On its opening day (10.2.30) the widescreen 70mm version of Raoul Walsh‘s The Big Trail (2:1 aspect ratio) played in exactly two theatres — Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Los Angeles and the Roxy Theatre in New York City. The rest of the country saw a 35mm boxy version.
The exceptional clarity of image and seemingly enhanced sound in the 70mm version is worth the price in itself. The 70-mm version ran 122 minutes; the 35mm boxy was 12 minutes shorter.
And that was all she wrote for widescreen cinema until the debut of CinemaScope in 1953.
Jordan Ruimy‘s Best Films of Martin Scorsese poll popped yesterday. Ruimy tallied the preferences of 114 critics, and the top three — no surprise — are Goodfellas, Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. I’m sorry but those are vaguely boring, right-down-the-middle choices. The Des Moines Realtors Association would’ve picked these.
HE’s top three are Raging Bull, The Wolf of Wall Street and The Last Temptation of Christ.
The two least admired Scorsese films on Ruimy’s list are Boxcar Bertha and Who’s That Knocking On My Door?, which got no votes.
The voted-upon Scorsese flicks with the lowest counts are The Color of Money, New York, New York and The Aviator, which snagged one vote each. Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Shutter island and Gangs of New York got two votes each. Cape Fear got 3, Kundun, 4 and Silence, 7.
HE’s three least favorite Scorsese flicks are Kundun, Shutter Island and The Aviator.
HE commenter Manwe Sulimo: “Why do you think festival critics are meh on Ferrari?”
HE: “Perhaps because festival critics don’t like it when a movie is delivering two things at once, an emotionally intimate family drama along with an exciting, high-torque racecar flick. Maybe they think it should be just one thing and not both at the same time?
“Ferrari is mostly an intimate, dialogue-driven thing about Enzo Ferrari’s family and business matters and therefore doesn’t really commit to the racing stuff in a sustained, whole-hog, Steve McQueen-in-Le Mans way until the final 35 minutes or thereabouts.
“I’m guessing that younger (Millennial, Zoomer) critics might feel a tad removed or skeptical given that Ferrari isn’t set in an era that they personally relate to. 1957 (i.e., the year of the Mille Miglia tragedy) was 66 years ago. For critics who regard the 1980s as a long time ago, that may be a bridge too far.
“What I particularly loved about Ferrari is Eric Messerschmidt‘s cinematography, which carries the Gordon Willis torch and is very reminiscent of the palette of The Godfather, Part II.”
The Ferrari wikipage has a section about the genesis of the project, and right at the top it says that director Michael Mann “first began exploring making Ferrari around 2000, having discussed the project with Sydney Pollack.”
This suggests why the late David Rayfiel, the screenwriting “colorist” who worked on several respected Pollack films (The Way We Were, Three Days of the Condor, The Firm) as an uncredited “pinch hit” guy…it suggests why Rayfiel, who died 12 years ago, has an IMDB credit for “additional literary credit” on Ferrari.
Having just noticed this credit, a friend asked me if I heard Rayfiel’s voice while watching Ferrari.
HE reply: “I could not hear David’s voice — not in the same way I’ve heard his voice in all those Pollack films. But what do I know?”
“JBM” in HE comment thread: “Mann was the final writer, combining two scripts by the late Troy Kennedy Martin (died in ’09) and Rayfiel (died in ’11). But Martin did the heavy lifting.”
For one part of America young girls are flooding theaters to see Taylor Swift's movie. I wish them the best in this brief moment of time that passes all too quickly as I know all too well. pic.twitter.com/sBM2ajqa4U
Fair HE Statement: Even in the tragic and traumatic here-and-now, it’s not anti-Semitic to explain or acknowledge the root causes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Familiar quote: “If the Arabs were to to put down their weapons, there would be peace. If the Jews were to put down their weapons, there’d be no more Jews in the Middle East.”
Funny: “I think we need to shut down Harvard University until we figure out what the hell’s going on.”
As I noted a month ago, Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall is a did-she-do-it? film — a smartly written marital mystery-slash-courtroom procedural. It’s about about whether or not a German writer named Sandra (likely Oscar nominee Sandra Huller) may be guilty of murdering her husband Vincent (Swann Arlaud) by pushing him out of a third-floor window in their Grenoble A-frame.
This is the source of the film’s tension, and what makes Anatomy a fascinating bad-marriage film.
Brody observes that once the film has revealed that Huller’s character is bisexual, it is all but guaranteed that she’s innocent. Because in today’s woke-subservient climate no progressive-minded filmmaker is allowed to make a bisexual woman into a villain of any kind. It’s simply not done.
In Brody’s words: “There’s the revelation that Sandra is bisexual, which, as I watched the movie, struck me as an instant exoneration, for the simple reason that a film governed by high-minded consensus would no longer dare to posit a bisexual woman as a wanton killer.”
“I’ll tell you three things. All writers are children. 50% of them are drunks. And up until very recently writers in Hollywood were gag men…most of them still are gag men but we call them writers.”
Elia Kazan‘s The Last Tycoon is an adaptation of an unfinished F. Scott Fitzgerald novel about MGM production chief Irving Thalberg. Thalberg is called Monroe Stahr in the film, and is played by Robert DeNiro in an extremely irritating fashion.
It was DeNiro’s annoyingly boorish performance that persuaded me to never see Kazan’s film a second time. (I caught it once in late November of ’76.) I’d always read that Thalberg was quite the MGM wunderkind, the power behind the throne — a blend of class and willfulness and concentrated drillbit smarts that everyone admired.
The Last Tycoon runs 123 minutes, and there were very few scenes when I wasn’t muttering to myself, “God, what an asshole.” Not to mention that idiot grin of DeNiro’s. 15 minutes into the film I was wondering why Kazan, one of the greatest-ever directors and a guy who could really see into actors and calculate what they were capable of bringing to a role…why did Kazan cast the dorky DeNiro, unless the idea was to undermine the Thalberg legend? A very perverse film, and the two scenes below reminded me of that.
In Henry Koster‘s Desiree (29th Century Fox, 11.16.54), Marlon Brando‘s performance as Napoleon Bonaparte was actually pretty good. Plus the 30 year-old Brando was the right age to play Napoleon at the time of his crowning, which happened in 1804 when he was 35. Phoenix is a great actor but he was 48 during filming and looks it. He’ll turn 50 on 10.28.24.
Not so much the film itself. An “historical romance” aimed at impressionable women. The music score was created by Alex North; the CinemaScope cinematography by Milton R. Krasner. Jean Simmons played the titular role of Desiree Clary. Costarring Merle Oberon (44 at the time) as Josephine. Plus Michael Rennie, Cameron Mitchell, Elizabeth Sellars, Charlotte Austin, Cathleen Nesbitt, Carolyn Jones and Evelyn Varden.
Go to 4:55 — that’s when a nearby explosion rocks this Palestinian woman’s building, and yet she more or less shrugs it off and keeps talking. Courage.
No food, water, gas, electricity…nothin’.
If I was a resident of Gaza City you can bet I’d be locking up and humping it south with a backpack and sleeping bag, as long as it takes.
Martin Scorsese‘s films have always been clear about who the lead character is, and why we should care about him or her or at least feel a certain kinship, even if they were criminals or morally compromised in some way. We always absorbed the stories that unfolded from this lead character’s point of view.
Goodfellas had a point of view — i.e., Ray Liotta’s or Henry Hill‘s.
The Wolf of Wall Street had a point of view — Leonardo DiCaprio’s or Jordan Belfort‘s.
Mean Streets had a point of view — Harvey Keitel’s.
The King of Comedy has a point of view — Robert DeNiro‘s or Rupert Pupkin‘s.
Casino had a point of view — Ace Rothstein‘s or Robert De Niro‘s.
The Departed had a point of view — Leo’s for the most part although Matt Damon and Jack Nicholson muscle their way in from time to time.
Taxi Driver had a clear point of view — Robert De Niro‘s or Travis Bickle‘s.
In The Age of Innocence, the point of view was owned by Daniel Day Lewis or Newland Archer.
Raging Bull certainly had a point of view — Robert De Niro‘s or Jake LaMotta‘s.
The Last Temptation of Christ had a point of view — i.e., Willem Dafoe’s or Jesus of Nazareth‘s.
After Hours had a point of view — Griffin Dunne‘s or Paul Hackett‘s.
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore had a clear point of view — Ellen Burstyn‘s.
None of these points of view (including Jesus’s) were necessarily imbued with moral instruction, and so goodness and morality weren’t preached.
We didn’t go to these films to receive moral messaging about the right moral path that the lead character should take. We were informed about how these characters felt about what was happening, and what they did in response to these forces of nature to further or clarify their game. They may have felt conflicted or guilty, but their stories were strictly about how they saw things and what they needed to do to fulfill their fate or at least stay out of trouble.
I’m sorry but Killers of the Flower Moon has no real clear point of view. It starts with the point of view of Leo’s Ernest Burkhart character but it kinda switches over to Lily Gladstone‘s Mollie Burkhart, and then it spreads out and diffuses.
Even the 19-minute chapter on the Osage murder saga in Mervyn LeRoy‘s The FBI Story (’59) has a clear point of view — James Stewart‘s or Chip Hardesty‘s.
The whole point of the book — it’s right there in the title — is that the Osage murder case launched the FBI. But that’s not in the film. Because Scorsese didn’t want to make a film about white guys.
