What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

The Big House (1930) with top-billed Chester Morris, Wallace Beery, and Lewis Stone. Robert Montgomery is fourth on the list. Directed by George Hill. I asked the Missus to watch along. She thought it was okay, sort of a downer. I kept raving about the direction, especially the solitary confinement sequence about half-way through (if you've seen it, you know what I'm talking about). I think it's a remarkable movie, considering (A.) movies had been talking for about two years, and (B.) the performances of Morris, Beery, and Montgomery.

Oscar Wilde from 1960 with Robert Morley, John Neville and Alexander Knox

I have nothing more than a Cliff Notes knowledge of Oscar Wilde's life: a talented playwright, poet and novelist (I enjoyed The Picture of Dorian Gray), gay or bi-sexual, convicted under the sodomy laws and has a cool picture that shows up on a lot of T-shirts and coffee mugs. I know there's much more, but that's what I got.

With that thumbnail of knowledge, I don't know how true this movie is, but assuming a modicum of accuracy as it aligns with my Cliff Notes version of Wilde's life, it does a good job with its two-dollar-and-fifty-cent budget.

A heavy, successful, middle-aged Oscar Wilde played by Robert Morley is publicly accused of "posing as a sodomite," which his incredibly understanding wife, kind friends and wise lawyer advise him to ignore, but he presses a libel suit and all goes horribly wrong from there.

After the above thirty or so minutes of set up, which leaves little doubt that Mr. Wilde was, by the standards of the day, guilty of, in the terminology of the day, "the love that dare not speak its name," the trial and fireworks begin.

Wilde proves his famous wit almost equal to the relentless opposing attorney, Alexander Knox, as the ripostes fly back and forth with entertaining verve and bite during Wilde's testimony. But Wilde makes the mistake of playing his game on another man's field as, eventually, Wilde stumbles and experienced Knox hammers away mercilessly in the movie's money moment.

It is all sad denouement for Wilde from there. A subsequent sodomy trial leads to a few years in prison. A broken Wilde is released, but with nothing left in his emotional tank or his bank account, he dies a few years later at the age of forty six.

The small message in the movie is one of pride before a fall as Wilde pushed a fight he didn't have to, but his power and ego - he was incredibly successful and held in high esteem by society at that moment - had him believe, despite much good advice to the contrary, that he would succeed.

Wilde, whatever the popular perception of him is today, was not fighting the good fight for gay rights back then, but to clear his reputation as his defense, effectively, was to deny his sexual involvement with other men.

The big message in the movie - note this is 1960 - is the injustice of a man being persecuted for consensual sex with other adult men (although, one was sixteen, which wouldn't fly today, but that's treated as tomayto, tomahto in the sweep of this movie). It's easy to cheer for the good guys now, but kudos to the producers for making this tiny-budgeted effort back then.

Oscar Wilde, the movie, proves, again, that a good story tops special effects and expensive sets. When Wilde and Knox are exchanging retorts and you feel the momentum shift from Wilde to Knox - and you can see it all going terribly wrong for Wilde - the cheap sets, costumes and toupees of this movie don't mean a thing because real and raw human tragedy is on display.

^^^Love Wilde, orientation doesn't matter and should not have factored in his life; rogue, reprobate,
profligate, mercurial Mick, and absolutely fabulous writer, his mind elaborately furnished with thoughts
and his prose stunningly knock-down gorgeous. His envious vindictive against Elizabeth Barrett Browning
sourced to his innate fragility. This insecurity pursued him through life. A death bed convert or reconvert
to Catholicism crowned his life if not career. The Paris hostel room in which he died can be leased nightly.
I think he's buried in PL cemetery, Morrison's last stop.

I never knew this flick, should catch it for a peruse.

Agreed, it's a good film. Other interesting biopics about Wilde:

2018 - The Happy Prince, with Rupert Everett (who also wrote/directed) as Wilde.

1997 - Wilde, with Stephen Fry as Wilde.

1960 - The Trails of Oscar Wilde, with Peter Finch as Wilde.

Tried to watch "Inside Daisy Clover" to check out Plummer and a young Redford....but alas watched 15 minutes and gave up on it. Natalie Wood and RuthGordon were atrocious.....a master class in over acting....or in Wood's case just plain bad acting.....terrible movie.....or at least the first 15 minutes.

belfastboy said:

Tried to watch "Inside Daisy Clover" to check out Plummer and a young Redford....but alas watched 15 minutes and gave up on it. Natalie Wood and RuthGordon were atrocious.....a master class in over acting....or in Wood's case just plain bad acting.....terrible movie.....or at least the first 15 minutes.

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It was years ago, so I no longer remember why, but I, too, only made it fifteen or twenty minutes in. When it's on, I always think I should give it another shot, but haven't.

Fading Fast said:

It was years ago, so I no longer remember why, but I, too, only made it fifteen or twenty minutes in. When it's on, I always think I should give it another shot, but haven't.

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We watched the TCM commentary prior to the movie and they mentioned that the actors/directors were disappointed at the negative critical response and the audience indifference to the movie.....to which I reply...."Duh!"

A nice little family drama, The Hollars, with a great cast: Margo Martindale, Richard Jenkins, Anna Kendrick, John Krasinski (who also directed), etc.

Family rock Martindale gets sick, and her mostly dysfunctional family has to face up to it. A familiar story, but it's played believably and (mostly) avoids the familiar dramatic cheap shots.

Smart Woman from 1931 with Mary Astor, Robert Aims and John Halliday

Smart Woman is an early talkie that feels like they simply filmed the play it is based on with a few exterior shots thrown in to make it look a bit more like a movie. It's also another 1930s movie about rich people living in big houses, driving luxury cars and taking exotic vacations all while cheating on their spouses. Depression-era audiences, struggling to find jobs and food, seemed to enjoy these films about rich people's peccadilloes, as Hollywood made a ton of them.

Young wife Mary Astor returns from a trip abroad visiting her ailing mother to find her husband, Robert Aims, has stepped out on her and now wants a divorce so that he can marry his very blonde girlfriend. Astor, truly in love with her husband and unaware he was straying, buckles at first and then decides to be gracious to her husband's girlfriend so as to buy time to find a way to win him back.

After inviting the girlfriend and her mother to spend a few days with her and her husband at a weekend house party (another popular Depression-era rich-people thing), Astor stumbles on a plan to make Aims jealous. She pretends an English Barron, John Halliday, that she befriended on her trip home, is really her boyfriend. [Writer's note, my girlfriend of twenty-plus years would not invite my new girlfriend and her mother over for the weekend other than to have them pick up my now dead body.]

The rest of the movie plays out as expected as Aims becomes less enthusiastic about getting a divorce when he sees his wife is interested in another man - and another man is interested in her. A bunch of small twists have to happen first before the inevitable, but you know where it is going almost from the beginning.

It's neither good nor bad because the story is fine but obvious, while Hollywood's skills at making talkies were yet to be perfected. Plus, the movie is in need of a restoration (and a soundtrack). It also doesn't help that the wrong people get together at the end as (mild spoiler alert) Astor should have let her self-absorbed bore of a husband leave when she had the chance.

But you don't watch this one for the story; you watch it for Mary Astor. It's a young as heck Ms. Astor before the next ten years of enduring horribly greedy parents, horribly greedy husbands (three) and too much booze, casual sex and exposure (her private sex diary became public in a salacious divorce trial) turned this twenty-five-year-old, lithe, pretty young thing into the tough-as-nail, almost-manly, thirty-five-year-old Brigid O'Shaughnessy of 1941's The Maltese Falcon.


N.B. Talented and enjoyable John Halliday puts in his typical strong-and-understated performance as the English Barron who should have wound up with pretty Mary.

Killer's Kiss from 1955 with Jamie Smith, Irene Kane and Frank Silvera

According to TCM's Noir Alley host Eddie Muller, Killer's Kiss, director Stanley Kubrick's first movie effort, was done on less than a shoe-string budget. He notes the future famous director, working with a thin story and no Hollywood help or experience, was learning as he filmed and edited.

If you go in expecting a complex and expensive Hollywood effort, you'll probably be disappointed, but if you go in open to seeing what would come to be known as an "indie" film, you're in for a treat.

Shot in black and white on the street of New York City with, seemingly, whatever was going on in the background often captured on film, the movie is, first, a stunning time capsule of the City in 1955.

From the chaotic lights, hustle and energy of Times Square to the desolate cobblestone avenues of the Lower East Side, you feel as if you're on the streets with the actors.

Kubrick might have been learning, but he understood how to frame a shot. Look for the scene toward the end where female lead Irene Kane walks up the long flights of steps to the taxi dance hall. It's a poignant moment of "less is more" cinematography.

I'm not in agreement with Muller's criticism of the story as its "thinness" comes across as Hemingwayesque in a stripped-to-its-essentials way (think, A Clean Well-Lighted Place). At just over an hour, the movie feels like a smartly filmed short story that gives you only what you need to care about the characters and their plight and leaves it up to you to fill in the rest.

Heading-to-Palookaville boxer Jamie Smith spies an attractive, young blonde woman, Irene Kane, in the apartment across the alley from his depressing one-room rental. Later, he comes to her aid when she's being attacked by her manager and somewhat boyfriend, low-level mob boss Frank Silvera.

From here, the story is an awful, kinda, love triangle as Smith and Kane, a dispirited taxi-dancer, begin to fall for each other in a two-broken-people-coming-together way. None of this sits well with Silvera who susses out that the young lovers are planning to leave the city together.

He then employs his connections and henchmen to try to break them up in a fast-moving last half hour that includes a mistaken rubout, a tense chase through desolate early morning streets, a violent axe fight in a creepy and empty mannequin factory and a pathetic attempt by Silvera to win Kane back, at gunpoint mind you, with alternating threats and pleas.

Kubrick uses the architectural marvel of Penn Station - beautiful yet filthy, like its home city was becoming at that time - to bookend this little gem of a movie that wonderfully captures the gritty side of New York.

With the classic resonating voice of a train conductor announcing arrivals and departures, we wait with Smith, right to the last minute, to see if Kane will join him or not in the escape: to see if this modern day Romeo and Juliet will have a more-propitious ending than their literary progenitors.


N.B. As noted by Muller, long-time TCM fans will recognize several scenes in Killer's Kiss from TCM's promo clip Open All Night. I always wondered if several of those incredible noir moments - a bored ticket-booth operator, a fatigued blonde undressing, dispirited taxi-dancers at work - were even from movies, as I'd never seen them in one. Little did I know, all this time, they were "hiding" in Kubrick's wonderful noir curio.

Tropic Thunder.

MisterCairo said:

Tropic Thunder.

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That is an awesome film. It's not for all tastes, though.

"Inherent Vice", starring Joachim Phoenix. I don't know. It's got some amazing production qualities and set pieces and is very easy on the eyes, but the story makes no sense, has several threads of which only one is resolved, lots of red herrings, and feels like about 20 minutes of film that might have cleared things up was cut out. For all of those reasons it reminded me of "Southland Tales", another intriguing beautifully made film that makes zero sense. In the case of Inherent Vice the lead character is stoned/high much of the film, so you don't really know what's realy and what's something he's imagined, and most of the conversations between characters are literally whispered or mumbled which doesn't help. Josh Brolin is amazing, though.

Last night I watch an eighties movie which would probably now be considered 'vintage' in itself: The Monster Club on Netflix. I'd somehow missed it previously, never heard of it before. A fun little "comedy horror" romp with a bunch of young, pre-teens. It does have one or two duff notes that have not aged well (the common to the period, casual homophobia, something which ironically the Code probably kept out of many earlier pictures; a teen girl being effectively blackmailed into assisting the good guys' plans with the use of a covert photo of her, impliedly in her underwear or partially nude - nowadays this would be bracketed in with "revenge porn" and could even amount to a criminal offence in several jurisdictions), but that aside it is a rather charming little picture. If I had to describe it in just one sentence, I would say it was "the comedy-horror tribute to the classic Universal monster features that John Waters never got around to making first". It's got some cute touches to it, especially the interaction between Frankenstein's creature and a five year old girl, that really are clever little visual tributes to shots from the original pictures. The plotline even takes in changing loyalties on the part of the monster which nicely reflect the 'misunderstood, not evil' theme that goes all the way back to Mary Shelley's original text. The bit that really packed an emotional punch for me was when the kids recruit the 'Creepy German Guy' neighbour to translate the (German language) diary of Van Helsing. Leaving the house, one kid says "You sure know a lot about monsters". He smiles - and as he closes the door, he murmurs softly to himself "Yes, I know a thing or two about monsters", as the camera pans down to reveal his concentration camp tattoo. Extremely effective, and subtly done. It's not in any way a plot point anywhere else in the film, and beautifully delivered without patronising the viewer.

The Beast Must Die (1974). Catchy title, huh? Calvin Lockhart plays Tom Newcliffe, a wealthy hunter who invites eight people to his island estate because he believes one of them is a werewolf and he wants to hunt it. Co-starring Marlene Clark, Peter Cushing, Charles Gray, Anton Diffring, and Michael Gambon, this is easily one of the worst movies I've ever seen.

Zombie_61 said:

The Beast Must Die (1974). Catchy title, huh? Calvin Lockhart plays Tom Newcliffe, a wealthy hunter who invites eight people to his island estate because he believes one of them is a werewolf and he wants to hunt it. Co-starring Marlene Clark, Peter Cushing, Charles Gray, Anton Diffring, and Michael Gambon, this is easily one of the worst movies I've ever seen.

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Is that the one with the bit at the end where they invite the viewer to figure out who the werewolf is, or am I thinking of another flick?

Edward said:

Is that the one with the bit at the end where they invite the viewer to figure out who the werewolf is, or am I thinking of another flick?

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Yes Sir, that is the movie.

Doctor Damage said:

That is an awesome film. It's not for all tastes, though.

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"It's a warm, blood-tasting syrup".

The Shining Hour from 1938 with Joan Crawford, Melvin Douglas, Robert Young and Margaret Sullivan

At an hour-and-fifteen-minutes long, this A-list MGM production rips along at a Warner Bros. pace, while packing a lot of melodrama into its short runtime.

New York City nightclub dancer Joan Crawford (just starting her looks' transition from pretty ingenue to lived-life-hard middle-aged woman), disgusted with her cynical Cafe Society world, agrees to marry a wealthy Midwesterner, Melvin Douglass. Despite telling Douglass she likes but doesn't love him, he pushes for marriage and a life with his family on their expansive farm.

Once there, Crawford and her husband's married brother, Robert Young, immediately develop sparks. However, the brothers' sister, and family matriarch, takes an instant dislike to Crawford, firing off put-downs her way at every chance. Meanwhile, Young's wife, the cute-as-all-heck Margaret Sullivan, slowly realizes she's losing her husband to Crawford.

Before TV shows like Dallas and Dynasty, they had movies like The Shining Hour where wealthy families, for no logical reason, all live under one roof enduring daily familial hate and machinations.

Heck, with all the cheating, subterfuge, mean comments and cocktails, The Shining Hour could have been a "lost" episode from either one of those TV shows. Upping the soap-opera quotient, like in those shows, are several financial entanglements and much sexual intrigue between the family and its employees.

The two most impressive things in The Shining Hour are the number of sub stories they fit into this seventy-five-minute effort and that they somehow, kinda sorta, stayed within the borders of the Motion Picture Production Code.

It's nothing more than a serviceable and quick soap opera lifted up by top-tier acting talent, but it's enjoyable enough for its modest aspirations and short time commitment.