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

[Murdoch]

That makes the ending a little easier to swallow, although my reaction was so strong upon first viewing that I don't have much interest in revisiting it anytime soon. The way the freaks become these silent predators, it just didn't sit well with me.

[matrixschmatrix]

I'm kind of with you on this one, Murdoch- it felt a lot like Frankenstein, where the thing you would normally see as a monster is infinitely more sympathetic than what would normally be the hero, yet the ending reads like a straight monster movie. I usually read that as a straightforward monster script with a director whose interests lay elsewhere- they can make you like the 'bad guy' with filigree work around the edges, but the overall structure of the plot stays the same, with the effect that the movie seems to be fighting itself.

[PillowRock]

Amongst the "1930s horror movies to see" responses, I haven't seen the Karloff version of The Mummy mentioned. I would expect that to be worth a watch.

If you have access to an edition of Dracula that includes it, the parallel Spanish language version is worth checking out some time; although maybe not ahead of some other things in a limited time frame before your list is due.

[matrixschmatrix]

Watched Korda's Private Life of Henry VIII tonight: it was about what I expected, fun Laughton performance, decent supporting cast- I particularly liked the turn from Elsa Lanchester, who's as fun here as she was in Bride of Frankenstein- but overall pretty forgettable.

[knives]

Rembrandt is amazing though and you should watch it next if you're going through that set. It's the least hammy performance I've seen from Laughton and his quoting of King Solomon is an amazing sequence. It also has the second longest Lanchester role I've ever seen which is a really huge plus.

[matrixschmatrix]

I'm going to contradict my post up page a little: I just rewatched Freaks, and I liked it a lot more this time through. I think it's going to wind up on my list, if only for being so goddamn distinctive (and being genuinely sensitive, for the most part.) I was totally on board with the ending this time, too- the whole thing about how fucking with them is dangerous, and how they defend one another, is reinforced repeatedly throughout, and the mood felt less 'suddenly the characters we like are monsters' and more 'the characters we like enact fairly justified retribution for being a horrible person.' Both of the characters they go after were murderers, after all, and Cleopatra's end is clearly meant to be poetic justice. It's shot like a horror sequence, but that too feels like it is playing on a sense of ironic reversal: throughout the movie, Cleo has been treating them like non-entities, too pathetic to be worth thinking about, so of course it's horrifying when they take up arms against her.

Actually, the big problem I had this time was with Hans- Cleopatra is so thoroughly unlikable that his love for her seems problematic, as though based on an assumption that he would automatically prefer a full sized woman.

Overall, I appreciated that it wasn't purely freaks vs. normals, and it made me really happy when Venus showed solidarity with the rest of the circus folk. It becomes a paean to outsiders, and however crude a lot of the plotting is, it's incredibly effective on that level. It looks a lot better than most of Browning's sound work, too- you can tell his heart was really in this one.

[swo17]

Night Court (W.S. Van Dyke 1932) I saw this under ideal circumstances, at the end of a horrible day, and this nasty little pre-Coder about bad things happening to good people hit just the spot. Walter Huston shines as a corrupt judge who single-handedly ruins the lives of a young couple just on the mere suspicion that they might hold a small piece of evidence against him. The film spends so much time setting these two young parents up in ridiculously Christlike perfection that you just know they're going to get screwed good, and the film does not disappoint. For a studio hack, Van Dyke shows previously unrevealed proficiency here, and the film moves swimmingly through every delightful mean-spirited complication. This clever bit of cinematic clockwork is absolutely making my list.

I shudder to think what kind of day you must have had to get such pleasure from this though I frankly am up for watching innocent people get screwed any day of the week. This was actually very similar to Afraid to Talk (available in the spotlight section) though I think that one goes even further, with more corrupt people in power and more, um, screwing, I guess. Still though, Night Court was very entertaining, and there should really be more movies like this.

I'd also like to put in a word for the excellent screwball It's Love I'm After with Leslie Howard, Bette Davis, and Olivia de Havilland, which I believe has only been briefly mentioned here once. This is kind of in the vein of Twentieth Century, only replace the actor-director dynamic with an actor-actor one, and throw an obsessive fan into the mix. Eric Blore is also very good in this as, guess what, a valet. I may have to make room on my list for this one.

[knives]

I think I was the lone mention of It's Love I'm After and it really does deserve some attention. It's easily the best (only good?) Davis movie of the decade. The scene where Howard fakes being drunk is one of the high points of the decade.

[Matt]

It's easily the best (only good?) Davis movie of the decade.

Three on a Match?

[knives]

That's a deep cut. I hadn't even heard of it before. Is it worth searching for?

[Murdoch]

YES (although Davis doesn't have a big part from my recollection)

[swo17]

It's on Forbidden Hollywood Vol. 2 by the way.

[lubitsch]

Just a look at

The Rest of the World

Obviously due to the more conventional storytelling of the era, smaller producing countries had no real chance to compete in genre films at the same level as the big ones did. So their biggest successes are the films with an especially regional approach or those with a daring experimental touch outside of industry pressures. Some of the films like Cancao de Lisboa or Hippolit a Lakaj are still very much beloved as national classics, but for the international viewer the reward is small.
I can't imagine much enthusiasm for the first flowers of Indian cinema though the Osten film scored well in the 20s list, but there's a bit of interest in South- and Middle America. The shaky Brazilian industry has two quite experimental films to its credit Ganga Bruta and Limite. the first looks to me like Mauro got a textbook on visual storytelling as present and decided to use it. The story and acting is still woeful, but the shots are pretty remarkable though the mixture of silent parts, subtitled ones and postdubbed passages is very jarring. I can't say I'm that much a fan of Limite either, but it's worth watching for what it is. From the Mexican films I'd like to point out Compadre Mendoza maybe not the best directed effort but a very well written story which is surprisingly modern and cynic toward revolutionary fervor. Vamonos con Pancho Villa is not bad either, but another film of interest is Dos Monjes an intensely moody melodrama using a dual perspective on a story, first one person tells his side and then another fills the gaps the other could not know and misinterpreted accordingly.
I admit to being unreceptive to the Southern european films, the Bunuel docu is fine, the Italian films just miss greatness though Treno popolare and 1860 have merits and Blasetti's Resurrectio, the best of the bunch is a curiously effective melodrama, distilling out of a melodramatic start a gentle romance and a visually appealing story. I neither favour yiddish films nor am I overly impressed with Ingrid Bergman's Swedish 30s films, but I'd like to underline the high quality of Nieuwe Gronden and Philips Radio by Ivens two films of immense formal qualities, the first rousingly filming the construction of a dam and the fight against the water (there's a superfluous political epilogue though), the second finding coolly composed visual structures in an industry film. Both films should be seen at any cost by those who liked the British docus.
Finally there's the Finnish director Nyrki Tapiovaara whose Varastettu Kuolema will be subtitled within 24 hours so all of us who can't speak Finnish can take a look for ourselves. I already thought his Juha a very fine film on its own, the story is well written, it worked with Stiller and Tapiovaara while not exactly breaking new ground does an expert job all around using the nature and the well chosen actors but also blocking the scenes quite good.

[Wu.Qinghua]

I completely agree about Tonka and Takovy je zivot, though unfortunately the 30s seem to be even richer in great films than the 20s, and thus these two won't make my list, though they'd surely rank somewhere in my Top 50s or 60s, and so I hope someone else will give them their vote.

I'll definitely vote for Takovy je zivot/Such is Life (Carl Junghans, CSR/DR 1930). The film is no easy viewing and I am not that fond of Baranovskaya's acting, which somehow reminded me of Beryl Mercer in Public Enemy, but, all in all, it manages to display an interesting portray of everyday working class family life in 1930s Prague. Lovely ...

And FWIW, I support Lubitsch' recommendation of Compadre Mendoza, although I am not sure, whether I would agree with his interpretation ...

[knives]

It's on Forbidden Hollywood Vol. 2 by the way.

See and I just rented Vol. 3. Though you did remind me she has a bit part in Whale's great Waterloo Bridge.

[swo17]

Another list in, and the top 10 just got a whole lot wackier with the induction of three American comedies. The top 10 is still mostly foreign though. And #1 isn't budging.

Also, I would have thought this would have you flipping out knives:

Varastettu Kuolema will be subtitled within 24 hours

[reno dakota]

Also, I would have thought this would have you flipping out knives:

Varastettu Kuolema will be subtitled within 24 hours

And here they are.

[knives]

Holy cow how did I miss that announcement. I'm going to have a good excuse to rewatch after dinner.

[matrixschmatrix]

Man, Morocco was pretty disappointing, especially after the spectacular Marlene performance in the first act- her male drag performance, her kissing the woman in the crowd, her utter disdain for Menjou's character, and the way she dominates Cooper in her wooing of them all seem like they're setting the stage for Marlene Unleashed, a Devil is a Woman where we're not even pretending that's not what want to see. Obviously, it didn't turn out that way.

Compared to the other von Sternbergs I've seen, with Marlene and without, it just seems unremarkable- there's a bit of play with gender politics, in the opening number and in questioning whether Dietrich will let herself be defined by a man, but overall it feels like a pretty straightforward romance- there's a sense of humor that plays within the movie, in a few dirty jokes and innuendos, but the overall nasty humor of The Devil is a Woman, The Scarlet Empress, or even earlier work like The Last Command is missing. Everything seems played pretty straightforwardly.

I didn't love Blonde Venus, but I think that was due more to the cruelty in it than any actual failing. It's a dark movie, but it has a lot to say about gender, about the Marlene character, about the way the world treats women, and about how much of a straightjacket a 'normal' household could be. Morocco seems to say very little- Marlene falls in love, some complications arise, and Marlene chooses love over material wealth. Menjou's character was interesting, but it's pretty much the same role as Grant's in Venus, and the context wasn't as interesting. It doesn't help that the PQ was so bad, either- so much in von Sternberg seems to be expressed through the sets and costumes and so forth, and it's hard to appreciate any of that in a print so fuzzy and weak that it looks like something out of the public domain.

The movie is pretty fascinating as a transitional work- the Dietrich character here is much more what she will be in the rest of her collaborations with Sternberg than she was in Blue Angel, and the overall sense of weary, exotic romanticism feels very much like it's going to lead to their masterpieces together. The problem may be simply that Gary Cooper was too much a focal point- Dietrich's presence is so dominating that trying to allow anyone else to be anything but support lessens the work.

(It's also hard to see anything noble about refusing to desert from the Foreign Legion, as I'm not huge on colonial oppression, but that's sort of an incidental point.)

[lubitsch]

And FWIW, I support Lubitsch' recommendation of Compadre Mendoza, although I am not sure, whether I would agree with his interpretation ...

Why? Our sympathies are obviously with the revolutionary, but in the end it's pretty obvious that he's an impractical, doomed character who can't adapt to the realities around him. His unfulfilled love story with the ranch owner's wife ralso eflects this. It's pretty much a classical tragedy, but with a dry, realistic touch.

[Tommaso]

Two more watched recently:

Dainah la métisse: I'm really happy to have followed the insistent recommendations to watch this film although there were no subs available; but thankfully the action is almost self-explicatory and some details could be cleared up by the nice synopsis written by davidhare and zedz here, who have also already described the film better than I can. So let me just add that the sequence starting at the 6th minute indeed looks like something from another planet, one of the most amazing things I've seen in a film from the 30s. But the whole film casts something like a hypnotic spell, even though Grémillon carefully never lets the style take precedence over everything else. Fascinating moments all the time, be it in the interaction of the characters, or

Spoiler

a camera set-up like that at the very end in which we're shown the dead body from above, through the steel meshes in the engine room, as if the death had been caused by the incessant workings of a machinery that we don't quite understand.

Amazing film.

Amok: this one, however, really left me underwhelmed. Ozep had made some very great silents like "Land in Captivity" and "The living corpse" and the equally effective sound film "Der Mörder Dmitri Karamasoff", so I had high hopes, but I'm afraid the film struck me as not much more than a pale Sternberg imitation played by particularly bad actors and a truly weak script. Sure, the visuals are impressive and the hothouse atmosphere is conveyed effectively, but much as I like films concentrating purely on style occasionally, the film feels far too derivative, and if you want something like this to work, you probably really need an actress like Marlene Dietrich.

So if it comes to Sternberg imitations set in the South Seas, I much prefer Heinz Hilpert's Liebe, Tod und Teufel, which not only adds a nice fairytale plot, but has two alluring main actresses (Brigitte Horney and Käthe von Nagy) who can actually act. And the cinematography of the great Fritz Arno Wagner works wonders to make this not terribly important film quite memorable.

[Wu.Qinghua]

And FWIW, I support Lubitsch' recommendation of Compadre Mendoza, although I am not sure, whether I would agree with his interpretation ...

Why? Our sympathies are obviously with the revolutionary, but in the end it's pretty obvious that he's an impractical, doomed character who can't adapt to the realities around him. His unfulfilled love story with the ranch owner's wife ralso eflects this. It's pretty much a classical tragedy, but with a dry, realistic touch.

Well, I can't agree with your characterization of the Zapatista commander as „an impractical, doomed character who can't adapt to the realities around him“. I lack basic knowledge of the main political and social features of the era of the Mexican Revolution, but let me try to draft another interpretation: 'El Compadre Mendoza' is the second out of three films of Fuentes dealing with the Mexican Revolution. In comparison to 'Prisonere ...' as well as 'Vamonos …', one of its most striking features is the support, Fuentes is showing for the peasant movement led by Emiliano Zapata and its struggle against the military forces of the Huerta and Carranza regimes, which in the end was lost by the peasant militias fighting on a local and decentralized basis. That is, in my eyes, the Zapatista General Niete is the tragic as well as positive hero of the movie and functions as a representative of a progressive, egalitarian social movement, Fuentes is embracing as one of the predecessors of his own liberal nationalist stance as well as of the socially more progressive policy of the Cardenas era 1934/40. Therefore, in my eyes, 'Compadre Mendoza' isn't dealing with the shortcomings of a very real social movement in the first place, but is first and foremost offering a scathing critique of the opportunism, narrow-mindedness etc. of the 'hacendero' Mendoza, who, as a representative of the landed elites, is torn between the old regime and the forces of social progress and in the end betrays the Zapatist general, who is not only his close friend, but also his son's godfather, in order to preserve his wealth and become part of the new, though doomed Constitutionalist regime of General Carranza.

[swo17]

Preemptive orphan defense: Granton Trawler (John Grierson, 1934) stream here (only 10 minutes long) or get it on the BFI's Blu-ray for Battleship Potemkin
While I respect the historical significance of a lot of these early British documentaries, I've never exactly been dying to know how people in the '30s got their mail, mined coal, or spent their lunch break. Or, for that matter, how fish were caught en masse. But these films would often stumble, perhaps accidentally, upon some brilliant visual moment, and Granton Trawler is full of these. The way this captures the constant motion of the boat, with the waves and seagulls ever swirling about is simply mesmerizing. The sound design, by Alberto Cavalcanti, is also noteworthy, subdued but still quite propulsive.

[lubitsch]

While I respect the historical significance of a lot of these early British documentaries, I've never exactly been dying to know how people in the '30s got their mail, mined coal, or spent their lunch break. Or, for that matter, how fish were caught en masse. But these films would often stumble, perhaps accidentally, upon some brilliant visual moment, and Granton Trawler is full of these. The way this captures the constant motion of the boat, with the waves and seagulls ever swirling about is simply mesmerizing. The sound design, by Alberto Cavalcanti, is also noteworthy, subdued but still quite propulsive.

Arguably documentaries per definition always have to stumble upon their great visual moments being films which try to capture real life unplanned, as it happens - though until the mobile camera equipments of the 60s the difference between documentary and fiction film can be very small indeed. And the best of these 30s docus are in their visual and aural design no less structured than experimental films by Fischinger or Lye, the completely postsynched soundtrack alone shows the eagerness to shape the material into a small symphony.

As for Compadre Mendoza, I agree very much, it's just that the film allows different approaches. Vamonos con Pancho Villa also shows an essentially positive goal and likeable characters, but the way they get killed off step by step has also disturbing implications since their fight is going nowhere. I don't know if you have seen the deleted final of this film which is on the new Mexican DVD box where

Spoiler

the last survivor has returned to his wife and kids. Pancho Villa returns, but the man feels tied down by the responsibility of family life. Villa seems to be sympathetic but at the farewell goes back into the house and kills the family, so that the man has only the revolution to live for. Apparently Villa trusts the man not to immediately revenge his family, but Villa's men are less sure and kill him which Villa laments because he was sure of the loyalty of the man and he may have been right.

This genuinely shocking ending was excised from the prints, but it underscores the impression of a fanatically fought mission which is doomed. In Compadre Mendoza the hacenda owner is a coward but he's genuinely torn between both sides and the government officer comes across as not unlikeable. The revolutionary in the meantime pledges himself to an outlaw life and an unfulfilled romance until the end which doesn't seem very practical and doesn't result in anything. Which is a fair picture of a revolution which cannibalized itself, the revolutionaries not being able to reap in the fruits of their efforts.

[swo17]

A couple more lists in and a new frontrunner has emerged, helped no doubt by the fact that it is the only film to appear on every single list. A lot of variety in the lists so far--as of this moment there are 123 orphans!