zerode – a sensibility

film, music, text, city, spectacle, pleasure

August 4, 2023 • 12:28 pm 0

On TCM, week of Aug 6, 2023 – singing and dancing, Powell and Pressburger

Pressed for time, so this is going to be a more telegraphic survey than usual, just quick notes on the films for the coming week that I think are most interesting, with some clips to whet your appetite.

Sunday, August 6

  • The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)
  • Bunch of Debbie Reynolds films, including The Affairs of Dobie Gillis (1953) and Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
Debbie Reynolds and Bobby Van in The Affairs of Dobie Gillis

Monday, August 7

  • Captain Nemo and the Underwater City (1970) – cheesy but fun example of the sort of science fiction and fantasy films produced on lower budgets before the whole blockbuster era and huge success of Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, etc. upended things. No more quick, cheap and fun Sinbad movies.
  • Billy Budd (1962) – directed by Peter Ustinov and starring Ustinov and Terence Stamp. I somehow didn’t even know about this movie. My personal must see for the week.
  • Berlin Express (1948) – directed by Jacques Tourneur. Allied agents fight an underground Nazi group in post-war Europe. Film noir-ish, great director.
  • On Dangerous Ground (1952) – directed by Nicolas Ray and starring Ida Lupino and Robert Ryan
Original trailer for Captain Nemo and the Underwater City

Tuesday, August 8

  • Bunch of films with Joan Blondell, a nice selection of 1930s movies, including two of the most fun and representative backstage musicals of that era:
    • Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933)
    • Footlight Parade (1933)
Original trailer for The Gold Diggers of 1933

Wednesday, August 9

  • Joan Blondell continues, with Blonde Crazy (1931) being the highlight
  • The Emperor Jones (1933) – adaptation of a play by Eugene O’Neill, with Paul Robeson
  • That’s Entertainment! (1974). An all-star cast, including Fred Astaire and Frank Sinatra, introduces clips from MGM’s greatest musicals.
  • That’s Dancing! (1985). Gene Kelly, Liza Minnelli and Mikhail Baryshnikov host this compilation of some of the greatest dance numbers in movie history.
  • Stormy Weather (1943) with Lena Horne, Bill Robinson, Cab Calloway
An old intro on TCM to The Emperor Jones
Lena Horne in Stormy Weather
The Nicholas Brothers and others in Stormy Weather

Thursday, August 10

  • The day starts, in the witching hours, with three short films from the 1930s directed by Roy Mack, showcasing Black performers
  • Uptown Saturday Night (1974) directed by Sidney Poitier and starring Poitier and Bill Cosby
  • Out of the Past (1947)- directed by Jacques Tourneur. One of the finest and most interesting films noir.
  • A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1949). Adapted from the book by Mark Twain. Bing Crosby plays an auto mechanic who’s sent back in time to King Arthur’s court. I loved this movie when I first saw it as a kid and don’t really have any critical distance.
Original trailer for Uptown Saturday Night

Friday, August 11

  • Some Rhonda Fleming films
  • Bunch of Alan Ladd films, including the most important, probably: Shane (1953), a crucial western.

Saturday, August 12

Martin Scorsese introduces The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

For people into film, I’d say there’s a bunch of must sees in this week, but many of them films people are likely to have already seen, like Singin’ in the Rain, The Adventures of Robin Hood and Shane. Ones people are maybe less likely to have seen that I think are must sees are the film noir—Out of the Past and On Dangerous Ground—Gold Diggers of 1933, Stormy Weather, The Emperor Jones, and the two Powell and Pressburger. Those last are not the best films by that crucial duo, but are excellent and discussed whenever that duo comes up. My favorite films by Powell and Pressburger are A Matter of Life and Death (1946) and The Red Shoes (1948).

To pick just one (and assuming you’ve seen Singin’ in the Rain and Robin Hood)… it’s got to be Stormy Weather if you haven’t seen it or Out of the Past if you have.

For more…

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July 31, 2023 • 4:55 pm 1

“Greatest” films, personal favorites and lists

I’ve posted a page with a list of the 101 greatest films. Not my “greatest films,” but rather an aggregate of 60+ “best” lists from a variety of sources—Sight & Sound polls, AFI lists, various lists by directors such as Stanley Kubrick and Akira Kurosawa, reasonably well-informed lists on specific cinemas like South Korea, Hong Kong and Africa, and so on.

My scoring system weights the Sight & Sound polls (all of them) heavily, with points for their position in those lists, and so in my top 101 list there are not huge differences from their polls. Further down on my full list (which is much, much longer than 101 entries), though, the aggregation of so many lists does provide insights into well-regarded films which have never gotten the nod in an S&S poll.

But let’s digress for a moment or maybe… upgress? Get meta. Boys and lists. What is it with boys and lists, especially pop culture lists? Should we make a list? Seriously, though, go read Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, which is an acute look at the male psyche, and in particular the psyche of males who make lists, structured around… a list of top 5 breakups. The protagonist, Rob, is of the view that “what really matters is what you like, not what you are like,” a view shared by the employees of his record store, “the musical moron twins,” and the three of them are forever making lists and judging people on their lists and likes. But the point of the book (it’s about girls, right? – just kidding) is that this is something we—blokes—need to grow out of. Which Rob does in the end.

Okay, that said…

The top 20 films from my aggregation that don’t appear in S&S, listed below, show a definite science fiction bias, which is interesting, and also suggest something of the disconnect of “popular” from “greatest” (at least as determined by critics and directors that S&S polls). It’s weird, for instance, to consider that neither The Maltese Falcon nor King Kong rank with S&S. These are mostly just very popular films, with the exceptions—like Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast—being films that are popular with film scholars, cinephiles and filmmakers, the kinds of people who make lists of “best” films.

The top 20 highly regarded films on my aggregate list that don’t make Sight & Sound‘s cut:

  • 1. It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
  • 2. The Wizard of Oz (1939)
  • 3. Star Wars (aka Episode IV – A New Hope) (1977)
  • 4. Annie Hall (1977)
  • 5. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
  • 6. Alien (1979)
  • 7. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
  • 8. All About Eve (1950)
  • 9. Beauty And The Beast (La Belle et la Bête) (1946)
  • 10. Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
  • 11. Brazil (1985)
  • 12. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
  • 13. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
  • 14. Duck Soup (1933)
  • 15. Gone With The Wind (1939)
  • 16. King Kong (1933)
  • 17. The Maltese Falcon (1941)
  • 18. Midnight Cowboy (1969)
  • 19. On the Waterfront (1954)
  • 20. Back to the Future (1985)
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July 27, 2023 • 8:42 pm 0

TCM week of July 30, 2023 – Daisies, Errol Flynn

First, some meta/blog discussion… I like doing these TCM review posts (which is probably obvious since I’ve been doing them so frequently, originally and now with the resurrected blog). It’s interesting—to me at least—to think about movies in groups and sets and to be able to draw out connections. And hopefully it’s of some interest to others. I have noticed, though, that I’ve written about the same films multiple times, often saying the same things—like with Kiss Me Kate—and also that I may have inadvertently buried some potentially (hopefully) interesting general material in posts that people who don’t watch TCM might not read, like a discussion of the different musical subgenres in one of those posts in which Kiss Me Kate featured. So I’m going to put some thought into how I do these, going forward. But for now…

oh yeah, before we begin properly – Hello to Jason Isaacs

Sunday, July 30, is a bit all over the map but in a very nice way. Some excellent movies, including

  • Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) – which I don’t care for, but I respect that’s a minority view
  • Great Expectations (1946) – directed by David Lean, and based on a slimmed down version written for the stage by Alec Guinness. Considered one of the best filmic adaptations of Dickens.
  • Gigi (1958) – directed by Vincente Minnelli and starring Leslie Caron, Maurice Chevalier and Hermione Gingold. Not a great musical, but a good one, though there are aspects that seem much less charming now than they presumably did, at least generally, when it came out
  • Coming Home (1978) – an important Vietnam War film, with Jane Fonda, who conceived of and produced the film, and cinematography by the great Haskell Wexler
  • Being There (1979) – with Peter Sellers. Directed by Hal Ashby, who also directed Coming Home. He had a good 1970s—some truly exceptional work.

So that’s a pretty solid day. But the standout, the real “must see” for the day—and the week— is the last: Daisies, “a 1966 Czechoslovakian surrealist comedy-drama film written and directed by Věra Chytilová” (Wikipedia). Not as well known as it deserves to be, but as with Jeanne Dielman the most recent Sight & Sound Critics Poll has boosted its profile: it was ranked 28th, after never having appeared in any Sight & Sound list previously: “This feminist milestone is an anarchic comedy of subversion whose approach to montage is as exuberant as the film’s two protagonists.” Its appearance, and Jeanne Dielman topping the poll, may reflect changes in the critics polled for the list, as well as an increased interest in more complicated and non-traditional films.

I got turned onto it fairly recently—though before the S&S poll—by a friend who’s an art history professional but regularly knows more about films than me, which is, you know, embarrassing. And when I try to show off some of my art history knowledge to get some of my own back… well, let’s just say it doesn’t go well for me as a rule. But I am grateful for being introduced to this really fascinating piece of filmmaking. (It’s also available on Max, Apple TV and the Criterion Channel.)

I can’t really go through every film that TCM’s screening, though sometimes it’s tempting, so I’m just going to call out a few of the films that seem like highlights from the rest of the week.

  • Them (1954) – Monday at 6am. An American giant monster movie, and one of the better ones, with a cameo by… Leonard Nimoy
  • Some great film noir as well on Monday
  • Lucille Ball on Tuesday
  • Anthony Perkins on Wednesday, including Psycho (but not, sadly, Pretty Poison)
  • The Silencers (1966) at midnight Thur/Fri – the first Matt Helm film, with Dean Martin as a secret agent. There were a whole bunch of secret agent movies in the 60s, trying to cash in on the success of James Bond. This one is fun, and fun to see Dean Martin doing his thing. It co-stars Daliah Lavi, who was in one of my favorite Bond films, Casino Royale (but probably not the one you’re thinking of). It’s also perhaps the first movie to feature a post-credits scene.
  • It’s followed by two blaxploitation films, Slaughter (1972) and then Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold (1975). Not great films from this genre, but of interest.
  • That night, Treasure Island (1934), directed by Victor Fleming (who had some success a few years later with Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz – in the same year) and starring Jackie Cooper. Justly famous film version of the book.

And the week closes out, on Saturday night, with two costume dramas starring Errol Flynn, two of the best, non-Robin Hood category: The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939) and The Sea Hawk (1940). Elizabeth and Essex was directed by Michael Curtiz (Casablanca) and also stars Bette Davis as Elizabeth I. Davis’ strong performance was considered Oscar-nomination worthy, but she actually got nominated for Dark Victory instead. The Sea Hawk again has Flynn as a ship captain battling the Spanish Empire and again with some sparks with Queen Elizabeth, in this film played by Flora Robson in a marvelous performance.

And just after midnight: The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). What more could you ask for? Well, Captain Blood (1935), obviously, but still… if you’re into great movies, fun period action and adventure movies, it’s just a terrific triple bill, pretty much unmatched.

For more…

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July 25, 2023 • 3:16 pm 0

TCM this week – July 25, 2023

Huh. TCM seems to be celebrating Christmas in July–very Australian of them. They’re showing the 1938 A Christmas Carol with Reginald Owen—my second favorite Christmas Carol, non-Muppet category, after the 1951 Scrooge version with Alastair Sim —at 2 am. Record it and hang onto it for 5 months?

And it’s not just A Christmas Carol. Right after it, they’re showing In the Good Old Summertime (1949), which is a musical remake—starring Judy Garland—of another Christmas staple, at least in my house, The Shop Around the Corner, directed by Ernst Lubitsch and starring James Stewart. It’s the movie that was remade most recently as You’ve Got Mail, but the original, set in Christmas-time Budapest, is—despite not having Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks—the better version, as well as being the Christmas-y one. I haven’t seen this musical remake, though the title suggests it is not a Christmas movie in this version.

Actually… that’s it for Christmas stuff. So not much of a Christmas in July. Curious that they’d even program A Christmas Carol now, even at 2 am…

Anyway, Wednesday has a number of good films, including Fury (1936), directed by Fritz Lang (Metropolis) and starring Spenser Tracy. That’s followed by To Kill a Mockingbird and In the Heat of the Night—so a good night of movies.

Thursday, July 27, is all about the Bard, with some very good Shakespeare on screen:

  • Kiss Me Kate (1953) at 8:30 am
  • Henry V (1944) with Laurence Olivier at 10 am
  • Romeo and Juliet (1937), directed by George Cukor and starring Norma Shearer at 12:30 pm
  • A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935) at 2:45 pm, and
  • Olivier’s Hamlet (1948) at 5:15 pm

I haven’t seen that “Romeo and Juliet” so it’s the must see for me. The Olivier Hamlet and Henry are justly famous. They’re interesting to watch alongside the more recent versions by Kenneth Branaugh—the earlier ones very much filmed versions of plays, the later ones trying to see how much more can be done cinematically, both by people steeped in, deeply engaged with Shakespeare. I love Kiss Me Kate, but I always want to see it in the 3-D version, ideally in the Castro Theatre of old, where the song “I Hate Men” tends to be a laugh riot. My favorite number in it, though, is “Brush Up Your Shakespeare”:

Continuing…

Friday is Blonde Ambition day. Or something. I like it when programmers do stuff like this—it’s a bunch of movies with “blond(e)” in the title, well four anyway, beginning with the best of the lot at 1 am, Blondie (1938), based on the comic strip.

Saturday, July 29, looks awesome—one of those days when, in the past, when so many movies you could only catch on TV, I would stay in all day watching stuff. It begins with one of the better San Francisco-based movies, Freebie and the Bean, which I’ve written about previously and which is a prime contender for the movie that started the whole “buddy cop” genre. It’s followed by a really stellar selection of stuff:

  • McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) at 4:30 am – directed by Robert Altman, starring Warren Beatty and Julie Christie, and with a soundtrack featuring Leonard Cohen
  • Key Largo (1948) at 2 pm – directed by John Huston, starring Bogie and Bacall, with Edward G. Robinson as the bad guy. Not as talked about or often seen as the other Bogie and Bacall films, but excellent.
  • Foreign Correspondent (1940) – early (well, before all the famous ones anyway), excellent, interesting Hitchcock
  • The Omega Man (1971) at 6:15 pm – fairly cheesy post-apocalypse sci fi film with Charleton Heston. Not as good as that other post-apocalypse film with Heston and some damn dirty apes, but an interesting piece for reflecting on trends in cinema, and in anxiety, as we moved out of the classic Hollywood era.
  • Double Indemnity (1944) at 8 pm – one of the most famous and most important of classic film noir. Not my favorite – which might be Out of the Past – but a must see for anyone serious about film and film genres.
  • Body Heat (1981) at 10 pm. A modern (when it came out forty years ago) reboot of the whole film noir genre, with William Hurt and Kathleen Turner. Excellent.

If you haven’t already seen it, the obvious “must see” film of this week is… McCabe & Mrs. Miller, which Roger Ebert hailed as “a perfect film.” (I mean, it’s not Howard Hawks, but it is pretty perfect otherwise.)

For more…

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July 9, 2023 • 3:54 pm 0

TCM this week: an Ozu silent

Coming up at midnight tonight is a chance to see Tokyo No Korasu (“Tokyo Chorus”), Ozu’s 1931 silent feature about a young rebel facing unemployment with three children to feed.

BFI’s synopsis: “Social comedy telling the story of a family man who is dismissed from his insurance company when he sides with a colleague in a dispute against the management. After an unsuccessful search for work and having been forced to pawn his wife’s kimonos he accepts an offer to work in a friend’s curry restaurant.”

In the past, movies like this were hard to see. This particular film wasn’t released in the US until 1982. But now it has a Criterion release, and you can also watch it (though not in as good a quality transfer as Criterion’s) on the Internet Archive.

It’s also showing later this week as part of the Harvard Film Archive program “Ozu 120: The Complete Ozu Yasujiro” which started on June 9 and runs through August 13.

An embarrassment of riches.

Ozu’s one of my favorite directors, though that’s hardly an outré opinion. His Tokyo Story (Tokyo monogatari) (1953) appeared in Sight & Sound’s list of the greatest films of all time in the first list after it was released and has climbed steadily in critical estimation since. In the 2022 version of the S&S lists, it was ranked #4 in both the overall list and the poll of directors. If you combine the various serious critical appraisal lists for the last 50 years, the only films that top it as contenders for “greatest film” are Citizen Kane, Vertigo, Rules of the Game (La Régle du Jeu), and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I have yet to see an Ozu film that didn’t seem a completely achieved work to me. I adore his cheeky comedy, Ohayo (Good Morning)—it’s one of the films I use to turn younger kids on to watching subtitled foreign films. I tend to try not to see movies like this on a small screen for the first time, but I’ve never had a chance to see Tokyo No Korasu in a theatre before. But I still don’t have access to TCM, so I may just have to watch this on Criterion. But wow, I wish I could attend all the screenings at the Harvard Film Archive.

Two Ozu films are available to stream for free on Kanopy: Tokyo Story and Floating Weeds (1959). There’s also an episode on Ozu and Kurosawa as part of the “Understanding Japan: A Cultural History” course produced in conjunction with the Smithsonian.

There’s been a lot of good writing on Ozu, as you’d expect with a director with that kind of critical regard and such a large body of work:

You can of course find plenty of Ozu on Amazon, particularly in Criterion Collection releases, including Tokyo Story and Good Morning (Ohayo). There’s also stuff to stream including Good Morning and Early Summer.

Some of the other things on TCM this week that are particularly appealing include

  • Carefree (1938) – one of the best Fred Astaire / Ginger Rogers pics
  • Ocean’s Eleven (1960) – the original, with Peter Lawford, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin
  • Jules and Jim (1962) – Truffaut
  • The Candidate (1972) – Robert Redford
  • Shaft (1971)
  • The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)

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July 3, 2023 • 8:49 am 0

TCM for the 4th of July: Musicals

Thought I’d try my hand at another of my TCM reviews, though with the recent uncertainty around TCM’s future, and also with the fact that I currently don’t have access to TCM, it does feel a bit odd. Still…

TCM has chosen an interesting way to celebrate the 4th of July—a day almost entirely devoted to musicals. It’s a good choice: it’s such an American genre, I feel, and while the Western is perhaps more so, that genre is enmeshed in two of the worst issues in American history, slavery and the dispossession and genocide of Native Americans, and even bracketing that (which is a lot to bracket) is often less “holiday” in spirit.

But the day begins (in the wee small / post witching hours) with two of the better of the Bob Hope and Bing Crosby “Road” movies: Road to Utopia and Road to Bali. If you’ve never seen one, check it out. They’re… well, dated in all sorts of ways, obviously. Not great movies, but often mentioned, some of the most popular movies of the 1940s. And interesting in other ways: they are often semi-spoofs of popular movie types of the era, not so much genres as common settings/plots, like the jungle adventure. And they are largely thin narrative wrappings around vaudeville and stage gags and routines, so also provide a small window into that world (as do Singin’ in the Rain and White Christmas).

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July 2, 2023 • 10:36 pm 0

if… (1968)

If…. is a 1968 British film directed by Lindsay Anderson, and starring Malcolm McDowell. A satire of English public school life, the film follows a group of pupils who stage a savage insurrection at a boys’ boarding school. The film was the subject of controversy at the time of its release, receiving an X certificate for its depictions of violence. If…. won the Palme d’Or at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival. In 1999, the British Film Institute named it the 12th greatest British film of the 20th century. – Wikipedia

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July 2, 2023 • 12:06 pm 0

Belle de Jour at Berkeley’s PFA

Luis Buñuel‘s masterpiece with Catherine Deneuve, Belle de Jour (1967) is playing at Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive (PFA) on July 22 at 7pm. The film is screening as part of the “Luis Buñuel’s Magnificent Weapon” series which includes all the director’s important movies.

In Belle de jour, Catherine Deneuve’s beauty is a thing in itself. Like writer Jean-Claude Carrière, Deneuve was a collaborator in Luis Buñuel’s vision, and she gives a knowing performance as Séverine, a bored-cold bourgeoise who discovers how good evil can be on afternoons spent in a high-class brothel, where fantasy itself is a fetish object. The film is as endlessly mysterious and fascinating as the Chinese lacquer box into which Séverine peers—and what does she see? Don’t quit your day job, Séverine. It takes violence, the more fantasized the better, to make any sort of crack in the lacquer. Belle de jour is L’age d’or updated and in color. As Raymond Durgnat wrote, “Glittery, cool and urbane, Buñuel’s film looks just like Lubitsch à la mode—almost a design for living in the Playgirl era. But underneath it’s a bleak and sharp surrealist object.”

—Judy Bloch

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July 1, 2023 • 11:11 am 0

A Song is Born (1948)

A Song Is Born (also known as That’s Life), starring Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo, is a 1948 Technicolor musical film remake of Howard Hawks‘ 1941 movie Ball of Fire with Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck. This version was also directed by Hawks, based on the story “From A to Z” by Billy Wilder and Thomas Monroe, adapted by Harry Tugend (uncredited) and produced by Samuel Goldwyn and released by RKO Radio Pictures. – Wikipedia

Mild-mannered Professor Hobart Frisbee (Kaye) works and lives with seven fellow musicologists at the Totten Foundation’s Victorian mansion in New York City. They have been immersed in work on a massive encyclopedia of music for 9 years, apparently without a radio and seldom if ever going out. Their window washers (Buck and Bubbles), needing help with a radio quiz, wise them up to the hip new sounds that have appeared during their isolation—swing, jive, jump, blues, two-beat Dixie, boogie woogie, bebop (“man alive”)—that they know nothing about. Hobart, the expert on “folk music” goes out and explores this music scene, visiting a range of New York nightclubs and jazz rooms, and inviting various musicians to visit the Foundation to help them with their work. One of them is a nightclub singer, Honey Swanson (Mayo), who’s involved with a gangster and… well, hijinks ensue.

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October 18, 2015 • 9:47 pm 0

On TCM October 19-25: a mixed bag with Dietrich, Scotland, Robin Hood, and Horror

rancho2

“She runs the West’s strangest hideout… a ranch where a guest can hide his crime… quench his thirst… betray a woman… and knife a man in the back… for a price!”

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October 11, 2015 • 12:00 pm 0

On TCM Oct 12-18: David Niven, Powell & Pressburger, Droogs, Punks, and Silents

TCM continues its look at the Star of the Month: David Niven with a couple of my very favorite movies.

A_Matter_of_Life_and_Death_Cinema_PosterOn Monday at 5pm (PT), they’re showing one of the greatest films to be made by the British film-making team of Powell and Pressburger, A Matter of Life and Death (1946; released in the USA under the unfortunate title, Stairway to Heaven).

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December 8, 2012 • 10:56 pm 0

Scenes of the Season: It’s a Wonderful Life

its-a-wonderful-life-530fp120810

Frank Capra’s 1946 film, It’s a Wonderful Life, has become one of the most watched films of the holiday season.  I can remember years when it seemed like it was showing on a loop—at least if you had cable.  This year, astonishingly, it doesn’t seem to be showing anywhere.  I know that can’t be right. Can it?

It hardly seems necessary to say anything about it—like Casablanca it’s one of those movies that even if you’ve never seen it, you probably still know the gist of it.

[mild spoiler alert] James Stewart is George Bailey, a small town guy with big dreams. He wants to shake that small town dust off his feet and see the world. And build things. Then he meets Mary (Donna Reed). Life seems pretty good, despite the fact that he never does get out of that small town. He runs the Savings & Loan that his father started and is the most popular guy in town. It’s Christmas Eve, and his brother  is returning for the holidays after being given the Congressional Medal of Honor for heroism during the war. But then things go terribly wrong over the course of Christmas Eve, and he ends up wishing he’d never been born. And an angel grants his wish.

The scenes where George meets Mary and where they decide to marry alone are worth the price of admission. And if you’ve wondered who Donna Reed was and why she had her own TV show, you’ll find out.

The film was a bit of a box office dud when it came out. It’s not as tight as other Capra movies; at 125 minutes it feels a bit long, and could have used some editing. And Capra’s corn-fed populism seemed to have run its course, as the strong turn towards noir in the post-war years might suggest. In fact, Capra never really made another major film, certainly none that are remembered or watched today. His heyday was the 1930s, when he had a string of hits that are still popular: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), You Can’t Take it With You (1938)—a personal favorite—and what is his most critically acclaimed film, and after Wonderful Life the one most frequently watched today, It Happened One Night (1934), with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert.

Directors working with the same actors on a number of films were fairly common in the heyday of Hollywood, but Capra’s working relationship with his staple actors was particularly rewarding. Lionel Barrymore in You Can’t Take it With You and Wonderful Life—a bit curmudgeon-y in both, but charming in the former and cruel in the latter.  Jean Arthur—astonishingly charming, “the quintessential comedic leading lady”—in You Can’t Take it With You and Mr. Deeds.  And James Stewart. James Stewart in two of his most remembered performances, in Mr. Smith and Wonderful Life, as well as in You Can’t Take it With You, in which he’s great.  Stewart has been better, and been in much better movies—including another holiday movie, The Shop Around the Corner (1940), directed by Ernst Lubitsch.  But Stewart’s roles and performances in the Capra movies tend to really stay with people.

As I said, I haven’t been able to find when and where It’s a Wonderful Life is showing on TV this season, but you can watch the whole movie online on YouTube:

For more…

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The 400 Blows

zerode

is an over-caffeinated and under-employed grad school dropout, aspiring leftwing intellectual and cultural studies academic, and cinéaste. Raised in San Francisco on classic film, radical politics, burritos and soul music, then set loose upon the world. He spends his time in coffee shops with his laptop and headphones, caffeinating and trying to construct a post-whatever life.

What's in a name... The handle "zerode" is a contraction of Zéro de Conduite, the title of Jean Vigo's 1933 movie masterpiece about schoolboy rebellion.