What I’ve Caught Up With, February, 2024 Part 2:
Film: Baby Face (1933)
A short pre-Code romp, Baby Face tells the story of Lily Powers (Barbara Stanwyck) who rather blatantly sleeps her way to the top, a film that literally could not have been made a year later under the Hays Code. Lily’s career starts with her father, who runs a gin joint, prostituting her until he kicks her out and dies when his still explodes. She and her friend Chico (Theresa Harris) go to New York where Lily more or less sleeps her way through her career. The ending only makes sense for the time in which this was made and feels like a cop out, but Barbara is always a joy. As an odd little side note, one of Babs’s early conquests on her rise to the top is a very young John Wayne.
Film: Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)
I considered doing a full review of this movie and ultimately decided that I just wouldn’t have enough to say about it. The world is once again in peril, this time from a killer AI, and Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) must mobilize the Impossible Mission Force to take care of business. The 164 minutes of this film are frenetic, filled with wild car chases, crashing trains, and knife fights and it never friggin’ ends. It’s fine, but it’s not really any better than fine. Action movies need to be pared down again to fit under 100 minutes. Bigger, better, faster, more just leaves me exhausted right now.
Film: Blow Out (1981)
A few years after The Conversation, Brian De Palma decided to make a similar film in Blow Out, where a sound recording catches a crime in action. Horror movie sound guy Jack Terry (John Travolta) is recording ambient sound when he catches the sound of an accident where a car goes into a lake. He saves a passenger named Sally (Nancy Allen), but soon discovers that the driver was the front runner in the next presidential election. Now he and Sally are loose ends that need to be snipped by Burke (John Lithgow) while they attempt to prove that this wasn’t an accident but an assassination. It’s The Conversation meets Blow-Up, but it’s the right level of sleezy and the end is brutal. It’s easy to forget that Travolta had chops, even back in ’81.
Film: Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget (2023)
Everyone loves Pixar and most people love Disney and Dreamworks, but I’ve always championed animation studios like Tomm Moore, Laika, and Aardman. I’ve loved Aardman since the early Wallace and Gromit days, so I was excited for a potential Chicken Run sequel. Sadly, Aardman seems to have dropped off in recent years. Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, starting with a virtually entirely different voice cast, is a pale shadow of the original. More depressing, it’s derivative. I liked this when it was made by Pixar and called Finding Nemo, because this is very much the same movie. The stop-motion work is still top-tier, but the story feels like nothing new.
Film: The Mark of Zorro (1940)
It's a given that a movie in 1940 is going to have a good amount of whitewashing in it, and that’s certainly the case with The Mark of Zorro, which puts Tyrone Power in the title role of a Mexican-California Robin Hood type. Don Diego Vega (Power) is brought home from Madrid to California where his father is the leader only to find that his father has been deposed by the greedy and venal Don Luis Quintero (J. Edward Bromberg). Don Diego pretends to be a fop, but takes on the mantle of Zorro (which means “the fox”) to help the oppressed. This really is a Mexican Robin Hood with a heavy dose of The Scarlet Pimpernel tossed in. Basil Rathbone plays the Sheriff of Nottingham equivalent Captain Esteban Pasquale and classes up the entire thing, and Linda Darnell as the Maid Marian stand-in (and Quintero’s niece) adds to the joy. It’s fun, but pales next to the stories it’s sourcing.
Film: Excalibur (1981)
Excalibur is what you get when you filter the stories of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table through a haze of the ‘80s and a truckload of psychedelics. It is, of course, a shortened version of Le Morte d’Arthur, because it would have to be. The real stories are wild as hell. This is merely over the top in pretty much every respect. This covers a lot of the basics of the story, all through what feels like a fog of hallucinogens. There are some fun cameos of people like Liam Neeson, Helen Mirren, Gabriel Byrne, and Patrick Stewart but it’s the wild scenery chewing of Nicol Williamson’s Merlin who makes the film. I saw this years and years ago, and there are moments of it that I remembered as if I saw it yesterday. Honestly, I’m a little shocked this isn’t a Ken Russell film.
You did very well with your viewing this month and managed to catch up with some great titles.
ReplyDeleteBaby Face is one wild ride almost to the end and Missy Stanwyck navigates every cunning turn of the character expertly. You are right about the wrap-up feeling tacked on for appeasement’s sake. The original ending was much more in line with Lily’s character in that she took the loot and skipped, but pressure was brought to bear and it was altered to what we have now. Actually, this film and the same year’s “The Story of Temple Drake” with its theme of sexual enslavement are two of the films most often cited as the ones that really kicked the Production Code into full-on enforcement.
I have a soft spot for Blow Out because I happened to get pulled into one of the crowd scenes when it was filming in Philadelphia. You really can’t see me, but it was fun being involved no matter how peripherally (no Travolta or Nancy Allen sighting though). Aside from that it is quite a tense film with a solid turn by Travolta and an uncompromising ending.
The Mark of Zorro is peak Tyrone Power and fits him like a glove at that point in his career. I can see the comparisons to Robin Hood especially with presence of Rathbone, in something of a specialty for him-erudite, elegant, and hissable, in the cast. Linda is all dewy sweetness but her character, through no fault of her own is missing the spunk Olivia de Havilland was able to avail herself of in Maid Marian. The most surprising thing about the movie is that it is not in color which considering what a cash cow Power was for 20th is strange.
I love, love, LOVE Excalibur while admitting that it is imperfect. It has so many cool pieces to it though I’m fine with overlooking a few pacing and logic problems. Boorman captures the essence and feeling of the story through costuming and sets with a huge assist from the cinematographer and Trevor Jones’s evocative score. While it’s great fun to play spot the future star as Liam Neesom, Patrick Stewart, Gabriel Byrne and so forth pop in and out of the picture and the central roles of Arthur, Guenevere, Perceval and especially Lancelot are ideally cast they all pale before the presence of two performers. Helen Mirren makes a meal of Morgana and her devious witchy ways but even she cannot hold a candle to Nicol Williamson’s deliciously hammy but always in control Merlin. The picture is his the moment he walks on the screen.
It's honestly not a shock that Baby Face acted as that kind of spur for the Hays Code. It is very unabashed in terms of its subject matter--Lily is very clearly and obviously succeeding through sex up to and including causing a murder suicide. I would imagine that it was a massive scandal for the time.
DeleteBlow Out is surprisingly unrelenting, and the ending is what makes it. It is absolutely picking the same bones that The Conversation did, but it picks the right bones.
Nicol Wiliamson's silver skullcap should have gotten its own line in the credits for Excalibur. Ridiculous that it was not Oscar-nominated for costume design (especialy when the winner was Chariots of Fire). Weird side note: The opening sequence that included the pseudo-rape of Igrayne is made wildly weirder when you realize that Igrayne was played by John Boorman's daughter Katrine. Directing your daughter in a partially-nude sex scene is a level of creep I find hard to deal with.
Of this half of the batch, honestly, The Mark of Zorro was probably the most fun, but I'm not sure I'd watch it over The Scarlet Pimpernel, given the option. Still, the sword fight at the end is a peach.
You're missing nothing if you skip the other two, at least in my opinion.
I have no interest in watching that overrated aging midget doing stunts that were done much better by silent film stars and Jackie Chan. Fuck Tom Cruise.
ReplyDeleteI haven't seen the rest of these picks with the exception of Excalibur (awesome film) and Blow Out (which I have on DVD) as the latter I think is de Palma's best film and certainly features the best performance of John Travolta's career as he's never taken risks like that as an actor ever again.
Baby Face is fun for a pre-Code film, and when you remember the sensibilities of the time, it's clear how you can draw a straight line from this film and films like it to the prudish Hays Code. The Mark of Zorro is fun and worth seeing.
DeleteI was really disappointed in this Mission Impossible movie. The fourth, fifth, and sixth films in the series were really entertaining, but this seemed like it desperately wanted to be John Wick.
I just can't get into the Mission Impossible movies. I'm with you on action films like that needing to be 100 minutes or less though. I rarely think the plots call for anything more.
ReplyDeleteThere are some good, recent, short(er) action movies. Gunpowder Milkshake is like 110 minutes, and Nobody is a tight 92 minutes. Dredd is 95, but it's also a dozen years old.
DeleteThe bloat is real. John Wick is 101 minutes, John Wick 2 is 122 minutes, and John Wick 3 is 131 minutes. John Wick 4 is 169 minutes. There's no reason for that.