Music and Lyrics: It’s supposed to be light

Posted by Bill Wren

The movie Music and Lyrics is a very light romantic comedy. That is all it aspires to be. Yet some of the reviews I’ve seen of it seem to dislike it for this very reason. I’m not sure why. What might their expectations be? Every romantic comedy will be The Philadelphia Story?

They’re dreaming if they expect that. I prefer to judge movies based on what they are and what they try to be.

There are types of movies I don’t like and only rarely do I enjoy films that fall into those categories. But disliking something and finding fault with it are two different things. I don’t particularly like 2001: A Space Odyssey. Frankly, it puts me to sleep. But I’m not about to say it’s a bad movie. I know it’s a very good one. I just don’t like it much.

Not that Music and Lyrics is in the same league as 2001. But it doesn’t try to be. It’s just a light film. And I wrote a review of sorts of it:

“Alex Fletcher (Hugh Grant) use to be in a 1980s pop band that was briefly popular with a few hits. His writing partner, who wrote the lyrics, went on to be a solo star and Alex faded into obscurity until the inevitable revival came along. Now he lives off his former fame playing fairs, conventions and other small venues – though that, too, is now drying up …

There is more to the movie Music and Lyrics but this is the heart of it. It’s a light, romantic comedy – very much a Marc Lawrence kind of thing – and it’s great fun to watch. I think it’s one of Lawrence’s better films and also one of Grant’s better performances, though he basically plays Hugh Grant. But I tend to like that …”
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Four movies and a post

Posted by Bill Wren

Over this holiday period, while I haven’t been posting on any of my sites, neither have I been sitting still.

Here on Piddleville, I actually have been adding reviews, though not highlighting them on the home page here.

I hope to rectify that today. So, recently seen …

Holiday Inn (1942)

The movie Holiday Inn is memorable for a number of things, some good, some not so good. To begin with, it brings together a trio made up of Irving Berlin, Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire. Not a bad place to start. The movie itself is a Hollywood soufflé, very light, very unlikely, and quite delightful…
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Unbreakable (2002)

Movies with surprise endings don’t often work well and, even when they do, it’s easy to tire of them quickly. In a sense, they are gimmicky. Done rarely, they’re riveting; done often, they’re tedious. I think M. Night Shyamalan knows this and feels the same way … You get the sense as you watch Unbreakable that he was trying to avoid the surprise ending. On the other hand, you also get the sense that stories of that kind are his natural inclination…
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The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945)

The Bells of St. Mary’s is movie that is very representative of a type of movie Hollywood made in its heyday, very much the way it’s predecessor was, Going My Way. On one hand, it is a type of film that Hollywood has continued to make (like certain Disney films) with varying degrees of success – family oriented and sentimental. On the other hand, it is anachronistic and, for some, nostalgic…
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Now, Voyager (1942)

Here’s a movie that caught me by surprise. It’s another one of those films I went into with little or no expectations. In fact, if anything, I expected it to be a dud. (I had seen a number of older, black and white turkeys recently.) Now, Voyager was wonderful. It’s also an unapologetic soap opera, the kind Hollywood once did so well…
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And now you are up to date. Sort of. More or less. My memory isn’t great; I may have have forgotten something …

Christmas in Connecticut almost great

Posted by Bill Wren

Some movies leave you scratching your head, like Christmas in Connecticut. You like it yet it bugs you. Why is that?

This is another one of those movies I saw years ago as a kid watching TV in the basement. The DVD came out in 2005 and I recall watching it then but feeling ambivalent about it. I suppose I still do, though I liked it much more when I watched it last night. But that opening …

Christmas in Connecticut (1945)

Directed by Peter Godfrey

This movie is an odd duck. It’s a good, quick paced Christmas movie of the old Hollywood variety, as in circa the 1940s (which is when it was made). Christmas in Connecticut has all the appearance of what we usually mean by a holiday classic. But it has some peculiarities and they are probably the reason it doesn’t quite achieve that status – though it comes close.

The first and most pronounced peculiarity is its opening. The first twenty or thirty minutes of the film are completely unnecessary and also suggest a different movie than the one we end up seeing. The movie is also a lot more interesting once that opening is over.

For some reason, perhaps length or a script change elsewhere in the film, the opening appears to be tacked on to what seems like a finished movie. Jefferson Jones, played by Dennis Morgan, is a war veteran in a hospital having survived being adrift at sea. He’s absolutely obsessed with food. This sort of sets up the movie that follows, except once that movie starts his food obsession seems to mysteriously vanish.

Food is at the heart of this romantic-comedy in the sense that it is one of the defining characteristics of Barbara Stanwyck’s character, Elizabeth Lee. She’s a kind of war time Martha Stewart, a famous master of country kitchens and homes, known as the world’s best cook. She writes for a magazine about her beautiful country home and describes the fabulous foods she prepares.

Except she’s a city apartment dweller and doesn’t know the first thing about cooking. The complication comes when her publisher, Sydney Greenstreet as Alexander Yardley, decides to invite himself and the war hero to Christmas at her home.

Chaos follows. There are also numerous complications, not the least of which is the need to have a husband and baby because Elizabeth Lee writes about them all the time.

It’s also quite funny, especially when Greenstreet’s Yardley sees one baby on one day and another on the next and can’t understand why it looks different, has a gender change, suddenly has teeth and can talk. “Most peculiar,” he says.

The romantic aspect is with Stanwyck’s character agreeing to marry her insistent fiancé (whom she doesn’t love) in return for providing her with a Connecticut country home to use to fool Yardley. The romance comes in when she falls in love with Jefferson, the war hero.

I also found some of the characterizations in the movie a bit peculiar, though not necessarily in a bad way. They just seemed odd. As mentioned, there is a food obsessed war hero who seems to forget his obsession once the real movie starts. Then there is Stanwyck’s Elizabeth Lee who appears to be completely self-centred and indulgent – yet we like her.

Despite the quibbles, I really did like this movie, especially once that opening was over. It certainly has the look and feel of a Hollywood holiday classic. It’s also funny and, in its Hollywood way, romantic. It gets great supporting performances, particularly those of Greenstreet, S.Z. Sakall (as the real food master) and Una O’Connor with her thick Irish accent and wonderful reactions.

For me, this movie played well – quick, engaging and almost, but not quite, satisfying. Had a bit of time been taken editing the opening, I would say it would be up there with the great holiday movies.

And I’m darned curious about how that opening came about.

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Bang for the movie buck – Auntie Mame

Posted by Bill Wren

Don’t ever accuse the entertainment business of not cleaning up its plate. There is no place like the world of entertainment for squeezing every last drop of blood out of a “property” (as the money guys refer to it).

For example, take the 1958 movie starring Rosalind Russell, titled Auntie Mame. It began as a play, became a movie, then later became a musical. Oh, but it was a book before all of that.

This story put on some mileage. Have a look:

  • 1955 book
  • 1956 play
  • 1958 movie
  • 1966 broadway musical
  • 1974 movie musical

Of course, there would also be records, cassettes, DVDs and mp3’s as the years rolled by, not to mention the VHS tapes, the DVDs and, now, online streaming/downloads. And many in the general public are probably completely unfamiliar with the story, Auntie Mame. Imagine that.

As for the movie, I wrote up review/overview a few years back:

“The movie succeeds in large part because of Rosalind Russell’s incredibly energetic performance. (You can almost hear voices crying out, “No more coffee for her!”) … “

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Posted in: | Tagged: auntie mame, broadway musical, , DVDs, energetic performance, entertainment business, , , musical film, , , rosalind russell, , vhs tapes | 1 Comment

Familiarity: a characteristic of the comfort movie?

Posted by Bill Wren

A friend of mine went to visit some friends in Edmonton a few months ago. When she returned, I asked her what she had done. “Nothing,” she said.

“Did you go anywhere?”

“Nope.”

“Did you at least go to that restaurant I told you about?”

“No; there wasn’t time.”

She had been there for over a week. Yet all she had done was spend time with her friends.

That’s what some comfort movies are.

Many years ago when the marathon-like M*A*S*H was finally ending its time on television, someone made the observation that few people had watched it because they were eager to see the next episode. They weren’t wondering what would happen next. They were watching simply because they wanted to spend time with the characters they had come to know so well.

That is what some comfort movies do. Many of the John Wayne movies are like this. They may have drama or comedy but many people watch them simply to spend time with their idea of John Wayne and the characters associated with him.

This particularly comes across in his later movies, like Hatari! or Donovan’s Reef, or even an earlier movie like The Quiet Man. Their merits as films aside, people watch to see the Duke and the actors/characters associated with him, like Maureen O’Hara. There is a sense of knowing them, of a personal relationship, though we know that couldn’t possibly be true – we’ve never even met them! Yet we feel that way.

So it strikes me that a characteristic of comfort movies is familiarity. We revisit certain movies in the same way we revisit certain friends and family. Familiarity. We enjoy spending time with them. This is why they are comfort movies.

Although it’s not the movie I’d like to start off with (it’s a bit misleading as far as what I consider a comfort movie to be), my favourite movie as far as this category goes is Father Goose.

Gasp! Am I nuts? Possibly. But for me this movie is as comfortable as old slippers. And that may be a good analogy because this movie is probably just as fashionable. Besides, it stars the always familiar Cary Grant, whom many simply like to watch. In anything.

Man Hunt and Fritz Lang’s dance with propaganda

Posted by Bill Wren

There is a strange irony in a movie like Man Hunt and its director Fritz Lang making the film meet the propaganda demands of the period. Those demands explain (I’m speculating) the sudden and out-of-the-blue ending to Man Hunt.

If ever there was a director who knew something about what Hitler and the Nazis meant, it was Fritz Lang, who left Germany and his career there because of them. As it is, he made Man Hunt and within it we see a very cold and brutal portrayal of what the Nazis were and represented.

Man Hunt (1941)

Directed by Fritz Lang

I like going into a movie knowing nothing about it, or next to nothing. That’s how I went into Fritz Lang’s Man Hunt. I knew about Fritz Lang though not a great deal. Let’s say I was aware of him and how he’s spoken of as a director.

Man Hunt fairly quickly lets you know what it is about, though in a deceptive way. It begins with a big game hunter lying in the grass, up in an elevated and hidden position, setting his rifle’s sights for a shot. Curiously, the scene intercuts with a German army officer, a Nazi, walking in what seems the same area.

Then we see what the hunter is aiming at: Hitler. We see he has the shot but, surprisingly, he doesn’t take it. He’s satisfied with knowing he could take it, and relaxes. Then he pauses, seems to reconsider, and puts a cartridge in the gun and re-aims.

He appears to have decided to take the shot and kill Hitler. He seems about to when the German soldier the scene had been intercutting with sets upon him. He’s stopped and taken prisoner.

We next see him, apparently having been beaten, taken to Major Quive-Smith, played by George Sanders. Now, we get the last few elements the story needs to really get going. We already know the time period, around the Second World War. It gets more specific now: it’s 1939, just before the war begins and world politics are sensitive to say the least.

What Major Quive-Smith wants from the game hunter, the well-known Captain Alan Thorndike played by Walter Pigeon, is a signed confession that he was trying to assassinate Hitler and was working for the British government.

To cut to the chase (no pun intended), Thorndike is tortured, yet continues to refuse. Finally, the Major takes him out and has him thrown from a cliff, murdered by the Nazis. He doesn’t die, however, and manages an escape and the chase is on. The big game hunter becomes the hunted and it is the Nazis, headed by Major Quive-Smith, and a darkly quiet and sinister looking John Carradine (“Mr. Jones”), who are hunting him.

The movie is about this hunt and, once Thorndike meets the young cockney woman Jerry, played by Joan Bennett, about a relationship that is somewhere between platonic and romantic. (Bennett plays Jerry with an accent that may be a tad overdone.)

It’s a very good, quick paced movie that pulls you in immediately with its tantalizing opening. As far as suspense goes, Lang knows his business. Along with the quick pace, there are some wonderful shots.

I wrote about Ugetsu recently and director Kenji Mizoguchi’s penchant for a moving camera shot, like his scrolling shot. In Man Hunt, Fritz Lang also uses this kind of thing (though not to the degree Mizoguchi does). The film opens with a moving camera shot that softly dissolves into another moving shot that, in turn, also dissolves into a moving shot. The effect is of one long moving shot that comes to a rest on Alan Thorndike aiming his rifle at his target, Adolf Hitler.

Throughout the movie you see Lang framing shots in wonderful ways and many of these also involve movement though not of the camera but of the characters.

There is one where a German officer is sitting at a desk and above him there is a large emblem. Initially, you think there is something wrong with the framing because it seems unbalanced – the space between the officer and emblem is too great. Then the officer stands and fills the frame and the shot makes sense.

Lang also creates great scenes combining his talent for framing shots with great sets that involve lines, labyrinths and curious designs. Visually, Man Hunt is fun to watch.

In fact, the only sour note would be the ending. On one hand, there is a very darkly Fritz Lang element to the story’s end for one major character, and there is a wonderful scene between Major Quive-Smith and Thorndike.

On the other, there is the abrupt ending with its patriotic trumpeting. It is understandable – the movie is a wartime propaganda product – but jarring.

So about ninety-seven percent of Man Hunt is a tremendous, suspenseful movie from Fritz Lang. It is well worth seeing.

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Film preservation in Dawson City

Posted by Bill Wren

by Robert Lovenheim

Film strip showing the effects of nitrate decomposition to the image. (Source: Cinecon Classic Film Festival, cinecon.org)
Film strip showing the effects of nitrate decomposition to the image. (Source: Cinecon Classic Film Festival, cinecon.org)

In 1978 a startling discovery elated the small world of film preservationists, restorers, and scholars. A trove of long lost original nitrate copies of silent movies was uncovered at a construction site in Dawson City, Alaska. Among them were long lost films starring Pearl White, Harold Lloyd, Douglas Fairbanks, and Lon Chaney. The permafrost had preserved them for 50 years after they had been tossed into an empty, abandoned swimming pool and covered with fill dirt.

How did these cinema treasures get to Dawson City? The story says a lot about the path of film preservation. Dawson City, it turns out, is at the end of the movie theater print circuit. Prints are usually shipped from theater to theater in an unchanging pattern. A new print starts in a big city like Seattle. From there it might go to Spokane, and then to Bellingham; next on the list might be Fairbanks, then Nome and finally Dawson City.

By the time a print arrives in Dawson City it has been run through a couple dozen grinding projectors by gum chewing teenage projectionists. It has been broken, spliced, cut to insert trailers and re-spliced and re-broken. It has so many scratches the Dawson City audience probably thinks it is always raining in the lower 48.

When a print ends its run in Dawson City it’s not worth shipping back. At first, the local movie theater donated the prints to the library. But in 1929 the library decided they didn’t want a lot of highly flammable nitrate prints in their stacks. They heaved them into an abandoned swimming pool where they were used as fill trash.

Trash: that’s the secret of film preservation. The great find of 1978 happened because somebody was digging a new foundation and unearthed a movie burial ground. The permafrost layer in the fill dirt above the movies had preserved them as good as in a temperature-controlled vault. They were given to the Library of Congress and restored.

Many assumed-lost movies have been found this way. They turn up in Uncle George’s attic or in Grandma’s garage. Movie making has always been a seat-of-the-pants occupation balanced between tight budgets and the rush to make money. Studios rarely kept archive prints. It was just another expense nobody wanted to pay for.

And why bother? The film negative was stored in the lab vault under lock and key and temperature control.  That is, if the producer paid the rent and sprinkler pipes didn’t break and flood. Hollywood pros speak the name Roger Mayer with reverence.  He was in charge of the lab at MGM and one of the first people to realize the tremendous value of carefully preserved movies. He convinced the studio to let him reprint many old ones on modern film stock. Before celluloid replaced nitrate as the base on which moving pictures were photographed, even carefully stored movies could turn to dust.

Every film student knows the story of Robert Flaherty traversing the Arctic making his famous documentary, Nanook of the North. After a year of shooting, he gathered all the film in his cutting room to edit and lit a cigarette. Poof! In 30 seconds everything was gone (Flaherty went back a second time and reshot the film).

Once missing films are found, the science and art of film restoration takes over. The caisson where most of this happens is an underground labyrinth at the Eastman House of Photography, in Rochester, NY. (There’s no reason it is underground except George Eastman’s old mansion is on top of it). Technicians have special machines for cleaning, lubricating, and printing. Old images are not the only problem. Film shrinks over time and will not fit the sprocket gears of newer machines. Restorers are crafty folks who know secret tricks like wet gate printing and high resolution video manipulation. Sometimes they must restore one frame at a time. They are true alchemists.

The next time you see Marty Scorsese on TV standing at one of those black tie parties announcing a brand new print of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, think of Dawson City, The Eastman House, and all those people who knew enough to read the labels on the cans before cleaning out Grandma’s garage.

(A big thank you goes out to for today’s guest post. You’ll find him over at Movie With Me where I – Bill – am an occasional contributor. Here is how Roberto describes himself at Movie With Me: “Resident Curmudgeon & Film Buff

“As a long time Hollywood producer, I love the internet because there are no rules, no gatekeepers, no stupid executives whose only skill is looking good in a suit. And I love film. The ones that are great, and the ones not-so-great that have moments of inspiration or brilliance. Making a movie is a roll of the dice. Once you have actors and tempers and weather you never know what will happen. The only thing you can be sure of is it will never turn out exactly the way you planned. I salute anyone who tries, and I try to sing the unsung because they too deserve a little glory for attempting the impossible. “

Many, many thanks!)

Ava Gardner and housekeeping

Posted by Bill Wren

Honestly, I just intended to write a review of The Barefoot Contessa (1954). I did, but it led to some housekeeping — on Piddleville, to the neglect of my actual house.

I felt the need to clean up the appearance of a movie I reviewed back in 2001, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951). And that led me to …

I ended up thinking about Ava Gardner and why it was so difficult to  put her in a decent movie and let her act. One of the things both those movies have in common is using Gardner essentially as scenery. Even as a symbol. But not as a character, although she appears to do her damnedest to be one and, to the degree it was possible, successfully.

I haven’t seen every movie Gardner was in; in fact, I’ve seen relatively few though those I’ve seen appear to be her better known films. There is one big exception. Unbelievably, I haven’t seen The Killers (1946). Don’t ask why; I’ve no idea.

Here is what I have seen and written about:

And then there is this review of Lee Server’s biography of Gardner:

Of the movies, my two least favourites are Pandora and Contessa. It’s probably Night of the Iguana I like best, partly due to the story, partly due to Gardner’s performance. The other is Mogambo — which surprised me. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen that one great movie that starred Ava Gardner. In some ways, she reminds me of the singer Eva Cassidy who the music industry could never figure out how to box and package.

Gardner’s problem with the movie business was different. Movies don’t appear to have gotten past the idea that she was a beautiful woman.

Other matters — what’s with the ads, pal?

You’ve probably noticed I have a lot of Amazon links and ads. I even put up a Barnes & Noble ad. Even a Google ad. They’re cluttering up my sidebar and appearing here and there in some of my reviews. The reason is simple: I’m experimenting. So they will likely clutter things up for a bit longer till I see what works, what doesn’t, what is unobtrusive but helpful and what isn’t.

As for the “what works” business, it may well be that nothing works. But I figure if something I’ve written gets someone interested in a film or book, I can make it easy to buy it, assuming someone would want to.

And there is, of course, the matter of paying for what it costs to run the site. Piddleville has been kicking around since about 2000 and I’ve never made any money from it but I have forked out quite a bit in registration, hosting and other costs. So if I can create a small revenue stream, at least enough to pay for the site, that would be a good thing.

I’m not much of a huckster; I’ve never wanted to be. But if I can generate some revenue without being an annoyance, I think that’s okay. For the moment, I’m just testing a few things and once I figure out what, if anything, works and isn’t a pain in a visitor’s behind, I’ll strip things back.

For the moment, however, please be patient! :)