War, Baby

Films: A Farewell to Arms
Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on laptop.

This is another of those reviews where I feel I have to come clean at the start. I studied literature in college and have a BA in it. That means that I’ve read a bunch of classics including my share of the works of Ernest Hemingway. The truth of the matter is this: I think Hemingway was one of the finest craftsman of short stories the English language has ever seen, but I hate his novels. I hate them. I find his style to be oppressive when it goes on too long, and the man was incapable of writing a woman character who was anything other than a conduit for a man’s ego. This left me with scant hope for A Farewell to Arms.

And sure, I expected this to be grim. This also happens to be a case where my set against the source material could be slightly mollified because the movie diverges significantly from the book to the point where Hemingway himself evidently hated this film. But, it’s still Hemingway and it still manages to use a lot of his dialogue from the book. Worse, the characters are absolutely drawn from the novel, and that’s where I have the biggest problem with the story.

Have a Conversation, Dammit!

Film: Street Angel
Format: Turner Classic Movies on rockin’ flatscreen.

When the Oscars first started, there were some different rules covering aspects of the ceremony. Janet Gaynor was one of the beneficiaries of those different rules. The first set of Best Actress nominees listed five performances; three of them were Janet Gaynor’s, essentially guaranteeing that she would win. She did, of course. One of those three performances for which she won was Street Angel, a straight-up melodrama concerning a good girl forced into bad decisions by circumstance. Yes, it’s drippy as hell, and of Gaynor’s three nominated performances (the others being Seventh Heaven and Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans), it’s clearly the one in service of the weakest story.

Like most melodramas, Street Angel is an essentially simple story. Young Angela (Gaynor) is poor and living in Naples with her sick mother. Desperate for her mother to get treatment, Angela decides that her only recourse is to obtain the money for her mother’s treatment illegally. This starts with a rather sad attempt at prostitution and when that fails, an attempt to simply steal the necessary money.

Lying in the Gutter You Can See the Stars

Film: Seventh Heaven
Format: DVD from NetFlix on rockin’ flatscreen.

Despite the fact that I’ve watched a bunch of them, I still tend to find silent films difficult. Silent horror films are interesting and plenty of silent comedies are still funny. But silent dramas? They’re a whole different thing. There’s always a little part of me that dreads them a little when they show up. This might be only the second new-to-me silent drama I’ve seen this year. Seventh Heaven showed up from NetFlix only because I forgot to rearrange the queue when I sent the last film back, so I can’t admit that I was looking forward to it or actively chose it. But I’d have to watch it eventually, right?

Straight off, there are going to be issues here for me. One of our two main characters, Chico (Charles Farrell) admits early in the film that he is an atheist. That’s a huge red flag for me that we’re going to be mired at least some of the time in religious foofaraw. Not many atheists maintain that position in a Hollywood film, and that was far more true back in the day than it is now. So I can guess where Seventh Heaven is going to go eventually within the first couple of minutes.

West Point

Film: Flirtation Walk
Format: Turner Classic Movies on rockin’ flatscreen.

There was a time in the past, specifically between the two World Wars, when Hollywood had a strange relationship with the U.S. military. It seemed that the military would assist with virtually any movie no matter how silly the premise provided that the military be shown in a positive light. It’s the only explanation for a film like Flirtation Walk. This is a film with a completely ridiculous premise and I can’t but think that it was made with some cooperation on the part of the U.S. Army.

Richard Palmer Grant Dorcy (Dick Powell) is a private in the army. He’s stationed in the Hawaiian Islands where he has a playfully argumentative relationship with “Scrapper” Thornhill (Pat O’Brien), his sergeant. Dick, who goes by the nickname “Canary” because of his penchant for singing (yep, it’s one of those), hates taking orders from Scrapper. Scrapper’s opinion is that Dick should try to become an officer and make something of himself, a future that Dick absolutely can’t see for himself.

Misnomer

Film: Bad Girl
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

The “idiot plot” is a movie plot where all of the problems of the plot could be solved if the principle characters just had a conversation about what was going on. For a modern film, it’s pretty unforgivable, but it’s easier to overlook in a film that was released a couple of years after the advent of sound. Bad Girl is exactly this sort of film. Our two principle characters spend the entire movie not communicating with each other, which leads to everything that happens until the end.

Dot Haley (Sally Eilers) has a job modeling clothing, particularly bridal gowns, to patrons of the story she works in. She finds that the male customers in the store do little but try to pick her up. She does her job as best she can and enjoys her evenings at Coney Island with her friend and coworker Edna Driggs (Minna Gombell). For these two, men are little more than things there to harass them, so it comes as a shock to them both when they discover a man at Coney Island who seems completely uninterested in flirting with them. This turns out to be Eddie Collins (James Dunn), although he offers Joe as his name. “Joe” and Dot get to talking and more or less insult each other. Before you can say “doodley-doodley-doop” we’re back at Dot’s place and the pair are making plans to see each other again.

Weimar Romance

Film: Three Comrades
Format: Turner Classic Movies on rockin’ flatscreen.

Anyone who knows me knows that I am not usually at a loss for words. It does happen, though, especially when I am presented with a movie that I frankly don’t understand. Oh, I get the plot of Three Comrades just fine. What I don’t get with this film is the point of it, nor do I understand for a second the incredibly stupid ending. In retrospect, I was probably way too nice to this on Letterboxd. Anyway, Three Comrades takes place in those years just following World War I. Just as it would seem that Germany didn’t know what it wanted to be in those years, neither does this film.

We start with the close of the war. A gang of three friends have survived and decide to go into business together with the premise that the country will need mechanics in these years. The three are Erich (Robert Taylor), Gottfried (Robert Young), and Otto (Franchot Tone). One evening, on the event of one of the three’s birthday, they go out for a drive in the country and end up racing another car. This is how the three meet Patricia (Margaret Sullavan).

Prelude to War

Film: The Mortal Storm
Format: DVD from Oak Park Public Library through interlibrary loan on kick-ass portable DVD player.

I get the impression sometimes that I’m really jaded. The List sometimes feels like it consists of about 90% films concerning World War II. I’ve lost count of the number of World War II epics, holocaust documentaries, and other similar films on the list. I suppose it’s only fair—it is one of the most important events of the last 100 years and in many ways one of the two or three most defining moments of the last century. It’s only natural that a lot of our art would concern it. But it’s getting more and more difficult to get me that interested in it any more since I’ve seen so much. So when another film pops through the transom and appears to be about the same thing, I breathe a heavy sigh.

The lesson for the day, though, is that I should learn to trust a little more. All I knew about The Mortal Storm going in is that it took place in Germany during the rise of Hitler, so I fully expected it to be just more of the same. I watched the trailer before starting the film and discovered, no shock here, that it was banned in a number of countries—all Axis powers, I would assume, as it does not paint a very flattering picture of the Austrian corporal and his oppressive social system. Again, this is not too terribly shocking. What I didn’t expect was how fully engaged I would be in this film, and how quickly that happened.