jkogrady

All the right ingredients are here for a perfect adaptation of Collins'

novel: a perfect (almost) cast, perfect art direction, nice camera

work, and a charmingly low-key score by Max Steiner, largely

based on English late renaissance music. So what went wrong?

They decided not to base the plot on the novel, that's what went

wrong. (Warning: spoilers ahead.) Sir Percival's biggest secret in

the book is that all of his titles are fake; why is this never brought

up? And Hartwright's sudden switcheroo from Laura to Marian at

the end makes no sense, is totally out of character, and doesn't

happen in the novel. At the end of the movie you get the

impression he's now married to both of them, lucky guy. Gig

Young is miscast, in any case, but everyone else is spot on: Count

Fosco is a most unlikely villain, but Greenstreet is the only actor on

earth who could possibly play him, absolutely evil and charming at

the same time and despite his 350 lbs or so, he moves like a cat.

Believe it or not, Countess Fosco really is like Agnes Moorehead;

and John Abbott's turn as Frederick Fairlie is wonderful, a great

comic performance. Author Collins enjoyed turning the conventional oh-so-sweet Victorian heroine cliche on its ear, and

in this book he contrasts Laura, who is that cliche personified, with

the altogether more hardheaded Marian. Alexis Smith is too

beautiful for the part, but is otherwise just right. This movie needs

a release on video; not many people know it, but devotees of

atmospheric old movies should definitely give it a look, despite its

deficiencies.

A runaway success in Europe, Flynn's Don Juan did not do so well

in the U.S. Nevertheless it is one of his best pictures and

deserves to be better known. Vincent Sherman, the director, does

not quite give it the slam-bang Curtiz touch, but instead imparts an

old fashioned worldly-wise flavor that is right here. The plot is

absolutely unrelated to Warner Bros' 1926 "Don Juan" with John

Barrymore, an actor who has sometimes been compared with

Flynn and who was even impersonated by him once in "Too Much,

Too Soon". Anyway, Flynn and Alan Hale Sr. were born to play Don

Juan and Leporello, and the movie was barely made in time, a few

years before Hale died, and before Flynn deteriorated too much.

Slated for production as early as 1945, endless delays caused by

logistical problems (not least of which was Flynn's increasing

alcoholism), it finally emerged at the end of 1948. Sherman

deserves a great deal of credit for making it happen at all. It is

given a lavish treatment all round, and the set designers did

exemplary work, particularly a superb massive staircase just

made for epic fencing duels. Romney Brent is spot on as the

befuddled king, and Robert Douglas is almost too velvety a villain;

what other color than black could he dress in? Viveca Lindfors,

who would later win a considerable reputation as an actress in

more serious Scandinavian movies, was at this stage merely an

ingenue for Warner Bros.; but she is for my money the greatest

leading lady Flynn ever had, stunningly beautiful and absolutely

credible in the part of an Austrian princess married to a pointless

king. Erich Korngold would likely have done the music had he not

given up on films and left Warners by the time this picture was

made; and his friend and compatriot Max Steiner has written a

score which is clearly a tribute to the Korngold style, and worthy of

both of them. Errol Flynn had a real knack for light comedy which

the studio seldom let him indulge fully; but swashbucklers and

screwball comedies are cousins under the skin, and here Flynn

found his real metier. Some of the best bits come early. One of his

inamorata complains "You've made love to so many women".

Without a beat of hesitation Juan replies, "Catherine. An artist may

paint a thousand canvases before achieving one work of art.

Would you deny a lover the same practice?" How many of you

male types out there could have come up with that line that fast?

Later on an irate husband says, "You're caught!" to which Juan

replies, "The Story of my life". Flynn was a limited actor, but within

those limits he was superb. Nobody had more grace, more

charm, more disillusioned humor. No man could enter or exit a

throne room with greater aplomb. Feminine friends of mine still

get a bit woozy over him, 38 years old as he was at the time. It's an

ideal marriage of an actor to a part.

This is, I believe, only the second movie to be made in the gloriously new three-strip Technicolor process, and it must be said that cinematographer Howard Greene and Selznick's always reliable crew of art directors turned in a stunning performance. At a time when color was not well understood by most technicians, these guys pulled off a virtuoso turn. The thing looks fabulous from end to end; lovely desert shots under all kinds of lighting conditions, and a generally underplayed and painterly use of color.

Then there is the music: one of Max Steiner's most magical scores, although unfortunately renters of the video will not quite be able to appreciate it as it deserves to be. Max wrote nearly two hours of music for what turned out to be a 79 minute picture; a good deal of it was lost and Selznick's sound engineers had a tendency to mix it under in such a way that its distinctiveness is much muted. This problem is exacerbated in the usually reliable Anchor Bay's VHS issue; they went overboard with the noise reduction filters and the result in many places is a blurry mush that does scant justice to Steiner's often piquant scoring. (Later: In the DVD this has been largely rectified). Some of the best passages were left on the cutting room floor altogether... All of this visual and audible loveliness has been lavished on a story of truly astonishing triviality, which is a pity, as the Robert Hichens novel had rather more depth. (Count Antioni, for instance, is a converted Muslim in the book; but 1936 Hollywood would not tolerate that. Would they today, I wonder?) Marlene Dietrich has to be the only woman on earth who would wander about the uncharted depths of the Sahara in high heels and a Travis Banton silk confection of a gown; the most horrendous sandstorms fail to displace a single hair of her coiffure. Charles Boyer strives manfully with awful dialogue and almost brings it off. Second tier characters like Joseph Schildkraut and the ever stalwart C. Aubrey Smith fare better, and Basil Rathbone is always good to see. Tilly Losch's hoochie- koochie dance in the Arab dive is positively embarrassing. The whole thing was definitely a miscalculation on Selznick's part, and he lost a bundle. Nevertheless it is well worth a look if you are a student of early color. Film music aficionados will have to take my word for it on the superb qualities of the score; the existing movie barely hints at them. This music cries out for a good new recording, like the many others that are coming out these days of classic picture scores.

I hesitate to add to the avalanche of praise bestowed, on this site,

on this perfect picture, the definitive Scrooge of all time, which I

have watched, spellbound, every Christmas since I was three

years old and will continue to watch as long as I am breathing. I

endorse the review already placed here by "jackboot"; and I have

also been particularly touched by that small scene between

Scrooge and the maid, with not a word spoken, that "Seashell 1"

mentions. Two points I would like to underline here which I have

not seen mentioned by others: First, this is about the only

"Christmas Carol" movie that remembers to be a GHOST story as

well as a Christmas story. The superb camera work by Pennington-Richards and the powerful score by Richard Addinsell

help to make this movie rather scary in places, as it should be.

Nowhere else have I seen the grim bleakness of the grimier side

of Victorian London so immediately conveyed. The scene where

Marley's ghost is caught out in the snowstorm with a multitude of

other wailing spirits is truly horrifying; and there are many such

moments, such as the one where the Spirit of Christmas Present

suddenly reveals to us the personifications of Ignorance and

Want; they really scared me as a kid, and they should scare us all

as adults now. Secondly, and above all, I think that the reason why

Alastair Sim succeeds so brilliantly here in a role which has

defeated so many is that he was chiefly a COMIC actor. Ebenezer

Scrooge has from the beginning an underlying humor which

makes him human; by allowing it to come out he makes the

transformation plausible, by making you understand that this

humor was dormant in him all along, just waiting to be awakened.

It just isn't Christmas without Sim.

Universal put out three Flash Gordon chapter plays, in 1936, 1938

and 1940; but despite the larger budgets of the latter two, the first

is the by far the most fun; its successors are pale in comparison,

although the Clay People of Series II are certainly worth while. I

loved the 1936 serial dearly when I was five years old, seeing it on

TV; and I still retain a good deal of affection for it, even now when I

am old enough to be aware of the cardboard sets, ridiculous

dialogue and frequent lapses of taste. Who cares? Flash's

adventures have nothing to do with outer space and are largely

medieval, as this 1930s art deco Siegfried battles shark men,

hawk men, and cheesy rubber dragons. Buster Crabbe is ideal,

and Charles Middleton positively believes he IS Ming the

Merciless. Then there is Princess Aura. I don't know about the rest

of you male types out there, but if I were Flash I would have

dumped Dale for Priscilla Lawson's voluptuous princess by

Episode Two. Besides the perfectly obvious fact that she would be

vastly more fun in bed, consider: When Flash is in horrible danger,

what does Dale do? She faints, or gets hypnotised. Aura,

meanwhile, has swiped a rocket ship, bribed the guards, found a

cache of weapons, and is actively doing her best to rescue the

guy. She saves Flash's butt from certain horrible death about every

other episode, but does the big lunk appreciate it? Oh well. Even

when I was five I was dimly aware that there was some reason I

wanted her to take me home with her... and above all, there's

Frank Shannon's Zarkov. "You are a remarkable man. I can use

you" says Emperor Ming; and what Zarkov doesn't say, but is

clearly thinking, is: "and I can use a blithering mad emperor with

unlimited power and a fantastic laboratory"! My favorite dialogue in

the whole serial comes in Episode One. Zarkov and Flash have

just met, and Zarkov explains that the Earth's only hope of survival

is his home built rocket ship. "Sure this thing will work?" asks

Flash, after they've come aboard. "I've experimented with models"

Zarkov replies. "Ah," responds Flash; "They ever come back?" With

perfect equanimity Zarkov says "They weren't supposed to." Now,

there's a REAL Mad Scientist after my own heart! Zarkov routinely

invents the impossible on five minutes notice, from invisibility rays

to anti-gravitons. The whole thing is so absurd it's magnificent, so

hokey it's colossal. It's for the precocious five-year-old in us all.

There is no way around it; Ben-Hur 1925 is a vastly superior

picture to Ben-Hur 1959. It covers more plot material in 140

minutes than the remake manages to get through in 212. True, the

acting style is remote, old-fashioned and somewhat operatic, and

the domestic scenes have some longeurs; but then the style of

acting in the remake is mostly just plain bad. Boyd and Heston are

the only ones who emerge with any credit, and the less said about

the others the better (excepting Finlay Currie, who can do no

wrong). Ramon Novarro is appealing and believable in the title

part; May McAvoy is also appealing, though not very believable.

Francis X. Bushman is a brutal and unsubtle Messala, but that is

appropriate to the character. Bushman and Novarro are both very

buff, too, for those who notice such things; Bushman was once a

sculptor's model. Carmel Myers, the gorgeous orthodox rabbi's

daughter, is a very nice Iras, a character omitted from the 1959

movie altogether. Frank Currer as the senior Arrius and Nigel

DeBrulier as Simonides are both superb; and special praise is in

order for veteran Claire McDowell, who is immensely moving as

Ben-Hur's mother; watch her in the exterior night scene where she

sees her son for the first time in many years but cannot approach

him because of her leprosy; she is a character straight from Greek

tragedy. The effects work is markedly better in this version than in

1959; the naval battle is clearly being fought from full size

battleships (except for a couple of obvious long model shots),

while the remake's parallel scene appears to have been staged in

a bathtub. The best thing in the 1959 remake is the chariot race,

which was copied almost shot for shot from the Fred Niblo

original. Niblo was a great action director, and he had the help of

assistant director Breezy Eason for the chariot race itself. I urgently

recommend to all interested parties the chapter on Ben-Hur in

Kevin Brownlow's classic book "The Parade's Gone By"; the story

of its making is as amazing, as epic and as unlikely as the story

told by the film itself. A word of commendation is also in order for

Ted Turner, whose video edition features all the original

technicolor inserts and a terrific score by Carl Davis. There isn't

much profundity here, but it's silent film making at its epic best.

MGM spent an enormous amount of money on it, and every nickel

shows on the screen. When you first see the vast Hippodrome, it

always amazes; no one expects it to be THAT big. When we first

see the Roman galleys, the camera shows us just one of them at

first, and lingers long enough for us to notice that it is a full size

functioning ship with crewmen swarming all over it. Then the

camera angle changes and we suddenly see about SIX of them,

stretching to the horizon. For sheer stupefying spectacle the

remake cannot touch this. If you like the 1959 movie, do yourself a

favor and see the original. My bet is you'll never go back.

I first saw this picture as a teenager some thirty years ago. I had no idea what to expect; all I knew was the famous still of Belshazzar's feast which has become one of the best known icons depicting the extravagance of crazy old Hollywood. But I was astounded and bowled over by what I saw. I will make no attempt at a plot synopsis here, since several other reviewers on this site have done so. Most readers already know that Griffith set out to tell four separate stories, laid in four widely spaced historical periods, and that he intercut freely between them, increasing the tempo as the film proceeded, and attempted to bring all four to a climax simultaneously. Clearly he bit off more than he, or anybody, could chew; but the fact that the limits of what cinema could do were being pushed so hard so early is what fascinated me then, and still fascinates me now. I wish to heaven that college film courses would just blow off "Birth of a Nation" and consign it to the oblivion it largely deserves, and show "Intolerance" instead, for this indeed is Griffith's monument, despite its poor state of repair; and at the risk of being technical I would like to address this. I have noticed that the one negative comment running most consistently through the reviews posted on this website is the relative lack of weight given to the French and Judaean sequences relative to the Modern and Babylonian narratives. This is largely the fault of the movie's checkered preservation history. When "Intolerance" failed to make huge sums at the box office, Griffith released the Babylonian and Modern stories as individual features in 1919, reshooting some scenes along the way. He cut up the original negative (gasp!) to do this, and by the time he decided to reassemble the whole movie in 1926, it turned out that all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't quite put Humpty Dumpty back together again. There was never a shooting script, or a written continuity; Griffith kept the whole thing in his head, and moreover could never stop tinkering with it while it was in release! Consequently, while the Babylonian and Modern stories have survived largely intact, the French and Judaean episodes were depleted by about half. So when we see it now we must recognize that we are viewing a broken sculpture. The movie is a restorer's nightmare; almost a third of its 2000- plus shots exist in variant versions, and the captions were rewritten more than once. But, broken as it is, it's still magnificent. There has never been, and will never again be, anything like it. It has all of Griffith's inconsistencies: subtle and naturalistic acting from Mae Marsh and Robert Harron as the luckless couple in the Modern Story are seen cheek by jowl with outrageous mugging by Walter Long as the Musketeer of the Slums, or Josephine Crowell's Catherine de Medici in France; but no masterpiece on this scale is ever consistent, after all. I love Connie Talmadge's Mountain Girl from Babylon; smart, funny and crazy. Other favorites: Tully Marshall as the villainous Priest of Bel; Seena Owen as the Princess beloved, my personal nomination for Most Fabulous Body of the Hollywood 1910s, never mind the deranged costumes; Alfred Paget as a genuinely humane Belshazzar; Howard Gaye as a believable and totally unforced Jesus. Everything the silent screen of 1916 could do, good, bad, subtle, overblown, crazy or glorious is embodied here; and Griffith never rode so high again. The most satisfactory version currently available, in my opinion, is the Kino on Video edition on vhs and dvd, the one illustrated when you first call the picture up on this site. There are some problems and a few missing bits that I take exception to, but overall this is the version that first time viewers should try.

Anyone who loves epic music in pictures must see, or at least hear, this movie, which has little enough otherwise to recommend it other than its often striking visual inventiveness. It is, in a sense, the feminine flip side to "King Kong", and even shares certain thematic elements. My perspective is a bit unusual; I fell in love with the music when I was 16, years before I actually saw the film, by way of scratchy old transcription discs taped and distributed by the Max Steiner Music Society ages before "movie music" had won the respect it now enjoys. Steiner's score is in his most expressionistic mode, highly akin to "Kong" but more operatic; there is even a full-scale ballet in the last act! The music is a perfect accompaniment to Haggard's novel, of which I am also very fond despite its old-fashioned elements. I have this marvelous fantasy of a new remake, faithful to the book, with a new recording of Steiner's score! Alas, not too likely. Both the novel and the music are of an earlier age probably not commercial enough today. Helen Gahagan was actually an opera singer (years before becoming the famous "pink lady" of the Nixon campaign for California!) and her approach to the part is remote, perhaps more suited to a silent movie. Cinematographer Roy Hunt positively roasts the woman with light in an effort to give her an otherworldly quality. Randolph Scott and Helen Mack are both in way over their heads, although subsidiary actors like Samuel Hinds, Lumsden Hare, Noble Johnson and the immortal Gustav van Seyffertitz come off rather better. Nigel Bruce does his standard pompous British ass, which is a pity, as he was capable of much better. The decor is great fun: this is the palace of the Emperor Ming the Merciless' dreams, if only he'd had the budget! But the superb score overrides all else. It would probably not be appropriate for me to openly hawk CDs in this place, but the original soundtrack of this picture is available from Brigham Young University archive. Beg, borrow or steal it today! The ballet sequence is as powerful as anything in Stravinsky, and no higher praise is possible. A pity the movie is not equal to its soundtrack; but that's a problem Steiner ran into more than once in his career.

This picture is absolutely one of the oddest damn things ever to come out of the old Hollywood studio system. Von Sternberg himself called it "a relentless exercise in pure style" and he wasn't kidding. Where to begin? For starters, it marks the apex of Sternberg's worship of Marlene Dietrich (worship is hardly too strong a word; it might not be strong enough). His justly famous expressionistic lighting, brilliantly shot by Bert Glennon, dazzles the eye throughout. During the wedding ceremony, for instance, the whole scene is lit by what must be 10,000 candles and is shot through a variety of diffusion materials; in one shot Dietrich's face can hardly be more than a foot from the camera lens but there is a candle between them, and fabric as well, making her face waver and melt into the sensuous texture. This scene is largely silent, and the movie as a whole, though made in 1934, is often silent with music only. Rubinstein's "Kammenoi-Ostrow" arranged for chorus and orchestra plays through the whole wedding scene while Sam Jaffe, a wonderful and versatile actor, plays the insane Grand Duke Peter like Harpo Marx on bad acid. The dialogue throughout is just plain weird, and the mise-en-scene far weirder. Sternberg has created an entire fictitious style for this movie that might be called Russian Gothic. The buildings in no way resemble the airy rococo palaces where the real Empress Elisavieta Petrovna spent her time; rather we are given a nightmarish phantasmagoria of wooden architecture with railings and balustrades carved into the shape of peasants in attitudes of great suffering, and vast doors which armies of ladies-in-waiting struggle to open and close. The aftermath of a brutal feast is portrayed with a skeletal tureen stand presiding over the indescribable flotsam and jetsam. Louise Dresser is a hoot as Empress Elizabeth, never mind the accent; and I also like John Lodge, although I didn't at first; the aplomb with which he delivers his outrageous dialogue finally won me over. Please ignore all the stupid stories about Catherine the Great and horses that you may have heard; there isn't an ounce of evidence for any of them. Instead relish the opening of this gloriously crazy movie: Edward van Sloan, in his best "Dracula/Frankenstein" mode, reading to the little girl Catherine about Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, as we dissolve to fantastic scenes of barbaric torture, culminating in a shot of some peasant being used as the clapper of a bell, which dissolves to the sweet young adult Catherine of some years later on a swing. In the 18th century, swings were considered highly erotic, and Sternberg misses none of this. She is called away by a servant, and runs breathlessly into the parlor where her parents are receiving the Russian envoys. Her actions are literally choreographed to the music as she bobs and weaves around the room, kissing hands and saluting her elders. This is pure cinema, and absolutely nuts, but glorious. Take a good strong snort of whatever your favorite mind-expander may be (a dry red wine with a shot of Stolichnaya under it is my recommendation in this case) and blast your brain with a truly strange movie made by real artists.

I have been very fond of this movie for years, particularly as compared with Fox's bloated monstrosity of 1963. Colbert is admittedly somewhat miscast (her face is altogether Parisienne), but she handles the part with considerable charm. Warren William, usually a very limited actor, is as good a Caesar as I have seen on film, commanding and uncomfortable by turns; while Henry Wilcoxon is the definitive Mark Antony, laughing, brawling, swaggering, crude and brooding. C. Aubrey Smith as Enobarbus, the last of the hardcore Roman republicans, is perfect. Victor Milner's cinematography is superb, if old-fashioned. There is one magnificent pullback shot aboard Cleopatra's barge, with more and more stuff entering the frame, which as pure cinema is worth more than all four hours of the Liz Taylor version for my money. Shakespeare and Shaw have both been drawn upon here and there, and the movie has generally good (and fun) dialogue, not always one of DeMille's strengths. Consider also the scene of Cleopatra's entrance into Rome: contrary to DeMille's usual reputation, this scene is underplayed, depicting a plausible parade through a very real Roman street with authentic trappings, compared to the outrageously bogus and overblown spectacle given us in 1963. A word is also in order for the music of Rudolph Kopp, an extremely obscure Hollywood composer, who turns in an atmospheric score redolant of the old silent movies. This style is easy to make fun of, but see how effective it is in the highly theatrical opening credits! DeMille used silent film technique well into the talkie era, particularly in crowd scenes, and it still works. The battle scenes are the weakest point, since evidently Paramount ran out of cash and C.B. had to make do with a bunch of short shots put together with Russian cutting; nevertheless, this is still as good a picture on the subject as has yet been made, a bit of extravagant old Hollywood at its most polished.