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1930 - Pre-Code Thirst Traps
20 Plays2 years ago
We kick off the 1930s with some European avant-garde films, more Marx Bros, tuxedo wearing cabaret singers, and both somber and bro-y WW1 epics!
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 1930 Films Discussed playlist right here!
00:00:00 - Intro
00:03:31 - The News of the Year
00:06:39 - Swing You Sinners!
00:13:41 - Dizzy Dishes
00:18:29 - Borderline
00:34:40 - L'Age D'Or
00:48:59 - Animal Crackers
01:02:29 - Morocco
01:17:53 - Hell's Angels
01:51:49 - All Quiet on the Western Font
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Overview
00:00:11
Speaker
Hello and welcome to One Week, One Year, a podcast where we watch and discuss a year of film history, every episode starting in 1895, the dawn of cinema. This week we are on our 40th episode, which is 1930.
00:00:27
Speaker
Is it a 40th episode? Yes, it is. OK, because we've got a couple of bonus ones in there. So I wasn't sure what the number is. That's counting the bonus episodes and the wrap-up episodes. So we're on episode 40 right now. I'm
Hosts and Platforms
00:00:41
Speaker
one of your hosts, Chris Ellee. I'm a film projectionist. And joining me, as always, is. I am Glenn Covell. I'm a filmmaker.
00:00:48
Speaker
And we are podcasters who have painstakingly gone through every single year in film history up to 1930. And we're gonna work on this next year for you. If you are listening to this on your podcast app, you can watch it on YouTube if you like.
00:01:08
Speaker
uh there is a uh you know we show uh we've got some little bonus information on the youtube upload uh but now that all this stuff is public domain or not public domain anymore and uh the uh people the rights holders have been a little um mean to us as far as uh
00:01:28
Speaker
Fair use and all that, which this should be. But anyway, we don't really have film clips anymore on YouTube. If you'd like to see clips, you can watch some of our older episodes that are public domain. But if you don't want to watch, you can listen on your podcast app of choice. Just search us up there.
Personal Stories and Anecdotes
00:01:45
Speaker
And yeah, follow us on Instagram, all that kind of stuff. And let's get started with the show. Okay. Glenn, how's it going? What's going on?
00:01:54
Speaker
Not much, still unemployed, but you know, it's been nicer in New York City. I went to the park this past week. You mean Central Park? I did go to Central Park, yeah, because I was uptown for once. I'm not usually around there, but it was a nice day. So I went to Central Park.
00:02:13
Speaker
And not once, I passed not one but two groups of people that were playing the Alicia Keys New York song, just blasting it. And so it was very like cliche, you know, Sunday afternoon in New York. Were they tourists or were they like? I don't know. It was just people were just loving being in New York that day, which, you know, it's a good feeling.
00:02:35
Speaker
I'm in Denver. Different city. How's that? That's okay. No one playing the Alicia Keys Denver song? No, they're all playing the John Denver song about West Virginia. Oh, okay. Which is still a Denver song somehow. No, that's a lie. I don't know. I've got my... I forgot if I mentioned this recently, but I've got my I think you should leave themed party coming up.
00:03:05
Speaker
And so I'm so annoyed with myself that I probably can't go. Hot dogs, sloppy steaks. We're also gearing up for the Denver Silent Film Festival, which is going to be in about a month. Yeah. But that's happening now.
Historical Context in 1930
00:03:22
Speaker
What was happening in 1930? Glenn, would you like to give us a little extra context for what was happening in 1930? Sure thing. The news of the year 1930.
00:03:34
Speaker
The Indian National Congress declares its independence from the British Empire. The existence of the celestial body Pluto is confirmed. Mahatma Gandhi sets off on a 200-mile march towards the sea with 78 followers to protest against the British monopoly on salt. Amy Johnson becomes the first woman to fly solo from England to Australia. The shadow debuts on the radio, striking fear to the hearts of listeners across the United States. The Vietnamese Communist Party is formed.
The Pre-Code Era in Hollywood
00:04:05
Speaker
The motion picture production code set forth by Willie Hayes is adopted in Hollywood, but only loosely enforced. And that last one is relevant, I think, to the movies we watched. That's right. We're in pre-code era, baby. Yeah, which I had a like passing understanding of, but I have only recently kind of fully understood what the pre-code era is.
00:04:29
Speaker
Which is, well, it's sort of loose, right? Like what the start and end of it are. It's generally considered 1927 and 1934, which is sort of the period of time between the introduction of sync sound, feature films with sync sound, and the formal enforcement of the Haze code, which didn't really happen until 1934.
00:04:56
Speaker
and so there's this pretty brief kind of period in Hollywood where the Hayes Code existed but no one really cared about it and so the movies are a little bit racier a little bit more violent
00:05:10
Speaker
There's more cussing in them. They're still very tame by modern standards, but it's like, it's kind of cool to see just like a little bit old movies that are a little bit more relaxed with their self censorship. Yeah. And these next four years of movies, they will be potentially the racist movies, the racist Hollywood movies that we're going to be getting for the next 30 years, pretty much. Yeah. Which I mean, from what I've seen is like,
00:05:40
Speaker
It's not that much, but it's still more than, certainly more than like 40s or 50s movies tend to be, so. I guess also people consider 1930 to be the beginning of the Golden Age of Hollywood. Oh, well, that seems maybe a bit, that's even looser than pre-code, I feel like, Golden Age. The peak studio system during the sound era, I suppose. Right, yeah. Well, it is sort of colloquially, I guess,
00:06:10
Speaker
at least Americans consider the Golden Age, right? It's like, it's old timey. They're making musicals and gangster pictures. It's the, yeah, it's the classic stuff. It's the classic. Why don't we jump right from one segment into the next with One Week One Real?
Fleischer Brothers' Animation
00:06:31
Speaker
A couple movies that are actually one reel this time. Yeah, right. Very true. Maybe even half a reel, actually. Yeah, they're pretty short. Because we've got two Fleischer Brothers animated films this episode. Yeah, which we haven't talked about any Fleischer Brothers stuff yet, right? Oh, we definitely have. Oh, we have. Yeah.
00:06:53
Speaker
Out of the Inkwell, certainly. Oh, okay, right. God, there's been others. I think we talked about one recently, too. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah, because they're sort of the, I guess at this point, a rival to Disney's animation. Yeah, these two animated shorts, Dizzy dishes and swing you sinners. Both produced by Max Fleischer, but directed by Dave Fleischer.
00:07:23
Speaker
feel very kind of like quintessential like thirties cartoon. It's good. It's good stuff. Yeah, in both good and bad. I mean, the only bad way I would say is that there's some definitely some kind of the racism. Yeah, the racism, the caricature and the the. Yeah.
00:07:44
Speaker
That's creeping in there for sure. It's not maybe as in your face as maybe some other stuff, but it's there occasionally just like, oh, yikes. Yeah, specifically in these two with some kind of random like Jewish stereotype kind of guys. Yeah. Yeah. But on both of these, I was just like, oh, yeah, that's that's there. There we go.
00:08:12
Speaker
But other than that, I think they're both pretty fun. Just in how silly and kind of... I don't know, they both have a lot of fun with...
00:08:24
Speaker
cartoon logic, I guess. I think we talked about that a bit with the early Disney stuff also. These feel like they're taking it a little further even. Yes. Honestly, I really I like what these are doing more than what Disney's doing right now. I think like the Fleischer brothers, as you were saying, really define that 1930s cartoon style. And Disney has always been in Fleischer's shadow up till now and only really appear recently.
00:08:53
Speaker
These movies, they feel like kind of amped up, like let's take cartoons to their extremes right now. I think some of the cell animated stuff that we have been talking about in years past has been like cartoony and squashy and stretchy at moments. But like Swing You Sinners is just so much vibrant movement, off the wall cartooniness.
00:09:22
Speaker
yeah unreal things happening that like you know things stretching and transforming and in cartoon logic ways right it's not even it's not even squashing stretch it's like things like transforming and morphing into other things yeah just through you know cartooniness like anything can be anything else yeah they both have a bit of a kind of like
00:09:48
Speaker
dream or nightmare logic to them, right? Anything is anything. And so it is the speed at which like characters or objects will just become other things is very palpable.
00:10:04
Speaker
it's all very like let's throw any idea that we've got out there and then yeah like make it zany looking i mean it's almost like the kind of early slapstick shorts where they have a premise and then they're like let's get everything that we can out of this premise but
00:10:23
Speaker
These get to be a lot more visually inventive because they're not based in the real world, which is good because movies due to the restrictions of sound are getting less visually inventive. So cartoons can pick up the slack. Yeah. Although these cartoons have sound because they are, as stated in the opening credits of each, talk cartoons, talk cartoons, talk cartoons, talk cartoons. I hardly know our tunes.
00:10:51
Speaker
And they're both musicals, I guess, kind of, or they're both very musically based. Yeah, they include music. I mean, so Swing You Sinners is about Bimbo, which is the Fleischer Brothers cartoon dog mascot.
00:11:10
Speaker
who probably Mehemaus was sort of made in the image of in certain ways. He is trying to steal a chicken, he gets caught by a cop, he runs into a graveyard, and then a bunch of ghouls and spirits chastise him for being a sinner and stealing chicken, and they do that in song. And then they do a bunch of creepy stuff to scare the daylights out of him.
00:11:37
Speaker
Yeah, there's a lot of dance and gravestones and butt-slapping ghosts, all kinds of fun stuff. It feels like an evolution of skeleton dance, but like way more involved. Yeah, yeah. I do think comparing it to skeleton dance or like the early Mickey Mouse stuff, I do feel like the animation in these feels a little looser and kind of less mechanical than those. It's got more energy.
00:12:04
Speaker
Yeah, they both feel like you can kind of see the limits of the early animation in terms of like, you can kind of see where they're, where the walls are almost, even if they're very off, both these are very off the wall and very like, don't really feel like they've been restricted in any sense in terms of what they can put on screen. There's a little bit of like rough edges on some of the animation just because of how early it is, I think.
00:12:34
Speaker
There's rough edges, but also like it is doing stuff that is kind of more involved than a lot of current day animation does. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think that animation nowadays, they found ways to.
00:12:50
Speaker
it economize on things in a way that might not be like visually obvious all the time. But it comes at the cost of this rubber hose animation is what they call it, like the rubber hose arms and legs these characters have. Because it lets it's just animation is not really this expressive anymore. Yeah, for the most part.
00:13:13
Speaker
So, cheap in some ways, but very expensive in other ways. It's a catchy tune. True. It's always a vibe having ghosts sing about your demise to you. Which even the premise feels like such a 1930s cartoon premise of go to a graveyard and have ghosts sing at you.
00:13:38
Speaker
about how bad you are for stealing a chicken. The other short, dizzy dishes, like it structurally feels a lot more like an early chaplain or Keaton short. Yeah. It's like a guy's a waiter, hijinks. Yes. Yeah. Hijinks happen. But yeah, every character in this one is an anthropomorphic animal, including the first appearance of Betty Boop.
00:14:08
Speaker
who in her first appearance is a dog. She looks like more like a human than a lot of the other characters but she's got these long dog ears which you could almost see as if she had like gauges in her ears and took them out and they're just dangling there. She got floppy dog ears but otherwise it's fairly recognizable as
00:14:28
Speaker
Betty Boop. Beatrice Boop, the beloved. She got the same voice. She got the same catchphrase. Yeah, she just kind of appears in there. It's mostly still about Bimbo the dog. Yeah. But, but yeah. This has a bit more like dialogue than Swing You centers.
00:14:46
Speaker
Mm-hmm, and I feel like the it feels like very like it's one of those things where you a lot of things from 1930s are Less kind of right. We have a picture in our heads like what do people talk like in the 1930s? And it's usually this very exaggerated, you know made Atlantic accent sort of thing and I feel like the dialogue in dizzy dishes is exactly this is because it's a cartoon already is exactly what
00:15:10
Speaker
It's like the cartoon voice of people in the 1930s, how they spoke. It's very like, meh, meh, meh, meh. You know, it's just this like nasal kind of loud way of talking. Yeah, yeah, very, very kind of meh, see, kind of stuff. Yeah, yeah. Which I think we're going to be getting into some of the actors that actually popularized that, where that voice comes from pretty soon, which would be fun to talk about.
00:15:39
Speaker
I'm looking at my Ultimate Gangsters Collection Blu-ray right past the camera. There you go. Yeah, Daisy Dishes is kind of insane. There's a lot of very weird jokes in it. There's a big mean dog, I think he's a dog, like a bulldog, who's very hungry and wants a roast duck. But because Ben was taking too long in the kitchen, he decides to make a sandwich out of the dishes on the table and eat that, and then proceeds to eat the table.
00:16:08
Speaker
He first eats the leg of the table. He's the leg of the table which has a bone in it. Which is like perfect cartoon logic. He breaks the leg off the table and takes a big bite out of it like it's a turkey leg but then there's a bone in it. And they eat the bone. Which introduces a whole concept of why are there bones in the table. Terrifying.
00:16:30
Speaker
That was I think the thing I laughed at the most was just this guy eating everything around him and it's almost like just through his interacting with it, it kind of becomes food.
00:16:41
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And the whole time he's just like, where's my roast duck? Yeah. Yeah. And all the wild bimbo is getting distracted by various things. He is preparing the roast duck by making it, putting, pretending it's a barber situation and covering and shaving cream and all. At one point, he like chops up a bunch of things with knives that then
00:17:04
Speaker
Somehow turned into a train that he rides away on. I feel like that was kind of an interesting joke because the chopping becomes so fast and so rhythmic that it sounds like the chug, chug, chug of a train. And then it just becomes a train, all of the stuff that he's chopping up. Because I was like, oh, he's going to make food out of this that he's chopping up. But then, no, it becomes a train for his escape. Yeah, and they just burst through the wall on his food train. Yeah. Yeah, they're a lot of fun.
00:17:35
Speaker
Minus the character stuff, but... Yeah. I guess the Fleischer brothers are Jewish, so it, uh...
00:17:43
Speaker
It's like get them licensed to have. Maybe. I don't know. Sure. Yeah. I mean, it's it's just an example of right. We don't see animation like this very much anymore outside of Adventure Time or Cuphead Cuphead that thank you Cuphead, which is specifically referencing Fleischer Brothers animation. Yeah. So it's like it's cool to see this style, but it also comes with this thing of like, oh, yeah, the 1930s were way more racist.
00:18:12
Speaker
Speaking of racism, let's talk about a movie that addresses that partially. Our first feature film of the episode, so our feature presentation. And now we're pleased to bring you our feature presentation. And now we're here to talk about Borderline, a movie that I had never heard of before like a week ago.
00:18:38
Speaker
But so I have a story about how I watch this movie. Do we start? Should we start there? Yeah, you know the story already, but for the listener. So we were researching what movies to watch and this movie came up. I was like, this seems like an interesting thing that doesn't get talked about a whole lot. And it's kind of a cool, deep cut. Maybe you lesser known or sort of more kind of independent, independently produced movie. And it does exist online.
00:19:04
Speaker
to watch, but in researching it we both found out that a 16mm print of this is owned by the New York Public Library.
00:19:16
Speaker
It just says that on the Wikipedia page for us. It's like, there's a 60 millimeter print in the New York Public Library. So since I live in New York, I was like, will they let me just watch that one? And it turns out, yes, they will, if you ask. I somehow have gone this long without getting a library card at the New York Public Library. I had a Brooklyn Public Library card, but not a New York Public Library card.
00:19:41
Speaker
So I went to the main branch, the Ghostbusters one, to get my library card, and it was very frustrating to have to wade through tourists. It's an amazing building, but it was annoying to have to wade through tourists. I was like, I'm here for library stuff, excuse me. And then I found out that the print is not there, it's at the performing arts library in Lincoln Center, which makes sense.
00:20:08
Speaker
So I went up there and the print actually hadn't shown up the day that I went, that like I set my appointment for. So I went back the next day and the print had shown up. And yeah, kind of like private screening, like a little room they have there, like just like a library room, but they have a projector, they have a screen, they have a bunch of, they had a bunch of old editing machines also, which is pretty cool.
00:20:32
Speaker
Wow. It was like a screening room that they used for this kind of thing. I don't think it was built for that purpose. It was sort of more of like like a classroom or like a conference room sort of thing. But yeah, it's they have a 60 millimeter projector. I think the print that I watched. Was struck, I think, in the 80s after the movie was sort of rediscovered. So it was not an original print of it since I think it was shot on 35 millimeter and it was naturally would have been shot on nitrate. Yeah. So.
00:21:02
Speaker
I don't think they would love to let me watch a nitrate print. But shout out to John at the New York Public Library for projecting it and talking to me about old film stuff. And yeah, I thought this was a cool and unusual movie for when it came out. I got to say, I didn't watch it under such special circumstances. And when I started watching the movie, I was like, oh, man.
00:21:32
Speaker
I started watching and I was immediately leaning forward, like, all right, I'm going to watch this thing in a very academic way and try to absorb as much of it as I can. Yeah, if you have a projectionist who is projecting it just for you, it's not something that you can easily just tune out. Yeah, I had to score it. It's a silent print. So I had to just throw headphones on and listen to some contemporary classical music on Spotify just to give it some score, which I found out is very different from the score that is on
00:22:02
Speaker
the version of it that's online. I don't like that score. I think that's part of why I didn't, I wasn't feeling the movie at the beginning. Yeah, I'm curious how much that would affect it, right? Because it's like neither of the scores that we watched it with I think are original to what, you know, I don't think this movie has a canonical score to it. We should probably talk about what this movie is and what it's about and who made it.
00:22:27
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I guess I'll just on the music really quick, like I the the music on the criterion release of this is some kind of like freeform jazz kind of stuff and which I don't conceptually have a problem with. But I felt like it didn't really fit very well to the scenes that were happening in the movie. I felt like tonally it like it was very dissonant and it was really like taking me out of the movie. And
00:22:57
Speaker
So the first like half of the movie, I was like kind of hating it. And I was like, all right, let me reset. Let me like re like reset my mind. I put on some different music that I just found off YouTube. And and I was like, let me let me focus in again on what's happening. And I did appreciate it afterward. So what was the music that you found?
00:23:20
Speaker
I just searched for mystery movie score and then played whatever playlist came up on YouTube. Yeah. Because I listened to it with, what's his name? Max Richter, I think, is the composer who has done, I think, a couple of film scores, but is more of a kind of like contemporary classical composer. His one thing that he's most famous for is On the Nature of Daylight, which is in every movie.
00:23:50
Speaker
Every movie, every TV show, if there's a sad scene that that piece plays, it's in so many things. It's very it's very good. But it's also at the point now where if I hear it in something, I'm just like, oh, here we go. It was maybe a little bit dour for I mean, the movie's not.
00:24:08
Speaker
the most chipper movie in the world, but it maybe could have used something a little faster tempo. But anyway. Right. This movie is made in a fashion that is very inspired by Soviet montage. It's about something, I think, a little smaller scale than Bausch and Potemkin. Yeah.
00:24:33
Speaker
a little more emotionally driven, but it's applying a lot of the same sort of techniques as far as like quick cutting and showing parts of the scene to that are off the action to just kind of get a sense of what's going on or like cutting to something that is sort of metaphorically resonant to what is happening in the main scene and just having like a shot of something else.
00:25:04
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's part of what was sort of putting me off the movie a little bit because I think that like when you combine it with this kind of like wordless emoting, it feels a little formless. But I think that some of it was quite well done, especially around the end of the movie. Yeah, well, I think I think especially early on, it's the movie doesn't give a lot of it's not really prioritizing narrative clarity.
00:25:31
Speaker
Like, for the first half, I didn't really understand what was happening in terms of the plot or how the characters related to each other or, you know, you kind of pick up things just by how, you know, how people are reacting to certain things. But it's like, there's very few intertitles in this and it starts kind of, and media res, like it doesn't really have like an introduction where you like meet all the characters and find out who they are. It sort of starts with like the plot already in motion.
00:26:00
Speaker
And it's really going for, I think the kind of montage editing, also just the writing and the performances are really going for sort of creating a feeling over narrative clarity, right? It's like a lot of the reasons for individual shots or individual edits are not to sort of like convey a specific piece of information, but more to kind of give an emotional feeling.
00:26:30
Speaker
Yeah, it's vibes forward, which I think maybe stands in contrast to Eisenstein, at least what we've seen of him. Because Eisenstein is building a vibe, but every cut has a purpose. And I think sometimes this is doing some cutting that I'm like, OK, but why did you do that, though? Yeah, there's a lot of thematic intercutting, where it will cut from a person to just
00:26:58
Speaker
wind blowing through some trees or a kitty. There's some of it which is very abstract, right? And some of it which I think is like really, really great uses of like match cuts. There's a couple really, really good match cuts in this movie. Yeah, definitely. One with two knives that is like perfect. It is like a great example of what a match cut kind of should be.
00:27:25
Speaker
Yeah, from a scene of somebody kind of goofing around with a knife and then another scene where someone is kind of taking a bloody knife that they just killed someone with and throwing it in a bucket of water. Yeah, it's so seamless and it's like on the action so perfectly that for a split second you think that it's the same knife and then you realize we've cut away to a different scene. Yeah. Yeah.
00:27:48
Speaker
It's very good. There's something happening on one side of a door and someone's got their hand like on the door handle and then you are cutting to the other side of the door to a hand that's on the other side of the door handle to transition from one side of the door to the other scene wise. Good stuff. This movie is made in Switzerland and it has a lot of
00:28:11
Speaker
I think there's a lot of almost just like little kind of vignettes of like Swiss life or kind of the landscape and the countryside of Switzerland, which I don't know. I like landscapes. I appreciated that stuff. Yeah. It kind of reminded me almost of to make a comparison of like a contemporary or like a modern filmmaker. It has almost a sort of like Terence Malachi vibe.
00:28:37
Speaker
I could see that. Yeah. In terms of like focusing a lot on just like the natural world and sort of like how the characters are interacting with it and also just drawing parallels between
00:28:46
Speaker
people's state of mind and sort of the, you know, the landscape around them. People's state of mind and the way that reeds move in the wind. Boy, boy had it. There are some reeds in this movie blowing in the wind. Let me tell you, which is it's very cinematic. What can I say? People filmmakers love reeds and you know what? Count me amongst them. Filmmakers, not reed lovers.
00:29:10
Speaker
Both, you know? Give me a good Frag Mightys any day of the week. Frag Mighty Joe Young, the perfect confluence of filmmaking. It's better a gorilla that likes brushing his hand through reeds.
00:29:34
Speaker
Uh, this movie is about racial prejudice, uh, and, uh, love quadrangles, uh, as, as many films are. Yeah. And, and, uh, yeah, there's a lot of, um, there's just like a lot of like intrigue of like, I'm with this person, but I love this person, but that makes me jealous. So I'm going to confront this person about that.
00:30:00
Speaker
That's like the meat of the movie, generally. Yeah. Then sprinkle in like how the two of the people involved are black in a white town and that there are people who are not fans of them because they're racist. Yeah. Yeah. The movie makes that pretty explicit. There are some slurs thrown in there. So if you wondered how racist the characters were, it's like, oh, no, they're they know.
00:30:26
Speaker
About a half. There are so few intertitles in this that about a half of them have the N word and then. Right. It's like two out of four because there I think there if there's more than four, it's not by that many. There might be like six or seven total. Yeah. At the most. This maybe was made by a group of artists in in Europe called the pool group that were mostly poets.
00:30:54
Speaker
The director of this movie, Kenneth McPherson, and then there were two sort of authors slash poets who had their sort of, you know, writing monikers were H.D. and Breyer, but they had full names that did not write down. Andy Whitifred Ellerman and Hilda Doolittle.
00:31:18
Speaker
Yeah. And they were the the pool group and they, you know, wrote intellectual essays and poetry and short stories. And Kenneth McPherson had he was already a filmmaker when he made this movie, but this is his first and only feature film. This movie is about a little over an hour. And I can kind of see this movie does have a bit of a kind of like
00:31:42
Speaker
European like early 20th century like intellectualist vibe to it I guess in terms of I guess it's an avant-garde movie right it's like playing around with very at the time like kind of cutting-edge editing stuff um I think this movie formally in terms of like the form of it like how it's shot and edited and made is way more interesting than most of their stuff that we watched from this year like it's
00:32:11
Speaker
It's trying stuff, right? It's trying a lot of match cutting and a lot of fast edits and sort of like playing with time and space in terms of the editing and how it's being shot. And like it's playing with really big ideas of like prejudice and sort of like interpersonal relationships and things like that. And it's doing it all without
00:32:33
Speaker
without any hand holding it's not trying to like set forth this like a clear sort of like narrative with it it's it's like you said very vibes forward so I appreciated those things about it that it was like it was trying stuff and it's I don't know if I would necessarily call this an experimental movie maybe for the time it was
00:32:53
Speaker
It's using an uncommon style, I suppose. I don't know if it necessarily did anything, any like one thing that had not been done before, but it was doing stuff that was, it was using uncommon filmmaking techniques for a unique narrative purpose, I suppose. Yeah. I liked it.
00:33:18
Speaker
Yeah. I didn't like the first half because I'm Phil Stein. And I did like the second half because I was like, ooh, a moiter? A moiter. Yeah, there's a moiter in this movie. I would like to see this movie again. I only watched it once for the show. But even immediately after watching it, I'm like, I feel like I need to see this again. One just because I didn't really follow the narrative very well the first time.
00:33:43
Speaker
And I think rewatching it with that in mind would be very helpful. There is a I couldn't find it easily. There is a like I don't know if it's an essay or if it's just sort of like a there's sort of a written piece accompanying the movie that was written by HD.
00:34:02
Speaker
uh... about it that i couldn't find anywhere online that i think is sort of meant to be a companion piece to it i sort of like read this thing and then watch the movie or vice versa and i only watch the movie so maybe there's a bit of you know uh... what's the thing when like the matrix video game ties into the movie different media combining uh... transmedia pan media media but there might be an element of that where it's like you're supposed to actually read this thing
00:34:32
Speaker
along with it, and I didn't do that. Well, speaking of movies that don't make a lot of sense, so... Good segue. Let's talk about... why don't you pronounce this actually, Mr... Lajdor? Lajdor. Or... Lajdor. Lajdor, or the Golden Age, which is a rough English translation. Age of gold, golden age, whatever.
00:34:57
Speaker
which is the follow-up to Ancien Andoulou by Louis Buniel and Salvador Dali. Yeah. And it very much feels in the same ilk, in the same realm. They've expanded out their 17-minute short to just over an hour-long feature. And they're doing a similar kind of thing with this.
00:35:27
Speaker
Yeah. But they're giving stuff a little more space to breathe, I suppose, and going into some new ideas instead of just violent horror. It feels, I don't know, I think this is just as surreal, probably, as An-Shi-Ah-An-Loo, but it feels more pointed, kind of. Like, I think that movie was so
00:35:54
Speaker
sort of purposefully just sort of like, here's a bunch of weird stuff. Figure it like, what does it mean? We don't know. Like it's just weird stuff. Like it means something. What does it mean to you? Like what, what thoughts does this stir in you audience member? Whereas this feels like there's more intent behind the imagery.
00:36:15
Speaker
Instead of just being like, what if ants came out of a hand? That's crazy, right? It's like, well, let's have a bunch of bishops sitting on the rocks by the ocean. And it's like, that feels more deliberate to me. It feels like they're making a point about like,
00:36:33
Speaker
Catholicism or religion or something. I'm not sure exactly what point they're making, but some religious stuff going on. I guess we should say also Borderline was a silent film, and this is a talkie, unlike on Chantalou, but it's like barely a talking film. Yeah, there are maybe like three or four scenes that have dialogue and the rest have kind of almost a movie tone esque, sink sound kind of situation.
00:37:00
Speaker
It does kind of feel like, speaking of the sound in this movie, it does feel like a very early example of, like, creative sound design, which is something we haven't really seen in a lot of early talkies. Like, it's usually onset sound or sound edit-in for specific, you know, specific sound effects of, like, this person slamming a door. We're putting a door slamming.
00:37:24
Speaker
Whereas this movie is a little bit more, because it's such a, you know, a surrealist movie, there's a bit more sort of like creative, subjective sound design stuff going on. Or even things of like, there's some, someone walks into their bedroom and there's a cow there with a cow bell on, and the cow leaves the room. The cow leaves the room, so the cow is off screen, but we still hear the cow bell, like from echoing from the next room.
00:37:54
Speaker
if not it kind of becomes it starts as diegetic and then it just becomes this like ringing echoing that goes on forever and fills all the space which is neat. But it's like we haven't seen a lot of that yet we haven't like now that sound is a thing in movies it is nice to see someone actually trying to use it in an interesting way as opposed to just what would this thing sound like if we filmed it? Yeah.
00:38:20
Speaker
yeah it's because this is so concerned with the kind of uh i don't know visual imagery uh
00:38:30
Speaker
just kind of what you get out of a certain visual image, they're using the sound occasionally to give you some sort of sonic imagery to layer on top of it. That cowbell continues on over the next scene and you're like, what's the juxtaposition here? Yeah, there's a bit with lava bubbling and they put the sound of a toilet flushing over it, which is great.
00:38:58
Speaker
Was that lava? I thought it was goopy brown mud. It might be mud. That's funny, actually. I thought it might be lava. I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong.
00:39:09
Speaker
I know that Psycho often gets the credit for the first toilet flush shown on screen because it was considered, it's too inappropriate to show that, but this has a toilet flushing off screen, but while it is showing you just burbling gooey mud, so maybe even more. Arguably more inappropriate.
00:39:37
Speaker
Yeah. It is funny, though. I'm curious how true that is, because I wonder if that's in an American film or if that goes for any film. Yeah, probably. Probably just an American film. Yeah. They're the ones that had all the strict censorship. But maybe not. I don't know. This this movie starts with a mini documentary on scorpions. Yeah. Ninety thirty's Planet Earth. Which is cool. Like, it's cool to see old footage of scorpions.
00:40:06
Speaker
Yeah. I actually couldn't tell whether it was stop motion or real. No, they're real scorpions. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. But yeah, I think it's just kind of funny to like, what can we do in our movie where we're throwing a bunch of weird stuff in? Let's start with a documentary about Scorpos, you know? Yeah. Not a bad way to start a movie. I was immediately hooked.
00:40:27
Speaker
This movie is very, feels very satirical, right? With all of the sort of surreal imagery in it, it feels very... If it's making any sort of point with it, it feels like it's very critical, I guess, of like aristocracy or the sort of bourgeoisie society of Europe at the time.
00:40:52
Speaker
Yeah, there's a scene with like a dinner party with some rich people and they're just sitting there in all their fancy garb and there are like half a dozen flies on their faces. Yeah. I guess there's also like some kind of commentary on... Horniness? I don't know. Yes. That's the word I was searching for. This might be the horniest movie we've watched for the show.
00:41:19
Speaker
I don't know if the movie is though. I feel like it like, I don't know, it's got like a weird relationship with it. The characters probably are, but yeah, the movie is almost, it's not necessarily judgmental against it, but it's almost like poking fun at them for how horny they are a little bit.
00:41:37
Speaker
I don't know. There's like a guy who like he is just bumbling from thing to thing, not being able to just just losing track of himself over how horny he is. Yeah. Well, there's there's a couple, right? There's a man, a woman who are both. It seems like all they want to do is make out on the ground in the dirt and people keep like preventing them from doing so. People like the guards keep showing up and like pulling them away. Yeah. The guards of society, man.
00:42:06
Speaker
the church yeah but all those bishops sitting by the ocean that turned to skeletons there's just so much imagery in this movie just shout out stuff it's like it's kind of hard to like summarize this because it
00:42:21
Speaker
It doesn't really have a, like, its plot is just a bunch of weird stuff happens. We could talk about, yeah, some of the specific imagery in it. I think this movie reminded me of actually is like Monty Python sketches, just in terms of how quickly it will move from one thing to another and how, how like surreal it is. Right. But even some of the like humor of it feels almost a little similar. There's a bit right where early on when the guy is getting dragged away, there's a little dog
00:42:51
Speaker
And he like takes the time to like break away from the people dragging him away to kick the dog. And it's like a little tiny dog. I hope this was done safely. It might not have been, but it is for as cruel as it is. It's the timing of it is very funny. And there's they put in a little sound effect, which sounds like a person making the sound of just like.
00:43:15
Speaker
As the dog flies off screen, it feels like taking the dog from Anchorman. It's such a ridiculous moment that I have no idea why it's there, but...
00:43:25
Speaker
It made me chuckle and I love dogs. I hate to see anything that happened to one, but it was the comedic timing of it was good enough that it got me. We'll just try and remain ignorant as to whether this was a Campbell Holocaust turtles situation. Yeah. I mean, the fact that it was made in Europe in 1930 makes me he probably just kicked the dog. Like, you know, I don't think that they were doing wire work at that point.
00:43:53
Speaker
There's a bit in sort of the first, maybe third of this movie that made me think it's kind of a parody of like City Symphony movies. There's a bit that's like, oh, the hustle and bustle of modern life and the city. And it's like, are they kind of making fun of like, you know, Berlin Symphony of a Great City a little bit?
00:44:16
Speaker
Or just that kind of genre, because that was like, right, that was a thing when this movie was getting made, so. Oh yeah, after...
00:44:25
Speaker
So he kicks the dog early on. Later on, he does the same thing to a blind man. It was just a blind man walking down the street and he like takes time away from whatever he was doing to go kick, kick that guy. Well, yeah, the guy is he's trying to take a taxi. So this this horny guy is getting introduced to him, I think, while he's getting like dragged away by some people, like seemingly being arrested or something.
00:44:49
Speaker
He kicks the dog while he's being dragged away. He's able to escape from those people. And then he takes a taxi to a rich, fancy person's party. But there's a blind guy that's standing in front of the taxi. So he just gets out and just kicks the blind guy onto the ground. And then gets in the taxi and drives away. It's very strange. Yeah. And that's this whole movie, right? There's a whole sort of like
00:45:17
Speaker
little section while at the party where a guy shoots a child. There's the aforementioned horny stuff like the man and the woman reunite and they're in the garden in a hedge maze and she eats his fingers off. There's a bit where his hand is crushing her face.
00:45:38
Speaker
and she like puts the fingers in her mouth and then we cut and there's like an amputee like a person without fingers has replaced the hand although later on he has fingers again so it's you know it's it's not literal i guess as if as if anything in this movie is literal none of it is
00:45:59
Speaker
Uh, probably also later in that scene is the most famous thing from this movie, which is that woman, uh, is kind of very aggressively sucking on the toes of a, of a marble statue. Yeah. Tarantino loves this picture.
00:46:15
Speaker
This scene was actually reproduced in the end of a David Bowie music video. He does that right at the end of the video in a similar fashion. David Bowie, big fan of Louis Buniel movies. This movie ends with a bunch of kind of dignitaries.
00:46:37
Speaker
One of whom kind of looks like Jesus who are walking into a castle to participate in an orgy. When they leave, one of the women tries to leave and then the Jesus guy kind of brings her back in and ostensibly murders her. And then he walks back out again. And the last scene of the movie is... When he walks out, his beard is gone, though.
00:47:01
Speaker
When he walks out, his beard is gone. That means something. I just don't know what it is. And and then the last scene of the the last image of the movie is a crucifix with like eight women's scalps like hanging from. Yeah, yeah. I think there's there's there's clear things that this movie is about. And I think those are sort of like. Aristocracy, religion and like sexual repression.
00:47:31
Speaker
Mm-hmm and the interplay between those all those things Yeah, what specific points it's trying to make about those I'm less clear on just because of how surreal the movie is But yeah, I feel like it's it's broader Sort of ideas are come across Yeah through all of the the weirdness and you know, the weirdness is part of it. I
00:47:54
Speaker
I think I'm probably more of a fan of Xian Andalou. I think like it's shorter running time and focus on just extreme violence makes it feel a little more punchy, even though there's like there's like more abstract imagery in this. But like you're more shocked by the abstract imagery in the other movie. Yeah. Nothing in this comes anywhere close to the razor blade through the eyeball.
00:48:19
Speaker
I mean, that's one of the most famous images in all of silent film, maybe all of film history. I don't know. But it's a very visceral, shocking thing to see, even if it's a goat eyeball. It's still just like, ah.
00:48:34
Speaker
It's, yeah, you know, it gets you. And yeah, this movie for all of its ambition doesn't, it never quite reaches that level of just like instilling a feeling in the audience. Quite to such a degree that that does. Another movie that
00:48:55
Speaker
deals with the upper crust society, which I'm sure you loved. Oh, boy. Is Animal Crackers. Animal Crackers. Which is more or less the same movie as the last Marx Brothers movie that we watched. Yeah, yeah, pretty much. I wrote down almost a remake of The Coconuts.
00:49:16
Speaker
Like, in terms of its character is its plot. It's remarkably similar. And they were sort of like, let's do another one of these. Change nothing. Change the bare basics of the premise and the character names. And that's about it. You were correct. I did not enjoy this one. I was very excited, having never seen any Marx Brothers movies, to like, all right, we're going to get to watch Marx Brothers stuff. I'm sure that's going to be great.
00:49:45
Speaker
And I know so far it's like zero for two with the Marx Brothers for me. I do not. We should take a break until duck soup. I think we should. Yes, I think until 33, we should take a break from the Marx Brothers because I get what their shtick is and I don't enjoy it. That's funny. Yeah, I mean, like I enjoyed coconuts. This is probably better than coconuts. It's more marginally. Yeah, it's like less incompetently made. It's still.
00:50:15
Speaker
It's kind of a mess though. Like there's still like, there's, you know, we're talking about the sort of weirdo European avant-garde shit. This is a Hollywood movie. And there's just straight up bad edits in this and like bad. Well, it's a New York movie. It was filmed in New York or New Jersey or something. I know, but it's like, it's not well made. Like it's the only real merits this movie has, I think, are its writing and its performances, neither of which I particularly enjoyed anyway.
00:50:44
Speaker
But, yeah. So this is sort of another situation where the Marx Brothers are all kind of playing similar characters to who they were before, except in a different setting rather than in Florida. I don't know where this is supposed to be. I think it's Long Island.
00:51:05
Speaker
Long Island, yeah. It's a fancy house in Long Island. And Groucho Marx is an adventurer who has done some mildly racist things in Africa. And he's coming home to regale an upper crust party about his adventures in Africa, while at the same time there is being revealed a $100,000 painting that
00:51:35
Speaker
is the pride and joy of the owner of the house. And then there are some hijinks involved with crime related to the painting, like there were crime hijinks in the last one as well. Much like in the coconuts, there are competing heist plans to steal or replace the painting. Like the coconuts, this is also based on a stage musical.
00:52:01
Speaker
that shared a lot of the same cast. I mean, Marx Brothers and I think most of the key cast members carried over from the stage version.
00:52:11
Speaker
And we had a key cast member who carried over from Coconuts too, which is Margaret Dumont, who kind of plays the rich woman who is sort of the most immediate foil to Groucho's jokes, where she just kind of smiles and goes, oh, you, you know. Right, to the point where, yeah, there's, oh my God, there's one of them that is just, it's so absurd that I couldn't deal with it.
00:52:37
Speaker
What are you talking about? There's a bit where a bunch of women show up and Groucho playing Captain Spalding, which is a character name that has been reused in other things. It was in Devil's Rejects and also there's a character in MASH named Captain Spalding.
00:52:56
Speaker
It was initially named after a guy who was a real army captain who got busted for dealing cocaine to Hollywood people. Didn't know that. There's a bit where a bunch of young ladies show up and Captain Spallings says, I'm going to sew a couple of wild oats. Basically saying, I'm going to fuck all these ladies.
00:53:19
Speaker
You know, the old Apercross people are like, oh, isn't the cat that I'm using? He's so charming. And it's like, is he? I don't know. I don't see it that way. Right. Which I guess is the joke. But this this movie did have it has some, you know, kind of edgy references to sex, I guess, some of which were cut out when it was re-released kind of deep into the the code era.
00:53:48
Speaker
Yeah, this movie, it's very cheeky, right? It's very like, hey, check this out, man. You know, it's as is the Mark's brother's way. Yeah, including Groucho talking to the camera as he might talk to the audience on the stage version. Yeah, but it isn't even like... It's like that thing obviously works sometimes, right? Like, everyone loves Fleabag because it's great. And I know that it's almost like a joke now to have, like, characters talk to camera.
00:54:18
Speaker
because it's a very common thing to do. And I think it's not the easiest thing in the world to pull off, but when it's done well, it really works, I think. I don't really think it's done well here. It feels like the sort of thing that would work on stage.
00:54:35
Speaker
Yeah, where he then just turns the audience. He's like, check this out. But I think he does it quite as much in this one. But there is there is one part where, you know, he's doing one of his million jokes that he does. And and he's like, he goes to the camera and he's like, they can't all be great. Right. Right. And I was like, correct, sir.
00:54:53
Speaker
One out of ten is not a great ratio. I think a lot of this probably worked better on stage than it does in the movie. It feels very stagey, right? For sure. A lot of the sets feel like stage sets. A lot of the blocking feels very theater inspired. It doesn't feel like a lot was done to sort of adapt this from the stage version so much as just sort of like
00:55:18
Speaker
We're going to film it with cameras and then release it to people. It's pretty restricted in terms of like number of locations, too. They didn't do anything to make it, you know, take advantage of it being a movie. It was probably just made pretty quickly and cheaply. The performances feel very stage-y, which I think with sort of the more
00:55:42
Speaker
Like, the Marx Brothers themselves, I think, kind of can get away with it because they're playing such big, broad, comedic characters. But I feel like the supporting cast that are all ostensibly playing normal people...
00:55:55
Speaker
Which is another thing in this movie where like everyone else in the movie is just acts like a person and then the Marx Brothers characters just act like maniacs and no one even seems to really acknowledge this. They're just kind of annoyed at them. Yeah. Yeah, I just I don't think it works like I don't maybe there's a some disconnect between
00:56:18
Speaker
the stage version and the film version, and that's what is making this feel so stilted and not very funny to me. I might just not like the Marx Brothers shtick. I don't know. I know. Doesn't feel a little blasphemous to say. Two movies in, I'm like, I don't like these guys. I don't think they're funny. There are jokes that work.
00:56:42
Speaker
Occasionally I got a couple laughs out of this movie, but I could count on one hand the amount of times I actually laughed during this, you know, almost two hour long motion picture. And a lot of those are like physical comedy gags are things that would have worked in a silent movie.
00:57:01
Speaker
I will say that Harpo's physical comedy is a little bit helped by his horn honking, which you can't have in a silent movie. But that horn really, that kind of adds a lot. It's a very funny sound. So you throw that in front of anything and it helps. I think maybe the single funniest joke in this for me was towards the very end of the movie, all the silverware falling out of Harpo's coat
00:57:31
Speaker
that he's presumably been stealing over the course of the entire movie and it's just like a steady stream of silverware just like falling out of his coat sleeve and it goes on and on and on and on and it's like how you know it's more silverware than anyone could ever fit in any garment of clothing it's just like this absurd cartoonish amount of silverware falling out
00:57:53
Speaker
And that's it's funny. It's I think similar. There was a similar joke, I think, in the coconuts where like he runs off screen, he comes back with like way too many tools to try to break someone out of jail.
00:58:06
Speaker
And then he has the key anyway. So it's like there's some good like prop comedy that I enjoyed. I mean, I like some of Groucho's like stupid lines, which some of them work. I mean, they a lot of them are like they're kind of funny, but they're also just groan inducing. Right. They're so like dad joke pun things.
00:58:29
Speaker
We tried to remove the tusks, but they were embedded in so firmly we couldn't budge them. Of course, in Alabama, the tuscaloosa. But that's entirely irrelevant to what I was talking about. I mean, I wrote down a couple jokes that I enjoyed. Oh, there's another physical comedy thing is someone writes a check and they drop it and it literally bounces off the floor.
00:58:52
Speaker
Yeah, is the checks good? And then he drops it on the ground. And it bounces, literally. There's a bit where I think Harpo sits on someone's lap while they're playing bridge. And he says, oh, he thought it was contact bridge.
00:59:06
Speaker
Which is, that was good. That's a good joke. A couple groucho bits. I shot an elephant in my pajamas. Have I gotten my pajamas? I don't know. Like, you know, just word placed. It's like he does about 20 of these in every scene. And so naturally, like a few of them land. A few of them are quite good. But it's, you got to sit through a lot of them to get to the good ones, I feel like. I hope as the as they keep making movies, they refine this stuff. And by the time we get to
00:59:34
Speaker
duck soup, it's like their hit rate is a little higher. Right. This movie, again, has like a totally random intro, not random, but it's like a scene where it's just like now Harpo plays the harp for like four minutes. Yeah, when that happened, I was like, OK, good, I can stop paying attention for a little while. Yeah, it's like, OK, I can, you know, I think I can microwave my soup or whatever. Yeah, I think this movie has
01:00:03
Speaker
pretty much all of the same problems as the coconuts yeah the audio is a little bit better a little bit but it's still even that kind of reminded me of the bit in uh singing in the rain with the pearls there's nothing quite that bad yeah but i've just yeah just things that don't sound well are sort of unrefined
01:00:24
Speaker
on set sound that is I think drowned out by some other noises or something in general last year the sound was kind of universally poorly recorded but I think in pretty much all of the movies this year it has been decent to good sound recording
01:00:47
Speaker
I think just to go backwards a little bit, I think a reason why I think a lot of the sound works in La Jure d'Or is because I'm pretty sure most if not all of it was not sync sound in terms of like it's not onset audio. I don't think they were recording sound while they were shooting. It lets you put the camera in more places and
01:01:11
Speaker
allows the performances to be a little looser and then allows the actual sound design to also be a bit looser and more expressionistic and whatever. So I think so many of the problems of these early sound movies are the limitations of trying to record picture and sound simultaneously.
01:01:32
Speaker
And when you don't try to do that, when you just spaghetti western style, just record all the audio afterwards, I think it allows for a freer filmmaking style. But hey, if you lock everything off on a stage-y set, then it shouldn't matter anyway, even though it does in Animal Crackers. Yeah. Animal Crackers, kind of a musical. I mean, it is a musical. There's full-on stage musical numbers in it.
01:01:59
Speaker
It has a bit of a Gilbert and Sullivan vibe to some of it. Mostly I'm familiar with Gilbert and Sullivan. Which are their big ones? The one that Sideshow Bob sings. Oh, okay. HMS Pinafore? Yeah. Yeah, which I'm sure we'll probably get to. Is there a film version of that? Probably. Probably. Maybe we'll get to the Simpsons episode. But another movie that has sort of musical performance in it.
01:02:31
Speaker
is Morocco, directed by Joseph von Sternberg and starring Melina Dietrich. Yes. Who are both pretty famous at this point or sort of like the 1930s are like the start of their famous run that they had as director and star. Yeah.
01:02:52
Speaker
Yeah, I think Marlene Dietrich was still pretty new at this point. Yeah. They had done one film for Oofa in Germany.
01:03:02
Speaker
called the Blue Angel, which was their first collaboration, which I also watched, but you didn't, and I don't know if I have a lot to say about it. I didn't take any notes because I watched it yesterday, just because I want to see it. I'm not shaming me here. No, that was just me watching too many things. Also stars Gary Cooper. Yeah, Gary Cooper. Famous actor. Who was in wings, but he's one of the leads in this.
01:03:26
Speaker
Yeah, he went on to make a lot of really big stuff. Yeah. Got some best actor wins and all that. But yeah, this is a movie that is kind of just concerning a lot of it's a love triangle, of course, because everything is classic old movie plot.
01:03:45
Speaker
I cannot get over the fact how every single movie is a love drive. It has a lot more maybe kind of silent longing than a lot of other movies of its ilk. A lot of like people just missing each other in terms of like being
01:04:08
Speaker
on board with the same stuff at the same time and then like that kind of things just getting awkward. Yeah. It's a better written love triangle than I think we're used to seeing.
01:04:19
Speaker
Right. And I almost feel like there's there's less of a clear, like good choice, bad choice in terms of like the love triangle. You know, it's like there's Marlene Dietrich is a cabaret singer in Morocco. And there are two men that she is has a relationship with, one of whom is Gary Cooper, who is a soldier in the French Foreign Legion. He's got big Rick O'Connell from The Mummy vibes.
01:04:45
Speaker
Which like, I wouldn't be surprised if this movie is like where that element of that character comes from. And he's the sort of like, rough and tumble, more kind of traditionally masculine, physical presence sort of character. And then there is, who's either, what's the other guy's name?
01:05:02
Speaker
La Basieur. La Basieur, who is a much more of a sort of like wealthy, tuxedo-wearing, fancy-pants sort of man with his waxed mustache and his nice cocktails and glamorous lifestyle. He's played by Adolphe Mongeau, who is in The Woman of Paris. Yeah. The movie doesn't necessarily judge either of those characters as like
01:05:30
Speaker
One isn't a sort of clear hero or villain. It's sort of like, yeah, really need to its character is sort of like split between these two dudes. But it's I feel like in a lot of these love triangle movies, there's like one of these guys is clearly a huge asshole. And one of them is a saintly cowboy who like rescues children from the well, you know.
01:05:49
Speaker
Yeah. Who will I pick? And this is actually like, you know, it makes sense why her character might have second thoughts about being with either one or like, because both all three characters feel flawed and human in their own ways. Which is, I think, sort of a Joseph von Sternberg staple.
01:06:11
Speaker
Um, is he likes sort of complicated human, uh, characters and relationships. There's a lot of things in this movie that I either in sort of vague terms or in like very specific terms, I see in more modern stuff. The really obvious one is, so we just watched Babylon for Art, 1920s decade review episode.
01:06:35
Speaker
And there is a moment in that movie that is like lifted from this. In the most, it is like shot for shot. The blocking is the same. And it's probably the most famous part of this movie. It's when Aline Dietrich is doing her big song. Wearing a tuxedo. Yeah. Marlene Dietrich looks better in tuxedo than I will ever look in any clothing. Aline Dietrich is the coolest. Just throwing that out there.
01:07:03
Speaker
Uh, if she wasn't dead, I would marry her. Um, but there's right, there's the bit in Babylon where lady Faye, who's the sort of more of an anime Wong archetype is dressed in paxido and does this, uh, risque song. And then, uh, kisses a woman in the audience who then hides her face cause she's embarrassed, which is just a thing that happens in this movie. Like it is just the blocking of it is like identical. Only a few tricks.
01:07:33
Speaker
body language and just general the way that she acts while she's performing like performing the song or multiple songs in this movie reminded me also of like Jessica Rabbit a little bit, which I realized Jessica Rabbit is a composite of like every 1930s or 40s like singer and or actress. Yeah. But there's there's there's certainly some money to be tricked in there.
01:07:59
Speaker
Yeah, it's a good scene. And also, like, I guess notably in the scene, she, you know, she's in a tuxedo and she is kind of like playing a male role in a way. And she kisses a woman who is in the audience. And I think that was kind of considered a bit much later, later on in the Hays Code. But yeah, yeah, would not have happened in 1935.
01:08:30
Speaker
One of several examples of this movie having sort of a bit more risqué-ness to it. That was a great find in the beginning of the movie, where Gary Cooper sees a woman who holds up her fingers to say, like, come to my apartment tonight at this time. And he holds up his fingers to confirm, and his, like, officer or whatever comes over and says, hey, what are you doing? What are you doing with those fingers? And he says, nothing yet.
01:08:59
Speaker
Yeah, I was pretty surprised by that line. Yeah, that's a good example of like what pre-code movies are like. It's like they they go a bit harder than what I think the general what I feel like most people tend to think of.
01:09:14
Speaker
in 1930s movies, which are fairly sort of staid and classy. There's this nice chunk of time where they're less, not less classy, but are just like they're allowed to actually be about things. It's a very classy movie. There's a lot of tuxedos in it. Yeah, I mean, the plot of this movie, I don't think is that interesting. Like, I feel like we've talked about it enough.
01:09:36
Speaker
Love triangle. Love triangle. But like it's a little bit better than normal, maybe. I don't know. I feel like I could talk about Mona Dietrich till the cows come home just because I think she's very cool and attractive to look at. Not just like but it's like not her her face. It's like she has a presence that I feel like is less. There's Duffy Ben people in the 20s that had a similar sort of right. There's like the vamp archetype. Yeah, she's not a vamp though.
01:10:06
Speaker
No, I feel like Malini Dietrich is a femme fatale, which is an evolution of the femme.
01:10:12
Speaker
No, and I guess not in this. In some of her other movies, maybe a bit more so. Have you seen, other than Blue Angel, have you seen any of her other movies? I've seen Shanghai Express also, which is from 32, I think. I feel like, yeah, her archetype feels like a much more 1930s archetype than a 1920s one. I feel like most leading ladies in Hollywood movies in the 20s were more, I think a good example is Clara Bow.
01:10:40
Speaker
like Clarabaugh even when she's being like overtly sexual is sort of in she's just she's like cute and bubbly and she's like oh hey he I don't know there's a bit of like Mary Pickford like like kiddie-ness yeah there's like a little bit of infantilization there's like a little bit of just like innocence to it of like
01:11:04
Speaker
Whereas I feel like Millie Needy Trick is showing up and it's like, I'm not innocent. I know what's up. Get out of my way. Like, yeah, that's not necessarily a new thing in terms of there's been characters like that in 1910s movies that we watched. But much like the transition from 1910s, 1920s, like we talked about how there was like a clear shift.
01:11:26
Speaker
Like a noticeable shift in the quality of movies and just like what types of movies were being made. I think there's less of that from the 20s to the 30s between 29 and 30. But I still am noticing, I'm picking up things like that. And I think this movie in particular has a lot of it. This movie shot outside a lot of the time, which is just that. It feels like a big step up.
01:11:53
Speaker
from something like Animal Crackers, which is like so stage bound, so sort of locked off in its camera and its visual style. Whereas this is like by no means doing anything crazy, but like the camera moves.
01:12:09
Speaker
They go outside. And so, yeah, it feels like a much more a much more modern movie. Yeah, it's it's eminently washable. Yeah. But it's it's I think a lot of the early sound stuff we watched was like, oh, this is rough. Whereas this is like, no, this feels like a movie.
01:12:27
Speaker
Yeah. I think especially these movies that we're going to talk on the back half of the episode about, uh, they are movies that don't feel so incompetently made sound wise and are actually just like, yeah, good movies. I could just say facts that I learned, but I don't know. That might not be the most interesting conversation. I mean, we'll probably be watching more Dietrich Sternberg movies in the next couple of years, maybe. So.
01:12:53
Speaker
Maybe. This is one of the more... I mean, Blue Angel is the first, and it's the only German one. That one feels very German, whereas this feels much more Hollywood. But, I don't know, they seemed like an interesting two people, and they worked together a lot during this short time period. Joseph von Sternberg was apparently very controlling, like possibly bordering on abusive, but...
01:13:20
Speaker
when we needed a trick, never had anything bad to say about him. And it was like, no, that's like, that's how we work. Like, that's like what I'm, that's what I'm showing up for. Oh, you mean as a director?
01:13:29
Speaker
Yeah, like I said, but like with her specifically, like he would be like super, super controlling in terms of like trying to craft her performance. And there's even it's apparently sort of a thing where like people don't even know who to credit more for like the movie success because it's like they're such a sort of like close collaboration. They were both married, but both had a semi romantic relationship during the making of the movies.
01:13:55
Speaker
Molly Dietrich had a pretty like open marriage her whole life so she had like many affairs with men and women just all over the place I think like multiple during the making of this movie then Gary Cooper was having an affair with someone else
01:14:12
Speaker
But then they also might have hooked up during the making of this. Reading about the people who made this movie, I'm like, oh, they were all sleeping together all the time. That was just their thing. It was very open. It was very loose. There's another movie we talked about recently that was like that. I think it was Wings, right? Oh, yeah. Also involving Gary Cooper. Gary Cooper was just having a grand old time on all these movie sets. I like the end of this movie.
01:14:40
Speaker
It's just like good filmmaking, right? So this movie ends with Amy Jolly. Amy Jolly. So Amy Jolly, all her hemming and hawing eventually, Gary Cooper is going off into the desert to fight with the Legion, and he's disappearing over the horizon, and she finally decides to run after him into the desert. And as she's running, she takes off her heels and leaves them behind in the sand.
01:15:09
Speaker
Which is just, it's very obvious, but it's a nice little kind of visual metaphor for like, oh, she's living behind her old fancy rich person life with the fancy rich man.
01:15:21
Speaker
to go live in the desert with a soldier who might die at any point. And, you know, it's like the last shot is like her disappearing over the horizon. And then the Paramount logo fades up over the sound of just like the howling wind, which is like another nice use of like sound design. It's not doing anything that crazy with it, but it's still it's like using sound in a way that isn't just here is a thing happening. What sound would it make? Right.
01:15:48
Speaker
And this would I feel like this would normally be like a kind of swelling music over the end. Yeah, no, it's a kind of a kind of a dour note to end on because it's like she's running after the man that she's presumably in love with, which is like a very romantic way to end a movie. But it feels like.
01:16:07
Speaker
almost graduate the graduate like where it's this thing of like, is this a happy ending? I can't tell. Like there's an element of just kind of an ominousness to it that is like this might not work out still, which I mean, you know, they haven't appreciated. You know, that's the thing is through the whole movie, they haven't really had like a fantastic back and forth, you know. No, it's like they're both kind of like wounded people running from a dark past, which in both cases is unspecified.
01:16:38
Speaker
So it's like you get that they have a kind of, they can relate to each other in a way that they can't really to other people. But it's still like, it doesn't necessarily feel like they have like a great happy life after this movie, you know? I think that I thought of, so this is also in combination with Shanghai Express, which is a pretty similar movie to this in a lot of ways. Casablanca feels like a sort of post Von Sternberg movie.
01:17:05
Speaker
with it's sort of like central sort of exotic location in quotes like you know two Europeans and it's sort of like transient characters who are like either running from something or running to something or you know there's doomed romance there's regret there's like criminal shadiness going on like this movie feels in addition to being set in Morocco feels very Casablanca like it's a sort of a proto Casablanca
01:17:35
Speaker
Hmm. Play it again, baby. That famous line from Casablanca, play it again, baby. Another movie that pushes the limits of the production code, the pre-code acceptability. Another movie that has a lot of sort of, for the time, risque stuff in it. Yeah. Hell's Angels, directed by Howard Hughes.
01:18:01
Speaker
That old crazy man Howard Hughes made a movie that he paid for with his drill bit money that his parents gave him when they died. Show me all the blueprints. Show me all the blueprints. He had not made blueprints yet by this point. I had seen this movie before because I saw the Martin Scorsese movie The Aviator when it came out and I was like, I want to see that movie that they're making in it.
01:18:27
Speaker
And so I saw this movie when I was like 15, maybe. Had you seen this before? No, I have not. I think I remembered not loving it, but just thinking like, this is an interesting artifact of its time. And I think that more or less holds true rewatching it. I don't necessarily think this movie is
01:18:49
Speaker
great there's good stuff in it but ultimately it has it has such a like i don't want to say nihilism but like a misanthropy to it like it's so huh the characters are so miserable and it ends on such a note of just sort of like everything sucks
01:19:07
Speaker
I think, yeah, I mean, this movie also, like, the characters are miserable, but they're also, like, douchebags, you know? Yeah, right. They're miserable, and they're also just, like, bad people. Or they're dumb. Or some combination of the two. Right. So, yeah. Howard Hughes had not made movies before this. He was a rich Texan whose family made a fortune in drill bits.
01:19:35
Speaker
and then died, and then he had a lot of money, and he decided, I'm gonna make an airplane picture because I saw wings, and I think that would be fun to do. This is a very, yeah, very post-Wings film. Yeah, for sure. This is more or less like, I wanna make wings also. Like, I do think this movie is significant in film history, and that it's like, one really rich guy self-financed this movie himself.
01:20:04
Speaker
You know, yeah, yeah, this was made outside of the studios. Yeah, I think it was released by United Artists, but it was like he paid for it himself, including holding up production to find clouds that looked like boobs, which is a real thing that he did. Wait, what?
01:20:22
Speaker
That's in the aviator also, but I tried to find more documentation on it. I couldn't find a lot, but that doesn't strike me as something that Scorsese would make up. That's too weird of a detail to just throw in there.
01:20:37
Speaker
That's interesting. I don't... Yeah, I didn't... It's been a long time since I've seen The Aviator, so I don't remember that, and I don't remember any boob clouds in this movie. I think this movie is also significant in that... So, The Jazz Singer came out, I think, like a few weeks before they started shooting. And this movie was intended to be a silent movie, originally. But then, I think about a year and a half in,
01:21:01
Speaker
Howard Hughes was like, hey, people want sound in their movies. Let's reshoot most of this movie to have sound in it. Which is another reason why this movie had a massive budget for the time, I guess. This movie, I think, cost, in 1930 dollars, it cost about 2.8 million dollars, which it only made back 2.5 million.
01:21:30
Speaker
So adjusted for inflation, that's about $51 million, approximately, in today's money. Which is pretty modest budget now. I was trying to find like, what's a funny example of a movie that costs about $51 million. And it's like, that's the budget of a man called Otto, which is not...
01:21:48
Speaker
an expensive or extravagant film at all. It's just like Tom Hanks' old and grumpy. Whereas this was the most extravagant, expensive movie. It wasn't the most expensive movie ever made when it came out, but it was kind of built up as this crazy big budget thing. There are a couple parts of this movie where I'm like, oh, that's where the money went. All of them involving airplanes.
01:22:13
Speaker
Yeah. I think most of that, though, was just because they had to shoot it twice. Right. Yeah. It doesn't necessarily scream expensive movie at all moments. Yeah. I think it's fairly obvious which scenes were reshot, because even though there's sound throughout the whole thing.
01:22:33
Speaker
There's definitely scenes that are clearly shot silent and then had dialogue edit in afterwards or sound edit in afterwards. The fact that they had to refute so much of it led to... So Howard Hughes didn't even... wasn't gonna direct this originally. He was just gonna produce it. And then he hired two different directors that both either quit or were fired. And eventually he was like, fine, I'll just direct it myself.
01:22:58
Speaker
And then he directed it up until the switch to sound, and then the sound, the sync sound segments were directed by James Whale, who we'll talk about next episode for Frankenstein, his most famous movie. So it's like, this maybe is basically co directed by James Whale, even though he has a weird credit, I think it's like,
01:23:22
Speaker
It's like sound scenes are staged by James Whale. I think it's something like what the credit is in the movie. It also led to one of the more famous things about this movie is that it's like not Gina Holler's first movie, but it's like her first big role. And she wasn't originally in it. Originally, Greta Nielsen, who's Norwegian, played that role. But since they were switching to sound, it's like, oh, she has a Norwegian accent.
Film Techniques and Terms
01:23:48
Speaker
It doesn't make sense for her to play this, like, upper-crossed British woman. Never mind the fact that Jean Harlow's from Kansas City doesn't sound British at all, but whatever. So this movie, I think, is an interesting example of this, like, intermediate period where movies are still adjusting to sound. Yeah, a lot of this movie is effectively silent. There's even intertitles in it.
01:24:11
Speaker
I mean, I think the intertitles are used in an interesting way, though. Right, because they were used to translate German dialogue. Yeah, yeah. So they're basically subtitles, but it's taken up the whole screen.
01:24:23
Speaker
Yeah, they don't know what subtitles are yet. So two sort of filmmaking terms that I'm sure you're familiar with that I kind of want to bring up because I don't really know. Both are sort of like vague in their origins, which is kind of interesting on its own. Right. So like a lot of this movie is shot silent with sound ed afterwards.
01:24:45
Speaker
now when stuff is shot silent like when stuff is like we're filming a scene but we're not gonna record sound for it it's usually marked MOS on the slate i don't know that MOS no one really knows what it stands for because there's multiple conflicting origin stories for it like ADR right ADR is the next thing that i want to bring up because
01:25:06
Speaker
They clearly 80-yard stuff in this movie. But MOS stands for either motor-only shot, meaning they're only using a motor for the camera, not for the sound recording equipment, which is much less interesting than the other origin for it, which is probably made up, which is that some German director in Hollywood, it could have probably been von Stroheim or Fritz Lang or Ernst Lubitsch, we don't know, asked for a scene to be shot, mitt out sound, and the guy
01:25:34
Speaker
you know, assistant camera whoever wrote MOS on the slate kind of as a joke making fun of the fact that he said MITT out sound because he was German and it stuck and we still say that now
01:25:46
Speaker
Which I think is a funnier story, naturally. And that's what I choose to believe is the origin of the acronym, MOS. But either way, that probably originated around this time period when they were switching to sound and needed to mark which scenes would be shot with recorded audio and which ones wouldn't be. ADR is a similar thing when there's so many conflicting
01:26:11
Speaker
you know, things that it stands for. Additional dialogue recording, automated dialogue replacement, I think is kind of the most common one, maybe. But it's just the process of...
01:26:22
Speaker
recording dialogue after a scene has already been filmed and dubbing it or sinking it after the fact. I've talked way too much about acronyms.
Movie Character Dynamics and Themes
01:26:32
Speaker
General things about this movie. It's two brothers, one who is a good old boy, British stiff upper lip, a traditional guy who sucks, and another one who is a coward who also sucks.
01:26:52
Speaker
Yeah, there's the straight-laced dumb one and the cowardly horny one. Those are our two lead characters, Roy and Monty, respectively. And we meet them in Germany before the war. They're living abroad in Germany, having a grand old time drinking beer.
01:27:08
Speaker
And, you know, Monty is philandering and making out with lots of ladies, including the wife of a German Count who challenges him to a duel. And Monty, being a coward, just goes back to England immediately and is like, I'm not dueling anybody, which then Roy decides to... His brother Roy is like, don't be an ass. Yeah. So Roy goes in his place to the duel and loses, but lives. They duel with pistols. He gets shot, but is in the arms, so he's fine.
01:27:38
Speaker
It's in the shoulder. This is nothing. Who cares? They both go back to England and war were declared. Their friend Karl, who's German, gets conscripted to go fight for Germany. They're all college buddies at Oxford before the war. Roy, being a good old boy, volunteers for the Royal Flying Corps. And Monty, being a horny coward, sees a sign that says, enlist in the RFC and get a kiss.
01:28:07
Speaker
And so he immediately just kisses the lady and they're like, well, you're in the Royal Flying Corps now, you got to kiss. And he's like, what, me? No. I didn't actually mean that. That was just a joke, right? Yeah. I just wanted to kiss from a lady. And throughout this sort of.
01:28:22
Speaker
Opening right there's off screen. There's this woman Helen who's Roy Roy's been dating and he's like, oh, Monty, you got to settle down and find yourself a nice gal like Helen. And then we meet Helen played by Dean Harlow. And she's like the like the least, you know, like the least traditional kind of person. Yeah. Yeah. She's the most like flirtatious. What's what's another? I'm trying to think of a better word than loose because that feels derogatory.
01:28:52
Speaker
That's it. I mean, this movie is kind of derogatory. This movie is kind of one of the almost like thesis ideas of this movie is like, don't trust women, they'll betray you.
01:29:02
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, true. I mean, I feel like when I initially started watching this movie and realized that both of the main characters are douchebags, I was like, OK, so this is like when I was realizing this was more of a dumb action movie than Wings, right? Right. I was like, oh, it's the Michael Bay version of Wings.
01:29:24
Speaker
And I was like, you know, maybe that's not fair to Michael Bay. Like he's always the explosion guy. And I wrote the Roland Emmerich. And then right afterward, the two brothers are just being total douchebags. And I'm like, OK, it's the Michael Bay version of wings. Right. Because Michael Bay has a bit of that nihilistic like.
01:29:43
Speaker
humanity is awful subtext to a lot of his movies. But yeah, this is like a bro-y action movie. It is, yeah. And it's one of the sort of points it seemingly is trying to make is that like, don't care about women because they will only betray you by sleeping with someone else, which is a very- Don't betray me. It's a very Howard Hughes-y stance to take, I feel like.
01:30:09
Speaker
It is wild how the movie never takes any effort to like, the characters never learn anything besides just like, oh yeah, women are untrustworthy. There's a version of this where I think Roy would still get betrayed by Helen and learn that like, oh yeah, you can't just like idealize people and just project everything you want someone to be onto a person. There's also another version of this where Monty gets over his cowardice and becomes a hero.
01:30:37
Speaker
Right, like that's kind of where you'd expect it to go is Monty sort of like learns not to treat women as disposable objects and actually like it's as heartbroken or sort of learns to care about somebody and also overcomes his cowardice which is established early on but it's this movie is a very no one learns anything movie and like the people they are in the opening scene are the people that they are in at the end of the movie which is bad shitty people.
01:31:06
Speaker
so they joined the air force uh it uh has a bit of a kind of training sequence a la wings but it really just kind of like jumps right into them being airplane guys really quick if this is a bay movie like wings is more of a spielberg movie right then yeah this did not
01:31:29
Speaker
I watched this after I watched All Quiet on the Western Front. Big difference. We'll talk about it in a second, but All Quiet on the Western Front is a movie that's just all about the abject horror of war and just how traumatizing and horrific it is. This movie is like, let's go kill some baddies.
01:31:55
Speaker
Yeah, it's very... It's pulpy, this movie. It's very pulpy, for sure. And I think when it gets into the flying scenes, you can really see where Howard accuses Hart was at in terms of why he wanted to make this movie, which is he just wanted to film airplanes flying around. Let's be... Yeah. That was his... That's his whole deal. He just wanted to kill a couple stunt guys.
01:32:14
Speaker
Yeah, I think three stunt pilots died making this movie. Yeah, though the way I mean, I think only one of them can be blamed on the production of the movie itself and the other two were just like they were doing a normal thing and then died. I mean, there is a story I saw multiple places where.
01:32:32
Speaker
There was a stunt that one of the sort of lead stunt pilots refused to do. He was like, this is way too dangerous. And Howard Hughes was like, I'll do it myself. And so he got on the plane and he did it and he crashed and fractured his skull. But I guess they got the shot.
01:32:48
Speaker
The in-air stunt work I also thought was maybe even better done in Wings, though. I think like this movie has a scene with like a million airplanes all like crisscrossing each other at once, which is cool. But I think just like the editing and composition in the aerial scenes in Wings is better. I think the flying scenes in this occasionally feel a little bit more kind of immediate or a little bit more like
01:33:16
Speaker
There's a sense of danger to them probably because they are incredibly dangerous what is being filmed and how they're being filmed. The sound helps too. Yeah, there's a couple times where like there's a camera mounted like in the cockpit almost looking at the pilot's face.
01:33:34
Speaker
and you can see the background behind them like just going crazy as they're like doing loops or whatever and it's yeah it puts you in the cockpit of a plane I think pretty well wings also did this but I think this movie is even a little bit more kind of intense in its in its flying scenes maybe
01:33:52
Speaker
Yeah, there are a lot of, I mean, really good parts of the dog fight, like the big dog fight toward the end of the movie, where it'll just zoom into individual Kaiser soldiers who are dying. And so they all die in like a kind of like unique way. Like, you know, one guy like, you know, gets shot and then blood comes out of his mouth. But like the the way that
01:34:19
Speaker
each of those shots kind of ends is the person collapsing and then the plane losing control and the skyline just spiraling out behind them, which is really cool. Which you can see because of all the clouds in the background.
01:34:33
Speaker
Yes. You've seen the aviator, right? I don't remember anything about the aviator. There's like 10 whole minutes in the aviator where Howard Hughes is like shutting down production because he can't find clouds because it's like the airplanes look fake because there's nothing behind them to show relative motion. And then he asked Ian Holm, the meteorologist, to find him clouds that look like giant breasts full of milk.
01:35:00
Speaker
And he's like I'll try but that can't be guaranteed on any occasion But eventually he finds his clouds and then film the whole thing and it's great. But so watching this movie I was just like hey, there are those clouds You know it does help Give a sense of like speed and sort of to ground where the planes are relative to each other This movie has one scene that shot in color Yes, it was shot in multicolor
01:35:29
Speaker
Which is not Technicolor, it was a different process, but I think it was printed by Technicolor. Because they were the only ones that had the... The scale. Yeah. And it looks pretty good for a two color Technicolor thing.
01:35:43
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, there's definitely you can get you can get ahead with two color to strip Technicolor. It's just that some things look abnormally red or green, but at least white skin tones look pretty good. And it had me kind of wondering like how other skin tones would look with.
01:36:03
Speaker
two strip Technicolor because it seems like it was probably designed more to accommodate white skin tones. But yeah, it's like a big party scene kind of where you're initially finding out that Helen is a bit more of a party animal. Yeah.
01:36:19
Speaker
So, yeah, the Helen character I find kind of fascinating just because of the movie seems to kind of hate her, but at the same time want you to kind of ogle her. It's very, this movie strikes me as just a sexist movie in terms of Helen sort of seems to represent women in general because the only other women that we ever see are like French prostitutes.
01:36:44
Speaker
Yes. Yeah. Or at least like brainless brainless people who are just like fawning over the military guys. Yeah. And it's like so Roy is sort of like hyping up Helen to Monty as this like good girl that she's that he's found. It's like, oh, she's so
01:37:04
Speaker
you know, pure and behaves yourself so well. And then we were introduced to her of her like running out from behind a bush, clearly having made out with a different soldier who's just like runs off in a different direction. And they're both just like hastily adjusting their clothing and like wiping their face. And then upon meeting Monty, Helen is immediately just like making eyes at him the whole time. And at the party, she's like, hey, why don't you drive me home? And he's like, oh, I guess so.
01:37:34
Speaker
And they get home and they just immediately sleep together upon leaving the party. And then Monty is then also immediately like, how dare you cheat on my brother, you harlot? And it's like, dude, it was with you, you doofus.
01:37:49
Speaker
And that's what I mean like I don't this movie is like moral stance seems very confused and yeah I mean even about the war too right like it is kind of there are some there are some parts that acknowledge that like you know Monty is talking about it being when he's thinking of defecting
01:38:09
Speaker
about it being a politician's war and like, what do I need to die for all of this just political alliances and all this kind of thing, which is not untrue about World War One. It really is just like, like there's there isn't much of a reason for it happening. But
01:38:29
Speaker
And then there's a scene toward the beginning before Monty signs up. It gets duped into signing up by a siren. By a siren with a sign saying, if you sign up, we will kiss you. Yeah. And he's just like, well, I guess I have to sign up now. He's like, ha-ba-ha-ba, boyo-yoing. Yeah. He read the sign, but he only saw the word kiss. He didn't see the enlist part.
01:38:58
Speaker
Oh, yeah, it's like it's like the the Simpsons bit where Bart's running for class president and he makes a sign that says sex. Now that I have your attention, vote for Bart. Yeah, but that's how they got people in World War One. Anyway, before that, toward the beginning of the movie, there's a scene of a communist or anarchist who or just an anarchist, right? Or just like a pacifist. Like someone someone in the audience calls him an anarchist, but like
01:39:26
Speaker
He is at least some kind of pacifist, where he is saying, all this misery in the world has been caused by and for capitalism. Why should we participate in this war? For capitalism, you will die for capitalism. Your sons will die for capitalism. Down with capitalism, down with war. And then this guy like snidely in the corner goes, down with the anarchist. And then the whole crowd just jumps on him and beats him up.
01:39:56
Speaker
But like, you know, he's not wrong. Yeah. And and in certain ways, neither is Monty toward the end of the movie. But then also the movie like clearly judges him for being a coward, which, yeah, for.
01:40:11
Speaker
for you know, not wanting to participate in his like national duty and It thinks that the war is a good thing and it does some like, you know by this point We already had DW Griffith making a movie apologizing to the Germans about how he portrayed them during World War one and This movie just has some cartoonish mustache twirling Germans. Oh, yeah. Yeah
01:40:39
Speaker
which I mean probably at the time was a bit more of just like
Zeppelin Scene and Anti-War Message
01:40:44
Speaker
I don't know a bit more propagandistic but like looking back on it I don't know it's just like a bunch of World War One Germans with monocles and big mustaches who are like
01:40:55
Speaker
you know, piloting Zeppelins and, you know, challenging people to duels. And it's, I don't know, I think it's fun. It's fun. It's fun, certainly. I mean, I don't think there's, you know, I don't think it's like necessarily offensive to make fun of Germans in that way. Although it was like, you know, between World War One and World War Two when they were like, OK, we're not actually mad at Germans right now. Yeah. They are just like, yeah, cartoonish villains. And I do want to talk about also the Zeppelin scene.
01:41:24
Speaker
We got done with the Zeppelin scene. That's true. Which I imagine they shot it with a real Zeppelin, or at least if it was a scale model, it was like a large, a very, very big one. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it was a scale model, but I don't know for sure.
01:41:40
Speaker
There were some really great shots when the Zeppelin was being introduced of it bursting through the clouds. You just see the clouds high up in the air and then just an enormous Zeppelin comes out through them, which is amazing.
01:41:56
Speaker
And then also, yeah, the commander of the Zeppelin is very ruthless, cartoonishly ruthless. It turns out that their friend Karl is in that Zeppelin, and they are on a mission to drop some bombs on Trafalgar Square in London. And Karl is on this, I wasn't aware of this being a thing, but he's on this like little tadpole looking thing. Yeah, little pod that they drop out the bottom.
01:42:25
Speaker
Yeah, they bring it down on a winch so that he can target the bomb stuff dropping out of the Zeppelin above him. Yeah, because they're above the clouds and they can't see down to where the bombs are going to fall. And Carl is conflicted. He has history in London. Yeah, it's like a month ago he was living there.
01:42:49
Speaker
Yeah. And they're like, pick the location to bomb. This whole thing depends on you. And so he tells him to drop the bombs over a lake. Yeah. And he's like, hey, direct hit. We blew up all of Trafalgar Square. And the people in the zeppelin above him are like, great job.
01:43:09
Speaker
uh yeah which is that that's a cool scene i think because it's like him like acting wise because it's him kind of having to make this decision to you know betray his country to do the right thing or whatever right yeah you know once the bombs are dropped and
01:43:24
Speaker
They were going to drop a few bombs and then the commanders gleefully like, let's just drop some more, destroy all of London. They drop more bombs into the water. But while Karl is getting pulled back up on the witch, which is going to take like 10 minutes or whatever, Monty and Roy and a number of other people in airplanes have found the Zeppelin and have begun a chase.
01:43:49
Speaker
And to rise high up into the atmosphere where the planes would not easily follow, they need to lose a bunch of ballast weight from the Zeppelin very quickly.
01:44:07
Speaker
So might as well cut the line for the guy in the pod. Yeah. And then have like half the crew jump out. Yeah, which is so which is so crazy. I wonder if there is any like historical precedent for that happening or if it's just a highly exaggerated example of kind of like the the German mindset number one of like sacrificing people willy nilly.
01:44:33
Speaker
Yeah, they were just like, yeah, it was like a whole like zero fighter situation of like, just kill yourself for the greater cause right now. Like jump, jump out of a Zeppelin to your death, please. So yeah, they kill Karl. He falls to his death. And then like about a dozen other people from the ship just salute and then jump out. Yeah. Which is a pretty crazy scene. It's pretty heavy. Yeah. Yeah. But doesn't work. Zeppelin still gets blown up.
01:45:01
Speaker
Yeah. There was a comment on YouTube of some person who was like, wow, like, like the people who jumped out, what good soldiers and yikes. I don't know, man. Like this is a little more complicated than that. I mean, I guess from a purely like military standpoint, maybe.
01:45:24
Speaker
It was presumably a jingoistic American who was saying this. But yes, to bring Roland Embrich back into it, the Zeppelin finally goes down. I see where this is going.
01:45:40
Speaker
There's a what they've shot down most of the planes, including Roy and Monty's. They're OK, but they kind of crash landed on the ground and all the other planes have been shot down in various ways, except for one whose gun was jammed the entire time. And he's like, doesn't anybody have any missiles left?
01:46:01
Speaker
And so he's like, what do I do? We've got to get the Zeppelin. And so he's just like he more, more suicide bombing. He just flies his plane straight into the Zeppelin and blows it up. And.
01:46:16
Speaker
It's cool as fuck. I mean, it's a plane flying into a Zeppelin. Zeppelin blown up in a big fireball. It rules. There is, you know, you're seeing part of this scene from the ground where Roy and Monty are like walking out of their plane. And then they see the Zeppelin blow up and they're like, hell yeah, you did it. And and then the Zeppelin starts falling right toward them.
01:46:39
Speaker
and they just book it away from the Zeppelin. And then there is an amazing shot, an amazing really wide shot of the two of them running away and then just this enormous on-fire Zeppelin crashing to the ground in front of them. Behind them.
01:46:57
Speaker
Oh, yeah, behind them. Yeah. And like I just audibly went, holy shit. It's also I mean, during World War One, I'm sure that phenomenon was observed. I'm sure we will saw Zeppelin's getting blown up and shot down. And so like it was people knew what it looked like. But it's crazy just how close that footage looks to the Hindenburg disaster. Yeah. Right. It is. It's it's a work of effects and miniature and bigature and whatever, however they did it.
01:47:26
Speaker
But it's like, it's pretty wild how accurate it is just to like, yeah, everyone now knows exactly what this looks like. And they nailed it. Yeah, they had like the flaming skeleton of it. And yeah, it looked it looked really amazing. And there was an intermission in the movie and it was right after that scene.
01:47:46
Speaker
Yeah, well placed. Yeah, it felt really good because it allowed people to go out into the lobby and talk about how cool what they just saw was. Holy shit, that Zeppelin scene was amazing. Which is exactly what I did during the intermission. I just walked out and it was like, oh my God, that scene, it was so cool. Yeah, I'm sure that's what everyone did.
01:48:11
Speaker
when this movie premiered. This movie's premiere was a big deal. I guess we'll talk about that too. Or should we talk about the end of the movie first? Sure. The movie ends with, right, the brothers get shot down. They're involved in this like spy mission, right, where they use a stolen German bomber to bomb this munitions factory. And then they're escaping and we get the big sort of third act dogfight scene. And they're actually shot down and captured. And because they weren't a stolen German plane, they're technically spies.
01:48:42
Speaker
Um, and they get brought to the Baron from the beginning of the movie who, uh, you know, was behind the whole duel thing. Roy sort of convinces him the Baron to give him a gun with one bullet in it to be, he's like, Hey, like I, I hate this other guy that I'm with. And like, I want to, I, I'll tell you what, uh,
01:49:05
Speaker
what you want to know, but I need, he needs to die. I don't really know what Roy's actual plan is here. He's like, okay, I have a gun now with one bullet. He fulfilled his plan. Like he, I mean, maybe he wanted to, like when he, he wanted all the bullets because he wanted to see if he could stage an escape. But like the reason why he wanted the gun with one bullet and he did this whole stunt
01:49:26
Speaker
was because Monty was about to tell them everything and about the invasion plan and would have like sentenced hundreds of people to their deaths so that he could get away. And Monty was like, or Roy was like, let me handle it. And then he kind of posed as if he was going to do that instead of Monty. But he realized that he couldn't trust Monty to not like spill the beans. So he just shot his brother.
01:49:56
Speaker
Yeah, in the back. Yeah. And then Roy is then, because he was captured as a spy and refuses to give up any information, is then shot by a fragment squad. And that's the end of the movie. A brother murders his other brother and then is killed.
01:50:12
Speaker
Which is, yeah, just very much in line with the whole, like, just the nihilism I get from this movie of just like, yep, bad, bad stuff. Like, Monty is introduced as a coward and he dies as one, kind of, and Roy is sort of like, I guess throughout the movie kind of held up as this, like,
01:50:32
Speaker
you know more moral or more upstanding of the two but he still is like at best naive at worst like completely incapable of reading people and just very very selfish in his own way.
01:50:45
Speaker
Yeah, self destructively traditional in certain ways. I don't love this movie. It's I think it has it. I think it has a lot of cool things about it. I think like the early like two strip Technicolor stuff is cool. Yeah, you know, the airplane stuff is the Zeppelin bit is great, you know, and I think that comes across too with.
01:51:06
Speaker
You can tell what Howard Hughes cared about the most. He's like, the Zeppelin scene is gonna rule. And then when it comes to actual character scenes, he's like, ah, who cares?
01:51:16
Speaker
Yeah. It feels a lot less, kind of. Make it vaguely wingsy. Yeah, yeah. This movie had a big premiere at the Chinese theater in LA, and everybody who was everybody showed up. Buster Keaton was there. Cecil B. DeMille was there. Gloria Swanson, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, all the who's who of Hollywood.
01:51:39
Speaker
There's footage of it. There's like newsreel footage on YouTube, which is kind of funny, which is then copied very accurately in the movie, The Aviator, also. Speaking of World War I pictures. Yeah. Let's get to our final film with the episode, All Quiet on the Western Front. All Quiet on the Western Front. The Academy Award winner for 1930. Yeah. For Best Picture. We're outstanding production, I believe as it was called back then.
01:52:08
Speaker
Uh, and, uh, you know, spoilers for the upcoming favorites section, but I agree that this is the best picture of 1930. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I, uh, I liked, I don't know if we're getting into favorites immediately. I, yeah, it's either this or Burlign for me. I think this probably overall is a more successful movie. This movie, um, this movie was very affecting for me. I, I was, I was.
01:52:33
Speaker
BOLD OVER by this. I've rarely seen war movies that are this
01:52:46
Speaker
unambiguously anti-war because, you know, the thing that I always say, which I believe or I bring up a lot, which I think is a reference or something that Truffaut said about it being impossible to make an anti-war movie because there's something that's glorifying about
01:53:04
Speaker
putting something on a movie screen. And I think that this has done one of the best jobs that I've seen of a war movie just feeling awful. There's nothing to be proud of here. This just sucks. This is bad.
01:53:27
Speaker
I like how much it doesn't necessarily just hit you over the head with it. I think the Netflix adaptation, the German adaptation of this novel that came out last year, it goes way harder with how violent it is in terms of seeing just people being torn apart by artillery and bayonets. It's one of the most violent movies that I've ever seen.
01:53:53
Speaker
Wow. But I like how much this movie... This movie is pretty violent for when it was made. But I like how much of it is...
01:54:03
Speaker
Naturally, there's that element of war that sucks and is terrible and is completely dehumanizing. But there's also just like how much World War One was just sitting in a trench not having food and like, you know, just the slow progression of like having your own humanity like stripped from you. Yeah. Is I think the thing this movie gets
01:54:29
Speaker
And I think is I haven't read the novel, but I think having seen now two different movie adaptations of it, like that is sort of the main idea that is being put forth is sort of like the the cumulative effect of how it just like hollows people out. Yeah. Yeah. Like that scene in the trench where they're starving for
01:54:49
Speaker
you know a week or something like that it's it's rough like they're all these people who you know they're they're being shelled constantly so they can't like they can't leave their hold that they're in and they can't sleep because of all the noise yeah uh they're they you know they start eating sawdust and stuff yeah they're also children right they're all like 17 yeah so it's like just that in addition as a thing that i think about
01:55:19
Speaker
with older wars, right? It's like how young the people were who usually fought in them. And, you know, there's tons of stories in World War I about people who lied about their age, who were like, 14, who went to go fight in World War I. I'm like, you put a 14-year-old in a trench? Yeah. It's crazy. And there's a scene later in the movie, you know, they were kind of seniors in high school or whatever the German equivalent of this was. But then, uh,
01:55:49
Speaker
There's a scene where it's a few years later and the main character is kind of back at the kind of training area and he's seeing the like even younger people. Yeah, he goes back to his old school.
01:56:07
Speaker
Yeah, but he goes back to the base camp and then he sees all of these even younger teens who have just been sent out on one mission and 80% of them died. And he's like, what are we even doing? And yeah, there's another scene where he is home on leave because he got injured and
01:56:31
Speaker
The movie begins with his teacher in school, basically telling him like, telling him and his classmates that it's noble to die for your country. You guys have a great opportunity here. Like this is so good and so right for you to do. And it's so your heroes for doing it. And then he comes home and sees after having his entire
01:57:01
Speaker
base of friends and classmates be maimed or killed. He goes back home and sees that teacher doing the same thing to some more students who and it horrifies him and he says like he tells them like there's nothing good about this like this is like without being a soldier. It's it's horrible. It's bad.
01:57:26
Speaker
Like, it's pain and death. And then the students are so bought in that they call him a coward and try and kick him out of the classroom. It did remind me of things I was reading about Kalagari and how that maybe is like a response to the German experience of World War I and how there was, like, people who fought in World War I came back and were like, we were lied to. Like, we were children who looked up to authority
01:57:55
Speaker
And they told us all this stuff about the glory of war and that it would be an adventure and all this stuff.
01:58:04
Speaker
And they were like, no, sir, incorrect. How dare you? Like we are betrayed and no longer trust authority as a concept anymore. Which is fair. And I think I think this movie gets at that feeling pretty well, even even if it's an American film. I don't think that there was quite that level of like disillusionment after World War One in the United States.
01:58:30
Speaker
I mean, it was certainly a much more distant thing for the US because it was never on, you know, whatever conflict happened in the US was like naval, right? It was like submarines blowing up ships and such. Like there was never, you know, Germany never invaded Florida. Yeah. Whereas I think certainly in like England and other parts of Europe and Germany, it's like it's a much more kind of palpable wound.
01:59:00
Speaker
in their cultural identity. I think this movie is often held up as one of the only examples of if an anti-war film is possible because of the Truffaut paradox of is it possible to be truly anti-war when film inherently kind of glorifies whatever your
01:59:25
Speaker
you're filming yeah it's like this is I think the the power of the the written material like again having not read the novel but it's like the writing of it is so strong that I think it
01:59:37
Speaker
It really imparts a real disillusionment with the entire idea of war. There's a similar scene in this movie as in Hell's Angels where the characters are talking about the futility and
01:59:57
Speaker
pointlessness of the war. And there, it's like this kind of thing to make fun of. But in here, it's like it's coming from a genuine place and it makes you believe it. It makes you like you've witnessed these children be traumatized horrifically by everything going on around them. And they're like, what? Why are we actually even doing this? You know, and it is a genuine question in the movie.
02:00:27
Speaker
Like you were saying, I think that this being an American production is kind of interesting because it's an American production in English, but based on a German book about Germans. It opens with the first lines of the novel. It's got a little title card at the beginning that's like the first paragraph in English from the book. Because it's not about
02:00:54
Speaker
Americans, I think it kind of sidesteps some of the issues that might arise if this movie were about Americans, which would be like this kind of tie to your own nation. You know, I think that like if you're making a war movie about your own nation's military, then there's this like reflexive support that you feel.
02:01:20
Speaker
where this movie, I think at least for American audiences, like allows you to be a little more dispassionate about what's going on because it is about Americans playing Germans and presumably Americans playing French people. So you can look at just the general idea of what it's trying to say, isolated from national feelings.
02:01:45
Speaker
Yeah. I would like to read the book. Having not seen two movies of it, it does seem like... And it's always kind of interesting just to compare the two. I don't think we need to get into that very heavily, because I don't think you've seen the German one, right? I have not, no. But it's, you know, a lot of the same... They have kind of the same big scenes, right? The big kind of turning point scenes are all the same, or very similar.
02:02:09
Speaker
Like there is maybe my favorite scene in both movies is when Paul, the lead character, is stuck in a crater with a French soldier that he's just stabbed but he's still alive. And they don't speak the same language and they're both just hiding in there and the French guy is slowly dying over the course of
02:02:32
Speaker
hours or days and Paul goes from immediately stabbing this guy to try to kill him, to talking with him and trying to almost sort of like keep him alive.
02:02:44
Speaker
And then he finally dies. And you see Paul's brain breaking throughout this whole scene. Yeah, because there are parts where his military training is kicking in and he starts acting more aggressively toward the guy. Yeah. And then he just pulls himself back. He's like, oh, no, no, you're my brother. I'm so sorry. Yeah. And he's giving him water. And he's trying to keep him alive. And he's like, I'm so sorry for what I did. I was afraid. I thought you were my enemy.
02:03:14
Speaker
And then he finally dies and it's almost like he gets angry with him again for dying. It's yeah, it's a very, it's a very intense, powerful scene that I think if I have one criticism of this movie, it's that I think the lead actor who plays Paul, Lou Ayers, Ayers.
02:03:34
Speaker
his acting style is very 1930s i guess like it's very big and there's moments that don't feel as maybe truthful as i wish they did for this movie i think he does a good job in a lot of parts but yeah there are definitely some things that are done a little too big and this was an early role for him too yeah but that being like i think for when this movie was made and when it came out i think
02:03:59
Speaker
Uh, he is well cast and is still, I mean, it's, you know, one of these pitfalls of being like an early talkie. People didn't really know quite how to act on film in many ways. It was like less naturalistic than we're used to seeing now, but, um, it is, I think for the time, it is a good performance. I don't want to bad mouth it.
02:04:21
Speaker
The soldier, the French soldier who was dying in that pit is named Raymond Griffith. And he was a comedian in a bunch of silent movies. But he is someone who this was his last movie he ever made, not because he died, but because he was able to be a silent film star because he lost his voice when he was a kid.
02:04:47
Speaker
And so he played a character who could not speak. Yeah. Wow. That's that's crazy. Yeah. And and also speaking to this as a sound movie, I thought the sound design and it was incredible. Every aspect of the direction of this movie, I think, is pretty incredible. Like this is this is easily the best directed sound film that we've watched.
02:05:11
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, this is this is like verging on the one like the best movie that we've seen so far to me. I wouldn't hold it up that highly, but I can see why it's definitely up there. Yeah, that's more of a matter of personal preference than anything else. Yeah.
02:05:30
Speaker
But yeah, this is a very, it's a very well made movie. But yeah, the sound design in this like the just explosions in the background, the when they're stuck in the trench, like the dust falling down from the ceiling, and just like this kind of
02:05:45
Speaker
Yeah, like in the out and out battle scenes, like the kind of extreme gunshots and explosions noises, I think it all sounds really, really good. And notable also is that this movie doesn't have a score, which is pretty common in early sound movies. It's funny that the Broadway melody actually had some
02:06:07
Speaker
Non-diegetic music, but now that there's like a lot of stuff that like now that sound is getting more established It feels like nine non-diegetic score music is becoming less like not it's not much Yeah, I did Morocco have a score that plenty of music and I never had score. Yeah, I was angels did but I Don't think Morocco does
02:06:30
Speaker
Yeah, this movie has no score. And in fact, like I think a score was added later and the director, Lewis Milestone, was vehemently against it and campaigned for its removal, which it eventually was. It is almost I think this movie is a good example of with the introduction of sound, silence takes on additional weight because like the choice not to have sound is then much more deliberate.
02:07:00
Speaker
And so I think the parts of this movie where they pull the sound out are actually like you really feel the silence of them. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, there's there's a lot of like off screen dialogue and off screen sound effects, which are things like this is a movie where if you took the sound out, it would really feel like it was missing something.
02:07:19
Speaker
Yeah, and there is a silent version of this movie. This was a process that a lot of movies went through in this early sound era where they made a kind of sunrise style version that is silent with intertitles but then has sound effects and music.
02:07:39
Speaker
That was the and it was also edited slightly differently the silent version of this so that's also Yeah There is a silent version. I know I feel like we've kind of like do we want to talk about the plot anymore like I? Guess we don't need to they go they go to war everyone dies They go to war and they string from like terrible thing to terrible thing some are like
02:08:06
Speaker
terrible in a life-threatening way and some are terrible in like a sort of interpersonal way and then occasionally there's some levity just to give you contrast. I do actually think the levity in this movie is like incredibly important to have like those few moments of lightness in them because even those kind of feel like
02:08:25
Speaker
really mundane in a way where it's like, they find a poster of a woman and they're like, oh my God, look at this, look at this lady. Just seeing a poster woman, they're just like, oh, what a life we could be living right now. Or they get double the amount of beans that they would get. And they're like, it is the best thing that has ever happened. They're like, we have two bowls of beans today.
02:08:51
Speaker
And it's, yeah, just to see how kind of the smallest amount of kind of comfort that they can find is like incredibly important to these people because yeah, they're children who have been asked to, you know, sit in a trench and kill people for years on end.
02:09:10
Speaker
I think another source of a lot of the levity in this movie is the character Cat. Love Cat. Great guy. He's kind of their commanding officer, but he's not a tyrant like the first one that they had. The mailman. Yeah.
02:09:32
Speaker
he is like someone who gets it basically he's like yeah yeah like this is bad and there's nothing good about it and we're just making the best of a good situation he's very jaded but at the same time he's not he's not a stickler for rules
02:09:48
Speaker
He's just like, we are just trying to survive. That's the best we can do. If we have to steal food, if we have to do whatever we gotta do, that's fine. And yeah, he's a source of levity and also kind of like perspective, right? He's a little bit older than the rest of the characters.
02:10:05
Speaker
But yeah, then he is killed unceremoniously from a leg wound that he just bleeds out from.
Paul's Symbolic End
02:10:13
Speaker
I think he might have gotten like nicked in the back of the neck or something again during that scene. Right. It's sort of unclear whether or not it's the leg wound killed him or if he was more gravely injured than he let on. It's not like a big death scene, right? It's just like he gets hurt and then they bring him back to camp. It's like, oh, he's dead. He died on the way back.
02:10:34
Speaker
which it feeds into like what the movie is doing, which is like, there's nothing heroic about these deaths and it's just random and horror. Yeah, he wasn't fighting in a battle even. They were just out like for a walk and a bomb landed on them. That's kind of like the last, I feel like the kind of like last amount of Paul's humanity kind of leaves when he finds that that cat has died. Like he's the last friend that he has. And it's... Cause they've all died. Yeah. Right. And then it's, he is this kind of just like,
02:11:04
Speaker
He's lost all will to even survive at that point. And so then it's like the end of the movie, which is great, is he sees a butterfly and it's like this one tiny symbol of like hope or beauty in the world. And it's like he reaches out to get the butterfly to get shot. Yeah. The meaning behind that imagery is very... It's poignant. It's very easy to understand, but yeah, it is very poignant and good.
02:11:35
Speaker
Good movie. Cat, he's played by Lewis Wollheim, who was normally cast as like, bruisers and villains in movies. Sort of a Wallace Beery type. He's got like, he's got a...
02:11:51
Speaker
kind of chunky face with a previously broken nose. Chunky face 1930s actors. He looks like he could be a boxer or a wrestler or something. And so he's kind of playing against type here as like a softy. And he does a really good job at it. Lewis Milestone, the director, had previously cast him against type in a comedy movie that he made the previous year.
02:12:18
Speaker
One other kind of note is that we touched on that scene where Paul goes back and sees the class, but he's on leave for like six days and he leaves after one day because he's realized that the war has changed him so much that he can't relate to anybody anymore. And then also he's just disgusted at the way that the powers that be or the kind of
02:12:47
Speaker
older men who aren't fighting in the war are treating it like a game yeah there's the backseat generals who are like looking at maps and like oh what they what they should have done is this and he's like this is terrible yeah yeah
02:13:00
Speaker
Yeah, like that scene, no war happening, but it's like that scene is one of the most sort of like powerful scenes of like what war does to people. Like they come back and they don't know how to function anymore because they've been conditioned just to live in these very specific terrible circumstances, which is still, you know, a problem with veterans coming back from war.
02:13:23
Speaker
And along with the lines of this being like a pre-code movie, we mentioned, yeah, there's some pretty shocking gore at some points. In particular, there's a part where
02:13:38
Speaker
There's a French soldier who's running toward some razor wire to try and go through it. And then a bomb blows up right next to him. And then there are just disembodied hands on the razor wire as the rest of him has been exploded. Yeah. And you're like, oh, my God. Amazing shot. Just a such a straightforward visual that is like it really like the brutality of it, but also just like the weirdness of it.
02:14:07
Speaker
is like really sticks in the brain, I think. But yeah, I guess we forgot to mention during the talking about Hell's Angels that also there's some cussing in it too. True, yeah. Where pretty extreme for the time. There are two, there's a God damn it and two son of a bitches in that movie, which. Which is like. Two sons of bitch. I don't think I even.
02:14:35
Speaker
clocked that when I was watching it. I did also read about that. But it's so tamed by today's standards that I didn't even think about it. But it is something that would never have happened in a Hays Code era film. A post 1934 movie would absolutely not say son of a bitch. Or if they did, it would be like a huge deal.
02:15:00
Speaker
Right. But yeah, this one is more pushing it with the violence. Yeah, which I think we even talked about, like the battle scene in this movie are super intense. Yeah. And I think our less I think the battle scenes and wings are like really impressive for their scale.
02:15:16
Speaker
Whereas this are, I think it's the scale is also there. It's like they're staged very well and it's clearly huge. Lots of extras, everything's blowing up. But I think it kind of puts you in a bit more of a subjective point of view than Wings. Wings was all about kind of like this big picture of like these massive battle scenes and planes flying overhead.
02:15:40
Speaker
This is much more like looking out through a tiny hole in a wall and seeing all this stuff. You know, it's like it feels very sort of from the perspective of the soldiers. And there were a couple of shots in this of like mortars landing or like things blowing up that were just still insane to see because they're just doing it for real. You know, I know they're using actual artillery or not, but it's like
02:16:06
Speaker
Yeah, there's some some kind of job jaw dropping stuff and it's well directed to like there's lots of great like Cameras on a track a lot of time just like tracking through stuff a lot of really good camera movement great sound design and that stuff. Yeah
02:16:21
Speaker
There are some good parts where they're able to do some more freeform movement with the camera by having having sort of pre-recorded sound over it. Yeah. There's like dialogue over camera moving, but it's dialogue that was recorded and then placed on top of it so that you could do much more dynamic stuff, which I thought was a really good way of getting around the issues that they had. Yeah. Yeah. It's like it's a great sort of this is maybe the first movie that we've watched that feels like it is kind of
02:16:51
Speaker
Properly using both methods of like recording stuff while the camera is running but then also Pre-recording stuff or recording stuff after to allow for a freer use of the camera good movie Good movie. This movie was banned in Germany amongst other places not right away, but in Germany this movie was attacked by Nazis
02:17:19
Speaker
who was straight up like attack screenings. Like they would show up and they would throw stink bombs and like, you know, beat people up who tried to get into the theater and like- They released rats into the theaters. Yeah. And it got, I guess, maybe because of that pressure, maybe there was some other political pressure, but this movie was banned before the Nazis took power in 33. It was definitely banned after that.
02:17:47
Speaker
And the book was also banned and was one of the first to be publicly burned. Other countries banned the movie. I mean, it's very obvious why Nazis hated this movie is because it is the least nationalistic thing that is extremely anti-war and is like, hey, old German men leading people to war bad. Don't do it.
02:18:08
Speaker
Right. But other countries banned this purely on the stance that it was seen as pacifist propaganda, which is wild. Yeah. It's wild to be like, this movie is too anti-war. Like, we got to have some more pro-war stuff out in the world. Yeah, I mean, people have been killed over that, so.
02:18:29
Speaker
Yeah, it's just it's crazy to think of a movie being banned for that reason, but it happened. Yeah. The book was also banned for similar reasons, sometimes up until like the 50s or the through the 70s, like it was banned for a while. The author of this book, Eric Maria Remark,
02:18:48
Speaker
Speaking of Marlene Dietrich and her many affairs, they had an affair later on in the 1930s, so it's good for them. The director, Lou Milestone, kind of went on to make a lot more Hollywood movies. Yeah, yeah. Including Mutiny on the Bounty and Ocean's Eleven, the original Ocean's Eleven. Quite a filmography. Yeah.
02:19:09
Speaker
Yeah, this movie is definitely in the pantheon of the great Hollywood movies, and I think it is. Yes. Deservably so. I think it's like the first great sound movie. Yeah, probably. Maybe it's just the fact that I'd seen it before. But yeah, I don't know. I didn't have a super strong emotional reaction to this movie. I really admire how well made it is, but I don't feel like I saw it and was like, ugh.
02:19:39
Speaker
my heart, you know? Which is... Yeah, I guess I didn't remember enough from the last time that I saw it that, uh... Yeah, maybe, maybe I'm... It hit me as if it was the first time. Maybe I'm just so hollowed out from having seen too many war movies. I don't know.
02:19:52
Speaker
Uh, and yeah, if we're to move into favorites, it's my favorite. What do you think? I'm going to say borderline just to be, uh, contrarian and to have a different, cause I think I, my enjoyment of both was about the same. And I'm, I mean, I was also, I saw borderline under very good circumstances and being able to see an actual projection of it and that sort of thing. I think borderline is less, it's less concerned with sort of like telling a narrative than I think all quiet is. Uh, but it's, I don't know, I appreciated just the fact that it's like trying a bunch of stuff.
02:20:22
Speaker
that I think we're in an era now where movies are starting to really kind of fall into a rut of saminess of like okay we know how to do this now like stuff kind of looks the same and it's you know there's you can kind of you can still kind of feel some of the the the weight that having to record sound put on production
02:20:46
Speaker
even if already it's, you know, the movies this year were so much better than the ones from 28 or 29. So yeah, I am very much looking forward to. I mean, we got we got a real doozy of a year next episode. So yeah. So perfect episode for spooky season. We're going to be talking about some universal monster pictures. Ah, just in time, though. Just in time for. Yeah. Well, Halloween.
02:21:14
Speaker
Uh, and yeah, we'll be probably be addressing some universal monsters in October as well. Cause you know, they're, they're out there. We can talk about the dark universe somewhere. Yes. The original dark universe.
02:21:28
Speaker
Well, with that silly reference, I think that'll be about it for this episode. Indeed. Thank you all for watching and listening. Make sure to leave comments and follow us on stuff. It's all in the description. You know what to do. Yeah.
02:21:49
Speaker
Yeah, that'll be about it. And the beginning of the 1930s, very exciting. Yeah. We're in the talky era. Who would have thought we'd make it this far?
02:21:58
Speaker
Yeah. This is the longest that I've ever stuck to doing anything. It does feel like with the beginning of the 1930s, it's like, oh, yeah, we're ending like a whole new era kind of. I think we said this last episode also, but it's it feels significant. The stuff that we're watching feels very different from 10 episodes ago, you know? Yeah. 40 down and
02:22:22
Speaker
In 40 more, I'll see you for a 2001 Space Odyssey or whatever. All right, well that's about it. Glenn, I'll see you next year. See you next year.