The Jazz Singer (1927)

  Content warning:  blackface

Jack Robin (Al Jolson) wants to be a jazz singer but on the eve of his big break on Broadway, he learns that his father (Werner Oland), a cantor, is too sick to perform at synagogue.  Even though Jack has been estranged for many years for not following his father's footsteps, he feels conflicted.  Should he follow his dreams and sing secular music or should he listen to his parents and perform only for God?  

So this is the big one.  The first talking picture.  Without taking away that achievement, which was pretty remarkable, this isn't a particularly good film on its own merits.  The story is lame, the songs are crap, and it hasn't aged well (the minstrel routine he does is full-body cringe).  It's a historical artifact but really not worth watching outside of a film class.  Still, as a film nerd, I felt like I had to so I did.  And now I'm saving you all.  Don't watch this, even though it is on Tubi for free.  Watch Singin' in the Rain instead.  

In other news, I watched the first season of Mob Psycho 100 (the anime, not the live action) on Hulu.  The animation took me a while to get into, it's not a style I like, but I did really enjoy the story and the characters.  If you liked One Punch Man, it's done by the same people.  In fact, there's a cameo early in one of the episodes.  The first season is only 12 episodes so you can knock it out in a day.

Sunrise (1927)

  Hey, look, it's a good movie!  Only took 97 years.  

A man (George O'Brien) contemplates killing his wife (Janet Gaynor) in order to please his mistress (Margaret Livingston) but ends up remembering why he got married in the first place.

I'm pretty sure this is also a Tyler Perry movie but it's public domain so more power to him.  

Jokes aside, this felt timeless.  Murnau really couldn't be beat as one of the greatest filmmakers of the Golden Age and I'm a little sad he seems to have fallen out of favor when they do retrospectives.  Obviously he's best known for sci-fi and horror but this is a pretty decent rom-com.  It was up for four Oscars in the very first ceremony and won three of them, including Best Picture.  It's available for free on Tubi and I encourage you to check it out.

The Gold Rush (1925)

  This spans like three holidays so it's pretty good for this transition period between Thanksgiving and Christmas.  Unless you are a godless heathen who already has a tree up.  You sicken me.

A gold rush brings prospectors of all stripes up to the harsh wilderness of Alaska to try their luck, including an intrepid Little Tramp (Charlie Chaplin).  He faces starvation, attempted murder, frostbite, and heartache pursuing his dreams.

It is wild watching this movie from damn near a century ago portraying only a generation back.  It's set in 1898 which was less than 30 years from when it was filmed.  Imagine how modern they thought they were.  And now we're looking back three times as much distance and it seems insanely far away.  

Also, everyone in this movie is wearing real fur.  And there's a real bear.  Insane.  

Story-wise, this isn't great.  It's very simple, more a series of vignettes than a throughline.  The love story in particular didn't work for me.  The technical aspects of film-making and the setups of the physical comedy gags, however, are astonishingly good.  They are why Chaplin is so highly regarded despite being a d-bag.

The Criterion Channel has the restored 1925 version as well as the 1942 re-release Chaplin re-edited.  

The Phantom Carriage (1921)

  With a little work, this could be a really good pandemic film.  Not that I'm advocating for such a thing, but the thought occurred to me.

A Swedish folk tale has it that the last person to die on New Year's Eve must spend the coming year as Death's carriage driver, collecting souls as a punishment for the evil they did in life.  Because if you die on New Year's, clearly you were doing something wrong with your life(?).  David Holm (director Victor Sjöström) doesn't believe in such nonsense so no one is more surprised than he when a drunken brawl lands him in the worst job imaginable.  The outgoing carriage driver is David's old friend Georges (Tore Svennberg), who coincidentally told him the legend to begin with, and Georges pulls no punches with his buddy, becoming The Ghost of Christmas Future and the angel Clarence all at once, taking David back through the shitty decisions that led not just him to his present moment, but also the young Sister Edit (Astrid Holm), a Salvation Army volunteer that tried to get David to turn his life around and is now dying of tuberculosis that David knowingly infected her with.  Yes, this one-man superspreader laughed and coughed deliberately in people's faces knowing he carried a potentially deadly disease.  Georges forces David to confront the consequences of his selfishness and lack of empathy.

This was made in 1921.  It is black and white, silent with dialogue cards, and it's just as relevant today.  Ain't that some shit?  The pacing is glacial for less than two hours running time but it's still very much worth a watch.  The special effects were amazing for their time and the score is quire good.  Very haunting.  I do feel obliged to mention the movie shows a suicide, an attempted murder-suicide, and implied domestic violence.  The Swedes were not fucking around over here.  It's currently streaming on the Criterion Channel.

The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926)

  This is a stunning film when you consider that it's all made of paper cutouts on colored backgrounds.  I think I read somewhere that it's the oldest stop-motion animated film and it was directed by a woman.  The original print and negative were lost but it was restored from a British print in 1999.

Told entirely in paper silhouettes, the film tells several of the 1001 Arabian Nights tales about Prince Achmed, an evil sorcerer, a magic flying horse, a beautiful maiden rescued from a land of demons, Aladdin and the magic lamp, and more.  The cutouts are beautifully intricate and it's clear a lot of effort went into this film.

I know silent films aren't for everyone but I really encourage you to take the time to watch it, not just for the technical achievements on display but to see an art form in its earliest stage.  People were still experimenting with what movies could be and Weimar-era Germany was a goldmine for creativity and boundary pushing.  It's currently streaming on the Criterion Channel.

Nanook of the North (1922)

  This is not nominated for this year's Oscars.  It's actually from my film class, which is Cinema of Exploration.  We've watched a couple of other things, but only bits in class so this is the first one I've watched all the way through.

This proto-documentary follows Nanook, an Inuit man from the polar circle, as he goes through several recreations of traditional indigenous activities, like building an igloo, trading hunted skins, and killing a seal and a walrus.  The filmmaker, Robert Flaherty, spent a couple of years trying to put together enough footage of "natural" life before saying Fuck It, and just scripting nearly the whole damn thing.  Still, it's pretty pioneering in that camera equipment in 1922 wasn't exactly the most user friendly or convenient, and it does show the arctic circle in the days before global warming.  You can watch the whole thing on Wikipedia or YouTube.  As a warning, it is super racist and they actually show real animals being killed.  My advice is to watch the film for the nature bits and fast forward past the trading post scene and the hunting scenes.

This film is a great example of accepting our past, warts and all.  This indigenous family was exploited for the entertainment of white people and that is inexcusable but that doesn't mean the film doesn't have value.  It's part of our collective human history and facing it is the only way we'll learn to be better.

Metropolis (1927)

I think this is the first film I've ever posted three times.  Again, with the German film class.  Get ready to learn some things, people.  This is also from the Weimar period, though much further along.  Again, you can see themes of totalitarianism, rejection of authority, a strong streak of communism, and also a reaction to technology in general.  Particularly, it shows the upper classes blindingly seduced by easy (and therefore evil) technology in the form of a beautiful but unattainable woman, who is also a popular demagogue engaged in stirring up the masses to both turn on their betters and destroy themselves in the process.  No foreshadowing there.  Posted previously 30 Nov 13.

I finally got to the Completed version.  It was still at #50 in my DVD queue but first on my streaming.  Meaning right now I probably have enough movies on my list for the next decade.

Anyway, I have to say the restorers did a great job putting the pieces back in and tying together the parts that are still missing.  The added footage was badly degraded and you can immediately tell which scenes were recovered because they look almost like they have a black stocking over them.  Still, this is a classic work and to have found any of the lost footage at all is amazing.

It's such a highly stylized film, really beautiful in its art and symbolism.  I would really encourage anyone interested in the beginnings of film to check it out.
Originally posted 7/18/11    I think this might be the oldest movie I've ever reviewed on this site.  It's certainly the first completely silent one.

I am ashamed to say that I had never seen Fritz Lang's Metropolis before.  I had heard of it, of course, what geek hasn't, but I had never actually sat down and watched it.

It stands up surprisingly well for being 84 years old.  I mean, think about that.  That is older than all four of my grandparents.  Do you have a living relative that was old enough to have seen this movie?  Forgetting the fact that it's a German film and was cut to pieces in most cases, did they like it?

The version I saw was the 2001 F. W. Murnau Foundation version that had been restored.  In 2008, about 30 more minutes of original footage was found in Argentina and New Zealand and a Complete Metropolis was released in 2010.  That one is in my queue at #447 right now.  What?  It'll give you something to look forward to. 

Yes, I cringed a bit leaving that sentence hanging on a preposition.  No, I'm not going to change it. 

Movie.

It is 2026.  The world is divided into the rich ruling class and the poor, who live completely underground.  Freder is the son of the city's founder, Joh Fredersen, and lives a life of ease, cavorting around with weirdly-costumed nymphs in the 'Garden of the Sons' until a woman from Below brings up a gaggle of children to the garden.  Suddenly suspecting there may be more to life than what he knows, Freder heads down into the lower-class ranks and trades places with a worker named only 11811. 

In the pocket of his worksuit, he finds a map leading him down into the catacombs even further beneath the city where the woman he has been searching for, Maria, is preaching to the masses, promising them the arrival of a Mediator to act as the heart between the hands and the head. 

Little does he know that his father and the mad inventor, Rotwang, are spying on the meeting.  Joh Fredersen demands that Rotwang make a Machine-Man (android) that looks like Maria in order to incite the proles into open rebellion so that they can be crushed and their spirits broken.  However, Rotwang is still pissed that Fredersen stole the woman he loved and decides that his mechanical Maria will destroy Metropolis. 

It has elements of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Frankenstein, The Time Machine and probably more. 

Also, a seriously bitchin' table lamp.  Honest-to-God, this was my favorite thing out of the movie.  I would put one of these in my apartment RIGHT NOW if I could find one. 

This is definitely a must-see for sci-fi fans.  I'll probably end up owning the completely restored version at some point.  

Destiny (1921)

  As many of you know, or have guessed by now, I am going to college.  Next semester (which actually starts in less than a month) for my last elective, I am taking German Cinema.  I was trying to get into the Horror Cinema class but that was waitlisted for like 1000 years.  I have no idea what we'll be covering in the class but I don't imagine we'll leave out Fritz Lang.  Serendipitously, I had added one of his films to my queue ages ago and started watching it on vacation.  I finally had time to finish it yesterday.

A young woman (Lil Dagover) is on vacation with her sweetheart (Walter Janssen) when he is stolen away by Death (Bernhard Goetzke).  The young woman begs Death to return her love and he offers her a chance to get him back if she could prevent the death of even one of three young men sharing the same fate.  So the woman steps in to three separate stories to try and save at least one iteration of the man she loves.

In 1921, these special effects must have been astonishing.  Even by today's standards, the storytelling is excellent.  Each mini-story is brought to life by beautiful costuming and sets for Turkey, Venice, and China, and while it is a little weird to see German actors playing Turkish and Chinese characters, you just kind of roll with it.

I haven't seen any movies featuring Death as a character in a long time, but folklore abounds with tales like this one.  Death could be pleaded with, bargained with, occasionally cheated, and sometimes he even took a vacation.  It's nice to go back and look at the representations of life's final mystery through the eyes of different cultures.

Haxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (1922)

  You guys know that Easter is a pagan holiday, right?  That's where the eggs and rabbits and maypoles come from.  In the spirit of Ostara, here's a movie about witches.  But, because life is confusing and generally lacking in pastel softness, it's a Danish silent film from the 20's illustrated by medieval woodcuts.  You're welcome.

Filmmaker Benjamin Christensen takes us back through the dark times of witch burning to draw parallels between the mania of religiously-condoned murder and "modern" psychotherapy.  Modern being a relative term when more than half the diagnoses consist of labelling a woman hysterical and locking her in an institution for her own good.  But, hey, it's better than thumbscrews and drowning, amirite, ladies?

The Criterion Collection blu-ray also includes the 1968 re-release, with a nifty jazz score and a rather boring voiceover.  Skip it and watch the silent version instead.  It's trippy and insane, therefore much more entertaining.

Our Hospitality (1923)/Sherlock, Jr. (1924)

  I've been trying to see this Buster Keaton double feature for ages.  It's been in my queue for at least three years, just making its way up the ranks.  It finally got to the top while I was in Puerto Rico.  I got an email saying that it had shipped, then a day later, another email saying that it had been returned.  I obviously wasn't home to receive it and no one would have put it back in the mail so I don't know what happened there.  As soon as I got home, I pushed it back to the top of the queue and Netflix shipped it out again.  I've had their service for about six years now and this is the first time I've ever had this happen.  It's fixed now and everything's fine but it was very odd.

Willie McKay (Buster Keaton) was only a baby when he was sent away from his family home by his mother (Jean Dumas) in the hopes that he would never fall victim to the decades-long feud between the McKay's and their neighbors, the Canfield's.  When he becomes an adult, Willie receives a letter from a lawyer to come and claim his father's estate, so he travels back to his original town.  He meets a young lady (Natalie Talmadge) on the train and falls in love.  Unfortunately, she turns out to be the only daughter of the Canfield's and her father (Joe Roberts) and brothers (Ralph Bushman and Craig Ward) have vowed to murder Willie and put an end to the McKay line.  Willie is invited to dinner by the Girl, which stymies her relatives who cannot offer a guest violence while he is under their roof.  Willie overhears this and must come up with increasingly ridiculous reasons not to leave their property.

Buster Keaton was an early master of physical comedy and this movie holds up just as well today as it did in the 20's.  The parody aspect is well done, all the jokes land, and the scenes in the river are just as tense.  I also found it an added amusement to see Keaton, who was 5'5", standing next to his beloved's brothers, who were 6'2" and probably 6'0"  (I say probably because Craig Ward's IMDb page is incomplete and he doesn't exist in Wikipedia, but based on him standing next to Bushman, I'd guess he was two inches shorter.)  You don't see that kind of height disparity much in movies anymore.  

  A poor film projectionist (Buster Keaton) longs to be a detective but can barely make enough to woo his girl (Kathryn McGuire), especially once he is framed for theft by a disreputable ladies' man called the Sheik (Ward Crane).  Disheartened, the projectionist falls asleep during one of his shifts and dreams that he is world-famous detective Sherlock, Jr. and on the case of a missing string of pearls, which necessitates a car chase, disguises, and a showdown with the villain to rescue the girl.

This is also a very entertaining film, but I don't think it survives at quite the same level as Our Hospitality.  The "movie within a movie" bit has been done so much since 1924 that seeing it here feels a little old hat.  The physical comedy is still top-notch but the plot is pretty weak.  As a double feature, though, these are a great pair of movies.

Phantom of the Opera (1925)

  This is not the musical.  There is no sweet, tortured anti-hero just looking for love.  This is Lon Chaney rocking some mask-worthy features and terrifying poor Mary Philbin.

The Paris Opera House, like any building full of artists, has its share of colorful history.  One local legend has it that a mysterious Phantom patronizes Box 5 and that to see his face is death.  The two most recent owners think it's all such rubbish, until they get a black-edged note from the Phantom himself, telling them that if they know what's good for them they'll put Christine Daae (Mary Philbin) in the lead part, instead of Mademoiselle Carlotta (Virginia Pearson).  They don't and the chandelier comes crashing down.  Meanwhile, Vicomte Raoul de Chagny (Norman Kerry) is disappointed to learn that Christine no longer wants to see him.  She only has ears for the mysterious voice that comes from her dressing room mirror.  She is disappointed and horrified when she finally gets to meet her dulcet-toned stranger and discovers he's actually a cellar-dwelling asylum escapee. 

I can relate.  I've been on a few bad internet dates myself. 

In exchange for returning to the land of the living, she promises the Phantom that she will never see Raoul again...which she immediately breaks by running off with him at a masked ball.  She confesses everything to Raoul and they make plans to escape to England.  But the Phantom has eyes and ears everywhere.  How will they get away?

I have to admit, it was a little weird to watch this movie without the Lloyd Webber score.  It truly has become synonymous with the name.  Still, it's good to see the film go back to the dark roots, since I was gravely disappointed with the ending change in the musical.  I think keeping the climactic final scene would have only strengthened the musical's appeal.  But you can watch it and judge for yourself.

The Ring (1927)/Young and Innocent (1937)

  Written and directed by Hitchcock, this one gets us back on track with the romance, but as a sports drama.

"One Round" Jack Sander (Carl Brisson) works as a boxer at a traveling fair.  The claim is that no one can go more than a round in the ring with him.  That is until Australian heavyweight champion Bob Corby (Ian Hunter) gets in the ring.  Jack manages to last four rounds before being knocked down.  His girlfriend (Lillian Hall-Davis) is pissed, at first, but soon finds herself won over by Corby's charm.  The boxing promoter (Forrester Harvey) tells Jack that the bout was to scout him to be Bob's sparring partner.  He accepts the job but starts to get very worried at the amount of time his girl is spending with the champ. 

It's no Rocky but it's not terrible.  

  This is another "wrongfully accused" film like The 39 Steps but with murder instead of espionage.

When famous actress Christine Clay (Pamela Carme) washes up strangled onto a beach, suspicion falls on Robert Tisdale (Derrick De Marney).  He knew the victim and was spotted fleeing the scene by two witnesses.  Protestations that he was going for help are unheeded.  After a lengthy interrogation by the police, Robert chances upon Erica Burgoyne (Nova Pilbeam), the daughter of the police chief.  At first reluctant, Erica is eventually brought around to the idea that Robert is innocent.  The two must evade capture as they try and find the real culprit.

Unlike in Blackmail, where the main character's problems could have been solved by the cops with one phone call, I can much more easily relate to Tisdale's flight from custody.  It's one thing to be able to claim assault and self-defense.  It's another to have two witnesses place you standing over the body of a dead woman who left you money.  I've never personally been subject to a miscarriage of justice but I'm pretty sure there's not a person alive that doesn't fear wrongful imprisonment.

Easy Virtue (1926)/Jamaica Inn (1939)/The Lodger (1926)

   I was not a fan of this film.  I think it runs into the chasm of what used to be socially acceptable but isn't any more.  There was apparently a remake done in 2008 that Netflix keeps pushing on me.  I might give that one a try and see if it's any more palatable. 

Larita Filton (Isabel Jeans) is divorced from her husband (Franklin Dyall) after he accuses her of infidelity with a painter (Eric Bransby Williams).  Fanning the flames of gossip, the deceased artist had left all his fortune to Larita.  Publically shamed, she hides out in the south of France where she meets good boy John Whittaker (Robin Irvine).  They marry and he takes her home to meet his extremely disapproving mother (Violet Farebrother).  Mrs. Whittaker doesn't know why she immediately dislikes her son's new wife but she's willing to just go with the feeling and makes Larita's life as miserable as possible.  John's younger sister (Dorothy Boyd) finds a picture of Larita in a magazine and rats her out as fast as she can.  Mrs. Whittaker orders Larita to stay away from the party she's throwing but Larita is tired of taking her crap.  She has her maid cut her dress to be just shy of immodest, then swans out to the ball.  She decides her husband has suffered enough and goes to get a divorce.  The End.

No, seriously, that's it.  She decides that she's brought enough shame upon him and leaves him, presumably so she can go die alone like scandalous divorcees are supposed to do.  This seems so alien to me and it wasn't what I was expecting at all.

  Pretty much up until now, all the Hitchcock films have been romantic comedies of some sort or another.  Not this one.

Mary (Maureen O'Hara) has come to the Jamaica Inn on the coast of Cornwall from Ireland to live with her Aunt Patience (Marie Ney) after her family had died.  Unfortunately, the innkeeper (Leslie Banks) is slovenly, abusive, and also a wrecker.  Meaning, he and his crew intentionally douse warning lights, causing ships to crash on the rocks.  Then they recover all the merchandise and murder all the sailors.  The very night Mary arrives, the crew has decided to hang young Jem Trahearne (Robert Newton) for skimming.  Horrified, Mary cuts him loose and the two run off.  They seek assistance from the local lord, Sir Humphrey Pengallon (Charles Laughton), a cunning and fickle man who takes instant interest in our fair Mary.

This is a well-done film, especially the performance by Laughton, but I would have liked to see more humor as a relief from all the bleakness.  That may have just been a misplaced expectation on my part, however, after seeing so many light romances from the director.  

  Apparently, this was the film that launched Hitchcock's career.  It's still a pretty good one.

Someone known only as The Avenger is killing young blonde women in London.  Around the same time, a new lodger (Ivor Novello) takes up residence at the Bunting house.  The Buntings just so happen to have a young blonde daughter named Daisy (June, just June).  Mrs. Bunting (Marie Ault) starts to suspect that the young man upstairs might just be the killer.

Jealousy seems to be one of Hitchcock's favorite emotions, as it motivates a lot of his characters.  Malcolm Keen plays Daisy's cop boyfriend Joe as he is consumed by the green-eyed monster, becoming more and more suspicious of dark and brooding Ivor Novello. 

Secret Agent (1936)/Champagne (1928)/Blackmail (1929)

  Much like The 39 Steps, this movie makes use of the suspense-filled world of international espionage.  War hero Brodie (John Gielgud) is recruited to British Intelligence and sent to Switzerland to eliminate a German spy.  To help him, he is assigned two partners:  the General (Peter Lorre), a mercenary to actually pull the trigger, and Elsa (Madeline Carroll), to pretend to be his wife and handle all the administrative tasks.  But when things start to get complicated, Elsa ad Brodie begin to rethink where their loyalties lie.

This is one of the more well-known films in this collection and there's a reason why.  The star power is good, the dialogue is snappy, and the plot is twisty for the time.  The ending is a little pat but you can't have everything.
  This one took almost three days to get through.  I don't know why but it just did not grab me.  And not for being a silent film, either, since I generally like those.  This one I kept trying to place the score against various pieces from Fantasia.

Betty (Betty Balfour) is a socialite who runs off on a cruise to elope with her boyfriend (Jean Bradin).  Her father (Gordon Harker) thinks that he's a gold-digger and pulls out all the stops to keep his daughter from marrying.

Seriously, he goes to his only child and tells her that he lost his entire fortune, forcing her to live in squalor.  When she remains upbeat and even gets a job, he has a family friend (Ferdinand von Alten) basically stalk her to keep her from going back to her boyfriend.  I would probably sue my dad if he tried to pull that kind of crap. 


  Even though this was made only a year after Champagne, it's a talkie, one of the first to use a double-track for dialogue and score. 

Hitchcock's weird sense of morality is on display here as well.  Alice (Anny Ondra) has a fight with her cop boyfriend (John Longden) and decides to go home with an 'artist' she met at a restaurant (Cyril Ritchard).  He turns out to be a rapey sort of artist and, in the course of the assault, Alice stabs him to death with a kitchen knife.  Terrified (and traumatized) she runs instead of calling the police.  Thanks to a staggering amount of evidence left behind, her boyfriend quickly figures out that she's the murderer but he's willing to help her out.  Then some shady dude (Donald Calthrop) shows up, also with evidence from the scene and tortures Alice and her boyfriend by holding it over their heads.

Here's the thing:  you don't want Alice to go to jail because she's basically a nice girl but she did in fact kill a man (in self-defense) and clearly feels horrendously guilty as a result.  Hitchcock plays with that guilt, framing the blackmailer --who, I must stress, is NOT a murderer-- as worse than the person who committed the crime and the person who is helping to cover it up.  That puts a rather different spin on things, doesn't it?  Does he deserve to go to jail in her place just for being an asshole?

The Farmer's Wife (1928)/The Manxman (1926)

  Seeing how much you guys liked the last collection of films I did, I thought I'd try it again with the Alfred Hitchcock Legacy Collection.  This is a much more manageable number, though, with only 20 movies instead of 50.  They're all Hitchcock, mostly his super-early stuff.  I already saw The Lady Vanishes through Netflix so I skipped it and went for the second one.

The Farmer's Wife is about a widowed farmer (Jameson Thomas) who decides to remarry.  He wanders around his village, proposing to the unmarried women.  However, he finds the prospects to be an exercise in humility as he is turned down again and again.  Finally, he realizes that his best bet is his housekeeper Araminta (Lillian Hall Davis).

Frankly, this was a snoozefest.  It's not particularly clever or funny and it drags on for far too long.  There is very little of the signature wit and a lot of reliance on British country stereotypes.  Give this one a miss.

  This was a much more lively and engaging story, even if I'd seen some variation of it before. 

Two best friends are in love with the same girl.  Pete (Carl Brisson) decides to work his passage to Africa in order to make his fortune.  Before he leaves, he wrings a promise from Kate (Anny Ondra) that she will wait for him.  He asks his best friend Phil (Malcolm Keen) to watch over her while he's gone.  Phil and Kate spend hours and days in close proximity and then, deliverance.  They get a telegram saying that Pete has died.  As sad as they are to have lost a friend, they're also happy they can finally be together.  Except, of course, Pete isn't dead.  He comes back none the wiser about the two of them and Phil convinces Kate to stand by her promise and marry the guy. 

And he's a great guy, that's the shitty part.  If he was an asshole or beat her or humiliated her in public, they would have had no problem declaring their love for each other and telling him to shove off.  But he's not.  He treats Kate like a queen, is good-tempered, and a good provider.  He's even over the moon when he finds out Kate's knocked up.  Apparently they don't teach math in the Isle of Man.

This is much more in line with Hitchcock's later works, being funny in a darkly sad sort of way and having a strong moral bent.  It puts duty over love, the ultimate "Bros before hos" with dire consequences for failing to adhere to that code.

Doll Face (1946)/The Great Gabbo (1929)/The Dancing Pirate (1936)

  This is a fairly cute old musical.  I have a fascination with Burlesque and this story was one of several written by the Queen of Burlesque herself, Gypsy Rose Lee, though billed under her real name, Louise Hovick.  The story concerns a burlesque performer named Doll Face who is rejected from legitimate musicals for being too uncultured.  Her manager hires a smarmy intellectual author to ghostwrite her memoir but then grows jealous when the author starts to pay too much attention.  The performances are quite good, considering that they actually got Perry Como, who famously insisted on only being in productions of "good taste", and Carmen Miranda.  I had always heard the name (she's the lady in the fruit hat) but I never understood why she was famous.  She is absolutely magnetic as The Nosey Best Friend, even if her accent is almost impenetrable.

  Take a look at that picture and tell me if this screams "happy musical" to you.

Me either.

So the movie is about an abusive ventriloquist, his long-suffering assistant, and his dummy.  Contrary to what the DVD sleeve says, this is NOT about how the dummy becomes a manifestation of his darker urges.  Instead, the dummy play the voice of reason and tolerance and the man himself is an arrogant asshole barely able to function in public.  He achieves great fame through his absolute mastery of ventriloquism after his assistant leaves him but ends up going completely insane when he can't win her back.

Erich Von Stroheim looks like a Bond villain (in fact, he actually played the creepy-ass chauffeur in Sunset Boulevard) and this is definitely one of his lesser films.  Avoid at all costs.

  I love how the poster promises Technicolor but the movie is in b&w.  That means I got screwed out of seeing all the pixels I was supposed to. 

Anyway, this is like Pirates of Penzance with a dude who's not a pirate meeting a girl and having to charm a town full of people.

Except this guy is a dance teacher from Boston who gets shanghaied onto a pirate ship to be a galley boy.  He escapes in California but gets caught by the townspeople who are going to hang him until the Alcalde's daughter decides she wants to learn how to waltz.  I would absolutely say pass on it, if it didn't have Frank Morgan as the Alcalde.  He was the Wizard from The Wizard of Oz.  It's weird because the character has almost all the same mannerisms, so it's like watching the Wizard pretending he's a Mexican municipal administrator named Salazar.  Seeing as I don't know any other films Frank Morgan was in, it's interesting to see.

Palooka (1934)/Glorifying the American Girl (1929)/Check and Double Check (1930)

  This is less of a musical than it is a boxing movie. I have seen at least 4 films about boxing (Rocky, Million Dollar Baby, The Fighter, and Girl Fight), which makes me practically an expert. At least on the difference between musicals and boxing. 

So, this is the story of a guy who falls into boxing because he almost runs over Jimmy Durante with a car. 

/considers previous sentence.

Yeah, that's right.  Joe Palooka is the son of famous boxer Pete Palooka who has been raised on a farm by Pete's estranged wife.  Joe's mother hates boxing because it turned Pete into a skirt-chasing alcoholic.  She wants Joe to stay on the farm.  But one day, while delivering eggs to the train station, Joe almost runs over Jimmy Durante who happens to be a boxing manager.  Durante immediately signs him to a contract and puts him in the ring with the current champion, William Cagney (James Cagney's brother).  Normally, this would be a slaughter but Cagney is drunk during the fight and goes down after a punch to the stomach.  Now Joe is the new Champ and with the title comes a nightclub singer played by Lupe Velez.  A professional gold-digger, Lupe wraps Joe around her finger to the discomfiture of his manager.  Bill Cagney catches Joe out with Lupe and manages to talk him into a re-match.  Durante is understandably concerned about this because Joe can't actually fight and every match he's had has been rigged.  Joe's mom shows up to try and break up his relationship with Lupe and Joe's dad shows up to train him. 

Bet you're thinking "yeah, yeah, Joe suddenly shows enormous talent after being trained by his dad for a few days and wins the fight", aren't you?

Well you'd be wrong.  Joe gets his ass kicked.  His own manager bet against him in the fight, double-crossing a gangster to do it, and then absconds from town.  He leaves the winnings to Joe, who retires to the farm with his mom and the girl next door to open a bed and breakfast.  I'm not entirely certain what the moral is here.

  Ok, I can admit it. I didn't really watch this one. I had just started it when my cousin called and, instead of hitting pause, I just hit mute. So by the time we were done talking, I had no friggin idea what was going on with this movie. I came in during some weird dance scene with women dressed as allegorical figures and then there was some comedy bit about men in a tailor's shop. Your guess is as good as mine. 

According to the DVD sleeve it's about a girl who gets discovered by talent scouts while working behind the counter at a sheet music store and becomes a Zeigfeld girl.  So there you go then.

  Yep, it's blackface. 

This was a bit of a shock to me.  I had heard of the Amos 'n Andy radio program in the same way I had heard of other old things, in that I was aware that they existed but not exactly sure what they were about.  Finding out that it was a comedy program based on culturally insensitive stereotypes was like finding out that your grandmother had a sex change.

The plot itself is horribly contrived.  Maybe that's what passed for wit back in 1930?  I don't know.  I've seen Scooby-Doo episodes that were more well-thought-out.

This movie is the first to introduce Duke Ellington and his Cotton Club Band to American audiences, so there's that I guess.  The movie doesn't linger very long on the actual black people since it invested so much of the budget on black greasepaint to make white people look like black people.