4 Star Films: Celebrating 10 Years of Blogging!

Posted on July 9, 2022 by 4 Star Films

Well, it’s been 10 years and I still haven’t found it in my heart to choose another name for my blog. What I can say is that I’ve put a lot of passion into it and it’s been an edifying experience.

Not only have I watched a lot of films, grown as a writer, and met a lot of great people through comments and blogathons, but I feel like I’ve created something that I can be proud of. I don’t know what forms this blog will take or when it will take a hiatus (I still have quite a few posts in the tube), but it’s been such a good rhythm for me.

For the last 10 years of my life, I don’t think I’ve gone a week that I can remember without at least 1 blog posting. I’ve gone through transitions between platforms and designs, a few of my very earliest posts were republished, but for the most part, everything is timestamped as they came out.

But rather than dwell on that aspect, I think I’ve really gotten to see my own writing change as I grapple with films and topics that interest me and directors and performers who have garnered my utmost adulation and effusive praise.

The mission statement of the blog still remains fairly unwavering: to look deeper at the best classic movies as a community. I know I often falter and don’t always meet my goal, but I will continue to follow what interests me and hopefully, that will continue to highlight films that are interesting to others.

As a simple way to reflect on the past 10 years, I thought maybe I would try and take a post from each of the last 10 years as a small overview of where we’ve been and where we’re going. Here it is:

2012: My 25 Essential Movies

For some context, I got into classic movies back in 2010 after discovering TCM on a family vacation and coming upon AFI’s 2007 list of the 100 Top Movies of All Time. At that point, there was no blog, but I wanted to keep some kind of record of my viewing. So for a couple of years, I maintained spiral-bound notebooks of short, page-long reviews. They were filled mostly with plot summaries, typos, and my own curt brand of hubris. I gave Citizen Kane a very tepid review on first viewing. In My 25 Essential Movies, I tried to break out of my original form and layout my viewing criteria. It’s twee now, but this was also the beginning of my blog.

2013: UP (2009)

Looking through my early reviews, you’d probably be hard-pressed to find anything close to actual thought-out commentary or analysis. It was more so observational writing with a few personal comments in summation. Still, one of the longer reviews I was able to find was on UP, a film that still deeply moves me to this day. Pete Docter is a fine storyteller. That opening montage guts me every time. Russell, Dug, and Kevin are characters for the ages. There’s something bitter-sweet now that both Ed Asner and Christopher Plummer are gone. And there’s some solace in knowing that a sequel to this movie would never be conceivable. It stands alone as a phenomenal film.

2014: The Spectacular Now

This might seem like a really random film to highlight, but one of my foibles is that I truly enjoy a good coming of age film and regardless of what you think of the genre (or this film), I saw The Spectacular Now right at a time where it resonated deeply. In fact, when I’m not writing reviews, working a job, and taking care of my other personal responsibilities, I’ve dabbled in screenwriting. The Spectacular Now was one of the first movies/screenplays I ever read where I thought this is a world that I know and that I relate to. It will be interesting if it will stay with me as I grow older or if it was merely a milestone of my late teens. I wrote a more succinct review that I probably like better over at Film Inquiry.

2015: Crimson Kimono

I discovered Crimson Kimono in college and I essentially transcribed the essay I wrote for a film noir elective onto my blog. I would say my writing has probably grown, but the impetus behind this piece and the film is still something that stays with me. Because the images and the themes Sam Fuller trades in feel so relevant and totally ahead of their time. As someone who is a lover of Classic Hollywood, but also half-Japanese, some might take it for granted, but those two worlds rarely intertwine. Crimson Kimono is one of the most exhilarating exceptions with James Shigeta and Glenn Corbett walking the beats of Little Tokyo. More recently I wrote a piece highlighting Japanese-American culture in Classic Hollywood.

2016: Citizen Kane

My feelings about Citizen Kane have gone through several evolutions through the years. I mentioned already that it was so overblown as “The Greatest Move of All Time” in my nascent film brain that I was left mostly under-whelmed. Future viewings have elicited a less lackluster response and each subsequent reappraisal has made it grow in my esteem. Now it’s gone beyond a gargantuan tragicomedy, but also a cinematic expression of many of the themes in Ecclesiastes (everything is meaningless — a striving after the wind). But further still, it is a film that still surprised me with its ingenuity and technical prowess. I try not to think too much about how Orson Welles was only 25 years old when he made it. Being a genius does not always guarantee success. Far from it.

2017: Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn

I very rarely write these kinds of posts. Listicles and Actor Bios probably are a lot more delectable as evergreen content on the internet than some of my more gargantuan reviews; I simply enjoy the process of review-writing the most. Still, this post I did for The Wonderful World of Cinema’s Blogathon on Grace Kelly has remained one of my most persistently read pieces. It’s not much but it just goes to show the lasting gravitas and impact of Kelly and Audrey Hepburn. In considering them my two favorite classic Hollywood actresses, I found I am one of many. This appreciation started early on in my journey, and it continues to this day.

2018: Rear Window

It seems fitting to include a review of the movie I consider one of my personal favorites. I’m not sure if it’s one of my better reviews, but regardless, I got to speak about Rear Window in a way that seems to highlight it in a different way than merely bandying about the plot points and my reactions. It was meant to dig into the stylistic choices Hitchock used down to the very meticulous use of music and sound design not only in the execution of a taut thriller but also in distilling the film’s romance down to its very essence. I’m not sure if others see it this way (or even the Catholic Hitchock), but Rear Window is a reminder to me of what happens when the so-called Greatest Commandment to “Love Thy Neighbor” has gone heedlessly awry. I love this movie.

2019: Ad Astra

I’m fascinated by spiritual elements in movies and I was fond of how I was able to explore them in my review of Ad Astra using the motif of the essay, “The Seeing Eye.” I don’t always find unique ways to frame my analysis, but I like to think my writing gets more individual and enjoyable when I’m able to bring something to the movie that works in tandem and somehow builds upon the film in ways that I could not initially imagine. The Greek idea of ekphrastic (artistic description) writing intrigues me, and in some fractured form that’s what I tried to accomplish here to some small effect.

2020: National Classic Movie Day

Blogathons have been such a meaningful way to connect with other classic film enthusiasts while stirring up a wealth of activity on each other’s sites. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention The Classic Film and TV Cafe’s yearly blogathon that has become an annual enjoyment over the last few years. For 2020, I was able to put together a list of 6 of my favorite films of the 60s running the gamut, and I was quite happy with my choices and what I said about them because they are totally indicative of my own personal tastes. This is the kind of writing I appreciate the most.

2021: Paterson

I was a late arrival to Paterson, but it was one of those films I instantly connected with on some elemental level. I feel like my best reviews are conceived at the moment right after the film has ended and my head is full of all my myriad thoughts and strands of ideas. The images are still fresh in my mind’s eye and the emotions still coursing through my body. At times, it’s under this incubation where I’m able to write things that still resonate with me. Other days I hack out reviews strung out over a few days, and it’s more like an act of mechanized assembly, but there’s something freeing when it feels like you are totally in touch with your creative flow.

2022: In The Heat of The Night

If I remember correctly, Sidney Poitier and Sophia Loren are the last two giants living on AFIs Top 25 Stars List, and they have remained close friends over the years as I’ve worked through their filmographies to varying degrees. The passing of Mr. Poitier was sad, but it also provided ample space to celebrate his prominent legacy and so many facets of his life and career. I revisited some of his most renowned films and dipped into some new ones only to be pleasantly surprised. Including In The Heat of The Night here is less about the review and more so about what it represents. I felt the same way writing about Olivia De Havilland, Kirk Douglas, and Stanley Donen after their passing, just to name a few. The hope is to keep Mr. Poitier’s legacy alive and well. His films can do the rest as a supreme testament to the conduct of his character.

I definitely should not take this blog for granted, and I have been very thankful for the opportunities and experiences it has afforded me these last 10 years. Thank you to anyone and everyone who has ever taken the time to read even a few of my words!

Regards,

Tynan

Classic Movie Beginner’s Guide: Joan Fontaine

Posted on August 8, 2020 by 4 Star Films

Although she probably wouldn’t like it one bit, with the recent passing of Olivia de Havilland, it seems necessary to acknowledge her sister and fellow actress Joan Fontaine.

Their sibling rivalry became the stuff of legend when they were vying for the same Oscars throughout the 1940s. What Fontaine portrayed on camera was this kind of alluring timidity, and her early work with Alfred Hitchcock remains one of the lasting creative partnerships of her career.

Her life off screen is more difficult to reconcile with her image, but regardless, here are a handful of her films worthy of searching out:

Rebecca (1940)

Joan Fontaine was a part of a couple epic ensembles with The Women & Gunga Din, but it was the early American classic from Hitchcock the following year that cemented her stature. Opposite the gail force of Laurence and Olivier and Judith Anderson’s ghostly Mrs. Danvers, she gets positively blown over. But part of the brilliance is how Fontaine plays the breathless young bride so effectively haunted by her husband’s past.

Suspicion (1941)

Hitchcock exploits Fontaine’s persona beautifully in this home thriller where her docile wife suspects her dashing husband — played by none other than Cary Grant — is out to murder her! It’s a tense set-up fraught with romance and peril. Both performers carry their assignments with impeccable aplomb although the ending might ruffle some feathers.

Jane Eyre (1943)

Joan Fontaine once again establishes a role pulled out a literary adaptation, and the parallels to Rebecca are quite strong. Orson Welles give the kind of brooding giant performance easily overpowering Fontaine. But it’s in her very reticence onscreen where she attains power and builds a sympathy with her audience, despite all the trials thrust upon her in Charlotte Bronte’s novel — adapted by none other than Aldous Huxley.

Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948)

Within the spiraling pirouettes of Max Ophuls and the tragic loves story of Stefan Zweig Joan Fontaine and Louis Jourdan take up their posts amicably. Fontaine’s performance runs the gamut of youth to adulthood as she falls in love with a famed pianist from afar and finds herself entwined in one of the most piercing love stories of the era. It’s a heartbreaker.

Worth Watching

You Gotta Stay Happy, The Bigamist, Othello, Island in the Sun, Beyond Reasonable Doubt

What I Learned About Peter Bogdanovich

Posted on May 9, 2020 by 4 Star Films

Recently TCM released their podcast The Plot Thickens featuring interviews with Peter Bogdanovich. He’s always been an intriguing figure of the movies, and part of this is how he’s been able to cultivate his image while also acting as a living bridge to Classic Hollywood.

He was part of the New Hollywood Cinema of the 1970s, but certainly associated and befriended some of the giants of the past from Orson Welles and Howard Hawks to Alfred Hitchcock and Cary Grant.

What’s unprecedented is his knowledge and his openness to share in interviews, regaling audiences with his stories. He really is a raconteur blending the talents of an actor, director, and film critic.

Recently I watched two of his earliest projects: The Wild Angels (1966) and Targets (1968) with Roger Corman, along with his documentary Directed by John Ford.

I also pored over some of his other interviews including spots on The Dick Cavett Show and contemporary retrospectives. There is some general overlap, but he always seems ready with a new recollection to keep the old masters alive for the present generations.

Here’s Some of What I Learned:

Cybil Sheppard in The Last Picture Show

-His father was a painter who grew up with silent pictures and gave young Peter an appreciation for the greats: Keaton, Chaplin, and Lloyd

-Bogdanovich started out at the Actor’s Studio working under Stella Adler at the age of 16! He lied about his age to allowed to study there

-When he was barely 20, he put on his own stage version of Clifford Odets’s The Big Knife starring Carroll O’Connor

-He started keeping film reviews on index cards around the age of 12 starting in 1952 all the way until 1970. One of his first reviews was on Howard Hawks’ Monkey Business (1952).

-The Monographs he wrote for the MoMA on Orson Welles (1961), Howard Hawks (1962), and Alfred Hitchcock (1963) led to in-depth interviews with each director and a reappraisal of their careers.

-At a screening of Bay of Angels (1963) in Los Angeles, he met Roger Corman who knew Peter’s writing and enlisted him to work on The Wild Angels (1966). The success led to his directorial debut Targets (1968).

-He met a young Frank Marshall at a birthday party for John Ford’s daughter. It would instigate a lifelong collaboration alongside his first wife Polly Platt.

-His competitive spirit meant he felt like he was a failure for not making his first film at the age of 25 like his hero and friend Orson Welles (who made Citizen Kane). Coincidentally, The Last Picture Show was hailed by some as the most important film by a young director since Kane.

-Most importantly, he wears bandanas, not ascots.

Recollections Rehashed:

Barbra Streisand in What’s Up, Doc?

-Frank Capra told him film always has a habit of slowing time down so you have to speed it up to make it feel natural. If you want to make it feel really fast, you have to speed it up even more

-Cary Grant told him Jimmy Stewart was doing the same stuttering, mumbling persona years before Marlon Brando ever got around to it

-He stole from Howard Hawks’ Bringing up Baby for What’s Up, Doc? because Hawks told him all the great directors stole from other people

-Hawks’ favorite directors were the ones you know who the devil made the movie because they have a personal style unique to the creator

-Jimmy Stewart famously told him if you’re lucky and God helps you, what actors have the opportunity to do is give audiences little bits and pieces of time that they can cherish forever.

The Other Side of The Wind (2018): Resurrecting Orson Welles

Posted on March 30, 2020 by 4 Star Films

With the name of Orson Welles comes any number of conflicting connotations not far removed from his greatest achievement: Citizen Kane. However, if we had to try and pinpoint an apt superlative it would fall somewhere in between a mythic and Brobdingnagian titan of cinema. He was a personality like few others.

Taking this into regard, The Other Side of The Wind could only conceivably be a colossal failure if it were in so many words: facile. Thanks be to the movie fates; Welles’ last work is no such thing. It is a glorious, extravagant mess of a film. Trying and befuddling scene after scene.

It has for many years been “The Holy Grail” for cineastes and to have it finally released to the public 40 years later — with so much hype spinning around, it might have easily been a letdown.

What a pleasure to admit how Wellesian this film is. Looming, unwieldy, pretentious, and loaded with complexities. All of these are compliments, mind you. It is corroded and alas, not the fully cohesive vision of an auteur, but its powers have barely been deluded by time.

The very form of the film, told from so many points of view, with all sorts of angles and qualities of footage, serves the very structure of the narrative. The fact it was indeed shot over half a dozen years, with hours of celluloid to ultimately cull through, only adds to its fractured quality.

The time in between its conception and release allows for fuzzier edges and dust to settle over the history with many of the primary players dead and gone. We still have first-hand eyewitnesses like Peter Bogdanovich and Joseph McBride and yet even they are now so far removed from the material. The myth has been allowed to instill itself.

Simultaneously, Welles once again makes us so radically aware we are watching a film, and he is directing our gaze. It’s his most audacious intent to blur the lines between reality and mere film narrative. It spins on this axis of meta mythos, instantly evoked by the film-within-a-film narrative and the caravan leading up to the 70th birthday of J.J. Hannaford (John Huston).

The biography is too obvious to ignore with thinly-veiled characters and the real-world issues plaguing Welles himself. Where to get the funding, literally making the story up as he goes along, and trying to stay relevant in a Hollywood that has all but abandoned him. It’s the old Norma Desmond conundrum (from Sunset Blvd). He’s still big. It’s the pictures that have gotten small. Furthermore, the fiction is too great to believe every word as the Sunday school truth.

Early on, the cuts are so quick and jarring, the viewer’s head is almost spinning to keep up. Because the choppy, looseness to it all almost feels amateurish and yet Welles is trying to drag us into his charade. He is creating a patchwork for us to get caught up in.

Early-onset fatigue must be acknowledged because The Other Side of The Wind can be a taxing ordeal with the constant cuts, close-ups, and whips from person to person even within a single conversation. It’s the antithesis of all traditional Hollywood continuity, thus serving its purpose.

This is also a fine time to mention the strikingly effective (if perplexing) riff off European art-house, with a startling amount of nudity, especially for a Welles picture. Bob Random and Oja Kodar are spliced into everything else, wordlessly pursuing one another through a cryptic labyrinthine of artistically stimulating landscapes. The film-within-a-film takes most obvious aim at Michelangelo Antonini who no so coincidentally filmed his Zabriskie Point in the home right next to Hannaford’s lair.

It’s also no small coincidence Ernest Hemingway is mentioned in passing as this spirit of the macho film director J.J. Hannaford is put up to the light of scrutiny. Huston himself was very much made out of the same mold. He was the epitome of a hard-living, hard-drinking, cigar-chomping man’s man. Each line of his craggy face tells a story. Each sputter in his voice is from years of such a lifestyle.

While Orson Welles isn’t an immediately similar figure, he ran in the same circles, shared overlapping industry experience, and probably internalized some of the same ideology pertaining to masculinity. They were both members of the Old Hollywood Guard.

Except the fine distinction is John Huston was not over the hill yet with such recent successes as Fat City and The Man Who Would Be King, two pictures that could not be more engaging for entirely divergent reasons. The verdict was still out on Orson Welles.

Meanwhile, Peter Bogdanovich adds yet another personal element to the picture. He was rather like Welles’ disciple, if not the propagator of his myth, and certainly a friend. But even their relationship became complicated when you consider the unspoken competition between them.

The young film critic-turned-filmmaker was at the forefront of The American New Wave and, at this point right in the middle of his trifecta of instant classics. The Last Picture Show was even heralded as the most important picture by a young filmmaker since Citizen Kane.

However, feathers were ruffled, jealousies set in, and what was formerly amiable, slowly deteriorated. You can even see it in how Welles is obviously jabbing Bogdanovich not so tactfully about his relationship with the much younger Cybil Shepherd. In the movie she is portrayed by the blonde robot who comes to J.J.’s party, appearing, uncomfortably, like easy prey for a predator.

Other persons of interest are Lilli Palmer who is an obvious stand-in for Welles’ lifelong friend Marlene Dietrich and then an acerbic, intrusive Susan Strasberg doing a send-up of Pauline Kael. I know very little about the Raising Kane fiasco and so it makes it difficult for me to make an educated assessment with what to do with this.

Then, we have posts filled by members of the Hannaford mafia who could easily be members of Welles’s own tribe including Mercedes McCambridge, Edmond O’Brien, Cameron Mitchell, and Norman Foster.

It’s sad to admit I have little to nothing resonant to add about their characterizations. They merely exist in this discombobulated world revolving around Hannaford.

It’s difficult not to put this movie in juxtaposition with Citizen Kane because they share the same gargantuan camp as only Welles seems capable of. In some ways, we might contend The Other Side of The Wind is Kane outside-in. The former film begins with a token of childhood. The life comes after and it seems ultimately meaningless. Revelations mean very little.

In the latter film, we begin at the opposite end of the spectrum at the end of a life and yet we never work back or get enough of a hankering of who this man is, much less all the phonies and wannabes around him.

I couldn’t help thinking as Hannaford and Brooks parted ways, I hardly know anything about them. There is not a meaningful throughline amid their continual babbling and bits of philosophizing.

What’s more, very little feels sincere. And yet this is itself an insidious lie. Because I know so much about them, that is, Huston and Bogdanovich. I’ve seen their films, I can recount a decent part of their history, their relationships with Hollywood, etc.

So The Other Side of The Wind is a bit like a rich canvass that gets more intricate and reveals more, the more we bring to it. The layers are there, all twisted and tangled, sometimes leading to dead-ends or left unresolved possibly due to narrative oversight. Maybe the actor was no longer available or the footage got ditched altogether. But of course, it’s, again, one and the same.

You don’t have a prayer of knowing much about J.J. Hannaford at the end of his party nor much about this film’s plot — what there is of it — but there is still more. We have these continual undercurrents — these refractions of reality — and we must dig through all the inexplicable pieces to try and discover some shards of truth.

Finally seeing The Other Side of The Wind feels like a giant sigh of relief. Let me say it now. It’s far from a perfect movie. But it is an extraordinary artifact from a phenomenal creative mind. It is a project worthy of Welles’ vision for the very flaws it exhibits from beginning to end.

Because slivers of himself find their way into the frame. His real-life struggles, demons, feuds, friendships, jealousies, preoccupations, and intimate fears all snuck in both overtly and unconsciously. This just might make it one of the most personal documentations we have from the man.

It’s a gift worth acknowledging, warts and all. The most honest word to offer in analysis is the very fact it mirrors the man. It’s the utmost compliment too. Francois Truffaut is quoted as saying, “I have always preferred the reflection of life to life itself.” One can only surmise if Orson Welles would agree or not. The Other Side of The Wind is as close as we’ll ever get to knowing.

4/5 Stars

Classic Movie Beginner’s Guide: 1950s Film Noir

Posted on November 22, 2019 by 4 Star Films

We follow up last week’s guide to classic film noir of the 1940s by continuing into the 1950s with 4 more entries. With the new decade came new progressions in realism, location shooting, and heightened character psychology.

As Paul Schrader wrote, the noir hero started to “go bananas.” What remained were graft, corruption, and the depravity of the human heart. True, gumshoes and femme fatales were never cut-and-dry. Now they were even less so. Enjoy!

Gun Crazy (1950)

Image result for gun crazy 1950

B movies form the backbone of this often down and dirty genre. There are few better than Joseph H. Lewis’s Gun Crazy an exercise in inventive economy. It tells the tale of a romance-fueled crime spree with verve and violent passion. Although mostly forgotten today, John Dall and Peggy Cummins do a fine rendition as a latter-day incarnation of Bonnie and Clyde

The Big Heat (1953)

Image result for The Big Heat

It’s a cops and robbers procedural with Glenn Ford as the straight-arrow family man going against the local mob. What Fritz Lang does is boil it over with newfound vindictiveness. We soon find out the good guys aren’t always untarnished nor the noir dames (Gloria Grahame) always the villains. True to form, Lee Marvin plays an incorrigible heavy.

The Killing (1956)

Image result for the killing 1956

It’s early Stanley Kubrick so some might find it a stark contrast to his later works. Regardless, it’s one of the finest heist films of all-time. Because the best-laid plans — even the most meticulous — always have a habit of going awry. The set-up is gritty and no-nonsense with a cast headed by a fitting protagonist: Sterling Hayden. Likewise, it’s ending just about sums up film noir fatalism.

Touch of Evil (1958)

Image result for touch of evil 1958

It’s often cited as one of the final signposts of classic film noir. With its tale of below the border corruption instigated by a portly Hank Quinlan (Orson Welles) against a Mexican policeman (Charlton Heston) and his wife (Janet Leigh), it more than fits the parameters of the genre. The extended opening shot is just one stunning testament of Welles’ vision as a director.

Worth Watching:

Sunset Blvd., In a Lonely Place, Night and The City, Where The Sidewalk Ends, Ace in The Hole, The Narrow Margin, Kansas City Confidential, Pickup on South Street, Night of The Hunter, Kiss Me Deadly, Bad Day at Black Rock, Murder by Contract, and so many more.

The Third Man At 70

Posted on October 16, 2019 by 4 Star Films

Oh, how I love The Third Man (or The 3rd Man). Regardless of how you write it, Carol Reed‘s post-war noir is one of those special films that was a case of love at first sight. I knew some of the reasons already, but watching the film with a friend (on his first viewing) teased them out even more so. It was a nice reminder of why this film continues to enchant me and engage me on fundamental levels time after time.

Dutch Angles in Post-War Vienna

My buddy was right. The Third Man is inherently disorienting. Visually the film presents all of its subjects from a stilted perspective. They’re always slanted, featured in crammed together close-ups, and never quite sitting square in our line of vision from the camera’s uncomfortably low angles. Whether we realize them or not, there’s no doubt the dutch angels (from “Deutch” or German) manipulate how we experience the action.

Starting with these formalistic elements, the mood is perfectly ingrained in the fundamental building blocks of the story with the crumbling city sectioned off into its uneasy alliances between the WWII victors. We have a crosshatching of districts and a melting pot of language and objectives.

Thus, when the blundering American author Holly Martins walks into the story, he, like his audience, has very little understanding of what is going on. His level of comprehension is lost in translation even as he goes around trying to get to the bottom of the scenario. Joseph Cotten does a fabulous job in the part effectively becoming our eyes and ears in the environment.

And this strong association is part of the reason I so vehemently decried Netflix’s tampering with the original film’s ambiguity. If you’re like me and Holly Martins, you’re no polyglot, aside from a few token phrases here and there. When the old man or woman in the house rattles off something, you’re lost in the unfamiliarity. You’re waiting for someone to explain it, even trusting on the good graces of others. In some regards, you are helpless.

It’s part of the way the film toys with us. You realize the whole time maybe you’ve been played and a whole level of the film’s context has flown over your head. Subtitles alleviate our ignorance but also cause us to lose out on some of the perplexity felt as a result of such a global battleground. The Third Man capitalizes on the richness of these cultural ambiguities.

The Zither & Herb Alpert

The music is next on my list. My friend was right again. The title song’s awfully familiar and after Anton Karas got plucked off the streets of Vienna to provide the lively but strangely hollow and foreboding soundtrack, it would go onto some acclaim on the music charts (including a guitar rendition by Guy Lombardo).

The tune is one of a select few early movie themes to hit the mainstream remaining fairly recognizable even today. This is even more surprising given its inauspicious roots. My friend connected the dots later only to realize he’d heard the particularly Latin-flavored version by Herb Alpert and The Tijuana Brass on their album !!Going Places!! He taught me something new, but you learn a lot being friends with an avid record collection.

Quick Pacing

It might be a mere generalization, but I feel like there are often complains leveled at films of yore that they languish, there’s too much talking, and they don’t boast enough action. But I think my buddy was spot on once more. The Third Man has surprisingly timely pacing (aside from the deliberate final shot).

One of the practical reasons for this might have been director Carol Reed literally being hooked on the stimulant Benzedrine to get through his hectic shooting schedule around the clock. This might be one explanation for the zip, even in the opening monologue. However, there’s also an undeniable drive to The Third Man because it’s stuffed with questions, mystery, and underlying tension.

As information begins to reveal itself, we have screeching taxi rides, reveals, harrowing meetings on Ferris wheels, and climactic chases sequences clattering through the rubble-strewn streets and labyrinthian waterworks. But the reason it grips us has to do with falling in with intuitively compelling characters. That’s as good a place as any to bring him up…

Harry Lime: Super-Villain?

The final observation I found to be particularly interesting was my buddy’s acknowledgment that Harry Lime felt surprisingly modern, a precursor even to the current villain. I want to tease out this idea even more because I’ve been drawn to movies that layer their menace. I can think of the likes of Black Panther or Mission Impossible: Fallout as two recent examples.

However, what I mean by this is how you don’t quite know where the trouble is going to come from, who you can trust, and who will betray you. It makes for a glorious puzzle to navigate. Is Calloway someone we can give our allegiance to? He’s an awful stickler for the law without clemency.

Mr. Crabbin is an unnerving chap before we ever learn who he is and the shifty-eyed likes of the Baron, Dr. Winkel, and Popescu have far more to tell than they willingly divulge. The woman Anna (Valli), who loves Harry, is almost delusional with her unwavering love for a scoundrel. Even Cotten, our initial hero, lumbers around like a drunken idiot, thinking he has everything figured out.

And of course, there’s Mr. Harry Lime himself. The most iconic charismatic, machiavellian anti-hero. Orson Welles makes him a dashing shadowy specter, larger-than-life and theatrical. But there’s no discounting the mercilessness pulsing through him. None of these characters are straight-laced by any stretch of the imagination. They have some flaw, evil, or vice dragging them down. Lime just remains the mastermind and the poster boy of it all.

The one character who seems like a generally agreeable chap is, of course, the one who SPOLIERS gets it. Somehow it fits the times and the world. It couldn’t be any other way.

So 70 years on The Third Man still remains one of the preeminent examples of a quality thriller, pulsing with atmosphere, style, romance, and intrigue. To say they don’t quite make movies like this anymore is immaterial.

What’s truly staggering is how brilliantly Carol Reed’s film still holds up. I look forward to many more viewings to come, preferably with a friend or two. After all, they’re the ones who help me appreciate classics like these with new eyes.

Happy 70th Year to The Third Man! You’re still looking great!

I’m also proud to be a part of the Classic Movie Blog Association celebrating 10 years of existence. Here’s to many more.

Review: The Lady from Shanghai (1947): Funhouse Film Noir

Posted on August 15, 2019 by 4 Star Films

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Before I knew the word “auteur” I think subconsciously I began to realize Orson Welles was gifted with this kind of innate artistic force that cemented all his pictures together. It’s part of what made him such a terror to work with and simultaneously a genius of such mammoth accomplishments as Citizen Kane and Touch of Evil.

However, even his lesser-known pictures addled by studio meddling or lack of funds, bear his mark of visual ingenuity and singularity. Run down the line from The Magnificent Ambersons to The Trial and Chimes at Midnight and you get the idea perfectly. Of course, The Lady from Shanghai keeps this same company capably.

At its core is not just one luminary performer but two: Orson Welles and his wife at the time, Rita Hayworth. From a purely cinematic perspective, no one had seen either of them quite like this before. Welles acting as actor, director, and producer introduces the story in first-person voiceover cloaked in an Irish brogue. Meanwhile, Hayworth loses her trademark luscious locks to transform into a bleached blonde.

To look at its opening frames alone is to acknowledge that The Lady from Shanghai is noir in nearly every conceivable way. Further still, it never abates along these lines traversing a befuddling narrative arc. It ultimately fails to ever gain clarity while casting Michael O’Hara as a fated hero destined for some inevitable destruction as the narrative zips along with lightning-quick pacing.

He is instantly pulled into the entangling web of Rosalie Bannister though it’s as much a testament to the seedy characters in her stead than her own inclinations. Hayworth gives us an immaculate conception of a femme fatale who is in one sense deadly and still somehow trapped within her very existence.

Even as O’Hara’s concerns for her well-being rise, he only gets dragged deeper into the dark depths of the squalid world around him. Because this particular tantalizing siren is surrounded by a sea of ravenous sharks just priming themselves to rip each other to shreds. Even if he tells himself otherwise, he’s chasing after a married woman, biting off something much too big for him.

Invalid attorney Arthur Bannister (Everett Sloane) clings onto his “lover” like a trophy because the truth is, he has dirt on everyone in his life — keeping them right where they serve him best. It’s his shifty valet (Ted de Corsia), constantly lurking around, who surmises that tough guys always have an edge. The movie is filled with such shifty characters.

George Grisby (Glenn Anders) is the most unnerving as Bannister’s equally conniving partner. His cackling chills the bones while his continuous obsession about murder and O’Hara’s own scrape with it becomes a queer fascination of his. The reason is still left unknown.

Welles’ camera lovingly adores Hayworth. As she learns to smoke, picking up the habit after seaside excursions or basking in the sunbeams on deck. She the epitome of classic Hollywood allure. It was never her hair anyways. I think it’s something in her eyes gleaming with inalienable life.

However, I want to hate most of the close-ups — as a visceral reaction — because I rarely feel an actor breathing down my neck and yet Welles readily goes back to them again and again in a way that’s unnerving. The worst of them all is, of course, Grigsby.

In fact, Welles continually chooses the most perplexing camera setups. It’s such that you cannot help but allow his perspective to infiltrate your own and dictate how you see things. He’s allowed for no other way whether it be the harsh low angles, overhead shots or cutting between various close-ups to create the patchwork of a single scene.

O’Hara joins the jocund company on the yacht while the picture benefits from early examples of post-war on-location shooting sweeping through Mexico, New York, and ultimately San Francisco. Though it has its share of perceived opulence, not least among it the borrowing of Errol Flynn’s prized boat for the production, equally visible is a certain degradation and subsequent atmosphere that can be traced to Touch of Evil a decade later. It’s an unsettling juxtaposition to go right along with the menagerie of players.

And if O’Hara’s own shark metaphors are not augurs enough, Welles has the gall to envelop himself and his lover in an aquarium where the sharks are literally circling in the background, magnified to almost inordinate proportions. The figures are black contours facing each other cloaked completely by the darkness, framed by the panes of the tanks. On the whole, it’s a definitive image of pure chiaroscuro photography, completely indicative of their fatalistic state.

Though the director’s picture originally clocked in at a whopping 155 minutes, it was slashed down to an expedient 87 minutes, which nevertheless means there’s not a continuous line of lucidity running through the drama. Because through outcomes that mostly elude us, O’Hara finds himself on trial for a murder that came to pass by means that are never quite expanded upon.

All of a sudden, he’s fighting for his very life by some cruel reversal. The most incongruous part is the very fact there’s almost a sing-song quality to everyone else from Bannister to Grisby to the District Attorney and the Judge presiding over the case to decide O’Hara’s life.

The flippancy to it all is disconcerting. It’s like Welles and Hayworth are caught in the ghastly webs of noir melodrama and no one else has the least bit of concern. It’s only a game to them. The doleful drone of the shipyards moan as the jury deliberates and Bannister all but admits he’s set O’Hara up for the gas chamber.

But the final act is quintessential Welles given the luxury of two fine setpieces. The creme de la creme is, of course, the funhouse hall of mirrors which is pure directorial showmanship, stylized with gunfire, broken shards of shattering glass, and images of our stars refracted in disarray. Words cannot do it the justice it deserves. It stands as a final testament to a picture that’s plot is about as wonky, unresolved, and inconclusive as any noir piece ever was.

But if you’re like me you get the sense Welles placed the utmost care in the aspects of the film that mattered most to him, namely the visual elan. Because certainly, Lady from Shanghai is a narrative mess. There’s probably little hope of actually justifying all of its leaps and bounds. And yet in the same breath, it’s equally difficult not to concede how visibly delightful a feast it is.

Will it satisfy everyone? Certainly not. But that’s a part of what made Orson Welles an unprecedented mastermind. He very rarely catered to others and as a result, his films are usually creatures of artistic invention all their own. There will never be another Orson Welles. The same can be said of any so-called auteur. That’s what makes them special — their easily attributed individuality. No one else is capable of making the same exact film. As it should be.

4/5 Stars

The Long, Hot Summer (1958)

Posted on April 17, 2019 by 4 Star Films

The_Long,_Hot_Summer As it turns out, Paul Newman’s a real barn burner. His family name is synonymous with conflagrations and it’s a great entry point for a character, in this case, a drifter named Ben Quick who’s run out of town by the local judge.

We never actually know if he was guilty of arson or not but we assume he must be. And so even with the audience, Quick carries that onus because the reputation seems to fit him. He’s a leering no-good, not to be trusted with money or women. It’s all speculation, mind you, though it cuts pretty close to the truth.

He receives some southern hospitality when a car screeches to a stop to pick him up. In the passenger’s seat is Eula (Lee Remick) with a coaxing sensuality accentuated by a sing-song twang that’s irresistible. More reserved is the driver, Clara (Joanne Woodward), who sees through Quick just like most people. She’s not about to be taken in by his animal magnetism.

This is just the beginning of a vast family drama and the names we have to thank are director Maritn Ritt, still trying to get his head above water after a blacklisting, and screenwriting stalwarts Irving Ravitch and Harriet Frank Jr.

Their tale was realized by weaving together three stories by William Faulkner that I have no prior knowledge of, matched with the atmospherics of a Tennessee Williams sweaty drama. In fact, it was released before a couple films that share more than superficial similarities, namely the well-remembered Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) also starring Newman, this time opposite Elizabeth Taylor and Burl Ives. Then, there was God’s Little Acre (1958) which was probably the quirkiest and most erratic of the trio starring Robert Ryan as the head of the family.

Arguably, there’s no larger-than-life figure than Orson Welles to take the part of the portly patriarch of the Varner clan, Will, a man who puts his stamp on the local town. After a stint in the hospital with ailments, he comes back in fashion, sirens howling, so everyone knows that the king has returned. First, it’s a visit to his mistress (Angela Lansbury) who’s anxious to get married so she can have more stability. His responses remain evasive.

The Louisianna heat is no fluke and Welles is perpetually perspiring. He lends an earthiness to the proceedings that undoubtedly takes some cues from Ritt. Will Varner laughs boisterously at the catcalls of young boys directed towards his daughter-in-law, just as he conspires to get his other daughter hitched up so grandchildren can start popping out. In this regard, he’s very pragmatic (if not misogynistic). He wants heirs to maintain the family name because his gutless son certainly isn’t going to be the one to do it.

While important to the stability of the picture, by all accounts, Welles was a terror to work with for everyone on set. There are multiple indications of why this might have been. It’s all too probable he felt pressured and slightly insecure with the young upstarts coming on the scene from the Actor’s Studio, including Marlon Brando and his current co-star Paul Newman. Alternatively, with Welles being the renowned directorial power that he was, there was probably some dissatisfaction on his part because he couldn’t pull all the strings and have total control like he was normally accustomed to.

However, put him together in a room with Paul Newman and you have two men in front of you as crooked as a barrel of fish hooks. Varner’s perceptive daughter puts it aptly, “One wolf recognizes another.” Soon they strike up a mutually beneficial deal throwing other people and lives around like they were pawns in a chess match to solely serve the two of them.

Varner wants a form of southern immortality. Males to bear his name and people to sing his praises and tame the land in a sprawling estate with spoils to match what he has accumulated over his lifetime. Quick, why, he just wants money and land and whatever else he can finagle out of the old man. What unites them is they’re both out for number one.

Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward go on their first cinematic date together and it’s a picnic in the park that ends prematurely. In real life, they would get married soon after principal photography wrapped and as they say, the rest was history. They stayed married for another 50 years until Newman’s passing in 2008. For a Hollywood marriage, this has to be some kind of record.

But regardless of what was going outside the frame, what is within the confines of the space is just as enchanting for the simple reason that they make some amount of palpable magic together. There’s a tension between them but then a certain attraction and pull that leads to oscillation back and forth in a continuous orbit of gravitation and then distaste.

In real life, it’s not what leads to stable romance but in film, it’s what dreams are made of because every sequence has an intangible undercurrent of spiritedness. It’s in the eyes twinkling. The unspoken words along with the spoken ones. Maybe it’s a lot of making something out of nothing but I would like to think it isn’t. They have something electric together.

Just as the film opened with fire, it’s another barn burning that ends the picture and gets the town in a tizzy. The irony is the very event that looks to be a dramatic firecracker actually reconciles a father and son. That’s the thing about The Long Hot Summer; it has the guts — some might say the gall — to end on an optimistic note without plunging into the throes of deep dark tragedy. Sometimes the 50s dramas take it too far. It’s almost as if they forget some of the greatest dramas historically were as much comedy as they were tragedy.

With so much talent, I’m inclined to like this one and since it all but led the pack coming out of the gates, it deserves some kudos. But best of all, the partnership between Martin Ritt, Ravitch, Frank, and Newman was just beginning, not to mention a marriage for the ages. It’s part of the reason why one can come away from The Long Hot Summer with a smile as wide as Will Varner’s.

3.5/5 Stars

Jane Eyre (1943)

Posted on February 1, 2018 by 4 Star Films

Are you always drawn to the loveless and unfriended? ~ Edward Rochester

When it’s deserved. ~ Jane Eyre

I can still recall visiting the Bronte Parsonage, marveling at the fact that these sisters were able to have such a lasting impact on the world of literature — a world so often dominated by men at that time — and I simultaneously rued the fact that I had yet to crack open any of their works. Now several years down the road, I still have not opened up Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre by Emily and Charlotte Bronte and so I can only come into this 20th-century adaptation with certain expectations.

I realize that no film can wholly represent every page of a novel — especially of great length — because in a practical sense it’s simply not theatrically possible. But my hope is that at the very least this version of Jane Eyre maintains the essence of the source material and if nothing else I can revel in the fact that it is a thoroughly engrossing film from director Robert Stevenson.

It feels like some sort of intriguing marriage between Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre and the recent craze of gothic fiction adaptations — the most noted of course being Hitchcock’s Rebecca only a few years prior — that by some strange happenstance had input from Aldous Huxley. Here we have the ever timid beauty Joan Fontaine starring once more, this time opposite Welles. But the story starts at a much earlier point in the life of Jane Eyre.

Her life is a desolate and horrible affair as we soon find out, due in part to a caustic culture that uses their religion to ostracize others instead of bringing them into the fold of society.

In fact, most of those who hold a Christian belief system are puritanical and more problematic still, hard-hearted. Ironically, there’s no room for grace in the Christian faith that they practice. Foremost among this crowd is Mr. Brocklehurst (Henry Daniel) who runs the Lowood Institution for Girls.

It’s in this very issue revealed early on where the film finds much of its substance. Because thematically all throughout the narrative the audience is forced to grapple with various characters who are subjugated to the fringes of society and for various reasons are labeled as outcasts.

This is how Jane is seen first by her unfeeling aunt (Agnes Moorehead), then by the narrow-minded reverend. They seem absolutely incapable of compassion sitting atop their high horses of proclaimed humility and charity. In reality, they have very little of either to offer. A few do show her kindness including Dr. Rivers (John Sutton) and the cook Bessie (Sarah Allgood) but such behavior is the exception and not the norm.

Still, Jane the very person who has been relegated to a wretched and lesser state is for that very reason ready and willing to reach out to those around her who are treated likewise. The very fact that she has been marginalized allows her to see it in others and be compelled to move toward them when others move away. She cares deeply for the outsider.

The most galvanizing experience involves her closest friend as a young girl (played by a child who still is very unmistakably Elizabeth Taylor). Then as she grows up and chooses to move away from the oppression of her surrogate home, it is the role of a governess in a gothic manor that once more allows her the opportunity to extend her graces to others. First in the form of the precocious ballerina extraordinaire (Margaret O’Brien) and then the brusque but obviously tortured man of the house (Orson Welles).

She sees in him something that runs deeper than the surface. He’s far from a bad man. In fact, she grows to love and cherish him because she sees the good that dwells in his conflicted soul. Burdened as he is with guilt and a past that still haunts him to the present moment. The film exhibits a bit of a love triangle as Rochester invites many guests to his estate among them the well-to-do Blanche Ingram (Hillary Brooke).

But the film pulling from its source material goes a step further still. It digs into the dark recesses, involving itself with the less than pleasant realities, namely an unseen person who hangs over the storyline like a specter. In those very designs, whether they are simply employing the rhythms of Bronte’s book or not, there’s another evident parallel there with the 1940 adaptation of du Maurier’s Rebecca.

Gothic tones matched with an impending sense of foreboding with the demure Fontaine similarly relating the action through voiceover even reading verbatim off the page as if from a diary. And once again it works. While there is no Mrs. Danvers, Welles has the same Shakespearian gravitas of an Olivier that accentuates the very modesty of many of Fontaine’s performances. Their exchanges reflect the sensibilities of the time but furthermore help draw up the very differences of their characters. However, as much as that juxtaposition would seem to draw them apart it even more passionately brings them together.

Some might find this rendition of Jane Eyre too stark, too much of a studio production, even too abrupt, but with Welles and Fontaine opposite each other, it’s a frequently enjoyable gothic romance. As much as gothic romances can possibly be enjoyable.

4/5 Stars

The Third Man (1949): Out of the Rubble

Posted on November 2, 2017 by 4 Star Films

Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

Great films ring anew each time you see them. Or in this case, they twang with the oddly disconcerting strains of zither strings. The Third Man is such a film that continually asserts itself as one of the golden classics of the 1940s. But we must set the scene.

There’s an image of a great city–a formerly great city–blown up, diced up, and quartered. The first syllable of dialogue glibly carrying a twinge of irony lays the groundwork for the entire plot really. This is Post-war Vienna. It’s where the blown out buildings strewn with rubble can exist with the elegant remnants of royal dynasties. A land of black marketeering and shifty-eyed collaboration between wartime allies. It’s deception and ambiguity to the nth degree not only evident in the people but the very social structure they find themselves in. Everyone’s got an angle, a secret to hide, and a reason to hide it. There’s a consistently fine line between right and wrong and the storyline is ripe with incongruities and dissonance that, if nothing else, are disconcerting.

It struck me that this is the original Chinatown except it doesn’t simply act as a mere metaphor. We actually get enveloped in the atmospheric Vienesse world that feels invariably gaunt and hollow. It’s a world that’s flipped upside down and with the hapless American western pulp novelist Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) as our guide, we become just as mixed up as he does.

He’s come to the town for the prospects of a job offered by an old school chum Harry Lime. But Harry’s not there to meet him. In fact, Harry’s not anywhere. He’s dead. But everything is clouded with that same ambiguity. The military police led by Inspector Calloway (Trevor Howard) and his right hand man (Bernard Lee) are still investigating Lime’s prior dealings on the black market in tainted penicillin. Meanwhile, Martins obviously goes blundering around trying to learn anything he can because these men are obviously incompetent. He scouts around for eyewitnesses and several of Lime’s acquaintances. Most of all he’s taken with Harry’s gal Anna (Valli) who is also torn apart by the death of her Harry. They bond over that although Holly soon becomes infatuated with her as she remains in love with a man who is gone forever.

This is the disorienting world that we are thrown into by Graham Green and director Carol Reed. Where heaven is down and hell is up. Ferris Wheels ever turning, rotating through their cycles. Dutch angles giving every figure a contorted view. We never see anyone for their face value and we can never assume anything. Because there’s always something lurking in the shadows.

the third man 2 Joseph Cotten is surprisingly compelling as the poor, unfortunate stiff and it’s hard not to feel sorry for him in his ignorance because we can relate with him. Alida Valli is striking as the aloof beauty who nevertheless has an unswerving affection for her former love that remains the only joyous thing in her current existence. Then, of course, there’s Orson Welles as the charismatic myth of a man–arguably the most intriguing supporting character there ever was even if it’s mostly thanks to the legend created by those who knew him.

Meanwhile, Carol Reed’s film is stylish and simultaneously dingy around the edges another gritty entry in the annals of film noir with some of the most beautifully pronounced shadows in the history of film. The final setpiece through the dank cavernous underworld of the Viennese sewers is a fitting place for the Third Man’s climatic moments to play out. It epitomizes all that has been going on above ground so far.

Then in a strikingly Deja Vu moment, the story ends much as it began in the exact same place with the exact same people but now there is so much more tension underlying each character. Feelings now buried in the dirt.

And in his final shot, Reed is fearless. He plays a game with the audience, giving them their final shot but instead of bringing it to a rapid conclusion he lets the gravity of the situation sink in before it’s gone in a fit of wistful melancholy. It ends as all films noir should with one man dead, another man smoking a cigarette, and the girl walking off with neither of them. It’s about as bleak as you can get but then again we’ve already spent the entire film getting accustomed to this lifestyle. This is only a day in the life of a city like Vienna. This is what life is in a post-war zone.

5/5 Stars

Note: I will say that I rewatched the film on Netflix and I would vehemently dissuade others from doing the same (at least if they’ve never seen The Third Man before). Because one major change they made that you would hardly even think about is adding subtitles in some crucial moments. When I saw the film multiple times before the lack of subtitles only added to my general sense of confusion in the face of ambiguities, much like Holly Martins faces himself. Subtitles take some of that away from us as an audience. In this case, the subtitles are tantamount to colorizing black & white movies or resorting to pan and scan. They can easily ruin the experience.