Sonic Youth wrote:I take it, Damien, you're not a Sea Hawk or Yankee Doodle Dandy fan. Or does that go without saying?
Nor are you a fan of High Sierra, Key Largo, The Maltese Falcon or Treasure of the Sierra Madre? All Through the Night is better than all of these?
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High Sierra is a terrific film (although Walsh's own remake, the western Colorado Territory, is more interesting, I feel).
I'm not at all a fan of John Huston. I find Maltese Falcon to be superficial with the characters never coming to life; Key Largo heavy-handed; Sierra Madre overly schematic with the irony is laid on awfully thick, although visually, it's a bit more lively than most of Huston's films.
Yes, I prefer All Through The Night to all these films, although with High Sierra it's a close call.
I literally haven't seen The Sea Hawk since I was a kid, although I recall at the time I remember thinking it wasn't nearly as good as Curtiz's Captain Blood. And I've never been able to stomach Yankee Doodle Dandy.
"Y'know, that's one of the things I like about Mitt Romney. He's been consistent since he changed his mind." -- Christine O'Donnell
Sonic Youth wrote:You just slandered Michael Curtiz.
(The fascinatingly nutty Mission To Moscow stands alone as not quite like any other movie of the studio era, )
Damien what do you mean? This is a film on my ''most want'' list - although I'm interested in it more for Ann Harding than for the political nature of the film.
Sonic Youth wrote:You just slandered Michael Curtiz.
Michael Curtiz made two undeniably great, for-the-ages movies in the 40s: Casablanca and Mildred Pierce. But the hobgoblin of his career was his inconsistency. And overall, his 40s output was mediocre, ranging from the pleasant-but-not-very-cinematic Life With Father to the innocuous Romance On The High Seas to the silly Flamingo Road to the unwatchable The Lady Takes A Sailor. (The fascinatingly nutty Mission To Moscow stands alone as not quite like any other movie of the studio era, ) Things got decidedly more dire with Curtiz in the 50s.
As for Vincent Sherman, Nora Prentiss is arguably the greatest little-known film of the 40s, onr of the most adult and knowing movies I've ever seen about the destructive power of love and sex and relationships. In this melodrama about an unhappy adulterous affair, Sherman employs a number of inventive and highly effective visual motifs, including the body language of his actors, most expressively. He is also extremely compassionate to all of his characters - it's a film in which one feels equally for the philandering husband and the members of his family. The plot gets a bit over-the-top, but Sherman imbues it with conviction and feeling throughout.
Alll Through The Night is the best 40s Bogart that isn't Casablanca or To Have And Have Not or The Big Sleep. The Hard Way is brilliantly evocative both in terms of psycholoogical nuance and ambience, and Old Acquaintance and Mr. Skeffington are fascinating Bette Davis vehicles which hold up to continued viewings.
Perhaps the best way to compare and contrast Curtiz and Sherman is to look at the two Janie movies. Curtiz directed 1944's Janie (an Oscar nominee for Best Film Editing), Sherman handled the 1946 sequel, Janie Gets Married. The first picture is about a high-spirited bobby-soxer and the havoc she inadvertently causes for her family and her town. It's at best fitfully amusing but contrived, sit-comy and slight. The Sherman is something else entirely. As the title indicates, the eponymous character is now wed (to a returning G.I. she fell for in the first film). It's rather grim for a comedy, and much of the thrust of the film is a portrayal of marriage as a stultifying and unrewarding condition, hardly what one would expect in a 1940s comedy about newlyweds. There are intimations of adultery, and Janie and her husband even have a contract, which is to be renewable each month at each spouse's option if he and she want to remain married. One can certainly see the pair 20 years down the line having become the couple in Nora Prentiss. Despite the dark undertones, the film is also quite funny. And as a story of G.I.s returning from World War 2, it's more effective than Wyler's The Best Years Of Our Lives, and spares us the self-seriousness (though it also has the same deep focus cinematography that was celebrated in the Wyler film).
Unlike Curtiz, most of Sherman's movies also ave thematic consistency, as they deal with familial relationships and conflicts between personal needs and desires and family onligations. This even comes through in a B movie piece of propaganda, 1941's Underground.
"Y'know, that's one of the things I like about Mitt Romney. He's been consistent since he changed his mind." -- Christine O'Donnell
This comes as a bit of a shock though one shouldn't be surprised when someone that old drops dead. The shock stems from the fact that I actually thought he was long dead until I saw and heard him on recent Joan Crawford and Bette Davis documentaries and listened to his commentaries on Crawford's The Damned Don't Cry and Davis' Old Acquantaince, two of their less remembered films which probably wouldn't have gotten the special DVD treatment they did were it not for the rare opportunity of having a 40s director do the commentary. He seemed remarkably alert for someone of his age and looked quite healthy and spry. A shame he didn't get to celebrate his 100th.
I think that, after Raoul Walsh, he was the most talented of the 1940s Warner Brothers contract directors.
HOLLYWOOD DIRECTOR SHERMAN DIES AT 99
By BOB THOMAS
LOS ANGELES, Jun 19, (AP) - Vincent Sherman, who directed - and romanced - Bette Davis, Rita Hayworth and Joan Crawford during his heyday as a leading Hollywood filmmaker in the 1940s and '50s, has died. He would have been 100 on July 16.
His death Sunday night of natural causes at the Motion Picture and Television Hospital was announced Monday by his son, Eric Sherman.
"Vince was in good condition until two months ago," said actress Francine York, his companion for the last nine years. "In January he had appeared on a documentary about Humphrey Bogart, and he told a lot of good stories. He was the last of the gentlemen, a real Southern gentleman."
Sherman, whose film career was seriously damaged by Hollywood's communist "red scare," later became a successful director of such television series as "The Waltons,""Doctors Hospital,""Baretta,""Trapper John, M.D." and "77 Sunset Strip."
He had begun as an actor, appearing on Broadway and in a handful of movies, among them 1933's "Counselor at Law," in which he had a small but memorable role as a young anarchist opposite John Barrymore. He also wrote several screenplays, including "Crime School," which starred Bogart and the Dead End Kids.
Because of his ability to evoke powerful performances from strong-willed female stars - he also directed Ida Lupino, Ann Sheridan and Patricia Neal - Sherman became known as a woman's director, a title he hated. He was quick to point out that he also directed Errol Flynn in "The Adventures of Don Juan," Paul Newman in "The Young Philadelphians," Bogart in "All Through the Night," Richard Burton in "The Ice Palace" and Ronald Reagan in "The Hasty Heart."
Sherman also gained a reputation for romancing many of his famous actresses, and he wrote about them in his 1996 autobiography, "Studio Affairs."
Though both were married at the time, he and Davis had an affair that began during the filming of 1943's "Old Acquaintance" and continued through "Mr. Skeffington," which was released the following year. His dalliance with Crawford lasted through three movies, and another with Hayworth happened during "Affair in Trinidad," after she had divorced Aly Khan.
Sherman's wife, Hedda, tolerated his extramarital adventures, and their marriage lasted 53 years. She died in 1984.
During the early 1950s, his thriving career foundered as he was dropped without explanation by Warner Bros. A federal agent had told the studio Sherman was suspected of communist ties.
"I wasn't a communist," he remarked in 1997, "but I knew people like John Garfield who'd been blacklisted, and I stood beside them."
Other studios shunned him, and he was caught in "a Kafkaesque situation."
After five years, he became employable again but never recovered his knack for skillful melodrama. His last major feature was a lame western comedy, "The Second Time Around," with Debbie Reynolds and Andy Griffith in 1961.
"My strong points were my relationships with actors; I got good performances from people," he said in a 1997 interview. "My weak points were in accepting assignments when I should have said no."
Turning to television, he worked well into the 1980s.
Born Abram Orovitz to one of the only two Jewish families in Vienna, Ga., in 1906, Sherman learned at an early age to defend himself against the taunts of his schoolmates.
After graduating from Oglethorpe University, he sought an acting career in New York, joining the left-wing Group Theater. Since ethnic names for actors were unfashionable, he changed his to Vincent Sherman. Squarely built with black hair and a ruggedly handsome face, he quickly began appearing on Broadway.
In the late 1930s Warner Bros. hired Sherman under an acting-writing-directing contract, and he was assigned to the studio's B-picture unit, adapting old movies into remakes.
He broke out as a director in 1942 with a gripping melodrama "The Hard Way."
Although he would go on to direct many important projects, he never rose to the level that would afford him consideration for an Academy Award.
"Of the 30 pictures that I made, I really liked only 10 or 12 of them," he said in 1997. "The rest were what we called bread-and-butter pictures."
Besides his son, Sherman is survived by a daughter, four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
"Y'know, that's one of the things I like about Mitt Romney. He's been consistent since he changed his mind." -- Christine O'Donnell
