bringing crates to an upcoming House of Horrors (this part clearly inspired the first half of Salem’s Lot). He’s stalked by both Dracula and the Wolfman, while hotgirl Lenore wants his smooth pliable brain for her Frankenstein. It’s all tiresome and bad except for the use of animation in the vampire bat transformations, which actually look smoother than the CG assists in From Dusk Till Dawn.

by ·Comments Off on The Shanghai Gesture (1941, Josef von Sternberg)

Dixie (Toothpaste girl Phyllis Brooks) arrives in Shanghai from Brooklyn, immediately runs into trouble due to being broke and clueless, has to be rescued by hat-guy Vic Mature (before his postwar breakout in My Darling Clementine). At the casino, “Mother” is Ona Munson of Scandal Sheet (not that one). Neither of these gals are no Marlene Dietrich, though Ona does call herself Lily at one point – but the movie is rescued by a delightful Gene Tierney (year after The Return of Frank James), who is the lost daughter of bigwig Walter Huston.

In fact everyone’s got Big Secrets and half the room wants to kill the other half when Mother invites all the major players to her new year’s table – between this and Mildred Pierce I met my melodrama quota for the month. Unfortunately these secrets and rivalries aren’t interesting, and the movie fizzles after a first half that was full of possibility. Rosenbaum: “Given the censorship of the period, much of the decadence is implied rather than stated.”

Mother has been watching Uzumaki:

This movie needs a restoration, I demand one:

by ·Comments Off on Mildred Pierce (1945, Michael Curtiz)

In a noir mood, and this made up for The Big Knife being mid. Monte dies in the opening shot, Mildred runs, considers jumping off a bridge, settles for trying (unsuccessfully) to pin the crime on slimeball Wally.

Rewind to MP’s home life with hubbie Burt, young tomboy kid and older pretentious Veda. Burt has a very bad day, getting fired by partner Wally and thrown out of the house for cheating. Burt will agree to a divorce the day of MP’s big restaurant opening, after she buys property from the charismatic Monte, who then flits around with the extremely spoiled and shitty Veda (her younger sister having coughed once in an early scene, then died suddenly of pneumonia). Turns out MP married Monte for business reasons, caught Veda smooching on him, then V killed her own stepdad-boyfriend and mom was trying to cover-up for her criminal daughter.

Parrots keep popping up in scene backgrounds, and you know I love that. Crawford won the oscar, her business manager Ida and daughter Veda split the vote for best supporting, and The Lost Weekend won writing and picture. Veda is Ann Blyth of Brute Force, Bert is squaresville Bruce Bennett (olympic athlete-turned-Tarzan actor), Monte starred in Bunuel’s The Young One and Renoir’s The Southerner, and Wally would have his moment in the mid-50s with Red Garters & A Star is Born & Dangerous When Wet.

The nominees:

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.