Scaramouche review

We watched the 1952 remake of Scaramouche - the one starring Stewart Granger. To fess up, I got it because of the six minute long sword duel between Scaramouche and Monsieur de Maynes which I've heard is the gold standard of swashbuckling cinematic duels. Well . . . hey, it is!

What I found in particular is that while academically aware that Hollywood cinema deeply influenced the Jackie Chan era of Chinese stuntmen and their often mind blowing antics, I haven't actually seen a lot of those movies. But with Scaramouche, I saw the kind of stuntwork that clearly presaged Chinese action movies of the 70s onwards. Not only the actors doing their own stunts, but crawling all over the scenery while swordfighting, swordfighting on narrow surfaces, swordfighting swinging from ropes, the tossing of everything in sight at each other, dropping heavy things from a great height to try to hit the other guy on the head . . . while lacking the kinetic oomph of a Yuen Woo-Ping directed fight, you can easily see all the elements that we'd see again in kung-fu movies. The visual language is clearly the same. So, great going, guys!

So, was there more than a swordfight? Yes! While Stewart Granger played Scaramouche's bemused insouciance to a T, I think that the show was stolen by Mel Ferrer was the villain, le Marquis de Maynes. Ferrer really caught the "it's great to be me" vibe that a viciously murderous wealthy and good looking French aristocrat should have. Obviously, de Maynes loved his life, especially when it involved killing someone, or bragging about killing someone. Even at the end, with a sword to his heart, the actor projected what I felt was perfect for the character - simply amused resignation that his time had come.

Even compared to the novel, however, it was pretty fluffy. In the novel, Scaramouche slowly evolves into a revolutionary idealist from a jaded cynic. While in both he's driven by the murder of his friend, in the movie it's all about revenge (and, to be fair, how hollow revenge is, which I liked - revenge is idiotic and I'm glad that the movie, as in the book, the desolation of seeking revenge is made clear). In the novel, well, it's actually about the Revolution, and eventually the Revolution's excesses! The movie doesn't touch on any of that, and wraps it up with a wedding.

And typical for a 50s movie, the female roles are pretty bland. Which I don't like, but it's something you've got to accept in most movies from the 50s onward. There are two female leads - played by Eleanor Parker and Janet Leigh, both talented actresses - but they exist merely as objects of love or lust for the hero. In the end, he chooses the good, pure and high born girl instead of the low born and quick witted woman with experience. Oh, well, I suspect that after the end credits roll Scaramouche would be going back to the actress in about ten minutes after being completely bored with his pure little noblewoman. But, like I said, while I don't like that kind of thing, I've learned to endure it.

Marked Woman review

The little lady and I just got done watching Marked Woman, a Bette Davis/Humphrey Bogart movie directed by Lloyd Bacon (who also brought Knute Rockne to the screen, introducing to a wide audience a certain Ronald Reagan, hehe). The 1936 crime piece is about "hostesses" (read: prostitutes) who operate in a mob owned clip joint. One of the hostesses, played by Davis, gets involved in a murder and initially resists the ADA (played by Bogart) in convicting the mobster - but after the hostesses' sister is murdered she bravely plays ball with law enforcement and brings the mobster to justice. Apparently the movie was inspired by New York's protracted battle against Lucky Luciano.

I really just watch loving Bette Davis act. She's just so splendid. Bogart and most of the supporting cast are also quite good, and at times the actor who plays the gangster, Eduardo Ciannelli, almost steals the show. But the reason to see the movie is, without a doubt, the chance to see Bette Davis act. She plays a wonderfully dignified, street smart call girl and the script doesn't degrade her, nor the other women in it. The thirties in cinema really was the height of this kind of behavior - movies with female roles that weren't just pathetic pandering girl stories of female sisterhood or whatever, banal romantic comedies or the even worse multitude of stories where women are merely victims of appendages of male protagonists. Roles where women could be honestly powerful started to decline in the 40s, and by the late 50s were almost gone altogether. They were gone by the 60s and 70s. Though they've started to return, I am just staggered at the numerous powerful female roles that I see in the cinema of the 30s, before women's role in movies was reduced to nothing but cheesecake victims as it has been much of my adult life. Because of when I was born, I grew up in an atmosphere almost void of powerful female characters. On the rare occasion Meryl Streep or Julia Roberts would make a movie that was a cut above the standard fare even those actresses are generally forced to work with, it was like a small window into a different film making universe where women weren't second class citizens. To me, Bette Davis flings open all the doors to that world - while the movies acknowledge the social reality of woman's powerlessness in a man's world, the movies, themselves, by featuring women in so many fully developed roles have really opened my eyes.

The upshot being, see this movie. And see a lot of movies with Bette Davis in them. Even the bad ones are pretty good. And see how movies were made before female roles in movies were crushed by all those banking interests who didn't want women to get uppity ideas.

Hancock movie review

Me and the li'l lady and a friend of ours saw Hancock the other day. We were somewhat amused by it. In particular, we liked Will Smith as the cranky, bumbling superhero whose antics were both benevolent and often incompetent. Critiques of the quality of the movie, otherwise, is a fairly weak script and incoherent plot plus mediocre effects. The upshot? If you like Will Smith, see it. If you don't, don't. Since I like Will Smith, I kinna liked the movie.

To me, though, what was really interesting is the PR man who turns Hancock's life around. I was getting a very It's a Wonderful Life feeling from it. In It's a Wonderful Life, one of the subtexts is that bankers do good in a community. Bankers are these benevolent people and crap like - the movie is functionally an advertisement for the banking industry. In a similar fashion, the PR protagonist of Hancock is this committed guy who wants to save the world by convincing corporations to do good deeds. I sort of threw up in my mouth about that. I mean, of all the impossible things I found that the most impossible. A superhero that can fly, bounce bullets off his face and move with incredible speed? That's downright realistic compared to an advertising guy trying to save the world through corporate benevolence! To me, that's the worst part of the movie - how it kisses the ass of corporate America and the praise for the ad industry.

Stalingrad the Movie

We just got done watching Stalingrad, a German movie about German Wehrmacht soldiers fighting in, sorta obviously, Stalingrad.

It was pretty heavy. We've had it for a couple of weeks now and didn't watch it because, y'know, it's a two and a half hour long movie that we knew would be relentlessly cheerless. And, over all, that's precisely what we got. It is the story of a crack unit of German fighting men who are sent to the bloodiest battle in human history, and on the losing side, at that. The movie had performances that ranged from the pretty good to outstanding, great cinematography, score and, of course, a deeply compelling source.

Pretty clearly, the point of the film was the relentless futility and stupidity of war. The battle scenes focused far less on the heroism of characters and a bit more on the psychological collapse of people put into that kind of meat grinding.

This is in some contradistinction to, say, something like Saving Private Ryan, a movie I couldn't really enjoy without being able to say why. Saving Private Ryan, despite the supposed realism of the battle scenes, has very little in the way to say about the psychological collapse of those who fight wars. The characters are all brave and heroic, and even at the end when Tom Hanks' character dies it's bravely (tho' I thought it came off more inane than brave) firing his pistol at a tank in some pathetic last desperate act of defiance. (I, personally, might have thought to get out of the tank's way, but I guess I'm silly like that.)

Stalingrad has brave people in it, but the battle scenes are far more about the multifaceted psychological harm that happens. Some of the scenes verge on the harrowing, but not necessarily the ones where peoples limbs or blown off or whatever. I mean, we've seen that kind of stuff since Platoon, right? One of the scenes with a group of desperate and hardened soldiers dealing with a bound Russian woman had a great deal of emotional impact, because of the casual assumption of brutality acceptable by soldiers in that situation - they just assume they're going to gang rape her in order of rank, and the psychological convolutions of the lieutenant, then the highest rank officer, when first trying to psyche himself up to rape her and then deciding not to do it was intense. And then, well, it's Stalingrad, so you've got to have people dying in the snow - the scene was both poignant and intensely beautiful. (Also, reminds me why I'm so happy to live in California. Yay mild winters!)

The movie's biggest flaw was . . . the lieutenant of this unit of soliders, and several of the people under his command, would confront German officers who were more traditionally Nazi, pompous, murderous and glory hounds. While absent the context of Nazi German's genocide against the Russian people - around thirty million Russians were killed, most of this civilians - I understand that the movie was trying to build sympathy for the characters. And it is certainly true that the people in the German Army, most of them, weren't genocidal monsters, but confused people living in a tyrannical regime that had mastered the arts or propaganda. But the context of the German invasion of Russia can't easily be ignored. So sometimes when the protagonists stand up to their brutal high ranking officers it comes off as being an apologia for the rank-and-file German soldier.

Mind you, I understand I say that in the context of American movies doing the same thing. I mentioned Platoon, earlier. Isn't Platoon an attempt to exonerate the rank-and-file American soldiery of the atrocities committed in Southeast Asia? I think clearly so. It shows the "average" American soldier as someone caught up in events outside of their control, doing atrocities under duress from their superiors. It ignores that each and ever drafted soldier was considered a legal and moral adult. So I can't hold that against Stalingrad too much, right?

Overall, I liked the movie a great deal. All of my favorite war movies - Apocalpyse Now, Paths of Glory, Full Metal Jacket - are about the stupidity and futility of war, and Stalingrad fits into that pack pretty darn well. It's a grim story, but a very good movie.