Sunday, March 4, 2012
Preston Sturges - The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1941) - Part 1 of 10
Preston Sturges' satire of American puritanism and self-righteousness, still breath-takingly cynical, and relevant.
Preston Sturges - Sullivan's Travels (1941)
Preston Sturges' great Hollywood satire is available on YouTube.
His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1941)
His Girl Friday crosses genres: it's both a classic newspaper picture and a definitive screwball comedy. The humor establishes this as a "comedy of divorce," a variation on an ancient theme of the war between the sexes, but the film's serious side comes from its critique of the press's exploitation of human tragedies. It is well worth seeing in its entirety.
Saturday, March 3, 2012
Love Me Tonight (1931) - Isn't It Romantic?
Just a couple of years into the sound era, Love Me Tonight offers one of the cleverest, most delightful musical numbers ever filmed--and incidentally, a tellingly witty illustration of how music gave cinema the power to conquer popular culture and the world. Genius.
Cecil B. Demille - "Old Wives for New"
The mode of DeMille's films says a lot about what brought huge popular audiences to movie houses in the years after World War I. DeMille became famous making slightly provocative films about beautiful women and "modern" love affairs. In "Old Wives for New," Charles Murdock feels trapped in an unhappy marriage. His wife Sophy has "let herself go" and takes no interest in the world beyond her home. On a camping trip he meets the fascinating Juliet Raeburn, a beautiful young self-made woman he feels is his true soulmate. When rumors circulate that Charles has found a lover, he throws suspicion upon a less reputable woman who has pursued him in order to spare Juliet from social disgrace.
The film touts ideals of fidelity and self-sacrifice. But it also proposes that marriage can be a trap; that both partners must work to merit the other's continuing interest; that "adultery in one's heart" is no sin, but more or less inevitable; and that sometimes, divorce really is the answer.
Rudolph Valentino in "The Sheik"
This scene from The Sheik suggests something of the enthusiasm for suggestive material in one style of blockbuster film in the '20s. The equation of the erotic with the exotic underlines the theme so often found in American film--and more broadly, in American culture: titillating material is displayed constantly, but in a spirit of condemnation and moral superiority.
The context:
Lady Diana Mayo (Agnes Ayres) is admired for her independence, high spirit and modern ideas, but when she is kidnapped by an Arab sheik, Ahmed Ben Hassan (Rudolph Valentino), she finds herself falling under the spell of his exotic masculinity. In the popular novel on which the film is based, Lady Diana learns to appreciate the sheik only after he takes her by force; in the film, he restrains himself and wins her with his consideration and respect for her. (When the film was re-released during the Code years, a scene of attempted rape had to be cut.)
Even so, the character of the sheik is recast for the film as the child of European parents, adopted by an Arab sheik; anti-miscegenation laws of the time would have precluded scenes suggesting romance and kisses between a European lady and an Arab man. The film was banned in Kansas City all the same.
"The Sheik" was crucial to Valentino's career as the greatest male sex symbol of the time--and created a huge backlash among American men, who boycotted the film and railed against the "effeminacy" of his screen image. He died at 31 in 1926, setting off a mass outpouring of grief among American women that was a significant moment in the history of Hollywood's power over the public imagination.
Buster Keaton - Sherlock, Jr.
Keaton uses not only his extraordinary talent for physical comedy, but essential elements of cinematic form, to construct his comedy. Like a lot of great actors and scenarists, he seems at his best when he's contemplating cinema itself.
Chaplin - Monsieur Verdoux
The final section of Chaplin's oddest film: a comedy about a wife murderer. The dark tone of this comedy seems almost quaint now; at the time, it inflamed Chaplin's right-wing enemies, particularly as its message appeared to dismiss the moral failings of private life in comparison with the enormities committed by states and corporations. Chaplin unquestionably suggests that banks and businesses are responsible for every crime committed by the people they impoverish.
Chaplin - The Great Dictator: Adenoid Hynkel's dream of world conquest
One of Chaplin's--and the cinema's--most effective and unforgettable criticisms of fascism.
Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush
Another celebrated Chaplin moment: stranded in the freezing North, Charlie serves his shoe for dinner.
Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times
I haven't found a great copy of Modern Times online, although I imagine it's available as steaming video somewhere. Here's the scene of the feeding machine, one of Chaplin's great comic images of dehumanization in mechanized society.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)