tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-148123332009-11-09T12:32:51.148-06:00In torn seats are film leadersTimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.comBlogger1562125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-20912148210632191932009-11-09T00:23:00.003-06:002009-11-09T02:29:53.577-06:00

In the first couple of years following World War II, as I have suggested, the Disney Animation Studios had begun to lose its way: too many cheap make-work projects that didn't challenge the animators enough and only barely broke even had inevitably led to a slipping of quality, and by 1947 or so, it was becoming more and more doubtful that the studio would be around for very much longer if

Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-10509455254493639672009-11-08T23:30:00.001-06:002009-11-08T23:32:09.916-06:00

The great mogul David O. Selznick had one of the finest-tuned senses for what people liked to watch of just about any producer in Hollywood in the 1930s, and in 1939 he decided that what the audience wanted were torrid melodramas about impossible love. The most famous of the three films he produced that year wouldn't come out until late December, and a highly anticipated thing it was too:

Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-1015964441525461052009-11-08T15:50:00.000-06:002009-11-08T15:50:54.188-06:00

So, with one thing (a wedding) and another (the film festival), and some scattered odds and ends (Pakula, Universal Monsters, Disney), I've fallen a couple of installments behind on my "monthly" retrospective of the films of 1939. That changes today, with the first of a three-week burst of classic movies from Hollywood's annus mirabilis.Today, from September, 1939 comes Intermezzo, featuring

Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-11306319304869288902009-11-08T01:15:00.001-06:002009-11-08T03:21:33.861-06:00

It is readily observed that there were six package films produced by the Disney Studios from 1942 to 1949, a desperate cost-saving measure in the years during and immediately following World War II. Not so obvious is the fact that these six films can be easily broken into three pairs: two Latin American goodwill efforts, two contemporary music anthologies, and two "double features" of stories

Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-9601731700740412332009-11-06T18:47:00.002-06:002009-11-07T00:57:57.704-06:00

I think it might be really fun to bring one of these Disney reviews in under 2000 words again, so I'm going to skip the history lesson this time, except to reiterate what happened to the Disney Studios in the post-war '40s: Walt Disney was inattentive, they were running out of money, and the package films - collections of cheap shorts sold as a feature - had been running dry as a creative

Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-36122893511198658152009-11-06T00:53:00.000-06:002009-11-06T02:54:09.360-06:00

It's all on display right there in the title: Fun and Fancy Free. I do not know but that I catch a slight whisper of defiant desperation in those words, but then, Make Mine Music is still fresh in my memory, and that is enough to make it clear that things at Disney were not much fun, nor free of fancy, in 1947 when this picture was being animated.In 1940, Disney had begun developing Sinclair

Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-16881112811140880952009-11-05T06:46:00.000-06:002009-11-05T18:48:45.888-06:00

If I have dragged my feet in this Alan J. Pakula retrospective, it is because I knew what lay in wait, and I wanted to stave off my fate as long as I possibly could. For even if the director managed to delay his arrival in the 1980s by the length of one film when he made the curious political thriller Rollover, we all owe God a death, and Pakula paid his with the leaden 1982 prestige drama

Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-54306529786230744672009-11-04T23:23:00.005-06:002009-11-05T03:56:38.212-06:00

It is a known thing that Walt Disney took the failure of Fantasia badly, and on a rather personal level. The film that was to have been the culmination of his artistic ambitions become a well-reviewed box-office meltdown, and if the studio never again came even close to making such a self-consciously artsy movie again, I think it is because the cuts that the producer received in those fateful

Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-47420362617600025552009-11-04T19:28:00.000-06:002009-11-04T19:29:40.754-06:00

The film Bronson, directed by Nicolas Winding Refn who co-wrote the script with Brock Norman Brock, is on paper a biopic of Michael Peterson, a man who has been in prisons and institutions for the criminally insane for the most of the years since his imprisonment in 1974, at age 19, for holding up a post office; but it is not at all the kind of biopic that explains what made its subject into the

Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-82105001417631121472009-11-03T15:20:00.003-06:002009-11-03T15:27:31.710-06:00

Saludos Amigos was a big enough success that Walt Disney was encouraged to put into production a second Latin American project, again theoretically meant to foster goodwill during the hard days of World War II. This quasi-sequel from 1944, The Three Caballeros (treating upon Brazil once again, along with Mexico in the place of Peru, Chile and Argentina), was a significantly more ambitious

Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-55827551554293998642009-11-03T12:48:00.002-06:002009-11-03T12:49:49.639-06:00

Now we're starting to get us some proper prestige releases! Along with a really odd number of blockbuster-type movies for this time of the year. Of course, the annual tradition of opening all the good movies in New York and Los Angeles before the rest of us get to take a peek continues unabated, and this means that nearly everything super-exciting in November isn't actually coming out until

Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-16570809507005512902009-11-02T23:11:00.004-06:002009-11-03T15:50:21.872-06:00

In 1942, a terrible fate hit the Disney Studios, from which the company perhaps never entirely recovered. The three "arty" features - Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Bambi - represented a business model that could never, ever be sustained, but Dumbo proved that there was still a market for exquisite little gems without so much of the insane ambition for drama and visual enormity. The problem was, the

Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-5269201851035808602009-11-02T20:56:00.004-06:002009-11-02T21:03:26.271-06:00

Antichrist opens with a prologue shot in drop-dead gorgeous black and white by Anthony Dod Mantle, taking place entirely in slow motion as a piece from Handel's opera Rinaldo, and depicting an unnamed couple played by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg having what looks to be pretty fantastic sex (for the most explicit bits they were doubled by Horst Baron and Mandy Starship, respectively)

Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-15714802916194538462009-11-02T15:31:00.006-06:002009-11-05T03:43:55.986-06:00

The first five animated features produced by the Disney Studios between 1937 and 1942 represent a level of sustained artistic achievement virtually unheard of elsewhere in cinema history. Pixar Animation Studios has a good shot at replicating the feat if they keep up their current level for just a couple more years, but outside of that I can think of no director or creative team that made so

Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-1779246045443442452009-11-01T12:36:00.002-06:002009-11-01T12:51:15.571-06:00

And so we come to the death rattle of Universal horror. For some reason that will only ever be known to those involved, the studio suits determined that the best way to retire their classic monsters was to mix traditional horror cinema with the comedy duo of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. The first of these, and by a fairly infinite degree the best, was Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, a

Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-70467154120368495782009-10-31T19:07:00.005-05:002009-11-05T03:39:50.311-06:00

In 1941, the fate of the Disney Studios rested upon a single film, for the second time in four years. The one-two punch of Pinocchio and Fantasia, both of them costing astronomical sums and both of them crashing and burning at the box office, had left the company teetering right on the edge of bankruptcy. The last-ditch effort to get some money in the studio coffers was to make an extremely

Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-3794750680472792822009-10-31T05:20:00.005-05:002009-11-05T03:32:54.413-06:00

That Pinocchio was a significant commercial failure is something I can sort of get my head around, but it ultimately seems pretty hard to believe that something so beautiful and heartfelt could be so soundly ignored. I have no such difficulty believe the same thing of the other Disney feature released in 1940, of unquestionably greater personal importance to Walt Disney himself. I'm referring of

Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-60984379849845411492009-10-31T01:26:00.005-05:002009-11-01T12:51:00.514-06:00

After the miserable failure of House of Frankenstein, there wasn't much that the next Universal horror movie had to do besides show up to be an improvement. But House of Dracula does more than just show up. Perhaps because the filmmakers realised on some level that this was to be the final hurrah for their iconic characters (at least, in a "serious" horror film), this last gasp of the second

Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-7747957607642696352009-10-30T13:28:00.002-05:002009-11-01T12:50:50.015-06:00

I have not been able to determine much information about the box office fortunes of the Universal monster films in the 1940s, so I cannot say if Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man and Son of Dracula, the studio's two franchise entries from 1943, made any particular sum of money worth mentioning. I suspect they must have, because their last horror film of 1944 - a banner year for monster movies,

Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-91688157136614983402009-10-29T23:54:00.004-05:002009-11-01T12:50:38.281-06:00

Given how sequel-mad Universal studios was in the wake of 1939's Son of Frankenstein, cranking out two Frankensteins, one of which was also a Wolf Man, a whole carload of mummy pictures, and hell, even a few Invisible Man follow-ups, it seems almost absurd that it took until 1943 to finally produce a second sequel to Dracula, after the 1936 Dracula's Daughter. After all, you'd think that Dracula

Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-55081342578325232752009-10-29T21:10:00.002-05:002009-11-03T14:42:23.709-06:00

It seems like just about every prominent fairy tale was at least briefly considered to be the follow-up to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, even before it was clear that the Disney Studios would survive that film's anticipated box office failure. Of course, when Snow White instead proved to be one of the great hits of its age, a second Disney animated feature went from being a pipe dream to a

Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-67927268511730995822009-10-29T14:25:00.004-05:002009-11-01T12:50:23.263-06:00

This, ladies and gentlemen, is what desperation looks like. By 1943, the steam was mostly out of the second phase of Universal horror movies, even in their new cheaper, B-picture incarnation, and if the cycle was going to keep on going, something bold and splashy had to be done, for then as now movies made their money from a snappy advertising campaign more than because of their inherent quality

Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-61282098916254707782009-10-28T23:43:00.003-05:002009-10-28T23:56:16.237-05:00

There are so many reasons to hate Oscar season - the intensely patronising time of year when studios clump all of their prestige-style movie into an increasingly small number of weeks just prior to New Year's Eve - but the one that is especially annoying to me right now is the way that the distributors insist on holding onto movies that premiered way early in the year, refusing to release them at

Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-80430411362362291632009-10-28T19:30:00.002-05:002009-11-05T03:29:28.075-06:00

There's a long way to go over the next 45 days and 72 years of movie history; and I hope you'll forgive me if I start it off with a bit of scene-setting before the review itself, even though the story I'm about to tell is extremely well-known.Walter Elias Disney had a perfectly American life story: born to a middle class family in Chicago, raised in the rural Midwest in the kind of postcard small

Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14812333.post-82351984947299358962009-10-28T10:56:00.001-05:002009-10-28T11:01:30.004-05:00

A number of different factors all contributed to the massive collapse of the New Hollywood Cinema almost exactly at the moment that the 1970s became the 1980s, and the last completely vital epoch in American filmmaking came to its crashing end. Not a very happy state of affairs for the historically-minded cinephile to contemplate, but even in the wrack of the early '80s, there are still certain

Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09491952893581644049noreply@blogger.com1