david-1976

This is a movie that justifies whatever expensive restoration is required. It has a great score, and an interesting cast. Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell had developed a certain cachet during the silent era as "America's Favorite Lovebirds," and indeed they are charming, almost like the leads in a high school musical. Gaynor, of course, continued to be formidable for a number of years, but Farrell's career took a long hiatus--even though it ended up with his popular series about "Charlie Farrell's Racquet Club" in early TV.

The important thing about this film is that it is a precursor to many other interesting works that emerged over the next twenty years. It has a number of production numbers that must have been inspired by Billy Rose's extravaganzas, and which foreshadow the "aquacades" that Rose produced during the 1930's, culminating in the spectacular shows of the 1939 world's fair. The water curtain used in the Southampton charity show is surely something that we will see later. I think that Fox and Busby Berkeley derived a certain amount of inspiration from this film in creating the psychedelic "The Gang's All Here!" during WWII.

In spite of what others may say, the most important number in the score is the title: "Sunny Side Up" which was a popular sing-along number in community gatherings through the mid- 1960's. As a former Cub Scout, I don't remember singing "If I Had A Talking Picture of You" or "I'm a Dreamer", but I still know all the words to "Sunny Side Up." The burden of the song was also an important depression-era anthem, and David Butler's opening sequence, with the poor children dancing under a fire-hydrant fountain, moving to a cop-umpired baseball game, to a bird's eye view of apartment life in New York City's tenements, is certainly a precursor to Hitchcock's exploration of a Greenwich Village neighborhood in "Rear Window."

It must have been exhilarating to be inventing cinema in Hollywood in the early sound era. Gaynor and Farrell couldn't last as a romantic couple, not with those reedy voices, but at the same time they earned an honest day's pay. Marjorie White and Frank Richardson gave a convincing portrait of vaudeville as it was in the 1920's, and the show's big production number, "Turn on the Heat," was worthy of late Busby Berkeley, with Eskimo women melting their igloos, shedding their parkas for bikinis, and generating heat enough to spawn palm trees and finally flame out of the very earth. El Brendel's appearance as a dialect comedian is also an artifact of early 20th century American humor, one that resounds through the 1950's.

With early appearances by Jackie Cooper (NOT Coogan!) and (I think) Shirley Temple in an appearance so short as to be almost subliminal--I'll have to watch a couple more times-- this film incorporates early cinema magic, a certain preservation of some vaudeville precursors (these persisted through television of them 1960's) and a lot of the future of cinema. It's definitely worth watching!

Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern had already made theatre history with "Show Boat," a deathless example of American Theatre, which is still best preserved by Universal's 1935 production, directed by James Whale (now remembered for "Frankenstein"), a wonderful movie that is also the most perfect representation of Irene Dunne, who is amazing in the role of Magnolia. Every time I watch it, I am blown away by the work of the entire cast, which includes many of the staples of the American stage.

The following year, Paramount hired Kern and Hammerstein to write them a movie, and indeed, the pair came through, writing some great songs for Dunne to sing, and, on the part of Hammerstein, coming up with a script that can't help but remind the literate of "Oklahoma!" in many ways. It also generated two of Kern's most lovely songs: "Can I Forget You?" and the perennial favorite--of singers if not of audiences--"The Folks Who Live On the Hill".

This show is interesting in many ways: one, it takes Dunne back to an earlier time--the 'teens of the twentieth century--in her interpretations, especially of "The Folks Who Live on the Hill," where she elaborately rolls her "r's" and sings in an elaborately formalized manner. It also fails to provide her with an adequate male singing lead, which she certainly had in Allan Jones with "Show Boat."

The story presages the ideas that Hammerstein brought to full bloom in his other masterpiece, "Oklahoma" (Masterpiece number one being "Show Boat".) The archetypes are all there: Irene Dunne as Laurie/Magnolia, Randy Scott as Curly (not the weak male lead required by Edna Ferber), Dorothy Lamour as a somewhat muted Ado Annie/Queenie, Charles Bickford as Jud/Frank, Dorothy Patterson as a peppy Aunt Eller/Parthy, Raymond Walburn as a textually removed but otherwise enjoyable Ali Hakim/Captain Andy (although what could go wrong with Charles Winninger in that role?). Add to that Alan Hale as the supremely evil railroad magnate--any comparison would be a stretch, and this is a perfect example of playing against type for Hale, the consummate cheerful sidekick--and you have a delightful Hollywood ensemble company, and I have neglected to mention the beloved Ben Blue, who probably parallels Rubber Face/Will Parker.

Talk to me sometime about my ideas anent archetypes: it's for sure--at least as far as I'm concerned--that Hammerstein had some definite "slots" in his scripts not only for particular actors but also for particular characters, and you can find them in subsequent hits like "South Pacific" and "The Sound of Music."

My print of "High, Wide and Handsome" was evidently videotaped off a television broadcast: the result is a posterized version whose commercial breaks were edited out; nonetheless, it is a pretty good representation of the film; I don't think that much was missing. Rouben Mamoulian, one of the great directors of film ("Love Me Tonight") and Broadway ("Carousel," need I say more?) added many of his signature effects to this movie, which also may have had some influence from John Ford, but the latter is something I'm flashing on, and I'm not sure what! Please see this sui generis film: it's not a copy of a Broadway hit; it was designed, as were many of Mamoulian's productions, as a film to be appreciated on its own.

Paramount should re-release this movie, in the most pristine version available. There are aspects of it that are antiquated, especially since two years later Hollywood brought us "Gone With the Wind" and "The Wizard of Oz," with all their technical accomplishments; but as a musical film achievement, there is a distinctive place for "High, Wide, and Handsome."

I have loved Tim Burton from the earliest time on: "Brazil" is wonderful, so is "The Nightmare Before Christmas," and so are many of the wonderful collaborations he made with Johnny Depp- -another of my favorites--that come in between. But this is egregious feminist twaddle that has as much to do with Lewis Carroll's Wonderland as Gumby has to do with nuclear physics, i.e., nothing at all. While it's visually stunning, and it is that, the story line is such a perversion that this film can only rank with "Pocahontas" as the rankest of polemic crap.

While I absolutely believe in the power of women to achieve great things, Linda Woolverton's screenplay makes me realize anew that talent is a minor component of Hollywood success. You want to write a story about girl power? Fine! But don't f*** with a story I love.

While MGM was advertising itself as the ne plus ultra of film studios, and churning out "A" films that are just plain awful, especially their musicals, (yeah, "Singin' in the Rain," IS a great movie musical, blah, blah, blah.) its lesser units were producing movies that were full of craftsmanship, good acting, and which remain pleasant to watch. One of these is "Invitation," which I saw (I think) for the first time just yesterday (6/14/10) on TCM. The plot is like one of those stories my mother liked to read in "McCall's" or "Redbook;" three-pagers with happy endings. "Why can't you write nice stories like these?" she'd ask me.

The story is simple: Dorothy McGuire is unspoiled rich girl Ellen, happily married to Dan (Van Johnson), child of doting father Simon Bowker (Louis Calhern), who showers her with fur coats at her happy Connecticut home. Dan, a Ford-driving architect, goes to work every day, comes home, is a loving husband. But Ellen's former best friend, Maud (Ruth Roman) has become catty toward Ellen, and Ellen doesn't understand. Maud has figured out that Ellen has a "heart condition," and that she only has a year to live--and that daddy Simon has paid Dan to marry her.

The "Invitation" of the title is the turning point--Ellen has been wondering about all the "one year" references the domestic help, Maud, and others have been making, and when she receives the invitation she looks up "mitral valve stenosis" in a medical dictionary. All the pieces fall into place for her, and she realizes that Dan was probably bribed into marrying her. But there's a new surgery that may heal her heart--and Dan, having rejected Maud for the final time--tells Ellen how much he loves her. Kiss! Curtain!

With nice performances by evil Roman, the dependable Ray Collins as Ellen's doctor, and all concerned, this is a jewel of MGM "B" output, which is where many of its best films are-- including musicals. McGuire is cast in her standard role of plain but beautiful heroine (and indeed, her beauty is elusive, rather shape-shifty) and Johnson is his usual ingenu, a role he plays well. The music, by Bronislau Kaper, is alluring: the jazz standard now called "Invitation" is introduced in an intriguing solo piano performance ostensibly by Roman but undoubtedly by Kaper, that reminds me of Poulenc. A later iteration could have been played by the King Cole Trio--but it was probably Kaper with studio guitar and string bass.

This is a movie that bears watching over and over--not because of the lame story, but because of the craftsmanship that went into its making.

When MGM wasn't trying to ladle on more and more stunning production and star capacity, it could make a good movie.

The Green Promise is now remembered largely because the guys at RKO built a footbridge across a fake stream: the bridge collapsed too soon, Natalie fell into the water, broke her wrist, and was afraid of water ever after.

The movie itself is obviously intended to endorse the activities of 4-H, the activities of which continue to be laudable in many ways. I have had students at the college where I teach who have spent their youth as 4-H'ers and have had a great experience.

Walter Brennan is playing Walter Brennan as Amos McCoy in this outing, about 7 years before that series. It's a rather flat performance. The other stars are pretty much who we expect them to be; Milburn Stone is "Doc" a couple of years before "Gunsmoke" made its TV debut. (Was he "Doc" on the radio? I don't know.) Natalie Wood turns in a fine performance here... as Margaret O'Brien. It's interesting to watch; even more interesting to hear. Away from the TV, I actually thought it was Margaret--the most incredible, most uncanny child star ever, whose subsequent career was... negligible.

Some have suggested that this film has some sort of "conservative" agenda, but I am not so sure. It seems to me that the film's agrarian message was and is pertinent to an ideal of American rural life that has often been dismissed by more sophisticated critics. Had the script been written by a blacklisted screenwriter, it would probably be hailed as a masterpiece of populist cinema, like "The Plow That Broke the Plains" or "The Grapes of Wrath," but since it seems to be more typical of rural (Republican) America, it is dismissed.

Yes, this is a didactic film, and one that probably furthers the argument that the mimetic is more powerful that the didactic in theatre, but as an example of "instructive" film--like, as has been suggested, those movies that children who grew up in the fifties and sixties watched in the classroom, it is pretty darn convincing, and a paradigm for the genre. At the same time, when compared to masterpieces like "The Red Star" it--oh golly!--is probably of as much merit.

I can't imagine a movie that has been more slandered on this website than "My Sister Eileen"! First of all, invidious comparisons to MGM productions should be flushed down the nearest public facility. Why would Leonard Bernstein/Comden and Green ever want to come near MGM again after what it did to "On The Town"? Wouldn't it be wonderful if they made a movie of "Wonderful Town"? Let's take a look: first of all, MGM casts Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra (or more likely, somebody like Troy Donahue or some other '50's crooner) in the roles of Bob and Frank, respectively. Then the obvious choices for the female roles would be Ann Miller as Ruth and Debbie Reynolds as Eileen, which would mean that most of the songs would be thrown out and replaced with half-arsed imitations by Roger Edens: the great "Conga" number would be replaced with--well, something like the "conga" number in "My Sister Eileen," which, BTW, is a terrific waste of Betty Garrett's talents, but this time, it would feature a lot of high-speed tapping! Gene Kelly wouldn't be right for the "What a Waste" number, so that would be scrapped, and replaced with something more pretentious, with Gene being muscular about magazine editing, and Eileen substituted for Ruth, because there were never two dancers more mismatched than Ann Miller and Gene Kelly. THEN, the Village Vortex numbers (including the "Wrong Note Rag") would have to be scrapped because while Debbie would be great in that number, Ann wouldn't, and neither would Gene; it would be replaced with a "beatnik" specialty starring Gene and Debbie dressed in berets and sweatshirts. Since Gene was to be the male lead, there would have to be a ballet number here, which would have made necessary more additions; perhaps a paste-in of a lesser Gershwin number like the "Second Rhapsody," which would require a giant Gershwin billing at the beginning of the movie--perhaps above the Bernstein/Comden/Green credit. Perhaps this would be the time to stick in a specialty number by some minor French singing star (not Aznavour nor Trenet).

By this time, there would be three original numbers left: "Christopher Street," sung by Jules Munshin (or even by Kurt Kasznar!) as Appopolous, "O-hi-o," sung by Debbie and Ann, and "It's Love," sung by Debbie while Gene looks muscular, dancing on various pieces of office furniture. The rest of the score is by Roger Edens. Does this sound far-fetched? Count the Bernstein/Comden/Green numbers in MGM's "On The Town," one of the trashiest renderings of a great musical ever perpetrated on American moviegoers! Compare "on the Town" with the MGM travesty, and ask yourself, "If I were Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden,or Adolf Green, would I want to do this twice?" There is a certain resemblance to the urban courtyard of "Rear Window" to be found in "My Sister Eileen," but this is hardly theft. You might as easily have found it in "The Goldbergs". Yoo-hoo! While "My Sister Eileen" is not Bernstein/Comden/Green, it is also not Styne/Sondheim or Styne/Harnick. Leo Robin, the lyricist, was simply not in the same rank--although he certainly had a workmanlike Hollywood career. Betty Garrett suffered from a hairdo that made her look like a graying Rosemary DeCamp, which detracted from her natural sauciness. Jack Lemmon demonstrates that he could've had a great musical career (try his duets with Judy Holliday, elsewhere); Janet Leigh does what she did so well--being a perky dancer--and Bob Fosse is just what we'd expect him to be--in fact, I like him better as an ingenu. His work is fresh and vibrant.

Please don't impose your expectations on this film: it is not an MGM musical (thank God!) and it's not a Hitchcock thriller. It is an ingenuous, unpretentious, delightful Hollywood musical, in the same Columbia tradition that gave us, almost by accident, "You Were Never Lovelier" and "You'll Never Get Rich", and it's a good rendering of the original stories.

All the commentators seem to love this film. I hate it. In a world too cluttered with garbage, this is a chunk that should head straight for the incinerator. The 1970's was the decade of the baby boomer--and since I am one I think I can say without shame that shooting is too good for the principles in this cheap-shot.

Director Robert Benton insists that he made the character of Joanna Kramer sympathetic and believable, and I'm assuming, in retrospect, that Meryl Streep--in this early outing--gave Benton just what he wanted. If she did, then what he wanted was far from sympathetic and believable only as a whining monster--for that is what Joanna Kramer is, a monster who wants it all, no matter what it costs anybody else in her life. I kept hoping for the deus ex machina to come in and strike her dead! Joanna is a cold, unlovable bitch and Meryl did such a good job of portraying her that it took me a long time to look at her in other roles to realize what a wonderful actress she is! Of course she has long since proved her versatility as an actress--the ghastly and unwatchable "Mamma Mia!" notwithstanding! Hoffman's performance is winning, and if the kid is a bit treacly, well, aren't they supposed to make you say "a-w-w-w-w" even as you barf? This film, obviously, is not high in my list. Everybody in the cast is better, elsewhere.

...at Grandpa van der Hoof (Vanderhof?)'s house. I actually think I dream of it.

It's been a long time since I last read the actual Kaufman/Hart play, but time never lapses long before I find myself wanting to see Frank Capra's screen version of "You Can't Take It With You." If Robert Riskin's screenplay mutes some of the socialist fervor of the original, where certainly Grandpa wouldn't have suggested substituting "Americanism" for "Socialism," it does create a dichotomy between an uptight social-climbing society, symbolized by the "Kirbys," and the happy if rather chaotic society of Grandpa and his family.

I don't think it is entirely a mistake that, in the fictional New York City of Kaufman/Hart/ Riskin that Grandpa is a representative of the city's (Dutch) past, i.e., "van der Hoof" and that the symbol of predatory capitalism is Kirby, representative of a "modern" WASP point of view that desires an exclusivity it can never really possess. I also don't think that the law's preoccupation with the unintentional--or at least harmless--gaffes of the Vanderhofs and their friends are unintentional on the part of the writers or the director. In a sense, I find it entirely fitting that people who ostensibly come from a much older heritage might find some of the statutory adventures of modern society constraining.

Andrew Carnegie is supposed to have said "The man who dies rich dies disgraced," which is a hair's breadth away from "You can't take it with you." (In fact, I once proposed that a portrait of Carnegie along with "You can't take it with you" be a symbol for my non-profit management school, but they just didn't get it.)

As a happy beneficiary of Mr. Carnegie's fortune, and as a lover of American cinema, I suggest that this film is one of the greatest ever made, and certainly the summit of Capra's contribution. It epitomizes the idea of the freewheeling American spirit of which capitalism is merely a part, contrasted with the narrower point of view that encourages homogeneity and acquisition. The Vanderhof/Sycamore clan lives in a big old house that has room for everyone, even for people with whom they don't agree--and others are lessened in comparison.

The cast for this film is incredible, and Capra brings out the best in them. It is undoubtedly the best of all Lionel Barrymore's roles, which is saying a lot, but there's a lot of Dr. Gillespie in Grandpa, isn't there? Spring Byington, Jean Arthur, James Stewart, Donald Meek, Harry Davenport, Charles Lane, Dub Taylor, Mischa Auer, and Edward Arnold were all wonderful. It would be remiss for me not to point out that Ann Miller never had a better role--or was better in a role--in her entire career. (Whether or not this is the fault of MGM's "Freed Unit" may be debated, but I think it is.) She's adorable, and legend has it that she was 14 at the time!

The film has its ironies: the whole neighborhood is depending upon Grandpa to void it's agreements to sell its property to Kirby and Co, to which it, individually and severally, has already submitted.

There are also little jokes: DePinna's was once a famous New York department store, and Mr. DePinna was the Iceman that came and never left; my personal favorite is when Dub Taylor (Ed) is playing Chopin's "Grand Valse Brilliante" on the xylophone, and "Essie" (Ann Miller) says

"Oh, I like that, Ed. Yours?"

"No, Chopin."

"It's got a lot of you in it!"

The thing to remember about this film is that everybody in it is SANE, and its message is that we depend upon people like Grandpa to keep us going. As I said: I think I have always wanted to live in that house: there's room enough to be oneself, room enough for others, and when somebody stops by, they find you just as you are, not as you're supposed to be.

When I was a little boy, my mother used to say that "The Enchanted Cottage" was her favorite movie. It was a long time before I ever saw it.

This is a lovely little film. Herbert Marshall does his usual good job playing someone impaired in some way but with a great deal of emotional fortitude. Mildred Natwick, cast a bit against type (she was a lovely comedienne) as the landlady, a dour WWI widow, ends up being sweet.

This is one of Robert Young's best performances, and I think that he is often underrated. He was something of an insecure man, and he projects his humanity so well in this and in many other films of the 1940's; of course, I'd gladly buy insurance from Jim Anderson, too!

What really strikes me about this film, though, is that the Young character, returning from the war, finds himself to be disfigured, and "Laura Pennington" believes herself to be ugly and unattractive. One of the things that has often struck me about people is how little their actual physical beauty affects how they perceive themselves, and how that influences their behavior.

Could it be that Robert Young's scar and Dorothy Malone's plainness are more in their minds than on their faces? Could it be that love can transform not only the plain so that they believe that they are beautiful, but also that it can transform the beautiful so that they can see that quality in themselves? The reason that this film works--and it works wonderfully well--is that it appeals to every person who has ever felt inadequate, and that there are very few people (and let's face it, those very few are probably sociopaths) who don't feel inadequate.

Pinero, the playwright of the original, understood this all to well, but it has never been a popular way of looking at things: in a way, this film is a "revenge of the nerds," which says (as does the nerd film) that beauty is, truly, in the eye of the beholder.

Really nice acting on the part of all concerned, including the wonderful Spring Byington. We don't have Hollywood actors like Byington and Marshall anymore, those wonderful character actors whose presence in a movie was part of the tissue that held it together, and connected it with other films. Lubitsch, Sturges, Capra, RKO, Warner Bros, and even MGM had a stable of these actors whose presence illuminated their work and expanded on it. Someday I will make a list of them and dilate on this subject further. This is a little gem that needs to be seen more often.

Jean Renoir's homage to the Paris of the late 19th century is beautiful in many ways. Not only does it appear to have been photographed by Toulouse-Lautrec and Mucha, it portrays the geographic Paris; the streets accessible only by staircases, the unpleasant end of fleeting popularity, and the sexual opportunism of men with a product to sell, in an uncompromising picture of show business that is in stark contrast with the picture painted by Hollywood. There is an obvious comparison to be made with Lloyd Bacon's "42nd Street," which had been made about 20 years before, featuring Ruby Keeler as a dancing sensation, a fresh-faced kid from the sticks who had come to New York to get into show business, who saves the show when the star fails--"You're going out there a kid from the chorus, but you've got to come back a STAR!!" Warner Baxter's "Julian Marsh" is a director who suffers for his art and is unappreciated. Jean Gabin's "Danglard" keeps running afoul of genital politics, but when he talks about the show he is more like Knute Rockne than like Julian Marsh. He's all about the game, except--for his pointy thing. He has a profitable new venture sewed up until his mistress become jealous of the woman whom she recognizes as his next mistress. His prospects rise and fall with every coital journey he takes.

Danglard takes Mistress 1 (Lola de Castro, played by Maria Felix) slumming to a dive, where he sees "Nini," (Françoise Arnoul) with her boyfriend and first lover, Paulo the baker, and discovers that she is a spirited dancer. He uses his charm and the prospect of money to lure Nini to studying dancing so that she may go on the stage. The prospect of money and fame charms Nini, and she become Danglard's next mistress, as well as an apt student of the cancan, which Danglard has dubbed "French Cancan," to cater to the current Anglophile tendency in the dance.

Both "42nd St" and "French Cancan" are tributes to show business--to modern entertainment--that has is own iconography and its own conceit. "42nd St." is centered around Julian Marsh, a great director of Broadway shows, which he organizes with great personal energy and dubious sexual involvement. The male juvenile is a middle-aged twit with lumbago, replaced by Dick Powell, the pretty tenor with secret wealth to hide. Danglard, on the other hand, goes from woman to woman, seducing them with the promise of fame, hooking them with what must have been a very persuasive endowment. One has no doubt that he is heterosexual and quite active. Postcoital scenes abound.

Days after seducing Nini away from Paulo, he has discovered Esther, a Piaf type, and begun to prepare her for her job of singing the film's theme song while he plays it on her fiddle. That of course arouses Nini's jealousy just as she has aroused the jealousy of Lola. (And of course Nini had already forsworn the privilege of being a Czarina!) The whole movie is about how Danglard's concupiscence has cost him money but how even his troublesome horniness is subordinate to his love for the show--how the audience demands devotion--and it is this potent combination of phallic persuasion and tempting fame that makes Danglard the hero, while asserting that a true lover of the show will never profit as much as the money men. At the movie's conclusion, Danglard, having outfoxed the creditors and the jealous babes, approaches a new attraction watching the incredible (and believe me, it IS incredible) performance of the cancan. "Have you ever thought about being on the stage?" he asks, and the curtain descends. Meanwhile, poor Julian is sitting of the fire escape of the theatre listening to Peggy Sawyer's new fans disparage his contribution to the show's success. (I won't even go into "42nd Street"'s central line, "Oh, Guy, it was GRAND of you to COME!")

Furthermore, I won't go into the glimpse one gets of legendary Parisian entertainers, including a brief vision of Piaf, nor of the vision of a Paris both urban and rural. Certainly there is a sample of the styles that engendered Trenet and Aznavour. But it is the memoir of an assertive and welcome masculinity, something unseen in any Hollywood musical with which it might be compared, is a pleasant relief from the androgynes of 30's Hollywood musicals (including my beloved Fred Astaire, not to mention Dick Powell), let alone the barf promulgated by MGM in movies like the repulsive "American in Paris." All those fountains! We'll save our comparison of that turkey to "Breakfast at Tiffany's" and its deconstruction of the American male for another day.

That Danglard may have been a hopeful vision, in postwar France, of a kind of hyper-masculine mec that may or may not have ever existed, is practically beside the point. That he is a man's man, neither John Wayne nor Edward Everett Horton, is perhaps more on target. That he is a man who likes the ladies is never in question. I, for one, wouldn't mind living his life at all. I wonder if Gabin was that lucky.

At the beginning of this comment I wanted to talk about Baz Luhrman and what Sinclair Lewis called "boloney". I never got that far. Baz's Moulin Rouge... well, Paris doesn't put that kind of stuff in the Seine anymore.

Usually a bad movie inspires a writer to reach new heights of invective, but this so-called movie defies description. A short blonde girl with a really weird voice, dressed in a Catholic high-school uniform, two guys who flourish power tools, and an old guy who was supposed to have known the original "Black Dahlia" have teamed up to lure actress wannabes into an old jail cafeteria kitchen, where they strap them to a table and cut them up, then taking body parts to various places and piling them up, while the police scratch their heads in wonder.

First of all, don't be fooled into thinking that this is the Brian DePalma film. I have a weakness for DePalma, from "Carrie" and "Body Double" on forward--so a little gore doesn't disturb me. It's just that this gore is so stupid.

This masterpiece comes from the hands of Ulli Lommel, and indeed the film is called "Ulli Lommel's Black Dahlia." Who is Ulli Lommel? Well, apparently he was a child actor, a protégé of Fassbinder and then of Andy Warhol. He is over 60, but he makes films that would embarrass most high-school videotape proto-Spielbergs. The screenplay does nothing to reveal what moves its central characters, the psychopaths, to do what they do--not even a little. Most of the action consists of women screaming while we hear the noises of power tools--most notably a reciprocating saw--and see spurts of Hershey's syrup--straight from the convenient squeeze bottle!--covering their faces.

There is absolutely nothing to recommend this film, which is part of a straight-to-DVD series about serial killers that Lommel seems to have arranged for himself. Obviously he thinks he's doing something grand, but from where I'm sitting it looks to me like a huge con. I am reminded of early John Waters (think "Pink Flamingoes") but obviously Waters has grown from that early effort. At 60-plus, I hardly imagine that Lommel is going to do much growing-- he's just going to sit around playing with his own caca.

I love Tim Burton movies in general, but I think that this one is something special. Not only do I like the characters and the story, but since there are already a bazillion comments about those things, I'd like to point out the prodigious gifts of Danny Elfman, who wrote the songs and the score for this film. He's amazing.

Of course, anyone who loves "The Simpsons" as much as I do is already an Elfman fan... and as Jack Skellington you can hear just a hint of the singing voice of Sideshow Bob!

But it's the music that just blows me away. It ranges in style from the 1920's Kurt Weill- Bertolt Brecht adaptations (right down, on occasion, to the rhythm banjo and mournful alto sax), to the Russian composers, Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich, all done with a sense of humor and homage that keeps it fresh, unlike, say, Kander and Ebb, who keep writing Weill-Brecht material to the point that there's more of their music in that particular style than there is by Weill, who figured out by the 1930's that it would only go so far, and who wrote some of the great tunes of the American theatre, as well as the incredible and underrated opera "Street Scene."

Elfman is a film composer whose work ranks with the best of (and this is high praise, indeed, coming from me) John Williams, Bernard Herrmann, and Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Even if this weren't a wonderful movie to watch (and it is) it would be a wonderful movie to hear.

Like one of the Canadian commentators who wrote about this film, I think it presents a valid argument for a "0" (where "0" equals caca) rating. I don't need to restate the "plot" here and I can't put in any spoilers because the whole thing is spoiled.

Maddin thinks that putting Vaseline on a camera lens makes things look retro. Bob Guccione thinks that Vaseline on a camera lens makes naked girls in white stockings look sexy. Maddin thinks that set designs that include a lot of "M" based shapes will make people think of Fritz Lang's "Metropolis." People writing about this film applaud its bow to expressionism. Well, expressionism was better done by the expressionists; the same director who made "Metropolis" spent most of his career making stinkers like "Rancho Notorious," and imitating early cinema "looks" is only interesting for so long. One could only wish it was actually shot on the old nitrate stock so that it could be badly stored.

The actors do what passes as acting, in a sort of an imitation of an imitation of grand guignol. The two female leads have interesting faces, but do nothing that resembles acting. Isabella Rossellini demonstrates one thing: she actually looks sort of like her better-looking mom, and that she chooses vehicles like the tiresome movies made by her dad, which today I find painful to watch.

The DVD contains three shorts that are much more amusing than the film they accompany (especially "Sissy Boy Slap Fest"), and the two "about the film" features have a "look-at-me-I'm-wonderful" air about them, narrated by some idiot who obviously would like to do a one-man "evening with Vincent Price" show in a bathhouse.

Gee: did I like this movie? I was prepared to; I thought the premise was interesting and the thought of Rossellini as a concupiscent double amputee might be funny, but the product ends up looking like something made up by stoned frat boys who think they're really, really, really witty.

Yeah: if you like this movie you probably also think Baz Lurhman is a genius, too. Pass the sedatives, please.

I watched this film for what seems like the very first time last night; in fact it may have been the very first time, even though I was probably 12 or 13 the first time it was on TV. Sally Fields's version of the character was on TV then, and it was generally a kind of ditsy role which would not move one to go back and watch the original, and the bulk of the surfer movies were so inane that focusing upon the movie that started it all was not high on my list of cinéaste priorities.

Now that I've watched it I have several things to say.

1. THe "Big Kahuna" character played by Cliff Robertson is a gentle look at the beat generation. Disaffected after his return from the Korean War, the BK has decided to be a "surf bum," i.e., a beat. I'm not sure that we can see this character from that perspective today, but a couple of things should be explained: the BK had been an officer (as are all military pilots, by definition, today) and he was ironically aware of the pretense of his persona.

2. Gidget ("Francie") was an emotionally and physically underdeveloped girl, as symbolized by the fact that all of her girl "friends" are much more buxom than she. You will not find another girl with Sandra Dee's cup size in the entire picture. Her friend "BL," wearing a pixie cut, has been proposed to be a lesbian. but she has an active boy friend and has been "pinned" by him. Far from being symbolic of homosexuality, BL's haircut suggests that she is pehaps a bit more sophisticated than most of Francie's friends.

3. The razing of the kahuna's beach shack is symbolic of the ephemeral quality of the "culture" typified by the surfers and their friends. the fact that "Moondoggie" is also the boy Gidget's father has been trying to get her to meet and date all summer is a bitter irony: these boys and girls will become what they are "supposed" to become by the world in which they live.

This short film (at 61 minutes) is a typical "B" feature of the early 1940's. It stars contract players from RKO, featuring Joan Carroll as "Joan Mitchell," child radio star, who lives with her older relative, "Pat," played by Ruth Warrick, whose career languished from her debut as Emily Kane in 1941's "Citizen Kane" to her spectacular run on TV's "All My Children," 1970-2005. Between those two high points, Ruth's career consisted largely of female leads in films like this one and supporting cast roles from 1941 to 1970. Talk about patience! As for Joan Carroll, her role as "Agnes" in "Meet Me In St. Louis" was probably the high point of her work, and as "Patsy" in "The Bells of St. Mary's," where she does a tiny star turn with Ingrid Bergman, deliberately flunking her exams so that she can stay at the school because she wants, she thinks, to be a nun. Joan retired at 23, in 1956.

Joan is the real star here--she's a radio personality with her own continuing series that is supposed to be about the "underworld." Dissatisfied with the way the underworld characters are being played, she runs away to get some real experience and improve the show's dialogue. She finds refuge with three small-time grifters, "Pinky," "Stogie," and "Jitters," played by three of those wonderful "types" with which movies of the thirties and forties abound. The cast also features Paul Guilfoyle playing his typical small- time tough-guy "banty" character. Of course, there's a lot of running around and close brushes with the "real" bad guys, but in the end, everybody lives happily ever after: "Pinky," "Stogie," and "Jitters" become regulars on "Joan's" radio show.

When I was a kid in St. Louis, there was an after-school movie called "The Early Show" on a local TV station--that bridged the gap between the soaps and the kid show before the news. This is the type of fare that one would generally find on "The Early Show," and unfortunately today these "B's" are rarely seen today. I think they'd be a refreshing change of pace. They're unpretentious and kind of sweet: the bread and butter of the old studios.

I HATE this movie. It has everything going for it, except (1) taste, (2) music, (3 )intelligence.

Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green wrote a great musical called "On The Town." It's about three sailors with a 24-hour leave in New York City in the middle of WWII. It's still a great musical, a musical with a great book of the quality of that of "Oklahoma!" that tracks the adventures, romantic as well as touristic, of three guys who cross the bridge from Brooklyn to Manhattan and want to drink in the whole city at once.

MGM takes an estimable amount of talent: Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Jules Munshin, Vera- Ellen (the prosecution exhibit for "Tap Thighs," but lovely nonetheless), Betty Garrett (the least well-used comedienne of the era) and Ann Miller (exploited but never really employed), and turns what could have been a landmark film into a dismal excursion that would leave the average guy wondering why anybody would want to live in NYNY.

This is one of the supreme examples of why I hate MGM, the outhouse of the movie musical.

They dump the wonderful "Carried Away" number in favor of the inane "Prehistoric Man" number for Ann Miller to dance to. Gee, thanks, Roger Edens! They eliminate Hildy's great "I Can Cook, Too!" not to mention "Ya Got Me," "I Wish I Was Dead," "Imaginary Coney Island," "The Real Coney Island," and the incredibly lovely "Some Other Time" with more Roger Edens crap.

The stars that MGM hired to do this movie were capable of making a masterpiece, but MGM, in its infinite wisdom, knew how to turn it into a colossal dump, and they did. Part of the problem was the pretentious image it decided to project for Gene Kelly (speaking of crap, what about "American in Paris*?") This is part of my prelude to "Why MGM Musicals Suck" essay; You can see my top 10 movie musicals (there are really 12 so far) in my review for "You Were Never Lovelier."

Stanley Donen went on to make some wonderful movies ("Charade" and "Bedazzled," which features Raquel Welch as one of the seven deadly sins, guess which? among them. But MGM, especially when "adapting" Broadway musicals, showed an uncanny propensity for turning great theatre into execrable cinema, piling Pelions of goo on Ossas of substance, and doing no one any good in the process. MGM certainly didn't bring out Donen's best.

*In its Ferde Grofe orchestration, the most perverted of George Gershwin's great works--but that's for another discussion!

Wow! I have never seen so many interesting trivia points, nor so many errors of fact, reported about any film on IMDb.

This film is what could happen when Busby Berkeley was given full rein and a lot of money to spend, and the results are incredible. Like the "Big Broadcast" musicals, this one is for the most part a series of vaudeville acts, but this time it's in Technicolor and Busby has a really big crane!! The plot is silly, negligible, and a reductio ad absurdum of the "gee kids, let's put on a show" genre, except this time Eugene Palette's kid, James Ellison, is coming back a decorated hero from the South Pacific, and Palette talks his neighbor, Edward Everett Horton, into putting on a benefit in his rose garden to sell war bonds. Both Palette and Horton are rich. their neighbors are rich, and they intend to make a pile of money. They convince comedian Phil Baker (a radio phenomenon also featured in the incredibly underrated "Goldwyn Follies" where he does a great number with Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy) to participate, along with Carmen Miranda, Alice Faye, Ted DeMarco, Benny Goodman (playing incredible knockoffs of some of his best numbers, as well as original ones for the show), Charlotte Greenwood (doing her vaudeville shtick: this is her most characteristic film appearance, "Oklahoma" notwithstanding) to participate. This in spite of the fact that the Horton character ("Peyton Potter") is trying to hide the fact that he married a showgirl, Greenwood, and trying to keep his daughter stuck on James Ellison (Pallette's decorated son, "Andy Mason") in spite of the fact that she really has a yen to follow Mama's steps in show biz, and in spite of the fact that "Andy" is really stuck on Alice Faye, who has been called "the blondest of all baritones," and a sexy baritone she is. People are running in all directions in this movie, and they all play themselves, regardless of their characters' names. The plot is as complicated and as silly as a Feydeau farce--and just as inconsequential.

The opening of the film is as striking a use of Technicolor as you will ever find. It's a lead-in to that great tune, "Brasil," and features Aloysio DeOliviera (who? don't ask me!) dressed in an exquisite black gown and wearing chartreuse above-the-elbow gloves that create a breathtaking effect--which leads into a silly number starring Camen and Phil and commenting on the 1943 scarcity of coffee.

Later in the show you also get Carmen doing one of the greatest of Busby Berkeley numbers, "The Lady in the Tutti-Fruitti Hat," featuring hundreds of cute toes digging into studio beach sand, an incredibly suggestive bit with girls dancing with giant phallic bananas--a play, I'm sure, on the horniness of long-distance wartime love--and culminating in the bananas growing out of Carmen's hat. You also get Benny Goodman and "Paducah," a song so inane that when I am in a really bad mood my wife will start singing it, and I will burst into giggles:

"Paducah, Paducah, if ya wanna you can rhyme it with bazooka/But you can't pooh-pooh Paducah: it's a little bit of paradise--/Paducah, Paducah, just a little bitty city in Kentucky/ But to me the word means lucky, when I'm lookin' into two blue eyes..." believe me, the lyrics get worse from here.

Alice Faye gets to sing her hymn to wartime celibacy, "No Love," and everybody gets to take a whack at what they do best. Some of the film's moments may be lost upon those who fail to see it not only as film but in its historical context. Unlike filmmakers today, nobody in 1943 made movies that approached the war from a pro-Axis point-of view. (John Wayne discovered that, by the 1970's, few were making films that weren't, when he tried to celebrate the Green Berets in Vietnam!)

Alice also gets to sing "The Polka Dot Polka," which leads into Busby's most incredible number, featuring hundreds--or at least tens--of gorgeous girls dancing with day-glo (and it hadn't even been invented yet!) discs or better yet, circles made of neon tubes. My first wife and I saw this film, aided by cigarettes filled with a controlled substance, on the campus of the University of Minnesota in the early 'seventies. The controlled substance was superfluous, but the movie's images were burned into my brain.

There is no route this film takes that doesn't call for a willing suspension of disbelief, and yet its total is one that makes a person feeling better walking out of the movie theatre than he did when he walked in. This is a movie conceived as a movie, using the right people playing themselves, and without pretense.

Like much of Paramount's output in the musical department, it's underrated--just as are the terrific "Road" pictures of Hope and Crosby, which never fail to tickle me. I have a copy I taped off of Turner Classic Movies. If Fox doesn't bring this out as a DVD, I guess I'll have to buy a DVD recorder so I can get a copy that doesn't degrade with each viewing the next time TCM shows it. I have a feeling that this great movie is just what Joel McCrea was talking about at the end of "Sullivan's Travels."

Rita Hayworth is supposed to have said that "men went to bed with Gilda and woke up next to me," and that was her problem with men. Never having had the opportunity to go to bed with Rita Hayworth, I can't say what would have happened to me, but I can tell you that Maria Acuña would have been more on my mind than Gilda. She and Fred virtually float whenever they dance together, and I think it takes nothing away from Ginger Rogers to say that. It wasn't until I saw this film that I realized what the big deal about Rita Hayworth was all about. Her character in this film, and the character's dancing, is not only gorgeous, but has an insouciance that no other partner of Fred's possessed. Just watching the "I'm Old Fashioned" dance routine, which has hardly any edits in it, and watching Rita and Fred kick the French doors shut is worth the price of admission.

Others have commented about the plot of this film--I don't think we need to go into it here other than to say it's a pretty typical boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy jumps through hoops, boy gets girl back plot. Only three members of the supporting cast really have much to do: Adolphe Menjou as the Maria's curmudgeon father moves the plot along and demonstrates why he was known as "the best-dressed man in Hollywood," even in a kilt, Xavier Cugat and His Orchestra provide a Latin beat, and Cugie gets to demonstrate his skill as a caricaturist. Gus Schilling, as Menjou's rather fey secretary, has to perform a number of tasks that were filled by as many as four actors in the Fred and Ginger films: the "Helen Broderick" comedienne role, the "Victor Moore" sidekick role, and whatever roles were assigned to Eric Blore and Eric Rhodes. I suppose when Schilling was cast Eric Blore was somewhere in the back of someone's mind at Columbia (although Franklin Pangborn also comes to mind). Schilling does a commendable job. The rest of the cast is competent but really doesn't do much to move the plot along. But this is a musical, and the job of all the characters who don't sing and dance, and even some who do, are there simply to move the plot along. The folks lining up at the box office were there to see Fred and Rita dance and to hear Fred and Nan Wynn (I wonder what Rita's singing sounded like) sing.

I just watched the recent DVD of this film, and it's a technical knockout. The print looks like it just came off the truck from Columbia for a first run, and the soundtrack is sharp. It also reveals that Rita Hayworth did NOT have great-looking legs like, say Marlene Dietrich or Lucille Ball. One thing that I did realize, though, is that this, like my favorite Fred-and-Ginger, "Swing Time," features songs by Jerome Kern--here with lyrics by Johnny Mercer, in "Swing Time" with lyrics by Dorothy Fields, and that in both films Fred plays a guy who doesn't really LIKE to dance: he sees his vocation as gambling, and only resorts to dancing to pay the bills when he's down on his luck.

This musical makes my "top ten" list of Hollywood musicals, which includes, by the way, any musicals made through 2006. Here they are, in no particular order:

1. "Swing Time" 2. "Show Boat" (with Allan Jones , Charles Winninger, and Irene Dunne, directed by James Whale: emphatically NOT the MGM bomb!) The title sequence to this film is one of the most original of all time. 3. "You Were Never Lovelier" 4. "Shall We Dance" (Fred & Ginger, not the delightful Japanese film) 5. "Oklahoma!" 6. "Top Hat" 7. "The Gay Divorcée" 8. "The Wizard of Oz" 9. "Guys and Dolls" 10. "The Gang's All Here" (Busby Berkeley's biggest production, featuring "The Lady in the tutti- Fruitti Hat") 11. "State Fair," the original "Iowa"version, please 12. "Love Me Tonight" (OK, so there are 12 in the top ten, but 11 is the only film that Rodgers and Hammerstein put together, and it has great songs. as well as Charles Winninger, and 12 has an interesting presentation from Rouben Mamoulian and a great score from Rodgers and Hart.)

Once again, these are listed in no particular order. It should be noted that only "The Wizard of Oz" comes from "the legendary Freed unit" at MGM. Perhaps someday IMDb will publish my yet-to-be-written "why MGM Musicals Suck" essay, but here's one point: All of the films listed above either were written AS movie musicals, or took a Broadway hit and used the power of film to render the book and songs more vividly. "Oklahoma!" is perhaps the best example of that, as opposed to the dismal MGM adaptation of Leonard Bernstein's wonderful "On The Town," which only proves, as do so many other MGM musicals, that Roger Edens may have been a good arranger but as a songwriter he left a lot to be desired--which didn't stop MGM from hacking almost all of the Bernstein-Comden-Green songs out of the movie. It doesn't explain why none of Busby Berkeley's best work came from MGM, but that's a story for another day.

Back to "You Were Never Lovelier:" Irving Berlin said that when he wrote songs he heard Fred Astaire singing them, which is something we should remember: Astaire was not only a great dancer, but a great song stylist who introduced a big chunk of the Great American Song Book. This is a wonderful film that does exactly what it's supposed to do: delight us and lift our spirits.

It's been suggested that the ending of "Born to Sing" was some sort of jingoistic war- promoting effort spliced on the end of this film--and it certainly was badly spliced, especially since we are not shown its effect on the audience, which up until the end has been a living part of the film. It should be said, though, that the piece "Ballad for Americans" which concludes the film actually was written for a WPA Theatre production, "Sing for Your Supper," in 1939. This show, 18 months in rehearsal, brought about the end of WPA's "Federal Theatre Project" and never reached much of an audience.

"Ballad for Americans," though, was written by John Latouche and Earl Robinson, who later produced one of the best American operas, "The Ballad of Baby Doe." The "Ballad for Americans" was introduced on radio by Paul Robeson, who recorded it as did Bing Crosby, and both recordings were best-sellers. The piece was actually performed at the 1940 Republican AND American Communist Party Conventions, and remained in the repertoire through the 1960's. The piece seems rather dated and jingoistic today, though oddly enough it was considered pretty left-wing at the time! I've always had a soft spot for it, as did my high school choir director. The shouted/spoken parts of the piece were a popular device of the time, another practice that lingered through the 1960's in various guises. I think that its inclusion in the film was meant to show just what a fine composer the Virginia Weidler character's father (Henry O'Neill) was (although it stretches the imagine a bit to think that in a couple of evenings Virginia could play it out a few notes at a time on the harmonica and have it transposed by an eight-year-old kid ("Mozart"--Richard Hall) who has to draw his own staff paper.) Unfortunately, we don't know whether it did that or not, because the film ends abruptly at the end of the piece--almost as if the production had run out of money so everybody went home.

Actually, I think it was pretty spiffily staged by Busby Berkeley, in a way that is reminiscent of his "Forgotten Man" number at Warner's and in a way that recalls the Deco/Moderne style of much of WPA art.

It should also be noted that Joe Yule is featured in a (very) minor role here at a time when his son, Mickey Rooney (AKA Joe, Jr.), was MGM's biggest meal ticket.

The stars could all have performed the musical as written--the most accomplished, acidic, and cynical of Rodgers and Hart's output, thanks to a great book by John O'Hara, but Columbia just couldn't leave well enough alone, although it certainly didn't take away half the score and replace it with half-baked numbers by Roger Edens, like MGM did to "On the Town." At least Columbia just subbed a few other R&H numbers that are always worth hearing.

Sinatra was close to perfect for Joey Evans--although certainly no better than Gene Kelly would've been; both Rita Hayworth and Kim Novak were equally attractive, although since the only musical number that Rita has to put across is "Zip," in an incredibly bowdlerized version (robbed of its intellectual heart) I wonder why her voice had to be dubbed. Would it have mattered if it weren't pretty?

The fact that this show, one of the most downbeat of all Broadway productions, was turned into yet another sweetsie-poo Hollywood confection (and of course moved from Chi, of which it reeks, to San Francisco, of which it doesn't) is yet another tragedy in the history of taking Broadway musicals to Hollywood, which, with the notable exception of "Oklahoma," just means that the show got butchered. It loses its edge about halfway through, when Joey starts being nice, Vera starts being nice, the puppy is nice, and everyone gets to live happily ever after--what a precious moment!!!

Hollywood was better at making its own musicals--"The Wizard of Oz" and "Meet Me In St. Louis"--are head and shoulders above any Broadway adaptation from MGM (whose musicals generally stink) and both Warner Bros and RKO, in the 1930's, make shows that put any of the "spectaculars" in the shade. One Fred and Ginger number is worth about 70 Marge and Gowers.

Oddly enough, Columbia showed that it could do a pretty good job with an original musical--one with Rita and Fred Astaire that contains some great original songs by Jerome Kern and at least one terrific dance number with Fred and Rita, "You Were Never Lovelier."

What Columbia did to Rita shouldn't ever have happened. With the right handling, she would have been a truly immense star, rather than the pinup girl she was fated to be at the studio most famous for the three stooges.

I, too, was compelled to remember this episode when I heard of the death of Red Buttons, a wonderful entertainer who needs to be seen more often in his film and TV roles.

I never saw the entire episode: parts of it were featured in a movie whose name I have forgotten--the protagonist was trying to remember who Tippy-Top was, and there were several flashbacks to Ronny Howard singing in the bathtub: "I love Tippy-Top, Tippy-Top loves me," and having conversations with Red Buttons who wore some sort of sailor outfit.

Anthology series like "GE Theatre," "Omnibus," and "Armstrong Circle Theatre" were an important cultural aspect of the "Golden Age" of TV, and it would be a real service to the public to show them--complete with original commercials--today. It was, I think, on "Armstrong Circle Theatre," for example, that I first saw Aeschylus' "Agamemnon," sitting in my Grandma's living room in 1956 or 7. Pretty heady stuff for a 7-year-old, but I still remember it, as well as that "live TV look." The chorus was unseen, portrayed by a slide of masks.

These early TV shows that arouse such vivid memories need to be revisited.

I have been of two minds about Michael Powell, ever since I discovered that I couldn't understand how "The Red Shoes" would make any little girl want to be a ballerina--any more than I have never been able to figure out how "The Little Prince" or "The Velveteen Rabbit" could be liked by anyone under 30.

Having just watched "Colonel Blimp" and "Black Narcissus," both of which are certifiable masterpieces, I think that"Peeping Tom" obviously shows the want of a Pressburger to make it a viable product. It's just plain bad. Bad cinematography, bad acting, bad screenplay, bad choice of material. Were this the film by which Powell is judged, he would be compared to Ed Wood. I know Martin Scorsese likes this movie, but for the life of me I can't figure out why.

I understand that this film has been compared to "Psycho." Can't figure that one out, either.

"Peeping Tom" does bear comparison to a Hitchcock film, however: "Frenzy," the only one of Hitch's films whose trailer is better than the movie, and the only one in which Hitch resorted to cheap effects, including the choice of a bad musical score, gratuitous nudity, and that ludicrous shot of Barbara Leigh-Hunt's "corpse." Powell doesn't quite go that far, simply showing the "protagonist," Mark Lewis, played by Carl Boehm, unsheathing his hidden tripod spike to stab his victims in the throat. Powell used a stag film star as one of the victims, which I guess was kind of louche, and therefore attractive to some.

The overall cheapness of the project, despite the use of Anna Massey and Moira Shearer, contributes to the overall tawdriness of "Peeping Tom." While I certainly number some low- budget masterpieces among my favorites, it's obvious that Powell took some awful short- cuts in making this one, and never asked his actors to provide anything like acting.

The plot of "Peeping Tom" is outlined elsewhere on this web page, and I don't feel it necessary to duplicate the efforts of others. I would like to see some of the later Powell efforts, especially "Age of Consent" and the two Pressburger collaborations in Australia from the 1970's, but I think none of these probably rises to the heights Powell and Pressburger reached in the 40's and 50's.

There's some great Powell out there; however, undiscriminating praise of his art does him no favor. If Criterion is going to bother to release "Peeping Tom," I think it might behoove them to release some of Anthony Asquith's previously unreleased (At lease in America) films, like "The Way to the Stars."