What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

Paris Blues from 1961 starring Paul Newman, Sidney Poitier, Joanne Woodward and Diahann Carroll with a few appearances by Louis Armstrong as "Wild Man Moore" and music by Duke Ellington.

It might not have been ahead of its time, but it was surely pointing the way. For 1961, a year before the enjoyable throwback fluff A Touch of Mink was released - with sex corralled by marriage and drugs confined to a cocktail or two too many - Paris Blues has casual pre-marital sex here, there and everywhere, divorced mothers enjoying life (and sex), unflattering discussion of America's racial issues, hints at a bi-racial attraction and cocaine use and addiction shown in almost all its ugliness. The full-force of the '60s was on its way.

All of this happens in Paris where minor jazz stars Newman and Poitier live and thrive as American expats - jazz is a more respected and appreciated art form in Paris at the time. They are doing their young-men-on-the-make thing - playing jazz at night, groupies, cool apartments, aloof postures - when two young female American tourists - Woodward and Carroll - capture their attention and force reality and decisions into their good-time world.

Divorcee and mother of two Woodward comes across as the less-mature jazz groupie willing to have a fling on her vacation with Newman than the more-serious Carroll who keeps pushing Poitier (who seems to have landed in more open-minded Paris to escape America's prejudices) to face up to American racial issues and, also, what a serious relationship is about.

Set in early '60s Paris - the location shots alone make the movie worth seeing, but this is not a scrubbed up city, but one still showing the scars of WWII while also capturing the moody but energized and underground feel of the jazz community. The hippies - and hippie style - hasn't arrived yet - so the look is counterculture early '60s cool: cigarette smoke everywhere amidst tight fitting dark suits, sport coats and turtleneck with sunglasses, goatees and somber looks as accessories.

The conflict peaks as Newman is forced to decide between his Paris life and music or Woodward and America while Poitier faces a similar decision with the added burden of racial issues as Carroll demands that if he wants her, he has to join her fight against America's prejudices.

Dated as heck, it's still a powerful movie as valuable today for its storytelling as its time travel - and Armstrong and the music. My guess, the movie wasn't a big hit (outside of Greenwich Village) - America probably wasn't ready to understand it all - but that's what good art does: it pushes, it expands, it challenges in an engaging manner.

That was an excellent review.^ I enjoyed reading it.

V.C. Brunswick said:

I liked the part where Rupert Pupkin (DeNiro) is trying to see Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis) and gets ejected from the latter's office by security. Outside he and fellow stalker Masha (Sandra Bernhardt) get into an argument and there's a big Chock Full O' Nuts sign in the background.

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KoC is a film I want to watch again before the Joquain Pheonix Joker picture, which looks, frmo the teaser trailers, to have tane some influence from the former.

Sin Takes a Holiday from 1930 with Constance Bennett, Kenneth MacKenna and Basil Rathbone

This movies proves a few things: one, even some very old movies had incredibly unbelievable plots, and, two - then as now - it doesn't really matter because, if the story and actors are enjoyable enough, no one cares.

To believe the plot of Sin Takes a Holiday, you'd have to believe that Constance Bennett looks dowdy just because she's in plain clothes, often stares at the floor and slouchers her shoulders a bit. Men might not have many skills, but spotting attractive slips of woman - even in plain clothes and with poor posture - is one skill they've all but perfected.

Okay, it's silly, but apparently a clique of young, wealthy, New York socialites and their male friends - who seem to marry, divorce and remarry (quite frequently) each other - fail to recognize that one of their members, a high-powered divorce attorney, has an attractive secretary (the very blonde, very lithe, and very cute Ms. Bennett).

Hence, when said attorney needs an arranged marriage so that he doesn't have to marry his soon-to-be-divorced and snotty girlfriend, Ms. Bennett - quietly carrying a torch for her employer - is called into duty but not even recognized by his friends as his once secretary. As noted, believability is not what's going one here.

As part of their arranged marriage, Ms. Bennett agrees to travel alone and abroad for a year, at which time the plan is that they'll get a divorce, presumably, because her husband, by then, will have disentangled himself from his pushy girlfriend.

With all that in motion - a well-funded Ms. Bennett sojourns in Paris for her year of married solitude where she meets one of her husband's friends, hawk-like Basil Rathborne, who, initially doesn't recognize her, but pursues her aggressively.

When the society pages in New York start reporting on the comings and goings of the now snazzed-up Ms. Bennett (she's got nicer clothes and better posture, but she looks about the same as before - beautiful) and her dashing "friend" (Rathbone), Ms. Bennett's heretofore disinterested husband becomes more than curious about his cast-off wife. From here, amidst a bunch of silly contretemps, the story plays out about as you'd expect.

It's all nonsense, but as noted, it all works because the story is fun and fast, the actors are engaging and ridiculously good looking and the world they live in is ritzy and carefree (which had to be very appealing to a Depression-suffering America). Then as now, movies offer escapism and Sin Takes a Holiday is wonderful, if silly, escapism.


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They Met in Bombay from 1941 starring Clark Gable, Rosalind Russell and Peter Lorre

There are two movies here. The first is a flat story about two international jewel thieves (apparently, that was a career back then) both pursuing the same wealthy woman's famous jewels (apparently, having famous jewels was a thing back then) who stumble upon and muck-up each other's attempts while feigning displeasure but developing somewhat of a rapport.

While Myrna Loy and William Powell could have done these roles - and made the characters fun and breezy - with ease, Gable and Russell don't develop the chemistry needed to make the silliness work. But it's worth staying with this effort because the second movie within a movie is about to start.

Gable and Russell steal the jewels, kinda together, and, perforce, escape from Bombay together in a tramp steamer, captained by a Chinese skipper (Lorre in bad make-up) bound for Hong Kong. Despite their bribes, Lorre sets them up for capture in Hong Kong, requiring the now fully in love couple (five weeks in a small cabin can change the minds of two attractive people) to escape by going overboard and then hiding out in Hong Kong.

Here, in need of money and an escape plan, former British officer Gable assumes the identity of a British Captain only to wind up being mistaken for a real officer by senior military leaders and ordered to lead an emergency evacuation of the British citizens from a province of Hong Kong as the Japanese invasion begins. It's as crazy as it sounds, but it works and actually saves a floundering movie.

Gable and Russell work together to help advance the evacuation in a movie now full of action, adventure and patriotism. Based on the date, one could guess that the movie itself was hijacked mid-production to become a propaganda film.

Whatever the reason, Gable and Russell embrace their new roles with joy and passion - now they have chemistry - while fighting the Japanese and selflessly helping the British and Chinese civilians escape. It all gets wrapped up too neatly and quickly, but for a movie that started out boring, its transition into a good military film that finishes with a flourish makes it worth the ninety minute investment.

Pitfall from 1948 starring Dick Powell, Lizabeth Scott, Jane Wyatt and Raymond Burr

• Classic, by-the-numbers noir

• Powell - bored family man & insurance adjuster with itch for adventure

• Burr - PI, really bad guy, obsessed with Scott / won't accept her rejection

• Wyatt - perfect wife to Powell

• Scott - good girl chooses bad man - low rent crook - and pays and pays

• Powell scratches his adventure itch with Scott, infuriating infatuated-with-Scott Burr who pushes Scott's criminal boyfriend to attempt to kill Powell

• Story pivots around stolen goods / insurance co., but really, it's all Scott - smoldering (she's never looked better), decent (not a femme fatale) and trapped w/ three men using her

• The rest is the climax - guns, bullets, murder, police

• The women (Scott & Wyatt) are good (really good, too good?) and the men are varying degrees of bad

• Perfect B&W scenes of LA and its burbs - noir and time travel heaven

• Surprised I'd never seen this excellent, textbook noir before

The Goodbye Girl

I just got around to watching The Witch. A bit of a slow burn,but I thought it was a great story. Loving Anya Taylor-Joy.

Since You Went Away from 1944 with Claudette Colbert, Jospeh Cotton, Jennifer Jones, Shirley Temple and Monty Wolley

It's war propaganda, but pretty good war propaganda showing life on the home front where forty-year-old husbands give up their well-paying jobs to enlist, wives support them and happily adjust to a reduced lifestyle, daughters miss their fathers and pitch in too, families take in borders (surface cranky ones with big hearts underneath) while young dispirited men who flunk out of military academies see the light and enlist. You get it - the problems are solved with good will and a buck-up mentality while everyone focuses on "doing their part" to win the war. It's no Mrs. Miniver (my gold standard for home-front propaganda films), but decently entertaining if you're in the mood.


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High Society from 1956 with Grace Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby and Celeste Holm

If you are going to remake a classic (usually not a good idea), then you need to forget about improving on it, but instead, take it in a different direction. That's the smart decision made here, turning the nearly perfect The Philadelphia Story from 1940 into a glossy musical with Crosby, Sinatra and Armstrong providing the singing/playing chops. Having a breezy style and beautiful Technicolor (it's not often I write that, but the color here is rich - not loud - further separating this movie effort from its progenitor) also helps make High Society a fun compliment to The Philadelphia Story. You watch The Philadelphia Story to see a classic; High Society, for some light, but sparkling, entertainment.

Just got done watching Leone's three Clint Eastwood westerns, for the umpteenth time. Great stuff. I have to fight the urge to get a repro poncho.

Last night I watched "Reversal Of Fortune" and I can see why Jeremy Irons got an Oscar for that role.

I'm considering buying a copy of the Russian film "Andrei Rublev"... is anyone familiar with it? good/bad?

Impact from 1949 with Brian Donlevy, Ella Raines, Charles Coburn and Helen Walker

A solid noir with an engaging but full-of-holes plot that still works as the twists and turns are fun enough if you don't over analyze them and the actors are strong with the exception of a slightly wooden and too-old-for-the-role Donlevy.

Okay, here goes: wealthy industrialist deeply loves his wife who is plotting to have her boyfriend kill him (she's not the get-her-hands-dirty type of femme fatal) by having the boyfriend pose as a cousin who wants to ride along with the husband from LA to Denver - the boyfriend plans to kill the husband along the way. But things go very wrong in a wonderfully over-the-top noir scene of attempted murder including a lug wrench, cliff fall, car crash, fire and, then, mistaken identity of a burned body.

After that, the movie moves into classic noir mode - smart, affable, older detective very slowly but persistently unravels wife's explanation while believed-to-be-but-not-actually dead husband (you'd learn this in the first twenty or so minutes) assumes another identity hoping to let his wife be convicted of his murder. If it sounds confusing - it is, but it only ramps up from there with new loves, new clues, dramatic headlines, last minute evidence produced at trial, in part, by a trip to Chinatown to find a crucial witness.

It's all a bit crazy, but is helped along by the outstanding acting of the beautiful Ella Raines (she does her beauty the timeless way - quietly understated but with bone structure that can't be denied) as the husband's new love interest, conscience and insanely good ammeter sleuth who partners up with the old detective. Throw in classic noir scenes of San Francisco (film noir's co-capital city along with New York) and outstanding cars, clothes and architectural time travel to the late '40s and it's well worth the two-hour investment despite its believability issues.

Murder, She Said from 1961 staring the wonderful Margaret Rutherford

I respect Agatha Christie's talent, but have just never been a fan of her books or the movies based on them, but have now found an exception.

Murder, She Said doesn't take itself too seriously and - in the tradition of many detective and "mystery" movies from the 1930s on - is more about the characters and their interactions than the, usually, off-the-shelf murder investigation itself.

Here, front and center, is 69-year-old Rutherford as the embodiment of English salt-of-the-earth decency combined with an indomitable will to solve mysteries - all wrapped up in an almost perfect caricature of a no-nonsense English grandmother.

It's her movie and she runs with it as she wills herself into the investigation of a murder she sees on a train running parallel to hers. The fun here is watching Rutherford tweak and motivate the skeptical, but friendly, local detective inspector while getting help from her aide-de-comp and romantic interest - the local librarian (and her real-life husband).

When the investigation leads her to a rundown estate with all the stock characters (a curmudgeon patriarch, both decent and money grubby heirs, suspicious staff, a lugubrious gardener and a precocious young boy who becomes her confidant), you realize the movie is about her personality and not the mystery (a basic murder with a "surprise" twist that you all but know is coming).

It's a short, enjoyable story that paints both a charming and slightly decaying picture of 1961 England, but one still populated by characters - most of good will and integrity. Also, not since Marie Dressler and Wallace Beery or James Gleason and Edna Mae Oliver, in the 1930s, has Hollywood had the courage and intelligence to make an older, fun, romantic couple the star attraction of a movie. The TCM host said this was one of four movies in the series - I'll be looking out for the others.

Old Acquaintance (1943) with Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins. Hopkins plays her character nearly over the top, Davis plays it on the calmer side, but the energy that meets in the middle is just right.

Edward said:

KoC is a film I want to watch again before the Joquain Pheonix Joker picture, which looks, frmo the teaser trailers, to have tane some influence from the former.

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King of Comedy is really just an alternative version or companion piece to Taxi Driver. A solipsistic, schizoid with a grand vision unleashes his madness and becomes an anti-hero in the process. Both films prefigure reality television and chart two sick paths of glory. I love them both.

Seb Lucas said:

King of Comedy is really just an alternative version or companion piece to Taxi Driver. A solipsistic, schizoid with a grand vision unleashes his madness and becomes an anti-hero in the process. Both films prefigure reality television and chart two sick paths of glory. I love them both.

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Very much so. I love that they also leave much to the viewer's imagination; 'Is Bickle really a veteran, or is he a fantasist?' is a precursor to 'Is Deckard a replicant' in many ways, though much less likely to ever have a final conclusion!

Edward said:

Very much so. I love that they also leave much to the viewer's imagination; 'Is Bickle really a veteran, or is he a fantasist?' is a precursor to 'Is Deckard a replicant' in many ways, though much less likely to ever have a final conclusion!

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God... you got me thinking... can you imagine a Paul Schrader written sequel to Taxi Driver!?

Seb Lucas said:

God... you got me thinking... can you imagine a Paul Schrader written sequel to Taxi Driver!?

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There are rumours circulating that there will be a sequel, supposedly the big man himself is interested, but I can't quite see how it could be pulled off without providing too many answers, so to speak.

Three Days of the Condor from 1975 with Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway, Cliff Robertson and John Houseman (who was born to play a cerebral CIA chief who can intellectualize away all the evil acts done under his orders with condescending confidence and a forbidding presence)

While the 1970s had its outstanding movies - The Godfathers and Jaws amongst others - one still has to pick and choose carefully in that decade (I'll take a random '30s - '60s movie over a random '70s one any day). However, Three Days of the Condor is a solid thriller with several Hitchcockian elements.

Redford plays a CIA reader - an innocuous position where he, with a small team of others, reads various journals, published papers, etc., trying to find connections or threads that could be useful to the CIA's higher-up strategic "game" players. He's no spy; he's no field agent.

Like in a Hitchcock movie, his innocent world is rocked by violence when all his coworkers are mysteriously assassinated while Redford happens to have stepped out of the office, leaving him, an-untrained "civilian," alone and hunted in New York City.

From there - as in several Hitchcock movies - Redford has to outsmart the guys trained to "do this stuff," while also figuring out what "this stuff" and the big picture is. All the things that you'd expect to happen, happen: Redford proves a natural at gun and fist fights, he kidnaps a beautiful woman for help who ends up falling for him, he leverages a seemingly preternatural knowledge of technology (cool '70s telephone and computer tech) to fool the CIA agents pursuing him, while slowly unraveling the story and turning the tables on the hunters.

Sure, it's not that believable, but what Hitchcock movie ever really was? It works for the same reason those movies work - you care about the people not the macguffin (the thing driving the story that Hitchcock rightly said really didn't matter that much). And in this one, Redford owns the movie as he quickly evolves from slightly cocky smartypants - who's too darn handsome for his own good - into serous man on the run. You care about him - and Dunaway, his hostage turned accomplice - as they try to outmaneuver the "bad" guys.

And in another Hitchcock parallel, the setting is also the star as 1970s New York City offers up both faded grandeur and present-day grit. From fin-de-siecle townhouses to almost urban-warfare Times Square - you feel New York in the movie as alternately elegant and threatening - expansive and claustrophobic. It's as much a star here as the Riviera is in To Catch a Thief.

Sure, there's some 1970s' style ugliness (all sorts of bad things are going on with Clifff Robertson's long-hair toupee) and, as noted, times where you need to suspend belief, but it's a sturdy effort in the spy genre and one that respectfully pays homage to Hitchcock.


N.B., For our FL clothing fans - in this one, Redford shows how to wear a classic herringbone tweed sport coat with a tie and jeans while later sporting a perfect peacoat. Nice to see some classic clothes being worn in the disco era.

I saw it when it was new and recall liking it at the time. It's not so much in the Hitchcock tradition as part of the seventies political paranoia genre that emerged following the collapse of sixties idealism in the Watergate era. (See also: The Parallax View, Executive Action, All the President's Men, Capricorn One, lots more.)

Fading, since it's apparently against your religion to ever mention the director in your otherwise great reviews, let me say that this is one of Sydney Pollack's better films.

Doctor Strange said:

I saw it when it was new and recall liking it at the time. It's not so much in the Hitchcock tradition as part of the seventies political paranoia genre that emerged following the collapse of sixties idealism in the Watergate era. (See also: The Parallax View, Executive Action, All the President's Men, Capricorn One, lots more.)

Fading, since it's apparently against your religion to ever mention the director in your otherwise great reviews, let me say that this is one Sydney Pollack's better films.

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Pollack is one of those "unknown" directors, despite having done some excellent films.

Doctor Strange said:

I saw it when it was new and recall liking it at the time. It's not so much in the Hitchcock tradition as part of the seventies political paranoia genre that emerged following the collapse of sixties idealism in the Watergate era. (See also: The Parallax View, Executive Action, All the President's Men, Capricorn One, lots more.)

Fading, since it's apparently against your religion to ever mention the director in your otherwise great reviews, let me say that this is one Sydney Pollack's better films.

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Other than All The Presidents Men (and only decades ago), I haven't seen any of the other movies you mention, but I have no doubt you are correct in the categorizing.

That said, at least to me, I saw many Hitchcock parallels in Condor without even trying - Foreign Correspondent and The Man Who Knew too Much literally jumped out at me.

You are also correct, I am guilty of not noting the director often (although, I do with David Lean movie as they always feel so David Lean to me). I will work on it.