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I was going to put together my list of the ten best movies of 2010, but I think I only saw two, and one of them, Hot Tub Time Machine, is such a shoo-in for the Oscar this year I thought why bother.
Instead, in the spirit of pure narcissism—and because I'm still working on my marathon essay on the years 1906-1914 and have nothing else to post—here are the ten subjects I most enjoyed writing about in 2010 (click on the highlighted link to read the original post):
10. Helen Chandler
Who?
She was an actress in the early days of sound best remembered now for getting her neck bitten in Bela Lugosi's Dracula. But I love her for uttering my favorite line of dialogue from the World War I flying ace movie, The Last Flight:
"What are you changing your shoes for?"
"On account of I can walk faster in red shoes."
9. Norma Shearer
It's fun—occasionally—to admit you're wrong and when I picked Norma Shearer as the best actress of 1931-32 for her performance in the comedy Private Lives, I had to admit I had been wrong in dismissing her so quickly in the past.
8. Ham Actors
You remember that Oscar ceremony where Wallace Beery beat John Barrymore around the head and shoulders with a rotary dial telephone? You don't? Well, it happened, at least here at the Monkey.
7. Movie Lists
I think I once vowed never to do a list—so, of course, this year I did two. Or three, counting this one.
6. The Aging Of Greta Garbo
But for an anomalous couple of weeks when somebody's droid app led to 3500 hits a day on my post about Popeye the Sailor, this post—a chronological series of photographs of Greta Garbo, ranging from childhood to old age—is the most popular one I've ever written.
5. Anita Page
Did you ever fall in love with a hundred year old dead actress you're not married to? You did? What are you, some kind of freak?
4. Leave It To Beaver In Japanese
Actually, I mean Yasujiro Ozu's classic comedy I Was Born, But ..., the story of a couple of mischievous boys who discover their dad is a middle management toady who survives as the butt of his boss's jokes. Why? "He pays my salary."
"Then don't let him pay you," his son says.
"Yeah!" the little brother adds with the implacable logic of a six year old. "You pay him instead!"
And you wonder why I blog for a living.
3. Jean Harlow
Seriously, I need to explain this?
2. Very, very old movies
I still say a rocket hitting the moon in the eye is one of the greatest images in the history of movies.
1. The Marx Brothers
Only a fool would write an eight-part, 12,000 word essay and not claim it as his favorite post of the year. Well, the Monkey may be crazy, but he's no fool.
I've got a number of essays in the works—the best screenplay of 1931-32, a special Katie award for cinematography, another for short subject—but in the meantime, I chased down William Dieterle's The Last Flight, one of the movies that didn't make the cut come Katie nomination time. It has a high rating on the Internet Movie Database, ranking thirteenth among those movies released in 1931—undeservedly, as it turns out, but not bad either if you keep your expectations in check.
Another in a cycle of World War I flyer movies, The Last Flight follows four wounded pilots—"spent bullets" one doctor calls them—as they nurse their physical and psychological wounds by boozing their way through postwar Paris and Lisbon. (The screen shots are from the websites Shadowplay and Booze Movies: The 100 Proof Film Guide.)
Richard Barthelmess plays Cary Lockwood, a pilot with badly burned hands and an even more badly burned psyche. Trained for war, ill-equipped for peace, Cary and his pals remain in Europe, drinking to anaesthetize the pain. Pretty soon they're drinking because they can't do anything else.
Taking up with the boys is an eccentric American girl, Nikki (Helen Chandler), who drinks, collects turtles in her bathtub and is not the least bit apologetic about her turned-up nose—very much the kind of woman you'd fall for whether in a movie, in a bar or across your neighbor's fence. She seems to grasp that the boys are as ready to crumble as stale cake and she makes no demands of them other than that they scrub her back and listen to her goofy, elliptical stories.
She's especially drawn to Barthelmess's Cary, the most fragile of the bunch, and to the extent that this character-driven study has any forward momentum at all, the budding relationship between the dotty Nikki and the desperate Cary provides it.
"What are you changing your shoes for?" ask the boys as she readies to chase Barthelmess to his favorite bar.
"On account of I can walk faster in red shoes," says Nikki.
You betcha.
The Last Flight suffers from the problems characteristic of many of Hollywood's early sound efforts—wooden line readings, awkward pauses and portentous, stage-bound dialogue. A good example of the latter would be that "spent bullets" line I mentioned earlier, a nifty metaphor pounded into utter submission with the following speech, typical of some of the screenplay's clunkier efforts:
"Spent bullets. (pause) That's it. They're like projectiles (pause) shaped for war and hurled at the enemy. (pause) They've described a beautiful, high, arching trajectory (pause) and now they've fallen back to earth. (pause) Spent. (pause) Cooled off. (pause) Useless."
I expected something in there about how a factory in Detroit had been converted over to wartime production and maybe even the pilots' dog tag numbers, but I guess the screenwriter (John Monk Saunders, who the year before won an Oscar for another WWI flyer movie, The Dawn Patrol) didn't want to hit that metaphor too hard.
The real problem with the movie, though, is not that it's over-written, it's under-written. I like a languidly-paced character study as much as the next man if the dialogue is sharp and the episodes are illustrative of something, but there's nothing much more at work here than to repeat over and over again that these guys left the best of themselves on the battlefield, an insight firmly established early then never deepened or built upon. It's as if Saunders started reading The Sun Also Rises, fell in love with the drunk scenes and determined to rip off as much as he could—there's even a bullfight!
"Road to hell paved with un-bought stuffed dogs," you can almost hear Hemingway saying, "Not my fault."
"Gary" at "Booze Movies" opines that "The film would have likely been even more powerful as a silent." I think he's right. William Dieterle, who later directed such movies as The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) and The Devil and Daniel Webster and was nominated for an Oscar for The Life of Emile Zola, was an accomplished visual stylist whose pictures here almost overcome the limitations of the acting and the screenplay.
The movie catches Barthelmess in the middle of his long, painful transition from silent film star (Broken Blossoms, Way Down East) to forgotten character actor 
(e.g., Only Angels Have Wings, again as a pilot with burned hands). He often played his characters from a boxer's crouch—shoulders hunched, lips tight, eyes gazing into the distance like he's waiting for the next blow to land. Here his style suits the movie just fine.
Helen Chandler, who plays Nikki, was a highly-regarded stage actress who unfortunately never learned to dial it down for the movies and she overplays here. Still, she's adorable in a clumsy puppy dog sort of way and is the best thing in the movie. She left Hollywood in 1937, wound up in a sanitarium to treat an alcohol and drug addiction and was badly burned while smoking in bed. She and her lovely throat are perhaps best remembered now for playing Mina across from Bela Lugosi in the 1931 version of Dracula. (For a nice little biography, check out the TCM Movie Morlocks post "Lost in a Dream Sometimes.")
Of the other players, the less said the better. Johnny Mack Brown, a former running back at Alabama, made a sackful of B-Westerns that spanned nearly forty years. David Manners never found much success as an actor, spent less than a decade in Hollywood, then wrote novels until his death at the age of ninety-seven. Elliott Nugent worked primarily as a director, including five Bob Hope comedies.
The theme of men broken by war and lost in peace is explored to much greater effect in the novels of Ernest Hemingway and the short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and in such movies as The Best Years of Our Lives, Three Comrades, The Enchanted Cottage, Coming Home and Key Largo. Nor does The Last Flight measure up to the movies that I have nominated for Katie Awards in any of the various categories. But if you stumble across it on cable one day or otherwise can dig up a free copy, The Last Flight is worth a look.
Note: After the movie's release, a stage version of the story, Nikki, ran on Broadway. The production starred Fay Wray, and in the role of Cary Lockwood, a young actor named Archie Leach. Sometime after, Leach changed his name to "Cary Grant," moved to Hollywood and made some movies which I suspect we here at the Monkey will wind up talking about at some length.
In honor of Bela Lugosi's birthday today, I am moving my choice for the best fun-stupid movie of 1930-31 ahead by a few days.
The brain child of Oscar-winning producer Carl Laemmle, Jr., Dracula was the first of Universal Studios' classic "monster" movies, a series that included Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Black Cat and Bride of Frankenstein and continued well into the 1950s (see, e.g., Creature From the Black Lagoon). The title character was played by Bela Lugosi, a Hungarian film actor who had had a huge success on Broadway with a stage adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel. Although Lugosi was not Universal's first choice to play the title character (Lon Chaney was reportedly set to play the role until his untimely death; also considered were Conrad Veidt and Paul Muni), he became so closely associated with the role, he rarely appeared in any other kind of movie.
The story, based more on the stage play than the novel, is by now a familiar one. A young British lawyer (Dwight Frye in the movie's other great performance) journeys to Transylvania to arrange Count Dracula's sea journey to London. Once there, Dracula begins to prey on beautiful young women, first Lucy Weston then Mina Harker—famously conflating sex, seduction, virginity and horror, soon to become staples of the genre—until that old vampire hunter Professor von Helsing arrives and divines Dracula's true nature.
The movie was a big box office hit upon its release in February 1931 and continues to enjoy acclaim today. Just last month, the London Telegraph included Dracula on its list of the twenty-five best book to film adaptations in movie history. The American Film Institute chose Lugosi's Dracula #33 on its list of the fifty greatest villains, ranked the movie #85 on its list of the 100 top thrillers and voted the line "Listen to them. Children of the night. What music they make." one of the top 100 movie quotes of all time. In 2000, the Library of Congress selected Dracula for the National Film Registry.
Lugosi himself didn't fare as well. Although he continued to work right up until his death, even appearing posthumously in Ed Wood's camp classic Plan 9 From Outer Space, most of his roles after the early 1930s were in campy, low-budget horror films for poverty row studios. He did have a supporting role as a Russian commissar in the 1939 comedy Ninotchka and in the 1945 Val Lewton adaptation of Robert Lewis Stevenson's short story The Body Snatcher with Boris Karloff. Lugosi died of a heart attack in 1956.
Martin Landau won an Academy Award for his portrayal of Lugosi in Tim Burton's comedy Ed Wood.
Will you find Dracula scary? Not unless you under the age of four. I mean, the guy's wearing a tuxedo for crying out loud—how scary can he be? I'm not even sure audiences in 1931 found this movie scary and certainly by the time Bela Lugosi reprised the role for Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein he was playing the part strictly for laughs. But while it's true that one generation's horror becomes the next generation's camp, the appeal of Dracula has always rested not on its shock value but on its ideas and it's there you will find the lasting power of its horror.
You have to know what kind of a movie fan you are. If you're a sit back, arm's crossed "show me something" kind of viewer, you may find Dracula slow and campy. But if you're willing to give yourself up to it, particularly with Halloween just around the corner, I think you will find it fun. At least I did.
I was going to put together my list of the ten best movies of 2010, but I think I only saw two, and one of them, Hot Tub Time Machine, is such a shoo-in for the Oscar this year I thought why bother.
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