jetpack_monkey | Cinema Blog #5: 1930s Revue

Accidentally started a small tradition last night. You see, I recently made a list of all the movies in my collection that I've never seen. The list came to about 250 films (this includes individual films in box sets) -- or roughly half to a third of my collection (depending on how you're counting). Given the huge number of films unexperienced and the large number of DVDs I buy in a month, it seemed best for me to start working through that list.

Thunderball (1965)	I started yesterday with Thunderball, which is incidentally not part of the tradition mentioned previously. Of all the James Bond films one has to own sole remake rights to, Kevin McClory has the terrible misfortune of having Thunderball's. Not actually a bad film but something of a bland one -- the moment when Bond started to get a bit loopy with the over-the-top gadgets (I'm thinking of the jetpack here) and self-satisfied smugness. Still an enjoyable experience, even though the climactic underwater battle is really confusing and many of the more iconic bits have become jokes due to the Austin Powers series. I'm working my way through the Bond films I haven't seen chronologically, so next up on that list is You Only Live Twice.
Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)	The tradition I speak of started innocently enough -- I'd been meaning to watch Michael Curtiz's The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) for quite a while now. Finally got a chance, thankfully. Action, adventure, sword fights, arrows to the gut, unintentional homoerotic banter -- it's all here. Errol Flynn is the consummate hero, jesting and buckling his swash, all while keeping his green felt hat firmly atop his awful hair. Plus it keeps a pretty heavy Norman vs. Saxon text running throughout, a political aspect that is appreciated if oversimplified.
It Happened One Night (1934)	I followed up with Frank Capra's It Happened One Night (1934), a charming romantic comedy that is hilarious, but would be moreso without some of the idiotic sexual politics. When stars Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert act as equals, the movie works perfectly. When Gable assumes superiority over Colbert, the movie deflates. I'm talking actual superiority -- there are some sequences where Gable only thinks he's better; he's proven wrong and there's comedy gold. There are others where the sexual imbalance is taken as read and these are the ugliest in the film. Incidentally, this could use a really smashing DVD release -- Columbia's current offering looks crisp only half the time. The other half appear to be suffering from some print damage which make the film appear washed out. In this era where Warner Bros. can restore almost perfect clarity to its back catalog, there's no excuse for this Academy Award-winning film to look so shabby.
And at this point, I consciously recognized an opportunity to work through the unseen titles in my collection. So, I watched three films from the 1930s this weekend (#3 coming next). Next weekend it will be three films from the 1940s, then the 1950s, and so on, so forth, etc. Once I finish a weekend with the 2000s, I'll hitch back to the silent era before proceeding to the 1930s again (there's a chance that I've actually seen all the silent films in my collection, however).
The Lady Vanishes (1938)	1930s film #3 last night was Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes, which (with support from the 1934 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much and 1935's The 39 Steps) acted as Hitch's calling card to the United States. What's kind of brilliant about The Lady Vanishes is that it starts out like a comedy about a bunch of people trapped in a hotel. For the most part, we follow the adventures of the vedy British Caldicott and Charters (Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford), who are not our heroes. We do take a brief side journey with Iris Henderson (Margaret Lockwood) and Gilbert (Michael Redgrave), who are our heroes, but you'd never know it from the opening twenty minutes. Hitch gives us just enough to go on so that when they do transition into our leading players, it's natural, even if we're not quite sure how it happened. The mystery (or the MacGuffin, if you will) is a little old lady who disappears off the train -- but only Iris can recall her existence. Hitch doesn't play any games with "did the woman actual exist" -- he's quite clear that she did and takes us off the narrative path on one or two occasions to remind us as much. He's not interesting in screwing with our heads so much as he is leading us down his cinematic path of mystery by the nose. The central question is never a question, much like a magician's trick. We know the woman didn't just vanish. We want to find out how it is that they can hide a little old lady in a very limited, claustrophobic space. The result is satisfying, even if there are a few holes here and there. The climactic shootout feels a bit impersonal, but it's a minor flaw in a minor masterpiece.