How cool was Yul Brynner I ask?? He goes: "I'm told that I can rely on you - rely on you to sell your own mother 4 a price"

LOL That to Edward Robinson,playing Dathan in the movie right?? this guy below??

You are welcome Reeth, just found a wonderful clip of the movie on Youtube. Davis throwing a fit with aplomb, fighting with the whole world, her playright, her director and boyfriend and her producer.



And the trailer of Sleuth:

Here is another couple of favorite movies from the great director Billy Wilder. I like most of his movies and he made vastly different kinds of movies from film noir to screwball comedy. Let me begin with his two big hits with Marilyn Monroe in the fifties, The Seven Year Itch(1955) and Some Like it Hot(1959), two films that really defined the fascinating sexuality of Monroe.

The Seven Year Itch(1955) is a comedy about marital infidelity set in New York city. Richard Sherman (Eweing) is a typical businessman publisher who has sent his wife and son to Maine to escape the sweltering heat of New York in summer and plans to be good in their absence.His resolutions are completely forgotten when his tenant from upstairs drops her flowerpot on him and walks into his air-conditioned apartment and his imagination runs riot. Based on a risque Broadway play, Wilder with his scriptwriter had to really work on their lines and scenes in the film to get around the strict film censorship board of the fifties. The resulting film is brilliant for its interplay of the suggestive and the innocent and Monroe epitomises that to a T. It has the famous subway grate scene that has Monroe standing on the subway grate with her skirt flying up around her waist.

Here is a brief scene from the movie:



Some Like it Hot (1959) is a personal favorite about two musicians(Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis), in Chicago, who witness the Valentine Day's Massacre and are hotly pursued by the gangsters, to escape whom they dress in drag and join an all girl's band which has Monroe as the lead singer. (Reminds you of Rafoochakkar? Don't even go there, the hindi version just got the shell of the story...all the daring suggestiveness slyly introduced in the film by Wilder is completely lost in the Hindi version). The film has some superb repartees and one-liners, the best being the one with which the movie ends. The film is completely absurd with the typical underlying cynicism of Wilder, cushioned beautifully with some superb acting and sparkling wit. The comic timing of the duo is perfect and Marilyn sizzles in the movie. Marilyn was notorious for the number of takes she needed for the simplest of scenes and dialogues, but watch her on screen and she seems a natural.

Have always wanted to see a Sergio Leone film. Had to cultivate a taste for Westerns. So started watching them chronologically. Hence have not reached the Spagetti Western genre yet. Among the early Westerns(40s and 50s) check out John Wayne in Howard Hawks' Red River(1948) and Rio Bravo(1959) and John Ford's Searchers(1956). John Huston's The Treasure of Sierra Madre(1948) and John Stevens' Shane(1952).

My favorite is High Noon(1952) a low budget, stark short Western by Fred Zinneman, which is actually different from the usual lavish epic Westerns which foreground male camaraderie and action...Has Gary Cooper looking world weary and the gorgeous Grace Kelly as his quaker wife who are the only two people in the cowardly town to face the villain. Howard Hawks answer to the film was Rio Bravo(1959) where male bonding and aspects of heroism emerge from the unlikeliest quarters. Was very entertaining too...

Will provide the pics later, if someone else can please oblige.

Film Noir

Here is some info on Film noir, a genre that I love... they were mostly B-grade movies made in Hollywood in the forties and fifties(classic film noir), on shoe-string budgets. They have gained a kind of cult status over the years and have now become a very respectable area of study. Though they cover a wide range of genres and issues, there are some typical stylistic elements of a film noir: It is situated mostly in cities, using the dramatic interplay of dark and light(very effective in black and white films) with plenty of cigarette smoke filling its spaces. It is a morally ambiguous universe inhabited by cynical detectives/cops/private agents, sexy femme fatales, and very often uses voiceovers and flashbacks, that underscore the pervasive sense of fatalism underlying the smart, suggestive, cynical conversation of the characters very often involved in a convoluted games of one upmanship.

A tribute to Film Noir


Wilder made two of the most fascinating films of this genre, Double Indemnity(1944) and Sunset Boulevard (1950). Both movies have stunning opening scenes that set the pace and mood of the films.

Double Indemnity for example begins with a man limping up to his office in the middle of the night and saying into a dictaphone : "Yes, I killed him. I did it for the money. And for a woman. And I didn't get the money. And I didn't get the woman. Pretty, isn't it?"

A trailer of Double Indemnity


In Sunset Boulevard the narrator is already dead, floating face down in a swimming pool when he starts narrating the story about how it all began...

A trailer of Sunset Boulevard

Thanks a lot Madhavi....
found this on the net....Film noir is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize moral ambiguity and sexual motivation. Hollywood's classic film noir period is generally regarded as stretching from the early 1940s to the late 1950s. Film noir of this era is associated with a low-key black-and-white visual style that has roots in German Expressionist cinematography, while many of the prototypical stories and much of the attitude of classic noir derive from the hardboiled school of crime fiction that emerged in the United States during the Depression....


Click to view attachment
This still from The Big Combo (1955) demonstrates the visual style
of film noir at its most extreme. John Alton, the film's cinematographer,
created many of the iconic images of film noir.

You are very welcome, Reeth. Love the topic you have initiated. That still from the Big Combo indeed is archetypal film noir. Scene of the crime, the man and the woman somehow implicated in the scene of the crime, shadows and light, smoke ...et al

Btw, how did you miss out on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in your Western lineup...? Also check out Midnight Cowboy.

Two more noirs from another favorite director, Orson Welles, the enfant terrible of Hollywood. The production stories of each film of Welles is as sensational as the films themselves, and the mystery still continues to intrigue critics and buffs about what those films would be like if Welles has been allowed to make them the way he wanted to...

The Lady from Shanghai(1948): It had Rita Hayworth sporting a short cropped blonde style (Welles had made her crop her famous luxurious red hair for the movie) and Welles himself as the doomed Irish sailor(sporting a bad Irish accent) who falls for her. The plot is a complicated whodunit with many plots and sub plots, some believable some not, but watch the movie for its characters, details, the amazing photography and the superb last scene in the hall of mirrors. The film was as doomed as its theme, the chief of production and Welles could not see eye to eye, Welles and Hayworth filed for divorce before the release of the film, and though the film was complete in 1947, it was not not released till 1948 and that too was hacked by nearly an hour and filled in with explanatory scenes by the producer who insisted the audience would not be able to understand the film otherwise.

This is how the movie starts :
When I start out to make a fool of myself, there's very little can stop me. If I'd known where it would end, I'd never let anything start, if I'd been in my right mind, that is. But once I'd seen her, once I'd seen her, I was not in my right mind for quite some time...me, with plenty of time and nothing to do but get myself in trouble. Some people can smell danger, not me.

Here is just a little bit of the amazing last scene of the movie, it has spoilers though:


And there are stilll the missing forty minutes of the movie hacked by the producers that the fans hope to find some day...

Ten years after being a pariah in Hollywood, Welles returned to make another sensational noir,[b] A Touch of Evil(1958), at the behest of the hero (Charton Heston) who had the star power to insist that Welles, who was also acting in the movie, be allowed to direct it. This was the last film he made in Hollywood.

Once again the fascination of the film lies in the characters, the 300 pound Hank Quinlan (played by Welles in a self parodic mode), the settings (Welles takes the audience into seedy strip clubs and the dark alleys and brothels of the border town) and the show-stealing cameo of Marlene Dietrich as Han Quinlan's ex lover, now brothel madame, who gets some superb lines:

You're a mess, honey. You ought to lay off those candy bars. [/b] Come on, read my future for me.
You haven't got any.
What do you mean?
Your future is all used up.

He was some kind of a man. What does it matter what you say about people.


The 93 mt. version of the movie that was released in 1958 had been badly hacked again by Universal, and Welles disowned the movie shooting off a 58 page memo to the producer about his vision of the movie. It is on the basis of this memo that recent attempts (I believe 4) have been made to reconstruct the movie in accordance with the director's original vision.

Here is an excerpt from a review of the movie:

Completely ignored by the Oscars, it was regarded as a rebellious, unorthodox, bizarre, and outrageously exaggerated film, affronting respectable 1950's sensibilities, with controversial themes including racism, betrayal of friends, sexual ambiguity, frameups, drugs, and police corruption of power. Its central character is an obsessed, driven, and bloated police captain ("a lousy cop") - a basically tragic figure who has a "touch of evil" in his enforcement of the law. Its other unusual and seedy characters include a nervous and sex-crazed motel manager, a blind shopkeeper, a drug smuggler, a sweaty drug dealer with a poorly-fitting wig, a terrorizing gang of juvenile delinquents, and an intense good cop - an international narcotics officer who is honeymooning (but ignores his wife), all in a sleazy border town (and a number of dark hotel rooms) within a twenty-four hour period.

The film opens with its most famous sequence. It's an audacious, incredible, breathtaking, three-minute, uninterrupted crane tracking shot under the credits (appearing superimposed on the left of the screen). The entire tracking shot covers four blocks from start to finish. In a close-up, hands set an explosive, timed device. A shadowy figure runs and places it in the trunk of a parked convertible. The pounding of bongo drums and blare of brass instruments are heard (Henry Mancini's score), accompanied by the ticking-tocking of the mechanism on the soundtrack. The camera pulls away sharply, identifying the car's location - it is parked on a street in a seedy Mexican border town. An unsuspecting, wealthy American man - Rudi Linnekar (the boss of the town) and his giggling, blonde floozy, mistress/girlfriend [later, we learn she is a striptease dancer named Zita] emerge out of the background darkness and get into the car, driving off through the streets toward the US-Mexican border about four blocks away.

From high above, the camera tracks the movement of the doomed pair in the shiny car through the squalid-looking town. It is a dark night as they drive through the town, the setting for the rest of the film. In the border town, there are flashing neon and electric signs, tawdry hotels and stripjoint nightclubs ("The Paradise"), crumbling arches, dark roofs, winding streets and twisting alleys with peeling posters on sides of walls and houses, heaps of trash, and vendors pushing carts. The black-and-white visuals emphasize the seedy atmosphere and the moral decadence, decay, and nightmarish dirtiness of the scene.



And here's that brilliant opening sequence of the movie

Sorry Reeth, about the slightly out of context post. A brief reminder about Ingmar Bergman. Not Hollywood certainly, but enough of Hollywood (to its credit) has been influenced by him.

Madhavi just add evrything here, dont worry about method and order, this is more fun

Finally the grand old man died...and that too on the same day as Antonioni. Had been dreading the day it would happen, having watched a number of his films, I have always been amazed at how personally a number of his films touched me, considering how distinctly different his lived experience was from mine.

One cannot help but mention his Seventh Seal in an occasion such as this. Heavily and ostentatiously symbolic, it is about a knight who comes back from the crusades and finds that his country has been ravaged by the plague. Death comes for him too, and in his desperation he challenges him to a game of chess. He knows the outcome but plays for time...

Here is the famous scene:


And Here is the trailer:


A film about faith and belief, Ingmar's knight opts for a wry, wavering, disappointing, and constantly questioned belief rather than accept the bleak alternative that there is no meaning in life. And that, btw is a terribly reductive reading of Bergman's richly layered film. And this is not even my favorite Bergman film (if you like Bergman, you will always have your treasured favorites among his repetoire of about fifty films...). For me, his most stunning films were Wild Strawberries and Persona, and a cherished light one is Smiles of a Summer Night.

And what can film noir be without Bogey...I promise not to impose any more noirs after these two:

The Maltese Falcon (1941)

Don't worry about the plot in The Maltese Falcon (actually that is true of most Noirs), note the style, the tough talking hero and the mood. The film made a legend out of Bogart. Consider this dialogue with which the hero sends the woman to the gallows after she pleads with him not to give her over to the law:

''I hope they don't hang you, precious, by that sweet neck. . . . The chances are you'll get off with life. That means if you're a good girl, you'll be out in 20 years. I'll be waiting for you. If they hang you, I'll always remember you.''

Here's an excerpt from Ebert:

Some film histories consider ''The Maltese Falcon'' the first film noir. It put down the foundations for that native American genre of mean streets, knife-edged heroes, dark shadows and tough dames.

Of course film noir was waiting to be born. It was already there in the novels of Dashiell Hammett, who wrote The Maltese Falcon, and the work of Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, John O'Hara and the other boys in the back room. ''Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean,'' wrote Chandler, and that was true of his hero Philip Marlowe (another Bogart character). But it wasn't true of Hammett's Sam Spade, who was mean, and who set the stage for a decade in which unsentimental heroes talked tough and cracked wise.

Cold. Spade is cold and hard, like his name. When he gets the news that his partner has been murdered, he doesn't blink an eye. Didn't like the guy. Kisses his widow the moment they're alone together. Beats up Joel Cairo (Lorre) not just because he has to, but because he carries a perfumed handkerchief, and you know what that meant in a 1941 movie. Turns the rough stuff on and off. Loses patience with Greenstreet, throws his cigar into the fire, smashes his glass, barks out a threat, slams the door and then grins to himself in the hallway, amused by his own act.

If he didn't like his partner, Spade nevertheless observes a sort of code involving his death. ''When a man's partner is killed,'' he tells Brigid, ''he's supposed to do something about it.'' He doesn't like the cops, either; the only person he really seems to like is his secretary, Effie (Lee Patrick), who sits on his desk, lights his cigarettes, knows his sins and accepts them. How do Bogart and Huston get away with making such a dark guy the hero of a film? Because he does his job according to the rules he lives by, and because we sense (as we always would with Bogart after this role) that the toughness conceals old wounds and broken dreams.

Alas, the mood and the mode won't work today ...but the darkness inherent in human motivations tainting all and possibilities of desperate heroism still might find echoes in this age.

And then there is [b]The Big Sleep(1946) which is credited with having one of the most confusing storylines in Hollywood film history. Based on the popular novel by Raymond Chandler that was published in 1939, it introduced the the first of the series of the Philip Marlowe novels. The plot, again, is the "McGuffin", to borrow Hitchcock's phrase, it does not matter. What matters is the on and off screen chemistry of the Bacall-Bogart pair, the double-edged dialogues and the atmosphere. And there is plenty of it in the film.
[/b]
You're not very tall are you?
I try to be... says Bogie....

Check out this compilation by a buff who has titled it "The Babes of the Big Sleep" with the following comment: The biggest mystery in Howard Hawks's THE BIG SLEEP is why almost every beautiful woman finds Bogie irresistible

Thank you Reeth, I remember being entranced by the drama, the spectacle and the sheer lavishness of the movie. Btw, it has another claim to fame... both Sophia Loren and Liz Taylor were in the movie as extras ...okay Liz had a cameo...

A number of things make The Great Dictator unlike any previous Chaplin film. Bosley Crowther's New York Times review noted that this was "no droll and gentle-humored social satire in the manner of Chaplin's earlier films. The Great Dictator is essentially a tragic picture — or tragi-comic in the classic sense — and it has strongly bitter overtones." And in a bow to technological inevitability, this was Chaplin's first full-on sound film with dialogue. Knowing that dialogue would destroy the essence of the necessarily silent Little Tramp, cinema's foremost pantomimist retired the character forever at the conclusion of Modern Times four years earlier. So The Great Dictator was the first feature-length film in which he starred as a character other than the Tramp.

In The Great Dictator Chaplin in fact plays two lead roles. One is a meek Jewish barber in the European country of Tomania. Granted, the barber bears more than a passing resemblance to the Tramp, even affecting the familiar bowler hat and cane. But Chaplin was clear that the barber is not the Tramp and The Great Dictator is not a Tramp movie. The barber is a World War I soldier stricken with amnesia in an aircraft accident. After twenty years in a hospital, he returns to the Jewish ghetto where he re-opens his long-abandoned shop, blissfully ignorant of how the world has changed in his absence. Thuggish Aryan stormtroopers patrol the streets to assault Jewish civilians. They paint the word JEW on the barber's shop windows. They wear armbands with the Swastika-like "double cross." The country is under the thumb of Adenoid Hynkel, the power-mad Fooey (that is, Führer), who with his jackbooted armies is determined to conquer the globe. Grinding the Jews in the ghetto beneath his heel is only the start of his plans.

Secondly (and more memorably), Chaplin plays the crazed dictator Hynkel. It's in this savage and undisguised parody of Hitler that The Great Dictator achieves its immortality. A pompous little megalomaniac, Hynkel was a pie in the face to a madman whom Hollywood and the rest of the world had come to fear. Chaplin inhabits Hynkel so fully that the barber is rendered almost perfunctory. Chaplin studied hours of newsreels to capture Hitler properly, and this lacerating sendup of the Führer's oratorical style blends mock-German gobbledygook with a bullseye on his theatrical bombast.

It turns out that the barber and Hynkel are lookalikes. ("Any resemblance between Hynkel the dictator and the Jewish barber is purely coincidental," quips an opening title card.) Hynkel prepares his plans to kill off all the Jews ("then the brunettes") with the aid of his loyal advisers, Field Marshal Herring and Propaganda Minister Garbitsch. Meanwhile, the barber innocently tries to adjust to his new life as a prisoner in his own country. He becomes involved with a young orphan woman, Hannah (Paulette Goddard), and through her falls in with a group of conspirators who aim to assassinate Hynkel. A scene where they consume puddings, and whoever spoons up a hidden coin must embark on the suicide mission, is one of the great Chaplin bits.

Each of Chaplin's pinnacle features — The Kid, The Gold Rush, City Lights, Modern Times, and The Great Dictator — contributed at least one of cinema's all-time indelible images. In Dictator that comes with the inspired scene where Hynkel, alone in his palatial Chancellery, dances a graceful ballet with a globe of Planet Earth. When the balloon-globe eventually pops in his face, the great dictator cries like a spoiled child. The scene is one of Chaplin's most sublime. Artistically, any faults one can quibble about in The Great Dictator are trumped by this famous sequence.

For good measure, Chaplin drives a clown car up Mussolini's ass as well. Vaudeville-trained Jack Oakie turns Il Duce into "Napaloni of Bacteria," a back-slapping, uncouth, low-comedy bulldog of a despot. He competes with Hynkel for everything from the height of their barber chairs (which telescope toward the ceiling in a brilliant one-panel cartoon of political one-upmanship) to whose army invades a country first. It's to Chaplin's credit that he shared so much screen time with the born scene-stealer Oakie, who barrels through the movie like a New York cab driver through a yellow light. The performance earned Oakie an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

Events turn so that the barber must impersonate the dictator in a radio address to the entire world. And here arrives the most controversial scene in The Great Dictator, probably in all the Chaplin syllabus. The barber, disguised as Hynkel, steps up to the podium and through the camera faces us eye to eye. Now Chaplin drops character utterly. He speaks not as the barber, but as himself and from the heart in a screen-filling close-up. In an impassioned six-minute speech he pleads for tolerance and the elevation of the innate greater good of the human spirit, and an end to oppression, industrial dehumanization, greed, militarism, and nationalism.

I want to see them all over again now

Do you get good copies of old hollywood films in India? Just curious, wanted to know if the libraries had copies of these films. Here, in the public libraries, you get an amazing selection of classic hollywood and even "foreign" language films.

Ah, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"... Jack Nicholson is one of my all time favorites. Would love to discuss some of his films too...after the Allen round though...


And talking of war films...check out some of Stanley Kubrick's masterpieces:

Paths of Glory (1957): Straight war film, sparse and tense..

Dr. Strangelove or How I Stopped worrying and Learnt to Love the Bomb (1964): Exaggerated satire with Peter Sellers in a brilliant performance.

Full Metal Jacket (1987): Dealing with the Vietnam War.