Tag: George Cukor

Challenge Week 29: It Should Happen to You

On July 26, 2016

In 2016 Movie Challenge

This was another very comfortable choice for me, a classic Hollywood era romantic comedy that I definitely knew about back when I was watching only classic Hollywood movies, but missed. In this case (unlike with April in Paris), I can probably guess why I skipped it – I enjoyed Judy Holliday in Adam’s Rib, but didn’t care too much for the two Holliday-led films I watched (Born Yesterday and Bells Are Ringing) all that much, so I think I likely pushed this to the back burner figuring it would be more of the same. I actually didn’t know anything else about it (like that Jack Lemmon is in it!) or what the premise of the story was.

Holliday is a Gladys Glover, a wanna-be actress in New York who really just wants to be famous. Her solution: use all of her savings to rent a giant billboard and just put her name name on it. A soap company wants the billboard, but she refuses every offer they make her, until they offer to put her name on several smaller billboards all over town in exchange. Soon, Gladys is famous for the mere fact of being famous. It’s a bit of a gentle satire, as well as an admittedly cliched reminder that fame comes at a cost.

Scorecard: April 2012

By Jandy

On May 11, 2012

In Film, Scorecard

[At the end of every month I post a rundown of the movies I saw that month, tallying them according to how much I did or didn’t like them. You can always see my recent watches here and my ongoing list of bests for the whole year here.]

AKA, the TCM Classic Film Festival edition. There are a few others mixed in, but the majority of these are from that Fest. Which means it was a damn good month of moviewatching. Oh, and apparently my two favorite new-to-me films were both silent. I honestly do not try to do this, people. It just happens that way, I swear.

What I Loved

Girl Shy

I wouldn’t say Harold Lloyd is a recent discovery for me as I continue my odyssey through silent film; I saw Safety Last quite a while ago and always included him as one of the great silent comedians. But beyond that obligatory name-checking, I hadn’t had a lot of exposure to his work. I was very grateful to put that to rights this month with not one but THREE Lloyd films seen at the TCM Fest and at Cinefamily, and the presentation of Girl Shy at the Egyptian Theatre will definitely go down as a lifetime filmgoing highlight. This film is awesome, taking the nerdy, girl-shy Harold through a series of misadventures whereupon he meets a girl and overcomes his stuttering shyness as he tells her about his book – which is about how to get all kinds of women to fall in love with you. It’s extremely charming and quite funny, and all capped off with one of the most incredible chase stunt sequences I’ve ever seen, and yes, I’m including Keaton’s motorcycle chase in Sherlock Jr. in that assessment. Just when you think Lloyd has done about all he can do with this gag, he tops himself and does something even more gasp-worthy. Insta-favorite. Full review on Row Three.

1924 USA. Director: Fred C. Newmeyer, Sam Taylor. Starring: Harold Lloyd, Jobyna Ralston, Richard Daniels, Carleton Griffith.
Seen April 14 at the TCM Film Fest, Egyptian Theatre.
Flickchart ranking: 372 out of 2930

For Heaven’s Sake

My other Lloyd experience was a double feature (the other one is a bit lower on the list) Cinefamily and the Silent Treatment showed in honor of Lloyd’s April birthday. These were actually before Girl Shy, and were already enough to solidify my Lloyd fandom, I liked them so much. Particularly this one. Thoughtless millionaire Lloyd accidentally funds an inner-city mission, but his apathy turns to extreme interest when he meets the preacherâ€™s lovely daughter. I really enjoyed this film, which has two fantastic extended chase/action sequences â€“ one with Lloyd provoking all the street thugs he can find into chasing him right into the mission (where he wins their loyalty by nonchalantly passing the collection plate to rid them of stolen jewelry before a police search), the other with Lloyd trying to corral a group of five drunk friends and get back to the mission for his wedding. Both are filled with physical gags and insane stunts, all done with a charm and physicality that belies Lloydâ€™s milquetoast first impression.

1926 USA. Director: Sam Taylor. Starring: Harold Lloyd, Jobyna Ralston, Noah Young.
Seen April 4 at Cinefamily.
Flickchart ranking: 512 out of 2930

Cabin in the Woods

I’ve been looking forward to this Joss Whedon-penned horror film for literally years now, as it went through distributor hell along with everything else MGM owned as they fought bankruptcy. In fact, I’ve been watching its progress so long that I remember being disappointed that I was going to have to watch a horror film to keep up with Whedon, because I wasn’t into horror films yet. Thankfully by the time it came out, I had overcome that hurdle and managed to see and enjoy most of the films Cabin in the Woods references, plus this film isn’t really going for scares as much as laughs and meta in-jokes, which are precisely up my alley. I had a great time with this film, which is extremely clever in the way it plays with expectations, horror tropes, and manipulation. I won’t go as far as some in saying that revolutionizes the horror genre – it doesn’t do that so much as celebrate it, poke loving fun at it, and layer a great workplace comedy in on top of it. It’s a lark, not a deep satire, and that’s fine. I laughed a lot, gasped some, and had a ginormous smile plastered on my face the whole time.

2012 USA. Director: Drew Goddard. Starring: Kristen Connolly, Chris Hemsworth, Fran Kranz, Anna Hutchison, Jesse Williams, Bradley Whitford, Richard Jenkins, Amy Acker.
Seen April 21 at AMC Burbank 16.
Flickchart ranking: 534 out of 2930

50DMC #25: Best-Scripted Movie

By Jandy

On August 19, 2011

In Film

The 50 Day Movie Challenge asks one question every day, to be answered by a few paragraphs and a clip, if possible. Click here for the full list of questions.

Today’s prompt: What’s the best-scripted movie you’re ever seen?

My excuse for falling so far behind getting to this entry is that I was totally stumped by the question. And it’s true. Like Favorite Male and Female Performance, this ends up being an almost arbitrary choice, because there are so many movies with amazing scripts, and how do you even go about picking among them? I toyed with choosing The Social Network for a bit, because Sorkin is, let’s face it, incredible. I thought about choosing a Coen script for a while, because they’re all wonderful, but I decided I didn’t want to choose a writer/director for this question. That let out the Coens, Tarantino, Wilder, Sturges, Godard, and whole raft of other people which frankly made choosing a lot easier. But I was still left with a lot of choices, especially back in classic Hollywood when there were far fewer writer/directors. Is His Girl Friday great because of its script? Well, it has a great script, but it’s most memorable because of the rapid-fire delivery of its script. Maybe a Robert Riskin script, like It Happened One Night? Certainly tempting. What about Casablanca, it’s more dramatic than comedic, like most of the quip-heavy films that first sprang to mind, but it certainly has a lot of great lines.

Of course, a script is much more than just dialogue, but dialogue is the most noticable thing. I couldn’t quite pry myself away from thinking about dialogue when trying to answer this question, so movies like The Thin Man came up, but I did ultimately turn away from that because as awesome as the dialogue and the relationship between Nick and Nora is in that movie, there are some parts of the mystery that admittedly drag a bit. I still think all the films I mentioned and many more would’ve been fine choices, but I’m ultimately going with The Women. Again, largely because of the wonderfully witty and catty dialogue all throughout, but the narrative is also strong (aside from a bit of sentimentality that’s more due to Norma Shearer’s acting style than anything else) and clever. Though The Women was directed by a man, George Cukor (who is nonetheless known for his adeptness at working with casts full of women), it was scripted by two women, Anita Loos and Jane Murfin, and they capture the competitiveness of this group of women perfectly, working from the play by Clare Booth Luce. Female screenwriters were not quite as rare in Hollywood at the time as female directors, but they still weren’t plentiful; The Women is very fortunate to have three great women writers behind it, and such a fantastic all-female cast to bring the words to life (including Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, Paulette Goddard, Joan Fontaine, Mary Boland, Marjorie Main, and more).

Is it the best? Couldn’t say. Probably not. But it is a film I return to again and again, and a large part of that is due to the script. None of the clips from the film on YouTube are embeddable, but the image below links to a montage clip of several of the best scenes.