The
Little Princess
An allegory of
the Boer War, for which see very importantly and most abstrusely Losey’s The Go-Between.
The observed kiss
also occurs under quite similar circumstances in Koster’s A Man Called Peter, but with a difference.
Master Po has a
text,
|
little
girls should feed daintily |
The
Blue Bird
A fine analytical
dream that takes apart a young girl’s misery and explains the world to her, miraculously
effecting a truce with Napoleon and setting a lame girl on her feet.
The other Lang is
also a genius, there’s no doubt about it, a monumental film.
Nugent of the New
York Times thought Maeterlinck was the bunk to begin with, and classed this
film with Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz as cinematic
hokum.
So New York
Times film criticism limped along, and there was World War II.
Gale
Sondergaard’s cat, Eddie Collins’ dog, Mr. & Mrs. Luxury (“the Luxuries”),
Light and the various other attractions of the dream, would seem to have gone
for nothing, but Fellini ended La dolce vita the same way.
Song
of the Islands
“O’Brien has gone
Hawaiian.”
“It’s female
psychiatry, that’s what it is.”
Donovan’s Reef gives this the full and complete analytical
treatment later on, until then there’s South Pacific and whatnot to pass
the time agreeably, as you might say.
John Ford comes
into it because of one T.S. at the New York Times, who wrote, “although
no less than four authors have struggled to create some semblance of plot
around the argument of a pair of island-plantation owners, this corner is
practically unable to find it.”
On
the Riviera
“The Happy
Ending” like “Choreography” is a tour de force finale, matched by the
placid yacht off the Mediterranean coast of Zenda.
The
King and I
Undoubtedly a
metaphor of postwar Occupation.
The film
evidently combines the stage production (confirmed by Variety and the New
York Times) and a study of Oriental court paintings “et cetera” for the
right effect.
Siam, Burma,
England, Moses and Uncle Tom’s Cabin (this in a Siamese dance-drama
described by Crowther as a “ballet” and “quaint”) permutate the integers in a
Rodgers and Hammerstein film masterpiece.
“Poor songs”,
says Time Out Film Guide, “(‘Hello Young Lovers’, ‘Getting to Know
You’).”
Desk
Set
The computer is a
timesaver in certain mechanical matters such as arithmetic and data retrieval,
you get out of it what you put into it. God, the human mind, and women are not
replaced by it.
This is amusingly
conveyed as a love affair between a methods engineer and a research director at
a television network in New York, they sweep each other off their feet, the new
vice-president has kept her on a string for seven years.
Critics were
rather bluff on the amusement quotient, they are such excellent timewasters.
“This is from the
Bible, Book of Amos, chapter one.”
Snow
White and the Three Stooges
The fairy tale
remembered in exquisite detail for widescreen and color with a cast that includes
Guy Rolfe, Patricia Medina and the title characters.
Edson Stroll is
Prince Charming, Carol Heiss the Princess.
Lang could not
have done anything more to make the work perfect, which it is, and the Stooges
are deadpan for once in their lives considering the grisly spectacle from the
Brothers Grimm.
“Ye Stooges
Three, Sole Purveyors of Yuk,” a patent medicine supposed to have grown hair on
Curly-Joe.
A masterpiece.
A detail of the
wizard’s study also figures in Cocteau’s La Belle et la bête and resembles
Death in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, and the ice ballet in the middle is
a prefigurement of the Queen of the Night’s dispelling in the latter’s The
Magic Flute.