Man With A Movie List

Director: Jean Renoir Year: 1932 Run-time: 1 hr 24 min Source: Criterion Channel Streaming Notable For : This is the first film on the list from the great French director Jean Renoir, son of the impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir.  Boudu  is adapted from a play - the titular tramp is a character is a tramp who, after being saved by a bourgeois bookseller, then proceeds to take advantage of his benefactor's kindness by upending all social mores and lustily pursuing his wife and maid (who he was having an affair with).  Verdict:  As a tramp character, Boudu is inevitably compared to Chaplin's iconic character.  However, unlike the purity and innocence that made Chaplin's Tramp so endearing, Boudu as portrayed by Michel Simon is more like Heath Ledger's Joker, taking delight at watching other people squirm at him.  And there are multiple cringeworthy moments, both comically cringeworthy as he gets shoe grease all over the wife's bedroom, and pr...

Director: Merian C. Cooper Year: 1933 Run-time: 1 hr 44 min Source: Amazon Video Ebert's review Notable For:   King Kong was a blockbuster monster movie with a clear legacy to the modern day.  Perhaps it did more than any other movie to permanently tie together the spectacular big-budget film with the latest special effects.  There's a reasonable case to be made that it, more than any other film of the sound era, epitomizes where American movies were going. Verdict :  The effects, the fight scenes on the island between Kong and the dinosaurs - they're all really cool, and they made this movie worth watching.  But the film is problematic down to its supposed thematic core.  The racism is the first thing that audiences started to notice, most obviously with the portrayal of the islanders, but more implicitly with Kong himself.  Then there's the weird sexism of its supposed theme, the idea that Kong (and in a parallel sense the leading man Jack) ...

Director: Max Ophüls Year: 1933 Run-time: 1 hr 36 min Source: Youtube Notable for:  Ophüls is a German director who is better known for the films he made in the 50's, near the end of his career.  Liebelei , which translates to "fling", is about a casual romance that quickly develops into something serious before ending in tragedy.  It's set in the Imperial Era of Germany, but seems to me to speak more presciently about the Weimar era that it was filmed in.  The loosening of social mores that frequently characterizes that period feels true to the natural way that romance blossoms in Liebelei  - as such, the story feels relatable from a modern perspective, even though we live in a very different time still. Verdict : This is an obscure classic that I wouldn't mind revisiting in the future.  It took some searching on Youtube to find a good version with English subtitles, but I'm very glad I did - this is a bit of a tearjerker, but the depiction of ...

Director: Sun Yu Year: 1933 Run-time: 1 hr 46 min Source: Youtube Review of Film as well as Bios of its Director and Stars Notable For:   Little Toys  is Sun Yu's second film of 1933, with much of the same cast.  Li Lili is wonderful in this film, but the lead is played by Ruan Lingyu, a woman with a much more tragic history, as recalled in the terrific essay linked above.  Here she plays a toy-maker who is competing against foreign factory-made imports.  She makes clever and imaginative games for children while the competition is selling guns and soldiers.  With a very real war with Japan heating up, the distinction is prescient and fascinating to explore in this film. Verdict : Little Toys  is a classic film that I feel has a lot more nuance than Daybreak  - unfortunately, the only version I could find is a poorly translated (and synced) version on Youtube with almost no music (the film is silent).  This makes it a pretty difficult...

Director: Dave Fleischer Year: 1933 Run-time: 7 min Source: Youtube Notable For : This is not the Disney feature film that would premiere four years later - this is a Betty Boop cartoon from Max Fleischer's studios.   (This is the second of the three animated shorts from 1933 to anticipate a Disney classic.) Betty Boop was in her prime here, two years after her debut and one before the Hays Code would force her animators to tone down her sexuality.  Betty's not really the main draw here - it's the nonstop craziness happening all around her.  This is probably the most dynamic and energetic cartoon I've ever seen - certainly it does more in seven minutes than most modern cartoons with a full feature length.  All this and a Cab Calloway song to boot. Verdict : This is my favorite of the three animated shorts in a row, and being on Youtube in HD, there's no reason not to watch it right now.  After the game Cuphead came out last year, there was a lot of t...

Director: Ladislas Starevich Year: 1933 Run-time: 26 min Source: Youtube Notable For : The second animated short on the list from 1933 is this stop-motion piece from the Polish-Russian film-maker Ladislas Starevich.  Stop-motion is almost as old as cinema itself (Starevich had been innovating since 1912).  The craft here is as good as any modern film, and Starevich's twisted imagination is on full display, with dolls and household objects coming to life in a dark version of Toy Story.  For animation fans, it almost goes without saying that Starevich was an influence on Jan Svankmajer's work much later. Verdict :  Every frame is a bizarre delight. There didn't seem to be an overarching plan to this work (indeed, it's possible that The Mascot  is an amalgamation of several shorter films featuring the same dog character), and so the film veers from one strange scene to the next, with much of the second half taking place in some kind of tchotchke hell governe...

Directors: Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker Year: 1933 Run-time: 8 min Source: Youtube Notable For:  Our first animated film on the list is one of three from 1933, all very good, made with very different techniques.  Night on Bald Mountain  is a rare example of pinscreen animation, which the directors invented themselves.  Each frame is a delicate shadow cast by millions of pins arranged as part of a device which is in principle like on those pin impression toys you might remember.  The result is eerie and extremely textural.  Night on Bald Mountain  is, like the scene in Fantasia from several years later, set to the evocative Mussorgsky piece.  It's a succession of strange, occult images, much looser than the Disney creation, but closer to the menacing nature of the musical work. Verdict :  It's worth seeing, although unfortunately the picture quality is poor and much of the delicateness of the images (which can be still be seen ...

Director: Sun Yu Year: 1933 Run-time: 1 hr 36 min Source: Youtube Notable For:  This is the first Chinese film on the list.  The early 1930's marked the start of China's first cinematic "golden age", with predominantly leftist films dealing explicitly with class struggle and the rise of communism.  The director Sun Yu produced two films in 1933 with mostly the same cast - both were big hits.  The real star here is Li Lili, who portrays a young girl from the country who experiences a series of tramautic events after moving to Shanghai with her boyfriend.  Eventually, she becomes fully independent, and she transforms from a quiet and demure girl into a witty firecracker dedicated to the communist cause. Verdict :  The film's humanism aligns it more closely to Pudovkin than Eisenstein.  The closest analogue is Jutzi's Mother Krause's Journey to Happiness.   Formally, the film moves a bit too quickly to feel honest, and the propaganda feels art...

Director: Marc Allégret Year: 1932 Run-time: 2 hr 7 min Source: Criterion Channel Streaming Notable For : This is the sequel to Marius , and the second in a beloved trilogy of French films based on contemporary plays by Marcel Pagnol.  It picks up immediately after the first film left off, changing the focus from the young man full of wanderlust to the woman that he carelessly leaves behind.  All of the great actors return from the first film. The mood weaves behind wry, character-based humor to extremely poignant drama.  There's a remarkable and novel compassion for women in this film, and the relevance to feminism may be one factor in the film's being remade twice. Verdict : I liked Marius , but Fanny  is revelatory in how it puts the first film into a greater dramatic context.  A contemporary moviegoer might well sympathize with Marius' desire to see more than his confining hometown, but the tremendous hardship that he imposes on Fanny, who is lef...

Director: Ernst Lubitsch Year: 1932 Run-time: 1 hr 23 min Source: Flixfling Notable For : We're in the middle of a sudden influx of great American comedies, and Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise  is one of the best.  It's not quite screwball comedy, but it has a wonderful energy (like Love Me Tonight ), and like the best escapist entertainment, there's never any real sense of danger or inescapable drama to the proceedings.  Lubitsch is a director I was looking forward to - his films have an ineffable energy (the famous "Lubitsch touch") - somehow he plays to the best of his actors' strengths, and the three leads in this film are all iconic in their own way.  You know you're in for a great treat from the very first moment. Verdict : This is one that I'd love to return to, to reveal to newcomers.  So many great scenes, little details that stand out.  The way that Herbert Marshall runs up and down stairs, barely moving his upper body as his feet s...

Director: Rouben Mamoulian Year: 1932 Run-time: 1 hr 44 min Source: DVD Notable For :  Love Me Tonight  is the first musical on the list. Set in Paris, it matches the French entertainer Maurice Chevalier, with his husky, deeply accented voice, with the American soprano Jeanette MacDonald.  The vocal styles are very different, but the chemistry between the leads is genuine.  It's first and foremost a light comedy, with the music (all classic Rodgers and Hart tunes) all serving the comedy, with many of the lyrics replaced.  When the characters aren't singing, they're walking and acting to a background rhythm.  It's nowhere near to the bombastic musicals of the 60's, or the elaborate choreography of Busby Berkeley, but something else entirely. Verdict :  This is a classic - my wife and I were laughing most of the time.  In addition to being a great musical, it might be the first great comedy of the sound era - the jokes aren't physical like in...