Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Sky's The Limit!

Article theme: War - Edwin Starr

"Psst - Fred, don't look now but I think you're featured on Pat Bastard's blðg again."

Not only the best and most overlooked Hollywood musical, but also the greatest accidentally anti-war movie of all time, it's too obvious a pun to call RKO's 1943 opus The Sky's The Limit Fred Astaire's shining hour (because that is the title of its main theme song), but I just did, so now what, bitch?

Actually, I'm assuming it was unintentional - even a kino factory like RKO wouldn't have dared commit a major star like Astaire to a based isolationist peacenik project at the height of the hostilities - but, just as every Hollywood attempt to marry pozzed messaging with actual artistic talent ends in divorce, so too this effort to keep proto-neocon support for the worst and most destructive war in history high undermines itself so hard you might just start to wonder.

Never forget that the same balding twinks who smirk media literately over the ebin propaganda satire in Starship Troopers also soyface into lockjaw over the Holy War Against Fashism based on this sort of farcically corny agitslop.

Astaire plays Fred (perhaps a clue that this complex character is closer to the real him than his typically airy persona), a fighter ace directed to perform a PR tour from coast to coast on his fleeting leave from the Pacific theatre who goes AWOL instead. The reason suggested is just boredom with his obligations and a yen for anonymity in a country that sees him as a hero for killing le ebil Japs, but this is surface level motivation. Disaffection with the whole war fits better and is supported by the scenes where Fred berates an aeronautical tycoon over the fitness of his aircraft for combat purposes at an obsequious works party in his honour. Through this point he's been a charming prankster, trying to lose himself in the escapism of civilian life, but in this scene his unloading becomes impassioned, showing-without-telling of psychological scars a studio propaganda flick of the period would otherwise have swept under the rug.

"Young man, what are you saying?"
"Look, personally I just prefer allies who don't sink our ships, send letter bombs to the White House, bomb our buildings and frame the Muslim Brotherhood for it, buy all our politicians and run pedo blackmail rings on our own soil."
"I simply won't hear such Woke Right Anti-Semolina-Pudding! Out I say!" - actual dialogue.

But the unravelling of Fred is gradual, a calendar in which he ticks off the days of his dwindling leave acting like those clocks in Rumble Fish, reminding us of the time elapsing before his freedom runs out, serving as a minimalistic motif to keep the rude awakening ahead in mind throughout the dream that plays out for us in between. First Fred goes looking for romance, and finds it by inventing photobombing and otherwise trolling Joan Leslie's qt3.14 photographer into falling for his impish charms.

Remember, boys: if she never looks at you like this...

...She'll never look at you like this.

It's a great romance of the cinéma and our foreknowledge of its doomed fate only makes it more poignant and none the less enjoyable as comic entertainment. Crack all the celluloid-closet jokes you will about our Fred, his chemistry with Leslie speaks of straightness you or I can but aspire to (well, you, anyway). Nor can we deny the sack required to smash his "One For My Baby And One For The Road" routine, in which the great danceman opened a leg shattering glass this way and that in an outpouring of sorrow as primal as it is precise. "Can't act" my taint, guy who wrote his infamous first screen test notes, this is a performance physical and emotional that mogs the talents of every pretentious thespian ever to don tights and also unrelatedly play Shakespeare.

On this b└og we stan a STRAIGHT king.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Cat People!

Believe it or not, movies were once made by people who could read.

If there's one thing on which I can't agree with Ezra Pound, it's in his negative review of Cat People. Famous for popularising jumpscares (which was rightly seen as artful at the time), this 40s RKO gem should be famouser all round. Simone Simon (which is French for Simon Simo) stars as Irena Dubrovna, a Slavic art ho qt3.14 who spends her time sketching panthers at the local zoo. Some Fucking Guy plays Oliver, who strikes up a romance with her in scenes that, much like Hitchcock's The Birds, threaten a feature-length romantic comedy before the horror creeps in to spare us that fate.

The panther, in the background, turns and moves with her as she exits the frame, as though it were her shadow. Happy accident or kinographic genius? No, I couldn't be bothered to find out either.

The idyllic romance is dogged (or should that be catted AMIRITE LOL) by ominous omens, but the pair persist unto the point of matrimony, only to find Irena rendered frigid by her paralysing fear that she will turn into a panther herself due to legends from her Serbian heritage. To be fair, it beats "I have a headache". But Irena wants to smash, so she pursues the cureall prescribed by modernity and twitter thots: therapy.

Wahmen will literally go to be hypnotised by a witch doctor who believes you want to fuck your parents before they'll try calming the fuck down.

When that inevitably solves nothing and makes things worse (hint: if they fixed the problem you wouldn't have to keep going), Irena's mood turns possessive and paranoid, and she ambiguously stalks Oliver's maybe-too-close coworker, Alice (Jane Randolph). As a panther? Only vague shadows hint. Monster movies often struggle to equivocate between plodding literalism and ham-fisted symbolism. By keeping you guessing to the end, Cat People doesn't just maintain a sense of mystery but in so doing keeps either unsatisfactory extreme at bay. Irena's pop-psychologised neurosis is a modern monster, her apparent animistic alter ego an ancient one. By casting a question mark over the symbolic clues, the nature of the horror remains in a quantum state between the two. You know, like Schrödinger's etc. etc.

A high-backed chair positioned just behind her head gives the appearance of cat-like ears...

Here she hides in the foliage like a jungle cat...

Cat People was redundantly remade in the 80s and couldn't be revisited today because of furfags.

You said it Johnny.

Fortunately the original is much less dated than most old school horror fare and can be viewed without condescension. Watch Cat People this Halloween.

Christian blôgg approved.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Tall in the Saddle!

TitS, for short.

Like noirs, slashers, rom-coms and found footage flicks, the western proliferated mainly because it was cheap to produce en masse, leading to an endless succession of mediocre entries with generic titles that could easily be mistaken one for another. The best entries often combined the setting with an unusual genre angle: the original 3:10 to Yuma largely foregoes action for suspense, and silent classic The Wind is an eerie psychological character study. Tall in the Saddle likewise takes a detour through murder mystery territory, though I barely noticed on the first viewing, because the plot is easily and cheerfully forgotten amid a rapid-fire procession of great scenes and oddball characters.

A little-acknowledged cliché is rendering exposition scenes more dramatic/hilarious by having characters eavesdrop from bushes.

John Wayne is Rocklin, an easygoing Chad who breezes into town courtesy of one of the great western geezers played by George "Gabby" Hayes. This cross-generational buddyship sets the affable tone for the picture, with Hayes' ham-and-cheese gurning counterpointing Wayne's laconic deadpan to consistently endearing effect.

A whole road trip movie with these two would have been perfectly acceptable.

Rocklin's pursuit of a property claim is complicated by murder and intrigue, and a classic male fantasy conceit in which a blonde Betty (Audrey Long) and brunette Veronica (Ella Raines) appear to vie for his affections.

Which way western man/porque no los dos?

The ubiquity of this dynamic must speak to some deeply Jungian archetype in the male psyche. Long embodies the demure tradwife, while Raines chews scenery as the gun-toting bad girl. Perhaps the key to the fantasy is that either way, you win.

>ywn be fatally shot by ella raines because she overheard a third-hand rumour that you caught her brother cheating at cards
Why even live?

In this series I aim to bring attention to forgotten gems as much as praise the classics, so I'm tending not to say too much to keep what may be your first viewing fresh. With Tall, however, there's not much I want to say other than to recommend it at the end of a long day's work. Each genre is a list of variations on a theme, and sometimes the variables of plot, setting, characters, cast, dialogue and so on just align the right way, like a pleasing passage of improvised jazz. Tall isn't the most ambitious or ""important"" western, but if time spent smiling like a fool while watching it is any sort of worthy metric, it's in a class of its own.

Sometimes you just want to see John Wayne ride horses, drawl folksily, and punch people.

It's often remarked upon how seldom movies scale the heights of Great Art, but it's less often recognised how seldom they're great entertainment. So many movies start out strong but lose their way and become maudlin as they drag out that late-act-two low-point, possibly out of misplaced fear that they'll be dismissed as frivolous without some po-faced moping making up the "drama" quota for srs art. Others make the even worse gaffe of trying to make some point or other about society, religion, politics or some other heady subject matter on which they're utterly unqualified to speak. Tall makes no point, makes no attempt to make a point, and even makes its melodramatic low-points somehow cheerful, more a well-judged ebb than an indulgent wallow.

We're even treated to some scenery porn at just the right moments, giving the mostly town-bound action physical space to breathe.

"But why single this assembly-line western out among all others?" you sound out, as though phonetically, brows knitted in simianesque concentration. Let me put it to you this way: if I can eat anywhere, I might gamble on some froo-froo haute cuisine, but if I want a burger, no amount of esoteric shit is going to satisfy me like a burger, and in that context, Tall is like a Five Guys in a world of Big Macs.

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