Mysteriously absent from any of the DVD packages of W. C. Fields films, including the two mighty useful but uneven five-disc Comedy Collection sets, the 1932 Million Dollar Legs is a compendium of golden shtick. The producer, Herman Mankiewicz, and the director, Edward Cline, who started out in the business as a Keystone comedian, were happy to make the most of the new sound technology that finally made it possible for Fields to cut loose on-camera, but they also included shout-outs to the silent era: Ben Turpin, the silent comic whose entire persona was his perpetual cock-eyed expression, slithers about as a spy, throwing his black cloak in front of his face like Dracula to subtly telegraph that he may be up to no good. Fields plays the president of Klopstokia, where all the women are named Angela and all the men are named George, and where all the inhabitants are master athletes. This pointedly includes both Fields and his arch rival, played by vaudeville veteran Hugh Herbert; the two of them routinely arm wrestle for control of the government, even though both men look as if the only way to get them from one end of a race track to the other would be to set the last beers in creation at the finish line. The film's romantic lead is Jack Oakie, the comic who is perhaps best for his Mussolini parody in Chaplin's The Great Dictator, and who looked a little like a young, housebroken Jonathan Winters. "Isn't he handsome, father?" coos Fields's daughter, Angela. (See above.) "Yeah," replies Fields, "but I'll fix that."

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Albert Finney in BIG FISH (2003)



How powerful is Albert Finney’s death scene in Tim Burton’s tall tale of a man with larger-than-life recollections of his own personal history? Well, let’s put it this way: according to New York magazine, “The last his family saw of [monologist Spalding Gray] was Saturday, January 10, [2004] when he took the kids to see Big Fish, the story of a dying father’s relationship with his son, at the Loews Village on Third Avenue and 11th Street. After the movie, Gray wept.” And then, 24 hours later, he tossed himself off the Staten Island ferry into the East River.  Perhaps the special power of the movie for Gray (and creative types in general, myself included) is best captured in the final line, after Finney (as Edward Bloom, a character played in flashbacks by Ewan McGregor) inspires his son (Billy Crudup) to mitigate the tragedy of death through art and fantasy: “A man tells a story over and over so many times he becomes the story. In that way, he is immortal.” And, frankly, isn’t reimagining the world and hoping for some existence beyond it (in Heaven and/or in films, novels, scientific discoveries, progeny, blog entries, etc.) more or less the heart of human existence?  For me, the greatest terror is thinking my consciousness and memories (not to mention the existence of my friends, relatives...even acquaintances and pets) will be erased forever at death. In particular, I dread the eventual demise of my parents and cling to hopes and fantasies that somehow there’s more than an empty void at the end of our road after all the fun and struggle of life...and so Burton’s film (about a father’s death transformed by flights of fancy) hit me like a 2x4, unleashing an unexpected, uncontrollable torrent of emotion unlike anything I’ve ever experienced at the movies (or maybe it was just the cameo by Miley Cyrus, in her feature film debut, back when she was known as “Destiny"). (AO)

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Leonard Pierce's Top Ten Best Movies Ever!

1. CITIZEN KANE (1941)
2. PERSONA (1966)



Ingmar Bergman’s Persona opened so many cinematic doors for me, I feel like the film itself holds me in a sort of eternal debt. It’s an incredibly intense film, with some of the most powerful and difficult emotional moments I’ve ever seen on screen, but despite its often harrowing bleakness, it feels to me like a gift. Its performances are so titanic, and yet so subtle, they awakened me to what real acting, as opposed to mere performing, really meant; its philosophical and psychological depth is profound in a way that I thought impossible without descending into polemic; and its liberation from traditional narrative perfectly straddled the line between what had gone before and what was yet to come. Its emotional intensity, its quiet self-awareness, and its breathtaking erotic moments all supported a meditation on identity and reality that’s stunning in its power. Apparently, it changed things for Bergman, too – he spoke of it as being the first film where critical reception and commercial success were not at all under consideration when he made it. He sensed he was taking his work as far as it could go, and he was right: over forty years later, it’s still perched at the extreme of cinema, one of the most moving, most meaningful films I’ve ever seen, and more than anything else he ever made, justified his reputation as the medium’s most probing artist.

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Phil Nugent's Top Ten(-ish) Best Movies Ever!

7. THE LADY EVE (1941)



Veronica Geng: "The American filmmaker Preston Sturges had a supreme gift for making people laugh without representing the world as better or worse than it is... In [his films], politics is rigged, poverty is immune to charity, bosses are petty dictators and workers live on dreams of jackpots, romantic love is either a luxury of the rich or a fabrication of the con artist, and small-town America's morality is the kind that ostracizes an unwed pregnant girl while embracing a bogus war hero. Yet these movies sent waves of euphoria rolling through the audience." That's one way of putting it. Here's another: Once upon a time, in a place called Hollywood, there lived a great man who one day decided that, if he had anything to say about it, the world would never forget William Demarest.

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7. ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1968)



I could go into (a little bit of) detail about how Leone simultaneously anticipates the "demythologized" Westerns of the 1970s and beyond and blows them all out of the water, but to do so would be pigeonholing the film's achievement. This film isn't just the greatest Western of all time -- it's one of the all-time great experiences one can have in a movie theatre. Sergio Leone's command of iconography is second to none, and his juxtaposition of pore-baring closeups and expansive landscapes is justifiably legendary. Many have called this film "operatic," and for good reason; this is an epic story told on a grand scale, with wonderfully archetypal characters who linger on and on in the mind. Much credit is due to the great Ennio Morricone, whose score defines the film's characters by their respective musical themes (love the way Henry Fonda's acid-guitar theme and Charles Bronson's guitar noodling mesh, suggesting their shared fate). One of the greatest pleasures for a filmgoer is finding a timeless scene -- a "Moment Out of Time," as it were. Once Upon a Time in the West is so assured and startling that it contains one Moment Out of Time after another, adding up to a peerless entertainment -- tense, moving, funny, artful, exciting as all hell, and above all the very cinematic definition of "iconic." (PC)

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After last week’s Reviews By Request poll resulted in a tie, I decided to watch and write up the first of the two “requested” films, John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley, in advance of this weekend’s Oscar ceremony. My review of the second film, Tom Jones, will run two weeks from today.

Among many film lovers, John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley has gotten something of a bad rap as the movie that bested Citizen Kane for the 1941 Best Picture Oscar. And while Valley isn’t the film Kane is, we might say the same of nearly any other film ever made, which makes the comparison a little unfair. Moreover, it makes perfect sense that the Hollywood establishment would prefer the elegiac Valley to the scathing Kane, especially when you consider that both films were made during World War II, when national and pro-Allied sentiment were at their peak. But today, these concerns are incidental, and the most important thing is this- How Green Was My Valley is still a pretty terrific film.

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My infant daughter has been sick this weekend, and I'm not feeling too great myself.  So this may be the most slapdashed, pithy-free column yet.  Keep those expectations low!  Adam Christ asked last week about setting up an online movie discussion based on one of the flicks I mention in this column.  I don't have an answer for him, but I promise to figure it out soon.  Anyway, here's what I like this week.  As always, be sure to mention any glaring omissions in the comments thread and I'll edit the column to add your recommendation.  

Mon, Nov 17:

6/7 pm: Restoration on IFC.

8:30/9:30 pm: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) on TCM.  This is the Charles Laughton version.

10:15/11:15 pm: The New World on IFC (repeat on 11/18 at 2:45/3:45 am).  By god, what a great movie.

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THE MOVIE: Directed by Gregory La Cava and based on a novel by T. F. Tweed, it stars Walter Huston as Judson C. "Judd" Hammond, an affable glad-hander and crooked hack politician who becomes a compromise candidate for president at his party's deadlocked convention. Hammond's election would seem to augur a quiet, complacent time in his country's history, but while driving himself through the streets of D.C., the Prez does his James Dean impression and winds up in a coma. He is not expected to survive, but he soon rises from his bed of pain, and when he does, he's a new man, fiercely committed to using the power of his office to fix what needs fixing and no longer interested in the sweet fleshy charms of his personal assistant and mistress, Pendie Malloy (Karen Morley). Fending off an attempt by the appalled jackals in Congress to impeach his newly honest ass, Judd gathers support from The People, threatens to declare martial law, and cloaks himself in powers that abolish the checks and balances system, making him answerable to no man.

Thus equipped, he takes charge of the banks and creates new work programs before turning his attention to the real problem vexing our nation: Da Mob. Judd abolishes Prohibition and then, in private communication with the criminal kingpin Nick Diamond, who's in charge of everything bad, suggests that he make plans to return to the land of his fathers, since he's just lost the raison d'etre for his bootlegging business and, besides, we don't cotton to foreigners in these parts. Diamond offers his counter proposal in the form of an attempted mob hit on the White House that leaves Pendie in the hospital and Judd in a state of high dudgeon. Taking the gloves off, he has all the gangsters in the country rounded up and summarily executed by firing squad in view of the Statue of Liberty. For his last trick, Judd gathers all the ambassadors from other lands aboard a yacht, informs them that he is rejecting the universally agreed upon limitations on naval power, oversees the bombing of a couple of abandoned American battleships as a demonstration of the power of American military might, and then muses that if all these jaspers could persuade their governments to immediately repay their mountainous war debts to the United States, which would destabilize their own national budgets to such a degree that Judd would have no need to fear that they'd be upgrading their own armies anytime soon, it sure would get them on his good side. Having threatened his way to guaranteed world peace, Judd collapses and, this time, finally cashes in his chips for good. The suggestion is made that perhaps he never really recovered from his accident but has been possessed by the spirit of a heavenly agent working through him to restore God's country to full strength.

WHY IT DESERVES TO BE FORGOTTEN: It is clinically insane.

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What made The Carpetbaggers a hit?: Americans have long been fascinated with the lifestyles and misadventures of the filthy rich. While the wealthy and powerful may have the same urges and appetites we do, their affluence allows them to exert these on a much grander and more ambitious scale, and in more lavish settings. It was this idea that drove the lurid, sex-soaked novels of Harold Robbins, one of the most popular novelists of the 1950s and 1960s. And for The Carpetbaggers he took his inspiration from perhaps the most famous millionaire of the day, Howard Hughes. Even more than in real life, the book’s Hughes surrogate Jonas Cord Jr. collected companies by day and female conquests by night, with no regard for the damage he caused. And while few readers would want to know Cord in real life, many of them enjoyed his exploits on the page, and the book would end up being the most-read novel of Robbins’ career.

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Lest we forget, Elvis Presley was once a movie star.  In fact, as malicious movie writer Joe Queenan put it, Elvis -- in his spare time from being the biggest rock and roll star in the history of the world -- also made dozens of the world movies of all time.  Elvis' movie work was noteworthy not only for its poor quality as film (honestly, folks, he turned out one stinkeroo after another; he made thirty-one movies as an actor, and maybe three of them are even remotely worth watching), but for their poor quality as soundtracks.  Considering that almost all of his movies were musicals -- because, believe me, nobody was hiring the guy for his acting chops -- they produced very few good songs.  Elvis had tons of great singles, but hardly any of them came from his movies.  Jailhouse Rock was a notable exception.

Made in 1957 with workmanlike pro Richard Thorpe at the helm, Jailhouse Rock was Elvis' third movie as a leading man, and one of his only tolerable ones.  He plays Vince Everett, a sneering yet charming hillbilly who serves a stint in the joint for involuntary manslaughter.  While there, he writes the title song, invents a hot dance craze to go along with it, and gets out of jail just in time to romance snooty society dame Judy Tyler.  It's pretty standard fare, and plenty hokey at that, but it's at least snappy and enjoyable instead of a joyless slog like most of his movies.  (It also had a tragic dimension -- Elvis' co-star Tyler died in a car wreck only three days after the film wrapped, and he refused to see it out of respect for her, thus ensuring he never got to see one of his only decent big-screen appearances.)  As Queenan has astutely noted, it's not as if we were particularly robbed of a bunch of great performances by the rotten scripts Colonel Tom Parker foisted on Elvis, but in the early days at least, he was occasionally cast in roles that played to his strengths as a rockabilly performer and allowed him to have fun with his roles.  Elvis also choreographed the dance number, basing it not on the formal dance routine called for in the script but his own hip-swinging moves of the day. Citizen Kane it ain't, but if you insist on seeing an Elvis movie, you could do worse.  Boy, could you do worse.

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Bernard Herrmann was one of the most legendary film composers of all time.  One of his first major compositions was the score to The Devil and Daniel Webster, in which he showed both his innovative approach and his playfully subversive nature by by double-tracking a violin to play a jaw-droppingly complex rendition of "Pop Goes the Weasel", and then claiming the solo was the work of a teenaged violin prodigy he'd discovered.  He composed a number of memorable movie scores over the years, from the towering, epic sweep of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (his very first project) to the moody, dark tension of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (his very last).  But it is with Alfred Hitchcock's name that Herrmann's will be foreever linked.

Hitchcock knew he was playing with dynamite when he made Psycho.  The movie that buried noir and ushered in the age of the maniacal slasher was a risky venture for him on many levels:  with its shocking violence, infamous mid-film twist, and horror plot, it was a massive deviation from the big-budget hit mysteries that had made so much money for his studio bosses in the late 1950s.  Fearing disaster, Hitch -- who was nothing if not determined -- tried as much as possible to make the film on the cheap, and he wasn't afraid to capitalize on personal relationships to do so.  Some stories have it that he strong-armed Herrmann, who had turned in incredibly monumental work for him before on such movies as The Man Who Knew Too Much, North by Northwest, and Vertigo; but Herrmann wasn't one to be cowed so easily.  He agreed to work on the soundtrack for Psycho at less than his normal pay, but Herrmann -- a rarity amongst film composers insofar as he retained near-total creative control over the final product of his labors -- made it clear he was going to do things his way.  Most famously, he ignored Hitchcock's foremost prerogative when writing the score:  the director insisted that, for maximum shock value, there be total silence on the soundtrack during the murders, most especially the infamous shower scene.

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Every couple of months, someone in the press gets wind of the notion that independent film -- which, to our knowledge, has never been a field people have entered with an eye towards getting rich -- is on its last legs.  Lamentations ensue, and then someone pulls out the box office receipts for The Dark Knight, and everybody has a good laugh.  This time around, it's National Public Radio's turn to sound the doom bell for our favorite art form.

"Chicken Little was right", screams the headline to Kim Masters' article on the last days of indie film, placing into evidence the testimony of one Mark Johnson, a big-time studio producer (Chronicles of Narnia) who also dabbles in the independents.  Unable to find a distributor for his small-budget southern gothic Ballast, he and director Lance Hammer are now taking it from city to city, screening it in front of whatever audiences will pay attention.  "I thought that, at the end of the day, quality would win.  We would like to think that if something is made well, it ought to be able to pay for itself," says the producer, who apparently has never ever paid any attention to any aspect of our culture. Art-house executive Mark Gill points out that independent films now have a 99% chance of failure (which, we're guessing, is up from the 98% of a few years ago, or the 100% of most of Hollywood history), and warns that "You have to be very good, or great, or you will die," which should come as exciting news to all the people who made great movies and failed anyway as well as reassuring every failure in the industry that they just aren't good enough.

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In the past, we've discussed here in the OST feature how soundtracks often happily combine musicians and filmmakers at the height of their powers in a collision of sound and vision that justifies and enhances the existence of both soundtrack and film.  In some of these entries -- especially Nashville, Blade Runner, and Fight Club -- we've seen composers and directors perfectly suited for each other, starting great partnerships or merely cementing a similar vision that would inform their work for years to come.  Today, though, we're going to look at an excellent soundtrack that's atypical for both participants:  a film score done by a great composer working out of his element and a skilled director whose career would, follwing this film, go into a long, slow decline.

The Pink Panther series marked director Blake Edwards at the peak of his powers.  While he would never be considered a great director, he at least would develop, largely on the strength of the early installments of the series, as a competent and sure-handed director of comedies, and with the first of the series -- appropriately named The Pink Panther -- he was at his very best, giving the movie exactly the style, atmosphere and pace that it needed.  It's not  Citizen Kane by anyone's measure, but it's light-years away from the dross that he would later helm in movies like A Fine Mess, Skin Deep and Switch.  Henry Mancini, likewise, was a titan of film music, but it was largely through professionalism and dedication than brilliance or inspiration.  He had a reputation as a good, fast worker, capable of quick turnarounds of impressively hook-laden scores; while he may never have taken your breath away, he certainly fought you for its attention.  Mancini had an extensive background in jazz, but it was never his speciality; he was too tempted by the sounds of '50s pop and exotica to nail down anything like an authentic sound.  If anything, he tended to gravitate towards what was known then as "exotic", a sort of symphonic jazz-lite tinted with hints of what would later be called "world music" and heaping helpings of cheese.  He too would decline in power as the decades dragged on, but here, both of them hit their strides something fierce, resulting in a widely hailed comedy classic that produced one of the most memorable figures in cinema, and a soundtrack whose main theme is one of the most recognizable tunes in movie history.

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Thanks to reader Cameron for requesting this week’s review. As always, for instructions on how to request the next review for this feature (to run in two weeks) see the bottom of this post.

I only have myself to blame. When I first came up with Reviews By Request, I did so in the hope that some loyal Screengrab readers would be recommend some treasures I hadn’t yet seen. However, there was always that fear that I’d left myself open for someone to come along and request something really terrible, and I would be committed to it by my word. And now, sure enough, it’s happened. I can’t begin to guess why reader Cameron might recommend William Girdler’s Three on a Meathook. Perhaps he legitimately likes the movie, or maybe he wanted to shake up the format a bit by recommending something crappy. Perhaps he’s one of those democratic souls who believe that every movie deserves a fair shake. Whatever the reason, I’ll honor his request. I’ve given my word, and I’ll be damned if Three on a Meathook is the movie that’s going to make me break my word.

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Diablo Cody, take notice. Once upon a time, in a magical land called the 1980s, there was a hip youth-culture screenwriter of the moment named Daniel Waters. He wrote a zeitgeisty movie called Heathers that Variety described as “super-smart black comedy about high school politics and teenage suicide that showcases a host of promising young talents.” Among those talents were Christian Slater, unveiling the Jack Nicholson impression that would sustain his career at least until the release of Kuffs in 1992, future 90210 bad girl Shannen Doherty, and future shoplifter Winona Ryder, who was sort of the Ellen Page of her time. Heathers was a cult hit, and Waters got the lion’s share of the credit.

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Now that Daniel Day-Lewis has been anointed the overwhelming front-runner for Best Actor honors on Sunday night, some members of the criterati have decided to rain on his parade before it even gets started. Leading the charge is Salon's Stephanie Zacharek, making the seemingly counterintuitive argument "Too Great to Be Good." Zacharek makes it clear that, while audiences, critics and Academy voters may have fallen for Day-Lewis's obsessed oilman, she feels the actor is peddling nothing but snake oil. "Day-Lewis doesn't so much give a performance as offer a character design, an all-American totem painstakingly whittled from a twisted piece of wood," she writes. "The tragedy of Day-Lewis' performance in There Will Be Blood is that it defies the naturalism that made him a great actor — and I use the word ‘great' unequivocally — in the first place, as if he'd decided that naturalism is boring, that it no longer presents a challenge for him."

The debate continues over at MSN Movies, with Jim Emerson coming down more or less on Zacharek's side.

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Roy Scheider has died in Little Rock, Arkansas, at the age of 75. He had battled cancer in recent years; the cause of death has been reported as complications from a staph infection. Scheider made his film debut in a 1962 horror movie called The Curse of the Living Corpse and throughout the 1960s worked on the stage and on such TV soaps as The Edge of Night, Love of Life, and The Secret Storm. He began to get small movie roles in the late '60s, and had a breakout year in 1971, when, as a thirty-nine-year-old juvenile, he played Jane Fonda's pimp in Klute and Gene Hackman's police partner in The French Connection. (In interviews, and ultimately in a commentary track on The French Connection DVD, Scheider liked to tell a story about how he won the part after someone saw him blow a stage audition and was impressed with the brio with which off the director.) Scheider got an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for the role, which would ultimately lead to his getting his first leading role in The Seven-Ups, a 1973 cop thriller directed by the French Connection producer Philip D'Antoni. But it was of course the 1975 Jaws that was Scheider's biggest hit and the movie that made him a familiar face to the public at large, and beloved to a generation of pop-eyed movie freaks.

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American moviegoers can't get enough of the 1980s, apparently. Those of us who had to live through it the first time remember it primarily as a time of bad metal, worse sitcoms, and waiting around to see what dumb-ass thing Ronald Reagan would say next, but to the generations that followed, it is a time for richly veined cultural nostalgia. From what we can recollect through the haze of drugs and alcohol that coat our memories of the decade, the hallmark of 1980s cinema was very loud explosions punctuated by the occasional car chase or wise-cracking black transvestite. It's not something we thought anyone would be eager to repeat, and yet there have been, in recent memory, new installments of the Die Hard and Rocky franchises; a new TV series based on The Terminator; an upcoming Indiana Jones picture; and, opening all across the country this Friday, a new Rambo movie. Even the Screengrab is getting into the act, with Gabriel Mckee posting his top ten action heroes who deserve a comeback, many of whom hail from the Decade That Time Refuses To Forget. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em: so says Take Five as we present a fistful of '80s action movies that we. . . well, we don't love, exactly, but we at least look back on with something less than severe brain trauma.

ROCKY III (1982)

Sure, the first movie had heart and soul. And the second movie had a ruthless determination to capitalize on the first movie's heart and soul. But do you know what they didn't have? Do you know what they lacked, which made the third installment unquestionably the best of all the Rocky movies? That's right: MR. T. They didn't have Mr. T, and as such, they suffered, as do all artistic projects not involving Mr. T. Here's a little secret they don't teach you at film school: sure, Citizen Kane might have been the greatest movie of all time — but it would have been even better if it had been able to feature Mr. T yelling at people. And Rocky III, whatever its other faults — and it had hundreds, from its hamhanded TV-movie direction (by Sly himself) to its predictable storyline — at least gave us Mr. T yelling at people in abundance. When his Clubber Lang (a savage, media-loathing brute allegedly inspired by young George Foreman) wasn't yelling at people, he was beating people up, and Rocky III brings us the double pleasure of seeing Sylvester Stallone clobbered by Clubber and Hulk Hogan as "Thunderlips". Just turn it off halfway through.

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