What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

[Fading Fast]

Let Us be Gay from 1930 with Norma Shearer, Marie Dessler and Rod La Rocque

If you're a fan of pre-codes and Norma Shearer, then this is an okay movie in a curio way, but you will not, if you weren't already, become a fan of pre-codes or Shearer from this clunky, early talkie effort.

The pre-code thirties are chockablock with stagey, drawing-room movies about wealthy society people getting together over a long weekend (at a "house party") to drink, smoke, play tennis and cards, ride horses, swim, have many affairs and make sly references to all those same affairs. The Rich Are Always with Us and Our Betters are two superior examples of this type of effort.

Let Us Be Gay tries hard to be a good one too, but Hollywood - writers, directors, actors, cinematographers, etc. - hadn't learned yet how to make "talkies," so you end up with this clumsy effort with odd moments when no actor is talking or even on screen.

Also, many of the actors over gesture and emote, having not yet learned to tamp down their stage and silent performance techniques for the less demonstrative needs of the "talkies." Within a few years, Hollywood would fix most of these problems; although, Ms. Shearer, despite being a huge star through most of the thirties, never really left her theater/silent-movie-acting mannerisms behind.

The quick and dirty in this one is that Ms. Shearer was a young, devoted but dowdy housewife whose husband had an affair leading to their divorce. Fast forward a few years and Shearer is an attractive, much sought after woman of the world in an early Hollywood version of the ugly duckling discovering that she is really a beautiful swan.

From here, the big moment for the story is when her former husband, three years after their divorce, unexpectedly runs into her at a house party and, and this is only a spoiler alert if you've never been to the movies, falls in love, anew, with his now glamorous ex-wife. There's also a bunch of other rich-people shenanigans going on here, sparking jealousy and cheating, all fueled by too-much drinking.

And a shoutout is owed to the house-party's host, Marrie Dessler, who is sixty eight in this one, looks closer to eighty and shines versus the rest of the cast with her intuitive understanding of how to act in a "talkie." In need of a restoration and, as noted, a hot-mess overall, this one can only be enjoyed as a museum piece from early Hollywood.


N.B., Despite its movie-making techniques being dated as heck, the men's wardrobes look like they come from a modern Ralph Lauren advertisement. Ralph Lauren makes no secret that he was inspired by classic Hollywood, an inspiration on perfect display in Let us Be Gay.

 

[MisterCairo]

What was the US Army's reaction on the movie, back in 1981?

My wife and I own this now, and watched it recently. Having been fans of Sons of Anarchy, we were surprised to learn the recruiter is Piney in SOA:

 

[Spiney]

The Dig on Netflix. A nice movie. Good cast, good acting, and nice cinematography. It was definitely worth the watch.

This is my viewing for this evening.

 

[Zombie_61]

Earth vs The Spider (a.k.a. The Spider) (1958). "Teenagers from a rural community and their high school science teacher join forces to battle a giant mutant spider." Couldn't have said it better myself; not to be watched for any reason.

 

[Harp]

Earth vs The Spider (a.k.a. The Spider) (1958). "Teenagers from a rural community and their high school science teacher join forces to battle a giant mutant spider." Couldn't have said it better myself; not to be watched for any reason.

Ever seen The Blob with Steve McQueen?
Chuck Norris said McQueen was so embarrassed he stayed inside for a week....

 

[LizzieMaine]

Earth vs The Spider (a.k.a. The Spider) (1958). "Teenagers from a rural community and their high school science teacher join forces to battle a giant mutant spider." Couldn't have said it better myself; not to be watched for any reason.

I dunno, "Doctor Who" built a global franchise on basically this.

 

[Fading Fast]

Citizen Kane from 1941 with Orson Welles, Dorothy Comingore, Joseph Cotten and Everett Sloane

After a handful of viewings over several decades, one's relationship with a movie, especially one as noted as Citizen Kane, kinda morphs into a series of impressions that evolve each time you see it.

I watched Kane this time because I had recently seen the Netflix movie Mank (comments here: #28152), which is a biopic focused on Kane's screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz's struggles to complete Kane's screenplay.

So, for this viewing of Kane, I was looking to see how Mank reflected on Kane. In particular, it had me over-focused on how the Mankiewicz-created fictional characters of Charles Kane and Susan Alexander in the movie aligned with their real-life inspirations, William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies.

Here, I was surprised, as in Mank, Davies is portrayed as a bright, thoughtful woman who truly loved Hearst and stayed with him till he passed. However, her Kane doppelganger, as penned by Mankiewicz, comes off as a manipulative shrew who maybe had some initial affection for Kane, but ended up resentful of him by the time she left and filed for divorce.

That noted, based on Mank anyway, it seems that even with the poetic licence he used, Mankiewicz still cut too close to the bone when portraying his former friends. Okay, but how about Citizen Kane away from Mank?

Before I ever saw Citizen Kane, I "knew" it was "the greatest movie ever made," so I've never been able to see it as just a movie, as I'm always, consciously or subconsciously, waiting for its perfectness to elevate me to a transcendental state of movie watching.

It never does, but it's still a very good movie even if it's a bit of a jumble that could have benefited from more thoughtful scene and story transitions. And I say that even knowing that the "jumble" was part of its groundbreaking technique and approach.

In addition to that, what I noticed on this viewing, more than before, was how good several of the supporting actors were in it as Welles' bravura tends to overwhelm discussion of the others.

Everett Sloan as Kane's unquestioningly loyal employee creates a sympathetic character of a thoughtful man with a lifelong blind spot for, or unconditional love of (you can choose), Charles Foster Kane. Despite his sometimes irritating obsequiousness, you feel for Sloan as he appears a decent and talented man whose life's tragedy is to have spent it all in service to a megalomaniac. But if you asked Sloan's character, you believe - and kudos to Sloan for pulling this off - that he wouldn't have wanted a different life.

Dorothy Comingore as Kane's mistress and second wife, Susan Alexander, delivers a painfully convincing performance as a woman of average intelligence, ambition and morality trying to navigate her way through the massive and emotionally disrupting pull of outsized-planet Kane. Her wonderful ordinariness is an incredible foil to Kane's extraordinariness: he's made smaller as she's made larger by their relationship.

And as the credits rolled, I was thinking, as I do each time I see it, I didn't see "the greatest movie ever made," but I did see something special. Maybe something too ego driven and too all sixes and sevens as Welles had too much Hollywood clout to be reined in, but heck, it's still a captivating picture eighty year later.

 

[Worf]

What was the US Army's reaction on the movie, back in 1981?

I was out of the Army by then... so I can't give you a reaction on how we troops felt about it, probably much the same as the Marines felt about Gomer Pyle, USMC. Funny, but a fantasy just the same. I'm sure the first dude in basic that replied:

"And that's the facts Jack!!!"

Got a little more than he bargained for.

Worf

 

[Worf]

"The Crazies" (1973, 2018) - Post "Night of the Living Dead" George Romero was tasked to helm a similar flick wherein a crashed Air Force plane carrying an "experimental" virus, crashed near a rural hamlet. The toxin polluted the local drinking water turning the inhabitants into "RAGE" zombies. The original wasn't great but it was "different" and gave one little hope that the Government would do anything other than "contain, cover-up and deny". Well the reboot is the same film except that the protagonists in the original were Viet Nam vets, in the remake their local Sheriffs. Both are entertaining but sad worth a view if you're fresh outta zombie/horror flicks for the evening.

Worf

 

[Julian Shellhammer]

The Blue Dahlia (1946) with Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake, and William Bendix, dir. by George Marshall. Supported by Ward Cleaver, just out of the service, and before he snagged that cushy insurance job. Tough talk, tough characters, and tough situations, which is what one expects with a story by Raymond Chandler. Good stuff.

In there somewhere was A Shot in the Dark (1941), with William Lundigan, Nan Wynn, and Ricardo Cortez. My research tells me that it's about how "Homicide detective Bill Ryder reluctantly teams up with wise-cracking news-hound Peter Kennedy to solve a pair of murders." Clocking in at just 57 minutes, it is a pleasant enough way to pass an evening in which you just don't want Citizen Kane or The Seventh Seal.

 

[Touchofevil]

The Swarm in the background on TCM the other night. It was so bad I struggled to look away.

 

[Worf]

The Swarm in the background on TCM the other night. It was so bad I struggled to look away.

Yeah... Richard Widmark and Sir (?) Michael Caine cashing one of those 70's disaster movie paychecks... Hope it was worth the humiliation.

Worf

 

[Zombie_61]

Ever seen The Blob with Steve McQueen?
Chuck Norris said McQueen was so embarrassed he stayed inside for a week....

Compared to Earth vs The Spider, The Blob is Academy Award material.

 

[Seb Lucas]

View attachment 306522
Citizen Kane from 1941 with Orson Welles, Dorothy Comingore, Joseph Cotten and Everett Sloane

After a handful of viewings over several decades, one's relationship with a movie, especially one as noted as Citizen Kane, kinda morphs into a series of impressions that evolve each time you see it.

I watched Kane this time because I had recently seen the Netflix movie Mank (comments here: #28152), which is a biopic focused on Kane's screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz's struggles to complete Kane's screenplay.

So, for this viewing of Kane, I was looking to see how Mank reflected on Kane. In particular, it had me over-focused on how the Mankiewicz-created fictional characters of Charles Kane and Susan Alexander in the movie aligned with their real-life inspirations, William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies.

Here, I was surprised, as in Mank, Davies is portrayed as a bright, thoughtful woman who truly loved Hearst and stayed with him till he passed. However, her Kane doppelganger, as penned by Mankiewicz, comes off as a manipulative shrew who maybe had some initial affection for Kane, but ended up resentful of him by the time she left and filed for divorce.

That noted, based on Mank anyway, it seems that even with the poetic licence he used, Mankiewicz still cut too close to the bone when portraying his former friends. Okay, but how about Citizen Kane away from Mank?

Before I ever saw Citizen Kane, I "knew" it was "the greatest movie ever made," so I've never been able to see it as just a movie, as I'm always, consciously or subconsciously, waiting for its perfectness to elevate me to a transcendental state of movie watching.

It never does, but it's still a very good movie even if it's a bit of a jumble that could have benefited from more thoughtful scene and story transitions. And I say that even knowing that the "jumble" was part of its groundbreaking technique and approach.

In addition to that, what I noticed on this viewing, more than before, was how good several of the supporting actors were in it as Welles' bravura tends to overwhelm discussion of the others.

Everett Sloan as Kane's unquestioningly loyal employee creates a sympathetic character of a thoughtful man with a lifelong blind spot for, or unconditional love of (you can choose), Charles Foster Kane. Despite his sometimes irritating obsequiousness, you feel for Sloan as he appears a decent and talented man whose life's tragedy is to have spent it all in service to a megalomaniac. But if you asked Sloan's character, you believe - and kudos to Sloan for pulling this off - that he wouldn't have wanted a different life.

Dorothy Comingore as Kane's mistress and second wife, Susan Alexander, delivers a painfully convincing performance as a woman of average intelligence, ambition and morality trying to navigate her way through the massive and emotionally disrupting pull of outsized-planet Kane. Her wonderful ordinariness is an incredible foil to Kane's extraordinariness: he's made smaller as she's made larger by their relationship.

And as the credits rolled, I was thinking, as I do each time I see it, I didn't see "the greatest movie ever made," but I did see something special. Maybe something too ego driven and too all sixes and sevens as Welles had too much Hollywood clout to be reined in, but heck, it's still a captivating picture eighty year later.

Mank had a particular and tendentious take on the Kane screenplay which is just one of many competing takes on the movie. It's not unlike the notorious 1971 Pauline Kael essay, Raising Kane, which worked very hard to take everything away from Welles.

For me Kane has a fairly dull story. The haunted tycoon who owns everything but lives in spiritual poverty and loneliness is an unexceptional narrative. Kane has almost nothing to do with the real world and is, rather, a celebration of what only cinema can accomplish. What makes this a great film for me is its playful and inventive use of visual composition and often unsettling storytelling stunts. The film's use of lighting, flashbacks, music, sound, and the staggeringly fine editing elevates the source material to something of near genius for me. Welles' real talent was taking material, good or bad, and making it remarkable through his exceptional directorial instincts.

 

[Edward]

I dunno, "Doctor Who" built a global franchise on basically this.

"The Crazies" (1973, 2018) - Post "Night of the Living Dead" George Romero was tasked to helm a similar flick wherein a crashed Air Force plane carrying an "experimental" virus, crashed near a rural hamlet. The toxin polluted the local drinking water turning the inhabitants into "RAGE" zombies. The original wasn't great but it was "different" and gave one little hope that the Government would do anything other than "contain, cover-up and deny". Well the reboot is the same film except that the protagonists in the original were Viet Nam vets, in the remake their local Sheriffs. Both are entertaining but sad worth a view if you're fresh outta zombie/horror flicks for the evening.

Worf

I enjoyed those, a nice variation on the zombie genre. Interestingly, not the first time (or the last) that George acted as an executive producer for a remake of one of his own works. Given the social commentary that was always a stand of Romero pictures, it's interesting to take particular note of what it is that changes or is updated. (c/f the 1989 remake of Night.... with Tom Savini in the biog chair, which changes the identity of the last survivor for a comment on the times and adds in a dig at contemporary news media.)

Compared to Earth vs The Spider, The Blob is Academy Award material.

With some of the tripe the AA have rewarded over the years, and all the times they got it 'wring', or regretted not giving somebody the award in a previous year, so elevated something vastly poorer another year (See: Dench, Judy; passed over for 'Best Actress' for Mrs Brown, the next year awarded Best Supporting Actress for an entirely unremarkable, phoned-in eight minute cameo in the execrable Shakespeare in Love), an Oscar is anything but a mark of quality!

 

[Fading Fast]

Dead Reckoning from 1947 with Humphrey Bogart and Lizabeth Scott

This outstanding noir sits one level below the great noirs of all time like The Maltese Falcon or Out of the Past: that is a compliment, not a put-down.

All the elements of a top-notch noir are here as we see a regular guy tossed into a noir world of gambling, alcohol, corruption, sex, violence and murder. It is a seedy milieu of smooth and oily nightclub owners, thuggish sadistic bodyguards, femme fatales and weary but smart cops.

Bogart plays a army hero whom Washington sends to (what I think is) a Midwest town to investigate the disappearance and, then, murder of his army friend who was about to receive the Medal of Honor. It's there that he discovers (minor spoiler alert as it comes up early) that his buddy had changed his identity and joined the army to escape a murder rap he was facing just before the war.

After that, the plot and clues go into a cuisinart that has the viewer at least as confused as Bogart is trying to untangle this mess of a story. It involves a pre-war affair between Bogie's friend and then-married nightclub singer / siren Lizabeth Scott, a smooth and creepy gangster, his thug, a casino and a couple of detectives very suspicious of Bogart.

A wary Bogart teams up with Scott to find the killer of Bogie's friend and Scott's boyfriend more out of need than faith in her integrity. Both thoughts prove prescient as Scott, a mix of blond seduction and ruthless self interest, does help Bogie, but also sets him up, surprisingly, several times. Men really will do stupid things for pretty women.

In the end, the story sort of fits together (at least eighty percent of it does), but you're watching this one for its noir vibe of gangsters with wall-safes holding inculpating letters, Scott lipsyching a torch song, charred bodies in morgues, gun fights, car chases on dark and rainy nights and, most importantly, Bogie falling in love with Scott even though he knows he shouldn't.

And much like its better antecedent The Maltese Falcon, the real story here is the love-hate attraction between Bogie and Scott (like Bogie and Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon) that produces the final pivot of whether Bogie will save Scott or let her fry. The chemistry between those two is good, not great, the supporting characters are interesting, but not iconic and the story is a bit too much of a muddle, which is why this very good noir is a notch below the great ones.


N.B., Lizabeth Scott needed more height; there, I said it. IMDB lists her height as 5'5", a number I'd challenge, but whatever it is, she needs more of it. Some women comfortably fit their short frames - Joan Fontaine and Veronica Lake come to mind - but some, like Scott, are tall women stuck inside a short woman's body. Heck, Scott could have been Lauren Bacall - husky voice, straight hair, cool aloofness, gets Bogie to do stupid things for her - if she had just had Bacall's three additional inches.

 

[Zombie_61]

...With some of the tripe the AA have rewarded over the years, and all the times they got it 'wring', or regretted not giving somebody the award in a previous year, so elevated something vastly poorer another year (See: Dench, Judy; passed over for 'Best Actress' for Mrs Brown, the next year awarded Best Supporting Actress for an entirely unremarkable, phoned-in eight minute cameo in the execrable Shakespeare in Love), an Oscar is anything but a mark of quality!

I can't argue with that. The "committee" has been pretty obvious about their "We're giving it to "insert_name_here" this year because he/she should have received it for..." choices over the years. Sadly, until they create a better "benchmark" the Oscar and the Golden Globes awards are all we have.

 

[Harp]

Sadly, until they create a better "benchmark" the Oscar and the Golden Globes awards are all we have.

Admittedly, I seldom catch a current flick and distance myself from today's motion pix/music/television fare.
The only film on mind to see is Brad Pitt's Moneyball. Not that I put the entire present scene down but
Hollywood needs to up its grade or Oscars will be given to Terminator and like crap.

 

[Haversack]

Tonight it was Captain Blood. That's what I get for listening Korngold scores earlier in the day. The first movie to put a pair of swords between Flynn and Rathbone.

Last night it was The Bad Sister. Betty Davis's first movie, (only she played the good sister), and a young Humphrey Bogart was the cad who took advantage of the title character. Not too bad. They were still figuring our how to tell a story with sound. Zazu Pitts got to display her talent for saying "Hmmf!"

 

[Edward]

Watched The Dig on Netflix last night. Mostly stuck with it for the clothes. The slow pace was quite relaxing after a lot of my recent watches, but I felt like it was missing a lot. Too much reliance on "human drama" between characters that were, quite frankly, two-dimensional and ill-fleshed out, and far, far too little information about the actual archaeological dig itself. Watch it for the wardrobe, but that's the only thing really worth it in it, tbh.