Notes on some movies I saw in 2004 and didn't review
Dec 28 '04 (Updated Feb 05 '05)
The Bottom Line part one of my end-of-the-year miscellany, continued at www.epinions.com/content_4199063684
Having shot past my usual editorial pontificating at each hundredth review and my fourth epinions anniversary, I have been planning an end-of-the-year miscellany. Collecting the jottings about movies I saw during the year and did not write reviews of (often because they are movies not in the epinions database) grew so long, that I have separated that part out and am posting it first. I've ordered these comments and capsule reviews in chronological order of the movies' making:
One of my favorite Christmas movies is "Three Godfathers," directed by John Ford with John Wayne and Pedro Armenderiz. I had not realized that the story had been filmed before, and by William Wyler at that. (I thought that the rather bloated 1958 "The Big Country" was Wyler's only foray into making westerns." The 1929 Hell's Heroes has the basic plot in a mere 68 minutes, and appears to have been shot on location, which was very difficult with the new very unwieldy sound cameras then. The head bank robber who finds a woman about to give birth by a dynamited empty spring was played by the always gruff Charles Bickford, who made many movies including big-scale westerns "The Big Country", "Duel in the Sun", and "The Unforgiven." Before Dodsworth in 1936 and such Bette Davis vehicles as "Jezebel," "The Letter," and "The Little Foxes," Wyler made many movies I've never seen nor heard anything about.
In 1932 in They Call It Sin then-rising-star Young played Marion Cullen, a Merton, Kansas church organist with artistic pretensions who flees to New York after a flirtation with Jimmy Decker (David Manners between "Dracula" and "The Mummy"). Decker is not only engaged, but is engaged to the boss's daughter (Helen Vinson) and has far too much to lose by following his heart (or whatever) to Marion. Jimmy's friend and doctor Tony Travers (George Brent) is very interested in the fresh young thing, but Marion disappears once she learns that Jimmy is already spoken for. She becomes the protégé of a lecherous musical revue producer Ford Humphries (Louis Calhern was already oozing oil in 1932!).
The plot is feeble, requiring a medical miracle among other things. Other than Louis Calhern's leers, the main entertainment is provided by Una Merkel, who plays Dixie Dare, a dancer specializing in doing cartwheels and considerably more savvy than Marion. Roscoe Karns adds his eye-rolling sarcasm as a choreographer accustomed to having to use dancers being bedded by Humphries.
Long before her reign on tv, Young was already a clothes-horse. I don't think she was much of an actress, and, to me, her face seems a bit long and horsey, to (another era's notion of beauty, I guess...) or a beauty, but she had some earnest/innocent charm (certainly more than David Manners had!). The dull soap opera picks up once Marion meets Dixie waiting to audition for Humphries. The first half hour offers some more compelling performances than those by Young and Manners (Marion Byron working in a Merton drug store and putting the moves on Manners, and Helen Vinson as a vicious enforcer of respectability as Young' mother).
Paul Lukas played a Russian intellectual making his living as a waiter in Grand Slam,,directed by William Dieterle (1933). It is a surprisingly funny satire of the building up of celebrity. The waiter and the Russian restaurant's hat-check girl played by Loretta Young become America's sweethearts as bridge partners who never squabble (in marked contrast to most bridge partners). With the aid of publicist and ghost-writer 'Speed' McCann (the wonderfully deadpan Frank McHugh) they become walking advertisements for the "Stanislavsky system," a "system" of bidding whatever one feels like (since bids are not rational, there is no basis for recriminations about their stupidity).
A duel with displaced bridge guru Cedric Van Dorn (sounds close to Goren, no? and I suspect the choice of the character's name "Stanislavsky" was also a slam at another kind of system), a puffed-up charlatan played very well by Ferdinand Gottschalk, is broadcast on radio stations across America like a prize-fight by Roscoe Karns (another great fast-talking deadpan comic actor of the 1930s). The bridge players are even in a roped-off square, though the audience is above them, unlike in boxing "rings."
The movie unfortunately all but drops Glenda Farrell, who plays McHugh's forgetful girlfriend. The wide variety of American types prefigures the comedies of Preston Sturges, though for manufacturing celebrity, "Grand Slam" most calls to mind two better movies from the same (pre-Code) era with Lee Tracy playing fast-talking publicists: "The Half-Naked Truth" and "Bombshell," but "Grand Slam" has its moments, especially for anyone who has played bridge with serious point-counters.
The film of Somerset Maugham's The Narrow Corner was obviously pre-Code (1933) in that Fred Blake, the romantic lead escapes the police in two places (even if he wasn't the murderer he was believed to be in either case). I was struck by how far up his waist were the pants worn by Douglas Fairbanks Jr. (above his navel). He and Ralph Bellamy go for a nude swim that is filmed very carefully to be unrevealing, too. The plot is tedious. Dudley Diggs as an opium-addicted physician/sage is the most interesting character, although he has some homilies to deliver. As usual, Bellamy loses the girl (the easily forgotten Patricia Ellis).
I tried to watch the 1935 Swedish melodrama Walpurgis Night with the then-rising star Ingrid Bergman. The movie also provided an opportunity to hear silent-screen star Lars Hanson (Flesh and the Devil) and his silent-film director Victor Sjostrom (in The Wind, The Scarlet Letter) speak. (Sjostrom speaks in "Wild Strawberries," but I haven't seen that since seeing any of the films he directed, "Laugh, Clown, Laugh" as well as the Gish-Hanson pairings; I also recently saw "Flesh and the Devil" for the first time with Hanson as the friend of John Gilbert who marries Greta Garbo.) I couldn't stay awake for it, though.
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The 1935 version of Enchanted April manages to be simultaneously tedious and perfunctory. It is difficult to show the transformative magic of Italy shooting in a studio with only stereotypical Italian behavior to belabor. The transformation of the four strangers fleeing London is instantaneous in the cut from the first day to a week later. Rather than develop, the screenplay flips a switch and the characters are different.
The husbands are boring enough in flashbacks without turning up, even if their presence does not drive the four women back into their shells and/or hostilities.
Jessie Ralph has the most fun (moving instead of entirely chewing up the scenery) and Katharine Alexander has some poignant charm out of her husband's shadow (and away from his hideous droning). Ann Harding is unremarkable here (with the Production Code being enforced). She had an appropriate line in an earlier (pre-Code) movie, "When Ladies Meet": "You're not worth a minute of one anxious hour that either one of us has given you," but in "Enchanted April" can only look hurt, rush out, and proclaim fealty to her errant husband.
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There were two reasons for me to want to watch the 1935 Steamboat 'Round The Bend. One was that the movie was directed by John Ford, and though I don't always like the movies he made, I'm trying to see them all. (Ford's badly dated The Informer also dates from 1935.) The other reason is that it starred the legendary Will Rogers (who was Fox's biggest star and something of a national institution. I know who is (and that he is more than the name on a California state beach), but had never seen him in anything (he died in an airplane crash in 1935 before the movie's release). The role of Doctor John Pearly did not call for dispensing much of the folksy wisdom for which Rogers was famous, but did use one of the talents from his vaudeville acts, lassooing (he lassoes Captain Eli's boat). Eugene Pallette was also on hand as a laid-back southern sheriff, drolly croaking his lines.
Doc Pearly, a veteran of the Confederate army, sells patent medicine and owns a broken-down, docked river boat called the "Claremore Queen" (Rogers's hometown was Claremore, OK.) Doc turns it into a floating museum of waxworks, stowing away the patent medicine, which is needed later, during a riverboat race that is also a race to deliver a key witness to avert the hanging of Doc's nephew "Duke" (John McGuire). One additional point of interest is that Duke's "swamp gal" fiancee Fleety Belle (Anne Shirley) shows herself fully competent to pilot the riverboat. No one even comments on this. Alas, the representation of female competence is accompanied by one of the cringe-inducing uses of Step'n Fetchit (Lincoln Perry) as the stupid, painfully slow-talking, and "shiftless n___er."
Neither the comedy nor the melodrama have aged well, and it would be easy to stop watching the proceedings. What is interesting is mostly in the last half hour: showing the workings of the paddle-wheel river boats (a proliferation of them not the result of computer multiplication or of miniatures).
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The blockbuster 1936 movie from the blockbuster novel Anthony Adverse won four Oscars, including ones for Tony Gaudio's cinematography, Gale Sondegaard's malicious smiling, and Erich Korngold's overblown and unmemorable score. I've never seen Frederic March worse. He and the very lovely young Olivia de Haviland had no chemistry and he looked bored around the world and through the long, long, long (142 minute) movie.
Jean Harlow played chorus girls gold-diggers more than once, though she was not much of a dancer and, at least in Reckless (1937), was dubbed in the songs. She made it with William Powell, to whom she was affianced at the time, and the story bears more than a passing resemblance to the suicide of her second husband Paul Bern. Powell and May Robson are good together. Rosalind Russell, a supporting player, also gets to be noble as the fiancée from the same social circle whom Tone jilted when he married the chorus girl.
In Suzy (1937) Tone played what Harlow mistook as a rich potential husband but married anyway. Later, after a Cary Grant song, she marries a rich French playboy. In both movies, she is the target for many snide comments, and perseveres, trying not to show she has been stung by them . Aside from the singing Grant who treats her very badly, "Suzy" is notable for showing the counterfeiting of a war hero (the gallant pilot played by Grant).
I was impatient with Man-Proof"(1938), but made it through Rosalind Russell's long speech to the usual straying husband returning to his wife conclusion. Walter Pidgeon is less caddish than heedless and immature, but I hate to see Myrna Loy being hurt. Her drunk speech is fairly amusing despite my impatience with drunks being represented as cute.
The Mad Miss Manton (1938) looks like something of a warmup for the great comedy costarring Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda, Preston Sturges's "Lady Eve." It is a silly tale of an irresponsible socialite (Stanwyck) pilloried by a contemptuous newspaper columnist (Fonda). Although corpses keep disappearing making her look foolish, there is a real murderer about, and the two stars come together and save each other.
The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex(1939), directed by Michael Curtiz from a play by the then prestigious Maxwell Anderson, was a vehicle for Bette Davis to oscillate between an insecure and unattractive woman besotted with the debonair Errol Flynn and the ruthless queen Elizabeth I. She ultimately turns out to be her father's child. There are lengthy scenes of Essex in the field, but no action. Those scenes are just as stagy and talky as the ones in court, but lack the fire and ire of Davis's queen. Flynn was charming and Davis histrionic. Olivia de Haviland (not yet pretending to be a plain woman) was quite lovely as the main lady-in-waiting, and Donald Crisp (just before his Oscar-winning role as the patriarch in "How Green Was My Valley") was the supplier of sage counsel as Francis Bacon. The color photography seemed unnecessary given the ultra-white makeup of the queen (though it was offset by her very red wig), but showed the very tall Vincent Price in very laughable pink tights. (What a ham Price was, which reminds me of the 1951 Robert Mitchum/Jane Russell resort noir "His Kind of Woman," in which he is hilarious playing a parody Errol Flynn.)
Walter Huston famously said that he wasn't paid to sell good lines, but to put across bad ones. He often did. So did Warren William. For both of them, putting across bad lines frequently involved overacting. It's a bit difficult to believe Walter William being overcome by passion of any sort, and especially any aroused by his boring (though gracious) clothes-horse of a wife (Gail Patrick) in Wives Under Suspicion, the tame and uninspired 1939 remake by James Whale of his more visually striking "Kiss Before the Mirror" made only five years earlier, but, presumably, too risqué to be rereleased after the Motion Picture Production Code began to be enforced. Frank Morgan switched roles from attorney to defendant from one version to the other, and, unfortunately, Gloria Stuart and Walter Pidgeon did not return. The story is mechanical with coincidences that strain credulity, but Warren William gave it his all. The only interesting touch was the courtroom set with the judge raised to an exaggerated height.
It All Came True (1940) is also quite silly, with a gangster played by Humphrey Bogart hiding in a boardinghouse, where true crime fan ZaSu Pitts recognizes him, and he shows a heart of gold in rescuing the boarding house from bank foreclosure by... turning it into a nightclub, where Ann Sheridan gets the chance to sing... Totally unbelievable but somewhat amusing.
I'm sure that I saw the 1940 Mark Of Zorro, directed by Rouben Mamoulian, as a child, and have seen multiple versions of the story. Tyrone Power is believable as a fop and did fine with a sword (in Spain and in Spanish California). Basil Rathbone delivered one of his snarling villains, and Linda Darnell provided the love interest. Plus the frog-voiced Eugene Pallette as a priest! The chases are unimpressive, but the final uprising was well choreographed and well photographed by Arthur C. Miller.
George Stevens, Jr. compiled color film of World War that was shot by his father, director and former cameraman George Stevens Sr. (Shane, Giant, A Place in the Sun), who was in charge of an army film crews in the European war From D-Day to Berlin (1994, Emmy-winner). Lasting less than an hour, it includes rare shots of George Patton and Omar Bradley, and Charles De Gaulle in color, and even rarer color footage from Dachau as the Allied troops tried to sort out who had been the SS guards. The documentary is less than an hour and includes many shots of Stevens with soldiers (not all generals) that he obviously did not shoot himself. The home movies of Stevens on the western front are supplemented with some footage of combat crossing Belgium, footage of the liberation of Paris, the aforementioned Dachau horrors, and looking around bombed-out Berlin.
I barely made it through Rouben Mamoulian's (1948) Summer Holiday, an uninspired musical based on "Ah, Wilderness!" in which Walter Huston demonstrated that he couldn't sing, Frank Morgan and Mickey Rooney did their usual shticks. The songs are insipid, Gloria DeHaven is insipid, and the one production number (the picnic) is a yawner. The earlier nonmusical (in which Rooney played a smaller part and Wallace Beery played the comic drunkard reprised by Frank Morgan) is better, though still far from great.
Another Barbara Stanwyck comedy (also inferior to "Lady Eve," Christmas In Connecticut from 1945 has a plot even sillier than "The Mad Miss Manton." She plays a sort of 1940s magazine columnist prefiguring Martha Stewart... except that she cannot cook, change diapers, or anything else domestic. Her publisher, a gourmandizing but unsinsister Sydney Greenstreet decides she should make Christmas dinner for a sailor who has recently been rescued from a lifeboat after the ship he was on was torpedoed. Alas, Dennis Morgan is this "romantic lead." Stanwyck, professional chef S.Z. Sakall, and suspicious housekeeper Una O'Connor provide sit-com humor.
I enjoyed Greer Garson posing as a lady (after years of close observation as a lady's maid) in The Law And The Lady (1951), a remake of "The Last of Mrs. Cheney" (in which Joan Crawford essayed the title role). Michael Wilding proved far inferior to William Powell in style and charisma (why did Elizabeth Taylor wed him?), but Marjorie Main was hilarious as Ma Kettle with a fortune. I don't recall ever before seeing Fernando Lamas in anything. He brought more passion to the suitor part than Robert Montgomery had, and Garson was easier to admire than Crawford.
Gillo Pontecorvo's (1956) The Wide Blue Road does not prefigure "The Battle of Algiers" or Burn! It is a standard outlaw movie involving an arrogant fisherman (Yves Montand) flouting regulations, courting and finding disaster.
I was also totally unimpressed with the Cole Porter songs in Les Girls (1957),though the production numbers directed by George Cukor (who made more musicals than I thought!). Gene Kelly plays an obnoxious impresario. He has one major dance number with Mitzi Gaynor (whom Cukor tried to have removed from the project when he took it over) and Kay Kendall is amusing (and is playing the part of someone who can't sing). As the third show girl, Taina Elg is a charisma void (why didn't Cukor want to get rid of her?). Jacques Bergerac (Ginger Rogers's fourth husband) is attractive and accented, the plot is silly, and the colors splashy.
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Andrzej Wajda’s famous 1958 film Ashes and Diamonds (Popiol i diament) looks striking (très noir) but I found it very confusing. The intentions of the killings at the start become clear, but I don't know why the assassin who no one knows is one runs and is shot near the end (other than to provide a photogenic ten-minute dance of death). In between the shootings is a lot of talk, though it does not clarify the politics. The whole movie puzzles me in that I thought Soviet control was established quickly and the movie is set after the fall of Berlin to the Red Army and at the time of the German surrender. With the kitsch Hitler portrait, the anti-Soviet plotters come across as leftover Nazis, rather than as fighters for Polish independence. I guess that must have been a necessary accommodation to the regime that allowed the movie to be made. (Non-Nazi opponents of the communist probably could not be shown.)
At the time, Zbigniew Cybulski may have seemed to be "the Polish James Dean." From a later perspective, his womanizing and arrogance (and destruction) seem much more like the young Warren Beatty (in movies made after 1958).
And the middle adumbrates "The Fireman's Ball," not one of my favorite movies, but hailed for showing aspects of Soviet bloc society that were already on display a decade earlier in this Polish film. (For a comprehensive review see Metalluk's at http://www.epinions.com/content_150539374212.)
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The 1959 warning against teen sex movie Blue Denim (from a play by James Leo Herlihy, directed by Philip Dunne) with a trembling Carol Lynley and an anguished impregnator in the 17-year-old Brandon De Wilde with smooth skin and a sensuous, tremulous lower lip. Although I am mesmerized by looking at De Wilde sort of grown-up and interested in seeing Marsha Hunt, the most complex character in the movie is Warren Berlinger as Ernie the blowhard pal of Arthur (De Wilde) who comes through for the young lovers. Whether the romantic ending is a happy one is open to doubt. To me it's more horror movie than happy-endinged romance.
Stephen Dade’s noirish black-and-white cinematography is the best thing on view in Robert Aldrich’s relatively early (1959) The Angry Hills. It is an all-too standard-issue tale of an American (Robert Mitchum) involved against his well-developed instincts for survival in resisting the Nazis in a periphery (Athens and the title hills of Greece), based on an early best-seller by Leon Uris. There’s a conventionally cold-blooded Nazi commander (Marius Goring), Theodore Bikel in the Peter Lorre role of the cowardly collaborator, a wooden Stanley Baker as a less-cowardly one, Elisabeth Müller and Gia Scala as brave love interests, and Robert Mitchum in what might be considered the Humphrey Bogart role if Mitchum had not essayed it a number of times himself. And in a variant on the Sidney Greenstreet role, every bit as rotund, but more jovial, is Sebastian Cabot. The set-up is handled well, but the middle of the movie drags through reprisals and miraculous escapes by the antihero. The low point is a discussion about values between Mitchum and Müller and the final scene is a bolt from the blue of redemption. The movie is watchable, not least for the Greek locations, but inferior to earlier Aldrich westerns and to his superb WWII melodrama "Attack!."
The 1965 hokey viral "thriller" directed by John Sturges, The Satan Bug, based on one of the many best-sellers by Alistair MacLean. It has some interesting helicopter shots (and goings-on) and the handsomely brooding George Maharis, but seems slack and talky to me. It takes way too long to get going. And though Maharis earlier appealed to me on "Route 66," his charms had faded by 1965, or their impact has lessened with the passing century. Richard Basehart (another tv star of my youth) is a credible two-dimensional villain (not completely unlike Alfred Molina's Doc Ock in "Spider-Man II").
Delbert Mann's (1966) Mister Buddwing employed one of my least favorite movie plot devices: amnesia. The amnesiac was played with convincing-enough pain by the genial James Garner (whose body of movie work is more impressive than many give it credit for). It has great New York location black-and-white photography by Ellsworth Fredericks and entertaining (if credulity-straining) sequences with women Garner tries to remember involvements with: Angela Lansbury as a prostitute, Jean Simmons as a blonde heiress, and Suzanne Pleshette as a struggling actress. Unfortunately, it also has Katherine Ross as an NYU student.
Peter Ustinov adapted and directed a 1967 movie from Romain Gary's Lady L which has opulent sets (Castle Howard in the frame). Sophia Loren and Paul Newman have no sparks and aren't funny. David Niven, as the rich lord who weds Loren, and Ustinov, as an assassination target, are mildly amusing. I thought that Gary novels were invariably turned into mediocre movies (The Ski Bum, Promise at Dawn, The Roots of Heaven), but IMDB informed me that a Gary novel was the source of "Madame Rosa" with a gruff. elderly Simone Signoret in a Wallace Beery kind of role).
I enjoyed (again) the 1969 Support Your Local Sheriff with James Garner doing his genial turn as the sheriff with Walter Brennan and Bruce Dern very funny as not-very-bright tough guys (a spoof of the Clantons). Garner handled the cowardly townsfolk without the anguishing of Gary Cooper in "High Noon," though he also received gun-toting support from a woman (Joan Hackett, playing in a conventional sexual antagonism romantic subplot). It's a hell of a lot better than "Paint Your Wagon"! "Support Your Local Gunfighter" (also costarring Harry Morgan and Jack Elam). With "Duel at Diablo" and "The Americanization of Emily," "Sheriff" forms a sort of mid-1960s trilogy of Garner goldbrickers coming through when the chips are down (or tetraology, if the grifter in "The Skin Trade" is added).
I remember (long, long ago) loving Tom Stoppard's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and being disappointed by the drab-looking 1990 movie version he adapted and directed. Other epinions reviewers mostly love the movie (it has almost a 5.0 rating average), and since I first saw the movie, I have seen at least half a dozen Stoppard plays staged, heard him in person, watched him pick up an Oscar for the screenplay of "Shakespeare in Love," enjoyed "Enigma," etc. Plus Tim Roth and Gary Oldman have more resonance for me now than when I first saw the R&G movie and I've recently seen "Waiting for Godot" staged. However, I still find the movie less than enthralling. Watching Stoppard plays on stage, I feel that I have to pay total attention every moment. In contrast, the movie seems slack and when R and G are not playing absurdist verbal ping-pong, my mind sometimes wandered. I think that Roth's weariness, disgust, and puzzlement are moving and that the hammy performances of Richard Dreyfuss and Gary Oldman are very funny. I hoped that in watching the movie again I'd be able to spot what makes it less involving and entertaining than the play. The camera set-ups are not static, and there is cinematic intercutting, and the performances I have already lauded. It seems that the camera is kept at some distance from the action, but there are closeups and the view of the befuddled characters is supposed to be ironic. Although I have again failed to pinpoint what doesn't work for me in the movie, I remain underwhelmed by it. (I suspect "Waiting for Godot" would similarly thwart screen adaptation, though perhaps the incursion of other characters in it would enliven the screen as the Dreyfuss troupe does the movie "R&G.")
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Sijie Dai's (2002) adaptation of his (2000) international best-selling autobiographical novel Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress makes the locale in which Dai was sent down from the provincial capital of Chengdu to be "re-educated" during the Great Proletarian Culture Revolution very vivid. Dai's book makes clearer that his education, which had only extended through a ninth year had already been usurped by the Culture Revolution, in that his middle school years were entirely focused on chanting Mao's Little Red Book. Dai's incarnation in the novel has no name. In the movie, he has the patronym Ma. In the movie he and his friend from the city, the nimble-witted Luo (who keeps Ma's violin from being burned by concocting an explanation that Mozart was thinking of Chairman Mao when he wrote the sonata Ma plays) are together with the seamstress from a neighboring village quite a bit, before Luo pairs off with her (this pairing is established early in the book). The three leading parts are portrayed by very attractive and soulfully-eyed young Chinese actors: Xun Zhou as the seamstress, Kun Chen as Luo, and Ye Liu as Ma (their name order is western-style). And Pujian Wang sensitively supplemented Mozart in supplying music for the movie.
The buckets of excrement Luo and Ma trudge up steps cut in a mountainside slosh are more vivid on the screen than on the page, the source of very ribald folklore is more vivid on the page. Most of the characters and incidents in the book were transferred to the screen, and an epilogue that I find perplexing added. (I can't explain what I find perplexing about it or about another incident that I turned to the book to clarify and found it not there without being guilty of plot-spoiling.)
Considering that the book was very popular here, I don't know why the movie is not available in the US. It played at several American film festivals and was theatrically released in Europe. There are European DVDs of it, and I watched a Chinese VCD (with English subtitles). Like Reading Lolita in Teheran, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is a tribute to the literary imagination discovered and nurtured in environments hostile to any ideas other than official dogma. (We aren't there yet, but some provisions of the Orwellianly named "patriot act" have moved us substantially closer, as I discussed yesterday in introducing my reading of Yuri Olesha's novel Envy... which brings us back to the pervasive costs of Bush's follies in how his administration executes a counterproductive "war on terrorism" and seeks to stifle any dissent or examination of what it is doing.)
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Stephen Frears's Dirty, Pretty Things (2002) was cleverly offbeat. I continued to wonder where the rest of the body was and who would be so stupid as to try to flush a human heart down the toilet without cutting it up. Benedict Wong, Sergi Löpez, and Chiwetel Ejiofor are terrific, Audrey Tatou adequate. What I heard of the commentary track told me that Löpez's English was hopeless, but I had no trouble understanding him, whereas I found Ejiofor difficult to understand early on. I think subtitles are helpful for most British movies, and found there was one for the hearing impaired. English was not the first language of any of the main performers, though Ejiofor was born in Britain.
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I wrote about William Dieterle's 1932 Kay Francis vehicle "Man Wanted" at www.culturedose.net/review.php?rid=10005467,
the 1933 adaptation of Sinclair Lewis's best-seller Ann Vickers at
www.culturedose.net/review.php?rid=10005589, Lewis's Arrowsmith as directed by John Ford at www.culturedose.net/review.php?rid=10005590, Michael Curtiz's entertaining 1947 whodunit with Claude Rains, "The Unsuspected" at www.culturedose.net/review.php?rid=10005749, and Budd Boetticher (1950) thriller "The Killer is Loose" at www.culturedose.net/review.php?rid=10005344
I don't think that I have anything to say about "Master and Commander" "Mystic River" that has not been said better by others. I thought both were unnecessarily confusing, and especially liked the Galapagos idyll in M&C and the helicopter shots derided by some in MR.
One movie that has stuck in my mind and now seems better than it did when I watched it and wrote about it is "After the Fox," directed by Vittorio De Sica and starring Peter Sellers. My appreciation of it was increased in part by watching the 1995 "L'Uomo delle stelle" (Star Maker), directed by Giuseppe Tornatore. Besides also showing an entrepreneur preying on naive rural Italians under the guise of putting them on the silver screen, it has a similar (and more extreme) turn from comedy to pain (a Tornatore specialty: also see his masterful Malena). And I guess that despite my lack of enthusiasm for Being There, my ambivalence toward Peter Sellers is in a more positive phase, possibly encourages by "The Life and Death of Peter Sellers" with the not-very-funny Geoffrey Rush playing the comic with no sense of any self under the masks.
I'm trying to get around to reviewing "Winter Kills", "Feeling Minnesota","Osama," and "The House of Flying Daggers" (the last with reference to the politics of "Hero" and other Zhang Yimou movies).
Plus, there are the 149 movies about which I wrote epinions in 2004, including many Jean Harlow vehicles and those directed by the Taviana brothers, Ermanno Olmi, Ralph Nelson, and Fritz Lang.
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