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)
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