laddie5 Reviews

Kiss Me, Stupid (1964)

Getting to Climax

[7/10 · 12 September 2010]

Billy Wilder had just come off making Irma La Douce, and as a self-aware artist he must have been conflicted and bitter to watch that piece of low-grade prurient tripe become the biggest box-office hit of his career.

More cynical than ever, perhaps, he embarked on one of his most problematic films. Kiss Me Stupid, as its title implies, is half masterpiece and half mess, riveting and unwatchable at the same time.

It begins with Dean Martin performing the great Gershwin classic "S'wonderful." This sweetly ironic song is built on clever, intricate wordplay, but Dino keeps interrupting it every few bars to lob cheap "adult" jokes at his smoke-wreathed Vegas audience. You can actually sense Wilder's disgust seeping through the sharply etched widescreen images.

And yet as the film's director he does just what Dino does... taking a sweetly ironic story and coarsening it with leering innuendo, poundingly unfunny punch lines, and pointless smut. Is Kiss Me Stupid a pointed attack on an empty and vulgar society? Or is it the empty and vulgar work of a tiring older man abandoning any pretense of giving a sh*t? Both, I suppose.

Despite its crude overemphasis, the movie is painfully accurate in portraying the worst aspects of American life: the stifling dead-end atmosphere of little edge of nowhere towns -- the total abasement in the presence of celebrity -- the desperate clinging to possessions all the way down the socio-economic ladder.

As with any classic portrait of this country, it centers on the only means of escape: the road -- in this case, the road to and out of Climax. The story begins with Dino cruising down it in his convertible, and ends with Kim Novak's Polly pulling out of it, waving cheerfully as she abandons her role as the town's most popular whore. You can't help but feel that the director, having finally let it all hang out in a movie with "flop" written all over it, can relate.

A Woman of Affairs (1928)

The New Woman

[10/10 · 13 February 2010]

This is Greta Garbo's best silent movie, and maybe her best movie, period. Some posters have noted that the story is a bit goofy. That's because in the original novel, the Garbo character's husband commits suicide on his wedding night because he has syphilis; due to censorship, this was changed to his being an embezzler. Thus the heroine's subsequent public promiscuity to protect his name, and the fact that everyone treats her like a leper, make very little sense. Yet the brilliant cast and director manage to put the original meaning across anyway.

But although sex and scandal are the story's raison d'etre, what makes the movie memorable is that it captures something essential about the time it was made (the end of the Roaring 20s): a restless, heedless cynicism and emptiness, a bitter gaiety, a mixture of desire and melancholy. And most of all, it shows the "new woman" of the 20s -- not a bug-eyed flapper doing a wild Charleston, but a woman who makes no fuss about being as strong and self-willed as a man. And in that respect, being so true to its own time, it achieves timelessness.

There's a great moment when Garbo strides up to her disapproving older nemesis in a belted polo coat and cloche hat with a cigarette dangling from her lips. She stands there until he's forced to offer her a light, then instead pulls a lighter from her pocket and insolently does it herself. Another when she's on her honeymoon with a man she doesn't love, and she lies in bed switching the light on and off -- you realize that she's bored, impatient, horny, and regretful all at once.

The story seems most dated when the characters are discussing whether or not Garbo is "good" or "decent." The men in the movie all stand around, trying to understand her and failing. She's beyond their narrow categories -- she has more wit, courage and intelligence than any of them. Watching her, she makes me ache with the feeling (like every other spectator, I'm sure) that the only one who's really capable of appreciating her is... me.

Phaedra (1962)

The Whole World Burns

[8/10 · 30 August 2009]

Anthony Perkins has two loves -- Melina Mercouri and an Aston-Martin DB4 -- and it's hard to tell which is more spectacularly hard, fast and beautiful. I've never been a fan of Mercouri, with her mask-like face and disembodied guttural voice, but she's ideally cast as the heroine of this modern dress Greek tragedy, and she moves through the starkly gorgeous Hydra landscape like a queen. Story, setting, costumes and photography have never done an actress more favors; inhuman as she is, you can't look away. When she snarls "I don't care if the whole world burns!" you not only believe it, you want to watch it with her. Dassin's direction is very assured throughout, for example staging a technically difficult scene on the Aegean where Raf Vallone's helicopter circles over Mercouri on their yacht and he drops flowers on her, and in such a way that we register only the outsized emotions. Two other standout moments have been noted extensively in the other comments: the stunningly filmed love scene by the fire and Perkins' final ride in the Aston-Martin, in which he dares and brings off the most wildly over-the-top scene of his career. True, he doesn't seem man enough for Mercouri, especially next to Vallone, but that's part of what makes it a tragedy.

A Feather in Her Hat (1935)

Mostly Feathers

[6/10 · 15 December 2008]

After failing as a leading man in Hollywood when talkies came in, Basil Rathbone came back as a character actor five years later. He had a remarkable 1935: David Copperfield, Captain Blood, Anna Karenina, and The Last Days of Pompeii especially showcased his range as a "villain," from pious sadist to laughing cavalier to haughty aristocrat -- each time acting with a subtle twist that made his character the most interesting one in the film.

And this little movie, in which he's not a villain but a gentleman drunk who becomes a surrogate husband and father to a poor shopkeeper and her son. It's not great literature; in fact it's pretty disgustingly condescending to the "little people" and their plucky spirit. As a story, it's about as interesting as an old doily fished out of grandma's trunk. Because I love him, I'd like to say that Rathbone saves it with a remarkable performance, but he's too much of a live wire to play a mild, passive weakling, and he doesn't have much chemistry with Pauline Lord, who plays the sacrificing mother we're supposed to be interested in. It's a part better suited to Roland Young or Donald Crisp... or Nigel Bruce.

Still, as a Rathbone completist, I was happy to get a chance to see it, having first read about it in Michael Druxman's biography of Rathbone waaaaay back in 1974... the recent airing by TCM is the first showing I'm aware of since then. Now if I could only get my hands on "Loyalties."

Art School Confidential (2006)

A Masterpiece

[10/10 · 31 August 2008]

It's easy to see why this movie got terrible reviews (in every sense), and continues to get them here. A reviewer, by definition, is not an artist. This movie is a bracingly tough-minded depiction of how a person becomes an artist, and every pitfall along that path.

Art School Confidential starts out like a satire, with a lacerating, devastating series of portraits of all the ways non-artists look, sound, behave and think. The students are spoiled narcissists, suckups, politicking weasels, imitators, or mindless followers of fashion -- all of them looking for validation outside themselves. The professors are failures who express their self contempt by becoming bullies, phony gurus, and sexual predators. And just beyond the "school" (in which no one learns anything) lie the leeches: the various patrons and marketers to whom art is just another product to buy and sell.

Our hero, Jerome, must navigate his way past them all and learn to live and create without their approval or even their comprehension. Failing this test, the other artist character Jimmy (beautifully played by Jim Broadbent) has become bitter, cynical, and ultimately homicidal. This is why the film seems to become darker as its true seriousness of purpose unfolds. This isn't a satirical teen comedy… what saves Jerome is his relationship with Audrey, but his final test as an artist is to see beyond his physical attraction to her and to finally understand her as his muse.

I've read dozens of reviews of this film and I don't think I've seen the word "muse" once. Anyone who doesn't get that point, illustrated beautifully in the film's final amazing image, doesn't know what they're watching. Most movies, no matter how cynical or dark, just want to be loved. Art School Confidential wants to show the world as it is and tell the truth about it. And it seems it has demonstrated its own thesis by ending up as unloved and misunderstood as its protagonist.

Splendor (1999)

Paging Miss Hopkins

[8/10 · 20 August 2008]

Surfing the cable channels one night, I stumbled on this little movie and was struck first by the gorgeous cinematography: the close-ups of Kathleen Robertson were almost hallucinatory. Despite her choppy bleached hair, ordinary looks, and snippy acting style, she looked so radiantly attractive that it was immediately clear the director was madly in love with her. The director being Gregg Araki, his taste in men was actually better: he clearly enjoyed putting Matt Keeslar and Jonathan Schaech together on a couch, in bed, and in the shower. The movie is Araki's modern version of Design for Living, the old Noel Coward warhorse (note the third-act appearance of a character named Ernest, the bourgeois dullard the heroine almost marries). Too bad Araki didn't have Miriam Hopkins to work with instead of Robertson. Visually, the movie is amazing, but where it falls seriously short is in the writing... to say that Araki is no Noel Coward is like saying that Pauly Shore is no Charlie Chaplin. Like, duh. Somehow, though, this wafer-thin comedy seemed to liberate him from the cynical dead end he'd fallen into in the 90s -- his next movie (with a solid story by Scott Heim) was Mysterious Skin, a riveting, fearless masterpiece that was unquestionably the best American movie of 2004.

Island of Lost Souls (1932)

Pads Paws and Claws

[10/10 · 17 August 2008]

When there are racks and racks of putrid horror crap in every video store, why oh why is this masterpiece not on DVD? I just watched it again on my old VHS copy, taped off of AMC back before the beast men took over there.... and wow. Even chopped up and blurry, this is the best and most frightening classic horror movie ever made.

"Lost Souls" has it all -- mystery ship sailing through the fog to forbidden island; mutants on the loose; Bela Lugosi (buried in hair but his voice vibrant with suffering); and a bugface crazy mad scientist playing God and paying for it big time.

Charles Laughton is terrific as the white-suited Dr. Moreau, whispering lasciviously, bellowing in frustration, and lording it over his half-evolved creations with dogma and bullwhip. As critic Mick LaSalle points out, the movie poses some potent metaphysical questions -- what is the law? are we not men? and what if God is actually just a sadistic fraud?

This being a Paramount horror movie, it all comes down to sex, baby. Failing in his attempt to speed up evolution by having his panther woman seduce the hero (who almost goes for it until she unsheathes her claws too soon), Moreau decides instead to simply put an ape man and the nice girl together in a cage and see what happens.

The movie builds and builds to a genuinely disturbing, horrifying climax in which a roiling throng of beast men carry Moreau into his own laboratory ("the House of Pain"), put him on the table, and grab the scalpels. Laughton once said he could never go near a zoo again... if you're lucky enough to see this gem someday, you'll know just how he feels.

A Free Soul (1931)

A New Kind of Man in a New Kind of World

[8/10 · 18 May 2008]

Yeah, yeah, it's Gable and Howard 8 years before Gone With the Wind, and even then the former makes the latter look like a eunuch. A number of posters seem flummoxed by this little coincidence and by the early-talkie theatricality of this movie. But for its time it really moves and breathes, particularly in the impressive scenes of Norma Shearer and Lionel Barrymore camping in the Sierras, trying and failing to leave their addictions behind and repair their broken relationship.

Technically, this movie may be primitive, but in terms of content and meaning you couldn't get it made today: it's the story of a woman who uses a thug only for her own sexual pleasure, and the baffled and violent way the men in her life react. All three of them are outwardly brilliant and successful -- the lawyer, the gangster, and the rich polo player -- but have their vanity and weakness exposed when confronted with a powerful woman making her own choices. Some of the quieter moments of this movie are pretty devastating.

p.s. strange how the myth that Gable "slaps" Shearer persists... are people really watching this movie? He shoves her back onto a couch twice, and that's it. The real violence is what she does to him by treating him as a boy toy.

Myra Breckinridge (1970)

Hard to Handle

[10/10 · 3 May 2008]

When the blight of Catholic censorship fell like an axe on Hollywood in July of 1934, Mae West was, if not the chief cause, at least Exhibit A in the case against movie smut. 42 years old and at her eye-rolling prime, she was in the middle of making "It Ain't No Sin" -- and there are no prizes for guessing what "it" was. Filming was suspended and she was forced to rewrite her outrageous, lowdown script two or three times before it could be approved. After that, the censors clamped down on her more with each film, and her huge popularity slowly evaporated.

In 1968, the ratings system drove the last nail into the Production Code, and suddenly you could put anything on the screen -- even "Myra Breckinridge," an incoherent mess of a novel featuring transsexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality, female-on-male rape, and free-floating camp sensibility... to which the movie added Vietnam-era American self-hatred, anti-Hollywood vitriol, and Mae West.

But hey, maybe that's what happens when you bottle up your impulses for 34 years. To me, it seems entirely appropriate that the woman most responsible for censorship should sashay back on screen to headline this carnival of perversion and bad taste. Amid its flailing about, "Myra Breckinridge" half-heartedly tries to excuse itself as some kind of expression of Woman Power. But Mae West, moaning and clutching herself while black dancers gyrate behind her, simply IS woman power. And as ever, she's so rapturously in love with herself she can hardly stop grinning with pleasure.

Yeah, she's almost 80, and a lot of people seem hung up on that. Don't they notice she addresses the age issue herself? "I'm a little tired today," she tells her assistant. "One of these boys will have to go."

In today's post-shame America, old age is the last taboo. It's a beautiful thing to watch Mae West demonstrate that it ain't no sin.

Strangers When We Meet (1960)

The love that is so bittersweet

[10/10 · 29 April 2008]

Kirk Douglas, still pumped up from Spartacus, fills out an array of knit shirts and chews a thoughtful pencil as a "serious" architect trying to balance his personal integrity with his suburban lifestyle (materialistic wife, snot-nosed kids -- the full disaster, as someone once said). Into his fading dreams comes the stunning Kim Novak... bruised, hurting, and longing for love so much she's practically falling out of her cashmere sweater. They sneak away to a beachside roadhouse for martinis and you can guess what happens next.

Except you can't, really. Some commentators on this board have called this a soap opera, but in fact the strength of the movie is that it avoids cliché at every turn. The illicit lovers elicit only sympathy (sorry, edwagreen, you really need a remedial writing course) as they encounter every real-life obstacle that adulterers are prey to -- socially awkward patio parties, lies stretched to the breaking point, shameful discovery -- and eventually spread damage and heartbreak to each other and those they care about most.

And so the great Richard Quine takes Evan Hunter's overcooked potboiler of a novel and turns it into a small classic -- full of a delicate sadness "worthy of Ophuls," as critic David Thomson put it. The movie has its nostalgic charms: an L.A. with smogless skies and plenty of room for building a new house; Walter Matthau as a neighborhood wolf (his leering advice to his 9-year-old son is priceless); Barbara Rush as the wife (I liked one poster on the old AMC site who beautifully summed her up as a "tight package"); and Ernie Kovacks as a semi-sleazy writer who gets some life lessons from Douglas.

It also has moments of quiet emotional truth and one is particularly poignant: Douglas and Novak meet accidentally at a kiddie park and haltingly talk through their situation, realizing how hopeless it is. When I was a lad, my parents took me to this exact same amusement park; it was on Van Nuys Boulevard in the Valley, next to Ho Toys Chinese restaurant, glimpsed briefly in the background. The intersection of my childhood and adult perspectives in this scene fairly blew my mind... "Strangers" is a perfect time capsule of Los Angeles in 1960, but it's also quite timeless.

Daddy Long Legs (1955)

Dream when you're feeling blue

[7/10 · 27 April 2008]

One of the better late Fred Astaire musicals, since his advancing years are made part of the plot, and his non-conformist role suits his aloof and chilly persona. He probably was never more charming than the Prom scene in this film -- first ruefully contemplating his own irrelevance among the college-age studs, and then out-dancing them all in the "Sluefoot" number. Too bad his partner is the chunky and gauche Leslie Caron, who ruins the big romantic dance by waddling through it in a bouffant skirt. (In the 1935 farce "In Person," Ginger Rogers wore a disguise consisting of buck teeth, glasses and a horsehair wig, and managed to look just like Caron.) Thanks to DVD you can fast-forward through the gawdawful dream ballet -- every other musical after "Oklahoma" had to have one, it seems, and this is one of the worst.

Monkey Business (1952)

Monkey Something

[5/10 · 27 April 2008]

This screwball comedy with tired blood shows why people were staying home watching television in 1952. Hard to believe that a movie with so much talent (Howard Hawks, Ben Hecht, a great cast) could just sit there on screen, alternately lifeless and shrill but never for one minute funny. Yet it has a bewilderingly high reputation -- maybe people look at Cary Grant in thick "professor" spectacles and think they're seeing comic genius, or maybe it's the monkeys: they act just like people! Actually in this film it's the reverse, and watching Grant and Ginger Rogers monkey around in middle age is just painful. That said, it's an improvement on their earlier teaming, Leo McCarey's jaw-dropping Nazi-fighting screwball "Once Upon a Honeymoon" -- in that movie, as in this, the two stars do nothing for each other. Too bad Rogers turned down "His Girl Friday" and "Ball of Fire"... I wonder if this movie was Hawks' revenge, because he films her with an ice-cold indifference that leaves her stranded on the screen.

The Last Flight (1931)

Flawed but Fascinating

[8/10 · 27 April 2008]

Though it pretty much deserves its reputation as a lost classic, The Last Flight is essentially a blatant ripoff of The Sun Also Rises. That's forgivable, but where Hemingway's depiction of despair cloaked in banter and monosyllables is delicate and evocative, John Monk Saunders tends to hit the same notes with a ball-peen hammer. Another problem is that much of the time the early-talkie cast simply recites the script's non-sequiturs and absurdities with singsong cheer and no clue that there's supposed to be a subtext. And if Helen Chandler gives a haunting performance, it seems less about acting than her own inner demons and premonitions of tragedy.

And yet... maybe because it was filmed only three or four years after the novel was published, the acrid Hemingway flavor comes through anyway. When they finally did make a movie of The Sun Also Rises, with a superb and faithful script by Peter Vietrel, it was let down by glossy production values and a menopausal big-star cast. This is how it should have looked: gritty and seedy, with dirt on the barroom floors. Flawed as it is, this movie (and A Farewell to Arms, filmed at the same time) does manage to put across Hemingway's vision of people connecting, brokenly and sardonically, in a world where no other hope has survived.

Sincerely Yours (1955)

You can't silent scream all the way to the bank

[10/10 · 26 April 2008]

Interesting that ptb-8 suggests this movie for late-night audience participation, for that's exactly how I first saw it at the late-lamented Vista Theater in L.A. about 20 years ago. It was featured in a "worst films of all time" festival, and while other contenders such as The Lonely Lady and Hello Everybody! had their piquant charms, nothing beat Sincerely Yours for continuous laughter and riotous audience response.

What makes the film so beautiful and so special is that it takes all the Classical Hollywood conventions (regular-guy hero desired by both nice girl and vamp; illness and disability used for shameless heart-tugging; totally artificial sets and lighting) and unthinkingly dumps Liberace -- grinning, unctuous, goggle-eyed and palpably uneasy -- right into them.

Lee gamely goes through the motions, but scene after scene goes weirdly wrong, with every third line of dialogue becoming a hilarious double entendre comment on the star's deeply closeted yet totally obvious sexuality. He's introduced interrupting his cigar-chewing manager's bubble bath, just thrilled to hear that he's secured tickets to the big prizefight ("I love a good fight" he murmers). He ends the film tap dancing in a pink tuxedo. In between he goes all dramatic as deafness strikes him (I seem to recall a silent scream) and takes to spying on a young boy's daily walks in Central Park via the biggest pair of binoculars you ever saw.

Don't worry that the music might be too highbrow for you: amid the butchered Chopin and Schumann, there's a full concert version of "Chopsticks" and some boogie woogie. Liberace plays a bit of the latter and smirks "that's the boogie..." and I have to say that waiting for him to complete the thought by saying "that's the woogie" was one of the most gloriously happy moments of my life. The Vista programmer informed us that Liberace's brother George assembled this eclectic musical programme; when the film became a huge flop, he ungenerously blamed George and the two brothers were estranged for some time afterwards.

That's the woogie, baby.

The VHS tape of Sincerely Yours is faded and panned-and-scanned; this inadvertent masterpiece deserves a full restoration to its widescreen glory on DVD.

Sherlock Holmes in Washington (1943)

A big country and a small matchfolder

[7/10 · 22 April 2008]

When I was a wee lad steeped in Conan Doyle's original Sherlock Holmes stories, this movie struck me as plain awful. It was painful to see Sherlock as a tourist in a wildly inappropriate DC milieu (the back-projected crazy quilt of Washington monuments on his drive around town makes it seem the chauffeur is on crack), spouting pax Americana patriotism and even paying tribute to the crime-fighting superiority of the FBI (??!!). Nigel Bruce was a particular affront as a doddering Dr. Watson, noisily sucking down ice cream sodas and struggling to read 30 pages on a 10-hour transatlantic flight.

But time has been kind to "SH in Washington." This was the first of these movies written by Bertram Millhauser, who always came up with witty dialogue for Rathbone and Bruce and snarky bits of malice for the supporting cast. Basil Rathbone gives a hopped-up performance as Holmes, barking out ludicrously improbable deductions and even reprising his Louis XI imitation as a limp-wristed "eccentric" collector. There is a small gem of a performance from Gerald Hamer (unbilled, sadly) as the master spy who sets the plot in motion -- he gives the movie a few whiffs of danger, intrigue and poignance. And it's hard to dislike a movie with two Moriartys: silky sadist Henry Daniell and glittery-eyed psycho George Zucco. By the way, the suspense hinges on the fate of a fast-dwindling book of matches, so if you're trying to quit smoking, this is not the movie for you.

Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (1942)

The needle to the last, eh Holmes?

[7/10 · 22 April 2008]

It's one of the paradoxes of Basil Rathbone's wartime anti-Nazi Sherlock Holmes films (Voice of Terror, SH in Washington, and this one) that while the plots and settings are mostly terrible, he is so good in them. Despite a bizarre wind-swept hairstyle meant to make him look younger, he blazes through every scene with so much bite and attack that you hardly register how flimsy the plots are. Here he also has great acting rapport with Lionel Atwill, who makes a wonderfully repulsive Professor Moriarty -- a heavy lidded cockroach with nice hints of sadism and depravity (it may not have been acting, kids). At the climax, changed into a lab coat in order to drain Rathbone's blood "drop by drop," he's as over-the-top sinister as Seinfeld's arch-nemesis Newman. The movie itself is ancient kiddie matinée fare, but it benefits from director Roy William Neill's attention to staging and atmosphere. It also looks fairly sharp in the DVD's UCLA restoration -- don't even think of buying any other edition, all of them faded, choppy public-domain prints.

Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942)

Find out what "Christopher" means

[7/10 · 22 April 2008]

This entertaining little melodrama does a decent job of moving Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson from the Victorian comforts of Baker Street into the WWII London of blitzes and blackouts. I have been watching this movie off and on for over 30 years, and it has never looked as crystal clear as it does in UCLA's stunning print on the recent DVD. Sound is sharp and clear, too, with some lines of dialogue understandable to my ears for the very first time. Speaking of dialogue, it's quite an indictment of today's Idiots-R-Us culture that a cheap B-movie from 60 years ago sounds like Shakespeare now. For example, when Basil Rathbone's Holmes reminds Thomas Gomez that the English believe every life has value, the sweaty little Nazi sneers "A quaint notion of an even quainter nation." Not bad. The plot purports to be based on Sir Arthur's wonderful endpaper Holmes story "His Last Bow," but it uses nothing beyond the villain's last name and the great closing lines. In its day, the British were outraged at this movie, with its suggestion of treachery and treason at the highest levels of government, and the country owing its salvation to the noble bravery of a prostitute. Doesn't sound so shocking now, does it?

Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (1943)

Ghosts don't stab people in the neck, do they?

[8/10 · 22 April 2008]

This was the first of the Universal Sherlock Holmes movies that returned the detective to traditional mystery plots, after three wartime anti-Nazi adventures. It's also one of the best... and in fact it was voted the 2nd-best Holmes movie of all time in one poll (after Rathbone's "Adventures" or "Hound," I forget which). The entertaining opening has Nigel Bruce's Dr. Watson, who has a bit more on the ball than usual, bringing Holmes into the case-which itself is a clever improvement on Conan Doyle's rather dull short story "The Musgrave Ritual." The cast features almost all of the usual stock company featured in this series (Dennis Hoey, Gerald Hamer, Vernon Dowling, Frederic Worlock, Gavin Muir), playing assorted cretins, rotters, weaklings, and twitching neurotics. Various sets from "Frankenstein" and "Dracula" turn up as well, and the plot abounds with bloodthirsty ravens, bolts of lightning, mysterious passageways, and a clock that strikes thirteen on the nights that evil is afoot. Rathbone strikes a nice balance between his earlier, more wired Sherlock and his later jaded style, but the excellent UCLA restoration also reveals him as a bit older and more ravaged than I recall. Maybe there's something to be said for a "soft" transfer after all.

The Lost World (1960)

Dino Cheese

[7/10 · 10 February 2008]

You can watch "The Lost World" one of two ways:

1) As a maddeningly mangled version of the great Arthur Conan Doyle novel, turning memorable characters into crude stereotypes and adding a half-dozen others so you won't notice there's only one brief sequence featuring "dinosaurs" (magnified lizards with rubber collars, tortured into listlessly attacking each other).

2) As an early '60s camp fest, what with the babealicious cave girl, Fernando "you look mahvelous" Lamas as a tricky native, Frosty the poodle (he gets special billing!), and Claude Rains as a peppery pipsqueak Professor Challenger -- not to mention Irwin Allen's colored-lights-on-styrofoam special effects. Savor Fernando's peerless reading of the line "my helicopter!" upon seeing that the dinos have crushed same, making escape impossible. Best of all, Jill St. John (an Annette Bening without irony) in her pink pants and boots, who announces "I can ride, fly, and shoot better than any man I know" and then spends the balance of the movie shrieking and running for the strong arms of David "Al" Hedison. Or is it Al "David" Hedison?

Released on DVD with the sweet, rather innocent 1925 silent version... Conan Doyle loved it and in terms of character development, thrills, and faithfulness it's still miles ahead of every subsequent "Lost World" movie or TV series (including the recent "ecologically correct" Bob Hoskins fiasco).

Houseboat (1958)

One Look Can Write a Book

[7/10 · 19 January 2008]

Aside from his Hitchcock movies and "Charade," this is virtually the only watchable movie Cary Grant made after 1944. It's really just one more of the bland family-friendly sitcoms that blight his later career, but more interesting than most for a couple of reasons. One is the passel of motherless kids, who for a change are convincingly sullen, bitter and unreachable until a brief last-minute conversion. The other is the presence of Sophia Loren -- raw-boned, gauche, gorgeous, and in real life determined not to become the fourth Mrs. Grant. The movie is contrived and totally unconvincing, but the two stars' tortured feelings for each other keep seeping through, giving many scenes an edgy tension you can't shake off. Loren's artless singing of the fine ballad "Almost in Your Arms" is haunting; their subsequent dance has an emotional fierceness that practically burns a hole in the screen.

Lady in the Dark (1944)

But the pearls and such, they don't mean much...

[7/10 · 11 February 2007]

Onstage, "Lady in the Dark" was the most groundbreaking musical of the 1940s. It was structured as a straight play about Liza Elliot, a serious, austere fashion editor who begins cracking up on the job. In sessions with her psychoanalyst, she recalls three dreams -- in which the serious drama bursts into lavish complex musical numbers featuring Liza as a singer/dancer who is the epitome of musical comedy glamour (so much so that Vincente Minnelli and Judy Garland named their daughter after this part).

On Broadway, Gertrude Lawrence used her crisp English accent and homely appearance to sketch out the editor, and her personal magnetism and wobbly soprano to put over the dreamer. This role should have been a snap for Ginger Rogers, who had not only proved herself the most talented woman performer in musicals of the 30's (including another psychoanalytical musical, "Carefree"), but also won an Oscar as a straight dramatic actress. And so she snapped it up, putting a clause in her contract with Paramount that the musical be bought for her. A much warmer, more attractive performer than Gertrude Lawrence, she could and should have had a triumph in this part.

As the saying goes: sadly, no.

First Rogers fell afoul of Paramount studio chief Buddy deSylva, a minor songwriter and crude vulgarian, who felt "forced" to produce the movie. DeSylva also hated the show's composer Kurt Weill and, perhaps in retaliation toward both Rogers and Weill, gutted virtually the entire score and thus the heart of the show. Director Mitchell Leisen, a rather nasty and self-loathing character, got off on the wrong foot with Rogers even before shooting. Leisen, who Billy Wilder called "a window dresser," looked down his nose at Rogers, pumped up the script's hatred of women, and put his energy into mink, sequins, gaudy hats, dry ice, and lots and lots of boys in tights.

And so one of Broadway's finest musicals became a gaudy Technicolor fashion parade interspersed with scenes of unbelievably unpleasant misogyny. With virtually no musical numbers to perform (including "My Ship," the song which holds the key to Liza's subconscious), and with a director who disrespected and humiliated her on the set, Rogers didn't stand a chance. Despite her skill and effectiveness in some moments, she comes off as cold and hard in the dramatic scenes and garishly overemphatic in the dreams. Meanwhile, her character endures two hours worth of condescension and hostility. On first viewing it's hard to even look at her fierce and unhappy performance, though if you can stand to watch the movie a few times, her work actually begins to look like a triumph against the odds.

As Martin Scorcese (a fan of this film) points out, the climax comes in the one musical number to survive intact from Broadway. The band strikes up "The Saga of Jenny," and Rogers opens up her skirt to reveal the most gorgeous pair of legs in movie history. As she shimmies her hips a couple of times, we get a taste of the audacity and exhilaration this show should be about. However, the famous jewel-encrusted mink skirt (designed by Leisen, of course) weighed 35 pounds and Rogers had to hold it up through the entire number; meanwhile, her high heels kept getting stuck in the hemp rug he laid down. She still manages to pull it off, but just barely. In a Lux Radio broadcast of "Lady" a year later, she also performed a sweet and delicate reprise of "My Ship." Her original, performed a capella in counterpoint to "Ain't She Sweet," and then hacked out of the movie by deSylva, is presumably decomposing in a Paramount vault somewhere in Hollywood. Ginger Rogers' career lasted another 40 years or so, but if you love her like I do, you have to deeply regret this movie -- the greatest and most unhappily lost opportunity of her career.