What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

[Worf]

Not every week. I always switch between german and english synchro. Same on Alien and Aliens.

Well... we likes what we likes... enjoy!

Worf

 

[sal]

Just finished Sword in the Desert with Dana Andrew’s

 

[Fading Fast]

The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry from 1945 with George Sanders, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Ella Raines and Moyna MacGill

It's a bit noir, bit soap opera, bit horror and a bit Hitchcock and, other than its off-putting ending, it works pretty well as strong acting and directing carry its, sometimes, thin story over its weaker parts.

Middle-aged bachelor George Sanders is a senior designer for a clothing factory in a small town where all that's left of his once-wealthy family is he and his two sisters who live together in the family's big old house. While a bit quirky, as adult siblings living together will be, all is going okay enough in their lives until a female fashion designer, (ridiculously striking-looking) Ella Raines, from New York is hired onto the factory's design team.

When Sanders and Raines' dating turns into a serious relationship, one sister, ditsy Moyna MacGill, is happy for them, but layabout and snobbish Geraldine Fitzgerald (she has a nice lilting echo to her full name) is outward supportive while frantically trying to undermine the relationship as she wants nothing in her life to change, in particular, having her brother there to dote on her.

Up to now, the story is a by-the-numbers, but engaging, soap opera, as Sanders is outstanding as a confused middle-aged man who is, one believes, shocked to find himself in a relationship with any woman, let alone a young, pretty and vibrant Raines. Director Robert Siodmak smartly creates two worlds for Sanders: one is oppressive in his overly-furnished and dark Victorian with his two dead-weight sisters stuck in the family's past glory and the other is all sunshine and sparkle with young and beautiful (and brainy) Raines.

Good-guy and weak Sanders, now engaged to Raines, tries to merge these two worlds, but good luck with that as Fitzgerald employs every passive-aggressive move possible to prevent the marriage while Raines, realizing the quicksand of that house with the sisters, refuses to marry him unless they live separate from his siblings.

Here, this soap opera, quickly but effectively, slides into horror / noir / Hitchcock world as poison (which cup has the poison?), a dead body (announced with a resounding thump), a trial, a death sentence and a last-minute confession all speed by. To say more about any of that or about the questionable switcheroo ending would give too much away.

The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry succeeds because all the actors - Sanders in particular - more than pull their weight and the director only slows it down in a few critical scenes. He also keeps it light enough to be fun, but like Hitchcock, he can, almost without you noticing, quickly shift into nail-biting tension and, even, murder. It's no Oscar winner, but it does what good movies do: it provides an hour-plus of solid entertainment.


N.B., Later in his career, Sanders would almost always play a highly confident, usually smarmy, manipulator, so it's interesting to see him convincingly play an insecure and bumbling man so well. And Ella Raines is one of those Hollywood mysteries as she seems to have had everything needed - looks, talent, screen personality - to be a major star, but alas, it didn't happened.

 

[Doctor Strange]

I also watched this recently and liked it. Like you, I was fascinated to see George Sanders play such an atypically weak character.

I'm working my way through several Almodovar films DVR'd from TCM on Sunday overnights. Last night's was The Flower of My Secret. It was good, but not quite first-rank Almodovar.

 

[Harp]

^^^Another flick superbly reviewed, annotated to must-see list.
I remain transfixed a la jeune Dorothy Malone. Twisted silk steel and SEX spectacle spectacular appeal.
And vaguely recall seeing what I believe to have been Asphalt Jungle. Book another ticket, also read.
Love a well written criminal heist, fence, local yokel jack leg lawyer up to his eyeballs in whiskey/women.

 

[Fading Fast]

^^^Another flick superbly reviewed, annotated to must-see list.
I remain transfixed a la jeune Dorothy Malone. Twisted silk steel and SEX spectacle spectacular appeal.
And vaguely recall seeing what I believe to have been Asphalt Jungle. Book another ticket, also read.
Love a well written criminal heist, fence, local yokel jack leg lawyer up to his eyeballs in whiskey/women.

IMHO, the Malone bookshop scene is the best combination seduction-pickup scene ever done in a movie.

 

[Fading Fast]

Detour from 1945 with Tom Neal and Ann Savage

For this first-time viewer, it was amazing to see how many iconic film-noir images came out of Detour: it was like discovering the fountainhead of film-noir image zeitgeist.

To be sure, there are earlier and better noir movies, but this sixty-eight-minute immersion in a man seeing his life shattered to pieces in front of him might be the best $30,000 ever spent making a movie. Inflation adjust all you want, that's still a tiny amount of money to make a movie.

And it took thirty-four years, but I have now found a woman who scares me more than Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction.

Calling Ann Savage a femme fatale, at least in this movie, is like calling a lion a kitten as female-lead Savage (yes a stage name, but seriously accurate) is a feral force of evil. She doesn't lure men to their destruction as a femme fatale; instead, she completely dominates men with a vicious and all encompassing bullying that belies any stereotype one has of the portrayal of women of that era.

It all starts with Tom Neal, a struggling New York City piano player who decides to hitchhike to California to meet up with his girlfriend who is trying to break into Hollywood. After catching a ride with a prosperous gambler who Tom, as the unreliable narrator of the story, claims died accidentally in the car, he takes on the man's identity as he thinks the police won't believe he is innocent.

Down the same road, in possibly the worst decision a man ever made in a movie, he picks up a female hitchhiker, Ann Savage. She immediately recognizes the car as she had ridden with the gambler earlier, puts two and two together, and then bullies and blackmails Neal into doing what she wants under threat of exposure.

Not satisfied with only taking the gambler's bankroll and car off of Neal (as she says, her cut will be one-hundred percent), she hatches a crazy scheme to have Neal pose as the gambling man's son to claim a huge inheritance. It's a hopeless plan that Neal, now, basically, Savage's prisoner in a hotel room, can't talk her out of.

In a perfectly prurient moment (blink and you'll miss it) that slipped by the censors, Savage, drunk and sweating in their hot and claustrophobic hotel room, late at night, propositions Neal for some hate sex, but he rejects her (I'd have been scared to say yes or no to her). No surprise, this infuriates her more, but since her only settings are infuriated and more infuriated, he couldn't win.

(Spoiler alerts) From here, Neal accidentally kills Savage - assuming he's recounting this part honestly (I doubt it) - and, shortly later, is picked up by the police as he wanders down a desolate highway. That last part felt code-required, as the better ending, and the one both more noir and more consistent with the story, would be that he goes on wandering, but looking over his shoulder for the police.

It's an insanely fast and stripped-to-its-core noir story of an average man who, by accident or one bad impulsive act, tips his life into a downward spiral accelerated by, possibly, the most arrantly evil woman ever in noirland.

Detour can also be seen as the most film-noir feminist movie ever made in the Golden Era: Mildred Peirce baked pies to gain her independence; Savage takes men on, on their own terms, and by dint of harrowing presence and unholy disposition overwhelms them for her own purposes. And while all that is going on in this dark gem of a movie, one iconic film-noir image after another speeds by.


If someone asked me to show them classic film noir in one photo, this pic would be near the top of the list.

 

[Harp]

^^^Ann Savage, imagine her cast as the Beautiful Wicked Witch of the West in Wizard of Oz.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Der Totmacher (1995).
Götz George, Jürgen Hentsch!

Fritz Haarmann...

 

[Edward]

I introduced our daughters and my wife to that classic from 1979 - Alien.

Freaked them out, and not having seen it myself in decades, was really impressed by how well it stands up. We saw the 2003 Ridley Scott director's version. I have the four main films in a blu-ray collection, got it for $10 CAD having spent more than $50 at a local shop.

Also have Prometheus, the sort of prequel. I can see now the links between the two.

Next week - Buckaroo Banzai Adventures Across the 8th Dimension!

I had a friend at school whose mother was heavily pregnant with his younger brother when she first saw Alien....

 

[Harp]

^^^Ann Savage, imagine her cast as the Beautiful Wicked Witch of the West in Wizard of Oz.

A bit tongue-in-cheek, but further reflection intrigues, teases thought. Margaret Hamilton's witchcraft
(as memory serves name) was spot on, but I always felt a little too typecast the proverbial broom rider....
Now Ann Savage as the Wicked woman is witchcraft against type. A chaste yet still sensuous, tincture.
Salacious clean sweeping....

 

[MisterCairo]

Just finished Sword in the Desert with Dana Andrew’s

With Dana Andrew's what?

;-)

 

[MisterCairo]

I had a friend at school whose mother was heavily pregnant with his younger brother when she first saw Alien....

I bet that got her thinking odd thoughts...

 

[Trenchfriend]

What was the US Army's reaction on the movie, back in 1981?

 

[Harp]

What was the US Army's reaction on the movie, back in 1981?

Warum diese spezielle Frage stellen Trenchfreund?

 

[Harp]

Detour, a noir vortex which features vixen Ann Savage as the woman of your desire and dread.
The thespian opposite her, Tom Neal was later prosecuted for killing his wife.
After viewing this Fading Fast reviewed film, I surfed net for some background and found an excellent
noir psychological analysis summary said flick; which further cast laurels toward this onyx noir gemstone.

If you are intrigued be so inclined to see a man stave his soul through Lucifer's pike wielded by a woman.

 

[Zombie_61]

What was the US Army's reaction on the movie, back in 1981?

Rumor has it the U.S. Army was very helpful and cooperative while they were filming Stripes, which surprised Director Ivan Reitman because the military personnel in the movie were depicted as buffoons. I've never heard or read what they thought of the finished product.

 

[Harp]

I've never heard or read what they thought of the finished product.

A team once set a VC tiger trap with a quickly laid L ambush configuration, coupla claymore mines
and two M-60 machine guns. Full wolf moon. Humid, rain. Lousy crap had to be done, so it was over
under ten seconds. Silence. A thunder in silence. Wait the moon, fog burn off. No, check out early.
Foggy dawn showed six dead tigers. The finished product. Six tigers. Real cats, deaderin hell.
Stalkin these Americans.
The production duly reported as six enemy dead.
Some ass...e G2 colonel wanted pictures of dead. Pictures taken as ordered.
Never heard or read what they thought of the finished product.

 

[Touchofevil]

The Dig on Netflix. A nice movie. Good cast, good acting, and nice cinematography. It was definitely worth the watch.

 

[Edward]

The Dig on Netflix. A nice movie. Good cast, good acting, and nice cinematography. It was definitely worth the watch.

Aero tweed suit as well, I believe.