What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

I haven't read BAT nor seen the entire film. Late Spring seems excellent.

I watched Hangover Square (1945) yesterday. I thought it was really good. It's set in London in the early 1900s, and has a kind of murder mystery vibe with a twist... it's pretty similar to Gaslight, if you've seen that.

Actually, I just remembered that I watched a Laurel & Hardy short even more recently. (Their First Mistake, 1932.) I love Laurel & Hardy; it's hilarious.

Harp said:

I haven't read BAT nor seen the entire film. Late Spring seems excellent.

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I'm reading it right now - and enjoying it. I think you'd really enjoy "Late Spring." Keep an eye on TCM as that's where I saw it.

Swing Girl said:

I watched Hangover Square (1945) yesterday. I thought it was really good. It's set in London in the early 1900s, and has a kind of murder mystery vibe with a twist... it's pretty similar to Gaslight, if you've seen that.

Actually, I just remembered that I watched a Laurel & Hardy short even more recently. (Their First Mistake, 1932.) I love Laurel & Hardy; it's hilarious.

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Welcome to Fedora Lounge.

I will start a sub-thread, called "I saw this movie so you don't have to".

I mentioned earlier a "thriller" called HOUSE, which you do not need to see.

On the treadmill, I looked for some fluff to watch while huffing and puffing.

Not sure why an Adam Sandler Netflix flick called The Ridiculous 6 (a play on Tarantino's Hateful 8 presumably) caught my eye, but why not.

Now I know why not.

How Harvey Kietel, Steve Buscemi, Nick Nolte, Danny Trejo and a host of other stars were convinced to join up, is beyond me.

I like silly laugh out loud crude humour. The key though is "laugh out loud".


Do not watch this film.

Cable recommendation: Tex Avery on TCM Saturday morning!

A quick heads-up, TCM is running a documentary on the great golden age cartoon director tomorrow (Saturday, May 8) at 6AM eastern time, followed by a block of his classic MGM cartoons from 7:00-8:00AM eastern.

If you aren't familiar with his wild MGM cartoons, I urge you to DVR the second hour. They're running forties classics like Red Hot Riding Hood, King-Size Canary, and Screwball Squirrel (Avery's attempt to create a cartoon star even more obnoxious than Bugs and Daffy... who then failed because he was TOO obnoxious!)

These aren't anywhere as well known as his earlier shorts from Warner Bros., but are among the funniest cartoons ever made. They represent a high point in classic animation and feature the high gloss of MGM's skilled animation department, which was second only to Disney at the time. If, like me, you find the beautifully animated Tom and Jerry cartoons from MGM's Hanna-Barbera 40s/50s unit to be too monotonously plotted, these uber-inventive shorts from Avery's unit from the same years are far more interesting.

Anyway, I've owned 16mm prints of some of these little gems for 40 years, and I plan to DVR both hours. Nuff said.

Dark Waters, a recent drama directed by Todd Haynes, with Mark Ruffalo, Anne Hathaway, Victor Garber, etc. Ruffalo plays the lawyer who discovered and fought DuPont's environmental poisoning in West Virginia from Teflon manufacturing during the nineties and early 2000s.

It's a sedate, serious drama that tells its awful story rather straightforwardly. Not what I expected from Todd Haynes, whose films are mostly period pieces obsessed with gorgeous surface appearances vs. the more complex stories beneath (Far From Heaven, Carol, Wonderstruck, the Kate Winslet Mildred Pierce). That is to say, it seems like it could have been directed by someone else: it's something of an outlier in Haynes' filmography.

Recommended, but note that it's a damn depressing story... because it's true.

Possessed form 1947 with Joan Crawford, Van Heflin, Raymond Massey and Geraldine Brooks

In her post-War movies, Joan Crawford was put in nearly every combination of a bad relationship or bad marriage imaginable. Sometimes, she's the aggrieved party and sometimes she's the "witch" from hell. Other times, she's just cracker-house crazy.

Most of these movies aren't that believable, but are pretty good soap operas. Crawford is usually too old for the role, but powers through it anyway by dint of presence and talent. Plus, her movies made money.

Possessed starts out pretty good as a confused Crawford is found wandering the streets of LA in an almost trance-like state (similar to Ida Lupino in 1943's The Hard Way - everything is recycled). She eventually is taken to a mental ward where we learn what happened to her through flashbacks revealed under analysis.

It's a boldly self-assured mid-century psychoanalysis on display here where mental "diseases" are confidently diagnosed and tied neatly together with their symptoms. The field of psychiatry only learned later what it didn't know. But in the mid twentieth century, psychoanalysis, at least in movies, is amazingly precise.

Crawford, we discover, had been a nurse to oil tycoon Raymond Massey's invalid wife. She was also having an affair with a younger man, Van Heflin, who's a playboy that she took seriously despite his warning her not to.

When Heflin breaks off the affair because Crawford keeps hounding him to marry, she agrees to marry Massey on the rebound. Massey's invalid wife and Crawford's patient had, by this point, committed suicide. Even when Crawford tells Massey she doesn't love him, he still pushes for marriage. (Pro tip: do not marry someone who outright tells you they don't love you.)

Complicating matters, Heflin is an engineer now in Massey's employ. Further complicating matters, he begins having an affair with Massey's daughter, Geraldine Brooks, now Crawford's stepdaughter (hey, it's a soap opera). Greatly further complicating matters, Heflin, who wouldn't marry Crawford, asks Brooks to marry him.

Crawford, whose character only had until now, at best, a tenuous grip on reality, starts to spiral out of control when she sees her former lover and, now, step daughter engaged. She (for no good reason) begins to believe she killed Massey's first wife. She (understandably) also fantasizes about killing her stepdaughter.

I guess it's a good job of acting by Crawford, but somewhere along the line it becomes a bit too much to really believe as everyone around her seems to miss her obvious spiral into crazy-town until it's too late.

Despite that, and too many coincidences, the movie still touches you as we've all known a woman (or man) deeply unable to accept being dropped by a boyfriend (or girlfriend). It's the heart and soul of the movie and it's powerfully poignant to see, especially when it's ramped when Crawford's former lover becomes engaged to a much-younger woman. That has the potential to make someone go nuts, like it does Crawford here.

Most of these post-war Crawford soap operas are worth the watch if you're in the mood for overly complicated and only marginally believable stories with a lot of backstabbing, broken hearts, salaciousness and, often, murder. On most days, sadly, I usually am.

The War Wagon (1967), right now on arte.

Fading Fast said:

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Breakfast at Tiffany's from 1961 with Audrey Hepburn, George Peppard, Patricia Neal, Buddy Ebsen and Mickey Rooney

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Doctor Strange said:

A dissenting view on Breakfast at Tiffany's...

I'm not a fan. I have always found this flick massively overrated, not to mention that the production code hampered any chance of its being an accurate adaptation of the source Truman Capote story (where the George Peppard character is gay). It has exactly two things going for it: staggeringly luminous Audrey, and "Moon River". Everything else is a mess. Yes, it's a good looking, stylish mess, but still. And since I detest Mickey Rooney even in his "best" performances, I just can't watch it.

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I enjoyed the film well enough. It reminds me of an amateur youth theatre production of Cabaret I once saw, which was similarly censored to make Clifford seem, if anything, more of a cuckold than actually gay (the original making much more sense of his "It could be mine!" quip about Sally's pregnancy). Interestingly, Cabaret in 1966 has a much higher level of nuance with Cliff's sexuality, and is much closer the original novels in plot in many regards than the stage show on which it was notionally based.

Where Tiffany's lost me a bit - not enough to dismiss it entirely, but it certainly mars it - was not only the Mickey Rooney element (that's a given, and I supposed something of its time, bearing in mind how closely he resembles the caricature of the Japanese from US wartime propaganda less than two decades previously) but the butchering of the ending to produce a more commercial, "happy" ending rather than the one in the book which actually rang true. Ten or a dozen years ago there was a stage play of the show done in London, which stuck true to the book - it was much better. That said, there was much to like in the film - not least the party scene with that beautiful double sweep of the camera that shows at first pass the image all wanted to portray, and at second the artifice of it all - the guy with the patch on the other eye and so on.

Interesting how things did change across the Sixties. I'm sure there's plenty in 1968's The Love Bug that isn't 'cool' by today's standards, but what seems a world away from Mickey Rooney's B@T character is the journalist whom Jim Douglas assumes to be Japanese and carefully bows to and enunciates sayonara, only to receive the response "Yeah, right - see you round, Douglas" in a Californian accent (at which he smiles at his own preconceptions being wrong).

Watched The Death Ship recently. A 1980 picture, in which a cruise ship is rammed, split in two and sinks. The handful of survivors the next morning board an empty ship (which happens to be the one that rammed them); it gradually becomes apparent it was a Nazi torture ship for picking up ditched allied airmen and others and torturing them for information. The ship haunts them and (psychologically) tortures them before killing off a number of them prior to some (including the children on board) escaping. Not a brilliant film, but an interesting little curio.

Also watched Red Tails this weekend. Not as bad as I'd expected it to be, even if it could have been so much more. All looked very nice; I do love the Tuskegee jackets - and in interesting array of the same. (One of them in some scenes even seems to be wearing an Ike which looked very much like British Battledress to my eye?).

Going back to last week sometime, it was Aparajito (1956) the second of Satyajit Ray's "Apu" trilogy, on TCM streaming. Halfway through Pather Panchali (1955), the first film. Will try to complete the trilogy before it drops out of rotation.

On the you-tube, it was the Russian fantasy with the English title The Sword and the Dragon (1959?). Does anyone remember how Channel 9 in Los Angeles would run the same movie for about a week? My school chums and I watched this over and over again.

Finally, the Missus chose The Hoodlum Saint (1946) with William Powell and Esther Williams, with James Gleason, Rags Ragland, and so many more. Uneven but fun, with wise-cracking mugs, socialite Williams, Powell being suave and urbane, the Wall Street Crash, and the story of Dismas the Good Thief.

Flower Drum Song from 1961 with Nancy Kwan, James Shigeta, Jack Soo, Benson Fong, Kam Tong and Miyoshi Umeki

Flower Drum Song is Rat Pack style meets an Americanized view of 1960s San Francisco's Chinese community seen through a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical filter with an overlay of everything that is the wonderful Nancy Kwan.

I'm not the target audience for this movie as, after The Sound of Music and Fred Astaire movies, my passion for musicals falls off a cliff. Yet, despite only a few of the song-and-dance numbers capturing my attention, the rest of Flower Drum Song's crazy kitsch made for a fun couple of hours of light entertainment.

A Chinese father and daughter, Kam Tong and Miyoshi Umeki, arrive illegally in San Francisco to honor a marital contract made years ago in China that promised Miyoshi to, now, fully Americanized nightclub owner Jack Soo. But Soo is dating and stringing along Nancy Kwan who wants to get married.

Kam and Moyoshi stay at wealthy and traditional Chinese patriarch Ben Fong's house where Miyoshi meets Fong's playboy son James Shigeta. Miyoshi immediately falls in love with him, but Shigeta, fully Americanized, denies the attraction he obviously feels as he rejects the "old" ways of arranged marriages, especially as his father clearly favors this relationship.

Thrown into the mix is Shigeta's younger brother who is a more American boy than Father Knows Best's Bud Anderson. Pushing for the old ways are several aunts and sisters, except for the one who has become Americanized herself. Most fun, super Nancy Kwan, realizing that she might lose Soo to Miyoshi, begins dating Shigeta and quickly ropes him into engagement to make Soo jealous. Don't worry, it's somewhat easier to follow on screen.

It's really a silly and innocent sixties romcom full of mix-ups and misunderstanding - think a Doris Day and Rock Hudson movie - set in San Francisco's Chinatown with a lot of singing and dancing. After a bunch of lightly hurt feelings, a few on-again-off-again engagements and some reshuffling of partners, at the end, as you knew would happen all along, the right people get together and all is good.

By today's standards, there are a lot of things wrong with the representation of Chinese culture, but there's also this: the movie's message is that all people are alike under their surface and cultural differences with the same dreams, wishes, desires and fear.

If you keep score of this stuff, all the light-hearted joking made over old Chinese customs is easily offset by all the jokes about American cultural silliness. None of it is meanspirited and, by standards of its day, it was pretty respectful to everyone. I loved that the Chinese kids raised in America can easily out-American everyone else.

Flower Drum Song's style is pre-hippies-sixties exaggerated cool, the sets are obvious, the Technicolor is too amped up and the song-and-dance numbers will either appeal to you or not, but if you just go with it, it kinda sorta works...or not. On another day, I probably would have turned it off, but it was just the nonsensical escape I needed on the day I watched it. Little of it is real, but it is fun.


Super Nancy Kwan in Flower Drum Song.

Fading Fast said:

View attachment 333902
Flower Drum Song from 1961 with Nancy Kwan, James Shigeta, Jack Soo, Benson Fong, Kam Tong and Miyoshi Umeki

Flower Drum Song is Rat Pack style meets an Americanized view of 1960s San Francisco's Chinese community seen through a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical filter with an overlay of everything that is the wonderful Nancy Kwan.

I'm not the target audience for this movie as, after The Sound of Music and Fred Astaire movies, my passion for musicals falls off a cliff. Yet, despite only a few of the song-and-dance numbers capturing my attention, the rest of Flower Drum Song's crazy kitsch made for a fun couple of hours of light entertainment.

A Chinese father and daughter, Kam Tong and Miyoshi Umeki, arrive illegally in San Francisco to honor a marital contract made years ago in China that promised Miyoshi to, now, fully Americanized nightclub owner Jack Soo. But Soo is dating and stringing along Nancy Kwan who wants to get married.

Kam and Moyoshi stay at wealthy and traditional Chinese patriarch Ben Fong's house where Miyoshi meets Fong's playboy son James Shigeta. Miyoshi immediately falls in love with him, but Shigeta, fully Americanized, denies the attraction he obviously feels as he rejects the "old" ways of arranged marriages, especially as his father clearly favors this relationship.

Thrown into the mix is Shigeta's younger brother who is a more American boy than Father Knows Best's Bud Anderson. Pushing for the old ways are several aunts and sisters, except for the one who has become Americanized herself. Most fun, super Nancy Kwan, realizing that she might lose Soo to Miyoshi, begins dating Shigeta and quickly ropes him into engagement to make Soo jealous. Don't worry, it's somewhat easier to follow on screen.

It's really a silly and innocent sixties romcom full of mix-ups and misunderstanding - think a Doris Day and Rock Hudson movie - set in San Francisco's Chinatown with a lot of singing and dancing. After a bunch of lightly hurt feelings, a few on-again-off-again engagements and some reshuffling of partners, at the end, as you knew would happen all along, the right people get together and all is good.

By today's standards, there are a lot of things wrong with the representation of Chinese culture, but there's also this: the movie's message is that all people are alike under their surface and cultural differences with the same dreams, wishes, desires and fear.

If you keep score of this stuff, all the light-hearted joking made over old Chinese customs is easily offset by all the jokes about American cultural silliness. None of it is meanspirited and, by standards of its day, it was pretty respectful to everyone. I loved that the Chinese kids raised in America can easily out-American everyone else.

Flower Drum Song's style is pre-hippies-sixties exaggerated cool, the sets are obvious, the Technicolor is too amped up and the song-and-dance numbers will either appeal to you or not, but if you just go with it, it kinda sorta works...or not. On another day, I probably would have turned it off, but it was just the nonsensical escape I needed on the day I watched it. Little of it is real, but it is fun.


Super Nancy Kwan in Flower Drum Song.
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Hard to see Detective Yemana in a role like that! Must check this out....

MisterCairo said:

Hard to see Detective Yemana in a role like that! Must check this out....

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I think he does a good job. This is not a challenging movie for the actors or the audience, but for what it is, he is quite enjoyable in the role.

Fading Fast said:

Super Nancy Kwan in Flower Drum Song.
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I love her solo # dance/song Love Being a Girl.

The Great Lie from 1941 with Bette Davie, George Brent and Mary Astor

"Was it a nice wedding?"

"Ooh, the usual thing, 'do you,' 'I do,' 'kiss the bride,' 'have some cake'."

- Bette Davis describing her wedding to George Brent


As is the wont of code-era movies, two people, George Brent and Mary Astor, who think they are married, find out, owing to some technicality with the license, they aren't. So, they get a do-over and can either remarry or say "phew!" Brent, after less than a week married to mean and selfish Astor, says "phew" and races out to marry his true love, Bette Davis.

That one event would be the soap-opera highlight of most people's lives and would be their "wow-'em" dinner-party story for the next forty years. But Warner Bros. was just getting revved up.

Astor, smarting from the publicly embarrassing loss of her husband to Davis, informs Davis that she's carrying Brent's baby (they were married for a week, after all) and intends to use the baby to steal Brent back from her. That fires things up a bit.

We're not done though. Brent, an independently wealthy flier, without knowing about the baby, takes a high-level war job in Washington and is lost flying in Brazil. After a failed search effort, he's declared dead.

Ms. Astor, with Brent now gone, is much-less interested in keeping his baby. She agrees to secretly give it up to Davis in return for, get ready for it, money.

After hiding out together during Astor's pregnancy - think living with your worst enemy in isolation for four or five months - Davis goes home saying the baby is hers while Astor returns to her single life without looking back.

Three months later, Brent walks out of the jungles of Brazil and returns to Davis who lets him believe she's the mother of their baby. All is going well for the couple - Brent loves both Davis and his son - until Astor blows into town dropping sarcastic hint after hint to Brent about the true mother of his baby right in front of Davis.

Privately, Astor informs Davis that, once again, she plans to steal Brent back using the baby as her leverage. This woman has no scruples.

Had I'd been on the murder-trial jury, I'd have voted to acquit Davis. But Davis somehow decides not to kill Astor and, instead, confesses the entire tale to Brent. Astor, then, tells Brent she's taking the baby and wants him to come with her. Does Brent give up his son or his wife?

The ending you can probably guess, but otherwise, you'll just have to watch this fun, ridiculous soap opera to see what happens.


N.B. #1 If you do see it, look for Bette Davis' double slap delivered with cool efficiency to hysterical Mary Astor; it belongs in the top-five of all movie-slaps*.

N.B. #2 While Mary Astor does more than yeoman's work as the bitch ex-wife from hell, it still seems like Davis' usual sparring partner in these types of movies, Mariam Hopkins (see The Old Maid or Old Acquaintance), should have been in the role. Maybe she was tired of taking the, seemingly, obligatory slap from Davis in these movies.

* Sadly, I couldn't find a GIF of the slap - it belongs in a GIF - but I did find this clip. For best effect, start watching at 3:50 in:

It is almost blasphemous to say this given the Era appropriate gems discussed above, but last night the wife and I watched The Dictator. 2012 film from, yes, Sacha Baron Cohen.

I saw this at sea deployed in 2015. He is an acquired taste I know, but lord is this funny.

The first laugh is the first thing you see after the studio intro:

In memory of Kim Jong-Il...

Last night my wife and I watched Woman in the Window on Netflix. It is a great thriller/suspense movie. Amy Adams played the leading role perfectly. I don’t want to give away any of the important parts of plot or spoilers, so I will keep my comments basic.

Amy Adams plays an agoraphobic child psychologist who finds herself keeping tabs on the families that live across the street, through the windows of her New York City home. Whilst she is unable to leave the confines of her house she has conversations, visits, and eventually run-in’s with one of the families she watches.

The plot kept my wife and I guessing till the end. I recommend this movie despite the poor reviews.

Enjoy your day!
Steven

Watched "Kes" last night, one I had recorded from a cable channel. It is a 1969 Kenneth Loach film now considered a classic. What a wonderful film. The downside is that it was filmed in the UK midlands with many first time actors. The accents so thick they could have been speaking Polish or Klingon. We could pick out the odd word here and there....enough to discern the goings on but weirdly did not detract that much from the film. If it pops up in your cable feed I suggest it is a must watch film.

What Every Woman Knows from 1934 with Helen Hayes, Brian Aherne, Donald Crisp, Lucile Watson and Madge Evans

"I'm six years older than he is. I'm plain and I have no charm. I shouldn't have let him marry me. I'm trying to make up for it."

- Brutally honest Helen Hayes discussing her marriage.


Ordinary-looking-and-almost-freakishly-petite Helen Hayes is on a path to spinsterhood in What Every Woman Knows. So her three well-meaning-but-bumbling brothers offer to pay for a poor young man's, Brian Aherne, education in return for his agreeing to marry Hayes once he graduates.

Set in Scotland and even with tongue in cheek, there are a thousand things wrong with this negotiation based on today's values, but it's still a fun scene where Hayes is, effectively, tossed onto the pile of chips in the center of the table and pulled out a few times. Then, Hayes herself, kinda liking the idea of being married to the young man in question, throws herself back in to seal the deal.

Despite the generally light tone, the movie turns serious at several points preventing this charming effort from slipping into farce or slapstick. Once Aherne has completed his studies, Hayes offers to let him out of the pact, but he bluntly states that a bargain is a bargain and marries Hayes even though he doesn't love her. Both, in their own way, did the stand up thing.

Hayes, clearly in love with Aherne, becomes the woman behind the man as his political career catches fire owing, mainly, to her efforts, which she hides even from her clueless husband. A career move to London has Hayes continuing to surreptitiously direct his political future, but Aherne - now exposed to a superficially more elegant and sophisticated class of women - begins to stray (enter pretty Madge Evans).

In a movie that thankfully avoids many cliches, Aherne, contemplating leaving Hayes, doesn't treat her like an annoying obstacle. He truly struggles with the fact he married her as part of a bargain and she's been a good wife even as he fell in love with another woman. Hayes, too, struggles with the morality of holding a man by obligation and not of his free will.

The resolution has, of course, Hayes, unnoticed, moving the chess pieces around so that Aherne sees what he'd be giving up and what he'd be getting were they to divorce. Despite landing where you'd expect it to, this is no Hallmark movie as its surface charm has real-life grit just beneath.

Putting our 2021 indignation aside allows us to see this 1934 movie is subversive for its day as most of the men are either strutting peacocks, like Aherne, or harmless bumblers like Hayes' well-meaning but foolish brothers. Whereas, most of the women are smart and shrewd operators who quietly run things off stage. This low-budget effort, which seems almost simple, punches well above its moral and intellectual weight class.


N.B. Look for Lucille Watson playing Hayes' cagey and wise London mentor as this old-pro stage actress made an incredibly smooth transition to "talkies." In What Every Woman Knows, she provides a combination of verve and gravitas to her few crucial scenes. Oh, and yes, she's another woman who is smarter than the bloviating men in this one.

Those Who Wish Me Dead

My wife and I gave this movie a try and it was very good. If you are looking for a fast paced action thriller (similar to the 1990’s good guys vs. bad guys), this movie checks all the boxes. As a firefighter, I usually try to avoid “firefighter movies” because of the lack of realism; (thanks Backdraft). Angelina Jolie plays a devastated smoke jumper named Hannah, unable to get over the loss of a fellow firefighter/smoke jumper and a family during a wildfire.

This movie travels the country and never lets up. It kept us on the edge of our seats until the end. The story is a bit thin, but it’s still a thoroughly entertaining film. Don’t be surprised if the violence directed towards a 6 month pregnant woman, stops your heart from beating; just as you realize she is a ferocious “Mama-Bear” in disguise. She is the unsung movie heroine that everyone will root for. The young 10 year old actor was convincing in his role as the target of the bad guys. He has some good one-liners that are perfectly timed when talking with Hannah.

I recommend watching this movie if you have HBO-Max.

Steven