Alice in Wonderland (1933)

It is a good thing that the 1933 "live action" movie of Alice in Wonderland opens with paired photographs of the characters and the actors who play them. With all of those masks, how would we ever find Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, and the others?

This is a movie to watch. If you love Alice in Wonderland, watch it. If you are entertained by your favorite actors doing unusual things, watch it. I fall into both categories, and I will admit to watching it mostly for Cary Grant. I am still a far way off from my goal of seeing all of his films.

In this adaptation, Alice takes a nap on a snowy day and wakes up to climb through a looking glass into Looking Glass Land, where we get to see so much perfect Alice:

*Alice is declared to be a volcano when she picks up some chess pieces to move them in an attempt to be helpful.

*"Goodbye dear feet."

*A terrific conversation with Caterpillar, Ed Sparks

*Edward Everett Horton (who I am coming to know as one of my favorite character actors) as the Mad Hatter:

*And Gary Cooper as a charming White Knight, possibly my favorite character (and Alice's) in this adaptation

*And the reason for my watching this movie: "Or shall the mock turtle sing?"

Oh, please!

Four stars for a great story (of course), fun costumes, and actors who seem to be enjoying themselves in their silly costumes. I hope to see this again.

On a side note, I've been thinking a lot about Cary Grant singing. His characters sometimes sing in the shower (Mr. Blandings, Charade, North by Northwest)... now he sings a very silly song as the Mock Turtle in Alice in Wonderland. Aside from Kiss and Make Up, is his singing always meant to be comedic? Then I found this while searching for Alice photos:

Cary Grant sings FCC Regulations ("Dinosaur Gardens" blog, 2006) Oh, fun!

The Great Escape (1963)

Four stars, and I would definitely see this again, even though I don't usually like war movies. I had two reasons for wanting to see The Great Escape: a long-time love of Nick Park's Chicken Run and a recent viewing of The Adventures of Pete and Pete episode "Grounded for Life" (season 2, episode 1). Both drew inspiration from The Great Escape, and I wanted to see it for myself.

The Great Escape is just a really clever movie. It is also almost three hours long, so here are some highlights...

*The Germans have built a brilliant new camp from which they think no captured officers can escape ("we have in effect put all our eggs in one basket"). First day open: 7 unsuccessful attempts, including men under branches in trucks and men trying to join a Russian work line. Hilts (Steve McQueen) tests weaknesses in the guards' line of sight with a baseball, earning him 20 days in semi-isolation.

*Clever ways of working on three tunnels while remaining unnoticed... carrying pouches of dirt in your pant legs to dump in the garden (see also Pete and Pete)... hammering during a singing of the Christmas carol "Oh come all ye faithful..."

*And, oh, the tunnel and the characters...

Recommended viewing order:

1) The Great Escape

2) Chicken Run

3) Pete and Pete's "Grounded for Life"

Bells Are Ringing (1960)

This movie has all the right ingredients for a fun comedy... Judy Holliday, silly plot twists... But the songs almost kill it. I guess when you put Dean Martin in a movie, you have to make him sing something. The songs are ridiculous and often painful, though. They are vehicles for predictable and sometimes nauseating rhymes. So three stars for Judy Holliday and some funny ideas... subtract one star for dreadful songs... Two stars. I might be willing to watch it again.

Ella (Judy Holliday) works for an answering service called "Susanswerphone." She is very good at taking people's messages and making wake-up calls. What she is not good at is dating. Susan keeps setting her up with nice men, and the dates all end up being disastrous - everything short of setting herself on fire. Ella just finds herself unable to talk to men in person. "You know, you're a good listener. That's an art in itself... helps to build the other person's ego," says her clueless date at the beginning of this film. Ella suffers through the date, of course managing to catch her dress on fire on the way out of the restaurant. Ella shines on the phone, though. She manages to get involved in all of her clients' life stories. She even falls in love with one and has to put on lipstick before she calls him. Sadly, though, she speaks to him in an old lady voice, and he calls her Mom. Leading us to the first dreadful song:

*I'm in love with "Plaza 0 double 4 double 3" She muses about whether he's 6'4" or 4'3". Oh, she even sings part of the song to a canary.

*And then the client, Jeffrey Moss (Dean Martin) sings to himself in the mirror: "You gotta do it" Seems he's a struggling playwright.

The plot picks back up again when the ladies of Susanswerphone are accused of being a front for a "lonely hearts club." There must be no meeting up with any male clients or "you and the madam are going to be taking calls at the detention home."

It turns out there is something nefarious going on at Susanswerphone, though. A bookie charms Sue into letting him run what she thinks is a record company out of the office. Really, he has developed a code in which different bets are called different composers, pieces, etc. This leads us to the next scary song:

"It's a simple little system," a partially spoken word song in which many sketchy bookies sing about their tricky code.

Jeffrey Moss leaves his phone unplugged one day, missing his wake-up call, and we get to watch Ella crawl around on his floor after she breaks in to wake her up. He wakes up, doesn't know she's "Mom," and a romance begins. How does she know so much about him? "I'm very intuitive." What will come of her having met up with a male client?

*"So that's what he looks like..." Sadly, the comic scene above includes this dreadful song before Jeffrey wakes up.

Ella teaches Jeffrey that you can say hello to strangers on the street. He is so in love after this ("If I couldn't believe in you after everything that's happened to me today, I'd crumble away like an old sponge cake."), that he just has to sing...

*"I got a girl," which includes the lyric, "she's got a lot to recommend her for a girl."

Then we have a song-writing dentist, the "cha cha cha," a dance in the park, a very bizarre song about dropping names, and another scary number called "He's in love with Melisande Scott."

Judy Holliday rescues the movie again near the end, though, with some great physical comedy. I'm upping my verdict to "would definitely watch again," but I will be laughing at, not always with.

Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941)

A Hitchcock slapstick comedy... fascinating. Hitchcock's only comedy... I can kind of see why. Having said that, the movie wasn't un-funny, it just didn't live up to my slapstick expectations. It kept falling short. Carole Lombard is fantastic with slapstick (Nothing Sacred), but there wasn't enough for her to do here.

When we meet Mr. and Mrs. Smith (Carole Lombard and Robert Montgomery) they are holed up in their bedroom. One of the rules of their marriage is, "You are not allowed to leave the bedroom after a quarrel unless you've made up," and they had a fight two days ago. While the help watches for them to emerge and Mr. Smith's law firm panics over his absence, Mr. and Mrs. Smith finally reconcile, agreeing that their rules for marriage have once again helped them to trust and love each other. Before Mr. Smith leaves for work, though, Mrs. Smith reminds them of their "no lying" rule, and asks Mr. Smith to honestly tell her whether he would marry her all over again. Mr. Smith very naively answers that although he loves her, if he had it to do all over again, he would hold onto the single life. Oops.

Upon arriving at work, Mr. Smith is then visited by a lawyer come to tell him that, guess what, his marriage license isn't valid. It turns out all people who got married in 1937 in Nevada with an Idaho license are not really married and that "it'd be better if everybody kind of got married again...to be on the safe side." Oops again. Mr. Smith is kind of excited about the idea of dating his wife again and doesn't seem to plan to tell her right away. The lawyer happens to be a family friend of his wife, though, and stops by to see her next. Mrs. Smith's mother is horrified, demanding that her daughter not spend another night with her husband until things are righted. Mrs. Smith is convinced that, despite the morning conversation, of course her "husband" will whisk her off to City Hall that very night after dinner. Otherwise: scandal.

But, the dinner doesn't live up to expectations, and there is no proposal. Instead, Mr. Smith tries to lure his "wife" into the bedroom. Horror! Mrs. Smith tells him what she knows and accuses him of having tried to use her "and then throw me away like a squeezed lemon." Mr. Smith is banished to a room at the men's club, and Mrs. Smith decides that maybe she would like to date other men. Mr. Smith spends the rest of the movie trying to win his wife back. At one point he even tells her, "From now on we're just friends." Her response:"Not necessary."

The favorite scene for both me and David involved Mr. Smith pretending to be deep in conversation with a pretty lady seated near him in a restaurant. Not only is his wife not jealous, but the pretty lady eventually turns around and notices the creep pretending to whisper in her ear. The scene below was pretty funny, too:
So all in all, only two stars, but I would probably watch this again, and I think all Hitchcock fans should be aware of his venture into slapstick.

Swing Time (1936)

To cuff or not to cuff? Another silly, but fun, film. I found it was best not to think too much about the plot.

Lucky (Fred Astaire) is about to get married, but his band members are concerned marriage will get in the way of the band's future. The film opens with Lucky's band members very skillfully tricking him out of getting to his wedding on time just by drawing cuffs onto the pant legs of a man in a magazine and telling Lucky that cuffed pants are in. Lucky has to go off and get his pants cuffed (minutes before the wedding, we are led to believe), discovers his pants are un-cuffable, and misses his wedding. He is then told that he has to raise a whole lot of money before he can be allowed to try to marry his spurned fiance again. So Lucky goes off to New York with the band to play and gamble, and he meets Penny (Ginger Rogers).

Penny is a dance instructor and wants nothing to do with Lucky after he annoys her on the street. Lucky pretends to need dance lessons, though, messes with her for a while, and then before you know it, they are an amazing team.

Lucky starts to think that maybe he doesn't want to raise all that money to marry his old fiance. I appreciated that Astaire and Rogers sang and danced to "A Fine Romance," a song that I love, during a snowy getaway together. Not the most exciting dance ever, but fun. And they got to wear fantastic hats.
Then suddenly, over an hour into the film, blackface? Why? Apparently the scene is some loved tribute to Mr. Bojangles, and we're supposed to be really excited that Astaire can dance with shadow selves. Hmmm... It's just always a bit hard to forgive these moments. I know the film is old, but people still could have had more sense.

Fun film, but two stars. Not my favorite Astaire and Rogers plot.

Follow the Fleet (1936)

Oh, I hope I never run out of Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers movies. In this movie they play Bake and Sherry. Bake is in the Navy, Sherry is a dancer who once rejected Bake's marriage proposal. When Bake comes into town on shore leave, he runs into Sherry, and they both rethink their separation. Bake messes up Sherry's very important audition, though, and all bets are off. How do you say sorry? Give someone a monkey and screw with their next big audition, not necessarily in that order.
There was also a bizarre side-story involving Bake's friend Bilge, played by Randolph Scott. After having one great date with Sherry's sister Connie, he felt that he was still free to play the field, and she felt that they had made an amazing connection and were getting married. Bilge's thoughts on Connie's thoughts? "She's a swell kid, but she's serious... She's sappy like you [Bake] - she wants to get married." And oddly none of Connie's friends told her that she was being a bit silly fixing up her father's giant boat just for Bilge and waiting for his proposal after just one date. There wasn't even any word from him while he was back at sea, and still she waited. She was told oh, he's just being silly... He'll figure it all out in time. She is told to fight for her man. But she practically imagined him! Nonetheless... do you think she got him in the end?
While watching the movie, my dad was busy looking up information about it. Apparently the dress worn by Ginger Rogers when she and Fred Astaire danced to "Let's Face the Music and Dance" (above) was so heavily weighted that she had to learn how to move while wearing it. And apparently she bonked Fred Astaire in the face. It was weighted so it could then effortlessly do things like this:
...which is of course a very important part of a Ginger Rogers & Fred Astaire movie.

Despite my love of the actors, I really want to give this movie one star. But I'm going to give it two stars due to the scene where they navy guys are all practicing for a benefit show on the ship deck, and some of the men have to be "dames." I really don't want to see it again, though. There were entertaining moments, but I think the whole buzz behind this movie is that it has what is considered to be one of Astaire and Rogers's best dance numbers (with the 25 pound dress). But that was not enough for me. I still love them in general, though!

Where the Boys Are (1960)

Four "co-eds" from a fictional university in the midwest head to Ft. Lauderdale for spring break (which is still called spring vacation in 1960).

Apparently a wild spring break time in 1960 meant crowded beaches, public drunkenness, long discussions about sex while fending off the advances of young men, and limbo.
The four girls rent a hotel room and set about finding boys - all except the one who seems to be named Merritt - although that name seems preposterous - who is brainy and wants to study. But of course she ends up meeting someone, it's a silly teen beach movie!
The girls have the cutest outfits, the cutest lines...
MERRITT: Okay, what happened to you?
MELANIE: I've been dining, I've been dancing, I've been drinking! Shh!
MERRITT: (to Tuggle) Put on some coffee, I'll get her things off.
MELANIE: Mair I've been drinking grasshoppers! Mair have you ever tasted a grasshopper?
MERRITT: Not intentionally, no.
MELANIE: No, Mair no, not a grasshopper that hops, Mair, a grasshopper in a glass that's green!
TUGGLE: You'll be green, too, in the morning.

The upbeat story takes a dark turn towards the end that left me kind of green, myself. I started to give it three stars but I think that having date rape be part of a beach movie - with the message that you'll be ruined for life if you don't stay a virgin till you get a ring - is a little harsh, so I'm deducting a star.

Still, it's an entertaining look at what life might have looked like on the cusp of the sexual revolution when good girls were still supposed to be desperately trying to hold on to old-fashioned values against the turning tide and the evening's entertainment might include a live girl in a fish tank. How's a good girl to compete with a soaking wet dime-store version of Marilyn Munroe?
Two stars - might be persuaded to watch again...

Mame (1958)

Few things to note right off the bat:
- this version is not the musical
- this is going in my top ten - or at least my top fifteen



Rosalind Russell plays Mame, the flamboyant single aunt into whose care Patrick Dennis is deposited after his father's death. Mame knows how to redecorate her large New York City home; Mame knows how to throw a party; Mame knows how to dress (the costumes in this one are a real treat), but what does Mame know about raising a child?

It turns out that Mame's frank manner and doting affection more than make up for her lack of experience. In a series of scenes from Patrick's life, we see him pulled between the staunchly conservative influence of the trustee of his father's estate "Uncle Dwight" and the flaming liberal influence of Mame.

It's a fun and funny series of incidents with lots of colorful characters and one very cute kid. I also loved the funky decor which almost functioned as an extra character. There are two long-suffering servant characters - a Chinese butler/valet and an Irish maid who are ridiculously and endearingly loyal. How they resisted making them sillier and more offensive I'll never know, but they aren't bad.




I am very fond of zany Aunt Mame and her antics. Four stars and I definitely plan to watch again.

The Wings of Eagles (1957)

I could not finish watching this movie about a Navy pilot played by John Wayne. He's a maverick who likes to take risks and drive his wife crazy. There's a lot of stuff about the need to fund the Navy's airplanes and pilots and the politics surrounding that which I didn't care enough about to follow.

I plan to come back and finish it, but I might not. John Wayne is ALWAYS playing John Wayne and I guess I'm not as interested in how the Navy learned to land planes on boats as I thought I might be.
UPDATE: Well I did go back to this and skipped to the end to see what happens. Seems he ends up a big hero (surprise) and retiring with some impressive war wounds. At least I thought they were war wounds until I skipped around and discovered they were caused by a domestic accident. Also his long suffering wife is LONG-suffering.
I guess bio-pics tend to be like this: long and rambling and not making much sense or necessarily paying off the way you think they will.
One star, not planning to watch again.

1776, the Musical (1972)

A musical comedy about the founding of the country? Sign me up for that! At present moment I am watching the decision to debate independence in congress be decided by Rhode Island after returning from the privy.

Ribald jokes, complaints about the plumbing and the flies - this is probably a pretty realistic portrayal of congress, actually. I know history has to be manipulated a little to allow for the right number of characters and things like rhymes in songs - but is that really much worse than the changes that are made in history books?
I was about to say something about this movie making history interesting to young people but since Kimberly just fell asleep I am going to abandon this line of thought.
Two stars for the movie, three stars for making me think about US history on Forth of July weekend.
Will probably try to watch again with the kids next week.