Jazzeum's Watch List (1 Viewer)

[jazzeum]

Olivia de Havilland is absolutely mesmerizing in an Academy Award winning performance in the 1949 movie The Heiress where she is transformed from a guileless emotional girl to a stone cold woman when her father rejects her choice of fiancée (Montgomery Clift) because he is a fortune hunter, her father tells her that her only attributes are her wealth and nothing else and her fiancée deserts her. Clift returns years later to attempt to make amends and she leads him on thinking she will go away with him but refuses to answer the door and leaves him pounding the door fruitlessly. Her Aunt (well portrayed by Miriam Hopkins) asks how she can be so cruel and she responds, easily, I was taught by the Masters.

A great, great performance and riveting movie as you see her transformed.

 

[jazzeum]

Ship of Fools from 1965 is noted for, among other things, being Vivian Leigh's last role and she doesn't disappoint. The cast is all star including Oskar Werner and Simone Signoret (they were both nominated for best Actor and Actress), Jose Ferrer, Lee Marvin, George Segal, Elizabeth Ashley and Heinz Ruhmann, who plays a Jewish businessman.

The movie has sometimes been called Grand Hotel with life jackets as it brings together several disparate personalities on a German cruise ship from Mexico to Germany in early 1933 and looks at their various foibles and character defects. Ruhmann is more German than the Jose Ferrer character (who is very good) and plays an enthusiastic Nazi, who is actually from Austria. The movie is replete with Nazi and racist overtones and the disaster to which the world is heading. Oskar Werner (the ship's doctor) is haunted and falls in love with Simone Signoret, who is on her way to jail. They are both fantastic.

Ultimately, the passengers are all fools, stripped of their veneer and shown to be self-centered individuals.

Compelling movie.

 

[jazzeum]

Munich. I saw this last weekend. Directed by Speilberg, it tells the story of Israel's hunt for the PLO killers of the Israeli athletes at Munich by a team of five men. Interspersed throughout the movie are flashbacks of the death of the athletes. The movie starts out with the hunt as acts of revenge but then explores the moral ambiguity of doing so (Speilberg's moralizing) although that is not my viewpoint. The goal of the Mossad is to ensure that the cost of killing Jews is prohibitive. However, as leads to the killers becomes cost prohibitive, the killing of terrorists likewise becomes cost prohibitive. As the movie progresses, the hunters become the hunted as the PLO is now after the hunters. The movie ends with the members of the Mossad team all dead except for two and the postscript that in 1979 the Mossad finally caught up with the mastermind of the Munich attack.

 

[jazzeum]

Au Hasard Balthazar. This is a 1966 French film about the lives of Marie and Balthazar, the donkey she adopts as a child, and the similar and tragic lives they live. Both are exploited, never living happy lives, but Balthazar achieves sainthood in the end for his noble service but Marie is just used and cast away; in the beginning we see Marie and her friends sprinkle water on his head as if to baptize him. It's basically about the course of a live in 90 minutes. Directed by Robert Bresson, it's now considered a classic and one of the best films of all time.

Here is a review by Roger Ebert, http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-au-hasard-balthazar-1966

 

[jazzeum]

The Informer. This is a 1935 film directed by John Ford about a former IRA operative Gypo Nolan (Victor McLaglen) who informs the British of the whereabouts of one of his friends, a suspect at large, which culminates in the suspect's death and Gypo receives 20 Pounds. You can see what the British think of him for his treachery and if the IRA finds out he will be a dead man. Gypo had informed on his friend so he could get the costs of passage to America for his girlfriend. The film follows Gypo as he foolishly spends his money on drink, picking up supposed friends along the way, and tries to blame someone else for turning over his friend to the British. In the end he has to face the wrath of the IRA as they deduce that he is the Informer. I won't ruin the rest of the plot for those who may want to see it but it's a gripping movie.

The movie was well decorated. Ford and McLaglen won Academy Awards.