1930s List Discussion and Suggestions (Lists Project Vol. 3)

[domino harvey]

Bombshell, Theodora Goes Wild, The Good Fairy, Thirty Day Princess, and Easy Living are all on my to-see list.

In case anyone hasn't seen it, there's a solid essay on TCM's blog about Theodora Goes Wild. (There's also an essay David Kalat just did the week before last on there about another pre-Code comedy, Girl Missing, which sounds like sort of a screwball detective story- has anyone seen it? Is the Archive disc worth getting?)

The Screwball set with Theodora is on sale at Amazon for 69% off--$7.99! and the other Screwball set is half off too!

[Ann Harding]

Fernandel is perfect in this, in a part that elicits both scorn and empathy.

Every time I think of this movie I see his grinning face and can't help from bursting with laughter. If anyone was born to do comedy it was him. That face is one in a million.

Anybody wanting to have a good laugh should get this hilarious photobook by Philippe Halsman. He interviewed Fernandel and took pictures of his reactions to the questions. It's wonderful!

[Murdoch]

Slavko Vorkapich's The Furies (not to be confused with Mann's film) is perhaps the most brilliant use of three minutes I've seen, he packs the film with his gorgeous montage and superimposition methods and the short is bursting at the seams to hold it all in. I'd seen his Life and Death of 9413 before, but it didn't prepare me for this.

edit: and now I see that this is just the opening to Crime Without Passion, something I am going to track down immediately.

Watched this and unfortunately the film that follows such a brilliant opening becomes far more conventional stylistically, with the opening acting as a sort of short film tagged onto the beginning as nothing that happens in the first three minutes has much narrative impact upon the following 60 minutes. I'm glad they gave Vorkapich free reign in that opening though, and there's another montage toward the end composed of Rains' worried face, his lovers, and the New York cityscape spinning that is well done, if not as striking.

As for the bulk of the film it's an interesting early noir, with Claude Rains turning in a good performance with his usual zeal as a misanthropic lawyer who juggles two lovers and accidentally kills one in a quarrel. Rains' conscience, which materializes throughout the film as a ghostly Rains, was a nice touch, and overall the film feels very much like the noirs of the 40s/50s plot-wise if not aesthetically. It won't make this list, but it might have made my noir list had I seen it in time.

[knives]

Man's Castle has midget baseball played for drama, does it need anything else to earn a spot on everyone's list?

[matrixschmatrix]

Having heard him mentioned in the commentary for Fantasia, I've been watching some Oskar Fischinger pieces- they're stunning. My favorite of his so far is from the 40s (Motion Painting No. 1) but there's one from the 30s that will almost certainly wind up on my list- An Optical Poem, from 1938.

You can see that Fischinger's hand was in the section of Fantasia he worked on (the Toccata and Fugue part) but this is much more interesting, to me- it flows differently, and it interacts with the music in a more dynamic way; the Disney piece seemed like it was reacting to the music, whereas Fischinger's seemed as though it were inventing alongside it, creating new art rather than accompanying what was already there.

Looking back through the thread, there are a few mentions of Fischinger, but it doesn't seem like there's any discussion- who else was championing him?

[Murdoch]

Optical Poem is sitting at number ten on my list, it's thanks to Image's Avant-Garde set that I discovered him.

[matrixschmatrix]

How is the quality on that? I could only find it on an awful, artifacted-to-hell copy on some Chinese youtube-esque site, I'd love to see it in a better print.

[Murdoch]

It's a perfectly watchable, clean print. The set as a whole is packed with interesting material, I highly recommend it.

[Gregory]

And no Fischingerophile should be without the Ten Films DVD from the Fischinger Trust/CVM. They've had material ready for a second volume for years now but apparently have been unable to find the funding to issue it (and yes, that is a guilt trip to buy the first disc). For what it's worth, Leonard Maltin gave Ten Films his highest praise, but don't let that stop you!

[zedz]

Any and all Fischinger is essential viewing, with the 30s arguably his richest decade, and the CVM 10 Films disc is the best source available.

My current version of the 30s list includes three of his films (in order: Study No 7, An Optical Poem and Study No. 8), and that's only because I'm probably artificially excluding several more. Study No. 7, the Hungarian Dance, is one of the greatest visual manifestations of music ever conceived - as matrixschmatrix notes, it's so much of a piece that the music and the visuals seem to be simultaneously engendering one another - and Study No. 8 leaves Disney's version of 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice' in the dust. And Fischinger was creating these miracles of synchronization through sheer force of will - he was mentally calculating how many frames equated to a certain number of beats and animating accordingly - he wasn't drawing alongside an optical soundtrack or anything, and if he miscalculated by a frame or two, the entire film would end up out of sync.

Len Lye's experimental animations from the decade are miraculous in their own way, but it would be decades before he attained the complexity and precision of image / sound matching that Fischinger completely mastered at the very birth of the medium.

EDIT: You can get the 10 Films disc here. Also note the fabulous Jordan Belson disc, another must-have, particularly if you're a 2001 fan.

[matrixschmatrix]

Welp, went ahead and ordered the Fischinger disc- if nothing else, this will be something I can show curious people in a few minutes instead of a few hours.

[knives]

Amazon is saying the set is out of print, is there any truth to that?

[swo17]

I will just go ahead and say (in a completely neutral, unbiased way of course) that I am extremely tempted to put Study No. 7 at the very tip top of my list, inasmuch as I can justify putting a three-minute wordless animated short in that position. The part where the lines start swelling with the music feels like God kissing you on the forehead.

Not to talk it up too much though... :-"

(knives, it's in print--just buy it directly from CVM at the link zedz posted.)

[zedz]

I will just go ahead and say (in a completely neutral, unbiased way of course) that I am extremely tempted to put Study No. 7 at the very tip top of my list, inasmuch as I can justify putting a three-minute wordless animated short in that position. The part where the lines start swelling with the music feels like God kissing you on the forehead.

Well put! And why shouldn't a three-minute wordless animation be the best film of the 30s? Unless there are a whole lot of feature films that feel like God kissing you on the forehead.

The big advantage with shorts is that, in a good one, there's no downtime to detract from the overall greatness.

[matrixschmatrix]

I was thinking about how I would rank Fischinger- would it be reasonable to put his work from the 30s as one entry? It's somewhat easier for me to compare a dozen shorts to a normal length film than it is to compare them one at a time, and figuring out where each one ranks relative to each other and also relative to other movies seems like it's going to get hopelessly muddled- besides which, it seems as though there's going to be a real issue with vote splitting on them.

[knives]

I think the would be rude to how he differentiated his own work. Plus seeing as how IMDB lists them as multiple titles it would be best to go by that logic. Anyways we've had short films on these lists before. I remember Black Ice for example making it pretty high on the '90s list.

[matrixschmatrix]

Fair enough, I just hate the idea of none of the shorts showing up because everyone prefers a different one.

[knives]

It's just a problem that's going to make these lists all the more challenging. Hell just looking to the '60s even if we did limit it to features there are going to be a lot of Godard's knocked off by the same virtue and during the last list a lot of Keaton's didn't make it because of the same thing.

Anyways I did manage to get to Swo's beloved No. 7and it took all of my energy to rip myself away from watching over and over again. The influence on Fantasia even beyond the one thing he did work on is phenomenal. There's no way in hell anything will top Mr. Thank You for me, but this one will likely get my number two spot based solely on how addicitng it is. It's the pringles of movies.

[Murdoch]

I guess I'm the odd one out as I actually prefer Optical Poem to No. 7, not that the latter won't chart highly on my list as well.

There's no way in hell anything will top Mr. Thank You for me, but this one will likely get my number two spot based solely on how addicitng it is. It's the pringles of movies.

If I had to pick a favorite director of the decade (which is one monumental task) it would be Shimizu, the dissolves that make it look as if the actors are disappearing in Japanese Girl at the Harbor are just magnificent, I fell in love during those.

[swo17]

matrixschmatrix, I get where you're coming from, but combining a group of a director's films (other than multi-part films like Bernard's Les misérables) goes against list project tradition, and would be problematic to tabulate into a final list. What if not everyone has seen every Fischinger film? What if you love some of a director's work but hate other parts of it? And where do you draw the line? You could probably also make an argument to include the entire work of Jean Vigo as one entry on your list, but it's a slippery slope from there to "#47: every Rocky movie."

I'm not inclined to change any rules, though I would suggest that directors who are likely to be susceptible to vote splitting are the ones where you should make up your own mind about what the highlights of his/her filmography is, and then be very vocal about your choice here, so that others can give each worthy film its due consideration. This worked out very well in the pre-1920s project for Panoramic View of the Morecambe Sea Front, one of 100+ surviving films from Mitchell & Kenyon, many of which are of a kind.

[knives]

There's no way in hell anything will top Mr. Thank You for me, but this one will likely get my number two spot based solely on how addicitng it is. It's the pringles of movies.

If I had to pick a favorite director of the decade (which is one monumental task) it would be Shimizu, the dissolves that make it look as if the actors are disappearing in Japanese Girl at the Harbor are just magnificent, I fell in love during those.

Haha, oh yes. Even that film which I have a tough relationship with is magnificent. That film tries so hard that naturally a few things will flop on the floor, but it's those things that flop that make stand straight on edge. That insane multi-part jump to a close up sucked my brain out through my spine the first time. Likely Mr. Thank You is the only one that will be on my list, but I would not disagree with anyone if they put other of his films on their list. They'd probably be more right than me even with something as fleeting in it's moments of genius as A Star Athlete.

[myrnaloyisdope]

I just got the Silent Naruse box and was pretty floored by Flunky, Work Hard. Alternately funny and devastating, there's a lot going on 28 minutes. It reminded me somewhat of Ozu's I Was Born, But..., given the subject matter of a lowly white collar worker trying to impress his son. But the tone here was a bit more somber, with the score really evoking a lot of emotion. I particularly liked Naruse's (unexpected) use of montage, as in the Naruses I had seen there is nothing quite so stylized as the flashback montage where the father realizes what has happened to his son. It's pretty astonishing and I am excited to see what else Naruse has up his sleeve in the rest of the boxset.

[knives]

If I told you there is only one film in the set that doesn't manage to at least reach the heights of this lovely short would you have a heart attack? Also just as a reminder while we're on the subject Naruse's first sound film Wife! Be Like a Rose is absolutely amazing and has the best use of the soundtrack I've seen in a '30s film. it will probably wind up being my second highest rated Naruse of the project.

[swo17]

After rewatching ¡Qué viva México! last night (which most of you probably know better as Да здравствует Мексика!) I feel obliged to mention that this film, in whatever form you happen to have seen it, is in fact eligible for our 1930s list. The main reason being that that's what was decided last time.

To this end, I have added a brief section to the first post devoted to special cases with regard to eligibility. There aren't many of them of course. If anyone can think of any other films where eligibility is in question please bring them up here. Actually, I know we have the rule that "IMDB release date prevails even if it is clearly wrong" but it doesn't seem like it would be much of a hassle to keep track of a list of exceptions in the first post that we're all willing to agree to, in case there's some hypothetical film someone thinks belongs in the '30s that IMDb has placed somewhere else for some bizarre reason. I don't want to rock the boat too much though. Does anyone have any concerns about this?

[knives]

Out of curiosity why did you list Les misérables when it's already listed as one title on IMDB. I figure that miniseries or serial rules take over from there.