1940 poll

[sally]

is there anything more disturbing yet cute than william powell making amorous pigeon noises? (i love you again)

[sally]

Green Hell is quite the odd movie, very Whale in some ways, but hard to match it to anything else really.

yes. quite!

[rischka]

oooh oooh where did you see this, is it on youtube? i love jungle adventure

all i can find is scenes from some game

[sally]

i'll put the link in resources. it's pretty crappy quality but either my eyes adjusted or it got better as it went along.

[rischka]

vincent price AND george sanders?? PLEASE and THANK YOU

[sally]

i never thought i'd say this, but perhaps you can have too much george sanders? (unless he's in a sirk movie) but i am beginning to not get enough vincent price. i reckon he dreamed in tragic byron and we got the awakened dregs. (that means i like)

1940 is so far a fantastic year for me fancying every single person in a movie.

even the john wayne ones. (i'm fond of three faces west)

[Lencho of the Apes]

I tried to watch Green Hell once immediately after heavy dental surgery, looped on codeine-4 and completely unable to focus on anything. Seemed like it was 240 minutes of machetes through underbrush, enough to put me off opiates forever.

[sally]

there was quite a lot of underbrush. speaking of such, was more freaked out by the sight of joan bennett washing her hair for some reason.

and looky, i just found ANOTHER 1940 vincent price & george sanders movie - the house of the seven gables. my to watch list is getting too long.

[...]

i just found ANOTHER 1940 vincent price & george sanders movie - the house of the seven gables

What? How did I miss that movie? Now I gotta see it. Sanders and Price do Hawthorne sounds like a winner to me.

[sally]

has anyone braved the postmaster? you know cinephilia is a terrible disease when it makes you consider watching stuff like that. but when the film makes top whatever lists by miguel marias and jacques lourcelles....this is as close as i get to angst.

[Lencho of the Apes]

Battement De Coeur - Henri Decoin

A little bit Cinderella, a little bit Pygmalion, all cynical and Frenchy if not exactly Lubitschin. Certainly close. Reform school girl falls upward from Fagin's gang to the wife of a promising young diplomat. It's all about the

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who, I do believe, has a fan or two on the premises. Tidy copy, adequate subs, the tube of you.

[sally]

help. i'm falling into a 1940 abyss. why has every decent or not hollywood director made a film this year? i can't possibly watch them all, let alone those one-off miracles that chance guides you to.

has anyone watched these maisie (ann sothern) films? 1940 has congo (jungle!) and gold rush maisie, both available.

and i'm looking at what's non eng-lang, just to pepper the hollywood barrage and i can see there are subs available for hannah in society dir. gunnar olssen. don't know anything about it other than swedish comedy, so i'm interested - anyone been able to find this?

likewise, miehen tie, tapiovaara's last film before he died in the war. (eng subs exist, can't find film)

and jesus christ, i just found thunder over paris (not sure if the subs match, but i'll give it a go later) and erich von stroheim in blackface. wtf.

[rischka]

i watched chad hanna, lovely faded circus picture. earnest farmboy fonda is always a little boring to me, if beautiful



gentle humor w/ dorothy lamour and linda darnell.

[sally]

that looks so pretty. i'm travelling all weekend, so that king will look fine alternating with the view from the train window...

[...]

Oh, so many more movies I want to watch from '40. It's gonna be hard to pare down the list.

I thought I had seen a Maisie film, but it turns out I didn't. Somehow I stupidly confused Sothern's movei Nancy goes to Rio with her movie Maisie Goes to Reno, can't imagine how that happened. I feel so ashamed.

[Evelyn Library P.I.]

has anyone watched these maisie (ann sothern) films? 1940 has congo (jungle!) and gold rush maisie, both available.

I've seen Congo Maisie. It is very fun, until the ending which is (no surprise) very racist.

Second what others are saying: 1940 is a year of riches, Hollywood-wise at least, and the initial list I drew up numbered over 150 titles! I succeeded in cutting that list in half, in part by enacting a runtime cut-off. If it's over 90 minutes it's off the watchlist, save for a couple longer must-sees. But at 76 titles, my list is still far from attainable!

[flip]

Damn it Flip! Don't go flaunting unseen Deanna flicks at me like that! Now I'm gonna have to dig it up and see it too. Though knowing our appreciation of Koster films isn't quite the same, I won't be disappointed if it doesn't make my top tier Durbins, but would be happy to find it does.

i hope you liked the rest of spring parade as much as the opening. the opening and closing musical numbers are the most enjoyable to me of any in a durbin film, and it's one of the best showcases of her criminally undervalued comedic skills. i would have preferred a more likeable partner than robert cummings though.

i've seen a lot of koster, and don't think highly of any of his postwar films, but he made several good ones in the 30s and early 40s. every once in a while he does something jawdropping (like the party sequence in one hundred men and a girl ), but most of the time i don't find him all that remarkable - i don't think he was interested in doing ostentatious things, even if he could. he did get good performances though, and was a great director of comedy earlier in his career, though his later career films don't resonate with me.

my favourite durbin films are spring parade and his butler's sister, a comedy that borzage shot as if it were a dreyer film. it started with eve, it's a date and that certain age are the best of the rest, though the other koster ones are mostly good (though i don't care much for the best-picture nominated three smart girls, which i find a cacophonous mess).

[...]

I'm watching it at work, so I've only made it half way through but it's still holding strong as a contender for the best of her films. I don't even mind Bob Cummings yet!

I quite like Something in the Wind, Durbin's movie with Donald O'Connor, The Turntable Song gives her something a bit more modern to sing which she does well and O'Connor makes a better co-star than Cummings. I Can't Help Singing is probably second among those I've seen all the way through.

Regarding Koster, I just thought I remembered you'd ranked The Rage of Paris higher than I expected in a previous poll, but that was the extent of my guesswork there. Koster often just seemed to have a weirdly sour tinge to his comedies at times that was hard to figure. It didn't quite seem to fit any sort of story logic when combined with the other bits, so I tend to write it off to some personality quirk I don't get yet. Spring Parade hasn't shown any of that though.

[sally]

Battement De Coeur was very charming! very morally amoral, as french films could do.

and i think i'll watch gold rush maisie. that way between us we can watch as many 1940 films as possible and let all those dead people briefly live again....

[MayaDeren_fan]

If I'm doing this wrong let me know, I'm rather new.

For the year 1940:

His Girl Friday

Shop Around the Corner
Night Train to Munich
Grapes of Wrath
Fantasia

[Umbugbene]

Welcome to SCFZ, MDF! I've seen you on Letterboxd many times. Yes, you're doing it right

[Lencho of the Apes]

Con el dedo en el gatillo - Luis Moglia Barth, Argentina (no subs available)

Narrative content is straight-up Public Enemy, and it's about as crackling and shooty as Wellman, although there are some tangential subplots that weaken the overall effect. What's really striking, though, is how extremely noir the camera work is; how did something like this come out in 1940? John Alton wasn't involved...

Sorry for the shabby print quality.

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[sally]

Lencho, you're probably not keeping an eye out but the only Mexican/Argentine film I can find with subs is ahí está el detalle. Have you come across any others (that are worth it?)

And now I want to wail pointlessly. I turned the screaming sirens off in my head and watched the postmaster, and just to serve me right, its the best 40s film I've seen so far, it might be the best film I've seen in months. I hate myself. Couldn't take screenshots but it really really deserves them.

[Lencho of the Apes]

with subs

I was really hoping to find an internacionalista copy of Los De Abajo, cuz it's the only Mexican film for the year that I'm enthusiastic about... but such a thing seems not to exist, nor any others that I've seen.

[owen]

Interesting rather than great but Leisen's Arise my Love is a lot of fun and is Wilder clearly working through the fact that he was safe in the US while his family aren't. Like I said it's not a lost classic but for Hollywood coming to terms with the war it's manages to hit all sorts of tones surprisingly well and Milland is a lot better than normal in it.

[Angel]

And now I want to wail pointlessly. I turned the screaming sirens off in my head and watched the postmaster, and just to serve me right, its the best 40s film I've seen so far, it might be the best film I've seen in months. I hate myself. Couldn't take screenshots but it really really deserves them.

Shame on you to doubt Lourcelles and Marías.

[karl]

Darn, now you've got me curious.

Meanwhile: De Mayerling à Sarajevo is definitely lesser Ophüls. Given the story and the setting you'd think surefire Ophüls masterpiece, but it's rather pedestrian.

[sally]

And now I want to wail pointlessly. I turned the screaming sirens off in my head and watched the postmaster, and just to serve me right, its the best 40s film I've seen so far, it might be the best film I've seen in months. I hate myself. Couldn't take screenshots but it really really deserves them.

Shame on you to doubt Lourcelles and Marías.

oh shame on me for lots of things. (and anyway, with these venerable old men, half the time it's films that are impossible to find, so it's like doubting the clouds....menaces (greville)....anyone?)

but onwards with the 1940 march, just watched island of doomed men, which has been seen by hardly anyone on here. dunno why, nice little well-shot lunatic lorre pic.

also, was in a charity shop and they had broadway melody of 1940 on dvd for 49p, so that's fate. (the 7 books i also came out with, inc kavan, giono & pavese, are just depressing mistakes that the groaning shelves in my house are going to regret)

[Lencho of the Apes]

I was afraid Strange Cargo wouldn't hold up well under a rewatch, but knowing a bit more about Borzage's version of spirituality than I did 20-odd years ago actually made the movie richer & deeper, even justifying Gable's hard-to-swallow tough-guy posturing. Vague echoes of everything from his peak period, Street Angel through Man's Castle plus or minus, and it specifically seemed like it was in dialogue with Liliom, which I seem to love more than most people.

And that hurricane in the final reels! Swoon!

Island Of Doomed Men is in queue; I'll certainly get to it before the end. Next up: June Night, The Blue Bird, miscellaneous Argentine things.

[patrick]

The Long Voyage Home (John Ford)
The Shop Around the Corner (Ernst Lubitsch)
In the Field of Dreams (Teuvo Tulio)
The Westerner (William Wyler)
His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks)
The Mask of Zoro (Rouben Mamoulian)
Night Train to Munich (Carol Reed)