Tag: movies I have never seen

Honey, nothing can live unless something dies. – Clark Gable, The Misfits

What is it? The Misfits is a star-packed elegiac meditation on love, loss and the American dream, directed by John Huston and starring Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable in their final film. A dusty urbanised western, it follows a young woman visiting Reno to get a quickie divorce (Monroe) and the older cantankerous Nevada cowboy she begins a tentative affair with (Gable). Packed with Hollywood talent, it’s a surprisingly thoughtful, eloquent film wrapped around its May-December romance. 

Yet it’s perhaps remembered most for the melancholy real-life fate of its three stars – Gable, 59, suffered a heart attack and died just 12 days after shooting wrapped. Marilyn, of course, died tragically at just 36 in 1962, and The Misfits was her final screen appearance. Co-star Montgomery Clift, whose life had already been speckled with so much tragedy, died himself suddenly at age 45 in 1966. Barely five years after The Misfits’ release, all of its lead actors were gone. 

Why I never saw it: Can we ever separate a movie entirely from what we know about its stars in real life? You watch The Dark Knight and mourn a bit the loss of Heath Ledger; My Own Private Idaho, we think of River Phoenix and all that might have been. Hell, even Good Morning Vietnam seems a bit sadder now with Robin Williams’ suicide. So it is with The Misfits, where at every turn you are confronted by Marilyn Monroe’s shooting-star beauty and fragility, and wiry Gable at the end of his career, old before his time yet still with a twinkle in his eye. You might write The Misfits off as one of those forgettable endless Hollywood epic dramas of yore, with more scenery than soul to it. But you’d be missing out.  

Does it measure up to its rep? Despite the legendarily chaotic production – with a drunken Huston gambling away in Reno, Monroe suffering several mental and physical health issues – The Misfits is something of a masterpiece. Those grand Nevada deserts shimmer in the black and white cinematography and playwright Arthur Miller’s script, filled with quotable lines, has a barbed, bittersweet wit to it that lifts the film higher. 

I have to admit when I think of Marilyn Monroe it’s of the frothy bubblehead she plays so well in Some Like It Hot or The Seven-Year Itch, a good-hearted soul but without a lot of deep emotional weight. So it’s a revelation to see how good she is here as the traumatised, sensitive Roslyn. You feel her exhaustion as she begins the picture as a new divorcee and the gentle rise in her spirits under the endless Nevada skies as she and Gable’s cowboy cobble together a kind of life out in the desert. Monroe portrays a woman who’s troubled, but hopeful. While she’s still stunningly beautiful and the camera loves her, she seems more human here than ever before, a woman with her own dreams rather than just an object. It makes you sad, to think of what might have been in her future instead. 

As for Gable, he harnesses all of his star power from classics like Gone With The Wind and It Happened One Night into a leathery old cowboy romantic who’s reduced to hunting down stray horses for dog food. With marvellous side characters – Thelma Ritter’s salty older divorcee, Eli Wallach’s prickly mechanic and Clift’s reckless doomed rodeo dude – The Misfits feels like nothing less than an exhausted pit stop on the road away from the American dream. It isn’t a cheerful movie, exactly, but it’s a staggeringly beautiful one, with every one of its hurt characters trying to find their way to a better tomorrow in the empty wasteland of Nevada’s scrub and dirt. 

Worth seeing? Definitely. It feels like a postcard from the final days of Hollywood’s golden age, but also strikingly modern in its mood of ennui and heartbreak. From Miller’s stark screenplay to the very final scene between Gable and Monroe, it’s a world long vanished, but the stars in it still shine with a bright light indeed. God, they were beautiful people, weren’t they? 

If I’m going to be alone, I want to be by myself. – Marilyn Monroe, The Misfits

What is it? The plot is simple: A peaceful alien arrives on Earth to deliver an important message, but is immediately met by fear and hatred. It’s an idea that’s been revisited countless times everywhere from E.T. to Starman to Arrival, but seldom with quite as much cool style as in 1951’s The Day The Earth Stood Still. Michael Rennie plays Klaatu, a seemingly human alien who arrives on Earth with an ominous robot sidekick, Gort, and who attempts to understand humanity. Klaatu grows close to an Earth boy and his mother, but fears that Earth’s warring nuclear powers threaten the rest of the universe’s stability. 

Why I never saw it: Some movies seep into the collective unconsciousness so much, you think you have seen them. Any somewhat movie-literate person recognises the image of Gort emerging from Klaatu’s spaceship. Yet when I was a teenager discovering all those old ‘50s sci-fi classics, this one wasn’t on the afternoon TV movie rotations. Somehow, the movie itself had slipped through my watchlist over the years but because it is so familiar, watching it felt a bit like rediscovering an old book you read and loved long ago. 

Does it measure up to its rep?  From the creepy theremin soundtrack to the bold and simple iconic designs of Klaatu’s flying saucer and Gort’s lurking menace, Day The Earth Stood Still is a template for what we think of when we think of smart science fiction. Don’t overlook Rennie’s quietly charismatic performance as Klaatu, one of the first of many cinematic “strangers in a strange land” to ponder the mysteries of us earthlings. Rennie anchors the movie when it threatens to dissolve into kitsch or sentiment (Keanu Reeves played the role in a widely ignored 2008 remake, which I haven’t seen). Sure, Klaatu’s relationship with naive little Earth child Bobby is a plot device that is a bit saccharine, but Patricia Neal’s thoroughly humane performance as his mother works very well, especially as she comes into her own in the final act. 

The 1950s were an absolute golden age for science fiction movies. Sure, they had existed before that and SF’s roots date back at least to the Victorian work of Jules Verne, but in the devastated aftermath of World War II, SF became a way for us to work out our feelings about the brave new world of atomic energy, mass death and the cosmic unknown.

Anyone who calls themselves a science fiction fan has at least a few ‘50s movies they love, from the original Godzilla to the creepy creatures of The Blob, The Thing and Them to the more thoughtful, contemplative vibe of classics like Forbidden Planet, The Incredible Shrinking Man and War Of The Worlds. The Day The Earth Stood Still stands firmly in that company, as science fiction that asks questions and makes us question our own beliefs. It’s ahead of its time and thoroughly of its time all at once. 

Worth seeing? Absolutely, because while the cold war paranoia that coursed through the bloodstream of so much 1950s science fiction has eased a bit, the movie’s message hasn’t lost relevance. We humans are still self-destructive, often brutish creatures determined to sabotage our world’s possibilities, as the last few years have so thoroughly reminded us. When Klaatu says at the end, “the decision rests with you,” that’s a message that resounds still 70 years on. Hopefully eventually we’ll listen.

What is it? I’m a movie-loving goof, and I’m still on my post-Oscars coverage high this week. And as a movie goof, I sometimes find myself staring off into space mulling the big questions – such as, who was the greatest movie star of all time? And the answer almost always is, Cary Grant, of course. 

“We had faces,” goes the famous line from Sunset Boulevard, and iron-chinned Grant perhaps had the greatest movie face of all. Less rugged than Bogart, more confident than Jimmy Stewart, a bit harder than Marilyn Monroe, Cary Grant could do broad comedy or bold adventure and rarely did a star make it all seem so effortless. Much of the DNA you find in Tom Cruise today comes straight from the Cary Grant foundation. 

Arsenic and Old Lace is a classic stage farce which still gets rolled out for local theatre productions on a regular basis, where two charming little old ladies are revealed to be disarmingly genial serial killers – plus, there’s a criminal on the run, a befuddled newlywed, fumbling cops and a confused fellow who thinks he’s Teddy Roosevelt. It’s a farce with a staggeringly high body count (13 bodies in the basement!) that somehow remains charmingly light on its feet. Frank Capra’s 1944 adaptation of the beloved play was originally going to star Bob Hope, and believe me, we’d barely remember it today if that bland hambone starred in it. Instead, Cary Grant signed on to play critic and playwright Mortimer Brewster (that name!) and it became one of his sweatiest, most frenetic performances. Turns out there’s few things funnier than watching smooth, smooth Cary Grant slowly come apart over the course of two hours. 

Why I never saw it: I’ve loved Cary Grant for decades, from his iconic Hitchcock roles to the early screwball stuff – The Philadelphia Story might be the single most starpower-packed comedy of all time, and surely Bringing Up Baby is the awkward height of the “meet cute” romance trope? His Girl Friday, still one of the best journalism movies of all time? But Arsenic and Old Lace somehow slipped through the cracks for me. Grant’s been gone for coming up on 40 years now, but there’s still gold in that there filmography to be mined for a movie goof. 

Does it measure up to its rep? I’ll make a slight confession – unlike other movies in this occasional series, I actually watched Arsenic and Old Lace twice before writing this up, a month or so apart. Partly that’s because of the bombastic pace of these witty old comedies, where the jokes and puns fly so fast that you barely absorb them all (seriously, if you’ve never watched His Girl Friday some time, it’s like a machine gun barrage of witty verbiage). So on the first viewing Arsenic is an energetic slap to the face, but it’s on a second viewing that the sheer craft of Capra’s stagecraft shows, with Grant’s immaculate comic timing, Raymond Massey’s jarringly sinister calm, Peter Lorre’s invaluable pop-eyed sidekick anxiety and the utterly hilarious Josephine Hull (who looks disarmingly like the late Rip Torn in drag) and Jean Adair as Grant’s dotty, murderous aunties. They’re quite convinced they’re doing the lord’s work by poisoning lonely old men, you see.  

Like most farces, it’s all a jumble of moving parts that somehow barely holds together. There are a few dated and strained comic gags (the Teddy Roosevelt stuff gets a bit much), but most of it still works beautifully. Filmed more than 80 years ago, it’s still stagey and broad (it never really lets you forget it was originally a play) but it’s also a masterpiece of comic chaos with a twisted, dark underbelly that lets it hold up better than some other farces of the era – a scene where Mortimer is about to be tortured by his sinister brother goes into some pretty darned dark places before the comedy kicks in again. 

Worth seeing? The thing with a broad farce is you absolutely have to be on its wavelength and roll with it. The densely silly farces of yesteryear with their rat-a-tat pace aren’t meant to be watched while also scrolling through Twitter and checking your emails. If you abandon distraction and go with the flow, Arsenic and Old Lace is a goofy blast of anarchy, with Cary Grant at his loosest and silliest.

In a week where Hollywood once again lined up to celebrate its stars and stories, it’s not a bad time to take a moment to salute the king, who shockingly never won a competitive Oscar. There was only one Cary Grant, after all. 

What is it: The greatest movie of all time* that I somehow never managed to see until now? Possibly! I don’t know how I’ve missed it because I’m a sucker for gloriously cheesy ninja action, but 1983’s Revenge of the Ninja is quite possibly the platonic ideal of what a ninja movie should be – an over-the-top mash-up of very loose takes on Japanese culture with Hollywood gloss, sloppy violence and masked men running amok. Ninjas had popped up in movies for years, including some classic Shaw Brothers kung-fu flicks, but it was in the eighties where they truly were everywhere. The 1980s, in my mind, were all about ninjas – in Chuck Norris movies, in gloriously bad rock musicals, in movies that combined Flashdance-style aerobics with ninja action, and of course in teenage turtles who were also ninjas. How inescapable was the ninja? My brother had a pair of nunchucks at one point and both of us managed to severely injure ourselves with them. 

Revenge of the Ninja is the middle part of what’s been dubbed the Ninja Trilogy by omnipresent ‘80s cheese film factory Cannon Films. I had seen its quasi-prequel and sequels, 1981’s Enter The Ninja (in which a white Italian spaghetti western star is cast as a master ninja) and 1985’s utterly amazingly kitschy Ninja III: The Domination years ago, but somehow I had never managed to see Revenge. (None of these movies actually have anything in common other than the same insane aesthetic and the casting of Japanese actor Sho Kosugi, who only really stars in Revenge of the Ninja.)

In Revenge, Sho is “Cho,” whose entire family except his infant son are killed about 30 seconds into the movie by ninjas. Foreswearing violence, Cho moves to America to start a new life by selling dolls (!). Unfortunately, he ends up unwittingly becoming partners with a heroin dealer (!!) who is also a master ninja (!!!). Things go downhill from there, but it ends with a kick-ass 10-minute ninja battle on top of a skyscraper, which, really, is all I’ve ever wanted out of cinema. 

Why I never saw it: Sheer, blind ignorance to one of the shining lights of the cinema art form, I guess. To be fair, my peak ninja phase was in 1984 or so, and pre-internet, if you missed a movie and it wasn’t showing on cable TV, you might just never see it. 

Does it measure up to its rep? Honestly, if I were 13 years old and seeing this for the first time, I’d tell you it was the greatest movie ever made. But in somewhat settled middle age, I’ll still tell you it features everything I ever wanted in a ninja movie. 

Worth seeing? Man has created the pyramids, the Mona Lisa, the symphonies of Mozart. But there’s few cultural achievements that can equal a good ninja movie. Revenge of the Ninja features a small child getting a throwing star to the face in its first five minutes, to give you an idea what kind of movie we’re talking about. Revenge features constant bombastic martial arts battles – man versus ninjas, small child vs. ninjas, small child vs. woman, ninja vs. what appears to be a group of Village People cosplayers, ninja’s mother vs. ninja, ninja vs. ninja. It’s all given propulsive energy by director Sam Firstenberg, with just the right amount of overacting, preposterousness and violence. Ninjas throw smoke bombs, display inexplicable hypnotic powers, and unleash flamethrowers in mid-fight. What more does a man need out of life?

For 90 minutes, Revenge of the Ninja features copious revenge and ninjas. It does what it says on the can, and never pretends to be anything more. Frankly, this should replace Die Hard as everyone’s go-to Christmas movie. There aren’t any Christmas scenes, to be fair, but we all know Santa Claus probably uses ninjas instead of elves to get the job done, don’t we? 

* Note: This review may contain a few mild exaggerations.

What is it: The first “midnight movie,” the surrealist “acid western”, “the weirdest western ever made.” Director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s  extreme cult hit El Topo was a groundbreaking, aggressive statement that helped to change cinema, taking western movie tropes and turning them into a bizarre, questing meditation on morality and enlightenment. Populated with grotesque images and moments of startling beauty, it’s soaked in blood, disorienting with its casting of real-life disabled or maimed performers, and the kind of movie all the film cognoscenti say that you really must see at least once. So, finally, I saw it once. 

Why I never saw it: For a movie that’s legendarily strange, El Topo has had a difficult path to actually being easy to see. It got tangled up in legal wrangling and was only released on DVD in 2007. The first of Jodorowsky’s films I’ve dipped into, El Topo is often called Jodorowsky’s ‘most accessible’ movie. I’m a fan of weird, but weird is very much in the eye of the beholder, ain’t it? (I still recall a date who I took to the Michael Bay movie The Rock talking about how strange and weird it was afterwards. Reader, we did not date again.) I love my Lynch and Cronenberg but am fully aware I’m a mere babe in the wild, vast woods of weird cinema, and have to admit I wasn’t quite sure what to expect with El Topo.

Does it measure up to its rep? The big question for every viewer of El Topo is whether or not it’s just a procession of cruelty with no deeper meaning. When the subject is nothing but “people are terrible,” it gets old, fast. El Topo starts off feeling a bit like a particularly dark spin on the whole “lone gunman wreaks vengeance” plot, following the man in black and his inexplicably naked young son (Jodorowsky himself plays the gunman) as they discovered a gutted village filled with dead people, track down the corrupt bandits responsible and execute them. The gunman then abandons his son for a rescued hostage and ends up on a surreal quest through the desert to kill four gunmen legends and become “the best there is,” a quest that gets increasingly stranger. In the end, the gunman disappears and is reborn years later in a cave, bleached white and now a mystical holy man who can’t quite escape his violent past.

While it’s hefty with the DNA of John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Django and other western icons, to me it also shares an awful lot with books like the dark, biblically violent Cormac McCarthy novel Blood Meridian, which also sees the west as a seething quagmire of man’s worst instincts, or of Robert Bolaño’s epic 2666, which turns an unflinching catalogue of murders into something stranger and deeper. If anything, I have to admit that El Topo wasn’t quite as weird as I imagined it might be, especially in its more grounded first half. Where it sticks, however, is the insinuating ugly beauty of its vision, where Jodorowsky stages violence with an icy calm eye as men, women and even children are gunned down, and in the end, we’re not certain if he’s saying life is worth nothing – or worth everything. There’s precious little hope in its final moments, suggesting an endless circle of violence and thwarted redemption.

Worth seeing? On one level, El Topo probably doesn’t seem quite as groundbreaking as it might have 52 years ago. We’ve had plenty of deconstructionist westerns: Clint himself in Unforgiven, Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man and much more, and plenty of weird, brutal cinema. Yet despite its more grotesque flourishes, El Topo is still a singular, fierce vision. His use of real-life amputees and dwarves is confronting, as is the brief animal deaths and sexual violence. Jodorowsky claimed back in the ‘70s that he really raped his actress co-star in one vivid, violent sequence, although he’s since walked that back as a big-mouthed publicity stunt. Either way, El Topo is still a triggering film, but it has value as some kind of warped mirror on society. Seen 50 years on, yes, El Topo does seem madly self-indulgent, frequently sadistic and exploitative. Yet it’s also hard to stop thinking about some of its imagery. I’m a sucker for the vision of a man in black, riding across the desert, on his way to who knows where, but knowing there’ll always be blood in the end.