The Other Three Films In My Top Five Best Movies EVER Made...In My Humble Opinion. Part 2

So, what I thought was going to be a short and cruisy post about my five favourite movies got a little out of hand once I began writing about the first film, "Casablanca". I realised that, to talk of these films properly, I was going to have to split the write-up in two parts.

Here's Part 1. It's okay, I'll wait...;

"Casablanca" and The Other Four Best Movies EVER Made...In My Humble Opinion. Part 1

...Okay, now that you're up to speed, I'll continue with Movie Number Three, "Chinatown". However, I won't say too much about it, since I already wrote a little bit about this film last December. And here's the link to that post;

"Forget it, Jake, it's Christmas."

The early 1970s saw a slew of movies set in 1930s America. While the Sixties gave us films like "Bonnie And Clyde" (Dir: Arthur Penn, 1967) and "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" (Dir: Sydney Pollack, 1969), the early Seventies produced films such as "Cabaret", "The Sting", "Paper Moon", "The Way We Were", and Roman Polanski's "Chinatown".

#3

                                           Directed by Roman Polanski
                   Paramount, 1974
                    Screenplay by Robert Towne


It was back in 1984 that I did Cinema & Film Studies at Preston College of TAFE. My lecturer was a fellow named- actually, I won't name him. That would be bad form. Anyway, he'd divided the year into three separate genres of film. In Second and Third Term, we would be tackling The Western and Alfred Hitchcock respectively. However, Term One would deal with Film Noir.
"Oh, this is gonna be great!", I remember thinking. I had already immersed myself in some Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett crime fiction, so I had some understanding of the Classic American hard-boiled detective and his world, but to some extent, "Chinatown" would go against much of what I thought I knew about fictional private detectives in America of the Thirties.

Robert Towne's brilliant screenplay mines Los Angeles history as it touches on the severe drought conditions that threatened to wipe out farming communities on the outskirts of the city in the late 1930s. The story concerns itself with Private Detective J.J.(Jake) Gittes, who is hired by a woman to gather evidence of her husband's suspected infidelity. Her husband just happens to be the city's Water Commissioner, a man named Hollis Mulwray. Jake Gittes does indeed get photos of Mulwray with a young woman and these pictures wind up splashed across the front page of the newspaper before another woman claiming to be Mulwray's wife appears with a lawsuit against Gittes, stating that she never hired him to investigate her husband's affair.
Gittes decides to find out who set him up and why. The film then goes into the corruption underlying City Council and Big Business as Gittes is drawn further and further into a conspiracy. I won't say any more about the plot. This really is a film worth seeing for yourself.

The character of Jake Gittes is, as far as I'm concerned, Jack Nicholson's finest hour. Others would say that "Five Easy Pieces" (Dir: Bob Rafelson, 1970), "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" (Dir: Milos Forman, 1975) or "The Shining" (Dir: Stanley Kubrick, 1980) was Nicholson's best role, but I beg to differ. Nicholson is a great actor and the role of J.J. Gittes fits him like a glove.
I suppose when one thinks of Jack Nicholson these days, it conjures up an image of a slicked-back receding hairline above a pair of black Wayfarers above a freshly-lit Marlboro Light. However, he is one of the finest actors of his generation. Even The Joker couldn't kill him AND he was cool enough to have kept all those purple suits after "Batman" finished filming.

Faye Dunaway plays Evelyn Mulwray, the Water Commissioner's wife and she delivers a beautifully nuanced and realised character that is at turns confident and brittle. You can see her struggle to maintain her composure whenever a certain person is mentioned to her. I always thought Dunaway was fantastic in "Bonnie And Clyde". And although she had a good career with films such as "The Thomas Crowne Affair", "Little Big Man",  "Three Days of the Condor" and "Network", I feel that she was underutilised. One of the better actresses of the 1970s.

The great John Huston plays Noah Cross, a self-made millionaire who wants to see a new dam built on the edge of Los Angeles, one that will starve the farmers of their precious water. It's kind of fitting to see him appear in this fine film, considering that his cinematic debut was back in 1941 when he adapted the screenplay for and directed the classic noir film "The Maltese Falcon", starring Humphrey Bogart.

Robert Towne's screenplay is a masterclass in how to write this kind of detective story for the screen. All of the classic elements are here- a private investigator with a smart mouth, a mysterious femme fatale, shady businessmen, sadistic thugs.
However, Towne throws in some major curveballs. Perhaps the most famous private eye in fiction would be Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, a P.I. who didn't do divorce work. Jake Gittes, however, appears to earn a living mainly from getting pictures of cheating spouses. And he does alright out of it, based on how well-tailored he is in the film.

The classic private detective is a product of the city and it is interesting to note that whenever Gittes steps outside of the urban boundaries of the city, he lands in harm's way. There's a particularly nasty encounter that he has with a short, knife-wielding creep, perfectly played by the film's director, Roman Polanski. I've read different things about the knife used in this scene. I've heard that the blade had a small hinge in it, and I've heard that the blade was real. I believe the latter, knowing Polanski.

The score by Jerry Goldsmith is mainly horns and some piano, and it works well for this film. The opening music over the credits is quite wistful and in many ways creates an image (in my mind, anyway) of a vintage Los Angeles on a summer's night as Jake Gittes steps out of his office at close of business, lights a cigarette, and gets into his car to drive home to an empty apartment.

I don't want to mention any more about the plot. It's a beautifully structured film, and we as the audience are, like Gittes himself, one step behind everything that's going on. There are a couple of truly shocking moments in this film which have lost none of their impact over the years, despite the fact that there have been a few variations of these story elements in other films since.

"Chinatown"  had the benefit of a solid script, which played around with the conventions of film noir and the private detective story,  and a respected and gifted director (till 1977, anyway), one who was able to take a classic American art form and sift it through a European sensibility.
These are just a couple of reasons why "Chinatown" remains a classic film from Hollywood's last great Golden Age and why it easily sits in my Top Five Favourite Films.





The next film features my other favourite actor from the old Hollywood era, Mr Cary Grant. Truth be told, a lot of my favourite films are Cary Grant movies. And this film is also one of Alfred Hitchcock's best. Apologies in advance for the annoying 'Pause' symbol that appears in the lower left corner of each picture.


#4

                                     
                                                      Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
                        M.G.M., 1959
                          Screenplay by Ernest Lehman

My third semester of Cinema and Film Studies was all about Alfred Hitchcock. We watched "Dressed To Kill" (1980), directed by Brian Di Palma, at the end of the course in order to get an understanding of Hitchcock's influence on other film-makers since his death in 1976.
If you ever decide to sit down and watch Alfred Hitchcock's output of the 1950s and then find yourself hungry for more, check out "Charade" (Dir: Stanley Donen, 1963), starring Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. It is the best Hitchcock film that Hitchcock NEVER made.

"North By Northwest" represented the fourth and final time that Grant and Hitchcock worked together. This collaboration concerns slick New York advertising executive Roger Thornhill, who is mistaken for a man named George Kaplan, a government agent who is trying to foil the plans of a man named Phillip VanDamm, wonderfully played by James Mason. It's a simple 'wrong man' scenario that has been done often in Hollywood films, and you can see a variation on this tactic in the recent Steve Carell/Tina Fey comedy "Date Night". "We are the Tripplehorns."

Cary Grant as Roger Thornhill, wearing what some have called the best suit ever worn in film. It perfectly represents Thornhill as the modern, urban and ordinary Everyman who finds himself thrust into extraordinary situations.  Grant can do no wrong in my book and by this late stage in his career, the smooth and urbane Cary Grant persona was very firmly established. "Everybody wants to be Cary Grant", he once said. "Even I want to be Cary Grant", he added.

Hitchcock films are well-known for clever uses of camera angle and placement and the way the camera represents the viewpoint of the characters. There are a couple of instances in this film which highlight Thornhill's increasing isolation as the story progresses. This shot here, for example...

...see that diagonal pathway, leading to the Yellow cab,  in the top left side of the frame? That speck in the middle is Thornhill making an escape. Beautifully staged shot. Cinematographer Robert Burks did some very fine work for this film.

This film also features another 'Hitchcock Blonde' in the form of Eva Marie Saint as Eve Kendall, a woman whom Thornhill meets aboard a train, and one who may or may not turn out to be his ally. Hitch had a thing for blondes throughout his films of the 1950s and '60s and Saint's character stays in your memory long after the final credits roll.

 

She's an icy blonde, but she smoulders. Eva Marie Saint as Eve Kendall.

Screenwriter Ernest Lehman has written a chase thriller that moves at a great pace. Hitchcock threw in what he used to call a 'MacGuffin'. Usually, it's something that everybody in the film wants, but we, the audience, never find out what it is.
In this film, it is a statuette which contains a microfilm that VanDamm is planning to take out of the country. We never find out what's on the microfilm and it doesn't matter. Hitch was a shrewd filmmaker and he knew that the MacGuffin was merely used to move the story forward. Quentin Tarantino did a similar thing with the mysterious briefcase that Marcellus Wallace was chasing in "Pulp Fiction" (1994).
The blueprint of this film is what Albert Broccoli and Harry Saltzman sought to replicate when they were in the process of bringing James Bond to the screen with "Dr No" in 1962.  They even approached Cary Grant to play Bond. He said he'd do one film, but he didn't want to lock himself in to a series. After filming "Charade" in 1963, Grant was wise enough to realise that he couldn't play the leading man to much younger women (on screen, anyway. His last two marriages were to women considerably younger than he, the lucky devil) anymore, and he retired from acting after completing "Walk, Don't Run" in 1966.
The Bond producers hung a main aspect of the plot of "From Russia, With Love" (1964) on their own MacGuffin, the Lektor cipher machine that Bond is sent to retrieve before embarking on a cross-continent chase that includes some further borrowing from "North By Northwest".
Lehman's script also provides the cast with some great dialogue filled with wit and innuendo. There are no wasted words in this script.

There are countless classic scenes from the first sixty years of Hollywood film that flicker 24 frames per second though the projector of my memory; The Little Tramp meeting the blind flower seller, Groucho Marx walking into a room, Astaire gliding across one, Dorothy clicking the heels of her red shoes, Philip Marlowe and Vivian Sternwood talking about horse-racing...or are they?, Gilda "Putting the Blame On Mame", Charlie Allnutt pulling The African Queen through the water, Sefton being beaten by his fellow POWs, Vince Stone throwing a pot of scalding coffee into Debby Marsh's face, Sugar Kane walking along a train station platform...and Roger Thornhill running for his life as a cropdusting biplane descends towards him.

This has become a classic action scene. Totally preposterous way of trying to kill somebody, but Hitchcock never really concerned himself with reality. "Most films are slices of life. Mine are slices of cake", he once remarked.

Hitchcock was wise enough to highlight the strengths of his cast and accentuate their iconic status. Cary Grant left home at a young age to join an acrobatic troupe before he became an actor. There's a confidence in his physicality and Alfred Hitchcock makes good use of this in the crop-dusting scene above, where Grant slips into a smooth run that increases in speed as the plane makes repeated attempts to kill him, and later on when Grant climbs out of a multi-storey hospital window and stands on the ledge before making his way in through the window of an adjacent room. This scene also plays on Grant's sex appeal when the woman in this room yells out "Stop!" before putting on her glasses, taking a clearer look at Grant and then repeating, but in a breathy, come-hither tone "Stop".
Cary Grant was 55 years old when he made this film, but he moves like a man ten or fifteen years younger.

POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT FOR THOSE WHO HAVEN'T SEEN THIS FILM. (SHAME ON YOU)

The finale takes place on the monuments at Mount Rushmore. Wonderfully staged, you begin to think that the cast were actually climbing around the faces of these historic Presidents.
It's a nail-biting scene.

SPOILER OVER

The film wraps up very quickly after that, and Hitchcock throws in some phallic imagery just to keep film students pondering for the next fifty years. There's a minor gaffe that occurs in the film's Third Act. Check out the kid in the café. I'll say no more.

"North By Northwest" is a slick film. And certainly, film scholars sit and analyse Hitchcock's other films such as "Vertigo", "Rear Window" and "Psycho" to within an inch of their lives. And while I think that those films of his are worthy of repeated viewings and analysis, I tend to prefer his other movies such as "The 39 Steps", "Saboteur", "Notorious", "Rope" (80 fantastic minutes long) and "The Man Who Knew Too Much". Here's an exercise for you; Get a copy of his 1956 remake (of his previous version) of "The Man Who Knew Too Much", starring James Stewart and Doris Day.
Watch this film with a few friends. I guarantee you that somebody will scream when a particular scene comes up. It's all to do with the framing of the shot. Hitch was a master at composing a shot to reveal information. When I first saw this film as part of my studies, one of my female classmates screamed when this shot appeared. People go on about the shower scene from "Psycho", but this scene from "The Man Who Knew Too Much" will make your stomach muscles clench.

And it's always a buzz when a film does that to you.


picture courtesy of http://www.everydayminerals.com/fan-club/play/544-akiko-stehrenberger


Film Number Five in my list is one that I've heard is screened every year at Christmas on at least one TV station in the US. It is perhaps a little dated in these cynical times, but the romantic in me loves this movie.

#5

Directed by Frank Capra, RKO, 1946, Screenplay by Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, Frank Capra and Jo Swerling.
Based on a story by Philip Van Doren Stern.

As with the other films in my Top Five, much has already been written by film historians, reviewers and scholars about this film. I can really only write about why they appeal so much to me. This story has been retold over the years, most recently as "The Family Man" (Dir: Brett Ratner, 2000), starring Nicolas Cage and Tea Leoni.
However, the 1946 James Stewart film is the most famous version of the story of a man who gets a chance to glimpse what the lives of his loved ones would have been like if he had never existed. The film concerns a man named George Bailey, who runs the family Building and Loan business in a small town called Bedford Falls.
George has dreams of travelling the world to explore far away lands and build cities of the future, but has always been held back by obligations to the business and there is a powerful and mean old rival banker named Henry Potter who is looking to ruin Bailey Building and Loan so that he can then have a stranglehold over the entire town.
George's Uncle Billy is entrusted with a large sum of money, which he promptly misplaces and this throws the future of the family business in turmoil, with George facing embezzlement charges and a jail sentence. It's at this point that George Bailey decides that his family and his business would be better off if he were dead. I'll say nothing more about the story.

James Stewart was perfect for the role of George Bailey, a decent man. A nice fella who just never seems to get a break where things go his way. He is utterly likeable. Makes you wish he were a friend of yours, although, in a way, he is, by the time the end credits roll. His George Bailey is just the kind of guy that you'd entrust with your life's savings. It was the type of role that Stewart was made for and I don't think it would have worked with many other actors of the era. Although, Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda or Spencer Tracy would have been interesting in the role. However, Stewart embodied a certain kind of American, one that looked like he'd just stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting.

I was running The Cinestore, a film bookstore in the city on the day that I heard James Stewart had died. Robert Mitchum died about three days later (or was it before) and I began to think that the end of the world had commenced. "Thank God for Kate Hepburn!", I remember thinking to myself.
I know that nobody lives forever, gang, but it still packs a wallop when somebody from old Hollywood throws in the towel. I was devastated when Cary Grant died, as I mentioned in Part 1.
I'm gonna be a friggin' mess when Connery goes.

Stewart is beautifully matched by Donna Reed as the girl who's had a crush on George since childhood, Mary Hatch. If there's a girl worth staying in Bedford Falls for, it's her. Reed gives Mary a nice girl-next-door quality and their relationship is well written, from when they're a couple of kids to when they become adults. But George dilly-dallies so long that Mary winds up dating another man and there are some tender moments during this segment of the film. The telephone scene is classic and is regularly used in compilation clips about the history of Hollywood film or James Stewart's career.

 

Donna Reed and Stewart receiving a distracting phone call.

 

 

Lionel Barrymore plays the town's powerful rival banker, Henry F. Potter. He is wheelchair bound and a mean, old, cranky man who wants to crush Bailey Building and Loan so that he can then be the only bank in town.

Barrymore was one of Hollywood's finest character actors, having started out in 1908 in silent film. Born in 1878, he, along with his siblings John and Ethel, became one of Hollywood's first acting dynasties, one that continues today with their Great-niece Drew Barrymore.

 

 

Barrymore plays the crotchety old man schtick very well. Still, I can't hate him too much because I watched him in "Key Largo" (Dir: John Huston, 1948) and he played a more loveable character in that film.

 

SPOILER ALERT***SPOILER ALERT***SPOILER ALERT***SPOILER ALERT***

If there is one criticism often mentioned about this film, it is the fact that Henry F. Potter doesn't get his comeuppance in the end. We, as the audience, don't see him brought to task for hiding (or stealing?) the money that Uncle Billy misplaces earlier in the film.

END OF SPOILER***END OF SPOILER***END OF SPOILER***END OF SPOILER***

 

 



I haven't seen this film for some time. My DVD copy is in a box among 24 other boxes in the garage and I'm waiting to see if my wife has a copy at the library branch where she'll be working tomorrow. Actually, wait a sec, I'll just check the library's database...
...okay, I've just reserved a copy at the branch where she's working tomorrow. Nice. I hope it ain't scratched to hell.

THE NEXT DAY...

Right, I've had dinner, plus a stick of Kit Kat (or two) and I shall now repair to the lounge room with a cup of Earl Grey (black, one sugar) to watch "It's a Wonderful Life" for the first time in about eight or ten years. See you in 130 minutes (approx.).
                                                           
Yes, it STILL holds up. Some of the acting is a little hammy here and there, but this is to be expected for a film from this era. At just over two hours, I had forgotten how the story played out in between the more well-known scenes and I'd forgotten that this film's running time was so long. However, Capra keeps the story moving and it covers the years from around 1919 right up to 1946 when the story is set. Capra has sometimes been accused of being overly sentimental with his films. "It's a Wonderful Life" is, after all, a Christmas story, but there are moments of great cruelty in it. I said to my wife while watching it that I felt the nasty moments in this film seemed to outweigh the good ones.
I can see why this film is replayed every year at Christmas. It's a story of hope, one that's there to remind us that we are fortunate with what we have, even if we don't know it at the time. And it's a reminder to us all that we have an effect on those around us.
As one character puts it; "Each man's life touches so many other lives."
And that line leads me into a little detour about a book I bought back in the mid Eighties called "Suspects" by film critic and historian, David Thomson. If you're a fan of film noir, this book is a must. Narrated by George Bailey at the age of 75, it links characters from over 80 Hollywood films, from Casablanca's Rick Blaine to Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle. In some way, they are all connected through George Bailey and it is an astounding trick that Thomson has pulled off in overlapping their lives. It may even tarnish your opinion of George Bailey by the time you're done. Well worth hunting down.

In the end, "It's a Wonderful Life" still resonates with me. By the time the end credits rolled on my viewing last night, the good moments overcame the bad as I sat there in my lounge room with eyes welling up.
I love it when a film does that to me, but I find that, as I get older, films do that to me more and more.
I must be mellowing in my old age.

I must admit that there are too many films that I consider favourites. These that I've written about are my Top Five, but I can see myself doing semi-regular write-ups on other films that I like. There are easily five or ten other films that come to mind, without thinking too hard.
Anyway, those are posts for another time, I suppose.

Thanks for reading!

My SM2 Loses Its Bearing...Or Does It?

Here's the bearing. Anybody have any...uh...'bearing' on where it might belong inside the SM2?

And a cropped close-up, 'cos what's a post without a coupla' pics?

Thanks all!

Three Seiko Dive Watches

When I put up that picture of my Seiko Dive watch in my previous post the other day, I got to thinking that I should do a quick write-up on this watch, plus the other two Seikos that I have.

Having read Rob Bowker's nice post about his own Seiko wristwatch;

T42

...I felt inspired to write about my own Seiko wristwatches. I'm already working on another sprawling review of a different watch, but thought it might be an idea to get back into watch-writing mode by writing about these fantastic watches from Japan.

 

 

Up above is how it looked when it arrived. Definitely has plenty of Seiko DNA in its design, but the three-link bracelet was a little too Rolexy for my liking (with this watch, anyway), so out came the tools and off came the bracelet.
Here's the Oyster bracelet, as equipped on a Rolex Submariner;



picture courtesy of Valet.com- Anatomy of a Classic; The Rolex Submariner

If I'd wanted a watch to look like a Rolex Submariner, I'd get myself a Rolex Submariner. One day. So, off came the bracelet and on went a nylon ZULU strap;

Just quickly, ZULU straps are basically the US military's version of the British Ministry of Defence-approved NATO strap. The main difference is the shape of the hardware. The ZULUs have oval-shaped rings, whereas the NATOs will have rectangular fittings.

 

 

If you want to read about the Grand Seiko series, follow this link to a recent article about the newly-released 44GS model;

 

Redefining A Classic- Introducing The New Grand Seiko 44GS

 

About six or seven years ago, I saw another Seiko model that looked really cool. Its design was very much made up of sharp, straight lines and there was a nice attention to detail throughout this watch. It was known as the Seiko Prospex Air Diver Titanium 200 (Model No. SBDA003), but collectors soon began referring to it as The Seiko Samurai.

 

 

A very angular design, it looks like it would be perfectly at home on some Japanese Anime character's wrist in the year 2072.

 

And because the case and bracelet are made of titanium, it makes for a very light watch to wear.

 

And this watch shows some nice attention to detail on Seiko's part. The dial is nicely legible and luminous in low-light. The bezel edge and winding crown are knurled for easy gripping with wet or dry hands. Looking closely at the chapter ring (that's the ring on the outer edge of the dial), you notice that the hour marker batons tuck slightly into these little notches cut into the chapter ring. It's a nice little touch. 

 



 The movement inside this watch is the Calibre 7S25. It's similar to the movement inside the Seiko SKX031 model mentioned above, but this Samurai model shows the date only. Timekeeping is, once again, a little fluid.

 

This Samurai series was only in production for a few short years and, as a result, there is some demand amongst collectors for these watches.

And, of course, now that I know this, I rarely wear it.

 

Once you begin reading up about Seiko dive watches, you will invariably land on the 7002 models that were produced throughout the '80s and '90s. (Don't quote me on the veracity of that sentence. I'm talking in ball-park terms, since I'm no expert on vintage Seiko). Their design harks back to models from the 1970s and they are instantly recognisable by many with an interest in wristwatches due to the crown placement on the case.

 

Since my taste in wristwatches leans towards classic models, I began looking at these on eBay and found a slew of them for sale. They are readily available. At the time of writing, a quick search for a 7002 brings up almost 300 listings for watches and spare parts.

Since I already had two Seiko dive watches, I had a pretty strict criteria for my next one; it had to be cheap. I was planning to modify this watch, so I didn't want to spend too much. As luck would have it, I got one off eBay for $40 bucks. Not too shabby. I read around on some Seiko watch forums and was told that modifying these old dive watches could indeed be a slippery slope. I bought two new dials for it, as well as a new set of hands.

 

Here's how it looked shortly after it arrived. According to the seller, the serial number dates this watch back to around May, 1993, so it's already 20 years old now.

I wanted to change the hands because they were exactly the same as what I had on my other Seiko Diver.

 

 

 

This watch houses the 7000 series movement. It was produced cheaply throughout the 80s and 90s and, while it doesn't command the same respect as the previous 6309 Calibre, it is still a work-horse movement. My one loses around two minutes a day, but some slight tinkering could bring that down a little. However, this isn't something that bothers me with this watch. It's a leisure-time watch, so if it's out by a couple of minutes, it's no big deal.

 

I had decided to make modifications to this watch because I was going for a certain look. The IWC Aquatimer Chronograph had just been released...

 

 

...and I liked the colour combo of blue and orange. So, I got onto eBay and snagged these two dials and swapped around the chapter rings...

 

 

 

...with the intention of using the blue dial and the orange ring. While it wasn't the same shade of blue as the IWC, it would do nicely.

Of course, this was not enough. I wanted this watch to have different hands as well, since the ones on it were the same design as my first Seiko diver. I was also wanting to mimic a classic Tudor dive watch design from the Sixties and Seventies, the famous, and highly sought-after Tudor 'Snowflake' Submariner...

 

Picture courtesy of...actually, I got this picture off the web so long ago that I don't remember where it came from.

 

 

The Tudor Prince OysterDate Submariner watch above was French military-issue back in the early 1970s. If you ever see a blue-dialled model with this style of hands, grab it! It ain't cheap, but it's rare.

It was nicknamed the 'Snowflake' due to the little square design on the hour hand.

 

Okay, the hands arrived, so I took them, the dials and the watch to my watchmaker for the necessary swap-over.

And this was the end-result;

 

 



 I opted for an orange minute hand, since it was a common practice for watch manufacturers to use orange for the minute hand to help differentiate it from the hour hand for diving purposes. And, once it was done, I put it on this strap, and I consider this to be the biggest mistake that I made;

 

 

I got this NATO strap from Fossil. Notice the rectangular hardware instead of oval-shaped rings as found on ZULU straps. It's well made and all, and the colours match the watch nicely, but it just...uh...'Tommy Hilfigers' it up a little too much.

 

Stupidly, I took it back to the watchmaker and had the black dial put back on, leaving the hands in place. What I should have done is remove the strap...and burned it. It's not a huge drama, since I can have the blue dial put back on, especially now that I have since purchased a Seiko steel bracelet for it. It would look quite neat on the bracelet.

Ahh, well, I'll get around to it someday.  I spent more on the modification parts than I did on the actual watch.

The Seiko collectors told me that would happen.

 

Seiko make great watches, without a doubt. Of the Japanese brands, I consider them to be the best, and when this company pulls out all stops, it manufactures a watch that gives many a Swiss brand a run for its money. Their watches can be had for as little as $80 or $90 for a plain dialled quartz watch that will be a dependable timekeeper. A quick search on eBay shows a few Seiko 5 Series automatic models selling for under $70, with many of them under a hundred dollars. They are a great value brand of wristwatch and cheap enough that one could amass a small collection of them without trying too hard or breaking the bank.

I have to hand it to the Seiko brand for its ability to create a wide range of wristwatches in many different styles and price points. This helps ensure that wristwatches remain both affordable and accessible.

 

 

 

Thanks for reading!

 

 

This Blog Is Two Years Old!

Another attempt at a letterhead. Or is it a footer?

Here's the Olivetti Lettera 32 photographed with the 'Dramatic' filter setting. 

 

Here's the first issue of 'Premiere' magazine that I bought in April 1990.

And here's the last issue from April 2007 when this great magazine folded. And I had every issue in between.

The Lettera 32 was my first typewriter. This Olympia SM9 is my latest. I had to wrap up this post as soon as the sun began to shine. There was a fence outside that needed painting.

And the same picture again with the filter set to 'Key Line' to make it look nifty and cartoon-like.

The watch in the picture up above is my circa 1962 Omega Seamaster. No way was I gonna wear this watch while painting.  I had it on one day when I came off my (mountain) bike. Instinctively, I covered the watch with my right hand as I fell.
So, if there's any risk of damage, I tend to switch to this Seiko Automatic (Model No. SKX031). Timekeeping-wise, it's a little bit...'relaxed'. It can gain or lose anywhere from 15 to 30 seconds per day, but these things will run twenty years without necessarily requiring a service. You could probably clamp this watch around a hand-grenade and pull the pin and it will still tick afterwards.

 Thanks for reading over the last couple of years, folks!

"Casablanca" and The Other Four Best Movies EVER Made...In My Humble Opinion. Part 1

 

 My Top Three favourite movies of all time used to be "Casablanca", "It's A Wonderful Life" and "Chinatown". In recent years, however, Frank Capra's timeless Christmas tale has been usurped by one of Howard Hawks' best films, "His Girl Friday". Rounding out the Top Five, then, are the Capra film and Alfred Hitchcock's "North By Northwest".

#1

                                Directed by Michael Curtiz
              Warner Bros., 1942
               Screenplay by Julius J. Epstein,              
                Philip G. Epstein, Howard Koch
                 and Casey Robinson (uncredited).
                  Based on "Everybody Comes to Rick's"
                   by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison.


The story centres around Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), an American, who runs a casino/bar in unoccupied Morocco during the Second World War. Complications arise when Rick's old flame, Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman), arrives in Casablanca with her new lover, a Resistance fighter named Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), whose presence unnerves the recently-arrived Nazi Official, Major Strasser (Conrad Veidt) who is intent on arresting him. Strasser is in Casablanca to investigate the murder of two German couriers who were carrying letters of transit, which allow the bearer freedom to travel throughout neutral territories. These letters of transit are now somewhere in Casablanca and Laszlo is out to get them so that he can carry on his Resistance work.
Rick remains neutral as both the German High Command and the French Vichy Prefect of Police, Renault (Claude Rains), try to get a bead on what makes him tick and where his loyalties lie.
Here's a scene from a transcript of the screenplay. It's one of the beautifully-written exchanges that populate this entire film.;

                                     RENAULT
                         I have often speculated on why you
                         don't return to America. Did you
                         abscond with the church funds? Did
                         you run off with a senator's wife? I
                         like to think you killed a man. It's
                         the romantic in me.

               Rick still looks in the direction of the airport.

                                     RICK
                         It was a combination of all three.

                                     RENAULT
                         And what in heaven's name brought
                         you to Casablanca?

                                     RICK
                         My health. I came to Casablanca for
                         the waters.

                                     RENAULT
                         Waters? What waters? We're in the
                         desert.

                                     RICK
                         I was misinformed.

 

The template for the character of Rick Blaine was described as "two parts Hemingway, one part Scott-Fitzgerald". He was to be smooth and urbane, but with a tough and cynical core. The casting of Humphrey Bogart as Blaine was an attempt by Warner Brothers Studios to distance their star from his usual gangster and bad guy roles and reinvent him as a romantic lead. He was a perfect choice. I have read that Ronald Reagan was slated for the part, but this is, in fact, bogus, and that the role was also offered to George Raft, who turned it down. This, it appears, is also not true. The role of Rick Blaine was always written with Bogart in mind.

                                   
                                            Humphrey Bogart as Rick Blaine, owner of Rick's Cafe Americain

 

I don't know what I could say about this film that hasn't been said better by film reviewers and historians over the years. The screenplay was based on an unproduced stageplay entitled "Everybody Comes To Rick's", written by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison and numerous changes were made to the original story by twin brothers Julius J and Philip G Epstein initially, before Howard Koch came on board to continue work on it while the brothers went on to write a propaganda war movie for Frank Capra shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbour. The Epsteins returned to work on the final draft of the screenplay some time later. Some further rewriting was done by casey Robinson, although his imput is uncredited.

Normally, I tend to worry when too many writers are involved in the screenplay because it usually results in a convoluted mess, but this film seemed to have been charmed from the beginning. There's not a bad line in the entire film and every character is well drawn.Warner Borthers was well-known for its high production values and this film has a beautiful look to it, with some great cinematography by Arthur Edison.

SPOILER ALERT (for the six people out there who've never seen this film)

Film director Sidney Pollack once said that the best love stories are the ones where the lovers don't wind up together. I tend to disagree because that's what happens in real life and I want more escapism in my films. However, "Casablanca" has a perfect ending. Rick Blaine wants to end up with Ilsa, but he knows the more noble option is to let her go with Laszlo, since she is the thing that keeps the Resistance leader fighting his cause. Absolutely perfect.

OKAY, YOU CAN READ ON, NOW

It's easily been about five years since I last watched "Casablanca". I have the 60th Anniversary two-disc special edition on DVD and, whenever I watched it, I'd get a mad craving for a cigarette. I've been off them for a couple of years, but I'm not sure if seeing Rick Blaine in his white dinner jacket and holding an unfiltered Lucky Strike (or even better, a Fatima) may not resurrect the urge for a smoke.

One way to find out. See you in 98 minutes!

 

 

100 minutes later...

 

My God, everybody subsists on a diet of cigarettes and alcohol in this film! I gotta get my butt over to Casablanca. Thankfully, I didn't get the urge for a cigarette while watching this film.

Besides, Bogart did enough smoking in it for the both of us.

 

"Casablanca" is my all-time favourite film and yet, after this viewing, it's an even better film than I recalled. I've already mentioned Arthur Edison's cinematography. The lighting and composition of nearly every shot in this film is superb and it clearly shows the care and attention that Warner Brothers Studios were renowned for in this era of Hollywood film.

Bogart's performance is multi-layered and there are some subtle shifts in his facial expressions throughout this film that convey Rick Blaine's hurt and conflicting emotions once Ilsa Lund comes back into his life.

 

 

 

Ingrid Bergman's performance is rich and shows the difference in acting styles back then between American actresses and those with European drama training.

 

 

                                           Ingrid Bergman as Ilsa Lund

 

 

Paul Henreid as Victor Laszlo plays second fiddle to Bogart's Rick, but he needs to be seen as both a sympathetic character and also one whom Ilsa would leave Rick for. Henreid does well in his role. He also appeared opposite Bette Davis in "Now Voyager" (Dir: Irving Rapper, 1942) and there's a scene where he puts two cigarettes in his mouth, lights them both, and then hands one to Bette Davis. It is one of the coolest scenes I've ever seen and, back in my early smoking days, every attempt to replicate the move would end in laughter for anybody watching me. Here it is off YouTube.

 

HEALTH WARNING- Smoking is very bad for you AND this scene may contain plot spoilers;

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-KGiwGn1d8

 

                                          Paul Henreid as Victor Laszlo

Claude Rains was a great character actor and here he delivers a wonderful performance as Captain Renault. In fact, this film has a beautiful array of character actors throughout, from Peter Lorre's brief screen-time as the oily Ugarte, to S.K. Sakall and Leonid Kinskey as Rick's employees, to Sydney Greenstreet as Ferrari, a shady businessman. And of course, there's also Dooley Wilson as Sam, the piano player at Rick's, whose rendition of "As Time Goes By" has become the stuff of Hollywood legend. Although, Barbra Streisand did a great little version of it in "What's Up, Doc?" (Dir: Peter Bogdanovich, 1972).

                                  
                                          Claude Rains as Captain Louis Renault

As mentioned above, I have read that the screenplay to this film was written in a very haphazard way, due to the working shedules of the writers involved. The Epstein brothers went off to do their patriotic bit for Capra and Howard Koch took over before they returned to the story a month later. It was even reported that whole scenes were being written on the day that they were due to be filmed. Either way, it's a great script, and, in 2006, the Writer's Guild of America named it the best screenplay of all time, and the American Film Institute have ranked "Casablanca" as Number 2 in their list of The 100 Greatest Movies. Probably behind "Citizen Kane", no doubt.

Perhaps it's because I'm a romantic at heart that I consider "Casablanca" to be such a great film. Perhaps it's because this film touches on notions of sacrifice for the greater good over one's own desires.
Perhaps it's because "Casablanca" is a perfect example of moviemaking from a time when story was important and scenes were given time to unfold.
I don't know.
All I know is that I watched it again a few hours ago and it's still in my Number One spot.


 #2

Picture courtesy of http://annyas.com

                            Directed by Howard Hawks,

             Columbia, 1940

              Screenplay by Charles Lederer

               Based on the stageplay "The Front Page"
                by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur.

 

I've mentioned this film before. It's one of the best screwball comedies ever made. I first saw it back in the late 1980s when it screened as a midday movie and I recorded it off tv onto a VHS cassette.

I played this film to death. I watched it EVERY NIGHT at around ten pm for ALMOST TWO MONTHS!

Once DVD came along, I kept an eye out for this film. I've bought two different copies of it on DVD, but the picture quality is not as good as the print that was screened on Channel 7 back in 1988. Why The Criterion Collection hasn't released a restored print of this classic film, I'll never know.

 

Cary Grant and Humphrey Bogart are my two favourite actors from The Golden Age of Hollywood. Back in the '80s, I was seeking out as many Cary Grant films as I could, keeping a lookout in the tv listings for screenings of his movies, hiring other films of his from my local video libraries.

 

This film was based on a stageplay, called "The Front Page", and had already been made into a movie back in 1931. It starred Adolphe Menjou as Walter Burns, newspaper Editor of a Chicago daily, and Pat O'Brien as his ace reporter, named Hildy Johnson. Johnson decides to quit the newspaper game to take a job in advertising and marry his fiancee just as a big story unfolds and Burns tries to keep him around to write the story so that his newspaper can get the scoop. The film touches on issues of race, reason versus insanity, and political corruption as a recently-unemployed man named Earl Williams is arrested for shooting a black policeman and the Mayor is looking to get him a death-sentence in a bid to garner public support for his office prior to an upcoming city election. This is a comedy?
There's more to the story, but I don't want to  ruin it for anybody who hasn't seen it.
 

This 1931 version is well-regarded,  and the film has since been remade a few times, in 1974 by the great Billy Wilder and starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, and again in 1988 as a dreadful film with Burt Reynolds, Kathleen Turner and Christopher Reeve. They moved it from a newspaper to a tv news station and it was called "Switching Channels", directed by Ted Kotcheff, but it is the 1940 remake by Howard Hawks that is considered classic.

The main reason for this was Hawks' introduction of sexual politics into the mix. Hawks decided to make Hildy Johnson a woman and this changed the dynamic between the two main characters. It was a master-stroke and the casting of Rosalind Russell as Hildy was perfect.
(EDIT 3/5/13- It was actually screenwriter Charles Lederer's idea to make Hildy Johnson female.)

 

The other thing that Hawks did was have his two main leads deliver their dialogue overlapping each other. As one neared the end of a sentence, the other would start talking, making for dialogue scenes that moved at a breakneck pace over the 92 minute runtime of the movie. This is a trick that was used often in the tv series "Moonlighting", starring Cybil Shepherd and a younger Bruce Willis, in the late '80s.

 

Cary Grant is in perfect form as Editor of The Morning Post, Walter Burns, who will stoop as low as he can to get what he wants and Rosalind Russell proves that Hildy Johnson is more than up to the task of deflecting his tactics. Like "Casablanca", the supporting cast is wonderful, with each actor creating a unique character of their own.




ABOVE- Cary Grant as Walter Burns and Rosalind Russell as Hildy Johnson. Do you know how hard I tried to find a four-button-functional double-breasted suit with wide lapels like that back in 1989? Impossible, short of going tailor-made, which I couldn't afford.
 

Here's a snippet from the screenplay (transcript) where Hildy is trying to tell Burns that she's quitting the newspaper game in order to get married.

 

                                                                                         BURNS
                              (still interrupting)
                         You've had a better offer, eh?

                                     HILDY
                         You bet I've got a better offer.

                                     BURNS
                         Well, go on and take it. Work for
                         somebody else! That's the gratitude
                         I get for --

                                     HILDY
                         I know, Walter, but I --

                                     BURNS
                              (ignoring her)
                         What were you when you came here
                         five years ago? A little college
                         girl from a School of Journalism! I
                         took a little doll-faced mugg --

                                     HILDY
                         You wouldn't have taken me if I hadn't
                         been doll-faced!

                                     BURNS
                         Why should I? I thought it would be
                         a novelty to have a face around here
                         a man could look at without
                         shuddering.

                                     HILDY
                         Listen, Walter --

                                     BURNS
                              (going right on)
                         I made a great reporter out of you,
                         Hildy, but you won't be half as good
                         on any other paper, and you know it.
                         You need me and I need you -- and
                         the paper needs both of us.

                                     HILDY
                         Well, the paper'll have to learn to
                         do without me. And so will you. It
                         just didn't work out, Walter.

               WIDER ANGLE

                                     BURNS
                         It would have worked if you'd been
                         satisfied with just being editor and
                         reporter. But no! You had to marry
                         me and spoil everything.

                                     HILDY
                              (indignantly)
                         I wasn't satisfied! I suppose I
                         proposed to you!

                                     BURNS
                         Well, you practically did! Making
                         goo-goo eyes at me for two years
                         till I broke down. And I still claim
                         I was tight the night I proposed. If
                         you'd been a gentleman you'd have
                         forgotten all about it. But not you!

                                     HILDY
                              (speechless)
                         You -- you --

She grabs something and chucks it at him. He ducks. The phone rings.

                                     BURNS
                              (to Hildy)
                         You're losing your eye. You used to
                         be able to pitch better than that.
                              (he reaches for phone)
                         Hello... Yeah... What? Sweeney? Well,
                         what can I do for you?

 picture courtesy of http://www.carygrant.net

                                  *****

 

Grant practically yells his dialogue throughout this film and it further illustrates his bluster and blowhard methods of going about things. Quite a difference from how the debonaire Cary Grant has often been seen on-screen.
I remember a quote from Ivan Hutchinson, who was an Australian film critic, when he was presenting another Howard Hawks film on tv. He said; "Hawks liked his men to be men, and his women to be their buddies."
This is true of this film. Hildy Johnson is seen as 'one of the boys', often referring to herself as 'a newspaperman'. However, it is the fact that she is a woman that lends this film some heart. Walter Burns and all of the reporters on his staff are indeed quite cynical and cold-hearted, but it is made clear early on that the news story that they are covering requires a woman's touch. I've always liked the way Howard Hawks drew his female characters. They were almost as tough-as-nails as the men, but they would always show their feminine side before the end credits.

"His Girl Friday" is a beautifully-shot film too. Cinematographer Joseph Walker lights every frame just right, which is another reason why it's a crime that this film isn't available in a better print. I've read that the rights to this film fell into Public Domain in the late 1960s and this accounts for the poor quality DVDs currently on the market. I think an e-mail to Columbia Pictures may be in order. Or maybe I'll type out a letter on my circa 1936 Smith-Corona Standard. They'll think I'm a crackpot.
There's also an elegance in the composition of the shots in this film. Nothing is accidental in the way that they are arranged.

 

The scene above occurs in the Third Act and looking carefully, you see that the candle-stick telephones on the table and the overhanging lights in the ceiling mimic Walter and Hildy. It becomes a little more evident a few moments later when they are both making frantic phone calls with their backs to each other and their placement in the shot is no accident. It's a long scene, filled with snappy, rapid-fire dialogue and it's a credit to the talents of Grant, Russell and Ralph Bellamy (as Hildy's small-town insurance salesman fiance, who arrives in the office) and how they seemingly effortlessly deliver their lines over one another and yet we, as the audience, are able to follow every bit of it. Absolutely manic!

I've noticed a shift in comedy films over the last ten or fifteen years. The Farelly Brothers got the ball rolling with films like "There's Something About Mary" (1998) and Judd Apatow has kept things flowing with his films in recent years although, in his defence, he doesn't resort to the same level of crassness. Two-thousand and twelve saw a 'remake' of "21 Jump St", directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, and, while the teenager in me found it somewhat amusing, the adult in me thought it struck a few too many low blows and easy laughs with its gratuitous use of foul language (and I swear as much as the next man, maybe more so) and crass comments. Remove the smut and it wouldn't be so funny.
It would be great to see a return to the kind of comedy film writing that doesn't rely so heavily on fart jokes and dirty talk. I'm no prude. It just reminds me of all the fart jokes and dirty talk that I heard from friends of mine back in my twenties.
It's a shame that there's no real middle ground between these types of comedy films and say, something like Woody Allen's output. Although, Allen's films have been a little hit-and-miss of late.
Nobody makes a good screwball comedy anymore. One that relies on clever dialogue that's actually funny too.
Thank God for films like "His Girl Friday".

**********************************

Well, this post got a little out-of-hand. I thought I would cover all five films, but it looks like I'll have to split it up into parts. And, of course, while writing this, I got to thinking about films numbers six to ten. That's a post for a later date, no doubt. Too many great films. And most of them are in black and white.

Thanks for reading! And stay tuned for Part 2.


CREDITS;

Thanks to Wikipedia and IMDB for info on these movies. Further and more detailed info can be found there.

Apologies for the little forward/reverse logo visible in some of the pictures. Saves me trawling the web for photos. Special thanks to those whose pictures I did use. Please don't sue. I'm a movie lover, like you.