Avanti (1972 Billy Wilder)

We just can't leave it alone. Every time we go to or come back from Italy...

Notes:

Lemmon as roses. Clive Revill brilliant as Carlucci: "When do you sleep?" "In the winter."

The film seems full of Lubitsch touches. Like Hitchcock making Frenzy (basically a return to his old London films) Wilder is going against the grain of the American New Wave in 1972 making an old-time comedy (though it's full of up-to-the-minute pot-shots at the US, Italy and England).

Pippo Franco is the meticulous pathologist. "He always lunches well. He knows all the widows."

A great character actor, Franco joins the ranks of brilliant supporting players like Walter Hampden and Marcel Hillaire in Sabrina.

"Let's have what they would have had."

This surely is from where the Airplane! joke is derived.

"This 'dame' is my niece. She was raised by the Carvelline Sisters!" (Whoever they may be.) Can Juliet Mills look any more angelic? (Compare to So Well Remembered.) She is perfect in this film.

Note Juliet's restless feet in the scene where they're having breakfast in bed together.

Earlier Avanti

Pygmalion (1938 Puffin Asquith & Leslie Howard)

It was his mother that called Anthony 'Puffin' on account of his distinguished nose.

Leslie Howard, Wendy Hiller, Wilfred Lawson, Scott Sunderland (Col. Pickering)

Scr. Cecil Lewis & W.P. Lipscomb, play and scenario G.B. Shaw. Won the Oscar.

"Not bloody likely. I'm going in a taxi!" Her enunciation stayed with us all through our holiday.
"They say he done her in!"

Loved the final shot - the back of Howard's head.

Ed . David Lean
Ph. Harry Stradling (op. Jack Hildyard)
Mus. Arthur Honegger

The Voice of the Turtle (1947 Irving Rapper)

Elenor Parker, Ronald Reagan, Eve Arden (poor Eve, always the bridesmaid...), Kent Smith, Erskine Sanford as the storekeeper (Orson Welles films).

Written by John Van Druten and based on his play.

There's a running gag about people overhearing the couple:

"I'm going mad."

"Wearing your brother's pyjamas."

This is quite a modern and risqué plot for its time in which Parker and Arden are in relationships which are just 'gay' and Reagan has no trouble kipping the night in a single girl's apartment (Parker is also an early sufferer of OCD). The first half takes place in a single night.

The attention to details is interesting, caught by Palermo-born Sol Polito's highly professional lighting and underscored by Max Steiner (Warner Bros.)

"Oops!"

The Secret War of Harry Frigg (1968 Jack Smight)

Newman, James Gregory and Norman Fell (who seems to play the same deadpan miserable in every film)

Escapee private Paul Newman is promoted to help rescue band of nice brigadiers from luxury Italian prison:

Nice brigadiers: Charles Gray, Andrew Duggan, Tom Bosley, John Williams (who I'd watch in anything) and Jacques Roux

Luckily, the Northern Italian castle (actually in California, unconfirmed) is presided over by Contessa Sylva Koscina:

There doesn't seem to be much chemistry between the two however. In seduction scene, Sylva looks bored (Q was admiring her socks):

 There are also rather too many obviously contrived group shots like this one:

Quite fun though. You can't help but warm to the brigadiers. Newman himself doesn't quite bring it off, though he's fun in scenes where he's learning all about Chateau Lafitte 1932, metaphysical poetry etc. Written by Peter Stone (with Frank Tarloff) - again, nowhere near as well written as Charade making me wonder if that was a bit of a fluke?

We watched the Czech Magic Box DVD which is of a rather grubby print and thus doesn't show off Russell Metty's photography to its best. Quite amusingly it is titled "Tajná Válka Harryho Frigga". Farrizio Moni is the Italian colonel, with Johnny Haymer as his sergeant, and the German commandant is nicely played by Buck Henry. Suitably Italian score provided by Carlo Rusticelli (Avanti).

Half Nelson (2006 Ryan Fleck)

Written by Fleck with Anna Boden, film tells of unlikely relationship developing between strung out teacher and inner city kid, both played beautifully by Ryan Gosling (who was Oscar nominated) and Shareeka Epps, actually 17 at the time, and often looking much, much older.

Ryan with very stupid plaster. Who plasters a lip anyway?

Anthony Mackie is the dealer, and sympathetic teacher Denis O'Hare perhaps looks familiar as he's a recurrent judge in The Good Wife.

It suffers from a choppy, documentary hand held look which doesn't always suit the material, and there's clearly a lot of improvised acting from non-professionals. But it doesn't fold itself into a neat box, and overall is quite tangy.

Evil Under the Sun (1981, released 1982, Guy Hamilton)

Peter Ustinov (as 'Hercules Parrot'!), Maggie Smith, James Mason, Jane Birkin, Colin Blakely, Nicholas Clay (with a widely variable accent), Roddy McDowell, Sylvia Miles, Dennis Quilley, Diana Rigg, Emily Hone (awful).

I'm not sure it was a good idea just to use music by Cole Porter.
Chris Challis shot it around the hotel on Cap Formentor, Mallorca (though it looks different now), a classy location doubling for the puzzling sounding 'Tyrrenhia'. Agatha Christie's original location in her 1941 novel was a hotel in Devon, so that was a definite improvement.

It's all a bit plummy, and not terribly interesting.

The Joneses (2009 Derrick Borte)

A bewildering film about people who impersonate a family and sell things. Said family comprises David Duchovny, Demi Moore, Amber Heard (The Rum Diary, Pineapple Express) and Ben Hollingsworth, with Gary Cole (The Good Wife), Glenne Headly and Lauren Hutton.

The King's Speech (2010 Tom Hooper)

The film, screenplay (David Seidler) and Firth won both the Oscar and BAFTA and Eastenders' director Hooper (then 38) won for Best Director: what a bastard. BAFTAs also went quite rightly to Geoffrey Rush (who lost the Oscar to Christian Bale in The Fighter) and Helena Bonham Carter (lost to Melissa Leo in The Fighter). Also with Guy Pearce, who's been busy 'kinging' (and who we kept referring to as Mike from Neighbours until we remembered his name), Jennifer Ehle, Michael Gambon, Derek Jacobi (another superb actor), Timothy Spall (great as Churchill), Anthony Andrews, Claire Bloom, Eve Best (Mrs Simpson).

Often funny film is also superbly edited (by Tariq Anwar) e.g. in the montage showing the King's progress through therapy. It's also most interestingly shot, with actors frequently inhabiting the lower edge of the frame, as though Danny Cohen is shooting from a stepladder: it has the effect though of making you concentrate more on the performer.

He's also using some very wide lenses. (Music by Alexandre Desplat.)

Loved the moment where Firth turns around and Rush is in the 'throne'.

It appears that the Queen did enjoy the film, and found Firth's portrayal of her father 'moving'.

Casablanca (1942 Michael Curtiz)

A perfect film, bright and shiny as ever, written by Julius G and Philip J Epstein and Howard Koch and based on an unproduced play 'Everybody Comes to Rick's' by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison.

It's tempting to think that's Curtiz behind the camera, or Edeson, but it could just as easily be camera assistant Wally Meinardus, Jack Warner or virtually anyone!

Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman (who's softly lit in every close up), Claude Rains, Peter Lorre, Sidney Greenstreet, Dooley Wilson, S.Z. Sakall, Paul Henreid, Conrad Veidt.

Caution: when singing La Marseillaise Madeleine Lebeau will move grown men to tears. Pictured here with Leonid Kinskey.

"How extravagant you are, throwing away women like that!"

The Germans wore grey, you wore blue. Won Oscars for best film, director and screenplay, and was shot with the astonishing skill of Arthur Edeson, pin sharp and without a shadow in sight, with long lenses which slightly blur out the detail surrounding the actors (according to David Lean and Ronnie Neame, anyway). Both Edeson and Curtiz had made well over a hundred films each by then. Outstanding music also by Max Steiner.

"I don't have time to spend the money I make here!"

It was the second film we saw on Blu Ray, on 10 December 2010. Also watched it on 9 April 2011, as an antidote to the wretched Mama Mia! and observed that with its wonderfully quotable dialogue it's a model for anyone wanting to make a film.

Comments from 31 December 2011:

It was released on 23rd January 1943.
Veidt was German, Henreid and Sakall (Jakob Gero) were Austria- Hungarian.
Ingrid's great - check her expression as they drink the last champagne in Paris.
You see the progress of Joy Page and her fiancé through the whole film.
In the sing off, Sam is out back having a joint with some of the band.
Capt. Renault sure is a cad ("Captain, another passport problem has turned up." "Show her in".)
Naturally there's a Westmore involved (Perc), and Edeson did at least get nominated (but lost to Arthur Miller for The Song of Bernadette).

Joy Page

O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000 Joel Coen)

It's nice to know the Coens loved Preston Sturges: based on The Odyssey, but deriving from Sturges' Sullivan's Travels and with plenty of references to that film (e.g. the joy-riding kid, chain gang who are allowed into cinema). And with a hint of Cool Hand Luke (the chain gang warder's dark glasses)?

Gorgeous George (dubbed for the singing by Dan Tyminski) as we've never seen him:

It's all in the eyes

Brilliantly shot, of course, by Roger Deakins. Notice throwaway beauty of deep focus autumn leaves in foreground, car receding in pin sharp focus; also the witnessing of KKK meeting that starts in monochrome silver and warms up wonderfully. The entire film was digitised and very selectively desaturated (see the ASC page.) Also reflections in the funniest scene (recording studio):

John Turturro, Tim Blake Nelson, Holly Hunter, John Goodman, Chris Thomas King (who has the best line - when asked about selling his soul to the Devil - "Well I wasn't using it"), Charles Durning.

"Actually I'm not sure that is Pete."

I Love You, Philip Morris (2009 Glenn Ficarra, John Requa)

Jim Carrey, Ewan McGregor, Leslie Mann

True story reminded me of another true story, Catch Me If You Can.

 

Ph. Xavier Perez Grobet 

Ends on Mozart's The Magic of Figaro and the surprise revelation that this basically harmless man is serving life imprisonment for various jail escapes and fraud.