Man With A Movie List

Director: Jean Renoir Year: 1938 Run-time: 1 hr 40 min - This isn't an easy film to love in 2020, since its protagonist murders women uncontrollably yet is meant to elicit a strange kind of sympathy, and the female lead is pegged as manipulative, coercing her lovers to murder.  Critics of the time period agreed that there is something deeply disturbing about this film based on an Emile Zola film.  Nevertheless, the performance of Jean Gabin and Simone Simon are fascinating to watch, and if the film took greater liberties with its source material, it might have been one of Renoir's finest.  As it is, it is a forerunner to some of the worst trends of film noir, as well as some of the best, and I wouldn't recommend it for everyone. - This is Jean Gabin's fourth film on the list in two years, a feat I'm not sure will be repeated. I might call Gabin the best actor of the 1930's.  It's fascinating to compare him to a male lead like Cary Grant.  Whereas...

Director: Marcel Carné Year: 1938 Run-time: 1 hr 35 min - Carné's second film of 1938 doesn't share all of the same film noir trappings as Port of Shadows , but it still reminds me a lot of the Marseilles trilogy in the tragic humanism of its hopeless characters. This film starts out as a series of inter-related stories centered at a Paris hotel, before merging those stories together. Carné doesn't shy away from themes that would never fly past the American Hayes code, and as such his early films have a brutal and refreshing honesty, even though I wouldn't claim this is an accurate representation of the French lower classes. Also like the Marseilles trilogy, there's a heavy focus on dialogue that makes this seem like it originated as a play (it was actually first a collection of short stories.)

Director: Marcel Carné Year: 1938 Run-time: 1 hr 31 min - This is the first of two Carné films on the list from 1938.  We haven't talked much about French poetic realism, the style pioneered by Pepe le Moko  (also starring Jean Gabin), but this is where that style heavily overlaps with what would become film noir (Wikipedia claims this was one of the first films to be called as such).  The tropes of noir are so heavily associated with post-war depression and malaise that it's pretty shocking to see these same tropes show up before the war - the French government agreed, and even banned this film for a time as not representative of the French spirit.  It's an excellent film, though. From my perspective, both of these early Carné works show clear ties to the Marseilles trilogy - this one, because of the persistent theme of the sea as a place for escape and loss of identity. - I am much more in love with the French acting style of the 30's than I am...

Director: Hiroshi Shimizu Year: 1938 Run-time: 1 hr 6 min - This is the kind of simple, elegant, beautiful, short film that I'm happy that the list sheds some light on. It's a short story told in just over an hour, but fitting in a surprising range of characters, all meeting in a resort town and never quite getting to know each other, but making a lasting impression nonetheless.  We get little glimpses into their lives outside the town, only the details we need.  No one is quite to help anyone else, and feels worse for it.  I found it less overtly melodramatic than the last Shimizu film I watched, Japanese Girls At The Harbor , a sign that Shimizu's style was developing.  Shimizu was an enormously prolific director , with so many of his films lost to the war. - This film fits into an interesting canon of Japanese films set at resorts, a canon that includes all-time greats like Tokyo Story  and Spirited Away .  There's something about the setting that ...

Director: Sergei Eisenstein Year: 1938 Run-time: 1 hr 51 min - Here we have the return of the great Eisenstein, who had stopped working for a decade, and the first Russian film on the list in quite a while.  True to form, it's a groundbreaking work in sound film in the same way that his previous works had revolutionized silent film.  It would be a gross exaggeration to say this was the first great military epic, with outstanding works like Napoleon  predating it, but it may be the most influential military epic, with everything from the cinematography to the score being like nothing else before it.  It's a slow-paced film in an era of Russian history that most westerners, myself included, know little about, but the heavy symbolism and deliberate pacing means that anyone will understand what's happening.  And, oh, to see the Germanic knights posed with their absurd and frightening helmets is really frightening, like Lord of the Rings  from a Russian poin...

Director: George Cukor Year: 1938 Run-time: 1 hr 35 min - This is the second Cary Grant / Katharine Hepburn film in this very year, but it's a very different romance from Bringing Up Baby , and they're both excellent films in their own ways. Holiday  starts out with the same "rich heiress" theme, but takes it in a different direction, and has a much warmer heart than one would expect from a comedy of this era.  On the surface, it's a film about class, but it turns out to be a film about being stuck in a life you're unhappy with.  Clare and I both thought it was sweet, and in the end it's not surprising that it came of a theatrical origin, as well as being directed by the same man at the lead of David Copperfield , even though those films are very different.

Directors: Michael Curtiz and William Keighley Year: 1938 Runtime: 1 hr 42 min - This is one of the "fluffiest" films on the list so far, certainly easygoing for one of the most expensive films of the era.  It's very likeable, although my heart will always be with the 90's Kevin Costner Robin hood (only sort of joking).  There's a lot to make fun of as well, and my wife and I had a lot of fun with the copious amount of meat eating in this film.  The Renn Fayres of the world certainly owe a lot to this film.  I also love how the principal mode of combat in these times was dropping on a person from a tree.  All joking aside, it's a beautiful film.  I don't know what kind of restoration this film's been through, but to go from black and white to this beautiful Technicolor is certainly jarring in a good way.  Just a very fun film.

Director: Norman Z. McLeod Year: 1934 Run-time: 1 hr 9 min - It's not easy to root for W.C. Fields' character in this film, given how much of a jerk he is, but in the end I was won over by his understated comedy.  I'd read beforehand that his routines were honed (and even patented), but this film has a much more improvisational feel than something like Duck Soup , so I found that surprising.  The film is rarely riotously funny, but it did manage to win us over in the end.

Director: Ben Sharpsteen Year: 1938 Run-time: 8 min - Mickey's Trailer  is the first Disney film on the list - it came out a year after Snow White.  It's also the first color film on the list, premiering eight days before The Adventures of Robin Hood .  It's a fun trifle, not really holding a candle to the sheer trippiness of the earlier Betty Boop shorts, but it has a number of fun sight gags and Looney Tunes-esque shenanigans. - After Snow White, Disney films would move away from rotoscoping, and given Disney's dominance of the animation landscape and how we talk about it, rotoscoping would soon come to be associated with "laziness" on the animator's part.  Not to besmirch traditional hand-drawn animation, but rotoscoping can be amazing (Betty Boop is evidence of that).  I'm beginning to wonder if Disney was just eager to separate itself from the work that Max Fleischer was doing (and perhaps even the association with black jazz performers like...

Director: Howard Hawks Year: 1938 Run-time: 1 hr 42 min - Bringing Up Baby  is in my mind the epitome of the screwball comedy, and probably its finest example.  Hepburn and Grant are just so perfect in their roles, and the level of constant absurdity gets to the point where it overrides any cultural datedness and just becomes fun.  (The main exception is the Irish stereotype, but given that he is justified in how he behaves, it's excusable.)  I was a bit shocked to discover that this was not a commercial success, and indeed almost ruined Hepburn's career (she had the most to lose, given how novel her quirky performance is). - Looking back at the three screwballs so far on this list, it never occurred to me before how the genre seems to rely on a rich and "privileged" female lead to be the one to challenge and emasculate the male lead.  Perhaps that was the acceptable way to present it to a depression-era audience?