From Those Were the Days:

1942 - The first broadcast of It Pays to Be Ignorant was aired on WOR Radio and the Mutual Broadcasting System.
12:13:16 PM    comment []  trackback []  

“I have nothing to say.”

DVDSoon.com is currently having a big honkin’ sale on selected MGM/UA DVDs for 7.98 Canadian—which comes out to about 5.95 in U.S. funds. If you’re into classic movies (like me), now’s the time to beef up your library with some choice titles—among the ones on sale: 12 Angry Men (1957), Paths of Glory (1957), The Killing (1956), The Night of the Hunter (1955), Red River (1948), The Manchurian Candidate (1962)—over 500 titles in all. This offer is only good until June 30, so snap ‘em up while you can.

I added some heft to my DVD archives with the purchase of some titles like Elmer Gantry (1960), The Little Foxes (1941) and Marty (1955), but I also got some movies of recent vintage and some guilty pleasures as well. I watched one of them last night: the 1988 suspense thriller The House on Carroll Street, a crackerjack flick that showcases a Hitchcockian sensibility against the backdrop of the Cold War/McCarthy era. Kelly McGillis plays a blacklisted civil libertarian who stumbles onto a plot to smuggle fugitive Nazis into the U.S. disguised as Jewish refugees. The screenplay was written by Walter Bernstein, who was also responsible for the best Woody Allen film not directed or written by the Woodman—The Front (1976). A good cast in this one, including Jeff Daniels (I’ve seen Daniels in many a bad film—but he’s always interesting to watch), Jessica Tandy, Trey Wilson, Jonathan Hogan, Remak Ramsay and Mandy Patinkin as a particularly nasty and weaselly Roy Cohn-type—who is neatly dispatched in true Hitchcock-villain style. Sure, the plot’s pretty far-fetched and hinges on a lot of coincidences, but as the Master of Suspense often remarked, “It’s only a movie.”

I followed House with 1948’s The Snake Pit—the landmark production starring Olivia de Havilland as a mentally-ill woman struggling to recover her sanity while incarcerated in a state-run asylum. I first saw this movie on American Movie Classics many years ago, and I was amazed at how potent it still is, even though it’s dated a tad (the film, for example, seems to give the “thumbs up” to shock treatments). De Havilland’s performance is simply superb; although she received accolades from the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Board of Review as best actress that year, she lost the Oscar to Jane Wyman’s pantomime performance in Johnny Belinda (1948). (Fortunately, the Academy folks were smart enough to give Livvy the Best Actress Oscar the next year for The Heiress, another great performance.) A fine script (with even some darkly humorous dialogue) by Frank Partos and Millen Brand (and uncredited, Arthur Laurents) from Mary Jane Ward’s novel plus a top-notch supporting cast (Leo Genn, Mark Stevens, Celeste Holm, Glenn Langan, Beulah Bondi, Lee Patrick and Natalie “Mrs. Howell” Schafer) makes The Snake Pit a must-see film. (Does AMC even show this one anymore? I have to admit, I stopped watching that channel just about the time it started tarting itself up with commercials and it tried to convince me that crapola like Halloween 5 and Amityville II: The Possession were classic movies.)
12:09:43 PM    comment []  trackback []