Category: 1938
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Queen of Magic has a lot going on. After the perfunctory cliffhanger resolution, there’s another chase sequence (of sorts) through the Clay Men’s caves. It takes a while–and has Buster Crabbe and company duking it out with the actual bad guys (Beatrice Roberts’s human thugs)–but eventually the Clay Men get them. The good guys. The…
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Queen of Magic has a lot going on. After the perfunctory cliffhanger resolution, there’s another chase sequence (of sorts) through the Clay Men’s caves. It takes a while–and has Buster Crabbe and company duking it out with the actual bad guys (Beatrice Roberts’s human thugs)–but eventually the Clay Men get them. The good guys. The…
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If only The Living Dead had some better stock music choices, because the actual content of the chapter is fantastic. Unfortunately, it’s got this passive, tranquil score without any energy or excitement. Meanwhile the onscreen action is all energy, all excitement. While Buster Crabbe, Frank Shannon, and Jean Rogers are crashing on Mars, their ship…
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If only The Living Dead had some better stock music choices, because the actual content of the chapter is fantastic. Unfortunately, it’s got this passive, tranquil score without any energy or excitement. Meanwhile the onscreen action is all energy, all excitement. While Buster Crabbe, Frank Shannon, and Jean Rogers are crashing on Mars, their ship…
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Until about three-quarters of the way into New Worlds to Conquer, I thought Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars was going to be one of those mistitled movies. Like the studio changed it for some reason. Because when adventurers Buster Crabbe, Jean Rogers, and Frank Shannon take off, they’re headed right back to Mongo. Then it…
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Until about three-quarters of the way into New Worlds to Conquer, I thought Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars was going to be one of those mistitled movies. Like the studio changed it for some reason. Because when adventurers Buster Crabbe, Jean Rogers, and Frank Shannon take off, they’re headed right back to Mongo. Then it…
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You Can’t Take It with You has three major plot lines, all interconnected, but separate enough the film often feels stretched. There’s the rather lovely romance between stenographer Jean Arthur and her boss, bank vice president James Stewart. There’s Edward Arnold’s attempt to create a munitions monopoly to take advantage of the coming world war.…
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Vivacious Lady strengths easily outweigh its weaknesses, but those weaknesses have a way of compounding on each other as the film moves to its conclusion. The most obvious–and usually forgiveable–problem is how the film can’t decide what to do with Ginger Rogers, the Vivacious Lady. Not the film, sorry, the script. Director Stevens, photographer Robert…
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Flash Gordon is all about its gee whiz factor. The serial goes all out to create the planet Mongo, which has come out of nowhere (in space) and is on a collision course with Earth. Only scientist Frank Shannon has a plan to save the otherwise panicked and resigned Earth–take a rocketship to the new…
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The Adventures of Robin Hood gets by on a lot of charm. Charm and costuming (good and bad). The film opens with title cards setting the scene. Sherwood Forest, evil King’s brother, righteous nobel, beautiful damsel, insidious villain, and Technicolor tights–Claude Rains looking like a Little Lord Fauntleroy grew up and broke bad. Rains, with…
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I’m hard pressed to think of a better comedy than Bringing Up Baby. Between Hawks’s direction, Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde’s script, the acting (particularly from Katharine Hepburn, who’s so funny, one just starts laughing when she starts talking to save the trouble of having to laugh after her line), it’s probably not possible to…
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Angels with Dirty Faces runs less than ninety minutes, but doesn’t really fill them. The first fifteen minutes of the film are flashbacks, tracking James Cagney’s character from troubled boyhood to juvenile detention to prison. Once the present action starts, Cagney immediately reunites with Pat O’Brien’s now priest, former similarly troubled youth. But Angels doesn’t…
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Captain Kidd’s Treasure runs into a problem I’m unfamiliar with for a docudrama. Its fictive license posits itself as fact, which makes entire short puzzling. There’s a brief recount of Captain Kidd, his execution and his treasure island. I think I’ve heard the name before, but I didn’t know the Kidd story. These MGM “Historical…
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Technically speaking, Old Smokey is a fantastic cartoon. The animation and the backgrounds are both excellent. Hanna composes some great shots, as well as the camera “movements.” But it’s not a fun cartoon. There are no gags, because there’s real danger. A house is on fire and only The Captain (the cartoon series’s lead) can…
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Until seeing The Face Behind the Mask, I had no idea there really was a mystery man in an iron mask. I’ve seen at least two of the movie adaptations, maybe three, and am aware of the source novel… I just had no idea it was based in some kind of fact. MGM calls the…
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It’s James Whale’s “Gilligan’s Island,” only with more rear screen projection, as a plane crash in the Pacific brings a varied bunch together on a tropical island. It’s a boring sixty-five minutes–the script’s real stagy, with a two or three week (there’s a lot of problems with time) break in the middle, with the second…
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I can’t figure out–past being an inspiring melodrama–if the filmmakers were trying for anything with Boys Town. The question of its success as that inspiring melodrama is easily answered… it fails. The first act of the film deals with Spencer Tracy trying to get Boys Town, starting just as a home, started. It works pretty…
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Young Dr. Kildare is very hard to watch. Not because it’s bad or because it’s insanely rare, but because Elmo Veron is one of the worst editors I’ve ever seen on a Hollywood film. Some of the fault–for shooting too many medium-long shots–belongs to director Bucquet, Veron’s incompetent eyes and ears for film cutting makes…
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The fabulous, “has to be a set” of a small business district adjacent a canal is not the best thing about Hotel du Nord, but it’s uncomfortably close. The film’s solidly directed, with some nice composition and some nice camera movement, but it’s nowhere near enough to pluck the film from the tub of melodramatic…
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The Lady Vanishes might be the most fun Hitchcock ever lets an audience have with one of his films. Vanishes maintains a comedic sensibility throughout and for the most part, that sensibility overtakes the mystery element. Even the mystery element gives way to an action element–besides North by Northwest (which only barely qualifies) and Foreign…
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When I was in middle school, I read most of the comic strips in the newspaper, Blondie being one of them. I remember seeing, in the TV listings around the same time (probably a little later), some station running a bunch of Blondie movies at five o’clock in the morning. I missed taping them, but…
The Stop Button 