What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

[Touchofevil]

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Harper from 1966 with Paul Newman, Lauren Bacall, Julie Harris and Janet Leigh

Harper is a bit of a hot mess, but a strong performance by Paul Newman holds this 1960s version of the classic 1940s noir-detective movie together. While there's, thankfully, all but no 1960s camp here, some of the decade's later new-age and hippie stuff seeps in to muddle the noir visuals, but that was reality in the second half of the decade.

Newman is a torn-and-frayed private detective - he's Bogey in The Maltese Falcon adjusted to 1960s cultural norms. Like Bogey, he's got a moral code that isn't Boy-Scout approved, but still, it's not bad and Newman, as did Bogey, tries to honor it.

Kicking off with an inside-Hollywood echo of The Big Sleep, Lauren Bacall hires Newman to find her missing, wealthy husband. Bacall, and almost everyone who knows her husband - his lascivious teenage daughter, his pilot and his former mistress - seem to be hoping Newman will find a corpse at the end of his search.

When that search reveals that Bacall's husband has been kidnapped, Newman drives his cool beat-up Porsche, which like him, seems held together by Bondo, all over the greater LA area trying to put the pieces together.

This leads him to a complicated-as-heck kidnapping strategy that includes a spiritual cult with a shady leader (do cults have any other kind of leaders?), a jazz clubs with a strung-out junkie singer (Julie Harris), oil fields used by the mob to "hide the bodies" and, in some kind of tangential connection, an illegal immigrant labor scheme.

It all somewhat comes together at the end if you think real hard, but for most of the movie you're just trying to catch up to Newman in figuring this one out. Even he seems to be throwing a lot of punches in the dark; still, he's several steps ahead of the plodding police.

The good in this one is not the Rube-Goldberg plot, but Newman doing the cool, disaffected private-investigator thing. This includes getting beat up a few times, aggressively tweaking the police and unenthusiastically shooting some of the bad guys. It also includes a wonderfully real, late-night booty call to his divorcing-him wife, Janet Leigh (stuffed into her jeans), who clearly still wants Newman in her...umm, life.

In a perfect mashup of film noir and later-sixties' zeitgeist, the end is, literally and philosophically, an amoral shrug of the shoulders that (minor spoiler alert) lets one of the bad guys go free, but it kinda makes sense.

Had a half hour of Harper's two hours of run time been left on the cutting-room floor, nothing much would have been lost. But despite its shortcomings, it's still good to see the iconic noir-detective torch picked up in the 1960s by Newman to later be handed off to Jack Nicholson in the 1970s classic Chinatown.

I enjoy Harper enough, but only because Harper (the detective) is the Ross MacDonald character, Lew Archer. MacDonald is one of my favorite authors. Sadly, Harper (the movie) doesn’t measure up well to MacDonald’s much more entertaining stories.

 

[Fading Fast]

The Old Maid from 1939 with Bette Davis, Mariam Hopkins and Donald Crisp

A young man from a "good" family is too poor to marry his society girlfriend. When she marries another man for money, he, in frustration, has an affair with his former society girlfriend's cousin (odder things have happened).

Out of this comes a secret birth (the cousin went out west "for her health" for several months), followed by a cover-up involving the cousin running an orphanage when she returns.

Years later, in an elaborate ruse, the baby, now a young girl, is adopted by her biological mother's cousin (the society girlfriend of many years ago), so as to give the girl a "proper" name.

This entire kit and caboodle required two decades of lies, feints and evasions that embittered the cousins and left a young woman, the "ba***rd" baby, ignorant of her own parentage.

Ah, the good old days. Today, we, pretty much, don't care about any of these former social conventions. Instead, we often celebrate the same behaviours that were once so disgraceful. Whatever your view of our new standards (overall, I'm in the camp they are better, but still, we could use more respect for self restraint and personal responsibility today), the old rules and norms made for much better storytelling.

Golden Era Hollywood milked the heck out this opportunity. Since the social rules seemed more elaborate and restrictive in the "Old South," many movies were set in some sort of "generic South" of the 1800s where a woman showing too much ankle would be horsewhipped in the public square (of course she wouldn't, but you get the point).

The above is pretty much the story and context of The Old Maid where Bette Davis is the biological mother who gives up her "ba***rd" baby to be adopted by wealthy and socially respectable cousin Mariam Hopkins as Davis becomes "auntie" to her own daughter. Davis then watches her child grow closer to her now legal mother, Hopkins, over the years, leading the two cousins to spend the next couple of decades living under one roof in mutual hate.

There are a bunch of other small twists and turns to the story all adding up to fantastic melodrama on steroids. Seriously, the writers have no shame in this one, but if you go with it, it's got some great jaw-dropping moments and it's got Bette Davis.

Davis can pretty much do anything on screen (but hold an accent). Here, she's at the top of her game showing a range of emotions with a flash of those famous eyes, nuanced facial expressions and her withering voice - it is a tour de force performance despite the saponaceous material. While Mariam Hopkins holds her own as the cousin who all but takes Davis' baby form her, this is Davis' movie from beginning to end.

Warner Bros., in particular, loved these "Old South" melodramas, The Old Maid, Jezebel, Little Foxes, etc., knowing that Davis could bring gravitas to even the most salaciously juicy of plots. Warner Bros. was right. In the hands of a lesser actress, The Old Maid might crumble under the weight of its own histrionics, but Davis' talent more than holds it together.

 

[Harp]

I actually enjoyed The Two Jakes, but that might be because I really like Chinatown. It was nowhere as entertaining, but I have enjoyed worse.

The original Chinatown, a tough nut to crack to begin with and an even tougher finished product to top.
I also think the 1930s time setting is unique in so many ways. All of which to my Irish peasant perspective
should have warned the pros to tread lightly-or not at all-here. I strongly suspect that a dearth of saleable
script material and Jack thinking he had the directorial chops to handle it hit the FAN.
Jakes turned out a helluva disappointment with Jack lookin like he didn't know Jack.
Couldawouldashoulda just left this tiger alone. Or, Eastwood might've had a go. I think Polanski directed
Chinatown, too bad he wasn't around-with the right material and the right guy a good sequel might have
been seen. On the other hand, there is something to be said about leaving a classic alone.

 

[MisterCairo]

Movie night last night we introduced the girls to the world of Bond. James Bond.

Casino Royale. Daniel Craig and Eva Green. What a blast!

 

[Fading Fast]

Movie night last night we introduced the girls to the world of Bond. James Bond.

Casino Royale. Daniel Craig and Eva Green. What a blast!

Sounds like fun, good for you guys. Do you plan to take them back to the beginning with Connery or would they not enjoy that?

 

[AmateisGal]

Movie night last night we introduced the girls to the world of Bond. James Bond.

Casino Royale. Daniel Craig and Eva Green. What a blast!

An incredible movie. Daniel Craig totally reinvigorated the Bond franchise. I'm looking forward to seeing his final Bond film, and I'm curious who they'll get to be Bond next!

 

[AmateisGal]

The Winning Team, a biographical film with Doris Day and Ronald Reagan about the baseball player Grover Cleveland Alexander who was from Nebraska.

 

[Julian Shellhammer]

Mannequin (1937) with Joan Crawford, Spencer Tracy, and Alan Curtis. Crawford wants out of her poverty-stricken New York family and life, and marries fellow Hester Street dweller Eddie (Alan Curtis) as a ticket to happiness. This being the 1930s, and Crawford being Crawford, melodrama, heartache, and emotional intensity quickly follow. Spencer Tracy plays a big part in the preceding story line.
The Missus liked it, and it made easing into Friday night enjoyable.

 

[Fading Fast]

The Age of Consent from 1932 with Dorothy Wilson, Richard Cromwell and John Haliday

This is what pre-code movies are all about. Set in a generic Midwest college, The Age of Consent is no rah-rah college musical or happy sorority-house-party movie like Hollywood's assembly line would stamp out with regularity in the second half of the decade. Instead, it's an honest look at the taut sexual relations at college in the early thirties.

Dorothy Wilson and Richard Cromwell are the young college lovers who fight out of frustration as they, simply put, want to have sex but believe, based on the conventions of the day, they shouldn't. So they continue to see other people and only end up making themselves jealous and unhappy.

They debate quitting school and getting married, but realize leaving college without a degree isn't a smart move either. One night, while they're on the outs, Richard walks a waitress friend home, they get drunk and have sex - yup, that's exactly what happens.

The girl's father walks in afterwards (thank God, not sooner) and has Richard arrested as his daughter is a minor (she's seventeen). The father wants Richard to "do the right thing" and marry his daughter or he wants him prosecuted and sent to jail. Holy smokes - right? This is no "are we going to win the 'big game'" or "will he ask me to the 'spring dance'" college movie.

The conclusion, involving a car accident and hospital scene, forces everyone to reflect hard on his or her beliefs. The waitress begins to buck her father; the father reexamines his religious views; Richard and Dorothy consider anew the value of their love and a few of the older faculty members see relationships, life and conventions in a fresh light.

Sure, the style of the movie is old fashioned and some of the moral issues seem outdated to us today as we've settled most of these questions (with the help of movies like Age of Consent), but you can feel the intensity of the contradictions and distress these young men and women faced back then.

With the enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code by the end of 1934, issues like these would be stripped out of or highly palliated in movies for the next several decades. This only makes these pre-code movies, clunky as they can sometimes be, more valuable for their realistic look at the moral and social issues of the thirties.


What's going on here ↓? Dorothy and Richard just had a fight, so Dorothy is going on a date with another boy, but she knows Richard is watching so she flashes some gam (note her look-back).

What happens next? Angry-and-jealous Richard walks home with his waitress friend and all goes horribly wrong from there.

 

[BobHufford]

The Winning Team, a biographical film with Doris Day and Ronald Reagan about the baseball player Grover Cleveland Alexander who was from Nebraska.

Premiered in my home town! Springfield, Missouri -- June 8, 1952. It didn't hurt that President Truman was there the same day (on the reviewing stand in the background) for the 35th Division military reunion.

 

[belfastboy]

Sprung for the full $7 rental of "News of the World"....often a waste of money BUT I really enjoyed the movie. Hanks was stellar, the role was right in his 'everyman' wheelhouse and he handles it well....Hanks at his best. The young girl was great. The movie itself was not ground breaking or momentous in any way but it was an engaging story delivered very well.

 

[MikeKardec]

Just saw No Escape, a thriller starring Owen Wilson, Lake Bell and Pierce Brosnan, for the second time and was reminded what a great little film it is. A young engineer/executive and his family move to a nameless southeast Asian country only to find they have arrived on the eve of something like a revolution. Targeted not only as westerners but for other reasons they must attempt to flee to safety. Super simple ... and that leave plenty of time for the exciting details. Owen Wilson is quite good, Lake Bell always excellent in the few things she does, Pierce Brosnan stands out as a boozy and uncouth veteran of a certain sort of "western aid" to the developing world who has both sold out yet retains some form of honor and a great deal of bravery.

No compromises, it works perfectly on it's, probably modest, budget. The single almost unbelievable moment in it, a jump across rooftops, is played SO well it puts you right on the edge of your seat. The action and character building accelerates throughout. The locations are perfect, no Hollywood glamour or artificial grunge. The portrayal of an unfolding coup and possibly successful insurrection is a slow burn and quite realistic. Definitely worth a view!

 

[MikeKardec]

On the other hand, there is something to be said about leaving a classic alone.

The Two Jakes: Worth noting is that this was sort of a split between a sequel and a remake, attempting to tell the same story but this time about oil. Personally, I don't like that split. I'll take one or the other but both in the same boat doesn't work out well ... at least in this case. That said, I never liked Nicholson in this role. While I thought that his swanky, preening, full of himself, private eye was an interesting choice, it would have been a better fit for another plot, like one about Hollywood. Make the man confront his own shallow vanity. It was okay in Chinatown, where you weren't really asked to like him, but (maybe because he directed Jakes) I thought the approach here was confused. Kudos, however, for the inspired casting of Meg Tilly who, though she looks nothing like the girl in Chinatown is very convincing as the adult daughter of Fay Dunaway and convincing as someone who grew up in horrifying and confusing circumstances and is making the best of it. You want to protect her and that saves some of Nicholson's performance.

 

[MikeKardec]

Monsters: A compromised photojournalist is asked to retrieve his boss's daughter from southern Mexico before travel ends during the migration season arrives for some gigantic alien creatures that have been breeding there for the past several years. You have to cut the film some slack over lame excuses for the lack of air travel but beyond that it's kind of wonderful.
Like No Escape a GREAT, non Hollywood, portrayal of the developing world and even does a terrific job capturing the complete aplomb with which its Mexican characters accept and creatively deal with the multi pronged disaster that has befallen them. When you see a film like this you see what true creativity can do (shot and to a certain extent improvised on wonderful "real" locations, the director spent a couple of years doing most of the CGI himself) rather than attempting to fake everything.

 

[MisterCairo]

Sounds like fun, good for you guys. Do you plan to take them back to the beginning with Connery or would they not enjoy that?

At some point. We figured they may not appreciate the older films, but as we expand our collection we will get them up to speed!

We have the collection of the four Craig films in ultra hi def blu-ray.

 

[Harp]

The Two Jakes: Worth noting is that this was sort of a split between a sequel and a remake, attempting to tell the same story but this time about oil. Personally, I don't like that split. I'll take one or the other but both in the same boat doesn't work out well ... at least in this case. That said, I never liked Nicholson in this role. While I thought that his swanky, preening, full of himself, private eye was an interesting choice, it would have been a better fit for another plot, like one about Hollywood. Make the man confront his own shallow vanity. It was okay in Chinatown, where you weren't really asked to like him, but (maybe because he directed Jakes) I thought the approach here was confused. Kudos, however, for the inspired casting of Meg Tilly who, though she looks nothing like the girl in Chinatown is very convincing as the adult daughter of Fay Dunaway and convincing as someone who grew up in horrifying and confusing circumstances and is making the best of it. You want to protect her and that saves some of Nicholson's performance.

Been awhile since last seen but Jakes fell flat line drudge, a two-bit soft boiled egg. Should have left alone.

In the original I thought Jack a convincing private eye, but the sequel flopped, all bad and not just a tad.

 

[Harp]

View attachment 322061
The Age of Consent from 1932 with Dorothy Wilson, Richard Cromwell and John Haliday

This is what pre-code movies are all about. Set in a generic Midwest college, The Age of Consent is no rah-rah college musical or happy sorority-house-party movie like Hollywood's assembly line would stamp out with regularity in the second half of the decade. Instead, it's an honest look at the taut sexual relations at college in the early thirties.

Dorothy Wilson and Richard Cromwell are the young college lovers who fight out of frustration as they, simply put, want to have sex but believe, based on the conventions of the day, they shouldn't. So they continue to see other people and only end up making themselves jealous and unhappy.

They debate quitting school and getting married, but realize leaving college without a degree isn't a smart move either. One night, while they're on the outs, Richard walks a waitress friend home, they get drunk and have sex - yup, that's exactly what happens.

The girl's father walks in afterwards (thank God, not sooner) and has Richard arrested as his daughter is a minor (she's seventeen). The father wants Richard to "do the right thing" and marry his daughter or he wants him prosecuted and sent to jail. Holy smokes - right? This is no "are we going to win the 'big game'" or "will he ask me to the 'spring dance'" college movie.

The conclusion, involving a car accident and hospital scene, forces everyone to reflect hard on his or her beliefs. The waitress begins to buck her father; the father reexamines his religious views; Richard and Dorothy consider anew the value of their love and a few of the older faculty members see relationships, life and conventions in a fresh light.

Sure, the style of the movie is old fashioned and some of the moral issues seem outdated to us today as we've settled most of these questions (with the help of movies like Age of Consent), but you can feel the intensity of the contradictions and distress these young men and women faced back then.

With the enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code by the end of 1934, issues like these would be stripped out of or highly palliated in movies for the next several decades. This only makes these pre-code movies, clunky as they can sometimes be, more valuable for their realistic look at the moral and social issues of the thirties.


What's going on here ↓? Dorothy and Richard just had a fight, so Dorothy is going on a date with another boy, but she knows Richard is watching so she flashes some gam (note her look-back).
View attachment 322062

What happens next? Angry-and-jealous Richard walks home with his waitress friend and all goes horribly wrong from there.

After seeing the code crash Detour and ruin a more practical noir ending; flip side of a saccharine wrap where
all concerned revisit and revise long held cherished values and all if not perfect, is better, ruins what otherwise
might have been more truthful. Let it all hit the fan and cast chips where they may. I have little sympathy
for sex starved kids getting a free college ride and apparently cannot control themselves. And such libidinous
state doesn't obviate parental religious scruples, beliefs, or coin of the realm hard economics of life.
When I was in college the indolent irresponsible crowd refused to accept any criticism or realize that choices
bear consequences whether wanted or not. Ahh, enough rant. Sorry.

 

[Julian Shellhammer]

Murder in the Air (1940) with Ronald Reagan as Brass Bancroft, Secret Service agent, and Eddie Foy, Jr. as his partner, Gabby Watters. One of four movies featuring Reagan as that character. This one deals with an "inertia ray" that makes the electric components of a motor sort of blow up. Saboteurs want it, so Brass goes undercover to foil the plot.
It clocks in at 55 minutes, with a sort of a "serial" feel to it.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Disney's Aladdin

Jago...

 

[Fading Fast]

High Fidelity from 2000 with John Cusack, Iben Hjejle (pronounce "Eebin blah, blah, blah") and Jack Black

Having recently read the book High Fidelity by Nick Hornby (comments here: #8528), I was on the outlook for the movie, which I had seen before, but I wanted to watch it anew now having read the book.

The book is good in a fluffy, capturing-a-cultural-moment way. The movie also captures the period, the 1990s, pretty well, but the lead actor, John Cusack, misses the mark.

Cusack's character in the book, Rob, is a bag of neuroses and insecurities that cripple him emotionally. As a result, he has an inability to form stable and lasting relationships with women. One bad breakup even leads to his dropping out of college. He agonizes over decades-old minor mistakes and slights that most of us would quickly forget while he covers up his self-doubt with erratic outbursts of anger and ego.

Rob is not a strong, confident man. But Cusack, in the movie, comes across as a big, good-looking guy who is more annoyed with life than insecure about it. His physical presence and demeanor speak conviction not self-doubt. Even when he's saying the diffident words of the book's character, you don't believe it.

A man whose entire being reads confidence playing an insecure man just doesn't work, which is a shame as the rest of the movie is reasonably enjoyable and captures the book pretty well.

The plot (using that word generously) is Rob reflecting on all his failed relationships and, now, in his thirties trying to take stock of his life as the owner of a just-getting-by record shop. He is also deciding if he wants to commit to his girlfriend that just left him, but isn't really gone.

The fun here is the 1990s cultural representation, like Rob's "indie" record shop, which perfectly captures that type of store. It's in an old and dilapidated building and has a disheveled and dusty atmosphere with vinyl records displayed in beat-up wood bins. Its staff of slightly disaffected young men are condescending to even their customers about their musical tastes.

Rob's former girlfriends, whom we meet when he does a self-help tour of his past dating life, are also a 1990s mix of women in their thirties from that time. Some are as messed up as Rob and some have their act together, seemingly, like normal people who have all but forgotten a guy they had a relationship with five, ten or twenty years ago.

The climax determines if Rob will continue to surf through his days more as an observer than a participant in his own life or will commit to a career he cares about (being a DJ) and a woman he loves (and who is way too good for him).

Lopping off a half hour from its nearly two-hour run time would have helped as stories need more heft and plot to last that long. If you were in your thirties in the 1990s (my hand's raised), then you'll enjoy the cultural touchpoints and the relationship foibles and angst well captured by High Fidelity. However, when a lead actor's mien and physicality refute the words of his character, the movie is going to struggle to find its center as High Fidelity does.


N.B. There's a scene toward the end (minor spoiler alert) where self-absorbed Rob's proposal to his girlfriend is egotistically all about him. Yet, proving to be, possibly, the only (gorgeous) woman on earth who would bother to understand this man, his girlfriend Iben Hjejle, in a wonderful bit of subtle acting, turns the scene around by exposing his self-centeredness without undermining his confidence. He should marry this woman if she's stupid enough to have him.

Here's the scene: