![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
My choices are sometimes strange bedfellows. I suspect there are spoilers ahoy.
CXXI: Dirty Love (John Asher, 2005)
Comedy starring whose talents I suspect I am not qualified to judge, and co-written with her husband, who directs - although I gather they separated soon after. Photographer Rebecca (Jenny McCarthy) has discovered her model boyfriend Richard (Victor Webster) is cheating on her, and seeks revenge by trying to get a new boyfriend - over looking the rather obvious plain-john (Eddie Kaye Thomas) in the process.
I think you can jump two ways on this - either you are watching eighty minutes of blonde jokes in which a husband humiliates a soon to be ex, or you are watching an unruly woman who goes through Farelly brothers style humiliations that tend to have men at the centre. The rigours of the beauty process are shown as painful and pointless, and the period sequence are an interesting venture into the grotesque. I'd buy it more if she wasn't so dumb - but this is not as bad as the reviews suggest.
CXXII: A Cottage on Dartmoor (Anthony Asquith, 1929)
Not technically silent - at least one scene had a soundtrack, using discs which have been lost. And a key sequence of the plot is about going to the talkies - we see an orchestra play along with a Harold Lloyd short, then pass out the beer and sandwiches during the talkie, My Woman (200% singing! 200% dancing!)
Joe, a barber (Uno Henning), loves manicurist Sally (Norah Baring), but she falls for a Dartmoor farmer (Hans Schlettow) and Joe boils with jealousy, leading to a moment of madness when Joe gets the farmer in his barber's chair.
This is curious for its shifts between realism (moors! cows!) and faked realism (a painted cottage) and expressionism (four basic sets, one of which is a remarkably roomy cottage). There's some but not much continuity editing, with sections feeling rather proscenium arch. On the other hand, there is much cross cutting, subjective editing (the camera wobbles at one point, and cuts to shots of cricket and speedway to mark conversations in the barber's chair), and at times it is even positively Soviet montage (the cinema sequence, the crisis in the barber's chair) and there's a flash of red (which Hitchcock may have stolen for Spellbound). Sometimes there's a very definite depth of field focus which characters move in and out of, which I don't recall seeing as much used before.
The plot is pure melodrama, and built around a flashback and a neat jump across time, and depends too much on lost notes or papers, but the emotional truth is there. It's a remarkable piece of work, recently restored to a very crisp print, with a live piano accompaniment. Recommended
Totals: 122 (Cinema: 51; DVD: 66; TV: 5)
CXXI: Dirty Love (John Asher, 2005)
Comedy starring whose talents I suspect I am not qualified to judge, and co-written with her husband, who directs - although I gather they separated soon after. Photographer Rebecca (Jenny McCarthy) has discovered her model boyfriend Richard (Victor Webster) is cheating on her, and seeks revenge by trying to get a new boyfriend - over looking the rather obvious plain-john (Eddie Kaye Thomas) in the process.
I think you can jump two ways on this - either you are watching eighty minutes of blonde jokes in which a husband humiliates a soon to be ex, or you are watching an unruly woman who goes through Farelly brothers style humiliations that tend to have men at the centre. The rigours of the beauty process are shown as painful and pointless, and the period sequence are an interesting venture into the grotesque. I'd buy it more if she wasn't so dumb - but this is not as bad as the reviews suggest.
CXXII: A Cottage on Dartmoor (Anthony Asquith, 1929)
Not technically silent - at least one scene had a soundtrack, using discs which have been lost. And a key sequence of the plot is about going to the talkies - we see an orchestra play along with a Harold Lloyd short, then pass out the beer and sandwiches during the talkie, My Woman (200% singing! 200% dancing!)
Joe, a barber (Uno Henning), loves manicurist Sally (Norah Baring), but she falls for a Dartmoor farmer (Hans Schlettow) and Joe boils with jealousy, leading to a moment of madness when Joe gets the farmer in his barber's chair.
This is curious for its shifts between realism (moors! cows!) and faked realism (a painted cottage) and expressionism (four basic sets, one of which is a remarkably roomy cottage). There's some but not much continuity editing, with sections feeling rather proscenium arch. On the other hand, there is much cross cutting, subjective editing (the camera wobbles at one point, and cuts to shots of cricket and speedway to mark conversations in the barber's chair), and at times it is even positively Soviet montage (the cinema sequence, the crisis in the barber's chair) and there's a flash of red (which Hitchcock may have stolen for Spellbound). Sometimes there's a very definite depth of field focus which characters move in and out of, which I don't recall seeing as much used before.
The plot is pure melodrama, and built around a flashback and a neat jump across time, and depends too much on lost notes or papers, but the emotional truth is there. It's a remarkable piece of work, recently restored to a very crisp print, with a live piano accompaniment. Recommended
Totals: 122 (Cinema: 51; DVD: 66; TV: 5)
Tags: