Shade is a beautiful film but…..
Shane is a top 10 western for sure….
Who doesn’t love Gunga Din (1939)?
Grant; McLaglen; Fairbanks, Jr.: what more could you ask for?
Not to mention A Place in the Sun
and Swing Time
a career to be envied.
Woman of the Year makes me smile, BUT….
The more the merrier too, BUT….
The Talk of the Town….NOOOOOOO
Gunga Din is one of my favorite films of all time. It is my father’s favorite film and by extension I have probably seen this more times than any other movie. He watched it every time it showed on television. I was going to start a thread on this but I didn’t want to get attacked for celebrating British Imperialism . . . which is ridiculous . . . of me.
Don’t forget I Remember Mama. It’s perfection.
The Diary of Anne Frank is also exquisite.
Remember too he began as a DP and photographed Laurel & Hardy’s most famous silent, Big Business.
@Soybean
Me too! I saw that film ad nauseam as a kid (though it wasn’t bad seeing it each time). I saw all those “films of empire” growing up.
Gunga Din
Zulu
Lives of a Bengal Lancer
The Drum (excellent Korda Technicolor with Roger Livesy and Sabu)
The Four Feathers (another excellent British Technicolor outing)
Bhowani Junction
even Wee Willie Winkie
I could go on. Gunga Din is possibly the best adventure film ever made, no exaggeration. It was huge back in its day.
Gunga Din?
I’ll see that.
Ooooh, I’ve seen;
Gunga Din
Lives of a Bengal Lancer (another favorite)
Beau Geste
Zulu
Zulu Dawn
The Four Feathers
Khartoum
Kim (with Errol Flynn-I think I’ve seen everything with Flynn)
Ill have to seek out The Drum and Bhowani Junction
Soybean…. they just celebrated Flynn’s birthday in my old hometown of Hobart with a star outside our oldest cinema. He even went to my old school (no big deal as he was expelled from most)!
Hey, a Tasmanian. Is this the correct terminology? I know he was a pretty bad actor but I love all of his films. He just had that something. And usually that something was Olivia De Havilland.
I’ll have a birthday refreshment for Flynn!
That’s correct ….. he wasn’t much of an actor, but he had some fun I’d say. I love Dawn Patrol from that his golden era…. and is your icon a Joe Jackson picture (I’ve been meaning to ask?) :)
Happy Birthday, Errol Flynn you lucky man!
I’m still searching for my Olivia.
(man, they had some great hair back then)
Oh, are you a Joe fan? Excellent. Yes, it’s a drawing I did back in my college days based on a Joe Jackson cd cover with a little bit of me thrown in for good measure.
Absolutely no love for George Stevens here. I dont like Frank Capra either.
Clovenhoof, you have to at least like Gunga Din, no?
Giant is one of the greatest of iconic American films. It contains shots that are so beautiful they can make you weep.
Stevens, for me, represents the best of the whole studio era. Like Hawks, he was as utility as they came, but he always added that extra je nais se qua to make his films extraordinarily personal. And think — this man directed Laurel & Hardy and Astaire and Rogers and Tracy and Hepburn and Cary Grant, Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift, Irene Dunn, and James Dean, to name a few, and in some of their best films.
Plus, as a beyond-the-normal-age volunteer soldier in WWII, he is the only known person to film footage in color, and was in the first platoon to discover/evacuate Dachau.
I think his work is extraordinary and it still stands as such.
If you’re interested, one of the best documentaries you can see is George Stevens: A Filmmaker’s Journey, 1984, made by his son. I highly recommend it to any person interested in film.
The WWII film is also available on DVD.
Capra? try The Bitter Tears Of General Yen…. his Von Strenberg rip off, but brilliant anyway.
Soybean…. yep a big Joe fan from day 1. Nice take on it with your splendid drawing sir.
Chris S. as Shakespeare said….. ditto! well argued.
Stevens suffers from auteur theory and this is a very auteurist site. Too much so, imo. He’s often seen as merely a superior studio craftsman lacking in personality – Wyler is another regular Oscar nominee who made lots of admired films but whose star has fallen quite a bit. Swing Time is up there with Top Hat as the best of Astaire-Rogers, Giant is a bit bloated but yes, there’s lots to admire, A Place in the Sun seems out of fashion, was highly thought of at the time, and Liz Taylor never looked more beautiful. I’m not so keen on Gunga Din, it’s entertaining enough within the Boys Own imperialist adventure genre, and i’m largely immune to Shane’s charms. I noticed Stevens was absent from the 250 Directors in Geoff Andrew’s book, he explained to me he left him out as he was concentrating more on directors with more recognisable styles, but Stevens should certainly have his place here. There can be a certain snobbery involved in such omissions (not that the fine folks here or Geoff Andrew, who’s excellent, are snobbish!). Stevens was fine with actors and creating credible settings. The Greatest Story ever Told harmed his critical reputation and Cahiers du Cinéma championed new gods
I think he got stodgy in the forties and fifties. I like his thirties films (Alice Adams, Annie Oakley, Swing Time, Vivacious Lady, Gunga Din) and parts of his forties films (The More The Merrier, The Talk Of The Town, I Remember Mama) but then he got into “important” subjects and lost his flair. I understand his WW II experience changed him but it made him self-conscious. He was a wonderful director of actresses, however.
Yes, i understand that problem with stodginess or grandiose tendencies, it was manageable in Giant but by the time of the Greatest Story ever Told it was certainly stodgy, probably with success his ambitions grew along with the rewards of Hollywood prestige and yes his earlier films were more sprightly..
I’d interested in how he brought out the best or near it in actresses- i’ve always thought Swing Time is Ginger’s peak. Cukor and Mizoguchi are other male directors known for specialising in roles for women
Giant. Love it.
Well, there was the little tyke whose dad took him to a movie at some theater in Boston’s old Scollay Square. it was Shane and the little tyke has loved film ever since and Shane was no small part.
Guy’s okay in my book.
@Christopher Sepesy
Only one point to quibble with you. I’m almost certain that John Ford shot color footage during the war as well. Just take a look at The Battle of Midway (1942).
I don’t think much of Shane, but Alice Adams, A Place in the Sun, Gunga Din, and I Remember Mama are excellent. A number of his films, as David Bordwell has observed , particularly the later ones, tend to be choppy because he overshot everything. I think this contributed to what Howard’s rightly identifying as stodginess in his later work.
Yes, Bordwell useful as ever. This is another example of where his analysis comes in handy in pinning down things lots of viewers might only sense or not be aware of at all. He doesn’t like Hollywood’s overshooting, so many different cameras and fast editing these days- “intensified continuity” is a bugbear of his, and rightly. I must admit i’ve probably not seen Giant since i became even aware of Bordwell.
Shane is a masterpiece I think, probably in my top 5 westerns.
I think Kenji nailed it re the auteurs stuff, and eventhough I understand his reticence to embrace the imperialist tosh of Gunga Din, it’s a wonderful romp for mine.
Wyler gets the same raw deal form the auteur theorists too kenji, spot on mate.
and the Ashes in Wales next week? woo hoo…. bring it on.
I haven’t seen that many, maybe 3 or 4, but I did like a Place in the Sun. Regarding Shane, I am definitely not a fan. Andre Bazin called it a “Superwestern”, i.e., a western that is somehow embarrassed of fully embracing the genre and so it needs introduce exterior elements to it. In Shane it is the psychological analysis and the selfconscious way in which it tries to rewrite the western myth. I think Bazin was being too severe but he was reacting against the fact that masterpieces of the genre that came in the same year, like Seven men form now and Naked Spur, got no attention from the critics while Shane was getting all the praise in the world.
Sarris on Stevens:
“George Stevens was a minor director with major virtues before A Place in the Sun , and a major director with minor virtues after. . . . What happened to Stevens was that his talent, like many of his colleagues, was strained to the breaking point by the massive projects of the fifties. His best days were in the thirties and forties when a movie was just a movie and when any extra care in the direction was conspicuously personal.”
@Matt Parks
Not always a big fan of Sarris’ criticism myself, but I love that quotation (The Diary of Anne Frank and The Greatest Story Ever Told are I think what he was probably talking about). Surprisingly succinct and to the point for him. I think that can also apply for a number of other directors from that era as well (Hawks, Hitchcock, Curtiz); their work in the fifties does feel a lot more strained than their earlier stuff (Hitchcock especially, I think only Rear Window and North by Northwest are really up to the same level as his stuff from the thirties through Strangers on a Train, those early films had a real feeling of effortlessness to them, which for a thriller goes a long way).
@Kenji
Good point about the auteurist bias here, spot on about some filmmakers being dismissed as “craftsmen”. Wyler is an excellent example, Wuthering Heights, The Little Foxes, Mrs. Miniver, and The Best Years of Our Lives are some of the best of that era and are an enviable filmography for any director, and he too strained in the fifties with projects like Friendly Persuasion and the unfortunate Ben-Hur.
Musycks
Not one film in the library to review or rate? from a director who made at least half a dozen classics that’s not good enough I think. Come on Criterion lift your game!