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Like Lawrence of Arabia, Out of Africa is a story of time and place. Just as T.E. Lawrence’s tale could only have happened in the Middle Eastern deserts of the Great War, Isak Dinesen’s would not exist without the gorgeous vistas of East Africa of almost exactly the same time.
Charles Dickens’s mostly gloomy Oliver Twist set to music is no sillier than the French tragedy Les Miserables recast as an English-language opera, and it works just as well — that is to say, very well indeed.
T.E. Lawrence was what a friend of mine calls a “transethnic,” like the couple of Italian guys you always see playing bagpipes in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade. David Lean’s gorgeous film captures this enigmatic man beautifully.
Make no mistake — Ben-Hur is not great art. But it is great fun. Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston), a contemporary of Jesus, is a Jewish prince in Roman-ruled Judea newly reunited with his boyhood friend Messala (Stephen Boyd). Messala, a Roman, has just returned from the empire’s capital to reign as tribune, a sort of lieutenant governor, of Judea. These old pals now find themselves separated by politics — one is the ruler, the other the ruled.
Instantly one of my favorite films, The Bridge on the River Kwai is a tense, terrifying, absolutely riveting film about the ironies of war and the deadly psychological games enemy soldiers play with each other.
Around the World in 80 Days is a huge, leisurely production, chock full of starry cameos and astounding scenery. There’s not really much of a plot, and the characters are little more than cardboard, but the whole point of this movie is to linger with Fogg and Passepartout as they drink in the beautiful countryside and exotic cities as they float languorously by. This is what Technicolor and 70mm prints were invented for.
It’s got baby gorillas, dogs riding horses, and Jimmy Stewart as a clown. Man, The Greatest Show on Earth is one fun flick.
It’s well over two hours long, it’s full of inappropriate accents, and it was filmed almost entirely on the ocean. No, it’s not the latest Kevin Costner epic — it’s Mutiny on the Bounty, a thrilling classic that remains surprisingly modern.
The ultimate dizzy, romantic, screwball comedy, It Happened One Night is not to be missed.
Wichita just ain’t far enough west for Yancey Cravat (Richard Dix). He longs for the untamed frontier. So when the 1889 Oklahoma land rush puts 2 million acres up for grabs, he packs up the wife, Sabra (Irene Dunne), and the kid, Cimarron (which means ‘wild,’ we’re told), and heads off to help build a new world, or, more specifically, the boomtown of Osage, Oklahoma.
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