OTTO PREMINGER, S / D

watched it for the first time this week, was also startled by Price

The way in which Preminger, the writers, and Webb depict Lydecker's sexuality is bizarre to say the least; I don't think it's supposed to make sense.

I hadn't noticed before that Laura walks back into her apartment almost exactly halfway through the running time

I'd avoided In Harm's Way because I've found better things to do than watch Kirk Douglas and John Wayne as Navy officers for three hours. Turns out it's a solid movie, in his second tier, with his usual long takes and cool performances. Patricia Neal sets her eyes on Wayne and doesn't quit until she beds him: his best screen partner since Angie Dickinson.

Whirlpool is a bananas noir followup to Laura, and in its way almost as good. Gene Tierney as an unhappy klepto married to a prosperous shrink, and Jose Ferrer is the villainous quack hypnotist who's supplied with some phenomenally acid lines by Ben Hecht.

I only listened to a little of Richard Schickel's disc commentary, but he called Tierney "Fox's resident somnambulist."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huqyli8aE_g

that trailer's kinda spoilerrific, sorry

I've almost checked Whirlpool out several times. Thanks for the push.

Gene Tierney's hair though...

what of it? i really can't tell if women's hair is good or bad, esp retro

I just watched Whirlpool last night (actually over the course of three nights, which I almost never do.) Found myself wishing it was a bit MORE bananas tbh, although most of the plot twists are pretty ludicrous, and Jose Ferrer is wonderfully oily in it.

heh how COULD it be nuttier? w/out being bad?

Let's hope this Laura remake never happens given, to quote Film Comment, the adapter's "feather-light touch":

http://www.avclub.com/article/james-ellroy-write-fox-2000s-remake-1944-noir-clas-208587

Nuttiness in plot contrivances, yeah, but Tierney is glacial and Conte is wooden, I dunno, I just found it slow (hence why three nights to finish it; I kept falling asleep.)

Confession: I don't quite get what's so great about Laura. At least when Clifton Webb isn't on screen.

Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney's instant chemistry on first meeting. He's been hearing about Laura for days and here she is!

I love the scene where they're drinking Shelby's cheap whiskey.

Another confession: when she first appeared in the apartment, I assumed it was a dream sequence. Maybe the way Preminger shot everything prior to her arrival was meant to throw the audience off in such a way?

yep

I didn't particularly pick up on or respond to the chemistry between Tierney and Andrews, which is probably why the middle section of the film felt so saggy to me. Awesome first 30-45 minutes, though, and it certainly picks up again when Webb re-enters the picture towards the end.

I've seen it two or three times, not for a few years. I think I'm basically with you; I like it, but not nearly as much as Double Indemnity or The Big Sleep (which I mention because of historical proximity--I realize all three are very different), not to mention Advise and Consent. My mom would always name either Laura or All About Eve as her favourite movie.

Who's gayer -- Shelby or Walter?

What might make the film odd viewing in 2015 is accepting Waldo and Shelby as Laura's suitors.

when men had CLASS

(yeah, vs Neil Patrick Harris in Gone Girl, gimme a break)

what's that got to do with this thread, gramps?

seems kinda obvious

keyboard dipped in olive water

Haven't you heard of science's latest triumph, the Flag Post?

more otto acid anecdotes:

Nick's thirteen-year-old boy, Griffin, had heard Janis Joplin was going to make an appearance at the party, so he talked Lenny into letting him go. At some point in the evening, a bald German man who seemed to be experiencing a bad acid trip latched onto the boy, asking his help getting settled somewhere. "I thought it was Colonel Klink" from the television show Hogan's Heroes, Griffin said. It was the film director, Otto Preminger.

Laura is wonderful

Is twin peaks an extended homage?

if you haven't yet, watch Where the Sidewalk Ends next dmac.

Thanks but just launched into 1944 The Lodger. Will put on list.

Is twin peaks an extended homage?

among many other things, yeah

I have said this before, but Vincent Price as the dim lothario in Laura is an odd sight when you have grown up with the old creepy one.

otm

Watch Daisy Kenyon.

I can't think of another movie with two homos as putative love interests.

re Laura.

Ach ye lads claim everyone

Such Good Friends has some bright lines (written by Elaine May, mostly) that are in the later Mazursky/Woody skewering-Manhattan-neurotics mode, and Dyan Cannon has her moments, but God what a 'hip' mess.

Here's the Glenn Kenny piece at the time of the Olive DVD/BR release, if you want to see Burgess Meredith's nude bit w/out watching it:

http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/2011/06/preminger-and-the-new-freedoms-such-good-friends-1971.html

Dave Kehr: "The expansive use of widescreen and the carefully choreographed camera movements are gone... replaced by crowded, shallow images of claustrophobic spaces. Packed with some of the most garishly tasteless 1970s décor imaginable, the film’s Park Avenue apartments start to resemble the hamster cage owned by Julie’s two quarrelsome sons. (It’s unclear whom the hamster is supposed to represent, but he remains the film’s most empathetically observed figure.)"

i just read the novel Laura, v much worth it. The Clifton Webb character is tall, obese and even gayer if that's possible; the Vincent Price character is just a desperate Southern 'aristocratic' horndog. Narrator changes with every "part," which i was meh about. Many nice NYC references from the early '40s that will be pleasurable for local history buffs, like Jefferson Market being a women's prison.

I called Such Good Friends "okay, barely" upthread; seemed a little better second time around.

I think Dyan Cannon's good, Ken Howard too. Laurence Luckinbill, her husband, reminds me of Frank Langella in Diary of Mad Housewife: no shading whatsoever, a caricature of male self-absorption circa 1970--he's kind of a drag. James Coco's pretty good, although the scene where Cannon goes down on him while he's on the phone goes on forever. The ending, as I wrote the first time, is nice. Considering when the film came out, right in the midst of the most hopelessly self-indulgent new-American-cinema monstrosities, and considering that Preminger himself was riding the crest of his own auteurist stature, it's really not too bad.

What triggered the sudden interest in hospitals around this time? Within a year of each other, there was Such Good Friends, The Hospital, Frederick Wiseman's Hospital, and some junky thing called Doctor's Wives (Cannon was in that one, too).

Change of Habit w/Elvis & Mary Tyler Moore as well.

Also a bad Peter Sellers film called Where Does It Hurt? (1972).

Also on TV Medical Center peaked in popularity right at that time. Even on daytime TV, General Hospital, which had been one of the less popular soap operas in the '60s, surged to #2 rated soap in 1971-1972.

This hospital thing is actually a question that's occurred to me before. I wonder if it had something to do with the demise of the Production Code in '68. Maybe certain medical topics were considered touchy up to then, and perhaps discouraged by the Code.

Over in Britain there was also The National Health w/Lynn Redgrave.

M*A*S*H* probably fits in there as well.

What most of these films have in common is depicting hospital culture as basically dysfunctional

That's what I was going to say too: that's the focus of the Preminger, Wiseman, and Chayefsky films. It's like all at once the institution was under a lot of scrutiny.