carvalheiro Reviews

A Patch of Blue (1965)

Its musicality for underlining any shot with an elaborated sense of orientation

[24 March 2009]

"A patch of blue" (1965) directed by Guy Green is a movie about the blindness of a young lady and by this happening was doing as event a date as a different kind of sensuality and also melodramatic sensibleness like is shown on the scene where the book "Light in a dark world" is delaying among friends. The musicality inspired by the synchronized sound track with the true melodramatic family story of smashed low class, from a single mother with her daughter cohabiting with an old man at home, after such an involuntary tragedy of the past - the acid thrown by a fellow of the mother during a dispute at home, before the awakening of the child at night which by error blind her little daughter - brings us the chock of mentalities.

All the subject is illustrated by this, which means also that this movie as fiction beside a reconstructed reality out of framework, having by this track a sound well conceived with an elaborated sense of orientation in that preciosity, touching the viewer for anything like more than complicity between two complementary characters. Namely between the fifties of police overwhelming presence at any corner by night as though it was the end of the world for tomorrow and the sixties with much more democratic values on the streets just before unrest on spirituality. The collective culpability that inspires this movie at the time, includes as well as if it was in the scene of the park also with the manifest indifference for this almost family affair by the occasional citizens that assisting such an incident between mother and daughter.

Conflict barely closed on the spot with the silent opportunity by the occasional witnesses of good taste and by this way winning the trend by a well done acting. Namely by the young character of Sidney Poitier as if it was a beautiful black athlete. It is ironically this kind of appointment and a little bit of fake brotherhood happens here, notwithstanding the solidarity manifested in a kind of portrait as anti-hero of the hour and exception to the rule, which is quite exceptionally even at that moment. Which is watched and showed at the redaction office of a local newspaper, where is another acquaintance at the time of the fight for civil rights and brings some consideration to the happening as unexpected encounter between two human kinds with different color skins.

The Hustler (1961)

Towards the bankruptcy of the odd welfare state

[30 March 2008]

"The Hustler" (1961) made by Robert Rossen from a sad novel with the same title and this is still an odd movie, in which it was for the most of its duration located in a main set. Like the backstage of people surviving as they could, before they lost any opportunities for choosing their way, as searching misery by non sense of daily life in an urban surviving style at the backyards of night activity. It was this lack of poetry from such an ordinary people, nonetheless skilled and waiting for chance in their lives, that this movie wins its fame as hymn of wrong side from the consumption society of values, to the time when should fighting for more dignity in their social blindness. This is still a portrait of modern misery, with a slight touch of gangsterism in a dramatic pause for any kind of sport. Where a big guy doesn't like anymore lose whatsoever, when gambling with such a young man in the middle of night till dawn. The quality of the main prize here is having for the least his thumbs broken and a less crippled girl as lover, because she killed herself meanwhile waiting for his lost soul helping still her busy dependence.

In this small universe of little corruption there, getting from the ground of bitter expectancy, as though a new kind of morality to the loser by such a convenience of the boss from his own tough underground soul, that still he - the young character of a snooker's player - will have much for learning about his ambition and ambitious career for this candid fellow here. Meanwhile, staying alive of course is enough and thinking better with such an empiric mind of daily struggle on snooker - green tableland of caves with smoking fog, sleeping in degraded hotels with cockroaches on the bed - is not so easy for instance. This movie also displays us degradation, as inside a fake luck's mentality for winning for the less an abyss by the lack of resources, even though the currency there it is not always favorable at the hands of such a young individual, in an odd match of snooker forever with apparently no way out.

What can he does, on the spot's snooker with such a style, when then he was here with both hands in such a weakened condition, for would thinking to play again less better next time, with such an adversary who controls himself the gambling landscape nearby in this borough ? The scene that shows us a resigned man, watched as though with his own professional way of life cutting down for a while - out of the labor, perhaps as a new kind of vagabond from the roads - in this kind of provoked fatality in his capabilities, it is illuminated crudely with the neon on the ceiling and the shadows on the walls of such a kind of new misery, in a place where predominated individuals like some of the same generation of men without scruples nor comprehension for a young winner needing a renewed of the beginning of his life properly. This is irony about the contrast between the two gamblers, in a fake trend with the robbery of the money, as win it by the character of a gambler performed at this stage by Paul Newman in his best movie ever, it seems now. The money that is not due by the strength of the next events, it is in itself enough as symbolizing an atmosphere but quite dry on its smooth for displaying in its anodyne brutality and sordid welfare at stake in such a defeat. It was an odd story, without another immediate sequel at the same decade, like a television story later.

The General (1926)

Balancing with rhythm

[20 February 2008]

"The General" (1927) directed by Buster Keaton as a silent movie it concerns within care about a train that crosses the line of fire between Yankees and confederates during the Secession war. What is possible to remember, as circuit of the boiler above the tracks, it is the hundred of mingled possibilities for eluding the mythic adversary. With such an energy and visibly hard work, in burning coal or timber and putting away the train, as if it was a kind of household during the cleaning. It is in itself, also an outlook of a comic serial, where the engine driver doesn't smile anytime during the race or as a kind of running against timetable and only as looking for his own working task, as absurd it was.

Keaton, in a double function as director and main character, is himself in it of course, but with a pathetic style of conduct as it was an animated double of the machine as device, like a dream of childhood. That never till now has losing for a while even his own attraction at the time, concerning his role in this original story within a stolen engine across forests, valleys and hills ; and charging of coal or timber its boiler, in such an acrobatic way of performing, which is in itself as sometimes even by the back, like an empty mannequin. Still, barely as a strength of his enigmatic function in this movie - like in two legs on two rails - seemingly pushing it in a given scene with a block of timber in his arms and hands, as it was the chief constable of the adventure. Can you hear me ? There is a fanatic on the track it seems, but he is a pacific human being who likes the daughter of a true general and he - as driver of the boiler -wants also crossing the artificial border cutting this region of the country, nowhere between both sides of the war. Finally, what does pretend him with this behavior ? Whether ending the conflict or if too his lunatic intervention seems to be whatsoever of the looking for what could be at that stage his own exhibitionist style, as though in confusing the normal strand of the status quo. However, blocking the way for other trains, because meanwhile the chaos installed by him on the railway as the main path for carrying out troops.

Notwithstanding, he has been master of the railway there, which means that this young man is of course a kind of diversion or even manipulation from the war ground itself as an outfit of the civil war for impeaching its necessary supplies, carrying it out of the rail during his foolish runaway, pursuing or pursued during the most of the time that this story develops holding it on the screen. Also, during the scenes where his own transport of nothing more than himself as egotist human being and the pleasure for driving a boiler, if on his back he was not under surveillance by an exquisite cannon. This rhythm is the core of the story with a parallel working side, with a kind of ironic competitive incompetence in it and by him its chance in a mechanical failure - learning more about driving it before his rivals and so-called enemies -, in front or from the back of the machine and its equilibrium, as well balancing it for another trail. In which during much of the time the cannons are also for anything in the tension of the story and as well the main place of the boiler locomotive in it. Where he puts in the fire more timber at the place of coal for burning it and by which it produces the energy that he needs for finishing the job, without smiling as it was his character as Buster himself since then in scope.

Pat and Mike (1952)

How to deal with gamblers and bookmakers on affluent society

[17 February 2008]

"Pat and Mike" (1952) directed by George Cukor is a clear and clean portrait of a young generation, who raises on the university campus after the world war and here housing in between Pacific Technology College and gambling golf nearby. Precisely, that is the surprise of this forgotten and renewed movie with an architectural approach as kind and efficacy smooth or lean universe of the sons for the next and much more prepared society, whom by the most of them coming from the upper class and probably with much more possibilities accessing to the ruling class, but not precisely all of them belonging there indeed. They meet abnormally when him, Mike, he goes searching Pat to her room at the residence, like in an expedition somewhat illegal, entering by the window like in a robbery or a fake detective visit without seeing if anybody was there, such as she was effectively in her privacy abused like it was by his unexpected introduction as himself did without any invitation and not by the open door as usual in such a residence, finally for purposing a deal in stand by reverting the results.

That's the good average for gambling and speculating either, concerning daily activity to win a match as the character played by Pat shows us at a championship for women. But an intriguing bookmaker, Mike, pretends that he should influence her activity with strong manners, even though good manners in society - on a dark and not so easy matter - needs also from him an innovative approach as a new kind of lover, as coach too for the training of her, as substitute of the colleague and her own and elegant husband who consents it in cohabitation. Another scene very smiling for the viewers, it occurs when Mike prepares with his hands inside a gymnasium both massaging the body belonging to Pat : the legs, the back, the neck and suddenly the telephone rings, meanwhile interrupting this flesh work by Pat as shared physical act between them, but not their established complicity in such a body work either with gesticulations, apart such energetic affects for the job, which continues in another slow effort underlining the trouble, like talking out of the visual scene. This kind of direction is Cukor signature. A horse cared by Mike as a kind of compensation for the lack of a shared human company in a given sketch of romantic refusal by night after Pat said tomorrow and goes to the bed, that turns quite unusual in her projection on the head of the gentle animal by seconds, maybe as anticipation the price of a winning race or a golf match for the next day.

The scene on the mounted police office, where the couple of players - her as famous player and her coach mate - are both repeating before the authorities on the ground what happened and by this way they both are courageously displaying there their skilled acrobatic movements for neutralizing the further bookmaker's aggression to them by such an improvised lesson - before the crooks that had made the fake charges against the couple - under the police officer attention, reversing ironically the roles as protective self-defense fighting exercise. For whom in such a fair-play may have convinced the police to liberate all without charges for anybody, after this turnabout to scare the fake victims of a true aggression. From young extortionists linked with the speculative gamblers for the business of bookmaking at the time of the winners, within the beginning of the motorized and priced affluent society for democratic values in a period of confusion and social boundary. At least, when individuals were menaced in its civil liberties and free speech, before a given moment of less liberal state with more madness and lack of credibility under corrupted circumstances, even in a comedy with also the happy end for the losers.

The Fastest Gun Alive (1956)

Human beings like others

[24 November 2007]

"The fastest gun alive" (1956) directed by Russell Rouse is a discovery in the western file, as a genre of movies almost forgotten in black and white. It's an encyclopedia in many aspects of all the kind of things that happened in a small community, when three bandits coming up and practically occupying this town, terrorizing people there while these are inside a church praying at the top of the main street, when saloon is closed in the morning at the other side in downtown in a contrast between bestiality and smoothness.

One of the scenes more interesting and also seldom enough watched it is while a young cow-boy, performed by Russ Tamblyn in that town council during a ceremony suited by a party, makes a typical dancing show. In a such risky way with an acrobatic style, which in this genre close the era with astonish vivacity for everybody from this community, in the presence of all for the enjoyed musical event. George Temple killed the father by competition because he learned with him being the fastest gun alive, more fast than the man who want kill Billy the Kid and the man who really killed Billy the Kid, twenty years before when his father was a seller of guns. He is a store man who refuses broken rules to his wife in a way of myth mania and cretinism well dominated by emotions and mediocrity of acting as though it was a past fall in love and dead.

Meanwhile, when a hold-up has been occurred nearby - in the triangle of Fort Bill-Yellow Fork-Cross Creek with such a vigilant's pursuit - and the outlaws came up to this town and went to the closed saloon entering inside doors, where only are waited by a little boy who tells to one of them - bad, old and fat - that he knows someone there at outside in the town, whom for him it seems being the fastest man shooting well in a duel from all around the landscape, like in a far-west mythic way of living together but in peace. A forgotten pearl in the genre and also a marvelous dramatic stand and strand, from a manner telling still one time more the apparently same story of always and already known since then. Two pieces of money changing destiny for a while, on November 7, 1889, as you can see soon.

Lolita (1962)

Past competitive space adventure

[24 November 2007]

"Lolita" (1962) directed by Stanley Kubrick is always an object of pure desire from a writer as Nabokov's scandalous approach, concerning the local American dream of way of life in the affluent society. As a new citizenship of the world as it was there, at the time of a new frontier for the beginning of the competitive space adventure. Therefore, also like an egotist mind, with several self destructive thoughts about sex and attraction for the forbidden.

In a given scene, with a letter sent by the girl to the man, it is also like it was perhaps one of the better moments of this movie about a child woman, whose eroticism and exhibitionism are only in the mind of the consumer. As a teacher and a teenager pupil for all the moments, into a view from the roads and motorways, too as something of modern and perturbing the nostalgic mind of someone of normal, but who experiments another circuit of affects only by a protective conception. In a dubious and very well imagined sequence on the dark rear of the stage, after the choreography of her high school, she asks him if it was possible staying alone with her colleagues in the next party at the end of the scholar year and such demand before her beautiful teacher who looks enjoyed for the godfather of Lolita, annoying his quite severe personality but somewhat stupidly himself is not so sure of that promissory deal and imposes next his own authority against any evidence of a reasonable concession in the air for the hesitant instant, with such an inexplicable feeling of nervous fear and not abstaining even a hair for losing the control in his mastermind role as it was in the place of the dead mother for a while in the instinctive subject for the definition of a young and natural candidate as boyfriend for the enjoyable happy girl like sharing a treasure with rival partners.

Where is the problem, if only in the mind of the viewers and stupidity and hypocrisy of these narrative threads from an aristocratic foreigner, who came from the European steppes with a servant mind reverted in child abuse by transfer. The gray atmosphere of the time is given namely when on the road far away of the town another car is at the back of Humbert, as it was a kind of vigilant chase to his activity as professor, putting his own freedom at stake or by no means as ambiguity noticed by the scene.

Woman of the Year (1942)

Dysfunction because distraction

[24 November 2007]

"Woman of the Year" (1942) directed by George Stevens is a young comedy that stays young, after all these years by its polyglots scenes even at first sight or superficial appearance, for all beginners in this genre of dramatic artifact. Where we don't know exactly even nowadays by what way acting : maybe also as living at office or at home as to cope with the same like on stage since then.

Specially when the main characters, either or at the same time, as here like such columnists, whose function for one of them was recollecting gossips from political arena or for the other allowing that baseball and so on interfered with such woman, that never pull out her enlarged white hat on the stadium. Another scene was presented as if it was a clue of the lack of privacy from the couple of pitchers from the high society - perhaps during the German occupation in Europe, just before the end of 1941 when the adoption of a Greek child was motive for a storming dispute - like in a kind of guest flat and party dance for the newly-wed, attended by the cronies and where during that evening late in the bedroom guests are as sleeping with the clothes at the place of the bride and groom as if for it they were already in their own home. There is many activity from her own calendar of daily events in which she participates as like the shadow of the first lady, it seems by the scene in the theater where he is like a clever and patient though guy among happy feminists, a tolerated human being by her fellows in that time of causes and tea with toast bread.

I agree that one of the most interesting scenes was that on the kitchen, when both are there for the breakfast and any domestic gadget or device as objects are on malfunction, not well preparing toast bread or the like as usually before, namely because distraction of the candidate as being woman of the year, observed by his skeptical mate for the great regret of her. This is his home and not like it was in her flat before, from where she comes in reconciliation after a first separation since their wedding.

Jailhouse Rock (1957)

Convertible and glad choreography for the first record

[24 November 2007]

"Jailhouse rock" (1957) directed by Richard Thorpe is a musical movie with some cruelty concerning the second half of the fifties from last Century, when just singing with a guitar it was everybody or nothing for what a young, who came from Memphis, wanted for warming people together and asking for his capacity.

Bringing home happiness and quite animosity, in inviting a married woman after the job for taking a shot at the bar nearby. It's not so glad to be there as also consumer because the storming bill and the new improvised singer had a dull before him, who took a drink and returns it above the cloth of the friend. After that dreadful incident it was jail, but lessons from guitar with another old country buddy there and coming out by chance.

Then, another girl with now a convertible and by this way, kisses and many kick-off's, also swings, a first studio for the first record and success. It was like a model's screening for posterity, after the unlucky days on the rocks and surprisingly enough well for the entire choreography, as fine movie like this one till today.

Spellbound (1945)

The audience by the screen effect

[23 November 2007]

"Spellbound" (1945) directed by Alfred Hitchcock as movie has a dream made from sketches elaborated by Dali, where it is supposed staying the interpretation of the sickness whose main character was affected. For instance the scene where himself is making his best in skiing down a snowed mountain during a trip, it is repeatedly matter of his own obsession. Having by this path in his imaginative mind, a place for troubles of true perceptive vision, as it was instead like a fake projection of a self distinguished substitution of memory and like that it is one of the very known moments of the story in this movie.

Besides, Hitchcock put the question about what ought truly maybe meaning that if he had as character a past problem, that took the attention for his personality of dandy. Otherwise, which means that his psychiatrist woman and also his lover has been convinced that he was not a murder, but only affected by the culpability as human being. Whose forgotten foolish mind from a child event, happened as a scene reconstituted and explained in why his recently behavior was like that, but not conscious of himself behind the others and outside of his own mind. If the fog in the mind is quite subject of controversy in this same story of analyze, against his own power of cure for the others, because the forced medication like it is well done in such a house of lost memory, to bring up to the remembrance of personality as if it was in a catalog of artificial dreams for the cure of his own ancient practicer, show us barely enough and without such an exaggeration, that this kind of happening as mystery of the recent past itinerary of this character is so troubled in itself, that the margin between criminal intention for murdering someone in such a legal activity like that is very short indeed, for another step about professional irresponsibility without a precise aim to kill the colleague.

As it was in question here just after the war was finished and Hitchcock's feelings remind in these nests of selected liquidation of human beings like it was made in many circumstances like that, even where he is as director at the time when it was made that movie with the drawings of the culpability of the main character by such a transfer of ethical responsibility. The scene which is very impressive still now, it is when the director of the house for mental cure, a doctor who points a pistol against the couple but after some lines between him and them returns it against himself and shooting, as well it was to the audience by the screen effect of the shot.

The Lady from Shanghai (1947)

Fair play in a puzzled conception of vanities

[23 November 2007]

"The Lady from Shanghai" (1947) directed by Orson Welles and interpreted by him is almost a quiz to the viewers from today, because its puzzled conception and the egotism behind a mirror of vanities in one selfish manner, as doing and seeing the things of life daily with fair play and touristy way of such eccentric expensive journey.

What brings this movie for the viewer is of course many things from the time, when expectancies from the victory of democracy were supposed changing the current life of everyday, but it was in part only much more a kind of mirage, even in court affairs like this one of the movie with a crippled lawyer and a mariner in location with the crew of unadaptive and surviving men of occasionally chance for the job. One of the scenes that took for instance the feelings of modernity at the time, it was while in a given instant on a cruiser boat, while it's listen on the radio - from inside the cabin, also seen in the deck by the couple of characters - a brief commercial without report with the reality of the fiction. However, but giving us a notion of the fake rule inside a banal story of adultery and wrong way for the adventurer, searching justice in Central America after fighting against Franco during the Spanish civil war.

All the plot is very confused as the searching of freedom in itself here is convoluted by so many tricks as in court scene that hope for better life is choking with the individualism of the main character. Or as in another scene further, not at all by the fault of the mariner lover, when the crippled husband and his beautiful young wife, each other rivaling by shooting against mirrors in illusory reflections of brightness by a shadowy night and broken it little by little, more by self-destructiveness than self-defense, after cutting down either their links, disgusting like before the story beginning. The scene that justifies the intriguing title of the movie extracted from a novel that it was not read till the end it seems by the gossips at the time nevertheless it was located in the Chinese theater where the feminine character attends a session and the contrast between her beauty figure and the old mandarins smoking a kind of cannabis, it is in the darkness and with a strange oriental sound mingled in such an exotic atmosphere, one of the most beautiful visual compositions concerned by a pause in the mystery of lives inside an extravagant plot.

Bridge to the Sun (1961)

Oriental tradition

[23 November 2007]

"Bridge to the sun" (1961) directed by Etienne Périer is a strange story well narrated and constructed with a fine taste for the Japanese atmosphere before, during and just after the end of WWII, about one mixed couple and a child, where the ship across the Pacific ocean substitutes the commercial plane, because Pearl Harbor attack and its symbolic attachment for both sides.

There is a scene when both are seeing moving pictures with a typical demonstration of love and kissing, suggested by a close-up from maybe one of the last movies of the time, with Greta Garbo as protagonist from nineteenth Century feminine role and her posture on the screen warming the viewers, as though the mingled couple of another story of romantic destiny.

The introduction of a young woman in a Oriental way of life, with the nationalism as forced background in the middle of traditions, it is very well explained namely with several small events from the daily rhythm of this rare love story - as such was two years before this one from another movie of the same kind - and the sensibleness for them from a Occidental young loving and blonde shell woman, also with delicate principles such as one Texan royalty, since she was young miss and missing from her country to another without relationship as worst than iron curtain, it is evidently a good surprise from the well controlled melodramatic story lines. A brief scene with the child and a paper-kite in a tableland landscape reducing in between with short shots the three years and a half of war in the Pacific ocean as an improvised newsreel with general MacArthur in one of them, till another paper-kite in the same place with the child now growing and his mother waiting for somebody, her husband.

The Americanization of Emily (1964)

Changing the date, sorry

[23 November 2007]

"The Americanization of Emily" (1964) directed by Arthur Hiller is not destitute of irony nor absurd humor, facing the battle of Normandy just after she was in love for a man who discusses the sense of the then present war, from a point of view as officer not at all orthodox, given the circumstance of determination fighting till the last man alive if necessary. Why then Americanization as purpose, if doesn't underlining the predominance of the taste, facing other twin nationalities as sensibility for winning by such a mistaken manner of delaying continually the tread of human beings on a given beach ?

Remembering obstacles in timber or wireless steal, mines and shells exploding continually as though the battle itself, this officer and that woman who loves him are both implied in the pulsation of a story married or widowed with history, whether it is of course the unusually tread of this movie. It seems like, if the lack of these women such as she was also, has been the main reason in why so much losses should be over that sad past destiny from the success in a personal story of both main characters. Namely, instead it wasn't like that much more so better indeed, mainly because the bad weather which it wasn't respected at the time, nevertheless the previous impossibility for changing the date in such a short delay before it happens in history.

It is of course the way that movie took, in its shape of narrated comedy that also attracts the viewer for an unusual reflection about such an event as unique like this one, for any kind of perspective around this big mission in the history itself as mainstream of the controversies from the beginning of the end of WWII and its paradoxical retroactive review. As always done forever in its crucial endeavors of the precise timing, in occupied Europe by the expansionism power in the twentieth Century. All this is put in charge on the theory of the postponed irresponsibility of these military chiefs, that losing the true meaning of the further impact on the rear public opinion, about the good reserve for impeaching a decision maker just in time before it happened, instead have asking too much disputable warrior's behavior from the privates about themselves for dying at any cost in such an important battle, because the main power of decision is previously out of danger.

Seven Days... Seven Nights (1960)

Steam and fog

[22 November 2007]

"Moderato cantabile" (1960) directed by Peter Brook was a movie with a certain spleen of its weather, like a love story in a foggy atmosphere near or not too much far away in Gascogne Gulf from the quite distant channel between England and France. The couple had met in a coffee break at the place of the port and both were seeing each other concerning a criminal environment from the daily journey, nowhere outside with the police searching for somebody helping to solve the killing of someone there.

Director Peter Brook so happy with his career, that he forgot perhaps in making more movies like this one, even though this one it was not so easy in finishing it, but that unfinished touch is not evanescent. This kind of appearance from the main characters, a woman with a child and a man, both young and the message it was there like that. A stylish look for both main characters that knowing something else about an event have an approach to a soft sentimental adventure and forgotten the reality of their acquaintance created a link of friendship without any presumption for after tomorrow.

Because it seems if did you understood that, something is always possible when things are confused for the minds and the first is breathing well and expelled oxygenate air, making steam by night : reconciliation brought her for another stand of high society from the time. It seems also that the screenplay came from someone who had much pleasure to bring any confusion in the mind of the characters with her - because is a she - deconstruction in her obsessive purpose, that life is not so important around if a kiss save your honor and butterfly. This is the strength of Marguerite Duras story adapted anyway by Peter Brook with a kind of innovative and quite prejudice against savagery of the time, during persecutions in France, because colonial defeat at the time mixed with resistance from Gironde tradition where the story came from.

Lady in the Lake (1946)

Annoying or disturbing situations

[22 November 2007]

"Lady in the lake" (1947) directed by Robert Montgomery as actor himself in a trend for developing the narrative like a subjective plot. Whose voice-over was directly concerning with the action, but he is as an insider without screening the body, except his reflex on mirror - one of the best shots when seeing a lady with the mirror in her hand aside as a cubic shape on which is the figure of the detective as noble man - and only his own hands sometimes and the same for the feet in others situations.

Too much duration for this kind of trend, but this fiction about a detective investigation - made as it was the writer himself - is obviously a factual reference and Montgomery also made this movie for helping the industry for a much more fast renovation of models, it seems now. It's difficult knowing else about what means since then the relative silence at the time from the writer himself concerning this trend, but this one was not very happy with as deduction from a brief commentary at the time as exception in Hollywood discoveries for the business.

The look of the camera is two times as perturbing the movie goers when the objects focused are somewhat distorted as plastic or plasticine, like enlarged or compressed in a new space dimension by the effect of the lens and as if it was alcoholism the main problem in this troubled fictive universe that changes continually as in a psychological mind without many other solutions than himself, alone as an outsider character to bring us some quietude about his discoveries on the solution of the subject.

Week-End at the Waldorf (1945)

A building in the city

[22 November 2007]

"Week-end at the Waldorf" (1945) directed by Robert Zigler Leonard is a bit of New York City and because of that, it is also a curious movie well illuminated by light inside the shadowy rooms, the elevators, the hall, the corridors and the floors, the views from the windows, even the decoration of the doors, when a kind of candidate for a burglar of high society and a melancholic actress lodged each one there, somewhere with a common door. That is the core of the story with countless sparks and stark's episodes, also a Mexican orchestra and a visit of a business delegation of a given country from an important region from the world.

The oil affair is there as background of a trick for happiness like the loneliness of a gentle man officer remembering as the recently death of a friend in fighting on the finishing war in Europe. Even a small sequence, here and there of a kind of documentary in the middle of this fiction movie, it was very interesting from the time where "I guess he laughs" it was a line said by this Irene about him. The sensation of claustrophobia that this hotel as location in itself brings to the story is minor.

When he goes traveling abroad by plane, this one turns the wings near the skyscraper where from the other side she stays observing it through the window of her room - as in close and counter close perspectives of the shots in the last scene - saying reciprocally good bye visually each other, in spite of distances with him by the small window from the plane as in an aerodynamic view of Manhattan and its architectural modernity of the time from the sky in a competitive way with the gray building of the hotel.

The Man Who Came to Dinner (1941)

Slipping on snow

[22 November 2007]

"The man who came to dinner" (1942) directed by William Keighley is a domestic narrative whose action is almost inside a house - in Washington DC and near the park and avenue from the front of White House, because by night it was possible behind its windows seeing it far away -, by convalescence of a famous and publicly respected individual.

Just after an accident on the snow at the entry nowhere in that city and whose happening it was subject of a commentary news in front page, because he was a kind of very known personality. Meanwhile, as an egotist satyr, he manipulates as he could without being seen all the kind of timing cure and even with his broken leg almost good, he fakes that it was not, because he never had such variety of familiar women around him constantly. There is here a typical way of making essentially from the drawing-room as a main stage as limited space for the domestic but boosted action by a kind of overacting and moving back and away from the characters at the entries, exits, like in a central place where the lines are said for instance between him and the nurse.

The dramatic conviction of the director Keighley is without fear for the rules and tricks in his conception of strong feelings and good arrangements from the heart, with the help of convenient lies quickly forgotten, call phones and fake improvisation behind scene, or out of the screen but in presence aside the focusing close of the camera. Almost in a non sense comedy of moralities before a school of girls well prepared for the treachery and marriage of facade, if necessary to content the old beard as distinguished personality there, perhaps not smiling too much about human weakness in an auction of values without great emotion and much cynicism. Facing the small event that constitutes someone of not good appearance for a given moment, when unexpectedly the sound of the knocked next door shows us the making of the scene in almost the same location as a surprise. A self comedy of values from an old intriguing human being, that takes prude behavior as pattern among women from his own office at home, with domestic turnabouts and phone calls, in a fine understanding of life and manipulation of spirits. Anyway, with whom did you think resembles this man ?

The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933)

It is special over all around him

[21 November 2007]

"The private life of Henry VIII" (1933) directed by Alexander Korda is of course a date in the link between a portrait of a historical character and an evanescent story in the current of events, during his reign as king who defies the Church of Rome and promoted himself as a kind of new in spirituality.

The scene that it's not possible forget, it seems as evidence from the movie and this one in special, it was when the actor who incorporates the title eats chicken - without fork nor knife, barely with his fingers - and throws the bones to the back of his sit, without even looking and only with a display gesture, that took the attention of anybody whom assisting him in his solitary meals is for the others like an usually ceremony without any particular manner of a distinguished and honorable individual. As though it was nothing more than his own portrait as particular of a pioneer decision maker in an already civilized Europe, who likes women and by this builds his fame and stylish look from a hallucinated mind, who is also responsible for a so bad figure in history itself.

The figure of the king is quite too much caricatured by the performance of the acting, seemingly as a mere crook above his own degree of responsibility and showing us his lack of style for the job, which means the private life for someone as him is the mediocrity of his own ability for the vital functions. But this kind of overacting is maybe much more the public portrait of a funny man with a sense of his own happiness like a Nero positive hero without burning London finally. There is a sense of decorative interiors where the king seems nasty, however as he was extremely unquiet with the function of the role, acting with some cunning before the matters of his sovereignty. Not clothed for the helm nor for the pleasure of each of the women who he took each time for an official marriage since Anne Boleyn and preparing the next revenge for the worst as it was an anticipated ritualistic anguish for the state and its death penalty in the tower of London near the Thames river.

Lonely Are the Brave (1962)

Western with motorway, dead or alive

[21 November 2007]

"Lonely are the brave" (1962) directed by David Miller is a kind of new western whose story has an ecologic side before the time when a pursued horseman by helicopter from the police and because crossing a motorway is killed by a van, when freedom of state it was reached just in time. This movie it seems now as a must of a genre that periodically is known for its announced death.

But it's not entirely true because the genre is continually renewed as here as an optical illusion of the time, when Roy Rogers and Gene Autry were still known from the television serials. It was very new for the time in the sixties and surprisingly unsoiled and somewhat unquiet, strange, killing a genre without too much shootings, gray in most of the duration.

Fantastic and the killer or probable undertaker was a very known actor with a small hole as characteristic sign on the face, dead or alive.

The Conspirators (1944)

Fishmen and oligarchy

[21 November 2007]

"The conspirators" (1944) directed by Jean Negulesco is a plot as old present past to liberate others whom were at the time imprisoned in a jail for scaring anybody else, that caught the viewer for a while in a very busy sequence interesting as example of hypocrisy from the ancient regime. All the darkness particularly in the night scene of the ball where as intruder one of the conspirators is there, where foreigners and local authorities are both entities in a pact, that this movie shows the reverse of the peaceful and apparatus of fake generosity. Within a sense of dramatic expression very sustained before the dangerous and strange move of the characters, facing a treachery for killing someone outside, it shows also the strength of this good screenplay.

The contrast between a group of main characters disguised as contacts for something not entirely legal and the commodities that they are concerned with, for their purposes for raising income and by this way merchandising human freedom with some local authorities, it is got without the entire knowledge of the concerned people. From whom one of them meets some inhabitants by night, in an open party boom at a known beach in the outskirts with typical songs and cloths from local fishermen, collaborating now in a neutral country under dictatorship of a specific oligarchy.

Preventing uprising in such a shadowy world it is obvious a kind of archaism without democratic stance by its architectonic similitude with a more liberal attitude for business by night under vaults, tunnels and climbs in an old city turned away to the ocean entry in Europe. Where under covered merchants - like in republican times twenty years before - living in a quiet and strange magic tranquility are in cohabitation, like searching an unknown royalty for their benefices out of the church influence in such a pause of war timed in 1943 just after last fascism schism, as only apparently in such a scale of mediocrity to make a living of the last resentment against an oppression less intensive than in other countries smashed nearby by an atmosphere of not far way mystery.

The Crusades (1935)

Overall vessels with horsemen on Mediterranean sea as it was at home

[21 November 2007]

"The crusades" (1935) directed by Cecil B.De Mille is as story conceived as love affair, explaining part of the influence that it produced in the internal affairs of two countries as nations in Europe, promoting the allegedly third crusades against Islam, situated at the corner of Southeast on Mediterranean sea.

Overall, at the time of vessels charged with horsemen, some of them who went fighting for an apparently common faith but forgotten the symbolic land and cultural influence of diversified local populations, far away of their respectively reigns like France and England. The spirit of cavalry, wedding intrigue, eroticism on the drapes and campaign bed of kingdom of Christianity are ingredients of adventure at the land lost, meaning expansionism and its pretext for quarreling about frontiers and warriors in a love affair at the mood.

Director Cecil B.De Mille enjoying us with such subject, altogether he capsizes over our child mind, maybe he was thinking in another configuration for the problem of imperialism and the propriety of rights from these times linking two things, fanaticism and medieval glory at the time of Abyssinia and its nature of rivalries where sex attraction concealed by the strength for power. A tent is the main location concerning an attitude for dealing and in this place both sides made what is better for each one of the intervenor before peoples in conflict in a postponed peace deal. The scene is that tent where both sides entering and a woman is the subject of sharing in between affects that are responsible for the way that the present crusade is understood by the chiefs in place with their costumes and clothes that the director put his energy not to explain why but what burns the heart of kings in that phase of humanity and superiority of Europe before its extremities... This kind of acting at the time was watched as explaining the orders of knighthood in a displaying manner of obvious meaning on public stage at the corner of a town of the ancient world. But historically displaced from the real present time of then in 1935 not at all in relationship of others in incendiary domestic mission where it was inserted such a Hollywood production as a flop.

Congorilla (1932)

Wild life before ethnographic's

[20 November 2007]

"Congorilla" (1932) by Martin Johnson and his courageous and beautiful wife, it was as movie an entire discovery of the potentiality from African jungle. The fragility of the rushes on African jungle as pictures from the trip are good enough for open the curiosity to this kind of life where the day slows easy and the contrast with the past and the present is almost nothing in terms of time for the help from these tribal peoples from the bow age and encircled timber huts within a strange magnetism from the sunset on the savanna.

Just in time of first Tarzan's and from the novels written in the spirit of Livingstone and Stanley from XIX Century explorers, but here concerning wild life as true first ethnographic view helping contact with Pygmy's for instance in the spirit of Jack London. Osa is shown when the team of explorers was in a given savanna, searching the lions and after while she is before one of it, in the moment of preparing the jump for the attack, just before the shootings of protection.

One of the scenes shows us a Pygmy smoking a cigar before the camera and the idea that a black man was like a monkey vanishes slowly of the mind of any viewer, I presume also, because the purpose was indeed approaching cultures and not exactly open another abyss in between. A free style for capturing snapshots over the jungle with people naked and happy in its natural environment but with a rudimentary look. It seems that it was here that we had seen one of the first aerial landscapes taken from a plane on African continent. The separation between race and culture it was here a matter of angle of view not an eugenic standard of the time and such a magnificence was too the subject of these contradictions, but differently understood if above the legacy of the XIX Century and the main activity of Martin Johnson and his wife, in the transit and competitive overview with others in the geographical exploitation of the moment, that it was too about chasing during hunts by local people. With such an imagined savagery with some rules and principles learned in Kansas, claiming a rescue of the forgotten colonized folks in the bush as a new small economy of scale, beginning contacts of other nature intuitively before exploitation or leaving them out of the history for the next generation. Martin Johnson was a voyager very known in the time of hangings and picnics, positioned in his interest for the cultural comparative studies about primitive peoples between continents also at the time of cannibalism and cutting heads as idea profoundly linked with the imaginary of common dealers around the world.

The Invisible Man (1933)

Acquaintance by the contours

[20 November 2007]

"The invisible man" (1933) directed by James Whale was a must in the empty conception of a speculative inhuman kind of specie, whose humanity was at stake for artistic purposes and only when its remains were accidentally burned inside a phantasmagoria as house dig in darkness.

Spirit's imagined it for the sake of the mad minds before selfish way of life at the time, as an invention that starts well but perished with his inventor as trick for animated substances. The book of H.G.Wells is from one generation before, but already on the XX Century, where it was possible theoretically imagining the transmigration of souls, as well it seems for the didactic fellow, whom the writer himself was at the bottom of his conviction - transmitting it for a popular audience -, as it was known in England during the past century of accidental burnings on the factories... Whale as director was sensible to this kind of experiments and speculative entertainment of fake science, namely by pure coincidence in the same year of the burning of Reichstag in Germany, by someone manipulated as the young delinquent Van der Lubbe whose figure was different of a mommy with black glasses as here.

The viewer amazingly had an acquaintance strongly bizarre by the contours of the thing, illuminated as a candle moving from the fire in a dark shape, that vanished finally by the intervention of someone out of that reality of lights and shadows in darkness. The horrified people watching the blaze inside the house, understood that carbon and lack of breathing during the fire in such a climax, where if it was as assisting the damned thing and had reflecting the situation of unexpected revelation from a kind of animism. From anything else like them and also seemingly responsible for the existence or not of human beings, in such a contagion till the next occurrence by mistaken fearless and as also in simultaneous, why not reflecting even the state of mind of a given collectivity before somnambulism. The surprise that took this visible man masked was a kind of machination as entertainment for the crowd. Linked with panic in a moment in which the law of Lynch was too much practiced anywhere in civilized countries of the time, at the place of the lack of credibility of institutions and the darkness illuminated by the fire was also the so-called popular judgment of the streets. Plenty of chauvinism against collective fear before the criminal mind of any suspected neighbor : the man with undercover figure by a scarf and a hat, enters into a bear house during Winter, as seemingly in his strange behavior a kind of cold because the snow on his shoulders, before the suspicious employee behind the balcony empty of alcohol bottles on the wall, it is a sight nonetheless a strange portrait of his human condition in abnormality and his situation. Given hard times of persecution of other nature at the boundary of dramatic comedy in an almost segregated location for such a maverick. Insight a tolerated segregation as it was also contaminated by radioactive rays, before an epidemic of hysterical and collective behavior from the crowd.

Top Hat (1935)

Here and there the shoulders of the dancers

[20 November 2007]

"Top hat" (1935) directed by Mark Sandrich is a musical movie whose cosmopolitanism give us a pair of dancers here and there, London and Venice at the time, with an energy from the body that anybody stand without move on each chair as movie goers. Even forty or seventy years after its stage acrobatics and choreography with tip tap shoes, in such a foolish concert visually beautiful and encouraging putting sadness for a while out of minds. Only when they were quiet and observing each other in silence, before others in a saloon of high society of the time, could their shoulders give some sign of apparently indifference from their own story as dancers with love affairs crossed by fake illusions.

The choreography and the decoration of the stage in the main show, that justifies the title with the black sophisticated hats and the sticks for the compasses and equilibrium of this couple of dancers - on which is in itself the most famous example of a screening music-hall moment by its simplification and high contrast of brightness in black and white -, are much more important together in the main other scenes than the holes of the plot with the tricks of snubbing characters at the time almost as farcical inspiration. That means the way that the dancers keep in touch or abandon each other in scene are conventions of golden youth without any interest out of their feet and hands round the speed of the rhythm in their balance as an eternal turnabout over the clouds of imagination and the deck of inspiration for a first kiss as plenty conventionality of Hollywood happy end for the good of everybody. Like director Mark Sandrich helps to understand us in his escape for marvelous eternity of these foolish dancers, a couple of dreamers for ever in a Europe that already doesn't exist anymore between wars and loves, only the ghosts of shipwrecking.

Otherwise, where the episodes of the story in between shows the dancers like human beings, such as a fair play for helping each other indeed, instead hearing the intriguing plot and competing each other against the level of either participation, in such a double show of supposed to be the own real life of the main characters, before the vassals as waiters of high life and old society, whose occupancy is nonetheless below as in snow condition, but like conserving ice on the rocks to drink and amazing in free times of travels. There is here in this musical movie the illusion of a couple of lovers in real life out of the fiction about dancers in Europe and far away of America, but it was only true on the stage for the marching of the same couple, dancing between moments of hate and loving each other forever when timeless separated by the conjuncture of a melodramatic but energetic plot at the time of gangsterism - with the scene of Fred Astaire simulating with his stick the choreography of the fall's shooting of each of the members of the orchestra -, in a magisterial evocation on stage decor of the rhythmic trepidation of the roar twenties from the dry law against booze... Almost nothing of eroticism but a fashionable way of showing elegance and somewhat sex-appeal as it was your sister brother fighting incest with fox-trot, tangos and waltz's.

David and Lisa (1962)

Criticising the model

[20 November 2007]

"David and Lisa" (1962) directed by Frank Perry was an astonishingly new kind of approach about adolescents traumatized by the adult's world for any reason or fault to adaptation on a competitive society. Because their own lyricism, not facing a reality very different of the sick turmoil of thoughts in a disturbed mind, turned only for self artificial abyss of imagination. Indeed, it was by no means a winning game inside a psychological development, instead criticizing the model of cure by electroshocks or drug medication installed in the fifties, as though a sleeping world should be the channel for cure and only that one. But the foolish David and the nervous Lisa, as tale for everybody with a problematic tale from childhood at home - having at the time here the alternative for being understood little by little -, whose contagion by a fake world of aggressive adults it was actually enormous, they were risking too then losing their own minds in an empty reality, but both in helping each other it was nonetheless better than worst.

There is in this movie, made as a documentary in a hospital, a kind of rare tenderness between them as young couple of characters, when they discovered each other as main stable twin soul condition for coming out of their own unreality, only for touching the walls and listening her dislocated voice-over. Now their fingers are applied in their own affair of learning love, like the other side of the separated foolish mind, by the help of a distant doctor in mental disease as place of transition for another state of healthily body art, without the spatial environment of a house of arrest for forcing cure. The way that director Perry and wife Eleanora constructed this movie at the time, out of the traditional melodrama concerning the house arrest for mental diseases for fools with a psychoanalytic expertise, it is the strength of the subject illustrated like a television direct to the souls.

Searching of lyricism and authenticity more than legitimacy, the characters never acting as in a psychological plot - for the case without at short term any cure, than loving each other or deepen in prolonged schizophrenia of very young people - in the sense of fiction as we habitually had been told in the recent past fifties - with a score of barbiturates and suicides not understated nor sensationalistic to the public opinion from the time -, namely in a big town and its outskirts. Where at an old abandoned convent this theatrical experiment was rehearsal for the screen, famous till this date at the beginning of the independent production out of self destructiveness of the creators then. This tale was about love between a boy who never talks since he enters there and a girl who doesn't like being touched on her skin.

Saratoga (1937)

Social conviviality at the horses racing

[19 November 2007]

"Saratoga" (1937) directed by Jack Conway, where Jean Harlow in a scene is putting face powder during a break at the horses race on Churchill Downs and she is enough interesting as character seen from her back as style and ritual of acting, as repetitive gesture of the women in instinctive standing before society with nothing to do after the end of a given race.

A trip by train and sleeping at night after talking, it is another scene of anthology from the thirties or also another, where all people around approaching, inside a saloon near the room of her, listening by the radio transmission which it seems a match of baseball, but it is a race horsing for gamblers broadcast from the stadium, interrupting their domestic activities for hearing the results of the winning horse, each time screaming as little boys. Both scenes for instance were moments of social conviviality, among bosses and employees in this comedy of happiness, waiting for the next as though nothing happened out of racing horses, except the mental health of this young woman, daughter of a land owner with horses for races.

The sense of a reasonable attitude is at stake, when the daughter of the owner of racing horses refuses to take medication, before the diagnostic made by the physician in her room after a break in her health. Refusing even the recommendation of staying alone on the bed, without too much light in the room by day, because her lack of sleeping when anguish and the turmoil of her own life are surrounded by friends of these quality and glamor, by whom they care after all for her better health. It is quite instructive knowing, how it is possible after such a last derby, what of either horses won really at the place of the other ; because, at first sight, it's impossible by the line of departure directly from the stadium itself during the race. The scene where is projecting a documentary, in a special session and where the viewers were a group of friends from the horses racing, with the main characters of this fiction movie there : it is almost unbelievable of happiness for the time, with smiles in every figure and particularly of the daughter of the horses farmer, for racing in such derbies and it works well as satisfactory behavior among them, when they discovered the small difference between the winner and the second place, by the slow motion at least on the last seconds, frame by frame on the screen projection with Moon Ray in second place, viewed by them in a special room aside the stadium, like a kind of referees from this distinguished people belonging to high society.