Viva Zapata! | Twentieth Century Fox | Elia Kazan | Marlon Brando / Anthony Quinn / Jean Peters | 1952
i liked it. Brando and Kazan did better work elsewhere though. amazing filmmaking serviceable screenplay shit supporting actors.
Blackboard Jungle | MGM | Richard Brooks | Glenn Ford / Sidney Poitier / Louis Calhern | 1955
need to write a longform piece on the shitness of this, it's monstrous, the most morally misguided shit i've ever seen. there are so many scenes with Margaret Hayes getting ogled and catcalled by the sensationalized switchblade-unsheathing inner-city toughs as the hot teacher, with Louis Calhern as the staff cynic (who talks about them like they're animals) to ask her if she's "dressing like that" to attract "certain kind of attention (i forget the exact problematic innuendo but it was gross) (at which point Hayes chuckles as if we're supposed to find this dialogue funny?). later after Hayes
is assaulted Glenn Ford's character's wife (Anne Francis) hindsight slut-shames her in a really needless scene. five years after Sidney Poitier played a tormented doctor in No Way Out, the only movie of its era to depict collective black defensive action against white racists in a heroic light, he's here playing a 'troubled student' who Glenn Ford (whose role would be played by Tom Hanks today maybe) sees potential in. there's an atrocious scene where he whitesplains to Poitier that the success of George Washington Carver and Joe Louis demonstrates that racism is no longer any excuse and then he starts bragging about how progressive the times are now and it's so easy now for black people to boostrap themselves in these modern times. it's so fucked. the end is a copout where the 'leader' of the delinquents is kind of scapegoated as the root cause of the other students' misbehavior (they were just knifing dudes but now that the bad influence is out of their lives they're cured!). there's a little bit of sociology lecturing, and a shoehorned scene that just fawns over the U.S. education system in areas that "aren't so troubled" (i mean if that sounds bad enough wait till you hear the content of this shit: it's temporarily disillusioned liberal do-gooder Glenn Ford returning to his mentor to refortify his dashed hopes, goddamn). Richard Brooks fucking sucked right? Stanley Kramer couldn't have fucked this up worse. the scene where the kids are destroying the poor mousy teacher's record collection is every boarder's worst nightmare.
The Outlaw | Howard Hughes | Walter Huston / Jane Russell / Thomas Mitchell | 1943
it's just like the screencap just a lot of stiff posing in doorways. Hughes was clearly cinematically illiterate, i will hate him forever for running RKO into the ground but i at least thought this was supposed to be kinda good. but nope! there's a lot of fake-folksy cornball preening that's buttered over with an extra cornball-cutesy score. i mean it's just like four actors standing around each other. the guy who plays Billy the Kid was shit. Walter Huston is so good it's tragic how massive the waste of his performance is here. damn.
Play It as It Lays | Universal | Frank Perry | Tuesday Weld / Anthony Perkins | 1972
i just read the book, which is easily my favorite Didion and just the most searing read. sometimes i wince at really spare terse prose but this is definitely perfection of that mode, the sun-devoured entanglement of pithy, freakish vignettes all gnarling to abrupt terminus. the lazily acid dialogue of characters in a perpetual stupor of amorality. perfect rhythmic sequencing of brief pungent details. it's a book you gotta associate with the most agonizing kind of sunlight, total erasure in an enveloping white heat, the golden allure of California melting into the blanched, razed despair of the final frontier of American sanity...anyway what huh oh shit i was supposed to be talking about the movie. the movie's okay. it gets some things right but then there are other things that should've been layups that were completely whiffed on. it's just kind of a redundant and incomplete experience when you've already read the novel's perfection.
Arsene Lupin | MGM | Jack Conway | the Barrymore bros | 1932
this movie's nothing to write home about. but it's also kinda effortlessly wonderful in the way only Old Hollywood could be. i watched it at the top of the morning, with a little bit of sun glare on my TV, and i got so thrilled by the constant somersaults and reversals in the story and the mechanics of the performances, and all the magical artifice. an utter delight!
The Mad Miss Manton | RKO | Leigh Jason | Barbara Stanwyck / Henry Fonda | 1938
the conceit is amusing for ten minutes but then it wears out its welcome. the dialogue is mostly a barrage of limp wit with some occasional zingers in the mix, but the plot is a weightless trifle that floats out of sight in the first twenty minutes and never quite returns into focus. Stanwyck knows she's playing a more caricatured or stylized character -- the socialite prankster (i guess technically you would call this screwball though when you think of the really good screwball out there...this just doesn't stack up) all becalmed frivolity in getting knocked about by the jams and twists in the plot. or to put it another way, she's the only character who treats it all as a roller coaster ride kinda, isn't taking all the murder lunacy so seriously. Henry Fonda is a straight man of sorts, not too effective. i feel like this is just a dribble of crayon the same Stanwyck/Fonda screwball dynamic that The Lady Eve refines into lean surefooted perfection.
Beware, My Lovely | RKO | Harry Horner | Robert Ryan / Ida Lupino | 1952
i'm a big Robert Ryan fanatic and i'd never seen this cuz who tf is Harry Horner? well boy howdy did Eddie Czar of Noir Muller spend what seemed like a half hour meticulously elucidating every scrap of production history trivia he could get his grubby mitts on, so now i'm a goddamn Harry Horner expert. he was mainly a production designer and so he directs in a y'know 'classical' theatrical way, facilitating an amazing barrage of long-take arty compositions of Ryan's and Lupino's faces interplaying with the period knickknack-ridden decor. but it's a good little story too, genuinely chilling at parts, disquieting.
The Suspect | Universal | Robert Siodmak | Charles Laughton!!!! | 1944
between Scarlet Street and Siodmak's Uncle Harry from the year after, there was definitely a mid-forties sub-cycle of movies about naive dopey older men set upon by shrewish wives or aunts or whoever it is...the protag played by Edward G Robinson or George Sanders or in this case the ever brilliant Charles Laughton, is driven to murder in pursuit of some tempting woman...it's all great noir fodder. this is good shit.
Enchanted Island | RKO | Allan Dwan | Dana Andrews / some assholes | 1958
fuck this shit ass flick. garish racism/misogyny, all-around ineptitude. the diminishing returns of the Classical Hollywood western/adventure/action brand of auteurism. i guess Dwan was completely out of steam (even tho he did the stellar Silver Lode and Tennessee's Partner just a few years before), like i wonder what his sixties work looks like, jesus. Dana Andrews looks older in this than he does in the mid-60s flicks i've seen him in. he's an actor born for psychodramatic close-up, slick black-n-white, not photographed in this inept washed-out glaring n blaring Technicolor. the camera just seems to emphasize how pudgy and unremarkable Dana Andrews is, his jowls seem bigger than they probably are somehow.