Thursday, April 7, 2022

Thursday Movie Picks #404: Diary/Journal

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This week, the theme is Diaries and Journals, which was actually a bit tougher than I thought it would be, only because I had to think for a bit about whether some of the movies I thought about using actually had a character keeping a diary. I thought, for example, about using the 1954 Luis Buñuel version of Robinson Crusoe, but I'm not 100% certain that Crusoe keeps a diary. Ultimately, I picked two movies where the title asserts that it fits the theme, and a repeat that I'm using just because it deserves more attention:

Journal of a Crime (1934). French playwright Adolphe Menjou is having an affair with the star of his latest play, Claire Dodd, and when wife Ruth Chatterton finds out, she's ticked enough to take her husband's gun and shoot Dodd. Because an escaped criminal is fleeing in the theater at the same time the murder takes place, he's accused, and Menjou is the only one who knows who the real killer is. He writes in his journal about how the guilt is going to destroy his wife.

The Diary of Anne Frank (1959). An obvious choice is this dramatization about the German Jew (Millie Perkins) whose family emigrated to Amsterdam in the early days of Nazi Germany, only to have to hide in an attic with her family and another family (Shelley Winters won an Oscar for playing the mother in the other family) for years until somebody ratted on them and the Nazis took them away to the death camps. Anne's father Otto (played by Joseph Schildkraut) was the only one to survive, and found the diary in the attic after the war.

Schtonk! (1992). I'm pretty certain I've used this one before for a theme on foreign films. This black comedy from Germany tells the story (albeit with names changed) of the forgery of the Hitler Diaries in the early 1980s and how German magazine Stern was stupid enough to fall for the ruse. I was lucky enough to see this one when the German department at my college showed it back in the 90s. As far as I can tell, it's never received any sort of home video release here in North America.

2 comments:

Birgit said...

I went with psychics this week. I have not seen your first or last one. I remember the Hitler Diaries and thought it must be fake and I was right. Dear Stern had to eat a huge amount of crow. The Diary Of Anne Frank was good but I was never a Millie Perkins fan. Ed Wynn was quite good in the dramatic role.

Ted S. (Just a Cineast) said...

I think the psychics are supposed to be the theme for next week. I've got two relatively obscure movies from the 1930s, and am trying to figure out which way to go for the third movie.