Mark's Musings

Yikes. This kind of film is even less enjoyable to me than Westerns are. This is number 63 on AFI’s 2007 top 100 list, and I’m pretty sure it’ll be one that I never watch again.

Cabaret is not a bad film, but it’s about people I find hard to care about, and it gets kinda artsy in spots, which is deadly to me. Specifically, the opening and the closing sequences (with the MC played by Joel Grey) are trying to be Meaningful-with-a-capital-M. And there are the little scenes thrown in here and there that are Symbolic-with-a-capital-Sym.

It probably would have helped had I felt sympathetic towards Sally Bowles (Liza Minnelli), but I was mostly cringing when she was on screen. The one thing she had going for her was that she makes no pretence at being anything other than a fun-seeking American in the middle of pre-war Germany.

She meets Brian Roberts (Michael York) when he’s looking for a place to live, and she immediately takes him under her wing — the impetus being that she can finally speak English again. His character is actually likeable, and he puts up with an amazing amount of poor treatment by Sally.

Overshadowing everything is the rise of Nazism, and there are a couple of scenes to bring this out. But of course we’re supposed to use it as something to highlight (contrast with? underscore? there’s a word here I’m looking for but failing to find; I blame my gin and tonic) the relationship between Roberts and Bowles.

There’s a brief moment of happiness, actually, but it’s too brief. Maybe it’s really me just projecting happiness onto the couple. Insert debate here. But in the end, Bowles takes matters into her own hands. Anything else would be out of character. The happiness was illusory, as far as she was concerned, and the sooner Roberts confronts that, the better off he’ll be. Or at least something like that, anyway — did I mention I don’t care for these sorts of films?

And then it has an Ending. Yeah, with a capital E. Sigh.

Some Like it Hot is 22nd on the AFI top 100 list. It is yet another Billy Wilder film. So this guy was prolific and good. A dangerous combination. Something that caught my eye, though, was the composer, Adolph Deutsch. His name keeps popping up as well, being the composer on The Maltese Falcon and The Apartment as well.

In any event, the last time I saw this film was as a pre-teen. I remembered thinking it was funny, but now that I see it as an adult, there is a whole level of humor here that I had completely missed, from double-entendres to the arrow on the floor indicator on the elevator. And this is not just funny, but hilarious right down to the last line, “Well, nobody’s perfect.”

The key features that make this film great include the tightly-woven plot, the excellent chemistry between Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, and the amazingly form-hugging outfits that Marilyn Monroe wears.

I should also note as an aside that this is the second film I’ve seen on this AFI list that includes a protagonist riding a bicycle. I’m not sure if there’s a list out there which catalogues all such films, but the fact that I just thought of it probably means such a list exists. Isn’t that rule 35 or something? If you think you came up with something original, you’re wrong?

Moving along. Joe E. Brown is playing nearly his last film role here as Osgood Fielding III — he’s in It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World and The Comedy of Terrors after this film, but that’s it, aside from some television appearances. So Some Like it Hot is not a bad film to wind down a career on, given his star status in the early 1930′s. He does such a wonderful job with his role as a rich old man just looking for love. There was always doubt in my mind whether he took “Daphne” at face value or knew all along she was a he. But the thing is that it doesn’t change the film at all either way.

There are plenty of clips from this film on YouTube, but I was hoping that there would be one specific one, from about three-quarters of the way through the film. Curtis’ Joe asks Lemmon’s Jerry, “Why would a man want to marry a man?” By the end, we know the film’s answer: “When he’s in love.”

The Searchers is all the way up at number 12 on the top-100 2007 AFI list. Alas, I am not a fan of westerns at all. I imagine this is a really great film to those who like a good Cowboys-n-Indians film, but I’m not among them. The fact that this was selected (by AFI) as the greatest western of all time only serves to reinforce that.

I mean, it was OK, but I just couldn’t get into it. It seemed loaded with clichés. You start off with the loner Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), then you meet the people he cares about. Once that’s done, the injuns attack and kidnap the wimminfolk. And then the loner goes after them with his sidekicks. The non-redshirt sidekick is none other than Jeffrey Hunter. Yes that Jeffrey Hunter! And he could not act in this film. Boy was that distracting. Wayne was fine as the Ethan, but Hunter, playing a part-English, part-Welsh, part-Native American Martin Pawley, was horrible. Maybe because he was sharing the screen with Wayne, but he just overacted everything.

The women are mostly there to serve as motivation for the men to do what they need to do, although this film does barely squeak by in Beschdel Test, just before a Comanche raid. One standout in this film is Vera Miles, who plays Laurie Jorgensen, and she not only has a fairly meaty role (for someone who isn’t a main character, I mean), but actually does a terrific job with it.

However, given the fact that westerns in general bore me, I found this film kind of tedious to get through. It took several nights of half-hour bursts to see the whole film. Here’s the thing, though: I have no idea why. If this were a sci-fi film, for example, I probably would have eaten it up, as the saying goes. Imagine the same exact plot, only with humans and aliens. After all, the role that the Native Americans are playing is The Other, and there’s no greater Other than extraterrestrials. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s an SF film out there that recycles the The Searchers plot. There were certainly elements of the first Star Wars film that borrowed from this, especially when Wayne & Co come back to a burned-out homestead, but not the plot.

I think one major stumbling block for me, aside from the fact that it’s, y’know, a western, was that Martin didn’t get any older and/or wiser in their multi-year search for Debbie (played in the latter part of the film by a teenaged Natalie Wood), who is Ethan’s niece and Martin’s sister-in-law. So while Debbie grows up, Martin does not.

Maybe that’s one of the problems I had with this film: there is no character arc to Martin or Ethan. They are who they are and the plot comes from how their characters influence and change the world around them. Martin starts off as a hot-headed kid, and he ends up that way. Ethan starts off as a man who does his own thing in his own way, and he ends up the same. Sure, they both would have liked things to have ended up differently, but they don’t and that’s that. The only bit that could be construed as development is that Ethan at first would rather see his niece dead because she’s the wife of a “Comanch”, and at the end (SPOILERS!) he’s just happy to see her alive again, and he takes her home. But there’s no way to show that that wasn’t his plan all along. And also, hello, if Debbie had children wouldn’t she want to be with them, or bring them home with her? Maybe she didn’t have any. One wonders how Ethan would have reacted to being a grand-uncle to a half-Indian-half-White baby, given his views on miscegenation.

This is the second film in the 2007 AFI top 100 list that I had never seen nor heard of before. It’s way down at number 80, but that belies its greatness. I’d put it ahead of Duck Soup for example.

It stars Jack Lemmon and Shirly MacLaine. Jack plays C. C. Baxter, a schlub who lets his superiors use his apartment for illicit affairs while he either waits patiently outside, or falls asleep on a park bench. MacLaine is Fran Kubelik, a lift operator for the company that Baxter works for. Their “meet cute” (a term I find awkward) happened before the film starts, but their romance doesn’t start until halfway through the film. Baxter goes a bit into creepy awkward stalker mode for a few lines, but it doesn’t seem to bother Kubelik. Maybe that scene needs to be rewritten or something.

Fred MacMurray is the CEO of the company Baxter works for, and in this film he plays a manipulative adulterer. This is the second film now (the first being Double Indemnity) that he’s been in that he doesn’t play the kind of characters I most know him for: benevolent Disney dads. I remember watching MacMurray when I was a kid in films like The Absent-Minded Professor, or The Shaggy Dog, or on TV as the dad in My Three Sons. It’s probably no accident that Billy Wilder was responsible for both The Apartment and Double Indemnity, both as writer and director.

The romance between Baxter and Kubelik is the heart of the film and, aside from the aforementioned creepy bit, is extremely well done, although a bit on the nerd-fantasy side of things. I really enjoyed watching the characters develop as well. Baxter has less of an arc than Kubelik, even though he’s in more of the film, but that’s because he starts off in love with her, whereas she starts off thinking of him as just a nice guy.

Finally, Jack Kruschen does a great job as the neighbor-doctor who helps Baxter out of a tight spot. He balances the nosiness and the helpfulness just right so that you agree with him while at the same time empathising with Baxter. A difficult feat to pull off, but he manages it nicely.

What a wonderful film this is. The Maltese Falcon is up at number 31 on the 2007 edition of the AFI top 100 list, but on my list it would be even higher.

What helps make this film so great is not just the acting, nor the directing, nor the cool camera shots, but the extremely tightly-woven plot. I love plots that twist and turn every which way, but remain internally consistent, and require multiple viewings to get all the nuances. I put Brazil in that category as well.

Humphrey Bogart plays an excellent P.I., Sam Spade, who manages to keep his head despite the fact that just about everyone around him is either lying, or out to get him. Or both. One scene when he’s at the top of his form takes place in his apartment, when Brigid and Cairo (Mary Astor and Peter Lorre) get into a fight and he actually talks the cops out of arresting everyone right then and there. It’s close, but they all three of them outsmart the cops with some sharp wit and extreme cleverness.

Much ado is made these days about the Lorre character being gay, and how they had to work around the Hays Code and the censors in order to get a homosexual character into the film, but it ultimately has no bearing on the story itself. Every character might be gay in this film and it doesn’t matter. Yes, Archer’s wife included. Actually, there’s a good film trivia question: what’s her first name? [Iva] What’s Archer’s first name, for that matter? [Miles]

What I’d rather make some ado about is the marketing for this film. Check out this poster:

See that? “A Story as Explosive as his Blazing Automatics”. Of course, Spade never gets into a shootout nor, for that matter, ever fires a gun. There’s something that kicks a tough-guy’s toughness up a notch when he can be tough even without a gun.

Everything is very neatly wrapped up by the end, except Spade’s relationship with Iva. But that just means we get to speculate on what happens next with them…

Sullivan’s Travels is the reason I started doing this AFI thing to begin with. Not specifically that film, though. Instead, I started for films I had never seen or even heard of for that matter.

You probably consider me a complete philistine for never having heard of Sullivan’s Travels before, but there it is. It was written and directed by Preston Sturges who I have heard of, although I can’t think why as there are no films on his filmography list at IMDb that I know.

The film is about John Sullivan, a comedy director, who wants to make a drama instead, to highlight the suffering in the world. The title of drama he wants to make is “O Brother Where Art Thou“, which was actually used in 2000 by the Coen brothers. Anyway, he has a series of mishaps where everything goes the opposite of what he intends, and it actually gets rather bleak near the end before it lightens up again.

The dialogue is snappy and the jokes are great. Joel McCrea, who plays the lead role, looked like he had a great time making the film, and it comes across to the viewer. Here the rapid-fire delivery style suited the picture, whereas in Double Indemnity, a film I saw at the start of this exercise, put me off by a similar style. Also, there’s an extended falling-in-the-pool scene that was very well done, but I don’t know my film history well enough to know if this was actually an homage to an even earlier version. I’d be surprised if there wasn’t one in a silent film, given the slapstick nature and the fact that no dialogue is required.

Sullivan is very generous with money. During one scene, he’s handing out $5 bills, over $70 in today’s money, to homeless people. In another, he gives $100 (over $1400) to a coffee shop owner. This is well after the Great Depression ended, so I think this goes to character more than it goes to making the audience feel good.

One last thing: I was amused to see was that, even as early as 1941, when this film was made, foley artists were already using the tire-squealing effect even when cars were driving on grass.

In the current film climate, where every film is an Gen-X TV/Comic nostalgia piece, a sequel, or a remake, it’s surprising that there are no sequels or remakes of Casablanca. On the IMDb website there are three other films named Casablanca listed — one of which appears to be gay porn — but none appears to be a remake. It’s hard to tell. The only version I’ve seen is the 1942 production, which is number 3 on the AFI top 100 list.

Anyway, I’ve always thought this film was excellent, despite the fact that Humphrey Bogart is a bit stiff (and stiff-lipped when kissing Ingrid Bergman), so I was happy to see it show up so quickly on the TiVo’s AFI recordings. And, although all but one scene was shot on a back lot in Hollywood, Michael Curtiz did a great job of making it seem like we’re in a foreign country. The plot is very tight even though there are three credited writers, and it works wonderfully well despite a few (very minor) flaws. There are enough little side-stories (such as the newlyweds that Rick helps out, and the character of Yvonne whom Rick dumps right at the beginning of the film) that the place seems real. And therefore the Rick/Ilsa story seems real as well.

The part I always wondered about, and maybe this says something more about me than about the film, is the did-they-or-didn’t-they the night before Rick gives Ilsa and Laszlo the letters of transit. It kind of matters, because in Paris Ilsa thought Victor was dead, but now she’s back again with him. But I suppose the mores of the time dictated that we would not be told, or shown any evidence one way or the other.

Another flaw was that Captain Renault’s (Claude Rains) character arc could have been a bit more well-defined, but I deliberately overlook this, choosing instead to assume he’s just an exceptionally quick thinker at the end of the film.

The film itself was based on a then-unproduced play called Everybody Comes to Rick’s, and wasn’t really expected to be so great. According to Wikipedia, they spent a bit over $1 million on the production, which is around $13.6 million in today’s dollars. Not exactly a blockbuster budget. It took in nearly $4 million (around $51 million today) which is quite a tidy profit.

And let me just end with noting how beautiful Ingrid Bergman was in 1942. Curtiz frequently showed her in soft focus with extra lighting to make her eyes sparkle, but on her it was overkill.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is number 73 on the 2007 AFI top 100 list. The screenplay was written by William Goldman, who also wrote All the President’s Men (which is also on the AFI list, at number 77). I know him best for The Princess Bride, myself.

I had seen the ending of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid at least twice, and I’m not sure why. Maybe it was part of a film retrospective, or maybe it was used to highlight unusual endings. Whatever the reason, I knew how this one was going to turn out, even though I had never seen the first 90% of it, so that colored my expectations somewhat. It’s about a couple of robbers — banks and trains seem to be their target of choice — who don’t have much of a life outside of robbing. They start off with a gang, but it quickly ends up just being the two of them plus the Sundance Kid’s girlfriend.

There were a few things I disliked about it, to start off with. First was the music. Except for the now-famous Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head, I found the score to be annoying. I was surprised to learn that Burt Bacharach wrote that score, because he’s usually better than this. Second was the excessive use of montages. I’ve only seen the film once now, but I can imagine I’d just fast-forward through these tedious sections. There’s one in the beginning during the credits (which, y’know, is generally fine), and then there’s one as they make their way to Bolivia, and then there’s an interminable one near the end as they rob bank after bank.

I should note, however, that I was somewhat hampered by the fact that the broadcast was pan-n-scanned, which meant the shots were horrible, with faces cut off, and half the action missing. I’ll have to see it again in widescreen.

So with the bad stuff out of the way, let me talk about what worked. The relationship between Butch and Sundance was great. They worked together well, and the actors (Paul Newman and Robert Redford) did a great job portraying that deep friendship. When you have two bad guys as the leads, you really need for them to be likeable in order to engage the audience and, despite the fact that they were doing some very bad things, they were still likeable characters.

In the middle of the film there’s a chase. They’re running from a “lawman” named Lefors who has employed a famous native-American tracker who goes by Lord Baltimore. Of course, whenever Newman said the name, it sounded like Lord Voldemort to me. I had to look it up afterwards. Anyway, Lefors is relentless. Butch and Sundance try several different tactics to get away from him, but he just keeps coming. Finally they jump in a river (just before the famous “I can’t swim” scene) as a last desperate measure to see if they can get away. Of course they do. The two “Banditos Yanquis” escape time after time from all sorts of scrapes and scraps, and there’s no reason to assume that the final showdown will end any differently. As I knew the ending, unfortunately, so what happens didn’t come as a surprise.

Goldman’s dialogue is another gem in this film. It comes as no surprise that it won the 1969 Best Screenplay Oscar. Butch and Sundance play off each other very well – the memorable quotes section on imdb only tells part of the story. And the “old prospector” character played by Strother Martin was perfectly written.

So, yeah, tighten up the montages, replace the score, and you’ve got yourself a film worth watching.

I have to admit I was surprised to see Duck Soup on the list.

For those who haven’t been reading this blog regularly, what I’ve been doing is giving some off-the-cuff impressions of the films from the American Film Institute’s “100 Years … 100 Movies” list. They originally came out with the list in 1997, and updated it for 2007. The TiVo software has the feature of being able to record any film on the AFI 100 list as it shows up on-air, so I’m seeing these films as they appear on the hard drive and not in any particular order.

Anyway, surprise: The Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup is 60th on the list. I love watching Marx Brothers films and if I happen to be channel-surfing and spot one, I’ll usually watch it to conclusion. However, other films of theirs are better (A Night at the Opera, for example), and that’s really the source of my surprise. The Wikipedia article on it states: “Duck Soup is now widely considered to be a Marx Brothers masterpiece.” Goodness, I wonder what I’m missing?

Sure, it’s classic Marx Brothers, with the sight gags, the slapstick, the rapid-fire one-liners (and multi-liners), and of course the trademark Harpo move of slinging his leg into his opponent’s hand. I am suddenly reminded that eleven years ago Rob Wheeler wrote an interactive fiction game called Four in One which is simultaneously frustrating and hilarious. Check it out if you want to take part in a Marx Brothers act.

But outside the Marxist gags, there’s the typical paper-thin plot, with Groucho playing Rufus T. Firefly, the easily-distracted leader of Freedonia. He’d rather woo a rich lady than run a country, and insists on going to war with Sylvania (which happened to also be the name of an electronics company at the time, but nobody seemed to care). And of course he pretty much is losing the war right up until the last minute when they capture the opposing leader who, as it turns out, would rather surrender his entire country than be pelted with fruit.

Funny? Yes. Top-100 material? Not really.

All the way down at number 46 on the 2007 version of the AFI Top-100 Film list, we get to It Happened One Night, a romance wrapped in an adventure. This one has a number of classic moments — moments that are well-known in movie history, including the “Walls of Jericho” (a blanket separating the two leads while they sleep in separate beds), and the hitchhiking scene where Claudette Colbert shows her bestockinged leg.

Many people have noted that Cobert is beautiful, but I’m not among them. She’s a great actor, make no mistake, but she doesn’t quite do it for me.

The plot surrounding the romance is a bit strange, with Clark Gable’s Peter Warne basically becoming a thief after Ellie (Colbert) gives away his last $10 (worth over $150 in today’s dollars!). He actually stole a car at one point. I guess we’re meant to assume that all the thievery is accounted for afterwards? But the romance itself is very nicely handled. Warne is sharp and witty, especially when he makes up a lie about kidnapping Ellie in order to keep a fellow bus passenger (Roscoe Karns) from ruining a potentially lucrative story.

Some interesting touches include having an autogyro (sort of like a tiny airplane with a helicopter blade above it), and being among the first films to use the bridal chorus from Lohengrin during a wedding scene. Of course these days it would be too cliché to do something like that. To my surprise, Wikipedia does not appear to have a list of films which use the bridal chorus, and the earliest one it mentions is 1944, fully ten years after It Happened One Night.

One thing I wonder about is at which point in aviation history did it become possible for a rich man such as Ellie’s father to own a private aircraft with a permanent staff. Could it have been the excesses of the 1920′s that made that possible?