Taxi Driver

Because we had both seen this one before, we were able to watch it a little more critically than a first-time viewer. Taxi Driver is the story of an alienated young Vietnam vet driving a Checker Cab in New York City. When he is rejected by the girl he takes to a porno on their date, he goes off the deep end and vows to rid the streets of NYC of all the scum.

Emily: Apparently the screenwriter, Paul Schrader, based the character of Travis Bickle on himself. While living in Los Angeles, he had a nervous breakdown, became really depressed, didn't talk to anyone for weeks, and developed an obsession with guns. Just a little trivia courtesy of imdb.

Kamala: This movie was shopped around by Shrader to a lot of studios, and Columbia took it with the package deal of Scorcese and DeNiro. After seeing Mean Streets, the tale of an epileptic mobster, Harvey Keitel, and his crazy cousin, DeNiro, the studio execs really wanted another Scorcese and DeNiro collaboration. Thank god because the other options for Bickle, according to wikipedia, were like Neal Diamond and Jeff Bridges......

Emily: Travis' monologues describing NYC as an "open sewer," the scene with Martin Scorcese in the back of the cab talking about shooting his wife in the face with a 44 magnum, and every scene shot with Harvey Keitel as the gross child-raping pimp build on the themes of urban decay coupled with the loneliness and isolation of post-Vietnam America. Robert DeNiro's character wants to make his mark on the world, (spoiler alert!) even attempting to assassinate a New York senator-the irony of the ending is that this man is hailed as a vigilante hero when really he's just an unhinged killer. America's fascination with folk heroes never ceases to astonish me.

Kamala: Yeah like Mr. Turner told us this story today about some horned toad called Old Rip that was buried in a corner stone in some building, and years later, when the building was demolished, they found the toad and it was alive!!! They even took it to meet Calvin Coolidge. Bizarre.

Emily: How does that have anything to do with folk heroes?

Kamala: It's got to do with American mythologizing. It's because the toad was underneath a Bible that it survived and it was such a big deal.

Emily: I'm not sure Peter Boyle can be anything but Frankenstein's monster in any movie he has a role in. I look at him and it's all I see. He has a small role as a cabbie.

Kamala: Jodie Foster is great for the role of the baby prostitute because she looks really young but sounds old.

Emily: The movie is really all about Robert DeNiro and his jacked body doing clap push-ups. Rocky won out over this movie for Best Picture in 1976, but watch the scene with DeNiro doing clap push-ups and you will be just as inspired to be the best you can be!

M*A*S*H

Robert Altman made M*A*S*H in 1970 to resemble Vietnam in all ways possible. The studio however, made him preface the film with quotes from Douglas MacArthur and Eisenhower, dating the film to the Korean War. In fact, the studio made him do a lot of things for this movie. Altman is quoted as saying that the film "was not released, it escaped." He experienced troubles akin to those Orson Welles had with Touch of Evil. 20th Century Fox was coming off some serious losses in the late 60's (Cleopatra anyone?) and was not going to take a chance on finicky artists: they had an iron grip on everything coming out of their studio. Despite all of this, M*A*S*H was the first major studio movie to use a certain profanity that rhymes with "duck."

Emily: I really liked this movie even though I was initially skeptical about watching it. Kamala has seen it about 10 times. Donald Sutherland is amazing and it's a shame Robert Altman didn't cast him in any subsequent movies.

Kamala: Apparently Elliot Gould and Donald Sutherland had some complaints about Altman, and only Gould apologized. Robert Altman cast him in The Long Goodbye; thankfully, because that movie is really good, but Altman never worked with Donald Sutherland again.

Emily: I thought the film was an entirely realistic slice of life type portrayal of a few months (I never figured out exactly how long it was...) in the lives of surgeons in the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital. Robert Altman has this technique where he doesn't just focus in on two or three characters reciting a script one after the other, the camera sort of just observes often large groups of people with two or three layered conversations going on at the same time. For instance, in the operating room there would be three separate quiet conversations that a constantly moving camera would switch between. I really liked his style as a director.

Kamala: IMDB movie trivia says that 80% of the dialogue was improvised, which helped to make it seem more realistic. Each actor really was his or her character. Altman also trolled small time improvisational clubs for actors, wanting normal looking unknowns, making for the incredibly long list of "introducing so and so"'s in the credits.

The 1970's!

The 1970's were an interesting time in American Film. As we have said in earlier posts, we want to focus on the larger studio films created by the "New Hollywood" generation of filmmakers. The 1970's saw the flourishing of young, film school educated directors who were given substantial artistic control over the films they created for large studios. However, in no way were George Lucas, Scorcese, Speilberg, Woody Allen, Coppola, and other new hollywood directors independent filmmakers. Their films often resembled independent films in terms of language, violence, sexuality, and theme. Taxi Driver, which we will watch later, is a good example of a film that, because of its extreme violence and misanthropic anti-hero, can seem like an independent film, yet was not by any means. The new hollywood directors blurred the line between independent and big-studio films.

We also want to examine the transition from innovative new hollywood films to the hollywood blockbusters that seem to come a dime a dozen nowadays.

Bonnie and Clyde

This is the last movie we will watch in the 1960s. Bonnie and Clyde is the true story of a couple who robbed banks during the Great Depression. "Times is hard" and Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker turn to burglary in order to make ends meet. Bonnie Parker is played by the (strangely) beautiful Faye Dunaway (who is less weird looking in this film than in Chinatown) and Warren Beatty plays Clyde Barrow.

Emily: This movie focuses a lot on the relationship between Bonnie and Clyde but it also serves as a metaphor for tensions in American society during the Great Depression paralleled with those of the 1960's. For instance, in one scene the boy Bonnie and Clyde use as their getaway driver, C.W. Moss, goes home to his father with a tattoo on his chest and the father freaks out. Also the fact that Bonnie and Clyde rob banks but don't bother hardworking farmers makes them into folk heroes in Texas and the surrounding states. Akin to Jesse James' notoriety in Missouri.

Kamala: We wanted to close out the 1960's with Bonnie and Clyde because it is considered to be the first "new hollywood" film. It was produced through Seven Arts, a small studio that, in 1967, was incorporated into Warner Brothers. This film broke boundaries with its graphic portrayal of gun violence. However, there is no sex. This film, along with Easy Rider, ushered in the new generation of directors that dominated the 1970s, about whom I will be harping a lot over the next week.

Emily: This movie is also not-so-secretly about erectile dysfunction/ Clyde's psychosexual hang-ups. He picks up Bonnie because she catches him trying to steal her mother's car. About three minutes later they are driving off together and Clyde is telling her about all the adventures they're going to have. It is a speedy romance, but they don't physically consummate their relationship until about ten minutes before the end of the movie. Clyde keeps saying he is "not a loverboy." The most uncomfortable not-sex scene in cinematic history is probably the one where Faye Dunaway is ready to go and scooching closer to Warren Beatty and he rolls over and violently pushes her away. She starts crying. Kamala suspects Clyde is a virgin.

Kamala: He's so proud of himself when they finally consummate their union. The camera focuses on two frolicking pieces of newspaper dancing in the wind.

Emily: Another mystery that's nagging at me has to do with the scene when the Barrow gang picks up a hilarious Gene Wilder and his lady friend. When Bonnie finds out he's an undertaker she gets all stony faced and orders him out of the car. It's bizzare. Gene Wilder acts the same in like every movie he's ever been in but it works so I'm not complaining. Faye Dunaway is excellent, as is Gene Hackman as Clyde's brother Buck. The credits were also very well done. I usually don't notice credits but these were very creative.

Kamala: I think JD and Elliot really love each other but can never be together.

Emily: We're talking about Bonnie and Clyde now, Kamala.

Kamala: ...Warren Beatty is hot.

Take the Money and Run

We are kind of grasping at straws with the sixties because both of us have watched a large amount of the more well known "mainstream" movies on our own time, so today we chose to watch Take the Money and Run.

Kamala: I had seen this one before, I really like Woody Allen movies, and this one is the first movie he ever directed.

Emily: It was produced by United Artists. In the early 60's, UA bought a TV channel that produced Gilligan's Island and other successful shows. Basically, unlike most other big studios in the 1960's, UA had money. In 1967, two years before Take the Money and Run was made, UA was bought by Transamerica. The new ownership encouraged, even more than before, new and innovative directors such as Woody Allen, Robert Altman, and more. This allowed for a lot of artistic freedom for directors like Allen, who was able to direct his first feature film for himself, with all his characteristic humor.

Kamala: Oooh we should watch a Robert Altman sometime...

Emily: I thought this one was really funny. There is this one scene where Woody Allen's character, Virgil Starkwell, is trying to play cello, sitting down in a chair, with a marching band. He spends like 30 seconds fumbling with the chair, bow, and cello and trying to keep out of the way of his fellow bandmembers.

Kamala: It is filled with classic Woody Allen little detail jokes, along with his adorable jew humor. In prison Virgil volunteers to try out an experimental vaccine. The only side effect he discovers is that he is temporarily transformed into a rabbi.

Emily: This movie was hilarious. People mostly think that the only Woody Allen movies worth watching are Manhattan and Annie Hall, but this movie proves that his earlier films are just as good. I guess by earlier films I mean some of his sillier, lesser known comedies like Love and Death, Bananas, What's Up Tiger Lily, Casino Royale, What's New Pussycat, and finally Take the Money and Run. All of which Kamala has seen, strangely, I didn't realize how much she likes Woody Allen movies.

Kamala: yeah

Dynamite Chicken

Dynamite Chicken was made in 1969 by Richard Pryor and some friends of his. They tried to capture the zietgiest of the late 60's with the vietnam war, Nixon, censorship, changing sexual mores, and hair in different segments narrated by comedians, actors, Allen Ginsberg, and some other people I have never heard of. It featured many prominent cultural icons such as Andy Warhol, Joan Baez, the music of Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and Malcolm X.

Emily: This movie utilized the cut-up technique, which we observed in the William S. Burroughs shorts, with flashes of different videos from the 50s and 60s, advertisements, news clips, naked women, and weird comedians. However, the way it kept coming back to Richard Pryor in some alley with a basketball gave it some continuity and pulled it together.

Kamala: It also eschewed narrative continuity. I wanted to watch Dynamite Chicken as another example of the chaos and opposing "contrasts," as the movie repeatedly repeated, that made up the socio-political scene in the late 1960s. We should have watched this one with Easy Rider, or even before it, but it just came today in the Netflix and that is how the cookie crumbles.

Emily: The credits called it a "A contemporary probe and commentary of the mores and maladies of our age.....with shtick, bits, pieces, girls, some hamburger, a little hair, a lady, some fellas, some religious stuff, and a lot of other things." which I think is pretty accurate. One of my favorite bits was the beginning, when we hear a male and female voice in the dark, talking about...what they have just done in the dark-and the girl asks for a light and then you hear like five other voices also asking for the lighter. ....It was an orgy. I don't know if I explained it very well.

Kamala: .....

This is kind of the definition of an independent film. It was financed in part by John Lennon, and distributed by some company called Tango Entertainment. It features many "counterculture" (I'm using that word for lack of a better one) icons, and has an intellectual or artistic agenda in that it rallies against censorship, police violence, racial politics, religion, the Vietnam War, and Richard Nixon.

Emily: The first scene is also great- a big fat guy walks out of his apartment to the 2001 music (when the apes discover the monolith). Richard Pryor is hysterical, and Fred Willard is in it! (that guy from all the Christopher Guest movies)

The Cut-Ups, Towers Open Fire and William Buys a Parrot: A William S. Burroughs Triple Feature

We chose these because the Netflix description made them seem like really avant garde, really really independent short films.
Good god they were.

William S. Burroughs was an author of the beat generation famous for such novels as Naked Lunch and Junkie. He collaborated with artist Brion Gysin and director Anthony Balch to create these shorts to make visual representations of the god knows what in Burroughs' mind. Gysin is "famous" for coming up with a concept called called "the cut-up technique." Burroughs wanted to use cut-up in his writing, and Gysin used it in his art. They would cut and paste and mix and match pieces of a whole in no particular order to find a truer new meaning in something regular. ( if you are really interested...) In the films, it manifested as very very quick jump cuts between three or four different story lines, if you can call them that, where the scene would vary maybe 3 times in 5 seconds between random moving symbols, a man and woman walking down the street, a man staring at a whirling lamp, and other strange things.

Emily: They eschewed conventional narrative form. They eschewed it in every way possible.

Kamala: We wanted to watch this to show that people were thinking intellectually about the films they were making and while it would have been difficult to watch this in 1963, I guess it is good to know that films like this were out there pushing the cinematographic envelope. That said, it was tedious and difficult to watch.

Emily: Here is a list of films Anthony Balch distributed:
Do You Like Women?
The Kinky Darlings
Lot in Sodom
Secrets of Sex (he also directed this one)
The Importance of Being Sexy
18 Year Old Schoolgirls

Both he and William S. were into appalling Sadean horror and exploitation film, and hints of this fascination are present in the short films in this compliation. The first movie, "William Buys a Parrot" is fairly straightforward, but "Towers Open Fire" had some creepy imagery, with soldiers. And the cut-ups feature close-ups on faces, people walking, and repetition of the words "Yes" "Hello" "Thank you" and the phrase "Does it seem to be persisting?" Not going to lie-we stopped maybe half-way through The Cut-Ups. It's all on youtube if you're interested: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAxUWfe_PJY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oc3bp7s0378&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oc3bp7s0378&feature=related

Cleopatra

Kamala: I will introduce this one because it is one of my favorite movies ever. Cleopatra is famous for being the "biggest flop" in the history of American film. This doesn't mean it isn't good, in fact I think it is awesome. Cleopatra is a perfect example of a huge budget studio epic. And I mean HUGE budget. For Cleopatra's triumph in Rome, they covered Elizabeth Taylor in gold and paraded her along the streets of a realistic and large looking Rome on a 40 foot tall statue of Anubis being pulled by maybe 30-50 elaborately dressed slaves. This movie was a spectacle designed to draw public attention from television back to the failing studio system. It was received well, but didn't do phenomenally well in the box office and as a result 20th Century Fox was plunged into debt. Wikipedia says it cost the equivalent of $300 million 2007 dollars. Despite all of this I think it is a wholly enjoyable movie to watch.

Emily: Kamala didn't tell me that Rex Harrison would be in this one, his Julius Caesar was a pleasant surprise. Kamala gushed about how much she likes Burton/Taylor movies for like 5 minutes before we started it. Apparently this was their first film together, during the filming of which they fell in love and Liz dumped her husband at the time whose name I forget.

Kamala:Eddie Fisher

Emily: You are a nerd. Anyways it was soooo long. The director, Joseph L. Mankiewicz also directed All About Eve, the first movie we watched. I didn't like this one that much, they kind of tooled with the history and the screenplay was horrible. But, I am glad we watched it because it fits perfectly into our project. Cleopatra is a perfect example of a movie fraught with the problems indicative of the plight of the big studios in the early 1960s. There were conflicts over the casting, directing, editing, costumes, shooting location, and Elizabeth Taylor even became deathly ill and needed a tracheotomy at one point. The film was made with no shooting script and the screenplay in the final version is rumored to be mainly improvisation by the principal actors.

Kamala: I will admit it is a little long. Mankiewicz had trouble with Fox, and there are a few different cuts varying in length. We saw the premiere version that ran 234 minutes. Films like Cleopatra showed the faults of the studio system to budding filmmakers who wanted to be able to preserve their artistic vision. There was this character in Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt, released in France also in 1963, played by Jack Palance who was every director's nightmare producer, perverting Fritz Lang's austere and beautiful film version of Homer's Odyssey. Independent filmmakers were able to work outside of the constraints of producers like this who were a dime a dozen in the large studios.

Tomorrow we will watch a collection of recently released, small budget short films by William S. Burrows.



you can see her tracheotomy scar in that picture if you look closely

Easy Rider

We both really liked this one. It was produced by Henry Fonda and directed by Dennis Hopper, who also played the leading roles, in 1969. Easy Rider met with a lot of critical acclaim, Dennis Hopper won a prize at Cannes and was nominated for multiple academy awards including Best Supporting Actor for newcomer Jack Nicholson.

We wanted to watch this one first, even though it is kind of a close to the 60's, because it shows what we want to build up to through the 60's. The hostility with which the "freedom," as Nicholson's character says, that Wyatt and Billy represent was met and the great divide between the counterculture and "mainstream" rural life in America show the uncertainty and violence that was present at the dawn of 1970. We want to track the progression of culture to what this film represents.

Kamala: This was great. The cinematography was almost self-consciously arty especially during the acid trip sequence. If anyone has seen My Own Private Idaho, it is pretty obvious that Gus VanSant was pretty heavily influenced by this one with its tracking shots of nature and freeze frames in the acid sequence. For scene changes Hopper used these flickering cuts that would switch back and forth between the new scene and the old three times or so before settling on the new location. He also used a lot of Godard-like angles and chaotic scenes where the focus of the shot changes rapidly from, for example a baton twirler's shoulder to someone's shoe to a tuba player's hat in a scene at a parade.

Emily: The wide angle shots of the American west were unbelievably gorgeous. Also thank god they defined the word "dude" for me, I was so confused. Also, Kamala did not do the LSD sequence justice. It was a visually arresting mishmash of over-exposed shots of the sky above an old New Orleans graveyard, Peter Fonda speaking to a statue of the virgin Mary, Fonda, Hopper and two lady-friends squeezed into this tiny space between two mausoleums talking to the dead, and clips of a woman reciting the Nycene Creed all edited together so quickly as to be almost nauseating. The soundtrack was good too.

Kamala: She already bought it on iTunes. There was this one shot that equated a cowboy shoeing his horse to Wyatt changing a flat on his motorcycle. I thought that was cool.

Emily: Basically what we are trying to get across was that Easy Rider, as opposed to the less mainstream movies we watched from the 50's, was arty. It paid attention to camera angles and actually had a philosophical point.

Kamala: Emily and I disagree on what that point is exactly. I think it was about the anger and resentment that the anti-war and counterculture movements garnered from the rest of America, and the resultant loss of some kind of overarching American identity.

Emily: I thought it was more about a search for personal freedom. More general and less about just America.

Whatever it was supposed to mean, we both recommend Easy Rider to anyone who wants to see a good film.

The 1960's

We are now moving on to the 1960's with the one exception of The Girl Can't Help It, a rock and roll movie from 1956, which Mr. Turner like REALLY wants us to watch.

Independent films and studios flourished in the 1960's especially due to a growing interest in the artistic foreign films that were becoming available in the US. France especially but a lot of Europe had, with the likes of Godard, Buñuel, Bergman, Fellini, Antonioni, and others, a very well developed market for arty movies from small studios.


The term "new hollywood" came to describe American directors such as Martin Scorcese, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Stephen Spielberg who gleaned much in film school from the great foreign directors in the 1960's. This "movement" as we guess you can call it really kind of started with Easy Rider and some other movies in 1969 and flourished in the 70's.

We will look at the sixties back to front, starting with Easy Rider.

Lost, Lonely, and Vicious

Lost, Lonely, and Vicious centers on the young struggling actor crowd in 1958 Hollywood. "Johnny Dennis" is a James Dean figure with an obvious deathwish who likes fast car chases, fast women, and is quick to anger.

This movie tried to be a mockumentary but inexplicably abandoned that device after like 10 minutes. It does a great job of portraying the disillusioned youth searching for auditions and big breaks. They stand by blankly eating popcorn as one of their friends beats another unconscious. Johnny mopes and pouts and searches for meaning in his life. This is an important difference between Lost, Lonely, and Vicious and High School Confidential. This movie is about a maybe 18 or 19 year old boy confronting his own mortality and what may seem like the usual questions that come with teenage angst, but it is refreshing to see complicated emotions in a teenager rather than the air headed girls and greasers that populated mainstream movies like High School Confidential.

Emily: Oh Johnny Dennis you are so misunderstood. He is just a kid trying to deal with feelings of inadequacy and his own meaninglessness on the scale of the world. He is fascinated by other people who are as fascinated with death as he is. Authors of books about dying and busdrivers who "just keep on going" when they get to the end of their routes. He is this teenage kid who thinks he is such a martyr for walking around with the weight of the world on his shoulders with a pained expression on his face.

Kamala: Most of the dialogue seemed really dated to the both of us, but compared to beach party teen movies I've seen it was covering new territory for teens in the 1950's. He says something about how a teddy bear will eventually lose its stuffing and be thrown out and then no one will remember it. The film presents Helen Preacher, an easily pleased drug-store clerk who cares for her sick father, as a foil to Johnny's despair.

Emily: Their stuffed animal creepily fell on them when they were kissing. I think it is supposed to symbolize mortality.

Kamala: It also speaks with Kandinskean emotional and lyrical volumes expressing an existential sort of dialectics.

Emily: You are a jerk. There is a character called Pinky who also seems, not liberated per se, but more frank about her sexuality and real feelings than other girls in movies we've seen.

Kamala: It still had one of those overly optimistic morals at the end, but the film was surprisingly thoughtful. The cinematography wasn't completely artless either.

Emily: There were several shots that superimposed Johnny's self-portrait (it's a creepy picture of himself half-skeleton) onto his face and it was really nicely done. There were echoing voiceovers ("Johnny...Johnny...JOHNNY!") and faces swimming up out of the water when Johnny is standing at the edge of a lake at the climax but you can't really accuse this movie of being cliche since it was likely breaking new ground when it was released. This was a good portrayal of life in Hollywood and does a nice job with the (now familiar) theme of the disillusioned teenage star

High School Confidential!

This movie was awesome in a hilariously bad public service announcement sort of way. It is the 21 Jump Street of 1958. It spins a cautionary tale of a few "weedheads" at a high school in California who learn that smoking weed leads to heroin addiction, and a jail sentence of 5 years to life. We wanted to watch it, for one because Mr. Turner suggested it, but also as a counterpoint to some teenage B movies we will watch tomorrow or something. This was made by MGM, Jerry Lee Lewis, pre-cousin marrying creepiness, wrote an original song, and it featured John Drew Barrymore, Drew's father, and Mamie VanDoren.

Emily: This one was amazing. It was so preachy and the statistics were hilarious, "280 out of 1200 kids are addicted to marijuana.....or heroin."

Kamala: This movie certainly is of little cinematic importance, but it sure was funny. It obviously represents a huge effort on the part of MGM to use teen heartthrobs speaking in what I guess was contemporary slang to hammer home some message about drug use. MGM was really strapped for cash at the time and was trying to appeal to both parents and children with this movie.

Emily: Through some internet sleuthing, we discovered that this movie actually came out in June of 1958, the MONTH AFTER Jerry Lee Lewis was shamed publicly for marrying his 13 year old first cousin once removed. That must have been a big blow for MGM because I bet when they made the movie they thought they would have this big star who released an album especially for the movie in April would be good publicity. Ha Ha

Kamala: We will flesh this one out later when we watch this B-movie called "Lost, Lonely, and Vicious," an independent counterpart to High School Confidential!

Julius Caesar

This 1950's epic did not strive to augment Shakespeare's dialogue with its own art: in terms of acting, casting, or cinematography. It was simply shot, Cassius was fine, but James Mason was mistakenly cast as a wooden faced and elderly Brutus.

Kamala: Part of the reason we chose this one was Marlon Brando as Mark Antony, but also it is a large studio epic.

Emily: The score was generally laughable and the camera work unimaginative, focused mostly on the acting of the principal characters. Brando was amazing. I sort of lost interest in the movie after Mark Antony's big speech to the crowd.

Kamala: This movie wasn't as much of a spectacle that I hoped it would be. I wanted to watch it for one, because I had it next on Netflix, but we also wanted see what the large studios could do in the 1950's. There were a large number of extras and somewhat complicated studio sets. MGM in the early 1950's (this one was from 1953) was trying desperately to compete with the rise of television by appeasing the masses in any way possible. This film perhaps is not the best example of MGM's desperation, but I would like to conjecture that its artlessness and unwillingness to take chances was influenced by the studio's tight artistic control.

Emily: The film was wooden and definitely boring, the last 45 minutes really dragged by. Mostly because Brando wasn't in it. But really, I have seen Shakespeare remakes, Titus by Julie Taymor and Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet of course, that take real chances artistically with the material. And this did not. But it's still worth watching if you're really into Rome or Marlon Brando.

Touch of Evil

"You're a killer."
"Partly. I'm a cop."

This exchange between two cops towards the end of the movie illustrates the moral struggle underlying the enforcement of the law. Vargas (Charlton Heston) asks Detective Quinlan (Orson Welles) who really has the ultimate authority--the cops or the law? In this film noir (the last we will probably watch) the ethical dilemma is between an american cop who frames the suspects he truly believes are guilty, and a mexican cop who tries to expose him in a quest for justice. 

The beginning of this movie is famous, and we both thought it was really cool. 

Kamala: It is a few minute long tracking shot starting with the placement of a bomb in the trunk of a car. 

Emily: The car moves in and out of the shot that switches focus from Charlton Heston and his pretty blonde bride and the oil magnate with his hooker driving the car. 

Kamala: It was ingeniously suspenseful. 

Emily: I really liked Marlene Dietrich as the creepy gypsy.

Kamala: She danced for Hitler. That is weird. 

Emily: She has this great line at the end though when a detective asks "Is that all you have to say about him?" she says: "What does it matter what you say about people?" I liked that.

Kamala: This is thought of as one of the last films of the "Classic" noir era, and that shows in its spare dialogue, ambiguous, almost bitter ending. One of the reasons Touch of Evil fits so well into our project is that it was produced through a large studio, Universal International, and director Orson Welles had trouble releasing his cut for that reason. The DVD came with a preface that after the studio showed him their final cut, Welles wrote a 55 page memo explaining how his artistic integrity was compromised. The version we saw was the closest available to Welles' desired cut. Basically the trouble with this movie shows what Kiss Me Deadly was able to avoid by working under United Artists.

Emily: It was funny the way they talked about the "reefer." And "mainlining" dope? I had no idea that it was possible to mainline "reefer." The narcotics subplot was cute. 

Kamala: Also we had to put subtitles on like 15 minutes in because Orson Welles was INCOMPREHENSIBLE! He sounded like Weelll sheee ii dont shsnoww ifff youuur. He had balls in his mouth. 
Also Charlton Heston plays a mexican...

Kiss Me Deadly

We wanted to watch this movie, because  it was produced by United Artists, and  because it is known for pushing the conventions for movies of the 1950s with its violence and sexuality. There is even a scene of implied vaginal torture with pliers, and a woman on fire. It wasnt the freshest or most suspenseful movie, but it had its merits, a rather interesting film noir plot complete with anti-hero and attractive floozies.

United Artists was essentially the first "independent" film studio, established by actors and directors in 1919 as a way to better control their artistic expression and their salaries. In the 1950's in an attempt to increase profits, United Artists began giving money to independent producers rather than working as a consolidated studio. This allowed the producer of Kiss Me Deadly, Robert Aldrich, who was also the director, to have more freedom over his picture than he would at a large, controlling studio much like what United Artists has become today under the iron fist of Mr. Tom Cruise. This film fits into our project as a independent counterpart to All About Eve with a relatively unknown cast.

Filmed in 1954, of course during the cold war, the theme of nuclear apocalypse is shocking. Tellingly, in the scene where the FBI agent tells Mike Hammer, the main character, that the much ado is over something having to do with the "manhattan project," Mr. Hammer, usually combative with cops, calmly cooperates.

Kamala: Kiss Me Deadly is also interesting because it influenced some independent cult films we will watch later in our project. The glowing suitcase filled with "the great whatsit" device shows up in Pulp Fiction, and Repo Man. Raiders of the Lost Ark too.

Emily: I thought the camera angles were fantastic. Very unconventional.

Robert Aldrich produced this film through his own studio, not completely under the wing of United Artists, giving him a little more freedom.

The female character Mike encounters in the beginning refers to women as "the incomplete sex," paralleling Bette Davis' speech on how women aren't women until they have a man. Clearly, this was a prominent theme in the 1950's.

Emily: This film was replete with semi-offensive caricatures of immigrants, incoherent street lingo (va-va-VOOM was one of my favorites) and tough-guy violence. It's great pulp cinema, even if it takes a while to figure out what's going on.

All About Eve

This movie won the Best Picture Oscar in 1950. It stars Bette Davis as an aging grand dame of the theatre, Margo Channing, and Anne Baxter as Eve, her usurping younger rival. We wanted to watch a well known and respected big studio motion picture.

Kamala: I just can't understand why a thousand alarm bells didn't go off as soon as Eve spoke.

Emily: She was damn creepy. Something sinister about her from the start. I really enjoyed the witty dialogue, and Marilyn Monroe's cameo was choice as she was pretty much playing herself.

Kamala: The final shot through the mirror was great...more about that later.

We thought the movie was about women and their struggle to succeed despite the natural process of aging. Bette Davis has several phenomenal monologues about losing her idea of herself, about the difference between "Margo Channing" and "me" and her insecurity regarding her age and attractiveness. Margo's boyfriend represented both aspects of her fear of againg--she worries that she is no longer attractive to him and that she may no longer have a place in the theatre world he represents as her director.

Emily: I think that because it is about the theatre the movie also is somewhat about fakeness, and the deception that is inherent in acting. The first voice over is Addison, the first voice the viewer trusts turns out to be the most duplicitous.

Kamala: Now that we are talking about the end... I thought the starting over concept was interesting, but detracted somewhat from the focus on Margo and Eve. But I guess the point, and especially with that last shot in the mirror is that for every woman there are always innumerable younger, prettier, more ambitious girls out there just waiting for their chance.

Emily: And the scene where Margo gets drunk at her party is hysterical:

Margo:[in front of her boyfriend, Bill] I love you, Max. I really mean it. I love you. Come to the pantry.
[She leaves]
Max Fabian: [to Bill] She loves me like a father. Also, she's loaded.

Day one

Kamala: Emily and I are going to watch independent and mainstream movies from the 1950's to the 1980's, and comment on their cultural and cinematographical importance

Emily: Yay!

Kamala: Tomorrow we will start with "All About Eve."