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Lonely Bronxite Marty (Ernest Borgnine) is being shown up by his younger brothers and sisters — they’re all married but him, and he’s got all the Italian ladies in the butcher shop where he works telling him, ‘You should be ashamed a youself!’ and ‘Whena you gonna get married, Marty?’
A powerful drama with the flavor of Shakespearean tragedy, On the Waterfront is a timeless story of corruption and those who fight it. Terry Malloy (a mesmerizing Marlon Brando) is a former boxer who works as a goon for union racketeers running the docks in the harbors of New York.
From the snarky opening scene, I knew I was gonna love All About Eve. Written and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, this is perhaps the first film with an attitude we today would call modern.
Gentleman’s Agreement proves that The Lost Weekend of two years earlier wasn’t an aberration — Hollywood in the 40s, while not abandoning sheer entertainment (though often with solemn underlying themes), began exploring serious social problems in an upfront manner. Gentleman’s Agreement may be a trifle too earnest at times, but it’s obvious that screenwriter Moss Hart and director Elia Kazan felt strongly about their subject.
How come filmmakers 50 years ago could do sentiment without going all sappy, and we can’t do that now? If Going My Way, a delightful movie confection, were remade today, it would end up as a sticky Hallmark Hall of Fame thing.
Get past the set pieces that date the movie and make it twice as long as it might be, and The Great Ziegfeld — a biopic of theatrical impresario Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. — is a moving story of how the weaknesses and obsessions that ironically made one man a powerful entertainment mogul inevitably brought about his downfall.
I suspected The Fifth Element was gonna turn out to be a bunch of claptrap, and I was right. It’s a visually stunning film, to be sure — I’m a sucker for gorgeous spaceships and gorgeous spacescapes — but ultimately it’s a strange brew of Blade Runner, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Douglas Adams, mixed with a lot of pseudoreligious, pseudoscientific nonsense.
Oh, there will be those who say that Armageddon is mindless fluff, a complete waste of celluloid, a blot on humanity’s collective soul. Heed them not. Director Michael Bay and producer Jerry Bruckheimer have crafted as fine an educational experience as you will find these days.
Even better the second time around…
Not that I know any IRA soldiers — at least, not that I know of — but Irish and Irish-American New York is the world I live in.
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