143. The Wolf Man (1941)

Directed By George Waggner

Synopsis

Man is attacked by werewolf. Becomes werewolf himself, gets killed at the end. Werewolf? Therewolf!

Review

With the miracle of the internets I am writing this from Portugal, I am in front of an open window at 2.35 in the morning, I can see a full moon over the buildings and I am in the middle of a heatwave, it must be about 40 degrees celsius outside, quite a bit over 100 Farenheit for all you with stupid systems. And it is the middle of the night...

So good night for a werewolf,or for watching a werewolf film, because there is no way I can sleep in this heat. I am sitting crosslegged and my arms keep sliding off my legs while I type because of the sweat... and I'm in my boxers as well.

Back to the film, this is the film that started the other great monster of the classic period of Universal horror films, The Wolf Man, but it is deservedely not as famous as Dracula or Frankenstein. It is simply just not as exciting.

The acting is quite good, with Claude Raines and Ralph Bellamy as the good actors and Lugosi and Maria Ouspenskaya as the obligatory hams, as well as Lon Chaney Jr. as the monster. The fact that the acting is quite good does detract from the film however, as the campiness isn't as present here as it was before. The monster is also never as scary, and altough the makeup is impressive for the time, it just makes Lon Chaney look like a poodle today.

The film is quite obviously extremely influential from the transformation scene to the scene where Lon goes back to being human, this has been repeated countless times in film and TV, as well as the tying up of the Werewolf who then escapes. So this is the original and the template for all other werewolf films, it is just not as fun as it could have been.

Final Grade

7/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

It was The Wolf Man that introduced the concepts of werewolves being vulnerable to silver (in traditional folklore, it is more effective against vampires), the werewolf's forced shapeshifting under a full moon, and being marked with a pentagram (a symbol of the occult and of Satanism). These are considered by many as part of the original folklore of the werewolf, even though they were created for the film. Unlike the werewolves of legend, which resemble true wolves, the Universal Wolf Man was an extension of the previous 1935 Werewolf of London in which both primary characters are a hybrid creature unlike the traditional interpretation. The Wolf Man stood erect like a human, but had the fur, teeth and claws and savage impulses of a wolf. For some unknown reason in-story, (censor boards of that time would NOT permit an actual wolf to be used in-story in "murder scenes" as it was too real), the werewolves, who would bite the primary characters and cause the antagonist to transform, was always depicted as being an actual four legged wolf. Perhaps as a note to show that the primary character was not as savage as the original werewolf who had degraded into little more than a mindless beast. There had been similar depictions of werewolves in several earlier movies but this was by far the most influential, and subsequent movies have built on this image.

The poem recited is used in each of Chaney's subsequent appearances as the Wolf Man, with the exception of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein; it is also recited by a character in Van Helsing (2004), which featured modernized reinterpretations of the classic Universal Studios monsters. In Van Helsing, the werewolf transforms by ripping off the human skin, revealing the wolfish form. The transformation also works in reverse; the werewolf fur sheds to reveal the human form. The werewolves in this movie were also controlled by Dracula after their first full moon.

This was the end of a beautiful friendship:

142. The Lady Eve (1941)

Directed By Preston Sturges

Synopsis

A girl and her father are hustling on a cruise ship, she falls in love with the mark. Hilarity ensues.

Review

This is the first Sturges film on the list, but it is a promising one... there are more to come. The Lady Eve is a smart and funny comedy which manages to bypass a lot of the Production Code censorship with its witty banter. The jokes are fast and plenty, from allusions to male genitalia and arousal to a faked female orgasm, surely a first in mainstream cinema history.

The performances are as good as you would expect from Stanwick and Fonda, meaning superb and the plot twists and turns never getting you bored for the perfect total of 90 minutes. You wouldn't really imagine Fonda doing a comical part of a bumbling scientist almost a la Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby, but he does pull it off, a long way from what he would do in Once Upon a Time In The West.

Hollywood comedies of the late 30's and early 40's are delightful, this type of romantic comedy was probably never bettered or equalled in any other era until the sole standing decent comedy of When Harry Met Sally decades later. Sturges is making a romantic comedy which is actually daring, and for that I tip my hat to him, it is not the best of them, but it is still damn entertaining. Get it on Amazon UK or US.

Final Grade

8/10

Trivia

The Lady Eve was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Writing, Original Story. The film has been deemed "culturally significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.

Checking out the mark:

141. Citizen Kane (1941)

Directed By Orson Welles

Synopsis

Newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane dies leaving as his last words the enigmatic "Rosebud", a group of journalists goes out to try to find what Rosebud means, meanwhile unveiling the life of Kane.

Review

From Bank Dick in 1940 which I found to be extremely overrated we come one year to Citizen Kane, Welles' masterwork and not at all overrated. Well, maybe I wouldn't say it is the best film of all times, but it certainly is pretty close to that. This is not to say however that it is the most enjoyable film of all times, in fact there are many other films that I'd rather watch and re-watch than Kane, but looking at this film you understand why it tops all polls of Directors and film business people.

This is technically the most amazing film, Welles is creating a bit of his own Xanadu in this film, it is a pastiche of elements from the best cinema up until the 1940's but Welles has enough vision to actually improve upon all of his ancestors. The presence of German expressionism is more than obvious, giving the film an almost horrific tone of heavy shadows.

Nothing had looked so beautiful in cinema until now, not even Gone With The Wind got close, and the plot of the film is also of extreme importance, today as well as in any other time. Kane is Hearst but he is also a slightly more benevolent Rupert Murdoch, he is the power of the press in all it's terror. Of course this isn't the first film about the power of the press, hey there's His Girl Friday... but none took it so seriously and so spectacularly as Citizen Kane.

The film is almost like a trip into the mind of Welles, the complexity of the images, the amount of detail put into each and every single scene, the brilliance of the shifting of scenes, the horrible beauty of it all, makes this film a masterclass in cinema. It really is something else, there is nothing like it, the only problem with the film is that you are so dazzled by it that you forget that the acting, except for Welles is sometimes not to the level of the rest of the film. Still, it is a pretty perfect film. Get it from Amazon UK or US.

Final Grade

10/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Film scholars and historians view Citizen Kane as Welles' attempt to create a new style of filmmaking by studying various forms of movie making, and combining them all into one (much like D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation did in 1915). Welles' acting style can also be seen as an early example of method acting. For example, the scene where Kane vents his anger from the top of a staircase, at his political opponent Jim Gettys. Welles tripped and chipped his anklebone during the filming of the scene, but the cameras continued to roll and the shot made it into the final print of the film. Some view this as an example of Welles' workhorse ethic. As a director, Welles disliked actors who subscribed to method acting, considering them unreliable.[citation needed] In particular he dismissed the practice of internalizing as being a hindrance rather than contributing to the production as a whole. He liked to work with actors who were malleable to his vision and always prepared to change a delivery at the drop of a hat without too much worry over motivation. Welles, as an actor, frequently practiced cold reading and spent more time memorizing lines (which never took him long) than doing any mental prep work. It is commonly agreed, however, that there are instances in Citizen Kane where Welles became consumed with his role. In one famous scene in the movie, Kane destroys his second wife's bedroom with his bare hands after she has left him. According to biographers, after Welles destroyed the room and shooting finished he stumbled off the set with bloody hands muttering to himself, "I felt it. I felt it."

The most innovative technical aspect of Citizen Kane is the extended use of deep focus (the use of deep focus was not, contrary to urban myth, unprecedented, but it had never been used to this extent). In nearly every scene in the film, the foreground, background and everything in between are all in sharp focus. This was done by renowned cinematographer Gregg Toland through his experimentation with lenses and lighting. Specifically, Toland often used telephoto lenses to shoot close-up scenes. Anytime deep focus was impossible — for example in the scene when Kane finishes a bad review of Alexander's opera while at the same time firing the person who started the review — Toland used an optical printer to make the whole screen appear in focus (one piece of film is printed onto another piece of film). However, many deep focus shots were the result of in-camera effects, as in the famous example of the scene where Kane breaks into Susan Alexander's room after her suicide attempt. In the background, Kane and another man break into the room, while simultaneously the medicine bottle and a glass with a spoon in it are in closeup in the foreground. The shot was an in-camera matte shot. The foreground was shot first, with the background dark. Then the background was lit, the foreground darkened, the film rewound, and the scene reshot with the background action.

Another unorthodox method used in the film was the way low-angle shots were used to display a point of view facing upwards, thus allowing ceilings to be shown in the background of several scenes. Since movies were primarily filmed on sound stages and not on location during the era of the Hollywood studio system, it was impossible to film at an angle that showed ceilings because the stages had none. Welles' crew used muslin draped above the set to produce the illusion of a regular room with a ceiling, while the boom mikes were hidden above the cloth.

One of the story-telling techniques introduced in this film was using an episodic sequence on the same set while the characters changed costume and make-up between cuts so that the scene following each cut would look as if it took place in the same location, but at a time long after the previous cut. In this way, Welles chronicled the breakdown of Kane's first marriage, which took years of story time, in a matter of minutes. Prior to this technique, filmmakers often had to use a long period of screen time to explain the character's changed circumstances. For example, in Erich von Stroheim's masterpiece Greed, the breakdown of the marriage of the main characters takes almost an hour of screen time, even in the most abbreviated cut.

Welles also pioneered several visual effects in order to cheaply shoot things like crowd scenes and large interior spaces. For example, the scene where the camera in the opera house rises dramatically to the rafters to show the workmen showing a lack of appreciation for the second Mrs. Kane's performance was shot by panning a camera upwards over the performance scene, then a curtain wipe to a miniature of the upper regions of the house, and then another curtain wipe matching it again with the scene of the workmen. Other scenes effectively employed miniatures to make the film look much more expensive than it truly was, such as various shots of Xanadu.

The film broke new ground with its use of special effects makeup, believably ageing the cast many decades over the course of the story. The details extended down to hazy contact lenses to make Cotten's eyes look rheumy as an old man. Welles later claimed that his own dashing appearance as a young man also involved a lot of makeup (including some strategically applied tape to give him a mini-facelift).

Welles brought his experience with sound from radio along to filmmaking, producing a layered and complex soundtrack. In one famous scene the elderly Kane strikes Susan in a tent on the beach, and as the two characters silently glower at each other as a woman at the nearby party can be heard hysterically laughing in the background, her giddiness in grotesque counterpoint to the misery of Susan and Kane. Elsewhere, Welles skillfully employed sound effects to create a mood—such as the chilly echo of the monumental library, where the reporter is confronted by an intimidating, officious librarian.

In addition to expanding on the potential of sound as a creator of moods and emotions, Welles pioneered a new aural technique, known as the "lightning-mix." Welles used this technique to link complex montage sequences via a series of related sounds or phrases. In offering a continuous sound track, Welles was able to join what would otherwise be extremely rough cuts together into a smooth narrative. For example, the audience witnesses Kane grow from a child into a young man in just two shots. As Kane's guardian hands him his sled and wishes him a "Merry Christmas" we are suddenly taken to a shot of Kane fifteen years later, only to have the phrase completed for us: "and a Happy New Year." In this case, the continuity of the soundtrack, not the screen, is what makes for a seamless narrative structure. (Cook, 330)

Welles also carried over techniques from radio not yet popular in the movies (though they would become staples). Using a number of voices, each saying a sentence or sometimes merely a fragment of a sentence, and splicing the dialogue together in quick succession, the result gave the impression of a whole town talking--and, equally important, what the town was talking about. Welles also favored the overlapping of dialogue, considering it more realistic than the stage and movie tradition of characters not stepping on each other's sentences. He also pioneered the technique of putting the audio ahead of the visual in scene transitions; as a scene would come to a close, the audio would transition to the next scene before the visual did.

Newsreel on the life of Kane (at the beginning of the film) :

140. The Bank Dick (1940)

Directed By Edward F. Cline

Synopsis

Drunken Fields helps capture a bank robber by accident. Gets made into a Bank Dick (detective, not Richard or male genitalia), hilarity ensues... in the end he captures another robber, gets 5,000 bucks and plus some money from a script he had written for the cinema and plus half the proceeds of this big mine. Happily ever after and shit.

Review

There are films that grow greatly in popularity in certain countries due to a particular emotional attachment. Many of these films are sub-par because let's be frank when we are kids we have really crap taste. This happens particularly with comedies, have you even honestly laughed at a joke that a 5 or 6 year old tells you? You might laugh at the ineptness with which it is told or how cute the child is but I can tell you that 99.9% of the times you will never repeat that joke to another adult as a funny joke unless you suffer from some sort of mental impairment.

It is only natural that the films that we loved as children, and particularly what we thought to be funny will stay in our hearts for a long time and even when we are old we are blind to their inherent shitiness. Then those children grow up to be cinema critics and suddenly some comedies that really don't deserve it enter the canon and are recognised as culturally significant by the Library of Congress. I figure that it is only when some one sees these films for the first time as an adult that an honest qualification can be made.

This in no way means that the 30's and 40's were a bad age for comedy, in fact some of my favourite comedies are from this age. But then you get stuff that, maybe because I am not American and I haven't grown up with them, leave me cold. One is the Marx brothers, which are too obvious and lacking in any subtlety whatsoever, and are only worth it for the surreal moments, and W.C. Fields, particularly The Bank Dick. This also happens with non-comedies like The Wizard Of Oz, but with comedies it is easier to gauge, because you are supposed to have a physical reaction of laughter or at least smile to them. In this film I got a bit of that in the first 5 minutes.

The part when Fields is leaving his house at the beginning works, and the car chase at the end also works, the first is funny the second is technically quite impressive. the other hour of the film is sadly quite dull. While the other Fields film on the list It's A Gift was actually quite novel and funny this one lags behind, not only by its own merits but because comedy has evolved so much since It's A Gift, it's a throwback and a not very good one. Fields is his usual bumbling old man, which is amusing but most of the secondary actors are pretty terrible and the direction doesn't get in the way of the film but doesn't help anything. So get it if you must at Amazon UK or US.

Final Grade

5/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

The film was written by Fields, using the alias Mahatma Kane Jeeves ("My hat, my cane, Jeeves!"), and directed by Edward F. Cline. Shemp Howard, one of the Three Stooges, plays a bartender.

The beginning of the film, and the only actually fun bit:

139. The Mortal Storm (1940)

Directed By Frank Borzage

Synopsis

Nazis are bad mm-kay? Only in 1940 no American were saying so ... Jews get rounded up and killed, friends stop being friends, books get burned, non-aryans live in fear.


Review

There's this myth that the US got into the war so late because people weren't really aware of what was going on in Germany, they were only aware after the pictures form the Death Camps were published... well it seems like some people were aware in 1940.

This film is of extreme historical importance for a number of reasons, firstly it got all of MGM banned from Germany, secondly and most importantly it shows a tremendous amount of balls. The US was pursuing a very cozy relationship with Nazi Germany, as long as the US wasn't being directly bothered they were fine with ignoring what was going on across the ocean. Now, this wasn't true of everyone and suddenly Hollywood took notice, maybe it is because there were so many refugees working in Hollywood, but MGM shows an amazing pair of balls in this film. Basically equating Nazi Germany with all that is evil.

The portrayal of Germany is actually quite accurate for 1940, without the benefit of hindsight, the prosecution of intellectuals and Jews (although the word is never said in the film, it is obvious, you only need to look at the non-Aryan Doctor's cuffs while he is in the concentration camp and see the J), the climate of fear and suspicion and the mass hysteria are all quite present here.

The other famous anti-Nazi film before joining the war is Casablanca, but that focuses much more on the love story than atrocities. IT is this film's unflinching portrayal of Nazi crimes so early on that makes it definitely one of the films to watch before you die.

Of course the acting is good and the plot isn't bad, but this film matters as a piece of propaganda, the good kind. Unfortunately it is quite impossible to get, except on a NTSC VHS from the States... you can also get it on TCM as it seems to be on there quite often. So get it on VHS from Amazon US.

Final Grade

9/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Freya and her family are implied to be Jewish but the word "Jew" is never used and they are only referred to as "non-Aryans." Though it is understood that the film is set in Germany, the name of the country is rarely mentioned except at the very beginning in a short text of introduction. The supporting cast includes Robert Young (Father Knows Best), Robert Stack, Frank Morgan (who played the title role in The Wizard of Oz the year before), Dan Dailey, Ward Bond, Maria Ouspenskaya, William T. Orr, and Bonita Granville. The movie infuriated the Nazi government and it led to all MGM films being banned in Germany, which was a large market for American films at the time.

Shockingly there is no clip of this film on Youtube, so you get Dean Martin singing with Jimmy Stewart, there is a little bit about Mortal Storm in it!:

138. Pinocchio (1940)

Produced By Walt Disney

Synopsis

Paedophile golem creating satanic warlock Geppeto creates a little boy out of wood to satisfy his more preverse desires, through the art of Astrology he manages to summon a soul from the fiery pits of hell to give his sex-puppet life. Pinocchio escapes a life of sexual abuse by joining a theatre, familiar jiminy cricket and summoned infernal Blue Fairy steal Pinocchio from honest working ethnic minority man. Pinnochio manages to escape the paedophile ring only to be put in an island where children are nothing but asses being sold to the highest bidder by the coachman. After escaping and kicking the heroin habit, Pinnochio sees no chance but throw himself off a cliff with a stone attached to his tail. He is swallowed by a whale and just when he thought he could rest he meets the Warlock again; he ends up dead in a bed in the house of Geppeto, the Evil. Who actually manages to revive Pinnochio by the use of the infernal Blue Fairy who also makes Pinocchio fleshy, as Geppeto was having some trouble with splinters in the nether regions.

Review

Well this film is much better than Snow White, and as the second long feature with a story by Walt Disney, it is a marked improvement. The animation techniques haven't really changed, neither would they until the advent of CGI, but there is so much more stuff happening on the screen that it just looks much more impressive.

Again there isn't much to say about plot, much like Snow White it is little more than a series of events following each other. Only here the events are actually more interesting than in Snow White, and there is a level of horror here which is ever greater than that on Snow White. In Snow White you basically had the wicked stepmother, here you have the theatre owner, the coachman, Honest John, Monstro, loads of stuff and they are all quite freaky.

If you are interested in the story of animation, this is really an indispensable film. The evolution is great from Snow White to this and as this came out before Fantasia, the step would be even greater there. So you should get this at Amazon UK or US.

Final Grade

8/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Pinocchio was not commercially successful when first released, and Disney only recouped about half of its $2.3 million budget, which was due in part to poor timing, with the cut-off of European markets due to World War II. By the time the film was released, the mood of Americans had also darkened, also due to the war. People just weren't as keen on seeing fairy tales as they were in the days of Snow White.

But there were other reasons why Pinocchio didn't quite pan out on initial release. One thing that Snow White had that Pinocchio didn't was romance. There wasn't much in the way of "falling-in-love-at-first-sight" in Pinocchio, as there had been in Snow White, which apparently was what people had come to expect of in Disney. To add insult to injury, Paolo Lorenzini, nephew of the original story's author, had beseeched the Italian Ministry of Popular Culture to charge Walt for slander in portraying Pinocchio "so he easily could be mistaken for an American," when it was perfectly obvious that the little puppet was in fact Italian. Nothing had apparently come of the protest.

Nevertheless, there were positive reactions to the movie as well. Archer Winsten, who had criticized Snow White, wrote: "The faults that were in Snow White no longer exist. In writing of Pinocchio, you are limited only by your own power of expressing enthusiasm." Also, despite the poor timing of the release, the film did do well both critically and at the box office in the United States. Jiminy Cricket's song, "When You Wish Upon a Star," became a major hit and is still identified with the film, and later as a fanfare for The Walt Disney Company itself. Pinocchio also won the Academy Award for Best Song and the Academy Award for Best Scoring of a Musical Picture. The film has been deemed "culturally significant" by the Library of Congress and in 1994 was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. In 2005, Time.com named it one of the 100 best movies of the last 80 years. Overall, Pinocchio is considered a true-blue classic today,and many film historians consider this to be the film that most closely approaches technical perfection of all the Disney animated features.

Pinocchio:

137. Dance, Girl, Dance (1940)

Directed By Dorothy Arzner

Synopsis

Girl dreams of being a ballerina, but can only get jobs doing crap dances. Bubbles, her colleague gets her a place supporting her in a burlesque show, love hexagon! Girl gets discovered and fulfils her dream.

Review

If you look up there, under the picture, there is something particular about this film... it is directed by a woman! It is only the second film on the list directed by a woman, and the other one was in the 20's! This has nothing to do with faults by the part of the list makers, its just that there weren't that many female directors in the world.

Usually I have a problem with adding female directors or writers to lists just to make their presence known. I think it does a disservice to women because it glosses over the differences in work opportunities of a certain era and because there are so few women doing those jobs there is a certain "scraping the barrel" feel to it, ending up with sub-par works for the sake of keeping some people happy, giving a bad image both of women's work and ignoring social problems.

That being said, this film is an exception, it is not only a good film but also a significant film. It is significant because I have never seen anything like it on the list until now, it has a very strong female sensibility, in a good way. It shows relationships between women for example in a much more realistic light, there's all the bitchyness and competition that you rarely see in romanticised views of womanly friendship. It is hard to believe that a film starring Lucille Ball would have such intellectual content, but the scene where Ball's stooge stands up to the crowd in the burlesque show is the closest to feminism that the cinema had come to in that day.

Beyond that, it is funny and smart, it must be the first film I've seen with a love hexagon, 6 people are part of the love story giving it a level of complexity not very common in the films of the 40's. So get it today at Amazon UK or US.

Final Grade

9/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Arzner faced significant hurdles to fully capitalize on her skills and talents. In addition to being a woman, she was a lesbian who was unwilling to disguise her sexuality (she often dressed in men's suits and ties). Joan Crawford once said, "I think all my directors fell in love with me; I know Dorothy Arzner did!" Nonetheless, her innovative ideas and approach put her in high demand as a director.

Arzner directed Paramount's first talkie in 1929, The Wild Party, which starred Clara Bow. To allow Bow to move freely on the set, Arzner had technicians rig a microphone onto a fishing rod, essentially creating the first boom mike.[2] The Wild Party was a success with critics and performed well at the box office. The film, set in a women's college, introduced some of the apparent lesbian undertones and themes often cited in Arzner's work. Her films of the following three years were strong examples of Hollywood before the Production Code. These films featured aggressive, free-spirited and independent women.

She left Paramount in 1932 to begin work as an independent director for several of the studios. The projects she helmed during this period are her best known, with the films launching the careers of many actresses, most notably Katharine Hepburn, Rosalind Russell, and Lucille Ball. In 1936, Arzner became the first woman to join the newly formed Directors' Guild of America.

For unclear reasons, Arzner stopped directing feature-length films in 1943. She continued to work in the following years, directing television commercials and Army training films. She also produced plays and, in the 1960s and '70s, worked as a professor at the UCLA film school, teaching screenwriting and directing until her death in 1979.

Dorothy Arzner, who never married or had children, died at the age of 82 in La Quinta, California. She was linked romantically with a number of actresses, but lived much of her life with choreographer Marion Morgan. For her achievements in the field of motion pictures, Arzner was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1500 Vine Street.

In a lovely dispaly of geographical knowledge I present Lucille Ball in her most famous role in I Love Lucy, doing an impression of Portuguese (Europe, speaks Portuguese) born, Brazilian (South america , speaks Portuguese) singer Carmen Miranda, while saying Ole (Spanish) and sharing the stage with a Mexican (Central America and Spanish language), oh well it's foreign. At least Desi Arnaz should know better:

136. The Grapes Of Wrath (1940)

Directed By John Ford

Synopsis

Tommy rhymes with commie, and after a gruelling exodus from Okieland to California looking for work after being evicted, Tommy goes on to pursue the cause of worker rights and other disgusting Red behaviour, while his family goes off to pick some cotton for the generous value of a nickel a ton... they should be thankful! Fucking proles.

Review

This is a superb film, the story is quite ballsy for 1940, showing the abuse and horrible plight of the people who left the dustbowl for a better life in the West, as any film dealing with oppression and suffering of an underclass it sounds a bit too workers of the world unite for the prevailing tastes of the 1940's. And that is part of the film's charm.

If ever there was a director who was ballsy that is John Ford, you can't take that away form him. The film isn't worth it solely for its politics, however, it is extremely well filmed, the cinematography is surprisingly dark for the time, and some of the camera plans are extremely beautiful, particularly when there are just silhouettes against the big sky or a man walking alone on a highway...

The film is also superbly cast, Henry Fonda is great, but so is Ma, played by Jane Darwell, they are also given some of those amazing set piece monologues which are really well written. The film is harrowing but not as much as the book, the 1940's were a tame era, if this film had been done at any other time with a lot more freedom and no production code we can only imagine how good it would have been. Get it from Amazon UK or US.

Final Grade

10/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Pre-production

Producer Daryl F. Zanuck was nervous about the hard left political view found in the novel, especially the ending. Due to the red-baiting common of the era, Daryl Zanuck sent private investigators to Oklahoma to help legitimize the film. When Zanuck's investigators found the "Okies" predicament was indeed terrible, Zanuck was confident he could defend attacks that the film was somehow pro-Communist.

Still, Zanuck watered down the novel's tone for the film and as a consequence did much to sell the fictional Joads story to the general public in the United States. In addition, critic Roger Ebert believes that due to Adolf Hitler's rising to power in Europe in the 1930s, Communism enjoyed a respite from "American demonology," at least for a brief time.

Odd production bedfellows

Both executive producer Daryl Zanuck and director John Ford were odd choices to make this film because both were considered politically very conservative.

One of the great monologues in the film:

135. The Philadelphia Story (1940)

Directed By George Cukor

Synopsis

Seems quite familiar by now, divorce Cary Grant wants to prevent his ex-wife form getting married a second time. Well, it is slightly more complicated than that, he takes a couple of reporters to the wedding, one of which (Jimmy Stewart) has a drunken party night with the bride Tracy Lord (Katherine Hepburn). Wedding is called off and Cary Grant marries his ex-wife... it is a good film tough.

Review

Ok, just by looking at the DVD cover you know that you are in for a treat, Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart and Katherine Hepburn in the same film... wowzers. Snd then the film surprises you but doesn't disappoint. We have seen Hepburn and Grant before in some pretty crazy, laugh a minute screwball comedies, you would expect something of the kind here.

Well if you did expect that you wouldn't be completely wrong, there are plenty of witticisms and laughs here, but they are always more smirks than laughs. The film is actually a very intelligently written work, it is not so much played for laughs, but something actually a bit deeper than that.

There are many discussions about class ans stations in society here, and most of them make some quite good points, also it is quite a risqué film for 1940, Hepburn sends her marriage to hell for a drunken night with a guy she had only just met and is never punished by it, in fact she saves herself from a doomed marriage. The acting is all quite superb, you really relate to all those characters, and in the end it is what comedies aren't that much anymore, funny but with a big brain and a heart in the right place without false morals. Great. Get it from Amazon UK or US.

Final Grade

9/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

The play was Hepburn's first great triumph after several movie flops (including the classic Bringing Up Baby), which had led to her being labeled "box office poison". Howard Hughes bought the rights to the film as a gift to Hepburn. When Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer decided to make a movie out of it, she stipulated in her contract that the film could not be made unless she was allowed to reprise her stage role. Hepburn initially wanted Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy for the male leads but they were not available.

It was remade in 1956 as a musical titled High Society, starring Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly, and Frank Sinatra.

The Three Greats together:

134. Fantasia (1940)

Produced By Walt Disney

Synopsis

A series of animations closely connected to pieces of classical music.

Review

Fantasia is the closest to experimental cinema that we have come upon since the silent era, and if only for that it is a more than respectable endeavour. Still like all collections of disparate pieces there are high and low points. Some of them work better than others and the last part with Schubert's Ave Maria as the definite lowlight, they even translated the fucking song... The toccata and fugue and the Dance of the Hours are highlights here, although in very different styles.

In my review of Snow White I had mentioned how good Disney was at connecting image and music, and this film is the natural progression from that, the imagination and skill of the animators is pretty amazing, as it is to see that the relationship between what you see on the screen and what you hear is so much closer than in any music video.

It is also great that even tough the film is slightly longer than 2 hours it manages to be entertaining the whole way through, even without a plot or much dialogue except the exposition of the narrator before each piece. It is a film that is very much worth seeing if you never have, so get it from Amazon UK or US.

Final Grade

8/10


Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Not only did Fantasia establish animation as a true art form, it also introduced film audiences to multi-channel sound, which played a very important part in Fantasia. After the completion of The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Stokowski enlisted the Philadelphia Orchestra, of which he was the conductor, to record the music for the six remaining segments. Walt Disney was present on the sound stage during an early session, and was very pleased with what he was hearing until he heard the playback from the recording engineers. He felt the recorded version of the music sounded tinny and undynamic, and asked his engineers to see what they could do about developing a better sound system. The engineers, led by William E. Garity, responded by creating a multi-channel sound format they called Fantasound, making Fantasia the first commercial film ever to be produced in stereophonic sound. The film also marked the first use of the click track while recording the soundtrack, overdubbing of orchestral parts, and simultaneous multi-track recording.

Always wanting to try new things, Walt Disney also had plans to film Fantasia in wide-screen and to spray different perfumes into the theatre at appropriate times during the Nutcracker Suite, but those plans were never carried out.

Offensive, yet cute: