To call this a horror movie would be kind of absurd. Whatever value this movie possesses stems from the enjoyment of imagining the quaint innocence of the audiences in the 1930s being frightened by the silliness on screen. Reviewing this movie, I will not worry about spoiling the plot twists. They are too ridiculous to consider.
Peter and Joan Alison are an American newlywed couple inexplicably celebrating their honeymoon in the Carpathian Mountains of Hungary. They meet Dr. Vitus Werdegast (Bela Lugosi) on the Orient Express and all three leave the train to take a bus to their destination. But the bus crashes during a rain storm and Joan is injured so Werdegast takes them to the home of his arch-enemy Hjalmar Poelzig (Boris Karloff) whom Werdegast believes has stolen his wife while Werdegast was imprisoned in Russia for fifteen years after WWI.
Werdegast treats Joan for her injury and injects her with a powerful sedative so she will sleep the night. Peter Alison sees that Werdegast and Poelzig are foes but he bides his time to leave the house the next morning when his wife is well enough to travel. Meanwhile Werdegast confronts Poelzig and demands to know where his wife Karen is. Poelzig brings him down into the subterranean fortress under his house (the one still wired with dynamite). Here he is shown Karen’s embalmed body in a giant bell jar. And he is told that his daughter (also named Karen) is dead. Slightly later on we find out that Werdegast’s daughter isn’t dead but instead is married to Poelzig and that she believes her father died in prison.
The next morning, we learn that Poelzig is a Satanist whose cult is about to celebrate the new moon by sacrificing a female victim. Poelzig wants Joan to be that sacrifice. Werdegast agrees to play a game of chess against Poelzig to decide Joan’s fate but he loses and so Werdegast seems to acquiesce in her role as victim and allows his man-servant to obey Poelzig and render Peter unconscious with some Hungarian karate chop and imprison him in a round room with a rotating tube as its wall. Don’t ask me why such a room is part of the story. The whole house is full of goofy modernist architectural features. Meanwhile Joan is being prepped for her role as sacrifice at the satanist ceremony.
But at the last second Werdegast rescues Joan and while leading her to escape they find the body of his daughter Karen that Poelzig has just murdered. Through a series of fight scenes Werdegast and his man-servant manage to manacle Poelzig and Werdegast uses a scalpel to skin Poelzig alive. Joan sees this and starts screaming. Peter finds a gun that Poelzig’s dead servant dropped and thinking that Werdegast is harming Joan, he shoots him. While dying of his gunshot wound, Werdegast orders the young couple to flee the house as fast as possible while he triggers a five-minute timing device that will set off the dynamite under the house killing himself, Poelzig and the whole satanic cult gathered at the house.
O, brother! Well, on the positive side the architecture in Poelzig’s house has some interesting German Expressionist touches. And the dialog is sometimes hilariously over the top. There is Karloff reciting a two-minute incantation in Latin which is quite absurd. And then when Lugosi is supposedly flaying the flesh off of Karloff’s face, they show Lugosi’s shadow and the way his hand is moving it looks like he is scribbling on him. This movie is a museum piece of what a 1930s horror movie might be. And there is just enough atmosphere to make watching it silly fun. Only for fans of the genre.
“Going My Way” is a comedy drama that took a bunch of Oscars and was the biggest box office draw in 1944. And since it starred Bing Crosby it unsurprisingly had several musical numbers spread through the movie. It’s the story of Father Chuck O’Malley (Crosby) a Catholic priest sent by the bishop to rescue a New York City parish; St Dominic’s, from the overwhelmed exhaustion of its present elderly pastor; Father Fitzgibbon (played by Barry Fitzgerald). With a supporting cast that includes such veteran character actors as Gene Lockart, Timothy O’Dowd and William Frawley the film drops any pretense at reality and has Father O’Malley manage to reform a local gang of New York City teenagers and converts them into a church choir. He manages to raise enough money to pay off the mortgage by selling a song to a music producer. He saves a runaway teenager from trouble with the police and even manages to reunite Father Fitzgibbon with his ninety-year-old mother by finding a way to pay for her trip from Ireland.
Now clearly this movie has nothing to do with reality. Having grown up in a New York City Roman Catholic parish I can assure you that no priest of Father O’Malley’s caliber has ever been seen. But treat the movie as a fantasy from a much more innocent time and enjoy it for its virtues. Crosby comes across as eminently likeable and the whole movie is a feel-good experience that can be watched around the holiday season to try and believe that there are still good people walking this Earth.
Now the interesting thing is this movie has the distinction of being one of only a very few good movies that had an even better sequel. The next year (1945) Crosby returned as O’Malley, paired with Ingrid Bergman as a nun in the movie, “The Bells of St Mary’s.”
But with or without the sequel, “Going My Way” is a heartwarming and well-made film that I can highly recommend to anyone who still wants to believe in the possibility of human goodness and hope. There is comedy, human feeling and a sense of optimism in the face of hardship. A classic.
It is entirely possible that this is the first science fiction movie I ever saw. I seem to remember seeing this on tv as a pretty young kid (maybe seven or eight years old). For that reason, it had a huge effect on my perspective on entertainment. Of course, watching this movie after all these years is a shock from seeing just how ridiculous the whole production is. But at the same time there is a fondness based on the nostalgia it inspires in me, even after all this time.
(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)
David MacLean is a young grade school boy whose father is an engineer at a local factory doing top-secret government work. He’s also friends with the local astronomer Dr. Stuart Kelston. David has a small telescope in his bedroom. One night he is awakened about four thirty in the morning by what looks and sounds like a thunder storm but as he watches out his window, he sees a flying saucer land in a sand pit located adjacent to his family’s property.
David runs into his parents’ room and tells them the story. Out of a desire to find out what had scared his son George MacLean goes outside to the sand pit to investigate. And the aliens open up a hole in the sand pit and capture George. When George does not reappear by daylight Mary MacLean calls the police and reports her husband missing. Two patrolmen in a squad car show up and while searching the sand pit area they are also captured by the aliens.
A little later George returns to his house and we immediately see that he is no longer the same man. Whereas previous to his disappearance he was a friendly husband and father, now he is a surly abusive man who backhands his young son for insisting that he saw the space ship land. Also, David discovers that George has a small X shaped wound on the back of his neck near his shirt collar. After a few minutes the two patrolmen appear at the house and they obviously behave just as George is.
And this pattern repeats as through his telescope David sees a little neighborhood girl Kathy Wilson being captured. Later George pushes his wife Mary into the sand pit. And off camera, the town’s Chief of Police also ends up captured too. With all these people now controlled by the saucer-men, their diabolical plan begins to unfold. They are trying to sabotage the nearby factory that is building an atomic powered rocket along with the other plants that are supplying components. Kathy Wilson’s father; Dr. William Wilson is a physicist who is designing the atomic rocket (although how a physicist becomes a design engineer is beyond me). So, she attempts to kill her family by burning down their house. George works in the factory creating the rocket engine so he and his wife attempt to assassinate Dr. Wilson with a high-powered rifle. And the two police officers successfully burn down the engine plant.
At first no one believes David when tells his story and the Police Chief has him imprisoned in a jail cell awaiting his parents’ appearance and probably his subsequent death. But the desk sergeant is disturbed by his obvious fear and calls a medical doctor to look at him. Dr. Patricia Blake listens sympathetically to David’s crazy story and when she finds out that they both know the astronomer Stuart Kelson, she calls him up and is told that David is a very honest and serious child. And when his parents arrive to get David, she notices that they really are behaving abnormally and so she makes up a story about David having symptoms of polio to prevent them from dragging him away.
Now Dr. Blake takes him to Stuart Kelston and we get a crash course on the latest theories on Martian biology. And somehow Kelston intuits that Martians have gotten wind of the atomic rocket project and they are here in their flying saucer to sabotage the project. And Kelston trains his enormous observatory telescope on the sand pit across town just as George MacLean pushes General Mayberry, who is in charge of security for the whole rocket project, into the sand pit.
Kelston springs into action. He calls the Pentagon and a Col. Fielding orders a mechanized brigade of tanks and other weaponry to descend on this little town. Orders are given to arrest the MacLeans, the Police Chief, the two patrolmen and General Mayberry. Only David’s parents are captured alive and are sent to a hospital to attempt to remove the control devices in the back of their necks. The army surrounds the sand pit and eventually finds the saucer and use explosives to open up a tunnel leading to the ship. Fielding and his men descend down and attack the “mu-tants” that serve the super-intelligent Martian. The servants are about seven feet tall covered with green skin and have bug-eyes. They shamble around so slowly it’s amazing they get anything actually done. The master is this little homunculus in what looks like a glass bell jar that the mu-tants carry around. He’s got a humanoid face on top of a body that’s an immobile lump with a few tentacles sticking out here and there. He seems to have been spray-painted with bronze colored paint. He controls his servants by telepathy which we observe as him furrowing his brow. At some point, David and Dr Blake are captured when a hole randomly opens in the ground below their feet. And they have to be rescued by the army and Dr. Kelston (he seems to be in love with Patricia Blake).
The last scenes are of the whole human team running away from the sand pit as the space ship begins to depart with a bomb that the army planted in it about to explode. In the last scene David wakes up and runs into his parents’ room to discover that the whole thing was a nightmare. He goes back to his room and falls asleep. But at four-thirty he’s awakened by noise and sees exactly the same sight of the saucer landing in the sand pit. The End.
My thoughts on this movie. Where to begin? Okay, so the whole movie drips with 1950’s cold-war paranoia. Every character portrayal is over the top and the dialog is pretty hokey. The astronomer’s explanation why the Martians are aware of this atomic rocket project makes no sense at all. And the idea that a local astronomer can summon an army by calling the Pentagon is pretty hilarious. As for the aliens, the costumes and the scenery in the tunnels are laughably bad and the space ship looks like a 1950’s set designer’s idea of a 2000’s manufacturing space. The special effects, mainly, an infra-red “ray gun” is pathetic. On the other hand, the personality of the boy; David is sympathetic and Dr. Blake comes off as a compassionate woman which is always attractive. And the whole action of the army in their “war” against the aliens is ridiculous. The colonel leads his troops into the tunnels and he’s firing machine guns at mutants instead of his gunners doing that. But it’s a great bit of nostalgia. The terrible special effects and the vintage military clips from WWII training footage is wonderful. And all the B-movie and television actors like Leif Erickson, Hillary Brooke (The Abbot and Costello Show), Barbara Billingsley (Leave it to Beaver), Robert Shayne (Inspector Henderson on the Superman Show) and Richard Deacon (Mel Cooley on the Dick Van Dyke Show) are so familiar and comforting. I highly recommend this movie for anyone who loves schlocky old sci-fi.
Guillermo del Toro is a horror story aficionado. He really loves the genre and has been dreaming for decades about filming Frankenstein. And being a “serious” director, he of course wants his version to be the definitive
one. Making the picture for Netflix means there will be a lot of cash available for sets, makeup, special effects and all the other expensive aspects of modern moviemaking. So, this movie will probably be visually stunning. And since del Toro has been around for a while and made several popular and critically acclaimed films with fantastical themes there is a good chance that his Frankenstein will have many good qualities.
The only question I have is whether anyone wants to see another Frankenstein. I’ve seen several film versions of the story and many years ago I read Mary Shelley’s novel. I’m not sure there’s anything left to dig out of that mine. In a way, the modern version of Frankenstein is Blade Runner. Man playing God and making men after his own image and then treating them badly is the story of Eldon Tyrell creating the replicants and then one of them; Roy Batty hunting him down and then killing his creator for making him a lesser being.
Do we still want the nineteenth century guess at what genetic engineering would look like? In the twenty first century we kind of already have the technology to play God. We could make a Frankenstein’s monster (or more like a Roy Batty). Do we still need the guy with the bolts sticking out of his neck?
Well, that’s the question I’m asking myself. I remember when Kenneth Branagh directed himself as Victor Frankenstein in a 1994 version with, of all people, Robert De Niro as the monster. It was really awful. And I think that may have quenched any future appetite on my part for this story.
Now maybe I’m completely wrong. Maybe this will be a stunning production that captures something from Shelley’s story that elevates the movie into a great entertainment. I’ll be waiting for the movie to premiere on Netflix and I’ll see what the critics have to say. But I’m deeply skeptical.
I think the future of fantasy and horror will require new stories that speak to us in this age of artificial intelligence and genetic engineering. But even stories like “The Matrix” and “Blade Runner” seem to be recycling old ideas. It’s going to take a poet with a PhD in cybernetics or gene splicing to make the next great mythical story. And who knows, maybe we’re tired of horror stories altogether. Maybe we’re looking for the next great fairy tale with a hero who lives “happily ever after.” Maybe in the next story the monster doesn’t hate and destroy his creator but pities and helps him instead. Now that would be a real curveball and might sell a hundred million tickets. That would be a story I’d pay to see. We could all use a feel-good story. In fact. we’re dying for one.
May I offer up this the 1985 SciFi Enemy Mine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_Mine_(film) )? It is an excellent adaptation of Barry B. Longyear’s novella of the same name, Directed by Wolfgang Petersen (of Das Boot fame). It had a low budget (40 Million) and its special effects are well, dated even for 1985. Excellent acting by Dennis Quaid and Louis Gosset as the principals. Bombed at the box office as it was Neither Star Wars, Dune, nor Wrath of Khan.
I would also like to add in the war film department the 1969 film Battle Of Britain . To say the storyline is weak is an understatement (although it is briefly redeemed by Susannah York prancing about in her knickers). The killer here is the aerial fight scenes. These involve LARGE numbers of actual Spitfires, Me109 and Heinkel 111 aircraft (Me109 and Heinkels being part of the Spanish Air Force). They are well scripted and had input from Douglass Baeder and Air Marshall Dowding. It has a G rating but some scenes are almost too realistic and freaked out the 8-year-old me, who dunned my dad into taking me to the movie.
I always thought this was a great short story. What a perfect subject for an easily made mini-movie. No super complicated special effects. Some old clothes and props. I like it.
I watched “Barry Lyndon” for the first time last night. I read that it was one of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpieces. And I do respect Kubrick’s art. But after watching it I realize that a masterpiece can be terrible entertainment.
(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)
The movie is the story of the career of Redmond Barry an Irish man who allowed his passions to dictate his fate to a degree that is painful to watch. He gets into a duel over a girl (his cousin) and this forces him to flee his home to avoid legal prosecution and then he joins the British Army during the Seven Years’ War and by deserting his service he ends up in the Prussian Army and after that he becomes first a spy and then a crooked gambler. And finally, he marries a rich English widow and attempts to become part of the nobility. And while attempting this he allows his philandering to alienate his wife and step-son and eventually lands him in a duel with this step-son in which Redmond loses a leg. Along the way his wife presents him with a son of his own and the little boy is tragically killed in a riding accident. He ends his life in exile returning to Europe to attempt to live off his ability to cheat at cards.
If this sounds like a ridiculous plot for a movie, it’s because, it is!
Ryan O’Neal plays Redmond and Kubrick directs the film as a straightforward narrative with very little dialog and only a few scenes that provide much in the way of emotional discovery. What this movie provides is cinematography. Beautiful landscapes, remarkable palaces and estates, perfectly lighted and photographed interior shots; all of the products of a master cinematographer. As a photographer myself I can appreciate the care with which the shots were set up and displayed for the viewer. And the costumes and battle scenes and rural settings are amazing. But that’s all you get. The story moves forward at a glacial pace and there really isn’t anyone in the story (except the six-year-old little boy who dies) that you care about at all. Redmond himself is a selfish, dishonest man. And he is surrounded with mostly the same kinds of people. Who can I recommend this movie to? I guess photographers, cinematographers and diehard fans of Stanley Kubrick. It’s just too slow and empty and bleak for a general audience. It’s visually beautiful and emotionally empty. Sorry.
I wanted to do a movie review. I’ve recorded Barry Lyndon and was going to watch it. But I got home late from work and the movie is three hours long and I thought I might fall asleep before I could write a review of it. So, I’ll wait for a better opportunity.
But it got me thinking about all those lists of the top twenty, fifty, one hundred or two hundred movies of all time. So, I looked at a bunch of lists. Some by leading directors, some by professional critics and some by just regular people.
I was horrified.
So many movies that I know are truly awful get on these lists. It makes you wonder if there can truly be a list of the top twenty movies of all time, never mind the top one hundred. One list from IMDB had, “The Shawshank Redemption” as the second-best movie of all time. It had, “Raging Bull” as the fourth-best. I find both of these rankings impossible. There are literally dozens of movies better than either one of these (in my opinion). By the same token, the list made up by famous directors also had movies listed that I’ve seen that were awful. Any top 100 list that includes, “Eraserhead” needs to be scrutinized very carefully to see if the judges have been using LSD at the time of the survey.
Okay, maybe there is no such thing as an objective list of the best films. But surely there must be a way to write an algorithm that incorporates several criteria to eliminate the worst excesses of either hyper-artistic avant-gardism and knuckle-dragging philistinism and provide a solid dependable list of very good films to look at. I think it can be done.
One thing though. I think it is necessary to divide the list into categories. Comedies, dramas, action-adventure and other genre movies need to be judged separately. It’s too difficult comparing films in different categories against each other. And in a way it’s unhelpful. Someone who hates comedies isn’t going to agree that any comedy can be better than the films he likes. And vice versa.
But for today’s post I’m going to ask the audience to take an active role. Pick one movie that you think has been neglected by critics that deserves to be elevated to a loftier status. And then pick a movie that is hailed by critics or the public as outstanding that in your opinion stinks. If you can only do one or the other, please feel free to provide that. I’m always looking for good movies to watch and I think it will be interesting to hear what movie you think doesn’t deserve the acclaim it currently enjoys.
I’ll start the ball rolling. Hitchcock’s, “Vertigo” always ends up in the top twenty movies according to high-brow critics and top flight directors. I’ve seen it and think it’s terrible. I’m not sure what exactly all the hype is about but it must be the “cinematography.” Something about camera angles. Well, they can keep it.
A movie I think has been overlooked is an earlier Coen Brothers movie, “Miller’s Crossing.” Gabriel Byrne is the protagonist; a gangster named Tom Reagan who works for Leo O’Bannon played enthusiastically by Albert Finney. John Turturro and Steve Buscemi are also part of the cast. True to the Coen Brothers style, there is over the top violence and emotional havoc in all directions but the effect is powerful and very interesting. If you like gangster movies this one is worth a watch.
Here’s yet another movie I haven’t seen in forty years. Although in a sense this is the first time I’m seeing parts of it because it’s the “director’s cut” which added twenty additional minutes to a movie that was already 161 minutes long.
I’ll dispense with the idea of plot spoilers. The whole movie is the confession by aged composer Antonio Salieri of his “murder” thirty-some-odd years before of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, a man he openly admits produced music of a divine quality. Basically, Salieri sets out to destroy Mozart as a way of taking revenge on God for giving the gift of producing sublime works of musical art to a man he judges to be obscene and undeserving instead of to himself whom he judges to be pious and deserving.
Over the course of several years, he does everything imaginable to ensure Mozart cannot make enough money to flourish including using his influence with Emperor Joseph II of Austria to discourage any patronage from the nobility. Eventually he discovers that Mozart has a deep-seated neurosis around his father’s dissatisfaction with the way Mozart lived his life and after his father’s death Salieri impersonates Mozart’s father’s ghost by showing up as a masked figure to commission Mozart to compose a requiem mass. Salieri knows that Mozart will assume the mass is for his father and this will further injure his physical and mental health.
Finally, because of mental stress, malnutrition, alcoholism and probably tuberculosis Mozart collapses during a performance of one of his operas. Salieri takes advantage of Mozart’s wife Constanze’s absence to persuade Mozart to work through the night to try to complete the mass which Salieri hopes to pass off as his own during Mozart’s own funeral as his final insult to God. But Constanze arrives just in time to take away the manuscript from Salieri and mourn for her husband as he expires.
All of this story is told as a confession by Salieri to a priest who arrives at Salieri’s room in a mental hospital where he was installed after attempting suicide on account of guilt for killing Mozart. But at the end of the film he is unrepentant, insane and declares himself the patron saint of mediocrities, a man whose works of art are completely forgotten by the world, while Mozart’s music continuously grows more and more popular and celebrated over time.
Basically, this movie is a tour de force by F. Murray Abraham playing Salieri with Tom Hulce as Mozart coming in a close second. But let’s face it. No one is watching a three-hour period piece about Mozart unless he wants to hear the music. Between the actual recordings of his chamber music and generous chunks from several of his operas this is not just a theatrical presentation. It’s a concert too.
And for that reason, I don’t think I can recommend this movie to anyone who dislikes classical music. I believe it would be painful to watch that much of something that doesn’t appeal to you. I’m not sure if even the theatrical release version of the movie at 161 minutes would be short enough for the non-music lover. But for people who don’t mind a little opera sprinkled on their corn flakes this might be a movie to consider. I thought it was pretty good.
Today I watched the old movie “Gunga Din” for like the trillionth time. And it has all the same silly things going on every time I see it. The gags are telegraphed, the sentiment is slapped on with a cement trowel, the improbabilities are piled to the sky. You name it.
But watching the three leads; Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen, and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. go through their paces as Kipling’s three sergeants is a never-ending treat that I can watch several times a year probably until they finally bury me. It’s a joy to behold.
And the picture works as both a comedy and an adventure story. And the supporting cast (including an elephant named Annie) provide plenty of support and opportunity for our heroes to search for treasure, destroy British Army discipline, romance the girl or save the day. And you know, I think I like the fact that even when it was being made, the British Raj was already a sore point for the social justice types but this movie plays up the “white man’s burden” aspect of the story even more than needed to match the historical era.
Sam Jaffe’s Gunga Din really is a minor role right up until the critical juncture in the story where he saves the day. But he does give the regimental bhisti his due. And the actors portraying the army officers and the officious Bertie Higginbotham, all acquit themselves with the expected amount of British bluster.
So, what makes this movie fun? Despite the well-acted lead characters, I think the success of this movie is thanks to the unflagging action, both comic and adventure. The heroes are constantly fighting savage tribesmen, jumping off cliffs into rivers, breaking out of jail by means of elephant powered building demolition and fighting their way through a saloon full of Scottish highlanders. They only slow down when poisoning Bertie Higginbotham at an engagement party. Armies of strangling Thuggees are no match for these soldiers three as they roll out their “three musketeers / all for one and one for all” routine to frustrate the Thug Guru’s master plan to defeat the British and restore India to the greatness it had known before Alexander the Great had slapped it around in the fourth century BC.
So, I have to state which of the three sergeants is my personal favorite. Now Douglas Fairbanks Jr.’s Sgt. Ballantine is never in the running. He’s the romantic lead and thereby much abused by his fiancée’s humiliating attentions. And despite the excellent work done by Cary Grant as the ebullient Sgt. Archibald Cutter I have to give the win to Victor McLaglen’s Sgt. MacChesney. Just on the strength of the facial expressions that he manages when the Colonel confronts him with the prospect of Bertie Higginbotham replacing Ballantine, I’d have to give him the prize. But there are just so many great scenes where he steals the show. Even pleading with an elephant using “baby talk” to get it to take medicine always cracks me up. And it really is McLaglen with his hand in the elephant’s mouth.
So why can’t they make movies like this anymore? I don’t think it’s the actors. There are plenty of those who could perform these parts. It’s the writers and directors. Either they can’t or won’t give us good stories. Maybe the producers just won’t allow them. But whatever it is, that’s where we are. And I can live with that. I have my DVD and it’ll last for longer than I will.
“Now in Injia’s sunny clime,
Where I used to spend my time
A-servin’ of ’Er Majesty the Queen,
Of all them blackfaced crew
The finest man I knew
Was our regimental bhisti, Gunga Din.”