Category Archive: Classic Film
All About Eve
"Too bad, we're gonna miss the third act. They're going to play it off stage."
(Written & Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz) (1950) This curlicued lass, Eve (Anne Baxter) shows her pathological ambition to act from a mile away, but the Theatre Folk are too wrapped-up in themselves to notice. Margot (Bette Davis) notices all right, but too late. Addison DeWitt gets it immediately though; he’s a critic after The Varnished Culture’s heart (soft-hearted though he is), and he is prepared to help the fledgling, albeit at a very high ticket price. This is the granddaddy of bitchy theatre films, a wall of highly-strung wit that both diminishes a film like Birdman yet makes that inferior piece possible. It features…
Continue Reading →Casablanca
"Forget Paris"
(Dir. Michael Curtiz) (1942) We recall this classic-of-classics in the wake of the horror in Paris. The soccer fans leaving the bombed-out stadium did it: Marchons, marchons! Qu’un sang impur Abreuve nos sillons ! (Take note, Australia: La Marseillaise – now, that’s a national anthem for you). And in the best ‘B’ film ever made*, Paul Henreid leads the band and crowd in Rick’s Café in a rousing version, drowning out nasty Conrad Veidt’s Teutonic warbling “Die Wacht am Rhein”. [*David Shipman (“The Great Movie Stars”) called Casablanca “probably the best bad film ever made”]. What a cast – Humphrey Bogart as Rick…
Continue Reading →Hud
'Let's dip our bread in that gravy while it's still warm."
(Dir. Martin Ritt) (1963) Larry (Lonesome Dove) McMurtry’s novel Horseman, Pass By becomes Paul Newman’s best role, as cattleman Hud Bannon, all ‘barbed-wire soul’ who just can’t feel or do good, lusting after housekeeper Alma, rejecting noble father Homer and corrupting nephew Lonnie. A relentless tale of the harshness of life on the land, with a bitter foot-and-mouth twist, Ritt’s brilliant and stark production makes his version of Spy Who Came in from the Cold look like The Sound of Music. Great work by all, especially Newman, Patricia Neal incomparable as Alma, and Melvyn Douglas monolithic as the old man. “You’re an…
Continue Reading →Macbeth
"Out, damned spot!" (Polanski version)
(by William Shakespeare) (1606) (Dir. Justin Kurzel) (2015) (Advance screening, Adelaide 29/9/15) [Films noted in passing: (Dir. Roman Polanski) (1971), (Dir. Orson Welles) (1948)] The Scottish Play is the Bard’s tightest, tautest, most nightmarish work, It contains his best poetry – in fact, almost every line is superb and has no waste. It’s personae encapsulate all of Freud and his successors, but says it better. Macbeth lays bare for us the fatal links whereby valour and honour, under the strains of chance, imagination and “vaulting ambition”, lead to evil acts, and ultimately, overweening psychopathy – a manual showing us how one good, or bad, step downwards leads to the next, and…
Continue Reading →Death in Venice
A template of death
(by Thomas Mann) (1912) (Dir. Luchino Visconti) (1971) Gustave von Aschenbach, an artist questing intensely after spiritual perfection, arrives, exhausted, unhappy, at the end of his tether, at the Lido and is entranced by a family staying at the same hotel, including handsome Tadzio in his little sailor suit. Shaken by his depth of feeling, Aschenbach attempts to skip town but upon a hitch in his arrangements, he decides to return to where he was smitten, and to embrace his doom with a light heart. Mann’s novella is a polished gem, a short and sweet epitome of a bitter quest to…
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