Editors' Note: I switched to the Brave browser recently, which seems to have a glitch with Blogger in that it often publishes posts to draft rather than publishing them directly to the public. I overlooked this when I posted this yesterday, which is why you're getting the Thursday Movie Picks on a Friday.
This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This week's theme is "Movies that have aged badly", which is fairly obvious, but I suppose also subjective. So I went with three movies that have aged in different ways:
Mission to Moscow (1943). After Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, America's communists quickly went from being relative isolationists, a position they took after the Molotov-von Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, to full-throated support for war. Indeed, in that period Dalton Trumbo wrote the book The Remarkable Andrew with the ghost of Andrew Jackson telling Americans to stay out of war. (The book was turned into a movie I have not yet seen, but from what I've read it doesn't quite follow the book.) At any rate, once the US entered the war after Pearl Harbor and the Nazis declared war on the US, Americans were treated to all sorts of propaganda about why Stalin was really an OK guy. (Maybe the Soviets wouldn't have suffered so badly in the first years of the war if Stalin hadn't killed off almost the entire officer corps in the 1930s purges.) In this movie, strongly promoted by Franklin Roosevelt, Walter Huston plays the US Ambassador to the USSR Joseph E. Davies, who really whitewashes those purges.
I'll Take Sweden (1965). Tired Bob Hope generation gap comedy in which his daughter (Tuesday Weld), having fallen in love with a man Dad doesn't approve of, leads Dad to transfer the family to the company's Swedish branch, where we learn that Sweden is, well, every sterotype that America had about liberal and sexually liberated Sweden. Lots of aging stars were trying to stay hip and made movies like this (see Deborah Kerr in Marriage on the Rocks for another horrifying example), most of which fall flat.
THX 1138 (1971). George Lucas' first feature film, about a man (Robert Duvall) in a future dystopia where everybody is drugged into emotionlessness, who sufferes a breakdown when his female roomate switches his drugs. The movie isn't bad although others will probably like it more than I did. The problem is that, like most cinematic looks at the future, the future is in many ways stuck in the present day that the movie was made. Total surveillance on reel-to-reel tape?
2 comments:
Interesting picks.
Mission to Moscow is probably the biggest head-scratcher of the group now considering our relationship with Russia. Taking that into account and the thick layer of propaganda ladled on top of nearly every scene it's a tough sit. It has a terrific cast of performers I love but there are better places to see them all.
I have seen Remarkable Andrew, it's an odd little flick but in a charming way with an almost unbelievably young William Holden. It's worth tracking down.
All I remember of I'll Take Sweden is Tuesday Weld being kittenish and Hope being arch.
Sci-fi is one of the fasting aging genres because of the technology as you say and I doubt that THX 1138 would be much remembered if it hadn't been directed by George Lucas.
I picked three that were big hits when they came out but I'm at a loss as too why.
Crash (2005)-Inexplicable Best Picture winner is a dreadful collection of noxious elitists having conniptions about all “the dark people” threatening their privileged existence in Los Angeles. Yuck!
Lovers and Other Strangers (1970)-They say nothing ages faster than topical comedy and here’s the proof! Awash in shag carpeting, Nehru jacket, love beads and “groovy” talk of raising consciousness, EST, and a bunch of other hippie dippy subjects of the ME decade. In its favor it does have a phenomenal cast-Bea Arthur, Cloris Leachman, Stiller & Meara, Gig Young, Bonnie Bedelia and in her screen bow Diane Keaton among others, plus the Oscar winning song “For All We Know”. This was a big hit, but you’ll be scratching your head as to why if you watch.
Easy Rider (1969)-Meandering biker flick was a seminal turning point in cinema the year of its release, made on a minuscule budget it was unbelievably successful becoming the fourth highest grossing film of 1969, creating the whole “Born to Be Wild” rebel motorcycle genre. But it is a collection of maddeningly diffuse thinkspeak vignettes when viewed today.
I should see admission to Moscow but, even when I was a kid, I was dumbfounded by the plot and making Stalin such a nice guy. Even when I was 10, I read up on Stalin because of my mom’s suffering at the hands of the Russians the first 6 months after the war ended. I consider him on equal level of evil next to Hitler. I haven’t seen the other 2 either but have wanted to see the last film because of th science fiction aspect of it.
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