Re: What Did You Watch? 2025-01-18 (Saturday)

Arthur Lipscomb <arthur@alum.calberkeley.org> wrote:

His Girl Friday (4K disc) 1940 comedy directed by Howard Hawks and
starring Cary Grant as a newspaper editor who cooks up a scheme to trick
his ex-wife (Rosalind Russell) to continue working at his newspaper
instead of running off to get married to Ralph Bellamy.  Between running
cons on Russell, Grant keeps framing Belamy for minor crimes.  In the
backdrop of all of this Russell is investigating an upcoming execution
which is politically motivated due to the killer (who may be mentally
incompetent) shooting a Black police officer and the governor needing
the Black vote to get reelected not stopping the execution.  I found the
humor for 1940 to be pretty good.  At one point I had to rewind it back
to confirm what I heard.  Grant's character is talking to someone about
Bellamy's character and is asked, what does he look like.  Grant says,
he looks like that guy from the movies, Ralph Bellamy.  Now I recognized
Bellamy's name in the credits because he starred in "Trading Places,"
but I didn't know he was famous enough that you could make a joke about
him in 1940.  This is one of those old movies with lots of fast talking,
and people talking over each other.  Even with subtitles it was hard to
follow the dialogue at times.  I never saw this movie (or heard of it)
before now.  But it's another movie in one of the 4K box sets I own.
And I'm determined to watch all the movies in those box sets.  Overall,
it wasn't bad.  And today I plan to finally watch the rest of the movies
(dramas and romantic comedies) in the set that I haven't gotten around
to yet.

I loved the break-the-fourth-wall joke about Bellamy.

This is adapted from the famous 1928 play The Front Page by Ben Hecht
and Charles MacArthur, two Chicago newspapermen who wrote about their
own experiences. The courthouse where the gallows was built still
stands, but hasn't been s courthouse since 1929.

In the play and the other movie adaptations, Hildy is a guy.

I like the 1931 adaptation starring Adolphe Menjou and Pat O'Brien a
lot, but in this version, they read the dialogue even faster than
apparently they did on stage. It's kind of a gag. This movie is exactly
the reason why modern movie audiences believe they get about 1/3 of the
dialogue of old movies.

Casablanca 1942 (4K disc) - The classic movie starring Humphrey Bogart
as an American nightclub owner in German occupied Casablanca during
WWII.  Bogart gets torn between helping his former lover and staying out
of the way of the Nazis.  Probably the most shocking thing about this
movie was the discovery that there was gambling taking place in Rick's
nightclub.

You were shocked SHOCKED?

This movie is not part of any box set.  I just happen to
like the movie so I bought it.  And now I had a good excuse to watch it.
 This was my first time watching this disc and as I put the disc in, I
was hoping there would be a commentary, and it turns out there is a
commentary, two in fact, with one being from Roger Ebert.  Ebert does
great film commentaries and this was no exception.  He gave an in-depth
commentary about the making of the movie and all the historic events
that was taking place at the time the movie was made. He talked a lot
about the production code of the time and what was and wasn't censored
as a result.  He said Warners were very anti-Nazi, before being
anti-Nazi was fashionable.

Yeah, yeah. Most of the studios were run by Jews, the real loudmouth
brothers sent as far away from New York as they could get, this dinky
little town on the west coast where the weather is always sunny. WWII
was a great inconvenience because they were forced to stop profitable
distribution in Germany. And when they switched to anti-German movies,
they completely turned on a dime.

And almost the entire cast and all the
extras were made up of real refugees from Nazi Germany (or invaded
countries) and in the scene where the nightclub patrons sing to drown
out the Nazis, the tears in the extra's eyes were real.

It's a wonderful story.

Nothing about this movie should have worked. Twelve screenwriters, based
on a truly lousy play that was never performed. Claude Rains is said to
have improvised contemptuously tossing the liter of Vichy water into the
trash. Conrad Veidt fled Germany in the early '30s with his wife,
Jewish, and despised the Nazis, so he played them as nssty as possible
on screen.

Pretty much if Ingrid Berman looked at you like she looked at Bogart,
you too would be a romantic leading man in movies. Supposedly the two
actors weren't even friends off screen but they had wonderful chemistry
on screen.

The Big Sleep (TCM) 1946 directed by Howard Hawks. The movie stars
Humphrey Bogart as a detective hired to look into a blackmail scheme.  I
saw this once before but didn't remember it all that well.  I had the
movie sitting on my DVR for over a year.  It would have ended up getting
deleted unwatched if I didn't have Casablanca to pair it with.  That
plus it also had the same director of "His Girl Friday" made me want to
watch it again.  I didn't care much for it.

Ok. You don't like the scene with the horsies? I've read that Martha
Vickers stole her scenes and Csrmen's scenes got edited down as they
were pushing Bogie and Bacall. Also, a lot of the movie was shot long
after production wrapped to play up the love on screen as they'd just
gotten married.

Who killed the chauffeur?