Normally, when I write about a find on Netflix, it is something obscure, like a small BBC production, or someone’s art film. Today, I’ve got something really great to rave about, and it kind of crosses the line into my Matinee Monday posts. Usually, Netflix, when they are able to get good movies (yeah, yeah, that is optimistic, I know), they aren’t “classics”. For example, I’m an MGM musical fan, and you can count the number of really great musicals on Netflix on the fingers of one hand. Continue reading →
I’ve taken a short break from most of my writing for the blog, and that included writing about my favorite topic, old movies. After lazing about for a couple of week, I seem to be building up another head of steam and am thinking of topics for future posts, and so I’ll begin with an installment of Matinee Monday.
I’ve been writing about the films of 1939, beginning with the ten movies that were nominated for Best Picture. One that I haven’t mentioned, and is the elephant in the room, is the monster hit, The Wizard of Oz. While Gone With The Wind was chosen as Best Picture that year (and won just about every other award), I think it’s safe to say that The Wizard of Oz is much more popular, and certainly much more a part of our culture than GWTW could ever be.
Back in February, when in the early stages of doing these movie posts, I wrote about the song that was made famous by The Wizard of Oz, “Somewhere Over The Rainbow.” To write about the movie and settle on any one aspect of the film would be impossible. The Wizard of Oz is probably the most widely loved of all films, reaching as it does to all ages, whether it be through appeal to childish fantasy, to mature audiences by dealing with the idea of lost dreams, and even the true meaning of life.
I can’t think of a film that is more analyzed, frame by frame, and has every aspect of its production written about, commented on, etc. After all, the fact that Buddy Ebsen (Jed, of The Beverly Hillbillies) was originally cast as The Tin Man and nearly died because the aluminum powder from his make-up got into his lungs is widely known and written about. The Munchkins? How about numerous documentaries and books about the little people who portrayed the Munchins? (There was even a feature movie made about the events entitled Under The Rainbow, if I’m not mistaken.)
Garland not the first choice? Frank Morgan buying an old frock coat in a thrift store to be part of the Wizard’s costume, and finding L. Frank Baum’s name in it? “The Jitterbug” and extended jazz dance scene by Ray Bolger left on the cutting room floor? Memorabilia selling at record prices? Where do you begin? Of all the Oscar-nominated films of 1939, not one comes close to inspiring love, affection and nostalgia as The Wizard of Oz. I could write five posts about it, and not cover it sufficiently.
I guess that when many of us try to think of something that appeals to us, we have to agree with Dorothy’s assessment of the Cowardly Lion, at the end, when she says she’s going to miss the way he cried for help when he was frightened. I think that beside the fact that the initials were the same (CL), the reason I chose Cowardly Lion as my Twitter avatar is because his use of language during his “Courage” speech just makes me smile:
This past week, we watched a film we had never heard of before, and loved it. Entitled The Best of Men, it tells the story of Dr. Ludwig Guttman, a Jewish refugee from Hitler’s Germany, who was instrumental in changing the treatment of patients with spinal injuries. Brisk and brusque, Dr. Guttman, when finally assigned to serve at a military hospital dealing with paraplegic soldiers, clashes with just about everyone: the nurses, fellow doctors, military higher-ups at the hospital. You name it, he clashed with it.
BUT he got results.
What drew us to this British film was the man playing the lead, Eddie Marsan. Admittedly, Marsan is not a household name, but he is one of our favorite actors. Confession time: we of the CSL household are serious Anglophiles; we love British programming. Whether it be the comedy of QI, the period dramatizations of Dickens, Austen and Thackeray, or even a few British crime dramas, like Midsomer Murders, Agatha Christie’s Poirot or Sherlock Holmes (either Cumberbatch or Brett is just fine, thank you.) We love them all.
We first came across Eddie Marsan as the snorting, irascible rent-collector Pancks, in the BBC production of Little Dorritt, and then were delighted when he turned up as Inspector Lestrade in Robert Downey’s Sherlock Holmes films. Finding that he was the star of The Best of Men was all I needed to put the film in our queue.
And was I glad I did. As I said, it tells the story Dr. Guttman, who transformed care for spinal injuries. The film showed how the soldiers were delivered to the hospital in coffins! They were not expected to survive, but merely waste away until the coffin was needed. Guttman began treating them as patients with a future, against the conventional wisdom of the time, and eventually gave the men a purpose for living. I did not realize this, but Dr. Guttman was the driving force behind the creation of the Paralympics, and was knighted in 1966 for his achievements.
All in all, The Best of Men, while not a well-known film, is a worthwhile film. Put it in your queue and enjoy.
The next film from 1939 makes me smile just thinking about it: Ninotchka. It starred the great dramatic actress, Greta Garbo, in a surprising new role: comedic! Just to show you how surprising this was to the movie-going public, here is the poster for that film:
Note the tag-line: “Garbo Laughs!” Garbo was so-well known as a dramatic actress that it was a complete surprise to everyone to find out that she was an accomplished comedienne. After all, Edmund Gwenn (Kris Kringle, in Miracle on 34th Street) is supposed to have said on his death bed, “Dying is easy; comedy is hard.”
In Ninotchka, three Russian commissars are sent by Moscow to Paris to sell jewelry confiscated from Russian aristocrats, but are corrupted by Count d’Algout (male lead Melvin Douglas.) Concerned about these three, Moscow sends a special envoy (Garbo) to straighten the commissars out and take charge of the sale. Garbo plays the role of the stern and cheerless envoy with a deft touch, and as she blossoms in the Paris summer, she comes to see that there are delights in the world.
Ninortcha was very successful, and even spawned a Cole Porter musical remake, Silk Stockings, with Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse. The dialogue is witty, with many digs at Stalinist Russia. One scene has Ninotchka reporting to the three commissars, “The last mass trials were a great success. There are going to be fewer but better Russians”.
Continuing with the films of 1939, I now come to another classic (as if any of the entire Academy 10 isn’t a classic), Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. This film is a sterling example of Hollywood’s ability to believe in true morality and goodness. It doesn’t hurt that the director is Frank Capra, who believed in old-fashioned goodness, and tried to present it in all of his films.
Simply told, Mr. Smith is the story of a small-town naif known for his good deeds who is appointed as interim senator by a corrupt political machine that needs to have an easy-to-control placeholder who doesn’t know how things are done in DC, in order to complete a massive scheme of political graft. A complication is that the congressional aide is a cynical politico who knows how things are done. Let’s see if I’ve checked off the boxes:
Small-town rube Corrupt big-city sharpies Cynical female operative Cynical female operative falls for naif Sharpies steamroll the rube
I’m not sure if I’m describing Mr. Deeds Goes To Town or Mr. Smith Goes To Washington. Throw in a daft angel or an absent-minded mother who uses kittens as paperweights, and I could be describing It’s A Wonderful Life or You Can’t Take It With You, all fine examples of the genre known as Capra-Corn.
This iteration of Capra’s vision of American goodness starred America’s “Everyman”, the inimitable Jimmy Stewart as the naive Jefferson Smith, head of a national boys’ organization. The female lead is one of my favorite actresses, the reclusive Jean Arthur, who starred in another Capra-Corn movie I’ve written about, Mr. Deeds Goes To Town. Together they have to overcome a nefarious political cabal, led by suave and urban Claude Rain and perennial tough guy Edward Arnold.
As always in a Capra movie, good ultimately triumphs over evil, but not before a climactic struggle in which Goliath nearly destroys David. In this scene, Stewart presents what Capra believed in:
Before I begin, let me introduce to you someone who has been called the greatest bass player in the world. Now, mind you, I might have been expecting the likes of Paul McCartney or Jack Bruce (Cream), maybe Jon Entwhistle (The Who). But when I heard Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys say that this person was the greatest ever, I had to take notice. So let me introduce to you, Carol Kaye**:
Carol Kaye? Who the heck is Carol Kaye? That would have been my thought a week ago. And then I watched a documentary on Netflix entitled “The Wrecking Crew”, that was absolutely mind-blowing! I grew up when music was truly great, the 60’s. Whether you had The Beatles, The Stones or the Beach Boys competing, you had great bands and great tunes coming out.
But did you know that the likes of The Beach Boys, The Association and other bands didn’t play on their records? Al Jardine, of the Beach Boys, explains it best. “We were on the road doing 150 shows a year. There was no way we could turn around and go into the studio.” Instead, the vocals were done by the band, but all the music was done by a group of 20-25 LA studio musicians who were loosely known as “The Wrecking Crew.”
And this documentary is a loving picture of the music that these musicians created in the name of others. If you have Netflix, add The Wrecking Crew to your queue. You won’t be disappointed.
** Oh, as to Carol Kaye? Here is a list of the singers and bands that she recorded for:
The Beach Boys
Phil Spector
The Door
Ritchie Valens
Frank Sinatra
Nancy Sinatra
Glen Campbell
Leon Russell
Sonny & Cher
Joe Cocker
Barbra Streisand
Ray Charles
Frank Zappa
Ike & Tina Turner
Johnny Mathis
Simon & Garfunkel
The Righteous Brothers
Herb Alpert
The Buckinghams
Paul Revere & the Raiders
Gary Lewis & the Playboys
The Monkees
Buffalo Springfield
It is the task of biographers to tell the why’s, how’s and wherefore’s of a person’s life, but how do you sum up a life? How do you get to the person and learn how his journey affected his soul? James Hilton did an exemplary job in his novella, Goodby, Mr. Chips (1933), telling the progress of a British boys’ school teacher from a second-rate teacher in a second-rate school to beloved icon.
Like Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind, Goodbye Mr. Chips was a recent literary work, a product of the 30’s. Another of the Class of ’39, Goodbye Mr. Chips is unlike GWTW. Goodby Mr. Chips was not grand in scope nor in size, it didn’t aspire to present an epic tale, merely the memory of a life that seemed small, but touched many.
Hollywood has told this story twice: once in 1939, starring Robert Donat as Mr. Chipping, and a second time thirty years later, with the great Peter O’Toole as the title character. Both were nominated for Best Actor Oscars. Mr. Donat received the award in ’39; O’Toole had the misfortune to be nominated the same year that John Wayne was nominated for his role in True Grit. While True Grit is an excellent film, it is pretty much acknowledged that Wayne was a lock for the Oscar, as he was the sentimental favorite of the Academy because of his many years in Hollywood.
Robert Donat’s portrayal of Mr. Chipping over the 63-year span of the film is a wonderfully sensitive look into the transformation of a life through times of joy and sadness, love and loss. Mr. Chips, as the boys of Brookfield call him, starts the film as a “rookie” teacher in the British school system, but over time, is transformed as time the the movie progresses into a beloved institution, through no fault of his own.
A sentimental movie, a sentimental story, Goodbye Mr. Chips is a loving look back at a way of life that doesn’t exist anymore, but deserves to be remembered. The only decent clip I could find shows how the timid Chips actually professes his love to Miss Kathy, a woman he met on holiday, and who would instigate his transformation:
Let’s address the elephant in the room. If I am going to write about the films of 1939, there is one film that must be pushed out into the middle of the room, front and center. In 1936, Margaret Mitchell won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel, Gone With The Wind, which became the top-selling book for two years running. David O. Selznick bought the rights to GWTW early, but due to problems, it took three years to film and release the movie.
One reason that it took so long to get the film to the screen was because Selznick only wanted one man to play Rhett Butler, Clark Gable. Gable was under contract to MGM, who wasn’t about to lend Gable to another studio. Lending actors to other studios to make movies was a common practice, but by the late 30’s Gable was such a hot property and screen idol that MGM wouldn’t lend him. To give you an idea of just how idolized Gable was, check out this video of a pre-Oz Judy Garland singing a love song to a Gable photograph:
In order to get Gable, Selznick negotiated an exorbitant deal with Sam Goldwyn’s father-in-law, Louis B. Mayer, in which he took on huge financial obligation, and gave MGM distribution rights.
But. He got Gable.
And for Scarlett O’Hara? The drama was no less intense. Selznick, for publicity, announced a 1400-person casting call for actresses to read and audition for the part. The gimmick did generate a swell of publicity for the film, but didn’t produce someone for the role. Instead, a veritable Who’s Who of Hollywood actresses (and their agents) were lobbying and working the phones for the part of Scarlett, including Katherine Hepburn, Jean Arthur, Tallulah Bankhead, Joan Bennett, Paulette Goddard, Susan Hayward, Vivien Leigh, and Lana Turner. In the end, it came down to Paulette Goddard (who had starred opposite Gable in It Happened One Night, in 1934) and Vivien Leigh; Selznick’s choice was Goddard, but controversy over her marriage to Charlie Chaplin caused him to opt for Leigh.
Despite the casting problem, the end result was that Gone With The Wind won ten Oscars and became the all-time grossing movie production up to that time; it took another 25 years for a film to earn more than GWTW. According to Wikipedia, when adjusted for monetary inflation, is still the most successful film in box-office history.
Tortured though it might have been to bring about, here is the first meeting of these two fabled characters:
Most movie buffs will agree with the title of this post; it is generally acknowledged that Hollywood’s Class of 1939 included the greatest of number of quality films produced in one year. To convince someone of this, all I need to do is list the 10 films that were nominated for best picture:
Dark Victory (Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, Ronald Reagan, Henry Travers)
Gone With the Wind (Clark Gable. ‘Nuff said.)
Goodbye, Mr. Chips (Classic remake of a classic novel.)
Love Affair
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Jimmy Stewart, Jeanne Arthur, Claude Rains)
Ninotchka (The Great Greta Garbo! Tag line: “Garbo laughs!”)
Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck’s novel, starring Burgess Meredith and Lon Chaney, Jr.)
Stagecoach (John Ford, director; John Wayne’s breakout role)
The Wizard of Oz (well, duh! And it didn’t win the Oscar!)
Wuthering Heights (Laurence Olivier, Merle Oberon, and David Niven)
You have noted that for one of the films, I gave no parenthetical notes. There is a reason for that: I had never heard of Love Affair before. The other nine films are well-known, and many I have watched more than once. But Love Affair? Never heard of it. And so I decided to see why this film was included in this roster of the greatest films ever.
Love Affair starred contemporary heart-throbs of the day, Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer, and was directed by one of Hollywood’s great directors, Leo McCarey. Alright, I knew all three names, but that didn’t signify anything to me. And then I started reading the plot, as given on Wikipedia (I’ve trimmed it down):
French painter Michel Marnet meets American singer Terry McKay aboard an oceanliner. They are both already engaged, but they begin to flirt and to eat dinner together on the ship, but his notoriety and popularity on the ship make them conspicuous, so they decide they should eat separately and not associate with each other.
As the ship reaches New York City, they make an appointment to meet six months later on top of the Empire State Building. When the rendezvous date arrives, they both head to the Empire State Building. However, Terry is struck by a car right as she arrives,…..
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before; as in An Affair To Remember, with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr! I had no idea that the Grant/Kerr send-up was a complete remake of the 1939 Love Affair. And now I know why it belongs in the pantheon of great ’39 films.
For the next few weeks (months?), I’m going to focus on films from this one year. It was Hollywood’s greatest output of truly wonderful films. I hope you’ll stay with me for this.
The CSL household has not watched a broadcast TV show in several years, ever since we bumped our internet connection up to DSL and discovered streaming video. That’s not to say that we don’t watch network shows; we are addicted to ABC’s Castle and the different Marvel series, such as Shield and AgentCarter. But for us, Netflix has been a mine of previously unknown programs that AREN’T deemed network-worthy. (Of course, given NBC’s dismal line-up over the past few years, maybe they should look to poach a few Netflix programmers.
We have become quite the Anglophiles, when it comes to programs that we like, but one we recently discovered broke even that mold. Death In Paradise is a joint UK-French production that is wonderfully different. Rather than set in the gritty streets of LA, or the gritty streets of New York or the gritty streets of London, it’s set in the gritty streets of Guadaloupe. (Okay, that’s definitely tongue in cheek.) Yes, it is filmed on the beautiful tropical island of Guadaloupe, hardly “gritty.”
Strait-laced British police inspector Richard Poole, who loves his up-tight life-style in England, is sent to the tropical Caribbean island of Honore to investigate the murder of the local policeman, and ends up permanently assigned to the island. HIs misery of suffering through tropical heat is compouned by not being able to find a proper cup of tea. Come to Death In Paradise for the murder mysteries, stay for Ben Miller’s wonderful portrayal of the stereotypically inhibited Englishman and revel in the Caribbean island accents of the rest of the cast.
Death in Paradise is a popular series, having been renewed through the current year. Here is the BBC trailer for series one:
GCF™ - Good Christian Family
GCH™ - Good Christian Husband
GCW™ - Good Christian Wife, Good Christian Woman
GCM™ - Good Christian Marriage
IYADWYAD, YAGWYAG™ - "If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got."
LYWACLTC™ - Love(ing) Your Wife Like Christ Loved The Church
The Curmudgeonly Librarian 