Anchors Aweigh (George Sidney, 1945)
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I have to admit that if you like 1940s musicals in beautiful color, sailors Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra, Hollywood, Olvera Street, Tom & Jerry, little Dean Stockwell, pretty Kathryn Grayson and José Iturbi, then you'll want to give this at least an extra popcorn. It's a very simple film, stretched out to 140 minutes, but it's pretty easy to watch. It's actually most famous for Gene Kelly's dance with Jerry the Mouse in Cartoonland. Both Frank and Gene fall for Kathryn and also want to help out her nephew (Stockwell). It also revolves around getting Kathryn an audition with maestro Iturbi. It might seem old-fashioned and quaint to some, but the luscious Technicolor cinematography of 1945 Los Angeles and some of its most famous locations is to die for.
On the Town (Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly, 1949)
This one has Frank and Gene (along with fellow sailor Jules Munchin) going all out on 24 hours shore leave on the opposite coast in NYC. This was one of the first musicals to shoot several scenes on location at the Statue of Liberty, the various museums, buildings, parks and centers of New York, New York. Gene teams up with Miss Turnstiles (Vera-Ellen), Frank hooks up with a lady cab driver (Betty Garrett) and Jules becomes the prime specimen of a hot anthropologist (Ann Miller). Together, they dance and party their way from one end of the City to the other, although Gene has a problem when Miss Turnstiles takes a powder, and he gets a new date in the form of the cab driver's roommate (Alice Pearce). The directing and writing teams got together three years later to make the stone cold classic
Singin' in the Rain.
Sergeants 3 (John Sturges, 1962)
This is the Rat Pack's follow-up to
Ocean's 11. It's a remake of
Gunga Din with a legit western/action director at the helm, but even with all the classic plot points in place, this film cannot balance the comedy, action, violence and sadism of the original. It looks good and Sammy Davis, Jr. is probably the best part of the movie in the Gunga Din role, but whenever they deviate from the original's plot, it's weaker, and even though George Stevens' version was full of slapstick, it just never quite crossed the line into silliness as this does occasionally. I suppose the less you know about
Gunga Din, the more you'll enjoy this.
Arsenic and Old Lace (Frank Capra, 1944)
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A Capra film with almost none of his themes apparent, but that's reasonable since it's basically a straight adaptation of the play, albeit by the Epstein Brothers, who co-wrote
Casablanca. This film has a strange production history. Capra shot it in late 1941 and enlisted while filming it. He got an extension to enter the Armed Forces until after he finished editing it. Meanwhile, Warner Bros. made a deal that it would not release the film until after the play completed its run on Broadway, which it did in June 1944, so the film was released in September of that year. As far as the film itself goes, Boris Karloff wanted to be in it, but the Broadway producers wouldn't release him, so Raymond Massey plays his part in what may be his greatest (straight-faced) comedic performance ever. The plot, about two little old ladies (Josephine Hull and Jean Adair) who poison lonely men and have their whacko nephew (John Alexander), who thinks he's Teddy Roosevelt, bury them in the "Panama Canal" down in the cellar, is pretty well-known and full of twists and turns and plenty of dark humor. My two fave performances though are probably Peter Lorre as plastic surgeon Dr. Einstein and Jack Carson as the new cop on the beat who just happens to have written a murder mystery play he wants to show the famous theatre critic Mortimer Brewster (Cary Grant).
The Pawnbroker (Sidney Lumet, 1965)
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Lumet's powerful treatise on how memory keeps alive the Holocaust within the dead soul of pawnbroker Sol Nazerman (Rod Steiger in one of cinema's greatest performances) even while he's living in the heart of Harlem where almost all the people are bought and sold in the marketplace by pimps and gangsters in a universe not that different from a concentration camp. Nazerman believes he's above all the ugliness he surrounds himself with because he just doesn't care, yet things at work and outside of it keep bringing him back to the past where he lost his beautiful wife and two children during WWII. He takes on an apprentice (the wonderful Jaime Sanchez) and tries to teach him how to learn a career but Nazerman's ghosts rear their heads and cause him to turn on the young man with horrible, yet perhaps, soul-saving results. The supporting cast is highly-unusual and terrific (Brock Peters, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Thelma Oliver, Reni Santoni, Raymond St. Jacques, Baruch Lumet, Warren Finnerty, and the mind-blowing Juano Hernandez).
The Pawnbroker is a truly unique film which is still powerful today, not only on a human level but as an American piece of cinema which borrows some editing techniques from Alain Resnais and makes them connect with the viewer in an incredibly visceral way, almost as a precursor to the brilliant editing found four years later in
Midnight Cowboy.
Room at the Top (Jack Clayton, 1959)
That's a good poster so I wanted to show it even though it's a bit misleading as to what exactly occurs in this film, another powerful one about people trying to live a life which is somewhere between reality and wish fulfillment... or is that reality and a nightmare? Joe Lampton (Laurence Harvey) moves from his lower class town into the city to take a better job and he immediately picks Susan (Heather Sears), the daughter of the wealthiest man "at the Top", as his future bride. Joe doesn't have any silly emotional connections to love and marriage; he just knows that he's had 25 years "without", so he wants to make up for it by getting as many years as he can "with" money and all that money can buy. Of course, Joe will have to overcome Susan's family and boyfriend. Meanwhile, Joe takes a liking to older Frenchwoman Alice (Simone Signoret, well-deserving of her Best Actress Oscar playing one of the most vulnerable, yet passionate women ever on the screen) who's trapped in a loveless marriage. Eventually Joe and Alice begin an intense affair, both physically and emotionally, even though Joe never wavers from his plan to have Susan. This film, which is certainly one of the more powerful dramas, is crammed with witty, satiric dialogue which helps to build up the point that most everybody lets everybody know what they really think of each other. Of course, Joe has to keep secrets from both his women, and as things come to a shattering conclusion, Joe is the character who seems to grow the most, or does he? It'll be up to you to decide what the ending truly means but to me it means "Masterpiece". This is the kind of film which might be considered a soap opera except that it doesn't whitewash, sell or overly emote anything, except for superb storytelling and filmmaking, courtesy of director Clayton (
The Innocents).
The Impatient Years (Irving Cummins, 1944)
Jean Arthur made this flick to get out of her contract with Columbia Pictures, and she only made two more films afterwards, albeit both classics (
A Foreign Affair and
Shane). This one is a topical flick about a woman (Jean) marrying a soldier (Lee Bowman) in a whirlwind romance just before he goes off to fight in WWII. When he returns home, she's had a baby and when they remeet, they find they have nothing in common and decide that a divorce is the best route to go for them. Jean's dad (Charles Coburn) convinces the judge (Harry Davenport) to have the couple go back over the four days from the time they met to the time they parted to see if why they married is still something they believe in anymore. There's nothing terribly wrong with this flick, but it's a comedy-drama, and the comedy isn't too funny and the drama isn't too compelling. Even so, I give it points for originality.
Party Wire (Erlce C. Kenton, 1935)
This is a fun flick about how two people carry on a romance in a small town where everybody knows everything about everybody else because of a party line where people listen in on other people's gossip and then pass it around town. Jean Arthur plays the daughter of a small town's favorite citizen (Charley Grapewin) and Victor Jory plays a wealthy playboy who returns home and realizes how much he really cares for her now. That's about it, but the town gossips want to twist everything around because they want some of his money and always think the worst of people anyway. This down-home, little movie allows film buffs to see two icons from
The Wizard of Oz, Auntie Em (Clara Blandick) and Uncle Henry (Grapewin) on opposite sides of a situation years earlier. (The duo were actually in four films together and
Oz was the final one.)
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