Oct 29
When I think of some of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, like The Ugly Truth or The Back-up Plan, I always come back to Plan 9 from Outer Space. This 1959 sci-fi horror from Ed Wood is largely included in discussions of the worst movies ever made, but there’s something unflappably fun about the whole experience – even if it was originally intended to be taken seriously. That’s more than I can say for a lot of today’s tripe.
Aug 22
Sleeping Beauty is the sixteenth animated feature in the so-called Walt Disney Classics collection and remains one of the most disappointing pictures of the bunch. The 1959 film didn’t do too well at the box office either, making enough of a negative impression on the Disney company to lead them to swear off of fairy tales until 1989′s The Little Mermaid.
The movie was a labour of love for the Disney company, as the animators and directors worked on it throughout the 1950s while Disneyland was under construction in California. Sleeping Beauty marks the last time that a Disney film would use hand-inked cels and it is a relatively good-looking movie, even though most of the detail is in the backgrounds. The use of Super Technirama 70 meant that the film could include more detail in the background than any other animated feature of the time.
Tennessee Williams’ one-act play Suddenly, Last Summer is given grand cinematic treatment by Joseph L. Mankiewicz in the 1959 film adaption. The picture is stunning from beginning to end, filled with staggering performances and terrific cinematography from Jack Hildyard. The Buxton Orr score, complete with the foundation laid by Malcolm Arnold, also helps increase the movie’s tension and overall mood.
The screenplay was penned by Williams and Gore Vidal, although there appears to be some dispute about how much work both parties did and whose work was more represented in the finished product. The production was a difficult one, with a number of personality clashes reportedly occurring behind the camera. Fortunately this does not play out on screen and the resulting performances are tremendous.
Incredibly dated and oddly creepy, Pillow Talk is a vehicle for Rock Hudson’s good looks and Doris Day’s charm. Directed by Michael Gordon, the picture floats a truly weird story along with some outdated concepts about sex, women and relationships. It also features one of the most invasive and obnoxious soundtracks I’ve come across in quite some time.
This is 1950s gloss working its magic, attempting to convince us that there’s a reason for the attraction between the characters and that the good looks and charm of even the most obnoxious, creepy, sexist individuals should be enough for love. We’re supposed to fall in love with the coupling of Day and Hudson because the music says so, not because it actually makes any sense. In reality, what happens in Pillow Talk is quite sickening.
Walt Disney’s Darby O’Gill and the Little People is a charming little piece of work that celebrates the Irish folklore of Herminie Templeton Kavanagh. Directed by Robert Stevenson, Darby is a colourful motion picture that would eventually lead Sean Connery to his James Bond role and would feature some pretty darn advanced special effects for its time.
The movie ages well enough, surprisingly, and it’s fun to chuckle at some of the campier sequences. The use of “forced perspective” put the “little people” further away from the camera, thus making them appear small in the necessary leprechaun sequences. A whole lot of lighting was required to create the effects, too, and it is said that a substation blew its beaker due to the amount of power needed to light one of the film’s key sequences.
