The Three Faces of Eve (1957): starring Joanne Woodward, David Wayne, Lee J. Cobb, Edwin Jerome
House wife "Eve" (Joanne Woodward in an oscar-winning role) buys alot of expensive "hollywood" dresses without remembering she had ever done so, then suddenly tries to strangle her child. Her redneck husband thinks she's batty and takes her to the doctors. It turns out Eve has multiple personality disorder, a disease which causes her to take up drinking alcohol and dancing in bars til all hours of the night. Her husband (played to the hilt by David Wayne) tells her "a good whoopin'" will knock some sense into her (he's quite a lowlife here), but in truth only her doctors can save her now. She's very polite when it comes to switching personalities, always able to do so at an instant, whenever demanded of her (even though she seems to have no control over it herself). Narrated like a docu-drama, Three Faces of Eve is still a 1950s handling of multiple personalities disorder. It maybe revolutionary for it's time, but the plot moves too slowly and what was once considered taboo (drinking in bars, oh my!) or shocking is now pretty blase. The only scenes of real greatness were the ones dealing with repressed memories, and these were handled with great artistry. I can see why Woodward won the oscar, she puts in a hell of a performance, its just too bad the movie itself seems so dated.
**/2 out of *****
Howl's Moving Castle (2004): Christian Bale, Lauren Bacall, Jean Simmons, Blythe Danner, Emily Mortimer
A young woman is turned into an old woman by a jealous wicked witch. She goes to the mountains to find the wizard who helped her once before. There, she finds a helpful scarecrow and Howl's moving castle itself. This is a highly imaginative movie where magical, fantastical things take place. Though it takes place in the 1900s, this world is filled with improbable mechanical devices, such as giant, wing flapping airships. It seems the emperor's sorceress is summoning all the wizards in the land so that she might turn them into bird-warriors (at least this is what I think is going on), to fight in a war that she seems to have constructed for no particular reason. Even when the storyline is trying it's best to baffle the audience, it never lets us get bored, there's just too much to look at here. I'm typically not the biggest fan of Japanese animation (the obvious exception being Akira), but this movie is hard to dislike. It's an amazing fantasy right up there with the best.
**** out of *****
Kwaidan (1964): Starring Rentaro Mikuni, Tatsuya Nakadai, Katsuo Nakamura, Tetsuro Tamba
Anyone who's ever seen "The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)", or any of his previous films based on Poe's stories, knows Vincent Price's contribution to horror. He seems to specialize in the weird and the offbeat, the creepy and the sometimes trippy. I get the feeling Vincent Price would've felt right at home in Kwaidan (if he had been in Japan at the time), a japanese ghost film that leans toward the avante garde. Kwaidan is actually four short separate movies, each with highly stylized sets and costumes (painted backgrounds with giant eyes in the sky). In story one, a samurai leaves his wife for a rich woman but realizes his mistake as he's constantly haunted by her memory. In the second story, A man trapped in a blizzard is spared by a snow vampire on the condition he never tell a soul the story of meeting her. In the third story, a young blind priest is asked to sing the story of an ancient battle to the ghosts of the participants. In the fourth story, a swordsman goes to get a drink and sees a stranger's face in the cup. All these stories play out almost like silent films, as there is very little dialogue, but there is a jarring, dischordant soundtrack. The art direction is very imaginative, everything looks like a graphic novel, unfortunately, it takes forever to turn each page. The movie is glacially-paced. I hit the fast forward button and it only made the actors move in real time. The stories are all too predictable as well, there's virtually no suspense generated. Perhaps these simple stories were taken from children's fairy tales. Perhaps this film is so inaccessible to me because it was written for another culture at another time. If so, I don't know. You could watch old episodes of Rod Serling's "Night Gallery" and get the same effect in a fraction of the time it takes to watch Kwaidan.
**1/2 out of *****
From Here To Eternity (1953): Starring Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, Deborah Kerr, Donna Reed, Frank Sinatra
From Here to Eternity is an old-fashioned blockbuster of a movie. Set in Hawaii, 1941, at the Schofield barracks (as the opening caption informs us), the ultimate destination of this film is Pearl Harbor, but Pearl Harbor is incidental in this movie to the story of the soldiers' lives leading up to that point. Montgomery Clift plays Pvt. Prewitt, a young "Rebel Without A Cause"/ James Dean (or "Cool Hand Luke", which this movie is reminiscent of)-type who's transferred to Sgt. Warden's (Burt Lancaster) division. He's a multi-talented kid, and one of those talents happens to be the very coveted talent of boxing. So it's much to his great misfortune that his new home is under the command of Capt. 'Dynamite' Holmes, a slimy officer obsessed with winning another boxing trophy for his mantle. He and the other boxers in the division make things rough indeed for the pacifist Prewitt. Meanwhile, The Captain's wife (Deborah Kerr) is trapped in a loveless marriage, and since Sgt. Warden "hates to see a good woman go to waste", the two have a steamy affair (and roll around on the beach). George "Superman" Reeves is there to make sure the Sgt. knows he's not the first soldier she's been with, though. Donna Reed and Frank Sinatra play the friends of Prewitt, but are there mainly to be in awe of him and his greatness, it seems. The soldiers all seem to spend their time getting blind drunk everyday (if that was the case, it's no wonder the Japanese caught us offguard!), and carousing in whorehouses. Years later, a carbon copy of this film will be made, an almost carbon-copy of it in fact, right down to main plot being a love story and the ending having a climatic battle scene. But where 2001's "Pearl Harbor" featured computerized graphics that had all the emotional impact of one set of trans-formers fighting another set of trans-formers, From Here To Eternity's battle scenes seem real (and not just because they incorporated actual battle footage into the movie) and tense. For a movie made in the 1950s, you'll find no evidence of Leave it to Beaver's "gosh oh golly" innocence here. This movie, though, is about love not war (even if both end in tragedy), and the men who chose war over love.
***1/2 out of *****
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Fri Mar 06, 2009 6:44 am
