Reviews of Classic Film, with artwork and news
LAST UPDATE March 25, 2025
New Criterion titles coming on disc:
Midnight (1939) - one of the great comedies of the 1930's with Don Ameche and Claudette Colbert on the loose in Paris. Comes out June 17, 2025 - Criterion page link
- they say "...a topsy-turvy Cinderella story with a cynical bite" but I think that's stretching it a little, our review of Midnight here.
The Richard Lester directed Three Musketeers and Four Musketeers (1973/74) are coming on 4K UHD disks on May 27, 20245. Criterion page on the disc set here.
Wages of Fear (1953) - The greatest "truck driving film" in cinema gets a 4K UHD release. Criterion page link - they say "one of the greatest thrillers ever committed to celluloid" and they might be right. (Criterion is also bringing out a disk of the William Friedkin remake of the movie titled Sorcerer from 1977 in June, 2025.)
Our 2022 review of Wages of Fear :
This French film is sometimes called one of the greatest movies ever made, and though it has a rather un-Hollywood ending (though apropos), it does contain a huge dose of classic Hollywood tension as two pairs of desperate men attempt to cross rough terrain driving two trucks, each laden with nitroglycerin. As bizarre as that sounds (and it actually fits within the story rather perfectly and logically), there are a number of side-stories that correspond to each man (Yves Montand, Charles Vanel, Peter van Eyck, Folco Lulli) and the sheer fear of the trek is bracketed by what we know about the characters (there's a generous prelude to the trip), as we watch them try to tough out the task through sheer panic-driven bravery, but that becomes impossible to maintain for one man who progressively disintegrates beneath the pressure. Wages of Fear is simultaneously a very direct and straight froward "thriller," and also a character study at the same time, with an exotic location starting at a poverty-stricken village in Central America and then on through the imposing landscape of the jungle towards the goal, a mammoth oil derrick fire where the explosives are needed to snuff the fire out."
The Long Haul - 1957
"I hear you're an honest man. It's a pleasure to meet an honest man. What's your price?" Crooked trucking company boss Joe Easy (Patrick Allan) to Yankee Harry Miller (Victor Mature)
Victor Mature plays Harry Miller, a well-meaning G.I. who exits military service after six years of duty in Germany and is excited to get himself and family back to the USA where he has a nice job waiting in California. His wife Connie (played by Gene Anderson) is from the UK and isn't that interested in the United States (and is maybe not that interested in Harry) and so the two make a compromise to spend the coming months in Great Britain before continuing on to a new life in the sun. Conveniently, her brother back in the UK who works for a trucking company can help Harry get employment during their stay.
We get strong hints from the start that this marriage is strained by fundamental disagreements between the two, and Harry is bending-over-backwards to keep the peace for himself, their son Butch, and to have a peaceful home life. Ironically, once he starts working in the UK, he's not home that much to enjoy it, and is constantly scrambling to learn how long distance trucking jobs are assigned in this new land, trying to be competitive amid the high-pressure of delivering on time, and understanding how much under-handed thievery is involved.
And understanding seems to be the anti-theme of The Long Haul. Just like Harry's marriage, in all the relationships we see on screen, no one quite fully comprehends anyone else, with one exception: Harry completely understands the crooked Joe Easy (played by Patrick Allan) the boss of the trucking company Harry comes to work for on, and then off, the books, and Joe completely understands Harry right back. Both are at odds against each other almost right from their first introduction, and through circumstances involving Joe's brutality toward his girlfriend Lynn (played by Diana Dors), Harry reluctantly rescues her and spirits her away from a humiliating confrontation at a cafe (called "a pig house" by Lynn) where the truckers hang out.
Lynn and Harry are about the only two people in the story willing to stand up to Joe, everyone else fearing his violent temper too much to try, though we do see an unnamed trucker at the cafe deliberately tripping Joe as he tears out after the escaping Lynn after he has publicly ripped open her clothing. Joe then beats the offending trucker unconscious. The defiant Lynn and the unhappily married Harry are natural allies, but this rapidly becomes more complicated because the two stars of The Long Haul start taking long, appreciative looks at one another.
In films about trucking, steering these colossuses of the road isn't easy, and the "inside story" of how trucking is managed isn't so easy either. The Long Haul has a gritty background to it and shows us how smuggling and highway banditry works. Victor Mature's honest Yankee gets put into a place where bending his ethics to keep work coming in to support his family corresponds to his bending toward the thick, full lips of dewy Diana Dors.
When The Long Haul premiered, it was just a month after another gritty, action-packed trucking movie, Hell Drivers, was released. Both films are occupied with madmen steering down the road at breakneck speeds, and an alarming paucity of police enforcement abounds in both.
Each of these films also owe something to the 1953 French Wages of Fear which presents the exact opposite of speeding, rolling juggernauts: truckers carrying nitroglycerin on ragged roads in South America traveling at a snail's pace to avoid blowing themselves up. The Long Haul eventually has more or less the same dilemma when Joe and Harry must pilot a lorry of illegal furs over the Scottish Highlands. They're on their way to meet a coastal smuggler boat and to get paid a fortune, the problem is that the roads they're using are more like suggestions of roads than actual thoroughfares, and the travel slows to a crawl and the two men, forced to hold back from fighting each other by circumstances, start to come unglued.
Highly melodramatic, but very well photographed and featuring good performances by Mature, Dors and Allan, The Long Haul isn't really the equal of Hell Drivers or Wages of Fear, but it is engrossing in it's own way.
Walmart old movie display March 10, 2025 – click to enlarge.
Physical Media and the future of "old movies"
Warnings about the demise of physical media have been reverberating for years. The signs of the collapse of DVD/Blu Ray sales has been evident just by looking at the retailer situation for discount stores like Wal-Mart, Target, and the big grocery store chains: smaller and smaller sections of space dedicated to physical media, and in the case of grocery stores and Target, very limited space and only then if related to a heavily marketed "major" film. Wal-Mart has been a little different by hanging-on longer, but they too have been subtracting space consistently, year-by-year, certainly a reflection that sales no longer justify space or the time for staff to keep the shelves stocked and organized (hence the sometimes "abandoned" appearance of a Wal-Mart movie section).
More Physical Media and the future of "old movies"
Warner Bros replacing malfunctioning DVD disks made between 2006 and 2008 - - they have a manufacturing error that renders the disk unplayable with age
Story at MSN The Verge
Disc rot is not a new phenomenon, but as ArsTechnica notes, properly-cared-for DVDs should be playable for up to 100 years, according to Sony. However, failing WBHE discs have stood out in particular amongst the physical media faithful, who have been posting about the problem for years in forums like DVD Talk and Home Theater Forum..."
The White Raven, 1917 - Ethel Barrymore
This is an astounding film for 2017, and Ethel Barrymore's naturalistic acting is well ahead of it's time, particularly as we see her surrounded by actors using familiar "silent film" acting techniques that are flamboyant and over-expressed (at least to our 21st century eyes) which that much more makes her starring role stand out from the rest. A story of multi-generational revenge and the hazards of bearing a grudge, the tale twists around a setting in the gold-rush Klondike of Alaska, and then the late-gilded age opulence of New York City.
A longer review to come.
All of the 2025 Oscar Winners – Hollywood Reporter
Fast Review: Think Fast, Mr. Moto, 1937 – Peter Lorre as the judo-expert Japanese detective who is tracking a smuggling ring while aboard a cruise ship crossing the Pacific Ocean, then in the Chinese city of Shanghai. An inexpensive start to the movie series (Lorre did eight Mr. Moto movies) that isn't really a B-film but is just barely a sub-A, if just because of the cast and the pretty good cruise ship and Shanghai sets. Think Fast, Mr. Moto moves quickly except for a bit of the shipboard romance between secondary stars Virginia Fields and Thomas Beck. Lotus Long is on hand in a nice small role as a phone operator who gets caught up in the investigation against the smuggling ring, and J. Carrol Naish along with Sig Ruman add more strong character acting, but the best material is Lorre mildly walking into traps and confrontations and wiping the floor with various attackers. The film poses the puzzle of whether Mr. Moto is even "on the side of the good" but it of course winds up that way, but only in the last minutes. Lorre's Mr. Moto not only outfights his enemies, he also out-thinks both the good guys and the bad guys by the time the credits toll.
Disney scaling back trigger warnings on their classic movies
Story at Washington Post
Warner Bros online YouTube channel has been loading up full feature films for no-cost viewing – Lifehacker
The death of DVDs and how it has damaged Hollywood
More on the background on home video money and how Hollywood has been caught flat-footed with streaming
Fast Review
Thirty Day Princess - 1934: This comedy stars Sylvia Sydney and has a script by Preston Storages (and Frank Partos), and on top of that there's a young Cary Grant along with Edward Arnold, and yet somehow this is second rate for all concerned. Sydney sometimes has the energy and focus to pull the dialogue and screen performances up to a higher level, and Edward Arnold is in fine shouting mode more or less throughout, but Cary Grant is rather rough around the edges and the script doesn't help a lot. Elements that turn up in later Preston Sturges' films like Easy Living and The Lady Eve are much more perfunctory here, and in general the tale of a veteran newspaper publisher falling in love with a young woman masquerading as a princess (because the real one is quarantined with mumps) has a hard time gelling all the ideas together smoothly. There is good tricky screen writing here, though, and if you're familiar with the "twins" gag from Palm Beach Story, you get sort of the acorn version here and it is a real plus for a movie that often feels out of step with its own ideas. Maybe Thirty Day Princess is the sort of film that drove Sturges towards later directing his own films from his scripts. Sylvia Sydney is fine and the main thrust of the story is perfectly screwball, but somehow a lot of this movie is simply out of time with itself.
Review
Midnight - 1939: Poor people thrown into the world of the rich is a mainstay of screwball era comedies, and Midnight handles it funnily, gracefully and effectively. Claudette Colbert is a young and beautiful American in Europe trying to find a way to marry into a better income level, gets lucky with a payout from a rich mother wanting her to stay away from her infatuated son, and Colbert immediately takes the wad of cash to Monte Carlo and ... blows it all. More on Midnight, 1939
Updated review: Hercules Against the Moon Men, 1964
The huge Los Angeles fire destroying famous Hollywood landmarks – CNN News
Hollywood 2024: no original movies made the domestic top 10 box office list – 10 top-grossing US films were all sequels and prequels – Techspot
Send Me No Flowers - 1964: Rock Hudson is a high-achieving hypochondriac who mistakenly hears his doctor referring to someone with only a few weeks to live before "their ticker" gives out, and he nervously applies the diagnoses to himself.
More about Send Me No Flowers - 1964
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