Briefs for October 15-16, 2017

So I watched Sadie Thompson off my DVR. This is the 1928 silent version of the Somerset Maugham story, starring Gloria Swanson in the title role; you might know the story from the Joan Crawford movie Rain a few years later. I'm not certain that the movie is in print on DVD. You can't get it at the TCM Shop, and the print they ran was from Kino, an old print that said Kino International even though the company is now Kino Lorber. I looked it up on their site, and they don't seem to have a DVD available. But Amazon claims there is one.

As for the movie itself, Gloria Swanson is good for the first two thirds, before the movie really devolves into melodrama. Lionel Barrymore plays the moralizer, and he's an even bigger jerk than in the other versions, and you wonder why anybody would listen to him. Director Raoul Walsh also stars as the marine, and it's nice to see him on screen a year before the car crash that cost him an eye and left him in an eyepatch which is probably how you see him in most pictures.

I was watching TV today and see that somebody's doing another adaptation of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express. I had to laugh, however, when the commercial promoted the movie by saying "Everyone is a suspect". Of course everybody is a suspect. Part of the point of an Agatha Christie movie is that it seems everybody except for Poirot or Miss Marple is a suspect. But if you know either the original novel or have seen the 1974 film (with Albert Finney as Poirot and an all-star cast), then you'd understand why everybody is a suspect.

I mentioned yesterday watching Cast a Giant Shadow off my DVR. There was enough time following the end of the movie for a fair amount of filler, and one of the things was a trailer for On the Town. It started off with James A. FitzPatrick doing a Traveltalks-style narration, but clearly written to go with the plot of On the Town. Unfortunately, that trailer doesn't seem to be on Youtube.

The only comment I can make about Harvey Weinstein is "Why now?" The whole trope of the casting couch has been around for decades, and nobody should be surprised that people (both male and female) are using sex either to advance their own careers or as a carrot for other people who want to advance their careers.