Atlas Shrugs

Saturday Night Cinema: Look Back In Anger

Tonight's Saturday Night Cinema is a taut, tough to watch film, Look Back in Anger. And with this film began the  British realism movement. Richard Burton plays "the principal character in this ferocious account of the emotional vandalism committed by what is popularly known as an 'angry young man.'" Burton is, as always, larger than life. He is scary (even to most adults) juxtaposed to Claire Bloom's sweet, ethereal (pathetic) sweetness as the abused mistress. Burton is delicious to watch, He is so damn manly and smoldering hot that even when he is cast a total bastard, you can't help but lust after the brute.

Love affair: Richard Burton and Claire Bloom in 'Look Back in Anger' (1959)

On a side note, Burton and Bloom had a torrid five-year affair. It adds a certain titillation for the viewer (at least it did for me. )

The NY Times film review: Look Back in Anger (1958) By Bosley Crowther, September 16, 1959

THE fury and hate that John Osborne was able to pack into a flow of violent words in his stage play, "Look Back in Anger," are not only matched but also documented in the film that the original stage director, Tony Richardson, has made from that vicious play.

In a rush of pictorial reinforcement that leads one to suspect Mr. Richardson was just itching for the cinema medium to fill the background and heighten the fever of the play, the passion of the characters now comes at you through the drab and depressing milieu of a genuine British midlands city and the sweatiness of an ugly slum.

The film, produced in England by Harry Saltzman, opened here last night at the Forum and Baronet Theatres with benefit showings for the March of Dimes.

In our eyes, the principal character in this ferocious account of the emotional vandalism committed by what is popularly known as an "angry young man" is still a conventional weakling, a routine crybaby who cannot quite cope with the problems of a tough environment and, so, vents his spleen in nasty words. And the two women who let him run over them, his wife and his mistress, still seem to us to be strangely gullible creatures, a little self-piteous themselves.

But, at least, in this caca-phonic picture, which has a sort of metallic clatter and bang and a throbbing, eccentric jazz tempo that is picked up from time to time on the sound track. Mr. Richardson does provide us with a sense of the dismal atmosphere the prevalence of social stagnation, that helps to frustrate our young man.

Saturday Night Cinema: The Lady Vanishes

Tonight's Saturday Night Cinema feature is The Lady Vanishes. "Vintage Hitchcock, with the pacing and superb editing that marked not only his 30s style but eventually every film that had any aspirations whatever to achieving suspense and rhythm." I think it's the best of Hitchock's early, British productions.

"My favourite Hitchcock: The Lady Vanishes" The Guardian

On top of a mesmerising plot, perfect casting and the greatest comic duo in British cinema, this comedy thriller derives special urgency from the troubled times in which it was made

Delightfully British ... Dame May Whitty, Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave in The Lady Vanishes (1938). Photograph: Moviestore Collection/Rex

Hitchcock and railways go together like a locomotive and tender. He loved them, they figure significantly in his work and never more so than in The Lady Vanishes. Much of what happens could only take place on a railway line – passengers delayed together by an avalanche; classes compartmentalised; strangers trapped together as they're transported across a continent; an engine driver killed in crossfire; a carriage disconnected and shunted on to a branch line; an intrepid hero struggling from one carriage to another outside a fast-moving train as other locomotives rush by; clues in the form of a name traced in the steam on a window, and the label on a tea packet briefly adhering to another window; and above all the enforced intimacy on this rhythmically seductive transport moving on its own tracks, independent of the changing landscape around it.

1. The Lady Vanishes
2. Production year: 1938
3. Country: UK
4. Cert (UK): PG
5. Runtime: 97 mins
6. Directors: Alfred Hitchcock
7. Cast: Margaret Lockwood, Michael Redgrave
8. More on this film

The Lady Vanishes is one of the greatest train movies from the genre's golden era, challenged only in the master's oeuvre by North By Northwest for the title of best comedy thriller ever made. Except for the opening sequence at an inn in a central European village, it takes place on an express train that has only two official stops in the course of its journey across the authoritarian central European country of Banrika. During this suspenseful voyage, a middle-aged British spy posing as Miss Froy, an eccentric governess, and carrying the film's MacGuffin, is abducted by foreign agents, and her disappearance is covered up. Shot on a modest budget, largely at the small Gainsborough studio in Islington, it never seems cramped or corner-cutting (though it's calculatedly confined), and it zips along with the speed of the Eurostar. In his 1966 interview book, Le Cinéma Selon Hitchcock, Truffaut told the master that every time he saw the film he intended to study the train's movements, the editing and the special effects, "but each time I become so absorbed with the story that I've yet to figure out the mechanics of that film".

Saturday Night Cinema: Kiss Of Death (1947)

Tonight's Saturday Night Cinema is the vicious and still shocking  film noir crime drama, Kiss of Death. A taut thriller that is unusually attuned to its lowlife characters. Based in part on a true story, Kiss of Death is given a veneer of reality by being filmed on location in New York, per the insistence of director Henry Hathaway. This is the film in which Widmark's character gigglingly pushes a wheelchair-bound old lady down a flight of stairs. Reviewer James Agee said it best: "You feel that murder is the kindest thing he is capable of". The film made Widmark a star--and also convinced him to start lobbying immediately for good-guy roles so that he wouldn't be typecast as maniacal killers for life.

Written by Ben Hecht, the film stars Victor Mature, Brian Donlevy, and Coleen Gray.

What really sets this noir apart...is a combination of Hathaway's deliberate craftsmanship and the small crackerjack ensemble led by Mature and Widmark

Victor Mature is terrific in his role as Nick Bianco. He balances a believable hood with a genuine guy who is motivated by his kids to straighten up from his crooked ways.

As our film begins a narrator informs us over the opening shots of a bustling Manhattan that, “Christmas eve in New York a happy time for some people; the lucky ones. Last minute shopping, presents for the kids, hurry home to light the tree and fill the stockings… for the lucky ones. Others aren’t so lucky.” Here we are introduced to Nick Bianco (Victor Mature) a former jail-bird, trying to fly the straight and narrow. After a year of his prison record impeding his efforts to get a legit job, we see Nick and a few cohorts enter a jeweler’s office and rob them because, “this is how Nick goes Christmas shopping for his kids.”

Saturday Night Cinema: Madame Curie

Tonight's Saturday Night Cimema is Madame Curie, starring the inimitable Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon. It's a perfectly lovely film -- and their love story is quite touching. Bosley Crowther of The NY Times named it one of the ten best movies of the year (1943).

Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon team for the third time in this fact-based biography directed by Mervyn Leroy, based on Eve Curie's book about her mother. In early 1900s Paris, poor Polish student Marie (Greer Garson) gets a chance to study magnetism with kindly professor Jean Perot (Albert Basserman). Perot also arranges for the shy scientist Pierre Curie (Walter Pidgeon) to share the lab with Marie. As they work together, Pierre and Marie fall in love. Pierre eventually musters up the courage

".... the ingenious manner in which the quest for radium is explained—the simple yet scrupulous illustrations by which the writers and Director Mervyn Le Roy have shown the tedious, exhausting experiments that finally led to the release of this wondrous stuff—is a masterful use of motion picture and a truly exciting experience on the screen. A fine and inspiring passage is here contained in this film at the Music Hall. And even if Mr. and Mrs. Miniver—or Pestle-Packing Mama and the Curie with the Fringe on Top—are the characters designed to play it, it is still a high accomplishment on the screen." (here)

Saturday Night Cinema: Marnie

Tonight's Sautirday Night Cinema at Atlas is one of my top five Hitchcock films, Marnie. Many cinephiles consider it a lesser Hitchcockian effort, but they just don't get it. Taut, scary and sexy -- icy cold Marnie's obsession with stealing and the hot hot hot hunky Sean Connery's obsession with Marnie is too good. It's one of his darkest and greatest achievements. I think it one of his best.

"A masterpiece of psychological mystery that encompasses all of the director's obsessions.

TCM:

The story of a cool, calculated professional woman who embezzles from her employer then relocates to some distant town where she repeats her crimes under an assumed identity, Marnie (1964) is unlike almost any other Alfred Hitchcock film with the possible exception of Vertigo (1958). Like the latter film, the blonde heroine (Tippi Hedren) becomes an obsession for one of her male victims - Mark Rutland (Sean Connery) - whose behavior is as peculiar as her own. Instead of turning her over to the police once he apprehends her, Mark forces her to marry him, partly in an effort to understand her compulsive need to steal and partly because he's sexually aroused by this beautiful but frigid kleptomaniac. As the relationship between Mark and Marnie progresses from jailer/prisoner to something deeper and more complex, Hitchcock's film refuses to conform to genre expectations. Is Marnie a perverse love story, a psychological thriller or a clinical case study? Certainly it's all of these things, but it's also one of Hitchcock's most personal films, mirroring his own off-screen obsession with the film's star, Tippi Hedren.

Working from a novel by Winston Graham, Hitchcock first hired Evan Hunter to develop the screenplay for Marnie in close collaboration with him and his cinematographer Robert Burks. According to Donald Spoto in The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock, the director described to Hunter and Burks "every shot of the first half of the film, the interior and exterior locations, the props, the spatial relationships between characters - and, in greatest detail, the physical, costumed appearance of the title character." "We go to close-up," he said, "to show her hair blowing in the wind while she's riding the horse - that's a leitmotiv that goes through the film." Hitchcock's detailed storyboards and pre-planned camera set-ups prior to production were legend but so was his intractable attitude about certain scenes and Hunter soon found himself clashing with the director over a controversial sequence - one where Mark rapes his wife on their wedding night. Hunter was disturbed by the scene and argued that it would destroy all sympathy for the male character but Hitchcock, who didn't like to have his judgment questioned, soon parted company with Hunter and replaced him with Jay Presson Allen, a relatively unknown playwright and screenwriter who had just scored a critical success with her play, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Allen later recalled, "I think he wanted a woman's point of view on Marnie and that's why he asked me....Hitch was a very Edwardian fellow. He put lids on himself. To work out his repressions, he created a framework - his art. It was his way of legitimizing everything and transforming his feelings and repressions into something creative."

From the beginning, there was little question that anyone other than Ms. Hedren would play Marnie (There was some brief interest in Claire Griswold, the wife of director Sydney Pollack, but she turned down all acting jobs to become a fulltime mother). Hitchcock had initially discovered Hedren in a Sego (a diet drink) television ad which led to her debut in his previous 1963 film, The Birds and it was obvious he was grooming her to be a star on the order of Grace Kelly. At the same time, his interest in her became obsessive and all-controlling. He started sending champagne to her dressing room at the end of each day. He began proclaiming her "his ultimate actress, the one he had waited decades to direct, and that she was giving the finest performance in any of his films" (Donald Spoto, The Dark Side of Genius). He even revealed a recurring dream he had to Hedren where she came up to him and said, "Hitch, I love you - I'll always love you." When she heard this, she replied "But it was a dream. Just a dream," and excused herself from his presence. The situation eventually turned ugly and it was rumored that Hitchcock made an overt sexual proposition to Hedren when he was alone with her. The actress was appalled and humiliated and, according to biographer Spoto, after that "he refused to address Tippi Hedren personally. He never even uttered her name, referring only to "that girl." His directions on the set were given through assistants, and her questions had to be relayed to him by an equally circuitous route. From that day forth he also lost all interest in Marnie."

When Marnie opened theatrically, most critics were negative in their reviews. While many had been divided on his previous feature, The Birds, almost everyone complained about Tippi Hedren's acting abilities, the use of rear-screen projection, the artificial, painted sets, the general lack of suspense, and the simplistic resolution of the heroine's psychological problems at the fadeout. A typical reaction was this excerpt from The New York Times review which called it "the master's most disappointing film in years...not only is Marnie burdened with the most glaringly fake cardboard backdrops since Salvador Dali designed the dream sequence for Spellbound (1945), but the timing of key suspense scenes is sadly askew." It wasn't until recent years that critical consensus has changed toward Marnie. Now, many Hitchcock admirers feel it is one of his strongest films, a genuine work of art that tackles disturbing themes in an experimental fashion. His use of rear-screen projection is now defended as an inspired creative decision that reflects the unreal nature of Marnie's world and Tippi Hedren's performance is likewise highly regarded as one of the finest female portrayals in any Hitchcock film. One thing is certain. Marnie is unique for being the last of its kind. It was the last Hitchcock film to feature a blonde heroine, the last to feature a music score by frequent collaborator Bernard Herrmann, and the last time Hitchcock would work with cinematographer Robert Burks.

Saturday Night Cinema: Groundhog Day

Tonight's Saturday Night Cinema is one of my top ten. Groundhog Day is brilliant on so many levels. Funny on its face, it digs deep, posing existential questions. It is refreshingly profound. Comic genius Bill Murray is brilliant and clever as the cynical, jaded Phil Connors. "Half Capra and half Kafka"

If you want to get rid of the subscribe to crackle tab running across the right of the screen, click on the tiny X on the top right of  the obnoxious rectangular box.

Groundhog Day (1993) Review/Film; Bill Murray Battles Pittsburgh Time Warp

By JANET MASLIN

Published: February 12, 1993

In "Groundhog Day," playing a formerly smug weatherman who finds himself condemned to relive one Feb. 2 over and over again in Punxsutawney, Pa., Bill Murray explains his feelings to two bleary-eyed, beer-drinking locals. "What would you do if you were stuck in one place and everything was exactly the same and nothing that you did mattered?" he asks despairingly. The two strangers listen very sympathetically. They didn't have to be trapped by a magic spell to know what he means.

That glimmer of recognition is what makes "Groundhog Day" a particularly witty and resonant comedy, even when its jokes are more apt to prompt gentle giggles than rolling in the aisles. The story's premise, conceived as a sitcom-style visit to the Twilight Zone, starts out lightweight but becomes strangely affecting. Phil Connors, Mr. Murray's amusingly rude Pittsburgh television personality, surely deserves to be punished for his arrogance. But who in the audience hasn't ever wished time would stand still and offer a second, third or even a 20th chance?

The jaded Phil, a perfect character for Mr. Murray, begins the story sounding terminally smooth. He refers to himself as "talent," and addresses a fellow newscaster as "Hairdo." He sneers at Punxsutawney and is contemptuous of his own charming producer (Andie MacDowell) and darkly funny cameraman (Chris Elliott). He even delivers pleasant-sounding insults to the proprietors of the bed-and-breakfast where he is staying, not realizing he may be staying there forever.

Saturday Night Cinema: My Fair Lady

The best stage musical of all time and one of the most loved romances.

I selected one of Hollywood's best-loved musicals for tonight's Saturday Nght Cinema -- a special Passover treat, My Fair Lady, directed by the legendary George Cukor. The film stars Audrey Hepburn, the epitome of what every girl aspires to be, and she is brilliant. I love, love, love her.

Contrary to what current box-office would say, there was a time when musicals were the most profitable “genre” in Hollywood. Beginning in the late ‘30s and all the way up to the ‘70s, musicals were bona fide blockbusters that drew the crowds to movie theaters on a weekly basis, perhaps because they were always huge spectacles that demanded to be seen in big screens.

Saturday Night Cinema: The Lady in Question

Tonight's Saturday Night Cinema is a delightful rarity, The Lady in Question, starring the supremely divine Rita Hayworth and the hunky, swaggering Glenn Ford. This marks the first pairing of Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford, which is what makes the film worthwhile. The chemistry is obvious. It would be six years before these two blow up the screen in Gilda. Charles Vidor directed this film as well as Gilda.

The film is a showcase for the spectacular Rita. Enjoy.

NY TImes 1940 review:

Without any preliminary fanfare Columbia yesterday presented the Bryant Theatre with one of the season's most delightful entertainments. Once you overcome the manifold implications of a title like "The Lady in Question," you will be rewarded with an hour and twenty minutes of delectable domestic fare that is by turn droll, down-right funny and slightly dramatic, but always irresistibly humorous. Charles Vidor, the director, has managed to keep his characters in situations that are plausible and has imparted to the whole the infectious atmosphere of home and hearth. The screen play by Lewis Meltzer represents an adroit adaptation of the French film by Marcel Achard, which was shown here last year as "Heart of Paris."

Not the least of the film's virtues are its players. Brian Aherne contributes one of his finest characterizations as the blustering, good-natured owner of a Parisian bicycle shop who, upon being called as a juror, is so touched by the pathetic girl accused of murdering her lover that he holds out for her acquittal, then takes her into his family on the pretext that she is the daughter of an old classmate. His efforts to hide the girl's true identity from his wife, to thwart the romance which develops between her and his son, lead to many amusing and touching domestic complications. To attempt to give further details of the plot would be to do the film an injustice, for it springs to life out of situations of a sort which invariably seem frightfully dull in print.

As the lady in question Rita Hayworth reveals a winsome personality and a talent which should soon bring her recognition as one of Hollywood's more capable younger players. Evelyn Keyes gives a spirited performance as an adolescent smitten by Cupid, and Irene Rich draws a sympathetic and understanding portrait as the mother of the Morestan family over which Mr. Aherne presides so humanly. All in all, "The Lady in Question" is an uncommonly good, if not a great, photoplay; a distinct treat for jaded cinematic appetites.

THE LADY IN QUESTION; screen play by Lewis Meltzer; based on a story by Marcel Achard; directed by Charles Vidor; produced by B. B. Kahane for Columbia Pictures.
Andre Morestan . . . . . Brian Aherne
Natalie Roguin . . . . . Rita Hayworth
Pierre Morestan . . . . . Glenn Ford
Michele Morestan . . . . . Irene Rich
Defense Attorney . . . . . George Coulouris
Prosecuting Attorney . . . . . Lloyd Corrigan
Francois Morestan . . . . . Evelyn Keyes
Robert LaCoste . . . . . Edward Norris
Henri Lurette . . . . . Curt Bois
President . . . . . Frank Reicher
Fat Boy . . . . . Sumner Getchell
Nicholas Farkas . . . . . Nicholas Bella

Saturday Night Cinema: Stella Dallas

Tonight's Saturday Night Cinema is Stella Dallas, produced by Sam Goldwyn and starring Barbara Stanwyck. This second film version of Olive Higgins Prouty's Stella Dallas is by far the best. The combined talents of Goldwyn, director King Vidor and star Barbara Stanwyck lift this property far above the level of mere soap opera.

Stanwyck's heartbreaking performance as the self-sacrificing mother is brilliant.

• Director - King Vidor
• Screenplay - Victor Heerman
• Screenplay - Sarah Y. Mason
• Producer - Samuel Goldwyn

Awards

• Best Actress - Barbara Stanwyck - 1937 Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
• Best Supporting Actress - Anne [act-234] Shirley - 1937 Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

Saturday Night Cinema: Death of a Salesman (1951)

Tonight's Saturday Night Cinema selection is the rarely seen 1951 version of the very dark Death of a Salesman, produced by Stanley Kramer and starring the enormously talented Fredric March. March is excellent and Mildred Diunnock is amazing. The film garnered five Oscar nominations: 1952 Academy Awards Best Actor in a Leading Role - Fredric March, Best Actor in a Supporting Role - Kevin McCarthy (who also won New Star of the Year - Male - Kevin McCarthy), Best Actress in a Supporting Role - Mildred Dunnock, Best Cinematography - Black and White - Franz Planer, and Best Score - Adaptation or Treatment - Alex Nort. 

It's one of the NY Times top 1000 films. Here was the 1951 NY Times film review by Bosley Crowther:

Now that Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" has been brought by Stanley Kramer to the screen and Fredric March has been given the opportunity to play its difficult leading role, a great many more million people, not only in this country but in the world, will have a chance to see this shattering drama at what is probably its artistic best. That chance was initiated at the Victoria Theatre yesterday.

For, in every respect, this transference to the motion picture form enhances the episodic structure and the time-ranging nature of the play—which, in short, tells a grim, reflective story of the terrible self-delusions of a man and the tragic upset that his faking works on his wife and sons. Where the earlier performance of the drama on the stage used the syntax of the screen, with time and location shifting often with the wandering of the man's mind, such movement and flow are thoroughly natural and consistent in the cinematic form. Past and present are run together with perfect smoothness and striking clarity in the film.

Furthermore, Mr. Kramer's production is so faithfully transcribed and well designed that it stands as a nigh exact translation of Mr. Miller's play, both in its psychological candor and its exhibit of a bleak bourgeois milieu. Except for a few small omissions of dialogue lines and words, the drama is offered in toto, right down to its torturing graveyard scene. And the whole atmosphere of middle-class drabness, which was visually strained on the stage, is here given full exhibition in skimpy bedrooms, kitchens and backyards.

Indeed, one perceptible advantage of this performance of the drama on the screen is the sense of a broader frame of reference for the "salesman's" failure that it conveys. The locale is nominally Brooklyn and points adjacent thereto, but this could happen in any American city and to anyone who lived by false ideals.

Mr. March's performance does a lot to illuminate this broader implication of the drama, for it fills out considerably the lack of humanity in the main character that Mr. Miller somehow overlooked and thus makes the character more symbolic of the frustrated "little man." The weakness of Mr. Miller's "salesman," in this corner's opinion, is a petty and selfish disposition, unredeemed by any outgoing love. Mr. March, by his personable nature, gives occasional fleeting glints of tenderness. Otherwise, he is the shabby, cheap, dishonest, insufferable big-talker of the play.

As the long-suffering wife of this faker, Mildred Dunnock is simply superb, as she was on the stage. Her portrayal of a woman who bears the agony of seeing her sons and husband turn out failures supports the one pretension of this drama to genuine tragedy. Cameron Mitchell and Kevin McCarthy are disturbingly shifty as the sons, and Howard Smith and Don Keefer do finely by the roles of close relatives that they played on the stage. Laslo Benedek's direction is commendable all the way.

"Death of a Salesman" is dismally depressing, but it must be acclaimed a film that whips you about in a whirlpool somewhere close to the center of life.

Saturday Night Cinema: Angel Face

Tonight's Saturday Night Cinema selection stars my man, the hot and hulky Robert Mitchum, playing (ahem) chauffeur to rich and beautiful (and neurotic) Jean Simmons in Otto Preminger's Angel Face. Simmons gives new meaning to femme fatale.

Jean Simmons' fascinating interpretation of an uncharacteristic role is the main drawing card of Otto Preminger's Angel Face. The daughter of Charles Treymayne (Herbert Marshall), who remarried a wealthy woman (Barbara O'Neil), Diane Treymayne's (Simmons) angelic countenance masks an unbridled psychotic who'll let nothing stand in the way of her happiness.

I'd rather not say more and spoil the twisted plot. Emanuel Levy called it a "superb Freudian crime thriller, noir-inflected in theme but shot by and large in crisp, bright drawing-rooms."

As an easygoing ambulance driver, Mr. Mitchum is annexed by a beautiful, smitten introvert, Miss Simmons, who, after installing him as a chauffeur, turns out to be the neurotic of all time. The early scenes of simmering byplay between this mysterious young lady, her fanatically adored father, Herbert Marshall, and hated stepmother, Barbara O'Neil, with the chauffeur as pawn, promise some tingling, civilized intrigue. (NY Times)

The Cast
ANGEL FACE, screen play by Frank Nugent and Oscar Millard; directed and produced by Otto Preminger for R. K. O. Radio Pictures. At the Mayfair.
Diane . . . . . Jean Simmons
Frank . . . . . Robert Mitchum
Mary . . . . . Mona Freeman
Mr. Tremayne . . . . . Herbert Marshall
Fred Barrett . . . . . Leon Ames
Mrs. Tremayne . . . . . Barbara O'Neil
Bill . . . . . Kenneth Tobey

 

Saturday Night Cinema: Leave Her to Heaven

 Tonight's Saturday Night Cinema is the film noir classic (in exquisite Technicolor cinematography, no less), Leave Her to Heaven. And if you are an avid Gene Tierney fan like yours truly, this is Tierney at the height of her beauty and acting powers, as she plays one of cinema's most chilling psychopaths. Gene Tierney was nominated for an Oscar as the cold-blooded murderess. Crazy never looked so seductive or "bit with such a ferocious over-bite as from Gene Tierney's demented character."

Cornel Wilde as the object of her mad affection and the lovely Jeanne Crain as the long suffering sister are superb. One film critic described quipped, "everything is beautiful in Leave Her to Heaven. In fact, too beautiful."

Saturday Night Cinema: The Bicycle Thief

Tonight's Saturday Night Classic film is a masterpiece, the seminal The Bicycle Thief. Atlas Shruggers have long known I am an unabashed cinemaphile. I have loved old movies for as long as I can remember. Every day, I would run home to watch The 4:30 Movie, where classic films were broadcast sliced and diced to fit into a 90-minute slot (with commercials). Imagine my joy when I discovered the uncut versions years later. 

I was an American film snob in my youth who had no use for European films that tried hard to out-style American greats but fell laughingly short. Until I saw the brilliant and devastating The Bicycle Thief.

This landmark Italian neorealist drama became one of the best-known and most widely acclaimed European movies, including a special Academy Award as "most outstanding foreign film" seven years before that Oscar category existed. Written primarily by neorealist pioneer Cesare Zavattini and directed by Vittorio DeSica, also one of the movement's main forces, the movie featured all the hallmarks of the neorealist style: a simple story about the lives of ordinary people, outdoor shooting and lighting, non-actors mixed together with actors, and a focus on social problems in the aftermath of World War II.

Lamberto Maggiorani plays Antonio, an unemployed man who finds a coveted job that requires a bicycle. When it is stolen on his first day of work, Antonio and his young son Bruno (Enzo Staiola) begin a frantic search, learning valuable lessons along the way. The movie focuses on both the relationship between the father and the son and the larger framework of poverty and unemployment in postwar Italy. As in such other classic films as Shoeshine (1946), Umberto D. (1952), and his late masterpiece The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1971), DeSica focuses on the ordinary details of ordinary lives as a way to dramatize wider social issues. As a result, The Bicycle Thief works as a sentimental study of a father and son, a historical document, a social statement, and a record of one of the century's most influential film movements. ~ Leo Charney, Rovi

Saturday Night Cinema: The First Of The Few (1942)

Tonight's Saturday Night Cinema is The First of the Few. It has so many great performances, most notably, the supreme Leslie Howard. Howard was active in anti-Nazi propaganda and was killed when his airplane was shot down by the Germans, who had thought that Churchill was aboard. 

Saturday Night Cinema: Design for Living

The Saturday Night Cinema is Noel Coward's Design for Living, directed by the brilliant and deliciously sly Ernst Lubitsch. The play is more Lubitsch than Coward, and if you are an unabashed Lubitsch fan like me, you're in for a treat. I recently watched "To Be or Not To Be" again and it's as sharp and brilliantly funny as the first time. Actually better after repeated viewings.

Design for Living was based on the stage comedy by Noel Coward, though little of his dialogue actually made it to the screen. Playwright Fredric March and artist Gary Cooper both fall in love with Miriam Hopkins, an American living in Paris. Both men love the girl, and the girl can't make up her mind between the two men, so the threesome decide to move in together--strictly platonically, of course....

"Design for Living" (1933) NY Times Movie Review

Miriam Hopkins, Fredric March and Gary Cooper in a Film Version of 'Design for Living.'

By MORDAUNT HALL.

Published: November 23, 1933

The Ernst Lubitsch-Ben Hecht picture which was inspired by Noel Coward's stage comedy "Design for Living" may be only a skeleton of the parent work, but it has the same familiar rattle. In attacking the problem of translating the play to the screen Mr. Lubitsch was aware of the probability of censorial scowls and the chance that the English author's brilliant dialogue might be a little too lofty for some cinema audiences. Therefore he decided that something unusually drastic would have to be done in making the film. Thus all that which remains of Mr. Coward's manuscript are the title and the theme.

Saturday Night Cinema: A Foreign Affair

Tonight's Saturday Night Cinema is from the brilliant Billy Wilder and stars the dazzling Marlene Dietrich in A Foreign Affair.

"The German director and his fellow German leading woman have made this film from the soul. It's more about post-war Berlin. Jean Arthur's talent saves the day and provides the comic relief, but it's Dietrich who shines all the way through -- she is simply divine. She steals the whole film, of course, and the scenes where she sings at the cabaret can be inscribed on one's memory for ever. Don't miss this classic."

Here Billy Wilder talks about making the picture.

A Foreign Affair (1948)
Jean Arthur, Marlene Dietrich and John Land a Triangle in 'A Foreign Affair' By BOSLEY CROWTHER, NY Times

Published: July 1, 1948

Maybe you think there's nothing funny about the current situation of American troops in the ticklish area of Berlin. And it's serious enough, heaven knows, what with the Russians pushing and shoving and the natives putting on their own type squeeze. But, at least, Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder have been happily disinclined to wax morose about the problems presented by occupation—and by "fraternization," specifically. Rather these two bright film-makers have been wryly disposed to smile upon the conflicts in self and national interests which proximities inevitably provoke. And in their most recent picture, a comedy romance, called "A Foreign Affair," they have turned out a dandy entertainment which has some shrewd and realistic things to say.

Congress may not like this picture, which came to the Paramount yesterday. And even the Department of the Army may find it a shade embarrassing. For the Messrs. Brackett and Wilder, who are not the sort to call a spade a trowel, as was eminently proved by their honest and hard-hitting film, "The Lost Week-end," are here making light of regulations and the gravity of officialdom in a smoothly sophisticated and slyly sardonic way.

Particularly, their interest is in how human beings behave when confronted by other human beings—especially those of the opposite sex. And their logical conclusion is that, granted attractions back and forth, most people—despite regulations and even differences in language and politics—are likely to do toward one another that which comes naturally.

Taking as their point of observation an American Congresswoman in Berlin, accompanying a Congressional committee sent to investigate the morale of American troops, the Messrs. Brackett and Wilder have looked realistically upon the obvious temptations and reactions of healthy soldiers far from home. They have wisely observed that black markets are not repugnant to boys with stuff to trade and that frauleins are simply bobby-soxers with a weakness for candy-bars. They have slyly remarked that Russian soldiers love to sing gymnastic songs and that Americans are nothing loathe to join them of a quiet night in a smoky cafe. And especially have they noted that an American captain may actually fall in love with a svelte German night-club singer and take her beneath his protective custody, even though she may have been the mistress of a former Nazi trump.

Of course, they have made these observations in a spirit of fun and romance. And the shame of the captain's indiscretion is honorably white-washed in the end. But there is bite, nonetheless, in the comment which the whole picture has to make upon the irony of big state restrictions on the level of individual give-and-take.

Under less clever presentation this sort of traffic with big stuff in the current events department might be offensive to reason and taste. But as handled by the Messrs. Brackett and Wilder as producer and director of this film—and also as its principal writers—it has wit, worldliness and charm. It also has serious implications, via some actuality scenes in bombed Berlin, of the wretched and terrifying problem of repairing the ravages of war. Indeed, there are moments when the picture becomes down-right cynical in tone, but it is always artfully salvaged by a hasty nip-up of the yarn.

Much credit is due the performers. Jean Arthur is beautifully droll as the prim and punctilious Congresswoman who has her eyes popped open to the power of love. And John Lund is disarmingly shameless as the brash American captain. Millard Mitchell gives a trenchant imitation of a wise and sharp-eyed colonel in Berlin and three or four other fellows are richly amusing as just plain Joes.

But it is really Marlene Dietrich who does the most fascinating job as the German night-club singer and the charmer par excellence. For in Miss Dietrich's restless femininity, in her subtle suggestions of mocking scorn and in her daringly forward singing of "Illusions" and "Black Market," two stinging songs, are centered not only the essence of the picture's romantic allure, but also its vagrant cynicism and its unmistakable point.

On the stage at the Paramount are Jo Stafford, Georgia Kay, the Lane Brothers and Sam Donahue's band.

A FOREIGN AFFAIR, screen play by Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, and Richard Breen; adaptation by Robert Harari from an original story by David Shaw; directed by Mr. Wilder; produced by Mr. Brackett for Paramount Pictures. At the Paramount.
Congresswoman Phoebe Frost . . . . . Jean Arthur
Erika Von Schluetow . . . . . Marlene Dietrich
Capt. John Pringle . . . . . John Lund
Col. Rufus J. Plummer . . . . . Millard Mitchell
Hans Otto Birgel . . . . . Peter Von Zerneck
Mike . . . . . William Murphy
Joe . . . . . Stanley Prager
Lt. Lee Thompson . . . . . William Neff
Congressman Griffin . . . . . Boyd Davis
Congressman Pennecott . . . . . Raymond Bond
Congressman Kraus . . . . . Robert Malcolm
Congressman Yandell . . . . . Charles Meredith
General McAndrew . . . . . Harlan Tucker
First M. P. . . . . . Gordon Jones
Second M. P. . . . . . Fred Steele
Congressman Salvatore . . . . . Michael Raffetto

Saturday Night Cinema: Misery

Shocking as it may seem, tonight's Saturday Night Cinema is actually less than 25 years old. But a great performance in a taut thriller is timeless, and Kathy Bates' Oscar-winning performance is cray cray great. Bates has a field day in this role, and James Caan is the perfect foil.

Adapted from a Stephen King novel, Rob Reiner's Misery cast James Caan as a writer at a career crossroads. The film opens with Paul Sheldon (Caan) completing work on his latest novel, a break from his popular series of novels featuring the character Misery Chastain. He gets into a severe car accident and is saved by Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates), a reclusive woman who nurses him back to health. Annie is a huge fan of the Misery novels, and she finishes reading the new one while Paul is convalescing. She becomes enraged when she discovers that Paul has killed off Misery. Annie injures Paul's foot severely so that he is unable to leave her house, and forces him to write a new Misery novel. A local sheriff (Richard Farnsworth) and Paul's agent (Lauren Bacall) both attempt to track down what happened to the missing author. Misery shot the relatively unknown Kathy Bates to stardom, winning her one of the few Best Actress Oscars ever bestowed for portraying an evil character. ~ Perry Seibert, Rovi

Saturday Night Cinema: The Blue Angel

I love Dietrich. She hated the Nazis and they hated her. And she was spectacular. This film launched Dietrich's career as a star in Europe. Blue Angel was directed by Josef Von Sternberg, who simultaneously made versions of the film in German and English. The plot features Lola, a nightclub singer who captivates the local youth with her blatant seductiveness. Professor Rath, an old bachelor from the town's university, turns up at the speakeasy to confront her about the effect she's having on his boys. However, he falls for her charm and continues to see Lola. The effects on his life and work are dramatic.

“A little flirting is all right, but always remember she’s a predator.”

The Blue Angel (Der Blaue Engel) is one of Germany’s most significant films. [....]

The Blue Angel was the first film that director Josef von Sternberg worked on with Marlene Dietrich. Their pairing is still regarded as one of the all time great director/actor collaborations in film history. Together they created Dietrich’s unique star persona, a mixture of masculinity and femininity, sensuality and stylised camp.