A very special birthday for Mr. Louis Armstrong with We Have All The Time in the World
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For this week’s selection, I did films that were explicitly lit about Sherlock Holmes. Or to be more precise, films about reasonable facsimiles of Sherlock Holmes but really aren’t fooling anybody.
On a nice side note these were pretty obscure titles and definitely put the breadth of Scarecrow’s collection to the test.
Kudos.
The first film on my list was They Might Be Giants starring George C Scott. (In case anyone is wondering this is the film that the band got their name from) Scott plays Justin Playfair, a former lawyer, who, since his wife died, has become convinced he is Sherlock Holmes. His Brother tries to get him committed, (partially for his own good and partially to get control of his fortune) He is taken into the hands of Dr. Mildred Watson (Joanne Woodward) and now that Holmes has his Watson he can now solve his greatest mystery… Whatever it is.
This was a fun little film based loosely on one of the main premises of Don Quixote. “Sure, we know they’re windmills… but they MIGHT be giants”. Following a series of strange clues (such as bags of garbage) Justin leads Mildred down the rabbit hole to a different perspective where disenfranchised mad people live in their own world and are quite happy about it, thank you very much.
I enjoyed this film. Sure it was short and mushy, it was a lot of fun. To put this in very geeky gamer terms I kept imagining this to be a story about a VERY benign coterie of Malkavians from the World of Darkness… and Scott and Woodward play off each other very well.
My next film is the German 1933 film, The Man Who Was Sherlock Holmes. Tells the story of two con artists (or at least we think they’re con artists) Morris Flynn (Hans Albers) and Macky McMacpherson (Heinz Rühmann) who try to pass themselves off as Holmes and Watson (in their defense they don’t SAY they’re Holmes and Watson… they just get on the train dressed in a deerstalker smoking a pipe and carrying a violin when they give their real names… they just don’t correct anyone who assumes they’re Holmes and Watson in disguise.
This gets them free passage on the hotel and free room and board at a fancy hotel. But it also gets them the attention of the police who want their help with a counterfeiting ring.
I’m not sure if I can truly recommend this film, but it was fairly well done, with solid comic performances from the leads, and perfectly enjoyable.
Regarding where and when it was made, the cynic in me kept regarding it as a propaganda film, as if it was trying to tell me “See? All of us Germans are happy people! Nothing to see here!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rqzl5fY3_Kw
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I’ve been a fan of Doug Walker’s Nostalgia Critic page for some time. While I don’t pretend to agree with him all the time, his analysis is always good and his points are sound. One of my favorite series he did was something called “Old vs New” where he compared a well-known film and it’s equally well-known remake and decides which was the better. Of course, the only problem with this format, as I saw it, was new had to mean recent which left out a whole lot of good examples. Since I don’t have that problem, I thought I’d give the format a try without that restriction, starting with one of the great classics of the mobster genre, Scarface.
I was drawn to the original Scarface as a way to continue my way down my list of Howard Hawks films (though I was surprised by some of the details since I’m pretty sure I was getting it mixed up with Little Caesar)
Scarface, based on a novel of the same name by Armitage Trail, is very loosely based on the life of Al Capone and tells the story of Antonio “Tony” Camonte, (played by Paul Muni,) a soldier in the the Southside mob run by mafioso John “Johnny” Lovo, (played by Osgood Perkins) He quickly climbs in the ranks killing Lovo after a failed assassination attempt and takes his place.
Everything begins to fall apart when Tony kills his chief lieutenant, Guino Rinaldo, (George Raft) after he married Tony’s sister Cesca, (Ann Dvorak). After this it’s all downhill with him being hunted down by the police, killing him in a climactic firefight.
I won’t call this my favorite Hawks film, but it is still incredibly good. It’s a fine cast led Muni who plays Tony as a ruthless animal who needs to be put down. My only problem with it is it’s done as a blatant morality play about how one should not take up a life of crime and the sermon frequently weighs down the plot.
Brian De Palma’s 1983 remake, with Al Pacino as Antonio “Tony” Montana, updates the plot to the 1980s with the Mariel boatlift with Tony as one of the many criminals Castro threw into the mix.
Thrown into a Miami refugee camp he is released by drug dealer Frank Lopez (Robert Loggia) in exchange for assassinating a former Cuban government official. He quickly rises through the ranks until he’s trusted enough to go on business trips to make deals with a Bolivian drug lord Alejandro Sosa (played by Paul Shenar )
This leads growing mistrust from Lopez until he finally has him killed. When this fails Tony kills him and takes over the operation.
His rise to power is swift until he gets arrested on RICO charges. In an attempt to get out of it he makes a deal with Sosa in exchange for assassinating a political activist. When Tony balks on the plan at the last minute, and after he kills his best friend for marrying the sister, Sosa has his mansion attacked with a small army, killing Tony in a climactic firefight.
I’m not sure what I feel about this version of Scarface. It certainly isn’t bad, but for various reasons, I always found a lot of the scenes, that are supposed to shock us over the sheer brutality, to be over the top and almost silly.
So how do the two Scarfaces hold up? At first, I was expecting the whole morality play quality of Hawks’ Scarface to drag it down and make it the lesser of the two. Instead, the stylized and theatrical qualities of it’s condensed story make it make it much more vivid (you can forgive the cartoonish way everybody throws punches) But at the same time, it’s still a little too condensed, as if Hawks can’t wait to have justice finally prevail.
De Palma’s Scarface has a lot more time to work on the details. Showing just how Tony rises to power, and more importantly, giving us more time to see Tony in his position of power.
Finally, the biggest thing to pay attention to is who’s the better Tony. For this, I have to give it to Muni in the first film. Pacino performance is at first glance tough and ruthless, but since we get more time to see him, he’s ultimately childish in his violent temper. Muni comes off as a force of nature who can’t be bargained with and takes what he wants.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CRtp5t-8-8
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This week I found myself drawn to watch some more Samurai Films. (Not counting the Kurosawa films I always watch) Specifically, I thought I’d try some of the darker ones. The ones that overtly criticize the code of bushido and wear their cynicism on their sleeves as a badge of honor. On a side note, these both have the same lead actor, the great Tatsuya Nakadai ( while I was certainly aware that he had a great career, to my shame, I was only aware of him as the psychotic gunfighter in Yojimbo)
The first film on my list, Kihachi Okamoto‘s Sword of Doom, tells the story of disgraced swords man, Ryunsuke Tsukue (played by Nakadai) who is exiled from his fencing school after killing his opponent in a match.
From there he starts to make a living as a hired sword taking the jobs that let him kill the most, and hunting (in this case the term is painfully literal) opponents to fight and kill.
You know that when a film begins with our protagonist cutting down a pilgrim we know that things are not going to be pleasant. This was a dark and depressing film that goes into great detail about Tsukue’s gradual mental breakdown. Until finally in the climax, he’s too busy fighting figments of his imagination to even notice the people who have actually been sent to kill him!
In the next film Masaki Kobayashi‘s Harakiri, peace time is not good for the samurai class. So much so in such time’s, there was a scam going around where a starving ronin would ask to commit seppuku in the family grounds and be buried. The idea was that they expected to be talked out of it and given some money out of pity.
Except in the Iyi family who decide to call one Ronin’s bluff and force him to go through with it. Made all the more terrible because he had sold his swords to pay for medicine and only had blunt bamboo props.
It’s later when another ronin, Hanshiro, (played by Nakadai) who turns out to be the ronin’s father-in-law comes to repeat this ceremony and get his revenge in at the same time.
I really loved this film. It was a great performance from Nadaki and the camera work on the final climax is amazing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zXPsRiRPEw
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When I started this week’s selection my basic idea was “live action cartoons” based on the way the film on my list had been described. But since I wasn’t having much luck finding a second film that fit that criteria I went with comedies starring Barbara Streisand (with screenplays by Buck Henry)
So anyhow the first film on my list, which was the thing that inspired it all was Peter Bogdanovich‘s What’s up Doc? starring Barbara Streisand and Ryan O’ Neil.
Ryan O’Neil plays Howard Bannister, a musicologist with a theory about musical rocks, who travels to San Francisco with his fiancee Eunice Burns (Madeline Kahn in her first film appearance) to compete for a research grant for his theory about musical rocks. When he arrives at his hotel he runs into Judy Maxwell (Streisand) an extremely eccentric woman who when we meet her is scamming room service, who immediately latches on to him whether he likes it or not.
In the meantime Howard’s bag, with his collection of musical rocks, get’s mixed up with Judy’s identical bag as well as another identical bag of jewels and an identical bag with government secrets. From there, things get really strange.
This was… Okay. Streisand does a good job as the eccentric, amoral possibly psychopathic force of nature that is Judy. But otherwise, this didn’t do that much for me. A lot of this film seemed to be very much based on Bringing up Baby, but the thing is I already saw Bringing up Baby and Hawks did it better.
Still, the car chase at the end was really well done.
The next film on my list the Owl and The Pussycat is an adaptation of the stage play of the same name, by Bill Manhoff. George Segal plays Felix a struggling writer and intellectual who just wants a good night sleep when there’s a knock on his door. It’s Doris, a struggling actress, model and sometime prostitute (played by Streisand) who he accidentally got evicted from her apartment after he complained about her to the building superintendent.
Soon he’s stuck with her and since Doris has a complete inability to keep her mouth shut, he is soon evicted when the neighbors complain. Soon the two are stuck with each other as they try to get on with their lives and a good night’s sleep. As the film goes on we have to ask will they finally succumb to the mutual sexual attraction before they kill each other?
This one really didn’t do much for me either. It suffered from a lot of the problems that a lot of play adaptations have, where the director tries to pad what is essentially just two scenes with only two main characters (with a small handful of side characters showing up in passing) with only one set per scene. While I’ve seen a few directors pull it off, these are few and far between.
Still, it was a fairly good character piece with well-written dialogue.
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Well, I’m back and back to watching my weekly selection and decided to dip once again into World War Two, and to keep things interesting I thought I’d focus on the Pacific Theater.
While I’d been aware of my first film, Tora! Tora! Tora! , directed by Richard Fleischer, Toshio Masuda and Kinji Fukasaku for ages I was only reminded of it this month. The only thing I had remembered about it was that it was a joint American/Japanese endeavor with both sides getting equal time to tell their story. (I’d also heard Toshiro Mifune was in it, which is incorrect. He’s in the next one.)
Driven by the American fuel embargo against them for their invasion of Manchuria to take the desperate gamble of neutralizing the United States Pacific fleet by attacking its main base in Pearl Harbor in the island of Oahu. We are shown in great detail the Japanese methodical planning and preparations as well as the serious misgivings of newly appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Combined Fleet Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto.
Meanwhile, in Washington, military intelligence has cracked the Japanese code and is pouring over transcripts. They know the Japanese are planning something, they know roughly when it’s going to happen, and that is all.
In Pearl Harbor itself, it’s mostly business as usual with some efforts to improve defenses but will they get everything ready in time because the clock is ticking.
I honestly don’t understand why this film did so badly at the box office because it was amazing. The attention to detail was incredible with the historical mistakes being so minuscule they have to be pointed out to you by experts. (The main one being the Japanese squadrons flying over a cross on a nearby mountain. A cross that was a memorial to the bombing.
After that, you can sit back and marvel at the attack itself. Other than some models this isn’t special effects, folks. This is the work of incredibly talented stunt pilots.
The main complaint I hear is the pacing. For me, this worked great. (After all, nobody complains about a similar storytelling pace in Seven Samurai. ) In fact, by putting all of the facts down in what I can almost consider the first military procedural I’ve ever seen, It makes the race against the clock to what the inevitable event would be, the fact that Naval Intelligence NEARLY got the facts together in time even more shocking.
The other thing that’s amazing is the film is so even-handed, while you are justifiably horrified by the final attack, at the same time you share the Japanese frustration of not being able to use the second wave of planes because the aircraft carriers weren’t in port!
Having started with the beginning of the Pacific Theater, I decided to finish with what was the beginning of the end of the end of the Pacific Theater with an all-star cast in Jack Smight’s Midway.
Starting like Tora! Tora! Tora! we have the buildup before the war with Leader of the Japanese Forces, Admiral Yamamoto, played by Toshiro Mifune, prepares for a final push, While back in Pearl Harbor the American Navy tries desperately to decipher Japanese transcripts in time. Admiral Nimitz, played by Henry Fonda, suspects that their target is Midway, but hunches aren’t enough for Washington.
But that’s not all Captain Matthew Garth, played by Charlton Heston, has a problem. His son has fallen in love with a Japanese-American girl who’s just been arrested. Now he’s desperately trying to help as best he can before it’s too late.
This film started okay. I especially liked Hal Holbrook’s performance as code breaker Commander Rochefort (though from what I found out, fact-checking afterwards his performance was different enough from the real Rochefort, he might have well been a fictional character) For the most part everyone else gave perfectly competent performances they all looked like they were phoning it in. (Personally, I thought Toshiro Mifune was completely wasted as Yamamoto (though it might have just been him being dubbed that made his performance seem more wooden.)
The subplot with Garth and his son seemed just tacked on. My personal theory is that they wanted to add more drama with a variation of the girl back home cliche, and throwing in Japanese internment made it more historical.
As for the battle itself… O boy… I don’t like to judge films by special effects, and I understand just how much it would have cost to recreate the actual battle of Midway in the mid-seventies, but over forty-five minutes of historical footage is definitely not the way to do it. Even ignoring the problems with it cutting back and forth to pilots in their cockpits in front of blue screens only draws attention to how it doesn’t work. In the end, I found myself just wanting to say to myself… The Americans won you can fast forward to the end.
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