Random Thoughts

Gregory Peck and Lionel Barrymore… And Greer Garson… Oh, I’ve seen her in Mrs. Miniver, which was very good indeed…

Uh-oh! It’s a movie about Irish in the US.

ME AM SUSPICIOUS

There’s something particularly dreadfully tedious about Irish cultural extruded product. The combination of religiosity, pomposity, sentimentality and forced cheer is positively venomous. If only these things had actual humour instead of some asshole saying and then going “HO HO HO” there’d been something to enjoy.

So I’ve got a totally open mind here! No prejudices! I’m sure this will be a wonderful movie!

[time passes]

OK, the first half hour was boring, and then the next three hours were annoying, and then the last nineteen hours were just excruciating.

It’s everything I expected. And more.

It’s a horrible, horrible movie.

Did it win all the Oscars? Hm…. No! Garson was nominated for best actress, which is well deserved, I guess, but then the entire world tried to forget that the movie ever happened.

But people liked it:

The film was a massive hit, earning $4,566,000 in the US and Canada and $3,530,000 elsewhere resulting in a profit of $3,480,000 in profit.

How many Irish are there anyway?

The Valley of Decision. Tay Garnett. 1945.

Popular movies in May 1945 according to IMDB:

Poster	Votes	Rating	Movie
	1361	7.4	The Valley of Decision
	6290	7.4	The Body Snatcher
	295	7.0	Molly and Me
	1010	6.9	The Scarlet Clue
	273	6.7	Pillow to Post
	2836	6.7	Back to Bataan
	507	6.6	Thrill of a Romance
	203	6.5	Boston Blackie Booked on Suspicion
	740	6.4	The Bullfighters
	338	6.4	The Brighton Strangler

This blog post is part of the Decade series.

*gasp* I can see colours!

Technicolours!

Well, this is a high-ticket item. Directed by David Lean from a script by Noel Coward (and also produced by him).

Margaret Rutherford is wonderful as the most unlikely medium ever.

It’s a very, very English screwball comedy: A deceased woman comes back as a ghost to visit her husband. Hi-jinx ensue where English people talk very rapidly at each other in exquisite Estuary.

I so want this to be wonderful, but it doesn’t quite connect. The jokes just aren’t funny enough and it doesn’t get screwy enough.

I mean, it is funny and it is screwy. But it lacks that certain something to push it over the edge into hilariousness and ends up in the uneasy “well, that’s amusing” territory.

Rex Harrison and Constance Cummings may be the problem — they just don’t have the chemistry.

Blithe Spirit. David Lean. 1945.

Popular movies in April 1945 according to IMDB:

Poster	Votes	Rating	Movie
	3898	7.2	Blithe Spirit
	228	7.1	Counter-Attack
	387	7.0	It’s in the Bag!
	1964	6.9	Tarzan and the Amazons
	957	6.8	The Horn Blows at Midnight
	747	6.7	Brewster’s Millions
	329	6.5	The Power of the Whistler
	546	6.4	Two O’Clock Courage
	555	6.4	Son of Lassie
	1427	6.2	Blood on the Sun

This blog post is part of the Decade series.

This is another cheap and cheerful B movie from that 50 movie box set.

Perhaps a majority of the movies on the box set are stage shows wrapped in a nonsensical excuse for a framing device. I don’t mind; it’s fun to watch those stage shows.

This is also an excuse to show a variety show, but it’s almost a real, proper movie, with great acting performances (a very young Jane Powell, for instance) and a real storyline. Well. Sort of.

It’s delightfully charming.

Delightfully Dangerous. Arthur Lubin. 1945.

Popular movies in March 1945 according to IMDB:

Poster	Votes	Rating	Movie
	1887	7.7	The Corn Is Green
	9427	7.6	The Picture of Dorian Gray
	2328	7.5	The Clock
	661	6.9	A Royal Scandal
	1542	6.8	Without Love
	442	6.7	Hotel Berlin
	1320	6.6	Dillinger
	435	6.5	God Is My Co-Pilot
	259	6.4	Keep Your Powder Dry
	247	6.3	Thunderhead – Son of Flicka

This blog post is part of the Decade series.

This is like… neo-realism… before neo-realism. So is it realism?

Oh, this is Elia Kazan’s first movie. He’d go on to define the 50s with A Streetcar Named Desire, On The Waterfront and East of Eden.

This movie looks wonderful. It’s so sharp: The light and the shadows. New and fresh and a new thing.

And the performances are as meticulous and detailed as the images are. It’s remarkable.

Unsurprisingly, it was only nominated for a couple of Oscars (and won a supporting actor one).

This makes me want to watch all Elia Kazan movies. I’ve only seen the most famous ones… unfortunately there’s no bluray collection of his movies. The blu ray of this movie was only released in Spain?

Weird.

Anyway, every single frame of this movie is a delight to watch… I don’t even know whether it made much sense, but it’s just kinda beautiful.

The last half hour tips over into bad melodrama, though.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Elia Kazan. 1945.

Popular movies in February 1945 according to IMDB:

Poster	Votes	Rating	Movie
	5625	8.1	A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
	289	8.0	Docks of New York
	2182	7.6	The Enchanted Cottage
	3308	7.5	The House of Fear
	1676	7.4	Hangover Square
	1029	7.1	Here Come the Co-eds
	355	6.7	Waterloo Road
	455	5.2	Fog Island

This blog post is part of the Decade series.

On a War Movie scale of 1 to 10 this is 25: It’s all soldier, all the time.

The director has the best profile picture ever on IMDB:

And the movie is just about what you’d expect from seeing that picture: It’s brash, manly and filled with robust humour.

And as you’d expect, it’s not actually funny.

The depiction of the minutiae of soldiering seems very modern. Many of the scenes in this film could have be edited into movies from the 70s and nobody would have noticed (except for the hairdos and the the film stock).

Oh! I was totally confused. I was trying to spot Errol Flynn here and the only one who looked Flynnish seemed too young. But Flynn was only 36 when this movie was made: I was confusing Flynn with Douglas Fairbanks. D’oh.

Here’s a plot summary: Some soldiers are dropped into Burma and then they wander around for an excruciating 140 minutes of screen time. There’s nothing wrong with any specific scene, and it’s… admirable?… in its focus on the guys in the jungle…

But it’s hard not to start dusting the bookcase while watching this. Or, if you have a cat, vacuuming the cat.

If this had been half the length, it still would have been challenging to keep concentrated.

Perhaps it should have been six times as long? Then it’d have been a 70s art movie. It could have been a double drive-in feature along with Out 1: Noli me tangere.

Still! I kinda like it.

Objective Burma. Raoul Walsh. 1945.

Popular movies in January 1945 according to IMDB:

Poster	Votes	Rating	Movie
	3610	7.4	Objective, Burma!
	470	7.0	Roughly Speaking
	895	6.9	The Jade Mask
	973	6.8	A Song to Remember
	742	6.6	The Great Flamarion
	326	6.5	Madonna of the Seven Moons
	586	6.4	Tonight and Every Night
	246	6.3	I Love a Mystery

This blog post is part of the Decade series.