An interesting list by Stephen Sondheim of his 40 favorite films re-emerged after his passing last week:
1. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Alfred L. Werker, 1939)
2. Bang the Drum Slowly (John D. Hancock, 1973)
3. The Barbarian Invasions (Denys Arcand, 2003)
4. They Were Five (Julien Duvivier, 1936)
5. Character (Mike van Diem, 1997)
6. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)
7. The Clock (Vincente Minnelli, 1945)
8. The Contract (Krzysztof Zanussi, 1980)
9. Dance of Life (Julien Duvivier, 1937)
10. Dead of Night (Alberto Cavalcanti, Robert Hamer, Basil Dearden and Charles Crichton, 1945)
11. Elephant (Gus Van Sant, 2003)
12. The Elephant Man (David Lynch, 1980)
13. Fires on the Plain (Kon Ichikawa, 1959)
14. Fresh (Boaz Yakin, 1994)
15. The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford, 1940)
16. Hangover Square (John Brahm, 1945)
17. Au Hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966)
18. Henry Fool (Hal Hartley, 1997)
19. High and Low (Akira Kurosawa, 1963)
20. Lone Star (John Sayles, 1996)
21. A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1946)
22. The Mind Reader (Roy Del Ruth, 1933)
23. The More, the Merrier (George Stevens, 1943)
24. The Nasty Girl (Michael Verhoeven, 1990)
25. Night Must Fall (Richard Thorpe, 1937)
26. The Oak (Lucian Pintilie, 1992)
27. The Official Story (Luis Puenzo, 1985)
28. The Organiser (Mario Monicelli, 1963)
29. Out of the Fog (Anatole Litvak, 1941)
30. Panique (Julien Duvivier, 1946)
31. Pygmalion (Leslie Howard and Anthony Asquith, 1938)
32. Adam’s Rib (Vyacheslav Kristofovich, 1990)
33. The Sea Wolf (Michael Curtiz, 1941)
34. A Slave of Love (Nikita Mikhalkov, 1976)
35. Smiles of a Summer Night (Ingmar Bergman, 1955)
36. The Thief of Bagdad (Ludwig Berger, Zoltan Korda, Michael Powell, Tim Whelan and William Cameron Menzies, 1940)
37. This is Spinal Tap (Rob Reiner, 1984)
38. To the Ends of the Earth (Robert Stevenson, 1948)
39. Torchy Blane in Chinatown (William Beaudine, 1939)
40. War and Peace (Sergei Bondarchuk, 1966-67)
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swanstep (2631)
2 years ago
@jay440. Interesting list. I've seen 23/40 and few more I've actually got copies of on a hard drive somewhere. A whole bunch then are essentially completely new to me. I'll be sure to make a list of those and to try to track down and watch a few in honor of Sondheim.
Possibly of interest. The following Reddit group is an awesome source of theater recordings including, especially right now, Sondheimiana:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProshotMusicals/
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jay440 (107)
2 years ago
Thanks for the link. It was genuinely moving to see stories of New York piano bars filling up with people, singing his songs in tribute. And in an odd sort-of Psycho connection, his #25 pick, Night Must Fall, about a nice guy serial killer, was a part he connected with:
"In an interview last year, Sondheim claimed that he was an adept actor since his early years and always wanted to play dark characters. According to the late legend, he always had a penchant for playing mentally disturbed characters and was obsessed with one particular figure from the play Night Must Fall by Emlyn Williams.
“I was good in college,” Sondheim claimed. “They always cast me, every play they did, if there was a very neurotic, self-destructive, gloomy, ‘Get Sondheim!’ I played every misfit. But there was one part I always wanted to play, which was Danny in Night Must Fall. It was about a serial killer, which is a play I had loved since I first read it when I was 12 years old. And once I played that part, I retired.” https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/stephen-sondheim-40-favourite-films-of-all-time/
Robert Montgomery (also in Hitchcock's Mr. and Mrs. Smith) played Danny in the film adaptation.
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swanstep (2631)
2 years ago
Oh yes, there are loose Psycho & Hitchcock connections aplenty with Mr Sondheim.
1. He was best buds with Anthony Perkins for many years (I assume lovers too). They co-hosted lots of mystery-themed parties that were a famous destination for Broadway and Hollywood hipsters of a certain ilk. Perkins' and Sondheim's script for the rather splendid whodunnit film, The Last of Sheila (1973) grew out of those parties. (There was a lot of The Last of Sheila in Knives Out too - note that Rian Johnson has a $450million deal with Netflix for 2 Knives Out sequels. Ka-ching! In a just world, Sondheim's and Perkins' estates would get a taste of that.)
2. Perkins was in a bunch of Sondheim productions on Broadway too.
3. Sondheim's first great success was as lyricist for West Side Story. This opened in 1957 and the movie dominated 1961. So West Side and Sondheim are kind of 'all over' Hitchcock's peak period.
4. A number of other Sondheim film picks really jump out. Dead of Night (1945) is a big tell - its famous Vent's dummy sequence is a big subterreanean influence on Psycho, as discussed here: https://moviechat.org/tt0054215/Psycho/58c7074b4e1cf308b9383a3d/OT-Edgar-Wrights-Fave-1000-films?reply=58c7074c4e1cf308b9383b01
Jon Brahms-directed Hanover Square (1945) w/ spectacular proto-Thorwald, super-Welles/Perkins/Clift-type actor Laird Cregar also has myriad Hitch connections. (cont'd).
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swanstep (2631)
2 years ago
(Cont'd)
5. Sondheim's relationship with his mom was.... interesting. The NY Times's 3 page Obit for Sondheim included the following segment:
Alone With Mother
Stephen Joshua Sondheim was born on March 22, 1930, in Manhattan, and lived first on the Upper West Side. Herbert Sondheim, his father, was the owner of a dressmaking company; his mother, the former Etta Janet Fox, known as Foxy, worked for her husband as a designer until he left her, when Stephen was 10. He was sent for a time to military school, and later to the George School in Pennsylvania, but until he was 16 Stephen, her only child, lived mostly with his mother, with whom he had a troubled relationship throughout his life. (His father remarried and had two more sons.)
In the years following his parents’ separation, Mr. Sondheim recalled for his biography, his mother treated him precisely as she had her husband: flirting with him sexually on the one hand, belittling him on the other. As an adult, Mr. Sondheim supported her financially; nonetheless, in the 1970s, the night before she was to have heart surgery, she wrote a letter to her son and had it hand delivered. It read, in part, “The only regret I have in life is giving you birth.”
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ecarle (14979)
2 years ago
I love how an OT thread can (here at least) move intelligently from one "trend worth discussing" to another.
Stephen Sondheim's death seems to have come with a certain "legend and power" to it. He DOES go back to the original West Side Story, which, thanks to COVID delays, is now coming out a dead-on 60 years after the 1961 original. Sondheim's death seems almost "promotional" to the new remake, and he saw it and praised it right before his death("If you know the show there will be some surprises.")
Personally, I see Sondheim as rather "hermetically sealed" over the decades. So many of his musicals did NOT become movies: Company, Follies, Assassins. The movie ones came early -- WSS, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum...anything else EARLY?
Later, it took a long time but we finally got Sweeney Todd in 2007. I"ve read that the film had compressions and song deletions , but I found it at once tuneful and REALLY gory(I had to start closing my eyes at about the 10th spray of jugular blood from Todd's razor.) Its in a near tie for my favorite of 2007, but the other one(Charlie Wilson's War) has won. I watch it more often, I quote the dialogue. Interesting, THAT was Mike Nichols final movie. Nichols AND Sondheim were young towering figures on Broadway; now they are gone.
How interesting that Psycho did not make Sondheim's list of favorites, even with Perkins as such a close friend. Their screenplay for "The Last of Shiela" is almost TOO intelligent for me, as if they are lost in their own private game and we are only sorta invited. The sniping at people like Sue Mengers and -- who else? Was nicely inside.
Sondheim's relationship with his mother does sound rather Psycho IV: The Beginning -- as does Perkins with HIS Mother after his father died (when Perkins was 5, just like Norman in the movie in dialogue evidently re-written BY Perkins.)
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ecarle (14979)
2 years ago
I will be interested to see how Spielberg's West Side Story fares in a few weeks. It is "Van Sant's Psycho" all over again, but musical revivals happen on Broadway all the time.
Whatever the reviews -- and just like Van Sant's Psycho -- the real issue is: will this come CLOSE to the box office and cultural impact of the original? Hitchcock's Psycho ran -- worldwide -- for MONTHS. And then two re-releases years later. Van Sant's Psycho? Gone in about two weeks, consigned to cable/streaming where it isn't really shown much.
Psycho and West Side Story have their connections.After all, they were made just a year apart and shared a key actor (Simon Oakland.)
Meanwhile, Cary Grant in North by Northwest is kidnapped on his way to the Winter Garden theater. Research suggests he was going to see West Side Story on stage. The writer of North by Northwest(Ernest Lehman) ended up writing and producing the movie of West Side Story.
I just love coincidences.
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swanstep (2631)
2 years ago
Personally, I see Sondheim as rather "hermetically sealed" over the decades....but we finally got Sweeney Todd in 2007.
I guess we've had Into The Woods (which nobody really liked) since Sweeney Todd. Overall though, yes, Sondheim's plays have proven hard to adapt for film: they aren't spectacles on any level, and they have lots of intricate dialogue and lyrics. In sum, they're too adult for average theater-goers let alone the average movie-goer. Sondheim has been a God for theater majors and theater insiders generally for decades but the broader culture (including myself) is still catching up with him.
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ecarle (14979)
2 years ago
Personally, I see Sondheim as rather "hermetically sealed" over the decades....but we finally got Sweeney Todd in 2007.
I guess we've had Into The Woods (which nobody really liked) since Sweeney Todd.
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I went to see Into The Woods primarily because the music (in the trailer) reminded meof the music in Sweeney Todd(music that I LOVED, starting with the powerful Herrmannesque stuff over the opening credits.) Alas, the movie was too weird and obtuse and I remember thinking..."I just don't think this guy Sondheim's plots fit our times."
Note in passing; tons of old Sondheim interviews out there right now, some as recently as weeks before his death. But also one in which he said he didn't much like the 1961 West Side Story but DID like the 2007 Sweeney Todd, "for being transformed into a movie rather than a movie of a play." This Sweeney Todd(movie) fan feels redeemed.
There is a song called "Pretty Women" in which those two skilled crooners(ha) Johnny Depp and Alan Rickman duet together and it WORKS -- the melody is beautiful and haunting, the men sing well ENOUGH(the orchestra helps) but the point is that the two men are singing as "suspense gathers": Arch-villain Rickman is in Depp's barber's chair with the shaving blade at his throat and Depp intends to kill Rickman at the end of the song and...and...
Great song. Great scene. Two great stars(I DO miss Depp.) And one of them is gone.
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ecarle (14979)
2 years ago
Overall though, yes, Sondheim's plays have proven hard to adapt for film: they aren't spectacles on any level, and they have lots of intricate dialogue and lyrics. In sum, they're too adult for average theater-goers let alone the average movie-goer. Sondheim has been a God for theater majors and theater insiders generally for decades but the broader culture (including myself) is still catching up with him.
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Time for one of my "autobiographical bits," but I think it is relevant here.
I grew up with Time and Newsweek delivered to the home of our family in California, and read them pretty much cover to cover each week. Always to the movie reviews first, but then often to the "Stage" section, which -- I realized only many years later -- meant that I was often reading about productions that I would never SEE (we never went to NYC, and the cost...) unless they were made into movies(which happened a lot.)
So some of those stage plays that Time(in particular reviewed) DID get to the movies -- The Odd Couple, Hello, Dolly, Hair... -- but a LOT of those plays NEVER got to movie form and so they only existed for me on the page.
Enter: Steven Sondheim. Time would write big articles -- with plenty of photos -- about plays like Company and Follies and eventually Assassins but -- those plays stayed only on the page, only in my mind, with little sense of Sondheim's musical style.
I recall my father commenting on a cover issue of Time (in the 70's?) about drug needles washing up on the New York coastline. He said "that wouldn't be a cover story anywhere else but New York -- you do realize this magazine is about New York?" He wasn't mad about it, he was just educating me that NYC was rather the center of things back then -- with sidetrips(in the magazine) to DC for the "Politics" pages. And though it wasn't called The New Yorker or New York magainze, Time WAS a New York magazine. Newsweek a bit less so...didn't it have DC offices?
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ecarle (14979)
2 years ago
Anyway, if Time was a New York magazine that paid a LOT of attention to ANY new Steven Sondheim musical play...then that is why I came to know quite about about Steven Sondheim over my years of reading of his musicals -- musicals that Hollywood simply didn't touch after awhile.
Side-note, similar: it wasn't just musicals that Time covered on Broadway. Plays, too. And around 1970, in Time, in Newsweek, and in the NY Times(which I read at the school library) I came upon a series of raves for the new "thriller" Sleuth.
Well, around 1971, word came that Sleuth would be a movie(with Laurence Oliver and Michael Caine after Cary Grant and Warren Beatty were thought of.) OK, exciting news.
But bigger news in 1971: "Sleuth" author Anthony Shaffer had agreed to write Hitchcock's new movie "Frenzy."
Even as a young fellow, I thought that was BIG news. I knew that Hitchcock was in decline and that Topaz had been largely disparaged. I knew that he was old. BUT: if Anthony "Sleuth" Shaffer was willing to work with him, maybe -- just maybe -- Hitchcock would have a hit again.
And so he did. Hitchcock foe Stanley Kauffmann wrote " Hitchcock finally gets a good script and lo, the director has returned." Well-- Hitchcock helped write it and to visualize scenes that couldn't be written(the first murder, the potato truck.) But yes...Anthony Shaffer was a BIG DEAL...
...and I knew he was coming because I'd read all about Sleuth in Time and the NYT.
With this twist: I actually didn't think Sleuth(with Oliver and Caine) was all that good. A big twist was no twist at all(maybe it worked on the stage without known stars.) It was..stageboand.
Frenzy was much more of a MOVIE..and exciting, and horrifying.
But this twist; Sleuth, not Frenzy, got Oscar noms in 1972. Actor(both Olivier and Caine), screenplay, Director. Oh, well.
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ecarle (14979)
2 years ago
Meanwhile, a lot of first reviews are in on Spielberg's West Side Story -- not necessarily from "name" critics, but do we have those anymore? Bottom line: raves. "The movie to beat at the Oscars...front runner for Best Picture."
Let's take that last, first. Could it be? A movie from the same material wins Best Picture ...with versions 60 years apart?
It sounds like too much. But Oscar competition is not what it was -- it COULD happen.
Also: another blow to the "Tarantino theory" of aged directors doing poor work. Spielberg is 74 -- older than when Hitchcock made Frenzy(a hit, I'll grant you) but closer to when he made Family Plot(a good "old man's movie") and later had to quit. Spielberg's West Side Story feels like a bigger deal than Family Plot, or even Frenzy.
BUT: we are waiting to see how the box office does. As I've noted, modernly , it seems like movies just can't fail with international markets, so I expect bigger numbers than for Van Sant's Psycho. Ha.
Speaking of Van Sant's Psycho, I DO remember a 1998 article before it came out wondering if the movie could actually WIN OSCARS based on its 1960 greatness -- or at least get nominated. The main item being promoted for Oscar was Joseph Stefano's slide update of his great(but unnominated) 1960 screenplay from the Robert Bloch book.
I recall this pushing me to "flights of fancy"(having not yet seen Van Sant's Psycho
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ecarle (14979)
2 years ago
Meanwhile, a lot of first reviews are in on Spielberg's West Side Story -- not necessarily from "name" critics, but do we have those anymore? Bottom line: raves. "The movie to beat at the Oscars...front runner for Best Picture."
Let's take that last, first. Could it be? A movie from the same material wins Best Picture ...with versions 60 years apart?
It sounds like too much. But Oscar competition is not what it was -- it COULD happen.
Also: another blow to the "Tarantino theory" of aged directors doing poor work. Spielberg is 74 -- older than when Hitchcock made Frenzy(a hit, I'll grant you) but closer to when he made Family Plot(a good "old man's movie") and later had to quit. Spielberg's West Side Story feels like a bigger deal than Family Plot, or even Frenzy.
BUT: we are waiting to see how the box office does. As I've noted, modernly , it seems like movies just can't fail with international markets, so I expect bigger numbers than for Van Sant's Psycho. Ha.
Speaking of Van Sant's Psycho, I DO remember a 1998 article before it came out wondering if the movie could actually WIN OSCARS based on its 1960 greatness -- or at least get nominated. The main item being promoted for Oscar was Joseph Stefano's slight update of his great(but unnominated) 1960 screenplay from the Robert Bloch book.
I recall this pushing me to "flights of fancy"(having not yet seen Van Sant's Psycho): if Stefano's screenplay could be nominated, how about Herrmann's score? And..how about Van Sant as Best Director -- which would be HITCHCOCK as Best Director since Van Sant simply aped his shots. Anne Heche for Best Supporting Actress as Leigh had been nominated? Vince Vaughn as Norman Bates(Perkins had not been nominated)???
The answers were all : No. But I daresay that Stefano's script and Herrmann's music were still worthy of nomination in 1998.
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swanstep (2631)
2 years ago
Enter: Steven Sondheim. Time would write big articles -- with plenty of photos -- about plays like Company and Follies and eventually Assassins but -- those plays stayed only on the page, only in my mind, with little sense of Sondheim's musical style.
In the light of Sondheim's death I've been catching up with recordings of (often very famous) productions of S's shows on youtube....and what is shining though to me most often is, I'm afraid, sheer cleverness. He's reminding me quite a lot of a non-musical playwright whose work has also only occasionally transferred to the screen: Tom Stoppard. Stoppard's plays often turn on the audience having at least a passing familiarity with some intellectual field or other (landscape painting, chaos theory, moral philosophy, Hamlet, you name it...) and succeed only to the extent that Stoppard can make some moderately specialized knowledge (of the sort that Stoppard himself was able to acquire with a couple of months study) from those fields titillating to them. I stopped being titillated about the time I entered grad school. Sondheim similarly seems to get a lot of mileage out of various film genres, modern art & the art scene, etc. and I wonder whether I'm in the long run going to find it name-droppy and pandering and finally only pseudo-clever. First time through I'm finding Sondheim's stuff impressively musically difficult but the upshot is often that there's just a single song with much obvious staying-power and that you remember. Choreography except in a few instances (Follies) is minimal. Sondheim said he liked film a lot except for film musicals which he's always detested (no musicals in his top 40 list above for example). This figures since dance is at the core of the film musical. Sondheim isn't sexy and when his characters *are* having lots of sex, it just seems wrong, is the opposite of hot, e.g., Bobby in Company has lots of girlfriends (including Christina Hendricks in one recent production!) but just seems like a closeted gay guy. One starts to see why Sondheim's plays have gradually tilited towards Opera since that's a less body-oriented, less sexy, less dance-y, more intellectual medium and tradition.
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ecarle (14979)
2 years ago
In the light of Sondheim's death I've been catching up with recordings of (often very famous) productions of S's shows on youtube....
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I realize that for all of my talk of Sondheim's musicals NOT being made into movies, and "staying on the pages of Time and Newsweek"..the modern miracld of YouTube and the internet likely allows us to see taped versions of ALL his works, yes?
There for the taking. Also: PBS. I do recall watching "Sundays in the Park with George" (Bernadette Peters) there some decades ago.
Also, this: in the 70's, Judy Collins had a big radio hit with the poignantbut not-quite-understandable "Send in the Clowns." It think it hit on the radio because of the MUSIC...the rueful sadness of it, even if the lyrics weren't clear. (WHY send in clowns?)
That was from Sondheim, ("A Little Night Music," from an Ingmar Bergman movie, and how is HE going to weather the years?), and I believe that it was made into a movie with Liz Taylor singing "Send in the Clowns." A movie that got no Oscar recognition or box office success at all, I think.
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swanstep wrote:
and what is shining though to me most often is, I'm afraid, sheer cleverness. He's reminding me quite a lot of a non-musical playwright whose work has also only occasionally transferred to the screen: Tom Stoppard.
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All I can say is that I enjoyed very much reading your entire post, swanstep -- food for thought as usual and not much for me to say. Interesting that a "musical genius" like Sondheim didn't like musicals.
I suppose he's like some of our movie directors who hit big early and then coast on reputation. West Side Story, Gypsy, and Funny Thing On the Way to the Forum were known hit musical movies and plays in their day...Sondheim could spend the rest of his career doing "think piece" musicals.
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ecarle (14979)
2 years ago
(Side note: rather like A Little NIght Music with Send in the Clowns, I feel that Gypsy and Funny Thing really only spawned one big radio hit each: "Everything's Coming Up Roses" and "Comedy Tonight," which opens the nicely manic Richard Lester film of Funny Thing with Zero Mostel getting to recreate his role, which he didn't get to do with Fiddler on the Roof.)
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swanstep wrote:
Sondheim isn't sexy and when his characters *are* having lots of sex, it just seems wrong, is the opposite of hot, e.g., Bobby in Company has lots of girlfriends (including Christina Hendricks in one recent production!) but just seems like a closeted gay guy.
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Hmm. I recall (from my Time reading days) that Dean Jones -- Mr. Disney movies himself -- got that lead in the first production. I'm pretty sure that Tony Perkins may have taken the role over from Jone or played it in another production. So....
Dean Jones: I have no idea of his orientation, but an interesting career. He had an interesting voice and a boyish manner -- I suppose Hitchcock could have tried him out as one of his villains. As a kid in the 60's, I mainly saw him in the Disney comedies I was raised on(The Ugly Dachshund, Blackbeard's Ghost), but he also did some "regular movies" (like Under the Yum Yum Tree) and also did the "Burke's Law" whodunit pilot as Burke's assistant who turns out to be the killer. Dick Powell played Burke in that pilot; Gene Barry took over the role(after Powell's death) for series.
DECADES later, I saw Dean Jones supporting Danny DeVito(top billing) and Gregory Peck (second billing) in 1991's Other People's Money(from a Broadway play) and I was like: "DEAN JONES? Where has he been?"
Thus concludes my Dean Jones career review. Ha. But Company must have made him "Broadway viable" for years.
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One starts to see why Sondheim's plays have gradually tilited towards Opera since that's a less body-oriented, less sexy, less dance-y, more intellectual medium and tradition.
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Well, if that is what worked for him. Christina Hendricks in anything is sexy, however. I'd like to see her in Company.
PS. A thought: I bought Streisand's "Broadway albums" in the 90s and 00s, and she did a fair amount of Sondheim songs. I learned them there, seeing them nowhere else to be heard.
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ecarle (14979)
2 years ago
House of Gucci w/ Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, Jared Leto, etc. has just premiered at the Venice Film Festival and is expected to contend for Oscars.
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I sort of passed over this up at the top of the thread but I'm looking forward to this movie. The poster alone did it: Lady Gaga flanked by some Pacino(probably my Favorite Old Time star of the moment with NIcholson inactive, Eastwood TOO old and DeNiro just a little lesser in my eyes); Jeremy Irons (His scenes as the Big Boss in Margin Call will forever be seared in my mind as pure acting pleasure); Adam Driver(there's just no escaping THAT guy); and Jared Leto ("Who's that?" I thought as I looked at the poster -- what a make-up wearing chameleon!)
I hope the movie is good, but the cast alone is bringing me in.
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ecarle (14979)
2 years ago
OT:
I chose Ghostbusters: Afterlife last week, and was personally surprised. (SPOILERS.)
I think it goes this way: the original Ghostbusters was a buddy team of guys and I think that's great. The Marx Brothers, Abbott and Costello, The Three Stooges. Animal House(above all), Caddyshack The Blues Brothers, and Ghostbusters continued the tradition most profitably.
But in recent years, we got Lady Ghostbusters (four funny ladies rendered not so funny) and now we get Kiddie Ghostbusters.
Really...its a kid's movie. I heard in my ears the Hispanic busboy at the end of The Candidate who says to Robert Redford, ""You no suppose' to be here."
But there is a subtext to the film for those in the know: Bill Murray was the comedy improv engine of "Ghostbusters" and he spent years personally shutting down any sequels after the subpar "Ghostbusters II,' much to Dan Aykroyd's chagrin (Murray had veto privileges).
Later on, Bill Murray "broke" with friend and Ghostbusters co-star Harold Ramis. They didn't speak for years, until Ramis fell ill and Murray saw him and mended fences. When Ramis died, Murray honored him at an Oscars ceremony in surprise remarks.
And...I think Bill Murray has been atoning ever since. He cleared Lady Ghostbusters and he cleared Kiddle Ghostbusters. And he's in them.
Ghostbusters Afterlife(the title means something) is ultimately set up as a very sweet and emotional salute to: Harold Ramis. Like the actor himself, Ramis's character(Egon) is dead in the storyline. But the rest of the gang's all here. And though I felt that 90% of the movie wasn't aimed at me at all, when the Old Guys showed up at the end, well -- emotion. (And in the post credits scenes, too.) Plus: Bill Murray is STILL funny.
Ghostbusters Afterlife is the best last 10 minutes of a movie I've seen this year.
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swanstep (2631)
2 years ago
25. Night Must Fall (Richard Thorpe, 1937)
I just checked out this one... and while it has some very nice, surprising (because so different from their respective, later star-making personas) performances from Robert Montgomery and Rosalind Russell, and some interesting character ideas that would *later* make for great films (an ultra-charming psychopath and a younger character who sees the truth but is also possibly fatally drawn to this charmer), NMF's script is a muddle and the directing is undistinguished. I mean *you know* Alfred and Alma must have seen this and probably the play it was based on too, They must have seen what was screwed up here, what story elements could be tweaked to make something truly sensational. Shadow of a Doubt (1943) in some sense does start here I'd say, as it has the same core ideas, but Shadow is also about 50 times better.
It's curious that Sondheim's list found no space for Hitchcock and yet includes admittedly suggestive mediocrities such as NMF (1937). 1937 was arguably the first year of Film's true Golden Age with at least 5 ultra-classics (Stage Door, La Grande Illusion, The Awful Truth, Lost Horizon, Stella Dallas) and a host of other real keepers (Make Way For Tomorrow, Pepe Le Moko, Topper, The Edge of the World, Shall We Dance). NMF is less distinguished than all those.
Relatedly, the very next item on Sondheim's list:
24. The Nasty Girl (Michael Verhoeven, 1990)
is a film I saw on its release and found shallow/silly, as did everyone I saw it with. I vividly remember people joking afterwards about how we shouldn't have bothered with this film from 'the wrong Verhoeven'. And nobody has ever talked abut this movie since because...it's not worth talking about. It wasn't memorably terrible, just shallow, 'Nazis are bad' stuff that's best forgotten and has in fact mostly been forgotten. Sondheim's movie taste is, it seems, very personal to him.
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ecarle (14979)
2 years ago
It's curious that Sondheim's list found no space for Hitchcock
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Its a funny thing about the "favorite movies" lists of famous people and Hitchcock. Sometimes, one ore more Hitchoccks make the lists. But sometimes, Hitch is verboten. I think he was just too successful and "brand name" for the intelligentsia to wish to acknowledge him. So NMF(Night Must Fall) gets picked instead, and its not at top HItchocck level.
I do believe that NIght Must Fall was remade in the 60's(with Albert Finney as the psycho) and bit more "Psycho" style blood and gore. I never saw that one, but I saw it listed in articles about 60''s shockers INCLUDING Psycho.
And doesn't the killer in NMF keep a severed head in a hatbox ala Thorwald in Rear Window?
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ecarle (14979)
2 years ago
Speaking of severed heads, sudden memory flash:
As a kid going to the drive-in with my parents, I'd sometimes fear the "Coming Attractions" segment between double feature movies. Often these trailers would be for Jack Lemmon comedies and John Wayne Westerns or re-releases of Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals like Carousel, but SOMETIMES, the image would be black and white, and the music would be SCARY and the screen action would send me diving down to the car floor for safety.
Such a trailer was for "Shock Treatment"(1964), which opens with pleasant Roddy McDowall cutting the tops off of overgrown plants with a giant pair of garden shears (you know, the ones that open and close like a big "X" in the air) . Two elderly women sit sipping tea at an outdoor table nearby.
And...Roddy turns slowly and centers the head and neck of one of the women in the garden shears and...with the woman now out of the shot(she's below)...Roddy makes an ugly face and chops off the woman's head(again unseen)
WHOA. How'd Fox get that trailer approved for impressionable 1964 audiences?
I read later than Anthony Perkins turned down the McDowell role in Shock Treatment. McDowall is shown in the movie "Hitchocck" as a possible Norman Bates being considered by Hitchcock. I suppose that might have happened. Perkins and McDowall were SOMEWHAT interchangeable -- boyish(McDowall had actually been a child star), cute, skinny and slight. But Perkins had something more "deep and sensitive" going on, I think. And more beautiful looks.
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ecarle (14979)
2 years ago
1937 was arguably the first year of Film's true Golden Age with at least 5 ultra-classics (Stage Door, La Grande Illusion, The Awful Truth, Lost Horizon, Stella Dallas) and a host of other real keepers (Make Way For Tomorrow, Pepe Le Moko, Topper, The Edge of the World, Shall We Dance). NMF is less distinguished than all those.
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Again you reveal your widespread knowledge of film over time and among countries. I've HEARD of all those films, but only seen a handful. (Heck I watched the truly awful 1973 "musical" version of Lost Horizon on streaming recently just to study its badness -- its like Burt Bacharach went all atonal all of a sudden, mostly AWFUL songs. Two good ones, though.)
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ecarle (14979)
2 years ago
Sondheim's movie taste is, it seems, very personal to him.
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As , I expect, all of our lists are to us. I know that MY list has both established great film classics (NXNW, Psycho, The Wild Bunch, The Godfather -- mainly violent, yes?) AND little known films that often get "two stars" in movie reviews (Hotel, Capricorn One, Used Cars). Its just my life as I've lived it, and the types of movies that amuse/excite me. I am personally amused that I gave "The Magnificent Seven" (2016 remake) my Number One that year; nothing much else was memorable to me as ENTERTAINMENT, and it allowed me to honor the much greater 1960 original (Number Three behind Psycho and The Apartment in 1960)
And this: I have often, in my life, seen a movie on Christmas Day. I remember this all the way back to Babes in Toyland(Disney version) in 1961. More odd was The Man Who Would be King in 1975. And one year without ANYTHING else to see on Xmas day(1994)..."Mixed Nuts" with Steve Martin. Does anybody remember THAT one? I don't even remember what its about.
Well, for 2021, it was Spider-Man whatever the title. As with my seeing Kiddie Ghostbusters a few weeks ago, obviously family obligations enter in here.
But weirdly, I flashed back to perhaps my favorite Xmas day movie -- 1966. The movie was The Professionals, Richard Brooks' "team on a mission movie" with a distinctly middle aged team of macho men: Burt Lancaster, Lee Marvin, Robert Ryan, Woody Strode. I compared the CGI mashup I WAS watching with memories of that "muscular" Western in wide screen Panavision Technicolor. I saw THAT movie AS a kid(with its multiple killings and glimpses of topless women) and that's what kids COULD see in 1966. Now...comic books reign.
That said, THIS Spider-Man is pretty special for certain reasons. I wrote about them with SPOILERS) on its page.
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swanstep (2631)
2 years ago
Its a funny thing about the "favorite movies" lists of famous people and Hitchcock. Sometimes, one ore more Hitchoccks make the lists. But sometimes, Hitch is verboten. I think he was just too successful and "brand name" for the intelligentsia to wish to acknowledge him. So NMF(Night Must Fall) gets picked instead, and its not at top HItchcock level.
Well said. Of course, genius has its own prerogatives. Hitch's own film preferences could be eccentric and sometimes apparently distorted a bit by professional jealousy and rivalries. And doubtless Hitch's views about musical theater or opera or... would be interesting to hear, but I'd guess they'd always look 'very personal' from the perspective of experts in or superfans of those areas.
A deacde or so ago David Thomson wrote a nice review of the first vol of Sondheim's famous Lyric Collection/Auto-biog, 'Finishing The Hat':
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n24/david-thomson/red-silk-is-the-best-blood
In it he compares briefly compares Sondheim's (peer- & collaborator-shrinking) name-status with Hitchcock's:
(Cont'd)
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swanstep (2631)
2 years ago
For decades now – since Company (1970), I’d say – most people have thought of the works as Sondheim musicals, just as Hitchcock films belong to their director. But like Hitchcock, Sondheim has always relied on collaborators. This book is dedicated to nine men: Julius Epstein, Arthur Laurents, Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart (A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum), George Furth (who did the book for Company and Merrily We Roll Along), James Goldman (Follies), John Weidman (Pacific Overtures and Assassins); Hugh Wheeler (A Little Night Music and Sweeney Todd); and last but not least James Lapine (whose work is not covered in this volume, but who would do both book and direction on Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods and Passion, and who Sondheim thinks is the only person he knows who can do a book and direct).
Sondheim says that everything he does is aimed at serving the book: in musicals this means the story arc, the dramatic script and what people say when they’re not singing. Anyone who has done musicals will attest to the importance of this. Sondheim has never contributed the book to any of his shows – at least he’s never taken credit for it. (Hitchcock never took a writing credit.) In addition to his three masterpieces for Sondheim, Lapine has directed other plays, a revival of The Diary of Anne Frank, for example; he directed the film Impromptu, and wrote a few plays you haven’t heard of. It’s clear that, along with all the others – from Hugh Wheeler to Hal Prince (a six-time director for Sondheim), from Angela Lansbury to Bernadette Peters – he has to feel lucky to serve Sondheim.
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swanstep (2631)
2 years ago
I do believe that Night Must Fall was remade in the 60's(with Albert Finney as the psycho) and a bit more "Psycho" style blood and gore.... And doesn't the killer in NMF keep a severed head in a hatbox ala Thorwald in Rear Window?
Night Must Fall (1966) w. Finney is available in full on youtube here (in not great but still watchable quality):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4068E0yrWc
I thought it was a reasonably effective updating of the 1937 version. NMF64 is much more streamlined than NMF37, removing some of NMF37's most irritating plot snafus and lingering stage-play fustiness,while also adding a lot of general UK, 1960s 'angry young man' class consciousness and cinema grit. Finney's hold/domination over the three women in the film is clarified as explicitly sexual this time, albeit aren't any brutal sex scenes to make this point the way there undoubtedly would have been if NMF had been remade 10 years later. Similarly, contrary to NMF64's reputation, it contains no blood or explicit gore. Two beheading axe murders yes to NMF37's 1 smothering and 1 left completely vague beheading murder, but both the axe murders in NMF84 happen just out of frame and no blood is shown (very implausibly I'd add!). How differently this would have been handled in a post-Wild Bunch/post-Texas Chainsaw/post-Torso world?
NMF64 replaces NMF37's conventional 'Police Show Up' ending with a haunting, artsy ending with no police in sight/earshot. This will polarize people. I was a bit irritated by it. In sum NMF64 is worth a look for completeness's sake. Its commercial failure definitely derailed Finney's career for a few years right after hitting big with Tom Jones (1963) - he didn't do another film until Two For The Road (1967), so NMF64's an interesting watch from that perspective too. It wasn't so easy to craft a Psycho-style, resonant, break out horror hit: Baby Jane did it, and so did Repulsion. NMF64, like hundreds of others, did not.
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