BLONDE VENUS
***½
USA
Mother love mixed in with bits of nudity, adultery, prostitution and a
musical number titled "Hot Voodoo", where Dietrich emerges from
a gorilla costume. She plays a housewife who, in order to make money to help cure her husband
of a fatal illness, returns to her former career as a
nightclub entertainer.
Audiences initially rejected all this, since they
preferred Marlene in more exotic settings, and not necessarily as a New
York hausfrau. Audiences actually had a point since the contemporary New
York setting lends it a certain pretension of realism. This type of
melodramatic nonsense really belongs in the type of Hollywood studio
recreation of a foreign land that made the previous collaborations between
this star and director work so well. Not that this particular one doesn't
have its moments: see "Hot Voodoo", where Marlene Dietrich emerges from
a gorilla costume.
dir: Josef von Sternberg
ph: Bert Glennon
cast: Marlene Dietrich, Herbert Marshall, Cary Grant,
Dickie Moore, Gene Morgan, Rita La Roy
BOUDU SAVED FROM DROWNING
***½
USA
A self-righteous book dealer saves a bum from
drowning and brings him into his home.
One of those social satires where an impoverished, uncultured outsider
is called in to point out the hypocrisies of the upper middle class. A lot of
it works thanks to the mischievous, captivating naivety Simon brings to
Boudu, but it lacks the flow of Renoir's best work.
wr/dir: Jean Renoir
cast: Michel Simon, Charles Granval, Marcelle Hainia,
Séverine Lerczinska, , Jean Dasté, Jacques Becker
FANNY
*****
France
A direct continuation from "Marius"
(1931) and itself followed by "César" (1936), this is
arguably the warm, witty and devastating highlight of Marcel Pagnol's
Fanny trilogy. The vibrant, lovable characters already established in "Marius"
continue to evolve with poignancy and astute observation. The actors
are uniformly delightful, particularly the incomparable Raimu, a life
force as César the temperamental bar owner.
dir: Marc Allégret
wr: Marcel Pagnol
cast: Raimu, Fernand Charpin, Orane Demazis, Pierre
Fresnay, Alida Rouffe, Auguste Mouriès, Robert Vattier, Milly Mathis
FORBIDDEN
***
USA
One of those early melodramas where a woman suffers for a married lover
for decades - and in this case, suffers hardcore: she bears a child, gives
up said child, kills a husband - there's more. Plausibility is a
non-issue.
It's hard to say what, of all people, attracted Frank Capra to
this material, but he pushes the tearjerking at a breezy pace (it's among
his least sentimental films) and the leads are remarkably unaffected and
charming. Those who only know Ralph Bellamy as the sap in screwball
comedies are bound to be shocked at his behaviour here.
dir: Frank Capra
cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Adolphe Menjou, Ralph Bellamy,
Dorothy Peterson, Henry Armetta
FREAKS
****
GRAND HOTEL
****
HAPPINESS
***½
USSR
A hapless farmer seeks fortune.
An uncompromisingly black, frequently absurd and often very funny Soviet
comedy, if a little difficult to follow it times. Its savage assault on
the clergy would still grant it controversy today.
wr/dir: Aleksandr Medvedkin
cast: Nikolai Cherkasov, Mikhail Gipsi, Viktor Kulakov, Lidiya
Nenasheva, Yelena Yegorova, Pyotr Zinovyev
HORSE FEATHERS
****½
I AM A
FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG
****
USA
A hysterical and uncannily gripping exposé of the injustices of the
then-contemporary judicial and prison systems, with a down-and-out Paul
Muni inadvertently getting involved in a stick-up and sent to the chain
gang. He is mangled by demonic prison wardens until he escapes, reforms
and gets stuck in another kind of prison, with a shrill, nymphomaniac harpy
blackmailing him into marriage.
Although socially conscious, the sermonising gets
heavy-handed and more than a tad exploitative. But whatever compulsion or
catharsis is involved in watching a sympathetic, upstanding man's fortunes
veer from worse to agonising, this movie gets it. And it ends on a
famously haunting note.
dir: Mervyn LeRoy
cast: Paul Muni, Glenda Farrell, Helen Vinson, Preston Foster,
Allen Jenkins, Edward Ellis, John Wray, Hale Hamilton, Harry Woods
KUHLE WAMPE
****
Germany
Although Brecht was involved in Pabst's 1931 adaptation of The Threepenny
Opera, he later renounced the film. He had much tighter control over this
agitprop exposé of Berlin working class life during the Depression, and
he therefore took greater pride in it. It's a superior film to Pabst's in
any case, borrowing some effective techniques from the Russians as well as
developing a sophisticated visual style of its own - the images are not
only starkly, eerily beautiful, they carry a newsreel immediacy that is
evocative of the period. The title refers to a camp for the dispossessed,
where the profoundly unfortunate family of the heroine ends up, countering
their squalor through communal drinking and a rabid fixation on tidiness.
Even if the call to revolution that drives the picture is unambiguously
intended to serve left-wing ideals, it's inevitable that its portrait of a
disenfranchised youth bent on political upheaval is viewed in the context
of the rising Nazism that put Hitler in power nine months after the
premiere.
dir: Slatan Dudow
wr: Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Ottwald
ph: Günther Krampf
cast: Hertha Thiele, Ernst Busch, Martha Wolter, Adolf Fischer,
Lili Schoenborn-Anspach, Max Sablotzki, Alfred Schaefer
LOVE ME TONIGHT
*****
USA
A Parisian tailor falls in love with a princess
and poses as a count.
This feathery, shimmery musical was enormously innovative for its
time: everyday street sounds
gradually build into a chorus in its captivating opening sequence;
a song Chevalier stars humming in his store carries the story from
contemporary Paris to a secluded fairytale castle etc.
Maybe it's a 1930s thing, but Rouben Mamoulian and his army
of writers get away with a lot of things that in themselves are
extraordinarily silly, as when
a horde of horses and huntsmen are projected in slow motion so as not to
disturb the sleeping deer. And there's also a nymphomaniac heiress, a trio
of hysterical old aunts and a plethora of quotable double entendres. It's
a delight - a silly, bawdy delight from beginning to end.
dir: Rouben Mamoulian
wr: Samuel Hoffenstein, Waldemar Young, George Marion Jnr
ph: Victor Milner
ad: Hans Dreier
cast: Maurice Chevalier, Jeanette MacDonald, C. Aubrey Smith,
Charlie Ruggles, Myrna Loy, Charles Butterworth, Elizabeth
Patterson, Ethel Griffies, Blanche Frederici
THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME
*****
THE MUMMY
***
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THE OLD DARK HOUSE
*****
USA
Though not nearly as famous as James Whale's other comic horrors, this is
arguably the wittiest, most chilling and all around best. The set-up -
young travellers are forced by a storm to seek lodging in an isolated
Gothic mansion populated by weirdos - may not yet have been a cliché in
1932, but Whale certainly treats it like one and peppers it with giddy,
bizarre British humour.
Visually, it's his most sophisticated film - his compositions
are more stylish and inventive than in either of his other classics - and
it's also the one most tightly crammed with oddballs: there's top-billed
Boris Karloff as a horrifically scarred, drunken, unstable butler, who
communicates in unintelligible grunts and wails; the piercing,
fundamentalist Eva Moore, who out-Una-O'Connors Una O'Connor; the
ever-screwy Ernest Thesiger as the effete, shifty host; an odd, tiny,
twitchy and bizarrely terrifying man named Brember Wills as the pyromaniac
locked in the attic; and, most unforgettably, a woman named Elspeth
Dudgeon (credited as John Dudgeon) as Sir Roderick Femm, the senile,
bedridden, squeaky-voiced 102-year-old baronet, who makes funny noises all
through the night. There's also the old lady from Titanic in the
shape of a young, delicate starlet and the soon to be much more famous
Melvyn Douglas and Charles Laughton among the civilised guests.
It's beguiling to watch Whale send up the still-quite-young
horror conventions while at the same time exploiting them to ratchet up
the tension. It's hard to say how it works, but it does terrifically. The
climactic showdown is as absurd and outrageous as it is intense and
unnerving.
dir: James Whale
wr: Benn W. Levy, R.C. Sherriff
ph: Arthur Edeson
cast: Boris Karloff, Melvyn Douglas, Charles Laughton,
Raymond Massey, Gloria Stuart, Lilian Bond, Ernest Thesiger, Eva Moore,
Brember Wills, Elspeth Dudgeon
POIL DE CAROTTE
***½
USA
A young red-headed boy is neglected by his
father and mistreated by his mother.
A sensitive, affecting cross of rural drama and Cinderella, sentimental in parts, but never
in the saccharine Hollywood style. All of the characterisations are in
fact psychologically acute in a style that would only become
familiar to Hollywood decades later.
wr/dir: Julien Duvivier
cast: Robert Lynen, Harry Baur, Catherine Fonterey,
Louis Gouthier, Simone Aubry, Macime Fromiot, Colette Segall, Christiane
Dor
QUE VIVA MEXICO
***
USA/Mexico
When Sergei Eisenstein went to Hollywood, he
first opted to direct this semi-documentary account of Mexican life - and
death - but never completed it. It has since been reconstructed in various
versions, of which the 1979 one is considered the most faithful to his
aspirations. As such, the film naturally holds a certain fascination for
film scholars, but its appeal is otherwise limited - as is its
endurability, since the film clearly wanted Eisenstein himself to edit it.
It was to have been his first sound film and he wrote the voiceover
narration for it, which, in this context, comes off as terribly
pretentious and never quite gels with the score.
The film was also to have been divided into a
prologue, an epilogue and four chapters, the fourth of which only survives
in stills - which is a particular shame since it looks like it would have
been the most interesting.
dir: Sergei Eisenstein
wr: Grigori Aleksandrov, Sergei Eisenstein
ph: Eduard Tisse
ed: Grigori Aleksandrov, Esfir Tobak
RED DUST
***½
USA
Brando did in Streetcar and maybe Paul Newman did in a couple of
things, but beyond that few men in Hollywood over the past century have
oozed sex so effortlessly and overpoweringly as Clarke Gable does in this
otherwise overwrought dinosaur about the sex life of a rubber plantation
boss in Indochina. If Clarke Gable isn't your kind of thing - and even if
he is - you also get to enjoy Jean Harlow taking a bubble bath in a barrel
and saying some rather naughty things. As a prim wife temporarily
disoriented by carnal impulses, Mary Astor gets in her way for a
significant stretch and she's lovely, as ever, but misplaced.
dir: Victor Fleming
cast: Clarke Gable, Jean Harlow, Mary Astor, Gene Raymond,
Donald Crisp, Tully Marshall, Forrester Harvey, Willie Fung
RED-HEADED WOMAN
****
USA
Before this scandalous comedy about a ruthless small-town social climber,
Jean Harlow was a blank face with hips and tits. It was as the titular
redhead that the archetypal platinum blonde first got to show off her
natural gift for tough, sassy screwball.
The picture is also notable for its pre-Code permissiveness
(Harlow ends up neither dead nor domesticated), and for a script which
Anita Loos reworked from a reportedly much soggier draft by F. Scott
Fitzgerald.
dir: Jack Conway
wr: Anita Loos, F. Scott Fitzgerald
cast: Jean Harlow, Chester Morris, Lewis Stone, Leila
Hyams, Una Merkel, Henry Stephenson, Charles Boyer, May Robson, Harvey
Clark
THE ROME EXPRESS
***
SCARFACE
****
SHANGHAI EXPRESS
***½
USA
A notorious prostitute runs into an old flame on
a train hijacked by Chinese revolutionaries.
Efficient star vehicle. Dated, certainly, but superbly photographed
and still quite entertaining.
dir: Josef von Sternberg
cast: Marlene Dietrich, Clive Brook, Warner Oland, Anna
May Wong, Eugene Pallette, Lawerence Grant, Louise Closser Hale, Gustav
von Seyffertitz
TROUBLE IN PARADISE
****½
USA
The romance between two international jewel
thieves is threatened by the attractions of their latest victim, a wealthy
Parisian widow.
A mischievous, sophisticated romantic comedy, much-loved by those
who remember it. It drags in patches during its middle section -
when too much time is spent with the uncharismatic wealthy widow - but for
the most part sparkles with wit and imagination.
dir: Ernst Lubitsch
wr: Grover Jones, Samson Raphaelson
ph: Victor Milner
cast: Herbert Marshall, Miriam Hopkins, Kay Francis,
Charlie Ruggles, Edward Everett Horton, C. Aubrey Smith, Robert
Grieg
VAMPYR
*****
Germany/France
A young traveller staying at a remote inn and
witnesses unnatural events throughout the night.
Dreyer belongs among the few filmmakers to realise the full capacity of the
horror genre, particularly the subtly unsettling impact that
suggestion can have over the viewer. In this, he was decades ahead of his time - in some ways, it
seems he remains decades ahead of our time.
The hazy, over-exposed look of
the film hasn't aged well - or at least the prints haven't - so that some of the imagery is difficult to
decipher today, but even then, it tends to contribute towards the film's
evocative, dream-like feel rather than detract from it.
dir: Carl Theodor Dreyer
wr: Christen Jul, Carl Theodor Dreyer
ph: Rudolph Maté, Louis Née
cast: Julian West, Maurice Schutz, Rena Mandel, Sybille
Schmitz, Jan Hieronimko, Henriette Gérard
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