| Welcome to In The Balcony. We hope you enjoy your visit. You're currently viewing our forum as a guest. This means you are limited to certain areas of the board and there are some features you can't use. If you join our community, you'll be able to access member-only sections, and use many member-only features such as customizing your profile, sending personal messages, and voting in polls. Registration is simple, fast, and completely free. Plus, you'll be eligible for the monthly $1 million prize. (Not really.) Join our community! If you're already a member please log in to your account to access all of our features: |
| Human Desire; pleasant surprise | |
|---|---|
| Topic Started: Jun 8 2009, 11:29 PM (143 Views) | |
| panzer the great & terrible | Jun 8 2009, 11:29 PM Post #1 |
Mouth Breather
  ![]](http://209.85.122.85/static/1/pip_r.png)
|
I've been looking for a movie to support my theory that Fritz Lang never really lost it and was tough enough to deal with the Hollywood guys in the Fifties, and lucky for me, with only one to go (Secret behind the Door -- not promising), Human Desire turns out to be a winner. Yay! Glenn Ford, see, is a train driver just back from Korea, and the little girl in his house has grown up and still loves him, but he prefers Gloria Grahame, who has no end of issues, some of them murderous, involving her husband Brod Crawford (!). This is from a Zola novel, sort of, and not just any Zola novel but the one Renoir used for La Bete Humaine, and you know, I think I like this better than the Renoir, even though I love that movie. Lang's good at details, gets all the train stuff right, and I'm a train kinda guy. I'll climb out on a limb here and go ahead, start sawing, Mr. Hale: I give this movie 5 stars -- it's everything a noir ought to be. A Columbia picture. Thank God for Harry Cohn. I saw it on TCM, alas not on the DVD ripper TV. but I'll get my copy someday somehow.. |
| Bird is the word... | |
 |
 
|
| Frank Hale | Jun 9 2009, 03:58 PM Post #2 |
|
Balcony Gang, Foist Class
|
All in good fun I hope, Paul. But you’re safe on this one. I can’t remember anything about it but the title and it’s not out on DVD so far as I know. You must be the only guy in the world who thanked God for Harry Cohn. |
|
|
|
| panzer the great & terrible | Jun 10 2009, 12:34 AM Post #3 |
|
Mouth Breather
|
Welles liked him. He sounds like people I've known in the rag trade: tough on the outside, but fair-minded if you get past the bluster (and the blatant sexism). Cohn was enlightened about race, at least, compared to other studio heads. He gave work to Odets (and bought Clash By Night) when Odets desperately needed money and nobody else would help him, and released left-leaning films like Born Yesterday and From Here to Eternity in the McCarthy era. I admire that. He also gave Fritz Lang, not an easy person either, this splendid opportunity to film an update of a classic novel that transforms the anti-hero into a returned Korean War vet, and how many of those are in the movies of that insane period? One thing I forgot to mention is Glenn Ford's performance, which is a lot more lively than usual -- there's a boyish wickedness that comes out from time to time that I've never before seen from this actor: I think of him as doggedly earnest and a little dull, as in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which may not be fair as it was surely his lowest moment (he should have decked Minnelli for making him wear that raccoon coat). Grahame is deliciously slutty, and Crawford's performance is so intense that I finally understood why he was a star for a time. I don't expect good acting in a Lang picture, so I was impressed. I suspect Lang took this project seriously, and I rate it among his best American films. It has raised my opinion of him for sure. Now there are only two more existing Lang flicks I haven't seen: Secret Beyond the Door, tedious title and all, Lang himself produced and said he preferred to all his American films except Fury. The other unseen one is The Woman In the Moon, which Dave Shepard told me to avoid back when dinosaurs roamed the earth. I think it would be safe to watch it now, and Netflix has it. I'll report eventually, but I don't expect much. |
| Bird is the word... | |
|
|
|
| Stony Brooke da Mesquiteer | Jun 13 2009, 06:13 AM Post #4 |
Space Aged Workin' Balconeer
|
Of the Lang films I've seen, I like German ones much better because of the camera work. Very innovative and he's liberal in his use of angles. Lang's American films seem to be more formulistic in the filming, and I don't know for sure, but I'd bet it was Hollywood driven. I've seen The Woman In The Moon (from Netflix) and I liked it. It has some slow spots, but there's the aforementioned camera work, and that bit of spies running amok and/or folks with a different agenda than the leads/ggod guys, that Lang seemed to employ in his German films. |
|
"It's a sad man, my friend... Who's livin' in his own skin... And can't stand the company" | |
|
|
|
| mort bakaprevski | Jun 13 2009, 07:56 AM Post #5 |
Soony Roony!
|
When I first read that, I thought, "Good Lord, Panzer is deifying Cohn." Then I realized there was a period between "that" & "He." Cohn had taste & produced, in my opinion, movies with much more class than anything ever imagined by Louis B. Mayer. A strange guy, though. Definitely a megalomaniac, who reigned suzerain at Sunset & Gower. He definitely wasn't a benevolent despot. On the other hand, his sexism notwithstanding, Roz Russell maintained that she could wrap him around her finger. I like how, despite his overwhelming desire to have Columbia accepted as a "major" studio, he continued making comedy shorts for 20 years after Hal Roach threw in the towel. He also was the last studio head to give up on serials. Fascinating guy!! |
| “I had a great idea this morning, but I didn’t like it.” | |
|
|
|
| panzer the great & terrible | Jun 13 2009, 06:17 PM Post #6 |
|
Mouth Breather
|
Absolutely. The book King Cohn is a great read. He certainly had enemies, and if he figured he was safe bullying somebody, he would -- like plenty of people I've known. A little flattery and a little of one's own intimidation seemed to work well enough with him, but if he caught you trying to trick him in any way he would never forgive or forget. The guy had amazing movie sense in that he liked movies and enjoyed them as an ordinary guy would. There are no tales of Cohn butchering somebody's masterpiece the way Zanuck, Mayer, Thalberg and Jack Warner did. If he thought you were a pro he let you do your thing. He wasn't one of those fools who thinks he knows everything, like some in the business today. I visited his grave in Hollywood Cemetery (now called Hollywood Forever) about 15 years ago; it's the grandest tombstone I ever saw, nearly as big as a house trailer, one side of it with his name and the other side with his wife's. Tantalizingly, her date of death wasn't filled in. I don't know if she is buried somewhere else, if she hadn't yet died at that time, or if she left the bastard for good. Need to go back and check that. There are quite a few other movie people buried there, including Doug Fairbanks, Tyrone Power, Jayne Mansfield (with a pink tombstone) and Tully Marshall, whose inscription reads "Beloved Actor." It's a swell place if you're a movie nut because it's so compact; you can do it all in an hour. Edited by panzer the great & terrible, Jun 18 2009, 07:53 AM.
|
| Bird is the word... | |
|
|
|
| « Previous Topic · The Dark Aisle · Next Topic » |
1:41 AM Nov 8
