Classic Movie Review From My Collection: Rocky

It’s easy to forget after the deluge of increasingly absurd sequels through the 80s that Rocky – the original – as not only a great film, but is raw and gritty. I guess because I grew up on the sequels, the whole of the series sits in my memory as polished Hollywood filmmaking. And I even watched Rocky ten or fifteen years ago!

The movie truly feels like something out of another era. It’s low-budget, it’s seedy and dirty. Interestingly, I watched John Huston’s Fat City for the first time last year. That’s another 70s boxing flock that predates Rocky by a few years. I remember thinking how gritty it looked and felt and was shocked to find how similar the pacing and look of Rocky (at least in the first three quarters or so is to Huston’s film. I wonder if it was viewed by director John Avildsen and cinematographer James Crabe to achieve a real brown street look.

Cult Classic Movie Review: Horror of Dracula

In honor of the late Christopher Lee, whose June 7 death was reported yesterday, I took a first look at the first of his series of iconic career-defining roles as Dracula. Lee is best known to modern audiences as the wizard Saruman in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies or as the Sith Lord Count Dooku in Attack of the Clones. But in the 50s and 60s, he starred in many of Hammer Films’ British horror films.

His first turn as the vampire was in Dracula, which was re-titled Horror of Dracula in the United States to avoid confusion with the Tod Browning-directed version from 1931 starring Bela Lugosi. The Hammer Films series was the second big iteration of attempts to bring Bram Stoker’s novel to the screen. Universal had made the Lugosi film and a few follow-ups, but Lee became a new generation’s face of Count Dracula for several years. Since the late 70s pop culture has been inundated with vampire stories ranging from the grotesqueries of John Carpenter and Stephen King to the comedy of Once Bitten starring Jim Carrey and then finally landing at teenage soap opera thanks to Stephanie Meyer by way of Anne Rice.

Classic Movie Review: Lady and the Tramp

One of the Disney animated classics that I fondly remember from childhood is Lady and the Tramp. It ws re-released to theaters when I was a kid (before widespread home video releases and before Disney put them out on VHS). It felt more monumental to me then than it does now. At only 76 minutes, it is briskly paced and spare. There’s really not much story to tell and the big romance between Lady (voiced by Barbara Luddy) and the street mutt Tramp (Larry Roberts) is developed in one brief sequence when Lady is lost away from home and Tramp saves her from some unsavory dogs and takes her on a date to an Italian restaurant for the iconic spaghetti-eating scene, which is now one of the most indelibly romantic moments in cinema history.

Classic Movie Review from My Collection: March of the Wooden Soldiers

One of the great classics of my childhood is March of the Wooden Soldiers, the 1934 Laurel and Hardy comedy fantasy based on the musical Babes in Toyland. When I was growing up it was on TV every year either on Thanksgiving or sometime shortly thereafter. It marked the beginning of the Christmas season and I waited for and looked forward to it every year. It’s not a great movie. Heck, it’s not even a great comedy, not even by Laurel and Hardy standards. But there’s something so magical in the story that so easily captures the imaginations of children.

Classic Movie Review: King Kong

One of the great pleasures of revisiting the really old classics is to see how concise Hollywood storytelling used to be. Watching the original King Kong from 1933, directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack and written by James Creelaman and Ruth Rose, I was amazed by how much adventure is packed into such a tight timeframe. It’s a little more than half the running time of Peter Jackson’s bloated remake from 2005, but their stories are virtually identical and most of the set pieces have the same basis.

Modern Classic Movie Review: Aladdin

It had been a very long time since I’d last seen Disney’s Aladdin. I was inspired to take another look at it because of the tragically too soon death of Robin Williams a few months ago. I’m not sure there’s any other Disney animated film that leans so heavily on the voice talent of one particular actor the way Aladdin does. That’s not to say it has nothing else going for it, but Williams’ voice work as the genie is so memorable, it’s hard not to think of the film as a Robin Williams vehicle rather than one in  long and proud tradition of animated feature films.

Classic Movie Review: To Have and Have Not

Warer Bros. struck gold with Casablanca in 1942 and their blatant attempt to recapitalize on that success came in the form of To Have and Have Not in 1944. It was very loosely based on the Hemingway novel of the same name and bears far more resemblance to the tale of a defiantly neutral anti-hero eking out a loving in Vichy Morocco during WWII than it does to Hemingway’s tale of a tough fisherman in Cuba running contraband to Key West. The Howard Hawks film transplants the story to Vichy Martinique and has Bogart’s Harry Morgan frequent a nightclub with a friendly piano player (played by Hoagy Carmichael) and then brings in a dame, Maria Browning, played by Lauren Bacall in her first screen appearance and first of four alongside her future husband.

Like Bogart’s Rick in Casablanca, Harry tries not to take sides for or against the Vichy government. He’s a man trying to make a living until he is pulled into a deal that has him actively aiding rebels fighting against Vichy. The parallels to Casablanca are so remarkable I can’t believe it’s considered an adaptation of Hemingway’s work rather than Curtiz’s film. There’s a Captain Renard, a police inspector played by Dan Seymour, whom you can almost hear announcing, “Round up the usual suspects.”

One significant, though unnecessary, addition is Harry’s fishing boat partner, a comically bumbling alcoholic played wonderfully by Walter Brennan. Were it not for the history-making pairing of two legendary movie stars who generate some fiery on screen chemistry with the aid of fantastic and sizzling line penned by William Faulkner and Jules Furthman, there wouldn’t be much left here to call classic. To Have and Have Not should have been relegated to Hollywood’s dustbin except that Bacall made such a huge impact on the film’s director and star. Together they impacted the world and became forever solidified in the public consciousness as one of the great Hollywood couples.

Classic Movie Review: The Big Sleep

There’s a legend about the making of The Big Sleep that the filmmakers contacted author Raymond Chandler to ask who had killed the chauffeur in his Philip Marlowe detective tale. He replied that he had no idea. The story, true or not, illustrates the mind-bendingly complex plotting of this classic film noir that has enough plot twists, double crosses, and murders to fill three or four movies.

Humphrey Bogart is Marlowe, the private detective hired by the wealthy patriarch of the Sternwood family to deal with a blackmail scheme involving Carmen (Martha Vickers), the younger of his two daughters. Vivian Rutledge, the elder daughter played by Lauren Bacall, involves herself, setting off a tension-filled relationship between her and Marlow for the remainder of the film. To try to recount the plot or even the basic story would result in a senseless explanation. As directed by Howard Hawks, The Big Sleep is an exercise in style. This is one of the great classic noirs, though it does lack a number of the genres hallmarks.

Classic Movie Review: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

My memory of watching The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly the first time was that it was long and good, but felt more like work than enjoyment. Fifteen years later my view is completely different. This is a masterful piece of filmmaking, a movie that plays with genre expectations and is humorous, violently playful, serious, and all-around entertaining. I’m not sure what didn’t strike me about it the first time.

Classic Movie Review: The Magnificent Seven

There are great parallels between the 19^th century American West with its lawlessness, gunslingers, and vigilante justice and feudal Japan and its share of samurai warriors. Codes of honor are similar as are the general sense of open and unconquered land, small villages vulnerable to the strength of an oppressor, simple farmers trying to scrape by. The Japanese samurai films of the fifties borrowed and lifted tropes from the American western genre. Then a funny thing happened and the westerns started mimicking the samurai films. Seven Samurai was and still is one of the greatest of its kind. It was popular (as much as foreign films could be popular at the time) in the U.S. and it was ripe for picking by a Hollywood studio. And so the 1960 semi-classic The Magnificent Seven came to fruition.

Classic Movie Review: Airplane!

It’s been many years since I watched Airplane, that crazy comedy film from the ZAZ team of Jim Abrahams, Jerry Zucker, and David Zucker. They mastered the art of goofball parody comedy and made my youth more enjoyable than it otherwise would have been. Airplane was the one that started it all. It’s possible to point to John Landis and Kentucky Fried Movie, but that’s more akin to sketch comedy – a bunch of funny ideas loosely tossed together around a larger centerpiece parody of Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon. But as an outright genre parody, Airplane set the bar, a bar that unfortunately has been lowered as the years have gone on.

Silent Classic Movie Review: The Thief of Bagdad

Douglas Fairbanks was the original big screen cinematic swashbuckler. By the time he starred in and co-wrote The Thief of Bagdad – which is perhaps his greatest achievement – he had already played Robin Hood, D’Artagnan, and Zorro. To play a title character in a story from the 1,001 Arabian Nights was just icing on the cake. Two years ago I enjoyed Fairbanks in Robin Hood along with live musical accompaniment. At the time, I thought that movie was an impressive feat of sets, action, and stunts, but then The Thief of Bagdad, quite frankly, dwarfs it in scope.

Classic Movie Review: Duck Soup

The best comedy is anarchic. It defies rules and conventions. If it’s truly superb, it creates new ones. The Marx Brothers were just such a comedy team. Their best films date from the early years of sound. Their act depended on, in addition to great sight gags, spoken dialogue and quips. Groucho, whose visage of a thick painted-on mustache and eyebrows and those signature glasses is one of the most famous in the history of movies, rivaling only Chaplin’s Tramp, provides the great zingers. His performance depends on his flawless delivery of double entendres and bawdy comments. Chico had the persona of an Italian immigrant, speaking quickly in a thick accent. Harpo was, of course, silent, except when he played the harp in some films. They started as a vaudeville troupe, performing music, dance, and comedy numbers on stages across America. The advent of synchronized sound in motion pictures brought them the lucrative contract with Paramount to make movies as well as the chance to reach an even wider audience.

Classic Movie Review from My Collection: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

A strange alien ship sits in a forest clearing. Small brown creatures rustle around in the brush. In 1982, anyone who’d seen a commercial or trailer for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial knew the story. But keeping in mind that when movies are written, filmed, and edited there is usually no concept of the marketing campaign to come, one might have surmised through this opening that it was Steven Spielberg’s follow-up to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. We all know the story now and it’s far from it. The two films are hardly even kindred spirits, so different are they in tone and execution.

25 Years Ago This Month: Field of Dreams Movie Review

It’s amazing how, not even being a fan of baseball, I can still be moved by the nostalgia that drips off Field of Dreams. I hadn’t watched it since I was a kid, and I remembered it as being sort of overly sentimental and hackneyed, but as an adult, as a grown man who has learned to appreciate America and history and our collective cultural consciousness, Phil Alden Robinson’s adaptation of W.P. Kinsella’s fantasy novel stands out as a modern cinema classic.

From My Collection: A Modern Classic Movie Review of L.A. Confidential

What studio executive looked at the talent and material coming together on the 1997 adaptation of James Ellroy’s pulp detective novel L.A. Confidential and thought it was a good idea? On paper, it just doesn’t look like it should work. But I guess that’s proof then that studios can’t predict everything based on filmmakers’ resumes, popularity of talent and story material. In L.A. Confidential they had on their hands a 1950s period detective story with an unbelievably complex plot, one that rivals Raymond Chandler for its twists and turns and reversals. It’s true that pulp stories were steaming along in popularity in the late 90s and neo-noir was perhaps starting to make another brief resurgence.

Special 500th Movie Review: Magnolia - a Modern Classic From My Collection

In choosing a movie to watch to mark my 500^th full length review, I went with Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia because, along with Pulp Fiction and The Godfather, it’s one of my top three movies of all time. By that I mean I consider it not only a great film, but that I find it endlessly watchable. Incidentally, I chose it several weeks prior to, and started watching the night before, Philip Seymour Hoffman's death. It was merely a thematically fitting coincidence. I have tried to watch it about once a year since it came out in 1999 and have mostly kept up on that vow. I think I may have watched it twice during my five years in Spain and possibly only this time since returning two and a half years ago, but I am intimately familiar with the movie. I also chose it because so much time has passed since last we met.

Classic Movie Review: Planet of the Apes

As I’m not in the habit of keeping the lid on a secret movie ending that’s 45 years old, I suggest you stop reading now if you’ve never seen and don’t know the ending of Planet of the Apes. If you also don’t know what Rosebud is or that Holly Martens faked his own death, then you need to go back to school. Also, Janet Leigh is killed in the first 40 minutes of Psycho. I mention these things because they are such well-known and deeply engrained plot points of famous movies that it’s virtually impossible to have a discussion about them while maintaining the secret.

Classic Movie Review From My Collection: Rear Window

I never fully realized before, but only just accepted it on face value, that Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window is one hell of a movie. The two or three times I’d seen it previously I guess I sort of accepted its status as a classic great movie. This time I absorbed it fully and saw in it how its technical prowess supports a great story and ironic commentary on both marriage and on watching other people’s lives unfold on a screen from a darkened movie house.

Voyeurism as a theme runs throughout much of Hitchcock’s work, of course, but Rear Window is the one time he’s thumbing his nose at the audience for being so interested in the lives of others. The image that plays behind the opening titles is of the shades going upon on L.B. Jeffries’ windows onto the back courtyard, like the curtain rising on his personal theatrical stage or movie screen. Jeffries (James Stewart) spends the next 100 minutes or so observing his neighbors or thinking about their actions. But what begins as casual observing becomes obsessive watching and a paranoia about possible dirty deeds committed by Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr) across the way. In the end Jeffries ceases to be a passive audience member and becomes what no member of a movie audience can be: an actor in the real life (to him) drama playing out.

Classic Movie Review From My Collection: Do the Right Thing

Spike Lee’s first two feature films clearly established him as a filmmaker concerned with issues within the African American community (She’s Gotta Have It showed him also being particularly sensitive to feminist issues), but his third time at bat proved to be the magnum opus – the film that would tie together race relations on Stuyvesant Avenue in Brooklyn, a microcosm perhaps for the entire borough or even the whole city of New York. Do the Right Thing remains to this day one of his greatest accomplishments for the skill in direction and writing to bring together good entertainment value, social issues, sound filmmaking techniques, and a clearly delineated personal vision into one concise film.