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The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932)
The Frankenstein of the Orient!
Filmmaker(s): Charles Brabin
Adventure
Horror
Science Fiction

The villainous Dr. Fu Manchu races against a team of Englishmen to find the tomb of Ghengis Khan, because he wants to use the relics to cause an uprising in the East to wipe out the white race.

11 Dec

Posted at 19:33h in Fours, IMDB Comments by
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Scientific Rape many times a movie can be worthwhile when it does no more than create and display a strange world. Almost always that's the case where the world is new and/or synthesised from previous abstract sources. "Metropolis" of five years earlier is often celebrated as...


Published December 11, 2024
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Freaks (1932)
Can a full grown woman truly love a midget?
Filmmaker(s): Tod Browning
Drama
Horror

A circus' beautiful trapeze artist agrees to marry the leader of side-show performers, but his deformed friends discover she is only marrying him for his inheritance.

11 Dec

Posted at 20:07h in Fours, IMDB Comments by
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Elephant Men older gems have to be watched with eyes on two levels. The first concerns the experience within the narrative. Projects that worked well in this regard when new often fade. Those that continue to work as the context changes get called "classics" as if...


Published December 11, 2024
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A Free Soul (1931)
She wasn't a divorcee but she believed that strangers could kiss!
Filmmaker(s): Clarence Brown
Drama
Romance

An alcoholic lawyer who successfully defended a notorious gambler on a murder charge objects when his free-spirited daughter becomes romantically involved with him.

24 Dec

Posted at 16:34h in IMDB Comments, Twos by
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The Big Speech movies are theatrical in the sense that all their values and methods are derived from stage values. This is one. Some movies are in that sweet spot after talkies got going and before the code was enforced, so they have a vitality that...


Published December 24, 2022
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The Iron Man (1931)
A Pig Iron Jaw and a Mule Kick Got Him the Paper Crown.
Filmmaker(s): Tod Browning
Drama

Prizefighter Mason loses his opening fight so wife Rose leaves him for Hollywood. Without her around Mason trains and starts winning. Rose comes back and wants Mason to dump his manager Regan and replace him with her secret lover Lewis.

19 Jan

Posted at 15:12h in IMDB Comments, Twos by
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No Cinderella you enter into a film, you are accepting a world. You are accepting whatever God and physics and mythology that the filmmaker has created. Within that world, wheels turn and things happen. All too often we think the movie is about those happenings. We...


Published January 19, 2024
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City Lights (1931)
True Blind Love
Filmmaker(s): Charlie Chaplin
Comedy
Drama
Romance

A tramp falls in love with a beautiful blind flower girl. His on-and-off friendship with a wealthy man allows him to be the girl's benefactor and suitor.

11 Dec

Posted at 12:17h in Fours, IMDB Comments by
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Seeing and Being Seen me, this film falls not into the category of favourite films (I'm a Marx brothers kind of guy) but earns instead a place on a very short list of most important movies. That's because it has two features that I truly appreciate. It...


Published December 11, 2024
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Animal Crackers (1930)
The maddest comics of them all!
Filmmaker(s): Victor Heerman
Comedy
Music

The well-known explorer and hunter Captain Spaulding has just returned from Africa, and is being welcomed home with a lavish party at the estate of influential society matron Mrs. Rittenhouse when a valuable painting goes missing. The intrepid Captain Spaulding attempts to solve the crime with the help of his silly secretary Horatio Jamison, while sparring with the anarchic Signor Emanuel Ravelli and his nutty sidekick The Professor.

04 Apr

Posted at 23:51h in IMDB Comments, Threes by
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Missed Marks periodically revisit the Marx films to recharge my own desire for creative anarchy. This time around, I became more aware of how unclever this is as film, and how clever they got later in the medium as fast learners. Its not anarchy yet. This...


Published April 4, 2023
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All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
They left for war as boys never to return as men.
Filmmaker(s): Lewis Milestone
Drama
War

When a group of idealistic young men join the German Army during World War I, they are assigned to the Western Front, where their patriotism is destroyed by the harsh realities of combat.

14 Feb

Posted at 04:44h in IMDB Comments, Twos by
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The March things fascinate me: films that are about something but are presented in a way that contradicts that something. Often it is a film whose message is to strive for the extraordinary, but the film itself is strictly formulaic. Here we have something much more...


Published February 14, 2023
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Paid (1930)
She Outwitted the Law...but Yielded to Love!
Filmmaker(s): Sam Wood
Drama

Mary Turner gets a three years prison sentence for a crime she didn't commit. Once released, she plots to get back at the man responsible for her conviction.

06 Dec

Posted at 16:45h in IMDB Comments, Threes by
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Finding the Fulcrum lucky we are to have these old films! God bless Scorcese and the many others involved in preserving the legacy. These films, particularly this one, aren’t worth watching for the purpose they were designed for: entertainment. That’s because they don’t work. But that...


Published December 6, 2022
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Bacon Grabbers (1929)
Filmmaker(s): Lewis R. Foster
Comedy

Laurel and Hardy are debt collectors trying to repossess a console radio.

16 May

Posted at 18:58h in IMDB Comments, Twos by
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Destruction was the 25th short as a team. I’m only now dipping into Laurel and Hardy in a serious way, but the whole 20 year collaboration seems to be based on two things: the comedy of destruction, and a sort of flummoxed humiliation. We laugh at...


Published May 16, 2023
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Perfect Day (1929)
Goodbye...
Filmmaker(s): James Parrott
Comedy

Two families embark on a pleasant Sunday picnic but manage to run into a variety of issues with their temperamental automobile. Each incident requires repeated exits and reboardings by Laurel, Hardy, their wives and grouchy, gout-ridden Uncle Edgar.

24 Dec

Posted at 16:58h in IMDB Comments, Ones by
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Not Perfect am in the midst of watching a lot of Laurel and Hardy shorts. I’m amazed at a few things. There are over a hundred. They all use the same gag philosophy, often the same gags. And they range from pretty darn funny to...


Published December 24, 2022
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