the week in review (8/8/04 - 8/14/04)

Need to think about seeing better movies...

Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933, Michael Curtiz) (v) 58
Reveals House of Wax for what it is: not a movie, but a 3-D delivery system. Ignore what Danny Peary says; this is the real deal, perhaps not scary (it is more an offshoot of The Front Page-style newspaper genre), but it's actually a movie, one that moves briskly along via shots and editing. (In other words, Mamet would approve.) The lead actress is annoying, for sure, with all that screwball patter, but at least she's an active participant, unlike the do-nothing female lead of House of Wax. Ending doesn't work; the actors aren't good enough to pull off the subtext needed in previous scenes. Deserves to re-ascend over its remake; or is Curtiz "too Hollywood" for adulation?

The Big Country (1958, William Wyler) (v) 55
Really hard to hate a movie that's all about shit-kicking the usual wild-west-frontier macho bullshit of the Western genre. In a reversal of the usual gender roles, city slicker Gregory Peck comes to "the big country" to marry his sweetheart, the daughter of a rancher, and bring along a little of that ol' civilization along with him. And of course, he proceeds to undercut every expectation they have of someone unfamiliar with (and resistant to) the lawless West. Would've been a fine story at, say, 100 minutes; at 167, it reaches for an epic status that it can never earn. Burl Ives gets an Oscar for having all the best lines; the young Chuck Connors is distractingly similar to Willem Dafoe.

Irma La Douce (1964, Billy Wilder) (v) 34
Apparently this was a musical before Wilder got his hands on it, which explains a lot. Shorn of songs -- in other words, ripped from its context as a musical -- it's just a increasingly-fluffy comedy. An interesting, almost Brechtian premise (a cop, on his first day of duty in the red light district, loses his job and becomes the pimp of the most popular prostitute) backs itself into a corner by the end of the first act, where he's jealous of the men she sleeps with and she won't let him get a proper job, because it would make her look bad. Really, the story should end there, or at least find a tragic way to resolve the tension. Instead, the cop disguises himself as an Englishman so he can be with her... oh, it just gets stupid. Had the characters been allowed to express themselves via song, the musical genre might've been able to sustain the silliness and provide a counterpoint to the characters' bleak reality; but what we're left with are sad people forced to smile as if they're being re-Neducated. I don't think the Wilder of Double Indemnity or Ace in the Hole would've put up with this shit. Lemmon makes Lemmonade, as usual, though.

Where we saw it: week in review | We deign to rate it: outta 100
Posted by kza at 09:30 AM | Comments (3)