The War List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

An ongoing project to survey the best films of individual decades, genres, and filmmakers.
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matrixschmatrix
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Re: The War List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#401 Post by matrixschmatrix » Sun Jul 30, 2017 9:03 pm

Rambo is interestingly... somewhat less reactionary, politically, than its immediate predecessors (in part because it would be almost impossible to be moreso) while also being cartoonishly violent enough to swap out individual kills with those shown in Punisher: War Zone with only a change in color timing. In addition to the standard Rambo homoerotic knifings and things, there's a Roadhouse style throat ripping, Rambo rather implausibly shooting the driver of a vehicle with a mounted chaingun in the bed (one would think it would not be set up to aim in that direction?) a dude getting arrowed on to a landmine, and a general sense of never missing a chance to have a red mist of blood escaping from someone's body. The fact that all of the violence is still directed against non white people, in service of what is essentially a white missionary group, is still pretty unsettling, though if I recall correctly the designated organization providing the piles of bodies is (was?) a legitimately awful right wing military junta.

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Mr Sausage
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Re: The War List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#402 Post by Mr Sausage » Sun Jul 30, 2017 9:45 pm

domino harvey wrote:Didn't the trailer show Rambo tearing off someone's head? I do have it on Blu-ray as the other half of a double feature with one of the other Rambo movies. I've had it up for sale on Amazon for a couple years and still no takers. Don't tempt me to actually watch the damned thing while it's still in my house!
It showed him outright punching someone's head off. Turns out they just hadn't CGI'd the machete blade in yet.
matrixschmatrix wrote:Rambo is interestingly... somewhat less reactionary, politically, than its immediate predecessors (in part because it would be almost impossible to be moreso) while also being cartoonishly violent enough to swap out individual kills with those shown in Punisher: War Zone with only a change in color timing. In addition to the standard Rambo homoerotic knifings and things, there's a Roadhouse style throat ripping, Rambo rather implausibly shooting the driver of a vehicle with a mounted chaingun in the bed (one would think it would not be set up to aim in that direction?) a dude getting arrowed on to a landmine, and a general sense of never missing a chance to have a red mist of blood escaping from someone's body. The fact that all of the violence is still directed against non white people, in service of what is essentially a white missionary group, is still pretty unsettling, though if I recall correctly the designated organization providing the piles of bodies is (was?) a legitimately awful right wing military junta.
Yeah, it's using the real-life atrocities of some current paramilitary government. One of the more interesting things about the film is how it actually critiques the other three, with Rambo finally admitting to himself that he doesn't really kill for truth, justice, morality, or patriotic sacrifice. He kills solely for himself, because he wants to. It actually admits the fundamentally selfish nature of Rambo's bloodlust, and indeed the reason he gets involved in this fight is exclusively to help a woman he likes, and no other reason. Of course that doesn't stop the movie from going to extra lengths to inform the viewer of the barbarities perpetrated by this real-life government, somewhat muddying the point.

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domino harvey
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Re: The War List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#403 Post by domino harvey » Fri Aug 25, 2017 1:49 am

Five came back from the unwatched field:

Father Goose (Ralph Nelson 1964) Grizzled boater Cary Grant is bamboozled into manning a remote pacific island to watch for Japanese aircraft in WWII, ends up through Hollywood magic forced to share his island retreat with Leslie Caron’s schoolmarm and her seven charges, all preteen girls. If that sounds like a bad sitcom, well, of course it does, because that’s all this this. The clashing of Grant and Caron is never funny and since both characters are so obnoxious, their eventual coupling is one of those “You could both do better” scenarios. This somehow won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, because giving Grant a tic like wanting to drink scotch and mentioning it every thirty seconds indicates a mastery of screenplay composition. (To be fair, it was up against one of the most bizarre lineups imaginable: A Hard Day’s Night, One Potato, Two Potato, the Organizer, and L'Homme de Rio)

the Key (Michael Curtiz 1934) William Powell waltzes into a happy marriage against the backdrop of the British occupation of Ireland in 1920 in this truly terrible film. If you are a fan of characters stopping everything to talk in the most dunderheaded back and forths of great swaths of dull dialogue, good news! No earthly idea what the title to this even means in relation to anything that happens in the film. Forget metaphor, there’s literally not a single actual key present either.

Never So Few (John Sturges 1959) Hard to believe Frank Sinatra’s reputation for coolness withstood this look:

Image

Sinatra is the American Captain helping the OSS fight the Japanese in Burma, an assignment which also involves romancing Gina Lollobrigida for unconvincing reasons. This is dreadful, dead-eyed stuff, the worst kind of post-war cinema without any real bite or insight. Steve McQueen has charisma to spare in an early role, but his character is as uninteresting and cliched as everything else here. Luckily Sturges and McQueen will fare better together in the Great Escape. If you want to see the perils of alcoholism, watch Brian Donlevy’s performance in the last ten minutes of this movie as the man struggles to just say his lines in the right order and at the right times. Truly depressing.

I’m not sure if this is inherent in the source or just a quirk of Warners’ release, but what passes for bad language is (poorly) censored in the film, though this only amounts to a few skipped “damns" and an utterance of "crap," if I recall correctly. Not exactly a desecration of great art, but odd nonetheless...

Too Late the Hero (Robert Aldrich 1970) Pyrrhic Pacific War tale with American communications specialist Cliff Robertson forced into combat duty with a ragtag group of Brits, led by an ineffectual Denholm Elliott and scheming medic Michael Caine. Aldrich is comically overrated as an auteur (It occurred to me while suffering through Whatever Happened to Baby Jane recently that the rope I'm willing to extend the director of Kiss Me Deadly is short enough that it was already fully uncoiled and gone long before I realized), but this was a lot better than I expected it to be, especially in how it avoids easy moral designation and gives its central protagonists a range of positive and negative markers. The time spent to humanize the antagonist is also fairly progressive and intriguing, especially considering his exit. There is one weirdly anachronistic moment in which Elliott chastises “longhaired conscientious objectors,” but I found little to no relevancy to Vietnam in this film, which for all its quandaries seems uninterested in critiquing military action itself.

the Wind and the Lion (John Milius 1975) Sean Connery’s Noble Arab kidnaps Candice Bergen (still in her paint drying mode) while Brian Keith’s Teddy Roosevelt confers with John Huston in America in this muddled and unnecessary desert rehash of dopey tropes and dull action tics. Precious little about this film is smart, but there is a remarkably stupid moment near the end when Bergen, now fully Stockholm Syndromed, holds the American cavalry hostage at gunpoint in order to free Connery, and the military leader’s response to this insurrection is, “Gosh, why didn’t you say so? We’ll join ya!” Vom.

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fiddlesticks
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Re: The War List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#404 Post by fiddlesticks » Fri Aug 25, 2017 9:02 pm

Having skimmed through this thread tonight, I am surprised to learn that, as far as I could tell, nobody voted for or even mentioned Dick Powell's The Enemy Below (1957), easily my favorite submarine film. A tense back-and-forth thriller of an American destroyer escort and German U-boat hunting one another, told from the alternating perspectives of the "feather merchant" American skipper (Robert Mitchum), trying to win the confidence of his crew while appearing to be unconcerned about it, and the battle-weary duty-before-ideology German captain (Curt Jurgens) and his aide and confidante (Theodore Bikel.) As this is a fairly well-known film, I suppose it's not been overlooked by this forum's members so much as, shall we say, not beloved, but I like it marginally more than Destination Tokyo and quite a bit more than the clunky Run Silent, Run Deep. Had I been around and participating at the time, I expect this would have been in my top 10.

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domino harvey
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Re: The War List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#405 Post by domino harvey » Fri Aug 25, 2017 9:21 pm

I've seen it and while I found it interesting in context of Hollywood allowing for nuanced views of German officers given that enough time had passed for such takes, the film doesn't work all that well for me outside of the historical aspect. I do think it's more successful than the twistier version of these liberties, Morituri, a few years later. However, with Operation Pacific still fresh (or should that be fetid) in my mind, both are certainly masterpiece submarine films in comparison. There's an unfortunate moment in Operation Pacific when the crew sits down to watch Destination Tokyo and John Wayne gently mocks the "Hollywood" nature of that film while sitting inside the world's biggest crock of a Hollywood sub film!

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bottled spider
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Re: The War List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#406 Post by bottled spider » Tue Dec 26, 2017 4:18 am

The Sky's the Limit (Edward H. Griffith, 1943) One can only assume Griffith was in the pay of the Germans when he made this. Certainly Astaire ought to have been kneecapped for it.

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therewillbeblus
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Re: The War List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#407 Post by therewillbeblus » Mon Apr 20, 2020 1:13 pm

domino harvey wrote:
Wed Aug 20, 2014 12:52 am
Five Branded Women (Martin Ritt 1960) Five Slavic women are accused by guerrilla partisans of fraternizing with an occupying Nazi lothario. As punishment, the five women have all their hair cut off and are left in the hands of the Nazis, who feeling the women's appearance might undermine their own, kick the women out of town. They fare better than the Nazi lover all five share, however, as he gets castrated by the partisans! From there the film follows our Hollywood and International stars (including Vera Miles, Barbara Bel Geddes, and Jeanne Moreau) as they gradually become more and more violent, eventually joining up with the same partisans who exacted the hair-cropping punishment. Despite the recognizable names, this isn't really an ensemble, as the film's protagonist is clearly Silvana Mangano's Jovanka (who has the most intimidating death-stare I've ever seen), who transforms into a total killing machine and is quite effective as the film's center.

In many ways this film anticipates much of the Grindhouse movement a full decade early-- rape revenge, a posse of girls with shaved heads and guns, nudie scenes (well, you know, it's 1960 so almost nude), and a perverse sense of justice and punishment. And the finale, involving the covert bombing of a Nazi film screening, surely must have influenced you know who. And while the film is not without its problems, I found myself highly entertained and surprised at how violent and unrelenting many of the girls' perils were. The film gives hard but logical answers to narrative problems that are far from Hollywood (and no surprise, since it was funded by Italy) and as a result feels exceedingly modern and ahead of its time. Recommended.
I have very little to add to this, but this completely worked for me and would likely near the top of a war list had I submitted one. The film’s evolution into that grindhouse perversity allows for cinematic cathartic wish fulfillment as well as demonstrating the truth of self-compromise, as people adapt to their circumstances through an evolution of their own identities that includes intense ethical shifts. It’s a bold exhibition but one that draws grey characters out of murky situations. While this is the women’s film, the male soldiers own role shifts don’t allow them to break free of the oppressive and unlikeable figures they embody in a dense space of interchangeable solipsism and patriotism. Heflin and co are unreadable even when engaging in character development and so we get to see the film completely through a marginalized feminine perspective in fight/flight, which helps with engagement in the ludicrous aspects of this adventure.

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domino harvey
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Re: The War List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#408 Post by domino harvey » Wed Aug 18, 2021 12:01 pm

One of the great joys of casting a wide net and watching lots of movies is that every once in a while you get a film that knocks you on your ass out of nowhere, and last night the latest example for me was a not particularly promising-looking programmer called Pacific Blackout (Ralph Murphy 1941), conceived before the US entered the war and concerning a wrong man journey set against a coastal city's first blackout drill. This is a brilliant set-up: set a Hitchcockian protag played by Robert Preston, an escaped con sentenced to die for an espionage crime he didn't commit, against the chaos of thousands of people in a city-wide playground trying to pretend at the war. The film is refreshingly plucky in its beats and the romantic lead played by Martha O"Driscoll is so daffy that she's right out of a screwball comedy and indeed the machinations and complications are funny in the way North by Northwest is funny even though neither are comedies. I don't think the film itself is especially brilliant like any of Hitchcock's similar films (it contains neither the depth not the aesthetic virtues, but few films do so it's not a fair fight), but it has enough small touches and wry ideas that it is elevated to a similar level of entertainment. One thing I particularly liked is how in a nice twist, almost everyone Preston encounters is immediately suspicious of him and his attempts to bluff his way through situations always seem to go south. I also loved the little show of camaraderie between Preston and a pickpocket in the film's best scene. I don't know, this isn't art, and me elevating it to a five star viewing experience gives it new expectations it may not be able to meet versus going in thinking it's gonna be average at best, but I think the premise is so smart and it shows us in its own way something valuable about the homefront at the time that it's worth seeking out, even against my outsized recommendation!

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therewillbeblus
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Re: The War List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#409 Post by therewillbeblus » Thu Aug 26, 2021 12:37 am

I didn't love Pacific Blackout nearly as much as you, but it was a fun 'one-crazy-night'/24-hours-or-less Wrong Man pic. O'Driscoll is the standout performer, having a blast with the situation-based material by not taking anything too seriously and, as mentioned, devolving into a screwball type. She is so clearly emulating the audience surrogate, a refreshing change of pace from the often male-centered identification (especially when in trouble and rattled with anxiety around intra-or-post wartime stressors!)- for here the filmmakers care far less about Preston's innocence, psychological state, or personality, and are fully on board for playing in the narrative sandbox as a temporary low-stakes sidekick. The pickpocket encounter is definitely the film's strongest scene, though I often found myself drawn to the very amusing dialogue that ranged from heavy-handed to superfluous. There's O'Driscoll's temporally-ignorant meditations on the sandwiches spliced in and paused on during the climax, Preston's code-evading "There are a lot of predicaments I'd want to be in with you, but this isn't one of them," and then the double-crossing villain's hilariously sincere attraction to metaphors: "It's all very symbolic isn't it, this gun is unloaded like the guns of oldfashioned countries... Conscience is a far more dangerous weapon than an unruly pistol." Solid, lean, smooth thriller.

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Matt
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Re: The War List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#410 Post by Matt » Wed Sep 15, 2021 9:32 pm

Back to Bataan is on TCM right now. I’m only half-watching it (as usual with TCM, which I keep on like some people listen to the radio), so I don’t really have anything to say about it. But it’s a great-looking movie, shot by Nicholas Musuraca, a guy who seemed to have worked non-stop between 1926 and 1966 and who is responsible for Out of the Past, Cat People and Curse of…, The Seventh Victim, The Spiral Staircase, The Blue Gardenia, The Hitch-hiker, and many other fantastic-looking, modestly budgeted pictures. Some excellent work here blending location shooting in the Philippines with stuff shot at the LA County Arboretum and also very clearly on a soundstage with a bunch of potted palms. Lots of compositions with mottled or chiaroscuro lighting, actors and extras with sweaty or wet skin, and staging in depth with crowds or scenery that’s just quietly stunning.

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domino harvey
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Re: The War List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#411 Post by domino harvey » Wed Nov 03, 2021 4:31 pm

One more entry for the Alternate Unseen History of French Cinema: Les Chinois à Paris (Jean Yanne 1974). This is an inspired and brutal satire of something I didn't expect to see come out of France less than 30 years after it happened: the French Occupation. Here the Chinese invade France, and the French roll over, again, and quickly accommodate their oppressors. The film's real masterstroke is that the target here isn't the Chinese but the French, and even if you don't find this film as funny as I do, I don't think anyone can deny the absolute fucking balls on Yanne to make a movie like this and get some of his high profile friends like Michel Serrault and Bernard Blier to show up. I've always enjoyed Yanne as an actor but I had no idea he was so gifted a comic director: though their films are far different, Yanne's picture shares with Tashlin an ability to instinctively know how to make a movie look funny. But he doesn't just rely on looking funny. The script, which he co-wrote, is probably what Mel Brooks fans think he's writing in this era: smart jokes interspersed with stupid jokes that are still pretty smart. The more you know about both the occupation and China in this era, the better some of these gags will land (for instance, if you haven't seen the East is Red, you will miss how incredibly accurate Yanne's parody midway through this film is-- like, just dead-on). And ya gotta love Yanne's shout out to his own work with Godard a few years prior via his own one-shot traffic jam, in which the carnage absurdly escalates as blood splashes all over the camera lens. Above all, for such a caustic film, it is all surprisingly well-natured. The conquerers are shown exhibiting buyer's remorse more than any real malice. And Yanne shows his criticism of the French comes from affection as the ending reveal shows the perseverance of the French spirit, in part due to their ability to confound anyone who's not French! Highly recommended, and I can't wait to dig into more of Yanne's filmography behind the camera.

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Never Cursed
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Re: The War List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#412 Post by Never Cursed » Thu Nov 25, 2021 1:05 am

For those of us that particularly care for Conspiracy (I hold out hope that that means more of us than domino and myself), I was doing some research about the film when I stumbled upon a master's thesis by a history student who loved the film so much he wrote about it for 110 pages. Not sure yet how I feel about the paper's central analytical thesis, but it has a lot of great information about the conception and writing of the film (including that it was actually a remake of a German TV film, Die Wannseekonferenz, and that it was originally conceived as a side project to a much larger-in-scope, unmade film about the indifference of the Allied powers to the Holocaust).

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domino harvey
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Re: The War List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#413 Post by domino harvey » Thu Nov 25, 2021 1:22 am

Cool find, thanks for sharing!

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Never Cursed
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Re: The War List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#414 Post by Never Cursed » Thu Nov 25, 2021 2:32 am

Apparently Die Wannseekonferenz as a film has quite a few interesting attributes: it was filmed entirely at the real vacation house where the Wannsee conference took place (including using the actual conference room as the location for the filmed conference), and... it is also described as a "darkly comic and even slapstick" film, with jokes about one of the attendees being a playboy and a running gag involving a dog interrupting the conference. I somehow feel the need to see this posthaste.

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knives
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Re: The War List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#415 Post by knives » Sun Sep 11, 2022 6:42 am

Mr Sausage wrote:
Sat Mar 15, 2014 4:08 pm
Spotlight:

The Beast aka The Beast of War (Kevin Reynolds, 1988): The current world political situation enhances the movie, which is about a Russian tank (the titular beast) lost in the Afghani desert and pursued by Muhajideen fighters whose village the tank had helped demolish. It's a tightly made action film. But a lot of the interest lies, of course, in the fact that its narrative has, it seems, ceased to be politically viable in the west: the Afghanis are the heroes of a barbarous colonial war that's been thrust on them. It's actually the second action movie from 1988 to take that narrative, the other being Rambo III, a movie that sentimentalizes the issue before pushing it into the background. The Beast is not so simplistic; there are a number of complications, mostly revolving around those from both sides who come to side with the enemy: one of the characters is an Afghani actually fighting for the Russians out of a love for his country(!), the other a Russian intellectual more interested in learning about Afghani culture from the former than fighting. The gender politics lead to an unexpected twist to the expected resolution as well. A fascinating and well made movie that got buried back when it was released.
Finally got this which is such an amazing movie. It’s unquestionably better today than when first released as it serves as a warning to the US that such wars are pointless. Reynolds does this by not getting into the whys of the Russian side and leaving the Afghan side simple.

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