Whoa. It’s London and she’s prey.

The awful landlady weaponizes the British monetary system. She first offers it to her for “3 pounds”, then “50 bob”, and then “2 guineas”, which is “42 shillings”.

Let’s see… I have to google this… just wait a minute…

So 12 pence is 1 shilling (which is the same as a bob)… And five shillings is a Crown… Four Crowns is one pund? So… A pound is 20 bob… And A guinea is 21 shillings…

Oh! She didn’t cheat her! The landlady did reduce the price on every offer. So perhaps she isn’t awful after all?

This is really good! Really odd, but really good. After half an hour, I’m still not sure what it’s supposed to be about, and I like that.

Ah! English cuisine!

OK, now I just don’t understand where this is going… but in a bad way. The people just seem kinda… random.

Everybody’s trying to help Jane get an abortion… without saying the words “abortion” or “pregnancy” or anything related to that, which makes a lot of these conversations kinda abstract. Or rather… excessively genteel.

Was this a British censorship thing?

The cinematography’s good… and I like Leslie Caron and Brock Peters. The storyline started off really intriguing and scary, but now it’s just… getting kinda annoying: It’s now a relationship drama with lots of … drama…

I mean, yes, the point of this movie is that being a single mother is a horrible, horrible, horrible fate, so everybody tries to help Jane with that problem… without asking Jane what she wants. But… it’s…

OK, perhaps this was really incisive and stuff in 1962? But it’s … I’m trying to avoid saying “annoying”.

Oh my god! This song was sampled at the start of The Queen is Dead by The Smiths! I’ve heard it a million times!

It’s so spooky finally hearing sampled bits.

For once, I think the casting is on purpose. A pet peeve of mine is that I can’t tell people apart — these two look the same, the three older women are indistinguishable, the two boyfriends are identical — but I think they did it on purpose here, instead of the normal thing where the casting agent just likes a specific type of woman/man.

…

Aha! I’m watching the extras now, and the author of the book on which this movie was based says that the director totally butchered the ending. In her book, the protagonist grew and become an independent woman, while in the movie she goes back to her family in France.

Fucking Forbes.

The L-Shaped Room. Bryan Forbes. 1962. ⚃

Oh! Preston Sturges! Now I’m excited.

Hm…

I’ve never seen a Preston Sturges movie I haven’t liked… But this feels so choppy. The different time periods and the odd chronology… It’s so odd! I’m just not feeling this?

The maudlin music doesn’t help either.

Oh, yeah, this is about a dentist.

This is a really … nerdy… exploration of dentistry history. There are funny scenes, but… it’s… it’s so weird. Was this financed by The Dentistry Society of the US?

Oh!

The movie was filmed in 1942 but not released for over two years, and the released version differed from what Preston Sturges had wished, although he publicly accepted the film as his own. Paramount Pictures disliked the film Sturges had made, and pulled it from his control, re-titled and re-edited it, in the process making it (especially in the early segment) more confusing for the audience to understand. The studio’s released version was marketed in a way that made it appear to be one of Sturges’ comedies. The film was not well received by the critics or the public, and marked the end of a sustained run of success for Sturges, who had already left Paramount by the time the film was released.

So this is the start of Sturges’ downfall. I’ve seen all of his previous movies, and they’re all wonderful — masterpieces, really. Breezy, smart, funny — of the sort you’d imagine he’d be able to keep on doing.

But this is a pretty bad movie. The studio editing probably didn’t help much, but the individual scenes kinda lack zip.

The Great Moment. Preston Sturges. 1944. ⚂

I’m not quite sure why I have this DVD… perhaps I bought it for the 1940s movie project, but didn’t use it?

It could be the Raoul Walsh connection — he’s pretty spiffy, isn’t he?

Anyway.

So this is Errol Flynn as Custer, the guy who had that stand. Hm… West Point? Is that a southern or northern thing? Oh, it’s in New York.

And then they play “Dixie” while they let the officers that have decided to fight for the secessionists march off south. This is portrayed as the heroic thing to do.

Well, yes.

Flynn accidentally negs Olivia de Havilland, so: Romance.

I guess the point of this movie is to stir patriotism for the fight against Nazi Germany, but it’s a bit annoying: There’s a stirring orchestra er stirring all of the time, and I’m getting a bit stir crazy.

Flynn’s pretty good in this? He’s convincingly jaunty.

What… is that Hattie McDaniel? She looks so much younger than in Gone With The Wind from a couple years earlier.

She’s totally hamming it up. I love it.

Callie tells it like it is.

McDaniel’s got all the lines.

I started watching this movie in a kind of bad mood, but it’s really winning me over. The funny scenes are very amusing indeed, the action scenes are plenty exciting, and the romantic scenes are very awww.

It’s firing on a lot of cylinders.

He’s a celeb now.

He’s so evil!

Anyway, I assume that this is all a fantasy, but it’s a pretty nice fantasy… but… it’s really dragging in parts. I feel like an hour could have been cut without losing anything of value.

They Died With Their Boots On. Raoul Walsh. 1941. ⚃