Meteor!

Meteor should be a solid 1970s disaster movie. Instead, it's horribly scripted and doesn't do any of the things a good disaster movie does – we should be following at least a dozen characters simultaneously and learning about their relationships as we go along. The eponymous disaster in this disaster movie is a series of meteor fragments that strike northern Canada, Switzerland, Hong Kong, and New York. Cool cool. But none of this happens until near to the end of the film, so we don't get much good disaster stuff at all. Instead, we spend most of the movie inside a bunker watching the Soviets and the Americans disagree with one another before they agree to blow up the meteor. In other words, Meteor fails to live up to its generic expectations, and so it is, unfortunately, boring.

Blithe Spirit (1945)

You know, I never really liked Blithe Spirit on the page, maybe because I thought the ending really wasn't that funny, even if the first act of the play is hilarious. Well, I quite honestly laughed my ass off watching Rex Harrison, Margaret Rutherford, and the rest of the cast of the 1945 David Lean–Ronald Neame–Noel Coward film of this play. It's delightful!

I've been watching films from the 1947 awards season, and I'd been postponing this one, but the Queer Cinema Archive posted about this recently as a bit of queer coding – the implication is that Margaret Rutherford's Madame Arcati character is coded as a lesbian – so I figured I'd catch Blithe Spirit tonight. Well, I've watched the film now, and I can't say I saw any such coding. However, a the end of the film there is some explicit queerness:

Elvira, the main character’s late wife, has been pestering him about her flirtations with a Captain Bracegirdle while she was alive. She had, apparently, been unfaithful to her husband with old Captain Bracegirdle, whom she tells us was very attractive. Well, at the very end of the movie, Rex Harrison has a monologue about how he’s always been picked on by women who have bossed him around. Harridans, he calls them. Then he says, “You were very silly, Elvira, if you think I didn’t know all about you and Captain Bracegirdle. I did. And what you didn’t realize is that I was extremely attached to Paul Westlake at the time!”

Incidentally, the poster, which is very sexy, doesn't have a thing to do with the movie, which isn't remotely sexy. Kay Hammond, the eponymous blithe spirit, doesn't wear anything approximating the sexy outfit of the woman on the poster, and her haircut looks nothing like this either. Honestly, I don't know who this is even supposed to be. In any case, although it is not at all sexy, Blithe Spirit is a very funny film, and I enjoyed it a great deal.

The Horse's Mouth (1958)

I had no patience for Ronald Neame's The Horse's Mouth. This was a peak Alec Guinness moment in British cinema, I guess, and he apparently could sell anything to audiences. Well, not to me. He's doing this weird gravelly voice in this movie and his character is the most irritating, annoying person. I found this rather insufferable.

......One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942)

I'm not sure why I'm so interested in WWII movies right now, but I am, especially ones about flying and ones made during the war. This one is great.

......One of Our Aircraft Is Missing was written and directed by Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger. It's absolutely great! The script is excellent, and Ronald Neame's photography is absolute genius. There are so many shots that are jaw dropping. It's really a superb bit of work. The special effects in this movie are great, too, and then there is the acting. The men aren't much to write home about, but Joyce Redman and Googie Withers both give stellar performances. This is a really good one.

Visions from 1964: Part Five

Bernhard Wicki's The Visit did not work for me. It stars Ingrid Bergman and Anthony Quinn, as well as a wonderful Valentina Cortese, but I didn't like it, and the entire conceit fell flat for me. A woman returns to her hometown and shames them because they shamed her when she was young? This kind of revenge is not interesting to me... I think because it is emotional revenge rather than a logical, murderous revenge. Killing someone, I guess I can get. Shaming him or her: no thanks. Also, I don't think I had ever read Friedrich Dürrenmatt's play (on which this film is based) and I have to say that if the play ends the way this film ends, I don't like the play either.

The Visit had fabulous costumes (that was why it got an Oscar nomination), but its camerawork was very strange, and its sentiments left me cold.

* * *

I honestly don't think I have anything to say about Edward Dmytryk's Where Love Has Gone. This was apparently based on a true story, but it is a soap opera through and through – something Jacqueline Susann might have written. It stars Susan Hayward (who I adore) and Bette Davis (who is beyond all adoration), but... this is dumb. It wishes it were a murder mystery, but it actually never builds any tension in that direction. In other words, I never cared who committed the murder in the first place. This is a melodrama through and through, a kind of poor man's Mildred Pierce, but it never really picks a side and so the final suspenseful moments have no effect.

Where Love Has Gone was nominated for Best Original Song and, if I'm honest, I don't really dislike the tune, sung by Jack Jones. It's a big, bright, brassy sort of thing with lots of violins, rather like something Frank Sinatra would normally make into a hit.

As for the movie though, don't bother.

* * *

The Chalk Garden is another boring potboiler that was probably originally a stage play.

Ok, I went and looked it up and of course it was a play – by Enid Bagnold. the film is directed by Ronald Neame, and he tries his best to make this something other than a stagey movie, but I'm afraid there's no saving it. It's a kind of David and Lisa or Miracle Worker sort of thing, where a teacher gets ahold of a precocious young woman and somehow convinces her to be less crazy and stop causing everybody to fret so much.

Edith Evans was nominated for an Oscar for this picture, and she earned her nomination. She plays a cranky old grandmother who believes she's caring for the young woman in her house but who is actually causing rather a lot of trouble because she's being so darned indulgent and not reading this child the riot act. 

It's not a bad little thing, and it's sort of your typical mid-century USAmerican realist drama, but I've never cared for mid-century USAmerican realist drama, and I haven't gotten any kinder to it in 2017.

* * *

Jack Clayton's The Pumpkin Eater follows a woman played by Anne Bancroft who has many children. Her husband is cheating on her (cheater, cheater, pumpkin eater), and she figures this out over the course of the film. Maggie Smith appears (in 1964!) in a tiny role as the first of her husband's lovers whom we meet. Peter Finch plays the husband, and this movie is interesting, even if it is quite strange.

The thing is, The Pumpkin Eater is a brooding, slow movie, and it is more than a little odd. I appreciated it more than I liked it. But it is about depression, and watching a movie about depression is not the easiest thing in the world to do.

Still, it gets kudos in my book for trying to get into the mind of the depressive in 1964 and not simply treating depression as something that needs to be somehow dealt with or cured. And I really love Jack Clayton's work as a director. I think his 1959 Room at the Top is near perfect, and this is gorgeously, assuredly made even if I didn't enjoy watching it, particularly. Clayton was really ahead of his time.

This concludes my 1964 viewing! Now to catch up on some 2017 movies.