What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

[AbbaDatDeHat]

Being ex-Army I concur. The only people that talk longingly of war are those that have never tasted it, seen it or lived through it. The original version of "All Quiet on the Western Front" is a masterpiece only matched possibly by "Paths of Glory". Having read several books on WWI and it's cost in lives, treasure and Crowns, it's hard to believe the same crew were right back at it less than 20 years later. Amazing.

Worf

Greetings All: The Canadian movie “Passchendaele” starring, written, directed and produced by Paul Gross in 2008 presents the utter horror of WW1 as well. A movie that will take the glory out of an unglorious task beyond one’s imagination. Wars are fought and won but battles are always lost.
Be well. Bowen

 

[Julian Shellhammer]

"His Gal Friday" is chockablock with one liners. I picked this one up on my New Year's Day viewing:

Grant's character is trying to get Russell's character - his former wife from their combustable but, clearly, passionate marriage - to write a story for his newspaper so he offers to buy an insurance policy from her fiancee as payment / inducement (what a different era - all three of them would end up in jail today for that move) but Russell doesn't trust Grant will follow through on the bargain so she wants Grant's check for the policy to be certified.

Grant: All right, the check will be certified. [sarcastically adding] Want my fingerprints?

Russell: No thanks, I've still got those.
​

I'm surprised that one made it past the censors.

Have you seen "One, Two, Three" form '61 starring James Cagney? He puts on a one-man speed-dialogue tour de force.

Indeed, One, Two, Three is a Cold War screwball comedy, if such a thing exists. Most folks don't know about this movie. You're right, Cagney machine-guns Billy Wilder's and I.A.L. Diamond's script at light speed.

 

[Fading Fast]

"The Day the Earth Stood Still" '51 - it has been so many years since I've seen it, that I had forgotten just how good it is

• Patricia Neal is as top-notch an actor as Spencer Tracy (I don't know how to pay her a higher compliment as he never seems to be acting, nor does she, they just are the character but without any pretentious "method" acting)
  • Why was she not a bigger star?
  • She's beautiful in a just slightly off way - did this hurt her?
  • "Hud," "The Subject was Roses," "The Fountainhead" and on and on - she only gives real performances

• My only quibble with an otherwise outstanding script is the "we are smart and superior because we see that mankind would be better off without war" trope. Of course it would, but saying that is easy (not smart or superior), finding a way to implement it takes smarts that no one yet has seemed to have

• The visual of the movie is so early '50s Art Deco / Superman perfect that it practically looks like a modern period piece made in B&W as almost all the details are spot-on to the era

 

[Doctor Strange]

One of the great seminal SF films. Some things you didn't credit:

• taut direction by Robert Wise
• fantastic score by Bernard Herrmann (with innovative use of theremin, electric guitar, other amplified instruments, vibes, multiple pianos, etc.)
• subtle lead performance by Michael Rennie
• dear Sam Jaffe

 

[Doctor Strange]

The Light Between Oceans, recent film set in post-WWI Australia with Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander. Beautifully shot, and the leads have powerful romantic chemistry, but the problematical story is ultimately not very satisfying.

 

[Fading Fast]

One of the great seminal SF films. Some things you didn't credit:

• taught direction by Robert Wise
• fantastic score by Bernard Herrmann (with innovative use of theremin, electric guitar, other amplified instruments, vibes, multiple pianos, etc.)
• subtle lead performance by Michael Rennie
• dear Sam Jaffe

Agree on all.

 

[AmateisGal]

Destroyer with Edward G. Robinson and Glenn Ford. Yes, a propaganda film from 1943, but still highly enjoyable! I always like seeing Robinson in atypical roles - i.e. not the villains or bad guys.

 

[PeterGunnLives]

I'm watching Laura, with Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews.

I love this movie!

 

[Benzadmiral]

One of the great seminal SF films. Some things you didn't credit:

• taut direction by Robert Wise
• fantastic score by Bernard Herrmann (with innovative use of theremin, electric guitar, other amplified instruments, vibes, multiple pianos, etc.)
• subtle lead performance by Michael Rennie
• dear Sam Jaffe

DtESS is based loosely on a short story, "Farewell to the Master," by one Harry Bates from the pulp fiction days of Astounding Science Fiction. Very loosely; I read the story many years ago, and only when I re-watched DtESS did I see the few elements the screenwriters retained.

 

[Benzadmiral]

Sunset Boulevard turned up on Saturday night on my local PBS channel, and I found myself glued and watching to the creepy end. Two details I never noticed before:

1) The rear driver's side door on Norma's Isotta-Fraschini carries her monogram, N.D.; and

2) William Holden's voice-over narration throughout, and often when his character Joe speaks, is hushed, almost as if he were talking on the phone to someone while trying to keep others from hearing.

 

[HanauMan]

I watched an old childhood favorite today, namely the 1964 movie Robinson Crusoe on Mars.

As a child I liked the entire movie. However on revisiting this film again I only really enjoyed the first half, up until the arrival of the 'aliens', which basically dealt with the survival struggle of the main character and the little monkey Mona. After that, a stupid, but fun, film got even more stupid!

I really like the Death Valley landscapes that were used in the film; they were one of the reasons for me visiting Death Valley on a road trip a while back. It was a bit strange to see Adam West getting killed, don't know why he didn't get to carry the entire film.

 

[Fading Fast]

Sunset Boulevard turned up on Saturday night on my local PBS channel, and I found myself glued and watching to the creepy end. Two details I never noticed before:

1) The rear driver's side door on Norma's Isotta-Fraschini carries her monogram, N.D.; and

2) William Holden's voice-over narration throughout, and often when his character Joe speaks, is hushed, almost as if he were talking on the phone to someone while trying to keep others from hearing.

It is an incredible movie that, IMHO, get better with more viewings, in part, as you pick up on details like you note above that you miss the first few times.

While I think he did a wonderful job in the role, Holden always seemed miscast a bit to me in it as the role called for more of a pretty boy and less of a manly man. Holden just doesn't look like a kept man. Montgomery Clift would have been perfect.

But holy cow does Swanson give an incredible performance as does the crazy Erich von Stroheim. Also, Wilder's use of color - the darkness of Swanson's world and the lightness of Betty's for contrast was genus.

As I know you are a big classic TV fan, I'm sure you've seen "The Twilight Zone's" blatant rip off episode "The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine."

 

[AmateisGal]

I'm watching Laura, with Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews.

I love this movie!

This is probably my all-time favorite movie. I've watched it so many times I've lost count. But it's SO GOOD!

 

[Benzadmiral]

It is an incredible movie that, IMHO, get better with more viewings, in part, as you pick up on details like you note above that you miss the first few times.

While I think he did a wonderful job in the role, Holden always seemed miscast a bit to me in it as the role called for more of a pretty boy and less of a manly man. Holden just doesn't look like a kept man. Montgomery Clift would have been perfect.

But holy cow does Swanson give an incredible performance as does the crazy Erich von Stroheim. Also, Wilder's use of color - the darkness of Swanson's world and the lightness of Betty's for contrast was genus.

As I know you are a big classic TV fan, I'm sure you've seen "The Twilight Zone's" blatant rip off episode "The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine."

I must have during one of the retro TV weeks with TZ a few years back. It's not one of the stories that jump out at me when I think Twilight Zone, though. Serling was not adapting something that was an old, forgotten "retro" movie, too; there were only 9 years between Sunset and the TZ episode. Apparently, with only 30 minutes of episode, he left out the Joe Gillis character.

The peculiar thing about Sunset is that I only saw it after I'd already absorbed so many of the parodies that Carol Burnett and others did on it in the Sixties and Seventies. So when I first saw the actual movie, I couldn't quite take it seriously. (As if the only knowledge you had of Gone With the Wind was the Carol Burnett-as-Scarlett and Harvey Korman-as-Rhett parody.) It was only later, after the parodies had faded in my memory, that I could look at the original film and see it as Billy Wilder intended.

 

[Worf]

I got roped into seeing "Jumanji - Welcome to the Jungle" - I thought I was going to have to gouge my eyes out ( I HATE Kevin Hart and I do mean HATE and I also believe Da Rock is a graduate of the Chuck Norris school of ahem.. acting) but I had a great time! Obviously written by someone who knows something about today's youth the film was fast paced, funny as hell and very entertaining. Some of the moral points were a bit "on the nose" but I found only one bit of dialogue diabetically cloying. The script was great, the acting solid and the action fast. You could do a lot worse if looking for something to take pre-teens to see while keeping your sanity!

Worf

 

[AmateisGal]

I got roped into seeing "Jumanji - Welcome to the Jungle" - I thought I was going to have to gouge my eyes out ( I HATE Kevin Hart and I do mean HATE and I also believe Da Rock is a graduate of the Chuck Norris school of ahem.. acting) but I had a great time! Obviously written by someone who knows something about today's youth the film was fast paced, funny as hell and very entertaining. Some of the moral points were a bit "on the nose" but I found only one bit of dialogue diabetically cloying. The script was great, the acting solid and the action fast. You could do a lot worse if looking for something to take pre-teens to see while keeping your sanity!

Worf

So glad you liked it! I took my mom and daughter to see this on Christmas Day and enjoyed it immensely.

 

[Doctor Strange]

I must have during one of the retro TV weeks with TZ a few years back. It's not one of the stories that jump out at me when I think Twilight Zone, though. Serling was not adapting something that was an old, forgotten "retro" movie, too; there were only 9 years between Sunset and the TZ episode. Apparently, with only 30 minutes of episode, he left out the Joe Gillis character.

Okay, I am not going to defend "The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine" for being partly inspired by Sunset Boulevard,... but I am going to inject a little reminder about 1959. Sunset Boulevard had had a successful theatrical run nine years earlier... and disappeared. In 1959, most big Hollywood studios hadn't yet sold their films for broadcast TV airings. Of course, this was decades before cable, VHS, DVD. And it wasn't like Sunset Boulevard was running twice a year on TCM, could be streamed from Netflix, could be looked up on Wiki, or was constantly being citied in Internet forums like TFL. Much of Twilight Zone's initial audience probably hadn't seen it. Or if they had, it was a single viewing nearly a decade earlier: they certainly didn't know it intimately like we do.

So before you accuse Serling of ripping off a classic film, please note that that classic film was nowhere as well known as it is now when he wrote that episode. Just sayin'...

(Also, it's a darn good early Zone episode - only the fourth one - that benefits from its feature-film-veteran talent. Excellent performance by Ida Lupino, music by the great Franz Waxman [who had scored Sunset Boulevard!], direction by thirties/forties pro Mitchell Leisen.)

 

[LizzieMaine]

Yep. Pre-1948 major studio films were on TV starting in 1955-56, but it wasn't until 1964 that NBC licensed the post-1948 Paramount library for television, and then only for special "Night At The Movies" presentations. These films didn't start showing up in local syndicated movie packages until the 1970s.

 

[Doctor Strange]

Indeed. I was one of those kids eagerly watching the broadcast TV premieres of films like Hitchcock's fifties masterworks on NBC Saturday Night at the Movies back then. (I remember being pretty baffled by Vertigo, which wasn't yet considered one of Hitch's greatest films, but a confusing misfire.) And then there were the cut-nearly-to-incomprehensibility-to-fit presentations daily on ABC's 4:30 Movie, which gave nearly 30 minutes of its 90-minute slot to commercials!

And as we've discussed before, important silent and foreign films were turning up on pre-PBS educational stations like NYC's WNET/13, and even in late night shows on local stations. (I think it was WWOR/9 that had a foreign film festival series at 11:30 Sunday nights.) You could (and I did!) see great stuff... but it was always on the station's schedule, not yours. Very, VERY different from now!

 

[LizzieMaine]

A company called Janus Films, which is still around today, distributed a great package of British films of the '30s and '40s during the '70s, mostly to PBS stations, and you saw all kinds of unique things there -- Ealing comedies, Jessie Matthews musicals, early Hitchcock, you name it. I can remember staying up late one night to see Anny Ondra in "Blackmail," which is one of those films that I only saw once and there are still images from it in my head -- the hallucination of the stabbing knife appearing on the big electric sign, brrrrrr....

These types of pictures got quite a lot of play on 1950s television in the US, before the major studios unloaded their pre-1948 libraries, but TV Guide always priggishly identified them as "British" in the listings so that viewers wouldn't be disturbed by the exotic accents and adult themes.