March 1945: Delightfully Dangerous




















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:

PosterVotesRatingMovie
18877.7The Corn Is Green
94277.6The Picture of Dorian Gray
23287.5The Clock
6616.9A Royal Scandal
15426.8Without Love
4426.7Hotel Berlin
13206.6Dillinger
4356.5God Is My Co-Pilot
2596.4Keep Your Powder Dry
2476.3Thunderhead – Son of Flicka

This blog post is part of the Decade series.

February 1945: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn



















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:

PosterVotesRatingMovie
56258.1A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
2898.0Docks of New York
21827.6The Enchanted Cottage
33087.5The House of Fear
16767.4Hangover Square
10297.1Here Come the Co-eds
3556.7Waterloo Road
4555.2Fog Island

This blog post is part of the Decade series.

January 1945: Objective Burma


















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:

PosterVotesRatingMovie
36107.4Objective, Burma!
4707.0Roughly Speaking
8956.9The Jade Mask
9736.8A Song to Remember
7426.6The Great Flamarion
3266.5Madonna of the Seven Moons
5866.4Tonight and Every Night
2466.3I Love a Mystery

This blog post is part of the Decade series.

December 1944: Together Again


















Oh, this is from the Icons of Screwball Comedy DVD “box”, which I can’t seem to find at the moment… I’m substituting the other box for the dice throw picture.

CONTINUITY ERROR

This is a supremely amiable movie. The actors are charming; the storyline is cute; the lines are witty.

It’s entertaining and amusing, but you know how this is going to end up: The mayor is going to resign her job, meaning that the village is going to be left in the unsuitable hands of that newspaper asshole.

So it’s kinda not very satisfying, although it’s a funny little movie.

Together Again. Charles Vidor. 1944.

Hey! I’m at the half-way point in this 40s blog series? Look at the stack of DVDs:

I think I must be. 1940-1945… That’s like… five years…

Popular movies in December 1944 according to IMDB:

PosterVotesRatingMovie
91907.6Murder, My Sweet
18117.5The Keys of the Kingdom
10067.5The Suspect
2767.4The Fighting Lady
15337.3I’ll Be Seeing You
51747.3National Velvet
13887.3Hollywood Canteen
2087.2Sunday Dinner for a Soldier
4176.9Together Again
3786.7Music for Millions

This blog post is part of the Decade series.

CCCB: Oliver Twist

It’s Thursday, so it must be time to bake something and read a book I’ve avoided reading for a couple of decades.

I’ve done cake and cookies, so why not bread? Nutty bread. Looks like the flour:nut ratio is 25:10, and I have no idea whether that’s like totally nuts.

I have baked a couple of loaves of bread before, but they’ve never been like actually any good.

So much ingredient.

I got to use the fud professor attachment to the kitchen machine. I may not have picked the right blade, though, because the nuts came out very unevenly chopped. On the other hand, the recipe said to do that to give some textural variety, so… Probably a bit on the coarse side, though?

Making the bread dough is a breeze with a kitchen machine with some oomph, so I don’t have to actually use any muscles. Except when cleaning up, as I seem to have smeared the machine with honey.

D’oh!

Wow, that’s some active yeast… it… like… quadrupled in size.

I’ve never handled dough that’s this sticky before. It’s absolutely impossible to do anything bready with, so I just kinda scooped the d’oh into the forms and hoped for the best…

And, yes, it’s a arisen again! Raise the bread!

Cool, baby.

Oo. I thought this was going to be very dense because of all the nuts, but it’s kinda fluffy.

Mmmm… butter on the bread while it’s still hot…

And some brown goats cheese.

And how does it pair with the book? Excellent! The nutty buttery goatey chocolatey (OK, I made hot chocolate to drink with this) goes great with Dickens’ witty and exciting book about that hapless waif.

I have to say (well I don’t I just told a lie ha!) that I’d rate this bread a “well, that’s quite OK then”. It’s the first thing I’ve baked in this blog series that’s like successful.

Am I getting better at this or is this just a fluke!? Tune in next week for

oh I have to talk about the book, too.

For this week’s eeney meeney miney mo of books that’s been sitting in my bookcase, unread, since the late 80s/early 90s, I choose… well, you’ve read the title of this blog post, so it’s probably no surprise. It’s Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens.

And the reason that I have it but didn’t read it is because I WON”T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME. I read tons of books, but whenever I have to read something, it’s just torture to motivate myself to read it. It’s insane and counter-productive and weird, but there it is. I remember once in like fifth grade we were assigned a book to read over the holidays and write about and we could pick pretty much anything we wanted. I picked a book I’ve already read, and the teacher asked why, and I said “well, then I don’t have to read it”.

Instead I read dozens of other books.

What can I say? I’m counter-productively lazy.

This book is an artefact of me taking English at the university, and I just couldn’t bring myself to read it. And looking at that first page, it does look a bit eh.

Whaaa? I’ve never seen an upside-down y typo before.

Anyway! As you all know, it’s a very funny, very angry book. Dickens is relentlessly witty, and is scornfully sarcastic about all persons in charge. And it’s an exciting, classic adventure story, to boot. I’ve seen several movie/tv versions of it, so I know just about what’s going to happen, but there’s so much pleasure to be had from Dickens’ writing. It just flows so well: It’s entertaining and smart.

It’s such an effortless read that I started wondering whether this edition had been updated to modern English or something, but no: I found somebody that had helpfully shot a picture of a 1837 page, and it’s pretty much identical, except for some slight changes in punctuation, as far as I can tell.

Oh! An ear! So I didn’t bail at the first page, but made my way to chapter 13 before I stopped reading back in… 1991? Something like that?

I have no recollection of having read bits of it before, so apparently reading a novel as a required assignment was so traumatic that I’ve suppressed the memory.

It’s a delight to read now that it’s unrequired reading.

But while it’s fun, in the final third I got to the “I want to read this book forever” slash “bored now” point. Dickens is padding out the storyline quite a bit with atmospheric bits (like the above). While it’s fun in isolation, the loss of tension in the third part is palpable.

So Dickens is nice, but what about the edition?

The reproduction of the artwork is shockingly bad.

But worse are the footnotes. Here’s a footnote after “crowd at the execution”, and I innocently flipped to that to see what the editor had to say, and…

Boom! Spoiled the next-to-last chapter of the book. Nice work, asshole. So I had to stop reading the footnotes and never found out what a “paviour” was.