Lisa Lieberman's Blog, page 3

High Noon

It’s not news that High Noon (1952) was really about Hollywood’s cowardice during the McCarthy era. John Wayne knew it. He turned down the Gary Cooper role when it was offered to him. The movie was “un-American,” he said in a Playboy interview, bragging about having helped run its screenwriter, Carl Foreman, out of the country.



Read the full review on Deathless Prose.

To Kill A Mockingbird

Watching the film the other night, I was devastated when Robinson looks at Atticus as he is being led out of the courtroom, after the verdict has been read. I told you so, his look seems to say. It’s almost as if he blames Atticus for giving him grounds for hope. Nothing would change in Macomb County, Alabama.

I’m not sure that movie audiences in 1962 picked up on these emotions. Bosley Crowther’s review in the New York Times speaks of childhood joy and wonder and close family relationships in the picture (you wonder if he read the book) but only alludes to “the trial scene” and “good and evil.” Reviewers of Lee’s novel could be equally obtuse. The Atlantic called it “hammock reading” and reassured readers that, despite the main action (the trial of "a Negro accused of raping a white girl"), “none of it is painful, for Scout and Jem are happy children, brought up with angelic cleverness by their father and his old Negro housekeeper. Nothing fazes them much or long.”

I certainly see more now than I did the first time. Here we are, having traveled a long way since the era of Jim Crow and the early days of the Civil Rights Era, only to find ourselves back in Macomb County, Alabama.

Read the full review on Deathless Prose.

Mr. Smith Goes To Washington

Here's an implausible plot: a charismatic outsider with no experience in government, a hero to his juvenile followers, arrives in Washington to fill a vacant seat in the Senate. He owes his appointment to some behind-the-scenes shenanigans by corrupt politicians in his home state. They think they can control him. Boy, were they mistaken.



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Young Mr. Lincoln

My New Year’s resolution for 2017 is to get back to blogging regularly. So, here we go with John Ford’s hymn to the moral courage and human decency of the martyred American leader who steered our nation in the direction of justice.

Henry Fonda almost didn’t take the role when Ford offered it to him. He held Lincoln in such reverence, he said, that it would have been like “portraying Christ himself on film.”

Read the review on Deathless Prose

Shane

Like all the best mythical heroes, Shane has only one name, and it’s no coincidence that Jack Schaefer, the author of the novel Shane, studied Greek and Latin literature in college.



I’ve read that the movie is routinely used in classics courses, to make the lessons of great epics such as the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid accessible to undergraduates.

Read the review on Deathless Prose.

The Quiet American

“I like to have a secret love affair, a hidden life,” said Graham Greene, “something to lie about.” Partly, that hidden life was espionage, but mostly it was adultery. Greene was married and he had a special liking for clandestine liaisons with the wives of his friends. Constancy or faith versus betrayal—religious, sexual, personal, political—his best works pivot around these dichotomies, intensifying the tension between them without trying to resolve it. And that’s what’s wrong with both film versions of The Quiet American. Neither Joseph Mankiewicz nor Philip Noyce could leave well enough alone.



Read the review on Deathless Prose.

Forget it, Jake; it's Chinatown

Made before the Hays Code, The Mask of Fu Manchu packs quite a fetishistic kick. There's a little something for everyone here: scenes of the evil doctor preparing to torture the handsome fiancé of the blonde heroine, stroking his victim's naked chest with his long fingernails before injecting him with a serum that will turn him into a slave. A kinky sequence where the young man is whipped by two semi-naked black minions of Fu Manchu's daughter (played by Myrna Loy in yellowface). Loy's character is clearly enjoying the spectacle, but her heart still belongs to Daddy.

Read the rest of my column on 3 Quarks Daily.

Bridge on the River Kwai

Eight years after his escape from a French colonial prison in Saigon, Pierre Boulle published the novel that became the basis for David Lean’s award-winning epic, The Bridge on the River Kwai (1954). Never mind that the bridge was actually on the Mae Klong river, that the actual senior Allied officer who oversaw work at the bridge did everything in his power to sabotage it. Try not to whistle the catchy theme song. I want to focus on the film’s ending, where the priggish officer Nicholson, brilliantly played by Alec Guinness, does manage to blow up the bridge.

Read more on Deathless Prose.

Shanghai Express

“It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily,” Marlene Dietrich tells her former lover in Shanghai Express (1932). This was before the Hays Code — just — when an actress could get away with a line like that.



Read the review on Deathless Prose.

An Affair to Remember

What makes the picture memorable is not the shipboard romance. It’s Grant’s bitterness when Kerr fails to show up for the rendez-vous they’d planned in six months' time. It’s not her fault, of course. The poor thing was hit by a car on her way to meeting him on the top of the Empire State Building and lost the use of her legs, but Grant doesn’t know that. Bitter, he’s even more attractive than he was when he was debonair. Maybe not as appealing as when he thought Ingrid Bergman was relishing her romance with Claude Rains in Notorious, but well worth watching.

Read the review on Deathless Prose.