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Reviews
Take a Letter, Darling (1942)
O tempora! O mores! O Paramount!
The title of this comment is not reflective of this movie, a witty and expertly-handled farce; a shiny, energetic bit of bric-a-brac representing a memento of what we'll look back on one day as the high point of American popular entertainment (if not American civilization - once so down-to-earth, and disarmingly unpretentious). Rather, it refers to the sad reality of what the powers that be are allowing to befall the pre-1950 Paramount back catalog, as vital a part of American cultural history as any you'd care to name. Whether it's Sony, or Universal, or Vivendi into whose corporate clutches the rights have now fallen, I've frankly lost track of - it's one of them, though (and maybe all three).
Point blank: these films are not being cared for, let alone properly restored. You see it time and again with vintage Paramount films - if it's a famous title they're sure they can make money on (like DOUBLE INDEMNITY, say, or the ROAD comedies or Sturges classics) the print looks and sounds pristine; but these days - if it's one of the hundreds of less-well-remembered Paramounts - invariably the picture is bleached and indistinct, the sound deteriorated, and the entire experience of watching the film deeply compromised. There's no other word for it than "disgraceful" (particularly as it's been Sony/Universal/Vivendi who've been keeping these films OUT of circulation for decades now, resulting in their less-well-remembered status in the first place!) if for no other reason that it robs us, and future generations, of the joy of REdiscovery that's such a rewarding aspect of watching vintage Hollywood films; of seeing, and appreciating, aspects and nuances that its contemporary audience perhaps missed, or weren't even looking for, the first time around.
I'm possibly making a mountain out of a molehill here, and particularly in TAKE A LETTER's case, as the picture is soft but certainly still watchable, though the crispness and contrast of the original image isn't there. (The the cast-listing after the picture ends, however, is so washed out it's utterly illegible. You can barely make out a single name.) And compared to the unmitigated audio-video horror that is now SWING HIGH, SWING LOW (another Fred MacMurray Paramount comedy, screened by TCM a few weeks ago), TAKE A LETTER is flawless by comparison. But it bothers me no end that seemingly nothing is being done to restore, to save, these movies. Paramount wasn't PRC or Monogram, for God's sake: their roster of pre-1950 features are easily the equal of Warners, MGM....any of the other majors. How is it possible that a billion-dollar entertainment conglomerate, even though it's one unconnected to the making of these pictures, can show such casual contempt for film history? "Lost" films are one thing; this is more like watching them being abandoned. Maybe an old-fashioned write-in campaign is called for.
Limbo (1999)
A Stunning Triumph
God love and protect John Sayles. Not because he hits every ball out of the park, because he clearly doesn't; but because he never lets his few strikeouts compel him to try to hit a five-run homer the next time out. In an era marked by increasingly degraded and degrading notions of "entertainment" and "storytelling" - for pity's sake, as I write this, grown adults are waxing rhapsodic over a movie about a costumed billionaire-vigilante (!!) - Sayles understands that great drama is about the people we meet every day; the places we live in and how they shape us; the things that change, and the things that remain; and above all, about the human heart in conflict with itself. In LIMBO, he takes risks with his zig-zagging narrative most filmmakers simply aren't capable of, and reaps rewards of such profundity, and richness of feeling, that most audiences are too conditioned by junk-culture to recognize, let alone appreciate them. Some viewers have felt betrayed by LIMBO's seismic shifts in tone and direction, and the elliptical ending, but even that sense of betrayal speaks to how utterly absorbing and moving his handling of his Alaska-set story is, and how unblinking his observations of his characters. (You can only feel "betrayed" if you're deeply invested in the story that's been presented, after all.) Sayles' screenplay, like his direction, is so completely free of artifice as to seem transparent - his "heroes" and "villains" are separated only by their degrees of vulnerability and weakness under pressure - and his small cast of actors are working at the height of their gifts. David Straithairn, always underrated, has never been better, and young Vanessa Martinez is a quiet revelation. You won't forget these characters, or this movie, regardless of how the ending affects you. And though you hate to jinx his thus-far phenomenal career with red-carpet hullabaloo, maybe it's time to make it official and coronate John Sayles as the greatest moviemaker of our time. He may not need or want the crown, but Hollywood certainly needs to made to cry uncle and acknowledge it.
Hard Candy (2005)
Chi-chi Claptrap
Predictably overpraised torture-swill that I watched on a pay-cable outlet that, honest to God, followed their airing of this film with SAW III, and then KINKY SEX CLUB (one of those faceless soft-core porn films they run in late night time-slots)! An unfortunate anomaly of programming, you say? Business as usual, says I. Though HARD CANDY depends upon the illusion of offering acerbic social commentary, its only value as cultural document is as a prosecution exhibit establishing the media's eager complicity in the continuing collapse of Western civilization - and that includes the critics. (Speaking of whom, I wonder how unanimous their praise would have been had this film been about a 14-year-old BOY taunting and tormenting an adult male pedophile attempting to seduce him? Ahh, but Hollywood doesn't like to dwell on the preponderance of homosexual pedophiles in the headlines they exploit for popular consumption. That sort of thing's bad for the overall agenda.) If you're still burbling pop-sociology phrases like 'grrrl power' and 'subversive gender/power reversal', adamant that HARD CANDY is provocative and powerful and that new standby for exploitative junk, 'darkly witty', try this simple test. Mentally subtract all the high-tech 21st century tchotchkes from the scenario - the cell phones and lap tops and such - and give HARD CANDY a 1930s, art-deco production design. Set it in Weimar Germany, and make it the tale of a worldly, predatory, pedophilic Jew getting his deserved comeuppance at the hands of a plucky, self-reliant Aryan maiden of 14. Voila! It's JUD SUSS with ropes and a scalpel! Now sit back, and let your conditioning do the rest.
Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993)
Like Watching Old People #!@%
It's my own private theory that the decade between roughly 1966, and roughly 1976, represents not just a sea-change/high-point/Belle Epoque of the arts in this country, but the duration of a force-field imposed by aliens who briefly took over our bodies and spent a long arts and crafts holiday here, giving us 2001 and REVOLVER and BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS and CLOSE TO THE EDGE and CHINATOWN and much more in the process; and when they left at last for their home world, the bodies they inhabited reverted right back to their true selves. In the case of Mel Brooks, through whose corporeal shell the Visitors had crafted THE PRODUCERS, BLAZING SADDLES and YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN, that means a pushy, tiresome, obnoxious hack.
Well, it's as good an explanation as any, right? Brooks so totally lost the plot from the latter half of the 70s on that bodysnatching aliens and Faustian bargains spring naturally to mind as reasonable explanations: that's how fast, and far, he fell off the cliff. There isn't a single funny moment in his ROBIN HOOD spoof, but this is far worse than simply "unfunny". Few things in life are as painful to endure as third-rate comedy performed badly, by incompetents incapable of timing a gag or delivering even a throwaway line without stepping on the joke. Not that this is measurably worse than the half-dozen or so lead balloons Brooks made prior to this. On the other hand, it's every bit as wheezingly unfunny as they were. If it wasn't, would Dick van Patten even be in this? Yeah.... when I think of freewheeling, anything-goes absurdist satire, Van Patten's the first name that comes to mind.
Oh, yeah....about those jokes. They're about on the level of a Bob Hope Special from 1971, only with the racier, edgier material cut out.
"And this is my friend Will Scarlet."
"Well, Scarlet's my middle name. (pause) My full name is Will Scarlet O'Hara. (longer pause) We're from Georgia."
That's one of the better ones, folks. And even though the joke as written is terrible, and could never be made funny no matter how it was read, the tortuous Pasadena Playhouse pauses actually make the thing even worse than it already is. Which is pretty much this movie in a nutshell - bad ideas, made worse by terrible writing, further doomed by an unsuitable cast, all of whom flail away helplessly without any sort of competent direction.
If you must see this, see it on basic cable so you'll at least have the cell-phone and diet soda commercials to look forward to. And maybe you, too, will wonder how it was possible anybody ever thought Mel Brooks was a genius, and how in the world did he keep getting money to make these godawful comedies. I can't help you with the second question, but as far as the first goes, trust me; it was the aliens.