The Great Moment

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. ⚂

They Died With Their Boots On

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. ⚃

Never Die Young

OK, I’ve started watching the DVDs that are at the bottom of the stack of unwatched movies… and they’ve sedimented there because of various reasons.

This one is there because I have absolutely no idea why I bought this movie. Neither the name of the movie nor the name of the director rings any bells.

But that’s a stylish opening sequence.

This is really fascinating. They’re really emphasising the format of the movie — everything is all horizontal and symmetrical.

And then there’s these.

I’m really digging this. The only thing that’s … disturbing is the guy reading the text. He’s got such a deep, sonorous voice, made for reading poetry, that it just seems fake.