Between this blog and my previous one, Professor Damian’s Public Domain Treasure Chest, I’ve been writing about movies for quite a while now. Because of that, there are a lot of posts that have simply gotten lost to the mists of time. So, I figured I’d use the idea of “Throwback Thursday” to spotlight some of those older posts, re-presenting them pretty much exactly as they first appeared except for updating links where necessary or possible, and doing just a bit of re-formatting to help them fit better into the style of this blog. Hope you enjoy these looks back.
I’ll admit that I don’t cover that many straight-up romance movies on this blog simply because they tend not to be my cup of Earl Grey. However, for a while on The Professor’s blog, when I was dedicating each day of the week to a different genre, Thursdays were called “Thursday Kisses day” and that, of course meant we went straight for the heart. Therefore I decided that Throwback Thursday this week might be a good place to feature a film from a genre that I so often tend to overlook. Plus, when you’ve got a film that stars both David Niven and Loretta Young to revisit, well, it seems a shame not to do so. So here we go, with a piece that first appeared on Feb 18, 2010.
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Thursday Kisses: Eternally Yours (1939) – Starring David Niven and Loretta Young
Echoing the debonair adventurousness of William Powell’s Nick Charles, today’s feature finds David Niven in the starring role of a stage magician/escape artist whose greatest trick may turn out to be reclaiming the love of his wife. Unfortunately, like most echoes, Niven’s portrayal lacks both the sharpness and lushness (in all senses of the word) found in the Thin Man series. And Loretta Young, who plays Niven’s wife/onstage assistant lacks the fire and wit of Myrna Loy’s Nora.
Of course, this really isn’t a fair comparison, because we never actually get to see Niven and Young react to poisonings, theft, or kidnappings. Instead, the problems faced by this couple are both more simple and more complicated, for it turns out that while Niven’s Arturo lives for the stage, the travelling, and the thrill, Young’s Anita longs for a simpler life… or at least so she thinks. She has even sold some jewelry given to her by her husband in order to build a home in the country where the two can finally settle down. True conflict comes, however, when Arturo’s latest stunt, jumping from a plane with his hands cuffed behind his back and having to escape from them so he can pull the ripcord on his parachute, proves not only successful, but an immense hit, and he is offered a two year contract to travel the world and put on his act. Realising that they simply want two different things from life and that Arturo is never going to settle down, Anita leaves him and eventually remarries.
This, of course, puts Arturo’s life and act on the skids and he is eventually reduced to performing mind reading and hypnotism tricks at private parties. When he happens to be hired by the boss of Anita’s new husband to perform at his winter retreat, a chance meeting of the two shows that the spark of their love is still there. The question though, is what can be done, since no matter how the two may feel, Anita is now married to another man. All of this climaxes when an out-of-practice Arturo is scheduled to perform his handcuff-parachute escape at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, only to show up and find that the plane he was planning to use has been changed and he no longer has his secreted lockpick. Will Arturo find some way out of his predicament, or will Anita wind up declaring her true love to a greasy spot on the ground?
Lightweight yet engaging, this romantic comedy finds all of its players in fine form. Niven is, of course, quite dashing, and Young plays well off of him. Broderick Crawford plays Anita’s new husband, a man who basically finds himself battered on every front and swept up in events over which he has little control. C. Aubrey Smith portrays Anita’s father (a bishop!) and practically steals every scene he is in.
Like so many of these films, a proper trailer is not available online, but here’s the first few minutes of it just to give you a taste of this fine little film:
Now for the skinny:
Title: Eternally Yours
Release Date: 1939
Running Time: 95 min.
Starring: Loretta Young, David Niven, Broderick Crawford
Director: Tay Garnett
Producers: Tay Garnett, Walter Wanger
Distributed by: United Artists
Until next time, Happy Treasure Hunting,
-Professor Damian
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Hope you enjoyed this blast from the past.
When I wrote about 
As proved true with Late Spring, Ozu takes his time with the story and brings a stillness to the work that allows it to become almost meditative. There is very little motion to his camera work, and indeed he allows the camera at times to linger and continue to focus on a location even after the characters and action have left it, thus allowing his audience time to contemplate the actions and scenes that they have just seen along with the words that have been said in a way that I suppose could be extremely off-putting to more modern audiences who are used to being rushed from one scene to another by directors who seem to be hoping that their audiences not think about what they have just witnessed for fear that they might find that the film maker has in some way come up short of his intentions.
Ozu also shows a sense of confidence in his actors by never forcing them to go over the top with either their voices or their actions, instead letting their performances match the moment in the film. This is not to say that their are never harsh words said, nor strong emotions expressed, but they are done so in a way that fits each of the characters and there is a sencse that both types of moments, the quiet and the loud, are there to serve the purpose of the film and in truth it feels like there is rarely an extraneous word spoken nor an undeserved or unearned tear shed.
Not too long ago I decided to 
Latifah definitely shines in this role, but Beauty Shop is also a great ensemble movie which manages, as the best do, to give each of its diverse characters just enough time and attention to bring their own to roles that could very well simply be stereotypes as opposed to fully-fleshed people. Sure, sometimes it feels like it’s almost stretching too far both to be inclusive and to have “something to say”, but it never reaches the point of feeling overstuffed or preachy (the hole into which, unfortunately, the second Barbershop movie fell a bit too often) . It also manages to deal with a wide range of topics, from the trials of being a black female entrepreneur to integration of the shop (both among the stylists and the clientele) to simply life on the streets and in an urban neighborhood without ever forgetting that first and foremost it is supposed to be a comedy.
One other thing that I definitely want to point out about Beauty Shop. Unlike so many of today’s comedies which rely on curse words and shock value to make them seem funny when they actually are simply generating uncomfortable laughs, Beauty Shop is rated PG-13, and it very rarely even feels like it’s coming close to crossing the line of that rating. Yes, there is one instance of a character using the “s-word” but it works in context. There is also a line early in the movie where Gina outlaws the use of “bitches and ho’s” in the shop because she is trying to create a comfortable place for her customers to come to, a move which I personally appreciated because I felt that it helped show respect for the audience and for the relationship between the characters. Yes, I recognize that it’s part of the common parlance in certain circles, and that’s fine, and I know that I run the risk of sounding like the stuffy old white guy here, but that’s just something that has always made me feel uncomfortable, and something that would turn this from a movie I’d feel very comfortable watching with my daughter to one that would make me question it just a bit.
Along the same line, and perhaps even more to the point, I will warn those who are overly sensitive that there is just enough use of “the n-word” that it could make some people uncomfortable, but it is used in a discussion of when and where and by whom it is appropriate, and that is something that I actually appreciated in this context, since it has long been my feeling that there is no way that people can actually have a dialogue about such things if the actual topic being discussed is considered out of bounds. And again, even in this, Beauty Shop never loses the light touch and never forgets that its main goal is to give the audience laughs.
Hiya, Kiddies! So, your ol’ Professor has decided to do something a little different this week. Instead of the usual western on Monday, horror/scifi on Tuesday, etc., this week we’re going to take a look at movies that cross the boundaries of genre. Today, for instance we’re going to take a look at a movie that is a cross between a western and a horror flick, 1966’s 
Anyway, after about 15 minutes of the baroness and her brother it’s time to get to the western part of the movie. Now if you had just joined in at this point, you might have no idea that nothing odd was going on, as this part is played just as straight as any oater of the time. We first meet Jesse (
Obviously, these two strands are eventually going to intersect, and when Hank is wounded in the resulting ambush, Jesse takes him to the village and the pair find respite at the Lopez house. Juanita then takes them to the castle so that the doctors can patch up Hank’s wounds. Upon seeing the strongman, Maria Frankenstein realizes that he is just the specimen that she has been looking for. After a bit of surgery, Hank is rechristened Igor and becomes Maria’s undead slave. Will he now follow her orders and kill his former partner? Or will Jesse be able to overcome the newly-made monster?
No, that’s not it. That’s one of the classic logo designs for the Justice League of America comic book series. Of course, there’s no way that Warner Brothers could simply have gone with that, because first of all, the movie can’t have “of America” in the title because of the studio’s dependence on world-wide sales. Also, for the same reason, the red, white, and blue color scheme would have to go.
Wow. If that doesn’t make you want to rush right out and see this movie, I don’t know what will.
Yeah, that’s ever so much better. Black-on-white block lettering. Woohoo!
The 70s were a great time for science fiction movies, and the original West World from 1973 is one of my all-time favorites from that period. It starred Yul Brenner essentially reprising his role from The Magnificent Seven, along with James Brolin and Richard Benjamin. Appropriately downbeat for the era, the movie was written and directed by Michael Crichton. Unfortunately it was followed up by the shall we say “less than stellar” Futureworld and a television series that was axed after only three episodes.
I have to admit I went into You’re Next with pretty low expectations. Some people I know seemed to like it, while others seemed at best disappointed. I’d heard it variously described as “effective”, “a parody”, a “horror comedy”, and “just plain bad”. That’s why I was pleasantly surprised by what I found.
Now that’s not to say it’s a perfect movie by any stretch. It certainly has some moments of really bad dialogue. There are a couple of moments that I suspect are more unintentionally funny than they were meant to be. A number of the characters are underdeveloped, and there’s at least one whose death I was actually cheering because the character was so frikkin’ annoying up to that point that I was happy to see them go.
Ten little monkeys jumping on a bed
One Got Fat is a production of Interlude Films which did a number of PSAs to be shown in schools, and features a group of school children dressed as monkeys who are riding their bikes to a nearby park. Along the way each of them fails too observe a bicycle safety rule and because of it meets a rather grisly fate. The entire film runs about 15 minutes and is narrated by acclaimed voice artist Edward Everett Horton, whose voice you will immediately recognize if you spent any time watching Rocky and Bullwinkle as a child.
So Tuesday we took a look at the 1914 serial The Perils of Pauline which was one of the first cliffhanging serials and starred Pearl White as the eponymous Pauline, and I figured today it might be fun to take a peek at a film that could be considered sort of a follow-up.
Take, for instance, the first song and dance number in the film – the Sewing Machine Song which shows Pearl working what is basically a sweatshop in Brooklyn while waiting for her big break. The only problem with this is that the real Ms. White was from a farm in Missouri and began performing with the local Diemer Theater Company during her second year of high school. Then, in 1907, at age 18, she went on the road with the Trousedale Stock Company, working evening shows then eventually joining the company full time, touring through the American Midwest. That same year she married fellow actor Victor Sutherland, but they soon separated and eventually divorced.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Christopher Walken and I love the way they use him as King Louie in the new Jungle Book movie. And in many ways his interpretation of “I Want To Be Like You” is one of the highlights of the film, but really, the did the whole let’s get him to sing bit in the live TV version of Peter Pan a couple of years back, and that really didn’t work, so I was surprised to see it happen here, too.
In a way, it’s kind of hard to know where to begin with the “what’s wrong with this movie” list, but since we’ve got to start somewhere, I suppose I’ll just randomly begin with Neel Sethi as Mowgli. For about the first fifteen minutes or so, I was really hoping that there was going to be a scene that would skip forward a few years after introducing the set-up where we would get some kind of time-jump that would re-introduce an older version of the character with a different actor. Again, unfortunately, this doesn’t happen.
As far as the aforementioned “rest of the cast”, I suppose we have to look at that two ways: the animated characters and the actors who voice them. As far as the voices go, this is one of the places where I have to praise the film. All of the choices are excellent, and they do an excellent job at inhabiting the various animal characters. Though again, i have to wonder why we’re once again subjected, like with Christopher Walken, to Bill Murray attempting to sing. Sure, we’ve heard him do his “mumble sing” bit before, and I understand that there was no way Disney could have released a new version of The Jungle Book without a call back to the animated version’s most popular song, but it would help if that version wasn’t Murray attempting to find the tune and Sethi screeching along.
Not only that, but there are quite a few points in the movie where the integration between Mowgli, the animals, and the CGI backdrops is so bad it looks like old-school rear projection. This is especially egregious in two scenes, one a simple walk-and-talk between Mowgli and Bagheera, and the other a very important interaction between Mowgli and the elephant tribe, both of which were so badly done that they drew me completely out of the movie.
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