Quickie Critical Commentaries

On this, our 19th day of self-isolation (with the exception of doctor visits and trips to the grocery store), I offer for your consideration, three movies and a novel......

"Snowpiercer" (2013).  This movie was directed by  Korean filmmaker  Bong Joon Ho.  After he swept the Oscars this year with his movie "Parasite" (which I enjoyed, btw), and upon the high recommendation of my pal Alan, I sought this one out on Amazon Prime, and watched it last night.  

After a cataclysmic event causes the earth to freeze and all life to become extinct, only a handful of humans survive and do so while residing on some sort of super train that endlessly circles the now frozen earth.  While I can appreciate the filmmaking - depiction of the train and the apocalyptic remains of Planet Earth are pretty neat - this just isn't my kind of movie.  I watched it on our downstairs TV while Mrs. Grandstander remained upstairs.  When it was over and I came back upstairs, she said "From what I could hear that sounded awful."  Pretty much so, I had to agree.

There were some names in the cast - Octavia Spencer and Ed Harris to name two, and the star was Chris Evans, who has gone on to make a name for himself in all those Captain America / Avengers movies.  In this one, he seemed to be trying to do nothing more than make himself a look-alike for U2's The Edge.

Two Stars from The Grandstander.

The next two movies are oldies and came to me courtesy of Turner Classic Movies and my DVR.

Based on and Agatha Christie play and novelette, "Witness for the Prosecution" (1957) was directed by the great Billy Wilder and starred Charles Laughton, Marlene Dietrich, Tyrone Power, and Elsa Lanchester.  Laughton plays distinguished English barrister Sir Wilfred Roberts who is being urged to retire for health reasons. Lanchester is the nurse who is constantly nagging him to slow down, take a nap, get his shots, and stop smoking cigars and drinking brandy, all of which Laughton delightfully ignores.  He is drawn into one last case defending American ex-GI Power against a murder charge, and Dietrich plays his wife, who may or may not be devoted to him.  It's a terrific courtroom drama with a fabulous Christie twist.  Its as nominated for six Oscars including Best Picture, Best Director (Wilder), Best Actor (Laughton), and Best Sporting Actress (Lanchester).  It did not win any Oscars, but that doesn't make it any less enjoyable and fun to watch.

Three and One-Half Stars from The Grandstander.

Based on a novel by John Godey, "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three" (1974) was directed by Joseph Sargent and starred Walter Matthau, Robert Shaw, Martin Balsam, Hector Elizondo, and Jerry Stiller.  It is the story of a ruthless gang of four bandits, led by Shaw, who hijack a New York City subway train and hold it and seventeen passengers for $1 million ransom, and, oh yeah, if the money isn't delivered in one hour, they're going to start killing the hostages.   Matthau is great as the Transit Authority police lieutenant  who must negotiate with head hijacker Shaw.  Matthau plays the dramatic tough guy cop while still being, well, Walter Matthau, and he's great.  He even wears an Irish tweed hat similar to the one I bought for myself when we were in Ireland last year!  Also great in small parts of this movie were actors Lee Wallace, Doris Roberts, and Tony Roberts as the Mayor of New York, his wife, and the Deputy Mayor.

This is always a movie that is brought up when the subject of Remakes of Movies is discussed.  In 2009, someone in Hollywood thought that this movie should be redone, and it was, with Denzel Washington and John Travolta in the Matthau and Shaw roles.  Some remakes of movies are good ("Murder on the Orient Express" comes to mind), some put a different twist on a story that makes it delightful ("His Girl Friday" and "The Front Page), and others are flat out awful.  The 2009 version of Pelham One Two Three was one of them.  My own memory of the remake was the constant and incessant cursing that took place it.  It was terrible.

Stick with the 1974 Walter Matthau version.  It gets Four Stars from The Grandstander.

And for you readers out there....

Alison Thomas is the gorgeous, somewhat snotty, and affluent 18 year old daughter of a Westchester, NY family on a Christmas vacation on the Caribbean island of Saint X (a fictional place for the purposes of this recently released novel).  On the last night of the trip, Alison goes missing, and a few days later, her dead body is recovered.  Two Saint X natives who worked for the high end resort where the Thomases stayed are held and then released for lack of evidence.  

How does such an event affect the lives of those upon whom it touches?  That is the story of this novel. 

The story quickly flashes forward eighteen years, when Claire Thomas, the younger sister who was seven years old when Alison was killed, is now 25, lives and works in New York, and goes by her middle name, Emily, hops into a NYC cab and sees that her driver is Clive, one of the then young men who was arrested for and then released after the death of Alison.  Thus begins the crux of the story as Emily tracks down and develops a relationship of sorts with Clive in an effort to find out THE TRUTH behind her older sister's death.  She also needs to learn just exactly who her sister Alison was, and why her death has shaped who she, Emily, has become.

The story is then told through both Emily's and, to a lesser extent, Clive's point of view, and author Alexis Schaitkin also offers snippets of points of view from some of the people who are a part of this story....the Saint X police chief, a news reporter, other vacationers at the resort at the time of the death,  and a host of others.  It's as really clever device, I thought.  I also thought that the opening chapters, where Schaitkin describes the island and the people who inhabit it, both natives and vacationers, and what lies just below the shiny veneers of these tropical paradises, we're brilliant.  It was what hooked me from the get-go on this book.

The story also touches upon other topics - white privilege and  tabloid journalism, among others - but the most intriguing is the existential question of timing of little events in a person's life when a seemingly minor decision can effect the entire course not only of that person's life, but the lives of countless others with whom they come in contact.  It was those little moments that caused this book to stay with me after I finished it.

There were parts of the story that dragged on a bit too long for me, and might have been a bit superfluous, but I still liked the book and would recommend "Saint X"  to anyone.

Three Stars from The Grandstander.

Old Movie Review: "Five Graves to Cairo"

In my quest to see as many Billy Wilder movies as I can, yesterday I watched "Five Graves to Cairo" (1943).  The movie starred Franchot Tone, Anne Baxter, and Erich von Stroheim.  Wilder wrote the screenplay with his frequent writing partner Charles Brackett, and it was only the second movie that he directed.

This is a World War II movie, but it takes place in a small space - a small hotel in an Egyptian desert oasis.  Tone is a shell-shocked British soldier who stumbles upon the place just before  the German tank troops, including Field Marshall Erwin Rommel himself, arrive to rest up before rolling on to conquer Cairo in the North African campaign.  Tone then goes "undercover" with the help of chambermaid Baxter in an effort to thwart the Nazis.  Of course, history tells us that that is indeed what happened, and this tense little drama offers an interesting speculation as to exactly how the Allies performed that task.  Fiction it may be, but fun and exciting fiction to be sure.

History and the movies have cast Rommel as a sort of "noble soldier", a brilliant military tactician, who just so happened to be doing his duty in service of the Wrong Side.  Not so in this movie.  Oh, Rommel is still the brilliant tactician, but noble...not so much.  As played by von Stroheim, he is an evil Nazi through-and-through, and he, von Stroheim, steals the movie.

As I mentioned, this was the second movie that Wilder directed.  A year after "Five Graves to Cairo", Wilder broke out big time with the terrific "Double Indemnity", and the roster of terrific Wilder hits continued to grow and grow from there.  Seven years later in 1950, Wilder and Brackett wrote and Wilder directed the classic "Sunset Boulevard".  In that movie, Wilder once again cast Erich von Stroheim as Max, the faithful butler to Norma Desmond.  In fact, von Stroheim was one of the great directors of the silent movie era, but is in the roll of Max von Meyerling that he is most remembered.

In the great body of work that Wilder produced, a movie like "Five Graves to Cairo" is easily overlooked, which is too bad.  It is one that movie lovers should make a point of seeing.  Be assured that it will be on my "DVR Alert" list when next it turns up on Turner Classic Movies.

"Sunset Boulevard", the Musical

You always worry when one of your favorite books/movies/plays is transferred to another art form:  book to movie, play to movie, or, in this case, Classic Movie to Andrew Lloyd Webber Musical Extravaganza.  


The 1950 Billy Wilder movie, "Sunset Boulevard", is by almost any source you care to sight, considered one of the Top Ten movies ever made in America.  It is the story of an aging silent screen movie star, Norma Desmond, who has been pushed to the Hollywood scrap heap with the advent of talking motion pictures, who meets up with down-on-his-luck cynical screenwriter Joe Gillis.  How the two meet, interact, and use each other makes for one of the most compelling movies you'll ever see.  The movie starred Gloria Swanson and the incomparable William Holden, and the thought of someone tampering with such a classic could seem almost sacrilegious.


However, Andrew Lloyd Webber provided the music and brought his story to the London and Broadway stages back in the early 1990's.  The musical was highly acclaimed and even Billy Wilder was pleased with it ("I think it would make a pretty good movie", he said), so seeing it has long been on my bucket list.


Anyway, the Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera brought "Sunset Boulevard" to town this week at the Benedum, and we took it in yesterday.  We both liked it.  The show starred a Broadway actress named Liz Callaway as Norma, and  Matthew Scott (who looks a lot like Pirate Neil Walker) as Joe.  Joe is the character who holds the play together, he is in almost every scene, but it is Norma who draws all the attention, and the numerous dazzling costume changes almost every time she is on stage is just the least of the attraction.  Norma also has the two show stopping musical numbers, "As If We Never Said Good-bye" and "With One Look".


The show is true to the movie, and while there is very little spoken dialog, what there is taken almost directly from the movie, including it's two most famous lines:

• "I am big.  It's the pictures that got small."
• "are you ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille?"

Very good show, well staged by the CLO, and all of the actors.  It made for a great day at the theater.

However, one should never forget the source material, the great 1950 movie by the great Billy Wilder.  If you've never seen it, and you love movies, then make it a point to see it very soon.

Old Movie Review - "Ace in the Hole"

Regular readers are aware of the fact that I have been on a Billy Wilder kick in recent weeks after reading a biography of him during the summer. This quest was rewarded earlier this week, thanks to Turner Classic Movies and the great invention of this era, the DVR, when I watched Wilder's 1951 movie, "Ace in the Hole" starring Kirk Douglas and Jan Sterling.

In this movie, Douglas plays a many fired newspaper reporter who finds himself working for a paper in Albuquerque, NM. After a year of looking for a story that will get him out of the sticks and back in the big time, he stumbles upon a guy who has been trapped in a mine cave-in. This is his big chance. When he learns that it a relatively simple procedure would enable the rescuers to free the trapped guy within 24 hours, he manipulates a crooked sheriff and mine engineer into using an alternate rescue plan that would take six or seven days to release the guy. By doing this, he can manipulate and milk the story to his own advantage, drawing maximum attention to himself, of course.

This begins a huge media circus that soon careens completely out of control. This was Wilder's follow-up to his classic "Sunset Boulevard" and it was not well received by critics at the time. Perhaps they didn't like how Wilder held up the mirror before them. It was re-released under a different title, "The Big Carnival", and it still never took hold. It wasn't until many years after release, when it appeared on television and later on video and DVD that the movie came to be recognized as the gem that it is. Woody Allen, for example, considers this one of his all-time favorite movies.

As I said, this movie does not paint a flattering picture of the news media, and keep in mind that this movie was made in 1951, long before 24 cable news outlets - and not to mention Larry King! - made the idea of media circuses a common event. Wilder didn't know it then, but he was making a movie about O.J. Simpson, Jon Benet Ramsey, Lacey & Scott Peterson, and Michael Jackson, or anyone of dozens of stories we could all mention if we thought hard enough.

Kirk Douglas is great in this movie. One Internet source I found states that Douglas not winning an Oscar for this movie is a classic case of when the Oscars got it wrong. (In case you are wondering, Humphrey Bogart won that year for "The African Queen.") He is not a nice guy or a likable character, to say the least, but what a performance!

This movie also contains a classic Wilder line. When Douglas tells Jan Sterling, the wife of the trapped guy, to go to a prayer service because it will look good for the papers, she tells him "I don't go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons." That's right up there with "it's the pictures that got small" in my book.

So, keep your eye out for "Ace in the Hole." It's a great movie.

On Billy Wilder

While on holiday (as our host, Maurice, phrased it) this week, I finished reading a book called "Nobody's Perfect" by Charlotte Chandler. Written in 2002, it is a biography of the great film director and screenwriter, Billy Wilder. A really good book if you are a movie lover. Lots of good behind-the-scenes stuff about the movies that Wilder made. And consider some of those movies. Here are just six of them:

Double Indemnity
The Lost Weekend
Sunset Boulevard
Stalag 17
Some Like It Hot
The Apartment

If those six movies were ball players, they would be first ballot Hall of Famers. If Wilder had never made another movie, those six would have assured him of Hollywood greatness. So to those six, add the following:

The Seven Year Itch
Witness for the Prosecution
Sabrina
Irma la Duce
The Fortune Cookie

There are others, but I think you get the idea. To be sure, when you make a lot of movies, they can't all be great, and Wilder had his clinkers, but as I said, the movies above make Wilder an All-Time Great.

Wilder had a most interesting life. Born in Vienna in 1906, lived in Berlin, where he got started in the movie business, between the wars, and fled Europe just before Hitler took power in Germany (his mother and grandmother died in Nazi concentration camps), he arrived in America with next to nothing. In addition to making movies, he began to buy and collect art, and his collection became one of the finest private collections in the world. He was the classic American Dream Success Story.

He directed his last movie, "Buddy, Buddy", one of the clinkers, in 1981, and lived to be 96, dying in 2002. He didn't want to end his career with a bad movie, and he kept coming up with script ideas until the very end, but, as Wilder might have he put it, they can forgive just about anything in Hollywood, except growing old.

The book has inspired me to re-watch some of these classic movies. Watched "The Apartment' last week, and "Some Like It Hot" tonight. Will probably pull out "Double Indemnity", "Sunset Boulevard", and "Sabrina" in the weeks ahead.

His movies always show up on TCM. Watch for them.

Old Movie Time

I have spent some time in recent weeks watching some old movies.


One of these was really old - Billy Wilder's 1945 classic, "The Lost Weekend." If you've never seen it, and this was the first time I had, it is a grim story about alcoholism, and despite being 66 years old, it is so well made, and the subject matter is treated so realistically, that it totally relevant in 2011.

Like "The King's Speech" this past year, "The Lost Weekend" took down the four big Oscars in 1945: Best Picture, Best Actor for Ray Milland, Best Director for Billy Wilder, and Best Screenplay for Wilder and Charles Brackett. Milland's performance is quite good and certainly Oscar worthy. Also, as I watched this I was struck by the thought that I don't think I've ever seen a Billy Wilder movie that wasn't great. (Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, Double Indemnity, Stalag 17....you get the picture.)

The other oldie that I watched was Peter Bogdanovich's "The Last Picture Show" from 1971. I can remember seeing this in college and liking it so I was almost afraid to watch it again. Sometimes a fondly remembered movie of your youth can seem pretty lame many years later (prime example: "Easy Rider"). "The Last Picture Show" still holds up well as a period piece and a portrait of small time life in a tiny, dying Texas town in 1951. Ben Johnson and Cloris Leachman won Supporting Actor Oscars for this movie, but it may be more notable for the early performances of a very young Jeff Bridges and Cybil Shepard. It was almost surreal to see the baby-faced Bridges in this movie after seeing him play the grizzled Rooster Cogburn in "True Grit" a few months ago.

There were also good pefromances by Timothy Bottoms, (and whatever became of him, by the way), Ellen Burstyn, and Randy Quaid.

It's still a good, if somewhat bleak movie to experience.