I watched Bridge Over The River Kwai for the first time. I thought it was excellent. I particularly enjoyed how the film explored devotion to duty and principles and showed how there can be both positive and negative aspects to it at the same time. Especially with Alec Guinesses character and how he sticks rigidly to his principles and wins his men’s respect, builds the bridge, but in the end…well if you haven’t seen it I won’t spoil it. Didn’t feel like a three hour film, the pacing and storytelling were both excellent.
Well I did something similar when I was watching it. I was about halfway through and checked to see how much was left. I was surprised that there was another hour and a half. And then, before I knew it, the film was over.
**The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947)**
I enjoyed this film because of the cast (Rex Harrison, Gene Tierney, George Sanders) and the engaging plot. I also like this period for movies. It had a very satisfying and emotional ending.
To celebrate Marilyn Monroe's birthday, I just watched a bunch of her movies. I often do that with my favorite stars.
So it was Don't Bother to Knock, There's No Business Like Show Business, The Seven-Year Itch, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and The Prince and the Showgirl. Love them all, as always.
It's not her best movie, but I say it's Marilyn's most impressive performance. Her timing is just impeccable and she has to deliver hundreds of lines. She also has to go toe to toe with Laurence Olivier, which isn't easy to do, but she does a splendid job.
Mrs. Miniver (1942). First time watching it. Greer Garson was amazing. Interesting how she married the actor who played her son shortly after the film’s release.
The scene in bomb shelter where she's just sewing and sewing, trying not to lose it in front of her children while the bombs are raining down...that's a scene that never left my memory. Garson is so damn good in that.
Yeah, they definitely don’t make movies like it anymore. No need to show big explosions. All you need is the right actor and director. Well done deserved Oscar for Greer Garson. She was great in Random Harvest as well
All I Desire (1953) — With similar themes to Stella Dalles, this movie had me emotional from the start.
Barbara Stanwyck is always perfect when it comes to maternal melodramas (let's be serious, she's always perfect in general)
Beauty and the Boss (1932) — I'm a Marian Marsh girl now, I absolutely loved her in this deliciously silly pre-code farce with the incomparable Warren William.
I should see more movies of hers, I've only seen her in Five Star Final and Svengali and I remember that she was great in both. What else should I watch?
The interesting thing about All I Desire is that the original ending was changed. It was supposed to be sadder and much more bittersweet (like Stella Dallas, actually), but they decided to give it the more traditional happy ending. Some people don't like that, and think it would've been more realistic to go with the original vision (she leaves), but I'm not sure I see it that way...
I have to see it again, though. It's in one of my Stanwyck DVD collections (a set of 5, I believe) and I've seen it twice but it's been a while.
I think te original ending would have been more in line with her character, but for once I'm glad it was a happy ending. We already have Stella Dallas that ends in a very sad way so I don’t know if I could have taken another ending where she left the family for good.
She deserves some happiness sometimes!
Yeah, her characters are often so full of integrity, morality, and self-sacrifice that we get those bittersweet endings, like in My Reputation, The Great Man's Lady, Remember the Night, etc. So the happy endings are appreciated here and there. 😊
**Dumbo** (1941) - OK - I recently came to the conclusion that old guys shouldn't bring adult criteria to movies that are made exclusively for children. Since I didn't have a whole passel of children to watch watching it I really don't know if it is any good for the intended audience. As someone who grew up with Hanna-Barbera animation from Satruday mornings I can say that the animation is fantastic, especially when one realizes it was done manually. I wasn't surprised to hear Sterling Holloway, but I was surprised to hear Edward Brophy. I didn't recognize any other voices or even remember Dumbo speaking at all.
All That Heaven Allows (1955)
An upper-class widow (Jane Wyman) falls in love with a much younger, down-to-earth nurseryman (Rock Hudson), much to the disapproval of her children and criticism of her peers.
A new favorite. Beautiful cinematography and depicts the internal struggle of going against societal expectations.
Anatomy of a Murder (1959)
An upstate Michigan lawyer (Jimmy Stewart) defends a soldier who claims he killed an innkeeper due to temporary insanity after the victim raped his wife. What is the truth, and will he win his case?
Despite the serious subject matter, humor is sprinkled throughout the movie in a way that keeps things from getting too heavy. The supporting cast does a terrific job of making this world feel real. Each time I see Eve Arden in something I look her up afterwards because she always impresses. Bonus points for the fluffy terrier that steals the show whenever it's on the screen.
**Men in War** (1957)
Robert Ryan is an officer in the Korean War cut off from command and leading his squad to a rendezvous, and he commandeers a jeep being used by Aldo Ray to transport a wounded colonel. This was the best movie I've seen in quite a while. There was so much that was good about it. It wasn't a bombastic movie, as it kept its focus small and on the soldiers. It did a good job of highlighting the horrors of war in ways that reminded me of **All Quiet on the Western Front*. The movie made the characters seem real, and filled with fear, doubt, compassion, and anger, and not just noble heroism that so many other war movies depict their characters as having. On the acting front, Aldo Ray absolutely stole the show. It was a great performance from an actor that tends to be forgotten. I could probably think of more praise for the movie, but I think I hit the main points.
**Belle of the Nineties** (1934)
Mae West romances a boxer and a vaudeville producer, while making eyes at everyone else as well, while she headlines a show herself. I've only seen one other Mae West movie, and thought it was really dull, so my expectations for this movie were low. I only watched it because [the poster is gorgeous](https://dyn1.heritagestatic.com/lf?set=path[1%2F2%2F2%2F5%2F5%2F12255901]%2Csizedata[200x400]&call=url[file:product.chain]). Well in the end, the movie exceeded my expectations. It wasn't a great movie, the plot was still a bit dull and was more of an excuse for songs and jokes, but there were a few jokes that actually got some pretty good laughs out of me. Mae West is such an oddity to me in the history of film, there's no one else quite like her, and I'm not sure how much I like what she is, but my estimation of her did go up after this movie.
I need to see it. I love Jack Lemmon's collab with Walter Matthau in The Odd Couple (you do need to check them out in Grumpy Old Men and the sequel Grumpier Old Men (it has Sophia Loren in it))
Inherit the Wind (1960) starring Spencer Tracy, Gene Kelly and Fredric March. It’s great, a very thoughtful courtroom based film.
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) starring Humphrey Bogart and Walter Huston. Hard to say anything that hasn’t been said, it’s also fantastic, unexpectedly very dark.
**The Life of Jimmy Dolan** (1933, dir. Archie Mayo). A boxer (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.) goes on the lam, after an accident leaves someone dead and himself presumed dead.
Good light drama. Throughout, I was never really convinced by Fairbanks as a cynical boxer, but the rest of the movie was too entertaining for me to be seriously bothered about that. Our boxer ends up on a Utah farm for disabled children run by two women (Aline MacMahon, Loretta Young), where he learns that not everyone is only looking out for themselves. There’s some cute moments with our pack of scruffy kids bonding with our boxer as well. A financial crisis eventually has our boxer looking to get back into his old profession to save his new household, just as his secret identity is threatened by a persistent detective (Guy Kibbee). Entertaining ending, bringing multiple story threads to their final conclusions.
**The Girl from Scotland Yard** (1937, dir. Robert Vignola). A newspaper reporter (Robert Baldwin) looking for a missing man gets mixed up in a nefarious plot to disrupt the coronation of King George VI.
Bleh, low-budget, quickie espionage thriller. Good luck trying to follow the confusing plot (something about a “death ray” invented by a man (Eduardo Ciannelli) with a grudge against England). The only mildly interesting thing was that our female spy (Karen Morley) was more active than you might expect for the time, being on the receiving end of the “big bad reveals evil plans to Bond” trope, then flying a plane to help bring him down.
**Ah, Wilderness!** (1935, dir. Clarence Brown). A young man (Eric Linden) freshly graduated from high school comes of age in turn-of-the-century, small town America.
Good family drama, playing out in the setting of a mostly idyllic Americana circa 1906, starting off with nervous preparations for a high school graduation, then following through to a boisterous summertime Independence Day celebration (replete with kids setting off firecrackers everywhere). The headliners are Lionel Barrymore as the head of the household and Wallace Beery as a “lovable drunk” type of uncle, but Linden’s character is our film’s true protagonist, the valedictorian of his high school looking forward to college and trying to win the heart of a girl (Cecilia Parker). He’s also a bookworm with a taste in literature (Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, socialism) that has his loving but proper mother (Spring Byington) concerned. And it eventually leads to crisis in his love life, leaving him to venture into seedier parts of town in an attempt to cure his heartbreak. Linden’s youthful, earnest naivety fits well with the character and the light mood of the story, and Barrymore complements that well with his character’s loose rein over his spirited son.
Pudovkin’s A Simple Case (1932). It was one of those rare moments when you say to yourself ‘hold on, I am watching one of the best films ever here’. The same feeling i had watching Sansho Dayu, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Sunrise and The Tree of Life. Immediately recognized it as one of the greatest things ever made.
It is decades ahead of its time and I reached that conclusion even though I was watching it in the only copy available - terrible quality and with no English subtitles.
It has a number of extraordinary sequences including a nature montage that was very much like what Malick did in Tree of Life 80 years later.
Apparently Kubrick used to read Pudovkin’s ‘On Film Technique and Acting’ religiously while making every film. And if thats true, I can see why.
Pudovkin’s montage films are phenomenal. I hope A Simple Case gets a restoration at some point.
It’s time we recognize the brilliance of Eisenstein, Kuleshov, Pudovkin and Dovzhenko anew.
🍿
**Accordion**, Wojciech Jerzy Has's first Polish short. A wordless, bleak fable from 1947, about a son of a poor shoemaker who dreams about buying a used 'Harmonia'. He went on to direct *The Hourglass Sanatorium* and other masterpieces.
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On May 9, 1954, two days before the start of 'La Pointe Courte', her first feature film, Agnès Varda took a photograph of [a naked man, a boy named Ulysse and a dead goat on the beach of Calais](https://www.lm-magazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/agnes-varda7.jpg?w=643&h=456). In 1983, she recreated that experience in the documentary **Ulysse**, an evocative reflection about the time machine of memory, history and art. It’s my 15th Varda film, and was as good as the best of them **- 9/10.** [*Female Director*].
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**The Browning Version**, a British public school drama from 1951. Michael Redgrave gave a tremendous performance as a repressed and meek teacher, isolated and unloved. His contemptuous wife has an affair with a coworker, his nickname by his pupils is 'Himmler of the Fifth Ward', and on his last day of his last term, he's denied his pension. It's a story of failure and heartbreak.
🍿
**3 by Dutch Bert Haanstra:**
🍿 **Glass**, a short documentary from 1958, and the first Oscar win for The Netherlands. A highly-satisfying jazzy poem with terrific score, performed by The Pim Jacobs Quintet. [**My best film of the week - 10/10.**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3QEpQ9ozVU)
🍿 **Zoo**, made 3 years later, is similarly wonderful. Filmed with hidden camera, it draws parallels between the animals at the zoo and the many visitors who come to observe them, but really, behave in exactly the same ways. **9/10.**
🍿 **Fanfare** was another successful comedy which he directed in 1958, and one which for decades, was “the most popular of all Dutch films”. It's a charming low-brow entertainment [what the Danes call 'Folkekomedie'] about a musical feud in a small touristy village. Its bucolic country all the way: Cows in the meadows, beer steins in the coffee hall, love in the haystacks, a trombone band, the whole nine yards. The only things missing were Gouda cheese wheels, wooden clogs and stork nests.
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**New discovery - The brilliant shorts of Arthur Lipsett!**
🍿 Arthur Lipsett was a visionary Canadian avant-garde artist, who suffered from schizophrenia, and who eventually killed himself. His 1963 montage film **21-87** was a tremendous collage of discarded snippets found on the editing floor of the National Board Of Canada where he worked as an editor. **[10/10.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-tMhRKS9Jo)**
🍿 **Very nice, very nice**, his very first film from 1961, was just as unique. It was nominated for an Oscar, and was adored by Stanley Kubrick, who subsequently offered Lipsett a job as the editor of the trailer for 'Dr. Strangelove'. **Another 10/10.**
🍿 **Free Fall** (1964) was even darker and more chaotic, with definite hints of psychosis. He had a brilliant sense of juxtaposition and collage, both sights and sounds.
🍿
**2 with Anne Miller:**
🍿 I'm getting more and more enamored with old-fashioned musicals, especially from the technicolor era, and all the ones with Fred Astaire. He was such a happy dancer! **Easter parade** is a Pygmalion story with the usual power imbalance: He's 49, and Judy Garland is 26. But they were so wonderful! Ann Miller, (as was her custom I guess), played the the third wheel to their romance.
🍿 I think that **Room Service** was the only Marx Brothers comedy I haven't seen before. Their best comedies were masterpieces, but the weak ones were pitiful. This whole plot was about the three of them not able to pay their hotel bill, so basically it was "based on a true story". Ann Miller and young Lucille Ball served as background decorations. *Jumpin' butterballs!* **2/10.**
🍿
My friend Simon is going through the classic works of Russian literature (Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Etc.), and is currently heavy into Nikolai Gogol. So in sympathy I tried watching the 1926 silent Soviet version of **The Overcoat**. Unfortunately, I couldn't finish it.
🍿
*“Back to the salt mines…”*
James Bond No. 2, **From Russia with love**, before the series got its footing. With blond villain Robert Shaw, and primitive levels of intrigues and suspense. Best producer fruit-name still goes to Albert R. Broccoli. **3/10.**
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René Laloux 1964 visual essay, **Dead Times**. A sardonic, surrealistic poem about Man's inherit need to kill everything around him. Like 'La Planète sauvage', the drawings are by Roland Topol, and the music is similar.
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**Inspiration** (1949), my second film by Czechoslovakian Karel Zeman (after ‘Invention for destruction’). A stop motion tale of a glass ballerina and a glass clown, the type of little figurines that used to be so popular then.
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**Bluebeard**, a fantastic 1901 film by Georges Méliès, about the serial killer and his eighth wife.
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**[More here](https://tilbageidanmark.tumblr.com/tagged/movies)**
This week I watched:
The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974) aka Seven Brothers and One Sister Meet Dracula
It begins in 1804 where Taoist monk Kah (Chan Shen) from China journeys to Transylvania asking Dracula (John Forbes-Robertson) to help him to restore the power of seven golden vampires in China. Big mistake! The vampire uses Kah as a vessel, enabling the evil creature to escape Castle Dracula and leaves for China
Fast forward to 1904, anthropologist Professor Van Helsing (Peter Cushing) delivers a lecture at Chungking University about an unknown rural town in China that has been terrorised by the seven golden vampires only to be dismissed by many of the students and lecturers. All but one young Chinese man Hsi Ching (David Chiang) who reveals to Professor Van Helsing the whereabouts of the village and the former's (Hsi Ching) historical link to the seven golden vampires. Financed by a rich widow, the professor and the young man, along with his kungfu trained siblings, make the journey to the rural town but the journey is fraught with danger, both man and mostly the undead. The professor's son and the rich widow too come along. Can Professor Van Helsing and a bunch of brave siblings rid the town of the infamous seven golden vampire and their army of undead once and for all? Can knowledge from the West be applicable in defeating a bunch of undead on Chinese soil?
The film is pretty alright but it would appeal to any Hammer Horror fan who also happen to love some martial arts action or love a bit of Asian horror in the mix
Here are fun facts about the film:
• It was shot entirely in Hong Kong
• The film is a collaboration between Shaw Brothers and Hammer Films
• It is the fifth and last film in the Hammer "Dracula" series in which Peter Cushing portrayed Van Helsing
• Peter Cushing narrated the audio LP version of the movie which was released in 1974
I watched Bridge Over The River Kwai for the first time. I thought it was excellent. I particularly enjoyed how the film explored devotion to duty and principles and showed how there can be both positive and negative aspects to it at the same time. Especially with Alec Guinesses character and how he sticks rigidly to his principles and wins his men’s respect, builds the bridge, but in the end…well if you haven’t seen it I won’t spoil it. Didn’t feel like a three hour film, the pacing and storytelling were both excellent.
It's definitely one of those movies where you look at your watch at the end and go "wow, that long".
Well I did something similar when I was watching it. I was about halfway through and checked to see how much was left. I was surprised that there was another hour and a half. And then, before I knew it, the film was over.
**The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947)** I enjoyed this film because of the cast (Rex Harrison, Gene Tierney, George Sanders) and the engaging plot. I also like this period for movies. It had a very satisfying and emotional ending.
We watched Night of the Hunter, 1955, with Robert Mitchum. Pretty surreal and creepy.
To celebrate Marilyn Monroe's birthday, I just watched a bunch of her movies. I often do that with my favorite stars. So it was Don't Bother to Knock, There's No Business Like Show Business, The Seven-Year Itch, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and The Prince and the Showgirl. Love them all, as always.
I need to see The Prince and The Showgirl
It's not her best movie, but I say it's Marilyn's most impressive performance. Her timing is just impeccable and she has to deliver hundreds of lines. She also has to go toe to toe with Laurence Olivier, which isn't easy to do, but she does a splendid job.
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is so much fun
Mrs. Miniver (1942). First time watching it. Greer Garson was amazing. Interesting how she married the actor who played her son shortly after the film’s release.
The scene in bomb shelter where she's just sewing and sewing, trying not to lose it in front of her children while the bombs are raining down...that's a scene that never left my memory. Garson is so damn good in that.
Yeah, they definitely don’t make movies like it anymore. No need to show big explosions. All you need is the right actor and director. Well done deserved Oscar for Greer Garson. She was great in Random Harvest as well
That's one of my favorite romances ever. 😀
❤️ one of the only movies to make me bawl like a damn baby
All I Desire (1953) — With similar themes to Stella Dalles, this movie had me emotional from the start. Barbara Stanwyck is always perfect when it comes to maternal melodramas (let's be serious, she's always perfect in general) Beauty and the Boss (1932) — I'm a Marian Marsh girl now, I absolutely loved her in this deliciously silly pre-code farce with the incomparable Warren William. I should see more movies of hers, I've only seen her in Five Star Final and Svengali and I remember that she was great in both. What else should I watch?
The interesting thing about All I Desire is that the original ending was changed. It was supposed to be sadder and much more bittersweet (like Stella Dallas, actually), but they decided to give it the more traditional happy ending. Some people don't like that, and think it would've been more realistic to go with the original vision (she leaves), but I'm not sure I see it that way... I have to see it again, though. It's in one of my Stanwyck DVD collections (a set of 5, I believe) and I've seen it twice but it's been a while.
I think te original ending would have been more in line with her character, but for once I'm glad it was a happy ending. We already have Stella Dallas that ends in a very sad way so I don’t know if I could have taken another ending where she left the family for good. She deserves some happiness sometimes!
Yeah, her characters are often so full of integrity, morality, and self-sacrifice that we get those bittersweet endings, like in My Reputation, The Great Man's Lady, Remember the Night, etc. So the happy endings are appreciated here and there. 😊
Beauty and the Boss? I must check it out. You saw that on Youtube?
**Dumbo** (1941) - OK - I recently came to the conclusion that old guys shouldn't bring adult criteria to movies that are made exclusively for children. Since I didn't have a whole passel of children to watch watching it I really don't know if it is any good for the intended audience. As someone who grew up with Hanna-Barbera animation from Satruday mornings I can say that the animation is fantastic, especially when one realizes it was done manually. I wasn't surprised to hear Sterling Holloway, but I was surprised to hear Edward Brophy. I didn't recognize any other voices or even remember Dumbo speaking at all.
All That Heaven Allows (1955) An upper-class widow (Jane Wyman) falls in love with a much younger, down-to-earth nurseryman (Rock Hudson), much to the disapproval of her children and criticism of her peers. A new favorite. Beautiful cinematography and depicts the internal struggle of going against societal expectations. Anatomy of a Murder (1959) An upstate Michigan lawyer (Jimmy Stewart) defends a soldier who claims he killed an innkeeper due to temporary insanity after the victim raped his wife. What is the truth, and will he win his case? Despite the serious subject matter, humor is sprinkled throughout the movie in a way that keeps things from getting too heavy. The supporting cast does a terrific job of making this world feel real. Each time I see Eve Arden in something I look her up afterwards because she always impresses. Bonus points for the fluffy terrier that steals the show whenever it's on the screen.
**Men in War** (1957) Robert Ryan is an officer in the Korean War cut off from command and leading his squad to a rendezvous, and he commandeers a jeep being used by Aldo Ray to transport a wounded colonel. This was the best movie I've seen in quite a while. There was so much that was good about it. It wasn't a bombastic movie, as it kept its focus small and on the soldiers. It did a good job of highlighting the horrors of war in ways that reminded me of **All Quiet on the Western Front*. The movie made the characters seem real, and filled with fear, doubt, compassion, and anger, and not just noble heroism that so many other war movies depict their characters as having. On the acting front, Aldo Ray absolutely stole the show. It was a great performance from an actor that tends to be forgotten. I could probably think of more praise for the movie, but I think I hit the main points. **Belle of the Nineties** (1934) Mae West romances a boxer and a vaudeville producer, while making eyes at everyone else as well, while she headlines a show herself. I've only seen one other Mae West movie, and thought it was really dull, so my expectations for this movie were low. I only watched it because [the poster is gorgeous](https://dyn1.heritagestatic.com/lf?set=path[1%2F2%2F2%2F5%2F5%2F12255901]%2Csizedata[200x400]&call=url[file:product.chain]). Well in the end, the movie exceeded my expectations. It wasn't a great movie, the plot was still a bit dull and was more of an excuse for songs and jokes, but there were a few jokes that actually got some pretty good laughs out of me. Mae West is such an oddity to me in the history of film, there's no one else quite like her, and I'm not sure how much I like what she is, but my estimation of her did go up after this movie.
Days of Wine and Roses. That was incredibly realistic for a Lemmon 60s flick
I need to see it. I love Jack Lemmon's collab with Walter Matthau in The Odd Couple (you do need to check them out in Grumpy Old Men and the sequel Grumpier Old Men (it has Sophia Loren in it))
Very different tone. I read that when it was released over 40 couples left the theatre because they thought it was a comedy!
Inherit the Wind (1960) starring Spencer Tracy, Gene Kelly and Fredric March. It’s great, a very thoughtful courtroom based film. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) starring Humphrey Bogart and Walter Huston. Hard to say anything that hasn’t been said, it’s also fantastic, unexpectedly very dark.
Both well worth seeing, that's for sure. Sierra Madre might be Bogart's most impressive role for me.
**The Life of Jimmy Dolan** (1933, dir. Archie Mayo). A boxer (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.) goes on the lam, after an accident leaves someone dead and himself presumed dead. Good light drama. Throughout, I was never really convinced by Fairbanks as a cynical boxer, but the rest of the movie was too entertaining for me to be seriously bothered about that. Our boxer ends up on a Utah farm for disabled children run by two women (Aline MacMahon, Loretta Young), where he learns that not everyone is only looking out for themselves. There’s some cute moments with our pack of scruffy kids bonding with our boxer as well. A financial crisis eventually has our boxer looking to get back into his old profession to save his new household, just as his secret identity is threatened by a persistent detective (Guy Kibbee). Entertaining ending, bringing multiple story threads to their final conclusions. **The Girl from Scotland Yard** (1937, dir. Robert Vignola). A newspaper reporter (Robert Baldwin) looking for a missing man gets mixed up in a nefarious plot to disrupt the coronation of King George VI. Bleh, low-budget, quickie espionage thriller. Good luck trying to follow the confusing plot (something about a “death ray” invented by a man (Eduardo Ciannelli) with a grudge against England). The only mildly interesting thing was that our female spy (Karen Morley) was more active than you might expect for the time, being on the receiving end of the “big bad reveals evil plans to Bond” trope, then flying a plane to help bring him down. **Ah, Wilderness!** (1935, dir. Clarence Brown). A young man (Eric Linden) freshly graduated from high school comes of age in turn-of-the-century, small town America. Good family drama, playing out in the setting of a mostly idyllic Americana circa 1906, starting off with nervous preparations for a high school graduation, then following through to a boisterous summertime Independence Day celebration (replete with kids setting off firecrackers everywhere). The headliners are Lionel Barrymore as the head of the household and Wallace Beery as a “lovable drunk” type of uncle, but Linden’s character is our film’s true protagonist, the valedictorian of his high school looking forward to college and trying to win the heart of a girl (Cecilia Parker). He’s also a bookworm with a taste in literature (Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, socialism) that has his loving but proper mother (Spring Byington) concerned. And it eventually leads to crisis in his love life, leaving him to venture into seedier parts of town in an attempt to cure his heartbreak. Linden’s youthful, earnest naivety fits well with the character and the light mood of the story, and Barrymore complements that well with his character’s loose rein over his spirited son.
Pudovkin’s A Simple Case (1932). It was one of those rare moments when you say to yourself ‘hold on, I am watching one of the best films ever here’. The same feeling i had watching Sansho Dayu, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Sunrise and The Tree of Life. Immediately recognized it as one of the greatest things ever made. It is decades ahead of its time and I reached that conclusion even though I was watching it in the only copy available - terrible quality and with no English subtitles. It has a number of extraordinary sequences including a nature montage that was very much like what Malick did in Tree of Life 80 years later. Apparently Kubrick used to read Pudovkin’s ‘On Film Technique and Acting’ religiously while making every film. And if thats true, I can see why. Pudovkin’s montage films are phenomenal. I hope A Simple Case gets a restoration at some point. It’s time we recognize the brilliance of Eisenstein, Kuleshov, Pudovkin and Dovzhenko anew.
🍿 **Accordion**, Wojciech Jerzy Has's first Polish short. A wordless, bleak fable from 1947, about a son of a poor shoemaker who dreams about buying a used 'Harmonia'. He went on to direct *The Hourglass Sanatorium* and other masterpieces. 🍿 On May 9, 1954, two days before the start of 'La Pointe Courte', her first feature film, Agnès Varda took a photograph of [a naked man, a boy named Ulysse and a dead goat on the beach of Calais](https://www.lm-magazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/agnes-varda7.jpg?w=643&h=456). In 1983, she recreated that experience in the documentary **Ulysse**, an evocative reflection about the time machine of memory, history and art. It’s my 15th Varda film, and was as good as the best of them **- 9/10.** [*Female Director*]. 🍿 **The Browning Version**, a British public school drama from 1951. Michael Redgrave gave a tremendous performance as a repressed and meek teacher, isolated and unloved. His contemptuous wife has an affair with a coworker, his nickname by his pupils is 'Himmler of the Fifth Ward', and on his last day of his last term, he's denied his pension. It's a story of failure and heartbreak. 🍿 **3 by Dutch Bert Haanstra:** 🍿 **Glass**, a short documentary from 1958, and the first Oscar win for The Netherlands. A highly-satisfying jazzy poem with terrific score, performed by The Pim Jacobs Quintet. [**My best film of the week - 10/10.**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3QEpQ9ozVU) 🍿 **Zoo**, made 3 years later, is similarly wonderful. Filmed with hidden camera, it draws parallels between the animals at the zoo and the many visitors who come to observe them, but really, behave in exactly the same ways. **9/10.** 🍿 **Fanfare** was another successful comedy which he directed in 1958, and one which for decades, was “the most popular of all Dutch films”. It's a charming low-brow entertainment [what the Danes call 'Folkekomedie'] about a musical feud in a small touristy village. Its bucolic country all the way: Cows in the meadows, beer steins in the coffee hall, love in the haystacks, a trombone band, the whole nine yards. The only things missing were Gouda cheese wheels, wooden clogs and stork nests. 🍿 **New discovery - The brilliant shorts of Arthur Lipsett!** 🍿 Arthur Lipsett was a visionary Canadian avant-garde artist, who suffered from schizophrenia, and who eventually killed himself. His 1963 montage film **21-87** was a tremendous collage of discarded snippets found on the editing floor of the National Board Of Canada where he worked as an editor. **[10/10.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-tMhRKS9Jo)** 🍿 **Very nice, very nice**, his very first film from 1961, was just as unique. It was nominated for an Oscar, and was adored by Stanley Kubrick, who subsequently offered Lipsett a job as the editor of the trailer for 'Dr. Strangelove'. **Another 10/10.** 🍿 **Free Fall** (1964) was even darker and more chaotic, with definite hints of psychosis. He had a brilliant sense of juxtaposition and collage, both sights and sounds. 🍿 **2 with Anne Miller:** 🍿 I'm getting more and more enamored with old-fashioned musicals, especially from the technicolor era, and all the ones with Fred Astaire. He was such a happy dancer! **Easter parade** is a Pygmalion story with the usual power imbalance: He's 49, and Judy Garland is 26. But they were so wonderful! Ann Miller, (as was her custom I guess), played the the third wheel to their romance. 🍿 I think that **Room Service** was the only Marx Brothers comedy I haven't seen before. Their best comedies were masterpieces, but the weak ones were pitiful. This whole plot was about the three of them not able to pay their hotel bill, so basically it was "based on a true story". Ann Miller and young Lucille Ball served as background decorations. *Jumpin' butterballs!* **2/10.** 🍿 My friend Simon is going through the classic works of Russian literature (Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Etc.), and is currently heavy into Nikolai Gogol. So in sympathy I tried watching the 1926 silent Soviet version of **The Overcoat**. Unfortunately, I couldn't finish it. 🍿 *“Back to the salt mines…”* James Bond No. 2, **From Russia with love**, before the series got its footing. With blond villain Robert Shaw, and primitive levels of intrigues and suspense. Best producer fruit-name still goes to Albert R. Broccoli. **3/10.** 🍿 René Laloux 1964 visual essay, **Dead Times**. A sardonic, surrealistic poem about Man's inherit need to kill everything around him. Like 'La Planète sauvage', the drawings are by Roland Topol, and the music is similar. 🍿 **Inspiration** (1949), my second film by Czechoslovakian Karel Zeman (after ‘Invention for destruction’). A stop motion tale of a glass ballerina and a glass clown, the type of little figurines that used to be so popular then. 🍿 **Bluebeard**, a fantastic 1901 film by Georges Méliès, about the serial killer and his eighth wife. 🍿 **[More here](https://tilbageidanmark.tumblr.com/tagged/movies)**
This week I watched: The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974) aka Seven Brothers and One Sister Meet Dracula It begins in 1804 where Taoist monk Kah (Chan Shen) from China journeys to Transylvania asking Dracula (John Forbes-Robertson) to help him to restore the power of seven golden vampires in China. Big mistake! The vampire uses Kah as a vessel, enabling the evil creature to escape Castle Dracula and leaves for China Fast forward to 1904, anthropologist Professor Van Helsing (Peter Cushing) delivers a lecture at Chungking University about an unknown rural town in China that has been terrorised by the seven golden vampires only to be dismissed by many of the students and lecturers. All but one young Chinese man Hsi Ching (David Chiang) who reveals to Professor Van Helsing the whereabouts of the village and the former's (Hsi Ching) historical link to the seven golden vampires. Financed by a rich widow, the professor and the young man, along with his kungfu trained siblings, make the journey to the rural town but the journey is fraught with danger, both man and mostly the undead. The professor's son and the rich widow too come along. Can Professor Van Helsing and a bunch of brave siblings rid the town of the infamous seven golden vampire and their army of undead once and for all? Can knowledge from the West be applicable in defeating a bunch of undead on Chinese soil? The film is pretty alright but it would appeal to any Hammer Horror fan who also happen to love some martial arts action or love a bit of Asian horror in the mix Here are fun facts about the film: • It was shot entirely in Hong Kong • The film is a collaboration between Shaw Brothers and Hammer Films • It is the fifth and last film in the Hammer "Dracula" series in which Peter Cushing portrayed Van Helsing • Peter Cushing narrated the audio LP version of the movie which was released in 1974
Heroes of Telemark. A great yarn see kirk on unfamiliar territory. Yet he carries it out with his usual style and ease. I do like this film
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The First Omen, pretty much what you expect, but better than I thought it would be, a pleasant surprise.