Pocket Symphony

On your right, you’ll see that I’m keeping track of all of the “Classic Movies” as I watch them. I imagine that at some point I’ll just show the latest 20, but since it’s only been 5 to date, you see them all.

Friday night, we watched the Woody Allen flick Broadway Danny Rose. As I unwrapped my DVD, I realize that this might only be the second time I’ve seen it since the original theatrical release (the first being the one and only time I watched my laserdisc). Since it was the weekend, we made a small party of it, and I was joined by Heather and Stephen, our next-door neighbor, who not only works in the film biz, but is a fan (you’d be surprised at how rare that is). The broad comedy of much of the movie prompted the question: “this is one of the greatest movies of all time?” - but in the end, the final feeling was that it’s a fine film (at least, that’s what I argued).

That night, I intended to watch the original Scarface, but I chose sleep instead. I wouldn’t get back to my DVD player until late Saturday night, after we returned from the Arclight Theater on Sunset where we saw the latest installment in the Batman franchise (for my opinion on that movie, you should check out the message board that I contribute to. There’s currently a lively discussion about The Dark Knight there).

A few months ago, I had a conversation with my pal Jeff about the original Scarface. He pointed out that the De Palma / Pacino movie of the same name (with script by Oliver Stone) is more of a remake than one might imagine. When I revisited the 1932 Hawks film, I went in with that in mind. And he was right. The movie is much tighter (read: shorter) than the 1983 epic, and the script is great. The entire cast is spot-on, with the one exception of Boris Karloff as a rival gangster. Maybe it’s just my expectation of Karloff in a certain kind of role, but it was difficult for me to get my head around him as a menacing Chicago gangster.

The latest movie on my list was Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon. This is indeed a cool movie. Released in England in 1957, it didn’t come out in the US for another seven months, when it appeared in truncated form as Curse of the Demon. This short version is the only one that was available in the States for many years (I think the long version was accidentally released on laserdisc at some point - but it wasn’t widescreen). The current DVD is a stunning widescreen presentation of the longer original version of the movie. As a skeptic who also happens to love stories of the supernatural, this played like a wonderful horror episode of the X-Files, albeit with the gender switch of Dana Andrews playing the skeptical Scully part. Additionally, as a pop culture fan, I was delighted to not only recognize this movie as the source for a line in a song from the Rocky Horror Show, but to spot an quotation that Kate Bush sampled for her masterpiece “Hounds of Love”.

I’ll probably not post this much about every movie I see (when would I have time to watch movies?). But if you see something appear in the list on the right and would care to start a discussion about it, I’m always game.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 21st, 2008 at 7:16 pm and is filed under Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.