What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

Fading Fast said:

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The Circus Clown (1934) with Joe E. Brown and Patricia Ellis


At the end of the silent era and into the talkies, Joe E. Brown carved out a niche in B movies where he usually played the same type of lead character: a down-and-out braggart smitten with a girl out of his league, but somehow he'd bully his way to success and the girl's heart.

Brown will work for you or not. He's bloviating and obnoxious, plus his trademark is an irritatingly loud scream/screech that must have appealed to his fans. Thankfully, though, in The Circus Clown, he downplays those awful traits to almost become a not unlikable human being.

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I've only seen Joe E. Brown in small roles in two movies: Some Like it Hot (1959), and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963). Would you suggest I watch The Circus Clown if I can find a copy somewhere, or would I be better off selecting some of his other movies? Or should I just not bother? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Just curious.

Zombie_61 said:

I've only seen Joe E. Brown in small roles in two movies: Some Like it Hot (1959), and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963). Would you suggest I watch The Circus Clown if I can find a copy somewhere, or would I be better off selecting some of his other movies? Or should I just not bother? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Just curious.

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I'd say skip him altogether. The only reason I watched this movie is because a friend of mine asked me to participate in a project he has going on another forum where he and I review what he calls neglected films. I've done it for a few years and it has definitely expanded my movie knowledge, but sometimes I get stuck watching movies I'd normally turn off in five minutes.

I respect that Joe E. Brown has some talent, but my God do I not enjoy his movies. If you really want to try one out, then yes, I'd go with "Circus Clown" as it's one of his less obnoxious efforts and Patricia Ellis is insanely adorable.

Last nite, I took EngProf's suggestion and tuned in several Seabiscuit documentary tuber offerings,
catching brief supremely dressed trackside elegance displayed Basil Rathbone and James Stewart.
''Gentlemen rankers out on a spree; Damned From Here To Eternity,'' as put Rudyard Kipling. And later,
while surfing, came upon a Heddy Lamar interview circa 1970s, wherein she praised costar Jimmy Stewart's on set kindness and professionalism.

Golden nuggets that glisten like diamonds.

Two Weeks in Another Town (1962) with Kirk Douglas, Edward G. Robinson, Claire Trevor, Daliah Lavi, and George Hamilton


It's close at times, but Two Weeks in Another Town falls short of being a really good movie and stands more as a neat collection – almost a curio – of famous actors shot on location in Italy – all in beautiful color. It's equal parts travelogue, movie, and Hollywood navel gazing.

Kirk Douglas plays a washed-up, alcoholic actor who gets asked by a famous director, played by Edward G. Robinson – who himself is trying to regain his former touch – to fly to Italy to help him complete a movie on time. He and Douglas were once a successful movie-making team.

Once there, there's no role for Douglas other than to supervise dubbing, but just being in the orbit of a movie set is lifting Douglas' spirits. Those spirits, though, get shot down when his ex-wife, played by Cyd Charisse, shows up looking glamorous and s*xy, married to a wealthy man.

Douglas, fresh out of a "rest home" (high-end rehab for its day), came to Italy for redemption, but got a busted-flat career boost and his ex thrown in his face. Nevertheless, he's a handsome man with a thin patina of Hollywood glamour still on him, so he is attractive to many women.

One in particular is Daliah Lavi, playing the young and ridiculously s*xy girlfriend of the movie's temperamental young star, played by George Hamilton. She switches teams mid-movie, giving Douglas a boost, which is furthered when a sick Robinson asks Douglas to direct in his place.

Douglas takes the reins, speeds up production, sets Hamilton on a good course, and is lauded by almost everyone – it's the movie's best sequence. But Robinson's shrew of a wife, played with venom by Claire Trevor, poisons Douglas to Robinson: "He's stealing 'your' movie."

This sets Douglas off on a bender into the climax, which is not quite what you expect, but you'll want to see it fresh. After that, there's a brief epilogue as both the movie and the movie within the movie wrap.

Douglas and Robinson were huge stars for a reason; they can carry mediocre material along on their talent and screen personality, which Robinson, in particular, has to do a lot of here. Somehow, the story, a reasonably good one, never quite gels.

While Robinson is doing the yeoman's work of keeping the material moving forward, Douglas adds true sparkle as the man is clearly committed to his role. Depressed, excited, or pensive, Douglas is an actor who makes sure you know it, and it works well in this one.

He lights up even more in his scenes with Lavi, a very pretty young woman who shrinks a bit opposite Douglas, personality-wise, but youth and beauty are great assets to fall back on, which Lavi does in several form-fitted and revealing outfits.

Hamilton, a hit or miss actor, misses until the last few scenes, but he, like Lavi, has ample reserves of youth and beauty to carry him through. Charisse, aging out of her youth and beauty phase, doesn't do much but wear expensive clothes and jewelry to taunt Douglas.

Who truly deserves note is Trevor, playing Robinson's vicious wife who tears him down brick by emotional brick, but woe be the person other than her who tries to do that. They have a badly broken relationship – they communicate by yelling – but somehow it works for them.

The last star of the movie is – and she's a big one – Italy itself. This is not the war-torn mid-century Italy of a Rossellini picture, but the glamorous expat community, recovering-with-gusto Italy of The Talented Mr. Ripley – you'll want to time travel back to this version of Rome.

Hollywood usually makes very good takedown-of-itself movies – heck, Douglas and director Vincente Minnelli, the director here, made an outstanding one ten years earlier in The Bad and the Beautiful – but somehow this one just stumbles along as okay.

Maybe a tweaking of the script, maybe something got lost in editing, or maybe this is all it had, but you can't help feeling that Two Weeks in Another Town was close to being a much better movie than it turned out to be.

For fans of the stars, the director, or post-war Italy – or the awesome-sounding and looking 1960 Maserati 3500 GT that Douglas' character drives (at high speeds) – it's still a fun film, even better the second time when you can focus on the eye candy and not its average plot.

^ Another excellent review old boy.

Always loved Kirk, film fixture actor of boyish fascination with world seen Hollywood film prism.

And Cyd Charisse aged quite splendidly. Her sensual striptease in The Silencers opening credit roll
easily matched ingenue Rita Moreno's leggy youthful West Side Story dancing.

Italy gave boyhood Gina Lollabrigida and Sophia Loren. I visited the Acropolis whilst a teenager, and stood
near the Erectheion where Sophia stood in the film, Boy On A Dolphin. The hell with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.

The Life of Oharu (1952) a Japanese film


What is worse than being a prostitute? Aging out of being a prostitute without any money saved. Worse still, trying to hide your age to keep working – at least that is the answer offered in director Kenji Mizoguchi's classic tale of feudal-era Japan, The Life of Oharu.

The real lesson of the film is that you don't want to be a woman...or a man in the feudal era. Other than the lords, the average men and women always seem anxious and worried. It's pretty much a Hobbesian world – solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short – for just about everyone.

Oharu is a fifty-year-old prostitute at the opening who, through flashbacks, we see had a Candide-like life. After being raised in a noble house, she has an affair with a man of lower status, resulting in her entire family being banished. But then the Candide "magic" kicks in.

A lord with a barren wife chooses Oharu to be the mother of his heir, which works out fine when Oharu gives birth to a boy. Hurray for Oharu, but also buh-bye, as she's not needed anymore. Unfortunately, back at the old homestead, dad has racked up a large debt.

So he sends Oharu to be a courtesan (a high-priced call girl), but she fails and comes back, yet again, penniless. Now she's sent to be a lady's maid to a wealthy woman, but the woman becomes jealous of Oharu once her courtesan past is revealed and it's buh-bye again.

A brief and happy marriage follows until her husband is killed by highway robbers – a real thing in that era. Another attempt at prostitution fails as does an attempt at becoming a nun (she visits both ends of the spectrum) and, finally, a climax you probably didn't anticipate.

The opening scenes of prostitution tell you this one probably does not end well, but it's quite the journey back to that opening. You can stretch the film into our idiotic modern politics, but no matter how "oppressed" a modern woman feels, to compare herself to Oharu is contemptible.

Women were owned by their fathers, husbands, or anyone they were sold to. Squawk, and a crack on the head or worse followed. Work was what you were told to do when you weren't having forced s*x – and you'd do all this, minus the s*x, in binding clothes and poor shoes.

Director Mizoguchi doesn't shy from his tale at all with relentless shots of Oharu suffering on the road – travel was awful – or cowering in a room waiting for the next bad thing to happen. Early on, she has some fight, even spirit, in her, but events slowly beat that out of her.

At one point toward the end, Oharu is a beggar on the streets singing a dirge like the old blues singers in the South and your first thought is her pain is real and she – just about the hardest way possible – has earned the right to sing about it.

Mizoguchi's style is slow and atmospheric, letting the era soak in while you absorb the time and place. His sets are not an exact duplicate of feudal-era Japan, but they take you out of present day. Also, like many Japanese directors of that era, there is little Hollywood speed or bombast.

Oharu is played by noted Japanese actress Kinuyo Tanaka who had a long and successful career working with Mizoguchi and a few other notable directors. The biggest challenge she has here is being forty-three, but having to look anywhere from seventeen to fifty.

Her youth and beauty is her ticket early, and while she's a nice-looking forty-three-year-old, you get confused when men are falling all over themselves to sleep with her. She was probably chosen for her talent and fame, but a younger woman would have fit the role better.

Another odd thing is that the movie is less depressing than it sounds. Yes, parts are horribly depressing, but Mizoguchi tells his tale almost objectively as one of "life goes on" rather than "look at how awful it is." Most life was awful then, so in a way, it was a smart directorial decision.

The Life of Oharu is acquired-taste viewing. Slow-moving, thematic 1950s Japanese period films don't grip you by the collar and draw you in; instead, they say, "Look at this world and these people and decide if all of it captures your attention."

There is a lot of real life here to do just that if you're willing to look for it in a movie quite different from what we're used to today.

The Tarnished Angels (1957) with Dorothy Malone, Robert Stack, Rock Hudson, and Jack Carson


Sic Transit Gloria Mundi


William Faulkner does not do happy and he certainly didn't do happy in The Tarnished Angels, a Douglas Sirk-directed adaptation of Faulkner's novel The Pylon, set in the world of barnstorming flyers during the Depression.

Robert Stack plays a WWI fighter ace who never found a place for himself in civilian life after the war. Instead, he – along with his wife, played by Dorothy Malone, their young boy, their one sad suitcase for all three, and their mechanic – travel around the country to different air shows.

He should get a job as a real pilot or find something else to do because barnstorming for a middle-aged married man with a kid is pathetic, especially when your aging wife is your "parachute girl": she jumps out of the plane (in a skimpy costume) as part of Stack's show.

We meet the family, plus Jack Carson playing the mechanic, at a dusty "flying circus" where a reporter, played by Rock Hudson, immediately sees that there is a bigger story here than the modest one his paper sent him to cover. Hudson senses the despair engulfing Stack's "crew."

They're a family, but only arranged as they are (past events leave the boy's paternity undecided between Carson and Stack) because Stack lost the dice game he played with Carson, so he took on the responsibility and married a pregnant Malone. Hallmark won't be adapting this one.

There is a story arc about Stack crashing the first day of the circus, so he needs a plane to compete in the upcoming "big" race for the prize money and penumbra of glory, but he has nothing of value to sell or trade for a plane...or does he? That's answered in the cruel Act III.

Until then, through Hudson's or Malone's eyes, we see this dysfunctional family dysfunction a bit more. The pressures of poverty and s*x weigh heavily: Carson is still carrying a torch for Malone, Hudson is lighting one, and a fat, bald man with a plane for rent wants s*x with her.

How that quadrangle works out is the climax. What plays out until then are the themes of poverty, despair, and an inability to let past glory go and just get on with living. Faulkner's writing and a strong cast create believable characters struggling under the yoke of these pressures.

Stack is, as Bruce Springsteen notes in his song "Glory Days," the guy who can't give up on his, well, glory days. He's bitter and takes it out on his wife, Malone, and his mechanic, Carson. He's only bad to his son in a neglectful way; he even, on occasion, tries to be a good father.

Faulkner is too talented a writer and Sirk too smart a director to make Stack a cardboard villain, so his scenes of kindness with his son help to round him out. He also shows his wife some kindness until the next three scenes, when he doesn't. It's the old saw about abused spouses.

Carson, though, is more lost than Stack. This airplane mechanic is living a life on nothing but a weird hero worship of Stack and a pointless lust or love for Malone – leaving no room for him to become a fully grown man. Carson, unobtrusively and sadly, beats on in the background.

Hudson, the reporter, gives one of his best performances as a young guy who walks into the middle of this broken family and tries to understand while also falling in love with Malone. His comments and observations are perceptive, but Stack and Malone don't want to hear them.

Watch for Hudson's speech toward the end when he tells off his editor by summarizing the real story of Stack's life, not the "World War I heroic fighter ace" story that the editor wants to print. It's a powerful scene that codifies the movie.

That leaves us with Malone, the effective star of the picture. She is perfectly cast as she looks a bit older than her thirty-three years, but in a "look at the hard life I lead" way, where her innate beauty and s*x appeal are still quite strong under the crow's feat, dyed blonde hair, and dust.

This story is her story: the tale of how a young girl fell for a WWI fighter ace and it all went slowly but enervatingly wrong from there. Her pilot hero is a vain, selfish man who's drained the youth and spirit out of his once-vibrant wife, leaving her a vagabond in her own marriage.

There is a scene toward the end when Malone is physically and emotionally empty, but she knows she has to continue living for her son. You can see her willing her psyche and body to keep going, despite there being no fuel left in the tank. It's raw acting talent at its best.

Douglas Sirk is known for his midcentury full-force Technicolor weepers, but here he shows he can work in black and white and turn the melodrama down, but the personal trauma up. Set in the Depression, Sirk smartly captured that era's despair by showing stark material poverty.

The Tarnished Angels, despite being made under the Code, is not family friendly. It's an adult look at adult dysfunction wrecking one after another life – lives of those who chose to be human bowling pins – all for the vainglory of one sad man. It's not easy watching, but it is engaging.

The Girl Said No (1930) with William Haines, Leila Hyams, and Marie Dressler


No really does mean no, except in this movie, which even from a 1930s perspective of cultural norms is obnoxious and offensive. It starts and ends with the male lead, William Haines, who was a huge star in the late silent era.

Haines' screen brand was to be a spoiled and pushy guy who gets knocked down a few pegs and learns from it, but in The Girl Said No his old personality keeps coming back. This leaves the movie with no real reason for being other than to watch Haines behave obnoxiously.

He plays the son of indulgent upper-middle-class parents who let him party and spend recklessly. Not unrelatedly, he's loud, abrasive, conceited, and pushy; he has friends, but you wonder why. He's the guy who will break your new golf club intentionally and think it's funny.

The "plot" has him falling in love with the secretary, played by Leila Hyams, of a manager at the bank where he worked before getting fired for irresponsibility. A job his father, naturally, went out of his way to get him.

Haines' courting approach to Hyams is a toxic mix of pushing himself on her, pleading with her, insulting her other admirers, and being obnoxious in general. Has that ever worked in the recorded history of courting?

Highlighting this insane approach, there are a couple of restaurant scenes where Haines, trying to get Hyams, creates chaos and causes soup to intentionally be spilled on people he doesn't like – one being Hyams' date. It's slapstick, not funny, and goes on forever.

Had Hyams shot him, a jury would have acquitted her. You have to pity Hyams here for having the unenviable task of trying to strike a reasonable balance with a crazy person. Another "plot" wrinkle is that Hyams' boss wants to marry her, which drives Haines insane with jealousy.

There's one more twist which should have reshuffled the deck, but as noted earlier, it only did temporarily. Haines' dad dies suddenly leaving the family in financial trouble, so Haines briefly acts responsibly, gets a modest job, and does his best to be "the man of the family."

He might even have won Hyams over, as she likes the new "normal person" him, but it doesn't stick. After he makes the most of a break – kudos to him – success goes screaming up to his head and out comes the old obnoxious Haines whom you had hoped was dead and buried.

The rest is the climax that you'll want to see fresh (if for some reason you choose to watch this giant ball of idiocy), but know that Haines' behavior toward Hyams would not only get him arrested today, but it would have in 1930 as well.

Hyams acquits herself well in a role that has no real win for the actress, as she has to keep Haines at arm's length, but also appear somewhat interested in him "underneath it." If your daughter brought Haines home, you wouldn't shoot him, you'd shoot her for utter stupidity.

A note has to be made about Marie Dressler's small but impactful role as a wealthy investor to whom Haines tries to sell some bonds. Dressler, in her sixties and looking every year of it, would soon become a huge star, as her talent and screen presence appealed to Depression Era audiences.

Here she manages to own a scene despite Haines' noisy, scenery-chewing efforts. It's all but an acting class in how becoming the character and not acting like one makes all the difference. But alas, Dressler's in all of one scene and then you're left with more Haines.

In real life, Haines – an openly g*y man at a time when that was not acceptable, who reinvented himself as a hugely successful interior decorator after his acting career ended – is much more interesting than the character he plays here.

Filmed nearly a hundred years ago, it's not surprising that cultural tastes and norms have changed, but still, you watch a movie like The Girl Said No (a great title that sounds modern) and marvel at how far into orbit movie extremes could be.

Real culture, just like today, is not as "out there" as movies sometimes portray it, as no office would have let this buffoon in and no normal girl would be interested in him. Heck, as noted, he'd have been arrested, even back then, several times.

Just like with Joe E. Brown movies (another obnoxious Depression Era screen "hero"), unless the style appeals to you or there's something else of interest in the picture, if a movie has William Haines in it, it's probably a smart move to watch something else.

I always thought of Haines in these kinds of roles as being MGM's idea of Harold Lloyd's character, except unappealing and not funny.

LA confidential surprisingly

^ William Faulkner and Dorothy Malone. Never read book, nor saw flick for some inexplicable reason.

Faulkner as recall serves, joined the fledgling Royal Canadian Air Force during WWI; so there's some background here for post war psychological development, a literary trait technique that Hemingway
also used along with F. Scottie in a lean compact style.

First World War authorship made deep impression, grade school through grad school and beyond.
And the older I've grown this became all the more profound; especially looking at film studio struggles
over such as Gatsby that bequeathed Fitzgerald such a bad rap. Hemingway tripped often enough as evident his frankness personified The Sun Also Rises. Faulkner adds mix by unapologetic full boil stir over open flame truth kettle. I heartily recommend his classic last, The Reivers, done right by filming with eminently capable Steverino; who delivers as always just the absolutely right deft touch sureness as writ.