I almost missed a milestone earlier this week.  The inimitable, irrepressible, and incredibly talented actress Betty Garrett celebrated her 90th birthday on this past Tuesday, May 23rd!  A showbiz veteran with a career that spans theater, Broadway, movies during the Golden Age of Musicals, and television, Betty Garrett’s lasting impact on the American entertainment scene and in the hearts of her many fans makes her a very special lady indeed.  If you’re a musical fan, you know exactly what I’m talking about.  Even though she appeared in relatively few movies compared to other Hollywood stalwarts, you knew you’d really seen something wonderful after watching one of her performances.  Much like Kay Thompson, whom I wrote about last week, Betty Garrett lit up the screen and it’s impossible to even think about her without smiling.

READ MORE

One of the greatest things about Turner Classic Movies, besides Robert Osborne, is the fact that they show movies that can’t be (readily) seen anywhere else.  Starting Monday, TCM will be featuring some of the best films from fifty-two of (arguably) the most celebrated directors in cinema’s history.  While you’re probably familiar with the classics that will air during primetime throughout the month – virtually all of which ARE available on DVD – you may not have seen some of these directors little known gems (that is unless, like me, you’re a regular viewer of the channel).  Some of these titles are (or have been) tied up in legal battles which have prevented their physical distribution to date; for others, their owners apparently don’t believe that the market is sufficient enough (given the costs) to make them available.  In time, Warner’s Archive and (Internet, cable & satellite) on-demand offerings will make it easier to see these ‘forgotten’ films from Hollywood’s Golden Era; for now, TCM is the only show in town.  Regardless of the reason(s), I’ve compiled a list of some of the better unavailable movies found on June’s schedule.

READ MORE

Some actors just tickle you.  It’s a highly personal thing.  I’m pretty much immune to the alleged charms of most “funny” guys in Hollywood, from Jerry Lewis to Jim Carey to Jack Black – I’ll admit they can (and do) have their moments but for me their signal to noise ratio falls squarely in the category of static.  I tend to get my yuks from character actors, guys you don’t think of as comedians but who nonetheless make you laugh.  Olin Howlin, for example.  You probably know him, if you know him at all, as the Old Man who becomes the first victim of THE BLOB (1958) but that was actually his last movie – his career went back to the silent era and he was always reliable as an addle-pated civil servant (from sheriffs to morticians to comical drunks, he played ‘em all).  These days, that kind of classic characterization is pretty rare but I see it alive and thriving in the person of Ray Wise. READ MORE

Sometimes, the man seems to have been dismissed during his film career as having “had a face like a duck”. He was regarded as a pretty nervous sort who might be a second lead at best, but could fake a certain hearty good fellowship whenever a part called for it and exemplified a sort of unadventurous husband and father. What most of us may not have been prepared for was the discovery that the man had talent too. Thanks to TCM, in the last few years, I’ve had a chance to see that he was more than the lightweight, improbable romantic lead of comedies cranked out in the studio era.

My fellow blogger, Jacqueline, of Another Old Movie Blog reminded me of this actor recently when she turned her nuanced eye on They Won’t Believe Me (1947) starring Robert Young and Susan Hayward as very star-crossed lovers in a small scale film noir about greed, desire and fate. The movie, which MorlockJeff also praised in an earlier blog,  benefits from the casting of the usually affable Young in the role of an ordinary man who, in his job as a stockbroker becomes involved with three archetypal film noir women, played by Hayward as a working class girl with ambitions for the finer things in life, Jane Greer as the polished, seductive Lorelei beyond his reach, and the solitary, wealthy socialite Rita Johnson as the controlling wife, who seeks to isolate Young and feed on his soul, like a mythical Harpy. I love this movie, and felt as though I’d discovered a secret door into the real Robert Young when I first saw this film after growing up enjoying his lighter-veined paternal roles in such movies as Sitting Pretty and, of course Father Knows Best, Marcus Welby, M.D. and those ’70s Sanka commercials when a grandfatherly Young used to ask “Why so tense?” just before foisting a cuppa the brew on some younger person about to snap.

READ MORE

In introducing El Dorado at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Andrew Sarris bemoaned  Howard Hawks’ future. He peered silently at the sparse crowd, and declared that the turnout was unsurprising. The recent class he offered on Hawks at Columbia University, he told us, was the least popular of all his auteur courses. Where have all the Hawksians gone? Well, I’m right here, and BAM tried to draw them out in their recently concluded program, “The Late Film”, which screened Red Line 7000 and El Dorado on consecutive nights, a crash course in late Hawks and a lesson about what cultures decide to preserve and forget.

READ MORE

Watching Barry Lyndon and reading about Stanley Kubrick once again stirred my interest in the directors of the Film School Generation. Truth be told, movies by the filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s are never too far off my radar. I grew up watching the movies of these filmmakers in the local movie theater in my small hometown in Ohio. The movies of Coppola, Lumet, Scorsese, Kubrick, Altman, Ashby, and many others were par for the course during those days. At times, I didn’t quite grasp what these directors were going for in their often challenging films, but they always expanded my understanding of what a popular film could be while still entertaining me. And those Hollywood directors who cropped up in the post-Film-School era of the 1980s, such as Walter Hill, the Scott brothers, John McTiernan, and James Cameron, still made smart, well-crafted genre films that had meaningful subtexts even if their narratives weren’t quite as innovative.

            But, as the barrage of hype for the upcoming summer blockbusters hits me everyday, I cringe at the thought of junk like Terminator Salvation and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen being given the time of day by anyone. (“Revenge of the Fallen”? Could a title be any more banal?) While they are rightly criticized for lack of content and incoherent narratives, I am most disgusted at the complete lack of craftsmanship. That directors such as Michael Bay, Judd Apatow, McG (the fast-food of Hollywood directors), and Zack Snyder could get so far in their careers without understanding or respecting the classic narrative style boggles my mind. The strength of Hollywood films in the past has always been their craftsmanship and the directors’ firm grasp of the classic narrative style and its techniques, even if the films’ stories were formulaic or simplistic. While the directors of the Film School Generation often experimented with or subverted the classic narrative style to great effect, they respected the artistry of the style’s basic techniques and understood the impact of their experimentations on the audience. Little of that is true for today’s directors who are the darlings of the corporate-driven behemoths that still call themselves “movie studios.” For many reasons, I find the flops, misfires, and missteps of the Film School Generation better viewing experiences than the best that today’s studio hacks have to offer.

READ MORE

Thanks to all who participated in last week’s query for input regarding the prospective titles that I might bring to my arthouse theater this Fall. I’m hoping I did not exhaust your patience, because this next list is going to really put you through the gauntlet. I’ll just let ‘em rip, fast and furious, and I’ll keep the blurbs brief. I’ll be picking 30 or more titles, so feel free to vote for all your favorites. READ MORE

Is there something weird in the water in Australia? Or maybe the air is different down there. All I know is that that culture has produced some of the quirkiest and most unusual films of any country beginning in the seventies with such movies as Peter Weir’s The Cars That Eat People (aka The Cars that Ate Paris, 1974), Stone (1974), and Thirst (1979), to mention just a few, and continuing through the ensuing decades with such cult items as Jane Campion’s Sweetie (1989) and Rolf de Heer’s Bad Boy Bubby (1993) to their credit. More surprising is that a few have gone on to become boxoffice hits in the U.S. such as Baz Luhrmann’s Strictly Ballroom (1992), Muriel’s Wedding (1994), and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994). But one of my favorites – LOVE SERENADE (1996) – which I recently revisited, didn’t strike boxoffice gold like the above three titles though it’s a strikingly original black comedy for those who fancy that often unappreciated mixture of the macabre and the comical which is so rarely well done.

READ MORE

I can’t make it East to New York for the Steve McQueen retrospective going on at the Walter Reade Theatre through  May 26th so in lieu of attending I’ll talk instead about a Steve McQueen credit not on the roster of films there.  READ MORE