Random Thoughts

Too Many Husbands. Wesley Ruggles. 1940.

Hm… Did I see this before? I didn’t think so… Is it part of a box set I’ve bought some years ago?

*time passes while I rummage through the bookcase*

I dud have it! On “Icons of Screwball Comedy Volume One”. Well, this isn’t a very good track record for this blog series so far: I’ve seen 66% of the films previously.

Anyway, it’s a very high concept movie. A man was lost, presumed dead, and his wife remarried. Then he returns, and now she’s married to two people. Hilarity ensues.

There’s a lot of lines like “She’s our wife!” and people doing double takes. It’s fun! I, like, lol-ed out loud at bits. It dances around all the awkward bits and ends up being very modern.

But this isn’t exactly a masterpiece. I think it aims for madcap insanity, but it only achieves slightly bizarre quirkiness.

But it’s a great premise and they soldier through admirably. It’s from a veteran director, Wesley Ruggles, who’d made films from 1917 on.

Popular movies in March 1940 according to IMDB:

Poster	Votes	Rating	Movie
	91851	8.2	Rebecca
	220	7.4	Drums of Fu Manchu
	3004	7.1	Road to Singapore
	789	7.0	Johnny Apollo
	944	7.0	Primrose Path
	1581	6.9	Strange Cargo
	1598	6.8	Virginia City
	374	6.7	It’s a Date
	293	6.5	The House Across the Bay
	946	6.5	Too Many Husbands

This blog post is part of the Decade series.

Pinocchio. Norman Ferguson. 1940.

I’ve never seen this one, but I’ve seen excerpts from it every Xmas (on a couple of channels), so I’ve heard the intro song more than a 80 times, and I’m feeling very Xmas-y now.

You can say many things about Disney, but at least they took really good care of all the stuff created under their auspices. So this Bluray looks really good, and in its original aspect ratio.

I find the animation somewhat confusing, though. That is, I thought that Disney was better at this stuff? Like, the fox villain character just… doesn’t look all that good.

Film critic Leonard Maltin said, “with Pinocchio, Disney reached not only the height of his powers, but the apex of what many critics consider to be the realm of the animated cartoon.”

See? It’s not that good.

It was a box office disaster upon release, which doesn’t surprise me. The character animation just doesn’t seem to be as accomplished as the 30s Disney shorts. But the background stuff and the effects are very nice.

The story is also… Well, it makes absolutely no sense, so I guess they justified it as “a parable”. It gets rather tedious. But the first half (before the plot, as it is, gets going) our is kinda nice.

Popular movies in February 1940 according to IMDB:

Poster	Votes	Rating	Movie
	984	7.7	Charlie Chan in Panama
	95739	7.5	Pinocchio
	1146	7.5	Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet
	1607	7.4	Broadway Melody of 1940
	606	7.2	The House of the Seven Gables
	2081	7.0	My Little Chickadee
	826	7.0	Young Tom Edison
	244	7.0	Blondie on a Budget
	573	6.8	Vigil in the Night
	391	6.8	Castle on the Hudson

This blog post is part of the Decade series.

His Girl Friday. Howard Hawks. 1940.

And we’re off!

I’ve seen this movie plenty of times before, and that’s not what I want to do in this blog series, really, but I had bought a new copy of this (as part of a screwball box set), so what the hey.

And, as you all know, it’s a wonderful film. The snappy repartee between Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell really er snaps, and it’s got an interesting milieu (a newspaper office) and built-in tension (they have to save an innocent (well, he’d only killed a “colored” policeman, which is the next best thing) man from being executed).

It’s a romantic screwball comedy, but perhaps some of Grant’s strategies towards getting Russell back veer into creepy coercion at oints, but what the hey. It’s a clockwork plot. Everything slots together neatly.

“He sounds like a man I ought to marry,” Grant says at one point, and I’m sure the entire set chortled. And describes what Bruce Baldwin looks like as “that guy from the movies… Ralph Bellamy”. Which is the actor playing him.

It’s all so meta!

It’s a strangely shot film, with most of it happening in a couple of rooms with people running in and out of them. It’s not very visual.

Which is a staple of screwball comedy, but was this based on a play, by any chance? Hm… It was!

It’s a thrill.

Popular movies in January 1940 according to IMDB:

Poster	Votes	Rating	Movie
	20952	8.1	The Shop Around the Corner
	66551	8.1	The Grapes of Wrath
	42649	8.0	His Girl Friday
	3165	7.7	Remember the Night
	239	7.4	Where’s That Fire?
	1365	7.4	Abe Lincoln in Illinois
	2632	7.4	A Chump at Oxford
	683	7.2	The Stars Look Down
	360	7.1	The Green Hornet
	1415	6.8	The Fighting 69th

This blog post is part of the Decade series.

When watching movies, it’s easy to get stuck in a rut and always return to your favourite genre. (Which, for me, is science fiction. I’ll basically watch anything that’s science fiction, no matter how bad it is, and it gets really, really bad.)

I’ve tried to mix it up by giving myself various stupid challenges, like watching a film from each country on the planet, or watching all the films of a director or an actor in a ridiculously in-depth way.

So I was wondering what to do next, and the idea occurred to me a few years back to do a deep dive into some specific era. And a decade is a nice slice of time. But which one?

I first thought about the 70s, because there’s a lot of interesting stuff from that decade I just haven’t seen, but there’s also so much… 70s… stuff… that it seemed a bit off-putting.

Then the 30s. I was all gung ho for watching smart alecks talking rapidly in the general direction of the other person, you see!, but while doing a 1968-1922 thing, I was a bit unimpressed by the very early 30s films. Things really took off, like, in 1933 or something. (NB! Probably wrong opinion.)

And I’ve seen so many 50s and 60s films, which leaves us…

The 40s.

Even though that means watching a whole bunch of war films. And besides:

Douglas Sirk, in an interview included on the Criterion edition of There’s Always Tomorrow, is quoted as having said that the 40s were a golden age for American films.

(It also, fascinatingly enough, has a note on the correct aspect ratio using the remarkable sentence: “The above images are a distortion and corruption of the original artwork, which travesty the integrity of both the human form and cinematographic space.” Not only is travesty a verb, but it’s a transitive verb! Wonderful! I learn so much.)

ANYWAY!

My methodology for choosing films this time is based on the old IMDB data dumps, which included release date data.  (IMDB has removed this information from their current exports.  Boo!)

I sorted the films per month, and then sorted the films on rating and number of votes per month.  Then I chose the highest-rated film per month (that I hadn’t seen before), unless a lower-rated film sounded more interesting.  (And this is also subject to availability; quite a few popular 40s films just aren’t available at this point in time.)

But nothing obscure; these are mostly all 120 commercial successes and not art house films.

Onwards!