Synopsis:
The two lovers are living together and are not married as they hesitantly explain to her brother. They had made a promise as children to get married when they grew up, but they “didn’t wait.” It’s an important plot point as it drives Cooper’s actions when he discovers that Crawford and Young are living in sin.Read More »
It is thanks to this film that the Marquis gained notoriety with a wider audience. The film is the result of film footage shot between May 1926 and June 1930 in several South American countries. Departing from Guayaquil, he first went to the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific. Upon returning to the capital of Ecuador, chance brought him to the Ocaina Indians, the Boro, the Napo, the Jivaro and the Piro. He explored the Incan mines of Machu Picchu, discovered only a few years prior, and ended his journey on the famed Guano islands. The musical score, inspired by traditional Indian music, was created by Maurice Jaubert.Read More »
This programmer was the last film of tragedy queen Helen Twelvetrees. Once a promising leading lady at RKO during the early sound era. Now a blowzy party girl, she and former prizefighter Buck Jones unofficially adopt the son of a late pal whom they were unaware he had. Young Donald O’Connor is the precocious youth who comes to adore them,Read More »
Mannesmann was a German industrial conglomerate. It was originally established as a manufacturer of steel pipes in 1890 under the name “Deutsch-Österreichische Mannesmannröhren-Werke AG”. (Loosely translated: “German-Austrian Mannesmann pipe mills AG”). In the twentieth century, Mannesmann’s product range grew and the company expanded into numerous sectors – starting from various steel products and trading to mechanical and electrical engineering, automotive and telecommunications. From 1955, the conglomerate’s management holding with headquarters in Düsseldorf was named Mannesmann AG. – more (on wikipedia)Read More »
The 1937 Thirteenth Chair was the third film version of the 1919 stage melodrama by Bayard Veiller. Dame Mae Whitty dominates the proceedings as Mme. La Grange, a phony mystic who is on hand when a man is killed during one of her seances. The killing takes place in the home of a provincial British Indian governor, and the victim was a blackmailer whom everyone present had good reason to despise. Complicating matters for Mme. La Grange is the fact that one of the suspects, Nell O’Neill (Madge Evans) is her own daughter. Dissatisfied with the manner in which brusque Scotland Yard inspector Marney (Lewis Stone) is investigating the case, La Grange takes matters in her own hands, stage-managing a second seance so that the guilty party will be frightened into a confession. More slickly produced than the 1929 version of Thirteenth Chair, the remake isn’t quite as enjoyable, lacking two vital ingredients: Margaret Wycherly and Bela Lugosi, the earlier version’s Mme. LaGrange and Inspector Marney.Read More »
A fake music-hall clairvoyant meets a woman, and suddenly his predictions seem to come true …Read More »
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Compilation of lighting and costume tests from various films, most notably Sternberg’s The Devil Is a Woman (1935).Read More »
A henpecked New Jersey grocer makes plans to move to California to grow oranges, despite the resistance of his overbearing wife.Read More »
Quote:
I don’t have much patience with colleagues who dismiss Charlie Chaplin by saying that Buster Keaton was better (whatever that means). To the best of my knowledge, with the arguable exception of Dickens, no one else in the history of art has shown us in greater detail what it means to be poor, and certainly no one else in the history of movies has played to a more diverse audience or evolved more ambitiously from one feature to the next. The opening sequence in Chaplin’s second Depression masterpiece (1936), of the Tramp on the assembly line, is possibly his greatest slapstick encounter with the 20th century, and as Belgian filmmakers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne have brilliantly observed, the famous shot of his being run through machinery equates him with a strip of film. Still, there’s more hope here than in Chaplin’s preceding City Lights, perhaps because this time the Tramp has Paulette Goddard, another plucky urchin, to keep him company.Read More »