What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

[Harp]

I love most of David Lean's films... but I don't like Ryan's Daughter either. And mind you, I dig depressing dramas more than most people. It just somehow doesn't work for me.... I'm not a fan of Doctor Zhivago either. Like some other elder directors (Hitchcock, Ford), I think Lean lost his way towards the end of his career.

Not a Zhivago fan? Dig out some Pasternak and vodka.
Ryan's Daughter proved a busted flush with you too? Like Madame Bovary? Flaubert okay or just so-so?

I would disagree that Ryan's Daughter is innately flawed, or Lean lost himself in this particular production.
However, as I have been saying this flick isn't everyones cuppa but your input is interesting.

 

[Fading Fast]

Mrs. O'Malley and Mr. Malone from 1950 with James Whitmore, Marjorie Main, Fred Clark and (bad girl of the pre-code 1930s) Ann Dvorak

B-Movies, as often noted, were the antecedents to the formulaic TV shows of the '60s through the '90s. Usually, at around an hour or so in length, they had simple, repeatable stories and were produced on a small budget with familiar actors but not major stars. In an era of limited competition, they contained just-enough mindless entertainment value to keep you watching (you know, like much of the first forty-or-so years of TV).

Mrs. O'Malley and Mr. Malone is nothing more or less than this, with the talents of James Whitmore, Marjorie Main, Fred Clark and Ann Dvorak boosting it a bit higher than most of its B-Movie peers. Whitmore, a successful and roguish defense attorney who spends twice his huge income on booze and babes, hops a train from his hometown of Chicago to New York in pursuit of a former client who owes him a ten-grand fee (the client stole a hundred grand).

Also on the train is pragmatic middle-aged Midwest farmer Marjorie Main who won a radio contest that's bringing her to New York City (just go with it), a Chicago District Attorney, Fred Clark, Whitmore's antagonist who is also after the thief and his money (but he'd love to lock Whitmore up too) and the thief's wife, Ann Dvorak, who wants the money as well.

In classic Hitchcock MacGuffin mode, you don't really care about the thief or the hundred grand. The modest fun in this one is watching no-nonsense Marjorie Main team up with her opposite, irrepressible and irresponsible Whitmore, to find the money. Meanwhile, the district attorney and the thief's wife nip at Main and Whitmore's heels all in the claustrophobic setting of a Chicago-to-New York City overnight train.

This one only works because all four main characters have a wonderfully fun chemistry where you feel they are letting you in on the jokes and pranks, which include a dead body that keeps inconveniently popping up in different rooms, Whitmore's futilely obvious womanizing and the DA's exasperation at knowing Whitmore will, once again, get the best of him.

I didn't want to like it, but kinda sorta did as, heck, the actors seemed to be genuinely enjoying themselves and, at about an hour in length, it's over before you can get too annoyed with it. Plus, it's incredible time travel as you feel that you're on an overnight train to New York. It's as if they extended the length of the cool train scene in North by Northwest to an hour.

 

[Harp]

^^^Sonofabitch is Irish, absolutely, exactamondo. Spends more than he makes on broads, booze, books.
Nothing like the alliterative Irish attorney chasing down a deadbeat client tracker flick.

 

[Worf]

I'm an HBO subscriber so I logged on to HBOmax to see what I could see. Man was I surprised. In addition to all that's on HBO and those "New Releases" (I'm talking to you Justice League) I found a ton of classic films (mostly Criterion Collection) I've wanted to see but never got the chance. I just spent the last 2 plus hours watching the 1965 Russian version of "War and Peace" and I've another 6 plus hours to go. All I can say is "wow"! WTF was Hollywood thinking with that dreadful 1956 turd with Henry Fonda? I'd also seen bits and pieces of the two BBC versions and was NOT impressed. This is how it was meant to be done. Grandeur on a scale that would make DeMille curse with envy and unlike his offerings... this movie has a soul! Man I can't wait to hit it again tomorrow!

Worf

 

[Fading Fast]

Two-Faced Woman from 1941 with Greta Garbo, Melvin Douglas, Roland Young and Ruth Gordon

The Motion Picture Production Code forced much silliness into movies, especially in the second half of the '30s and the '40s when Hollywood worked overtime coming up with scenarios where married people could almost, but not really, have affairs.

Sometimes it turned out well as in The Philadelphia Story, which, if you cut through the code, basically has Katherine Hepburn sleeping with all three male leads. But sometimes too much is asked of the code's scaffolding and the entire plot just collapses in on itself.

After a wobbly but okay start, Two-Faced Woman collapses in on itself. Melvin Douglas (an odd male lead at best with his squeaky voice and receding hairline) plays a New York City publishing tycoon on vacation who, in a week, meets, falls in love with and marries a carefree ski instructor, Greta Garbo. But when the vacation is over, he obnoxiously renegades on his pre-marriage promises of a laid-back life that he made to Garbo and "orders" her to come back to New York City with him so that he can return to his business.

I respect that cultural norms were different throughout history and we can't just arrogantly and arrantly judge every period by today's unforgiving political pieties, but even by 1940 standards, Douglas comes across as an imperious jerk. You don't promise your fiancee one life and, then, break that promise an hour after you're married and get mad at her for complaining.

But he is mad and goes back to New York by himself. At least up till now, Two-Faced Woman is a real movie, but then much nonsense ensues. Garbo, attempting to get her husband back (why? who knows), shows up in New York and comes up with the crazy plan to act as her (made up) philandering twin sister to, and this makes no sense, attract Douglas to somehow save their marriage.

She doesn't even seem really upset when Douglas tries to sleep with, what he believes is, his wife's sister - I wanted to punch the guy through the screen. But, I guess, the censors were happy as the affair wasn't really an affair because he was cheating on his wife with his wife (heavy sigh).

More nonsense follows, but somehow we are to believe it all works out as Douglas falls in love with Garbo again and she, now, agrees to move to New York. I stuck around till the end because this is Garbo's last film appearance, she looks great and did the best she could with awful material. Roland Young as Douglas' friend and Ruth Gordon as his secretary and Garbo confidant also deserve credit for bringing some credibility to this ridiculousness

There is one fun scene where teetotaler Garbo gets drunk on champagne for the first time in her life - the woman was an actress - but it is nowhere near enough to save this hot mess of a plot. It's a shame Garbo couldn't have gone out on a high note, but the problem here is the material not her. Sometimes the Motion Picture Production Code's limitations drove creativity and nuance, unfortunately, Two-Faced Woman is not one of those times.

 

[Harp]

^^^Garbo retired to the Apple as I recall, wayze back in the day when I considered Columbia's
admission offer to veterans, pondered the possib that I might happenstance meet her on the street
somewheres; usually around Wall Street. Always regret New York, like a gal never caught but ardently
pursued, always remained the occasional stop, fast fling vacation, but never any academic tenure.

 

[Fading Fast]

^^^Garbo retired to the Apple as I recall, wayze back in the day when I considered Columbia's
admission offer to veterans, pondered the possib that I might happenstance meet her on the street
somewheres; usually around Wall Street. Always regret New York, like a gal never caught but ardently
pursued, always remained the occasional stop, fast fling vacation, but never any academic tenure.

For years, the New York tabloids, the heirs to our beloved 1941 Eagle, would publish pictures of Garbo "caught" going to the grocery store, etc. Hence, growing up in the '70s, my dissonant introduction to Ms. Garbo was seeing her movies on TV where she was all youth and beauty and glamor and, then, opening the paper and seeing an old, bundled-up woman hidden behind big sunglasses.

 

[Harp]

I never comprehended why Apple newsrooms seemed hell bent intrusive and cruel, obsessed Garbo;
instead of mature acceptance of nature and respectful of her personal privacy.

 

[Touchofevil]

The Third Man on TCM’s Noir Alley this morning. Wasn’t a fan of it the movie the first time around; maybe it was the zither. The second time is when it clicked. Now, I stop and watch it whenever I come across it.

 

[Touchofevil]

Currently, Sicario: Day of the Soldado
I really enjoy the Sicario movies; watched them both many times. I am a big fan of Benicio Del Toro and Josh Brolin. Intense, great acting, great action, overall very well done.

 

[AmateisGal]

Pillow Talk with Doris Day and Rock Hudson! Doesn't matter how many times it's on - I'll watch it on TCM.

 

[Trenchfriend]

 

[Fading Fast]

Harper from 1966 with Paul Newman, Lauren Bacall, Julie Harris and Janet Leigh

Harper is a bit of a hot mess, but a strong performance by Paul Newman holds this 1960s version of the classic 1940s noir-detective movie together. While there's, thankfully, all but no 1960s camp here, some of the decade's later new-age and hippie stuff seeps in to muddle the noir visuals, but that was reality in the second half of the decade.

Newman is a torn-and-frayed private detective - he's Bogey in The Maltese Falcon adjusted to 1960s cultural norms. Like Bogey, he's got a moral code that isn't Boy-Scout approved, but still, it's not bad and Newman, as did Bogey, tries to honor it.

Kicking off with an inside-Hollywood echo of The Big Sleep, Lauren Bacall hires Newman to find her missing, wealthy husband. Bacall, and almost everyone who knows her husband - his lascivious teenage daughter, his pilot and his former mistress - seem to be hoping Newman will find a corpse at the end of his search.

When that search reveals that Bacall's husband has been kidnapped, Newman drives his cool beat-up Porsche, which like him, seems held together by Bondo, all over the greater LA area trying to put the pieces together.

This leads him to a complicated-as-heck kidnapping strategy that includes a spiritual cult with a shady leader (do cults have any other kind of leaders?), a jazz clubs with a strung-out junkie singer (Julie Harris), oil fields used by the mob to "hide the bodies" and, in some kind of tangential connection, an illegal immigrant labor scheme.

It all somewhat comes together at the end if you think real hard, but for most of the movie you're just trying to catch up to Newman in figuring this one out. Even he seems to be throwing a lot of punches in the dark; still, he's several steps ahead of the plodding police.

The good in this one is not the Rube-Goldberg plot, but Newman doing the cool, disaffected private-investigator thing. This includes getting beat up a few times, aggressively tweaking the police and unenthusiastically shooting some of the bad guys. It also includes a wonderfully real, late-night booty call to his divorcing-him wife, Janet Leigh (stuffed into her jeans), who clearly still wants Newman in her...umm, life.

In a perfect mashup of film noir and later-sixties' zeitgeist, the end is, literally and philosophically, an amoral shrug of the shoulders that (minor spoiler alert) lets one of the bad guys go free, but it kinda makes sense.

Had a half hour of Harper's two hours of run time been left on the cutting-room floor, nothing much would have been lost. But despite its shortcomings, it's still good to see the iconic noir-detective torch picked up in the 1960s by Newman to later be handed off to Jack Nicholson in the 1970s classic Chinatown.

 

[Harp]

Chinatown is classic, right down to laid against parked car tire pocket watch nuance,
Nicholson had the chopsticks, but his subsequent sequel The Two Jakes flat line tired.

 

[Edward]

Watched My Bloody Valentine last night on Prime - a lazy opt for a recommendation on the system after the disappointment of Ginger Snaps III being pay-extra only after all this time (the first two I rewatched recently as well, excellent films). MBV is formulaic and it's easy to spot the three or so shots really staged purely for the 3D in which it was shown in cinemas, but it's fun enough all the same. Engaged me for a couple of hours.

 

[MisterCairo]

Own them both on blu-ray!

Currently, Sicario: Day of the Soldado
I really enjoy the Sicario movies; watched them both many times. I am a big fan of Benicio Del Toro and Josh Brolin. Intense, great acting, great action, overall very well done.

 

[MisterCairo]

We own the Ginger Snaps collection! Then fiancee and I had a book by Canadian film reviewer, 100 Best Movies You Have Never Seen. GS the first was on the list so we rented it.

Watched My Bloody Valentine last night on Prime - a lazy opt for a recommendation on the system after the disappointment of Ginger Snaps III being pay-extra only after all this time (the first two I rewatched recently as well, excellent films). MBV is formulaic and it's easy to spot the three or so shots really staged purely for the 3D in which it was shown in cinemas, but it's fun enough all the same. Engaged me for a couple of hours.

 

[MisterCairo]

What film is that again???

 

[Edward]

We own the Ginger Snaps collection! Then fiancee and I had a book by Canadian film reviewer, 100 Best Movies You Have Never Seen. GS the first was on the list so we rented it.

The first one really struck me as a clever little picture with how it plays with lycanthropy as an allegory for menarche. The sequel is solid too. The third part I understand to be a prequel - I do look forward to seeing it in due course. Great, female-led stories. The male characters are good too, though I particular enjoyed that romantic subplots and such were not created to add unnecessary distraction or because they were expected even if entirely superfluous, a la The Day After Tomorrow.

Watched the "recent" (2019) take on Stephen King's Pet Sematary last night. It's interesting how horror, imo moreso than pretty much any other genre cinema, really is of its time. There's a very different feel to this version that makes the original somehow seem a bit campier. Nonetheless, it's a good watch. Some very clever alterations to the plot of the book which stick very close to the spirit of the original made for some nice surprises in the final act. Amusingly, just when I was about to grumble about the lack of Ramones content (Stephen King is a big Ramones fan and included several references to them in the original book; the first film version included a use of their classic Sheena is a Punk Rocker as well as a specially written track that shared a title with the film), the end credits were soundtracked by a fair cover version of the original Pet Sematary song. Being picky, I'd have preferred the original, but on the other hand it's nice to see younger acts paying tribute to the masters.

Also watched the first half of Medway. I'm no expert on the war in the Pacific, so can't comment on it from pov of military campaign accuracy, but it's an enjoyable flick without, so far at least, any of the more egregious WW2 stereotyping. Caught myself at one point speculating on where they sourced their M442as and A2s....

 

[Touchofevil]

Chinatown is classic, right down to laid against parked car tire pocket watch nuance,
Nicholson had the chopsticks, but his subsequent sequel The Two Jakes flat line tired.

I actually enjoyed The Two Jakes, but that might be because I really like Chinatown. It was nowhere as entertaining, but I have enjoyed worse.