104 in 2009 Weeks 46-48: The Last Laugh, My Favorite Wife, Quai Des Orfevres, and The Most Dangerous Game

Whoops. So much for getting back to normal.

Der Letzte Mann (The Last Laugh)
F.W. Murnau, 1924

An elderly doorman at a posh hotel (Emil Jannings) is demoted to washroom attendant, and his life begins to fall apart. He is saved by happenstance.

I’ve got a lot of love for Murnau, but this one didn’t work for me. He works some of his usual magic with some interesting camera tricks and multiple exposures, as well as his typically beautiful and expressionistic lighting, but the story just isn’t there. It’s extremely simple – a man loses his sense of worth and falls down the social ladder, then receives a bunch of money for no real reason and lives happily ever after. Legend has it that the studio insisted on a happy ending and Murnau tacked on the most ridiculous happy ending he could think of in protest. Points for sticking it to the man, I suppose, but it didn’t help the movie.

2.5/10

My Favorite Wife
Garson Kanin, 1940

Seven years after his wife is lost at sea and presumed dead, Nick Arden (Cary Grant) remarries. When he arrives at the hotel where he intends to spend his honeymoon, he is reunited with his recently-rescued wife (Irene Dunne), and has to figure out how to deal with the situation.

The most amazing thing about this movie is how unbelievably inappropriate the subject matter is for a wacky comedy (and it is wacky, slide-whistle soundtrack and all). The position that Nick finds himself in isn’t inherently funny at all – it’s horrible. And yet, as it turns out, it’s actually pretty hilarious in practice. Overall, it suffers from oversimplification – the new wife is very quickly established as being kind of terrible, so there’s no question of how things will turn out – but it still works, primarily on the charm of the leads and the kind of sick way they manage to keep wringing laughs out of such awful dilemmas. Fairly slight overall, but very enjoyable.

7/10

Quai Des Orfevres
Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1947

Jenny Lamour (Suzy Delair), an up-and-coming singer, accidentally kills a lecherous producer who put the moves on her. Her husband, Maurice (Bernard Blier), who had intended to murder the producer, finds the body and becomes the chief suspect. Both of them proceed to hide the truth from the police and from each other, with potentially disastrous results.

Clouzot is often described as the French Hitchcock, and I tend to agree with that assessment, in terms of both positive and negative characteristics. Like Hitchcock, he has a way with the suspense scene – there are sequences in this movie that are masterfully executed, notably the bit of business surrounding the lighting of a pipe with crucial evidence – but he also shares Hitchcock’s typical clumsiness with and apparent disregard for the plot mechanics that make such scenes possible. The conflict in this story is resolved in a wholly arbitrary manner that reminds me of a “how to host a mystery” event – everyone tried to commit the murder, and a randomly selected character actually succeeded. Clouzot gets some points back by having his character recognize and address the meaninglessness of what’s going on, but it’s a nearly throwaway moment that doesn’t adequately cover the issue. Still, as I said before, there are some tremendously well-designed suspense setpieces, and some of the character work, particularly as it relates to Dora (Simone Renant), the photographer/neighbor, is very compelling. It’s not a bad movie, but doesn’t excel either.

6/10

The Most Dangerous Game
Ernest B. Schoedsack and Irving Pichel, 1932

I know you’ve read the short story. It’s like that, except with a love interest (Fay Wray).

I don’t have a tremendous amount to say about this – it holds pretty faithfully to the story, with a few typical Hollywood alterations that don’t really change the trajectory of events. It’s awfully dated, though, with Count Zaroff’s googally eyes representing what is supposed to be intensity, and some extremely stagey sequences in the first half of the movie. One such sequence serves as the low point of the whole production, where several characters sit around a room, discussing the theme of the story in the most basic terms imaginable, just to make sure we all understand what we’re about to see. Fortunately, it was interrupted by a pretty nice shipwreck sequence. In general, the action was pretty solid – it’s just the dialogue and performances that drag it down. There’s a general sort of blah feeling about the whole exercise, as if no one really cared to do anything with the material other than put it in a film can.

As a side note – shame on Netflix for using a COLORIZED!!! print for watch-it-now. I don’t think I really would have liked it any better in black and white, but the color certainly didn’t help.

3.5/10





Progress: 121 (Par +25)

104 in 2009 Week 45: Assassination Bureau and A Story of Floating Weeds

Back to the old speed, two movies per week.

The Assassination Bureau
Basil Dearden, 1969

An up-and-coming reporter (Diana Rigg) convinces Ivan Dragomiloff (Oliver Reed), the chairman of the Assassination Bureau, to accept a contract on himself. Little does she know that the man bankrolling her contract (Telly Savalas) is also part of the Bureau, and has a scheme of his own.

Boy, and it started off so well. After an amusingly slapstick montage of assassinations over the decades, The Assassination Bureau kicks things off with several clever, smartly written introductory sequences. There’s a little twinkle in the eye of every actor, the witty rejoinders just roll off of their tongues, and everything seems like it’s going to be great. In short order, the apparent structure of the movie becomes apparent: Dragomiloff will travel to various European cities and outwit the Bureau member in each location that is trying to assassinate him. Simple, but fun, and well-suited to Reed’s smug charm.

If only it had stayed as simple. Instead, the whole movie begins to deflate rather dramatically, as a plot to start World War I takes over the plotline and things just get too big and ponderous. We eventually wind up with a swordfight on a zeppelin. It’s really one of the worse flameouts I’ve seen – even the Reed/Rigg chemistry seemed to diminish as it went on. This could have been a modest but wonderful comedy/thriller, and for a brief moment it was – but it all just slipped away, right on screen. Such a shame.

4/10

A Story of Floating Weeds
Yasujiro Ozu, 1934

A traveling actor (Takeshi Sakamoto) brings his troupe to the city where his beloved nephew (Koji Mitsui) lives – but the nephew is actually his son, whom he abandoned out of shame over his profession. The actor’s current mistress (Reiko Yagumo) becomes jealous and plots to tear the family apart.

This is kind of an interesting production, a silent film made several years after they’d fallen out of style. It seems there may not have ever been a score attached to it, because the DVD offers a modern composition only as a secondary option. I can’t imagine watching it without music.

Overall, the story is extremely melodramatic and even starts to border on the silly at times. Fortunately, every time it threatens to fall apart, Ozu manages to pull things back together with a wonderful bit of low-key humanity, like the father and son fishing, the child actor protectively stuffing his porcelain kitty bank into his shirt like a kangaroo pouch, or the two people (names withheld for spoiler purposes) eating together on the train at the end. Touches like these, not to mention most of the cinematography, are beautiful enough that it’s easy to overlook the excesses of the plot.

6.5/10

Progress: 117 (Par +27)

104 in 2009: Week 44: Putney Swope and the last of the horror

Okay, I lied. We're not quite back to normal - I've got to list off the last of the eligible Halloween movies. But then we're back to normal. So here's the Halloween stuff:

The Unseen 1.5/10
And Soon the Darkness 7.5/10

And now, here's the first post-Halloween movie:

Putney Swope
Robert Downey, 1969

Putney Swope (Arnold Johnson, voice of Downey), the token black man on the board of an advertising committee is accidentally voted in to be the new chairman, due to the unwillingness of the other members to vote for each other. He renames the company “Truth and Soul.” Chaos ensues.

Putney Swope opens well, with a hilariously deadpan board meeting that ends with Swope’s election to chairman. Then, as if someone threw a switch, it all goes off the rails. The rest of the movie almost seems like a series of vignettes that are maybe a little too interconnected for the term to be accurate, but not by much. This wouldn’t really be an issue if it managed to remain as funny as the opening scene, but, despite a few howlers, it really kind of drags after that. Part of the problem is that much of the comedy is based on the idea of being offensive and outrageous, and a lot of what’s happening doesn’t have that effect any more. Because there frequently isn’t much of a joke beyond the outrageousness, there’s not much left. Plus, there’s a strongly self-congratulatory feel to all of the envelope pushing that’s a bit obnoxious. Still, I have to admit that some of the racial dialogue in particular remains somewhat. . . I don’t want to say shocking, but let’s go with surprising. I can definitely see how it became the cult classic that it is, but it mostly misfired for me.

3/10

Progress: 115 (par +27)

Haunt Review: The 13th Floor and Blood Shed

6100 E. 39th Ave. Denver, CO
http://getscared.com/

No picture for this one; couldn't get anything to turn out. It was too dark and the signs were all too far away. Which brings up the first thing I want to address - organization and signage. This is the one area where this haunt completely and utterly failed. When you pull up, there are four lines - two for ticket buying (regular and VIP) and two for the haunt (regular and VIP, again). This seems like a good way to do it, but there are no signs anywhere and the lines sort of much together. I would expect that, with a separate ticket window for each type of ticket, they might label each window so that, for instance, someone buying a VIP ticket doesn't wait in the longer regular ticket line unnecessarily. Alternatively, they could have staff directing people to where they need to be. This haunt always has massive crowds (lines around the block), and they really need to figure out how to deal with them better.

But enough about the line - how were the haunts? Kind of a mixed bag. Blood Shed is first, and is the more modest of the two, running probably only a third of the length of the 13th Floor. It was, in some ways, the more effective of the two due to the fact that everything seemed to be running at full steam. The actors were well placed and worked for their scares, sticking with characters and not relying on the simple "jump out of the darkness" effect. Props and sets were fairly minimal with the exception of a few rooms, but what was there worked well. Quite enjoyable, but over far too soon.

After you exit Blood Shed, you are directed to the second of three lines for the 13th Floor (the first was outside, pre-Blood Shed). Entertainment for the line consisted of dancing girls on a stage, which was fairly amusing. Still, the haunt is very strictly designed around a particular theme with associated mythology, and I think it would have been better to spend the line time presenting some of that mythology.

Once you get through the line, there's a short (fake) elevator ride down to the underground 13th Floor and you reach the third (mercifully short) line - then it's finally off into the haunt. One thing I'll say for the 13th Floor - they have some really nice moments. Some of my favorites included a walk over a bottomless pit, a pitch-black hallway that you have to feel your way through (with bugs on the walls), a giant snake leaping out of a corpse, the spiked wall, and a ghostly bride who kept disappearing around the corner in front of us. The problem is that in between these great moments, there was frequently a whole lot of wandering through dark hallways with nothing happening. Also, there seemed to be some technical issues - at one point, we walked through what clearly was a vortex tunnel, but it wasn't vortexing. Also, near the end, there was a very impressive giant demon monster/thing, but it seems like it ought to have been moving, just a little. Still, overall, I think the good outweighs the bad - but given just how popular the place seems to be, I was expecting a little more oomph.

7/10