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TM2YC's 1001 Movies (Chronological up to page 25/post 481)

TM2YC

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81 years ago...

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Camille (1936)
Director: George Cukor
Country: United States
Length: 109 minutes
Type: Romance, Tragedy

You can sense the tragedy approaching from the very start of 'Camille'. Like a flower in a vase, you know it isn't going to last forever (flower imagery is all over this film). Greta Garbo plays a Parisian socialite/courtesan who embraces life with no caution, spending money as if the next day will be her last. Robert Taylor plays Garbo's handsome young love interest and it's interesting to see him being given the soft-focus close-ups. The finale gives Romeo and Juliet a run for it's money in the heartbreak stakes.


Another early Hitchcock film next.
 

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Sabotage (1936)
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Country: United Kingdom
Length: 76 minutes
Type: Thriller, Drama

'Sabotage' (aka 'The Woman Alone') is based on Joseph Conrad's novel 'The Secret Agent' but Alfred Hitchcock changes the profession of the agent to a Cinema owner and so cleverly uses the extreme flammability of Nitrate-Stock as a plot point. The scene involving the film-stock shows Hitchcock is already becoming "the master of suspense", something we also see in this scene of a wife contemplating murdering the husband that has betrayed her:


A William Wyler film next.
 

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Dodsworth (1936)
Director: William Wyler
Country: United States
Length: 101 minutes
Type: Drama, Romance

I wasn't surprised to read afterwards that 'Dodsworth' was based on a stage play because with all it's hotel-room settings, it never quite manages to escape those dramatic confines. William Wyler does his best though, with excellent composition and lots of different European locations. The performances are superbly subtle and well drawn, describing the slow collapse of a marriage. Walter Huston brilliantly plays the title character, a kind man, perhaps too decent for his own good. The end was very satisfying, helped out enormously by Alfred Newman's bittersweet score.


An early Sci-Fi film next.
 

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Rogue-theX said:
TM2YC said:
An early Sci-Fi film next.

Oooh, I think I know whats coming next! :cool:

Did you guess the things to come correctly...?

82 years ago...

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Things To Come (1936)
Director: William Cameron Menzies
Country: United Kingdom
Length: 96 minutes
Type: Science-Fiction

'Things To Come' is somewhat lacking in the character department but it's a fascinating technical achievement. This 1936 British Sci-Fi film (written by H.G. Welles) is probably the earliest entry in the Post-Apocalyptic film Genre (It's also maybe the first ever serious Science-Fiction film overall, since some consider 1927's 'Metropolis' as more fantasy, than reasoned speculation). So we get a vision of a society regressing to a time of warlords obsessed by oil, several decades before Immortan Joe and The Humongous.

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The scenes of "Everytown" being bombed at night look astonishingly like actual newsreels from 'The Blitz' but that was still 5-years away. After a campaign of chemical and biological warfare there is a plague of infected zombies being shot at by the living, straight out of 'Night of the Living Dead'. The future tanks still look futuristic, even if the aircraft look a little more like something from Thunderbirds. The subterranean science-city looks a lot like the one in the latest 'Fallout 4' video game and it's a similar concept to 'Tomorrowland'.

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It may not have accurately predicted the course of the late 20th Century exactly but it did predicted the pop-culture themes we'd still be exploring today and is clearly influential. I don't think I'll be watching this again for it's paper-thin characters but I look forward to marveling at the Miniature-FX work a second time. Sadly we only have a surviving 96 minute cut, when it was originally around 2 hours long.


A Sacha Guitry fillm next.
 

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81 years ago...

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The Story of a Cheat (1936)
Director: Sacha Guitry
Country: France
Length: 81 minutes
Type: Comedy, Drama

'The Story of a Cheat' ('Le Roman d'un Tricheur') is told in flashback, which I'm a fan of. The eponymous "Cheat" sits in a café recounting blackly comic tales from his life. Sacha Guitry stars, writes and Directs, doing all three with total charm. I suspect his narration and the style of the opening intro are primary influences on Orson Welles 'The Magnificent Ambersons'. This is his only film in the book and the only one of his films I've ever seen. I shall have to seek out more of his work on my own, so it's fortunate that Arrow are releasing a new Blu-Ray boxset in a fortnight:

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https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sacha-Guitry-1936-1938-Limited-Blu-ray/dp/B07511FB9F/


A Rudyard Kipling film next (He makes such exceedingly good cakes).
 

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80 years ago...

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Captains Courageous (1937)
Director: Victor Fleming
Country: United States
Length: 115 minutes
Type: Drama, Adventure

Harvey, a rich and spoiled boy falls off an ocean liner, gets rescued and so spends 3-months with a crew of hardy Atlantic fisherman. The central role by 12-year old Freddie Bartholomew, might just be the best child performance I've ever seen. He manages to play Harvey as initially cruel and deceitful but keeps our sympathy and finally in love with him by the time the credits role. His scenes with surrogate father-figure Manuel (Spencer Tracy) had me dabbing the corner of my eyes on more than one occasion. 'Captains Courageous' is another movie I'm putting straight on my all-time favourites list.

I'd wager the makers of 1975's 'Jaws' have seen this. Some of Franz Waxman's score sounds quite similar to the brighter sections of John William's. The fast paced energy and excitement of fishing is reminiscent of Spielberg's shooting during the third act. Lionel Barrymore's Captain Disko sounds the spit of Quint (although somewhat more loveable).


Next up is the first film in the book from China.

(By the way, I realised I've passed a hundred films, a few movies back, so only about 900 hundred more to go!)
 

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80 years ago...

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Song At Midnight (1937)
Director: Ma-Xu Weibang
Country: China
Length: 118 minutes
Type: Horror, Drama, Musical

'The Phantom of the Opera' is transposed to (then) present-day China. The phantom is renamed 'Song', who in this reimagining is not only a famed Opera singer but also a Che Guevara-esque figure in pre-revolution China. For politics and for his love for a girl, he is cruelly disfigured in an acid-throwing attack. 10-years later he is an outcast but helps tutor a young Opera singer much like himself, and serenades his lost love with a "song at midnight".

Out-of-print and out-of-copyright, purchasing a decent copy of 'Song At Midnight' ('Yè Bàn Gē Shēng') proved impossible, so I had to resort to a poor youtube upload. The video was unwatchable, the sound was unlistenable and English subtitles were unreadable :D . Some mental agility was needed to simultaneously watch the actors, read the subtitles and work out what the hell they were supposed to mean! It speaks well of the film, that despite all that, I was able to enjoy the movie and follow the narrative quite easily.

A few examples of the "Backstroke of the West" level subtitles I had to work with:

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I'd love to revisit this one day if it ever gets a restoration because beneath all the film damage and distorted audio there is clearly a beautiful looking Gothic Horror film. I'm sure fans of the classic Universal Horror movies would enjoy this too.


Next up is a Jean Renoir masterpiece, which thankfully I already own in a great DVD transfer.
 

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80 years ago...

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The Grand Illusion (1937)
Director: Jean Renoir
Country: France
Length: 114 minutes
Type: War, Drama

I've watched 'La Grande Illusion' before and was delighted to have an excuse to watch it again. The most humane of anti-war movies, which doesn't actually contain any war. It's about French POWs who have been through WWI, seen it's futility and so are almost as friendly with their German captors, as with their countrymen. They all have their different reasons but are united by the goal to escape. Nationality, military-rank, religion and race are all ignored in the confines of the prison but somehow class can never be quite forgotten.

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Erich von Stroheim comes out of the Director's chair to play a German aristocratic Aviator, appearing more constricted by his code of honour, than by the neck-brace that protects his damaged spine. Jean Gabin is the standout as the rough working-class Maréchal. They are both supported by a superb cast including Dita Parlo (in the only female role), Marcel Dalio as Rosenthal (the son of a wealthy Jewish family, who keeps his fellow prisoner's spirits up with generous food parcels) and Pierre Fresnay as a French Aristocratic officer. Fresnay and Stroheim's characters have a note of sad mortality, seeming to know that the WWI catastrophe spells the end of an era where their class held sway over Europe.


Next up is another Barbara Stanwyck picture (always a good thing!).
 

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Stella Dallas (1937)
Director: King Vidor
Country: United States
Length: 106 minutes
Type: Drama

'Stella Dallas' follows the rise and fall of a working-class girl who dreams of being a part of the "smart set". She seduces a well to do man who marries her but she soon finds she cannot change who she truly is and can never be a part of his world.  So her ambitions for respectability switch to their daughter but she must sacrifice everything for it. The well-to-do people see only the worst in Stella but Director King Vidor shows us the audience, the private moments where she shows her worth.


Every time I watch another Barbara Stanwyck film I become more impressed with her acting abilities. This is the best I've yet seen, in a title role of deep emotional complexity. Two scenes really stood out for me, both relying on long slow closeups of Stanwyck's face. The ending scene of Stella secretly watching her daughter being married from behind jail-like railings, tears mixed with rain pouring down her face and a look quavering between sadness and joy, is unforgettable.


Next up is another Paul Muni film.
 

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The Life of Emile Zola (1937)
Director: William Dieterle
Country: United States
Length: 116 minutes
Type: Drama, Political

I confess I didn't know too much about 19th Century French writer/journalist Emile Zola before watching this film but I knew the rough outline of the legal case that this dramatises. The film is not the simple biopic that the title suggests but mostly focuses on the final (and arguably defining) chapter of Zola's life. The first 30-minutes is devoted to showing us glimpses from his earlier life, all of them important (in retrospect) in informing how and why he acted as he did during "The Dreyfus Affair", employing much clever foreshadowing.

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There is a spy at the top of the French military and it's decided that he must be Captain Alfred Dreyfus, simply because he was Jewish. He is swiftly convicted and imprisoned but later when the real spy is discovered the top-brass cover it up to hide their incompetence and prejudice. Zola intervenes in the case by deliberately provoking the military into suing him for libel when he denounces them in an incendiary front-page letter to the French President (Called "J'Accuse...!").

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Curiously no mention of antisemitism is made in the dialogue, although the implication is absolutely clear. Whether this is to make the film a more universal representation of a gross miscarriage of justice, or Warner Brothers being reluctant to address the issue head-on in the pre-Holocaust years, is unclear.  If I hadn't read it was Paul "Scarface" Muni in the title role I wouldn't have realised. He completely disappears into the character, giving a full-body performance of Zola as he slowly ages (aided by excellent hair and makeup). Muni delivers several fiery speeches, culminating in his final summing up at the libel case, consisting mostly of one powerful 4.5-minute long take:


Next up is a film that Orson Welles said "would make a stone cry".
 

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Make Way for Tomorrow (1937)
Director: Leo McCarey
Country: United States
Length: 92 minutes
Type: Drama, Romance

This was the 3rd or 4th time I've watched 'Make Way for Tomorrow' and it gets better every time. An hour and half slips by, with well written scene, after scene. An elderly and very much in love couple (Bark and Lucy) lose their house and have to stay separately with their children's families. They all try to make it work but can't and the couple slowly fear that they won't ever be together again. There are devastatingly heartbreaking yet subtle moments but it's also full of kindness and love. The sympathetic friendship Bark has with the elderly shopkeeper Mr Rubens is charming and also touching when we see how Bark's plight makes him appreciate his own wife all the more. The final scene makes me well up each time I see it (spoilers):



Next up is the first animated feature film and the first film from the list in Technicolor.
 

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Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
Director: David Hand, William Cottrell, Wilfred Jackson, Larry Morey, Perce Pearce & Ben Sharpsteen
Country: United States
Length: 83 minutes
Type: Animated, Romance, Musical, Fantasy

According to a little Wikipedia research, Disney's 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs' is one of the first ten-or-so features to use the full Technicolor 3-strip process (the first colour film in the book too). There are many films before it that used partial 2-strip, or tinted methods, in whole, or in part to reproduce colour on screen and there were also several experimental shorts (some by Disney) but this is definitively the moment when full lustrous colour had arrived at the Cinema. 80-years later and Technicolor's process has never been improved upon in my opinion.

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Disney's trademark animation style is mostly here for the Dwarfs and animals but Snow White and the other humans appear noticeably rotoscoped and less smooth. The characterisation is almost nil, the Prince being the worst off with barely a line. Snow White is just a vacuous pretty girl who likes washing, cleaning and cooking for the men. If the Disney writing team want to do a new live-action version, they are going to have some serious work bringing this one up to date for modern audiences! In fact this might be a rare case were a remake would be welcome and interesting.

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The songs are of course memorable but they are sung in that horribly dated warbling white 1930s style. 20% of the movie is plot and 80% is d*cking about in the Dwarf house. As the first animated film it's a mighty technical achievement for 1937 and looks beautiful in HD but it does nothing for my heartstrings in 2018. I expect a compelling story, dramatic stakes and strong characters in my animated movies these days. Pixar and the 1990s "Disney Renaissance" have clearly spoiled me :D .


(01.00 - "...and Grumpy who thinks he's a confirmed woman hater". They really knew how to market movies in 1944! ;) )

Another Leo McCarey film next (a 'Best Picture' infact).
 

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The Awful Truth (1937)
Director: Leo McCarey
Country: United States
Length: 90 minutes
Type: Comedy, Romance

When Leo McCarey won the Best Director Oscar for this light-comedy, he quipped "I want to thank the Academy for this wonderful award... but you gave it to me for the wrong picture!". He was referring to his other 1937 film, the much more serious 'Make Way for Tomorrow' and I have to agree with him. 'The Awful Truth' is a comparatively unremarkable film, other than the back-and-forth insulting banter between Irene Dunne and Cary Grant being totally delightful and since that makes up 95% of the run-time it's very good fun. They play a married couple who suspect each other of infidelity, so hastily arrange a divorce then spend the rest of the movie falling back in love. The dense comedic dialogue is often very clever, take this exchange playing with the myriad interpretations that can be placed on the words "Same" and "Different" (Oscar Wilde would be impressed):

Jerry: In a half an hour, we'll no longer be Mr. and Mrs.... funny, isn't it?

Lucy: Yes, it's funny that everything's the way it is on account of the way you feel.

Jerry: Huh?

Lucy: Well, what I mean is, if you didn't feel the way you do, things wouldn't be the way they are, would they? I mean, things could be the same if things were different.

Jerry: But things are the way you made them.

Lucy: Oh, no. No, things are the way you think I made them. I didn't make them that way at all. Things are just the same as they always were, only, you're the same as you were, too, so I guess things will never be the same again.

Lucy: You're all confused, aren't you?

Jerry: Aren't you?

Lucy: No.

Jerry: Well you should be, because you're wrong about things being different because they're not the same. Things are different except in a different way. You're still the same, only I've been a fool... but I'm not now.

Lucy: Oh.

Jerry: So long as I'm different don't you think that... well maybe things could be the same again... only a little different, huh?


Next is another film starring the excellent French actor Jean Gabin.
 

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81 years ago...

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Pépé le Moko (1937)
Director: Julien Duvivier
Country: France
Length: 94 minutes
Type: Drama, Crime

There are a lot of '30s Hollywood films in this list, so the stark difference in style of this French-made film is obvious. Gritty social realism, a free roaming camera, stylish angles, sharp atmospheric lighting and naturalistic acting are all things you associate with Hollywood's "Film Noir" period of the 40s/50s. In 1937 at least and judging by 'Pépé le Moko', the French are ahead of the curve and operating on a different level. Jean Gabin (in the title role) is superb as a French gangster, king of the Casbah but trapped like a rat in it's maze like streets, surrounded by police.

Look at the Scorsese-like brilliance of this violent scene showing the murder of a traitor to the gang. The way the camera stalks the victim, the use of loud happy music is unsettling and the intercutting of comic imagery all serve to maximise it's horror. POV shots are used to make us the viewer simultaneously experience killing and being killed. It should also be noted that this slaying immediately follows a romantic/sexual scene, making it more physiologically shocking.


I noticed Hollywood did a near shot-for-shot remake a year later called "Algiers", although typically they sanitised the ending. I haven't watched it all but scrubbing through, scenes/shots look almost identical.

The next movie is an early Bette Davis role.
 

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80 years ago...

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Jezebel (1938)
Director: William Wyler
Country: United States
Length: 103 minutes
Type: Drama

'Jezebel' could easily play in a double-bill with 'Gone with the Wind' as this is another Deep-South/Plantation film, set before that era (thankfully) ended. The main character Julie (Bette Davis) is also a spoiled rich girl much like Scarlett O'Hara, except here we are not expected to sympathise so much. At first Julie comes off as refreshingly head-strong in the face of stuffy high-society but it soon becomes clear she is petulant, vain and callous. A central plot point rests on the colour of a dress, one red dress in a sea of white would have been a striking image in Technicolor but here, in monochrome, it doesn't really work.

An unlikable central character I can deal with but the constant racism prevented me from engaging with, or enjoying the film. I'm sure all the black servant/slave characters (there are many) say "Yasum" about five hundred times in the screenplay and the actors are forced to do those horrible smiling minstrel performances. Even Julie's final "redemption" speech has her saying she knows "How to talk to a sullen, overworked black boy and make him fear you". There is one brief glimmer of hope when Henry Fonda's character, fresh from a trip to the more enlightened North, asks the black Butler "Uncle" Cato to have a Mint Julep with him... but Cato gives him a kindly smile and tells him "T'aint hardly proper but I'll kindly take one out in the pantry". It's still amazing to me that within living memory of the 13th Amendment, Hollywood was making films portraying slavery as totally fine. F*ck you movie! :mad:


Some Errol Flynn swashbuckling next... in Colour!
 

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79 years ago...

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The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)
Director: Michael Curtiz & William Keighley
Country: United States
Length: 102 minutes
Type: Adventure, Romance

To be honest, I'm not sure what parts of the Robin Hood myth were original, or invented for this first hit talkie adventure but this has all the scenes you'd expect. The fight with Little John, the Archery competition (and the splitting of the arrow), the rescue from the hangman, the unveiling of King Richard, the badinage with Maid Marian and lots of swashbuckling up and down stairwells. I've watched 1938's 'The Adventures of Robin Hood' quite a few times and it sits alongside 1991's 'Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves' and Disney's animated version in my perfect Robin Hood trifecta.

The script and direction are amazingly efficient, cramming everything into 102-minutes. All the major characters are fully introduced and Robin Hood is already fermenting an insurrection by the 15-minute mark. What's more, we already love Robin Hood, hate Sir Guy of Gisbourne and love-to-hate Prince John. The all-star cast includes Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Basil Rathbone and Claude Rains. It boasts a thrilling score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold and the Technicolor process is exploited to full effect with costumes and images recalling colourful medieval paintings. By the way, I read that Olivia de Havilland is still alive today and will be 102 in July!


Next up is another Michael Curtiz film but on a totally different subject, New York Gangsters.
 

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79 years ago...

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Angels With Dirty Faces (1938)
Director: Michael Curtiz
Country: United States
Length: 97 minutes
Type: Gangster, Drama

Another Jimmy Cagney gangster film but the twist here is that he isn't an outright villain like Scarface, or The Public Enemy. He's got honour and kindness beneath the anger and criminality. The actor that plays the young Cagney is so convincing in appearance and voice, that at first I thought it was Cagney. Humphrey Bogart appears in an early supporting role, which felt very weird to me as I kept expecting the film to be about him. The opening crane shots exploring the bustle of the New York slums is a definite stylistic influence on the period gangster films of Scorsese, Coppola and Leone, however, much of the rest of the film looks very set-bound. The genius last shot makes up for it, when the light and shadow cast from a drain, combined with the choir on the soundtrack make it appear as rays of heaven.


While watching, I couldn't get the brilliant Sham 69 tune of the same name out of my head... :D


Next is a documentary about the Nazi Olympics.
 

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Olympia (1938)
Director: Leni Riefenstahl
Country: Germany
Length: 228 minutes (3 3/4 hours)
Type: Documentary

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I got 'Olympia' on DVD a couple of years ago (a copy from the Baltimore Public Library that had found it's way on to eBay?) in what my research led me to believe was the best available source. It turned out to be unwatchably bad, so it sat on the shelf. Fortunately, just in time for me reaching this point in the book, Criterion and the Olympic Committee have scanned the film in 4K and it looks fantastic. Director Leni Riefenstahl is again given full reign and limitless resources to document a major event for the Third Reich, the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Every type of camera is placed in every conceivable position to capture the events in incredibly dramatic detail. She spent two years sculpting the 1.2 million feet of film shot, reportedly just screening the dailies took 2.5 months! I'm not really a sports fan but if sports footage was presented at this level of film-making, I'm sure I would be.

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'Olympia' is divided into two films, 'Part 1: Festival of Nations' and 'Part 2: Festival of Beauty'. The opening 18-minutes of Pt1 is a wordless and elegant continuous montage set to triumphant music, taking us from the ruins of ancient Greece, then it's statues, then the statue-like naked bodies of male and female athletes in super slow-mo and finally a fantastical flight across the map of Europe from Greece to Germany, incorporating many effects, animations and paintings. Pt2 begins with Riefenstahl creating a 20-minute ballet in the edit using gravity-defying gymnastics footage. Pt1 focuses almost exclusively on the 'track and field' competition within the amphitheater, then Pt2 ventures out to follow the various other events, equestrian trials, sailing, swimming, cycling and distance running. The star of Pt1 is famously the black US quadruple Gold medalist  Jesse Owens and the star of Pt2 is the steely-eyed Glenn Morris (also from the US team). I found myself really cheering him on as he competes in the grueling Decathlon. He went on to take the lead role in 1938's 'Tarzan's Revenge'... so maybe Tarzan-fan @"BionicBob" is familiar with him?

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The bulk of the movie is a relatively straight-forward sports Documentary highlights-package, very much like we get today, although edited to a high artistic standard. Some sequences and moments really set this apart as a unique piece of film art. Riefenstahl is often less interested in who is competing and winning and is more focused on how the human body works. The pole vaulting is a super slow-motion exploration of the specific rapid and dexterous moves required to actually perform a vault. The diving sequence is perhaps the most famous part of the film, featuring a beautiful montage of divers, at various speeds, running the film forward and back to create an aerial ballet in the edit. The sequence includes a clever match-cut that makes it appear that a diver disappears into the surface of the water and out the other side into the sky. It ends with cruciform bodies floating in air silhouetted against the clouds like angels ascending to heaven. A more general technique of interest is the occasional cutting to very long/wide shots, to show the athletes racing ant-like in the vast stadium. Effort was clearly put in to shoot, edit and present each event in a unique way.

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Apart from the German commentator using the word "Negros" a couple of times (not in a negative way, just mentioning them in the vernacular of the day), the odd Nazi flag and many enthusiastic Nazi salutes, the film is generally free from propaganda. It's oddly an almost anti-Nazi celebration of the human body and spirit, in all it's races, shapes and genders. There is no attempt that I could detect to favour the white German athletes, over the black or Asian competitors from other nations in the way it's shot, or edited. Watching 'Olympia' is a much more pleasant experience than horrifically racist Hollywood films like 'Jezebel' (from the same year) or John Ford's 1934 'Judge Priest'. Apparently Owens received a congratulatory wave, handshake and signed-photo from Hitler. Owens stayed in unsegregated hotels in Germany and received the first ever sponsorship for a male African American athlete from German shoe maker Adidas. In contrast, on his return to the USA he was made to use the servant's entrance to his own New York celebration and received no congratulation from the President, or invitation to the White House. Things were clearly pretty bad in America in the '30s, when they make the Nazi state look less racist.



Next is a French Comedy.
 

Garp

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TM2YC said:
Fortunately, just in time for me reaching this point in the book, Criterion and the Olympic Committee have scanned the film in 4K and it looks fantastic. 

Did you buy the complete Criterion boxset?
 
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