Hello!

We’re trying to get these Tuesday reviews off early, so as to take advantage of the Monday holiday!

I finally got a gander at all of MGM’s 1933 Men Must Fight the other night, DVR’d from TCM. It’s a real jaw dropper, a creaky adaptation of a creaky play with one insanely good special effects sequence. Diana Wynyard, a nurse in WW1, loses her flyer boyfriend (Robert Young) in France but bears his child. To make everything morally Kopasetic for the high-class Diana, she marries her generous admirer, Lewis Stone. The theatrics are beyond stiff.

Back in the USA and twenty years later it’s now a futuristic 1940, complete with picture phones. All other progress seems stuck in 1933, however. Stone is now the Secretary of State trying to bolster a failing peace plan. Diana is a vocal pacifist, a position that gets sticky when war breaks out with an enemy unidentified only vaguely as the ‘Eurasian States.’ When Diana proclaims that the world’s mothers must stop producing sons to die in men’s wars, the savage hecklers at her speeches turn into an angry mob, screaming death threats and attempting to storm her 5th Avenue home. Diana’s grown son Phillips Holmes proclaims that he subscribes to the same pacifist credo, which prompts his outraged fianceé to break off their engagement, and his stepfather to finally divulge the fact that he’s a bastard rather than part of his family. The bizarre finish sees the son flip-flopping and racing to a biplane to battle the enemy (who?) in the skies over New York City. Learning that his real dad died a hero, the son becomes a dashing air pilot, seemingly in just one day. An inane final scene sees the three generations of rich women now rooting for the fight, yet also lamenting their abandonment of pacifist ideals. Grandmother May Robson says her last line, that mothers will just be ignored the same as always, as if it’s supposed to be funny. Having made no coherent dramatic point, the movie just ends, in mid-war.

TCM’s print has a patch with a bad buzz on the soundtrack but is otherwise okay. The shocker is in the next-to-last reel. For over sixty minutes the show has taken place in stuffy interiors, with out-the-window cutaways to silent stock footage of victory parades, etc. Just as the family is breaking up over the pacifism issue, a full-on air raid hits NYC. Massed biplanes (in 1940) drop little wing bombs. One tiny bomb is all that’s required to wipe out the Brooklyn Bridge, and just two are enough to blow up the Empire State Building. The miniature effects are excellent, with blasted skyscrapers falling into the streets via traveling mattes and more miniature explosions. It looks like thousands should be killed, but the only casualty we see is Diana, whose arm is broken when her taxi is hit by one of those bombs that obliterate entire buildings. I’d never heard of Men Must Fight until a few years ago when I think Richard Harland Smith mentioned it . . . is it the first negative-subjunctive future history war movie? For the prediction of an aerial war in 1940 it beats Things to Come by three full years.

See you next Saturday — Thanks for reading — Glenn Erickson

Hello!

I’ve been impressed lately with Phil Hall’s The Bootleg Files reviews over at Cinema Crazed, wherein he’s tracked down information about barely-known titles not released on, uh, authorized discs. Phil was one of the first critics to welcome me at the Online Film Critics Society, going on sixteen years ago. I think he’s found a good vein of reporting here, as every Bootleg entry I’ve read has been news, and I tend to be one of those people with the illusion that I’ve seen everything. This week the subject is The Bootleg Files: Afrique 50. Phil’s back-story explanation of the film’s suppression says a lot about colonial politics — the filmmaker René Vautier paid the price for defying French law, when he filmed actual conditions in French West Africa. I knew that the French were really touchy about such subjects, because they even censored the old western Major Dundee, taking out dialogue that implied that French colonial Legionnaires used torture. Phil’s column serves a useful purpose. Each entry begins with ‘just the facts’ data: ‘where last seen,’ ‘reason for bootleg status,’ ‘chances of seeing a commercial DVD release.’ Good show.

I’m hoping for a full report next week on the much touted new “ScreenX” format, from a special correspondent. Movie audiences (prompted by David Letterman) rejected Peter Jackson’s attempt to raise the frame rate in his Hobbit movies, but maybe they’ll respond favorably to what sounds like an exaggeration of Abel Gance’s silent ‘Polyvision’ tryptich effect. Apparently, either the whole show or certain sequences will open up to cover a 270- degree field of vision. That slice of a circle goes beyond ear-to-ear coverage . . . are they looking for a virtual reality effect?  I’ll be curious to learn more about the format: is it worthwhile? Does the image have seams? Do the ‘sides’ show matching live action, or is everything relevant concentrated in the front panel (if there are indeed panels)? Does the camera pan to follow action, or do we instead turn our heads? What happens in close-ups and fast cutting? The good part about this is that my contact knows enough to give an accurate report. Here’s the Hollywood Reporter article on the film and the ScreenX format.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson