Reviews of Classic Film, with artwork and news
LAST UPDATE May 14, 2025
Blu Ray disc of the 1967 Taming of the Shrew coming
The Franco Zeffirelli version, starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, includes commentary tracks, documentaries, and an in-case booklet featuring an essay on the film. Scheduled for release in July from Powerhouse Films
Diary of A Chamber Maid – 1946*
What if you were famed director Jean Renoir and you were making an adaptation of a play that is based upon a 1900 novel Le Journal d’une femme de chambre by Octave Mirbeau, and as this has a historical setting for your two main stars, Paulette Goddard and Burgess Meredith (in fact Meredith helps write the adaptation!) and because you're, well, French, you handle some of this film in a breezy, light European way that emphasizes the comedy that is in human foibles. In fact, Burgess (and Reginald Owen and Florence Bates) help this along with a slapstick-like showcase of jumping, running and leaping as if the Keystone Kops choreographed this section of the film. The French and Americans love physical comedy, so what's the harm in giving it to them?
But, wait a second, there are some very serious topics within Diary of A Chambermaid, such as murder, madness, class conflict, and the struggle of weak young men against dominating mothers (and thoughts of suicide!) not to mention the lingering atmosphere of postrevolutionary France in which the ex-aristocracy is still fuming over how the country was turned upside down in pursuit of "Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité".** This is where you let heavyweight actors Francis Lederer, Hurd Hatfield and Judith Anderson take over, in fact Lederer plays his part of the pathologically scheming valet Joseph in such a dark way you'd think Diary of A Chambermaid is a noir film. Well, maybe his part of it is!
But, wait, there's more! Goddard's beautiful blonde chambermaid is trying to convince herself the only way out of the drudgery of being on the low-end of the social scale is to use her obvious beauty to seduce a man with money and then to insulate herself behind a wall of wealth to eliminate the terror of being mistreated, sexually assaulted, starving or simply being hastily fired from a job.
And fired at a moments notice is a very real threat. When Diary of A Chambermaid begins, scullery maid Louise (Irene Ryan) actually is being fired, and before she has officially even been hired. She and Celestine (Goddard) have travelled from Paris for jobs in the countryside where the Lanlaire estate is, but because the Lanlaire's valet Joseph (Lederer), who has come to pick them up at the train station, thinks Louise is "too ugly" for the job, she is summarily dismissed. This leaves Louise stranded in the French countryside, friendless and penniless, without the means to obtain a return ticket back to the city. Celestine intrudes (the valet looked her over and found no physical fault), tells the valet to go tell the Lanlaires that if they don't take on Louise as the new scullery maid, then they also don't get Celestine for the new chambermaid. Celestine then dismisses Joseph as if she is his superior (something we're already agreeing with and we're only a few minutes into the film) and Joseph marches off to a waiting horse-drawn wagon to leave the station. Celestine and Louise, in full panic, with their backs to him, mumble to each about what to do now, both of them shocked at Celestine's courage. But, instead of exiting back to the Lanlaire estate, Joseph calls for them both to come and thus the two relieved women join the Lanlaire staff.
And this is the whole film in miniature. Celestine's growing confidence to command the decisions to run her own life, and to see through the pretensions of the people around her, whether they are wealthy or just the other servants around her "who have plans" (some quite criminal), finally to the point she can see through her own phantasy of wealth, too.
But before that epiphany she is first bent upon selecting a wealthy man (married or not) to seduce, and so we see her going after the half-crazy Lanlaire neighbor, Captain Mauger (Burgess Meredith). Unfortunately, Renoir (or the script) really don't have enough room for this activity of seduction, though the advertising drawn up for the movie in 1946 is certainly emphasizing this aspect. Instead, at its core, the movie is really a romance, with the Lanlair's son Georges (Hatfield) sulkily in love with the perky, brave chambermaid.
Unfortunately, Georges is completely compromised emotionally, mentally, and apparently physically. I kept thinking he had tuberculoses or some other terminal physical illness ("I've had a cold for six years" he claims at one point) that explains his long absences to other geographic locations away from the Lanlaire home. But, nowhere does the script actually claim any of this, instead we finally realize its all in his head because the young man won't confront his doting, domineering mother who babies him like he actually has a debilitating illness.
A few years later Hollywood would churn out plenty of films about angst-ridden, distraught youth confronting smothering parents, raging and tearing up in front of the cameras as if they're being eaten alive by emotional fire ants, but in this film, Hatfield handles the task of aimless youth and smoldering rage by lazily slouching on a couch or chair, reading a book, doing not much of anything and simply being sad.
With enough mood changes to fill out a much longer epic tale, Diary of A Chambermaid compacts too much into too short a space. It's a romantic comedy, it's a noir, its slapstick and its a political and sociological study. But Goddard, who is probably a few years too old for this role, has the powers of a glamorous movie star and balances all of these fragmented ideas upon her character, and for the most part it works.
The Travis Banton costuming is another main feature of the film and really takes flight once the plot has fixed upon what we're really up to: the Lanlaire mom and dad wanting Celestine to lure their son Georges out of his funk and to engage with something besides laying around (although the film hints at just laying around being acceptable, too, in a very 1946 kind of way, with Judith Anderson's Madame Lanlaire doing her best to doll-up Goddard's chambermaid with the right clothing "to make the household a little more gay," and insisting on the right perfume because "cheap perfume is unforgiveable." Renoir's direction shows Madame Lanlaire's instruction and remodeling of Celestine underscoring a manipulative perversity, and the schism in this movie shows up the most between Judith Anderson's serious portrait of a claustrophobic overbearing parent and Goddard's cheerful, hopeful house servant.
Though there are twists in Diary of A Chambermaid with murders, Burgess Meredith's madman character killing a squirrel ala' Lenny from Mice and Men, and a mini-revolution in the village along with a heist sub-story, its all too much to really flesh out with only a 1:26 runtime. We stick with Paulette Goddard moving through situations, getting steadily smarter about what's going on around her, and voicing the often-time good dialogue and wearing the gorgeous Banton costumes which maps her transformation: she is dressed like a lowly scullery maid cleaning floorstones, a maid in an outfit suitable for doing laundry, and then a classic black silk chambermaid outfit with lace epaulets (and this is the major selling point in the film's original advertising), and then she is in finer and finer finery as her character has gone from servant to coquette to.... Well, somehow her own person, though, unlike the original story that seems to indicate a collapse of hope at the end with the sinister, plotting and lusting Joseph being the chambermaid's consolation "prize," there's no such problem in the film version. With part of the cast cleared from the boards, so to speak, wealth no longer the mesmerizing allure it once was, and the rejuvenated and self-confidant Georges on his own two feet finally after he fought Joseph, got beaten, came back with "the more I'm beaten the stronger I get" and launched into fighting Lederer's vicious valet like he is Popeye on spinach, we're on the precipice of an all-American Hollywood ending.
But Renoir the director is French and this isn't a friendly John Ford Donnybrook when a large-scale fight breaks out in the local village. Renoir's brief, lethal mob scene at the end of Diary of A Chambermaid has a coldness that presages Julien Duvivier's Panique (also from 1946, but released later in the year) and depicts the comeuppance of Joseph the Valet in a brutal, but carefully obscured way that makes the film seem like it wasn't really about exposing the emptiness of wealth, or the stupidity of lust, or the self-delusions of social status, but escaping, or avoiding, or punishing the cruelty of humans against humans, and of course, finding true love.
*has a 1945 credit on the title, though
** "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity"
"Spring Sale" at Powerhouse Films - lots of titles, such as Blonde Venus, Bluebeard's 8th Wife, John Ford at Columbia box set, Ministry of Fear, etc.
New Blu Ray Disk coming
Laurel and Hardy : The Silent Years 1928 - Blu Ray coming in April – Eurekavideo
2000 copies - 1080p HD presentations on Blu-ray from 2K restorations of Leave ‘em Laughing, The Finishing Touch, From Soup to Nuts, You’re Darn Tootin’, Their Purple Moment, Should Married Men Go Home?, Early to Bed, Two Tars, Habeas Corpus and We Faw Down - Region Coding : A/B/C
Huge sale on disks at Kino – Kinolorber
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 and Diana Dors in a heated up and gritty tale of illegal cross-country trucking in the UK - The Long Haul
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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