Things That Make Me Go “Squee!”

Two big stories from the land of Doctor Who have caught my attention!

First up, the new Doctor, Matt Smith, has finally turned up in costume, and what a costume it is! A tweed jacket with a bow-tie. Yes, very trendy that. Actually, I think it works well and plays a nice counterpoint to the youth of the actor.

Second, and perhaps as important, Tom Baker, known as the Fourth Doctor, is at long last coming back to Doctor Who! He’s going to play the Fourth Doctor in a series of audio plays (not being made by Big Finish, sadly). I’m looking forward to hearing those.

Third, the guest list for Gallifrey 2010 has been updated. In addition to the actor who played the Fifth Doctor, we also now have those who played the Doctor’s Daughter and Nyssa, as well as a few other people. Fun times ahead!

Greatest Films – The Bride of Frankenstein

There’s few sequels that have been as good, or better than, the originals. The ones I’ve seen that spring to mind are films like Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Shrek 2, Superman II, Spider-Man II, and of course The Empire Strikes Back. There’s others out there. I hear The Godfather: Part Two is one of those films, but I haven’t seen it.

One of the first films to have this happy state of affairs is 1935’s The Bride of Frankenstein, an entirely superior film to the original 1931 film, Frankenstein.

The first movie ended with the apparent deaths of both Dr Frankenstein (Colin Clive), and the Monster. This movie contains a scene with Mary Shelly (played by Elsa Lanchester, who later turns up as the Bride), Lord Byron and others talking about Shelly’s novel. She explains that the story didn’t quite end where everyone thinks it does, and then we go to the movie proper.

It opens seconds after the ending of the first one, and we see that the good Doctor has not, in fact, died, he’s just gravely wounded (“I’m not quite dead yet!”). To no one’s surprise, we see moments later that the Monster (credited in the opening simply as “KARLOFF”), isn’t dead, either. Well, no more so than he was before, though he is very badly burned.

After a bit of comic relief with Una O’Connor in a role that would be only slightly less over-the-top than Cloris Leachman’s role in Young Frankenstein
(about which, more later), we find the Doctor recovering in his home, where he’s soon visited by the enigmatic Doctor Pretorius, who believes the Monster needs a mate. After some surprisingly well-done special effects sequences, Frankenstein agrees, and Pretorius proposes a toast, “To a new world of gods and monsters!” (a line that would later lend itself to the film Gods and Monsters, about the life of the movie’s director, James Whale).

The Monster, meantime, finds a voice as he starts spending time in the company of a blind hermit who teaches him a few words. As the film moves on, the Monster becomes more and more adept at speaking, and memorably gets the last line of the film.

Modern audiences cannot help but spot at least an undercurrent of homosexuality in the film. Whale himself was gay, and it seems obvious that Pretorius is meant to be at least somewhat gay (though this is disputed by many. He certainly pings my gaydar, for whatever that’s worth), and it’s possible that his relationship with Frankenstein is a little more than just as teacher and student.

Then there’s certain elements of religion. Notice the scene where the mob captures the Monster and ties him to a pole. It doesn’t make much to imagine him with his arms outstretched and lashed to a cross (which was apparently the original idea until the censors quashed it). One would hardly define the Monster as a Christ-figure, but the image remains.

There’s also a surprising amount of emotion. One cannot help but feel for the Monster, particularly in the scene at the end where, just as he hopes to get what he wants, he finds instead he’s lost everything. Karloff’s performance in the movie is masterful, particularly in those last few moments.

The look of the film is heavily influenced German Expressionist films, such as The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, Metropolis, and of course, Nosferatu. It gives us a great deal of atmosphere and illusion, tension and drama, and does so without really calling attention to itself.

If the film has any real flaw, it’s in what it has become over the decades. While the movie itself is still wonderful, it was very adeptly parodied in the movie Young Frankenstein, which is much more a satire of this film than the first one. When you see the scenes with the hermit in Bride…, it’s hard not to remember what Gene Hackman did with them in the later film. Not surprisingly, the two movies can make for a delightful double-feature.

The movie is longer scary, if it every really was. But instead it is a thoughtful, surprisingly intelligent and emotional movie that, like many great films, is about more than just the surface plot.

Greatest Films – The Adventures of Robin Hood

In like Flynn!

Wikipedia tells us that the story of Robin Hood has been kicking around for centures. The name itself began kicking around in 1228, but people were probably telling stories about the character for a long time before that.

There’s been many iterpretations of the Robin Hood story, including several on film which have varied from poor action adventures (Robin Hood – Prince of Thieves), to weird comedies (Robin Hood – Men in Tights), to an animated version (Disney’s Robin Hood), that probably has most furries creaming their jeans.

But to me the best version of the story ever made was the 1938 Technicolor classic, The Adventures of Robin Hood. It has everything you could ever want in an adventure film: a sneering villain (Basil Rathbone), a beautiful heroine (Olivia de Havilland), a dashing hero (Errol Fylnn), great sword fights, wonderful dialogue, beautiful costumes, amazing sets, and an all around feeling of lighthearted joy and delight!

You know the story: Robin of Locksley goes out to stop the evil Prince John (Claude Rains), and his henchman, the Sherif of Notingham. Along the way he teams up with his Merry Men (including Little John, played by Alan Hale Jr, a man I was most used to seeing as the Skipper on “Gilligan’s Island”), enters an archery contest, and wanders around with the kind of smirk Johnny Depp nearly managed to imitate in Pirates of the Caribbean – The Curse of the Black Pearl.

There’s several things that make this a great film. First, it’s insanely entertaining! It’s never slow or dull. It has brisk pacing that never lets up. The cinematography is well-done and fascinating to see, given that it was one of the first Technicolor epics (though you might go a little blind from the bright colors). The writting is sharp and clever. Even the music is everything you’d want from a movie like this! But the real gem here is the acting.

Consider the by-play between Robin and the Sheriff, or Robin and the Prince, or Robin and Maid Marion or, hell, Robin and a brick wall! Errol Flynn had this magical sort of charisma that forced you to pay attention to him every time he was on the screen and to be happy you were doing so. He brough a casual ease to his characters in movies like Captain Blood and The Sea Hawk. He’s so important to The Adventures of Robin Hood that it’s basically impossible to imagine the movie without him, how much more vapid and uninteresting it would’ve been with just about anyone else playing the lead. It’s his swaggering, his smart-ass attitude and his talent with the sword that makes him the most memorable part of this film.

This isn’t to take away from the rest of the cast. A hero is nothing without a great villain and you’d be hard-pressed to find one better than Basil Rathbone, with his sneer and his (frankly superior), fencing skills, he made a worth advesary for a hero like Flynn’s Robin.

The movie is relentlessly fun, light-hearted and enjoyable. If you haven’t yet seen it, you’re doing yourself a great diservice. Watch it and see the swashbuckler genre done to a perfection that has hardly been seen since!

Greatest Films – The Grapes of Wrath

“Rich fellas come up an’ they die, an’ their kids ain’t no good an’ they die out. But we keep a’comin’. We’re the people that live. They can’t wipe us out; they can’t lick us. We’ll go on forever, Pa, ’cause we’re the people.”

The history of the Dustbowl Era is one that looms large in the minds of most of my family. The mere fact that some of us were born in Washington to people that came from Kansas and Oklahoma explains volumes about what it must’ve been like in those places back in the day when you could have a wonderful crop one year, and the next year you could be turned out of your house and home.

John Ford’s 1940 film version of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath is a flim like none other. Listed on many critics film lists as the best ever made, at least prior to Citizen Kane showing up in that position starting in the late 1950’s, it tells the story of the Joad family, uprooted from their home in Oklahoma and sent hurtling into a new life in California.

As the family travels to California, they deal with many setbacks, including the deaths of two of their clan. When they finally reach California, they find that a glut of cheap labor has led to depressed wages, meaning that for a whole day’s work they earn barely enough to scrape by.

Eventually after many trials and tribulations, the family reaches a camp run by the government (with a camp superintendent played by a man who actually did run such a camp in reality). There the family finds a safe place to live, decent wages, and a hopeful future… at least until the past catches up with one family member.

While Henry Fonda plays the protaganist in this movie, the real stand-out star is Jane Darwell, who played Ma Joad. From her first real scene, where she expresses concerns her son might’ve turned “mean” while in prison, to a touching farewell to her possessions when she tosses them into a stove before leaving, to the end, where she has one last dance with her son then gets the last words in the film (those at the start of the article), every moment she’s on the screen is incredible. It’s a movie worth seeing for performance alone. Women like her are, to a great extent, what this country is built on.

This was also a very political film. It was one of the first films to show poverty, true, soul-crushing poverty, in the United States. Most of are fortunate enough not to know what it’s like to nearly starve to death (heck, put all the family together and we’d start to influence the tides), but in the not-so-distant past people were starving, dying, on the streets of our nation. Not because they were lazy, or foolish, but because they were being destroyed by a system that had left them to fend for themselves.

It also explored, somewhat obliquely, ideas of Communism that were floating around at the time. There was a large, simmering, vocal minority that believed only Communism could save the workers of the world from exploitation at the hands of big business. Looking at the way the world was then, one begins to sypathise.

All in all, this is a very personal film that’s also quite epic. You see the sweeping panoramas for which Ford is rightly famous, but then you also get the small strokes, the tiny personal touches, such as when the children see flush toilets for the first time. It’s a must-see for anyone interested in history, and anyone interested in film.

Greatest Films – Star Wars

In the begining...

I was born in April of 1972. My earliest memory is of the Bicentennial celebrations. I seem to remember watching people playing around with fireworks at our neighbor’s house. But I’m not 100% sure these memories are accurate.

The first memory I know for sure is accurate is seeing Star Wars in 1977. This was back when it was just Star Wars. Not Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope. No, it was just a simple, single film.

But what a film it was! I am pretty sure I’d seen movies in theatres before this one, but I don’t remember doing so. The first movie I remember seeing after this one is Star Trek: The Motionless Motion Picture. When I got a little older, I remember being very happy every time I went to visit my Aunt Judy because she had HBO, and there was a decent chance they’d be showing Star Wars, so I’d get to see it again. When Christmas and birthdays rolled around, one of the things I’d always ask for was Star Wars action figures. My mom always made me use a magic marker to color their feet black so they wouldn’t get mixed up with any owned by any of the neighbor kids.

Through the 1980’s a lot of my life centered around the Star Wars films. I remember seeing The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi when they were first in theatres. Hell, I’ve even seen the abortion best known to the world as The Star Wars Holiday Special!

I provide this rather lengthy digression because I want to make it clear that this movie has had a huge impact on my life, and that’s something reasonably common to my generation. We’re called “Generation X”, but in many ways we’re really the Star Wars Generation. The earliest members of the generation would’ve been only twelve or thirteen when the first movie came out. The last ones were born when Return of the Jedi was still fresh.

With Star Wars George Lucas managed to take several diverse elements (mythology, Japanese cinema, westerns, etc), and combine them into a film that was truly universal in nature. You can take the movie to just about anywhere in the world and people will recognize elements familiar to them, even if they’ve never seen the movie before.

Even now, thirty-one years after the movie first premired, it’s casting a shadow over the world of film. Along with such movies as The Birth of a Nation and Citizen Kane, it completely recreated the way movies are made. Certainly it’s one of the most influential films ever made. It’s also far more accessible than either of those other two great movies.

Of course no real reflection on this movie could go by without taking notice of the amazing score by John Williams. Even now, I bet you can remember the sound of the music playing as Luke looked out at the twin suns setting, or the music playing as everyone but Chewbacca got medals, and of course you’ll remember the amazing theme to the film’s opening titles. The film’s score gave a gravitas to science fiction music that had been previously reached only by 2001 – A Space Odyssey (a film not nearly as good and very overrated), and even that movie’s score was made impressive by the fact that it was lifted from the classical masters.

Of course back in 1997, many fans screamed, “Murther! Murther most foul!” when George Lucas released the special edition versions of the movies with enhanced special effects and the like. Me, I like the special edition versions of all three movies, especially the first. They don’t change the story any, they are prettier to look at, and it was nice to see the movies in the theatres again.

The film is not without flaws. The dialogue is a little clunky and wooden (to those bitching about the prequels being shallow on the dialogue, I suggest you go back and listen to the first three films again). The characters are pretty one-dimensional for the most part.

But despite those flaws, the movie is spectacular, and even now has an impact that cannot be underestimated. I remember a few years ago, after it had first come out on DVD, I had a couple friends over for Christmas. We were talking, playing video games and just generally goofing around. While we were eating, I popped on the movie, and even though we’d all seen it a half a gazillion times, we were still enthralled and gave it our almost undivided attention to a film that came out in 1977. Now that’s praise!

This isn’t the best film in the sextology. That honor goes to The Empire Strikes Back. But it is the most important film, and one of the best movies ever made.

Greatest Films – Sunset Boulevard

Ready for her close-up!

“I am big! It’s the pictures that got small!”

So we have one of the best, most remembered lines from Billy Wilder’s best film, the other well known line being “Alright, Mr deMlile. I’m ready for my closeup!”

I saw Sunset Boulevard for the first time recently. It was everything I’d hoped for and then some. Though it was made in 1950 it, like all classics, for example, Wilder’s Some Like It Hot , and Ace in the Hole, still resonates today.

The plot to this dark comedy/drama/horror film is simple: It opens with a corpse floating in a pool, and a narrator describing the life of an out-of-work screen writer (William Holden), trying to avoid repo men, hides his car at what he thinks is a deserted mansion, only to find it occupied by Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), a famous film star from the silent era, and her butler, Max (Erich von Stroheim). After some minor misunderstandings, he gets recruited to polish up her dream screenplay, an adaptation of Salome. The rest of the film covers her growing attraction to him and his semi-willingness to be used by her.

Norma Desmond is portrayed as a sad, lonely, borderline insane woman who haunts her old home, living in the memories of her golden past when she got, “17,000 fan letters a week!”. She still gets some, though it’s revealed they are being mailed by her butler. She was unable to make the transition to talking films. She dreams of making a comeback, or as she calls it, a return, but would never dream of simply going to the studio and asking for a part. No, it has to be on her terms, with her film Salome, which, of course, must be directed by Cecil B deMille (who, it’s worth noting, appears in the film as himself).

William Holden does a wonderful job as screenwriter Joe Gillis. He’s a hardworking writer, but he’s had a lot of writer’s block lately, and is on the verge of returning to Ohio to work for a newspaper when he encounters Norma. He knows she’s just using him, and doesn’t seem overly surprised when she claims to be in love with him. He lets her buy him lavish gifts, and offers no more than a token protest. When, at one point, he gets the guts to leave, he finds that she’s attemtped suicide, and returns to her.

Erich von Stroheim’s performance as the butler, Max, also deserves plenty of attention. Just like Max, he was himself a director, making the film Greed, regarded as one of the best of the era, though also a very long film, clocking in at ten hours on its first cut. He is one of Norma’s ex-husbands, and goes out of his way throughout the movie to do whatever he can to protect her.

The film is very savvy about Hollywood, more so than even most movies today. In addition to de Mille’s appearance, you can also spot Buster Keaton playing one of the “waxworks” at Norma’s bridge game. Portions of the film take place on Paramount’s studio lot. The film is well informed about the movie industry, but doesn’t cram that knowledge down your throat.

Gloria Swanson, no relation, sadly, was, like Norma Desmond, a major figure during the silent era. When Desmond says, “Without me there would be no Paramount [Studios]!”, it could well be Swanson herself talking. Unlike Norma, she continued on after the films “got small”. She had a career in radio, and later in TV, and seemed content in her life. She was 53 when she made this movie, younger than many famous actresses today. She died in 1983, and left behind a wonderful body of work that awaits rediscovery by a new generation of film fans.

Greatest Films – The Ten Commandments

There's trouble in Egypt tonight!

In the begining, deMille created a silent film. And it was good. But lo! It lacked color, it lacked sound and it lacked the great Heston. So deMile created The Ten Commandments anew, and saw that it was good, said that it was good, and it was… really quite corking, actually.

The Ten Commandments really only features said laws towards the end of the movie, but that’s ok because as they say, getting there is half the fun. The movie is a spectacle on a grand scale, with huge sets, a cast of literally thousands, location filming in Egypt, beautiful costumes and a 1950’s mentality that meant they had to sanitize quite a bit of the actual story.

The tale the movie tells is one known to most people. The Hebrews are living as slaves in Egypt until God tells Moses (Charlton Heston), to go tell the Pharaoh (an amazingly good Yul Brenner), to let his people go. Moses does, Pharaoh tells him to get lost, and plagues happen. Eventually the innocent are murdered and Moses is allowed to take his people into the Promises Land where they will be slaves to God, instead of to Pharaoh.

‘course that’s just my interpretation of Exodus.

The film is specatcle of the first order, with a huge a-list of Hollywood’s finest actors including Heston, Brenner, Vincent Price, Edward G Robinson, Yvone de Carlo and others. All the performances are great, particularly the two leads. Atheist though I am, even I found Heston compelling in his role as Moses.

What’s most interesting, though, is some of the side stories to the movie. If you pick up a copy of the DVD (you can get it by clicking the link above), you can hear an audio commentary by a woman (I forget her name, forgive me), who obviously is a believer, as was deMille. What makes that so interesting is hearing her talk about the compromises to the Biblical story that deMille made, and justifying them to herself and the audience!

For example, she points out one scene where Moses is standing next to a black woman. That he had an Ethiopian wife is news to me (apparently I didn’t read Exodus close enough), and this movie doesn’t really want you to know that he did. All you see is a black woman standing next to Moses and some large black guy standing next to her looking more like a Zulu than an Ethiopian. Of course this was because we didn’t want to ruffle the feathers of 1950’s society by showing an interracial marriage (though apparently deMille himself was big on civil rights).

Also glossed over, and again something I missed in the Bible, is that due to Moses’ stammering, Aaron actually spoke to Pharaoh. I knew he had problems talking, but I’d assumed God had just fixed that. In the movie there’s no stammering and no Aaron talking to Pharaoh.

Of course the Biblical facts had to be gussied up a little for the film, in order to make the movie more, well, movie-like. But I find it interesting that people who believe in God would think it’s ok to twist the stories they believe in just to make a good movie.

Anyhow, theology aside this is indeed a great film and one worthy of all the adulation it gets!

Greatest Films – The Wizard of Oz

They say he's a wonderful wizard, but you know he never calls his mother.

Ah, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Truly, this series was the Harry Potter of its day. Within just a few years of the 1900 publication of the first book, there were several sequels, a Broadway musical, a series of traveling plays and, as we see in this boxed set, even a movie that came out back in 1910!

But what most people are familiar with is this movie. The 1939 version of The Wizard of Oz. Judy Garland was far older than Dorothy, but still managed to do an excellent job playing her. Ray Bolger’s Scarecrow was unforgettable, as was the Wicked Witch of the West, played with cackling glee by Margaret Hamilton. They, along with the other actors, the incredible set design, the wonderful music and the bright, cheerful Technocolor fantasy combined to make this a truly iconic film.

There’s a lot layers to this film. There’s some of the obvious ones, like the switch between black and white to represent Kansas, and color, bold Technicolor no less, to represent Oz. There’s also the more subtle ones, like the possibility that the entire work is a scree against capitalism or a parable about the French Revolution. Really!

I wonder to myself what audiences felt about this movie in 1939? It’s my understanding that it didn’t have the best box office performance. It didn’t do well at the Oscars. Perhaps it just stood out to many as being too bright and cheerful, given the events unfolding in Europe when the movie was released.

Regardless, by now its a timeless classic. I remember when I was a kid watching CBS broadcast the film annually, and since then have caught it from time-to-time on TCM (aka: Ted Turner’s penance for inflicting colorization on the world). The film has been around for my entire life, and I’m pleased to see that after two previous attempts, it finally got a DVD worthy of its legacy.

The Wizard of Oz (Three-Disc Collector’s Edition) includes the movie itself, complete with a fascinating commentary, several behind-the-scenes documentries and trailers. What was really interesting to me was the disc that contained the 1910 version of the film, as well as other silent-era movies. They aren’t the best films ever made, but they’re interesting. Even more interesting is the cartoon version of the materiel, which featured the stunning inovation of showing Kansas in black and white and Oz in color. Rounding out these extras is a documentry on the life of L Frank Baum, which is well-worth watching.

Equally interesting are the printed items that come with the discs, including reproductions of the press-kit and an invitation to the premire screening. If I ever get my hands on another time machine, I’m so crashing that party.

Is this set worth the price? Heck, yeah! Worth every penny and then some. If you like Oz, like musicals or just like good films, this is the set for you. With the combonation of a great movie and some wonderful historical items, this set is a perfect 10.

Greatest Films – M

“Who knows what it’s like to be me?”

An anguished cry from a tortured man, one that can’t help elicit sympathy, despite the fact that the man in question in a serial killer who preys on children.

M is a revolutionary, incredible movie in many ways. It began the career of Peter Lorre. It was the last gasp of German Expressionism before the Nazi takeover. It is, in many ways, Frtiz Lang’s best film. It’s haunting, moving and memorable like few other movies ever are.

Many people today forget what a major impact German cinema had on the development of movies. Starting with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligariin 1920, and moving up through movies by greats like F W Murnau (Nosferatu, Faust, Sunrise), and Fritz Lang (Metropolis, The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse), Germany manged to put forth some of the best, most amazing images ever projected up onto a screen. Who can forget the arrival of the plague ship in Nosferatu, or Rotwang’s robot in Metropolis? These images are iconic in our society, a fact made all the more interesting when you consider that not long after M another German would make the Swastika a very memorable and iconic image.

M tells the story of a serial killer who preys on children. We see him meeting a young girl as she goes home from school. We see him buying her a balloon. We see her mother wondering why she isn’t home and calling out her name as the camera focuses on the pathetic place setting for a lunch the girl will never eat. We see her ball rolling away into the dirt near some bushes. We see her balloon rise up into the telephone wires.

As the populace gets more and more concerned about these killings, the Berlin police get more and more frustrated, as does the criminal element. Sales of their various wares are down. Business is hurting. They resent being lumped in together with this child murder and even consider taking out an add in the papers to say that he isn’t one of them.

Eventually the criminals decide to act and begin to hunt for the killer themselves. What happens after they catch him is something that needs to be seen to be believed, as a kangaroo court of crimal masterminds puts the killer on trial, saying that many of them are quite well informed of the way the legal system works.

M can be viewed as the start of two major genres; film noir and police procedural. Much like in The Silence of the Lambsand The Fugitiveyou see the slow, steady process the police use as they try to track down a killer before he strikes again. And the film’s status as the earliest form of noir is obvious to anyone who has ever seen any movie in that particular genre.

M is at times a hard movie to watch. You will find yourself feeling sympathy for Peter Lorre’s character, vile though he is. His performance occupies maybe 20 minutes of screen time, but was so memorable that it resulted in him being typecast for the rest of his career. Given how good he was in those roles, maybe we should be thankful for that.

M was released on DVD as part of the Criterion Collection. The two-disc set can be bought for a surprisingly reasonable price on Amazon.com and is well worth purchasing, if for no other reason than the fact that you’re not likely to find it in your local Blockbuster (though you can get a basic copy from Netflix). It includes many extras. The German dialogue with English subtitles may turn off some poeple, but it frankly adds an air to the film that dubbing would miss.

To conclude: If you’re a fan of movies like this, or just enjoy a good film, I highly recommend you make time for M.