evanston_dad

A unique and rather eerie western that finds Gary Cooper playing a doctor in a small gold mining town trying to live a life of decency in a culture of mob rule.

One of the things that makes "The Hanging Tree" different from other, more rosy screen versions of the American West is the tone of barely suppressed violence that runs through the film. These townspeople have a tree they use specifically for the purpose of hanging people, for god's sake, and it's like they're just itching for an excuse to use it. I think this movie struck me because that's what America feels like right now in this moment in time -- a place where everyone is angry and on edge and just looking for the slightest excuse to lose it.

Cooper and Maria Schell are really good in this movie, and Karl Malden is loathsome.

The title song, which I love, was nominated for an Oscar.

Grade: A.

"The Sheepman" manages to strike a tricky balance between western comedy and western suspense film. Glenn Ford coasts on oodles of screen charisma to play the film's protagonist, and he has a lot of chemistry with Shirley MacLaine, though she doesn't have a whole lot to do. Leslie Nielsen is fun as the villain, and though we know Ford is probably going to win the day, there is genuine suspense in finding out how he's going to do it.

"The Sheepman" was nominated in the category of Best Original Story and Screenplay at the 1958 Academy Awards.

Glenn Ford had never been one of my go-to actors, but in recent years, after seeing more of his films, I'm starting to grow a real fondness for him.

Grade: B+

This kind of dopey movie is like one of those family-friendly live action Disney movies from the 1960s. There's certainly an audience for it, but I'm not it.

The biggest appeal this movie had for me was the curiosity factor in seeing the movie that consternated Hollywood in 1956 when Dalton Trumbo won an Oscar for its motion picture story under the pseudonym Robert Rich and no one had any clue who that was. I don't really even understand that particular award category -- I don't know how anyone could differentiate a movie's original story from its screenplay, or what a motion picture story even is. Apparently the Academy decided it couldn't either, because this film also has the distinction of being the last one to win that award. The following year the motion picture story and original screenplay categories would be merged into one award.

"The Brave One" brought bargain basement studio King Bros. Two additional Oscar noms, for its editing and sound recording. Despite being released by a low-budget studio, the film had some heavy hitters in its credits, like cinematographer Jack Cardiff and composer Victor Young.

And can I also say that I already hated the idea of bullfighting and this movie made me hate it even more. I would totally root for the bull.

Grade: B-

Grace Kelly won the Best Actress Oscar for this movie, but it's Bing Crosby who made the biggest impression on me.

Crosby plays an alcoholic actor who's been hired to star in a new Broadway show. The movie chronicles his crisis of confidence and the lure of the bottle while the man who's staked his success on him, played by William Holden, hopes that he can hold himself together, and his beleaguered wife tries to decide whether she wants to stick by him or bail. It's not surprisingly kind of a downer, and late in the movie it veers into unengaging melodrama as the story tries to foist a love story on us that doesn't feel like it belongs. But it's worth it to see Crosby doing really fine dramatic work playing against type.

The first scene featuring Crosby is one where he is auditioning for Holden and a skeptical producer of the show. He performs a number that he had performed in a show earlier in his career. Crosby is absolutely magnetic. Watching this scene, it's easy to see that intangible thing called star power that made him such an enduring and endearing entertainer.

And while I don't begrudge Kelly her Oscar, if they were going to give her one, they should have given it to her for "Rear Window," released in the same year.

"The Country Girl" scored big at the 1954 Oscars, nominated for seven awards and winning two. Director George Seaton won the Best Screenplay award in addition to Kelly's Best Actress win. The film was also nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Seaton again), Best Actor (Crosby) Best B&W Art Direction, and Best B&W Cinematography.

Grade: A-

I saw "Victims of Sin" as part of the annual Noir City festival at Chicago's Music Box Theater. TCM's Eddie Muller was on hand to introduce the film, and he spent a good while talking about the magnetism of the film's star, Ninon Sevilla. And boy was he not kidding. She is a dynamo in this film, a hard-edged noirish tale about a nightclub performer who takes an abandoned baby under her protection and spends the rest of the film protecting it and herself from a thuggish gangster.

This film has some content that an American film would never have gotten away with, and there are a few moments in it so rousing that the audience I saw it with burst into cheers and applause. There are a lot of musical moments in the film, quite a few showcasing Sevilla's talents as dancer. But even in the non-musical moments, there's something about this movie that feels like a musical. It moves like one, as if a choreographer had a hand in blocking out all of the scenes.

It's not a long film, but yet I did feel like it overstayed its welcome by a hair. The end teeters into the kind of melodrama that for me gets tiring pretty quickly. But that's a small complaint -- mostly this film is a blast.

Grade: A.

This quick and dirty little crime thriller has a sensational first act, bringing together a bunch of characters in a middle-of-nowhere diner being held hostage by a couple of bank robbers on the lam. It's really suspenseful, but it's also really playful, and I was pleased that the film opted for fun rather than grimness. The second half of the movie, which takes place after things in the diner have come to a head, deflates a bit. It's like the story climaxes too quickly but then has to stick around for a while longer just to meet the requirements of a feature length running time. I wonder how this would have done as a short film.

But flaws aside, it's still a fiendishly entertaining movie. It doesn't really have much of a point, which is fine by me.

And it's got a kick-ass soundtrack.

Grade: A-

The last 20 minutes or so of "Love Lies Bleeding" goes off the rails in the most delightfully bonkers way. Even more to its credit, it gets funny. It wasn't until the last few scenes with Ed Harris that I realized I was supposed to be laughing at his haircut. And I thought, "was I supposed to be finding this movie funny the whole time?"

If I had, I would have liked this movie much more. But everything leading up to that last goofy little bit abused my goodwill too much for my opinion of it to rebound. God almighty this has to be the grossest movie that has yet or will yet come out this year. It's full of gross people doing gross things. Everyone looks like they would smell terrible and have bad breath. It's set somewhere in New Mexico I guess, or at least that's where it was filmed, but wherever it is it's a horror show goon parade of everything that's most terrible about America. It's the kind of place people fly over to get somewhere better. The actors try, especially Kristen Stewart, but the director is so determined to turn us off that no one really had a chance to make much of this surly, grumpy weirdo fest.

And I have never seen a bigger collection of unacceptable haircuts in my life. It was almost like a contest to see who could look most ridiculous.

Grade: C-

I'm not a foodie and I hate cooking. But even I was mesmerized by all of the detailed scenes of food preparation in this film. It's the food equivalent of that guy who used to paint landscapes in real time on PBS. So relaxing.

The film built around all of these cooking scenes is ok. It's very slow and very long, and it comes close to wasting an acting talent as formidable as Juliette Binoche. It's also overly formal and stilted, and always feels like a bunch of contemporary actors and artists guessing at how people from a long-ago time period would act and sound rather than ever believably capturing it.

But it's a pretty film, and all that cooking! The highlight of the film is a long scene where Binoche's husband serves her a multi-course dinner while she's recovering from a bout of illness. The movie takes the homily "food is the language of love" and makes it literal.

I would be exhausted if I lived like the people in this movie. Every meal has to be three hours long, every bite has to be a profound experience, every conversation has to be intellectually rigorous, every time anyone opens his mouth he begins by saying something like "It was the so and so philosopher who said....." or speaks in metaphor. Wasn't there an early 20th century version of popping in a frozen pizza and getting on with your evening?

Grade: B.

Barbara Stanwyck has Errol Flynn's number in this spooky mansion noir with a twist ending that had me tipping my hat at the film and saying, "Well played, sir."

Stanwyck and Flynn have a lot of chemistry together, and the film is dripping with atmosphere. There's lots of scenes of Stanwyck slinking around the house at night, prowling through the shadows and shimmying up dumb waiters. The whole film is a classic example of misdirection. At one point, my wife said, "Wouldn't it be hilarious if Flynn wasn't the bad guy at all and Stanwyck's been wrong the entire time?" Well, guess what?

Richard Baseheart appears late in the film as Stanwyck's dead but not dead husband.

Grade: A-

Ronald Colman acts the hell out of this movie and justifies the Oscar he won for it.

"A Double Life" has a really cool premise. It's a noirish thriller that finds Colman playing a method actor who has trouble distinguishing between reality and the part he's playing when he's cast in his dream role, that of "Othello." The whole thing is very meta, and even kind of funny in a dark, twisted way, as it lampoons actors who take themselves too seriously. Long before method acting was really even a thing, it was remarkable to me that this movie based its entire premise on it.

George Cukor does some really terrific directorial work here. Okay, so his use of reflective surfaces is a bit heavy handed and overdone, but dig that shot at the end when a character moves over to where Colman is dying, blocks the light, and throws shadow over Colman's face so that he looks like he's got his Othello stage makeup on.

A young Shelley Winters plays a buxom, sexy waitress who meets a grim end.

In addition to Colman's Oscar win for Best Actor, "A Double Life" brought Miklos Rozsa his second Oscar for composing the film's score. Cukor was nominated for his directing, and the writing team of Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin were nominated for their tight and brisk original screenplay.

Grade: A.

It's mighty hard to suspend the disbelief needed to accept Errol Flynn as a sun-weathered western outlaw, what with his aristocratic diction and all, but here we are. He has some nice chemistry with Alexis Smith, but somehow this movie never really takes off. There's a pretty satisfying shootout at the film's finale and a memorable final scene, but a lot of the rest of the film is draggy. S. Z. Sakall is on hand to be the comic relief, and he's really tiresome. Smith gets a chance to warble out a song or two, one of them the Oscar-nominated ditty "Some Sunday Morning." The film also copped a nod for its color art direction, though there's nothing overly impressive about it.

A not very memorable western from a decade that produced a gazillion of them.

Grade: B-

I watched "Experiment Perilous" just a few days ago, and it left such little impression on me that I barely remember enough about it to write a review. I found it ridiculously hard to follow for a movie of its type, but that's probably because I was bored and only paying half attention. George Brent is a drippy leading man, and Hedy Lamarr is lovely but not much of an actress. The plot brings to mind "Gaslight" from the year prior, mostly due to the controlling rich dude who has a vested interest in making his wife think she's crazy.

This film received an Oscar nomination for its black and white art direction at the 1945 Oscars. It consists mostly of lavish drawing rooms.

Grade: C.

"Desperate Journey" follows a group of WWII soldiers who find themselves shot down behind enemy lines and trying to get to safety. Errol Flynn is the Aussie leader of the group, while Ronald Reagan is the wisecracking American who's just so over those pesky Nazis. Alan Hale is unfortunately on hand to be comic relief, which means he mentions something about being hungry every five minutes or so. The movie has a buddy comedy vibe more than a serious men-in-peril one, which you'll either like or not depending on your mood.

"Desperate Journey" received an Oscar nomination or its special effects in 1942.

Grade: B.

A weirdly specific movie about the men who came up with ideas to address blackouts that fighter pilots during WWII would experience when diving. The first part of the movie is a contest between the pilots, let by Fred MacMurray, who know all about flying, and the doctor (Errol Flynn) who wants to approach everything from a scientific perspective. Then in the second part of the film they all make peace and team up to try some new ideas.

"Dive Bomber" is pretty dry and it's way too long. I appreciated that it tried to be more than just a morale boosting bit of patriotic fluff, but I can't say I was ever very engaged by it.

Nominated for a Best Color Cinematography Oscar in 1941, for some admittedly striking aerial work.

Grade: B.

Joel McCrea washes up on a mysterious island, meets the no-talent Fay Wray, and then runs off with her into the jungle in a survival game engineered by the crazy rich dude who lives there. I swear, those crazy rich dudes are always up to something sketch. The winner gets to bang Fay Wray, because as crazy rich dude says in so many words at one point, sex is way better after you've had the experience of killing someone first.

Can we just let that sentiment sink in for a moment? That's a really disturbing blend of sex and violence that more than anything brands this film as pre-code. "The Most Dangerous Game" is probably worth seeing for an example of what pre-code films were allowed to get away with, but as a movie it's nothing special or memorable. It's done on the cheap, and Wray is terrible. McCrea isn't great either, but that's not so much his fault as it is the material, as we know that we was quite good in lots of other things.

Grade: B.

Hokey film in which famed football player Elroy "Crazylegs" Hirsch plays himself in the story of his own life. The tone of the whole thing is that cheesy rah-rah Americana popular in those post-WWII years, but there's something sort of endearing about the film and it goes down easy enough. A large part of that is due to Hirsch himself, who wasn't a professional actor but who exudes a genuine earnestness that's disarming.

The film is full of footage from Hirsch's actual games spliced in amongst the fictional scenes, which probably accounts for the film editing Oscar that Cotton Warburton received for this otherwise obscure movie.

Grade: B.

I can't imagine "Million Dollar Mermaid" still being of interest to anyone who doesn't have the nostalgia of seeing it back when it first came out or who are Esther Williams fans. I watched it because I knew Williams was a huge star and wanted to see something of hers, and it was Oscar nominated for its color cinematography so I thought it would at least look pretty. It's dull as anything, and people coming to it to see Williams' impressive athleticism may be disappointed. I'm sure it took a lot of skill to do what she does in the water, but translated to the film she just mostly floats around underwater looking lovely. There's really nothing about this film that I could recommend to another viewer.

Grade: C-

Am I the only one who wanted to punch Dev Patel in the face while watching this film? He plays Saroo Brierley, a young Indian man who was separated from his family when he was a little boy, funneled into the Indian orphan system, and adopted by a loving Australian couple. He longs to return to India to see his birth family again, but is torn between wanting to reconnect with his roots and remaining loyal to the people who raised him.

The first half of "Lion" is the film at its best, thanks to the winningly adorable Sunny Pawar, who plays Saroo as a little boy. But once Saroo ages into Patel, the film turns into a saggy, interminable series of scenes in which Patel mopes, lashes out at everyone who's nice to him, spends every night staring at Google Earth while taking no action whatsoever, and generally acts like a spoiled brat. What his actual dilemma is is never made clear by the screenplay or Patel's performance. I stated above that he's torn between two cultures, but I'm only conjecturing about that, since that's not shown in the movie. Instead we watch a privileged man surrounded by supportive people whining about how he wants to return to India while we watch him and want to scream at him, "Then stop moping and and just go visit India already!!"

Patel was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award, but he didn't deserve to be. Nicole Kidman, who plays his adoptive mother, was much more deserving of her Best Supporting Actress nomination. The film also nabbed nominations for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, and Best Original Score, but won nothing.

Grade: B-

I saw last year's nominated documentary short "Nai Nai and Wai Po" without realizing that "Didi" was the fictionalized autobiography of that film's creator, Sean Wang. It didn't hit home to me until I saw the character of the grandma in "Didi," who was featured in the short film and is Sean Wang's actual grandmother. So that's all very cool.

"Didi" is very funny, and hits a lot of the targets about navigating adolescence and all its terrors that most of us who've lived through it would expect it to. I saw it with my 15 and 13 year old sons, and was a bit disappointed that it didn't seem to resonate more with them than it did. But I liked it.

It's mostly about a kid who thinks he always has to be something that others want him to be before he's had a chance to figure out what he wants to be himself. It also touches on what it's like to be "othered" by your racial identity (in this case Asian) without being preachy about it or making its audience feel like it's getting homework.

Not a groundbreaking film, but a nice alternative if you're looking for something beyond the typical summer movie fare.

Grade: A-

Many of Billy Wilder's comedies had a dark edge to them, but "A Foreign Affair" is one of the darkest. It makes sense, since this romcom is set in a bombed out Berlin in the years just after WWII. The devastation of the German people, both physical and mental, is an ever present specter hovering over everything, and there's a violent undertone to the film, particularly in the sexually aggressive relationship between Marlene Dietrich's Nazi sympathizer and John Lund's Army officer, that feels like it might bubble over at any minute, as if all of the hate and violence of such a terrible conflict hadn't yet worked its way out of everyone's systems.

Jean Arthur is adorable, but she's never allowed to be adorable in this. She looks god-awful for most of the movie, with her severe braids and dumpy clothes. I kept waiting for the scene where she'd appear all gussied up and cute, and there is a scene sort of like that, but she still somehow manages to not be cute even when gussied up.

This isn't top-tier Wilder, but it's worth a watch, if for no other reason than to see what Berlin looked like in 1948. It's almost inconceivable to me that a city could ever recover from that kind of destruction.

"A Foreign Affair" was nominated for two Oscars in 1948, Best Screenplay and Best B&W Cinematography.

Grade: B+

A really dreary and pointless movie that finds Cary Grant wandering around the streets of his old neighborhood moping while his mom dies of cancer.

Grant received the second of his two career Oscar nominations for his performance here, but he's miscast and doesn't make much of this character. It's a crime that neither of his nominations was for a comedy. Give me his performance in "Bringing Up Baby" or "The Awful Truth" over this prestige drama stuff any day.

Ethel Barrymore won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance, and she's pretty good, but there's not much to her character. This type -- the quietly enduring mother figure -- was and still is catnip to Academy voters, and Barrymore joined the long line of actresses who won or were nominated for playing characters of this sort.

The film also received nominations for Best Film Editing (which I don't understand at all) and Best Dramatic or Comedy Score, which doesn't seem like much of an achievement given that there were 20(!) nominees in that category in 1944.

Grade: C.

A screen version of the Robert Louis Stevenson novel that might seem decent if you've never seen the famous Fredric March version.

Spencer Tracy does a passable job in the dual title roles, relying more on acting and less on makeup for his transition into the Hyde character. And though at a disadvantage to the earlier film by coming out on the other side of the Production Code, it still manages to be pretty sexual and frank. But it pales in every conceivable way to the breathtakingly horny original. The bigger budget and sheen of studio gloss actually do a disservice to the material, when what this story needs is dirt and grit, which the March version has in spades. It's a case of "why bother?" when you have a superior version you can watch instead.

"Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" was nominated in the categories of Best B&W Cinematography, Best Film Editing, and Best Dramatic Score at the 1941 Academy Awards.

Grade: B-

"The Late Show" is a good idea on paper. An old school gumshoe detective straight out of a 1940s film noir teams up with a hippy-dippy product of the counter culture to solve a byzantine murder mystery.

But despite a satisfyingly crusty performance from Art Carney and the formidable comedic talents of Lily Tomlin to work with, this film is a dud. I think much of it is supposed to be funny, but it never really is. It's directed with too heavy a hand by Robert Benton, when it needed a lighter screwball vibe. Robert Altman produced, and the film does bear a lot of similarities to his throwback detective movie "The Long Goodbye" from a few years prior, but that movie leaned heavily into its weirdness and deconstruction of the hard-boiled crime genre, whereas "The Late Show" is way more pedestrian and mainstream without any other attributes to compensate for its dullness.

And the sort-of love interest story they try to foist on Carney and Tomlin is just plain ick.

Robert Benton received an Academy Award nomination for the film's original screenplay.

Grade: C.

Another internet reviewer summed up the experience of watching this very well. They also have an interest in watching all of the movies that have been nominated for Best Picture Oscars over the years and have found some hidden gems in doing so. But they've also had to sit through a whole bunch of movies like "Flirtation Walk" that feel like a total waste of time.

I'm not sure I thought it was a waste of time, because I don't think any movie is a total waste of time. At the very least, I think it's fascinating to see what studios thought people wanted to see, and how the culture as reflected in movies has changed over the decades. But I can see what they mean. It seems inconceivable to me that anyone could find something to like in this thuddingly boring movie, and it boggles the mind that anyone at the time thought this was worthy of a Best Picture nomination, even in a year with twelve nominees. But I guess times have changed along with our standards for entertainment.

I like Dick Powell better as a film noir anti-hero than a song and dance man (though he doesn't do any dancing in this), and I've never liked Ruby Keeler (who oddly doesn't dance either, though that's ok because I've seen the result). This movie is part tribute to our military heroes/part show-within-a-show musical. It's all terrible, or at least would be terrible if it wasn't so inert. It would have to be somewhat bold to be outright terrible, whereas this movie is lifeless and dull beyond comprehension.

Also nominated for a Best Sound Recording Oscar, but that's meaningless because back then studios could put forward movies for automatic nominations in that category. And anyway, it's not like great sound recording would have made this movie any better.

Grade: D-

"Thelma" gives June Squibb and the late Richard Roundtree the chance to deliver a couple of fun performances in the rare movie that prominently features elderly characters without patronizing them.

The central relationship in the movie is between a young man and his grandmother, but I saw a lot of my mom in the character of Thelma. She's 81 and in pretty good shape, the usual wear and tear issues of aging aside. She has mobility issues and has said that it would be tempting to sit on the couch all day and watch T. V., but she forces herself to stay active and independent. As a result, she's doing pretty well, and I know that if she had the choice between getting out and about and running the risk of getting injured or overdoing it vs. Wasting slowly away from a sedentary lifestyle, she'd say bring on the risk. I don't blame her, as I think I'll feel the same way.

"Thelma" nails what it's like to be children trying to care for an elderly parent. You want to let them be independent, but you also know that anything that happens to them as a result is going to fall on you to handle, so you do things for them instead and caution them against trying to do too much themselves. But then you're taking away the very thing that is helping them stay sharp and healthy, even though you mean well. It's a crappy position to be in, and it's no wonder that studies show people in their 40s have the least life contentment of any other decade.

On the other hand, I could not relate at all to the helicopter parenting of the characters played by Parker Posey and Clark Gregg in this movie, as that isn't how I parent at all.

Grade: A-