Please Murder Me

It is difficult sometimes to remember that just because we first see an actor in a particular role, at a particular age, that isn’t necessarily what they’ve always been. It’s easy to picture, for example, Jack Nicholson as the rebellious Randall McMurphy and forget the dashing young hero of The Raven, or to see Kurt Russell as any number of scruffy wisecrackers and forget the fact that he started out as a child actor. So when viewing an older movie, it’s sometimes surprising to see an actor or actress from well before the age at which one usually pictures them.

Like most children of the 80s, I was familiar with Angela Lansbury primarily from Murder, She Wrote or from her voice-acting as the kindly Mrs. Potts in Beauty and the Beast. If I had ever stopped to think of it, I’m sure it would have been obvious to me that she didn’t simply stroll into Hollywood as a senior citizen. But it’s not something that really occurs to a person until one sees the evidence of it, and so it came as a bit of a surprise to see her playing the role of Myra Leeds in Please Murder Me, a 1956 film noir directed by Peter Godfrey. And in this film, she’s not a meddling crime solver; rather, she’s at the center of the crime herself, as a young woman accused of murdering her husband.

The Adventures of Tintin

I ought to be more familiar with Tintin than I am. My local public library’s children’s section had hardbound volumes of all or most of the comics in the series as I was growing up. I could have gone through pretty much the whole run. But I first looked at them when I was still in first grade — perhaps just a bit too young for a series that was aimed more at teenagers. A couple books didn’t catch on with me for whatever reason, and I never went back to them. Instead, I wound up going over and reading a different Franco-Belgian classic comic, Asterix (also aimed at young adults, but more overtly funny to a youngster). I don’t regret reading the Asterix comics for a second (as an adult I can see how brilliant they are), but I do regret passing up on Tintin way back when.

This “almost but not quite” familiarity left me with an odd form of anticipation when Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg came out with The Adventures of Tintin in 2011. I knew what Tintin was, unlike most Americans, but I knew very little more. I knew the general tone of the stories, but not the specifics. I could recognize Tintin, Snowy, Captain Haddock, and Thompson and Thomson… but I didn’t know the characters. Seeing the previews was an odd mix of nostalgia and novelty at the same time. It became one of my most anticipated films of 2011… but as bad luck would have it, I didn’t manage to see it until now. That said, it was well worth the wait.

Brideless Groom / A Trip to the Moon / The Rounders

Got an assortment of short films to cover today. Rather than give each of them individual full-length reviews — I find it hard to justify giving a 20-minute film an entire day to itself — I thought I would cover the three of them in a single post. Two are comedies, one is science-fiction; two are effectively silent films, one is a talkie; and all are black and white and older than 1950.

The three films? The Three Stooges short Brideless Groom, Georges Méliès’s famous A Trip to the Moon, and the Charlie Chaplin Keystone short The Rounders.

Sherlock, Jr.

The second part of my Buster Keaton double feature from the other day– and the intentional part — was the 1924 film Sherlock, Jr. It’s one of Keaton’s better-known films, and one of the more critically acclaimed ones. Like many of Keaton’s works, it not only stars the comic actor, it was directed by him as well. Unlike many of those works, in this case the director credit is given to Keaton outright and is not shared with another director.

Keaton plays a theatre projectionist who fantasizes about being a private detective. He gets his chance when a watch belonging to his girlfriend’s father (Joe Keaton) is stolen. Unfortunately for the would-be hero, his rival (Ward Crane) has framed him for the crime.

Our Hospitality

I didn’t actually watch Our Hospitality intentionally, at least not at first. I hadn’t even been aware of this 1923 Buster Keaton film (directed by Keaton himself with John G. Blystone) until I was about 20 minutes into it. This is, I’ll grant, a bit of an odd situation for movie viewing, but it’s simple enough. I had intended to watch Sherlock Jr., one of Keaton’s more acclaimed films that I’d been wanting to see for some time. But when I selected it, the streaming service I was using had it as the second feature following Our Hospitality; this wasn’t mentioned on the Sherlock Jr. icon, and I was looking away from the screen at the time the title card came up. So it took a little while before I realized that what I was watching wasn’t merely different from what I expected from Sherlock Jr. but was rather a different film altogether.

And so instead of a relatively short feature, I wound up watching a moderately long Buster Keaton double feature. Well, there are certainly worse ways to spend an evening, and worse films to stumble onto accidentally than Our Hospitality.

Oldboy (2003)

I have to confess, I had not previously seen any examples of Korean cinema. And indeed, had I merely stumbled across Chan-wook Park’s Oldboy blindly, I might have thought the premise sounded moderately interesting, but I may still have passed it by. But blogging can be good for broadening one’s horizons. I had seen Oldboy bandied about the comments sections of some other film blogs, and it was always praised as being a captivating, dark, and “sick” film. I had thought “sick” was simply being used in that odd slang sense of “really cool”, but this wasn’t the case; they actually meant sick as in disturbing. But I’m still glad I took the time to watch it, as it is very well done. Plus, the film is being remade in English by Spike Lee (set to debut this coming October), so the film turning up on my radar now meant it was a convenient time to see it before the remake — and thus before the arguments over whether the remake was as good, better, or an utter travesty.

Oldboy tells the story of Oh Dae-su (Min-sik Choi), a gregarious drunk who one fateful night has to be bailed out of jail for drunk and disorderly charges. But before his friend can take him home, Dae-su is abducted by unknown figures, and finds himself in a rather different prison. An apparently privately-run prison. He is not told why he is there, nor for how long his stay is to be. After fifteen years, he is released, just as suddenly and inexplicably as he was imprisoned. A greatly changed man, Dae-su sets out to find out who was responsible for his imprisonment, and why it was done — and to get his revenge.

The Hunger Games

With the Harry Potter film franchise ending in 2011, it was only natural that Hollywood would start looking for the next young-adult sci-fi/fantasy franchise to exploit. Fortunately for them, there was already an heir apparent, with Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy already catching fire (if you’ll forgive the pun) with juvenile readers. Production started shortly before Harry Potter ended, and the first film debuted a little more than a year ago, in March 2012, under the directorship of Gary Ross.

Set in the future dystopia Panem, The Hunger Games starts with a brief explanation of what the world and the games are like. A civil war had erupted in Panem in the past, as different districts revolted against the capital. The rebels lost. Hard. As punishment, the Hunger Games were established. Once a year, a boy and a girl between the ages of 12 and 18 are selected from each of the 12 districts. These 24 youths are then made to compete against each other in the Games, a brutal battle royale in an environment that the capital gamesmen can manipulate. There can be only one survivor. By the time of the film, the televised games are now in their 74th year, and the capital presents them as if they’re a big show of unity and fun for all the districts. The children of the districts have a differing opinion, as might be expected. When her twelve-year-old sister’s name is drawn in her first year of eligibility, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) volunteers to be the female tribute for district 12 in her place.

The Shadow Strikes

Released in 1937, The Shadow Strikes is the earliest film based on the pulp fiction and radio hero, the Shadow. In fact, it may just be the earliest film based on any superhero — if we can apply the term to the Shadow. Normally I wouldn’t hesitate to do so, as he’s certainly a forefather of the genre and has plenty of thematic similarities, but it’s a little more difficult to apply the term in this particular film.

See, to some extent it’s unclear as to whether director Lynn Shores and the writers were fully aware of who the Shadow is. While it’s based off an actual Shadow story, “The Ghost of the Manor”, it doesn’t feel entirely like a Shadow adventure.

Chronological Bond: From Russia With Love

Year: 1963
Series Number: 2
Director: Terence Young
James Bond: Sean Connery

After just short of two months, it’s time to return to the James Bond series with the second film, From Russia With Love. I hadn’t intended for it to take so long to get back to “Chronological Bond”, but I honestly just lost track of it for a bit. But delays or not, the series will saunter onward.

As I enjoyed Dr. No, I was glad to see that director Terence Young was still at the helm for the second film. I already knew Connery would remain as Bond for a while, of course, but the Bond directors aren’t talked about quite as much as the Bond actors. It’s a shame because there are definite signs of growth in From Russia With Love in terms of the action and the story.

X Marks the Spot

“X Marks the Spot.” It’s a phrase that has become a cliche, an easy way to designate certain locations as being of significance. It immediately conjures up visions of treasure maps and hidden secrets. Given its inherent declaration of exciting adventure, it’s perhaps surprising that only two feature films have ever used the title — this one from 1942 and an even more obscure one in 1931. (IMDb lists this film as a remake of the other, but as the plots are dissimilar, this seems erroneous.) It may be even more surprising that the title seems to have little to do with the film. There is no hunt for a treasure, although there are certainly secrets, and there is no X revealing the location of what’s hidden. The “Spot” is just a nightclub, albeit a significant one.

The film is by director George Sherman, a prolific “second feature” (i.e., B-movie) filmmaker whose biggest title as a director was Big Jake. Sherman directed a vast number of westerns, but X Marks the Spot is a noir mystery set in the era immediately following the repeal of Prohibition.