Reviews of Classic Film, with artwork and news
LAST UPDATE July 21, 2024
Germany honours Marlene Dietrich and other women who resisted Nazi tyranny – UK The Times
The exhibition also features Marlene Dietrich, the film star who emigrated to the US in 1930 and became involved in helping German Jews and politically persecuted people who had fled in 1933. In 1937 she rejected Hitler’s offer to return to Germany and applied for US citizenship, which she was granted in 1939. After the US joined the war in 1941 she performed for US soldiers and German prisoners of war in North Africa, Italy, France, Belgium and Germany. After 1945 she was defamed in Germany as a "traitor".
Fast Reviews: Good Neighbor Sam (1964): Secret identities and mistaken identities were part and parcel of many a classic era screwball film, and the 1964 Good Neighbor Sam featuring Jack Lemmon is a revival of the concept but with some aspects that could never have survived the Breen era of censorship.
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Fast review: Bad Boys Ride or Die 2024 – One of the themes of modern action films of the 21st century is "forgotten sons" in which a mature, adult man is forced by a story line to remember he has fathered children and now circumstances require him to rise to the occasion and deal with the matter. Eventually, both some sort of emotional intimacy with the kid (who is in trouble) and some kind of overt physical action in which the father performs a deed that compensates in some fashion for years of absence and alienation will prove his true emotional investment in the child. There's a wistful "what could have been" angle to the tale, but not big enough to really cast doubt on the happy ending.
Will Smith and Martin Lawrence are a good comedy team and in between the jokes they set up some pretty involved stunt work as they battle a conspiracy of lies against their now departed "father figure" of police Captain Howard (Joe Pantoliano) and a threatening range of threats building up from both feds and criminals. Bad Boys Ride or Die has a complicated series of clues to solve, of course, but also a lot of Florida scenery and a wide cast of characters making up it's "family." In between the fighting and a final confrontation at an abandoned coastline theme park featuring a large albino alligator, the main thing we get is the dominant value of family for a "grown ass man" and the need to kill vicious criminals.
Shelley Duvall 1949–2024
Fast Reviews:
Central Intelligence 2016: The "Rock" (Dwayne Johnson) wears a fanny-pack, a My Little Pony tee and is an unstoppable secret agent who reconnects to hisold high school hero Golden Jet (Kevin Hart) while simultaneously undermining a conspiracy of double agent activity that could lead to worldwide disaster.
The film depends heavily upon the visual of a rather diminutive Kevin Hart compared on screen with the enormous Dwayne Johnson (in this way it's a faint echo of older films like the Schwarzenegger/DeVito Twins of 1988), and the humor in Central Intelligence (script and story by Ike Barinholtz, David Stassen, Rawson Marshall Thurber) mines that (plus the flashback "fat" jokes from the high school years of the characters) with a certain level of off-the-cuff funniness while trying to stay on the legal side of political correctness about body humor - - no small task in the 21st century. Joking aside (which is half the film) the other half is the impossible deeds of the heroes against intelligence agents of the United States who are not necessarily on the side of the United States. In between is the story of "Golden Jet" having to face that his high school years were apparently the high point of his life and he now drudges away through a career as an accountant with extremely lowered expectations... that is until Dwayne Johnson shows up and turns his world upside down.
Action film-comedy hybrids can sometimes have a tough time balancing the matter of whether we have tension about the heroics and the evil of the dangerous bad guys while also being instructed by the film to laugh it all off as the jokes around the explosions and bullets fly. Central Intelligence gets more from the humor and tension from the simple question of who is and who isn't the "rogue agent." The feats of prowess in fighting, shooting, dodging bullets and surviving the violence constantly being directed at our heroes isn't so much our worry over their making it out alive instead more like the basic question of a detective story: in what clever way will they do it, since we know they will, the threat of destruction just not strong enough. At its most effective, Central Intelligence is a well polished comedy with an excellent display of stunt work.
Literally the worst take on classic film, EVER. They were real people who created magic and we were lucky to have them.
— 𝔻𝕖𝕓𝕠𝕣𝕒𝕙 🥃🖊️ (@DADiClementi) June 30, 2024
It was finite.
And true.
And real.
And therefore, perfect.
And it’s over. https://t.co/wvoItdR7uz pic.twitter.com/4cinTgFelk
Fast Review: Eyes in the Night - 1942. Edward Arnold is one of the great "shouters" in classic Hollywood, able to wield belligerent but sharp dialogue at a high decibel, often accompanied by arm and face gesticulations that makes everyone else in the cast look like they're not moving (or small, Arnold himself was 5'10").
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Fast Review The Beekeeper – 2024: Depicting bad governments doing bad things has been a genre of cinema since the 1970's when real gov't scandals overwhelmed the news and made the topic not as controversial as it had been (when Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington premiered in 1939 it was pooh-poohed by a number of Senators and Congressmen for its depiction of high-level corruption as being too fantastic, a notionMore about The Beekeeper, 2024
UK's Powerhouse Films releasing four classic film disks in September:
You and Me (1938) 2K restoration, film by Fritz Lang Powerhouse page
When Tomorrow Comes (1939) 2K restoration, film by John Stahl with Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer Powerhouse Page
You'll Never Get Rich (1941) High Definition remaster, film by Sidney Lanfield, with Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth Powerhouse Page
The Lady is Willing (1942) High Definition remaster, film by Mitchell Leisen, with Fred MacMurray, Marlene Dietrich and "Corey the Wonder Baby," Powerhouse Page
Donald Sutherland has died
Donald Sutherland 1935–2024
Canadian actor Donald Sutherland's career spanned six decades, beginning with his roles in classic films such as The Dirty Dozen (1967) and MASH (1970). He was often praised for his ability to seamlessly transition between genres, for example Don't Look Now (1973), Ordinary People (1980), and his more recent roles in blockbuster franchises like The Hunger Games series. Sutherland was given an Honorary Oscar in 2017.
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The 1984 quasi-punk sci-fi mystery film Repo Man is coming out on Criterion Blu-Ray disc (4K digital restoration, approved by director Alex Cox, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack – one 4K UHD disc and one Blu-ray disc) in September. The Criterion page about their HD edition.
Fast Review: Cactus Flower – 1969
At the start of Cactus Flower, a prone Goldie Hawn is on her couch as her tiny apartment fills with gas from her tiny oven. Like a sacrifice to a shrine she positions herself with arms crossed below a large framed photo of Walter Matthau, who has just broken a dinner-date with her, and she lays still and breathes in the killing fumes. Her suicide goes awry when her neighbor, unsuccessful playwright Julian (played by Rick Lenz), sniffs the gas out in the hall, and unable to get through the door, smashes out one of her windows to climb in and turn the gas off. He then administers mouth-to-mouth respiration to the passed-out young woman which turns into a heated kissing session until Hawn's character snaps awake, realizing these aren't middle-aged Walter Matthau lips!
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Columbia 100 Anniversary will have Lawrence of Arabia and Close Encounters of the Third Kind returning to movie theaters. Also, Rear Window will be in Theaters, too, as part of that film's 70th anniversary.
Fast Review: The Maze – 1953
As a mystery/horror film, The Maze digs right into a 1953 obsession, that of evolution gone wrong, but it is combined with a Gothic "haunted house" story about how to keep a dark family secret very secret for literally hundreds of years (though they keep a copy of a book titled Teratology laying around in the open).
More about the film The Maze – 1953
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