What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

[Bushman]

Troll on Netflix.

Saw the trailer a while back, but forgot that it had come out. It's not great, but it's not bad either. It's dubbed from Norwegian, and is basically about an ancient Norwegian rock troll being uncovered from beneath a mountain and immediately begins a rampage to Oslo. I got some pretty big Godzilla 1998 vibes from this movie, and it's pretty much just dumb fun.

 

[Julian Shellhammer]

In no particular order-
The Square Jungle (1955) with Tony Curtis as good kid who becomes successful in boxing thanks to trainer Ernest Borgnine, to the joy of Tony's dad Jim Backus. But you know how ambition can drive some people just too far! Directed by Don Siegel, who delivers with gritty shots of the fights, flash cuts of zoomed-in close ups, and savage-looking beatings in the square jungle.

Tony Curtis again, this time as Anthony Curtis, in 1949's Johnny Stool Pigeon, playing a mute hitman for drug-runners tracked down by US Treasury agent Howard Duff who is aided by convicted felon Dan Duryea, the titular character who risks erasure by cold-blooded smugglers when he is released from prison in order to aid Duff in infiltrating the crime ring.

Scrooge (1951) with Alastair Sim, which is my favorite film performance as the squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner, in my favorite film adaptation of the story. Michael Hordern's performance as the ghost of Jacob Marley is breath-taking: see if you can catch the one or two times he blinks.

Christmas in Connecticut (1945) starring Barbara Stanwyck, Dennis Morgan, Sidney Greenstreet, Reginald Denny, S. Z. Sakall, and many more. Magazine columnist Stanwyck is a faux-cook/hostess/housewife who is railroaded by publisher Greenstreet into hosting war-hero Morgan for a "homey" Christmas dinner. We laughed a whole lot at the situations and the dialogue. It's part of our annual Christmas movie line-up.

 

[AmateisGal]

Christmas in Connecticut (again) and Holiday Affair (again). I think it's a tie between these two for my favorite Christmas movie.

 

[Edward]

Troll on Netflix.

Saw the trailer a while back, but forgot that it had come out. It's not great, but it's not bad either. It's dubbed from Norwegian, and is basically about an ancient Norwegian rock troll being uncovered from beneath a mountain and immediately begins a rampage to Oslo. I got some pretty big Godzilla 1998 vibes from this movie, and it's pretty much just dumb fun.

Yes, watched that one recently myself. Good fun.

 

[Fading Fast]

The Mob from 1951 with Broderick Crawford, Ernest Borgnine, Jean Alexander and Neville Brand


It's tough to be a 1950s movie about mob corruption on New York City's docks, but not to be the classic movie On the Waterfront. The Mob, though, is an engaging crime-drama noir with a tight script, solid acting and plenty of 1950s mob argot and heavies.

One of Hollywood's least-likely leading men, bulldog-faced Broderick Crawford plays a cop who goes undercover to find the leader of the waterfront mob. Whereas On the Waterfront draws a wide circle to look at many of the elements of waterfront mob corruption, The Mob uses Crawford like a one-man wrecking ball smashing into everything as he tries to make a beeline to the big guy behind the rackets.

With a cover as an "up from New Orleans after a little trouble" union man, Crawford pushes his way into New York's waterfront with an aggressive attitude backed up by his brute size. He's loud and cocky, which draws the attention he wants as he keeps pushing to get in on the real action - the rackets that control the unions and skim money off of everything.

The story is good yet generic, but where The Mob shines is watching Crawford effortlessly shift from blustering stevedore to quick-witted undercover cop time and again as he balances a ridiculous number of relationships and tense situations trying to dig out information without blowing his cover.

There's a good supporting cast with Otto Hulett as Crawford's no-nonsense lieutenant, Ernest Borgnine as a mid-level mob boss and Neville Brand as a psychotic mob thug (a role genetics forced on him), but this is Crawford's movie.

Lacking a real femme fatale, The Mob does have blonde Jean Alexander playing a street-smart cookie comfortable moving amongst the cops, thugs and workers of the waterfront. Along with Crawford's fiance, played by Betty Buehler, who gets unwillingly pulled into the action, that's pretty much it for the woman's angle in The Mob.

After Crawford knocks around the waterfront for awhile, beats up a few guys and gets beat up himself a few times, the story speeds to a climax that includes state-of-the-art surveillance, a crime boss' fancy hidden apartment (a thing back then), a mobster's surprise double identity, Crawford being exposed, Buehler held hostage, a gun fight and, finally, a James Bond-like last-minute twist.

The Mob's fast-moving eighty-seven minutes proves that a leading man doesn't always need leading-man good looks as Broderick Crawford drives this effort with a force of personality and massive physicality.

The Mob is a very good movie that would probably be more well known today if not for On The Waterfront, but it still deserves a watch for its engaging and different look at mob corruption on the docks.

 

[Touchofevil]

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

Christmas in Connecticut (again) and Holiday Affair (again). I think it's a tie between these two for my favorite Christmas movie.

I decided to make a Christmas commitment and chose Alastair Sim as Scrooge. I promised myself
a Carol viewing this week armed with cheese ball, rye, and Jonathan Walker Black Label.
And Scott. Kicker is Cate Blanchett's Carol crossed mind as per Highsmith's avant novel The Price of Salt.
Now roped, will do Gaspar, Melchior, and Balthazar. A slight digression along Bethlehem pike.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Innerspace (1987)

 

[AmateisGal]

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

Love this movie!

 

[AmateisGal]

Last night we watched the Top Gun sequel, Maverick, and it was very good. I enjoyed it.

Tonight I watched the new Knives Out movie, Glass Onion. Holy wow. Very, very well done. I loved it. Craig Daniel as Benoit Blanc is incredible.

Just finished watching the original Ocean's 11.

 

[Fading Fast]

Fast Workers from 1933 with John Gilbert, Mae Clarke and Robert Armstrong


In the early 1930s, Hollywood churned out many short, impactful pre-code talkies ('29-'34) with a real-life take on sex, love and friendship, as it does in the double-entendre titled Fast Workers, starring John Gilbert, Mae Clarke and Robert Armstrong.

Gilbert and Armstrong, playing riveters on a skyscraper, are buddies and co-workers who protect each other from scamming women. Gilbert is the lady's man and Armstrong is the one who is too trusting of women, but if either falls for a woman, the other investigates her fidelity.

Enter pretty grifter Mae Clarke who makes her living scamming men out of money with fake sob stories about her sick relatives or an evil landlady.

Gilbert and Clarke have a true attraction for each other, but since he's got her number and since she really likes him, the implication is they sleep together now and then separate from her "business."

Trouble arises when Clarke begins "dating" Armstrong because she learns he's got a good amount of money in the bank and is a nice man who falls for her made-up tales of woe. Initially, Clarke doesn't know that Armstrong is Gilbert's friend nor does Gilbert know that Armstrong's new love is Clarke.

With that set up, the movie slowly smashes everyone up when Gilbert realizes that Clarke is the "wonderful" girl his buddy Armstrong wants to marry.

Gilbert seems both jealous and angry, while Clarke, too, becomes hurt that Gilbert wants to "protect" his friend from her. She, also, really wants Gilbert to take her seriously as a girlfriend, but she can't admit this to him.

It ramps up from there when Gilbert takes Clarke away for the weekend to gather evidence to prove to Armstrong she's not a good woman.

A few things, naturally, go wrong with that stupid plan and everybody ends up burning mad at everyone else, so much so that Armstrong and Gilbert have A Separate Peace moment of "did my best friend nearly try to kill me?"

The story is contrived, but the underlying passions and jealousies are all too real, which shepherds the plot over most of its holes and awkwardness. Also helping things along, especially for 1933 audiences, are the scenes of Gilbert and Armstrong at work.

Putting up skyscrapers was cutting edge technology that fascinated the public back then.

It's hard to believe today, with our modern worker safety laws and norms, but in the 1930s, it was accepted that a certain number of workers would die during construction of any one of these vertical marvels. It was a crazy kind of wild-west-in-the-sky environment.

The scenes of Gilbert and Armstrong walking around on beams without harnesses and other safety equipment, hundreds of feet in the sky, as molten rivets are nonchalantly tossed around are still captivating and nerve racking today. These are real men, pushing the metaphor, who are the last cowboys in America.

Fast Workers ends in melodramatic fashion with a pre-code-style rough and uneven justice that would not be allowed once the Motion Picture Production Code was enforced.

The movie works, though, because the emotions and passions are real, the skyscraper scenes engaging and, most importantly, because Clarke and Gilbert give outstanding performances playing not particularly nice people, who are kinda in love and who, occasionally, try to do the right thing.

As to Fast Workers' racy title: the rivitors have to work fast to get the heated bolts in place before they cool; the men are also fast workers with the women they meet; and, finally, the women hustlers like Mae Clarke are fast workers when scamming men. And all that is just a typical day in pre-code Hollywood.

 

[Viking752]

Avatar: The way of Water in Digital 3D

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

Last night we watched the Top Gun sequel, Maverick, and it was very good. I enjoyed it.

Tonight I watched the new Knives Out movie, Glass Onion. Holy wow. Very, very well done. I loved it. Craig Daniel as Benoit Blanc is incredible.

Just finished watching the original Ocean's 11.

Haven't seen this Maverick but word is Cruise fit gloved hand. My sole concern is correctness which spoils.
Craig failed to assimilate Bond, close but not quite. Angst yet lacked other desperate qualities.
Will look for his Blanc with crossed fingers.
I've seen this Sinatra and fine with it, although nothing sublime, substantive.

 

[Fading Fast]

Roadblock from 1951 with Charles McGraw and Joan Dixon


Diane (Joan Dixon): Someday you're going to want something nice and expensive that you can't afford on a detective's salary.
Joe Peters (Charles McGraw): Like what?
Diane (Joan Dixon): Like me.


Roadblock is a work-a-day noir in the best sense of the phrase. It's not groundbreaking or original and it has several plot flaws and a low-budget obviousness, but at just over an hour, it delivers a solid punch of noir including a few particularly good blows like the quote at the top.

Charles McGraw plays an honest insurance detective (noirland was chockablock with interesting insurance detectives in the 1940s and 1950s) who meets a gold-digging grifter, played by Joan Dixon, at an airport.

She, unbeknownst to him, uses him to get a reduced fare for herself by tricking the ticket agent into believing McGraw is her husband. (Scamming airlines over their "rules" clearly goes back at least as far as the 1940s.)

It's a cute-meet, film-noir style, as he's a bit miffed at first, but these two quickly take to each other. Yet Dixon immediately kiboshes any affair because - and a big kudos to Dixon's character for brutal honesty - she tells him she has no interest in a $350-a-month insurance detective (again, see the quote at the top).

McGraw and Dixon have good on-screen chemistry and well-written dialogue as her dismissive nickname for him "Honest Joe" and a coin-flipping game they play to make small joint decisions captures the silly fun that happens during the flirting stage of new relationships.

But he's poor by her standards of a champagne and limousine life, so they go their separate ways. They meet up again later, though, when he's investigating a fur robbery of a company his firm insures because her new "boyfriend," a big-time gangster, is the chief suspect.

Being around Dixon this time is just too much for "Honest Joe," so "Honest Joe" hatches a dishonest plan to get "big" money in order to get Dixon. The twist is that just as he makes this decision, Dixon begins to see the downside of being a kept woman and devoting her life to money. Now, she even seems willing to take McGraw on his terms and salary.

But these two never get on the same page, so the rest of the movie is a pretty good "inside job" heist movie - a payroll truck, money "buried" while it's "hot," a police and insurance investigation (McGraw tries to squirrel that effort) - and a star-crossed-lovers tale.

You know a noir movie is doing something right when you are kind of - and you don't like to admit this, even to yourself - rooting for the bad guys to get away with their crime because you empathize with them and don't really care about some big anonymous company that had its payroll robbed.

McGraw and Dixon are good as a B noir team, so much so, you wish they had done a few more movies together. He has the right square-jawed look to be "Honest Joe," but also a vulnerability that makes you almost understand why he turned.

Dixon, cursed by being a Howard Hughes discovery, didn't have much of a Hollywood career, but in Roadblock, she shows an ability to play a young gold-digger who never really goes full femme fatale when love and life's realities hit her. It's a challenging bit of acting that she pulls off reasonably well. Plus, oddly for a Hughes "protege," you don't immediately notice her bustline.

Roadblock, with its small budget, is a daytime noir, as its action - investigators questioning suspects, car chases, crooks stuffing suitcases with stolen money and plenty of body heat - mainly takes place in the sunshine and not on noir's usually playground of nighttime, neon-lit shadowy-and-wet streets and alleyways. To be fair, though, a sunshine look worked for the set-in-Mexico noir classic The Big Steal.

There are better noirs than Roadblock, but one of the things that makes film noir such an incredible genre is the large number of small-budget films that swam in the wake of the genre's big-budget classics.

At seventy-three minutes and with a basic story told and acted well, Roadblock is a enjoyable "quick hit" of noir that does its job and then, like a good noir antihero, gets off the screen.

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

Fast, I believe he was in Holden's film Bridges of Toko Ri. Dim memory, the girl griftess never a new face.

 

[Bushman]

Watched Avatar: The Way of Water. The movie is pure visual gold, and much more character driven than the first. In the first Avatar, Cameron made you fall in love with Pandora. In this one, you fall in love with its people. I'm definitely hungry for more.

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

Watched Avatar: The Way of Water. The movie is pure visual gold, and much more character driven than the first. In the first Avatar, Cameron made you fall in love with Pandora. In this one, you fall in love with its people. I'm definitely hungry for more.

Meant to see this. Opened here the other week. Behind films, but saw the Elvis reception line, caught
Tom Hanks waved back. He was thin, not heavy.

 

[Edward]

White Christmas, 1954. Interesting picture I'd never actually gotten around to before. Fun and snappy; vastly superior to (and les problematic than) Holiday Inn.

 

[Worf]

"Automat" - This is a brilliant documentary about the Horn & Hardart/Automat chains that flourished in NY City and Philadelphia from the 20's till their inevitable demise in the 90's. A semi-predictable "talking head" documentary saved by great and I mean GREAT interviews with former H&H patrons ranging from Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner, to Colin Powell, Ruth Bader Ginsberg and numerous others. The whole history of the chains is laid out as is its meteoric rise and inevitable fall to fast food chains. Rife with nostalgia but never cloying.

I spent a few years as a Cub Scout (before our troop disbanded) and we went to Radio City for the Christmas shows a few times. To me the highlight of the trips were the lunchtime meals at the Automat across the street. We never ate out as kids and these meals were a treat still remembered by me to this day. Put in some coins and magic would appear...

Worf

 

[Fading Fast]

"Automat" - This is a brilliant documentary about the Horn & Hardart/Automat chains that flourished in NY City and Philadelphia from the 20's till their inevitable demise in the 90's. A semi-predictable "talking head" documentary saved by great and I mean GREAT interviews with former H&H patrons ranging from Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner, to Colin Powell, Ruth Bader Ginsberg and numerous others. The whole history of the chains is laid out as is its meteoric rise and inevitable fall to fast food chains. Rife with nostalgia but never cloying.

I spent a few years as a Cub Scout (before our troop disbanded) and we went to Radio City for the Christmas shows a few times. To me the highlight of the trips were the lunchtime meals at the Automat across the street. We never ate out as kids and these meals were a treat still remembered by me to this day. Put in some coins and magic would appear...

Worf

I saw it too and agree with all your comments. It's a really enjoyable and informative documentary.

My Automat experience was when I moved to New York City in the late '80s. I lived five or so blocks from the last Automat still open in New York at that time.

Even though it was shabby and had its share of homeless camped out at a bunch of the tables, I still enjoyed going now and then for the time-travel experience. Plus, even then, it was still good value.

It was neat in the documentary to see that particular branch noted as being the last one in the city. When the documentary showed some of the local TV news clips on its closing, it jarred my memory as its closing was a minor story in the city for a few days back when it happened.