Screen Screed: Thoughts on Movies From a Lifelong Eater of Cinema

      I get a pang of heartbreak whenever I see Sharon Tate in anything.  She worked in TV, had a recurring role on The Beverly Hillbillies as one of Mr. Drysdale's secretaries, but that was before her film career took off, a period of four years when she was in six films, two bit parts in the early 1960s adding to just eight total.        If you type in "Sharon Tate" in Amazon Prime, around seventy titles appear, including the film (listed on Amazon as 12 + 1 ) reviewed here, but, depressingly, dozens of titles reflect the actions of an evil dead creep named Charles Manson, who sent his minions to slaughter Tate and her friends in Benedict Canyon on August 9, 1969.      The Amazon search would seem to indicate that Sharon Tate is more famous for being a murder victim than she is for being an actress.  For her sake, I want that to be a different reality.      Her last movie, an Italian comedy called Una su 13 (...

      A year after he made one of film history's most famous and beloved films, Casablanca , Michael Curtiz directed a rip-roaring pro-military propaganda extravaganza, This Is the Army (1943).  While the former film's pro-Allies propaganda weaves seamlessly through the narrative, with accompanying ambiguities represented by Humphrey Bogart's doubt-ridden character, as a story of resistance to Nazi aggression, the latter film's propaganda hammer-blows the viewer in the ears and eyes, leaving no doubt where the film studio (Warner Brothers), working in cooperation with the federal government, stands on the subject of U.S. Army recruitment and the necessity of "getting the job done," or, as one mother says to her son, "Go get em!"      Meaning: Kill the "Japs," kill the Germans.      Irving Berlin, composer of the World War One era version of this stage show become a film, had written in the climactic sequence the lyric:     ...

      One night in Portland, Oregon, in 2005, my friend took me to a maze-like video store.  She had to get to bed at ten, I was used to going to bed at two, so she had suggested I watch a rented movie in my guest bedroom.  I only had about thirty minutes in the store.  The selection seemed complete in terms of most of the history of cinema.  Among the scores of films I wanted to see I came across a double videocassette of Chelsea Girls  (1966), directed by Paul Morrissey and Andy Warhol.  I considered it as a strong possibility, though it's over three hours long.        Finally, I picked Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Eclisse (1962).  I'm not sorry for the choice, it's a great film, but that moment when I nearly selected Chelsea Girls has stayed in mind for fifteen years as I've known I could've watched it then.  It proved elusive, too.        Eventually, just last night I located the film on Yo...

     Soviet cinema of the 1920s possessed a dynamic character as if, through the arts, the new state established in 1917 wished to present its latest works as thrilling experiments in editing, direction, cinematography, and visual style.       Aelita (1924), directed by Yakov Protazanov, adds art direction and set design to these elements.  Some of the action, taking place on a Mars ruled by a stern fellow named Tuskub and his Queen Consort, Aelita (Yuliya Solntseva, who later directed several films, one as recently as 1980), unfolds on grand sets with enormous, sweeping stairways and strange angles cutting across circular forms.  The society on Mars is completely regulated, one third of the workers kept in cold storage until needed.      This striking scene shows workers, heads covered with block-like helmets, trudging to slides where they whoosh down to a processing room, loaded like frozen fish onto a conveyor belt.   ...

     Moravian film director, Edgar G. Ulmer, well-known for making a slew of low budget quickly made films from 1930 to 1964, directed Moon Over Harlem (1939), shot in 16 millimeter over four days in New Jersey and New York City with a mostly African American cast.      Musical numbers are very good, with the band Christopher Columbus and His Swing Crew, and "Sidney Bechet and His Clarinet," as it reads in the main titles.  Dancers in sexy costumes sway like trees in the wind in one scene, while main character Minnie's (Cora Green) troubled daughter Sue (Izinetta Wilcox in her only film) builds on her success as a singer and performer in Harlem's clubs and theaters, wearing fur coats by film's end, but losing her estranged mother to gunmen punishing her irresponsible criminal step-father, Dollar (Bud Harris).      The film begins with a wedding and ends with a funeral.  Minnie and Dollar marry each other.  Soon, it's apparent ...

      From 1931, Der Mörder Dimitri Karamasoff ( The Murderer Dimitri Karamasoff ), made in Germany by the Russian director Fyodor Otsep (Fjodor Ozep in the credits) stands out for several reasons: superb musical score by Karol Rathaus, cinematography by Friedl Behn-Grund, acting by the two leads, Fritz Kortner and Anna Sten, and editing by Otsep and Hans von Passavant.      Based on Fyodor Dostoevsky's 1880 novel, The Brothers Karamazov , the film pares down the story, I presume (I haven't read it, but it's a thick book), concentrating on Lieutenant Dimitri Karamasoff, his falling in love with Grushenka (also desired by Dimitri's father), and his headstrong attempt to commit patricide in order to secure the woman for himself.      Fritz Kortner's bullish performance depicts a man who takes what he wants.  He has the movements of a caged dog impatient to walk and breathe fresh air.        Anna Sten's Grushenka co...

     If anything spoils too many Hollywood films it's the Hollywood ending.  The obsessive desire to end a movie on a light note, even when the narrative thrust points differently towards more complexity, has either ruined quite a few otherwise good films or at least asphyxiated some movies' potential greatness.        Sometimes a film comes through all the way to the end, as when Joan Crawford in Humoresque (1946) walks into the sea, unnoticed by a nearby man walking his dog, and then the dog senses the tragedy--a powerful finale without which the film would've been just good, but maudlin, rather than great.      I get the impression some directors were pressured by higher-ups to impose "happy endings," even jarring out of place ones, on films hardly headed in that direction, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Orson Welles' second film, an infamous case in point.  The film's grim, but logical, original ending no longer exists...