Reviews

So few movies have a woman as the main protagonist, much less an older woman. Marie Dressler is wonderful, as usual, but the script helps a great deal, and the good, unpretentious direction. Old movies really have something special, a sense of compassion and humanity. Richard Cromwell makes a very good impression. It is sad that he lived only 50 years and was forgotten. One wishes Angela would reminisce about him. He had a very pleasant speaking voice. A voice is an instrument, and speech is music.

I enjoyed everything about this movie: camera, pacing, acting, dancing, plot, characters, French language, and historic value. Above all I enjoyed Josephine Baker's incredibly subtle singing, and the beautifully written and orchestrated songs. And the background music is also superb. The whole movie has an atmosphere of generosity and good cheer, and a pleasant absence of Hollywood glitter. They really don't make them like this anymore. Not for those who want blockbusting glamor. This is a modest film, but there is charm in modesty. Less is more.

I wrote down my impressions ten years ago:

Saw it for the third time and I could keep watching it forever. It is one of the greatest ever made. Visually gorgeous. The dialogue is smart, real. Joan Crawford is priceless. Everything works. This could have been a soap opera, but it is far from it. It is touching, amusing and always interesting. It never sags or lags. The only flaw is the rather pointless death of one of the daughters. The movie has some didactic elements (don't spoil your children), but it is far from being just a sermon. There are no villains. The writer sees everyone as a human being. These are real people, complex, contradictory. Yet the complexity isn't overdone. The movie remains light and never sinks into bathos. I don't know what it is about Joan Crawford that thrills me so much. She is a damn good actress. She knows just the right balance between acting a character and being one. Gone are the days of stylish acting like hers.

My views are not set in concrete. I can't believe I liked Love Story (1970) only a few years ago! In retrospect it seems shockingly classist, with the girl having to conveniently shuffle off her mortal coil to prevent inter-class miscegenation. Hollywood is reactionary when it comes to racial and class miscegenation (and many other things), and one must watch out for these cryptic messages that masquerade as tragedy. Is Mildred Pierce a tragedy, because she is a working woman? Is the message, that working women are up to no good?

This gorgeous film is a bit too dark and too harsh on sister Aimee, but it is riveting throughout, and the best Stanwyck movie I have seen. Her acting is so much subtler than in later years. In the final scene she is absolutely ravishing. Fascinating characters, plot, cinematography, with just the right dash of nastiness. They really don't make them like this anymore. The big mystery is where, when and how did cinema learn its craft so early, and why did it lose it sometime in the fifties. Today's movies just cannot compare with this artistry. Today's movies don't look like movies at all. They rather look like documentaries about movie-making. Roll camera is the only special effect they seem know.

I can never understand Shakespeare. What's he trying to say, if anything? That old age is a misfortune that ruins everyone's life? I can discern no other message in this pretentious jumble. They say the Bard is often quoted. The only thing in this play I've heard quoted is "more sinned against than sinning". Brilliant! Let's quote it again: "more sinned against than sinning"! Once more: "more sinned against than sinning". So good! Bob Hope has more quotable one-liners than the Bard, and I think Henny Youngman is wittier than Bob Hope. I will keep trying to give the Bard a chance to impress me, but this is reputed to be his greatest play.

There are lots of things to like in this movie: glimpses of London, black and white photography, likable young actors, old fogies, fast pace, great music, but one gets the impression that the original play was cut, and there is nothing that would have interested me more than the uncut play, flaws and all. That would have been more interesting than the touches from Max Sennett and Jacques Tati.

The play's central message seems quite conventional: nerd gets the best girl, playboy overwhelmed with his mannequins. For all the mockery of the old folks, the values permeating this plot are old folks' values. The view of women is passive. They don't swing, they are merely "taken advantage of", and the nicest girls is the most virginal, as if sexual activity were incompatible with niceness, and virginity were incompatible with napalm. But that's movies for you: always asserting the unassailable, rocking the cradle instead of the boat.

Tushingam steals the show. She has more screen presence than Garbo.

Gorgeous cinematography and music wasted on a flawed play.

Not only is the writing bad, the plot is shapeless and incoherent and pointless. Hamlet is supposed to embody doubt, yet he kills without compunction. He fatally stabs that old man by mistake, without suffering any legal, social or emotional consequences, and the stabbing isn't even subsequently recalled in any manner. And that old man elicited not a few titters from me, as he constantly moved around, rushing up stars like a man half his age. And he says things that don't fit in the play: "To thine own self be true. Neither a borrower nor a lender be". Here are samples of The Bard's terrible writing:

If it be, why seems it so particular with thee? Then you saw not his face. Courses through the natural gates and alleys of the body.

Take this from this if this be otherwise. Oh cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right.

And why does Hamlet give that peroration to his actors? It is pointless. And why is that peroration so similar to the stilted speech of the old man who says "to thine own self be true"? And why is Hamlet called "sweet prince" after he kills several people? It was interesting only from a historic perspective.

To be is not to be, that is the answer.

What a great singer! Jorge Negrete's voice is quite thrilling, rich, potent, expressive, just perfect for this type of song. It's hard to believe that he despised this sort of music and preferred opera. These songs are far better than opera, which is stuffy, staid and dull, and lacks that verge and impudence and humor.

This movie is worth seeing mainly for the great singer and songs, but the plot and good old-fashioned cinematography are also appealing.

My diary informs me that I liked this film in 1989, of which I remember nothing today:

Very good movie. I feared it would be just a Robin Williams "vehicle", another story about an unconventional young teacher clashing with the stuffy authorities. As I watched the movie I kept wondering whether it was upholding personality or principle. Was it just a paean to a wonderful teacher, something like "To Sir with Love" or was it upholding some principle? There were moments when I was about to dismiss the movie as a pretentious version of "Beach party bingo", Franky Avalon gone Ivy League. When one of the students, well, no spoilers, I feared the movie was degenerating into soap opera. Then I feared a sudden happy ending that would tilt the balance toward personality and narcissism and away from principle. But at the very end, it becomes clear that it is the other way around. Conventionality and conformity cannot be defeated. However, the ideals of Thoreau and other free-thinkers cannot be either.

Let's not give all the credit to Capra. Let's point out that a movie is a collective creation involving directors, writers, cameramen, editors, actors, musicians. And when everything works, as in this movie, it's a miracle, isn't it? How can so many things coalesce? Lionel Stander stands out as a frog with a heart of gold. And where and when did Gary Cooper learn to act so well? One is impressed with all the good acting in this movie, even character parts. Those non-pixilated old ladies are adorable. That stern psychiatrist spouting banalities and doodles. There are too many interesting characters to count. That's what movie making is all about. It's good that the movie is on DVD, but a movie like this must be seen in the theater, together with other people. I find it very sad that the new generations don't get a chance to experience old movies collectively. We humans have a need for collective experiences.

What I didn't like about the movie was the "socking", which at the time was cute, one wonders why. It is transparently there to prove to us that Longfellow with all his poetry and music and no girl is no sissy.

This must be the best Capra movie.

This simple TV series has more cinema than many a fancy European movie. The memorable episodes are too numerous to count: the mama's boy, the manequin, nightmare on Elm Street, Ida Lupino living in her movie past, meeting her former leading man, now an elderly supermarket manager, Jack Carson as the ultimate used car salesman, Jack Klugman as the trumpet poet, Burgess Meredith as the bookworm, the uncle and the niece - a mutual detestation society, the grandfather clock, the shopkeeper who wishes he were someone else, Don Rickles as the bully, the people imprisoned in a tube, Joan Blondell yelling about that flusie in Yonkers, the camera that predicts the future, the heat wave, that man with the doll house, the alien bartender with the third eye, the man whose life is a movie, and one of the very best: William Shatner and bride in that small town diner. All these episodes linger years after one has seen them. The half hour format is just the right one, compact, succinct. The hour-long shows are less impressive. I must say even the lousy episodes are enjoyable. This show has just the right mixture of the grotesque, fantastic, preachy, dreamy, perplexed and ironic. Great acting, great black and white. Rod Serling was a poet.

I'm saddened to be unable to give this film a good review, written by John Cleese, who could be referred to as the thinking man's thoughtless man, and who was so funny and over the top in "Fawlty Towers". Lesson: never go mainstream (unless you want to make money, of course). One is left wondering: how much of Fawlty Towers was owed to Mrs. Cleese's penwomanship. This movie contains fewer chuckles than a joke my dad used to tell: on a very hot day, an old man was wearing a winter coat and sweating profusely. When asked why he doesn't take the coat off, he says: "It can't the coat, I've no problems with it in winter".

Of the few Russian movies I have had the pleasure of seeing, this is the record-holder. I saw it more than ten times, partly to learn the language, but I remember being quite thrilled with it back in 1990. I like the gloomy mood and the artless artful cinematography.

There is a bit of masochism in having a whole family endure such hardships for so long, but this sort of documentary is quite endearing and informative. There should be more such programs.

As to 1900, many of the hardships are artificial. Why for instance did women have to wear cumbersome clothes in a time before air conditioning, clothes that are very hard to wash? No vacuum cleaners? Big deal! Sweep! Our ancestors couldn't have been so miserable. There was plenty of fun even then, even a thousand years ago.

I saw this documentary, most of it, over a decade ago, and I would like to see it today more than ever, because with the passing of time, the past becomes even more fascinating. In fifty years it will be even more fascinating. It gets better and better, as this slice of life recedes into the past. Of course, the family is also inherently interesting and likable. Not any family would do. There could be countless such shows, yet we seem to prefer fiction to reality. And so, this one remains all the more valuable because of its sheer rarity. Are there boring parts? Probably, but even boredom is interesting if one is interested. No need to be fascinated all the time.

I sampled some of Cleese's other work, and it failed to amuse me as much as this series, which I saw more than a decade ago. I laughed abundantly, especially in the episode where Mr. Fawlty is trying to catch the womanizing lowbrow only to appear lowbrow himself. The main theme is the failure of stress management. Time and again, Mr. Fawlty tries to eschew stressful situations only to be plunged into them with a vengeance. I also remember the inspector and the rat, and the Major saying we must shoot those rats, and Mr. Fawlty pleading: "Forgive and forget", and the psychologist inquiring "How often do you and your wife manage it?", and a hamster called Basil, and Mr. Fawlty yelling at his incompetent cook, only to be found yelling to no one in particular by his cantankerous American guest, and Mr. Fawlty disregarding his wife's injunction against hiring cheap, incompetent carpenter O'Reilly, and Mr. Fawlty trying to hide his big quarrel with his wife on their anniversary, with well-wishing guests arriving, one of them perceptive, and Mr. Fawlty being seized by irresistible frankness when tending to German guests, and the Japo-Norwegian fish, and the thief-inspector, etc. Yes, I guess it was and is funny.

This delightfully silly movie populated by likeable actors, greatly filmed and scored, can be viewed either as the horrors of ghostly intrigue, or as the horrors of architecture, of structures built for the glory of the builder, rather than the comfort of the residents. Ghosts seem to prefer expensive mansions to mobile homes. Having been freed of life's constraints, they want to live it up for a change, and they don't seem to like sharing big houses with mere mortals! "The Haunting" scared me as a youngster. This one amused me even then. One thing seems certain: you can't have a horror film without a big, unwieldy house. Architecture shapes our lives to an extent that can only be qualified as horrifying. I guess one could say that architecture is the mother of history. Architects should see this one. The true horror master may be Frank Lloyd Wright.

There's good stuff in this movie, particularly the subtle music and the incredible views. The camera is also quite fine and unobtrusive. And the simple, sweet story is good too, enhanced by the real life father and son bond. Not so appealing are the obligatory firecrackers at the end. Definitely better than Shane.

I don't know why I didn't like it when I first saw it nearly two decades ago. At the time I felt that it was an inferior version of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, which I had seen years earlier and loved. I felt, that far from naive, Mr. Smith was hysterical, self-righteous, megalomaniacal, manipulative, humorless, and downright fascist with his intransigent zealot's zeal for cleaning up government corruption and his private army of "boys". The casting is certainly typical Hollywood: the good are extremely handsome, the evil are extremely homely, and guess who always wins. Poor Eugene Pallette elicits sympathy just because of his ungainly appearance, and his incessantly demeaning casting as a goon. I still have some of those misgivings after seeing the film recently, but this is a very well-made one, particularly, the cinematography. It is absolutely amazing that Hollywood should have gotten so good, so early, and that such an art should have been lost so long ago. No camera work in the last forty years remotely compares. It is not just the black and white, it is the shades of gray, the contrast, the lighting, pacing, angles, composition, a very sophisticated art. The scene where Smith weeps at the Lincoln Memorial is very moving. I think it would have been more moving if the lady hadn't appeared to console him. But why highlight Lincoln, why not Washington? Indeed, isn't it astonishing, that no movie has ever been made about Washington? (I am not saying it should be made, just wondering why not). Harvey is still my favorite Jimmy Stewart movie. Far more humor in that one. As a movie, on a similar subject, I thought "Storm Center" (1956) more satisfying than Mr. Smith: "dumpy" woman hero, small town, low key, bolder message.

In real life I only saw Jimmy Stewart as a dog-lover. He appeared on TV with his dog on Dinah Shore's pet show. The last time I saw him was on Johnny Carson, reading a poem he wrote about his late dog, and choking up. I felt so sorry for him. A rather inscrutable man, who flew missions not only over Germany, but also over Vietnam. I think his son died in that war. It is amazing that such a long-lived, accomplished man was never interviewed about his movie career, nor wrote anything about it, or his life. So public, yet so private.

I tried at least ten times, fifteen minutes at a time, but over the years, this movie has not been seen by me in one sitting. I must therefore conclude, that it belongs to a very special trilogy: the three most overrated movies this side of the Atlantic, together with "Gone with the wind" and "Citizen Kane". On the other side of the Atlantic (where far fewer movies have been to my liking), the distinguished trilogy is (tentatively) composed of "L'Avventura", "Eight and a half" and any Ingmar Bergman opus of your choosing. Don't you believe that thing about the test of time. A thing isn't good just because many say so.

A comedy with touching moments. A bunch of crooks win big in the lottery, but cannot cash the ticket. They try to find an "honorable" person to do it for them. They advertise. Dozens appear, and strife erupts. Eventually, marriage ensues. Message: the main thing in life is contentment. This is the best Mexican movie I have ever seen (they haven't been showing the best ones on TV). It had its hilarious moments, as when the crooks try to impersonate a respectable family. The background music was impeccable.

The performances are good, the movie is captivating, but the underlying psychological premises are deeply flawed. The biggest flaw is making the psychologist a kind of Messiah. What a contrast with "Equus" where the psychologist himself wrestles with truth. This movie seems to be saying "GET THEE TO A THERAPIST, PARTICULARLY IF THOU ART WEALTHY!" Unfortunately, only the rich can afford it. And why is it that suburbanite's problems are somehow more "moving", and they are more "sensitive" and "troubled"? When will movies lavish compassion and dignity on the poor and the dark-skinned, whose psychologist comes in the form of prison bars? No sensitivity to them brutes? Another problem is the psychologist's emotional coldness. He looks at the young man as if he were a bug, with a chilling, ruthless objectivity that's unintentionally comical. And if the shrink knew the answer all along, why does he withhold it for so long, making the poor wretch (poor only in a figurative sense), go through such agonies? Perhaps because "going through" agonies is the only way out of them? How convenient for the shrink's pocketbook. This movie is a good illustration of the fallacies of psychiatry: seeking to reduce everything to one single emotion, as if grief were not a panoply of emotions, as if everything weren't about everything. I saw the movie twenty years ago, and my reaction then was the same. This is from my then diary:

While better than most movies being made today, it wasn't good. It looked like a long commercial for psychoanalysis. It's title could have been "Shrinks are swell folks", or "If you haven't been to a shrink, you don't know what you've been missing". The all-knowing, compassion-overflowing shrink is the central figure of this movie. He looms as large as God Almighty.

This movie promotes oppressive helplessness, reliance on "professionals", distrust in one's own intellectual and emotional resources. We are living in the age of helplessness, when people aren't trusted to make their own choices, solve their own problems. We all have to be professionally processed. Whatever happened to "the best things in life are free"? We must get away from this cult of professionalism which is a variation on the cult of fame. People must once again be judged on their merits, not their diplomas. And we must once again trust ourselves to be the ultimate judges on what's up and what's down.

Notice also, how so many movies feature tenderness only in the context of tragedy, as if ashamed that in any other context, it would be too lascivious.

This movie has everything, including and above all style. Finally a movie that's every bit as good as the title song! So many movies are inferior to their music. The subject is sleazy, gloriously so. And there is a good dose of compassion too. Great script inspires great acting. The song is quite original and catchy, and the singer, Gene Pitney, is an overlooked and neglected genius, both as a singer and as a songwriter. And let's have a hand of applause for Tiomkin, a Russian who wrote some of the most quintessentially American music!

This is great theater and great TV, but it is frustrating to see mere prestige overwhelm a lot of good stuff. The same year that this play was shown, another great TV event took place, now viewable only at the Museum of Television and Radio: "The Ballad of Huck Finn", produced by the unforgettable, but sadly forgotten Robert Herridge. What poetry! What acting! What soul! Then there is that scoffed at, forgotten show MAMA (1948-1957) which is far better theater and far better TV than O'Neill's over-wrought though fascinating neurosis. There is only so much gut-wrenching pathos one can take, and it must be supplemented with more down to earth stuff. All classic TV theater should be on DVD, regardless of the quality of the original tape. Indeed, the worse the quality of the original tape, the more vital it is to rescue it on DVD. There is an obsession with color TV that's hard to understand. I always preferred black and white. I still have a black and white TV set (with a VCR and DVD of course).

One of the best comedies ever made, full of comic details, non-stop hilarity, one of those rare movies that can be seen again and again and it gets better every time. A comedy that doesn't insult human dignity or intellect, full of interesting characters and vignettes, and a lot of emotion too. Not surprisingly, the acting is fabulous when the writing is good. Everyone gives a memorable performance. It doesn't get any better than this. Funniest lines: "In the Piazza", "Doesn't do windows", "Campbell is a noble name". "Is mom going to sing?" "Grazie, grazie very much". "A few Berlitz lessons, and...". "So many of you left a little something here". Lolobgrigida, Winters and Savalas are priceless. The tune by Ortolani fits the movie perfectly. I first saw it in 1969, then in 1983. After so many years it doesn't get stale. That's what I call a classic.