Ace in the POLL!! BILLY WILDER DIRECTS

it's certainly one of Wilder's best films.

Double Indemnity > High Noon

jeez Gary Cooper is a pretty cowgirl than Grace Kelly.

is High Noon really liked by non-fans of Westerns? i didn't know this! i thought the default Westerns for non-Westerns fans were the Spaghettis.

Confused here too, High Noon seems like a pretty hardcore Western to me

It's the kind picked as the favorite by people (eg Bill Clinton, ugh) who don't know from Budd Boetticher, Peckinpah, Anthony Mann et al.

morbs otm. shane's kinda like that also.

iirc Farber hates on High Noon for similar reasons

I don't hate the movie anymore than I hate DI, but if you stack them up against say My Darling Clementine and Out of the Past, respectively, you see what's what.

every time Brandon de Wilde said "SHAAAAAAAAANNE" I hoped he'd get stung by hornets.

Noel Murray reviews the new Blurays of Witness for the Prosecution and The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes

http://thedissolve.com/reviews/938-witness-for-the-prosecution-the-private-life-of-sh/

Saw Fedora for the second time -- a really sincerely bitter funeral for Old Hollywood, side AA of Sunset Blvd. It'd have been claimed as a gay classic if he'd succeeded in casting Dunaway and Dietrich in the Keller and Knef roles.

Holden is so vital to making any of it work; Jose Ferrer very funny as the mice-and-monkey-fiddling cosmetic butcher.

Weirdest of all, Mario Adorf and Gottfried John showing up as a comic hustler hotelier and a strong-arm chauffeur. You can hear the German producers telling him, "Hey, hip to Fassbinder? Use these guys."

isn't Kevin Bozelka a fan?

he would be!

Did you dine at the Fedora restaurant afterwards, Morbius?

dont know it

OK, this was very good, maybe great, both a love letter to and exposé of Classic Hollywood, which he had to go to Germany to make because "the boys with the beards" had taken over. Recommended even if you are not a Friend of Fox.

i'm fine with Detweiler's rant bcz hey, he's talking about DePalma.

Detweiler? You mean "Dutch"?

btw Olive Films releases a Fedora BD on Oct 28.

Read about it.

Did you read about the dubbing of the actresses voices on Wikipedia?

*potential spoiler*

yes! halfway through I wondered "why does Knef sound like Keller? who's dubbing who?"

there is a great Lost Weekend gag in the Bugs Bunny cartoon Slick Hare.

review of the Brackett diaries, he didn't like many people

http://blog.vincekeenan.com/2015/01/book-ready-when-you-are-cb-charles.html

NYers can see both The Apartment and 1,2,3 in 35mm on Friday, which would be exhausting

http://www.bam.org/film/2015/black-and-white-scope

Fedora available on DVD.

like, for five months?

Kiss Me, Stupid Bluray out. The vile, smutty thing!

Hah. I think I'll get that as a birthday gift for a friend who loves it.

does he like "ACTION," like Dino?

Not really; it just makes his love for the film all that more baffling. But what can I say, it's a "charmer".

I have great affection for its prurient, curdled heart. (the uncut Euro version, obviously)

This maybe something that belongs in the "Post a Controversial Opinion" thread, but here goes: the narration in Double Indemnity bothers me way more than the much maligned voiceover in the original cut of Blade Runner. Kael gets at part of why when she calls it "so gaudy and terse that it seems an emblem of 40s hardboiled attitudes," but for me it is as much a problem of the film telegraphing its punches in an unnecessary way. I guess it could be argued that the narration helps focus on MacMurray's friendship with Robinson, but the final scene conveys already this much more succinctly and poignantly. Honestly, I really cannot think of any way that the narration/flashback structure enhances the film at all.

not a very good movie, but there should be a book-length study of representations of evil in cinema called closer than that with jack nicholson on the cover peering through his fingers at the viewer/bartender

I didn't include what Morbs called "the honorable miss" The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes .

https://humanizingthevacuum.wordpress.com/2017/07/23/shut-up-and-deal-the-best-of-billy-wilder/

Dietrich is great sizing up Congresswoman Jean Arthur in A Foreign Affair:

"I see you do not believe in lipstick. And what a curious way to do your hair, or rather not to do it."

Man, those early shots of John Lund driving his jeep to Dietrich's place through the ruins of Berlin... while "Isn't It Romantic?" plays on the soundtrack.

Dont know this one, put it on my watch list

It's one of BW's most enjoyable movies and it's a shame it's not more well-known. Even John Lund is good.

it has real emotional depth, i think due to Wilder and Dietrich's biographies.

The Fortune Cookie, which i hadn't seen in at least 20 years, is obv second-tier but better than i remembered. Matthau is positively Fieldsian.

I don't think the NFL would cooperate with this script today.

Some of Whiplash Willie's best line are throwaways ("Unwed mothers... I'm for that").

Kino Lorber Studio Classics drops A Foreign Affair on Blu August 6th!

tried to watch Avanti! a few wks ago and got about as far as the kitch-y coroner w/ the color-coded italian forms and turned it off. none of it was funny or charming and there was no reason to think it'd get better imo. there was a line where jack lemmon outright refers to juliette mills' character as fat that seemed really mean-spirited and would probably draw protesters today
― johnny crunch, Sunday, February 14, 2010 2:05 PM

After 1964 the guy totally lost it.
― Inculcate a spirit of serfdom in children (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, February 14, 2010

wrong and wrong!

Rewatched Avanti! last night and it's pretty good. Lemmon and the screenplay make no attempt to present him as much more than a blinkered louse for the first half of the movie. Clearly the female lead should've been cast with a plus-sized actress, but they only got character roles then. Also Wilder wanted to rescue Juliet Mills from her "Nanny" sitcom, and she comes through charmingly. Clive Revill is a great poised fixer/hotelier. And the last line of the film has Lemmon recanting his fat-shaming. (Also, the coroner scene is not "kitschy" but marvelous.)

In the "lost it" late period I also like the Holmes movie and Fedora.

also i rewatched Some Like It Hot last night and the skeptics can go to hell, or Spats Colombo's place.

Much of the Lemmon and Curtis interviews on the CC are to do with their costuming.

Are there really a lot of Some Like it Hot skeptics out there?

apparently, Woody Allen!

I also saw a Letterboxd comment that it's now "problematic." [redacted]

I watched Avanti! on Amazon last month: leaden and way too long.

A little too long, othwise disagree.

I do think one layer of Some Like It Hot now lost on almost everyone under 50 is its feeding off the pop culture, particularly the movies, of 1929-33 or earlier films about the period (Raft, Pat O'Brien, George E Stone, Rudy Vallee refs etc).

admit a lot of those references do go over my head, still a fun movie tho

I mean I know George Raft and Rudy Vallee but I don't doubt there's stuff I miss