Another Woman. Woody Allen. 1988.

Oh, this is the first Allen movie with cinematographer Sven Nykvist, and it looks very Bergmanish indeed. Which I love.

But it’s more style than substance. This is part of Allen’s series about rich, cultured Manhattan denizens that made me abandon Allen in the first place. Gena Rowlands is great, but there’s a lot of dicey performances here, and basically all the lines are hair-raisingly artificial.

Rowlands saves the movie.

The Amazing Quest of Ernest Bliss. Alfred Zeisler. 1936.

This is another public domain movie, so it hasn’t been restored, and the audio is rather bad on this copy. But Cary Grant is Cary Grant.

This British movie seems a bit… basic. American movies of this era were more technically accomplished, I think? Yeah. There’s a lot of clumsiness when moving the camera around and some non-ideal blocking.

It’s a pretty classic storyline: Rich guy pretending to be poor to prove some obscure point. There’s so much fun to be had within that framework, but this feels so… abbreviated. They’ve got one fun scenario in, and then the next one is kinda really beyond absurd, and then it’s almost over. It’s really sloppy, lazy writing. I wonder whether the original 1920 movie was better, because the script to this one by horror movie writer Balderston is such a wasted opportunity.

It’s hard not to enjoy watching a Cary Grant movie, though.

The Pied Piper of Hamelin. Bretaigne Windust. 1957.

I bought two DVD box sets of public domain movies… and this was the only movie that was on both of them. So perhaps it’s really really good?

Or perhaps is just one of the very few public domain movies that are in colour. Because as we got to the late 50s, the companies got wise to the worth of even catalogues of B movies: You could sell them to all the new TV stations that were starved for content.

So from now on the rights were snapped up from the estates of bankrupt movie companies.

I think! I haven’t read a comprehensive history of the business side of this era, but that’s what I’ve pieced together from tid-bits. It may be wrong! Don’t listen to me!

But… this movie is… pretty tedious. It’s all in cod-oldee tymey rhymey, and kind uninteresting.

I bailed after half an hour.