The OtherArena

[Steve Yohe]

I had never hear of the movie, but I watch everything shown on Eddie Muller's film-noir show on TCM. I also don't like films directed by Otto Preminger. But I watched the 1945 film FALLEN ANGEL tonight & I think it's the best mystery film, and one of the best films period, I've ever seen. The cinematography, writing, editing, art direction, music, casting, and even the direction (yea Otto) are perfect.

It's filmed like a noir film, but I would call it a mystery....and you might describe it as love story, but really is just about love. There is a crime, but I'm not going to say what type, because it's a surprise. In this type of film, I never have no problem figuring out who did the crime …. but with this I couldn't. The movie takes on a form I've never seen before. It's not an artsy movie, it's bare bone hard core, but idealistic. I think?

The case is great: Danna Andrews, Alice Faye, Anne Revere, Charles Bickford, John Carradine, and most of all Linda Darnell. I keep reading that Darnell couldn't act, but if so, I wonder what she is doing in this film. She kills in every scene.

Dana Andrews is one of the great actor....if he isn't drunk. He has pedigree, having made BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES...one of the great films. You can not see his acting. I think he was one of the best, when he wasn't drunk. He drank more that Lee Marvin & Gorgeous George together.

Alice Faye was a famous musical star, who was making a comeback with this film. She was pissed off with the cut of the film & didn't act again for 20 years. Yet she is great in it, and the movie should be a classic.

One of the great character actor, is in it....Anne Revere....she won a Oscar for playing the mother in NATIONAL VELVET to Liz Taylor (one of Ken's old girls). In 1951, her career was ruined by being blacklisted & she never made any more films. She did get Tonys for stage work. The funny part is that she was a direct descendant of Paul Revere. Her famous quote is: "I'm a free thinking Yankee rebel & nobody's going to tell me what to do."

So I think ****1/4. I hope John sees this movie some day. I want the DVD. It's called FALLEN ANGEL but it's impossible to tell which character is the angel in the title. --- Steve Yohe

[Steve Yohe]

Looking around on TCM today, I found a movie called REUNION IN FRANCE. I was going to pass until I saw it was a 1942 MGM movie with Joan Crawford and John Wayne. HOLY COW...what could go wrong there. So yeah, I bit on it. To start off answering the top question....YES Joan baby hit up on John Wane on the set. John couldn't handle that degree of action & passed.

This was a propaganda film, set in occupied France, which came off as a screwed up version of CASABLANCA. But everything is turn around. Crawford is Humpty Dumpty Bogart, Wayne is Ingrid Bergman, and Phillip Dorn was Paul Henreid. Dorn does get the girl, but Wayne flys off to Spain, and Crawford makes the sacrifice & stays in Paris with Dorn to fight all the Nazis.

To make this movie work, you had to believe that Joan had power over everyone, because everyone wanted & had to fuck her. Yeah. Joan kisses everyone in this movie. And she is good at it. She even kisses the Nazis guys. The Gestapo guy get a French Kisses. Wayne doesn't even talk to her....he just starts kissing. This movie is all Joan baby....John doesn't show up until 43 minutes into the film. Joan, like always, works her ass off.....it's acting, but I don't know if it's real acting....but she just pounds away...and she is good at it. I can see why she was a huge star with women. They even wanted to fuck her. I do think a French character should have some type of French accent. She doesn't. The Duke seemed to get the job because he was the only American star not in the war, hadn't kissed Joan, and had a bigger nose than Joan Crawford. He does punch a Nazis really good. His lines are terrible & he has very little to do, but be Mr Crawford....and he doesn't even get the girl. I wanted him to ride into Nazis Paris on a horse or a tank...with machine guns blazing. Wrong movie.

Also answering another question....I would fuck Joan Crawford....hell my 2nd full time girlfriend was crazy....why not?

I can't answer the question...who is Phillip Dorn?

So that's my review....give it **1/16. There is a story that the title was supposed to be GETTING THE DUKE OUT OF FRANCE.

It had a major director in Jules Dassin...who made NIGHT & THE CITY...the best wrestling movie of all time. The producer was Joseph Mankiewicz.

John, your the only one reading this...other than Ken.....did you ever see the movie SLEUTH (1972)? I would like your opinion on that one. ----Steve Yohe

[jdw]

[Steve Yohe]

Watched Micharl Curtiz's THE BREAKING POINT (1950) with John Garfield tonight. It is one of the few true perfect films. Everything works. Great acting with Garfield, Phyllis Thaxter, Juano Heranatez, Patricia Neal, and Wallace Ford. Said to be a remake of TO HAVE & HAVE NOT, which was supposed to have been made from a Hemingway book, but this is a way better movie, and Garfield out acts Bogart. It's film noir at it's best. ****1/4. This is a film that Sam Peckinpah studied & liked. Has a gunfight on a boat with Garfield shooting it out with 4 gangster's, that is as good as anything Sam ever filmed. The movie also has a lot of heart, with great stuff going on with Garfield and his wife Phyllis Thaxter.

It was Garfield's favorite role, but it bombed because he had put on the list of un-American activists put out by congress. So Warner Brothers didn't push the movie. Great movie. Film at Newport Beach where I used to hang out as a kid. ----Steve Yohe

[Steve Yohe]

Wondering If John Williams is watching PERRY MASON on HBO? Does the great John have HBO?

I've been watching PERRY MASON and enjoying it ..... them trying to make something out of a famous TV show that was locked into the same phony unrealistic finish each week. If it was a wrestler it would have been the Sheik .... or for the younger people ... Hogan. It was interesting....then came last night's show (week 6?). I thought it was terrible. The courtroom stuff was really weak. The whole show fell apart for me. Nothing worked. I wondered if there was a new director or something. I also think Matthew Rhys is missed cast. Everyone else is fine. But I've loss faith in the show. Sorry because I was enjoying it. ---- Steve Yohe

[jdw]

I got tired of HBO years ago, and it (and Showtime) bit the dust when I adjusted my cable packages.

Now I have a variety of streaming items - Netflix, Amazon Prime, Acorn, BritBox... might be another one in there. Anything off HBO that I want bad enough, like Chernobyl, I can get on blueray/dvd down the road.

[Steve Yohe]

About a month ago, during my insolation, I turn to TCM and watched a movie called A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH (1946) staring David Niven & Kim Hunter. I had never seen the film before, and it probably is famous, but it left me with the feeling, that it is one of the best movies I've ever seem. It was directed by Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger....and I didn't know them either. ****1/3. It was a Hollywood production filmed in England, and it has all the great English actors of that era in it. The story seems stupid.....An English piolet on a bombing run....makes a distrees call & the radio operator who is an American girl.... he tells her his plane is shot in hell ... and all his men had baled out .... leaving him with his dead gunner & a parashot that has been shot up too... he says he is going to die in 5 minutes but wanted to give his position before jumping from the plane to his death..... which he picks because he doesn't want to burn up. In a very poetic talk they fall it love ... you know, it's David Niven at his best. In what seem to be in the middle of it .... he falls to his death. But he lives...finds the American girl, & they are in love. OK... no one in this film uses the words heaven, god or angel .... but I am because I can't figure out how to write this without them. So as it goes, it turns out that he should have died .... and it was the first time in 3,000 years that that type of mistake had been made....so a "kind of" angel of death is sent to get Niven .... but he refuses to go .... because he was in love .... and things had changed .... he had been willing to die, but the situation had changed & it wouldn't be fair to the girl or him. So this Angel goes back up to .... you know up there (you guys who believe in god can help me with this) ... he talks it over with all the the dead people up there & (after I skip over about an hour of the movie) they decide there need to be a trial to figure out what's the fair thing to do. Niven is given his choice of anyone in the history of time to defend him. Lincoln is mentioned. So the trial is the end of the movie & it is wonderful. That crazy story works. The acting is just great. It's one of the perfect movies & it was a very hard film to pull off. It may be as good as any movie ever made. I hope I talked someone into watching it some day.---Steve Yohe

[Steve Yohe]

Watched JOJO RABBIT last night & thought it was great. **** I would put that on my list of the best films of 2019. I don't know why I didn't see it last year. Sam Rockwell, Scarlett Johansson & the kids & every one were great. Can't say anything bad about it. Funny, dramatic, emotional, and covers everything about tolerating other people.. I don't think I talked about the Oscars last year....maybe because I didn't care...or something. JOJO RABBIT would have been a better pick than the film that got best picture. I think some PC freak, who felt it was wrong to treat Hitler like a joke, said it was immoral...so they we're scared of it. Same people who didn't like Hart to MC. Very sorry I didn't see it in a theater. --- Steve Yohe

[jdw]

Not so scared of it that the movie got nominated for Best Picture, and the Writer-Director took home an Oscar for the Screenplay. He also won the BAFTA and the Writers Guild awards for the script.

Some knocked it, but overall it was a pretty well received movie.

[jdw]

Steve - please resist the temptation:

https://film.avclub.com/please-don-t-go-to-a-movie-theater-it-s-just-about-th-1844756993

[Steve Yohe]

I'll wait it out. The only real temptation would be the Bond movie. I'd go to a late show...away from people on week days. Maybe wait a few weeks.--- Yohe

[Steve Yohe]

It has been announced that Francis Ford Coppola has done a new edit & a restoration of GODFATHER: PART III .... with a new ending. They say it will be in theaters in December. He needed to created a new beginning, and middle, and end. I don't think Coppoa knows what was wrong with the film. ---- Steve Yohe

[Steve Yohe]

There was a number of early Laurence Olivier films on TCM this week. This was during the NBA walk out, so I decided to look at some early films of his. I picked THE DIVORCE OF LADY X from 1938. I was interested in seeing him act with Ralph Richardson, who was the actor Olivier replaced as the top Shakespearean actor in England. Richardson always seemed like a character actor in films doing mostly cameo parts, so I don't get him as a star. THE DIVORCE OF LADY X, I had heard of it (I read the Olivier bio book years ago).....and the film is a sophisticated comedy. I'm always trying judge Olivier because he is considered one of the great actors, as least in his style. As it began, I was thinking “can he be such a great actor....when he was in a part that Cary Grant could do and blow him away in?” But by the end, he had won me over. The part need a master of the English language over a movie star charm.

The movie was about a major English divorce lawyer who got stuck in the London fog & has to stay in four star hotel over night. He just needed a small room, but there wasn't any, so he took a big suite. There was a big ball or party down stairs with a ton of rich ladies dressed up to kill. They were told it was too fogy to drive home, so they needed to stay over night in the hotel, but all the rooms are taken. If they were not going to spend the night sleeping in chairs in the lobby, they needed to share a room by talking their way into someones room. The manager goes to Olivier & he refuses because he had been traveling & needed to sleep, and because he had to be in court the next morrning. He says he knows he'll get push around by the women & he does want to lose his bed. He comes off as a AO. So Merle Oberon is one of the ladies, and she is kind of a spoiled rich girl, great looking, super smart, rich (well everyone in this movie is rich), and has that young girl ego that thinks she can get whatever she what from any man. So she just walks into the lawyer's room, and after about 30 minutes of a verbal battle....she...of course...ends up sleeping in the bed, and he was on the floor in the next room. It's a lot of fun talk …. but not flirting …and thru out they act like there not interested... but after she leave....without giving her number or address...Sir Laurence (I'm going to call him Larry, because Chuck Heston told me it was ok) realizes he loves her. And she goes home & tells her father, a powerful judge, that she met the man she was going to married. The judge knows Olivier & respects him, and that later gets them back together. She goes to court to watch Larry work on a divorce case, which has a woman who fooled around on her husban. Larry gives a speech, only he could put off:

“Woman has a religion of her own ..... the ancient creed of womanhood. There is only one article of faith, but every woman sincerely and steadfastly believes in it, and that is she is the unique and perfect achievement of the human species, being especially evolved to be above criticism, beyond reproach and outside the law. Man in his folly and kindness has been bamboozled into accepting woman as a rational being and has granted her emancipation on that assumption. What is his reward? Modern woman has disowned womanhood and refuses man's obligations. She demands freedom but won't accept responsibility. She insists upon time to develop her personality and she spends it on cogitating on which part of her body to paint next. By independence, she means idleness. By equality, she means carrying on like Catherine the Great. By companionship with man, she means that he should wait upon her hand and foot. Modern woman has no loyalty, decency or justice; no endurance, reticence or self-control; no affection, fine-feelings or mercy. In short, she is unprincipled, relentless and exacting; idle, unproductive and tedious; unimaginative, humorless and vain; vindictive, undignified and weak, and the sooner man takes out his whip again, the better for sanity and progress."

Yeah, Merle ends up marring Larry, It's all very romantic.

There is more to the movie, but it works because of the writing and the actors.....and the plot doesn't matter much. I liked it a lot. ***2/3 Larry and Merle were a screen team. She became a major star acting with Larry in WUTHERING HEIGHTS in 1939. Into the 1940's, she didn't act much. Only in films in the need of class actors. She was high on the list to star in GONE WITH THE WING. She was married three times, and was called the queen of Hollywood. She, until her death, never stopped looking great.---Steve Yohe

[Steve Yohe]

I've been writing a lot of reviews in 2020 about films I liked. I know that sucks because the negative stuff is more fun. So just for John I'm going to do a couple:

As a kid, maybe like 7 years old, I went to see a ape movie called KONGA. You know KING KONG is my greatest film of all time, so I thought I was going to see another great movie like KONG. I went to the Vogue Theater on Whitter BL & I remember taking a bus. So it ended up being a terrible ripoff of KING KONG and I hated it. Just stupid shit. But after 10 or so years, I got over it, but if I had known how to write....it would have been my first bad review. I neve again rode a bus anywhere. All I remember is jerk off Michael Gough (the butler from BATMAN) being a doctor who returns from the jungles of....someplace...and gives his nice little chimpanzee some drugs....and the chimp grows into a 60 foot gorilla.... who he uses to kill his wife. Just before the whole English army shows up to blow up Konga.

Now 65 years have pssed so I was thinking maybe I was a goofy kid, and I had KONGA wrong. Maybe I should be using my knowledge from watching movie for all this years & re-review it again. RIGHT....it only fair.

So this is my new review of KONGA, the 2020 version: THIE IS THE MOST FUCKED UP PIECE OF SHIT EVER MADE. So 1/16 of a star.

They should never allow Englishmen to made monster films!!!!

Because of my good friend Chuck Heston, I sat thru the movie SKYJACKED (1972). Mistake....Chuck works his ass off....but this sucked too. Chuck plays the part of the pilot who has the hots for the girl doing the dishes in the back of the jet, with all the creepy passengers. It's bad. Chuck said he made the movie so MGM would let him use the outtakes from BEN-HUR for his first direction ANTONY & CLEOPATRA. Poor Chuck, turned out that Cleopatra was played by Hildegard Neil. In SKYJACKED James Brolin plays the worst crazy bad guy in the history of film. He was so bad, he was forced to live the rest of his life living with Barbara Streisand. SHIT! So *1/15. Heston enjoyed this so much that he returned to play the same part in AIRPORT 1975. Turn out that SKYJACKED was biggest money maker for MGM in 1972. .---Steve Yohe

[jdw]

I enjoy reading these.

I'm not looking forward to another spin with Godfather III. I'm more interested in tracking down his redo of Cotton Club as something to take a look at.