Finally, a movie that dramatizes the shame of being a rich alcoholic guy with a low sperm count! Continue reading “Written on the Wind (1956)”
Category: Classic
Tomorrow Is Forever (1946)
Tomorrow Is Forever completely ignores any worries about coincidence piled atop happenstance heaped upon chance and hefts around its wildly unbelievable story with an Orson Welles-sized assurance only a classic old movie could have. Continue reading “Tomorrow Is Forever (1946)”
The Great Lie (1941)
The Great Lie recycles the same plot as an earlier Bette Davis movie, The Old Maid, only this time Davis is the one raising the kid that isn’t hers and lying to everyone about it. The Great Lie‘s great sin though isn’t reusing a story full of silly sacrifice and artificial drama, but that it is so damn gimpy in doing so! Continue reading “The Great Lie (1941)”
I Remember Mama (1948)
To: Kathryn Forbes
From: MonsterHunter Publishing
Re: Your Submission
We are in receipt of your stories about your mama that you’ve gone and turned into a movie. Since we aren’t in the practice of actually reading, we were forced to watch the movie version of your book, Mama’s Bank Account. Frankly, we are not convinced of the complete veracity of your tales. Is the audience really expected to believe that a simple woman from Norway could overcome such soul-shattering odds as a sick kitten or a child with an earache? We can only assume that you felt your mother’s war against indigestion and the time she had a bad haircut was simply too much for the audience to handle. Continue reading “I Remember Mama (1948)”
Picnic (1955)
As soon as I started watching Picnic, I knew that I was in for another one of these sweaty, desperate epics about how life in a small town is full of hypocrites, nosy old maids, and damp drifters who are drenched in the promise of something better than what the small town was offering up to its population of breathy starlets. Continue reading “Picnic (1955)”
All That Heaven Allows (1955)
Jane Wyman, looking every bit of her forty-plus years in the role, plays Cary Scott, an upper class dame who had her husband go and croak on her last year. He left her some money, a house, two snotty young adult kids, an empty existence, and a hunky gardener played by Rock Hudson!
Before Rock can start planting his trees in Cary’s yard, the movie shows us the kind of pointless shell of a life that Cary has been living since her husband took the easy way out. She has a friend, the anvil-faced Agnes Moorehead (Endora from Bewitched) and she seems to like Cary as much as anyone, but we soon see that friendship in this little upper crust town is premised on everyone acting like they are supposed to. This means going out to the country club, enduring dull parties with self-important gossips, and dating old guys who have never heard of Viagra. Continue reading “All That Heaven Allows (1955)”
Lost Horizon (1937)
I might have been able to tolerate Lost Horizon‘s uptoian feel good mumbo jumbo about how everybody is really polite to everyone else and how all the Tibetan natives were forced to learn English (say, this is paradise, isn’t it?) by some pushy Catholic priest, if it all wasn’t just so freaking boring.
Director Frank Capra let that whole “slow down the pace” ideal of his paradise seep into his filmmaking here because this one edges ever so slowly from leisurely to glacial to La Brea Tar Pit paced.
It took him the first half hour alone to establish that the plane carrying star Ronald Coleman and his supporting cast was being hijacked to paradise. (If this place is so great, why do you have to commit an act of air piracy to get people to join up?) Continue reading “Lost Horizon (1937)”