Regularly updated blog charting the most important films of the last 104 years.
Saturday, September 29, 2007
169. Gaslight (1944)
Directed by George Cukor
Synopsis
Mindfucks ahoy! Guy drives lady insane slowly by mind-screwing her. A good detective finds out about it and all is solved!
Review
This was a fun film and for one particular reason, the character of Gregory/Sergis is one of the creepiest, evillest and smoothest characters in cinema. He drives Paula insane while always seemingly concerned with her and seeming devoted. The whole way he drives her insane is at the same time despicable and fascinating.
Ingrid Bergman also has a pretty good part here as the slowly going insane woman, she won an Oscar for this, which was well deserved. There are other points of interest here, firstly it is a costume drama and with that come all the clothing and sets, secondly it is the first film part for Angela Lansbury, yes, she of Murder she Wrote who got an Oscar nomination for this, good on her! And then you have the always great Joseph Cotton here.
I highly recommend this one, the plot really has no surprises, but it is so well performed that you do get some kind of emotional rapport with the characters. Definitely something to check out if you haven't.
Final Grade
9/10
Trivia
From Wikipedia:
From the film's title, "gaslighting" acquired the meaning of ruthlessly manipulating an individual, for nefarious reasons, into believing something other than the truth.
You can get the whole thing on Youtube, here you go for part one:
Old writer doesn't want his fag-hag to belong to anyone else, successively destroying her relationships. After casting aspersions on her husband to be, Laura prepares to go to the country. Laura is found dead in her apartment, but is she? And if she isn't who is the body? And who shot that body in the face?
Review
This was quite a perfect little whodunnit film. And probably one of the greatest possessiveness films, the whole story is about possessiveness, but you must see it really. Waldo is incredibly possessive of Laura, but there is no sexual tension there, he is an old bachelor writer with a taste for the best things in life, who makes a life out of being bitchy in his newspaper column, Laura is his friend that brings out the best in him, and for whom he buys clothing and expensive antiques.
Waldo is obviously a caricature of an old bitchy Queen, although that is obviously never stated in the film, because we are in 1944, it makes him one of the most interesting characters in the whole thing. Of course there is this whole romance story between the detective investigating the murder and Laura and Vincent Price comes into it as well, but that is all secondary really. It is the relationship between Waldo and Laura that fascinates and that is ultimately crucial to the film.
The filming has all the staples of noir, the hard shadows, the angles, and it seems everyone has annoying blinds constantly making all white surfaces scored with diagonal black shadows, but it does work as an ambience. It is a fun film and although not spectacular, it is well worth watching. The pacing is perfect, it never gets dull and it wraps itself up nicely. There isn't much to the story between Laura and the detective, but it didn't matter anyway. Final Grade
9/10
Trivia
From Wikipedia:
The character of Waldo Lydecker appears to be based on the columnist, broadcaster and New Yorker theater critic Alexander Woollcott, a famous wit who, like Waldo, was fascinated by murder. Woollcott always dined at the Algonquin Hotel, where Laura first approaches Waldo.
Otto Preminger's original idea for the film score was to use Duke Ellington's "Sophisticated Lady." David Raksin later composed the familiar score for "Laura" over the course of a weekend, after being inspired by a Dear John letter he received from his wife.
The film has been remade as a made-for-TV movie, with the inspired casting of Vincent Price (the original Shelby) as Waldo Lydecker! Price plays the possessive Lydecker as somewhat of a fop.
Captain Morgan is a guy who rents his boat out for fishing. After he loses a costumer and he has no money and he wants to help Slim out of Martinique he takes a job helping the Free French. This gets him into all kinds of trouble. Eventually he gets the girl.
Review
This was a pretty fun film to watch, Howard Hawks continues his tradition of strong women in this, and Bacall is probably the coolest, sexiest little thing to hit the screens. Bogart is a known quantity and he makes his best impression of Rick here. He is apparently selfish and only looking out for himself, but then he has a good heart and does the right thing. You know, Bogart.
Another good thing about the film is the soundtrack, the songs in it are pretty cool, it has a kind of Jazz that I really like and Cricket is a great character. Lauren Bacall's voice can be a bit Nicoish, but hey I like Nico.
In the end there isn't anything really surprising and original about this, but it is a really good film, it works well in its genre. It isn't too fancy, but the script is quite well written (it should be it's William Faulkner adapting Hemingway) and the characters are likeable and Lauren Bacall steals the show. See it. Final Grade
8/10
Trivia
From Wikipedia:
In the movie, Bacall sings "How Little We Know" by Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer. Another Carmichael song, "Hong Kong Blues" (co-written with Stanley Adams), was also used. Incidentally, Carmichael plays Cricket, the piano player in the film.
Another song played in the film was "Am I Blue?", written by Harry Akst and Grant Clarke.
The whole film is on Youtube!, just search for it, meanwhile you get Bacall singing:
Family lives in St. Louis, they like St. Louis, they like boys. Father wants to move to New York. Girls like St. Louis, father relents. They stay in St. Louis. Girls like that.
Review
Oh Judy, Judy, Judy. Gay icon Judy Garland does it again, starring in pretty vapid musical with admittedly big production values. I'd go on pills too. Well at least it is a change from Visconti and good films in general. She will eventually do better films, however.
The reviewer in the 1001 Movies book has a very dark interpretation of the film, and despite an effort by me to see that I couldn't. I would see it if they ended up going to New York, and I could see it in the destruction of the snowmen, but the film doesn't have an arch of any kind, more of a circle, it ends up exactly where it starts with nothing of consequence happening in the middle.
No one dies, no one gets married, no one has sex, nothing. And there are plenty of good films like that, but this isn't one of those, because nothing else happens. Yes, it entertains, the music is good and Judy has a great voice, but that doesn't sustain the whole film unfortunately. Unless you are musical/Garland obsessed I'd give it a miss.
Final Grade
6/10
Trivia
From Wikipedia:
The film was nominated for Academy Awards for Best Cinematography, Color, Best Music, Scoring of a Musical Picture, Best Music, Song (Ralph Blane and Hugh Martin for "The Trolley Song") and Best Writing, Screenplay. Margaret O'Brien received an Academy Award for Best Juvenile Performance for her work that year, in which she appeared in several movies along with Meet Me in St. Louis.
The film has been deemed "culturally significant" by the Library of Congress and 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.
In 2006 this film ranked #10 on the American Film Institute's list of best musicals.
A Woman is married to an old fat man, she falls in love with a tramp who is very pretty, albeit uncommonly hairy on his shoulder area. They kill the husband, live racked with guilt until they run away only for her to die in a car crash and for him to be arrested. All's well that ends well.
Review
This could have been the birth of neo-realism if it wan't a complete plagiarism of The Postman Always Rings Twice which led the film to have all kinds of legal problems. The fact that it came out of fascist Italy also didn't help. It is actually pretty surprising how this came out of fascist Italy - even though it was considered a morally corrupt film it did come out.
Visconti is a great director, the relationship of the characters with their lanscape stroke me particularly while watching this, also the way in which the dialogue is delivered is pretty naturalistic with the constant chatter of people saying stuff, making small talk etc.. It should be noted however that the BFI (British Film Institute) edition of this film for the UK has decided what we need and don't need to understand about the film by being extremely sparse with it's subtitles. It seems that they only felt like subtitling what main characters say when it is actually relevant, fortunately I can understand Italian enough to fill in the blanks, but I was pretty disappointed with them. You pay quite expensive money for BFI DVDs and then even though it has a pretty cover, the image quality is sub-par and the subtitling is really terrible.
That said the film isn't perfect, the female lead sometimes hams it up a bit,as do most secondary characters, the pace of the film is a bit too slow, making it overly long. This story didn't need 2 hours and 15 minutes, but that length does give it its feeling of inexorable slouch towards shit happening.
Rant over - this is a pretty great film, and a good antidote to the US of the production code era. There is a general aura of authenticity compounded by the use of on-location shooting that is something pretty new, and something that Italian Neorealism would continue to explore for many years. Final Grade
8/10
Trivia
From Wikipedia:
Visconti adapted the script with a group of men he selected from the Milanese magazine Cinema. The members of this group were talented filmmakers and writers and played a large role in the emerging neorealist movement: Mario Alicata, Gianni Puccini, Antonio Pietrangeli and Giuseppe De Santis. When Ossessione was completed and released in 1943, it was far from the innocent murder mystery the authorities had expected and was promptly banned, its distribution outlawed by the Italian government. At the end of the war, the government ordered the film destroyed, but Visconti kept a duplicate negative from which all existing prints have been made. After the war, Ossessione encountered more problems with mass distribution, this time in the United States. As a result of the wartime production schedule, Visconti had never obtained the rights to the novel and Metro-Goldwyn Mayer began production on another version of the film, directed by Tay Garnett (The Postman Always Rings Twice, 1946), while the Fascist ban on Visconti’s work was still in effect.
Due to the copyright issues, the film didn’t gain distribution outside of Italy until 1976. Despite limited screenings, it gained acclaim among moviegoers who recognized in it some of the same sensibilities they had grown familiar with in neorealist films by Michelangelo Antonioni, Puccini and De Santis, among others.
Uncle Charlie goes to visit his family in Santa Rosa, California. What they don't know is that he is a SERIAL KILLER! dum dum dum!
Review
Hitchcock is a master. There are few characters with the capacity for menace that Uncle Charlie played perfectly by Joseph Cotten has in this film. Uncle Charlie is a pretty scary character because he isn't a socially inept serial killer, he is actually just the opposite, a charmer as well as a bit of an asshole.
Hitchcock has the amazing ability for creating characters that even if they are stereotypical are utterly convincing. The whole family in the film is convincing, the geeky neighbour is convincing and this makes the menace of the villain all the more worrying. If there is one thing I would change in this film it would be that Uncle Charlie would kill Charlie, but it would be unthinkable in the days of the production code.
Still this is one of the great Hitchcock films and if you have any interest at all in crime stories this is definitely a film you should pursue. No one does them better than Hitchcock and actors don't come much better than Cotten. Final Grade
9/10
Trivia
* Alfred Hitchcock cameo: Hitchcock appears on the train to Santa Rosa playing cards with a man and a woman, at around 15 minutes into the film.
* The house of Charlie's family is on McDonald Ave., in Santa Rosa.
* The stone train station in the film was built in the year 1904 and is one of the few commercial buildings in downtown Santa Rosa to survive the earthquake of April 18th, 1906. Built for the Northwestern Pacific Railroad, it is currently a visitor center.
A man is reported dead and his cattle rustled. A lynching mob is assembled and with the mob go seven reluctant spectators. After the lynching it is discovered that the man wasn't dead, and the sheriff has caught the killers. Oops! They all have a big laugh about it, the end!
Review
The Ox-Bow incident is another of those occasions where you see the Western rising up to what it should do. Westerns shouldn't be films about bravado or hero worship but portrayals of what man is capable of doing in adverse situations when his most primordial instincts come to the front. These can be good things or really bad ones. This film is about really bad ones, when the world is almost lawless and mob mentality rules.
Of course this film is being made during WWII and very few films didn't have some kind of message about the war, in this case it shows the difference between the proper American system versus Nazi mob mentality. This is all the more subtle because the film is set in the US, leading to more basic ideas about the essential common psyche of the human race. 'It's not just those Germans, it can and it has happened to us to', is the message, so be careful and prize your due process.
So, even tough it has the 2nd World War in mind, it is making a point as relevant today as then. Arbitrary justice with no trial is not fair and is essentially a source for injustice. The necessity for due process has rarely been as well articulated as it is in the end of the film, when Henry Fonda reads out the letter of one of the lynching victims. A deep and meaningful film.
Final Grade
9/10
Trivia
From Wikipedia:
Woody Allen, in his stand-up comedy routines, referred to his marriage as "The Ox-Bow Incident."
Girl goes in search of her sister, who apparently has been a member of a satanic brotherhood, has snitched and now MUST DIE!
Review
Ok this film is here following the last two Tourneur films, also horror film for RKO, this is, however markedly inferior. The film feels disjointed, maybe due to cuts made to it and therefore doesn't seem to go anywhere.
The film noir qualities of the film are quite obvious, but unfortunately aren't as good as in any of the Jacques Tourneur films, there is however one scene of importance here and that is the danger in the shower scene. Many years later Hitchcock would pick it up and do Psycho, the risk here isn't as imminent but there is a definite sense of menace in the bathroom.
There is not really much to this film, if you love Tourneur but have seen his films to death, and need some more RKO horror films this is probably a good thing to get,l otherwise don't bother that much. It's good and all but pales in comparison unfortunately. Final Grade
7/10
Trivia
From Wikipedia:
The film has been praised for the shadowy camera work by Musuraca, which prefigured much film noir imagery, including possibly the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. However, the film was initially criticized in reviews for having too many characters and a storyline that doesn't always make sense. (According to the film's DVD commentary, scenes containing additional story lines, some that may have made the film clearer, were cut before the film's release.) Most controversially, the film resolves with the suicide of one of the main characters (contrary to the spirit if not the letter of the Production Code), and is possibly the only film score of the period to end in a minor key. The story goes that Lewton was warned not to make a film with a message, and he replied that this film did have a message: "Death is good."
The Seventh Victim may be regarded as an unofficial prequel to Lewton's 1942 film Cat People. Tom Conway's character Dr. Judd appears in both films, and Elizabeth Russell, who plays Mimi, the dying woman, in this film, reappears (in the same clothes) as the unnamed "cat woman" (she also appears as a different character in The Curse of the Cat People).
Someone made a film with the same name which looks quite a bit crappier:
A Canadian nurse goes to the West Indian island of St. Sebastian to assist the catatonic wife of a sugar planter. Is the wife catatonic or is she a zombie? Well you'll have to watch the film to not quite know for sure.
Review
Jacques Tourneur brings us another pretty amazing horror film with quite a sub-par plot. This is much like what happened with Cat People an excellent film technically but with quite a simple plot.
Thankfully the film is so interesting in the way it is directed, its use of shadows and the creation of an ambiance that it rescues the film from any other criticisms. Tourneur is great, there is a pervading sense of dread in the whole thing the depiction of the Voodoo followers is actually quite positive but appropriately scary.
The silent character of Carrefour (or a man possessed by the spirit of the loa of crossroads) is actually something that will stick in my mind, you can see him in the picture above. Still this film is much more positive in its depiction of "natives" than any A film in Hollywood. It seems that you had to make B-movies to be able to be politically correct and depict black people as actual people and not cardboard cut-outs to be shot at for the savages they are. This isn't quite as good as Cat People but it is indeed very close, so if you liked that you'll like this. Final Grade
8/10
Trivia
From Wikipedia:
As was typical of many of Lewton's horror films, he was given the film's title and, with the aid of credited writers, he created the story around the title, in this case borrowing elements of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. Also typical of many Lewton films, the supernatural is treated ambiguously, and it's never entirely clear how some events should be interpreted.
I Walked was a critical and financial success. It has since been acclaimed for its haunting atmosphere and nuanced performances. It is not a "zombie movie" in the common sense of the term, but it is arguably more accurate and sensitive in depicting Caribbean culture and voodoo rites and beliefs than many horror films.
A trailer which is so unrepresentative of the film that it's insane:
The story of the life of Clive "suggie" Candy, a career officer and a lovely man.
Review
It would be tempting to classify this film as a propaganda film. It would be tempting but also wrong. This film is so much more than that, of course there is an element of propaganda here, after all it is a war film directed in the UK in 1943, it would be unthinkable if it wasn't. But it is also a touching story about growing old and about life and general. It really transcends the idea of propaganda in so many ways that I think we are safe putting that aside.
This is actually one of the best films I've seen on this list. Firstly it is beautiful, it has the best use of Technicolor up until now, it isn't as gaudy as Wizard of Oz but it does make the film look all the more realistic. Then it is brilliantly directed, it almost looks like a film from the 60's in its image quality and use of colour. Then you have the plot, following the life of Candy in flashback and creating though the 2 hours and a half of it one of the most loveable characters in cinema.
I am really flabbergasted with this, I can't believe I hadn't seen it before and wasn't particularly excited about seeing it. Everything is perfect, the acting, the makeup, Deborah Kerr as the archetypal ideal woman of Candy, playing three different characters which we see through his eyes. Then you have the details, the passage of time through the stuffed animals he mounts up on his wall or the passage of leafs on a scrapbook that stops being added to when his wife dies. Those empty pages are truly touching. The film just has such a lightness of touch together with humour and a deep humanity that it becomes something truly incredible.
This humanity of the film stretches even to the Germans, Theo is the obligatory "good German" but there is more than that, there is no attempt to justify German actions but there is an attempt to understand Germany, to understand the hardships of the time between the wars and not to taint all Germans with the same brush. Gods I'm gushing here... you owe yourself to watch it.
Final Grade
10/10
Trivia
From Wikipedia:
"What is it really about?" – C. A. Lejeune, The Observer, 1943.
"Colonel Blimp is as unmistakably a British product as Yorkshire pudding and, like the latter, it has a delectable savor all its own." – New York Times March 30, 1945.
"It addresses something I've always been profoundly interested in – what it means to be English... it is about bigger things than the war. It takes a longer view of history which was an extraordinarily brave thing for someone to do in 1943, at a time when history seemed to have disintegrated into its most helpless, impossible and unforgivable state." – Stephen Fry, interviewed by the Daily Telegraph, 2003.
The film provoked an extremist (and unintentionally funny) pamphlet The Shame and Disgrace of Colonel Blimp by "right-wing sociologists E. W. and M. M. Robson," members of the obscure Sidneyan Society:
"[A] highly elaborate, flashy, flabby and costly film, the most disgraceful production that has ever emanated from a British film studio."
In recent years, particularly after the highly successful re-release of the film, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp has been re-evaluated critically and is today regarded as a masterpiece of British cinema. The film is praised for its dazzling technicolor cinematography (which with later films like The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus would become The Archers' greatest legacy), the performances by the lead actors as well as for transforming in Roger Ebert's words; 'a blustering, pigheaded caricature into one of the most loved of all movie characters'.
Theo the German gets all the best lines, here's when Candy gets demoted:
Close your eyes, think of a bodice-ripper, add all cliches. There! Oh and James Mason pokes a lady to death.
Review
There are some films on this list whose simple presence baffles me. and it is not just me, the book itself seems quite apologetic about putting this film in. It is crap in terms of plot, nothing else in the film is particularly bad, but the screenplay is so bad that you really can't pay any attention to anything else in the film.
Then it is a film that grates with out modern sensibilities, when Stewart Granger talks about his black prize-fighter as his "nigger sambo" you necessarily cringe, when one of the main characters is a child in obvious blackface you also go... "ohh this isn't right". These are, however minor quibble because no matter how abhorrent to us today this was the "thing" in the early 40's, but it just goes to show that it is not only Americans in the 40's who are devoid of racial tactfulness.
Ok this film is interesting in the sense that it is a complex costume drama with quite impressive sets being done in Britain during the War, it is a piece of WWII escapism and it was what people wanted to watch. Still, none of these are qualities intrinsic to the film, the film is a pile of wank which will give you the occasional laugh, because it is so bad. As my wife says, 2 hours of my life I'm not getting back. Final Grade
4/10
Trivia
From Wikipedia:
The Man in Grey is generally considered the first of the "Gainsborough melodramas", a series of period costume films produced by Gainsborough Pictures. Although not very well received critically, it was a great commercial success and became one of the ten most successful British pictures of 1943. It caught the mood of the nation brilliantly as it fused elements of previously successful "women's pictures" with a distinctive formula of its own. It had great star appeal with a strong cast and an intricate plot with its counterpointing of good against evil, obedience against rebellion, male against female and class against class.
This is a quite interesting film, it is filmed as if it was a documentary, but it is clearly scripted and although the actors are actual fire-fighters they had to learn their roles for the film. And of course the camera angles and the quality of the cinematography (which is quite good) would be inconceivable if this was an actual documentary during the Blitz.
So we put the idea that this is in any way a documentary aside and then we can focus on the film. The acting is a mixed bag, some of the "actors" are so natural that they work perfectly, while other seem to be slightly too aware of the camera therefore seeming quite soulless when saying their lines. This is however a minor quibble. One problem is a sound one, I don't know if it was my copy, but at times the soundtrack is much louder than the speech, or often the speech is nearly whispered because the boom was probably too far away.
The plot isn't that fascinating it involves fighting a fire before it gets to a boat. The excitement comes from the constant rain of bombs from German aircraft and the always imminent fire. In the end it is a pretty good film about camaraderie and the British Blitz spirit idea, and it does have an interesting idea with the using of actual people who were doing the jobs depicted in the film. Final Grade
7/10
Trivia
From Wikipedia:
Humphrey Jennings' reputation always remained very high among film makers, but had faded among others. His films appear strikingly different from the 'social critique' approach which typified the documentaries of Grierson and his "school" of the 1930s and the feature films of the 1960s and 70s such as Lindsay Anderson'sThis Sporting Life (1962) or Karel Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960).
After 2001 this situation was partly rectified: firstly by the feature-length documentary by Oscar-winning documentary-maker Kevin Macdonald, Humphrey Jennings: The Man Who Listened to Britain (made by Figment Films in 2002 for British television's Channel 4); and secondly by Kevin Jackson's monumental 450-page biography Humphrey Jennings (Picador, 2004). In 2003 two of his films, Listen to Britain and Spare Time, were included in the Tate Britain retrospective, A Century of Artists' Film in Britain which featured the work of over one hundred filmmakers.
As of 2005, nearly all the films of Humphrey Jennings are available on DVDs.
No excerpt of the film on the Youtubes, so here's Fireman Sam, suitably Firemany and British:
... uhhh. Girl does stuff and then sees herself do stuff. Death has a mirror for a face. She may or may not have been dead throughout the whole film.
Review
As you can see by the synopsis Yankee Doodle Dandy this ain't. It's the kind of film that you feel should be aplauded by snaping your fingers at the end, oh and cigarettes and beret wearing are optional but might improve your enjoyment of the piece.
Yes, it is pretentious, but isn't all avant-garde/experimentalism pretentious? And is this necessarily a bad thing? Frankly with all these down to earthy, war time films I was gasping for some pretentiousness. It seemed for a while that after Buñuel the world of experimental cinema was dead, but Deren and Hammid put it squarely back on the map.
So it isn't that innovative, Spaniards were doing it in France 20 years earlier. This film does, however, have an aesthetic which is both very particularly of the 40's and also very particularly American. This is what marks it as a different and interesting film. It is still obsessed with the subconscious as well as death and mutilation like any good surrealist film, but it does it differently and it shows.
Final Grade
7/10
Trivia
From Wikipedia:
Deren and Hammid wrote, directed and performed in the film. Although Deren is usually credited as its principal artistic creator, filmmaker Stan Brakhage, who knew the couple, has claimed in his book Film at Wit's End that Meshes was in fact largely Hammid's creation, and that their marriage began to suffer when Deren received more credit.
Women they all be biotches! (Except my wife, she's luverly)
Part I:
Part II:
And... The Milla Jovovich video for The Gentleman Who Fell:
