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1936 - Industrial Nipple Twister
20 Plays1 year ago
This episode we're talking about reefer (madness), so you don't want no part of this shit! No shorts this time so we get right into it with the aforementioned anti-drug "movie", Humphrey Bogart making a big splash, Fritz Lang turning his critical eye towards the USA, Frank Capra's feel-goodery, a nightmarish look into the future, and Charlie Chaplin's final film as The Tramp! All of that and more!
You can watch along with our video version of the episode here on Youtube!
You can check out our Instagram, Twitter, and other social media crap here: http://linktr.ee/1w1y
And you can watch and form your own opinions from our 1936 Films Discussed playlist right here!
Our Feature Presentation!
Reefer Madness/Tell Your Children
The Petrified Forest
Fury
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town
Modern Times
Things to Come
See you next year!
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Transcript
00:00:06
Speaker
What?
Introduction and Hosts' Background
00:00:10
Speaker
Hello and welcome to One Week One Year, a podcast where we watch and discuss every year of film history in order, starting from 1895, the dawn of cinema, and this year is 1936. I'm one of your hosts, Chris Ellee. I'm a film projectionist, and joining me as always is... I am Glenn Covell. I am a filmmaker. And we're talking about movies, because we approach the movies from different perspectives, you and I, you know? Do we, though? Really?
00:00:40
Speaker
Sometimes you like a movie that I don't like, et cetera. Yeah, I don't feel like we have wildly different perspectives on things, but sometimes we disagree, and I think those are fun episodes. Yes, agree to disagree. Yeah. I think they're not fun episodes. Agree to disagree. Oh, no.
Career Journey and Frustrations
00:01:01
Speaker
Yeah. How's it going, Glenn? What's up? It's going. I'm still, you know, trying to keep busy, look for work things. Been writing more this week, though, so that's good. Trying to get some more screenplay pages.
00:01:16
Speaker
Getting that Celtics time in. Oh, I'm done with Celtics, man. I'm on the final draft 12, baby. When was the moment when Celtics stopped being used? When they switched something on their website and a bunch of my stuff got lost.
00:01:35
Speaker
Oh. Like I recovered most of it, I think, but it's like I don't trust it anymore. So now I've been migrating all of my past works into Final Draft, which is a better program anyway. Wow. That's that's horrendous. That's a really bad thing for a screenwriting program to do. Yeah. Yeah.
00:01:57
Speaker
I mean I was sort of like, I was kind of abusing the way it worked and I was like putting lots of like folders within folders and things to try to get around there like initially that was it was just free you could do whatever and then they put like you can only have I think three projects for free and so I was like Russian nesting doll all of my screenplays within each other to keep it
00:02:20
Speaker
And so I think that partially might have been what, like, messed it up, but whatever. Hey, people who make programs, make them free, come on. Well, that's what I mean. I just bought Final Draft because that is a thing you can just, like, it costs money once and then you own it. You know, when things used to work that way? That's good. Yeah, Jesus Christ. Remember when you could buy goods and services and then you owned them?
00:02:42
Speaker
Isn't it just better to pay a fee every month on 30 different things for the rest of your life?
Inshitification and Internet Monetization
00:02:51
Speaker
This is all what author Cory Doctorow calls the inshitification of the internet. As things move toward making money, they inshitify themselves. Yeah, I mean, not incorrect.
00:03:08
Speaker
I am on the eve of driving back to the Kansas Silent Film Festival.
Historical Context of 1936
00:03:15
Speaker
I was on the fence for a while, but I made a call and I'm heading over, so I'm excited for that. I might try and, I don't know, I'll record some takes on audio, I guess. We'll see how that goes. Yeah, please.
00:03:28
Speaker
Yeah, this is not releasing then, but I'm leaving tomorrow. Going to drive through a bunch of corn and maybe go to the Wizard of Oz Museum. Oh, cool. Yeah. Before we get started in earnest, we tend to like to give you, our listeners, our viewers, our tasters, we like to give you a little taste of what is going on in the year in which we speak.
00:04:00
Speaker
Give you, give you a little, give you a little taste of context. So Glenn, why don't you take it away? The nose of the year 1936. King George V of the United Kingdom dies at age 70. His son takes a throne as King Edward VIII, but abdicates the same year. The Hoover Dam is completed. The Winter Olympics are held in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany. The Spanish Civil War begins after an armed uprising by nationalists against the Spanish Republic.
00:04:28
Speaker
Germany violates the Treaty of Versailles by invading the Rhineland. The Summer Olympics are held in Berlin and are the first international sports to be broadcast on live television. Benjamin, the last known thylacine or Tasmanian tiger, dies in captivity.
00:04:44
Speaker
So a real cheery slice of news that I found for this year. So Benjamin was the last what? He was the last Tasmanian tiger? The last known Tasmanian tiger died in a zoo in Tasmania. This is not a Tasmanian devil. No, no, those are still around. But the Thylacine, the Tasmanian tiger, which is a like
00:05:09
Speaker
crazy-looking stripey coyote thing. They gotta look up a picture of them boys. Yeah, I mean there's like all these you know rumors that they're still out there in the jungle somewhere but it's like no one's ever found one so it's just sad. That's interesting. I like the idea of
00:05:30
Speaker
momentous animals with bland names. Like I was just watching a video of Jonathan, who is the oldest living land mammal or land animal, the Jonathan, the tortoise. And he was born in like the 1840s or something like that. That is insane. Incredible. Yeah.
00:05:50
Speaker
Look at Jonathan. Also, great that his name is just Jonathan. Yeah, I mean, I think that's his name. It's the same name as the kid who likes turtles, I suppose. Anyway, enough 20-year-old memes.
Reefer Madness: Plot and Critique
00:06:04
Speaker
Let's get into our feature presentation. Here we are with the zombie Jonathan. Okay, feature presentation. And now we're pleased to bring you our feature presentation.
00:06:21
Speaker
We're getting right into the feature presentation this episode because we're not doing any shorts. Yeah. There were a lot of shorts that looked interesting, but we didn't watch any of them. I kind of think that we should start with a very silly film. OK. I'm assuming you're talking about Reefer Madness. Indeed I am. Reefer Madness, or as it was originally titled, Tell Your Children,
00:06:52
Speaker
a very silly thing that exists. This is quite a movie. Although, I will admit, not as silly as I hoped it would be. No, it's just kind of shitty. Right. That was kind of, I had heard of this movie for a long time that it is this crazy, over-exaggerated, overblown sort of anti-marijuana movie.
00:07:17
Speaker
But it like, it's kind of yeah, it's kind of just like a bad PSA. It's not even that like bonkers. I mean, it's like there are some some nice laugh moments in it where it's like marijuana is worse than heroin and morphine. Right. Can you believe it's the worst of them all?
00:07:40
Speaker
And yeah, just some like some there's some some silly laugh lines for sure. But over the 65 or so minute runtime, I could have laughed more. I could I could have had more fun and been less bored. And I think a lot of the I'd seen like clips and things like the scene where like the woman jumps out the window.
00:08:01
Speaker
and usually that's kind of taken out of context like look at what they thought what they were like trying to sell is like this is what marijuana makes you do and it's like she jumps out the window for completely separate reasons that have nothing that like she is not she is not stoned when she jumps out the window hmm but anyway i i mean are we gonna like go through the the plot of this movie is like a bunch of teens uh get like
00:08:28
Speaker
I don't know, wooed into smoking reefer. You don't want any part of this. You don't want it. Get out of here. It doesn't give you a hangover. It's not habit forming. We could just do dialogue from Dewey Cox for this whole section. Yeah, we'll get to walk hard eventually. It does have a very funny opening text.
00:08:57
Speaker
Yes. Which I don't know if I want to read the whole thing of, but the first line of it is, the motion picture you're about to witness may startle you. It probably will not startle you. But if it does startle you, that lets you know that we have not failed in our job of scaring the pants off of you about the dread marijuana. The quote, frightful assassin of our youth.
00:09:24
Speaker
It's like an incredibly fear mongering movie made by the squarest people who have ever lived. That is the thing, right? It's that like, like this dialogue, like the dialogue as written is so corny, right? It's like,
00:09:42
Speaker
I think a lot of people watch this movie and it is among the like a lot of stoners like to watch this movie and it is among the oldest movies that many people have watched and so they go oh this is the way the goofy corny way that people used to talk and it's like no
00:10:00
Speaker
No, not not at all. This is terribly written. Yeah, it's just like the people who crusade against marijuana now are square and the people who crusaded against it 90 years ago were square also. And so they wrote square dialogue. Yeah.
00:10:16
Speaker
I mean, this is like, this is like the flip side of like an Ernst Lubitsch movies where it's just like, those movies are like fun and like kind of counterculture, culturally. Whereas this is like the most, it's just like a dad in a business suit talking about how a smoking reefer will lead to your death.
00:10:42
Speaker
Yeah, it's almost, it's like more or less presented as like a presentation to the camera, even though there is an audience in the scene. Because it kind of, you know, he says that there was in Brooklyn, New York, in the city of Brooklyn, New York, there was a. That's where I am.
00:11:00
Speaker
There was a patch, a field of marijuana that was grown by a tenement building. And then it shows you the leaves, the pot leaves in the
00:11:14
Speaker
ditch or whatever, and they dry it out, the leaves and berries, and smoke it like a cigarette. Have you seen the old if YouTube video made by now current New York City Mayor Eric Adams about searching, it's like a PSA about how to search your child's bedroom? Oh, is that an old video?
00:11:38
Speaker
It's old-ish. It's from before he was mayor. I see. I thought that was a current thing. No. I saw it when he was running, and I was like, he's not going on my ballot. But it is arguably funnier than Reefer Madness.
00:11:55
Speaker
like just as absurd. But that's kind of what I thought of while I was watching this. I'm just like, what is, what is even happening? Like who is making this? And why is it so poorly made? Yeah. The director of this Louis J. Gasnier is French, I don't know. Louis J. Gasnier. He did the Perils of Pauline. Oh, wow.
00:12:21
Speaker
the one of the early serials, film serials. So he's been in the biz for a while. Maybe just he also worked with Max Linder. So I think this is the last movie that he made, possibly. Oh, it's not it's not quite the last. But but yeah, I mean, you know, it's definitely kind of
00:12:46
Speaker
It's made very amateurishly, especially compared to somebody who's been in the biz for like 20 years. Yeah. So I guess that some of the the backstory on this movie is that it was initially made by a like Christian group as a like a PSA against
Cultural Legacy of Reefer Madness
00:13:05
Speaker
against reefer. It is also insanely difficult to pin down any accurate release info on this, like
00:13:15
Speaker
when it was released and by whom because it was like made this this like crusading psa originally but then it was pretty quickly taken and possibly re-edited edited into more of an exploitation movie by this like exploitation circuit
00:13:33
Speaker
And it's a little hard to tell like of the versions that are around like which is which and what's new and what isn't. Yeah. There's like scenes where people are like showing leg and things like that. And I'm like, was that was that what the church was making or was that what the exploitation people added later? I kind of get the sense that at least the one that I watched was like it didn't seem
00:13:54
Speaker
dramatically re-edited it or kind of messed with. Yeah there were parts where there was legs showing but it fit well enough into the scene that it seemed like it could have been there originally or it was very well done exploitation additive. I also I mean I think this movie kind of gets around the Hays Code by being on its surface and like an educational film.
00:14:19
Speaker
Right, or at least like, yeah, like a PSA specifically, you know, which is I think why the like exploitation distributors wanted it was like, here's a movie that has like a ton of drug use in it that we can show, you know, without getting in trouble, basically. And it is there are there are many instances of the characters in this being like,
00:14:44
Speaker
comically absurdly square. One of our main kind of like POV characters who's a teenager presumably like I don't know 16 17 years old named Bill who gets bullied by his eight-year-old brother and when his offered soda is like no I never drink that stuff.
00:15:08
Speaker
This guy won't even drink soda. Hey, I mean, that has cocaine in it, so... Not anymore, it doesn't. D.W. Griffith saw that. He single-handedly removed cocaine from sodas ten years after it was removed from sodas. Right, yeah.
00:15:28
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. There's not even a lot happens in this movie. It's very short. It's so boring and it's like barely coherent. It's the acting is terrible. Yeah, it's a mess. Right. It's like it's it's kind of inventing all of these ways for marijuana to be dangerous and it doesn't even follow its own kind of made up rules around that. Like it's it's wildly inconsistent. I think giggling is maybe the only accurate behavior.
00:15:58
Speaker
in the entire film from people who are on drugs or not like that's the only time i ever like believed i believed any of the performances in it yeah that i was thinking at some points that like this kind of uh like acting is so amateurish that it almost like is loops back around to being naturalistic it's performance art because like like
00:16:25
Speaker
These people are not hiding their accents in the way that a lot of people would have at the time. It feels a bit more just like recording imagery of some guys who are talking in maybe a stilted way.
00:16:43
Speaker
But yeah, I mean, I think a lot of a lot of the like death and chaos in this movie is is mostly from it being about criminals and not the fact that they're smoking marijuana. Like that is almost incidental in the movie. Hmm. I guess there's like a hit and run, but the person that he hits is just kind of nothing. So no one should feel bad at all. And that's that's I think you should leave reference number one of the podcast. Sorry, I had I had to get that in there.
00:17:14
Speaker
That's like the only one that is kind of like, yeah, don't operate heavy machinery. Pretty much everything else is completely incidental to any smoking that's happening. And so then it becomes this very overblown melodramatic crime story with a lot of death and madness.
00:17:36
Speaker
And then after all that, it like hard cuts back to the kind of the narrator from the beginning, like speaking directly to Camry. He's like, this happened. And I'm like, no, it did not. No, sir, I do not believe you. Well, it has a thing in that crawl at the beginning. It says, you know, this is inspired by true events, but it's a thing. It's a fictional thing to to let you know the kind of thing that marijuana does.
00:18:03
Speaker
But yeah, this this is not the only movie, though, that we have seen for this year that starts with the like any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
Impact of the Hays Code
00:18:18
Speaker
Yeah, I know that that's like a kind of COA line that they have like at the end of credits these days. But it's interesting that like a lot of people at this moment are adding it to their movies.
00:18:33
Speaker
Very directly I was thinking it's funny to see and movies that are based on real people and I'm like hang on yeah, yeah, I Don't know. Is there anything else we really want to say about this movie? I feel like there's not a lot to say about it It is it's kind of a it's like a kind of a fun weird cultural object But in terms of like it was it was less watchable than I was hoping it would be and
00:18:59
Speaker
I also watched it completely sober. Maybe if I got really stoned and watched it, it would be great. I had a bit more of an immersive 4D experience. You did the 4D, you did the 4DX experience. And it was still, yeah, it wasn't that fun. Oh, good to know. This is probably something that's better to watch as a riff tracks than as a real movie.
Transition to Crime Films
00:19:27
Speaker
you went you went for the uh method uh film watching method podcasting yeah yeah so i mean that movie deals with uh crime and criminals and we've watched a couple other movies that are primarily crime films sure some crimey wimeys yeah do you want to do uh the petrified forest sure
00:19:51
Speaker
So, this is nominally a gangster movie. At least it was on my gangster's Blu-ray collection. It's not really a gangster movie. No. And the thing... So, we were kind of deciding what movies to watch for this episode. The reviews...
00:20:13
Speaker
the contemporary now reviews for Batch Ride Forest, a lot of them were like, this is not a good movie, it's boring. It's not what I wanted out of this movie. So I almost turned against it because we had a lot of other candidates for this episode. But Glenn's a big Bogart guy. Am I?
00:20:37
Speaker
Are you? I thought you were. I thought you liked Maltese Falcon a lot at least. I like Maltese Falcon a lot. I like Big Sleep a lot. I don't think of myself as a Bogard guy, but I like Bogard in things for sure. Wait, yeah, Bogarding is definitely the link between these two. Yes, it is.
00:20:59
Speaker
But I think all of those reviews were people who expected it to be a gangster movie when really it is a play. It's a play with two locations, like one brief scene change and then you go back to the original area.
00:21:16
Speaker
Yes, this is a movie about kind of a, I don't know, urbane European type who's drifting across. He is basically just a European. He calls himself American though. He clearly isn't. I'm not sure what was going on there. Right, he has a very clear English or at the very least Mid-Atlantic accent.
00:21:39
Speaker
And he's rolling through America trying to find his way. He's a failed novelist and he happens into a gas station in Black Mesa, Arizona. Black Mesa?
00:21:57
Speaker
I lit up when they said that. Me too. I said, where are the hound eyes? Where are the vortigaunts? And so he encounters a local lady who dreams of a bigger life in Europe, in France, where her mom is from. And then some gangsters show up and make everything tense. And then everybody has tense conversations.
00:22:27
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, this maybe this movie is mostly tense conversations. Yeah, it's it's it's it's very like proto hateful late I think yeah, yeah, not incorrect. I I was actually Really enjoying this movie until the end. I think the ending is Not good. Really? Yeah, all right. I didn't like it but I
00:22:53
Speaker
I thought it's a bold ending, certainly. It is, yeah. It is that. This and Fury and Modern Times, two other movies that we're gonna be talking about, these all really made me start wondering how much this pre-code, post-code stuff is really like means, you know? There's a lot of like really edgy stuff in these three movies that
00:23:21
Speaker
you would kind of assume if you were thinking about the code that they would not really allow. Yeah, it's I think it's less of a hard cutoff than I kind of was expecting. Yeah. To see. I do think that as we've talked about, there's a lot of stuff in pre-code movies that I was like surprised to see in an old movie. You know, a lot of that is kind of being toned down through at least once the Hays Code gets enforced more. But
00:23:51
Speaker
Yeah, it's not like everything isn't becoming like super squeaky clean overnight either. Yeah, I mean, in some of these movies that we watched for this episode, there were moments that were like more just me in current day going, oh my God, you know, than honestly a lot of the pre-code movies. But anyway, this is all a digression. The gangster is Humphrey Bogart.
00:24:21
Speaker
Well, is he a gangster or is he more? He's more of an outlaw, I feel. He's a killer. He's on the run and he's got a gang. Right. But he's he's more he's more of like a John Dillinger type than a like Al Capone type. Isn't John Dillinger a gangster? I think of John Dillinger as a bank robber, first and foremost, not so much. He had a he had a gang, but a gang in the sort of Wild West type of like he had
00:24:48
Speaker
like a a gang of ruffians that he ran with you know not like it wasn't like this isn't organized crime this isn't you know this isn't the mafia this isn't uh
00:25:00
Speaker
There's not really hierarchies or organization and things like that. It's him and a couple other guys driving around in a car stealing stuff. They're a crew, I suppose. And in the way that you say that he's an outlaw, there's an old man who is one of the characters. He talks about having had a run-in with Billy the Kid.
00:25:27
Speaker
And, uh, and he immediately respects this kind of, uh, this kind of evil man because he's like, you're an outlaw, like the old days. That's great. Yes. Take us hostage. I'm having fun. This grandpa is way too excited to see someone get murdered. Every time they're like branding a gun, it's like, oh, shoot him, shoot him. He's like, he just wants to see someone get killed so badly.
00:25:49
Speaker
I believe it's the grandpa who has a line in the movie about the kind of the split between like an outlaw and a gangster. He says, gangsters is foreigners. You're an outlaw. And he's like in a very racist way saying like, no, no, no, you're better than gangsters. You're not Italian. You're American. I suppose that's true. There's a lot of like race and nationality stuff going on in this.
00:26:15
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Like he says, he kind of implies like, oh, foreigners, Italians are bad guys and you're cool because you're Humphrey Bogarts. And there is a kind of really conspicuous sign in the gas. It's like a gas station slash restaurant that's run by a sort of like
00:26:35
Speaker
jingoistic dad who at the moment that all of this crime goes down, he's heard about the crime and then much like the bad guy in Dr. Captain Blood, Peter, Dr. Captain Blood, he leaves the scene to go fight the crime while the crime goes to where he just left.
00:26:58
Speaker
So he joins up with his crew, his very stone cutters, elks, kind of vigilante crew of dads. And they go and try and hunt these these bad guys. And then in the process, completely miss them. But his his gas station has this really conspicuous sign that says tipping is un-American. Keep your change. Don't pay my family.
00:27:26
Speaker
One of the criminals that works with Humphrey Bogart's character is Black, and there's another kind of black servant slash driver. He's a valet, yeah. A valet of a couple rich people. And they have this conversation where the criminal, the outlaw, he's trying to get this other Black guy who's kind of like,
00:27:56
Speaker
Still in this sort of role of servitude from you know circa 70 years ago, right? he's still in this role of servitude to like loosen up and like try and like Free him a little bit too. He says take a drink color brother Which I thought was a really interesting line it was like a really yeah really interesting dynamic and then like a lot of this is also a foreigner
00:28:26
Speaker
point of view character, like looking at what America is from his perspective. Yeah, there's a bit in that conversation. It is like the only two Black characters have one conversation. Passes the Bechdel test.
00:28:46
Speaker
where the criminal Slim says, and you heard about the big liberation, which I didn't know what that was referring to when I looked it up. And I believe it's referring to there was a sort of like communist movement amongst primarily Southern black workers in like the mid 1930s around when this movie was coming out. Oh, I didn't know that.
00:29:07
Speaker
I thought he was talking about the Civil War. I mean, possibly. But that seemed to that seemed like it was referring to some sort of contemporary thing that I was unfamiliar with. And there was, yes, this sort of like. Like in a lot of communities in the 1930s in the United States, there was a lot of interest in communism, which I mean, makes sense.
00:29:33
Speaker
When capitalism has collapsed your entire country for like a decade, I mean at that point only six years-ish.
00:29:43
Speaker
Yeah, just like little, there's like a lot of little, little bits of characterization like that, little sort of like conversation around like bigger topics that I think is interesting in this movie. I think narrative, narratively, there's like not a lot going on. No, it's slow. It's like a lot of conversations that are, have sort of interesting dialogue, but it's not like there's not enough meat on the bones of the conversation to really like be that conversation focused sometimes.
00:30:14
Speaker
But yeah, I do think like this movie is like 90% dialogue, but I think there's some there's some good character stuff and some good dialogue. Yeah, for sure. There's kind of there. There's this whole romantic subplot between Alan Squire, who's the sort of like
00:30:34
Speaker
Mysterious, vaguely English. He says, he describes himself as an American once removed. Whatever that means. Yeah. He's kind of doing the reverse of the kind of hipster American who goes backpacking in Europe and is finding themselves. Right. Like he's backpacking in the US and like in the desert. Hitchhiking, talking about how far he can get with his thumb.
00:30:59
Speaker
Yeah, how if I can go with my thumb? And then he talks all he's always talking about poetry. And he talks about like the plight of the intellectual. Right. And so Gabrielle, who's this like young woman who works at a gas station with her dad and like dreams of getting out, getting anywhere, getting all the way to France, she like falls head over hills for this guy immediately. She's like, what did you say? Poetry?
00:31:25
Speaker
And so there's this kind of, but then she also has this like, lunk-headed football player who's also like, pursuing her romantically that she does not really want to have anything to do with.
00:31:40
Speaker
but also like he's the only non-related male within 200 miles. He seems like he's the only other man who lives. There's a great line later where Alan, the intellectual, describes him as, he is a man of muscle and he is suffering from the pangs of frustration.
00:31:59
Speaker
They have a lot of like nice little like interest. I watched this before I read anything about it, really. And so I didn't know that this was based on a play, but I could tell that if it was very theatrical in the sense of how it's staged and the way it's written, it feels very play like. Yeah, yeah.
00:32:20
Speaker
It's just got all these things like, hey, I'm going to say a thing, chew on it for a second. Alan also is talking about the boorish football player types and him, the suffering intellectuals. He talks about how man took away or destroyed nature to create his highways and cities.
00:32:49
Speaker
And he proposes that neuroses are nature's way of getting back at man. And I'm like, that's something to think about, I guess. That's like an interesting thing for you to say. I look like, even though I consider myself a pretty intellectual person, I do think Alan is kind of insufferable in a lot of this. Like a lot of his just sort of like,
00:33:16
Speaker
his vague philosophical musings. We're just like, all right, dude. Like, sure. I think he hangs right on the edge of insufferable. I was OK with it. Right. Because he also he also has like a very kind of like dry sense of humor about it. And he is likable enough where you're not just like, oh, God, get this guy out of here. But it also is then fun to see that guy sort of like having this like battle of wits almost with these like very hard edged
00:33:45
Speaker
criminals that like have no patience for his bullshit whatsoever, and he's kind of like trying to... So here's one of my things with this movie was there was a brief period towards the end of the movie where I thought where the movie was going was that Alan was going to like use his intellectual musings to play some weird mind games with gangsters and like
00:34:11
Speaker
get everyone else out of their hostage-ish situation. If he was going to use his intellectual powers of messing with their heads, force them into some weird loophole that they'd agreed to. That does not happen. No. It's much darker than that. It's much like
00:34:31
Speaker
It's it's less it's less narrative than that in a way. It's like it's more just like like because he respects them so much, you know, all of them pretty much all of them immediately really respect the criminals who are keeping them hostage. And they're just having like interesting conversations with them as far as just like, like, look at you. You're a person who doesn't who lives by their own rules. You're having fun in life. Yeah. Yeah.
00:34:58
Speaker
I didn't really ever think that he was going to try and outsmart them because one, yeah, he likes them too much. And two, he has a death wish. She doesn't like his own life. Right. And it's kind of the death wish thing that kind of soured me on this movie a little bit. But I also like he has such a he's so vague about his backstory, Alan.
00:35:20
Speaker
that I was like, is there going to be some like twist where he's actually is like super capable and it's going to like take all these guys out or something like that? What is like there was a period of time where I was like the ending of this movie could go bananas and I will be so excited for that to happen. He does not do that at all. It is that Alan is like.
00:35:43
Speaker
has too many neuroses because, you know, people put, made roads. And then, and now he, so he doesn't want to live, but he wants to leave behind his, uh, you know, his money to, uh, Gabrielle, the woman played by, um, uh, Bay Davis early, Betty Davis role of eyes fame.
00:36:06
Speaker
It's not even necessarily that he wants to die. It's just like he sees no point in living and he doesn't really see himself, like see any value in himself. And he is so inspired by Gabrielle's story that he's like, oh, well, like the best thing that I can do with my life is give you my $5,000 for my life insurance.
00:36:30
Speaker
not to like take you to France myself like you wanted to and actually like grow as a human being or like provide companionship to another person it's like I find his sort of like death wish to be incredibly uh
00:36:44
Speaker
selfish and dumb and like it really soured me to that character. Like yeah he wants to he wants to be remembered as a hero who was an artist who died before his time and right and like shut up dude you asshole like get over yourself and just like live your life man
00:37:07
Speaker
Yeah, he shuts out, he shuts out all possibility of his life improving. And he's like, literally the best thing that I can do is die for you right now. Yeah, but like he doesn't try to prevent it. It's like it's very it is like not selfless at all.
00:37:24
Speaker
I don't think. Right. I mean, yeah, like, yeah, it's his idea. I mean, we're kind of dancing around. It's, you know, spoilers. But like, like, you know, he he asks Humphrey Bogart's character, who is a seasoned killer, to say like, hey, this is my plan. Will you kill me? And he goes gladly. Sure. Sounds like fun. He's like, hey, man, it's your life. Like, whatever. I'm going to shoot you. I guess I will. But then he's like.
00:37:53
Speaker
he is like, oh, like, he tells him, like, I'd prefer Gabrielle think that it was in Cold Blood, like, that I didn't, I didn't tell you to shoot me, like, don't tell her that, you know. And I'm just like, this guy sucks. I think, I think I see what you're getting at here, which is that, like, this movie is doing some interesting, cool stuff, but I think it just needed, like, one more element to stack on top of what was happening, to make it feel like it was, like, fully fleshed out,
00:38:22
Speaker
fully thought out. I think that if if Alan had had that thought of like oh I'm I'm not contributing anything to society like I am I would be better off as it as a dead person like my I don't see my life improving and then he has a thing where like he actually through this very tense situation has like
00:38:43
Speaker
you know, comes around a corner actually realizes that like, no, no, no, life is worth living. And there's like, there are people that I enjoy being around and like, there's like, there's so much more to see, you know, if there was like, if there was
00:38:59
Speaker
if like the movie used that as a jumping off point to like this character can now learn something as opposed to just like I don't know I mean I see where you're coming from I think that could be good but I think it's like it it doesn't need to be that conventional or he turns out to be a secret badass and he like I would also like to see that
00:39:18
Speaker
I just think that like, you know, I think there's parts of this ending that feel cheap. But also, I think that it's like a really daring ending. Like because it's so narratively unconventional. It's not like how you would like he doesn't learn or grow, you know, he he just like he's just like, hmm.
00:39:45
Speaker
I could die and I'd be of service and and then he dies and he is of service and then you just kind of have to think about yourself whether like what the deal with that was or like why like whether he was justified in doing what he did yeah I mean my thought is that he's a dumb idiot and is not noble whatsoever I have a very kind of like Robert McKee reaction to that it's like it is unconventional because it sucks
00:40:13
Speaker
No, I respect it. I respect it. I think that it could have been handled better, but I don't know if the only way to handle it better was to make it more cliche, you know? Sure. Yeah. No, very good point. But yeah, I found this maybe to be very narratively unsatisfying.
00:40:35
Speaker
I can feel that. Which is also too bad because I think the setup for this movie is great. I think the like bottled energy of disparate people who are all kind of like trapped together in this like lonely gas station and they all have like very different personalities and they're all kind of like. Such a place. Flashing and but it's like that's cool. I love that stuff. Yeah. I just I feel like yeah I feel like the resolution is just like oh.
00:40:58
Speaker
I don't like that. Two quick notes from this movie. One is the amazing line where she asks him, what's the first thing you see when you get to France? And then he says the customs office. Good line. Funny. And also there's a Tommy gun in this movie. Once again. Only the cops get to use it. Yes. The cops have a Tommy gun, but there is a Tommy gun depicted, which already. Yeah.
00:41:25
Speaker
Right, already they're just like, well, they're more like guidelines, really. Yeah, I guess so. Breen can't watch everyone. Since this was a play originally, the guy plays Alan. Leslie Howard was in the play, as was Humphrey Bogart. Humphrey Bogart was like not really a movie actor at this point. And when the industry was going to we're going to make the movie, Warner Brothers wanted to cast Edward G. Robinson.
00:41:53
Speaker
from Little Caesar as Duke, the head criminal. But Leslie Howard, being a good friend, was like, you have to cast Humphrey Bogart. He's too good in this world. You can't recast this guy. He's so good in this. Humphrey Bogart's incredible in this movie. I guess this is the earliest Humphrey Bogart movie I've seen. And it is immediately, he is very, very good on screen. This guy knows how to hold the camera
00:42:23
Speaker
very well. And it's like cover bugger. He plays like kind of, uh, you know, maybe the guy's like, oh, you know, uh, a checkered past or like kind of rough run the edges. This is like the most, like this, he is a, like a bad dude. Yeah. And he really chews it up in this movie. Yeah. Um, I, I mentioned Don John Dillinger earlier, which who was killed in 1934
00:42:48
Speaker
but was, I mean, that was only two years before this movie came out. As far as I know, the character of Duke Mantee, which is who he plays, is kind of loosely inspired by John Dillinger. And Humphrey Barra did watch like old newsreel footage of John Dillinger to kind of get hit like his mannerisms.
00:43:07
Speaker
Which I can see in the way he plays it. He's got this weird arm stance. He holds his arms, his elbows kind of stick out in a weird way. It always looks like his arms are resting on something, but there's nothing there. And I couldn't find any concrete answer as to what's up with that, other than that might be a thing where his permanent resting posture is as if he's wearing handcuffs.
00:43:37
Speaker
because he's spent so much of his life in prison that he just has this like permanent like handcuff stance. Interesting. Which I think is like if that is where that comes from I think that's a really cool interesting acting choice.
00:43:52
Speaker
Um, but I, I couldn't find any like quotes from him about that. So who knows. But, uh, another crime movie that also feels like it is very much about America. Yeah. It's, it's problems therein is fury by our old pal Fritz Lang. David Ayer. Yeah. The first, the first, uh, yeah, not that fury, not the tank movie is the first, uh, American Fritz Lang movie.
00:44:22
Speaker
Yeah. And this is really good. This movie kind of blew me away. I was like, holy shit. Like very early on, I was like, this movie is like going places. This movie is like has some ideas for sure. Yeah. Although it does take a minute to get started. It does. Yeah. I was watching this with my partner and she like kind of
00:44:48
Speaker
Yeah, she was like, this is the Metropolis guy. Come on. And like, kind of left after 15 minutes. And I was like, oh, you should have just stayed another 10 minutes and it would have got so intense. That first, yeah, like 15-ish minutes. I was sort of like.
00:45:04
Speaker
Cause it is, it's very slow. It's very kind of mundane. But I was like, it's for it's long. This is like gonna, this is gonna pop off soon. I'm sure. And then it really does. This is tense. This movie is tense. So tense. And like, this is a movie like First Reformed, as you can see behind you on the wall. This is a movie that feels like angry about things. Yeah. Yeah. Very much so.
00:45:34
Speaker
Yeah, and it's got ideas about like, I mean, I think the main thing that Fury is about is interrogating like mob justice, is like interrogating like the intelligence of a normal person to, and whether you can use your intelligence, like it's interrogating the fact of whether a normal person can actually decide whether another person is innocent or guilty.
00:46:02
Speaker
And it's basically saying you hear about crime stories, but you don't know. And how dare you think you know? Yeah, it feels very... It reminded me a lot of M in its focus on community justice and of gossip and things spreading
00:46:27
Speaker
Unchecked through a community and like kind of about almost how like ideas can be dangerous Mm-hmm and how like violence is is like weirdly communicable like it it
00:46:40
Speaker
like violence is a thing that like spreads between people without you know it's it's this weird sort of like mental disease almost yeah but like it this movie also does not have any sympathy for the people who are infected by this disease this movie hates them and the only thing that kind of spares the recipients of this disease of
00:47:07
Speaker
mob justice of vigilantism is that It is that they they happened to not be successful hmm, but also is like especially in like the second half I feel like the movie is also very much about how like violence is Kind of like cyclical and it's like, you know violence begets more violence kind of yeah, or at least like the want for revenge is Like a sickness that can take you over
00:47:37
Speaker
Yeah. What a good movie. Yeah, this is really good. I can't believe we almost didn't watch this. Yeah. My like big take on this movie is like Fritz Lang fled Germany as the Nazis were taking over. Oh, like looking at how like wow. Looking at how like Europe was being like taken over by fascism and violence and like nationalism and like mob
00:48:07
Speaker
you know, mob mentality of just like... Which is what the Nazis used, yeah. Right? All of it. And then he, you know, flees to America and is like, you've lynched how many people?
00:48:20
Speaker
What the fuck is wrong with this place? Yeah, there's a part in the movie that is probably saying a real statistic about the amount of lynchings that happen in America at this point, one every three days on average, and that only a small percentage of them ever even go to court. Which I believe. Yeah.
00:48:48
Speaker
And it is, it's like this, you know, this guy who has in World War I, he has seen like the worst of humanity at this point in life, more or less.
00:49:00
Speaker
And then he comes to America and he's just like, you guys have some issues. You got to work out. I did not even it's stupid of me. I did not even think of this angle that you brought up about how like this is drawing a parallel with Naziism. Like it's so obvious and I did not think of it. That's like all I could think about watching this movie. It is definitely it definitely feels like it is because I think his last couple of German movies like.
00:49:24
Speaker
And to some degree, and especially Dr. Mabuza, are like pretty explicitly about the kind of ideas of like, you know, hatred, like spreading unchecked through a community or through people.
00:49:40
Speaker
I mean, Mabuza is like almost about the same idea, but in a sort of like a like a spiritual way. Like a weird like sci fi mind control way where, yeah, yeah, like hatred is a like a personified like ghost thing that like infects people or like possesses people. Dr. Mabuza is also a movie that rules.
00:50:04
Speaker
I don't know, should we talk about the plot of this more? Well, I mean... It's got Spencer Tracy in it, he's famous. Yeah, and it's also got... I feel like the first half, second half split of this movie is interesting too. Mm-hmm, for sure, yeah. This has also got Sylvia Sidney in it, who was in Marily We Go To Hell, was the wife in Marily We Go To Hell. She's good in this too, she's very good at playing anguish in both. Yeah, I think she probably has...
00:50:34
Speaker
I don't
00:50:54
Speaker
We're about to talk about the, we're about to talk, if we're about to talk about the plot, like if any of this sounds interesting to you, like watch this. This movie is so good. Yeah, this is like, yeah, fully recommend. Um, I like, I don't want to get too deep into it, but like the first half of the movie is about Spencer Tracy as Joe. His name's Joe. He's a regular Joe.
00:51:17
Speaker
It could happen to any regular Joe. And he's about to get married to this lovely woman played by Sylvia Sidney, but he's got no money. He's got to drive out of town for a while and they're not going to see each other. It's this very sort of somewhat cliche, but very sweet romantic story.
00:51:35
Speaker
And he's just driving through town in like small town America. Yeah. Mind his own business. He's a nice guy. He like adopts a dog, you know. Yeah. Right. He adopts the most adorable dog anyone has ever seen named Rainbow. And he says, you look you look just like me. This goddamn movie, man.
00:51:57
Speaker
This is right after he and his wife have to leave each other for a year because they don't have enough money. They can't get married. They don't have the money. It's the Depression. He sees a little dog and he's just like, you're just like me, lonely and small. And then he's like, you're mine now.
00:52:17
Speaker
And so he's driving through a small town and he gets pulled over by the sheriff because they're looking for some kidnappers who are in the news that have kidnapped the child and are holding them ransom. And so the whole town is like on alert because of this kidnapping. And so
00:52:34
Speaker
Just just pointing guns at random guys. Right. So they pull they pull him off the side of the road like pointing gun at him. They like search through it. They like completely tear apart his car, basically search through all this stuff and they find money that has been like linked to the kidnappers. So they they put him in jail just like to hold him just so he doesn't like leave town. But also like they're like these cops, you're just
00:53:04
Speaker
You're just really... They're not good at their job. They're being way too cautious. They're like, basically...
00:53:14
Speaker
treating this guy as if he's guilty without any evidence. No, yeah. I mean, honestly, I think it goes beyond them just being dumb or overzealous. I think that one of the types of people that this movie is indicting is cops. They are in this movie
00:53:35
Speaker
like vicious and uncaring and uh hostile to innocent people just because they feel like it uh they have they don't you know he's explaining himself and it's just falling on deaf ears because they have the airtight proof that he has peanuts in his pocket like like it is ridiculous how like how they're treating him it is like even after
00:54:01
Speaker
the sheriff sort of comes around and kind of realizes that he's made a mistake. He's still sort of like not necessarily incompetent, but just like ineffectual at sort of like resolving the situation. I mean, he doesn't know that he made a mistake until toward the end of the movie. But I mean, like the word spreads that this guy is in jail for kidnapping and like the whole town just starts frothing at the mouth at this. Like they found the kidnapper. We got to we got to get him.
00:54:31
Speaker
Yeah, it's a deputy who was trying to look cool in front of people and said too much. Right, exactly. But the sheriff is then trying to protect him from this mob that forms, but does a terrible job of it. There is a shot between
00:54:49
Speaker
You see the gossip spreading throughout the town and it cuts to a bunch of chickens. Hens, I suppose. Which is a nice little bit of metaphor there. Maybe slightly sexist, but I don't know, whatever. Maybe slightly sexist. Very on the nose. But so this mob forms and breaks into the jail with a battering ram and sets it on fire.
00:55:12
Speaker
Yeah, which is like a harrowing scene. It's like cutting back to... It's terrifying. It's cutting back to Joan, who is... He's locked in his cell. He can't get out. And he's seeing this mob of like 200 people that are coming to kill him. They're breaking into a police station.
00:55:30
Speaker
so that they can kill him because they think he's guilty of something that he didn't do and and you're just cutting back to him just accepting that he and his dog are like who's in the in the cell with him are going to die any minute and yeah it's like they after they set fire to the jail it like cuts around with like the faces in the crowd they're all like smiling and proud at what they've done they're all so pleased with themselves for murdering this guy in a jail cell
00:55:59
Speaker
Yeah, they're in like a total frenzy and they're they think they're right and and Catherine his his fiancee like arrives just in time to like see his face in the window as like the flames Take the building and she faints and then they throw dynamite at the building and blow it up which they don't actually show they I feel like Fritz Lang does a very good thing where he
00:56:26
Speaker
He moves the camera down to the street and you just see the cars shaking from the shockwave of the explosion. Which almost makes the explosion feel bigger without even showing it. It's very good. And that's like the midpoint of the movie. And then the second half is that you find out that Joe
00:56:45
Speaker
is
00:57:04
Speaker
So it's off screen, but the dog still dies and it made me very upset. I mean, we spend a couple minutes in this movie going like we're halfway through and like our protagonist was murdered in a fire, burned alive. Yeah. We spend a couple minutes sitting with that. Then he reappears.
00:57:26
Speaker
in as evil joe um he reappears he's bitter he's angry he's jigsaw now he's he's become he's become a batman villain pretty much yeah and so he doesn't tell his fiance that he's alive he instead only tells his brothers and they kind of very reluctantly help him in his revenge plot against the entire town that uh
00:57:53
Speaker
tried to kill him. Yeah. So yeah, now he's like dead set on giving them the death penalty for killing him, but he happened to escape. But he walks around and talks about how he's a dead man, how he shouldn't be alive, and he's just here for revenge.
00:58:17
Speaker
And he like, he like looks different in these late in the second half of the movie, like partially because he's become evil. And but also partially because like he was like burned in the fire. He's talking about like he's telling his brothers about the experience of getting out of the building, like seeing his dog die. But he talks about how he also ran. Rainbow the dog did have puppies earlier in the movie that do survive.
00:58:45
Speaker
But then the puppies don't have a mom! I know, but it's like we get at least the p- like there are still the puppies. But he talks about like having to slide down some metal on the burning building and he says he could smell his flesh burning and it's like Jesus Christ! That's the thing, that's the kind of thing you can get a- you can do in a Hays Code movie where it's like you can talk about super gnarly shit, you just can't show it.
00:59:12
Speaker
Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. Like, they're not saying any swear words. They're just describing, like, gruesome things. Yeah, I guess so. But, like, this really felt like it was pushing it. It's law and order rules. You can describe anything you want.
00:59:28
Speaker
I'll also back up just a little bit and lighten it up just a little bit to say that while the mob is yelling at the police station, one of them makes a current Popeye reference. It's like a pop culture reference of the era of the recently debuted Popeye the Sailor Man.
00:59:51
Speaker
That really stuck out to me too. I also noted that of like, oh, they're making Popeye references already. That's like really, really permeated the culture. Yeah. People love Popeye. Episode title. Yeah, I guess so. In an episode where we don't watch a Popeye movie. So the second half is like mostly like a courtroom drama about the murder trial of 22 of the townsfolk. And it's still really intense.
01:00:17
Speaker
Yeah, right. So Sylvia Sidney's character, Catherine doesn't know that Joe is alive, but there's throughout the second half, there's like she like starts to piece together through little hints and things like that. Like early on in the movie, she like helps like stitch up his coat with blue threads. It's the only thread that they have. And then later on, she like sees that same coat with the stitches. So it's like, wait, that didn't get burned up in the fire. How did that? Yeah, one of the brothers was wearing it. So
01:00:45
Speaker
and then it's like so and she's like piecing together all these little clues through like at one point joe sends in like kind of like a ransom note as evidence like like anonymously like supply evidence to the prosecution and he like he misuses a word he makes like a malapropism where he he uh he says momentum instead of memento and she like picks up on that it's like fuck only joe would say that
01:01:12
Speaker
It's I love little details like that They're like planted in the beginning and then like come back in a really big way and are like this huge moment at the end and that the ending of this movie apparently I read that Fritz Long wanted a like more downbeat Darker ending. Hmm. I'm not sure exactly what it would have been I think one of the things Fritz Long wanted was that Joe was somehow initially guilty of something Which I think kind of
01:01:42
Speaker
hurts the movie. I think it is very important that Joe starts out as totally innocent of anything, and because of this experience, it turns him into this vengeful, hateful person. It's about him being corrupted, and that's taken away. He's somehow guilty. Right. I'm like, that's dumb. This movie does have a surprisingly
01:02:05
Speaker
nice ending, I guess, for the kind of movie that it is. But I also it feels like the right ending, though, still. Yeah, I was thinking in broad strokes, it feels like it wraps up a little too quickly, maybe, and it probably could have had a little bit more nuance to it. But it's like the the 22 people are or at least some of the 22 people are found guilty of murder for lynching Joe. There's some great courtroom stuff to where like the prosecution is
01:02:35
Speaker
like calling out the characters for their crimes but he's sort of like it does feel like the movie is almost calling out like greater societal ills almost like there's a thing where the I think it's like the sheriff won't testify against the the lynch mob and he's like oh no it was it was other people who weren't from the town did this
01:02:56
Speaker
And the DA is like, oh, I see, foreigners. Foreigners did this, huh? Which is just like, why is that so evergreen that that is always a scapegoat? Yeah, I guess so. A huge part of Nazi Germany was scapegoating Jews in Roma and lots of other groups that they didn't like. Oh, really? I've never heard that about the Nazis.
01:03:25
Speaker
But like this this scene also But like also when when the sheriff is on the stand it's really notable that
01:03:36
Speaker
this guy who was attacked by the people in his town, his police station was burned down, and his authority was completely undermined by this crowd. It's like a small town. The DA makes a whole big show of how everyone, including the cops, are not
01:04:02
Speaker
they don't care about doing the right thing they just care about keeping up appearances and they care about like keep sticking together and they can let you know afford they can let somebody who's not from the town die horribly and unjustly and and face no consequences for it because uh they gotta stick together right and like that was like a moment of like
01:04:29
Speaker
pretty extreme darkness when the sheriff refuses to speak the truth. He purges himself specifically so that he can not maybe face his own, be at the other end of another set of mob justice, right?
01:04:49
Speaker
There's an implication that anybody who would tell the truth and not create fake alibis and all this stuff would probably be ostracized at best and lynched at worst. Yeah. A lot of this courtroom stuff reminded me of January 6th.
01:05:13
Speaker
in the capital riot, especially in the way that all these people gleefully participate in this mob violence, and then are confronted with it later in court to be like, we have
01:05:32
Speaker
footage of you like people filmed this like we can see you doing this and enjoying it like how how do you defend yourself and they're just like I don't know like I was caught up in the moment and it's like bullshit you can't use that as an excuse like you killed a guy
01:05:47
Speaker
Yeah, I wasn't expecting that from this movie. I wasn't expecting this movie to go as hard as it does. Yeah, very much so. And I think to get the ending that it's looking for, it has to walk this really fine line because it does not want to let the vigilantes get off
01:06:08
Speaker
specifically because Joe survived. But it also wants to indict Joe for continuing the cycle of, you killed me, I kill you, you know, cycle of violence. And so there's a way that it's like,
01:06:26
Speaker
I was really worried that the movie would kind of come off like, oh, there's nothing wrong with what they did because Joe ended up being corrupted as well. And like Joe is the final villain that must be defeated in the narrative. But I think it does a good job of
01:06:47
Speaker
a pretty good job of doing both, right? It does not let the mob go for what they did just because Joe lived and just because Joe was also corrupted by violence.
01:07:04
Speaker
Right. It's like it's kind of this weird like threading in the needle thing where it's like, right, it can't it can't let any of its its multitude of like villainous characters off the hook, but it also doesn't want to end on like a huge downer either. Yeah.
01:07:22
Speaker
So it's this thing where like Joe then reveals himself to be alive and like turns himself in basically so that the mob doesn't get the death penalty. But it's like they're still on the hook for, you know, destruction of property, assaults, you know, all these other attempted murder attempted murder. And then like then presumably Joe is also probably on hook for some crimes. Right. It ends up coming off like anti death penalty.
01:07:48
Speaker
essentially, but certainly also anti everything else that's happening in the movie. Yeah, I was impressed with how well the movie threaded that needle. Yeah. It does feel like a very kind of Hollywood ending.
01:08:05
Speaker
for this movie that is not a typical sort of like Hollywood narrative. But I think it works. It probably there's probably a better version of the ending than what is in the movie. But it's still I'm still impressed with how they like landed the plane kind of. Yeah. Yeah. Like a lot of movies can only have one bad guy and like whoever is the worst guy is the bad guy and then everything else is kind of absolved by association.
01:08:32
Speaker
Yeah, and I think this movie wants to be about bigger things than that. This movie never directly mentions racism, but I think it is definitely doing things to put the thought into the audience's head about how much violence is driven by xenophobia and intolerance. They talk around it more than anything else, but it's
01:08:59
Speaker
it's present in
01:09:20
Speaker
fits in with the story in certain ways with the sort of police prejudice and like history of lynchings and that kind of thing. There's a scene toward the beginning of the movie, not you mentioned that, there's a scene toward the beginning of the movie where Catherine is kind of like looking out her window and she's seeing like her black neighbor like singing a song about like when
01:09:47
Speaker
uh oh god i mean it it seemed i was looking up the lyrics trying to figure out where the song came from and it might have some like vague association with a minstrel song but it was uh she was singing in not not in a derogatory way but talking
01:10:02
Speaker
I'm dancing around this because she says when the darkies M free and she is black and so I'm just hoping I'm just hoping this antiquated usage but like I think that maybe like you know it is maybe planting that seed a little bit by just kind of having a black character specifically like name dropping
01:10:26
Speaker
slavery and like the non-freedom of black people in America. It's very brief and it's got its own kind of racism involved in it. It kind of does feel deliberate in that way. Yeah. Another thing that like really struck me about this movie is how it feels so pointedly anti-fascist
01:10:49
Speaker
and yet also very unmistakably American and about American society. And that's a very uncomfortable combination, which it was then in 1936. It is now. This movie would be transgressive coming out now too. Right, yeah. It's like everything this movie is about is just as relevant in 2024 as it was in 1936, which sucks.
01:11:17
Speaker
But it makes the movie feel really prescient now. Yeah. Yeah. To end our discussion on this movie, unless you have anything else to add. Not really. I want to end it on a fun light note, which is that Rainbow, the dog, rest in peace, was played by a Karen Terrier named Terry, who would later go on to play Toto in Bruiser Devos.
01:11:44
Speaker
Oh my god. So Rainbow is the same dog as Toto. Somewhere over the rainbow. Look at that. Those last two movies are, while being crime movies, they are, they make explicit references to the Great Depression. They are very like Depression era movies. Uh-huh. To switch genres here, another movie that is very much about the Great Depression but is much sillier is Mr. Deez Goes to Town.
01:12:10
Speaker
Oh, okay. I thought you were going to go to another one. All right. Scrolling in a different direction. Yeah. I got all planned out.
01:12:18
Speaker
Disredeeds Goes to Town, the Frank Capra movie starring Gary Cooper. Gary Cooper. Before doing this show, I basically only knew Gary Cooper from High Noon, which is a Western tense thriller kind of movie. There's a guy, Gary Cooper, he's a serious old-timey actor. I didn't realize that Gary Cooper is a huge goofball in most of his movies. Even like Morocco, which is a drama, he's still kind of a goofball in that movie.
01:12:48
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, especially in design for living as well. I actually like wasn't super familiar with Gary Cooper. I mean, I knew the name, but like I didn't I'm not sure I'd seen any of his movies. It's also he's like very like tall, traditionally handsome, like Hollywood leading man type of guy. I did not expect him to do as many comedies as I've seen him.
01:13:09
Speaker
Yeah, when I watched Design for a Living, I thought that he was the other guy, because I thought the other guy kind of had a more distinctive face. And I was like, oh, the guy who seems like the mainer character, Frederick March, I think is. Yeah, yeah. The other guy in Design for a Living. Like the guy who has the more distinctive face and is the mainer character, that's got to be Gary Cooper. Yeah, because he's the name I've heard. But yeah, this movie, I think,
01:13:37
Speaker
It seems to have kind of cemented a bit of an image for Gary Cooper as like a kind of traditional all-American guy. Stand-up type, you know? Yeah. Who has American morals. A swell fella.
01:13:51
Speaker
Yeah, this is a this is a very Frank Capra esque movie. Yeah, yes. I don't think it's as good as some of his later movies, but it's like the seeds are there. The like the Frank Capra voice is like very loud in this film. Yeah, he loves America. This guy. Yeah. I mean, this is this is about like a small town.
01:14:15
Speaker
like a naive small-town guy who comes to the big city and kind of gets taken advantage of by all these soulless city types. Yeah, but then his country ways went out and he changes everyone around him for the better. His folksy charms win the day. We'll get into this a bit later. I have a story to tell, but this movie was, of course, remade as Just Miss Beads starring Adam Sandler as a like
01:14:43
Speaker
rough and tumble Massachusetts guy who comes to the big city and rinsed people over with his folksy ways. Same kind of deal. Yeah, sure. This movie opens with a car driving over a cliff, which is a hell of a way to start a picture. Yeah. Yeah, this is like much more of a bang, crash, zoom opening than than I would have expected for a kind of a light comedy. Yeah.
01:15:10
Speaker
A guy dies in a car crash, and he's very wealthy, and he only has one living heir, which is Mr. Deeds himself, who lives in a little town in Vermont called Mandrake Falls, and he's kind of like the town hero, everyone likes him.
01:15:31
Speaker
He loves the tuba. He's in the town parades and helps out everyone in town. Everyone's like, we love this guy. He's super famous. We all love him. In our small town where we all know each other, he's the one we know the most because we all love him.
01:15:48
Speaker
Yeah, it is a little bit. I think it kind of takes a little bit away from the sort of like small town bumpkin comes the big city. Like Mr. Deeds already seems pretty wealthy when we meet him. He's got like a big old house. He's got a tuba. He has like wait staff that like work in his house. Notoriously expensive tubas, I suppose. Yeah. Right. Yeah. His full name Longfellow Deeds, which is quite the name.
01:16:12
Speaker
Which they keep in the Adam Sandler one. Right, Adam Sandler is a real Longfellow type. Yeah, he looks like his name is Longfellow. Oh yeah, my name is Longfellow. But yeah, he's just this kind of like guileless, sweet summer child. I think someone describes, someone says, the boy must be a nitwit.
01:16:31
Speaker
That's the other thing too. The lawyers that go to Mandrake Falls to get Mr. Deeds, get Longfellow, and tell him that he's inherited all this money are the most 1930s people to ever live. There's one, Cobb, the press agent, who's played by Lionel Stander.
01:16:51
Speaker
is like the most he's such a 1930s guy. He's just like, I look here, pal, we got to find this long photo guy. Tell us where he's just like he's he's like if you took the 1930s and put it into a person, it's it's this. It's Lionel Stander in this movie.
01:17:08
Speaker
Yes, correct. I guess the only other example I can think of as someone who is more 1930s than that guy is the female lead of this movie, Bebe Bennett, played by Gene Arthur, who is like the classic fast-talking cynical reporter. She's just like, I'll get the story, but it's not gonna be fun.
01:17:28
Speaker
And it's just like, has no faith in humanity left. She's like seen it all. Yeah. So she is going in because he, you know, Mr. D's doesn't talk to anybody. He's kind of just trying to figure out because he's such a good guy, he's trying to figure out what to do with all of this money that is the right thing to do so that he can give it all away and then go back to Vermont where he's happy. And he's just trying to get rid of everyone around him. He loves fire engines.
01:17:57
Speaker
He gets really excited when he sees a fire engine. It's such a weird note that he just turns into a five-year-old when he sees a fire truck. He's like, oh my god, a fire truck. I need to go chase in it. This is like, yeah, manic pixie dream boy situation. It's really like, yeah, cynical reporter falls in love with manic pixie dream boy. Whilst trying to trick him,
01:18:26
Speaker
Like she's lying about who she is so she can get the story. And it turns out that like he's writing all this mean stuff about him. He's so pure that she's like, man, I feel kind of bad about this, even though I'm a New Yorker who has no soul. And and eventually she kind of comes clean and he's like the last person, the only person who was OK was also trying to trick me. So screw everything. I'm leaving basically.
01:18:56
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And then they got it. They got to go go get him back and convince him to save the fortune from the greed lawyers. And he gives all his money away to all the starving farmers. Yeah. Yeah. This is another movie that, you know, makes a makes acknowledgment of the depression. I think it's interesting how this movie is like one of the most explicitly like about the depression movies that we've seen.
01:19:23
Speaker
Yeah, although it kind of it kind of all hinges on the idea of like the farmers don't have any money and they're losing all that they have. Well, toward the end of the movie. Yeah, I think the beginning is very much like like many movies kind of living outside of the reality of the depression. It's just like, wouldn't it be nice to be rich and have stuffy, stuffy British people try and put your pants on for you? You know, I think that's that's like top hat. And yeah, yeah.
01:19:51
Speaker
And so like, yeah, it's this fish out of water in high society kind of comedy at the beginning. And then toward the end, like the kind of irresponsibility of somebody being hideously wealthy at this time kind of makes itself more apparent to both the audience and the main character.
01:20:14
Speaker
and and so like yeah it goes from this kind of innocent fantasy to okay wait but like this is actually kind of messed up like like like we need to fix this you know then it has this like such a feel-good like wholesome ending where he gives all the money away yeah yeah yeah and like you know for i think frank capra was like
01:20:36
Speaker
like a, you know, quite conservative person. But this movie like is this movie is like rather left wing in its politics. Well, I mean, I feel like that might just be an Overton window situation where it's like a fairly conservative person in 1936 is now a like fairly left leaning person because it's shifted so much. Hey, I mean, you know, Adolf Hitler was a fairly conservative person in 1936.
01:21:05
Speaker
Fairly, but a big thought I had while watching this was Sam Raimi loves this movie for sure. Why? Well, because Sam Raimi co-wrote the Hudsucker proxy, which is like almost a remake of this.
01:21:23
Speaker
Huzzard proxy has a very different plot details, but it's still a sort of like innocent guileless man is given access to extreme wealth and there is a cynical fast-talking 1930s reporter that accidentally falls in love with him. Oh, wow. Yep. That's a Coen brothers movie, but Sam Raimi is one of the writers on it and he also directed
01:21:48
Speaker
like a montage in the middle of it. And then also there is a scene at like a fancy restaurant with like live violin players, which I am like 90% sure Sam Raimi took from this and put in Spider-Man 3.
01:22:04
Speaker
because it is so similar and it just seems like such a same, rainy thing to do. It's like, I'm making a Spider-Man movie. I'm gonna put a scene from Mr. Deeds in it. This movie has a lot in common, I think, with Mr. Smith goes to Washington.
01:22:19
Speaker
which we'll get to it, which makes sense because that was originally Mr. Diaz Goes to Washington and it was going to be a sequel to this movie. Oh, yeah. But yeah, we'll get to it. I haven't seen Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. They have a lot of similarities. It's a wonderful life to has like a lot of thematic similarities to this movie.
01:22:39
Speaker
I think both of those are better than Mr. Deeds goes to town. Goes to town? Goes to town. The movie isn't set in New York because that would make the movie soulless. He goes to town. To town, yes. He is leaving Vermont and going to town. You know, New York town. Yeah. And yeah, this movie is a little... I almost feel like it's so wholesome at times that it's like...
01:23:07
Speaker
It needs a little bit of like, it's a wonderful life like cuts the wholesomeness with like, you know, it's like, which I think evens that movie out a little bit more whereas, but this one is like more of a straightforward comedy than that is like, yes, not as it's trying to kind of
01:23:24
Speaker
pull you in with a bunch of silly comedy and fish out of water stuff and then hit you in the heart with some of the sort of like the big heartfelt speech at the end of what a good person Longfellow is. Another thing that I feel like kind of hurts this movie's image or whatever, maybe not image, but it's like the whole thing is that Longfellow is like winning over everyone with all of his folksy ways and also just punching people in the face. He does that a lot in this movie.
01:23:53
Speaker
Yeah, I wonder if it, yeah, it does seem like it kind of undercuts what it's going for a little bit. That he's just extreme violence in this movie. I recently rewatched Miracle on 34th Street and that also takes the stance where like sometimes you just got to sock him in the face and it's like, do you though? I don't know if that's a good message. Yeah. I mean, and that Santa Claus does get in trouble for hitting a guy with this cane, but it's like even in that it's like even Santa Claus, the nicest man
01:24:22
Speaker
He's so nice that he's a magical creature. Like, sometimes he's just like, shut up, I'm gonna hit you because you suck.
01:24:31
Speaker
I mean, I think it would. Would our society be better if you could just kind of sock a guy sometime? You get one. You got one free punch now. Maybe one a year. One a year, you know? On Purge Day. On Punch Day. Punch Day. I think Punch Day would not go well. We knew a movie called The Punch. The Punch. The Punch Anarchy. The first punch.
01:25:00
Speaker
Everyone serves punch. The punch election year. This movie also, one other small note about it that sounds weird now when they said it, is that there's a courtroom scene again in this movie and the evil lawyers bring in some people from his town and they call Mr. Deeds pixelated.
01:25:24
Speaker
They say he's pixelated, and that kind of makes the modern ears perk up a little bit. Right, you're like, what? That wasn't even a word back then, but back then I guess it... I watched this off of Blu-ray. It meant pixie-like? Yeah, yeah. Like fairy-like? Like they're sort of... Touched. Like a space cadet, I guess. Like they're not grounded. They're sort of living in fairy land all the time.
01:25:49
Speaker
which I had never heard that definition of pixelated. It's funny that that word got reinvented to mean a completely different thing. Yeah. I watched this pixelated man in high definition. It's a good letterbox review. So earlier in the episode, I made the mistake of saying that I had a story about the Adam Sandler remake of Mr. B's Ghost of Town.
01:26:15
Speaker
and I never followed it up. So we are now recording this extra segment days later after I've edited the episode, realized that I never actually told the story that I was setting up.
01:26:28
Speaker
You're showing them behind the magic right now. Yeah. First of all, have you seen the Adam Sandler remake? If I have, it was so long ago that I don't remember. I know the foot scene, but I know that was also in the trailer. Right. Yeah. It was big, big trailer moment. I was probably like 13 when I saw it, so I don't remember. Right. I came out in 2002, so I would have been 11 when it came out, although I'm not sure I actually saw it in 2002. It might have been 03.
01:26:58
Speaker
It's very much a movie that you watch on DVD in the mid 2000s and not like a movie that you rush to see in theater.
In-Flight Movie Experiences
01:27:07
Speaker
I mean, watching on DVD probably would have been preferable to how I saw it. And this is that story. So in, I guess, 2002 or 2003, me, my mom and my brother went on a trip to California and Washington. We flew out there, you know, back in 2000.
01:27:26
Speaker
to 2003, you didn't get the smorgasbord of in-flight movies that you do now. This was the olden times when on an airplane, if you wanted to watch a movie, you got one. They're like, we picked one that everyone has to watch. I kind of missed that, actually. It was. There was a communal aspect to it. It's true. Yeah. But so the in-flight movie on that fateful day was Mr. Deeds starring Mr. Adam Sandler and
01:27:54
Speaker
Me and my family were not particularly interested. This was probably before I had seen a lot of Sandler movies. I think maybe the only thing I'd seen him in was like Big Daddy, VHS, which is, you know, not his best work, I'll say. It's one of his classics, I suppose. Right. But it's in that it's not like a pinnacle like Happy Madison, Adam Sandler comic.
01:28:22
Speaker
It's kind of one of the mid-level, like, yeah, it's fine. But so that context. So we're like, well, I guess we're just going to go to sleep because we don't really want to watch the one movie that we have on the flight. So we went to California. And then to get from California up to Washington, we took an overnight train. It was like a two-day train trip. Wow.
01:28:45
Speaker
And the evening of the train trip, there was like, hey, we're showing a movie. And we're like, oh boy, what's it going to be? What's the movie going to be? And it was Mr. Deeds again. And we were like, damn it. We were looking forward to watching a movie. But I guess we're not gonna. Because now, at this point, we're just pissed at that movie. We're like, not bad. I feel like fate is telling you to watch Mr. Deeds. Right? It's starting to feel that way. But we didn't watch it. And so then...
01:29:15
Speaker
You know, we, we spend like however many days from Washington and then we're, we're, we're on a flight back. No idea if it was the same airline or anything. And we're getting, we're like in the airport and we're like, what do you, what are the odds? What do you think the odds are going to be that like the inflight movie going back is going to be Mr. D's again? And we're like, it better not like it will, but if it is, I guess we have to watch it.
01:29:38
Speaker
Right? Them's the rules. And we get on the flight and, you know, it's like settling in, getting the stuff all ready. And they're like, oh, the inflight movie today will be Mr. Deeds. And we're like, oh, God damn it. It's like a silent flight. And like these three people are like yelling. And so that is exactly.
01:29:59
Speaker
Our reaction was like, the universe has told us, like, watch the fucking movie. And so we finally were like, fine, fine. We hear you. We're going to watch it. Maybe it's good. Maybe this is, you know, we're being forced into it. And so we watched it and it was not particularly great. I don't remember it being terrible. But thinking back on it now, I do think it doesn't quite
01:30:28
Speaker
Because it's a remake of Mr. Deeds goes to town, it tries to kind of keep that Frank Capra sweetness. Oh, interesting. Intact. But it's also an Adam Sandler movie. And his whole thing is he's like a crazy New England guy who comes to the big city. And it's like he's not innocent the same way that Gary Cooper is in the original. He's just like, ah, I'm crazy. Ah, what are you going to do? He probably punches just as many people.
01:30:57
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, there is a craziness strain in the original. There's a weird mishmash of the kind of zany surrealism of Happy Madison movies and the Frank Capra-ness.
01:31:09
Speaker
and they don't fit together well. As I remember, I have not seen this movie in over 20 years, so take that with a bit of salt. Maybe it's actually really good. It's 11-year-old Glenn's movie reviews, basically. Yeah. Tune in for more memories of movies that I saw when I was 11.
01:31:32
Speaker
Um, so that's, that's my, that's good. I like, I like how it follows the rule of threes for, uh, for, for jokes and stories and whatnot. It did, it did work itself out in a very humorous way. So for that, I, I, do you think your story's funnier than the Adam Sandler, Mr. Deeds? Um, possibly. Although again, I have not seen it in over 20 years, so I don't want to.
01:31:57
Speaker
I can't say that with much. Maybe we gotta watch Mr. Deeds for our 30s wrap up episode. That would be a choice. There's too many other choices. But so I would be remiss if we didn't put this in the episode, especially since I said it. And you are no longer remiss.
01:32:17
Speaker
Enjoy, everybody. Enjoy the rest of the podcast.
Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times
01:32:20
Speaker
But another movie that's a comedy that is about the Great Depression. Again, yeah. The Big Daddy, Modern Times. Yeah. It is The Big Daddy, 1936. It is, yes. The first Chaplin in a while. Have you heard of Charlie Chaplin?
01:32:39
Speaker
I have. Yeah. This is the final appearance of the tramp. This is the goodbye to the tramp. Yeah. Yeah. The last tramp film from from Charlie Chaplin. Having not known anything about this movie before I saw it, I had always heard about modern times being the last movie with the tramp and being a mostly silent movie from 1936. And I thought that like the title was
01:33:08
Speaker
Commenting more on, like, feeling like you're caught in an earlier era. You're not catching up with Modern Times. You want to stay in the silent era. You want to stay the tramp. You want to, like, Modern Times is too much for me. But that's not really what the movie's about. I think it kind of is about that, but not very explicitly. Like, it's not really
01:33:35
Speaker
the main through line of it. It's not sort of the main kind of thematic idea that it seems like it's playing with. No. I mean, its idea of what modern times means is industrial capitalism. Yeah. It's like, hey, look at all these gears, man. So many gears these days. I mean, it's gears, but it's like, you know, instrumentalization of workers and like, you know, the the the depression being modern times of like
01:34:04
Speaker
Yeah, it's it's Charlie Chaplin has always had this kind of socialist bent to what he's doing. And this is maybe the most explicit. Oh, yeah, I would say.
01:34:14
Speaker
Definitely the most explicit. I mean, yes, there's a point where he accidentally leads a communist rally. He, at multiple points, accidentally becomes a communist figurehead in this movie. The whole premise of the Tramp character is sympathy for the poor and the working class. I mean, Charlie Chaplin was hideously wealthy, but he had a good head on his shoulders ideologically, I suppose.
01:34:43
Speaker
Yeah. Another example of like movies from 1936 being like weirdly timely for now is I feel like this movie is just about Amazon.com. Like that was my like big note was like, oh, this is movies about Amazon factories. This movie is just about industrial factory work. It's about soulless and terrible. It is. It's a silent sorry to bother you.
01:35:09
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it has this whole like very kind of like futurist, certainly aesthetic design to it, but then also just like, it's very futuristic and sort of the technology it's depicting there's like security cameras, which I don't really think existed 1936.
01:35:26
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's at least not in the way that they were depicted here. It's I don't think it's meant to be set in the future. I think it's meant to be set in the current day. It's just depicting a workplace that has like advanced so much in its kind of like surveillance apparatus nowadays that like there can be a giant screen in the bathroom with a camera saying you're pissing for too long. Get back to work.
01:35:54
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, man, wouldn't it be terrible if there was an actual company that did that, that said you're pissing too long, get back to work? That was like named after some South American jungle or something. I think that was the moment I was like, oh, this this movie is about Amazon. It's got a lot of kind of like metropolis vibes and it's it's kind of futurism. Yeah, we got we got big gears. We got some Jacobs ladders. It definitely feels like Charlie Chaplin watch Metropolis. It was like, yes, this. I want this.
01:36:24
Speaker
Yeah, but not so like art deco sci-fi. It's still kind of lives in this world for sure. It's just like I think that like where it is kind of taking its flights of fancy of
01:36:41
Speaker
you know, visual depiction of high technology. It's really just kind of trying to like emphasize this like, you know, this overbearing and, you know, you are a cog in the machine and you will literally become a cog industrial capitalism.
01:37:00
Speaker
But I think both this and Metropolis are literalizing that, where it's like, yeah, factory workers are becoming literal pieces of machinery. And when they break, they just get thrown away. That's the most Marxist thing about this movie, probably, is talking about how workers are getting treated like machines.
01:37:20
Speaker
Yeah, one of the kind of most famous images from this movie, apart from the most famous image of this movie, which is Charlie Chaplin inside of Gears. But the second most famous image is pretty quick. Yeah. The second most famous image is, you know, he starts out the tramp starts out in this factory, the steel factory or like steel mill. And some people approach his panopticon boss and say, hey,
01:37:48
Speaker
Do you like worker productivity? Because we have a bargain for you, so you can stop having those pesky lunch breaks. We have invented a machine to shovel food into your worker's mouths so they have no excuse to take a lunch break. And the machine immediately fails in hilarious ways. It's slapping him in the face and shoving sandwiches in his eye and all that fun stuff.
01:38:18
Speaker
as food machines in movies do. I think this movie has a lot of, I can see a lot of the influence this movie had on more recent filmmakers and like, I think there's a lot of like Wes Anderson energy in this movie. Huh, how do you mean? I think just in the way in which it's so meticulously designed, like I think more so than any other Charlie Chaplin film that we've watched, this one is like very designed, like it is sets,
01:38:46
Speaker
And it is like very intricate sets that like have very specific aesthetic choices in it. Some of the sets are massive and like very, I don't know, like like storybook or like toy house, you know, dollhouse kind of thing. And then I mean, Pee Wee Herman has I mean, Pee Wee Herman takes a lot from a lot of like early like silent comedy stuff.
01:39:08
Speaker
Yeah, because I think I think that the whole kind of like Rube Goldberg machine stuff has been in has been around since like the 1910s, like tons of silent movies have played with that kind of thing. It's just a great visual. The the was it the automatic butcher or whatever that was? Hey, there you go. That's like 19. Oh, that was that was 1896, wasn't it? Yeah, that was very early. So good point. And then I think it was Jacques Tati who I've only ever seen playtime.
01:39:38
Speaker
But I think that too of sort of like the workplace being this like weird sort of like machine world and like technology that is like brand new but feels kind of useless and like why are we why is this a thing? I can see a lot of a possible kind of like lineage between this movie and Playtime.
01:39:59
Speaker
But right. So the tramp gets he gets kicked out of his job because he like attacked another worker because he went wrench crazy. He has like so caught up in his like wrench routine. He's basically an industrial nipple twister. And and then he goes he goes around. That's a good episode.
01:40:22
Speaker
And then he goes around, he gets so stuck in his motion of taking his wrenches and twisting things that he must twist everything, including somebody's nipples. Yeah, it's very silly. It's kind of funny, we're talking about this movie first as something that like, I don't know, as like a philosophical thing, which, you know, it's probably the most theming heavy of any of his movies that we've seen.
01:40:48
Speaker
It's pretty like clear what he's trying to kind of talk about. Yeah. Yeah. But it also has plenty of silly stuff like. Right. It's also like incredibly goofy, nipple twisting. And yeah, it is like it is full to the brim with just like goofy chaplain esque physical comedy. It's a chaplain esque.
01:41:08
Speaker
yeah i i get i kind of feel like twin peaks is slightly uh lynchian but so he yeah chaplain-esque one chaplain-esque two first so first they send like the mental hospital
01:41:26
Speaker
and then he gets out and while he's like walking the streets he becomes an accidental communist um and then like the cops show up to like strike break or whatever and he gets arrested despite not you know he just picked up a flag
01:41:41
Speaker
by accident. And so now he's in jail. We get a nice long section of like jail humor. Yeah. Including yet another thing that I can't believe that people say anything. I can't believe that people say anything about pre-code, post-code because we are getting yet another silent comedian cocaine joke. Yeah. Nose powder. Excuse me. Nose powder.
01:42:08
Speaker
Yeah, there's someone who smuggles in some nose powder. He puts it inside of a salt shaker to hide it while he gets searched. And that rascally tramp, he's shaking that salt shaker all over his food and getting real hyper.
01:42:26
Speaker
It does just get, yeah, it's a really funny moment where he is very much over salting his food. And you're like, oh no, Charlie, that's cocaine. That feels like something from an Adam Sandler movie.
01:42:39
Speaker
It's like, oh no, there's cocaine in the salt shaker. Ooh, it's going on his toast now. I just handled very well on this. I like it. Yeah, no, it's good, but it's so silly. And it also doesn't feel old-timey, I guess. It feels like it's unexpected to see this directly make jokes about cocaine.
01:43:01
Speaker
Yes. Yeah. This is this would be that in and of itself would push a movie in postcode is a pre-code movie would say cocaine, I guess. Yeah. But like, you know, even like old Harold Lloyd movies, like it didn't explicitly always say cocaine, but I thought it did in the in. Was it get out and get under? I think so. Yeah. I thought that there was just the thing of maybe picks up a thing that says cocaine on it. But I could be wrong. Maybe I'm misremembering.
01:43:30
Speaker
He puts a bunch of salt on his food and he takes a bite and he goes, damn, this food's good.
Sound Usage and Comedy in Modern Times
01:43:40
Speaker
And then immediately starts shaking tons of salt on it, eating lots of the food.
01:43:47
Speaker
And he starts bouncing around all over the place. Again, another thing that feels like it should be from a Seth Rogen, like a drug movie from 2012 or something, is that Charlie Chaplin does so much cocaine that he can dodge bullets. Like, that does not belong in a movie from 100 years ago. That belongs in a movie from now.
01:44:17
Speaker
Well, see, this is this is what people don't know about old movies is they're cool, actually. They have cocaine in them. Yeah. Everyone who does cocaine is cool. I didn't think it was funny how all like the convicts in this movie are just wearing like lots of denim. I'm like convicts 1930s just dress how like modern Brooklynites dress now.
01:44:40
Speaker
Like, if you were to take the exact prison outfits from this movie and just walk through Park Slope, you'd be a very fashionable person. Wow. Huh. I guess I haven't been to Park Slope recently enough. Full of denim. Just lousy with denim.
01:44:58
Speaker
That's another episode title. Lousy with denim. But he like gets out of prison for being a model prison. He like stops a prison escape. Again, like kind of accidentally. Yeah. There is he like gets taken up to like the warden's office and there is a there's a lot of sound throughout this movie. There's not a lot of dialogue. There's a bit of dialogue.
01:45:22
Speaker
But like not a lot of sync sound there's plenty of sound effects and like sound jokes Yeah, it takes it takes city lights to the next level Right. There's joke where he's he's in like the waiting room outside the warden's office and he's got a growling stomach It's very loud that feels kind of like a city lights joke where it's like this is a joke that is reliant on sound but isn't dialogue driven and
01:45:44
Speaker
Yeah, but there is some dialogue like early in the movie. I feel like like the evil boss is like speaking to people over his projection screen. And yeah, it does it does feel in the beginning of the movie like like the sound is kind of.
01:46:05
Speaker
representing, I mean, I guess I'm kind of going back on what I said earlier, because it does. This is getting way off topic from what we were just talking about. But the people who introduced the the feeding machine, they introduce themselves with a talking machine, right? Like they they press play on a little recorder to give their presentation about the eating about the horrific capitalist force feeding machine.
01:46:31
Speaker
And so they're kind of like drawing this comparison in the movie between talking, the talking technology and evil technology that's ruining everything. Yeah. These talkies, they're ruining pictures. It does kind of feel like Chaplin is definitely the most vocal person.
01:46:50
Speaker
who is like, I don't like talking in movies. I refuse to put it in there. Yeah, which I feel like I want to get into more heavily in a second. The back half of this movie
01:47:04
Speaker
It's kind of like not unrelated from the first half. This movie is very, its plot is very kind of like scatterbrained. It's just like, and then a bunch of stuff happens. Yeah. Classic silent comedy. There's like a whole section where he's, he's working as the night watchman in a department store, which has another like very famous gag in it where he's on roller skates and he's, roller skating right next to a giant hole, a drop off. And it looks like he's like skating right up to a ledge. And it was, it was done with optical effects and
01:47:33
Speaker
Like uh, uh, it's like a matte painting it was technically a matte painting but yeah, it was like forced perspective painting a glass I think
01:47:40
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it works really well. I was like kind of gasping when I hit when he got up to the edge. It looks pretty much flawless. Like it is even knowing kind of how it was done ahead of time. I was still just like, because he's blindfolded while he's doing it. Right. It feels it's a very like Harold Lloyd esque thing. Like I think Harold Lloyd is really the really pushing the kind of like almost falling jokes.
01:48:05
Speaker
But that whole section is full of great gags. There's the whole thing with the escalator. It's really good. And it's also in this section where the female lead of the movie is introduced who I don't think is ever given a name. Her name's Ellen.
01:48:20
Speaker
Okay. I don't know if that was ever once, uh, named in the film, but, um, a fairly, I think kind of typical, like Chaplin female lead character. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, but, uh, she's very good in this. I forget who the actor is who plays her. Um, I don't think I wrote it down. Paulette Goddard. Paulette Goddard does a lot of like, infuses a lot of personality into a, what could have been, I think, a very underwritten character.
01:48:49
Speaker
Yeah, I think that she adds this kind of scrappiness to the character. It's like a kind of resourceful underdog, basically, who's living on the margins, but also she's very generous to the people around her. She's trying to support the other homeless people, that kind of thing. And yeah, I don't really know how much I buy into the romantic plot of this movie. I don't really think that
01:49:17
Speaker
her and Troy Chaplin have a lot of like romantic chemistry. It doesn't help that Troy Chaplin is like 20 years older than her, but whatever. I'm making that number up, but it's like. I'm looking at it right now and he's 21 years older than. Oh, excuse me. I was actually a little under. They kind of because they're both like
01:49:39
Speaker
on the run from the cops somewhat. They're both trying to kind of like eke out life without having to like work for the man. Or like they do want to work, but it's like every time they try to like get a leg up, you know, through circumstance they get like chased by the cops. And so they move into like an old shack on the outskirts of town, which I was like, is this the same shack from the Gold Rush?
01:50:03
Speaker
To me, a lot of this movie felt like I'm going to revisit some of my greatest hits as the Tramp. That skating scene seemed to be a bit of a callback to the rink.
01:50:20
Speaker
And this seems to be a callback to the gold rush. Like it's like I'm saying goodbye to this character by like revisiting some of my greatest moments here. And yeah, I feel like that felt deliberate.
01:50:35
Speaker
Yeah. By the way, I just I was to put it in another worst context. This this movie is the the goodbye to the Tramp character. And Paulette Goddard was born four years before the Tramp debuted. She was she was four years old when Charlie started playing the Tramp. Thankfully, it doesn't it doesn't ever get like creepy in a way that some other early Chaplin movies can if you know the full context behind like who the people are in the scenes.
01:51:05
Speaker
Yeah, I think that like the tramp to him is like it's like this timeless clown character and it's like you know he has you know graduated some of his other leading ladies because like he felt like the tramp should be with kind of a young ingenue type but like there's a lot of
01:51:27
Speaker
bad sexist stuff that goes into this kind of thought process, but I get it in a way, right? Like, I don't necessarily agree with it, but I understand where he's coming from, where it's like, the tramp is not him, it is like, him, the 45-year-old man or whatever, it's like, the tramp is a, the tramp is like an iconic just being, right? So, yeah, the tramp likes ladies, so.
01:51:56
Speaker
But I think like there are some of his earlier movies that are like have things in them that are uncomfortable to watch. Whereas this one, I don't think that I think this movie. No, it's fine. More or less succeeds in being a just like innocent, sweet movie. Yeah, there are worse age gaps today. It doesn't. Yeah, it doesn't really change. Yeah.
01:52:15
Speaker
But so then it's like the trams kind of get different jobs. He goes back to the factory and we get more factory gags. There's a bit where a pocket watch gets flattened and there's like a cardboard cutout, like completely like paper thin flat pocket watch. Yeah. It's enormous because it's been flattened out. Ellen gets job at a like a singing cafe.
01:52:37
Speaker
where, like, all the wait staff have to sing, um, and then she gets the trampa job at that same place. But, oh, what's this? He can't sing. Oh, no. He can't... No words come out of his mouth. Which, at first I was like, oh, that's very deliberate. It's like, oh, no, like, the tramp can't sing because, like, he doesn't have a voice.
01:53:01
Speaker
But then he's a real Gordon Freeman type. Right. But then he sings in what in French or Italian. It is a garbled language that sounds like French, Italian and some other things, but it's not actually any real words. So it's right. He can't sing in English anyway. He can sing in a made up European language. I don't know. We should talk about that choice. It was it's an interesting choice. It feels like a very deliberate choice.
01:53:29
Speaker
Like, even to, you know, have the tramp talk at all, right? It also, I don't think is... It might be his voice, but it's definitely not, like, recorded sync sounds. Like, it was definitely... It's definitely lip-synced. You know, this movie is thinking about sound in silent movies. It's thinking about the tramp as this and City Lights, I believe, were both originally filmed, like, as attempts to be...
01:53:58
Speaker
actual talkies. And he found, at least with City Lights, that it just did not work with the Tramp. He felt like he must be a silent character, it just didn't make sense. This is the closest the Tramp ever gets to speaking, is he gets to sing a song.
01:54:14
Speaker
Yeah. And it's like, you know, I think that's an interesting decision that honestly, like, I don't know if I agree with that, like, you know, this is the goodbye to this silent character. Like, why not just keep him silent the entire time, you know?
01:54:29
Speaker
why it was a stunning scene to watch the tramp sing it was weird because we have been for uh over 20 years watching the tramp not make any yeah not make any noise so it was it was interesting in and of itself but i was like i'm not sure like what it's doing you know and whether it might have been better not done
01:54:52
Speaker
Yeah, the fact that it was done, I think it's like another kind of it's a fitting choice that it's like he's not saying anything, you know, right. And he's he's saying gibberish instead of vocalizing, but he's not really saying anything.
01:55:08
Speaker
Yeah. It just felt like a small betrayal, I think, you know? Yeah. I don't know it. Right. Because at first when it's like, oh, no, he's being asked to say and he can't. I was like, here we go. This is good. Yeah. Sing because he's a silent character. Yeah. And that's like, oh, all right. It's, you know, kind of splitting the difference a little bit. Yeah. I wasn't sure what the point was. I think that's that it's it's to get a laugh. Maybe I don't know. Maybe that that maybe we're thinking about it more than he ever did. I don't know.
01:55:37
Speaker
I don't know, it took five years between movies. He had time. There was some really funny jokes in this section, like him trying to get the food to the guy, and he keeps getting pushed away by the dancing crowd. Some classic restaurant door jokes, like we've seen with Keaton and Garbuckle. Restaurant door jokes are so good, and they're evergreen. They're always funny. It was very funny watching this after having watched the bear. The bear? You didn't say corner.
01:56:07
Speaker
Yeah. Pretty much. And then the cops show up and try to arrest them and they have to run away. And Charlie Chaplin knocks over every single chair. Like as he's being chased, he's just like throwing chairs behind him. Very good. And it ends on a very kind of classical Chaplin-esque ending of him looking like walking off into the distance. But he's got a lady with him this time.
Closure of the Silent Film Era
01:56:36
Speaker
So it's sort of like this final image of the tramp is him, as he's done in a bunch of other movies, like walking off away from camera into the distance. But he has a friend now. Yeah, he's finally found someone to walk with him. Right. He's finally made a friend. He's done being a kind of a Ronin type. Yeah. Oh, Ronin.
01:57:00
Speaker
Oh, man, that is... I love the idea. It's like, oh, you know, Charlie Taft's The Tramp. A real Ronin type. Chaplin-esque. He, um... I mean, I couldn't really imagine a version of Yojimbo with The Tramp. I think that could really work. Oh, my God! I kind of... I want to, like, make a sketch of that. That sounds very funny. Like, you could totally play Yojimbo as a comedy.
01:57:30
Speaker
You absolutely could. Yeah, there's like there's two warring gangs and like there's the tramp in the middle. I'm kind of surprised that that wasn't a movie that Chaplin ever made. That almost that might be more of a Keaton thing. I feel like.
01:57:45
Speaker
I think there is a Keaton movie that is that. Yeah, that one that like where it's like the West Virginian rival clans. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I haven't seen our hospitality. You have, right? Yeah, I would not compare it to you Jimbo, but I guess in a sense they're similar. So to get into the fact that this is a largely silent movie made in 1936,
01:58:13
Speaker
This does feel like this might be the last time someone made a silent movie. Like even in 1936, this is like kind of a throwback movie. It is like a distinctly un-modern movie that is like doing a thing that movies don't do anymore. Yeah, it's like making a 2D movie now.
01:58:35
Speaker
Did Jim's Cameron just walk in? But it does still feel like this might be the last time someone made a silent movie just because they wanted to and not because it was like... This movie isn't really like a pastiche of a bygone era necessarily, even though it is a kind of a throwback-y movie. It does feel like anytime someone made a silent movie after this, it is a like...
01:58:58
Speaker
not necessarily a parody but it is a like kind of reverential thing of like we're looking back on the the early days of Hollywood or the early days of film and it's we're making a silent film right whereas this is just like Charlie Chaplin was like fuck it I still want to have this movie mostly just be silent because I can and because that's how I like to make movies yeah and it's like it's made by people
01:59:24
Speaker
who made silent movies, sort of transitioning out of it, but it's still like, this feels like, even though it isn't technically a silent movie, there is talking in it, there is sound in it, it's kind of like the last real, the last thing I could ever describe as like a real silent movie. Yeah, I mean, you know, I, um,
01:59:46
Speaker
even though it isn't that, like by technicality. Yeah, I mean, I was seeing some people who perform music for silent movies talking about whether they thought that city lights counted. And to them, which I think is interesting too, like these musicians whose career is scoring silent movies, they don't consider modern times and city lights and sunrise to be silent movies.
02:00:13
Speaker
because to them the thing that makes a silent movie is the ability to create your own score to it. Which I think is you know it's an interesting distinction right like where this is like using some of the kind of using like a lot of the kind of aspects of silent movies but like something that like kind of proposing a
02:00:36
Speaker
like a fundamental idea of what a silent movie is being something that specifically does not have a specific score, rather than just a certain filmmaking technique. That this may be like the last American movie to like use silent movie techniques for a long time, I suppose. If we want to be agnostic to whatever our definition of silent movie is. Well, it is. It's one of the it's like you think it's
02:01:06
Speaker
It's something that is easily definable. And once you get into it, it's a lot harder to pin down. Yeah. I mean, that makes me think of, I just thought of right now, a movie that came out last year called No One Will Save You, which is a like home slash alien invasion movie. And there's no dialogue in the whole movie. Hmm. It is. I mean, it's a sound film like there's lots of sounds in it, but there is no spoken dialogue in the whole thing. Mm hmm.
02:01:35
Speaker
So it's like, is that a silent movie? There's less talking in that than there is in this. I like there's some animated stuff that kind of counts, like the Red Turtle, something like that. Right, yeah. Is it simply no talking? Which I don't really think it is. And I do think that the synchronized soundtrack is a pretty clear cut distinction of like,
02:02:00
Speaker
Is it a truly silent film if it has a like definitive soundtrack that if you take that away, it's not really the same movie? Yeah. As opposed to anything earlier where it is like, the music is what you put over it. Yeah, it's kind of like, what's my analogy here? What is it like?
02:02:23
Speaker
It's like silent movies are an egg. And these movies are like an egg product, you know? They are something that resembles an egg. What's the other food? There's another food that it's like, there's like a real version of it, and then there's like cheese products, you know? Oh, okay. Yeah. Silent movies are like eggs, and silent movies are like cheese, is what you're saying.
02:02:52
Speaker
Together they are an omelette. I'm saying that modern times is the spray cheese of silent movies. It resembles a silent movie, but it isn't technically a silent movie. Yes, that's my metaphor. Yeah, no, I actually do think that is a fairly accurate description, an apt of what this movie is, yeah.
02:03:16
Speaker
Were you going to say anything else about the silent sound aspects? I feel like I kind of took you on another train here. I don't think so. I mean, I just I think it's interesting that this does feel like a real kind of like button on the like silent movie era. Like it is. We were definitively past the silent movie era. That is done. Yeah. But this is this like one last like movie that is sort of luxuriating in what silent movies kind of used to be.
02:03:44
Speaker
for one last time before it's all gone.
02:03:51
Speaker
Yeah, you know, silent movies were existing for longer in other countries. This is 1936 is the year that like Yasujiro Ozu made his first sound movie, his first talkie. So he was making he and other Japanese directors were making silent movies up until this point and maybe past this point, I'm not sure. And I'm sure in like less developed countries that still had film industries like they're probably the transition was probably slower as well.
02:04:21
Speaker
But but yeah, at least for Hollywood. Yeah. Up until, I don't know, Mel Brooks made silent movie. Right. Yeah. It's like the next thing I can think of that is a like.
02:04:34
Speaker
deliberate sort of like, you know, silent movie thing. Although even that I think has tons of sound in it, like it's not a silent movie at all. But unless we got anything else to say about modern times, I think it's time to move on to another film about looking into the future.
Introduction to Things to Come
02:04:51
Speaker
In the year 2000. All the way to the year 2036. 2036 in this one. All the way to 12 years from now. In the film Things to Come. Yeah, this movie is fascinating.
02:05:08
Speaker
Fascinating, yes. Good, not sure, but fascinating, absolutely. I will say, so this movie is in three parts, more or less, and each kind of depicts a different era in the near to far-flung future. I think that the segments get progressively less good. I think the first segment is really good.
02:05:30
Speaker
like i well this is the first segment is they're like how did they predict it this well yeah the first so so this movie is initially set in 1940 four years in the future and it on on christmas eve or christmas day yeah in kind of a like seemingly
02:05:50
Speaker
England, but also like not explicitly England. They're kind of. I think it's England. But right. But it does have this kind of like last laugh asks like we're not going to give any place names. This is kind of just like in a country that
02:06:05
Speaker
It's got this kind of Twilight. This movie reminded me a lot of The Twilight Zone in many, many ways. Sure. Yeah. I mean, they explicitly call it every town. Right. Exactly. It's every town. Yeah. They're all talking with English accents. It was, I think, shot in England. So it's like, but it's, yeah.
02:06:26
Speaker
So this movie is imagining some kind of future land conflict that initiates another world war. The war to end all wars again. Huh. I know that seems a little far fetched. It's maybe a one year too late. Yeah.
02:06:52
Speaker
yeah it so here's the thing this this first part of the movie that's depicting the outbreak of this war is harrowing like it's yeah really well done i started watching this movie initially late at night
02:07:09
Speaker
And I watched about 15 minutes of it, and then I was like I'm too tired to watch this so I restarted it at a different point So I watched like the outbreak of this war and that night I had dreams about chemical weapons And I had a dream
02:07:31
Speaker
Okay, I had a really intense dream about a future American Civil War that I was witnessing the outbreak of, and as I was trying to escape with a bunch of other people on a boat,
02:07:47
Speaker
There were, like, chemical weapons that were being dropped from the sky, and we were all, like, suffocating inside of the boat. And I was, like, completely unable to breathe, and my vision was fading, and I died, and then I woke up. And, like, that was, like, what the beginning of this movie inspired in my mind. It was, like, a dream of, like, a slow, painful chemical weapon death. Damn.
02:08:17
Speaker
I did not have visceral nightmares from this movie that I can remember anyway. But yeah, the beginning of this movie is very, I was just mostly just taken aback by kind of how like spot on it is. And it does feel like they know what they're doing, making this stuff like. Right.
02:08:38
Speaker
It feels like they're talking around ever saying Germany or England, but it's like they say they know me in like an in a top gun fashion. Right. But it exactly. But it's like in 1936, like people knew people were like, this shit's going to go bad soon.
02:08:55
Speaker
Yeah. And then it's like, yeah, this this place that looks very much like England is getting bombed by airplanes and like buildings are blowing up and like people are running for cover in like subways. And it's like this all happened when they said it would. It's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. It's like the blitz. They didn't have a name for it. Like they didn't call it that. But it's like they are showing you scenes that are like very recognizably of the blitz.
02:09:22
Speaker
in 1936, four years before it happened. I mean, something about this kind of makes me wonder if this movie was like made from this kind of dread of the future that honestly, a lot of people have right now, you know? Yeah, absolutely. Like they could feel that World War II was about to happen. And so they were making this like expressing that. Thankfully, World War II did not go quite as badly as it is portrayed in this film.
02:09:51
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It became a complete like world ender in this. Right. It's like in this movie, World War Two becomes like more or less like the apocalypse. Like it. Yeah. There is chemical poison gas being used, which I get. Thankfully, World War Two was not really a thing.
02:10:11
Speaker
But it certainly was in World War One, which was why they were so fixated on it. Exactly. But then that in in the film, Things to Come leads to this like they call it wandering sickness. And there's just this like plague that spreads across the earth. Wouldn't know what that feels like. Yeah, due to the chemical weapons.
02:10:29
Speaker
Yeah, I want to talk also just about the very beginning of this movie too because like they're they're doing some like really kind of good stuff with like juxtaposing like this Christmas joy with With like the coming war also the effects in this opening section are phenomenal
02:10:48
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. The way that it's shot, there's a reason why it gave me nightmares. It's really effective, the way that it's done. On Christmas Day, the children are opening presents and they're playing with little toy soldiers.
02:11:10
Speaker
foreshadowing the violence that's about to happen and also like they're juxtaposing. There's a really striking shot as all the soldiers are being mobilized of a child pretending to be a soldier in the foreground with the shadows of all of the adult soldiers marching off in the background.
02:11:31
Speaker
Uh, like making, yeah, these juxtapositions between like innocence and violence in both the Christmas and the children with the war. There's like an extremely dark scene, uh, that's taking place during the war.
02:11:49
Speaker
where the main characters have the same actors play different people throughout the course of the movie. They are flying airplanes, dropping chemical weapons on the enemy. One of their airplanes crashes, and then the friend lands to go and rescue the guy who crashed.
02:12:10
Speaker
They're kind of like holding each other, wing style. And then you see like the chemical weapons that he just dropped rolling in on both of them. Like he is like creating his own demise by dropping the chemical weapons. And a little girl walks up, they're putting on their gas masks. A little girl walks up, presumably like one of the civilians of
02:12:40
Speaker
this country that they're bombing, and he realizes that he doesn't have long to live, so he gives the child his gas mask, and he's just sitting there going like, man, I probably just killed this kid's mom, and now I'm giving up my life to save her. It's a little bit like didactic, like he's talking to the camera more or less, but it's also like
02:13:04
Speaker
damn you know like jeez and then and then his friend leaves his gun behind yeah so he can shoot himself as instead of being you know slow death by gas yeah yeah and then the scene ends with a gunshot it's it's yeah it's really it's really serious stuff yeah it should be noted this movie was not made under the haze code because it was a uh a uk production
Post-Apocalyptic Society in Things to Come
02:13:30
Speaker
Yes, correct. But still, it's like, yeah, it's astoundingly dark. And like this first part is very serious, very gritty and realistic and serious compared to the next two parts, which are not. Yeah, I mean, they get progressively more kind of outlandish.
02:13:51
Speaker
Which is kind of the point but also yeah, it's like the opening starts like and it's so immediate and so like Terrifying yeah, how like peaceful life shattered by like the most horrific war Possible which is like I think that all these people Remembered happening within their lifetimes like yeah, they're like this happened like 20 years ago. This was not
02:14:14
Speaker
You know, we all remember this. Yeah. This first part is very, very good. Yes. And yeah, the second part is a lot of fun. And the third part is kind of like, what? Right. So then the second part is like we fast forward to 1970.
02:14:33
Speaker
Yes. We kind of like take little jumps ahead. It's like World War Two lasted until about 1966. Yeah, but then like the chemical weapons as you were saying like have created effectively like zombies. Right. It's like it like drives people mad.
02:14:50
Speaker
And it is a disease. So it's like this is kind of like a proto zombie movie for like 10 minutes. Yeah. Because I feel like early earlier there's a quite zombie and things like that that are more about sort of like the mind control and the kind of like weird like kind of black magic of zombies. Yeah.
02:15:09
Speaker
But it has the zombie flavor of like a post apocalypse and it's like yeah do we shoot this person who we recognize who used to be a person you know yeah they want they walk around is called the wandering sickness they walk around kind of with their hands in front of them right they got dressed in in you know rags and shambling around.
02:15:31
Speaker
So, we have that digression right at the end of the war, where the combination of the war and the wandering sickness has taken out about half of the entire world's population. They're trying to spend the next time rebuilding, basically, but it's a total apocalyptic
02:15:52
Speaker
situation and so right there the society that we're following is run by this like warlord who was like a former soldier that has like taken over this town yeah after the after the wandering sickness is done it's like 1970 and it basically becomes Mad Max at that point like right we go there's a um there's a Rolls Royce being pulled by horses yeah
02:16:14
Speaker
It's just like the garb of the people is very like Road War here Everyone starts wearing like medieval more like medieval style clothing like our and furs and things There's yeah, there's a lot that's clunky about this movie, but there's also it's like a lot. That's like really Presages so many things like World War two Zombies Mad Max, which I I did not expect from it. I
02:16:38
Speaker
What I knew about this movie was really only kind of like the third part of it, which is like the super like far-flung futuristic like spaceship stuff.
02:16:47
Speaker
this kind of like really intense like war movie thing and then like the like crazy like Mad Max post-apocalyptic stuff. I'm like, where is this movie going? This is crazy. Yeah, we should mention also this is written by H.G. Wells. It's oh, yeah, like based on a short story that he wrote and he wrote the screenplay as well. Yeah, I kind of get the sense he didn't really write it as a screenplay. He like wrote a thing that they then
02:17:14
Speaker
shot but I don't think he like wrote it as a screenplay necessarily even though I think it was intended to be written for the screen still he didn't use Celtics no no he did not but there's this whole kind of like fallout style like Brotherhood of Steel thing where people are trying to like preserve technology like the old technology and like keep that so they're like trying to
02:17:37
Speaker
Uh, they're like mechanics who were trying to like get airplanes working again and like make fuel for them and like, cause the, the warlord wants to keep the war going, basically. He's like, no, they're like, they're going to come get us. We need to like have weapons. We need defenses.
02:17:53
Speaker
Yeah, and he's like trying to like elevate himself to this like God status almost. Yeah. Like our king basically. He acts like a king, but like there's holes in his castle, you know? Yeah. Degraded columns and that kind of thing.
02:18:12
Speaker
This is pretty like, I don't know, standard, like post-apocalyptic. Yeah, there's a warlord. He's bad. We don't like him. Like, how are we gonna get out of this situation? Well, and then a space man shows up. Yeah, and then like a weird helicopter shows up.
02:18:27
Speaker
There is, oh, this is really where the Brotherhood of Steel thing comes in with like, there is this other society that is really futuristic and is like, no, we've kept technology going. We have flying machines, we have all this stuff. And like, we're past your petty conflicts. We don't need that.
02:18:43
Speaker
Yeah, they're peaceful. They're trying to get rid of the violence of the last, what, 40 years or so? Or 30 years. But there's also something a little bit ominous about them. A little sinister. One of those things, I was thinking about this the other day. Why are utopias always feel sinister in things?
02:19:10
Speaker
In Star Trek, when they land on a planet and everyone's just super happy all the time, it's like, what's going on? Who's getting melted in the basement? Something's wrong here. I just think that's interesting how it feels
02:19:26
Speaker
like we reject like complete like comfort and and like safety it's like if if something's like too happy we're like no this something's wrong like there has to be some dark underbelly to this
02:19:42
Speaker
Right. It's like I don't know if the movie really ever fully comes down and says like these people are bad. I mean, honestly, I think the movie like the movie is on their side, especially as we move into the third section. They kind of overwhelm with their amazing 1970s like aircraft carriers in the sky kind of situation. So, yeah, they kind of roll in and take over this area and they're like, we've defeated the warlord.
02:20:12
Speaker
Violence is over now. Yeah. And then we go from we have we have a flying wing. Yeah. And there are all these people kind of dressed in these like, I mean, you know, 60s, 50s, 60s, sci fi kind of clothing of like jumpsuits, you know, matching jumpsuit type with helmets.
02:20:34
Speaker
which it does feel like something from like a 50s or a 60s sci-fi thing. And it predates that by like 20 years, which is interesting. I mean, I do think 60s or like 50s sci-fi especially was taken a lot from like 30s pulp.
02:20:50
Speaker
stories also sure yeah a lot of this image you probably did exist in some way but like cinematically we haven't really seen like many depictions of the future we haven't we have seen have not like been this thoroughly i don't know this thoroughly designed in a way that i think we can kind of recognize this something that like if you know logan's run in before kind of visions of the future yeah yeah we flash forward to 2036
02:21:19
Speaker
Then it is kind of, instead of being this like post-apocalyptic wasteland, it is like this kind of more utopian society. Yeah. Everyone has all of their needs accounted for. There's like massive underground cities. Cities are all underground now. No more windows. There's a guy who's like talking about like, oh, back in the past, he's like an old man, wise and old man. It's like, I remember when I was a child, we back in during the age of windows.
02:21:52
Speaker
Weird take, incorrect, but I get where you're coming from. Hey, in the next 12 years, we're cutting all windows out. No more windows. Mac OS across the board. Yeah, in 2036, I'll be 43 years old. 43 years old.
02:22:16
Speaker
Yeah, damn. I'm like, it's not that old. The future city does look, it does have like a very futuristic aesthetic that I still feel like, still feels kind of like it reminded me of the Oculus in New York City, which is like a very wild looking futuristic building, but it's like, it doesn't look like 30s futurism. I guess it has a slightly more kind of art deco
02:22:45
Speaker
design to it but it's yeah I think a lot of the futurism in this movie is doesn't feel as kind of dated as I might have expected it to hmm yeah yeah
02:22:56
Speaker
They sit on clear chairs. Yeah, everyone's wearing capes.
Utopian Future and its Challenges
02:23:01
Speaker
I do hope in the next 12 years, we go full capes. Just everyone's got a cape. I don't know. It's not good for airplane jet engines. True. That is true. Or revolving doors. But there's also a thing where there's seemingly no humor in the future anymore. Because no one has any hardships, there's no jokes. Humor is like a lost form.
02:23:25
Speaker
Yeah, I think, you know, the movie. So the conflict of this third section is between the kind of sort of humor lists. We have turned ourselves into machines, but we are ultimately correct establishment of the future utopia and then a kind of easily riled up mob.
02:23:48
Speaker
uh that yeah uh that decide you don't want to go to the moon yeah they're they're like too much progress too much stuff happening let's return to cavemen let's become let's be it's like it's like humanity is too content we have to rebel right i think that is if nothing else a very interesting like philosophical question where it's like if you have ultimate comfort and contentment within a society like
02:24:35
Speaker
I think they don't like portray it as a perfect actually utopia because one of the main complaints of these people is not just like we don't like progress and we want to stir things up. It's also like them saying that this constant progress has made it so that we can't ever rest.
02:24:43
Speaker
is that sustainable? Are humans built to live that way?
02:24:53
Speaker
Like we're not allowed to just sit and enjoy our lives because we're constantly having to work to make the society more and more advanced. We need growth. Yeah. It's all about growth. They need to see that second quarter growth.
02:25:09
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, honestly, like I get them from that point of view. I don't know about like, I don't know about like, you know, sabotaging a moon launch. That's cool. Why sabotage that, you know? Although even that the thing of the like, we don't want. Why are we going to the moon? This is pointless. Like there's nothing up there was a thing people said when we landed on the actual moon. It was like, why are we going to the moon? We have so many problems here already. Like you spent so much money to go to the moon.
02:25:37
Speaker
Right. I mean, yeah, I mean, which is also like, you know, I think it's very cool that we landed on the moon. But like there are a lot of things on Earth that we could spend money on to make our lives better. You know. Yeah. Yeah. And there's also like the kind of complicating factor of it's like there's almost like a kind of new king and dynastic thing going on because like the people who are the beneficiaries of a lot of the the best technology are like the children of the guy who leads the society.
02:26:07
Speaker
which they didn't specifically call out as one of their complaints, but it did kind of seem a little off. But yeah, I thought this last part was kind of boring and like it didn't... I don't know. It was just fine. Right, it raises some interesting questions kind of philosophically, but yeah, it isn't nearly as fun to watch as the other ones. There are some just kind of fun, like futuristic things, like someone has a kind of an Apple watch,
02:26:34
Speaker
had the thing going on, which that was like, you know, Dick Tracy had one of those too. There is the the way that they're going to get to the moon is similarly to a trip to the moon. They have a giant space gun. It's going to shoot a space bullet into the moon. Hey, at least Fritz Lang was like, no space gun. We're just going to build a rocket. That's going to that's going to be how it goes. We're going to consult with Nazi rocket engineers.
02:27:01
Speaker
because they know that we need to build rockets, as we did as Americans, consult with Nazi rocket engineers. Exactly. The same rocket engineers. Literally the same people. This does have a really good sense of scale with the miniatures. They really sell the kind of grandiosity of this future. The sets are crazy in this movie. Yeah. There's a mob that attacks the moon gun, but it goes off.
Philosophical Themes and Comparisons
02:27:30
Speaker
there's kind of ends in this like kind of monologue about the future of humanity and how like
02:27:35
Speaker
We have to progress. Humanity is built to strive for more. It's a little earnest. All of the universe or nothing is what he says, which I think is intended in an optimistic way, but I think that phrase, all the universe or nothing sounds- It sounds like manifest destiny. It sounds bad. This movie ended on a note where I was like, huh, not sure how I feel about that.
02:28:02
Speaker
Yeah, like I said earlier, I don't know if I think this movie is good necessarily, but I think it is fascinating. I think the ideas it's playing with and the ways in which it is looking towards the future and trying to like
02:28:16
Speaker
Not necessarily predict things, but it does end up predicting a lot of things fairly accurately. And I think it is also just that it is this like very kind of like philosophically minded science fiction thing. Yeah. Much like the Twilight Zone. It has a very Twilight Zone-y vibe to it. It's three episodes of the Twilight Zone. Kind of, yeah. That have this kind of, yeah, that's like generational sort of Cloud Atlas thing with like the same actors reappearing. Yeah.
02:28:46
Speaker
I think it is a really interesting movie to watch, especially in its historical context. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think it's... I think there are parts of it that are really good, obviously. I think there are parts of it that are kind of lame. But I think that all of it... I think it's worth watching because it's really interesting. It's really fascinating.
02:29:07
Speaker
yeah yeah i'd like to watch the commentary i didn't get a chance to did you have a favorite film that we watched fury me too fury was like head and shoulders above everything else i thought i mean modern times was quite good uh i like modern times i like mr deeds fine like i i think that a lot of the other movies we watched were like
02:29:29
Speaker
enjoyable, good movies. But I was like kind of stunned by Fury. It left me enraptured. Yeah, it's just like it's so intense. It is it is so kind of cutting in its it's like it is a very critical movie. And a move with a lot in its mind and a very angry movie naturally with that title.
02:29:56
Speaker
But I agree with its overall stance that violence is this weird thing that takes over people's minds. And unless you actively go against it and call it out, it is just going to spread and it's going to pull everyone down with it.
02:30:19
Speaker
And it's like, ugh, I was just like, damn. It's real for that. This movie is like hitting on so many levels. If only it started with us. And feels so relevant to like the moment that we're now talking about it in. For sure, yeah. No, it's a very serious movie. My joke that I was about to make was that if only it started with revenge is just sort of cold, old Klingon proverb. Old Klingon proverb.
02:30:49
Speaker
It really was the Kill Bill of 1936. Sure, yeah. Why not? No, it wasn't. Just one last fun thing to say about Fury is they call avocados alligator pears. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Which I did not know that that was everything that people call avocados. And I looked it up and the reason they stopped is because people thought alligator pears sounded gross.
02:31:14
Speaker
But I don't. I think they sound cool. And so I'm going to start calling albacatas alligator pears. I really need to like deliberately make a list of 1930s things that I want to start saying. Well, because it's think about it. It's like, hey, what's this? What's this fruit? Looks kind of like a pear, but it's not. No, it's perfect. It looks kind of like an alligator. It's shaped like a pear, but with sort of an alligator texture.
02:31:37
Speaker
Yeah, in addition to needing to make a list of 1930s slang to integrate into my life, I have a running list of annoying hobbies that I can take up from the 1930s. For the last year it was tap dancing, and this one I want to walk around with the tuba.
02:31:59
Speaker
Send in more ideas for us to be annoying. I love the idea of you becoming a like a 1930s comedian who's just tap dancing and playing tuba and like poking people's eyes and just doing doing Marx Brothers bits. Oh, yes. Yeah, I've attempted the harpo like putting people's hands in your pockets.
02:32:21
Speaker
I've been attempting the harpo grab your hand and hold my leg up with your hand thing, and it doesn't ever turn out well. It's just like, what the hell are you doing? You're annoying me. That's how every character responds to it in a Marx Brothers movie also. No, but they just drop it immediately. It's not like a coyote hanging over the cliff kind of thing where they don't realize that they're holding my hand or holding my leg. They don't let the joke land. No.
02:32:50
Speaker
Yeah, they're just like, if only I could be a cartoon character. Anyway, thank you all for listening slash watching slash we appreciate you all for checking us out. Make sure to take a look at our Instagram. We post stuff there sometimes and subscribe and all that jazz, you know.
02:33:14
Speaker
I feel like I should say this at the beginning instead of three hours in. Well, this is your reward if you've somehow stuck it through this long. Your reward for watching three hours of YouTube or podcast is to hear people say, please subscribe, the thing that you don't hear enough. Hit the bell icon. Hit the bell. Yes. I will see you next year, Glenn. See you next year.