Mar 24
I’ve often railed against the inanity of the movies of the 50s and 60s. The inability to produce characters of complexity, especially in comedies, taints the films of the era even though there are exceptions. But the so-called “classics” of the two decades are, more often than not, greatly disappointing and staggeringly boring. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is no exception.
Walt Disney’s Peter Pan owes an awful lot to the 1924 silent film of the same name and, of course, the original stage play. Many of the characters look true to form and J.M. Barrie’s vision is certainly appreciated, but there’s something missing from Disney’s fourteenth entry in the Classics canon. It’s the last film to involve all nine of Disney’s Nine Old Men animators and the last picture Disney would release through RKO.
Fritz Lang’s The Blue Gardenia is a pretty average piece of film noir. It attempts a bit of a sideways swipe at the newspaper world’s sensationalistic treatment of violent crimes, but the jabs are too insignificant to make this movie all that scathing. It remains a pretty obvious entry in the noir category, even if it does feature Lang’s trademark moodiness and darkness.
The Blue Gardenia is considered the first of Lang’s “newspaper noir” trilogy, with the other two pictures being While the City Sleeps and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. This, his seventeenth Hollywood movie, is one of the key markers of Lang’s decline in terms of American cinematic prestige. At the time of this movie, Lang was getting less and less time to put his productions together and had less control over the way the films were made.
William Wyler’s brilliant Roman Holiday is one of the most charming romantic comedies of all time. The 1953 film introduced audiences to Audrey Hepburn, who won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her glowing performance as Princess Ann. Hepburn was cast after a screen test and, after she had performed a stately scene from the movie, won the part after candid footage of her talking things through with the director was discovered after cameras kept rolling after the official test. Some of the footage was featured in the original theatrical trailer and Hepburn’s natural chemistry won audiences over.
Wyler, one of Hollywood’s most distinguished and talented directors, shot the film on location in Rome in a move that was hard on the budget. As a result of the budgetary issues of shooting in Rome and in Cinecittà (a large Italian film studio founded by Mussolini in 1937), the movie had to be shot in black and white. One wonders about how the pageantry of Rome would have come across on screen with a little more vibrancy, but Wyler’s expert direction captures the magic of Rome in spades and one hardly can tell the difference between traditional B&W and glorious “Technicolor.”
Jun 25
From Here to Eternity is a 1953 film that deals with themes of war, infidelity, murder and intimidation. The film frames its subject matter on a military base on the days preceding the Pearl Harbor attacks. Based on the controversial and rather explicit book by James Jones, From Here to Eternity is a classic film and was on AFI’s List of 100 Greatest Films before the American Film Institute’s latest revision, where its spot was replaced with Taxi Driver. Nonetheless, From Here to Eternity resonates in the annals of film history for a number of reasons.
The film follows a pair of stories that criss-cross during the duration. First, Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt, played by Montgomery Clift, has requested an Army transfer and heads to a new location in Hawaii. There, he begins to be aggressively coerced to fight again on the Army boxing team. His new captain, Dana Holmes (Philip Ober), wants to put together the best boxing team he can so he tries everything to get Prewitt to join, including punishing him unfairly and treating him like scum.
