What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

[belfastboy]

Watched a Netflix pic..."Beckett", an action/thriller set in Greece. Watched the trailer and the scenery was stunningly beautiful and seeing as how we cancelled out two months in Greece for this year decided to watch it to scratch the itch.

Not a bad movie. ....6 out of 10 or so but all the good scenery was in the first 15 minutes and after that nothing.

 

[Touchofevil]

The Big Heat on TCM. Seen it many times. Stumbled across it tonight. Saw Glenn Ford, stopped, and recognized what it was and stayed. Good cast. Better than the two stars it received.

 

[Julian Shellhammer]

Confidential Agent (1945) with Charles Boyer and Lauren Bacall. In 1937 Boyer's character travels to London to buy coal for the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War. The Fascists want to get the coal themselves. Violence and death ensue. Bacall's character is supposed to be English, but she speaks undiluted Yankee. Boyer is clearly French, but he's supposed to be Spanish. At the end the Missus said it dragged somewhat.

 

[Fading Fast]

The Big Heat on TCM. Seen it many times. Stumbled across it tonight. Saw Glenn Ford, stopped, and recognized what it was and stayed. Good cast. Better than the two stars it received.

Much better than two stars. Comments here: #28473.

Plus this:

 

[Harp]

^GG was quite elegant and could hold a scene together without any directorial assistance.

 

[Fading Fast]

^GG was quite elegant and could hold a scene together without any directorial assistance.

She's impressive. The above is probably her best moment on screen (headlines on, rolling in with verve with the pitcher of martinis), but watching her more than hold her own going toe-to-toe with Bogie in "In a Lonely Place" sold me on her acting chops.

 

[Harp]

She's impressive. The above is probably her best moment on screen (headlines on, rolling in with verve with the pitcher of martinis), but watching her more than hold her own going toe-to-toe with Bogie in "In a Lonely Place" sold me on her acting chops.

Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool, a GG bio flick with Annette Bening seems worthwhile. Need a FF film review.

 

[Harp]

She's impressive. The above is probably her best moment on screen (headlines on, rolling in with verve with the pitcher of martinis), but watching her more than hold her own going toe-to-toe with Bogie in "In a Lonely Place" sold me on her acting chops.

Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool, a GG bio flick with Annette Bening seems worthwhile. Need a FF film review.

 

[Fading Fast]

Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool, a GG bio flick with Annette Bening seems worthwhile. Need a FF film review.

Appreciate the heads up. I'll try to find it. Bening is a great pick to play her.

 

[Fading Fast]

The High Cost of Loving from 1958 with Jose Ferrer, Gena Rowlands, Bobby Troup, Edward Platt and Jim Backus


The "happy 1950s" had plenty of not-happy movies made in that "good" decade. With the Motion Picture Production Code still holding on, many of these films had slapped-on happy endings, but audiences could easily see past that to the real concerns and fears raised in them.

The High Cost of Loving is a strong, if unknown, entry in these middle-class angst movies revealing Americans worried about their jobs, especially with all the money they owe. Proving that this was no one-off effort, versions of the same themes are addressed in No Down Payment, Patterns, The Tunnel of Love, The Bachelor Party and other 1950s movies.

The High Cost of Loving starts off charmingly where a "typical" suburban couple, Gena Rowlands and Jose Ferrer, begin their day in an almost choreographed routine as each has his or her role in getting the coffee started, orange juice poured, eggs cooked, bread toasted and table made all done in congenial silence as they also dress for work.

But on this morning, nine years into his marriage, Ferrer learns his wife might be pregnant, a possibility it seems both of them had given up on. They then leave for work together as he goes off to his mid-level corporate job, while she goes to her job at a small shop in town.

If you've ever wondered what Jack Lemmon's, from The Apartment, life would look like if he married and moved to the suburbs, the answer is he'd become Jose Ferrer in this movie.

With the happy baby news lifting his day, Ferrer then learns that he's been left out of a big-wig lunch at his recently bought-out company, which implies he's not on a path for promotion and might even be out of a job.

That suddenly shifts the movie into serious mode as Ferrer, stunned because he thought he was considered a high performer being groomed for promotion, contemplates losing his job with both a baby on the way and debt up the wazoo.

He, at first, keeps this news from his happy-about-being-pregnant wife as she reveals how the baby and his pending promotion (she doesn't know the truth yet) convinced her she was wrong having thought "the big parade had passed them by." There is no way Ferrer could have followed up that heartbreaking confession with his bad news right then and there.

Adding to his angst, he begins interpreting everything at work as confirmation he's going to be fired. With the pressure building, he finally confesses his fears to his wife.

In a very raw way, we see Ferrer go through the five stages of grief for his job, culminating in several emotional speeches about the insecurity of working in corporate America and the unfairness of it all. He bitterly asks his boss, "just where does the balance lie between my responsibility to the company and the company's responsibility to me?"

While the overall tone of the movie is light, these powerfully revealing scenes in the middle had to strike a chord with 1950s America or they wouldn't have made so many similar movies. (Very minor spoiler alert) With the aforementioned movie code still in control, everything works out in the end.

The High Cost of Loving is an, overall, light-hearted movie, but with a surprising vein of angst and fear. Just like 1950s audiences probably did, you leave kind of smiling, but also kind of disturbed as real life doesn't often have a Motion-Picture-Production-Code-provided "happy ending." 1950s nostalgia is just that because, as movies like this show, the 1950s is, like every decade, much-more complex than the shorthand future generations assign to it.


N.B. #1 Gena Rowlands is familiar to most of us as a strong, kind-hearted Southern grandmother, a role she seemed to play in every third romcom made in the 1990s. So, it's really fun to see her here, early in her career, playing a smart wife (and you won't miss this) rockin' a killer body.

N.B. #2 This punching-above-its-weight B movie comprises a lot of future TV stars in its engaging cast including Jim Backus (Gilligan's Island), Bobby Troup (Emergency), Richard Deacon (The Dick Van Dyke Show), Edward Platt (Get Smart) and bald-as-ever Werner Klemperer (Hogan's Heroes).

 

[Harp]

Gena, wrapped tight doesn't look preggers. Lithe and lovely.

 

[Fading Fast]

Gena, wrapped tight doesn't look preggers. Lithe and lovely.

Until this movie, I had only known her as the "grandmother" in a bunch of '90s movie. She did a really good job in this one and looked fantastic.

 

[Alex Oviatt]

Happen to be in Missoula so I rewatched A River Runs Through It. Great movie. Great hats.

 

[belfastboy]

Happen to be in Missoula so I rewatched A River Runs Through It. Great movie. Great hats.

I forget the where but the book set in/around Missoula had to go further afield to find a remote enough site to film. The Montana of the book no longer exists around Missoula. Still Missoula is one of our favourite destinations that we try to visit each year......except for these Covid years.

 

[Harp]

Happen to be in Missoula so I rewatched A River Runs Through It. Great movie. Great hats.

"...and the favorite apostle, John was a dry-fly fisherman."

 

[Edward Reed]

The Shop Around the Corner
(1940)
Can’t go wrong with a Jimmy Stewart picture! If one dares to limit his films to a top ten this one certainly is right near the top!

 

[Fading Fast]

On Dangerous Ground from 1951 with Ida Lupino, Robert Ryan and Ward Bond


On Dangerous Ground is two movie halves tied together by one character. It only kinda works as both halves are good, but both halves are also incomplete.

The first half is straight-up noir where weary police detective, Robert Ryan, chases down bad guys on dark, wet, shadowy streets. He's a man on the edge who lives alone in a depressing one-room apartment, has no life outside of his work and is becoming too violent on his job.

His partners and boss try to tell him he's losing it and that he needs some balance in his life, but he takes that advice as well as most people take advice. You expect the next scene to be him, literally, killing a suspect vigilantism style.

But instead, after roughing up one too many suspects, his boss, with pressure from above, assigns him to help with an out-of-town murder case in a small rural town in hopes it will clear Ryan's head a bit.

That's the big shift between the two halves of the movie as the next scene has Ryan driving across a snowy landscape on his way to the town. From here, the movie feels less claustrophobic and noirish as Ryan seems to be wound less tight in the open space. We don't know it yet, but our noir movie is about to become a rough-around-the-edges romance.

Now part of the search team for the murderer, Ryan meets a blind Ida Lupino living in an isolated house that seems, in some unknown way, connected to the murder. The hunt for the murderer is a Hitchcock Macguffin as you don't care at all about that, but you do care about Ryan and Lupino - both lost and damaged souls starting to connect.

When Ryan and a local helping with the search stay at Lupino's house for the night (they believe they are close to the killer and want to pick up the trail in the morning), we are supposed to believe Ryan and Lupino fall in love. They have good chemistry, but falling deeply in love in a few hours, as supposedly happens here, is a movie thing, not a real-life thing.

(Minor spoiler alert) Lupino pleads with Ryan to protect her mentally challenged brother, the murder suspect, from harm when he's captured, but try as he can, he's not able to. Yet, in the end, these two broken people get together.

At about eighty minutes, split almost evenly between the opening noir half and the second half romance, neither movie is given enough time to fully develop, while the link - Ryan moving from the city to the country - isn't strong enough to fully knit it all together.

Quirky noir director Nicholaus Ray explores similar themes - men on the edge who fall in love - in several other of his efforts (my favorite is In a Lonely Place, comments here: [URL='https://www.thefedoralounge.com/threads/what-was-the-last-movie-you-watched.20830/page-1404#post-2733712']#28068). Yet in On Dangerous Ground, he just doesn't have enough film nor story to fully realize his ambitions. It's worth the watch, but more time, connection between the two movie halves and budget was needed.


N.B. If Ida Lupino is the female star, with top overall billing in the movie (even above Ryan), you expect her to get in the movie before it's half over, yet she doesn't show up until the second part of On Dangerous Ground. Pro tip: put your headline star in more than just the second half of the movie.
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[Edward Reed]

This is my first time seeing
I Wake Up Screaming
(1941) a Noir/Crime film. I was in the mood for another Betty Grable flick and I am so accustomed to her cheeky song and dance films that I was taken aback by this serious role that she pulled off extremely well. Enjoyed the film for the most part although there were a few nonsensical over the top moments but then it is 1940s noir! LOL! Entertaining and rather captivating if not overly convoluted. Betty Grable, Victor Mature and Carole Landis

 

[Fading Fast]

View attachment 355911 View attachment 355912 View attachment 355913 View attachment 355914

This is my first time seeing
I Wake Up Screaming
(1941) a Noir/Crime film. I was in the mood for another Betty Grable flick and I am so accustomed to her cheeky song and dance films that I was taken aback by this serious role that she pulled off extremely well. Enjoyed the film for the most part although there were a few nonsensical over the top moments but then it is 1940s noir! LOL! Entertaining and rather captivating if not overly convoluted. Betty Grable, Victor Mature and Carole Landis

Great comments. I have not seen this one, but will now keep a look out for it, sounds like a must-see noir.

 

[Harp]

View attachment 355908
On Dangerous Ground from 1951 with Ida Lupino, Robert Ryan and Ward Bond


On Dangerous Ground is two movie halves tied together by one character. It only kinda works as both halves are good, but both halves are also incomplete.

The first half is straight-up noir where weary police detective, Robert Ryan, chases down bad guys on dark, wet, shadowy streets. He's a man on the edge who lives alone in a depressing one-room apartment, has no life outside of his work and is becoming too violent on his job.

His partners and boss try to tell him he's losing it and that he needs some balance in his life, but he takes that advice as well as most people take advice. You expect the next scene to be him, literally, killing a suspect vigilantism style.

But instead, after roughing up one too many suspects, his boss, with pressure from above, assigns him to help with an out-of-town murder case in a small rural town in hopes it will clear Ryan's head a bit.

That's the big shift between the two halves of the movie as the next scene has Ryan driving across a snowy landscape on his way to the town. From here, the movie feels less claustrophobic and noirish as Ryan seems to be wound less tight in the open space. We don't know it yet, but our noir movie is about to become a rough-around-the-edges romance.

Now part of the search team for the murderer, Ryan meets a blind Ida Lupino living in an isolated house that seems, in some unknown way, connected to the murder. The hunt for the murderer is a Hitchcock Macguffin as you don't care at all about that, but you do care about Ryan and Lupino - both lost and damaged souls starting to connect.

When Ryan and a local helping with the search stay at Lupino's house for the night (they believe they are close to the killer and want to pick up the trail in the morning), we are supposed to believe Ryan and Lupino fall in love. They have good chemistry, but falling deeply in love in a few hours, as supposedly happens here, is a movie thing, not a real-life thing.

(Minor spoiler alert) Lupino pleads with Ryan to protect her mentally challenged brother, the murder suspect, from harm when he's captured, but try as he can, he's not able to. Yet, in the end, these two broken people get together.

At about eighty minutes, split almost evenly between the opening noir half and the second half romance, neither movie is given enough time to fully develop, while the link - Ryan moving from the city to the country - isn't strong enough to fully knit it all together.

Quirky noir director Nicholaus Ray explores similar themes - men on the edge who fall in love - in several other of his efforts (my favorite is In a Lonely Place, comments here: #28068). Yet in On Dangerous Ground, he just doesn't have enough film nor story to fully realize his ambitions. It's worth the watch, but more time, connection between the two movie halves and budget was needed.


N.B. If Ida Lupino is the female star, with top overall billing in the movie (even above Ryan), you expect her to get in the movie before it's half over, yet she doesn't show up until the second part of On Dangerous Ground. Pro tip: put your headline star in more than just the second half of the movie.

Intriguing cinematic theorems regarding On Dangerous Ground, which serves a spliced postulate cord
stitched to a lady's inexplicable late entrance however seemingly scripted by its prologue.

Took a gander at lovely Jeff Donnelly; lady fair whom I never knew existed. And that shot of GG
with Bogie, conical-pensive, concerned all wrapped inside a blouse....just like Burma.
But back to Jeff. She has an understated elegance and her beauty is of a quiet subtle effect,
eyes a man could drown in and undeniable depth of character.