Man’s Favorite Sport?

I started watching this movie thinking that it was a Stanley Donen movie or something…

… but it’s not — it’s Howard Hawks. And it’s an excruciating watch.

It’s basically Bringing Up Baby done for the 60s, with Rock Hudson as the Cary Grant part.

For the Katharine Hepburn part, we have not one, but two Magic Pixie Nightmare Girls (from Germany, for some reason? financing?).

There’s a lot of odd bits in here…

Hepburn and Grant had wonderful chemistry, so while Grant’s character sometimes wanted to strangle Hepburn’s character over her madcap behaviour, there’s absolutely zilch here. Instead the two women are just insanely (and I mean insanely) annoying, and I wanted to strangle them myself.

Oh, and this embarrassment… He’s Native American, see.

The movie has one thing going for it — Hudson’s not all bad with the physical humour. But even there, Grant did these things so much better.

Many older directors didn’t really do well in the 60s, or at least made a few clunkers. Michael Powell (of & Pressburger fame), for instance, made some real stinkers, and even Hitchcock couldn’t keep up. This movie feels like somebody old wants to make a new, modern comedy, but ends up halfway to a Carry On movie, only without the boobs.

It’s well shot, though.

Wet shirt time!

Yeah, OK, it’s more like two thirds to a Carry On movie.

The plot goes for zany but ends up dumb.

It’s well-liked by imdb.

Yeah.

I dunno; I really really disliked this movie — I was annoyed and I was bored — so I’m going to throw an unfair die. So there:

Man’s Favorite Sport?. Howard Hawks. 1964. ⚀

The Heat’s On

This is another one of those movies that’s mainly a way to string together a bunch of musical numbers and call it a film… and also featuring Mae West, but it’s not a typical West vehicle, because she isn’t in it all that much.

Despite all that, this is much better than it has any reason to be. I guess it’s a testament to how good the Hollywood professionals were back then: They could take a nothing-much concept like this and make it into a really amusing movie.

And Mae West has several dozen of funny one-liners to hand out at any given moment.

This is the performer that’s given the most screen time, I think? And looking it up, she has to be Hazel Scott…

Yes, it’s during WWII, so we get a couple of patriotic numbers, too.

And this thing — a Gardening for Victory skit that seems to come out of nowhere, but I assume was sponsored by the gummint.

It’s a pretty madcap movie.

With a whole bunch of characters with character.

imdb hates it.

The Heat’s On. Gregory Ratoff. 1943. ⚄

The Swimmer

Amazingly enough, this movie has good reviews — it has a 92% tomatometer.

The imdb rating is more realistic.

It’s a really, really bad movie — nothing makes much sense, and the characters’ motivations seem totally random. I was going “wha? wha?” throughout the entire thing.

The only thing here that worked was the ending, which I guess was trying to reference Beau Travail, perhaps?

The Swimmer. Adam Kalderon. 2021. ⚁