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Hmm, I'd been thinking of cinephilia in the sense of endlessly quoting, citing, and referencing other movies, but that's an interesting thought- certainly, if we're following the Hitchcockian metaphor of voyeurism as cinema, this is almost uniquely positive about the results, which makes a lot of sense for Captain Ascot.

There are a few present. Off the top of my head: Gazarra quotes the title song to Laura and the theme from Lubitsch's the Merry Widow scores one of the hotel scenes; Bogdanovich invokes Rio Bravo's opening with this film's, names and underscores his production company's title card after a popular song from another Hepburn movie, and, most importantly of all, casts and dresses John Ritter as Bogdanovich himself (who of course ends up wooing the same woman as the director did, to happier returns in-film)

thirtyframesasecond wrote:I'd love a good career retrospective of Trnka on DVD if one was available.

Image put out a DVD with 2-1/2 hours of material though it's long OOP and a bit pricey on the secondhand market.

domino harvey wrote:the deepest fantasy of every film lover (going from observing/watching films to participating in them)

I never received this memo!

That actually doesn't appeal to me at all. Likewise, reading Anna Karenina doesn't make me want to write a novel and listening to music doesn't make me want to form a band.

The Shanghai Gesture

I recognize that the plots in a lot of von Sternberg movies are essentially vehicles to hang a series of beautifully designed shots on, but in most of his work- certainly the entire Dietrich cycle, but the silent movies of his I've seen as well- there are personalities huge enough to keep everything together, such that the art design feels like an extension of their personas. Here, I think, that is too atomized; the huge, central role, the would-be Marlene, seems to be pantomime acting the whole time, disappearing within her absurd costume, and thus her cunning schemes and capers feel rather silly, and one notices the places where the dialog doesn't work all that well. Mother Gin Sling is meant to be this towering, Shakespearean figure (she's explicitly compared to Shylock at one point,) great and terrible and flawed and awe inspiring, and the beauties of her casino- which Skyfall rather shamelessly stole, I thought- are the glories of her presence made manifest, but to me it all kind of falls apart because there's just nothing much there.

Walter Huston is fine, I guess- he's unremarkable, but there's not much to be done with the part. Victor Mature is a lot of fun, holding himself as a sort of regal, lazy tiger of a man, and only occasionally letting on that as far as one can tell he is purely decorative- he's the homme fatale to Gene Tierney's character, but she becomes so readily dissolute that he only has to devote himself halfheartedly to making her fall apart completely, so he just kind of lounges around and half smiles at everything. Tierney herself is frankly a delight, if only because her character is such a contrast- after seeing her in the Preminger movies, and in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, seeing her play a character who seems at first as though she will be the noirish hero, dragged into a trap from which she cannot extricate herself, only to have it turn into the kind of absurd, bratty, spoiled heiress people tend to project onto the Parises Hilton of the world was as fun as it was unexpected, and the movie continually topped the joke of how little she was able to get done or follow through upon. Phyllis Brooks, the Chorus Girl, appeared to have walked in from the set of Stage Door, which is a thing I would be ok with seeing in practically anything, and the movie is completely stuffed with fun character actors in smaller parts.

Again, though, I think Ona Munson's complete inability to project herself through all the trappings of her character means that all the fun stuff swirling around the edges, like the glorious madness of the set design, doesn't come together to be much of anything. I don't want to be cruel to the actress, and honestly I don't know that one can blame her- it was a role that really called for a very specific skill set, and I don't know of too many actresses outside of Marlene who have it. What one is left with is still honestly pretty great, since it's still a von Sternberg movie through and through, but I don't think it will live in my mind in at all the way that The Devil is a Woman and The Scarlet Empress do.

One thing that strikes me about They All Laughed -- a sort of cheater's apologia -- is the way Bogdanovich undisguisedly censors the point of view of the cheated upon: Leon's wife remains a never heard voice on the other side of the telephone; Dolores' husband is seen only through an apartment window; Stavros Niotes is viewed mostly from a distance, seen but not heard conversing, relegated almost entirely to the background. The film is a comic fantasy in which nobody really gets hurt by infidelity, a fantasy than can only be sustained by ignoring one half of the equation. It seems to me that Bogdanovich makes a point of showing us the very act of sweeping the dirt under the carpet.

swo17 wrote:

thirtyframesasecond wrote:I'd love a good career retrospective of Trnka on DVD if one was available.

Image put out a DVD with 2-1/2 hours of material though it's long OOP and a bit pricey on the secondhand market.

We have that in our library but still missing Midsummer/Old Czech Legends unfortunately.

I would love to see Old Czech Legends, but so far haven't successfully tracked it down. I like Trnka a lot though, and I have a real fondness for Midsummer Night's Dream; it's essential that those who seek it out find the widescreen version in Czech. It's really a whole other gorgeous experience, and so much of what is enjoyable about this film is that it is just lush eye-candy. I believe this feature is included on that big list of to-be-restored Czech films put out by the NFA, which if true will be a real treat when completed. I know it's often considered one of Shakespeare's weakest plays but it was one of the first I saw an actual production of when I was little and it's been a sentimental favorite of mine ever since. I think Trnka's film captures its playfulness better than any other adaptation I've seen.

Now that being said, I doubt I'll be able to find room for it on my list as I already have about 100 stone-cold classics duking it out, not including all those I haven't seen yet.
And since everyone else is playing, I'm at 378/585 (65%).

bottled spider wrote:One thing that strikes me about They All Laughed -- a sort of cheater's apologia -- is the way Bogdanovich undisguisedly censors the point of view of the cheated upon: Leon's wife remains a never heard voice on the other side of the telephone; Dolores' husband is seen only through an apartment window; Stavros Niotes is viewed mostly from a distance, seen but not heard conversing, relegated almost entirely to the background. The film is a comic fantasy in which nobody really gets hurt by infidelity, a fantasy than can only be sustained by ignoring one half of the equation. It seems to me that Bogdanovich makes a point of showing us the very act of sweeping the dirt under the carpet.

Partly, but Christy and Audrey Hepburn's character are both amongst the cheated upon without being excluded from the fun (and Stavros is more the cheater than the cheated in this equation, overall)- Christy in particular is given a chance to work through the whole process. I would say in the case of both Stavros and Delores' husband, it is their status as 'the kind of people who hire PIs on their spouses' that exclude them, as both are as close as the film has to villains- Delores' husband in particular, for obvious (if partially extratextual) reasons. Leon's wife, I should say, doesn't get to be part of it simply by virtue of being too tangential to any of the plots.

Hail Mary
In a certain way this film was my first encounter with Godard way back having bumped into Ebert's review. In it he does a lot of work explaining how if anything this is extremely respectful of the Mary myth and that there is nothing to offend here, even the modern day setting. In the same breath though he decries the film as extremely boring. It left a fairly interesting idea of the film in my head and one the movie doesn't entirely fulfill. For the most part this is typical of Godard of the period with nothing striking me as surprising or unique to the degree of highlighting it compared to something like Passion or Keep Your Right Up. Running with Ebert if there is an element of boring here, overall I'd rate this as fun, it's that he handles the Mary element, which composes about an hour of the 80 minute movie, exactly as you would expect. There's a lot of musings on metaphysics and quoting Hegel and the sense of a real atheist treatment of the story. He adapts it to himself no differently then he would say the Odyssey. This leaves me wondering why this is getting highlighted over some of the other Godard films of the period. The only real answer I can come up with is the cynical thought that the supposedly salacious source material makes the film seem more than what it is. The last section of the movie though is great and seems predictive of where Godard would go in the '90s with even a taste of the heaven section of Notre Musique in some of the cuts.

I actually found Mielville's prequel which Cohen treats as part of the film a much more engaging and intellectually controlled film. She presents a lot of the aesthetic tricks they were developing at the time like odd sound syncing and that brown cinematography and makes it feel anew. The best thing at least in relative terms is that the story is naturally integrated into the philosophy of the piece rather then just an ironic attempt to get more commercial light thrown on the film. The relation little Mary has with her parents is very sad and has some real weight. Having her speak through Baudelaire quotes or other typical tricks works in this story as both a way of acting out by a little girl and as a way of making the scenario transfer as an essay outside of the essay film format (what I assume is their effort across these '80s films). The film is also interesting as a way of seeing what a Mielville without Godard is like. She's stuck playing second banana so often that it is hard to tell what exactly she brings to the table. This film, admittedly not entirely independent of Godard, suggests quite a lot given what's already been said. There's probably some circular reasoning if I then try to figure out what is a Mielville touch and what is Godard in their other projects, but at the very least she seems to be key in his melding of the '70s philosophical streak and the '60s interest in elements of narrative.

knives wrote:Hail Mary
I actually found Mielville's prequel which Cohen treats as part of the film a much more engaging and intellectually controlled film.

Mieville's "Book of Mary" was treated as part of Godard's film from the start--that's how it was presented when "Hail Mary" was released in American theaters when I saw it back in '85/'86. Some people thought that it was all one film at the time.

And was presented as such on the earlier New Yorker DVD as well

Cohen's back description makes it sound like this was the first time it made it over to the US hence my phrasing.

Hey I know we do open spoilers in these threads but this is genuinely and surprisingly an oddly twisty movie- and it's 45 minutes long- so it's probably worth watching before reading this.

The Unknown

I haven't seen a Lon Cheney/Browning collaboration before- for that matter, I'm not sure I've seen Lon Cheney in anything before- but this was a hell of a start. It's something special, nigh-Cronenbergian in its fascination with flesh- not merely performing bodies, or beautiful bodies, or muscles or actions, but parts, which never seem quite to connect to a whole.

Cheney is an interesting lead; he seems at first to be playing sort of a very modern character, someone who is cruel and controlling from a place of weakness, and someone who has allowed his disability to become fetishized, and encouraged that fetishization; here, as in Freaks, there is likely a whole textbook to be written about ableism and humanizing othered people and the intersections between jump scares in reaction to people who are different and giving such people better and more exciting parts (though here the latter defense works less well)- but there are layers upon layers of trickery. One knows going in that Cheney has arms, of course, and it's not hard to spot them in his original costume, and one thinks one's jumping ahead of the movie, but then of course it turns out that the so-so disguise of a man pretending to be armless is the point. The real trickery is far more invisible- Cheney's arms are hidden, but so, often, are his feet, and the feet holding his cigarette and wine glass and so forth are those of a genuinely armless man.

At any rate, the deeply pathological love triangle- in which one man is thoughtlessly, possessively handsy, and the other is disturbingly, muderously possessive- is in many ways simplified at the reveal of the arms, and that the arms are those of a killer, because Cheney becomes then a mere heavy, a bad guy who must eventually be vanquished by the good guy, and loses a lot of its pathos. Or again, so it seems. Cheney murders Crawford's father (though he was a thoroughly unsympathetic character) and tries to isolate his target, which all makes a fair amount of sense. And then, again, things get strange- because the fake armless man realizes that he cannot maintain his charade and get close to Crawford, and concludes that he must become a real armless man. Meaning that the pathos that was lost in the original reveal must logically come back; and the signifiers flip again. The resolution builds to an even further, stranger mix of symbols, as the noble strongman (whom Joan Crawford has overcome her fear of) nearly loses his arms- before ending with a slight thud, as Cheney merely gets trampled, and in a way that doesn't quite tie back into everything.

No matter. It's hard to express how odd this movie is, especially for one that at times reverts to some extremely broad EVILLLL acting on Cheney's part (though his performance is at other points quite delicate) and I feel like there's a lot to unpack in terms of the arms and the hands as locuses of power and of murder, and what this movie is saying about strength and the ways in which strength can be used. I'm not sure of how to say it, but I am absolutely interested in hearing anything anyone else has to say about this one.

The Unknown's macabre just desserts beautifully anticipate EC Comics' eventual mastery of this kind of narrative resolution, though I think the motivations are not particularly complex beyond the obvious, vaguely O Henry-esque methodology of being a bit of a sick joke!

Ha, that's a good comparison. I think there are some notes to Cheney's performance that give it a bit more depth, and there's something about seeing it with real people on screen that moves the thing from the sort of straight, nastily logical thing that it would likely be on paper.

The Unknown is my favorite Cheney, though there are a few major ones I haven't seen. I appreciate that, as in The Phantom of the Opera, he's actually a scary, dangerous man instead of the gentle giant heart-of-gold type you see in a lot of his movies (including the other two packaged with the TCM set that includes The Unknown, actually).. Not that his characterization isn't complex in The Unknown, but just that it's on the table from the outset that he's capable of killing.

matrixschmatrix wrote:Hey I know we do open spoilers in these threads but this is genuinely and surprisingly an oddly twisty movie- and it's 45 minutes long- so it's probably worth watching before reading this.

The Unknown

I haven't seen a Lon Cheney/Browning collaboration before- for that matter, I'm not sure I've seen Lon Cheney in anything before- but this was a hell of a start. It's something special, nigh-Cronenbergian in its fascination with flesh- not merely performing bodies, or beautiful bodies, or muscles or actions, but parts, which never seem quite to connect to a whole.

Cheney is an interesting lead; he seems at first to be playing sort of a very modern character, someone who is cruel and controlling from a place of weakness, and someone who has allowed his disability to become fetishized, and encouraged that fetishization; here, as in Freaks, there is likely a whole textbook to be written about ableism and humanizing othered people and the intersections between jump scares in reaction to people who are different and giving such people better and more exciting parts (though here the latter defense works less well)- but there are layers upon layers of trickery. One knows going in that Cheney has arms, of course, and it's not hard to spot them in his original costume, and one thinks one's jumping ahead of the movie, but then of course it turns out that the so-so disguise of a man pretending to be armless is the point. The real trickery is far more invisible- Cheney's arms are hidden, but so, often, are his feet, and the feet holding his cigarette and wine glass and so forth are those of a genuinely armless man.

At any rate, the deeply pathological love triangle- in which one man is thoughtlessly, possessively handsy, and the other is disturbingly, muderously possessive- is in many ways simplified at the reveal of the arms, and that the arms are those of a killer, because Cheney becomes then a mere heavy, a bad guy who must eventually be vanquished by the good guy, and loses a lot of its pathos. Or again, so it seems. Cheney murders Crawford's father (though he was a thoroughly unsympathetic character) and tries to isolate his target, which all makes a fair amount of sense. And then, again, things get strange- because the fake armless man realizes that he cannot maintain his charade and get close to Crawford, and concludes that he must become a real armless man. Meaning that the pathos that was lost in the original reveal must logically come back; and the signifiers flip again. The resolution builds to an even further, stranger mix of symbols, as the noble strongman (whom Joan Crawford has overcome her fear of) nearly loses his arms- before ending with a slight thud, as Cheney merely gets trampled, and in a way that doesn't quite tie back into everything.

No matter. It's hard to express how odd this movie is, especially for one that at times reverts to some extremely broad EVILLLL acting on Cheney's part (though his performance is at other points quite delicate) and I feel like there's a lot to unpack in terms of the arms and the hands as locuses of power and of murder, and what this movie is saying about strength and the ways in which strength can be used. I'm not sure of how to say it, but I am absolutely interested in hearing anything anyone else has to say about this one.

While not a Browning collaboration, I recommend you watch The Penalty, where Chaney plays a legless man. The plot is your usual hokey melodrama. It's really worth watching for Chaney's performance, which is full of an incredible, white-hot intensity.

Yes, that and Sjöström's He Who Gets Slapped, where he plays the most frightening thing of all, a disgruntled circus clown.

I'm a bit late to the metric posting party, but after finally figuring out what I've seen and what I own, it looks like I have watched 307 of the films, and own another 82 that I'd like to watch before this project is over. That may not seem like much, but tying run times in puts my objective at an intimidating 10,405 minutes/173.4 hours (or as Domino likes to call it, a light week of watching film). I was hoping to move through these chronologically, but after finishing Les Vampires last night, I'm not sure I have the endurance to include Fantomas (technically out of order but purchased after I started the later Feuillade), Dr Mabuse, Greed, and Die Neibelungen in my next 10 films, with Napoleon soon after.

I'm currently at 285, after having seen a round dozen specifically for the project thus far. I've got 36,970 minutes to watch if I want to finish, which is to say that if I watched movies for 24 hours a day, I'd be done about two thirds of the way through day 26. Seems pretty doable, really.

I've been trying to watch at least one feature length movie I haven't seen from the list a day (though I've been cheating that a bit, since I've already included three in that borderline Sherlock Jr space) and I've been doing better than I have in a while- having the freedom to leap around chronologically is making avoiding burnout a bit easier. If I watch another 106 movies before next January, I will at least have seen 2/3rds of the thing, which seems like a close enough approximation to me- there are a few dozen on there I know I have absolutely no interest in, and a few more where the difficulty in seeing it in any kind of a decent version is probably higher than I'm willing to make the effort for, but given the nature of the list it's not as though I'm in any danger of running short of picks. I do want to try and see as many of the pre-20s ones as possible, as there aren't that many and it's sort of pre-gaming for the next list.

In that case definitely make room for Sir Arne's Treasure if you haven't seen it before. It's one of the few I'm making a concerted effort to rewatch during this period (I'm just short 87 films so I'm handling that part casually).

Sure, it's on the list.

Having just watched Gold Diggers of 1933 (which is marred by Dick Powell, looking weird and acting unpleasant, but which contains what is pretty easily my favorite Berkeley number I've seen in Remember My Forgotten Man)- is that Preston Sturges calling everyone on just before Berkeley's own cameo? I can't find any verification and it's driving me nuts.

Il Fuoco
This was nicely adequate. There's nothing great on display here outside of Pina Menichelli's amazing lead performance as the poet, but the film is so fun in it's lightweight silliness I was charmed all the same. It even finally got the bad taste of the Ottinger out of my mouth by reversing all of its qualities. Certainly the plot is better held by the more cynical Dying Swan, but in terms of more tonally accurate comparisons I feel that Assunta Spina captures this melodramatic prima donna story more effectively (even if Menichelli is more powerful in the role then Bertini).

Moolaade
For me one of the largest joys of Sembene is seeing the evolution of west Africa as a colonial state into the modern world as a problematic group of free ones. So for his final film to feel so out of time is simultaneously a shock and fitting. There's so much here that convinces you that this is intended to be a period piece, but then you have to notice the plastics scattered in the background and there's even a conversation about a television set. Given that this is set in Burkina Faso rather then Sembene's home of Senegal perhaps this is intended to highlight the different evolution for each community from colonialism. While Senegal, as beautifully shown in Faat Kine, has become something of a metropolitan where the problems of the past are that they are past his Burkina Faso is emphasizing the tradition to avoid the modern despite sympathies and realities shouting otherwise. Early on the revaluation that Colle's only surviving daughter was born through a doctor and cesarean is a subtle touch on this disagreement. Likewise I am curious as to the history of stories and activism against excision. The only other film about excision I've seen, the marvelous and satirical Finzan (also in the Bambara language), hits a lot of the same ideas about the modern and traditional while presenting nearly all of the same characters and plot points as Moolaade. The most interesting connection between the two is the use of the western Paris living fiance to highlight how this is still a discussion on colonialism after all of these years. When the girls explain why they don't want excision one of the girls says that she heard Colle's daughter hadn't and she's getting a nice husband from France. France remains the pinnacle of upward mobility and the key way for women to escape the patriarchy. Sembene doesn't allow it to be the only way as shown by the whipping scene which is powerfully defiant. The respect it is shown especially compared to the impotent Frenchman leads me to believe that the other horror of the film is still France and the almost mystical power of oppression it retains on the people. There has got to be another way to escape oppression then the road of Europe.

Of course those connections could just be me making myth out of things each film chooses to treat as a known because natives of Mali, Burkina Faso or where ever would known these things. Though it seems to be in Sembene's artistic sensibility to do a little bit of myth making considering how he combines superstitions here, in Xala, and most likely elsewhere (this is only my sixth of his films). This all is avoiding just how disturbing the film is able to get despite an almost comedic tone and never showing anything gruesome. Sembene is very blunt about how excision is painful and deadly featuring even a scene where a mother discusses how her daughter is not healing well and receiving very poor medical advice. The movie never becomes actively a social film, instead keeping to a Martin Ritt happenstance approach, but the horror that necessitates the moolaade is always felt even when it is not a topic of discussion.

Mr. Thank You

Wow, what a tremendous sweetheart of movie. It's Renoir-esque, in a way- it's intensely humanist, at least in the sense of assuming that at some level everybody is more or less decent, and in loving even its jerkier characters- but there's a jolliness to it that is all its own, even when going into some truly depressing topics.

I always get distracted, when watching this kind of movie, thinking about the historical context- Japan was five years into their occupation of Manchuria when this movie was made, and a year away from invading China- one imagines that the government and society as a whole was already ramping up the militarism and fascism that seem to define the country during the war. But this movie doesn't seem like it could be much further removed from either. Arigato-san himself is dressed in a quasi military fashion, with his white gloves and calf-high boots, but his character is defined by a sense of duty not to making the trains- or in this case, the bus- run on time, nor to efficiency in any way, but to the web of personal connections he has made along his route, and to the actual people riding in his bus. He is a heroic character whose heroism is shown as much in the subtle gestures of the little smile he has for the hangers-on to the back of the bus as by his ultimate willingness to sacrifice his dream of economic upward movement to save a near stranger from being fed to an industry that terrifies her, because ultimately his sweetness and generosity of character extend to everyone.

It's not clear to what degree the concomitant sweetness of the rest of the characters is meant to be him rubbing off on them, and to what degree it is just the movie's general faith in humanity, but moments in which a character like the woman in the black collar- the brash one, who has brought liquor- shows that she is willing to stop trying to box out and corner the driver when she realizes that the 17 year old travelling with her mother has both a greater need and a greater connection are among my favorite things in the movies, a Flannery O'Connor esque moment of grace that totally changes the implicit sexual politics of the movie; by giving her such decency, it is no longer implying that her brashness and willingness to be forward signal an immoral or lesser woman than the 17 year old, just another, delightful way of being. Indeed, the scene where she gives everyone a slug of liquor (apart from Mr. Moustache, whom she scores off beautifully) and gets them to sing is a delight, and it was nice to have the movie implicitly agree that there was nothing shameful going on there.

Speaking of the 17 year old, it took me far too long to be certain that it was indeed prostitution that she was headed for- until the lovely, whispered speech that forms the movie's climax, I wasn't clear if she was going in to be a factory girl and that falling into prostitution was a risk, or if it was just understood that there was nothing else for her, and wasn't initially clear on why she was so ashamed. There's a fair amount about women being sold in the movie, which rather than breaking the spell of people being lovable it weaves, gives it the feeling that its faith in humanity is not based on denying the ugliness we get ourselves stuck in- there is ugliness, and far more so there is pettiness, but people have their reasons, and implicitly people have better selves that could be reached, if given the opportunity. Even the closest thing the movie has to a villain, the aforementioned Mr. Moustache, is given (alongside some marvelous comic business, like the way he pops his head out of the bus when the driver is talking to pedestrians in one of the scenes) an explanation for his fumfering self importance- he, like the rest of them, is a poor man trying to scrabble his way along, and his brittle ego is a natural consequence of his hollow job and exhausting with trying to hustle.

This i the first Shimazu I've seen, but if the rest are in any way comparable to this one, I'm willing to brave the so-so print quality and the social contexts I don't immediately grasp to explore it further. As much further as the Eclipse set will take me, anyway.