I want to thank the law offices of Farner, Grisso, & McCain for a fantastic poll! Seriously, great work!
My ballot:
1. Imitation of Life – As perfect a capitalist product as has ever been created in the USA, delivering contradictory pleasures sometimes within a single shot. Classical Hollywood never topped it.
2. Angel Face – Preminger’s unblinking eyes make sure we’ll want to scratch out our own.
3. Night of The Hunter – The terrible, horrible capacity for evil in us all.
4. Duck Amuck – The most terrifying film ever made.
5. The Long Gray Line - The greatest of Ford’s living, breathing organisms. More movingly than anything in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, the Christmas scene demonstrates community formation through history making. If you can make it through these five minutes without bawling, then you need to take a break from ILX.
6. The End – I felt so incredibly alone at the end (get it?) of this.
7. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes – Rosenbaum called this a “capitalist Potemkin” and he’s right! Where Eisenstein’s editing offered a filmic correlation to dialectical materialism, the remarkable final track in to the Dorothy-Lorelei coalition exemplifies capitalism’s repetition compulsion. And give it up for George Winslow who should have won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance as lecherous piggy in the making Henry Spofford III.
8. Singin’ In The Rain – Postmodernism avant la lettre (or après if you believe Lawrence Grossberg).
9. Female on the Beach – The cost of nothing. Joan Crawford’s greatest film.
10. All About Eve – Patricia White in Uninvited: “It is one thing to love and emulate Bette Davis; it is another thing entirely to succumb to the charms of Barbara Bates” (213).
11. Track of the Cat – William H. Clothier’s colorless color photography makes this the one classical Hollywood film you could say you’ve seen without actually seeing. But that’s to ignore one of the most miserable family melodramas pinned to celluloid and Robert Mitchum’s quintessential inhabitation of the surly breadwinning male.
12. Harriet Craig – A prequel of sorts to Female on the Beach which means the ending is a happy one.
13. Wagon Master – Another Ford organism, his favorite among his westerns and mine too. In just 86 minutes, the film feels as if it always has been and always will be.
14. Rio Bravo – Thank you, Fred Zinnemann!
15. Torch Song - A fine documentary about Joan Crawford which just so happens to feature the greatest line in motion picture history: “Lobster Newburg and coffee.”
16. Bonjour Tristesse – Jean Seberg’s perfect summer starts to slip away from her as Preminger’s ever-gliding camera picks up every shard culminating in the devastating final shot.
17. Bend of the River – During the winter of 2000, all three of our immediate surrounding neighbors bitched at us for shoveling snow near their property. And then suddenly I couldn’t get this western out of my head. There is still Manifest Destiny in America even if the space to conquer is just a six-foot stretch of alleyway.
18. All That Heaven Allows – Gawd let Sirk have one unironic masterpiece!
19. Queen Bee – Joan Crawford’s Eva is not the villain here (well, not the only villain).
20. Shadows – And thus began a life of sin – Hollywood’s not Cassavetes’.
21. Pandora and the Flying Dutchman – A world where God himself is chaos. Eurotrash dance amongst the ruins of their civilization as pianos sink into the sand and headless statues pay witness to cars dropping in the ocean. Love, the mad, underappreciated Albert Lewin.
22. The Other Woman – Hugo Haas gets reflexive which is sort of like saying a mirror gets reflexive.
23. Hiroshima Mon Amour – To paraphrase Barthes “what’s terrible about narrative is that it makes the monstrous viable.”
24. Awaara – Charlie Chaplin – the Raj Kapoor of Hollywood.
25. Beat The Devil – As with Minnelli’s The Pirate (1948), I’m not sure we’ve caught up with this film yet.
26. Eaux d'artifice – The fire in water.
27. Edge of Hell – Just when you thought Hugo Haas couldn’t get any more bathetic, in walks Flip The Dog.
28. Kiss Me Kate – Cock lust in 3-D! And a proscenium so screechingly camp that not even the preposterous Howard Keel can shout it down.
29. A Movie – If the USA had a movie trailer.
30. Susan Slept Here – Frank Tashlin’s most sustained bit of lunacy. And narrated by an Oscar!
31. Johnny Guitar – Starring Joan Crawford in Red, Mercedes McCambridge in White (with a voice scarier than the one she provided for The Devil in The Exorcist), and, oh yeah, Sterling Hayden as the title character.
32. Strange Fascination – Hugo Haas at his most self-lacerating, quite literally at one point.
33. Father of The Bride – Along with Minnelli’s even more frightening The Long, Long Trailer (which I forgot to nominate), this film is the reason why we cannot determine genre by audience reaction alone.
34. Glen or Glenda? – The ultimate in ineptness as avant-garde serendipity.
35. Murder by Contract – Alternate title: Death by Life (at least if you live in a capitalist economy). Also, I love films you can snap along to.
36. Nightcats – Out of focus shots of kitties fuck with our concepts of figure and ground.
37. It Should Happen To You – I watched this immediately after Stalker. Where Tarkovsky’s film seemed like a command from on high, Cukor punches his film full of holes so we can worm our own way in and out of it, a perfect model of democracy in the belly of the Hollywood beast.
38. Pickup – Hugo Haas at his sleaziest which took some doing. Keep a Wet Nap nearby.
39. Mother India – India, where they manage to make a film in which characters spontaneously burst into songs about despair and poverty. And then it becomes one of the most popular things in the universe.
40. Ruby Gentry – Marvel as Jennifer Jones takes out her revenge on the earth…like actual dirt. From King Vidor in his high delirious period.
― Kevin John Bozelka, Wednesday, 19 November 2008 04:15 (fifteen years ago) link
Right you are about Jean Hagen, though I think you'll forgive my confusion:
'If the subject of movie dubbing is confusing to some trying to connect who is who, then what about the strange set-up connected with the classic MGM musical Singin’ in the Rain (1952)? This merry mix-up of real life dubbing was addressed in Ray Hagen’s article on Jean Hagen in Film Fan Monthly (December 1968): "In the film, Debbie Reynolds has been hired to re-dub Hagen’s dialogue and songs in the latter’s first talking picture. We see the process being done in a shot of Reynolds ... matching her dialogue to Hagen’s and synchronizing it while watching a scene from the film. But the voice that is used to replace Hagen’s shrill, piercing one is not Reynolds’ but Hagen’s own quite lovely natural voice—meaning that Jean Hagen dubs Debbie Reynolds’ dubbing Jean Hagen! To further confuse matters, the voice we hear as Hagen mimes "Would You?", supposedly supplied by Reynolds, is that of yet a third girl ... [Betty Royce]". Confusing? Well, there’s more. Although Debbie sang in the movie, notably the title tune (dubbing Hagen!), Debbie herself is dubbed again by Betty Royce in her duet with Gene Kelly "You Are My Lucky Star."
'Like Debbie Reynolds, other actresses or singers who were quite able to sing their own songs were still dubbed. One reason was money; if a studio had a music track but the vocalist who recorded it was unable to film, they just got someone else to lip sync the song on the screen.'
http://www.classicimages.com/past_issues/view/?x=/1998/november98/idibthee.html
So that is Reynolds singing "Singin' in the Rain"...
― Pete Scholtes, Wednesday, 19 November 2008 06:32 (fifteen years ago) link
two years pass...
eight months pass...
two months pass...
two years pass...