Okay. I'll give it a whirl, EC, and I shall stick to talkies, hey?
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Excellent, telegonus. Talkies are fine; I can't keep up with anyone on silents!
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Inevitable twins: 1931's Little Caesar and The Public Enemy. Each is a classic in its own right. Together, they changed Hollywood, putting the gangster picture on the map.
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Oh yeah. And Cagney and Eddie G. were early examples of stars who did it "without matinee idol looks." They did it with their voices, and their attitude...though I'll admit, young Cagney was pretty good looking(I ALWAYS see Sean Connery in his brow and sneer, shorter though he was. NOBODY I ask sees that. Hah.)
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Similar duo: Dracula and Frankenstein, also from '31, they put the horror film, which wasn't really a genre till then, and then le deluge.
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Yep. I always rather see them as the "Psychos" of their time; people screaming and fainting in the theaters, near-bannings. But they just don't have the power-punch of the Psycho murders.
Psycho, I might add, rather mixes Dracula(Norman thin and vampirish in his dark clothes) with Frankenstein's monster(Mother on her lurching rampages, more monster than Mother.) Says I.
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King Kong, from 1933, a blockbuster, it made musical accompaniment to action (called "mickey mousing" at time), the movie is itself a monster, looms as large as Psycho in film history.
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From everything I've read...probably MORE than Psycho. And it shows ya: the genre movies that make so much money now could have dominated the screen a lot earlier in film history -- but American studios turned their noses up.
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(Though unlike the Hitchcock picture it didn't put giant monsters on the map, not right away anyway,
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That seems to have waited til the 50's and radioactivity and Godzilla and (from radioactivity) any number of GIANT creatures -- ants(THEM), spiders, etc.
But Godzilla wasn't the first "dinosaur on a rampage movie" of the 50s. An American Warner Bros hit called "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms" got there first. An A-bomb woke that guy up in the Artic and he made his way down to NYC(eating a fishing boat and a lighthouse en route.)
Some years ago, I decided that "Beast" was my favorite of 1953 and it gets to hold that title as an adult. In Los Angeles, this was a HUGE local ratings buster and played all week on the Million Dollar Movie (Once a weeknight, twice on Saturday twice on Sunday.)
Trivia: Few Hitchcock movies played the Million Dollar Movie in LA in the 60s. One was Dial M. The other was Man Who Knew Too Much '56 -- BEFORE it was shown on network. Hitchcock and JImmy Stewart sued over that -- and Man '56 got showings on NBC, ABC, and CBS over the next decade!
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it virtually invented the "talking picture spectacle" as it came to be known.)
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Kong, you say? (I got distracted.) Hmmm..never thought of that.
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The later Thirties are more generic even as there are great films aplenty,
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Well, they've been telling us about 1939 for decades now -- though me, I'm partial to 1959. And 1960.
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and to carry on over Gone With The Wind would be redundant, so I'll pass for the time being.
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OK.
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Citizen Kane, love it, hate it; steering clear of it is impossible. Sad to say that as the years have passed and the Internet came along, the word overrated might almost have been invented to create the dividing line between those who love it and those who say "meh". Its influence is everywhere. Yes, it lost money upon its initial release, yet had ever a flop been more influential? While not itself a film noir and the noir genre is unthinkable without it.
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I expect Citizen Kane will always hold a high spot because it ISN'T a thriller or genre piece, though it borrows the tropes(spooky giant mansion, noir lighting, Kane going kinda mad; not to mention Benny Herrmann). A film like Psycho will always be seen as a bit too "easy to watch" as a traditional thriller; Kane had more on its mind, the Story of a Great Man(who wasn't so great.)
But remember: someone called "Psycho" -- "The Citizen Kane of Horror Movies." But I call Psycho: Citizen Kane. They're equal to me...
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After that, I'm getting tired.
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Sorry to hear that, but we value getting you for whatever stretch we get you. Every time!
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
Worthy of mention from later on: The Sound Of Music. The epitome of the unhip was the film that displaced Gone With The Wind as the highest grossing movie of all time.
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Yes. Sometimes we forget that "Landmark Films" can be a function of the box office. Its like the Godfather in that it is a Best Picture that was a big entertainment blockbuster.
It brought big budgeted musicals back to life for one last hurrah, and a long one it was, extending into the Seventies (think Ross Hunter's 1973 Lost Horizon).
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That was a fascinating stretch, akin to today's comic hero cycle, but shorter.
THe Sound of Music was the biggie, but Mary Poppins and My Fair Lady the year before helped set the stage.
It took a few years to get them cast and made but...
Camelot
Oliver
Star!
Throughly Modern Millie
Darling Lili
Funny Girl
Finian's Rainbow
Paint Your Wagon
Hello, Dolly
...were the big ones I can remember. They either flopped or couldn't earn back their money even if the grosses were huge(Paint Your Wagon, Hello Dolly.)
The musical made Julie Andrews -- and then it sank her. Mille, Star, and Darling Lili(especially the last two) sank her as quickly as Mary and Maria had launched her.
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Also, its star, the English Julie Andrews replaced American Doris Day as the last of the "square" female superstars-role models-ideal wives and mothers with no real sex appeal but plenty of female fans
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Whereas Oscar Levant said of Doris Day, "I knew her before she was a virgin," I think one of Julie's husbands was more blunt, saying that her , well, "hair down there" was ...lilacs.
I trust we recall that Mister Hitchcock tried to sex Julie up by pairing her under a pile of blankets doing something unseen but likely naughty with Paul Newman, at the beginning of Torn Curtain. Paul Newman was one sexy guy, Julie was pretty but just couldn't pull the sexy off. This was staged to generate the heat of Janet Leigh and John Gavin at the beginning of Psycho(albeit with the gimmick of the man and woman being covered up)...but it felt like a corporate business meeting between two "Superstars"(trademark 1966.)
And this: When they made Torn Curtain in 1966, Julie Andrews was actually a bigger star than Newman. She was paid more and had those recent blockbuster hits. But by 1973/74, Newman was still star enough for blockbusters like The Sting and The Towering Inferno -- but Julie Andrews had been long since consigned to TV. Only Andrews' husband, director Blake Edwards, saved her -- with a trio of films -- 10, SOB(where Julie is famously topless and STILL not sexy), and the Big One, Victor Victoria.
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telegonus (736)
7 years ago
Truly, EC. Citizen Kane is special. And another thing that I (and many others) love about it: it's a great back lot movie that HAD to have been a back lot movie. This is not a film that could have been made on location. The location is the RKO studio. An issue worth pondering here: all the skill, the genius, really, that went into the making of studio films back in the day. The art departments, the sound men, editors. Kane isn't just an Orson Welles film, it's a labor of love created by many hands. Gifted people, most forgotten except by hard-core movie buffs, without whom Welles could never have fashioned the picture.
To go back to those early sound films: the two "dynamic duos" of crime and horror really do stand out from the pack. Each is different from the other, even in its own genre. The success of Dracula may have spawned Frankenstein but Jimmy Whale was not at all like Tod Browning as a director. Similarly, Little Caesar is minimalist, and like Dracula didn't cost a ton of money; and also like Dracula its title character ventures from the boonies,--downstate Illinois for America, Transylvania for Europe--to the big cities of London and Chicago. Rico and Dracula aren't alike at all physically or temperamentally, though each is pursued by a dogged realist who takes him out in the end; an Irish police detective in LC, a doctor in Dracula.
King Kong was too "lightning in a bottle" to have yielded successors, thus unlike Psycho or Jaws it produced no copycat follow-ups of the Homicidal-Baby Jane-Tentacles-Orca kind. The budget busting nature of the film, which had to be a blockbuster, likely intimidated Depression era studios, even the biggest of them.
Apropos of the Fifties, bug-eyed monsters and giant creature pictures, they owed a lot to Kong, though so much time had passed they couldn't follow a similar course. BTW: didja know that Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, a big hit for Warners, maybe even their biggest for 1953, was a pickup?
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telegonus (736)
7 years ago
To continue: Beast was an indie, and a pricey one, and when the producers consulted Warners on a possible distribution deal the studio saw gold, bought the movie outright, which, alas, denied huge profits to those responsible for its making. That one's follow-up, Them!, was wholly Warners. Yet even this late, with color, 3D and CinemaScope available, the studio, which had had some success with 3D, passed on all three and chose black and white.
As we've discussed before: Warners made the right choice. Black and white ties the film to Noir and also to the late Forties-early Fifties semi-docs of the Northside 777-Walk East On Beacon kind, which made it look like it was really happening, not a movie. This was of enormous help early in the film, when it's still playing like a mystery. Later on it takes on some of the characteristics of war films, of which two of its featured players were veterans of, notably Battleground, which both James Whitmore AND James Arness had appeared in. We've also gone over the Jaws-like aspects of Them!, which has a very similar plot structure, and in my opinion is better in the suspense department early on, if less colorful. The ending of the earlier film is near apocalyptic feeling, while Jaws feels downright pastoral by comparison.
Finally, and briefly: Godzilla, King Kong Of The Japanese monsters, eh? I saw it not too many months ago and it's actually, even in its "butchered" American version a stark, beautiful, tense and exciting film from start to finish. Aside from maybe the "island connection", complete with natives, it has little in common with King Kong, though on second thought these two are similar in having their title monsters wreak havoc on a major city. Kong's damage was small beer compared to the near nuking of Tokyo by by the Pacific sea monster. In Japan (for sure) and internationally, less so in America, I think it's fair to say that Godzilla is a landmark film,--and then some.
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
To continue: Beast was an indie, and a pricey one, and when the producers consulted Warners on a possible distribution deal the studio saw gold, bought the movie outright, which, alas, denied huge profits to those responsible for its making.
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Hmm. Too bad. That story is as old as the hills in Hollywood.
But Ray Harryhausen was launched and -- with Bernard Herrmann doing the scoring - -became a legend with The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts.
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That one's follow-up, Them!, was wholly Warners. Yet even this late, with color, 3D and CinemaScope available, the studio, which had had some success with 3D, passed on all three and chose black and white.
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I think Them started up as a 3-D production to be done in color. But they turned it into a "desert noir" b/w film instead. Still, modern day prints of the film start with the title word "THEM!" in color and 3-D-like depth over the b/w opening shot.
A great childhood memory of : Them. It was on the Million Dollar Movie, all week.
The TV guide summary said something like "Giant mutants run amok in Los Angeles." But it didn't say what the giant mutants WERE.
I watched the film with its first half hour of great "mystery in the desert." WHAT has killed an entire family in their vacation trailer(save a little girl) who have vanished? WHAT has killed a General Store owner whose corpse is bloody ( a grisly image for a 1954 film) and surrounded by piles of sugar. WHAT kills a police officer -- offscreen -- his death accompanied by his high-pitched scream and an even more high-pitched sound of the attacking killers?
WHAT? About forty minutes in, we find out: giant ants.
And that's how I first saw Them. NOT knowing the monsters would be big ants. I can still remember the surprise.
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
As we've discussed before:
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I suppose. But revisits are great!
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Warners made the right choice. Black and white ties the film to Noir and also to the late Forties-early Fifties semi-docs of the Northside 777-Walk East On Beacon kind, which made it look like it was really happening, not a movie. This was of enormous help early in the film, when it's still playing like a mystery.
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Absolutely. Them has been praised for its realistic first forty minutes in which -- by having the cops think they are dealing with a serial killer psycho - -the groundwork is laid to take those killer ants VERY seriously (and we never see too many of them, maybe three were built for the movie.)
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Later on it takes on some of the characteristics of war films, of which two of its featured players were veterans of, notably Battleground, which both James Whitmore AND James Arness had appeared in.
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Well, as Stephen King noted, in the militaristic fifties, the military was always called in to do battle with these monsters, and civilians were subjected to martial law and other indignities because The Army Knows Best. In Them, the officers believe Fess Parker that he saw giant ants -- but they order him kept under lock and key in the looney bin "for national security reasons."
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
We've also gone over the Jaws-like aspects of Them!, which has a very similar plot structure,
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Yes. Long build up and then three men team up to fight the creature(s). Edmund Gwenn is the rough equivalent of Richard Dreyfuss; James Arness tracks with Roy Scheider, and James Whitmore gets a Quint-like death in the jaws of a giant ant.
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and in my opinion is better in the suspense department early on, if less colorful.
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Hmmm. Well, almost a tie for me. Jaws benefits from having less censorship and thus more bloody terror to the initial attacks.
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The ending of the earlier film is near apocalyptic feeling, while Jaws feels downright pastoral by comparison.
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Well, Them is from that militaristic, Cold War paranoia period of American films. These monsters were often stand-ins for The Communist Menace. Red ants, not Reds...
Them also anticipates The Birds in suggesting that animals COULD take the earth over from humans.
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I should note that while The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms gets my 1953 Best of slot, Them could have easily gotten my 1954 slot if it were not for Rear Window.
Yes, these are ridiculous choices if taken against the serious films of the year(From Here to Eternity, On the Waterfront) but both The Beast and Them taught this young fellow about the mechanics of thriller story telling: build-up, suspense(both films have the authorities not believing the protagonists about these creatures existence), and pay-off: The Beast destroys NYC with great determination (and radioactive blood dripping from his wounds); the ants are ready to take over LA.
Also: The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms and Them got BIG promotion when they played KHJ-TV Channel 9 in the 60s. Boomer kids ruled; these were big event movies -- playing all week long on the Miliion Dollar Movie. They are seminal parts of my childhood...
...and they are leading to Psycho...
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
Here is my list of favorite fifties movies:
1950: Sunset Boulevard
1951: Strangers on a Train
1952: High Noon
1953: The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms
1954: Rear Window
1955: To Catch a Thief
1956: The Wrong Man
1957: 12 Angry Men
1958: Damn Yankees
1959: North by Northwest
Pretty "Hitchcock heavy," yes? And yet I think Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, and The Wrong Man are all classic and unique in different ways. Rear Window may be the masterpiece, but To Catch a Thief is the most glamorous movie I've ever seen, and The Wrong Man just may be the saddest.
Strangers on a Train sits all by its lonesome as the best of the Warners Hitchcocks -- action all the way(at least in narrative pacing, if not physical set-pieces) and the Second Greatest Psycho in Hitchocck (Bruno Anthony), played by perhaps the most tragic actor Hitchcock ever worked with(Robert Walker, who died shortly after making Strangers and only one more movie which he didn't finish entirely.)
North by Northwest caps Hitchcock's fifties run...but Psycho is really the "completion" of that run.
And that leaves only a few slots for "non-Hitchcocks."
Sunset Boulevard has plenty of Hollywood/LA Gothic atmosphere(Hollywood always seems to have its past faded figures intermingled with its current "hot ones") and a biting Billy Wilder co-written script.
High Noon is a suspense piece as well as a Western, and will always stand for all of us as a look at what it means to be abandoned and alone. (Yeah, John Wayne and Howard Hawks hated this, and made Rio Bravo in response -- but, its still a great thematic work.) That said, though High Noon is my favorite of '52 -- I like Rio Bravo(probably my Number Two for 1959) about ten times more.
The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms is one of the "seminal" events of my childhood. The Beast's killing at an amusement park is a great climax, but I'll never forget how he first rises out of the bay and attacks Bowery dockworkers to start his rampage . Nor will I forget the poignant death of impish Cecil Kellaway in a diving bell that the monster eats like a bon bon. Cecil's great last words, via radio transmitter to his daughter: "But the most amazing thing about it is --" CHOMP. (Note in passing: diving bell scenes always creeped me out; its like lowering a human being in a coffin with a window into the briny deep.)
Damn Yankees and 12 Angry Men were also Million Dollar Movies, so I got intense multiple viewing exposure to them. Damn Yankees has just about the happiest musical song I"ve ever heard -- "You've Gotta Have Heart" -- driving the whole movie like the shower scene does in Psycho; but it has other great songs and great characters in Ray Walston's Devil and Gwen Verdon as his sexpot man-killer.
12 Angry Men has that great premise -- it starts with its all-male jury at 11 to 1 "guilty" and Fonda takes it all the way back to "not guilty" -- a great cast, great Hitchcockian direction and something to say about human nature: we generally avoid conflict with our fellow human beings, we avoid confronting them, we don't "dig deep" into their feelings. Well, these 12 men will not get that luxury. In trying to implement the Constitutional rights of their jury service, they confront each other and themselves.
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In choosing only one per year in the fifties, I do my movie love and memories a great disservice.
I mean, to leave these movies unmentioned:
Them
Marty
Giant
The Bridge on the River Kwai
Vertigo(yes, I DO like it)
Touch of Evil
Rio Bravo(sneaking up on NXNW as my favorite of '59)
Some Like It Hot
Anatomy of a Murder
....rather screws up the strength of my regard for these movies. Any one of them could be my Number One of those years, too.
I have great regard for such "obvious" fifties classics as Streetcar Named Desire and A Place in the Sun(but Strangers on a Train, Bruno, and that carousel are much more "fun" memories from the same year). From Here to Eternity and On the Waterfront seem bracing, Hays-Code defying, and involving.
Its just that the Number Ones on my list matter just a bit more personally to me. Its interesting to realize -- just now -- that at least three of them played nine times a week on the Miliion Dollar Movie. I didn't watch every showing all the way through, but I watched bits and pieces of EVERY showing along with a first all-the-way-through viewing.
Not to mention, pretty much EVERY Hitchcock movie of the fifties holds a hallowed place in my heart, especially Dial M, Harry, Man 2 as unmentioned above.
And All About Eve from 1950. Great if a little too melodramatic for my taste now and -- why don't these dolts SEE THROUGH Eve? I like that George Sanders DOES...what a great role, what a great voice.
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swanstep (2715)
7 years ago
1950: Sunset Boulevard
1951: Strangers on a Train
1952: High Noon
1953: The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms
1954: Rear Window
1955: To Catch a Thief
1956: The Wrong Man
1957: 12 Angry Men
1958: Damn Yankees
1959: North by Northwest
1950, 1954, 1959 agree.
1951 Streetcar
1952 Singin' in the Rain
1953 Tokyo Story
1954 Rear Window
1955 The Night of The Hunter
1956 The Killing
1957 A Face In The Crowd (HMs: Sweet Smell Of Success, Paths of Glory, 12 Angry Men, Wild Strawberries, Seventh Seal, Nights of Cabiria - I can watch any of these films any time.) One of the greatest film years - whole careers get built off of each of these films!
1958 Vertigo
I need to check out Beast from 20,000... Q. Checking now, a fathom is 1.8 meters, so 20,000 fathoms is ~3x as deep as the deepest known ocean trench on Earth. Is the finding of such a super-trench a plot point in the film or is the title just hyperbole/figurative?
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
1950: Sunset Boulevard
1951: Strangers on a Train
1952: High Noon
1953: The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms
1954: Rear Window
1955: To Catch a Thief
1956: The Wrong Man
1957: 12 Angry Men
1958: Damn Yankees
1959: North by Northwest
1950, 1954, 1959 agree.
1951 Streetcar
1952 Singin' in the Rain
1953 Tokyo Story
1954 Rear Window
1955 The Night of The Hunter
1956 The Killing
1957 A Face In The Crowd (HMs: Sweet Smell Of Success, Paths of Glory, 12 Angry Men, Wild Strawberries, Seventh Seal, Nights of Cabiria - I can watch any of these films any time.) One of the greatest film years - whole careers get built off of each of these films!
1958 Vertigo
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I think in past posts, I've offered my favorites of the sixties and seventies(probably my two favorite decades for film; I grew up then) and the nineties(which for some reason I liked a lot better than the 80s).
I feel pretty solid about my fifties list. I would feel less so about a forties list or a thirties list, my expertise and memories and experience of those years is not extensive.
What's clear about my fifties list, of course, is that I elected to pick a Hitchcock 5 times out of ten. Which is another way of saying "most years in the fifties, my favorite was a Hitchcock." Which makes sense. If one is a Hitchcock fan but not really an overall MOVIE fan, why, every year he made a movie he would have the winner.
But that's not quite so either. I'm not really gripped by most of his forties films. I respect the British 30s stuff, but it doesn't really haunt my memories, either.
No, with the years behind us now, it seems clear that Hitchcock "peaked and hit his stride" from 1951 (with Strangers on a Train) to 1963(yes, I will let The Birds in; its just too damn famous and too great a technical achievement.) Hitch was on a roll, and for me, as a Superfan, it was hard for another, perhaps more accepted, perhaps more "Major" fifties films to overcome my mesmerized deep love of What Hitchcock Does.
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
To hit a three-in-a-row grouping of
Rear Window
To Catch a Thief
The Wrong Man
rather betrays the more famous three-in-a-row of
Vertigo
North by Northwest
Psycho
...and I can't say that the first three outweigh the second three. But the first three outweigh other movies of 1954, 1955, and 1956 to me. And that's knowing that the very fine movies swanstep and telegonus have picked were out there, too.
This is repeating NOW, in the current phase of my life. I gave QT almost an "automatic win" for his last three films:
Inglorious Basterds 2009
Django Unchained 2012
The Hateful Eight 2015
As with Hitchcock in his prime -- except I'm not sure QT is in HIS prime -- I'm so anticipating and excited by ANY QT film that comes out that it rather "pushes out" the more formidable and noteable films of the year of release. And here's the weird part: each of those three films above has some sort of "overindulgence" flaw, and all of them have scenes of sadistic violence that has me questioning QT's mental state, and worried (a little) about mine.
QT gets my Number One for 1994 as well(Pulp Fiction) and my Strong Number Two for the great year of 1997(Jackie Brown -- bested only by the supergreat LA Confidential.) I guess the competition was stronger(in my mind) in the years of Reservoir Dogs, the two Kill Bills, and DeathProof.
And so it is with Hitchcock. Yes, I could give him the 5 Number Ones in the 50's I give him; but I can't give him 1950(Stage Fright) or 1952(I Confess) or 1953(Dial M.) I like them all, but they don't "blow out the competish" as Rear Window, To Catch a Thief and The Wrong Man do.
In fact, I think I tend to count To Catch a Thief and The Wrong Man as my two favorite Hitchcocks that don't usually make other people's ten best lists(where the Big Four and Shadow of a Doubt and Notorious and The 39 Steps are usually found.)
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
I need to check out Beast from 20,000...
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I don't think it will hold much weight with you. First of all, you aren't first seeing it at "a single digit age." This was a childhood biggie for me. But to the extent The Beast gets to stay on my list, it is that I honestly couldn't think of any movie from 1953 I like MORE.
And there's this: the film (along with Them, also from Warners, a year later) was a pretty good lesson in story construction, and has a Hitchcock-like suspense through-line: the hero(who is French, adding exoticism to the story) gets the briefest view of the dinosaur in the Arctic....and nobody believes him. As it becomes apparent that the Beast is making his way down the Atlantic and destroying things along the way(a fishing boat at sea, a lighthouse on the rocky shore)...our hero keeps trying to tell everybody what he saw...and people STILL don't believe him. Its a strong Hitchcock trope. Eventually, our hero picks up a couple of people who believe him. One gets eaten by the dinosaur, and now EVERYBODY believes him. And then the dinosaur comes ashore in NYC and we get our big, long climax, which is pretty famous in monster movie circles.
I recall something clearly from the Million Dollar Movie viewings. The scene BEFORE the dinosaur comes ashore in NYC is a quiet and sad one, between our hero and the daugheter of the scientist who was eaten in the diving bell. The father is mourned. And then in the next scene, the Big Guy comes ashore.
I always felt some poignance to the scene before the monster comes ashore, but I felt excitement, too, once I'd seen the movie before: "Hey, they're mourning the eaten scientist. That means the NEXT SCENE is the big attack on New York. Here we go!"
Narrative.
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
The entire movie, I might add, was built around a Ray Bradbury short story entitled "The Lighthouse," about a dinosaur coming out of the sea and attacking a lighthouse. In the movie, this is a chilling night scene, with the lighthouse shown "alone and waiting to be victimized" before the monster rises out of the sea to "mount and attack it." (It is as if the dinosaur believes the lighthouse is a "foe" that must be destroyed.)
There are a couple of lighthouse keepers who don't make it....haunting night scene.
PSYCHO CONNECTION: I have "The Beast" DVD and it has a trailer for the film from 1953. Before footage from the movie rolls, three "Young Warners Contract Players" take the screen, one by one. Each says something dire about the mysteries of nature that Earth faces in the nuclear age.
The three young actors are:
Merv Griffin(soon to be a talk show star)
Paul Comi(most famous as the cop boyfriend in Warners' House of Wax, another great 1953 scare memory)
and...ta da...Vera Miles. And I will say that Vera is not only beautiful here, but she delivers her "warning" with an emotional intensity that is Lila Crane at her most strident, all the way.
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swanstep (2715)
7 years ago
need to check out Beast from 20,000...
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I don't think it will hold much weight with you. First of all, you aren't first seeing it at "a single digit age." This was a childhood biggie for me.
Fair enough. I know for a fact that I can never be completely objective about my (seen on tv in) childhood faves from (roughly) this era: Forbidden Planet, Jason and The Argonauts. That said, I've been impressed/moved as an adult first-time-viewer by things like The Incredible Shrinking Man and X: The Man with X-Ray Eyes and Day The Earth Stood Still. These are just well-produced, well-written, thoughtful films.
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
Q. Checking now, a fathom is 1.8 meters, so 20,000 fathoms is ~3x as deep as the deepest known ocean trench on Earth. Is the finding of such a super-trench a plot point in the film or is the title just hyperbole/figurative?
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I think hyperbole/figurative...it just SOUNDS good.
However, the film does make the point that this dinosaur can evidently breathe underwater and is "following a trench" on his march(walking, not swimming) southward to NYC. I never quite understood how this "beast" could be so amphibian; but then I don't even think they give him a real name as a type. He's not a T-Rex or a brontosaurus. He's a "somethingsaur."
"The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms" may be an indie, but it has that Warner Brothers studio polish(including the "echo chamber" sound system that always marked a Warners film in the 50s and 60's.) I'm pretty sure that it inspired the more ragged looking Godzilla(Gojira) from Japan the next year, and that triggered a whole series.
One more memorable "dinosaur on the rampage" movie was "The Giant Behemoth" a British production from the late fifties. I remember that movie because it was the first film launching a Los Angeles Saturday night horror series called "Chiller" in April 1962 (a childhood memory, but I looked up the start date in newspaper archives.)
It is a mark of how horror/Sci Fi cheapies could dominate the Boomer Kid sixties, that the first "Chiller" movies got full page ads in TV Guide and the Los Angeles Times. "The Giant Behemoth" was the debut film; the next week, it was "House on Haunted Hill." I can assure you that the "playground talk" about these two films was intense. "Hill" in particular got "Psycho"-like full coverage in boyhood talk circles.
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
"The Giant Behemoth" was off limits in my house, because THIS dinosaur breathed a radioactive ray from his mouth that burned the faces off of people. The movie got turned off in my one-TV house. My ability to see the weekly "Chiller" movie depended on my parents going out or not; it took a few years to get a second TV so I could watch these things on my own.
I recall getting to see such "Chiller" classics as "Attack of the Crab Monsters" and "Attack of the 50 Foot Woman." About THAT one: She's pretty and she does grow to 50 feet and stomps down to a local bar to confront her cheating husband and his girlfriend. TV Guide put the full-page ad for "Attack of the 50 Foot Woman" up, and all these years later, I'm here to tell you: that's one sexually suggestive ad. I'm shocked that they got away with it in 1958 or whenever the movie came out. Basically, the giant, sexy woman is astride a freeway, grabbing cars. In a short skirt.
But I digress.
I will say this: there were a LOT of creature features made in the 50s, but I think "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms" and "Them" were considered to have bigger budgets and better scripts than the norm; Warners promoted them like A releases. And The Beast has that great Ray Harryhausen stop motion photography.
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telegonus (736)
7 years ago
Great choices, EC, though when it comes to films of the Fifties I get awfully contrarian, more so than usual. So damn much CinemaScope, 3D, Todd-AO, good girl Doris vs. bad girl (but we all love her) Marilyn. Then the (admittedly brief) Grace and Audrey rivalry.
So damn many long and quite frankly bloated films. I like some of them, a lot in many cases, but egads: The Greatest Show On Earth, The Robe, The Egyptian, Desiree, War And Peace,--and the Yul Brynner threesome from '56: Anastasia, The King And I and The Ten Commandments. OMG! If I hear the name Deborah Kerr mentioned I'm going for the gas pipe!
Here are some of my favorites from the Fifties, and I'll try to do it by year (by memory).
1950: The Killer That Stalked New York, The Gunfighter, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, Caged, Convicted.
1951: The Steel Helmet, Pickup, Tomorrow Is Another Day, The Thing From Another World.
1952: Clash By Night, Beware, My Lovely, Don't Bother To Knock, Another Man's Poison, Holiday For Sinners.
1953: The Naked Spur, Invaders From Mars, It Came From Outer Space, Jeopardy, Pickup On South Street.
1954: Black Tuesday, Gorilla At Large, Them!, Suddenly, Dragnet, Riot In Cell Block 11.
I'm getting too tired to finish the decade but you get the picture, or rather pictures: short, fast, tough, to the point, daring, small scale, mostly black and white, often featuring has-been or past their prime stars or character players in the leading roles. Thrills and chills, very little in the way of respectability...
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
Great choices, EC, though when it comes to films of the Fifties I get awfully contrarian, more so than usual. So damn much CinemaScope, 3D, Todd-AO,
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Its a strange decade. One sees now -- clearly -- how the terror of television(tiny images in black and white that people swarmed to watch) drove Hollywood to fight back on terms of size and color. You could not get those on your little b/w TV. Of course, the movie biz also found out that their overlong, bloated epics weren't much competition to Lucy and The Honeymooners given the human connection made by the characters to the folks at home.
And yet, "trailing" all the bloated fifties movies were all sorts of cheaper, tougher, lower key noir type pictures: The Killing, Night of the Hunter, Kiss Me Deadly, The Harder They Fall..perhaps even Strangers on a Train (a black and white movie more as a case of studio choice than Hitchocck's as with The Wrong Man and Psycho; Stage Fright and I Confess are, too.)
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good girl Doris vs. bad girl (but we all love her) Marilyn. Then the (admittedly brief) Grace and Audrey rivalry.
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A nice summary of four of the biggest fifties female stars. I guess Liz Taylor belongs on that list, but she was rather versus EVERYBODY.
Hitchcock worked most famously three-in-a-row with Grace(and sought her for The Trouble With Harry, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and North by Northwest, too. And then famously got and lost her for Marnie) He did one with Doris -- one of her best. Marilyn he never wanted to work with; Audrey he wanted badly, getting her and then losing her for the unmade "No Bail for the Judge."
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
Hey, Hitchcock "got and lost" two actresses roughly the same way: Audrey on No Bail for the Judge; Grace on Marnie. Oh, well, at least he got SOME movies with Grace. Hitch reportedly never spoke to Audrey again, and turned down doing "Wait Until Dark" with her accordingly(says one rumor; but Hitch was at Universal and that was a Warners film -- would Lew Wasserman have let Hitch "loan out" to Jack Warner?)
I wish Hitchcock, Hepburn and Wait Until Dark would have worked out. The film as we have it is a great, scary thriller(with Alan Arkin's Roat, says Stephen King, the greatest villain in film history.) Its already my favorite of 1967(based on the screamathon full house night I saw it). I do worry that Hitchcock may have "formalized it" and lost some of the hipness that is in the final film as we have it.
But boy, could Hitchcock have used a big hit like Wait Until Dark after Marnie and Torn Curtain. He could have been a real participant in that great movie year of 1967(in real life, Lew Wasserman killed "The First Frenzy" that year and Hitchcock sat the year out.)
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telegonus (736)
7 years ago
Yeah, those cheaper and tougher films are and were a save for me, by which even as a kid I'd have gone for Ida Lupino and Robert Ryan over Mitzi Gaynor and Rossano Brazzi anyday.
I do like those Rodgers & Hammerstein musicals in my fashion, recognize the artistry in them. They were and are larger than life, especially Oklahoma! and South Pacific.
Damn Yankees is great fun, I agree, with Gwen Verdon selling her stuff, as it were, and Tab Hunter,--Tab Hunter!-- a revelation. If he hadn't been tied down to Warners, for the most part an at best second rate studio in the Fifties, he might have gone much further as a star. His biggest rival, Rock Hudson, had the often edgy U-I and of course Douglas Sirk backing him up, while Tab made "vehicles" with the likes of Natalie Wood.
But those movies you were "supposed to like" because they're good for you, like greens and vegetables, turned me off much of the time for that reason, just as oddball titles like Stakeout On Dope Street, Death In Small Doses and Riot In Juvenile Prison drew me in. Then there were all those period crime films that enjoyed some serious box-office success; and of course the deliberately beatnicky Roger Corman sci-fi pictures about Crab Monsters and haunted seas.
As to the period crime flicks I've always felt there was a connection between them and Some Like It Hot, which channeled roughly the same era. The Mickey Rooney vehicle Baby Face Nelson was actually a literal blockbuster in 1957.
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
So damn many long and quite frankly bloated films. I like some of them, a lot in many cases, but egads: The Greatest Show On Earth, The Robe, The Egyptian, Desiree, War And Peace,--and the Yul Brynner threesome from '56: Anastasia, The King And I and The Ten Commandments. OMG! If I hear the name Deborah Kerr mentioned I'm going for the gas pipe!
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Ha. I thought Deborah Kerr was rather pretty and that Hitchcock should have used her(but in which picture? So many actresses, so few vehicles.)
But that list almost pinpoints what went wrong with many fifties movies. A whole lotta length, size, color...but often not much really gripping emotional interest. These were "coffee table book movies" with a certain heavy gloss to them.
I will admit to an affection for the Rodgers and Hammerstein films of the decade. In fact, one of my earliest memories -- I'm guessing 1958 so I was very, very young -- was the album of "The King and I"(the movie) playing in the house for me to strut around to, ala the King. (It's funny I can summon that memory -- its two years before Psycho so I can actually remember when Psycho didn't exist! But not much.)
Anyway, I saw these movies in the sixties in re-release and on TV, but Oklahoma, The King and I, South Pacific, and Carousel(with its marvelous instrumental carousel-based overture)...I dug them. The songs at least. They were on the radio all the time as I grew up. A strong memory of the late fifties and sixties. Funny how "The Sound of Music" rather trailed the bulk of Rodgers and Hamerstein to the screen, and ended up defining the sixties as the other films had defined the fifties.
But Damn Yankees was hipper, faster, lighter on its feet, sexier..."the anti-Rodgers and Hammerstein.") I mean, its got the Devil singing a song about "The Good Old Days" of the plague, Jack the Ripper, and cannibals...and Lola the Seductress singing about how she seduces and ruins men....
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
Truly, EC. Citizen Kane is special.
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Oh, yeah. Its a movie that became too much the "usual greatest movie of all time" on paper and thus seemed to be taken for granted and rather disparaged over the years.
Until one looks at it again. And sees, in shot after shot, frame after frame, a movie made by a man who was basically saying "Look at what you can DO on film." Every shot is a major cinematic idea that required some sort of creative work(by the director AND those skilled folks of whom you speak) to bring it off.
I think Psycho is the same way. Every shot, SOMETHING exciting going on technically. The Birds almost pulled off the same feeling, except its early slow stretch with Tippi just can't get that paranoid mojo going that Psycho had.
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And another thing that I (and many others) love about it: it's a great back lot movie that HAD to have been a back lot movie. This is not a film that could have been made on location. The location is the RKO studio.
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Great point. I'd say that applies to Casablanca as well, and Notorious(even with hits Rio setting.)
In the 40s, movies didn't have to worry about televsion. Once television hit, "going on location" was part of the fight that also included Cinemascope, 3-D and epic grandeur as weapons against that little gray tube.
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An issue worth pondering here: all the skill, the genius, really, that went into the making of studio films back in the day. The art departments, the sound men, editors. Kane isn't just an Orson Welles film, it's a labor of love created by many hands. Gifted people, most forgotten except by hard-core movie buffs, without whom Welles could never have fashioned the picture.
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Absolutely. Welles was the "idea man" but its those other folks who executed.
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
I would say by the 1970s, when the studios collapsed(except as "financing banks") and movies were made "handheld on location without built sets" -- a whole lotta craftspeople disappaeared. Soon they would be replaced with special effects people...but those people in turn became Silicon Valley CGI people.
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To go back to those early sound films: the two "dynamic duos" of crime and horror really do stand out from the pack.
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Proof positive that THOSE genres would survive and thrive once Hollywood got rid of the "prestige movie from a classic novel" approach to film narrative. Hitchcock benefitted somewhat from this, but he really didn't make crime pictures and he rarely made horror movies (like three out of 53.)
No I'm thinking of crime as : Cagney to Bogart to film noir to Bullitt to Dirty Harry to Lethal Weapon to Die Hard to Pulp Fiction.
Horror: well...everywhere. Forever.
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Each is different from the other, even in its own genre. The success of Dracula may have spawned Frankenstein but Jimmy Whale was not at all like Tod Browning as a director.
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True. Dracula and Frankenstein were linked together as the most famous of the Univeral monsters(The Wolf Man came a decade later) but the two stories are different as is the direction.
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Similarly, Little Caesar is minimalist, and like Dracula didn't cost a ton of money; and also like Dracula its title character ventures from the boonies,--downstate Illinois for America, Transylvania for Europe--to the big cities of London and Chicago. Rico and Dracula aren't alike at all physically or temperamentally, though each is pursued by a dogged realist who takes him out in the end; an Irish police detective in LC, a doctor in Dracula.
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Ah the Hays Code era -- the bad guy could have all the charisma and the best lines -- but he went DOWN.
Except Drac kept coming back.
And this: the color Hammer Dracula and Frankenstein movies of the 50s through the 70's. I haven't really seen them, but what a weird payoff for Hammer Studios, perhaps the only studio with an exclusive horror reputation? Universal was that way for some years, but branched out eventually.
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
King Kong was too "lightning in a bottle" to have yielded successors, thus unlike Psycho or Jaws it produced no copycat follow-ups of the Homicidal-Baby Jane-Tentacles-Orca kind.
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Ha, Tentacles and Orca remind me that Jaws really didn't generate many serious successors or competitors. Nor did the Jaws sequels have any heft.
Jaws was rather a "unique" horror movie that made the case for a great white shark as the villain and pulled off something that nobody could ever replicate again. Its HARD to cast an animal as a villain. (Having the shark eat that little boy helped.)
At least many of the Psycho successors caught the bloody shocks of the psychopathic kills pretty well.
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The budget busting nature of the film, which had to be a blockbuster, likely intimidated Depression era studios, even the biggest of them.
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Yes. All that painstaking effects work cost money and time. As I recall, we got Son of Kong and Mighty Joe Young, but neither of them played on the epic scale of King Kong.
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
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Apropos of the Fifties, bug-eyed monsters and giant creature pictures, they owed a lot to Kong, though so much time had passed they couldn't follow a similar course.
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By the time all these movies hit local TV in the 60s, kids like me saw King Kong and Godzilla and The Beast as "from the same package." I had to develop into adulthood to realize that King Kong was made about 20 YEARS before Godzilla, with The Beast in between(but closer in time to Godzilla.)
I would say that whichever screenwriter seized on the atomic bomb as the source of either (1) creating giant versions of small animals(ants, spiders -- GRASSHOPPERS in "Beginning Or the End") or (2) "Rousting" giants from their sleep(The Beast, Godzilla, The Giant Behemoth) well -- they set the pace for an entire decade of SciFi horror.
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BTW: didja know that Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, a big hit for Warners, maybe even their biggest for 1953,
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I think I read that somewhere, and AGAIN the proof: The Beast and Them were huge hits -- likely kid/teenage driven -- and the Star Wars Future was ready to go in the 50s. It just took decades for studios to give up on adult filmmaking as their main bread and butter, and to shift to genre stuff.
I like to say: if the world were fair, we would have seen red carpet premieres in the 50s where the stars walking the aisle were Kenneth Tobey, Faith Domergue and Richard Carlson.
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was a pickup?
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I have read this and it fascinates me: the "indie film" has always been around, I guess. I mean, how did Harryhausen and company raise the money to make the pricey Beast BEFORE Warners bought it? It has a rich musical score, for one thing.
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swanstep (2715)
7 years ago
Ha, Tentacles and Orca remind me that Jaws really didn't generate many serious successors or competitors.
Not for lack of trying! I was a kid and saw essentially all the attempts to redo Jaws and there were a *lot* of them:
Grizzly (one of the first out of the blocks - huge playground hit, saw it twice on first release notwithstanding its terribleness)
Orca
Piranha
The Swarm
The Car (beat for beat replay of Jaws with a car as the shark directed by Cat Ballou's director - in the same vein, Duel got re-released for the big screen down under)
Sasquatch (Jaws mixed with pseudo-science 'In Search of...' - dreadful)
Ha, even King Kong (1976) was sold as 'Jaws but where you cry when the shark dies'.
Jaws 2 was lame indeed but when you're 11 or 12 you don't listen to critics...I even read the novelization first!
And The Deep was sold as Jaws with wet t-shirts. I was confused.
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
Ha, Tentacles and Orca remind me that Jaws really didn't generate many serious successors or competitors.
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Not for lack of trying! I was a kid and saw essentially all the attempts to redo Jaws and there were a *lot* of them:
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I expect I should have phrased differently. NOT: "Jaws didn't really generate MANY serious successors or competitors" but "Jaws didn't really generate many SERIOUS successors or competitors."
In other words, many "Jaws-like" films were made, but none of them managed to pull off the mix of serious thriller and A-list adventure that Universal and a committed director and cast gave us.
I remember being SO dishearted by "Jaws 2." Roy Scheider was there, and the Mayor, Murray Hamilton -- but Shaw(obviously) and Dreyfuss(by his choice) were NOT, and suddenly the Jaws trio was missing two corners.
Worse, I recall the whole story line shifting to a bunch of permed glossy teenagers that gave Jaws 2 the feel of "Beach Blanket Bingo" populated by Dr. Pepper commercial dancers.
And the shark attacks were terribly silly.
Note in passing: a silly shock scene in Jaws 2 in which a teenage girl watches helplessly while the shark kills her boyfriend found its silly match in Psycho II in a shock scene in which a teenage girl watches helplessly while "Mrs. Bates"(or someone) kills HER boyfriend. In both scenes in both movies, one sensed an A movie becoming a C movie, with not terribly great teenage actors pulling us out of the classic nature of the original films, with their skilled adult actors.
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
Not for lack of trying! I was a kid and saw essentially all the attempts to redo Jaws and there were a *lot* of them:
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Grizzly (
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Wasn't there one called "Claws," too? Fitting.
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one of the first out of the blocks - huge playground hit, saw it twice on first release notwithstanding its terribleness)
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Interesting to see this group of films as YOUR "playground discussion fodder." Its a key element to the hows and whys of childhood/teenage filmgoing: SHARING the experience with your friends. Either (1) Those who get to see the film tell the story to those who don't OR (2) if all parties have seen the film, they exchange opinions on "the most gross scene" or some such.
I expect this desire to communicate on the movies we see and remember has formed the nucleus of internet chat groups, today.
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Orca
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In which the Jaws 4 plotline of a "vengeful animal"(killer whale) comes into play. The whale hunts Richard Harris down like a reverse Captain Ahab.
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Piranha
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I never saw the original(directed by Joe Dante, yes, a cult director?) but "me and the boys" saw the 3-D remake a few years back. The film opens with pirhana devouring an aged Richard Dreyfuss in his rowboat as he sings "Show Me the Way to Go Home."
The movie then becomes an odd mix of sexual exploitation(a lot of bare breasts) and truly gory deaths. And yet, our older group found the film immensely funny.
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The Swarm
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On my short list for "worst movies ever made." Bad lines like "the bees have always been our friends" really can't help stop but draw laughs and director Irwin Allen stages the killer be attacks like bad episodic TV. I still say that Irwin Allen delivered a well-written classic with McQueen and Newman in The Towering Inferno, but its like that's all he had in his bag(plus the poorly-written but visually impressive Poseidon Adventure.) After Inferno, the Irwin Allen career collapsed. The Swarm hastened the crash.
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The Car (beat for beat replay of Jaws with a car as the shark directed by Cat Ballou's director - in the same vein, Duel got re-released for the big screen down under)
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A weird movie. Since The Car was an instrument of Satan, there was an Exorcist vibe, too. And of course a Duel vibe. But it wasn't very good. With only James Brolin in the lead, it wasn't a star vehicle, either.
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Sasquatch (Jaws mixed with pseudo-science 'In Search of...' - dreadful)
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Ha. "Nevah hoid of it."
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Ha, even King Kong (1976) was sold as 'Jaws but where you cry when the shark dies'.
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That's what Dino De Laurintiis said. He was kind of right -- the shark never got any sympathy. But King Kong 1976 was a "guy-in-a-gorilla-suit" movie that betrayed the magic of the original...and also featured a giant gorilla robot for a few shots, that didn't work.
In short, none of the craftsmanship and care that went into Jaws went into King Kong '76.
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Jaws 2 was lame indeed but when you're 11 or 12 you don't listen to critics...
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No, you don't. I must have 100 childhood/teen favorite films that barely get two stars from the critics. But I love them.
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I even read the novelization first!
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Novelizations were cool. The authors wrote them FROM The screenplays So the scripted: "Norman looks at the car sink in the swamp" becomes "Norman looked at the car sink in the swamp." Except Psycho was from a novel so it didn't need a novelization.
I recall buying/reading the novelization of Tim Burton's Batman ...and the book had scenes not in the movie. Which means I was reading scenes in the SCRIPT not in the movie.
And The Deep was sold as Jaws with wet t-shirts. I was confused
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swanstep (2715)
7 years ago
King Kong was too "lightning in a bottle" to have yielded successors, thus unlike Psycho or Jaws it produced no copycat follow-ups of the Homicidal-Baby Jane-Tentacles-Orca kind.
Although, of course, almost every big picture for the next 10+ years after KK has a Steiner-like full orchestral score so *that* impact was huge and immediate (and similar to Star Wars really which brought back rousing, full orchestral scores in a big way).
I'd like to add that 1933 is a very monumental year for US film. Sound technology has finally been locked and mastered and now Hollywood is ready to roll is the overall message. Kong instroduces SFX and spectacle and Steiner scores; 42nd St, Footlight Parade, and Gold-diggers of 1933 show Busby Berkeley arriving quickly at the height of his powers; The Marx Brothers make their best movie, Duck Soup, Cukor and Katharine Hepburn are great together in Little Women, Lubitsch is making some of the sexiest and wittiest comedy ever with Design For Living, Stanwyck is a killer star in Baby Face (anticipating most of noir really), Flying Down To Rio's fun and introduces Fred and Ginger, and so on. Suddenly US movies just *can't stop giving pleasure* at a time when the world really needed a pick-me-up. Lots of money's going to be made and deservedly so. Three Cheers for 1933 - old Hollywood was dead but new Hollywood was now it was clear going to be just fine.
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telegonus (736)
7 years ago
Agree 100%, Swanstep. I've felt the same for many years now. 1932 was the last year when sound pictures were "early talkies". By 1933 movies were movies, and they had sound. There was no need to make a distinction. There was a smoothness to films starting in 1933.
Even, where horror is concerned, such a skillfully and splendidly made a film as Karl Freund's The Mummy is an early talkie, while James Whale's 1933 The Invisible Man isn't.
Also from that wonderful year: The Bitter Tea Of General Yen, Only Yesterday, The Kennel Murder Case, Cavalcade, Berkeley Square, I Cover The Waterfront, Hallelujah, I'm A Bum!, Dinner At Eight and Queen Christina, and that's just for starters...
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swanstep (2715)
7 years ago
1932 was the last year when sound pictures were "early talkies". By 1933 movies were movies, and they had sound. There was no need to make a distinction. There was a smoothness to films starting in 1933.
I like that way of thinking about it. A useful examples: There's a remarkable difference between Lubitsch's Trouble In Paradise (1932) and his Design For Living (1933), and I think it's grounded in the sound - TIP sounds like everything's being recorded through a tube and the acting necessarily feels constrained and distanced by that. DFL by way of contrast sounds modern and natural and Miriam Hopkins, Gary Cooper and Fredric March feel at home on the screen, and the illusion's complete, we're with them. Design For Living is completely intelligible and hilarious to any Friends- or Seinfeld- or Curb-viewer (just as It Happened One Night, Bringing Up Baby, Holiday, and all the rest are), whereas Trouble In Paradise like The Blue Angel is really for major film buffs only.
Of the early talkies I tend to think that All Quiet on the Western Front and M and Frankenstein transcend the limitations of their sound the best, perhaps because there's not too much playful quiet conversation in any of them to expose the limitations of their sound.
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Also from that wonderful year: The Bitter Tea Of General Yen, Only Yesterday, The Kennel Murder Case, Cavalcade, Berkeley Square, I Cover The Waterfront, Hallelujah, I'm A Bum!, Dinner At Eight and Queen Christina, and that's just for starters...
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Need to see all of these (except officially Dinner at Eight, which I know I saw at the peak of my Cukor-mania because I saw everything, but I don't remember it at all!).
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telegonus (736)
7 years ago
Funny about Dinner At Eight, Swanstep: I can scarcely remember any of it, either. Oh, a scene here or there but not the movie as a whole. But the Grand Hotel, which is similar, features many of the same cast, also doesn't stand out so strongly as I might have expected prior to my first viewing, and given its huge reputation (it's been demoted, it seems, like so many Metropix of its era).
George Cukor's work was getting better by the year back then, eh? By the end of the Thirties he was a master. His Forties work sparkles. I have yet to see Susan & God (do they keep it in a closet somewhere at TCM?) but know the Crawford pictures from the Forties and, of course, the Tracy-Hepburn ones. One of my favorite non-comedies they made together and with Cukor: Keeper Of The Flame. Such a dark film, indoorsy and yet woodsy, too. Some effective over the top acting,--it wouldn't have worked without it--and a strange fairy tale vibe, as if it were a contemporary non-musical noir riff on The Wizard Of Oz. A strange film for all involved in its making.
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ecarle (14979)
7 years ago
I enjoyed reading the swanstep-telegonus dialogue on films of the 30s films...and I feel a modicum of shame at my inability to join in the discussion on practically any of them.
Though I can do OK on the original King Kong and The Wizard of Oz. Plus the Universal horrors.
I expect I've covered this before, but when I spoke to the "Chiller" series of horror/Sci Fi movies on LA local TV in the 60s, I should mention that there were two other horror movie package shows around the same time:
"Shock Theater": The Universal monsters and horror of the 30's AND the forties. Universal released this package and launched a "toy model" series of Frankenstein, Dracula, Wolf Man, Mummy, Creature from the Black Lagoon and other models you could build with glue as a kid. I did.
Shock Theater was on local channel 5.
"Strange Tales(of Science Fiction)". We kids called this "Strange Tales" for short, and it had a great eerie instrumental theme song called "Out of this World."(Available on YouTube; my nostalgia peaks.) This was on Channel 9, which was owned by RKO. Hence, the original King Kong and the original Thing from Another World played on this channel. But also packages of cheap SciFi like the truly scary "IT! The Terror From Beyond Space," which now does double duty as "the first Alien" AND the first "IT"(watch out, Stephen King.)
Growing up for a few years in a one-TV home, I only got to see these horror movies if the parents were gone or willing to let me watch. Eventually, we got one additional teeny-tiny black and white portable set and that's when I caught up on all the cheesy horror movies I could take. I also watched Strait-Jacket(with my eyes closed a lot), and the first half hour of Psycho(before the folks came home and I had to turn it off) on that little set.
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