Re-reading Bloch, Sam's recounting to Lila of Dr Steiner's diagnosis of Norman includes the following:
-
swanstep — 9 years ago(November 19, 2016 10:38 PM)
22 Island of Lost Souls Erle C. Kenton, 1932
IoLS has a lot in common with Freaks (1932) but also with the two, great 'mysterious island' movies King Kong (1933) and The Most Dangerous Game (1933). Together these 4 films form a quartet of semi-horrors focused on the policing of the boundary between the human and the non-human. IoLS has great make-up effects, a taut, thoughtful script from the Wells novel, and Laughton as an unforgettable Morreau. Great voice-work from him throughout and even better blood-curdling screams at the end together with Kenton's steady direction make IoLS a near-classic. It doesn't have Kong's spectacle or Freaks' outrageousness/mind-blowingness (even in the expurgated form we have it in), but it's of similar basic quality I'd say. A must see in other words (what took me so long?). -
swanstep — 9 years ago(November 20, 2016 11:30 PM)
19 Monkey Business Norman Z. McLeod, 1931
A very pure example of Marxian anarchy, almost no plot, just gag after gag (for better or worse), brothers plays themselves, no Margaret Dumont, no one else makes any impact whatsoever.
I guess, on reflection, that I prefer my Marx brothers a little more mixed/impure where there's more story and a stronger, more visual directorial hand in the mix (see, e.g., McCarey and Sam Wood doing Duck Soup and A Night At The Opera respectively). Monkey Business (1931) just wasn't involving enough, was too one-note for me (I much prefer Hawks's Monk Bus (1952) w/ Grant, Rogers, Monroe - not on Wright's list - I think that's enough to get me banned from some cineaste circles!) -
suzishadow — 9 years ago(December 01, 2016 06:52 PM)
I much prefer Hawks's Monk Bus (1952) w/ Grant, Rogers, Monroe - not on Wright's list - I think that's enough to get me banned from some cineaste circles!)
I prefer HH's Monkey Business, too.
"Fire bad. Tree pretty." -
swanstep — 9 years ago(November 26, 2016 09:06 AM)
92 D.O.A. Rudolph Mat, 1950
124 The Big Combo Joseph H. Lewis, 1955
Two partially successful noirs, both with superior photography (director Nat was himself one of the great DPs for Dreyer before coming to Hollywood to shoot things like Foreign Correspondent for Hitch, To Be or Not To be for Lubitsch, Gilda, and so on), and both let down by inferior acting and plotting. DOA is further hampered by terrrible sound fx early and ponderous Tiomkin score. Raksin's jazzy score for Big Combo is well-judges by comparison.
Redeeming features for Big Combo include typical, late-noir looseness about sexuality: both male leads are explicitly characetrized by their sexual ablities to pleasure women, and a couple of the henchmen are clearly signaled as a gay couple. Like Kiss Me Deadly (1955) there's a sense that everyone good or bad is getting their rocks off in pretty callous ways.
Redeeming features for DOA include a good hot-jazz/jump-blues scene and its general picture of 1950 San Fran as party town. It's a shame in a way that the picture doesn't stay there instead of diverting to LA.
DOA bears some resemblance to Kazan's Panic In The Streets (1950), a New Orleans Noir, but PITS strikes me as a much better overall film. British Noir, Night and The City (1950) also strikes me as more complete, less flawed than DOA. Neither of these are on Wright's list. Also not on Wright's list from 1950, Cukor's sparkling Born Yesterday or Ophuls' luminous La Ronde.
From 1955, I'd definitely take Smiles of A Summer Night, Ordet, Man From Laramie, To Catch A Thief over Big Combo
DOA and Big Combo are definitely worth seeing but they're not in my view among the best films of their respective years, they're the third or fourth best noirs of their years. Nor are they super-fun enough so that their strengths just overwhelm their weaknesses: which is what, e.g., Rebel Without a Cause and To Catch a Thief and La Ronde and Gun Crazy strike me as being. -
swanstep — 9 years ago(December 01, 2016 01:59 AM)
95 Los olvidados Luis Bunuel, 1950
Essential film in the tradition of ultra-grim films about societies (here Mexico) eat their poor children alive. The post-war period saw a bunch of classics on the theme of lost children in Europe after WW2, esp. Germany Year Zero and Forbidden Games. Los Olvidados then shows that poor kids surviving (barely) in Mexico City untouched by war have it no better than refugee kids and kids surviving in ruins in Europe.
Perhaps because of the greater universality of peacetime poverty (compared with post-war scenario) Los Olvidados looks forward to 400 Blows and City of God (which I needs to rewatch now to spot its explicit references to Los Olvidados) and Lilya-4-Ever in a way that the German-Y-Z and Forbidden Games don't.
So, a tough watch, and not at all the playful surealism of early and late Bunuel, and its probably true that if LO was the first film on the topic I'd watched rather than the 21st I'd be less deatched from it than I in fact was. Los Olvidados did feel like 'eating my vegetables', but, well, you do have to eat your vegatables! I've very glad to have seen LO. I should have seen it long ago. I'm glad it's over with now. -
swanstep — 9 years ago(December 02, 2016 09:24 PM)
120 It's Always Fair Weather Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly, 1955
IAFW famously lost MGM a lot of money and helped precipitate the end of the Arthur Freed unit there. Its fractious production also saw the end of Kelly and Donen's working relationship and (most of) their friendship.
But is the film itself a failure? I think so, but it's also kind of fascinating. E.g., many of its good ideas aren't very well-developed (hence FAIL), but it's still fascinating to see in anlage what people like Wilder&Diamond and Demy&Legrand would take to the bank over the next decade. More on this at the end of this note.
What makes the film a failure? First, not a single memorable or even particularly good song. Second, dance opportunity after dance opportunity is missed: e.g. 1, Kelly and Charisse are a romantic couple in the film but they never dance together. WTF? e.g. 2., Kelly has a male dance partner in Michal Kidd (a star choreographer making his front-of-camera debut I Believe but aside from a bustling opening number with three guys and a sequence of three guys parallel dancing in split screen Kidd and Kelly never dance together. Moreover Kidd never gets a solo number (a big one was planned but Kelly out of jealousy nixed it causing big blowups with Donen and Kidd). This is insane. Donald O'Connor feels a long time ago in 1955. e.g. 3. There's no climactic dance number rather there's just a brawl. Again, WTF?
Overall, the film's musical and dance strategies just seem misguided throughout. In a couple of numbers you can feel that Donen is trying to give the number to Kidd by putting him in a light color while having Kelly and Dan Daily disappear in dark suits. But this is like watching a representation of Donen trying to sabotage his own picture. It's nuts. And Charisse's solo number is actually with bunch of pug-ugly boxers and Charisse while great is pretty covered-up throughout. It's as though the film trying to lose money! Dolores Gray who plays a loathsome TV-presenter (who's almost a Jean Hagen figure) gets a big song and dance number that's deliberately bad ('I'm just a faithful lassie looking for a faithful lad'), but since Gray is a B/way trouper she almost makes it good/work. Still, Gray's no movie star and on an instinctive level there's no way to understand why she should be getting all that focus and time. The balance in the film is all wrong in my view.
So far I haven't said anything about what IAFW's actually about: three war chums drink up big as they are decommissioned at the end of WW2 and agree to meet again exactly ten years later (i.e., in 1955) in the same bar. We get a montage of the next ten years disappointments for each man, then they meet as planned and can't stand each other. The rest of the film is then them figuring out that they've all become heels of various sorts, taking some actions about their lives (Kelly getting together with Charisse for example), and learning to like themselves and each other again.
It sum, IAFW tackles some of the same issues as Wyler's stone-cold-classic Best Years Of Our Lives while also treating in outline some of the emerging characteristic 1950s male ennui about being A Man In A Gray-flannelled Suit, dealing with intrusive TV, nuclear nightmares, proto-feminism (from both Charisse's character and Gray's) and so on. This is a pretty down-beat stew of ideas for a movie musical, esp. when combined with an overall theme about the fickleness and unsteadiness of friendships in civilian life where people naturally spread across a big continent. But having announced these big topics the film doesn't really do much with them. Instead it really makes you want to see Best Years of Our Lives or The Apartment again.
Kelly's big solo number on rollerskates - probably the only scene from the movie that most people would have any awareness of (I think it was excerpted in That's Entertainment) - is pretty nifty but the actual song he sings is 'I Like Myself' which is as bad as it sounds. It's sung and danced right after it's become clear to Kelly that Charisse is 'the one', he's taken charge of his life, and so on, and the self-absorption and self-analysis just hits the wrong note I'm afraid. Plus while the dancing soars Previn's music just doesn't. IAFW is like the evil inverse of Singin' In The Rain: there everything just fits and here, even when the pieces are interesting they don't quite fit together, and the emergent feeling is very muted.
Technically the film is strange too. It's in a very wide, at least 2.5-1 Cinemascope aspect ratio, and this means that Donen feels he can't come in and do closeups (unless he artificially shrinks the screen into panels which he does occasionally). Emotions never quite land for this reason I'm afraid. And the overall color pallette is pretty muted for an MGM musical. I guess I think I know what they were going for - the look and feel of Frank Sinatra's albums of the time In The Wee Small Hours, Songs for Swinging Lovers but they don't -
swanstep — 9 years ago(December 10, 2016 05:06 PM)
Technically the film [It's Always Fair Weather] is strange too. It's in a very wide, at least 2.5-1 Cinemascope aspect ratio, and this means that Donen feels he can't come in and do closeups (unless he artificially shrinks the screen into panels which he does occasionally). Emotions never quite land for this reason I'm afraid.
I just read that La La Land (2016) is the same 2.5+-1, Cinemascope aspect ratio. The reviews don't seem to suggest that
La La Land
has any problems with close-ups or emotional connection more generally. It'll be interesting for me to see how that works.
Remember too that the problem ultra-wide screen raises for dance-based musicals is that, unless you are a philistine like Baz Luhrmann, then you'll want to shoot the dance sequences mostly from head to toe (plus a bit of covering space). That height has the perverse effect of shrinking the dancers horizontally within the frame. This problem in turn tempts choreographers and directors to fill up all that unwanted side-ways real-estate with other dancers. So suddenly rows of people, whose faces you can't really see, not the stars you want become the main event. Intimacy is lost.
The successful dance-based musicals that use ultra wide-screen are, principally, West Side and Seven Brides. Why/how does it work in those cases? Well, West Side famously succeeds in spite of its central couple-stars Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer it really is the Jets and the Sharks and large ethnic groupings and their singing and dancing that carry the movie. In Seven Brides again it's large, 7+-strong groupings of men and women rather than solo stars or pairs that are the center of attention. In sum, these are exceptional musicals whose content seems to warrant lots of collective row-action - raising barns, busting up a gym, taking over a schoolyard, and so on.
But is
La La Land
like that? It doesn't seem so. It looks like it's a solo- and pair-dancing-based, boy-meets-girl tale. Most of La La Land's content inspirations from Singin' In The Rain to Umbrellas of Cherbourg were in 1.33-1.85 ratios seemingly for very good reasons. Demy's follow-up to Umbrellas, The Young Girls of Rochefort is the closest, at 2.35-1, but that's not an especially auspicious comparison since it mainly involves group dancing (it's about Carnies coming to a town - and the two main sisters in the story often dance together with their beau-wannabes so again there's lots of 4-people, natural row spacing) and when it does break down to solos and pairs (esp. the sequence with Gene Kelly and Francoise Dorleac near the end) then I think that the asp. ratio does distance us from the dancing in a way that's unhelpful. I and probably Chazelle first saw Rochefort in cropped forms where this wasn't a problem, but post-BluRay it's widely available in its true wide-screen format - though not as wide as Cinemascope! - such scenes don't work as well as they used to in my view.
In sum, director Chazelle has created a large number of problems for himself with his choice of aspect ratio. I'd guess that the horizontal character of LA has tempted him in this direction, but there have to have been trade-offs. Will crowd numbers that play to the asp. ratio squash the intimate story and their dances, or not? Assuming the film's good, I'll probably see it a couple of times, and if so, I'll do one nerd viewing where I concentrate on the asp. ratio question in every shot and scene. I'm really looking forward to this movie! -
swanstep — 9 years ago(December 03, 2016 05:19 PM)
164 Odds Against Tomorrow Robert Wise, 1959
Decent tortured-Robert-Ryan-film that turns into a caper-film. Three leads (Raym, Begley, Bellefonte) are excellent with good hard-boiled dame turns from noir-stalwart Gloria Grahame and Shelley Winters. Excellent avant-jazz score too is a standout.
What prevents the film from being better-than-decent is, I think, the caper itself. It comes unstuck very quickly and realistically and then the film seemingly notices that it's coming up short tacks on a White Heat (1949) ending but without any good dialogue, which doesn't really work. A coda back in the city at the end (i.e., with some of the left behind dames and kids) perhaps underlining that the caper wasn;t really the point and offering us something else, might have been a good idea, maybe with some editing tricks to delinearize the narrative a bit.
So, for me at least, OAT isn't a complete film and so is properly in that penumbra of near-misses outside the list of best films of the year in 1959. Art-film staples that don't make Wright's list, e.g., Hiroshima Mon Amour and Pickpocket (one of Taxi Driver's models) are complete and just better. So in my view are somewhat chance-taking Hollywood things like Suddenly Last Summer and often underrated stuff like Pillow Talk and maybe The Nun's Story. (Obviously I have no disagreements with the NBNW, Some Like it Hot, Rio Bravo, Imitation of Life, Rio Bravo core of Wright's 1959 cohort). -
swanstep — 9 years ago(December 16, 2016 04:45 AM)
33 The Invisible Man James Whale, 1933
A fast-paced, good-looking romp/semi-thrill-ride from James Whale that was a big hit in its time. It struck me now however, as being as of less interest than Whale's other famous films (Waterloo Bridge, Frankenstein, The Old Dark House). The basic problems seem to be with the story itself: invisible guy, Griffin, is utterly megalomaniacal from the beginning; it's not as though the temptations of invisibility themselves are corrupting here. We really just can't wait for him to be cornered and shot. Any sympathy for him from his sort of love-interest (Titanic's Gloria Stuart in her salad days) feels completey misguided and Stuart really has nothing to play. The whole film (which is only 71 minutes) is really only a single Act and the end feels completely predestined, which doesn't make for the greatest viewing experience.
1933 was a pretty good movie year including a bunch not on Wright's list: Design For Living (peak Lubitsch), Baby Face (Stanwyck becomes a big star), Little Women (Cukor and Kate Hepburn make first beautiful music together). Invisible Man (1933) is fine but not good enough methinks. -
swanstep — 9 years ago(December 16, 2016 06:24 AM)
160 A Bucket of Blood Roger Corman, 1959
Another very short film (just over an hour). This time the obvious observation is that with a bit of trimming this could be a half-hour Twilight Zone ep. The final scene of ABOB teases us with the prospect of a seemingly impossible twist ('He's gonna turn himself into one of his statues! But how is that possible?) and doesn't quite deliver Maybe Serling could have figured out a way to make that final scene pop?
As always with Corman's own stuff, he reveals himself as a good technician. Camera amost always feels like it's in the right place, edits are punchy, decent performances are the norm. He's better than William Castle on that level, and you can feel him having really learned his lessons from Hitchcock and Welles and Lang in this film.
Takedowns of beatnik culture were old news by 1959 but the idea that the counter-culture could hide psychopaths probably felt prescient shortly after ABOB's release. Still, the story here is just so-so, and somehow Dick Miller's character never achieves any great heights of piteousness or tragedy. Corman doesn't have a Stefano or Shulberg or Chayefsky or Lehmann in his corner taking characters and scripts to the next level. And there's some (unhelpful) ambiguity as to how much Dick Miller's character understands what he's done at the end of the film, which together with the slight stupidity you have to impute to everyone else in the film that they don't pay much attention to, e.g., one of the prettiest cafe regulars going missing, makes the wrap up feel tentative.
In sum, ABOB wouldn't be anywhere my best-of-1959 list. We have a couple more Cormans coming up (his Poe films) in the early '60s. Can any of those equal X- The Man With X-ray Eyes which is currently my fave Corman-directed picture and worthy of a top-10-ish placing for its year. -
ecarle — 9 years ago(December 16, 2016 05:22 PM)
Another very short film (just over an hour). This time the obvious observation is that with a bit of trimming this could be a half-hour Twilight Zone ep.
or an Alfred Hitchcock Hourthough those started in '62.
As always with Corman's own stuff,
And it is intriguing to think about how many "Roger Corman movies" were DIRECTED by Corman. More often and as time went on he seemed to content himself with being a mini-mogul and giving chances to everybody else(Bogdanvich, Scorsese, etc.)
I've always been intrigued that given how cheapjack and poorly written most Roger Corman movies are, I think he graduated from Stanford University. Goes to show you..the degree doesn't make the man. Possibly the production and business smarts came from there, though. But Roger Corman movies look like somebody without a high school education made them.
Which leads me into a trap: a LOT of people without a high school education are very smart, and/or become very rich.
I have read that the MPAA resisted all attempts from Jack Nicholson(not the Nicholson who helped run American International; and people thought they WERE related, and they weren't) and Martin Scorsese to give Roger Corman an honorary Oscar for so much schlock. Butdidn't they? Eventually? (And I think Peter Bogdanovich's excellent "Targets" was from Corman.)
he reveals himself as a good technician. Camera amost always feels like it's in the right place, edits are punchy, decent performances are the norm. He's better than William Castle on that level, and you can feel him having really learned his lessons from Hitchcock and Welles and Lang in this film.
Interestingly put. I saw this a few months ago on TCM and at a minimum, I felt the performances were good.
Takedowns of beatnik culture were old news by 1959 but the idea that the counter-culture could hide psychopaths probably felt prescient shortly after ABOB's release.
Well Charlie Manson was ten years away and hidden more in the hippie culture, but who's to say the Beatniks were equally susceptible to embaracing madness?
I might add that "Bucket of Blood" is circa 1959 , and its more famous sibling "Little Shop of Horrors" (with Jack Nicholson doing a memorable cameo) was in 1960, and these are EXACTLY the kind of movies Hitchocck was "sensing in the marketplace" and demanding a "Hitchcock response"(Psycho, of course.)
The murders in Bucket of Blood are pretty gory, if not shown..the beheading of one poor sucker ends with his death off screen but a most Arbogastian "final scream."
In some ways, Bucket of Blood is JUST as shocking as Psycho(probably the savge nature of the murders), but ultimatelyno. The victims simply weren't built up as human beings as in Psycho, the murders weren't as graphic and extended in time as in Psycho. Stillwe're in the ballpark, content-wise.
Still, the story here is just so-so,
True. A guy kills people(well, a cat first) and puts plaster on them and voilahe's a hit sculptor! Shades of House of Wax, a little too predictable and nowhere near the weirdness of that plant that yells "Feed Me" in Little Shop of Horrors(which later became a musical and a movie with Bill Murray in the NIcholson cameo.)
and somehow Dick Miller's character never achieves any great heights of piteousness or tragedy.
True. Though Dick Miller seemed to catch the fancy of Joe Dante, who put Miller in most all of his 1980's movies that I'm not so enamored of (Gremlins, Innerspace) but is Miller in "Matinee"(1993), which I AM enamored of?
Corman doesn't have a Stefano or Shulberg or Chayefsky or Lehmann in his corner taking characters and scripts to the next level.
Hitchcock worked at the top of the studio system where talent is plentifuland expensive. Thus Hitchcock could make the best WITH the bestthough he got Joe Stefano, a tyro, at a real bargain and damngreat dialogue!
And there's some (unhelpful) ambiguity as to how much Dick Miller's character understands what he's done at the end of the film, which together with the slight stupidity you have to impute to everyone else in the film that they don't pay much attention to, e.g.,
Didn't Roger Ebert call this "the stupid plot" where the whole thing falls apart if anyone notices what's going on?
one of the prettiest cafe regulars going missing, makes the wrap up feel tentative.
In sum, ABOB wouldn't be anywhere my best-of-1959 list.
Well, as you've mentioned before, 1959 is the year where one finds North by Northwest, Rio Bravo, Some Like It Hot, Anatomy of a Murder.one of the best years ever. Oh yeah, Ben-Hur, too. And Pillow Talk.
We have a couple more Cormans coming up (his Poe films) in the early '60s. Can any of those equal X- The Man With X-ray Eyes which is currently my fave Corman-directed picture and worthy of a top-10-ish placing for its year.
I dunno. Let's find out. Vincent Price becomes part of the discussion -
swanstep — 9 years ago(December 17, 2016 11:02 PM)
In sum, ABOB wouldn't be anywhere my best-of-1959 list.
Well, as you've mentioned before, 1959 is the year where one finds North by Northwest, Rio Bravo, Some Like It Hot, Anatomy of a Murder.one of the best years ever. Oh yeah, Ben-Hur, too. And Pillow Talk.
To be fair, NbNW, Rio Bravo, Ben-Hur (and also Imitation of Life and The 400 Blows) are all on Wright's list. but, yep, no SLIH, Anatomy of a Murder, Pillow Talk, Suddenly Last Summer, Pickpocket, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Shadows, The Nun's Story, and so on. Bucket of Blood is quite good but the competition's hot. -
swanstep — 9 years ago(December 18, 2016 05:24 AM)
145 The Monolith Monsters John Sherwood, 1957
Undistinguished, formula '50s sci-fi. Meteorites expand fast when exposed to water (and also seem to turn people into stone although that side of the threat is woefully under-developed), threaten to overrun small town and after that. the world? Salt water, however, turns out to dissolve them real good. The End.
Some pretty good sfx of the towering then collapsing and shattering then rebuilding meteorite monoliths are the high-lights. Everything else about the production is utterly perfunctory. Makes the Quatermass '50s films, which I was quite dismissive of earlier in this quest, look like masterpieces. TMM isn't the worst film on Wright's list but it's one of the least interesting. Not really worth watching unless you're a '50s sci-fi completist. -
swanstep — 9 years ago(December 30, 2016 01:00 AM)
107 House of Wax Andr De Toth, 1953
Maybe you had to be there (either in 1953 or in one of its '60s and '70s revivals) to get this one One of the original 3-D hits, House of Wax (1953) 3-D aside is a remarkably pedestrian thriller. Vincent Price has a super-elaborate scheme for both settling scores with enemies and re-populating his wax museum. One that involves lots of collaborators and lots and lots of ways of getting found out. It should have been possible to make Price's character a piteous, Phantom-/Hunchback-like figure but the film is too busy showing off 3-D to expand him beyond stock-villainy.
In sum, I found this film a real disappointment, one of the worst, genuinely famous films. I prefer the imitator, Corman's Bucket Of Blood (1959)!
To think that Wright chose HOW (and also Glen or Glenda!) over things like The Ear-rings of Madame D., Tokyo Story, From Here To Eternity, Shane, Roman Holiday, Pickup on South St, The Man Between, and so on. -
jay441 — 9 years ago(December 30, 2016 04:21 PM)
I've read some intriguing personal anecdotes on this board about encounters with Golden Age Hollywood, and now here's mine.
House of Wax director Andr De Toth visited my university film theory class in the mid-80s. Clean-shaven head, black eyepatch. No riding crop. Our young Hungarian film professor asked him, twice, about his alleged involvement in filming, for Nazi Germany, one of Hitler's invasions, and, twice, De Toth politely declined to answer.
I don't remember too much else about this visit, except that at the next class meeting one of the students said that Veronica Lake had been married to De Toth (!) and had written in her autobiography that he would practice goose-stepping in the back yard (!!). -
swanstep — 9 years ago(December 30, 2016 10:53 PM)
House of Wax director Andr De Toth visited my university film theory class in the mid-80s. Clean-shaven head, black eyepatch. No riding crop. Our young Hungarian film professor asked him, twice, about his alleged involvement in filming, for Nazi Germany, one of Hitler's invasions, and, twice, De Toth politely declined to answer.
I don't remember too much else about this visit, except that at the next class meeting one of the students said that Veronica Lake had been married to De Toth (!) and had written in her autobiography that he would practice goose-stepping in the back yard (!!).
Great anecdote thanks. I don't know much about De Toth .and hadn't heard about his marriage to Veronica Lake (she must have been quite a catch for him). Apparently he had his eye-patch at the time of House of Wax, since one of the most famous anecdotes about the film is the ironic note that De Toth with almost no 3-D perception himself nonetheless had to direct one of the biggest 3-D features. This Obit make him sound like a real character:
http://tinyurl.com/hyog8lg
I think I'll have to check out his westerns. -
Byrdz — 9 years ago(January 28, 2017 06:14 PM)
Maybe you had to be there to get this one.
You might have something there. When it opened it was quite thye thing to see and it was really
REALLY
scary. Course seeing it as a kid probably helped !
Bushinsky's wax head on the shelf and then he moves !
JUMP !!! -
ecarle — 9 years ago(January 29, 2017 08:52 AM)
Maybe you had to be there (either in 1953 or in one of its '60s and '70s revivals) to get this one One of the original 3-D hits, House of Wax (1953) 3-D aside is a remarkably pedestrian thriller.
I tell ya, swanstep, your reviews of the Wright list are coming so fast and furious I keep missing some. The update (with the interesting De Toth story from another poster) drew me to this December post and, well, "gentle rebuttal" time again.
Vincent Price has a super-elaborate scheme for both settling scores with enemies and re-populating his wax museum. One that involves lots of collaborators and lots and lots of ways of getting found out.
Ha. I must admit the plotting here isn't particularly sophisticated. Its another reason that Hitchcock's thrillers always seem "a cut above." Hitchcock rarely took "the easy way out" on plotting. There had to be some logic and feasibility to how matters unfolded, even in the most fantastic of his thrillers. Hitchcock had a direction for writers: "Anticipate questions that the audience will be asking themselvesand answer those questions as soon as you can in the script."
It should have been possible to make Price's character a piteous, Phantom-/Hunchback-like figure but the film is too busy showing off 3-D to expand him beyond stock-villainy.
Well, I think he comes off as a bit of both. In the opening scene before he is burned and misfigured, he's a nice enough guy, an artiste who is being sold out by his nefarious in-it-for-the bucks partner. The resulting fire turns him into a madman and I think what's scary about it is that Price kills both enemies(the partner) and innocents(Phyllis Kirk's roommate Carolyn Jones) alike. We can root FOR Price when he murders the partner, but we have to root against him when he kills Jones.
In sum, I found this film a real disappointment, one of the worst, genuinely famous films. I prefer the imitator, Corman's Bucket Of Blood (1959)!
Well, its definitely a "had to be there" thing. I see "House of Wax" as really aimed at a pre-teen audience. Its almost William Castle level in terms of the simplicity of the script and the basics of the scares. Its for kids OR.."the kids in all adults."
House of Wax made the rounds of The Million Dollar Movie in Los Angeles in the 60's(9 showings a week), along with The Magnificent Seven, Them, and Dial M for Murder, so its a strong memory of childhood.
I recall a 3-D re-release in 1971 that I couldn't go to because the only theater showing it in my town wasa PORNO THEATER. My parents wouldn't let me go in there, even for a "regular" movie. I caught a 3-D showing years later(for once, I can't even remember which decade) and I know that I found most memorablethe guy bouncing rubber balls on a string off a paddle at us.
All that said, I have this great "original release" memory from none other than ..my mother. She saw the film on release in 1953 with some girlfriends and she said they were all screaming and jumping all through it. The "Psycho" of its time for THEM. A more innocent time.
Noteable: Charles Bronson(then Buchinsky) as Price's mute assistant, a character who plays rather sad and slow-minded, but nonetheless tries to put the hero's head in a guillotine during the climax. Its almost Hitchcockian, our "sympathy for the villain" here.
Noteable: this has Frank Lovejoy in it as the older heroic cop; I'm not much of an expert on 40's/50's actors, but Lovejoy sure had an accessible, gruff everyman quality to him. Durable. And his name cracks me up: Frank Lovejoy. Its like the first name doesn't match the last name, and Lovejoy sounds too sweet for such a tough guy. I recall Lovejoy as a cop in the estimable Bogart movie "In a Lonely Place" Frank Lovejoy evidently could shift from serious(Bogart) to campy(Price) as the studio required it.
Noteable: Phyillis Kirk, the female star of the movie, went on to star in a TV series version of "The Thin Man" with Peter Lawford, and then as a local LA TV host. Between House of Wax, The Thin Man TV series and that hosting job, I saw a LOT of Phyillis Kirk in the sixties. She had one of those interesting "second tier working actress" careers. And in "House of Wax," she's nude(if covered by straps while tied down on a table) at the finalerather erotic stuff for us young boys of the time. -
swanstep — 9 years ago(January 02, 2017 09:14 PM)
32 Sons of the Desert William A. Seiter, 1933
Reputedly one of Laurel and Hardy's best pictures, SOTD is certainly the best of the handful of L&D films I've seen. Unfortunately, that's not saying very much. L&D's films are visually primitive compared to Chaplin/Keaton/Lloyd and without any of the physical grace and real gifts for pratfalls that the great early comedians shared. Watching L&D here there's the occasional laugh (often at the shocking physical violence dished out to Olly by his screen-wife) but nothing too uproarious.
Perhaps the biggest thing that L&H have going for them is also the thing that makes them largely impotent now: their buddy schtick and pricklish wives schtick and not especially artful whack-on-the-head slapstick are all the future of comedy in both movies and TV. The Three Stooges and Abbot and Costello and The Honeymooners and Martin and Lewis are just their most obvious superior descendants.
Anyhow, I'm glad I suppose to have seen Sons of the Desert, but I'll never watch it again. -
swanstep — 9 years ago(January 05, 2017 07:36 AM)
102 The Prowler Joseph Losey, 1951
A surprising, depressing noir. Hard to discuss without giving away plot points, the film concerns corrupt, murdering cops, horrendous husbands, and at-the-end-of-their-rope wives. Nobody's clean in this picture, and the picture's no fun at all I'm afraid. A black-listed Trumbo had a hand in the script but didn't manage to come up with any good dialogue this time. The story's strong with maybe just a few implausibilities holding things back. The final gun-down by police is a little too wild-west given the circumstances of the case at the time. but it makes for some good visuals.
Worth seeing.perhaps most of all for some nifty feints and red herrings early on and the High Sierra-like ending with some strong acting from Evelyn Keyes.