Horizon

check out the 100th birthday cake I made him and which old abg-o comrades noshed on:

http://www.geocities.com/alternative_bbc/graham_greene.htm

Someone please tell me, am I completely insane or is The Third Man a very overrated movie?

Don't get me wrong, the cinematography and editing and all that are really splendid, and the music...well, the music's fine if you like that sort of thing, zithers and all that, I guess. But I don't think it's nearly as good as it's made out to be these days. For one thing, Joseph Cotton's performance is not his best work. He's almost as bad as in Portrait of Jennie or that one he starred in with Peter Lorre...can't remember the title right now.

Harry Lime: "What the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

A terrific bit of dialogue, although thoroughly insidious and slightly fascistic.

So should we be surprised that it is featured on a "forum on conservative thought in film" (tied in to a recent rightwing film festival in Hollywood)?

I just saw it again on Saturday and I'm sorry, Alan, but you're completely insane.

I'll have to watch it again.

Thanks very much for that link, Gene. A rightwing (a very rightwing) film festival. It never occurred to me that such a thing might exist. And their headlining guest is the director of Scary Movie 3. A lot to chew on here.

A terrific bit of dialogue, although thoroughly insidious and slightly fascistic.

Slightly? What I'm curious about is whether that conservative film site is quoting Lime with approval or condemnation ...

Slightly? What I'm curious about is whether that conservative film site is quoting Lime with approval or condemnation ...

That's what I was wondering too. I suspect the former.

Much to my embarrassment as a film buff, I have never seen The Third Man. I love Orson Welles. I love Joseph Cotten. I like Graham Greene. Why I have not watched this film-- in spite of owning a VHS copy of it-- is one of those great mysteries. Maybe I'll try to find that VHS (or just buy the Criterion DVD) someday and find out which Alan is right...

Well, just to up the ante, Graeme, films I have never seen include:

Easy Rider
The Blues Brothers
The Godfather
Raging Bull or Taxi Driver or any of those supposedly seminal De Niro movies.
It's a Wonderful Life
Reservoir Dogs
Psycho or Vertigo

The Third Man is one of the films which made me want to take the degree in film history which I eventually took. It's so hard and yet brittle. No character comes out of it well: even the exceptionally magnetic Lime ends like a trapped rat. Everything - the cinematography, the actors, the direction and the music - works together to create an alienated and alienating world. You sense Holly's optimism dying with each betrayal.

I want to see some early David Lean, like pre-color David Lean. Anyone have an opinion on which one is the best, if you had to choose?

Speaking of old British films I saw The Ladykillers recently. Pretty amusing but really very obviously the product of a completely different world. To me, at least. A little sad to watch it in a way.

Anyone seen the Cohen brothers's remake?

I want to see some early David Lean, like pre-color David Lean. Anyone have an opinion on which one is the best, if you had to choose?

Assuming we're talking about directorial efforts (Lean did a lot of film editing work in the 1930s and early 1940s), then the options are:

Hobson's Choice (1954)
Sound Barrier, The (1952)
Madeleine (1950)
Passionate Friends, The (1949)
Oliver Twist (1948)
Great Expectations (1946)
Brief Encounter (1945)
Blithe Spirit (1945)
This Happy Breed (1944)
In Which We Serve (1942)

Personally I would suggest Great Expectations, which features Alec Guinness in his first role and that extraordinary creature otherwise known as Jean Simmons.

Speaking of old British films I saw The Ladykillers recently. Pretty amusing but really very obviously the product of a completely different world.

... which is its very appeal, n'est pas?

Well, sometimes you sense a movie trying to define you, as the audience, in a way that makes you uncomfortable or that is unfamiliar, and I had this feeling watching The Ladykillers. In some cases it made the gags less effective, but, as you say, its naïveté has its own anachronistic charm. I suppose I had prepared myself more to see something along the lines of Kind Hearts and Coronets, which is a wicked movie and an old favorite of mine.

Not long after this I watched Bridge on the River Kwai for the first time in maybe ten years. I had never noticed Guinness's extraordinary physical performance in that movie. Just the way he walked across the yard from solitary confinement to the commandant's quarters was, in my opinion, utterly brilliant.

'A little sad to watch it in a way.'

What do you mean?

Not long after this I watched Bridge on the River Kwai for the first time in maybe ten years.

In the course of my research I've been talking to someone who worked on the Burma-Thailand railway for real; and I've been dying to ask him what he thinks of Kwai. But I haven't plucked up the courage yet ...

That's very cool, Alan. Let us know what happens if you get around to asking him.

'A little sad to watch it in a way.'

What do you mean?

Well, as obviously exaggerated and silly as the movie is, it does appeal to an assumed and shared sense of decency in its audience, and I don't think these days it finds many people who can relate to that. That is a little sad.

Alan Allport wrote
In the course of my research I've been talking to someone who worked on the Burma-Thailand railway for real; and I've been dying to ask him what he thinks of Kwai. But I haven't plucked up the courage yet ...

I don't see what the problem is. My father was captured at Singapore having arrived on the MV Canterbury a few days before capitulation, and spent the next three and half years as a POW including work on the railway. He took my older brothers to see Bridge on the River Kwai when it was first released, it is perhaps one of only four or five movies that he has been to see in a cinema. When it was re-released sometime in the early 70s he was going to take my younger brother and I to see it as well and he was a bit non-plussed when we went to see it by ourselves without him.

Having said that "It's quite good but of course it's fiction" is the only comment I have heard him make about it.

Paul Stables

Speaking of old British films I saw The Ladykillers recently. Pretty amusing but really very obviously the product of a completely different world.

I like it, almost as much as KH&C and The Man in the White Suit, because it centers about such a delightful conceit. I think we are supposed to laugh as much at the little old lady as we are at the gang. The gang were caricatures at the time: Sellers' teddy-boy hints at Brighton Rock (back to G.Greene) and Lom's stylish mid-Atlantic gangster could be Harry Lime. The Ladykillers is equally unkind to everyone.

It's also one of a handful of films which shocks me by being in colour (The African Queen is another).

In terms of b&w Lean everyone rates Great Expectations but I always found it a little mannered. Brief Encounter is hard to take seriously after it has been spoofed for so many years (although we decided, when studying it, that the characters did have sex in the boat house). With the b&w films, the stiff-upper-lipped element is more annoyingly obvious whereas the colour work evokes British restraint through the contrast of closed characters and lush open scenery. It I were going to pick one b&w Lean to watch again, I'd probably choose Hobson's Choice, with Brief Encounter second.

If I were picking any British director's b&w work I'd go for Reed (back on Greene, again), Boulting and P&P all of whom have a better grasp of chiaroscura than Lean.

Er....sorry...long comment....

Speaking of Reed, The Way Ahead (I have a really bad quality DVD print of it in its edited US format, The Immortal Battalion) is one of his more interesting directorial efforts. It was Peter Ustinov's first writing credit. A 'war movie' which is really more of a social commentary.

Lean's Oliver Twist is his best b/w from the 40s.
This Happy Breed is his best in colour, which features a nicely restrained performance from Robert Newton, who Lean bribed to stay sober throughout the shoot.

Anyone seen the Cohen brothers's remake?

I did. I liked it a lot. It's a good remake in that it keeps to the spirit of the original but is distinctly different as well. I took my 12 year-old Goddaughter and she loved it to bits, and she's a tough critic where these things are concerned.

I pretty much have seen every one of the 'noteworthy' films Alan hasn't with the exception of Easy Rider. Though aside from The Blues Brothers and It's A Wonderful Life, I saw all of them in the past five years.

Mags on Brief Encounter:
(although we decided, when studying it, that the characters did have sex in the boat house).

I remember thinking that when I watched it at the time as well. Which is only a slight improvement given that it was said-without-saying-it that they had a full-out adulterous affair (with all that entails) in the Noel Coward play it was based on.

Thanks for the recommendations, everyone. I now have quite a few films to add to my queue, although it may have to wait until I get this sudden addiction to anime out of my system. (I expect to go see Ghost in the Shell 2 again soon, and will then probably post a review.)

Oh, and speaking of Alec Guinness, Smiley's People is now out on DVD (in the US at least). That one I will have to buy.