The Classic Film Thread (Pre-1970: Bogart, Stewart, Grant, Peck, etc.) - Page 2

I saw this for the first time a couple of months ago. I'm glad I hadn't seen it before because it's always nice to find something new and wonderful.

I don't understand how any martial arts film fan can't love this movie. It's a joy to watch these people move. And there's certainly nothing wrong with the movie between numbers, either. It's easy to see why this movie's got the reputation it does.

Great thread.

Paths of Glory - Cut and pasted from this thread http://chud.com/forums/showthread.php?t=70377

" I don't know, General. If I had the choice between mice and Mausers, I think I'd take the mice every time. "

I always had wanted to see this as soon as I had seen a clip of it during the academy awards. I mean Kirk Douglas, Kubrick and WW1? It was a no brainer. I expected a terrific film and I got that but I never expected to get so upset while watching it.

*spoilers* After I saw that lead officer grenade his own man and cut tail and run I lost it. Rarely have I had murderous feelings while watching a movie but in that moment I wanted to strangle that turkey. *end spoilers*

WW1 was an awful war that was purely insane. The way they would rush those machineguns was ridiculous. Gallipoli is a good film as well but Douglas here is just fantastic. This is a film everyone should see.


The Best Years of Our Lives - Interesting story my brother got the Starz channel free over a weekend during one of their promotions and I ended up watching Pearl Harbor for the first time. It was so terrible I could barely watch. I switched over to TCM and they had The Best Years of Our Lives about to start.

I had heard of its great reputation and wasn't dissapointed. In fact I came away stunned how William Wyler got these relationships so right while Michael Bay got them so wrong. A brilliant piece of work and dare I say it timeless.


The Hunchback of Notre Dame [1939] - Still remember catching this late one night as a youngster and absolutely loving it. Charles Laughton is unforgettable in his portrayal of Quasimodo. Maureen O'Hara so breathtaking as Esmerelda. Its slow in parts but so satisfying (if a little too upbeat in comparision to the real story).

It makes me sad to think many youngsters feel the Disney film is the best presentation of this classic Hugo story. Laughton's performance alone towers over the rest of what came from those later remakes.

It's a shame their working relationship effectively ended with Spartacus (although Spartacus is still a great movie) Paths of Glory is a terrific war movie.

Ditto. I remember catching this several years ago on AMC (back when they were still showing classics). I was shocked at how good it was. Laughton has been unfairly overshadowed by his movie star contemporaries, but he really was a spectacular actor.

Anyone here a fan of 30's gangster films?

Angels with dirty faces is a great film, dead end kids not withstanding, jesus, they're annoying but Cagney just dominates this film, no-one bitchslaps like Cagney. At the time the message about whether crime is a cycle that's bred by poverty must have seemed pretty radical, not so much today. Bogart also turns in a weaselly performance as his lawyer.

To your question, I will simply respond:

Mother of God, is this the end of Rico?

To get away from the lovefest, I think the continued critical love for "The Jazz Singer" is beyond stupid. The movie is noteworthy as a technical achievement, aside from that it's a boring, overblown product of its time, complete with racial stereotypes that seem to get a pass or something when AFI does its "bests" lists. I get it, he sings, that's great. Aside from that, who can honestly sit through it today?

I recently saw "The Adventures of Robin Hood" for the first time. Talk about a movie that completely holds up. You don't have to make any excuses for it, unlike the JS.

Are there many critics who praise The Jazz Singer for anything beyond the technical innovation?

Am currently watching Some Like it Hot for the first time. Am liking it very much. Am imagining Jack Lemmon's character to be the same person as his character in Glengarry Glen Ross. Interesting.

...

Awesome. And you could cross post it in the "getting high" thread and just tell them to stare at the colors. Beautiful film, and his entrance into the feast with the dead deer across his shoulders is one of the most badass moments this thread will ever come up with.

A great companion piece to the film is The Mark of Zorro, with Tyrone Power. It's a bit of a rip off of Robin Hood (Basil Rathbone plays the villain again, and the same dude that played Friar Tuck turns up), but still loads of fun on its own. Around ten bucks on deepdiscount, during the current sale.

ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES is in my top ten films of all time. Cagney is just stunningly great. Pat O'Brien is just as good. And I love the Dead End Kids. They are refreshingly real, not cute child caricatures. They're pretty much little shits with good hearts, and I love the anecdotal story about how they kept trying to steal their scenes from Cagney until he smacked them around a little bit. I watch this film a couple of times a year.

Some dialogue to whet the appetite:

Michael Curtiz is one of the greatest directors that no one really seems to talk about, but he consistently made amazing films, like this, and CASABLANCA, THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD, YANKEE DOODLE DANDY... he's just one of the best directors who ever lived and he isn't talked about too much.

As well as King Creole, one of the only Elvis Presley flicks that manages to feel like an actual film.

But Jesus Christ, was he prolific. 172 films. Maybe 98 or 99 after the advent of talking pictures.

Absolutely. I recommend all of it. Seriously. You really can't go wrong.
"The Maltese Falcon", "The Thin Man", "The Glass Key", and all of the Continental Op stories.

Its #90 on the AFI's list of the 100 Greatest Movies of All Time. So yeah, I assume so. If technical achievements alone qualified a film for that list, then they left off a ton.

Absolutely. I was stunned by how good it is, especially how well it holds up. Great choreograhy, great acting, violent. The movie is greatness.

I love this movie more than I love my own taste buds, but their duel in Captain Blood is even better than this one.

And the Dead End Kids are awesome.

I started going off on a tangent in the Spike Lee thread about the glorious WW2 propaganda film SAHARA but realized it's far more suited to this wonderful thread. Who else here's seen this movie, and if so who amongst you can help me describe the awesomeness of this film that I simply can't find the right words for?

The great camaraderie of all these gung-ho Allies from various nations all hitching a ride on a tank to journey across the desert, getting in adventures battling Nazis, facing their own deaths for the good of the free world. The Italian prisoner in this movie is so fucking incredibly good that the guy got an Oscar for his performance I believe, his speech denouncing the Nazi prisoner was so good it had me jumping to my feet ready to kick the crap outta the Hunnish hordes myself. The American country boy learning from the African Muslim about his religion and getting along just fine. This whole movie's so much fun, so exciting, so innocent, it's like getting lost in an old adventure movie as a kid all over again after six years of disenchantment and moral decay with the wars of present day. Makes you wish life was like it is in propaganda movies.

Mattioli's right on. All of Hammett's stuff is pretty great. THE MALTESE FALCON is his magnum opus, but I personally love RED HARVEST--it's about the best action/mystery tale I've ever come across. THE GLASS KEY is more methodical than the Continental Op stories, which are rapidly pace actioners, but the story is rich with character. You read GLASS KEY and you'll see a whole lot of similarities with MILLER'S CROSSING, even some verbatim lines taken out of it.

Agreed on Curtiz being incredibly unsung, he was a master craftsman.

I saw this Bogart film called 'High Sierra' a few years ago and thought it was good, pretty straightforward, contained a great lead performance by Bogart, in a better film his performance would have elevated it to a classic but the film just can't match him. Ida Lupino gives a good performance, the film was co-written by John Huston.

Another nifty little noir film starring Bogart is 'Dark Passage', it's a pretty downbeat little movie, not one of Bogie and Bacall's best.

Anybody else see Sign Of The Cross ('32) on TCM last night? I'd never heard of it before last night. It's a pre-code ancient roman epic with the greatest arena scene ever commited to film! Screaming Christians are mauled by bears and tigers, a woman tied to a post is killed by a gorilla. But that's just the warm-up. Scantily clad women with spears battle midgets wearing blackface. One midget is impaled through the torso and held up high, his writhing midget body sliding down the spear as the crowd cheers.
Eli Roth has nothing on Cecil B Demille.

Holy shit, that sounds amazing. Midgets in blackface.

Shit, Blockbuster Online doesn't carry it. I think I may have to try the Netflix free trial.

I'm amazed half that stuff even got past the censors, then again, it's violence not sex so it's ok.

Make sure you get the uncut version that runs over 2 hours. The white haired man in the leather chair said all the good bits were cut for a rerelease in the 40's. There's a scene with a saucy woman taking a milk bath and I saw nipple. I swear on my children I saw nipple!

There was period early on when there were no written or even assumed rules about what could be shown. That's why so much was cut over ten years later. There's also the fact that DeMille was The Duke, A Number One. Plus the whole movie was a biblical story that heartily endorsed Christianity. But really it was exploitation as glorious as the roman arenas themselves.
Another funny irony is that the romantic lead is obviuously gay. From TCM-
Cecil B. DeMille's sex-and-religion epics allowed him to have it both ways. He delighted in showing all the sin and depravity of biblical times, then wrapping it all up with a sanctimonious message. In the era before the Production Code imposed strict censorship in films, the depravity in DeMille's movies got more screen time than the sanctity, and none more so than in The Sign of the Cross (1932).

I thought the producton was introduced earlier but that makes sense, I'll definitely check it out when I get the chance, sounds absolutely wild, like something Jack Hill would come up with.

I could be wrong, but I think the studios all set their own standards. Any cuts made to films, such as muting out Colin Clive's line "Now I know what it feels like to be God!" in Frankenstein, came from the studio bosses.

I managed to see Citizen Cane on the big screen when I was in college (early 90s). It was amazing, but it's not my favorite Orson Welles movie. I like The Third Man and A Touch of Evil (which I've also seen on the big screen) better. Fantastic movies.

I saw Vertigo at a Hitchcock festival and it was awesome too. Kim Novak was beautiful!

How about great, old horror movies? The Haunting is a great one from the 60s. It's more tense and creepy than any of the remakes/sequels.

Have I said how much I love TCM? I love it like tits. That's how much.

Plays 1:30 AM, TCM, on 6/18.

Plays 4:00 PM. TCM, 6/23.

TCM: I Can't Stop Pimpin'.

Watched Flight of the Phoenix last night after finding the remastered DVD for $5. Man, what a fucking great movie. It starts out very no-nonsense, sort of settling in with the survivors of the plane crash into the dullness of sitting around, waiting to be rescued, but then it starts getting as harsh and as cruel as the desert surrounding them. Right when you think the guys have earned a break, the movie kicks them in the teeth again. It makes it that much more uplifting when the plane actually takes off--Robert Aldrich, who directed, spends two hours making you feel the sand in your eyes, so when the plane actually works it's hard not to grin like a motherfucker and cheer.

And James Stewert is so damn good in this. He gets really dark the longer it goes, and when he threatens to kill the man who's been stealing more than his share of water, you absolutely believe him. I don't think I've ever seen him play someone so angry before--I mean, he shoots a fucking camel six or seven times in the face with a revolver just because it belonged to the Arab tribe that killed Peter Finch. Then there's the subtlties he peppers his character with--towards the end, when he and Attonborough find out that their airplane designer is really a model airplane maker, Stewert doesn't say a word, he just sits there, giving the toymaker this "I'd strangle you if I had the strength" look, and his hands start to shake the pages of a magazine he's holding out of sheer, barely contained outrage. It's a phenomenal performance, and it's one of his that doesn't get mentioned often.

And he's not the only one who kicks ass, either--Richard Attonborough gives the film a cool-headed heart to balance out the screaming matches between Stewert and Hardy Kruger, but he's very vulnerable as well. He has the drive and the will to do what's neccesary to survive, and many times is the one keeping everyone else motivated, but there's one scene where Stewert turns his vitrol on Attonborough and you can see how much it wounds him--again, no words, just in the acting. Ernest Borgnine is also good in his small role as the mentally unstable Truker Cobb, who's so desperate to prove that he has the ability to help out that he literally kills himself over it.

This was given a glancing resurge in awareness when the 2004 remake came out (and bombed), but it's teetering on the edge of being a forgotten classic again, which is a shame, because it's one of the taughtest character dramas made in th e 60s.

I'm right there with you on this one. In addition to being absolutely fantastic, The Haunting is hands down the creepiest horror film I have ever seen.

Greg, you said it about Flight of the Phoenix. Just the make-up effects alone, as the men become more and more pocked by the sun and sand, make me feel downright uncomfortable. Add the performances on top of that and you really feel like you're sweating it out with them.

Oh man, oh man, you have just made me so excited that I tivo'ed this.
And yes, Turner Classic Movies is inexhorable greatness.

There's one particular effect I loved, while Hardy Kruger is discussing his plan for making an airplane out of the remains of the wreckage, in the middle of his talk he reaches up to his lip and actually peels off this huge chunk of dried skin off his lip. It's a subtle thing, but it's stuff like that that lets the movie draw you in and puts you through hell.

The one make up effect that actually kinda made me wince was that huge spot of missing skin on the big army guy's nose. It starts off as a small knick, and as time progresses it turns into this big red patch of peeled-off skin, before he becomes so dehydrated that it starts to turn gray. Great work by the makeup crew on this one.

I like HIGH SIERRA a lot, but it falls short of being a true classic. The racist humor with the Algernon character is ill-placed and tasteless, as is the subplot where Bogart's Roy Earle falls in love with the lame girl. If the fat had been cut off in those areas, so that the movie is a little less romantic and more of a noir crime movie, it would be so much better. Maybe if John Huston directed it would have been on par with THE ASPHALT JUNGLE. However, the scene where Bogart intimidates the hotel concierge is great. "Just like that." **taptaptap**

DARK PASSAGE I like, even though it is a severe misuse of Lauren Bacall. Bogart gets to play a character that is unsure of himself, paranoid, and helpless. It's Bogart playing against type. And the first half of the movie, with the first person cam, is fun and experimental. Also some great supporting characters (Agnes Moorehead, Tom D'Andrea as the cabbie). The facial surgery segment also has some moody impressionistic effects that are interesting.

There was one Bogart movie I saw a few months ago on TCM called IN A LONELY PLACE, and I really liked it a lot but can never seem to catch it again. From what I remember, Bogart played a screenwriter whose fiance begins to suspect him of being a murderer. It begins as a love story and then surreptitiously becomes a neat suspense picture.

Anyone wanting to be sent into a Netflix classic film queueing (??) frenzy should watch Martin Scorcese's The Century of Cinema. You'll be blind-buying Fred Astaire musicals and fim noirs you've never heard of. When he describes Leave Her To Heaven as "the only Technicolor film noir", I dare you to not track that sumbitch down.

For the Obscura, Cecil's Madam Satan has to be seen to be believed.

Going back and forth between this and imdb, copying and pasting names and seeing what will be playing on TCM is dictating my weekend schedule. I forget when it was added, but that tv scheduling thing is a GREAT feature.

I watched 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf' tonight, Mike Nichol's debut has to be one of the most fearless debut's ever (and he followed it up with 'The Graduate'), the interplay between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton is almost instinctive, Taylor has the showier role at the start as she yells and berates her way through the first half but then the cracks start to show and she delivers a beautifully honest performance of a damaged woman who gave up trying to save her marriage a long time ago. Richard Burton is even better, he's given the quieter role and he does so much with it, you can see how 'George' is even more dangerous than Martha, by the end of the film, he emerges the winner but at such a great cost, there's one moment in the film where Martha finally get's him to snap and he does because the edge isn't in his favour but he comes back and quietly devastates Nick and Honey.
As Nick and Honey, George Segal and Sandy Dennis provide great support work, especially from Dennis, she becomes almost childlike when completely drunk.

It's fascinating to watch these people just completely get destroyed as they get more and more drunk, George and Martha are so skilled at these psychological games that it's almost effortless, Martha's more blunt in her approach but no less devastating, Nick and Honey are clearly less experienced but you can see cracks at the beginning.

This is one of the most chilling pyschological horror films ever made.

That is one fucked up little movie, I love it.

I think it should be mandatory to have this shown to couples before they get married.

I just saw Cat People for the first time and I loved the fact that there's a jump scare that's exactly like the jump scares I've seen dozens and dozens of times in numerous horror films. I can only imagine what kind of effect that must've had on an audience back then, when they saw a scene like that for the first time ever.

The results of the Hayes code are always amusing in movies like this, especially in Cat People, where the whole story is about a woman who's afraid to have sex, but all they talk about is how she's afraid to kiss her husband.

I don't get to see as many conventionally classic films as I used to, being currently in Germany (although I get to see a lot of German classics of the 40s and 50s, which are very interesting in a different way).

The last truly classic film I saw was over Xmas, when I happened to catch The Big Sleep. What a film! Incredibly complex, incredibly adult themes, risqué dialogue...amazing to think it was made in 1946, while the Hays Code was still in force. Bogey and Bacall at their best.