Category: Drama

The Bad and the Beautiful (1952)

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The shocking conclusion you come to after watching Kirk Douglas, Lana Turner, Dick Powell, and Barry Sullivan cavort around in one of these typically self-loathing movies about the movies is that no matter how bad someone hosed you in the past, if there’s a hit picture to be made with them again, no professional or personal vendetta you have against him or her is so great that it couldn’t be put aside for at least the duration of shooting.

As Kirk’s reviled producer John Shields tells Dick’s author James Bartlow, some of the best movies have been made by people that hate each other. That’s a fascinating concept and must make for some fun days at work, but I’m not sure that it adds up to much of anything beyond the film industry’s obsession with itself. Continue reading “The Bad and the Beautiful (1952)” →

Blossoms in the Dust (1941)

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Here’s a movie that’s signed onto the pro-orphan agenda that certain special interests groups continuously push in this country. It’s one of those do-gooder fairy tales where stuff like suicides and dead kids occur at convenient intervals just so that our heroine can be inspired to new heights of self-sacrifice while the audience is inspired to new depths of self-loathing for ever firing up a movie about a woman who crusades to have Texas’ law about illegitimate kids having to be identified as such on birth certificates and marriage licenses changed. Continue reading “Blossoms in the Dust (1941)” →

A River Runs Through It (1992)

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ARiverRunsThroughItPosterBy the time narrator Robert Redford solemnly intoned the final line of this film, “I am haunted by waters,” I could do no more than to sit for some several minutes and attempt to catch my breath. My two hour journey through the lives, loves, and fishing trips of the Maclean family had left me drained, my very soul touched and changed at least six times during this movie. I learned so much not only about the meaning of living a full life, but about what it is to be a man. And a son. And a brother. And a father. And the value of a really good hair conditioner.

I knew I had learned something about myself after watching this because I realized that the secret to healthy man-to-man relationships within your family is sharing a love of fly fishing, preferably in the sun-drenched, painterly-photographed outdoors of Montana as imagined by the Sundance Kid himself. Continue reading “A River Runs Through It (1992)” →

Old Acquaintance (1943)

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There’s only one reason anyone would ever seek out this semi-obscure Bette Davis movie (one of only about 19 that she made during the 1940s alone!) and that can be summed up in one semi-questionable word: catfight! What began a few years before in The Old Maid comes to a throat-throttling head as Bette finally has it out with arch foe Miriam Hopkins.

And by the time Bette gets around to choking the life out of her late in the film, you’re inclined to think that she was peeved that Miriam’s hammy and clueless performance was ruining the movie.

Miriam’s inability to tone down her shrill antics isn’t the sole reason that you end up wishing that she and Bette had just set up a boxing ring on the set of The Old Maid and hashed it out over the lunch hour between set up shots four years before this mess, it’s just the most glaring. Continue reading “Old Acquaintance (1943)” →

Klute (1971)

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Jane Fonda won an Oscar for her work as the only-in-a-Hollywood-movie hooker who’s smart, good looking and deeply troubled by her lifestyle. This is a hooker that’s so Hollywood, she even visits a therapist on a regular basis!

Her name is Bree Daniels and lately she’s been getting strange phone calls. She also has the feeling that someone is watching her. I’m assuming that it isn’t so much that she’s pissed that someone is getting off messing around with her on the phone or that someone is peeping her, it’s that they’re doing all this without paying her for it!

While Bree is in New York City fuming over all the free samples she’s given away, we need to go to the heartland to meet the other half of our movie, Donald Sutherland. The place is Pennsylvania and Sutherland plays a small town cop named John Klute. He’s buddies with a guy named Tom Gruneman. Tom has gone and disappeared while on a trip to NYC and now his wife and Klute wonder why he hasn’t come back yet. Continue reading “Klute (1971)” →

The Old Maid (1939)

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Obviously, this movie might be classified as a chick flick since it deals with subject matter that only a woman could enjoy. At least a woman from 1885 that is. I frankly think that most modern women who see this Bette Davis flick would think she was a doormat for no good reason. The guys who see this movie are obviously just trying to suck up to their girlfriends or probably have no use for girlfriends.

This one came out in 1939 so I suppose it was possible that some unwed mother could have had to lie about her baby’s origins for her whole life just so that her baby could have the advantages of being a rich adopted kid instead of a poor bastard. But this movie piled on the drama beyond that and the result was that I never quite figured out the purpose for most of Bette Davis’ actions. Oh I understood it was because she loved her daughter very much and wanted only the best for her, I just never got why that required her to become a dried up, crabby old maid. Continue reading “The Old Maid (1939)” →

The Carpetbaggers (1964)

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This movie confirmed to me what I always suspected. Namely, that I have really bad taste. How else can I explain that despite the fact that this film was two hours and twenty minutes of silly soap opera trash, I had little problem sitting through all of it?

Jonas Cord, Jr. (George Peppard) has serious daddy issues. Dad has called Junior on the carpet for another one of Junior’s flings with the ladies. After attempting to castigate his son with a bunch of jive about real men having brains in their heads, not in their pants, Junior fires back about his dad being an impotent old man and that it was good that Junior does what he does so that his dad’s wife won’t think all the Cord men are losers!

Though I’m a big fan of such scenes, I was also a bit worried that this would be one of those movies where Junior would be having run ins with dad every half hour or so, thus slowing down Junior’s ruthless business ways and his callow treatment of the money-grubbing skanks he was sure to bed down and throw out like yesterday’s Wall Street Journal.

But Harold Robbins didn’t proclaim himself the “world’s best writer” and sell three quarters of a billion books, by getting bogged down in stuffy father-son arguments. So, right after that the old man croaks right there in the office! Continue reading “The Carpetbaggers (1964)” →