OTB#30: City Lights


City Lights. Charles Chaplin. 1931. ⚃

Oh, wow. It’s a silent movie? From 1931? I thought Hollywood had stopped making these at least a couple years before? And everybody had hastily started converting everything into talkies?

Was Chaplin one of those people who thought that silent movies were for art and sound was vulgar or something?

Wait a bit while I pause the movie and do some googling.

Right:

Chaplin was dismissive about “talkies” and told a reporter that he would “give the talkies three years, that’s all.”

Huh:

Chaplin was nervous about the film’s reception because silent films were becoming obsolete by then, and the preview had undermined his confidence. Nevertheless, City Lights became one of Chaplin’s most financially successful and critically acclaimed works.

So I guess people in 1931 were willing to give Chaplin a chance, even if it wasn’t a talkie.

Huh squared:

In 1952, Sight and Sound magazine revealed the results of its first poll for “The Best Films of All Time”; City Lights was voted #2, after Vittorio DeSica’s Bicycle Thieves.

The list from 1952 is kinda interesting in that about a quarter of the movies are things that have sort of been forgotten…

OK, back to the movie. *unpause*

[an hour passes]

Well… this is thoroughly amusing, but I’m not sure why this was voted the second best movie, ever, in 1952.

The directors that voted for this movie are also… er… I’m familiar with one of them.

But I don’t quite get it. The film is, basically, a series of long-form skits. Sure, there’s an over-arching romantic comedy plot going on here, but the time spent on that plot is minuscule. And, yes, all the skits are solid, but it does feel like we’re watching three 30-minute films stitched together.

I laughed, I cried… but…

This blog post is part of the Officially The Best series.

OTB#37: Un condamné à mort s’est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut

A Man Escaped. Robert Bresson. 1956. ⚄

There’s four films by Bresson on this “officially the best” list, which is a lot? I don’t think there’s anybody with five movies, but Bresson is tied for the coveted Most Movies On The List prize with Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Stanley Kubrick and John Cassavetes. Hm… In total, there’s 63 directors represented on the list…

[some time passes]

Wow, even for a Bresson movie, this is pretty stark. The acting is pared down to an absolute minimum (that is, everybody’s got their resting bitch faces on, I mean, er, engage none of their facial muscles), and the milieu is as simple as it gets (a prison), and the protagonist does a voice-over that states, in the plainest way possible what he’s doing:

It’s fascinating that something as tense and gripping could result from something this simple.

[more time passes]

But, OK, most of this movie is watching a guy do crafts (making a rope from wire, hooks to get over a wall, etc). It’s… I have to admit to zoning out on some of the scenes. Whenever there’s some, like, action happening, it’s studiously kept out of the frame.

[even more time passes]

The final sequence is marvellous, though.

This blog post is part of the Officially The Best series.

OTB#37: Some Like It Hot

Some Like It Hot. Billy Wilder. 1959. ⚄

I’ve blogged about this movie before, but we’re in a pretty serious grouping of movies on this list, so I want to re-watch it. Here’s a second look at the screenshots from that movie. You’re welcome.

The last time I watched this, it was on an interlaced DVD, which means that the effective resolution was ca. zero times zilch. I hadn’t planned on re-watching this now, so I haven’t re-bought it on 2K, so I (“oops”) accidentally downloaded a 2K version from der interwebs.

Unfortunately, the bitrate is shitty, so the 2K version doesn’t really look much better than the DVD version I watched earlier.

*sigh*

I guess crime really doesn’t pay.

[time passes]

It’s a very fleet-footed movie, but it’s fascinating that they spend this much time setting up the premise of the movie. I mean, it’s Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis in women’s clothes, and, of course, Marilyn Monroe (also in women’s clothes). But there’s like a deep, in-plot reason for all this to happen. Which I respect enormously.

As comedies go, it’s not really “ha ha” funny a lot, but it’s so consistently charming that it’s impossible not to sit here on the couch with a sheepish grin on my face.

[more time passes]

There’s so many scenes here that could have gone super-creepy, but Wilder short-circuits them every time.

[the end]

It’s such a charming movie. The final line in the movie is just perfect.

This blog post is part of the Officially The Best series.