1950s movies marathon – part 33

The Wild One (1953, USA)

The first outlaw biker movie does to the 1950s what Marlon Brando’s gang does to the town they terrorize: Enter it noisily, jeering and taunting, and leave everyone less innocent than they were before.  There’s no turning back now.  Watched it all.

Magnetic Monster (1953, USA)

Radioactivity! Magneticism! Computers! Mumbo-jumbo! Yes, the bad science fiction movie has arrived, and I sure hope it’s here to stay for a while.  Watched: 20 minutes.

The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953, USA)

Locked in a surreal castle, young Patrick McGoohan is forced to conform to the strict piano discipline of Dr T and the new Number Two, his own mother.  Watched it all.  Although Dr Seuss more or less disowned it, this may be the first good children’s movie that takes children seriously, by being absolutely, utterly ridiculous.  And the message it imparts to the kids of the 50s is that sometimes your parents are stupid and you shouldn’t listen to them.  I wonder how that will play out.

Dance Hall Racket (1953, USA)

The only nice thing I can say about this is that I have no idea what they’re trying to do here.  There’s a dance hall.  With crime.  And everyone just stumbles lazily through a script that is like a sketch show without jokes.  And it’s written by and stars Lenny Bruce?!  Watched: 9 minutes.

Book roundup: Robert Paarlberg, Fa’iz El-Ghusein, Det hendte 75

Robert Paarlberg - Food Politics - What Everyone Needs to Know

Robert Paarlberg – Food Politics – What Everyone Needs to Know (2010)

All the big issues in food politics, such as international food prices, food scarcity, genetic modification, subsidies, and obesity.  Surveys the current state of things, and what the different sides believe.  Seems even-handed, though the left won’t like his siding with agricultural science and economics, and I find it shocking how easily he dismisses individual choice as a factor in healthy eating.

Recommended: Yes.

Fa’iz El-Ghusein – Martyred Armenia (1917)

A genocide is just an abstract number until you’ve read the eyewitness account of someone who has stood and cried over the corpses of raped women, lying forgotten by the road.

Recommended: Yes, but the translator has decided to leave out the most gruesome details, (hard as this may be to believe).  Why is there no new translation?

Det hendte 75

All the events of 1975 that you can remember, and some that you can’t, such as the wonderful news that the troubles in Cambodia are over at last.

Recommended: Yes.  Such summaries are almost worthless at the time when they’re published, but when you read them four decades later they illuminate all the concerns and blind spots of their age.

1950s movies marathon – Best of 1952

1952 was either one of the worst years in movie history, or I’ve been unusually hard to satisfy lately. Or perhaps it’s that it offered little new, and this marathon is above all about newness.  I’ll watch anything as long as it’s interesting, and what makes it interesting is that I don’t quite know where to place it.  Almost everything from 1952 fits neatly into existing categories, adding nothing of their own, and what’s left is this meagre picking:

The White Reindeer

Eight Iron Men

Bend of the River

The Thief

Singin’ in the Rain

Viva Zapata!

The Importance of Being Earnest

Children of Hiroshima

Next up: 1953, with 370+ movies lying ready to face the fast-forward button. (Wait, 370?!  Yes.  And rising steadily, year by year.)

..so I shall make you an example to all who see you

On the arrival of a batch of Armenians at Deir-el-Zûr from Ras-el-Ain, the Mutesarrif desired to choose a servant-girl from amongst the women. His eye fell on a handsome girl, and he went up to her, but on his approach she turned white and was about to fall. He told her not to be afraid, and ordered his servant to take her to his house. On returning thither he asked the reason for her terror of him, and she told him that she and her mother had been sent from Ras-el-Ain in charge of a Circassian gendarme, many other Armenian women being with them. On the way, the gendarme called her mother, and told her to give him her money, or he would kill her; she said she had none, so he tortured her till she gave him six liras. He said to her: “You liar! You [Armenians] never cease lying. You have seen what has befallen, and will befall, all Armenians, but you will not take warning, so I shall make you an example to all who see you.” Then he cut off her hands with his dagger, one after the other, then both her feet, all in sight of her daughter, whom he then took aside and violated, whilst her mother, in a dying state, witnessed the act. “And when I saw you approach, I remembered my mother’s fate and dreaded you, thinking that you would treat me as the gendarme treated my mother and myself, before each other’s eyes.”

– Fa’iz El-Ghusein, Martyred Armenia (1917)

1950s movies marathon – part 32

Children of Hiroshima / Genbaku no ko (1952, Japan)

A woman returns to the ruins of her childhood home in Hiroshima.  Watched it all.  One of the odd things about this marathon is to experience the contrast between two familiar but exclusive points of view: The American view of Japan during the Second World War, and Japan’s view of itself immediately afterwards.  There is hardly any overlap, and yet they’re both partly valid.  To be honest, I love such moments, when I find myself holding multiple incompatible views in my head.  I actively seek them out.  It’s a rush.

The Greatest Show on Earth (1952, USA)

I wouldn’t say it’s that great.  But the circus acts are okay.  And Charlton Heston looks like you will have to pry that Indy hat out of his cold, dead fingers.  Watched: 8 minutes, then fast forwarded to see an impressive but not entirely plausible (model) train accident.

Clash by Night (1952, USA, Lang)

The Barbara Stanwycks of the world are doomed to choose between stupid, kind men and charming douchebags.  No matter what they choose, it turns out wrong.  Watched it all.  This is the first movie where I’ve actually liked Marilyn Monroe.

Les Miserables (1952, USA)

Since the purpose of movies based on famous novels is to save those who haven’t read them from feeling left out of Culture, and I have already seen a Les Miserables, I don’t think I’ll bother with this one.

Book roundup: Mikael Jalving, George Sutherland, Jo Benkow

Mikael Jalving - Absolut Sverige

Mikael Jalving – Absolut Sverige (2011)

When it seems that the Norwegian multiculturalism debate is stuck in an unproductive track, flirting nervously with a reality we fear does not respect our ideals, trying to see how few concessions to it we can get away with accepting, I do as the sport fans do, and take comfort in knowing that at least we’re better off than the Swedes.

Recommended: Yes.

George Sutherland – Twentieth Century Inventions: A Forecast (1901)

You do know that all predictions are worthless, right?  I see you nodding, and yet afterwards you go off and predict stuff.  Ah well.  Behold George Sutherland, ye haughty, and despair.

Recommended: Some of it, while other parts are too technical. The chapters on road and rail and warfare alone should suffice to prove that you’re being an idiot by even trying to forecast the future.  (Again I see you nodding, and then you think “well, he doesn’t mean the kind of predictions I make”.  But I do.  I do.)

Jo Benkow – Fra synagogen til Løvebakken (1985)

An account of Benkow’s life in the Norwegian Jewish community before and after the Holocaust.

Recommended: Weakly, for its perspective, not for its writing.

1950s movies marathon – part 31

The Importance of Being Earnest (1952, UK)

The thing about Oscar Wilde plays is that I always feel certain that I’ve already seen them, but then it turns out that I don’t recognize a single scene.  Surely I must have seen Earnest before, but who are all these people?!  Watched it all.

Invasion USA (1952, USA)

How to do a war movie on a shoestring budget: 80% military stock footage, 20% some guys hanging around in a bar listening to a newscast about the invasion.  Watched it all – with MST3k commentary.

Kvinnors vantan (1952, Sweden, Bergman)

I remember having seen some good Ingmar Bergman movies, but there certainly are a lot of bad ones, and there is something uniquely annoying about a bad Bergman movie.  Watched: 7 minutes.

The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice (1952, USA, Welles)

This edition comes with an updated, partly electronic, stereo soundtrack.  This is possibly a travesty, or at least very very odd.  As for the rest, I have the sense that I’ve been beaten over the head with dramatic shadows.  Watched: 17 minutes.

To Live / Ikiru (1952, Japan, Kurosawa)

Bureaucrats are unloved zombies who follow pointless rules for decades, and then they die, just at the point of discovering that it has all been in vain.  Watched: 14 minutes.

..and on arrival at the Euphrates he asked permission to drown himself

Whilst I was Kaimakâm of the district of Kiakhta, in the Vilayet of Kharpout, I was acquainted with an Armenian Notable of that place, named Barsoum Agha. He was a worthy and courageous man, dealing well with Kurds, Turks, and Armenians, without distinction; he also showed much kindness to officials who were dismissed from their posts in the district. All the Kurdish Aghas thereabouts kept close watch over him, hating him because he was their rival in the supremacy of the place. When, after my banishment, I arrived at Sivrek and heard what had befallen the Armenians, I enquired about him and his family. I was told that when the Government disposed of the Armenians of Kiakhta he was summoned and ordered to produce the records of moneys owing to him (Kurds and Armenians in that district owed him a sum of 10,000 liras); he replied that he had torn up the records and released his debtors from their obligations. He was taken away with the other Armenians, and on arrival at the Euphrates he asked permission to drown himself. This was granted, and he endeavoured to do so, but failed, as he could not master himself. So he said to the gendarmes, “Life is dear and I cannot kill myself, so do as you have been ordered,” whereupon one of them shot him and then killed the rest of the family.

– Fa’iz El-Ghusein, Martyred Armenia (1917)

..visions of air-ships hovering over a doomed city

Military aeronautics, like submarine operations in naval warfare, have been somewhat overrated. Visions of air-ships hovering over a doomed city and devastating it with missiles dropped from above are mere fairy tales. Indeed the whole subject of aeronautics as an element in future human progress has excited far more attention than its intrinsic merits deserve.

A balloon is at the mercy of the wind and must remain so, while a true flying machine, which supports itself in the air by the operation of fans or similar devices, may be interesting as a toy, but cannot have much economical importance for the future. When man has the solid earth upon which to conduct his traffic, without the necessity of overcoming the force of gravitation by costly power, he would be foolish in the extreme to attempt to abandon the advantage which this gives him, and to commit himself to such an element as the air, in which the power required to lift himself and his goods would be immeasurably greater than that needed to transport them from place to place.

The amount of misdirected ingenuity that has been expended on these two problems of submarine and aerial navigation during the nineteenth century will offer one of the most curious and interesting studies to the future historian of technological progress.

– George Sutherland, Twentieth Century Inventions: A Forecast (1901)

1950s movies marathon – part 30

Viva Zapata! (1952, USA, Kazan)

Marlon Brando is the Mexican Moses, who leads the slaves out of Mexico into, well, Mexico.   Watched it all.  As biopics go, this one seems to be not intolerably inaccurate, although at the price of confusing viewers who have not made it a purpose of their life to study every twist and turn of the Mexican Revolution, which seems to have had an above average number of twists and turns.

Phone Call From a Stranger (1952, USA, Negulesco)

One thing I can’t tolerate in a movie is intentionally annoying characters.  They’re just too annoying.  I want to punch them.  I want to get away.  And then I remember – I can.  Watched: 10 minutes.

Captive Women (1952, USA)

1000 years in the future, Earth is a battlefield, and John Travolta stalks the land.  Watched: 10 minutes.

Singin’ in the Rain (1952, USA)

Make them laugh, make them laugh, make them laugh.  Watched it all, many times before, and again now.  Partly because it’s fantastic, and partly because for the first time now I understand the context it was made in.  This is MGM’s goodbye to old Hollywood, a response to Sunset Boulevard, and its exact opposite in every way: Cheerful where Sunset was dark, naive where it was cynical.

Kid Monk Baroni (1952, USA)

Hey, it’s Leonard Nimoy, as an angry young punk off the streets!  I love first sightings of famous actors, (although Nimoy is arguably more famous as a poet).  Watched: 5 minutes.