Celluloid Heroes

He looked exactly the same when he was alive, only he was vertical.

The Trouble With Harry is a like a picturesque photo essay of a New England autumn, only with a dead body managing to spoil most of the shots. It was also such a change of pace for Alfred Hitchcock that a lot of audiences seem to strip their gears at the time. Being known for his suspense thrillers, directing such a lightweight and cheerfully dark comedy was like a high curveball sailing past the moviegoer’s head.

As a result, Harry is not usually remembered with the classics among Hitchcock’s body of work, and that’s a shame. It’s a genuinely funny film populated with an appealing cast of eccentrics (or, as they are known in New England, “just normal folk”).

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Try to be your normal, humorous self. The guy you were before the tailspin. Do you remember that guy? People love that guy.

It’s a rare film that actually has a measurable impact on a completely unrelated industry. And for it to be such a sweet, low-key comedy like Sideways is, I think, almost unheard of. But after this film was a hit with audiences, sales of Pinot Noir skyrocketed while those of Merlot tanked.

I sincerely doubt that the filmmakers went into this project aiming to reshape the wine industry. They were just trying to make a quiet, very human story about two friends on a road trip to celebrate an impending marriage and, in that effort, they very much succeeded.

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I’m runnin’ out of deputies.

Lawrence Kasdan’s Silverado is a modern old-fashioned western. It’s old-fashioned in the way that it pretends that the western never fell out of favor as a genre. Embued with the optimism that westerns lost in the late 1960s and 1970s, it freely embraces the time-honored conventions that Blazing Saddles gleefully lampooned a decade earlier. It modernity comes mostly from its first rate production values and its cast of stars-in-the-making.

Filmed mostly in New Mexico, Silverado makes the maximum use of the wide open spaces available. Towns sit in the middle of vast plains that stretch to distant mountains. The cinematography is almost a character unto itself.

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My grandfather used to work for your grandfather. Of course the rates have gone up.

Young Frankenstein remains the most consistently self-assured film of Mel Brooks‘ career. Not as audaciously funny as Blazing Saddles or The Producers, it is still a pitch-perfect send up of the Universal monster movies of the 1930s. Filmed entirely in glorious black-and-white, the cinematography sets the perfect mood for lovingly satirizing those classics.

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Damn you! I’m not an actor, I’m a movie star!

Great comedies, or even just good ones, always have a great deal of affection for their subject. Surely, Mel Brooks must have loved the old Universal horror films to make Young Frakenstein. He also must have had fond memories of his days as a writer for Sid Ceasar on his Your Show of Shows, because My Favorite Year was clearly made with a great deal of love for the Golden Age of Television.

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We’re growing a strange crop of agnostics this year.

It is sad and a bit puzzling that, 80 years after the events that inspired this film, the battle is still going on. In 2005, almost six years into the 21st Century, numerous school district all over this country are attempting to insert the dubious concept of intelligent design into biology textbooks. Despite claims that it represents an alternative theory to Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution, the primary intellectual thrust of intelligent design never seems to extend past the same anti-evolutionism that led to the passage of the Butler Act which precipitated the actual Scopes Trial.

Inherit the Wind, both this film and especially the original 1955 play on which it was based, were not meant to give a historical account of the Scopes but rather to use it as an allegory for the Red Scare era. Even so, playwrights Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee used the trial transcript for much of their in court dialogue, so the scenes that focus on the trial itself stay close to the historical record.

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