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

      After his memorable performance as Pepe le Moko in Algiers (1939), Charles Boyer in the same year starred opposite Irene Dunne in Love Affair , a romantic comedy directed by Leo McCarey, whose credits include famous funny movies like Duck Soup (1933) and The Awful Truth (1937).   Love Affair , as insubstantial as it is compared to McCarey's best known films (he also directed Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary's ), nonetheless has its two stars' interpersonal chemistry lending weight to a light though melodramatic love story about a transatlantic crossing lasting eight and a half days, during which a professional woman, Terry McKay, falls in love with Michel Marnay, a playboy who's never worked before.      He's dabbled in painting but never sold anything.  Later in the film, in New York, he sells lots of paintings.  Of course, this is how unknown artists succeed in life--selling out all but one painting, held onto for sentimenta...

      At work during a dull two hour period, no customers, I searched the phone for a movie to watch.  Ten minutes later I selected Speak Easily (1932), director Edward Sedgwick's fifty-fourth of his seventy-eight feature films.  Sedgwick worked with Laurel and Hardy, directed Buster Keaton in The Cameraman , his last film a big screen I Love Lucy  (1953) I had never heard of prior to ten minutes ago.      Directors in Sedgwick's era worked all the time, working with movie to movie, under contract, making livings, buying houses, marrying, having children and pets, their jobs backed by a strong union.  Directing seventy-eight feature films by the age of sixty--how old he was when he died--is quite the cinematic achievement, so I respect the work of those days when directors each made shitloads of movies.  As Rhombus, YouTube Channel John Berner (Blue circle with a J in it for the thumbnail), I've made eighty-one movies since 200...

      Lotte in Italia  ( Struggles in Italy , from 1971) and Un film comme les autres ( A Film Like Any Other , from 1968) resemble abstract paintings; cinema not meant to conform to narrative practices typical of storytelling from Hollywood or anywhere else.      After May 1968, with France's explosive general strike, workers walking out from their jobs and demanding progressive changes from their employers, leftist intellectuals like Jean-Luc Godard tried to make sense of what happened.  In A Film Like Any Other , Godard went from making One Plus One (featuring the world famous Rolling Stones) to directing a group of non-actors sitting in a field of overgrown grass near boxy apartment buildings reminiscent of the geometric backgrounds in his film, 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967), an amazing movie revealing its riches more and more with each viewing, yet possessing the spirit of experimentalism present, pungently, in A Film Like Any Oth...