I must give Slavko Vorkapich (whose work gets an onscreen credit this time!) another shout-out for his montage work. He simultaneously provides baroque expressionism and succinct storytelling, two things that have absolutely no place in a Robert Z. Leonard film. And truly, this movie does not deserve those sequences. A showcase for MacDonald and Eddy, the story is yet another love triangle where one man promises financial security and the other promises true love. As the lugubrious framing device illustrates…
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The Last of Mrs. Cheyney 1937
Oddly enough, the dialogue in this remake didn't seem to be nearly as clever as in the 1929 original, despite a script that boasts another Lubitsch collaborator (Samson Raphaelson instead of Hans Kraly). The Production Code is surely a culprit. Any genuine heat from the earlier film has been replaced by Nigel Bruce and Frank Morgan doing their usual bumbling schticks. Those performers are pretty hit-or-miss for me, and I'm afraid both landed in the "miss" category this time. Another…
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Wild America 1997
JTT's voice changed while they were making this, and they didn't exactly shoot it sequentially. I feel like I completely missed that when I was nine, but I guess I missed a lot of things back then.
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The Ten Commandments 1923
In terms of both its structure and the incredibly on-the-nose intertitles (DeMille makes me long for the relative subtlety of Griffith), this thing's basically a sermon. But it's a good one! The actors do a good job of suggesting actual human beings despite not getting any help from the script -- well, except for the guy who played Moses; he was dreadful. The film is consistently engaging. DeMille's instincts for popular filmmaking were right on the money. His true biblical epics are better (this one's more a knockoff of Intolerance), but there's still quite a bit worth seeing here.