J.D. Hansel

1950s Movie Reviews

Alice in Wonderland (1951) Review

by

Thanks to Tim Burton, this movie is sometimes called “the good Alice in Wonderland.”  I understand why – nostalgia goggles can do that to even the best of us.  The problem is that this movie just isn’t very good.  Sure, the 2010 film has problems and may be highly annoying to some, but at least its story is actually a story.  The original Lewis Carroll story isn’t a story.  It’s a drug trip.  And that’s what this movie is as well.

Now, I don’t want to fault the movie for problems it could not help but inherit from its source material, which is the only reason I’m giving this movie such a high rating – if Disney had come up with the story, I’d be giving it two and a half stars at best.  I’m still not even sure that the other elements of the movie merit this rating, because a lot of the film is just unbearable.  Surely Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum could have been done in a way that’s less excruciatingly irritating, and surely certain parts of the story could have been given a few more small splashed of humor.  The soundtrack is so-so, with some songs I really like a lot, others I think do the job just well enough, and others I find either forgettable or stupid.

So, I’m giving this a nice rating because of two redeeming qualities: first is the casting of a few of the main characters.  I really like the Cheshire Cat in this movie, and the Mad Hatter is one of the great Ed Winn performances.  The one who really steals the show, however, is Alice, voiced by Kathryn Beaumont.  Her voice is absolutely perfect for the part, and perhaps just perfect in general – I could easily listen to it all day.  The second redeeming quality is the visual style, as this might just be, in some respects at least, the most visually pleasing animated film I have ever seen.  It’s got all of the curves and colors one would want a trippy wonderland to have, and its style also serves to mark its particular moment in animation history.  The resulting film is one that I don’t enjoy watching very much – it was a struggle to finish it quite frankly – but I do enjoy looking at it and listening to it, so I’ll let it slide.

T

 

A Star Is Born (1954) Review

by

This movie may have made a big splash in its day, but I don’t think it gets talked about much anymore.  I can understand why – in many respects it’s very generic.  It’s the kind of romantic epic/tragicomedy that feels like textbook Oscar-bait, just mixed together with show-tunes.  That  being said, it’s a pretty solid film.  It may start out boring, but as it goes on, the performances get more impressive, the drama gets more captivating, and the musical numbers get more enjoyable.  The look of some of these numbers alone is reason enough to watch the film, and I see this as one of the greatest examples of theatricality in cinema at its best.

But at the end of the day, as expected, the appeal is Judy Garland.  I’ve always known she was a great singer, but this is the movie that shows the full range of her acting abilities.  What’s amazing is how she takes a character that’s absurdly cliché and makes her distinct.  Along with her co-star, she made me really care about a story in which I thought I would have no interest, creating a level of sincere, beautiful drama I hardly ever see.

So yes, much of the movie is trite and forgettable, and the film starts off quite boring – I imagine it stays boring for those who don’t like musicals – but it redeems itself in spades.

Carousel Review

by

The backlash to La La Land shouldn’t be nearly as surprising to me as it is – rejecting that which everyone else seems to uncritically adore is one of the ways that our species keeps itself from becoming too gullible, thoughtless, or monogamous.  While it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference between the critics who just want to seem/feel smarter than everyone else, whether they’re the posh elitists from the background of a Woody Allen movie or the hipsters in the nearby coffee shop, and the critics who genuinely wanted to appreciate the film for what it is rather than what it isn’t, but left the theater feeling unsatisfied.  For me, one of the key criticisms I keep hearing that I actually do find to be a valid one is the issue of the lack of a strong sense of focus and plot during many large portions of the film.  When I put the first third of the movie under a microscope, I find that there’s really not a lot of story here – or arguably not a lot of “movie” here – just spectacle and emotion.  There’s a time and place for spectacle and pure emotion in cinema, however, and this place generally is indeed found in the musical number, but my preferred explanation for why La La Land has this problem is that it becomes one of the ways the film address the problems that the musicals from the 1950s have.  In other words, there are times when La La Land seems like it offers nothing more than its genre as its entertainment, but this is justifiable in my view.  The film for which it is not so justifiable is 1956’s Carousel, which is purely a display of its genre and nothing more – purely flavors without substance.

All of the songs feel like usual Rogers and Hammerstein songs, but few of them are memorable.  All of the story beats feel just right for a standard stage musical, but none of them are interesting.  All of the performances are impressive and spot-on, but I couldn’t care less about the characters.  Perhaps it’s just because of the generation gap, but the way that the characters think, speak, and behave strikes me as being so different from my experience with being a human being and interacting with other human beings that I find it hard to believe these characters are even meant to represent our species.  Their expectations of how life works are so far away from contemporary progressive values that I was more bewildered by the characters’ emotions than I was invested in them.  The film almost made me care, however, simply by being so stylistically emotional, with music that, at the very least, saturates the conflict appropriately.  The visual style alone is enough to make the film worth watching in spite of all of its flaws, because this is the way that a movie is supposed to look and feel – this is the kind of thing I want to see when I look at a movie screen.

All put together, the different elements work in tandem to make it abundantly clear that the viewer is watching a Rogers and Hammerstein musical, and in a sense, this film can be used as a benchmark to see how close a film comes to feeling like a mid-century musical – to capturing the genre.  There’s a good bit of Oklahoma in here, a piece of South Pacific, a touch of the yet-to-be-produced Sound of Music, and resemblance to Singin’ in the Rain or Bye Bye Birdie at times.  In this sense, the movie is like a “Greatest Hits: Volume 3” for its genre: it’s the same style we expect and all the same stuff we’ve heard before, but more boring now.  I think it works better as a stencil than a movie, allowing other films to use its tricks and tropes to properly stylize other films in the genre, hopefully helping the next director who tries to do something like La La Land perfect all of the little things that make a musical truly feel musical.

The Seven Year Itch Review

by

This film is absolutely mad – or at the very least its protagonist is.  It had been a long time since it had last seen a Billy Wilder comedy, but after seeing Double Indemnity this past Autumn, I was naturally interested in seeing if his comedies could be as intelligent as his dramas.  I was not disappointed, but I was surprised by just how far this story dives into madness, creating a crazy comedy about romance instead of a romantic comedy.  I think this is where the film’s intelligence is found: it recognizes with brilliant observation just how absurd the human imagination is when fueled by fear, lust, and images from fictions, almost making it a criticism of its own medium.  Admittedly, the screenplay is clever, but not quite as funny as it could be, and Marilyn is sexy, but not quite at her best as a performer, so I watched it in parts over time to prevent boredom.  In spite of this, it’s definitely the must-see comedy movie of its era because it taps into the anxieties of the adult, straight, American male on a level few films have apart from The Graduate (and because I cannot believe it was approved by the code).  This makes it a perfect introduction to the inner-workings of the male mind, and it has the benefits of stylistic charms and hearty laughs to make it a thoroughly enjoyable experience.

Touch of Evil Review

by

Very often for these reviews, I like to take the general critical consensus of a film’s worth into account for the star rating.  I usually don’t let what the professional critics have to say influence the body of my review very much, but for the number of stars, it’s nearly always a factor.  This is because I want the star rating to serve as at least one of the following: an objective, logical analysis that reduces the influence of the specific emotional context of my viewing of the film and just focuses on quality; the extent to which I recommend the film to others; a “protest vote” to counter the views of the other reviewers; a bold statement to bait its viewers to read the article that goes with it.  Sometimes I go for somewhere in the middle of all four, but I usually use the reviews of the other critics to help my more objective ratings by rounding them up to a higher number of stars when I’m stuck in a dilemma.  For this film, I’m definitely rounding up due to critical consensus – I just can’t figure out what my own feelings are about the film, but I can’t think of anything wrong with it either.

I have no issue with the protagonist, apart from the fact that the casting is comically bizarre, and most of the other characters are fine by me as well.  Welles’ character in the film is obviously a delight, and his handiwork as a director is as much of a big, eye-catching performance as his acting is.  The lighting is wonderful, making for excellent “noir” visuals, and the way that some of these scenes are shot is exceptionally impressive.  The choice for the music is particularly interesting because its very fun for a drama from this time period, including a lot of classic (then-contemporary) rock ‘n’ roll, making for some unique juxtaposition.  The film has a few truly great scenes throughout, and the climax is just perfect.  As much as I like the story of Welles’ character, it really feels like there isn’t a whole lot of story in the film – at least not for the first half.  It can feel kind of slow and boring at times, leaving me wondering why I’m supposed to be interested, but these moments are balanced out with moments that are shocking, dazzling, or otherwise intriguing, making for a very fascinating piece of work in the end.  If Touch of Evil is the last film noir, as many historians say it is, it’s nice to see the genre went out with a bang.

Gun Crazy Review

by

SPOILER WARNING

In my last review, I wrote a bit about how I’m currently fascinated with génial–nanar blends – films that are very impressive and enjoyable in some scenes, yet are so stupid, bizarre, or unimpressive that they become enjoyable in other scenes.  One of the best examples of this type of film is unsurprisingly found in the film noir genre: Gun Crazy, also known as Deadly Is the Female.  While I don’t think it’s meant to be a comedy, many scenes are so strange or absurd that they seem laughable, giving me a feeling that’s no so different from what I get when I watch Duck Soup in that it feels almost like a child’s idea of how to make a movie rather than a rational adult’s.  What I think Gun Crazy demonstrates is that this group of films, in which I would include Gun Crazy, often achieves this state by trying to be completely interesting, surprising, or unique.

First, consider the strange aspects of this film.  The protagonist is obviously a very odd choice for a romantic lead in a crime drama because of his tall, lanky, silly appearance, which is only made sillier by his awkward smile and his unexplained obsession with guns.  Towards the beginning of the film, two characters are presented as children – Clyde Boston and Dave Alastair – who are dressed as adults and look exactly the same when they grow up.  Towards the end, Annie is randomly crazy enough to steal the baby from Ruby’s house to keep herself (and Bart) from getting shot by police.  The foggy, swampy environment of the ending looks nothing like the rest of the film, and wouldn’t naturally occur in that location, breaking what little sense of realism the film had maintained.  Best of all is the line that was nominated for inclusion in AFI’s 100 Movie Quotes: “We go together, Laurie. I don’t know why. Maybe like guns and ammunition go together.”

Now consider just how much of Gun Crazy is clever and creative.  The opening titles are presented over the background that becomes the first scene, meaning the cast and crew held on that shot for a few minutes before they started moving – nothing novel, but certainly something rare and interesting.  As far as the storytelling goes, there is great irony in the fact that the protagonist first encounters his lover when she shoots him and their relationship ends when he shoots her.  The bank robbery scene that was shot all in one take is highly impressive from a technical standpoint, not to mention how difficult it must have been for the performers to time everything properly and improvise any needed dialogue.  Even some of the weirdest things can be viewed from a perspective that makes them seem clever.  For example, one might see the representation of young Clyde and Dave as miniature adults as an indication that much of the film (or at least the opening scene that takes place in the past) is being presented from Bart’s perspective according to his memory.

Ultimately, all of these positive elements and bizarre elements seem to come from the same directorial approach: making the film as interesting as possible – striving to make things unique at all costs.  Trying things that people have never done before in cinema can lead to the greatness of Citizen Kane or the ridiculousness of a Joel Schumacher film.  In spite of its resemblance to other film noir, it clearly strives to be very much its own film, refusing to let anyone say that it is not unique.  This isn’t the greatest answer to my question of how we get génial–nanar blends, and it is not my final answer – in fact one professor of mine found it very inadequate, arguing instead that it has something more to do with affect.  Still, the desire to make something very different from what everyone’s seen before, something that’s very captivating and memorable at all costs, does seem to be at least a preliminary requirement for the génial–nanar.  I don’t think anyone else would have thought to make a film noir with a tiny touch of the western and a big load of goofiness, but the fact that this mixture was somehow able to get produced in the height of the studio system’s panicked identity crisis is enough to make it the unique novelty that audiences never knew they wanted.

156-gun-crazy