• The 39 Steps

10/3/21 (Sun)

Hitchcock’s 1935 version of John Buchan’s novel. Old-fashioned, not sure if the director was entirely serious. After gunshots interrupt a stage performance, a frightened stranger asks Hannay if she can stay the night with him – and he agrees. Really?? Very friendly town there, London. As he sleeps in the living room, she staggers in from his bedroom in the middle of the night and falls over – with a knife in her back. Really?? Running from the police, Hannay grabs a stranger in her train cabin and kisses her passionately in a desperate move to throw the cops off, to which she barely reacts – really?? Hitchcock gives little away in each scene, which is great in his more mature works, but here these touches can come off as contrived. I recalled the stage parody in which four actors played all of the dozens of characters that appear, and now having seen the original film, I wonder which one is the real parody.

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• Scarface (1932)

9/27/21 (Mon)

Howard Hawk’s seminal gangster flick was released in 1932 after a year of fights with the censors and apparently released in a bowdlerized version. Producer Howard Hughes soon removed it from circulation and stuck it in his vaults, where it remained until his death in the 1970s. The version here is supposedly more or less the original, though irritating reminders of the censor’s stamp remain, such as the opening text warning us about the danger of gangsters and an irrelevant scene with a newspaper editor accusing politicians (and by extension the public) of failing to do their jobs. Fortunately the ending was left as originally filmed rather than the moralistic finale evidently demanded by the studio.

The movie was clearly based on Al Capone – try the title, for one thing – despite claims otherwise. Ben Hecht, one of the credited screenwriters (he was at the same time writing Twentieth Century for Hawks – now that’s versatility), knew Capone and must have consulted other gangsters given this level of verisimilitude. Whatever tinkering that the producers did to the results, Capone must have approved since no one seems to have been shot for it.

It is a dramatic and credible story extremely well told. Continue reading →

• Twentieth Century

9/27/21 (Mon)

Howard Hawks’ hilarious 1934 screwball comedy, boasting an ever-quotable script by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur based on their Broadway hit of two years earlier. I knew the basic story via the stage musical: a high-strung NY stage producer, down on his luck, finds himself on the same train liner from Chicago as his ex, now a big Hollywood star. He sees a golden opportunity to return to the spotlight – he just needs to create an entire play and sweet-talk her into starring in it by the time they arrive in New York. And the race is on.

The film has the usual breathless pace, screaming and exaggerated acting that characterize this genre, but it’s all done in great style. Continue reading →

• Le Mépris (Contempt)

9/18/21 (Sat)

I wasn’t sure I was ready for more Godard after Breathless, but this 1963 film about filmmaking is considered one of the director’s more accessible works. Plus it had Brigitte Bardot, who seemed an unlikely choice for the lead.

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• À Bout de Souffle (Breathless)

9/7/21 (Tues)

I was already in Truffaut mode after The 400 Blows, so with the news of Jean-Paul Belmondo’s death, I immediately decided to watch the actor’s breakthrough Breathless, which was co-written by Truffaut. Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 debut work is considered a milestone in film history – one critic says in apparent seriousness that movies can be divided into pre- and post-Breathless. It stands with the previous year’s Blows as one of the founding works of the French New Wave. Unlike that film, though, it hasn’t aged well.

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• Stalag 17

9/4/21 (Sat)

Billy Wilder’s 1953 film about goings-on in a German POW stalag during WWII. That would seem an uncomfortable subject just a few years after the war, but it was based on a highly successful Broadway play by two former POWs recalling their own experiences. Continue reading →

• The Angel Levine

4/23/22 (Sat)

When you hear that an Orthodox Jew, played by Zero Mostel, is visited by an angel named Levine, you don’t expect to see Harry Belafonte. But that’s the premise in this oddball 1970 work adopted from a Bernard Malamud story about a modern-day Job and an emissary from Heaven sent to save him.

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• Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows)

9/3/21 (Fri)

Truffaut’s fantastic 1959 film about a boy effectively pushed into delinquency was his first full-length feature but already feels like the work of a master. It is not a story so much as a slice-of-life sequence of events that follow events in the adolescent’s life. The curious title comes from a French idiom, faire les quatre cents coups, that apparently means “to raise hell”. The film was reportedly released initially as “Wild Oats”, which fits the meaning better, but the title soon reverted to the direct translation, where it has remained since. Still, the English title does work in its own way even devoid of context as a symbol of the seemingly endless vicissitudes that the boy is subject to, the blows being psychological as well as physical. And it sounds better than “The 400 Vicissitudes”.

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