Last week I watched a dozen movies:
- Foreign Correspondent isn’t Hitchcock’s best, but it’s decently suspenseful.
- There are several good peformances in The Barretts of Wimpole Street, but the best may be from Charles Laughton, who’s perfectly hateful in his role and plays all the weird subtext with a gleam in his eye.
- Son of Lassie is surprisingly dark, a proper trapped-behind-enemy-lines war film.
- There’s a reason why every film production of it since has been compared to Olivier’s Hamlet. It’s not the only way to take the play, and it’s arguably too theatrical and stage-bound, but it’s evocative and haunting.
- Quicksand starts out a little silly, and Rooney’s voiceover is sometimes a distraction, but when the movie starts racking up twists and starts tossing Peter Lorre into the mix, it gets a lot more fun.
- The Sea Wolf is a tense sea voyage, with some great cinematography and a terrifically menacing performance by Edward G. Robinson.
- Anyone who thinks an over-reliance on movie sequels is a recent phenomenon should be introduced to early Hollywood series like the Dr. Kildare movies. They made nine of these things in the span of just five years, then another half dozen spin-offs in the six years after Lew Ayres left the series and the title role. (And that’s to say nothing of the television series a decade later.) Calling Dr. Kildare, the second film in the series, is no less dated and hokey as the first, but it’s still genuinely entertaining.
- William Powell and Myrna Loy are, no shock, terrifically charming together in I Love You Again. The movie has a very silly, but nevertheless clever, premise, but it’s mostly worth it just to see these two on the screen again.
- The Devil Commands has some fun mad-scientist shenanigans, along with a sad and haunted Boris Karloff.
- Vacation from Marriage is (probably intentionally) a little slow to start, but the cast is just so good.
- I don’t want to say Lon Chaney Jr. is no Boris Karloff, because the makeup and his performance in The Ghost of Frankenstein are at least well done. It’s just a case of diminishing returns, with both this and Son of…, the two sequels post-Bride of Frankenstein. That’s probably to be expected, following two of the very best monster movies ever made, but still.
- Okay, so Die Hard is absolutely a Christmas movie if Meet Me in St. Louis is one. The movie is good fun, with some decent songs—including, of course, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”—but it just as easily be called a Halloween movie, since there’s a much more extended sequence set at that holiday, and that’s also where the movie’s vibrant Technicolor truly comes alive.
