What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

[Edward]

Yes, that suit is awesome. And if you look closely, you'll see his tie has a selvedge.

The whole outfit is sublime - but it's also how he wears it. It's what's wrong with a lot of modern period films as well, while other just soar: you really can sense when people are comfortable in their own clothes. Sometimes you see an actor on screen in a 40s suit and he just looks all wrong, forever fidgeting, like a child dressed up for a family wedding. Then you get those who just inhabit those clothes, so natural in them, and they look like they would belong in a picture from back then, just like that. Dicaprio is one of the latter. I don't know what he wears off duty, but it's a rare actor now who looks as at-home in 40s & 50s period pieces as he does, imo.

 

[Fading Fast]

Howards End from 1992 with Emma Thompson, Anthony Hopkins, Helen Bonham Carter, Vanessa Redgrave, and Samuel West


"Stop being a jerk and just get the man a job" – said no one in the movie, but someone should have, as all the bad stuff that followed wouldn't have happened.


To be fair to the above, the plot of Howards End is, at best, the third most important piece of this beautiful English period drama from Merchant Ivory Productions, based on the E. M. Forster 1910 novel of the same name.

The number one and two most important pieces are a competition between the lavish period scenery, details, and mise en scène – and the incredible performances by Emma Thompson, Anthony Hopkins, Helen Bonham Carter, Vanessa Redgrave, and Samuel West.

It is the kind of movie that you "absorb" in repeated viewings. You can't take in all the period details – the costumes alone are a treat – the scenery, fine performances, and the layered story about class distinctions, arrogance, and obsession by watching it just once or twice.

The plot itself sees three families – the very wealthy "aristocratic" family of business led by Hopkins, the upper-middle-class "artistic, slightly bohemian" family led by Thompson, and the working class poor family led by West – interact in often quiet but, ultimately, dramatic fashion.

Today we talk about "class," but it's fluid and squishy. It wasn't at all fluid or squishy in England in the early twentieth century. Hopkins' family, thus, is content being near the top of the pyramid and, well, quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) contemptuous of those beneath it.

Thompson and her brood see life with more of a socially conscious perspective, where they consider art, culture, and charity to be "above" business and money. Yet, while they are charitable, they don't give much of their cosseting income away.

West's immediate family, which is just his wife and he, is simply trying to survive. That is especially true after Thompson's family's failed attempt to help them leaves the Wests worse off. Thompson had pushed Hopkins, against his will, into "helping" with this effort that went awry.

Thompson then tries again to get Hopkins to help West, since his initial advice hurt him. But Hopkins' attitude is "I didn't want to get involved in the first place, so now I'm done." It's one of those situations where he has a small point and leverages it with arrogance to his advantage.

The irony, as noted in the fictitious quote at the top, is had Hopkins just gotten the "lowly" West a clerkship somewhere – which would have been easy for Hopkins to do – none of the ensuing problems that rocked them all would have happened, but alas.

The titular Howards End, a pretty country retreat, plays into all this – and those ensuing problems – mainly as a symbol of the artistic sensibilities of people like Thompson's family versus the financially- and status-calculating insensitivities of people like Hopkins' family.

Hopkins' family owns it but doesn't truly appreciate its beauty – other than Hopkins' first wife, played by Redgrave. When she dies, though, the heirs jockey to see who'll control it after Hopkins passes, but he just lets it out as a way to take it off the table for the time being.

All of these threads weave in and out as the story ambles toward a climax, but the joy is in the journey. It is in seeing the characters expose their true selves and maybe grow a bit.

Look for the scenes between Thompson and Hopkins whose eventual marriage is managed like a peace treaty between two friendly countries who don't truly trust each other. Look also for any scene with Bonham Carter as she completely embodies her annoying-as-all-heck character.

There really are, though, no bad scenes. Even when the drama flags a bit, you can still marvel at the period details and the acting. You'll almost be happy for the opportunity to be able to focus on these qualities of the movie – qualities that defined the Merchant and Ivory brand.

Producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory created that brand – Merchant Ivory Productions – which reached its peak in the 1980s and early 1990s. It came to stand for lavish, thoughtfully filmed and cast adaptations of respected literary works.

Howards End represents one of the collaboration's highpoints. It is a movie that stood outside of the mass-market products of Hollywood of its era.

Over three decades later, the greatest compliment one can pay Howards End and Merchant Ivory Productions is that the movie has stood the test of time: in an era of CGI "blockbusters," a Merchant Ivory Production today feels like an oasis of artful moviemaking.

 

[Edward]

A Complete Unknown (2024), via Amazon Prime. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11563598/?ref_=fn_all_ttl_1 James Mangold has form with the biopic format, having turned in 2005's sublime I Walk The Line. Here he handles Dylan's legend well indeed. A much more traditional biopic format than the (also wonderful, if much more surreal) I'm not there (2007), in which multiple performers, perhaps most notably Cate Blanchett, play a version of Dylan at different stages in his career. Mangold's picture neatly sidesteps the trap of sameness that rock biopics can fall into (rise to fame, fall from grace, rise again as Treasure Legend) by concentrating on a small portion of Dylan's life, specifically the years 1961 to 1965, from his arrival on New York's burgeoning folk scene to the infamous negative audience reaction to Dylan Gonig Electric at the Newport Folks Festival in 1965. The sense of period - insofar as I can judge, Not Having Been There - is superb. As are the performances; there's a case to be made that despite this being Dylan's story, it's really an ensemble piece, with very strong performances by all the main players, particularly Edward Norton as Pete Seeger. Young Timothy Chalamet is striking as Dylan. He's clearly put huge work into it. The production employed the same vocal and movement coaches as worked with Austin Butler on Elvis, and the result is compelling. Chalamet moves and sounds like a young Dylan. All the actors performed in character at certain points, with live scenes performed and shot as live, and all of the "Dylan" vocals on the film (as well as his guitar and harmonica) are Chalamet performing. It's quite a stunning feat to pull off, and they do it. Ironically, while the Covid-19 pandemic that delayed shooting this production almost killed the project at one point, it also made this realisation what it is as Chalamet used the time to learn to play as he does. One of the most impressive elements of this is the simultaneous harmonica and guitar playing. As anyone who has ever tried will tell you, the harmonica can be a deceptively tricky instrument to master. I don't know if he also learned to ride specifically for the picture, but Chalamet also rides a beautiful Triumph Bonneville T100, helmetless. Bob's bike was a Tiger (hence the 'T') back when, but the bike provided was one of Triumph's beautiful reissue series that they have been producing in recent years, and the new ones are branded as Bonnies (back in the day, Bonnies and Tigers were separate lines). Close enough that few if any will spot the difference. The bigger bending of the true story is that Bob didn't buy his first Triumph til 64 - it appears earlier than that here. The film also shows Bob playing Girl from the North Country some years before Martin Carthy taught him the old, English Scarborough Fair song which inspired the former. There's a little playing around with the timeline in some small ways as you get in most biopics. Which somehow feels appropriate for Dylan, given the way he has always mythologised himself and his story (as indeed he's depicted doing here, with his tales of being a carny).

This is obviously a picture which has been approved by the man himself (who was consulted and involved to some degree), but for all that it doesn't hold back on showing that Dylan could be difficult, particularly in his relationships. In ending at the point where Dylan Goes Electric, it gives a nice closure to this part of his story. As the noise of the motorcycle riding away can be heard, though, it does leave me wondering if the success of this picture might tempt those involved to return to Dylan to explore his once much-mythologised motorcycle crash, and the years thereafter before he returned to touring in, as memory serves, 75.

I've grown up with a healthy distaste for The Sixties (which especially in Britain,, and to a somewhat lesser extent Ireland, are the equivalent of The Fifties as a corporate nostalgia machine in the US) being peddled as the pinnacle f popular culture, chiefly by those whose formative years fell in that era selling it (or a version of it, at least) back to their peers, and pushing it on everyone else too. But I've loved Dylan since I discovered him in my relatively early punk days so I had high hopes for this picture. Whereas Elvis, for all its positive points, fell somewhat short (part of its problem being, I felt, that it rather held back on a lot of stuff as a piece designed to sell rather than explore the man behind the mythology), this for me delivered.

 

[Hurricane Jack]

Mangold's picture neatly sidesteps the trap of sameness that rock biopics can fall into (rise to fame, fall from grace, rise again as Treasure Legend) by concentrating on a small portion of Dylan's life, specifically the years 1961 to 1965, from his arrival on New York's burgeoning folk scene to the infamous negative audience reaction to Dylan Gonig Electric at the Newport Folks Festival in 1965.

Otherwise to cover his ongoing legacy would have required a 6-hr miniseries.

I once broke up a pretty serious relationship with a girlfriend in those days when she said, “but he can’t sing!”

Great review Edward!

 

[Edward]

Otherwise to cover his ongoing legacy would have required a 6-hr miniseries.

I once broke up a pretty serious relationship with a girlfriend in those days when she said, “but he can’t sing!”

Now that's fan-loyalty!

It's hard to find anyone else to compare him to in terms of volume of his output. Is there any other, single artist that has gone well over forty studio albums of original content? (I think I have almost all of them now, on vinyl - a few doubled on CD. Still looking for a vinyl copy of Christmas in the Heart).

Great review Edward!

Thanks.

 

[Hurricane Jack]

Now that's fan-loyalty!

Always been a student of language & the meaning of lyrics. I guess you would have to have been a preteen or teenager at that time, but there had never before been anything like the lyrics of those early songs. There are other songwriters who have written meaningful lyrics since, but not at that time.

 

[Fading Fast]

Mata Hari from 1931 with Greta Garbo, Ramon Novarro, Lionel Barrymore, C. Henry Gordon, Lewis Stone, and Karen Morley


To appreciate Mata Hari today, one has to appreciate three things that were still in the cultural zeitgeist in 1931: the real-life Mata Hari, the screen persona of Greta Garbo, and the Romantic Era view of love. Bring a modern "entertain me" mindset to this movie and all hope is lost.

The facts about the real-life Mata Hari are still debated today, but the shorthand in 1931 was alluring spy who traded ***ual favors for treasonous information. Now women brag about their ***ual adventures on social media, but in her day, Mata Hari was a prurient outlier.

Garbo herself had an aura of smoldering, androgynous sensuality. Her arresting and cold beauty and that husky, indecipherable voice saw her starring in talking pictures even though you didn't always know what she was saying. But so what? She was exotic *** on screen.

In 1931, the Romantic Era view of love – that it was a transcendental life force, which would see lovers sacrifice all for each other, even if only to be together after death – was still a cultural force. Today, love is the opposite: transactional and tossed aside when inconvenient.

Mata Hari the movie combined these three elements into a tale of spying, illicit ***ual liaisons, treason, and romance – and all with a very forgiving tether to the truth. But its atmospheric story possessed an allure that captivated era audiences, contributing to its box office success.

That story, as told here, has Garbo playing the famous spy who sleeps with senior Russian officers – including a bombastic one played by Lionel Barrymore – to obtain information for her German handler, played by Lewis Stone.

On her trail is a French intelligence agent, played by C. Henry Gordon. Garbo, though, stays a step ahead, until she gets emotionally ******* with a young handsome Russian officer, played by Ramon Novarro. He's a Romantic Era hero who falls for her on sight, as Romantics do.

That is most of the plot, which is stretched to an hour and a half with Barrymore wanting Garbo for ***, Novarro wanting Garbo for eternal love, Stone wanting Garbo for information, Gordon wanting Garbo in the dock for spying, and mysterious Garbo wanting God knows what.

Garbo as Mata Hari is the perfect blending of history and Hollywood mystique, as revealed in one scene when Garbo/Hari has Novarro break a religious vow just to see him do it for her. Keep your eye on the lighting in this one as it is beautiful camera work in service to a narrative.

It's a selfish and senseless – really, mean-spirited – demand by Garbo/Hari, but tinged with *** and dominance. It's Mata Hari history and the Garbo screen persona merging into one.

The picture can still be slow going for modern audiences expecting a spy to drop into a room suspended from ceiling wires or to shoot her way out of a trap with thirty agents surrounding her apartment.

While there are a few good action scenes, this one, instead, is about the emotional and the intellectual-chess sides of spying: Barrymore's greed, Novarro's kindness, and Garbo's Garboness.

It's also about Gordon as Inspector Javert (those French inspectors don't give up easily) and Stone as a proto Germany's WWII-era leadership (this all takes place during World War I), who cares about the good of the Fatherland, not the welfare of his agents like Garbo.

Watch for a brutal scene, for the era, of how Stone "deals with" an agent, played by the lovely Karen Morley, who disobeys him – even stone-cold Garbo took notice. Still, she's Garbo, and she's Mata Hari, so she goes her own way, fate be damned.

While MGM was willing to play fast and loose with the facts, that "fate be damned" still had to have Mata Hari die as in real life. So the studio wrapped a full-force, made-up Romantic love story with Novarro around Garbo's death to ensure its appeal to contemporaneous audiences.

Novarro, Barrymore, Gordon, Morley, and Stone all contribute greatly to the picture, but this is Garbo's movie from beginning to end. Sporting exotic and bejeweled skull caps or slicked-back hair, her incredible beauty, often lit like a dark angel, is its own character within a character.

Notice in the near final scene – when a cape-wearing Garbo is walked to the execution yard – how incredibly powerful she looks casting a larger-than-life shadow or in silhouette from behind. It shows a director and a cameraman who understood the Garbo mystique.

Modern audiences will either take all this in – Mata Hari, Garbo's aloof beauty, Navarro's blind faith, and the okay spy story itself – and "get it" as 1931 audiences did, or the movie will feel sluggish. Mata Hari is, by design, the antithesis of our modern "wow me" movie ethos.

 

[Edward]

Always been a student of language & the meaning of lyrics. I guess you would have to have been a preteen or teenager at that time, but there had never before been anything like the lyrics of those early songs. There are other songwriters who have written meaningful lyrics since, but not at that time.

My 'discovery' of Dylan came in, of all places, a school assembly in 1991. Our headmaster spoke on the outbreak of the Gulf War, and read several verses of With God on Our Side. I was already very into lyrics at the time (punk rock background) - those hooked my attention. Back then of course as you know if you were interested in off-mainstream music you had to seek it out. The record store I went to didn't have Times... in stock, so I walked away with Greatest Hits on cassette. That really stuck with me - It Ain't Me, Babe I remember particularly catching sixteen year old me (thirty-four years later I appreciate it on a whole different level). Picked up guitar a few months later, and the first few songs I learned were mostly Dylan. Still play those.

 

[Worf]

Now that's fan-loyalty!

It's hard to find anyone else to compare him to in terms of volume of his output. Is there any other, single artist that has gone well over forty studio albums of original content? (I think I have almost all of them now, on vinyl - a few doubled on CD. Still looking for a vinyl copy of Christmas in the Heart).



Thanks.

On Dylan, as a lyricist/song writer he has few peers, alive anyway.... but as a singer..... I'll have to plead the 5th. Like other song writers his tunes were best done by others at times. Hendrix, Nina Simone are two that come to mind often. Her versions of "The Times They Are a Changin'" and "I Shall Be Released" send shivers through me and wring tears as well. Please don't think I'm not appreciative of his talents, I own "Blood on the Tracks" and some other albums, just don't ask me to listen to him sing for more'n one album at a time.

Worf

 

[Edward]

On Dylan, as a lyricist/song writer he has few peers, alive anyway.... but as a singer..... I'll have to plead the 5th. Like other song writers his tunes were best done by others at times. Hendrix, Nina Simone are two that come to mind often. Her versions of "The Times They Are a Changin'" and "I Shall Be Released" send shivers through me and wring tears as well. Please don't think I'm not appreciative of his talents, I own "Blood on the Tracks" and some other albums, just don't ask me to listen to him sing for more'n one album at a time.

Worf

I've always enjoyed his voice, but I get where you're coming from. A lot of folks like Dylan as a writer but prefer to hear his work performed by others.


It's interesting to get a rare glimpse into whose versions of his work Bob likes. An eye witness once played him the Ramones take on My Back Pages. It was reported "He smiled." On one of the greatest hits packages of the last twenty years, Dylan provided liner notes. Referring to Hendrix's covers of his material, said Bob: "What I don't know is why he didn't do more of them. They were his songs." When I saw Bob play All Along the Watchtower live, the arrangement he was using owed much more to Hendrix than to his own original cut.

Blood on the Tracks is an absolute masterpiece.

 

[Hurricane Jack]

Blood on the Tracks is an absolute masterpiece.

Highway 61 Revisited, another one.

 

[RBH]

On Dylan, as a lyricist/song writer he has few peers, alive anyway.... but as a singer..... I'll have to plead the 5th. Like other song writers his tunes were best done by others at times. Hendrix, Nina Simone are two that come to mind often. Her versions of "The Times They Are a Changin'" and "I Shall Be Released" send shivers through me and wring tears as well. Please don't think I'm not appreciative of his talents, I own "Blood on the Tracks" and some other albums, just don't ask me to listen to him sing for more'n one album at a time.

Worf

I saw Dylan and Willie Nelson in Memphis years ago. ( in 2005 )
I did not understand a single word Dylan sang.... BUT.... I got to see Dylan LIVE!!!!

 

[Edward]

Highway 61 Revisited, another one.

That was the one where he went electric - changing the world a second time. That he's still producing material of that quality now is mindblowing.

 

[Doctor Damage]

The whole outfit is sublime - but it's also how he wears it. It's what's wrong with a lot of modern period films as well, while other just soar: you really can sense when people are comfortable in their own clothes. Sometimes you see an actor on screen in a 40s suit and he just looks all wrong, forever fidgeting, like a child dressed up for a family wedding. Then you get those who just inhabit those clothes, so natural in them, and they look like they would belong in a picture from back then, just like that. Dicaprio is one of the latter. I don't know what he wears off duty, but it's a rare actor now who looks as at-home in 40s & 50s period pieces as he does, imo.

Nearly anyone can look good like that if they wear that sort of clothing all the time and give it no more thought than you would a t-shirt and jeans. And wear it the same way, too. No babying your nice clothes, wear them without a thought. That's the key!

 

[Fading Fast]

Strangers When We Meet from 1960 with Kirk Douglas, Kim Novak, Barbara Rush, and Walter Matthau


The laziest insult hurled at melodrama is that it's not realistic – that it's just a soap opera – the latter phrase being a tautological failure as an argument. Life has plenty of melodrama – or soap opera to it – and it's often quite real.

In Strangers When We Meet, a man and a woman, both married and both living in a "perfect" mid-century suburb, have an affair that is a realistic soap opera. Every movie trying to tell a neatly packaged story has its flaws, but lack of realism isn't a problem here.

Kirk Douglas plays the man. He has a pretty wife, played by Barbara Rush, a successful architecture career, and two healthy children, but he's "unsatisfied" with the compromises he makes for his clients. His career achievement hasn't equaled his youthful artistic idealism.

Had he read The Fountainhead, he would have known what to do – don't compromise, and suffer the consequence of maintaining your integrity. You then have to be Howard Roark hocking your watch to keep your office open. But who wants to do that?

Almost nobody does. So when Douglas meets a new, pretty blonde neighbor, played by Kim Novak, he finds another path to happiness and fulfillment – cheating.

Novak's struggle is a husband who has lost his ***ual itch for her. In an early and painful scene, Novak tries to seduce him into bed, but it's clear his lust for her is gone. Men in theaters across America had their hands raised at that moment.

So these two very pretty people are primed for an affair that happens because Douglas pursues Novak hard using a house he's currently building for a client as a come-on. The house – beautiful, isolated, and fragile, but also thrilling and new – serves as a metaphor for their affair.

What follows could have been a long-play episode of the TV series Mad Men, which captured the mid-century era as well as any contemporaneous movie did. Like one of Don Draper's many extramarital dalliances, Douglas and Novak's affair arcs its way through all the stages.

There's the early ***ual and romantic ecstasy, followed by the worry about hurting others and the fear of being caught, as when the couples meet at a house party thrown by Rush.

Finally, they face the ultimate and excruciating question that climaxes almost every affair: do we blow up our lives and all those around us or do we end the affair?

What works is the overall realism. Douglas has toned down his usual boisterous acting enthusiasm enough to feel like a frustrated type A stuck in the suburbs. It helps too that Novak's innate sad-eyed beauty is perfect for playing a sad-eyed wife.

Director Richard Quine captures this well through the details: the furtive looks between the lovers when in public amongst their neighbors, the ***ual frisson fueled by risk when meeting at an "out of the way" place, and the awfulness of always lying to your spouse.

Eventually, a nasty neighbor, perfectly played by Walter Matthau – the guy had a long career for a reason – forces things to a head, but that's not really the best part as no conclusion to an affair is ever as engaging and exciting as its beginning and early fire.

You'll want to look for the long sequence when Rush finally calls out her husband on what she knew all along. She runs through almost every emotion – believably and movingly – a human can have about being cheated on, revealing, again, Hollywood's deep talent pool.

In modern period movies, we've come to recognize the mid-century suburb with its signature large cars, sleek houses, dressy clothing for even casual events, bright colors, and slate patios. It seems almost meta accurate here in a time warp way, like the past is imitating its future self.

Strangers When We Meet – an awful title – is "just a soap opera," but one that captures both its era in a neat time capsule and the perennial struggle of maintaining a long marriage when someone new and attractive wanders by. It's a darn good achievement for "just a soap opera."

 

[Edward]

Nearly anyone can look good like that if they wear that sort of clothing all the time and give it no more thought than you would a t-shirt and jeans. And wear it the same way, too. No babying your nice clothes, wear them without a thought. That's the key!

Absolutely. All about confidence born of familiarity. What I always say to people who tell me "I'd love to wear a hat like that, but I don't think I could pull it off."

 

[Trenchfriend]

Boot, 1985 uncut.

 

[2 Days Dubai]

View attachment 705641
Strangers When We Meet from 1960 with Kirk Douglas, Kim Novak, Barbara Rush, and Walter Matthau


The laziest insult hurled at melodrama is that it's not realistic – that it's just a soap opera – the latter phrase being a tautological failure as an argument. Life has plenty of melodrama – or soap opera to it – and it's often quite real.

In Strangers When We Meet, a man and a woman, both married and both living in a "perfect" mid-century suburb, have an affair that is a realistic soap opera. Every movie trying to tell a neatly packaged story has its flaws, but lack of realism isn't a problem here.

Kirk Douglas plays the man. He has a pretty wife, played by Barbara Rush, a successful architecture career, and two healthy children, but he's "unsatisfied" with the compromises he makes for his clients. His career achievement hasn't equaled his youthful artistic idealism.

Had he read The Fountainhead, he would have known what to do – don't compromise, and suffer the consequence of maintaining your integrity. You then have to be Howard Roark hocking your watch to keep your office open. But who wants to do that?

Almost nobody does. So when Douglas meets a new, pretty blonde neighbor, played by Kim Novak, he finds another path to happiness and fulfillment – cheating.

Novak's struggle is a husband who has lost his ***ual itch for her. In an early and painful scene, Novak tries to seduce him into bed, but it's clear his lust for her is gone. Men in theaters across America had their hands raised at that moment.

So these two very pretty people are primed for an affair that happens because Douglas pursues Novak hard using a house he's currently building for a client as a come-on. The house – beautiful, isolated, and fragile, but also thrilling and new – serves as a metaphor for their affair.

What follows could have been a long-play episode of the TV series Mad Men, which captured the mid-century era as well as any contemporaneous movie did. Like one of Don Draper's many extramarital dalliances, Douglas and Novak's affair arcs its way through all the stages.

There's the early ***ual and romantic ecstasy, followed by the worry about hurting others and the fear of being caught, as when the couples meet at a house party thrown by Rush.

Finally, they face the ultimate and excruciating question that climaxes almost every affair: do we blow up our lives and all those around us or do we end the affair?

What works is the overall realism. Douglas has toned down his usual boisterous acting enthusiasm enough to feel like a frustrated type A stuck in the suburbs. It helps too that Novak's innate sad-eyed beauty is perfect for playing a sad-eyed wife.

Director Richard Quine captures this well through the details: the furtive looks between the lovers when in public amongst their neighbors, the ***ual frisson fueled by risk when meeting at an "out of the way" place, and the awfulness of always lying to your spouse.

Eventually, a nasty neighbor, perfectly played by Walter Matthau – the guy had a long career for a reason – forces things to a head, but that's not really the best part as no conclusion to an affair is ever as engaging and exciting as its beginning and early fire.

You'll want to look for the long sequence when Rush finally calls out her husband on what she knew all along. She runs through almost every emotion – believably and movingly – a human can have about being cheated on, revealing, again, Hollywood's deep talent pool.

In modern period movies, we've come to recognize the mid-century suburb with its signature large cars, sleek houses, dressy clothing for even casual events, bright colors, and slate patios. It seems almost meta accurate here in a time warp way, like the past is imitating its future self.

Strangers When We Meet – an awful title – is "just a soap opera," but one that captures both its era in a neat time capsule and the perennial struggle of maintaining a long marriage when someone new and attractive wanders by. It's a darn good achievement for "just a soap opera."

'Don't you think I'm pretty?''

I first saw this when a hormonally charged adolescent attending an all male Christian Brothers of Ireland parochial school; and this is the film that launched Kim Novack into my personal Hall of Shame.

 

[Fading Fast]

All Quiet on the Western Front from 1930


All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) is one of the most powerful anti-war movies ever made. Its stark contrast between Germany's pre-war rah-rah patriotism – it enthusiastically sent its young boys off to fight – and the horror and death of trench warfare is chilling to this day.

Based on a German novel, director Lewis Milestone imbued his picture not with an "our side versus yours" perspective, but with an every-soldier feel. You often forget it is German soldiers you're following as they just become any group of young men living and dying awful lives.

It starts in the classroom in Germany where a jingoistic teacher encourages his class of all high-school-aged boys to enlist voluntarily for the glory of fighting for "The Fatherland." While almost every country has done this to some extent, the ferver feels distinctly German at this moment.

Young, handsome boys, a bit scared, are whipped into a frenzy of patriotism and heroism, and, amidst peer pressure, march off to war en masse, with brass bands playing nationalistic songs as crowds cheer (to be fair, the latter could also have come right out of WWI-era America).

From boot camp on, though, war quickly loses its allure for the boys, but even after enduring the stereotypical near-*****tic drill sergeant, they head off to the front still clinging to the belief that glory awaits.

Optimism takes another blow when they meet the "veteran" soldiers – men and boys just like them who have been fighting for months or years and find they aren't talking about heroism or their country, but cynically about the awfulness of fighting, their fears, and their hunger.

With their confidence and idealism in full retreat now, the only hope left is the fighting itself, which proves to be the horrible hell we today all know it is. Milestone brilliantly captures that horror – the fear, filth, maiming, and death – with one vivid sequence after another.

Over the course of this two-plus-hour movie, Milestone shows appendages being blown off or amputated in the "surgery" by doctors too weary to remember how many amputations they've performed that day. Bombs fall, men scream, men duck, men die, and on it goes.

Men, ordered to take a piece of land that looks like every other crater-pocked piece of land, charge out of their trenches to be bombarded with artillery and, if they make it through that, run into a wall of ***fire – it's slaughter, not a battle.

It's also all confused orders, no food, filth, more trenches, sickness, and brief furloughs where the men try to shove in as much living – food, drink, ***, sunshine – as they can before it's back to the confused orders, no food....

Lew Ayres – in the lead playing one of the boys who, pumped up on patriotism, enlists – gives a career performance as we slowly see his idealism diminish to where, as many soldiers say happens, he's only fighting for the men around him – everything else is long-lost idealism.

Look for the scenes where he goes home on furlough and meets his former teacher and a bunch of older men who tell him what needs to be done to win the war. Milestone and Ayers understood the power of less being more.

Written today, Ayers' character would give bloviating anti-war speeches that were really the screenwriters' virtue signaling. Instead, he says very little, which only serves to make the teacher and the old men look smug and small. It's brilliant, powerful and effective filmmaking.

The final scene in All Quiet on the Western Front is a classic you'll want to see fresh, but like everything in this thoughtfully done movie, it shows more than it tells.

Somehow, in 1930, in the early years of "talkies," when Hollywood was still trying to master the new technology, it made an anti-war movie that has stood the test of time.


N.B. Lew Ayers was a conscientious objector in WWII who pushed to serve as a medic in combat zones. One can only wonder if this early anti-war role affected him or if he chose it because it aligned with his already-existing beliefs.

 

[2 Days Dubai]

Another look at Summer of '42 starring absolutely hauntingly beautiful Jennifer O'Neill.
Gary Grimes as narrator-protagonist in this elegiac classic along the John Knowles' A Separate Peace literary New England track but an entirely different form altogether. A filling fling across time's distanced traveled at Nantuckett, but the feeling is never quite right with beginning-last end pieces bookstop; nor is Herman Raucher's autobiography all that well written. A disjointed but somehow ambulatory beach book that rushes towards conclusion with a celerity remarkable for what is seen but not lingered over. There's sentiment in this tragic deflower of adolescent virginity but not sentimentality. Still, Death opened a door to Life, while Love guised Eros plays her scenes with remarkable aplomb.