What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

The Last Hurrah from 1958 with Spencer Tracy, Jeffrey Hunter, Pat O'Brien, Donald Crisp and on and on - great cast.

It's a good movie about politics, just not as good as it thinks it is and not as good as the numerous better political movies that, in only a few years, were about to spill out of the early '60s - Seven Days In May, Fail Safe, The Best Man and more.

Long-time Irish mayor (Tracy) of (effectively, though it never says) Boston is running his last campaign against the candidate put forward by the "Brahmins" desirous to put the "Irish," "immigrants," "workers" back in their place by taking the reins of power back for the old Protestant order.

Fair enough story, but unfortunately, the writers and director John Ford stereotype out both sides - the working-class politicians and supporters are almost all goodhearted and decent; whereas, the Brahmins are cardboard evil - prejudice cheaters that quickly lose their temper when confronted.

Probably meant to represent the "big" issues in a personal way - Tracy's nephew (Hunter) is an "impartial" newspaper man who is dating one of the leading Brahmin's daughter, but he becomes close to Tracy during the campaign. Somehow it doesn't really work as, again, the issues are all too black and white, but it is enjoyable to see pros like Tracy and Hunter carry a scene.

It's a good effort, but like other '50s political movies, such as Washington Story or Born Yesterday, it doesn't dig deep enough into the dirty inner workings of politics or admit the compromises that even the "heroes" have to make to win, but it's still worth the viewing time for its quality of acting and fun time travel to the '50s.

Blade Runner, right now from 19 yo self-recorded VHS-cassette.

Let's see, how the Tannhauser-monologue feels, this time.

Village of the Giants (1965). "Genius" (11-year-old Ron Howard) accidentally creates a substance dubbed "goo" that causes living things (animals and humans in this movie) to grow to roughly five times their normal size after they eat it. A group of "delinquents" comes to town, eats the goo, and tries to take over. Now, we've all seen movies that weren't particularly good for any number of reasons, but this one is completely pointless. Except, perhaps, to validate your disbelief that it exists, there isn't one reason, good or bad, to ever watch this turkey.

Thieve's Highway from 1949 with Richard Conte (a young Barzini!) and Lee J. Cobb

I started to write a standard play-by-play and, then, realized nobody needs that for this movie. What you need to know is it's classic noir.

You have independent truckers - hardscrabble men in barebones trucks (there are no refrigerators, sleeping beds or air-conditioning in these death-traps) - fighting with their rigs, each other, shippers and buyers. There's also a corrupt wholesale market dealer (Cobb - born to play a noir bad guy as his aura speaks dirty business / dirty politics / dirty whatever is going on) who uses muscle, cops on the take and whores to bribe, lie, cheat and steal his way to wholesale market success.

There's a son on a mission to avenge his father who was crippled by Cobb while he also is trying to earn money to marry his girl-next-door-looking fiancee. He's the "hero" dipped into the slime of noir world and we watch voyeuristically to see if he can stay, kinda / sorta, clean as an alluring prostitute, corrupting money and a friend-cheating deal are all tossed his way.

And in classic noir fashion, the atmosphere, the streets, wholesale market and dark alleys of post-war San Francisco, share top billing as we see a city from its grimy side. Despite a slapped on "code-approved" ending, the more noir movies you see, the more you know all Americans weren't buying / nor was every studio selling the "happy '50s" story. Hollywood always liked money, so there had to be large demand for these seedy-side-of-life stories even during the "simple and good" '50s.

The whole popular culture trend of the immediate postwar era tended to the grim and the bleak -- noir films were part of a whole movement that included violent crime/detective novels and fiction magazines, cynical private-eye radio shows, and dark "true crime" comic books. There are a lot of theories about why this particular aesthetic caught on just at that time, but the most convincing to me is that they were largely targeted at "pissed-off ex-GIs" who had seen horrible things during the war -- on both sides -- and lost whatever idealism they had ever had as a result.

Not that there weren't such stories being told before the war -- the whole hard-boiled genre has its origin in the equally-cynical 1920s --but the unusual concentration of such material over the 1946-50 period suggests there's something to the theory.

LizzieMaine said:

The whole popular culture trend of the immediate postwar era tended to the grim and the bleak -- noir films were part of a whole movement that included violent crime/detective novels and fiction magazines, cynical private-eye radio shows, and dark "true crime" comic books. There are a lot of theories about why this particular aesthetic caught on just at that time, but the most convincing to me is that they were largely targeted at "pissed-off ex-GIs" who had seen horrible things during the war -- on both sides -- and lost whatever idealism they had ever had as a result.

Not that there weren't such stories being told before the war -- the whole hard-boiled genre has its origin in the equally-cynical 1920s --but the unusual concentration of such material over the 1946-50 period suggests there's something to the theory.

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And a bit sloppy of me to lump '49 into the '50s, but to be fair, plenty of noir grime and bleakness was also served up all throughout the '50s.

The theory sounds reasonable, but in truth, has there ever been a time some meaningful subset of the population hasn't been open to noir/cynicism/the dark side?

And while the war-weary-GI as cause is a reasonable theory, the same argument - reversed - has also been proffered as the reason for the appeal of the "safe," "conservative" 50s. To wit, after seeing and living the hell of war, it's been argued, most Americans just wanted "normal" life with security and, even, blandness as they had already had all the "excitement" they needed and wanted in life.

And maybe both views are true as different people respond to war/trauma differently.

Certainly not all ex-GIs emerged from their service with a bad attitude, and it's not necessarily the case that all who did were messed-up combat veterans. Probably there were a few T-5 mimeograph-crankers who came out of the service fed up with everything and found solace in the gory pages of a Mickey Spillane novel, just as there must've been a front-line infantryman or two who came home from overseas and devoted the rest of his life to pacifism. So any theory can't apply to all possible cases.

But I think there's much that can be said in support of the idea that the Mr. & Mrs. Happy McSunshine suburban image of The Fifties was to a considerable extent a direct response by the Boys to the reeking cynicism of the "Noir School." (And by "The Boys" I don't just mean admen -- movie producers, TV producers, publishing company executives, the various fronts and councils and coalitions that answered to the NAM such as "Religion In American Life" -- all were part of that hive mind I call The Boys.)

It's telling, for example, that you didn't get too many really hard-core noir films from the one studio that had the most invested in selling the Boys' company line: MGM released far fewer examples of this genre than Warners or Paramount, studios which had always had a reputation for "telling it like it is" in opposition to the wholesome fantasies favored by Louis B. Mayer. Until, of course, Dore Schary pushed Mayer out and started to have his way with the studio. And even more to the point, many of the best noirs came from the independent studios that had always taken a more or less "outsider" point of view.

I also think you can also draw a direct line from the attitudes of the Noir Era to the stylized cynicism of the Beat Era -- the whole Kerouac mindset would have fit right in on the streets of Noirville. Even at the height of The Fifties there were dissident voices who knew it was all the bunk.

Last night I watched Jeff Lynne's ELO - Wembley or Bust (2018).

I am a big ELO fan, and saw them 2 years ago at Radio City Music Hall in NYC where I almost exploded in my seat. This film gave me the opportunity to see it close up and relive the experience.

I generally gauge concert films by The Last Waltz (1978), the concert film that changed the genre for the better, on all levels, from what had been done previously. On that note, I enjoyed the occasional in-between-songs 'interviews' that gave lots of dimension to the whole ELO experience, both past and present.

I am saving this one for future viewing.

Hail, Caesar!

Fun. First Cohen Brothers' film we do not want to own. If anyone can tell me what the "plot" is, I'd be interested in knowing.

Commies were fun.

For her birthday, Herself elected to go and see the Disney "live action" version of The Lion King. I've never seen the original 2D animation, and to be honest have no more inclination to see it having seen the revamp. The songs are, of course, awful. There's been much said about the dreadful new Beyonce number that has been inserted in order to have a shot at the Best Original Song Oscar, but I can't honestly say it stood out as worse than all the other original dreck written by Elton John et al. I'm not sure what changed at Disney, but post-Aristocats they certainly lost all ability to put great songs into their pictures. Ironically, the actual score (as far as I know, new for this version) is excellent. The animation is also superb; I enjoyed the footage of the animals significantly more than the lazy dialogue and wafer-thin plot (if only they'd stuck closer to the Hamlet inspiration, it would have been vastly improved). I can understand that Disney wanted to nix the reality rule that would have seen the female love interest slaughtered (along with any other cubs) when Scar took over, though how many kids will instead be traumatised when they grow up and realised that Simba as a result "marries" and breeds with his own half-sister, who knows. If you like modern Disney and/or you're the right age to have seen and loved the original, it might be right up your alley. For the rest of us, well. Let's just say it ain't no Jungle Book.

"She's Funny That Way"
We really enjoyed it.
It's sort of a Wes Anderson meets Woody Allen kind of film directed by Peter Bogdanavich. I need to watch it again just to catch all the things I missed while laughing.

MisterCairo said:

Hail, Caesar!

Fun. First Cohen Brothers' film we do not want to own. If anyone can tell me what the "plot" is, I'd be interested in knowing.

Commies were fun.

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The overarching plot is allegedly about Eddie Mannix (*) keeping everything running as the studio fixer... but it's really just an excuse to recreate all those golden-era Hollywood sequences. They were more honest with Buster Scruggs, not trying to have a through-plot, just having fun deconstructing western tropes.

(* The rare Coen protagonist who's not uber-stressed and under fire from all directions - see Barton Fink, Tom Reagan, the Dude, Larry Gopnik, Llewyn Davis, etc. They essentially let Clooney's dumb-cluck star handle that aspect of the plot.)

I adore the Coen Bros., but I've been mostly disappointed in their recent films. Their technique is always entertaining, but the story cohesion and nutty internal logic of their best films hasn't been seen for a few years now.

Pickup on South Street from 1953 with Richard Widmark, Jean Peters and Thelma Ritter

"That muffin you grifted, she's okay. Stuck her chin way out for you." - Moe (Thelma Ritter)

Many Hitchcock films have noir elements, so it's only fair that some noirs have Hitchcock elements. In Pickup on South Street, a work-a-day pickpocket (Widmark) - not a bad guy if you ignore his career in thievery - picks the purse of a courier (Peters) who, unbeknownst to her or Widmark, was carrying secret film to a Communist cell operating out of NYC in the mid-'50s.

Because the FBI had her under surveillance, waiting to capture whomever she dropped her film off to, Widmark and Peters now find themselves in a noir version of the common Hitchcock plot device of an average man caught up in world events with everyone chasing a MacGuffin (in this one, it's film we know is important to the security of the United States, but we really don't care that much about the film itself).

It takes awhile to understand the plot and keep straight all the groups chasing Widmark and Peters - a few different government entities (including the FBI) plus members of the Communist cell - but as with a Hitchcock movie, all you really need to know is that some good guys and some bad guys are both looking for some innocents stuck in the middle, with the twist in this one being that the innocents are average noir bad guys who you still kinda root for as they seem unfairly trapped.

To be sure, this is the '50s, and writer/director Sam Fuller was commenting on America's anti-Communist fury (which, ironically, turned out to be a long-term gift to the left as that era's horrible persecution - which ruined innocent lives - is still regularly evoked as one of the left's most heroic moment and used as a forever cudgel to bludgeon the right). But in noir fashion, the movie's dismissive view toward any big morality is well captured with this exchange:


Basically, Widmark as McCoy is derisively saying, "hey I'm on the fringe of your society; I got a chip on my shoulder about the US and the police and you want me to join forces with the same guys who want to lock me up because of Communism?" But despite his cynicism, most of the criminals are presented as having some sort of omertà where normal criminal activity is fine, but they won't help the Commies.

You can spend as much or as little time as you want contemplating those big issues as the movie really works because of the things that almost always make a movie work: a few well-developed characters deal with life's real challenges in a compressed and dramatic fashion.

In addition to Widmark as an almost-likable pickpocket and Peters as the knocked-about tramp you want to believe in, it's Thelma Ritter - as a street snitch barely holding on (she'll sell info to the cops or other criminals, but not the Commies) - who brings the most humanity (broken as it is) to the movie while stealing every scene she's in.

As cops and Commies chase and pressure Widmark, Peters and Ritter - while also keeping a close eye on each other - Peters begins to fall for Widmark (Widmark takes longer) with Ritter being the only one who sees the whole picture - prompting the above opening quote where she tries to knock some sense into Widmark regarding Peters' loyalty. It's also just a beautiful example of noir argot as she tells Widmark the the muffin (girl) he grifted (pick pocketed) stuck her chin out hard for him (she took a beating, literally, instead of selling him out).

The on-location New York scenes - crowded and screeching subways, dilapidated docks, looming iconic bridges and seedy bars and tenements - are used by Fuller to maximum advantage. His dissolute and brooding vision of New York City increases the plot tension while framing the movie's moral relativism. And for us today, throw in the period clothes, cars and architecture and the time travel is outstanding. But even with that aside, this movie - its acting and Hitchcock-like plot and tension - stands on its own as a noir classic.


N.B.

⇧ Peters, a perfect film-noir woman - looks a bit dirty even while taking a bath.

Faithless from 1932 with Tallulah Bankhead and Robert Montgomery

• Fast pre-code that's more morality tale than pre-code raunch

• Spoiled, rich socialite Bankhead blames the poor for being poor and dismisses marriage to a middle-class guy (Montgomery) - "live without my many servants, never! -" before her money dries up in the depression

• Then, reduced to being a kept woman by a former social "inferior," she begins to see the light and leaves him to marry the now poor, former middle-class guy

• But there's one more big step down - hubby gets beaten up by union guys on strike when he takes a job as a replacement driver - so, Bankhead becomes a common street whore to pay for hubby's medicine

• Being MGM and not Warners, the story is framed as an lesson to not give up in the depression / that hard work and decency will pay off (I'll leave the how unspoiled in case you ever see it)

• Tallulah Bankhead is her birth name - fanfreakin'tastic name, but no way she didn't have a bare-knuckle's brawl with the studio to keep it / those geniuses probably tried to turn her into Tally Bank or some such other stupidity

I tried to make thru Aquaman. Bailed out after 1 hour. Too long, too many detours in the story line.

Cold Comfort Farm.

Aunt Judith "No, Amos, NO! You can't leave us, what will we do without you"????

Amos "The Lord will provide! Or not, according to his will..."


And remember, there'll be no butter in Hell....

It was Humphrey Bogart day on TCM yesterday, part of their "Summer Under the Stars" programming for August. So while we were at home I watched as many as my wife could tolerate--the last 30 minutes of Passage to Marseille (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), most of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), the second half of Dark Passage (1947), and recorded They Drive by Night (1940) to watch later. I've seen them all at least a few times before (Except for They Drive by Night, which is the reason I recorded it) and would recommend them to anyone expressing an interest.

Zombie_61 said:

It was Humphrey Bogart day on TCM yesterday, part of their "Summer Under the Stars" programming for August. So while we were at home I watched as many as my wife could tolerate--the last 30 minutes of Passage to Marseille (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), most of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), the second half of Dark Passage (1947), and recorded They Drive by Night (1940) to watch later. I've seen them all at least a few times before (Except for They Drive by Night, which is the reason I recorded it) and would recommend them to anyone expressing an interest.

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I watched They Drive by Night. Bogey is in a supporting role. Not a great movie, but a lot of great hats!

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Zombie_61 said:

It was Humphrey Bogart day on TCM yesterday, part of their "Summer Under the Stars" programming for August. So while we were at home I watched as many as my wife could tolerate--the last 30 minutes of Passage to Marseille (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), most of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), the second half of Dark Passage (1947), and recorded They Drive by Night (1940) to watch later. I've seen them all at least a few times before (Except for They Drive by Night, which is the reason I recorded it) and would recommend them to anyone expressing an interest.

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"...as many as my wife could tolerate..." LOL

I had it on in the background on mute all day as I had to work (and really did work this time), but loved looking up and just seeing the visuals of all the movies you noted.

MisterCairo said:

Cold Comfort Farm.

Aunt Judith "No, Amos, NO! You can't leave us, what will we do without you"????

Amos "The Lord will provide! Or not, according to his will..."


And remember, there'll be no butter in Hell....

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One of the kids showed me this film a few years ago, and I haven't stopped laughing yet. We still call rain "nature's fecund blessing."