Monthly Archives: November 2019

Barefoot in the Park
Directed by Gene Saks
Written by Neil Simon
1967/USA
IMDb link
Repeat viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Ethel: I feel like we’ve died and gone to heaven – only we had to climb up.[/box]

Neil Simon comedy with two of America’s most beautiful people at their most beautiful.

Corie (Jane Fonda) is a sexy, fun-loving, free spirit.  Paul (Robert Redford) is a straight-laced lawyer.  This odd couple marries hoping love (and sex) will triumph over their differences.  After a blissful honeymoon, Corie installs them in an apartment building where all the tenants are reported to be crazy.  They must be as there is no elevator, little or no maintenance, and the tiniest of rooms.  All must walk up five flights to reach the Bratter’s cozy hideaway.

Early on the Bratter’s meet their crazy upstairs attic neighbor Victor Velasco (Charles Boyer).  He is an eccentric lothario that appeals to Corie’s sense of adventure.  Corie’s mother Ethel (Mildred Natwick) is more a counterpart to Paul.  Corie tries to play matchmaker.  The one-liners and gags flow.

I played Mildred Natwick’s part long ago in an amateur production and have most of the dialogue memorized still.  It’s a light, fun, entertaining film with some special performances.

Mildred Natwick was nominated by the Academy for Best Supporting Actress.

Thoroughly Modern Millie
Directed by George Roy Hill
Written by Richard Morris
1967/US
IMDb link
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Miss Dorothy Brown: Oh, I do hope he won’t be an addict. I mean with all that dope.

Millie Dillmount: It didn’t hurt Sleeping Beauty or Snow White.[/box]

The soundtrack was in regular rotation when I was young.  Disappointed in the actual movie.

It is 1922.  Sweet young thing Millie Dillmount (Julie Andrews) arrives in the big city and transforms into a modern flapper within the first couple of hours.  She gets lodgings in a small hotel run by white-slaver Mrs. Meers (Beatrice Lillie.  She soon makes friends with more naive transplant Dorothy Brown (Mary Tyler-Moore).

The girls are romanced by John Gavin and James Fox.  Carol Channing plays Muzzie Von Hossmere, a character apparently created solely so that Channing could play her larger-than-life-size stage persona on screen.  All have many adentures.

This movie starts out promisingly enough but rapidly just became too self-conscious and over-the-top for my taste.  It’s also a long film with an overture and intermission and dragged for me.

On the other hand, the costume and production design are very competent, the music is good, and the performers give it their all.  It was also interesting to think about it as a product of its time with regard to the women’s lib theme.

Elmer Bernstein won the Academy Award for Best Music, Original Score.  The film was also nominated in the Best Music, Adapted category (is this a first?).  It was also nominated for Best Supporting Actress (Channing); Best Art Direction-Set Decoration; Best Costume Design; Best Sound and Best Music, Original Song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzMTY80Qbqg

Far from the Madding Crowd
Directed by John Schlesinger
Written by Frederic Raphael from the novel by Thomas Hardy
1967/UK
IMDb link
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Bathsheba Everdene: [to her workers] Don’t anyone suppose that because I’m a woman, I don’t understand the difference between bad goings-on and good. I shall be up before you’re awake, I shall be afield before you’re up, and I shall have breakfasted before you’re afield. In short, I shall astonish you all.[/box]

The complete package for a great literary adaptation.

Bathsheba Everdene (Julie Christie) lives a simple existence in the English countryside. She loves to flirt and sheep farmer Gabriel Oak (Alan Gates) asks her to marry him.  She refuses the proposal.  A freak accident causes Gabriel to lose his flock and he must seek employment.

Bathsheba unexpectedly inherits a large farm.  Defying society’s expectations, she intends to manage it herself and does a smashing job of it.  She hires Gabriel as her shepherd. She also flirts with a middle-aged prosperous neighbor, William Boldwood (Peter Finch). Finally, the handsome, but reckless and hard-drinking, Sergeant Francis Troy (Terence Stamp) tries for her hand.

I live for finding new-to-me movies to love.  Put it off because of its length and because I remember Hardy’s novels as grim.   I was immersed in the great story and acting the entire time.  The visuals and soundtrack are very beautiful.  Recommend to fans of this kind of thing.

Far from the Madding Crowd was nominated by the Academy for Best Music, Original Score.

Death Rides a Horse (Da uomo a uomo)
Directed by Giulio Petroni
Written by Luciano Vincenzoni
1967/Italy
PEC/Sancro International Film
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Ryan: Two lessons, my son. First, watch behind you. Second, count your shots – four bullets for one man, that’s a waste.[/box]

Petroni is not Leone but this is a fine, if extremely violent, Spaghetti Western with a dynamite performance by Lee Van Cleef.

As the film opens, a gang of very bad guys invades a home, rapes the women and kills every man, woman and child therein before setting the house on fire.  Unbeknownst to them they had missed the youngest son, Bill, who witnessed the whole thing.  Bill grows up to be John Philip Law. He has been out for revenge for the subsequent fifteen years. At last, he finds clues that put him on the trail of his enemies.

Soon thereafter, Bill meets up with Ryan (Van Cleef) a seasoned gunman who is after the same gang and the $15,000 payout he has been waiting for while he rotted in jail.  Ryan does not want Bill to mess up his rendezvous with destiny so he employs various strategies to keep him one step behind.  Over the course of the movie the two develop a grudging respect for each other.  Much blood is shed.

The dialogue, penned by Luciano Vincenzoni (“The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”) has wit enough to lighten the very bleak story.  It also gives Van Cleef an opportunity to be super cool in one of his first leading roles.  The Morricone score took some getting used to. Recommended to fans of the genre.

Anna Karenina
Directed by Aleksandr Zarkhi
Written by Vasily Katanyan and Aleksandr Zarkhi from the novel by Leo Tolstoy
1967/USSR
Mosfilm
First viewing/Netflix rental

 “Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed. ” ― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

My favorite novel gets an epic, but lackluster, treatment from Mosfilm.

Anna Karenina (Tatyana Samoylova, “The Cranes Are Flying”) is married to the much older Alexi Karenin, who is a dry, self-absorbed politician.  They have a young son, Sergei.  They live in Saint Petersberg.  Anna goes on a mission of mercy to Moscow to convince her philandering brother Stiva’s wife Dolly to forgive him.  On the train there, she meets the mother of the dashing officer Alexis Vronski.  When Vronski and Anna meet the attraction is immediate and irrestistible.  They begin an affair.

Karenin is all about his reputation and while he doesn’t seem to care all that much about the infidelity he is not about to be humiliated in public.  Anna becomes pregnant and almost dies in childbirth.  Karenin finally frees her to live with Vronski but refuses to give her a divorce or to let her see her son.  Things go way downhill from there.

I love Tolstoy’s book so much.  It is clearly impossible to convey the tone or depth of the 800-page novel in a two-hour movie.  All the versions I have seen accomplish part of truncation by glossing over the romance between an intellectual named Levin and Dolly’s sister Kitty.  But it is this relationship that completes the contrast foreshadowed in Tolstoy’s famous first line:  “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

This film is very grand and epic but I thought it was, at core, lackluster.  My favorite film adaptation so far is Julien Duvivier’s Anna Karenina (1948) with Vivien Leigh and Ralph Richardson.

Massacre Gun (Minagoroshi no kenjû)
Directed by Yasuharu Hasebe
Written by Yasuharu Hasebe and Ryuzo Nakanishi
1967/Japan
Nikkatsu
First viewing/Amazon Prime

[box] “I know a thing or two ’bout killing and there ain’t no way to kill someone by accident. You got to work at killing.” ― Philip Elliott, Nobody Move[/box]

I think I’m getting maxed out on Nikkatsu hit man movies, even ones with striking visuals and an awesome score.

The plot is the same as usual.  Perennial assassin Jo Shishido stars as Kuroda, an assassin for hire.  A yakuza boss hires him to kill his own girlfriend.  This he reluctantly does.  Then it is all out war between Kuroda and his brothers and the boss’s gang.

I this was the first of these I had seen, I would have probably liked it more.  In a graphically violent genre, this has some of the more gruesome gun deaths I remember.  Composer Naozume Yamamoto does a great job with the blues-inflected jazz score.

You Only Live Twice
Directed by Lewis Gilbert
Written by Roald Dahl from a novel by Ian Fleming
1967/UK
Eon Productions
First viewing/Amazon Prime

[box] Tiger Tanaka: You like Japanese sake, Mr. Bond? Or, would you prefer a vodka martini?

James Bond: Oh, no. I like sake. Especially when it’s served at the correct temperature: 98.4 degrees fahrenheit like this is.[/box]

1967’s Bond entry is missing a certain something.  It certainly isn’t explosions!

U.S. and Russian spacecraft are mysteriously disappearing.  The case takes James Bond (Sean Connery) to Japan where he meets up with many Asian Bond girls and super-villain Blofeld (Donald Pleasance).  I think fans can figure out the rest of the very slim plot from there.

This was made on location and I enjoyed seeing 1967 Tokyo and the girls are certainly gorgeous.  Pleasance makes a great villain but there is simply too little of him.  The film is mainly double entendres and explosions and probably will not linger in my memory long.