As a service for readers who have misunderstood the movie marathon concept, and think it’s about me being nice and selecting all the Classic Movies for you, here’s my favorites from 1943:
Ministry of Fear (1944, USA) – Fritz Lang imitates Hitchcock. It’s all there: The regular guy running away across the country, suspected of a crime he didn’t commit. The sinister spy ring with tentacles into all the best circles. Also the sense that it would all have been simpler if he’d just come clean with the police from the start. But what would be the fun of that? Watched it all.
Cry of the Werewolf (1944, USA) – Begins with a werewolf princess living in hiding among gypsies, (yay!), but then there’s the same old story where a couple of normal people struggle with how to fit the strange things they’ve experienced into their boring rational worldviews. Yes yes, werewolves and vampires and voodoo rituals are real, now get on with the movie. Watched: 17 minutes.
On Approval (1944, UK) – Two aristocrats and their friends move out onto an island for a month to see if they could stand being married to each other. Watched it all. I love how the introduction tries to show the contrast between the modern 40’s and the naughty 90’s.
Bathing Beauty (1944, USA) – Apparently an excuse to show off beautiful swimsuit models in Technicolor. Unfortunately I hate the music. Watched: 8 minutes, then fast forwarded to see if there was any good music at all. There was, and also a man in a tutu, and a message at the end about how this movie will be shown to soldiers overseas, which I think they appreciated.
Some pictures from Victory Through Air Power, the 1943 Disney movie I mentioned earlier, a crazy stunt pulled by Walt Disney to change the Allied war strategy.
Victory Through Air Power (1943, USA) – Not propaganda as such, but an argument made by Disney and an ex-Russian pilot, aimed in part at the Allied governments, about how air power should be used to win the war. It’s informative, awe-inducing, and quirky in that Disney way. Opens with a history of flight, and ends with scenes of the fiery hell Allied bombers will rain on Japan’s industrial areas once they learn how to overcome the great distances. Can you believe the magnificent arrogance of Walt Disney, to use his own army of animators to convince Roosevelt of some idea he’s just picked up from a book? Unbelievable. Fantastic. Watched it all. The White Cliffs of Dover (1944, USA) – An American nurse waits for casualties to arrive from the front, and goes into flashback mode to tell us why she loves America’s dear cousins, the English. Watched: 13 minutes.
The Lodger (1944, USA) – I don’t see how Jack the Ripper could have escaped the police all that time if he’d seemed so shifty and shadowy as this lodger does. Watched: 12 minutes.
Double Exposure (1944, USA) – A magazine where photographers fake their pictures and the owner is a health freak hires a Woman Photographer, causing shock and confusion. I’m not sure what to make of the intro text: “New York – Where half the girls are working girls .. and the other half are working men.” What? Watched: 13 minutes.
Le Corbeau (1943, France) – An anonymous letter writer spreads dark accusations in a small town. The town is so full of depraved people that practically everyone could be the culprit, or at least are so unlikeable that you don’t mind them being falsely accused of it. Watched it all.
Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman (1943, USA) – By the undead eyebrows of Bela Lugosi, how many are there of these? Watched: 10 minutes.
Watch on the Rhine (1943, USA) – European exiles from both sides meet in the US. Pretty dull considering the screenplay is written by Dashiell Hammett. Watched: 32 minutes.
Lady of Burlesque (1943, USA) – Life at a burlesque theatre, with relatively little clothes for a ’43 movie, and a good sense of fun, including a fistfight between a room full of dancing girls and cops. Watched: 24 minutes.
Stormy Weather (1943, USA) – Jazz musical with an all-black cast. Is that progress or segregation? Watched the musical numbers, skipped everything between. One singer looked and sounded oddly familiar: Turns out he’s Cab Calloway, who I remembered from The Blues Brothers, 37 years later.
The Mysterious Doctor (1943, USA) – This isn’t The Doctor at all, just some medical doctor who wanders by accident into one of those isolated, evil villages England is so full of. Watched: 7 minutes.
Bataan (1943, USA) – Soldiers hold a bridge in the Philippines. Big explosions and men staring somberly out into the jungle follows. Watched: 28 minutes.
Old Acquaintance (1943, USA) – Bette Davis writes thoughtful books that critics love but readers don’t. Miriam Hopkins writes romantic trash that sells well. They’re the greatest of friends, but you just know that a Bette Davis movie is going to turn out bitter, and so it does. Watched it all. Based on a play by John Van Druten, who apparently saw nothing odd in writing a play about a critically acclaimed playwright who happens to be a wonderful person, and her stupid friend who makes tons of money.
Ladies’ Day (1943, USA) – Meet a team of baseball players and their loud, nasally voiced dames. Watched: 14 minutes.
Ghost on the Loose (1943, USA) – The East Side Kids and Bela Lugosi have certainly fallen far since the 30’s. Watched: 4 minutes.
Millions Like Us (1943, UK) – An ordinary family in wartime London. Perhaps a little too ordinary. Watched: 19 minutes.
In Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven from 1971, a therapist gets a patient who can change the world with his dreams. When things change, they change so that it has always been that way, and nobody knows the difference.
The therapist believes he can use this power to make the world a better place, and also get himself a nicer office, and he starts to take control over the patient’s dreams. He gradually changes the world from an over-populated, starving, war-crazed mess to a sparsely populated, well-fed world that is ordered according to his ideals. Which include eugenics and state-run child upbringing.
And everybody knows it’s always been like that.
This is a story about utopianism versus real life. The therapist never gets exactly what he wants. The dark side of human nature keeps reasserting itself. And when he gets what he wants, there’s a price. To solve over-population, the dreamer’s subconscious invents a plague in which billions of people died. To solve race conflicts, everyone must turn the same grey skincolor. The world becomes gradually duller, joyless.
Le Guin introduces the chapters with taoist quotes, and the patient eventually arrives at a taoist point of view: You can’t force your will on the world, even when you think you’re right. You have to respect the dynamics of things as they are.
Shadow of a Doubt (1943, USA) – Nice uncle Charlie comes to visit his small-town relatives. He brings large wads of cash, jewelry with other people’s names on it, and a nihilistic philosophy of life. Watched it all.
Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943, USA) – Self-congratulatory musical about Hollywood actors. Watched: 10 minutes, then fast-forwarded through the rest to see if it’s also a patriotic war musical. Doesn’t seem to be, but one can never be too sure.
Destination Tokyo (1943, USA) – Whenever I see Cary Grant I expect him to crack a joke and offer a drink. Which makes it hard to take him seriously as a submarine captain. Watched: 11 minutes.
Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (1943, UK) – Opens with a raven with a taste for blood. How cool is that? But the rest isn’t so impressive. Watched: 15 minutes.
Son of Dracula (1943, USA) – The 1943 idea of horror was to play ghostly music while a bat flies across the screen. Watched: 11 minutes.
Whistling in Brooklyn (1943, USA) – A serial killer story, the first in this marathon. I hate serial killer stories. Watched: 4 minutes.
Private SNAFU (1943-45, USA) – A series of educational cartoons for soldiers, made by Frank Capra, Dr. Seuss, Fritz Freleng, Chuck Jones – and Mel Blanc. Which means they’re also hilarious. Here’s my favorite, which explains that even if you are a super-awesome super-soldier with super-powers, you still maybe ought to read the field manual. “The Americans are on our side, you know.”
There’s now a remake of The Prisoner, which began airing this weekend.
I’m not convinced by it. It’s certainly different from the original. It’s okay that it’s different, of course. James Caviezel shouldn’t be the same Number Six as Patrick McGoohan any more than Daniel Craig should be the same James Bond as Sean Connery. You have to change, or there’s no point in a remake. But so far I don’t like it.
Here’s one way in which it’s different: The premise of both series is that a man is imprisoned in a surreal environment, an isolated village, where someone tries to break his mind. But Caviezel’s Number Six is a victim. McGoohan never was. McGoohan was always in charge. Caviezel plays Number Six like a character from Lost. McGoohan played him like free will incarnated. Someone who doesn’t bend. Who falls when he’s struck, but always gets back up again.
Caviezel’s Number Six is someone you can feel sorry for, sympathize with. McGoohan’s Number Six is someone you can admire, be inspired by.
I’ll try to watch the new series on its own terms. But if you haven’t seen the original, that’s the place to start. Despite the .. weird second half of the series.
As a service for readers who have misunderstood the movie marathon concept, and think it’s about me being nice and selecting all the Classic Movies for you, here’s my favorites from 1943:
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