What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

belfastboy said:

Great review. I agree Olivier made the movie. One thought I had and not sure it would have worked but if I was the director I would have tried to make Olivier's character have some redeeming qualities.....just a little bit of something I could muster some sympathy for him. As it stood I found him such a reprehensible character that I wished him an ill fate throughout the movie and cared nothing for his demise.

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Fading Fast said:

Yes agreed, he got what he deserved. I think he's one of those guys who'll be nice to some (his family) if he's rolling in money, but even then, it's always going to be all about him.

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belfastboy said:

It is interesting as my wife deals with the fall out of what she now realizes was a mother with strong narcissistic qualities we watch two movies centred around such characters and the damage it inflicts on the family.

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Fading Fast said:

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All Fall Down from 1962 with Warren Beatty, Angela Lansbury, Karl Malden and Eva Marie Saint

The late '50s / early '60s saw movie after movie of broken families breaking some more as happens in All Fall Down, albeit, here with a little variation on the Oedipal Complex mixing in a touch of creepiness to the sadness of this family.

The Willart family - mother (Lansbury), father (Malden) and second son (Barndon de Wilde) - adore/idolize/blindly love handsome first-born son, Berry Berry (Beatty), who is mad at adult life in the way a wild horse is mad at being broken (or maybe he's just mad at his ridiculously horrible name).

Unable to live up to the expectation of his lionizing family, Berry Berry vagabonds around the country keeping alive doing odd jobs, getting money wired from home (for bail now and again when he gets drunk and does something stupid) and skating around the edges of being a gigolo.

Meanwhile, back at the homestead - a rundown old Victorian - the family pines away for their absent hero son, somewhat appeased by the appearance of cousin Echo (in what parallel universe do these names not seem insane?), a pretty, early '30s school teacher, played by Marie Saint, who the family feels is on a glide path to spinsterhood.

With all the pieces now in place, they can start falling down. Right when the sixteen-year-old second son is developing a hard puppy dog crush on Echo, in walks Berry Berry to steal her heart. Despite initial concern, matriarch Lansbury embraces the relationship as she and her enervated and alcoholic communist husband (Mauldin) thinks this might be the thing to settle their prodigal hero son down. Even though the second son still pines for Echo, he so idolizes his older brother that he, too, embraces the relationship because anything Berry Berry does is right.

From here, things really fall apart (and, alert, spoilers come fast and furious). While still just dating Berry Berry, we learn that, until-now, virgin Echo is pregnant with his child, which - of course - pushes away Berry Berry, who wants nothing to do with responsibility, while breaking Echo's heart (maybe) and her hold on life (for sure).

As all of this comes out, the scales fall from the eyes of the second son and the father who finally see Berry Berry for the wrecking ball that he is, which only pushes the mother into deeper denial and a deeper love with her son. To be sure, she was jealous of his potential marriage all along, which was just part of this family's variation on the Oedipal thing, which includes the second son plotting to kill Berry Berry to avenge the wrong he did to Echo.

At the end - I saved a little plot if you haven't seen it yet - nobody is left standing, least of all the viewer. Despite a feels-forced final-moment attempt to put a positive spin on all this breakage, the message - as with so many of this period's movies - is, as Berry Berry screams at some point, "I hate life." Hopefully you don't - I don't (except on that rare, really awful day) - but like wanting to almost touch a hot stove as a kid, sometimes it's cathartic to see your worst fears played out in a safe way. At least all these depressing movies argue the public, at that time, wanted this release.

N.B. I don't think Karl Malden has ever given a bad performance - or at least not one that I've seen. Usually, he's perfectly cast as a model of propriety as a cop, priest or some other person of authority keeping things grounded as the world spins into chaos around him, but here he's equally convincing being part of the spinning chaos.
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• Taking place in Hungary in 1956 as the USSR was crushing the Hungarian rebellion, several foreigners (mainly English) trying to get out of Hungary are held up in a hotel by a Russian Major (Brynner) suspicious that they are smuggling out Hungarian resistance fighters

• The foreigners, overall, aren't doing so, but one, Kerr, is trying to smuggle one resistance fighter out - a wounded Robards - which sets up a battle of wits and sexual tension between Kerr and Brynner

• A bunch of other stuff takes place around the core story - pockets of Hungarian resistance attack Brynner's Soviet headquarters, we see the Hungarian locals conflicted over joining the resistance and several of the British being held are forced to choose between exposing Kerr and Robards or helping them and, thus, risking imprisonment or death for themselves

• But most of the two-plus hours are spent with Kerr and Brynner not sleeping with each other as he continues to suspect Robards is not English (Robards' cover story), but a Hungarian resistance fighter (which we know he is)

• Not that it's bad in a melodramatic way, but it's hard to believe that Brynner wouldn't have figured out who Robards was in ten minutes and it's harder still to believe he'd risk his career and life by not immediately arresting him and Kerr

• Brynner is presented as a man conflicted with the moral issues of the Soviet suppression of the Hungarians - so much so, that he's willing to risk it all to let one Hungarian go, in truth, mainly because, let's just say it, he wants to bang Kerr - eh, not that believable

• All this is made harder still because Deborah Kerr, while pretty, has an expression and body English that read as if she'd shattered into little pieces if a man touched her, but I guess the subtext and country metaphor is the fiery Russian wanting to conquer the aloof Englishwoman - yawn

• Lastly, there's so much Russian and Hungarian spoken (without subtitles) that you feel left out of a third of the movie - maybe done to give the audience a sense of how the English captives felt, but still, you don't go to a movie to not know what the characters are saying

Trenchfriend said:

Amélie (2001)

Oh maaan...

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Haversack said:

Sid and Marty Krofft have a lot to answer for... especially their jingle writer.

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• Montgomery plays a New York City mob guy - an urbane "protection" racketeer - who runs away to a farm in upstate New York to hide out until a recent "issue" with the police can be "fixed"

• There, by movie-magic happenstance, he winds up living with a honest, hard-working American farm family who also happens to have a preternaturally beautiful daughter - O'Sullivan of Jane-from-Tarzan fame who proves here that she looks gorgeous even with her clothes on

• Since the family doesn't know he's a mobster hiding out, they think he's just recovering from an injury, there are a lot of jokes around and contretemps that occur from him concealing his true "career" from them - about half of the jokes/situations work

• Being a code-enforced movie, all goes as planned: Montgomery transforms from cynical mobster to enlightened man who sees the good in honest, hard work and decent living (especially when a pretty girl sits like a cherry on top of it)

• All that's left is for him to come clean to the family (and see if they reject him) and to pay his debt to society

• It's harmless fun - nothing great, but Montgomery and O'Sullivan, with an assist from Edward Arnold as the doggedly pursuing NYC detective, make it interesting enough

steve u said:

Abuse? or "tool of the trade"?

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steve u said:

The banana Splits ...Yes, being born in 1957 I remember.
"It'll never work, were doomed" The Adventures of Gulliver

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• It turns out, 1948's well-known Mr. Blandings Builds his Dreamhouse was first made in 1942 as George Washington Slept Here. Not really, but the two movies all but share the same story

• An upper-middle-class New York City family, living in a cramped apartment (a typical New York story), on the wife's (Sheridan) whim and unbeknownst to the husband (Benny), buy an in-complete-disrepair Pennsylvania farmhouse

• After decamping to their "new" home and intent on "fixing it up," the story follows the usual arc of many fish-out-of-water stories as the local contractors and real estate agents take advantage of the "city slickers" as they spend all their money trying to make a run-down two-hundred-plus-year-old shack into a home

• The one-liners - the reason for the movie's existence - are good, but not great with Benny trying hard to make average material funnier than it is as he both needles his wife for buying this white elephant and all the locals for fleecing them

• Along the way, as troubles mount - no water from the always-being-drilled well, loss of the house's only access road, insanely leaky roofs, and on and on - the family also, naturally, fall in the love with the slowly-being-restored house and the warming-to-them locals

• The climax comes as the money runs out, the bank is about to foreclose and their rich uncle (Coburn) turns out not to be rich, necessitating a deus ex machina to save the day

• As noted, if this all sounds familiar to Mr. Blandings Builds his Dream House, it's because it's, pretty much, the same story. Overall, the Blandings' version is a bit slicker, and Grant's more-subtle humor is more to my taste than Benny's "yak-yak" style, but both are reasonably enjoyable movie cognates