Haunted House meets Mystery meets Western love watching these films from the early thirties. Rarely are they good in the way that I need as a modern viewer. But the story is not the one the movie directly delivers, but the larger story of movies...
A young woman turns to Holmes for protection when she's menaced by an escaped killer seeking missing treasure. However, when the woman is kidnapped, Holmes and Watson must penetrate the city's criminal underworld to find her.
Displaced Mind and Eye form — at least as established in the Holmes stories and subsequent early detective fiction, has the reader experience things in the order the detective does. In the best, there is some tension as we know the detective is ahead of...
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.
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...
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.
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...
An alcoholic lawyer who successfully defended a notorious gambler on a murder charge objects when his free-spirited daughter becomes romantically involved with him.
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...
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...
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.
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...
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.
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...