Keyword Archive:
Black and White

Duck Soup (1933)

Friday, July 1st, 2011

Remember, you’re fighting for this woman’s honour, which is probably more than she ever did.

I would offer up Duck Soup as the spiritual great-grandfather of movies like Blazing Saddles and Airplane!. Its plot seems to exist as an afterthought, unnecessary baggage that gets in the way of the movie’s true purpose: “four Jews trying to get a laugh,” as Groucho Marx would later confess.

Duck Soup

It’s possible to view Duck Soup as a brilliant political farce, lacerating the bloated self-importance of world leaders, or you can just look to it for 68 minutes of pure post-Vaudevillian anarchy. It works both ways. This may not be the Marx Brothers at their most coherent, but it’s easily them at their funniest.

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The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)

Tuesday, June 14th, 2011

When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

While John Ford would go on to direct several more pictures after this one, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance represents a sort of exclamation point of one of most celebrated directorial careers in American film. His previous high-water mark, The Searchers, was a film torn between the conventions of a previous era and emerging modern sensibilities. Liberty Valance is thoroughly modern by 1962 standards and virtually timeless by any other.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

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Them! (1954)

Wednesday, June 8th, 2011

Spit’s all that’s holding me together right now, too.

Them! launched what would be Hollywood’s version of the Godzilla movie, expressing our atomic-age fears via giant bugs and insects instead of rubber lizards. This particular sub-genre has been largely forgotten by our collective movie memory, but Them! remains as an example of 1950s sci-fi done with a style and self-confident maturity that the category often lacks.

Them!

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Raging Bull (1980)

Wednesday, June 1st, 2011

I’m your brother and you ask me that?

Raging Bull is an unforgettable portrait of man who seemed to lack the capacity and imagination to ever be happy. It’s not a film you watch to be uplifted or reassured about the human condition. The most pleasant thought you can take away from the story of Jake La Motta (Robert DeNiro) is how fortunate you were not to be one of his friends. Or him.

Raging Bull

Stacked next to La Motta, DeNiro’s other great role for director Martin Scorcese, Travis Bickle, is a poster child for well-adjusted contentment. (more…)

Fail Safe (1964)

Friday, May 13th, 2011

He who is without sin, let him cast the first stone.

Fail Safe (Henry Fonda and Larry Hagman)

It’s best to think of this movie as the estranged fraternal twin of Dr. Strangelove. Fail Safe is the sober, humorless one. Both films cover virtually the same territory, that of an inadvertent nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, but while Stanley Kubrick treated Armageddon as a subject worthy of absurdist gallows farce, Sidney Lumet takes it seriously for some reason. (more…)

Seven Days in May (1964)

Thursday, May 12th, 2011

You got something against the English language, Colonel?

Seven Days in May

Directed by John Frankenheimer, this film teams with his masterpiece The Manchurian Candidate to form a potent one-two punch of Cold War paranoia. The earlier film, with Frank Sinatra and Laurence Harvey, boasted a more complex plot and a layer of political satire that’s not found here. That doesn’t make Seven Days in May a lesser film, just a different one with different goals. (more…)

Dr. Strangelove (1964)

Thursday, May 5th, 2011

Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!

Stanley Kubrick’s acid-soaked absurdist farce about the end of the world has to stand alone among the genre of cold war films in the same way that 2001: A Space Odyssey stands alone among science-fiction films. (more…)

From Here to Eternity (1953)

Friday, November 30th, 2007

Nobody ever lies about being lonely.

In lesser hands, this movie would have been one long soap opera, but this adaptation of James Jonesrather bawdy novel manages to wring real human drama out of its characters instead. The real miracle is that the filmmakers managed to tame the rather explicit novel enough to appease the censors and still stay true to the spirit of the story. If all you remember or know about this movie is Burt Lancaster’s famous clinch on the beach with Deborah Kerr, then you owe yourself a viewing of this movie, which has a lot more to offer.

From Here to Eternity

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Paths of Glory (1957)

Sunday, November 4th, 2007

There are few things more fundamentally encouraging and stimulating than seeing someone else die.

Paths of Glory

Legendary French director François Truffaut famously said that it was impossible to make a truly anti-war film, because film inherently glamorizes everything it depicts. That quote is hard to reconcile, however, with the evidence of Stanley Kubrick’s first truly great movie. (more…)

The Dawn Patrol (1938)

Sunday, November 4th, 2007

Don’t worry. You’ll die soon enough.

1938 was a pretty good year for Errol Flynn, featuring two of the films for which he will always be remembered, the other being the Technicolor romp called The Adventures of Robin Hood. This remake of a pre-code Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., movie, however, is the better of the two films, requiring Flynn to do some real acting.

The Dawn Patrol

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