What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

^
Crain and Darnell have two landmark films, Pinky and Zorro which continually pull memories of entranced
wonder at their beauty and spark. Southern had a certain allure that came from her confidence.

Perhaps I am biased but their likes and female witchcraft cast a spell over me. Today's bunch, excepting
Ana de Armas and Taylor Swift who cameoed Amsterdam, really never spark any fires.

 

[Julian Shellhammer]

The Big House (1930) dir. George W. Hill, with Chester Morris, Wallace Beery, Lewis Stone, and many more. I've raved about this before, so I will avoid repletion and say it's an exceptional well-done film/movie with Hill's direction using the camera very well.

 

[Fading Fast]

Term of Trial from 1962 with Laurence Olivier, Simone Signoret and Sarah Miles


The British kitchen-sink dramas of the 1960s were usually populated with up-and-coming stars. Term of Trial, though, has the heavyweight acting talents of Laurence Olivier and Simone Signoret. It also, however, has its own up-and-comer with Sarah Miles making her film debut.

Olivier plays a worn-out middle-aged school teacher who went to jail for being a conscientious objector in WWII. This has thwarted his career advancement in the field of education.

His bitter wife, played by Signoret, has contempt for him because his "ideals" have left them poor. Their inability to have children is another rub. While it's implied it is because of her, she somehow twists it into further resentment of her husband.

Amazingly though, Olivier and Signoret show you that there is something real to their marriage. He clearly loves her, faults and all. She, at minimum, knows at some level, her disdain for him is unfair, even if she won't fully admit it, even to herself.

It's a nuanced and complex relationship, as most long marriages are, that in the hands of these acting pros, feels authentic. They fight - her loudly, him quietly - and then just go on as they were. It's not always pretty, but it's genuine.

Because he sincerely wants to help one of his students, Olivier starts tutoring a cute girl, played by Sarah Miles, from a poor family. Wife Signoret, with her radar up, immediately warns her too-trusting husband that Miles is "a tart" who will make trouble for him.

Miles does develop a crush on Olivier, but he, for that era, never crosses a line. You understand neglected Miles' response to Olivier's sincere attention and kindness. You equally respect his sensitivity toward her, even though you know it won't end well.

Director Peter Glenville, throughout the movie, captures the subtleties and complexity of real life in these relationships. Many movies go the easy route of creating archetypes, but Glenville does the hard work of building complicated characters with tangled motives.

From the title alone, though, you know what's coming when Olivier, on an overnight class trip, rejects Miles' advances. He sincerely tries to do it in a way to save Miles embarrassment, but a hurt teenage girl with a viperous mother isn't a combination for restraint.

The climatic trial, no spoilers coming, is well done, but the movie's real climax comes afterward during the denouement when Signoret and Olivier have their final bedroom faceoff. The surprising twist in that scene is a poignant ending to a poignant movie.

Olivier, Signoret and Miles, along with a cast of British veterans that includes Hugh Griffith as Olivier's attorney and Roland Culver as a cynical coworker of Olivier's, give this movie so much acting talent that almost every scene comes alive.

Director Glenville, with a small budget but a very good script, smartly focuses on his actors with moving close ups and mood-setting panning shots of Olivier, in particular, walking through the poor neighborhoods where he lives and works.

The kitchen sink dramas of the 1960s highlighted the post-war underclass in Britain. Term of Trial does that, but it also questions the values of a society that continues to punish a kind man like Olivier for his peaceful ideals about war and teaching.

Lost amidst the better-known kitchen sink dramas like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, The Sporting Life and a Room at the Top, Term of Trial deserves more notice today for its realistic portrayal of a battered marriage, a good man and societal hypocrisy.

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

^ Hits hard this. My youth in caste and class London is lower rung Spitalfields but quick wits
and books led the way out. Missed Larry in Term here though I've known his sainted kind. Chips and Sir also
splendid as Miss Jean Brodie's prime.
Bits and bobs but a film I am searching is Stand and Deliver. Calculus teach makes goods LA. Saw a Korean
film yesterday after exchange hrs about maths student and an older renowned maths wizard. And another
maths with Russell Crowe I want to look. His papal exorcist is out and must be interesting.

 

[Fading Fast]

The Lady Vanishes from 1938 with Margaret Lockwood, Michael Redgrave, Dame May Whitty and Paul Lukas


Hitchcock's movies echo, but each one brings something different that makes it special. The Lady Vanishes is another spy/macguffin tale, but the humor dial is turned up, which along with its almost lazy train ride, makes it a nice amble through international intrigue and romance.

Margaret Lockwood plays a young English socialite on holiday, just before her wedding, in a small European country with some girlfriends. When her train home is delayed - she's going back, the friends are staying on a bit - she gets waylaid in a nearby railroad hotel.

The hotel is crowded with train passengers including the comedy team of Charters and Caldicott, played by Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford. There's a musician, as well, played by Michael Redgrave, who, in an early meet cute, irritates the bit-snobbish Lockwood.

Being set just before the start of WWII, there's also an echo of Casablanca as several of the guests at the hotel are "suspicious looking" foreigners. Right before getting on the train the next morning, Lockwood accidentally gets bonked on the head.

With that long, humorous introduction - Wayne and Radford are typical Brits annoyed at "foreign inefficiency” as they just want to get home to see a cricket match - the train ride begins as an older governess, played by Dame May Whitty, befriends a wobbly Lockwood.

They sit in the same compartment, have tea together, but then, after Lockwood wakes up from a brief nap, Whitty is gone. Since the train hasn't stopped, Lockwood looks, but not only can't find Whitty, everyone else who she knows saw Whitty denies having seen her.

Boom, we are now in a typical Hitchcock plot as a "regular" person, Lockwood, is dropped in the middle of a mystery that we'll soon learn has a sinister angle to it. Desperate to find help, she bumps into Redgrave; they bicker, but team up to look for Whitty.

That's the set up for the heart of the movie, which is Lockwood and Redgrave flirt fighting their way through a search on a train that seems full of people trying to deceive them. Paul Lukas pops up playing a doctor who acts like an ally, but is he?

From here, the movie is Lockwood and Redgrave slowly finding clues that seem to indicate Whitty did exist, while various passengers and members of the crew deny that she did. They argue that Lockwood's head injury caused her to be confused about having seen an old lady.

It's typical Hitchcock that's well done as small details, from a discarded tea package to a finger-drawn name on a fogged-up window, become important, while "simple" scenes, like people just sitting in a passenger compartment, are tinged with mystery and danger.

All along, though, there is a lot of humor as even a baggage compartment fight Lockwood and Redgrave have with one of the bad guys is more funny than threatening. It's done in a way, however, that never slips into camp or undermines the overall threat of danger.

To tell more will give too much away, but it's no surprise that there is an international espionage angle to the mystery. There's also a macguffin, a clause in a treaty between two European countries, that will be recycled in Hitch's 1940 movie Foreign Correspondent.

The Lady Vanishes is vintage Hitchcock as so many of his classic storytelling elements are here including an innocent person tossed into an espionage mystery, a silly macguffin and comedy mixed with danger. But of course, its most important element is its romantic overlay.

Lockwood is outstanding as the sometimes flighty socialite who rises to the occasion with determination, smarts and guts. Despite many faults in his personal life, Hitchcock loved strong female leads even, for a change in this case, a brunette one.

Redgrave matches Lockwood as a spirited leading man who can be lighthearted one moment and deadly serious the next. You wonder why Hitchcock never used him again. Whitty and Lukas, acting pros through and through, elevate every one of their scenes.

Shot on sets and in the English countryside, and with a modest budget, The Lady Vanishes is one of the better train-ride movies ever made. It works as a pre-WWII espionage tale, too, but its real strength is simply its charm.

The Lady Vanishes is also one of the more-relaxing Hitchcock movies. It is better on subsequent viewings as you're no longer distracted by its quite complicated plot, so you can just enjoy the atmosphere, humor and romantic sparks between Lockwood and Redgrave.

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

^ Looks top shelf Fast. I favour 'kitcheners' and 'cozzies' that basically take a few simple recipes in hand,
selects suitable theme and runs all out with the mix. In masterly hands this is possible and Alfred Hitchcock
I believe was years ahead of his time.

 

[Fading Fast]

The 13th Letter from 1951 with Michael Rennie, Charles Boyer, Linda Darnell and Constance Smith


Director Otto Preminger set and filmed his remake of the 1940 French film Le Corbeau in a province in Quebec Canada, which gives his film a realistic "small town" intimacy and a French "feel."

The 13th Letter, though, falls firmly in the classic noir mystery genre of movies that Hollywood was making in the early 1950s, especially with a cast that includes Charles Boyer, Linda Darnell and Michael Rennie, actors who were familiar to American audiences.

Rennie plays the handsome, young and a bit aloof new doctor in town. He is respected as a professional, but he seems hesitant to form any close bonds with the single and not-so-single women interested in him.

He has, however, befriended an older doctor, played by Boyer, who runs the local hospital, even though Boyer's young wife might be one of the women interested in Rennie. Rennie also has a rough-edged relationship with a pretty, petulant patient, played by Darnell.

Then the letters start coming: anonymous "poison pen" notes sent to Rennie and others in town implying Rennie has been having affairs with several women, including Boyer's wife, played by Constance Smith.

This throws the small community - in an era when one's reputation and personal probity meant much more than they do today - into a tizzy. The suspicions cause some patients to no longer avail themselves of Rennie's professional services.

It only gets worse as subsequent letters are sent to more people, with one even accusing Rennie of violating medical ethics. When that one leads to a horrific patient reaction, the police get involved.

The people in the town also take up sides. Even Rennie's friend Boyer can't help becoming suspicious of Rennie and his wife. This all forces Rennie to tell more about his somewhat checkered past that explains why he moved to this province in the first place.

He and Darnell evolve from being antagonists to dating, but their former friction and the new pressures of the letters stress their aborning romantic relationship. It's also not helpful that Smith, Boyer's wife, who the letters say is Rennie's lover, is young and pretty.

The letters, additionally, bring out buried animosities as we learn that Smith's sister, the less-pretty sister of the two, feels that Smith stole Boyer from her. This also makes the sister a possible suspect in the search for the letter writer.

It all adds up to good noir, which Preminger shot in black and white with plenty of sharp angles and ominous shadows. Like Hitchcock did often, Preminger slowly turns an innocent and pleasant looking community into a foreboding and claustrophobic one.

As more letters come, the town's increasingly ominous atmosphere helps us see the damage suspicion can do to a small religious community as even Rennie's lack of regular church attendance is disparagingly noted.

Rennie is very good as the handsome young doctor at the center of it all as he has an innately mysterious mien. Boyer, as always, is engaging and convincing. Darnell and Smith, both strikingly pretty women, amp up the sexual and noir tension. It's an impressive cast.

The climax, no spoilers coming, is a bit convoluted and not fully believable, which undermines the overall impact of the movie. Still, with its appealing setting, good story and talented actors, The 13th Letter is an enjoyable and suspenseful mid-century noir.

Note, at one point, the movie's working title must have been "The Scarlet Pen."

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

^ Lovely Linda saved Zorro inside the chapel when she remarked his sword scabbard tipped out beneath a
friar cassock, but kept his secret. So I know she's good with the goods here.

Hitchcock directed I Confess in Montreal 1953, featured Montgomery Clift and Karl Malden in a fine tight noir.
A good second serve after The Thirteenth Letter.

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

Chasing The Win, a thoroughbred racing documentary focused on Carl Callaghan, an Irish emigre
who slept beneath the Brooklyn Bridge in New York before his break into the pinnacle of the sport of kings
as trainer for Kinsale King, winner of the Dubai Cup. Callaghan's luck waned considerably however, and his
phoenix rise is heart and soulful shown together with the harsh realities of professional thoroughbred racing.
My only criticism is that barn and backstretch milieu could have been featured more favourably instead
of a wink and nod; almost grudging bow. It's the bottom tier backstretch folk who are the actual cornerstone
of thoroughbred racing and Callaghan epitomizes the best of both tiers, trainer and backstretch.

Kinsale King's owner was an Irish physician Southern California immigrant who stabled a half dozen horses
at Hollywood Park, however his brother, a banker and financial advisor is interviewed at length, a cold ba***rd
miser with ice water coarsing his circulatory system. He alone is worth the time to watch this film.

 

[Fading Fast]

Elevator to the Gallows from 1958, French with English subtitles


It certainly helps to have Miles Davis doing the score for your film noir movie, especially when it includes a troubled woman walking the lonely streets of Paris at night with only her anguish and the haunting sounds of Davis’ trumpet to accompany her.

Elevator to the Gallows, starting with its Davis score, has so much style, it makes up for a flawed plot. You just get absorbed in the black and white beauty of mid-century Paris with its somehow pretty neon, ubiquitous cigarette smoke and smartly dressed men and women.

Real Paris could never have looked this artsy cool. Credit, then, to director Louis Malle for, in an early "French New Wave" film, creating a visual ideal that matches the movie's embodiment of the famous quote, "live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse."

A young, good-looking and in-love couple, played by Maurice Ronet and Jeanne Moreau, want nothing more than to just be together, of course, only after they kill Moreau's wealthy husband. That's the rub, though, as murder is so darn hard to get away with.

The main story centers on Ronet's attempt, as an executive in Moreau's husband's company, to kill her husband, yet to make it look like a suicide. Waiting for him at a nearby cafe is Moreau, but a small stumble in the plan's execution leads to a night of anguish.

An accidentally left-behind grappling hook used in the murder forces Ronet to immediately return to the scene of the crime. He then becomes trapped in the building's shut-down-for-the-weekend elevator, causing Moreau to become frantic when he doesn't show on time.

While Ronet is stuck in the elevator and Moreau spins, two insanely stupid teenagers - a French James Dean type and an idiot flower shop salesgirl, played by Georges Poujouly and Yori Bertin - steal Ronet's nearby waiting car.

The movie takes a weak detour into its rebel-without-a-clue subplot as the two teenagers go on a brief crime spree. A spree that includes a risqué-for-the-time stay in a motel and then a stupidly tragic end that marginally connects back to the Ronet and Moreau storyline.

The stories, and all the principals' lives, are finally tied together as the police investigate Moreau's husband's apparent suicide and the idiot kids' crimes. After a lot of suspension of disbelief, the denouement is poignantly grounded in French justice.

Moreau is the center of the movie, though, as it is her desperate anguish that gives the film its noir melancholia. She does it with a mien of despair, more than with dialogue. Her late-night walk, alone and frightened, when Ronet doesn't show, defines the movie.

Yori Bertin as the French flower shop girl, who just goes Bonnie Parker one day, also deserves mention as her character has a huge development arc to cover in a very short time, but Bertin adroitly pulls it off.

Ronet might be billed as the co-star and might have the most screen time, but along with Poujouly, the men are really just props to advance the women's narratives because Elevator to the Gallows is a woman's picture in the way only the French can do it.

Elevator to the Gallows is often cited as the first of the "French New Wave" Cinema. But whatever it's called, its beauty is its stylized mid-century Parisian cool, captured in celluloid. It's style over substance, but oh, what style.

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

^ Jeanne always pulls the wagon but she's no mule and Catherine Deneuve never eclipsed her for my pence.
Mea culpa another French croissant criminal missed. And my conscience has bothered me over an earlier
artistic masterpiece, Reed's Third Man, last seen whilst Cambridge youth bound. I do recall Joseph Cotton's
stunning capture of character but his wardrobe wear utterly stopped all with his effortless elegant nonchalance, draped overcoat topped fedora, sweater and cigarette ponder poise. Had it spades down cold.
With mature focus I'll read Greene's yarn first for good rugby then later this fall sit The Third Man down right.

 

[Edward]

Spent a couple of days in hospital after going to A&E with chest pains late Saturday night (turned out to be a touch of angina, taking it as a warning...). The wife brought me in some bits on Sunday morning to occupy my time, including my phone charger. The phone was a real game-changer; streaming existed when I last spent time in hospital, but not to the extent it does now. Very pleasant to while away time with the headphones in watching stuff on my phone. Film-wise, Deadpool 2, which I'd not caught before and was tremendously entertaining.

 

[Fading Fast]

Spent a couple of days in hospital after going to A&E with chest pains late Saturday night (turned out to be a touch of angina, taking it as a warning...). The wife brought me in some bits on Sunday morning to occupy my time, including my phone charger. The phone was a real game-changer; streaming existed when I last spent time in hospital, but not to the extent it does now. Very pleasant to while away time with the headphones in watching stuff on my phone. Film-wise, Deadpool 2, which I'd not caught before and was tremendously entertaining.

Glad it was just angina. Stay well.

 

[Fading Fast]

^ Jeanne always pulls the wagon but she's no mule and Catherine Deneuve never eclipsed her for my pence.
Mea culpa another French croissant criminal missed. And my conscience has bothered me over an earlier
artistic masterpiece, Reed's Third Man, last seen whilst Cambridge youth bound. I do recall Joseph Cotton's
stunning capture of character but his wardrobe wear utterly stopped all with his effortless elegant nonchalance, draped overcoat topped fedora, sweater and cigarette ponder poise. Had it spades down cold.
With mature focus I'll read Greene's yarn first for good rugby then later this fall sit The Third Man down right.

Those studio era stars from the '30s and '40s really knew how to wear tailored clothing.

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

Spent a couple of days in hospital after going to A&E with chest pains late Saturday night (turned out to be a touch of angina, taking it as a warning...). The wife brought me in some bits on Sunday morning to occupy my time, including my phone charger. The phone was a real game-changer; streaming existed when I last spent time in hospital, but not to the extent it does now. Very pleasant to while away time with the headphones in watching stuff on my phone. Film-wise, Deadpool 2, which I'd not caught before and was tremendously entertaining.

Stay well. Lock the drinks cabinet and leave lard still like a good lad.

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

Those studio era stars from the '30s and '40s really knew how to wear tailored clothing.
View attachment 548899

Isn't it the truth. Cotton looks to wear a knit tie above though I may be mistaken. I've never mastered the craft
of the gentleman beyond formal dress mess red jacket uniformity but I can hold my own with sweater and
Gloverall coat, yet it's school yard romp in comparison to Sir Joseph here who also played a sure foil with a
cigar or cigarette as mere prop. And didn't he tell Hedda Hopper or was it Louella Parsons he'd kick her in the
arse for sore rumour spread?

 

[Julian Shellhammer]

Rounding up the movie watching here at Shellhammer Maison du Film, it was Four Wives, 1939's visit with Priscilla Lane, Rosemary Lane, Lola Lane, and Gale Page, whom we met in Four Daughters. The sibling quartet is fumblingly overseen by papa Claude Rains, who has the smallest Claude Rains role I've ever seen, in a heavy wig and fake mustache grousing about almost anything, in a vaguely German (?) accent. Head sister Priscilla is the focus here, dealing with the possibility of marriage just months after the death of her husband. Adapted from a book by Fannie Hurst, the production has a screen play by the Epstein twins, who gave us Casablanca, and directed by Michael Curtiz (ditto). We watched to the end, despite the melodramatic soap-opera tone.

Then it was about less than half of Make Your Own Bed with Jack Carson and Jane Wyman, she the secretary of a detective agency, he a detective of same. They're engaged, waiting for Carson to get his own agency. He gets fired for goofing up, and she tries to take her annual vacation. Alan Hale, Sr. plays a rich business owner who can't keep domestic staff, and hires Wyman and Carson to serve as cook-valet-chauffer. He lassos them in by pretending to have death threats against him, Nazi spies in his mansion, and would they go undercover to find out the bad guys, and honestly, the plot and acting get worse. The humor is alternatingly strained and slapstick. We turned it off.

In the midst, it was Invention for Destruction, aka The Fabulous World of Jules Verne. From Czechoslovakia, from 1958, by Karel Zeman, it was designed to look like Victorian era wood cuts, interwoven with live action, animation, and what looks like stop-motion. Evil genius uses a scientist's powerful energy invention in a plan to take over the world. I remember seeing this on local television in my youth, and just recently stumbled across it. If you haven't seen it, it is interesting in that it is almost steampunk, yet flecked with genuine touches of character driven humor. Worth a watch.

 

[FOXTROT LAMONT]

And didn't he tell Hedda Hopper or was it Louella Parsons he'd kick her in the
arse for sore rumour spread?

---and he actually did this at a Hollywood presser. Probably hoofing it in Florsheim loafers that day.

 

[Edward]

Those studio era stars from the '30s and '40s really knew how to wear tailored clothing.
View attachment 548899

I've always thought that in part it's to do with what folks actually wore back then. A lot of modern productions, even when they get the details perfectly right, the giveaway that these are 'modern' people dressed up is that often they look like they're wearing a costume. Folks back in the day who really 'dressed like that' would of course be so natural in it... Not unlike how, I suppose, when you go to a wedding or other formal event you can usually spot who wear a suit / kilt / w.h.y. regularly and is totally comfortable in it, and who doesn't and isn't.

It's one of the reasons I think Leo Dicaprio is so great in those 40s & 50s period pieces. He does have the sort of physical look to him that makes him seem from that era, but also a lot is in the way he wears those clothes: he looks totally comfortable, like he does it all the time.

I think sometimes you can see the difference in a long-running TV show where the characters all war something atypical of the period in which it is filmed - whether historical costume or uniform or whatever. M*A*S*H or Star Trek, or some such. There's an air of "costume" in the earliest shots, then as time goes on and they inevitably spend so much time in the show wardrobe, they begin to wear it unconsciously - just like normal clothes. There's one of those immersion TV-shows that the BBC id years ago - I think it was The Victorian House? - where in the final episode it shows them returning to 21st Century clothes for the first time in weeks, and how they find the transition back odd. The father of the family talked about it specifically, as I recall.

Stay well. Lock the drinks cabinet and leave lard still like a good lad.

Thanks, yes - luckily I made a lot of the Sensible Lifestyle Changes a few years ago, which means a lot less impact now (and could quite possibly be why the diagnosis is much better than it might have been otherwise!).

 

[Edward]

Glad it was just angina. Stay well.

Thanks, yes - taking it as a warning, being careful. Stress-triggered, doctor reckons (I was told yesterday I'm now the third academic in our department in the last year to be hospitalised with a heart issue). The variety they think I have is one that's not got underlying lifestyle causes - it's a vessel in the heart spasming rather than thickening artery walls - but lifestyle, job stress particularly, is a definite trigger. My department at the university has introduced a new workload monitoring system this year, and based on crunching last year's data it flagged up that I did somewhere in the region of 136% of my assigned teaching load last year (as well as a full 100% of my admin and scholarship requirements), so I imagine that didn't help! I've already been promised more TAs as needed this year, so that's a plus. I'm not good as rule at saying no at work, so this has given me a bit more of a motivation to do that when needed.