Profplum-3 Reviews

Life with Father (1947)

A charming picture...

[15 October 1999]

Life With Father, the story of an eccentric, excitable 1880s gentleman and his continually exasperating family is the perfect showcase for the under-appreciated talents of William Powell. Powell, best know for his work with Myrna Loy in the "Thin Man" series of films. Powell uses every second of this plum role to display his charming style and verbal acuity.

The story is simple: Powell and his wife, played by Irene Dunne, face a series of calamities, some serious and some ridiculous, mostly brought on by their four rambunctious, red-headed sons. After a visiting cousin brings along fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Taylor, events are put into motion which threaten to turn Powell's neatly-ordered world upside down.

The performances are uniformly fine, and Powell and Dunne are absolutely sterling. A supporting cast that includes Zasu Pitts, Edmund Gwenn and early appearances from Martin Milner and Elizabeth Taylor round out the picture quite well. If there is anything to detract from the complete enjoyment of the film, it is Taylor's performance, which can get grating, but hey, she's just a kid, and when you look at her, you can already see the amazing beauty still to come. The exceptional visual style of the film makes you long for the day when people rode in horse-carts to Delmonico's for dinner.

Watch for some classic dialogue between Powell and Dunne over the cost of a new coffee pot, between Powell and his son about "the facts of life where women are concerned," and the nonsensical wordplay over the return of a Porcelain Pug-Dog.

Liquid Sky (1982)

A wretched little freak-out.

[1/10 · 8 September 1999]

Oh, what a dreadful, dreadful film this is. What a flimsy little strip of celluloid offal. Let me tell you about it, hmmm?

Liquid Sky is about a set of twins, one boy, one girl, both played by the same woman. The female is abducted by aliens one fine night, and from that point on, everyone she has sex with, and there's plenty, just plain disappears, right then, right there. Poof! Gone. And it's not just for the fellas, she makes women disappear, too, with her own little Lap-top disintegrator. She even vaporizes her own she-male brother, which, since it's the same actress, calls for some tricky camera work for the big moment. As my old friend Velma would say: "Jinkies, Fred!"

Anyway, I don't really remember how it ends, except that it maybe involves this big mutha of a mutha-ship, because I was, by then, a broken man. I would say it was a parable about the AIDS crisis, but I think that's giving credit where it is not due. I think is was just some raving twisty's vision of the perfect girl: one who puts out, isn't afraid of playing dress-up, and won't ask you to call them next week, because you've been reduced to a fine mist.

"So," you say, "That sounds like maybe it could be ok...it has sex in it, right?" Beware, my salacious simian. Any possible jollies you could pull from this art-house nasty are entirely negated by the maddeningly incomprehensible script, the dyed-in-the-wool bad acting, and the utterly bonko synth-pop score.

Having said that, I must admit this. I saw this movie once, well over ten years ago, and it has hung with me ever since. So it is at least an event that cannot be forgotten, like say, perhaps, being mugged or passing a kidney stone.

Beat the Devil (1953)

Cheerful, sharp-witted fun

[8 September 1999]

BEAT THE DEVIL is like a bright, shiny, mechanical toy - one of those pictures where the viewer is best off just sitting back and watching it go. If you can do that, you'll find yourself smiling through the entire experience, thanks to the flawless dialogue and the sheer joy the performers exude at being able to take part in this lark.

Bogie unwillingly teams up with a quartet of bungling small-timers to connive their way into ownership of a heretofore unseen uranium mine in Africa. From this point onward, it's pretty much a case of "If something bad could happen, it will" with hilarious results.

This is Bogart at his most relaxed and low-key, you can tell he knows as well as we do that this bunch of losers is never going to get it together well enough to hit the big time. But like us, he finds it effortlessly amusing, and is willing to sit back and enjoy the show. Gina Lollabrigida supplies the spitfire, Jennifer Jones is maddeningly attractive, and Robert Morley and Peter Lorre supply big smiles as two crooks who are only about one-half as smart as they think they are. Watch for Lorre's brief dissertation on the meaning of time!

To Catch a Thief (1955)

Lovely to look at, lacking in parts...

[7 September 1999]

I like to think that Alfred Hitchcock took a break occasionally from his efforts to push us over the edge, and this movie is probably one of those breaks. It's entirely possible that Hitch just wanted to take a nice vacation in the south of France, and thought this would be a good way to get the studios to pay for it. The film stars Cary Grant as John Robie, a dashing former jewel thief who is in danger of being arrested for a series of robberies done in exactly his style. He sets out to catch the copycat thief himself and hand him over to the French police to prove his innocence. Along the way, he runs into Grace Kelly, playing a headstrong daughter of one of the thief's prime targets. There really is not a lot of substance to the picture, but it is strongly supported by the sheer beauty of Princess Grace, the lovely settings and the fun support from Jessie Royce Landis as Grace's down-to-earth mother and John Williams as the proper British insurance agent who bets his job on Robie's chances at catching the real thief. Among its disappointments are the script which is often weak, and surprisingly, Cary Grant, who just doesn't seem at ease in the role - perhaps he, like us, realized that he was getting just a little to long in the tooth for this sort of thing.

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953)

So THIS is where all those cliches came from!

[7 September 1999]

This endearing little film about a giant sea-beast on the loose in New York City is the foundation for almost all the things that later became cliches in the the hands of the hacks. At first, you may think that the standards hold it back, but when you realize that this is where they came from, you may become affectionate toward this once-groundbreaking film. Oh, the big stop-motion lizard moves like a jerky marionette, and the performances are melodramatic, but did you really expect them to be real in the first place? It's a GIANT LIZARD movie, my friends. The special effects hit an all time low during the deep-sea diving bell sequence, but even this has a certain black and white beauty to it, except for the atrocious stock footage of sharks and octopi. All in all, it's an oddly charming and still original work, and worth seeing.