“FanFare Guests” Archive
Victoria Balloon | FanFare Guests
Guest contributor Victoria Balloon writes:
Before there was House and Gray’s Anatomy Americans got their Hollywood medical drama from watching Dr. James Kildare. Not the 1960s television series starring Richard Chamberlain, but a series of MGM short feature films from the 1940s.
It doesn’t take much to turn medicine into drama. The doctor who stands between life and death is a hero made for the movies, and Hollywood has known it for a long time. Classic films with plots based on period science and technology are fun to watch, and MGM’s Dr. Kildare films, based on the stories of Max Brand, present characters that are still well-known today.
The young Dr. James Kildare, son of a country doctor and fresh out of medical school, was played by Lew Ayres. Ayres won acclaim for his role as Paul Bäumer in All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and worked steadily throughout the 1930s. Unfortunately, studios cast him as a tough guy or rich dilettante, and the roles never quite suited him. It wasn’t until he played the alcoholic younger brother of Katharine Hepburn in Holiday (1938) that he was able to demonstrate the complex mixture of gentle charm and brutal honesty that exhibited his talent.
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Guest blogger Joe Malone writes:
I like to go to plays. Not Broadway extravaganzas, but community and university theater productions. Unfortunately, my spouse doesn’t share this interest -- which cuts back on my dramatical attendance, except when our daughter comes home for a visit. Fortunately, stage plays find their way onto the silver screen, even moreso in the '30s and '40s than today. Modern examples of the play-on-film would be Bug (2007) and Doubt (2008), which I have reviewed. Unfortunately, we are not living in the age of Eugene O’Neill, Thornton Wilder, and Tennessee Williams, except insofar as revivals and remakes allow us to do so. With all due respect, John Patrick Shanley, Tony or no Tony, is no Kaufman or Hart, the two who wrote the play from which The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942) derives, via the Epstein twins’ screenplay. (The Epsteins of Casablanca fame).
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Guest blogger Scott Nye writes:
A lot has been made about this year being the 50th anniversary of Psycho and Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, especially with the latter embarking on a cross-country tour, courtesy of a newly-struck 35mm print. But two other incredibly important, immeasurably influential films are also celebrating their golden anniversaries – Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura and Frederico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. And what all of this has stirred in me is not a sort of wistful yearning for movies of this caliber to be made today, nor a desire to trace the many, many ways these four films changed cinema (though I won’t be considering Psycho for this), but rather a simple question – what happened to all the cool art films?
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Guest blogger Julie writes:
If that picture or grouping of names means anything to you, then congratulations, you have seen On the Town (1949), one of the greatest musicals ever. I watched it again recently and was struck by the fact that this film, in addition to its many other delights, features some of the most phenomenally modern female characters in cinema, even by today's standards. What's even more striking is that it's not even a film about how modern and awesome they are, which is usually where you find those types of characters (i.e. biopics), and the filmmakers don't seem like they're making a film about gender politics.
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Guest blogger Matt House writes:
Duncan Jones nostalgic sci-fi space romp, Moon, is a mostly well known film in certain circles, with those circles mainly consisting of people who are passionate fans of cinema in one form or another. Outside of those too cool for film-school film fans, Moon is not a recognizable name (unless you're talking New Moon, of course), and the general public has little to no clue about the movie. At least that is what I assume but my assumption is more than likely spot on.
That alone somewhat speaks for how the film was completely neglected by the Academy this year - in a ceremony that applauded ten films instead of five - so they could make room for movies more along the lines of the summer blockbuster. Or, to put it in simpler terms, make room for films that the general public know about, thus, drumming up better ratings from the "average person." Basically, popularity over substance becomes even more prevalent.
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Guest blogger DJ Heinlein writes:
If you have read the review I had published for Shutter Island, there is a particular section in the article where I cover the topic of cameo appearances. It can be tremendously distracting for me if I recognize too many familiar faces appearing in bit roles. Are you ever the same way about watching a movie with an excessive amount of familiar faces appearing within it? There are certain instances when the minor appearance is acceptable and I will shrug it off without much thought or further consideration. Any given comedy film is the single most acceptable excuse for an excessive use of the cameo performance, because the desired intention would be to provoke a laugh. However, a dramatic film is not necessarily the case unless the cameo appearance by a recognizable face is coherent to the story itself. An acceptable example of a dramatic cameo appearance that I am willing to overlook would be the appearance of Hunter S.
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Guest blogger Donna Hill writes:
Whomever said overt violence on film is a sad reflection on the effects of modern technology and overexposure to violence in video games has never seen Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery released in 1903. Plenty of violence and plenty of bodies for a film that runs less than 12 minutes.
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Guest blogger ClassicBecky writes:
I don’t like baseball, but I love movies about baseball. You see all the good parts without the long, boring stretches. The same may be true for many people regarding ballet. Even if you would not spend an evening at the ballet, there are three movies about ballet that I believe are movie-making at its best.
The Red Shoes (1948) is probably the most famous of ballet-themed movies. Starring prima ballerina Moira Shearer, it is a story of conflict, love and tragedy. The Hans Christian Andersen tale about a girl who covets a pair of red shoes, only to find that they will never stop dancing, is mirrored in the story of ballerina Vicky Page (Shearer). Her love of dance and fascination with Lermontov (Anton Walbrook), the ballet impresario who is a thinly disguised version of real-life ballet producer Diaghilev, collides with her wish for normal love and life with composer Julian Craster (Marius Goring). This conflict is portrayed on a melodramatic and epic scale.
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Guest blogger Richard Lamb writes:
When I was a kid, way back in the midst of the Seventies, movie viewing was restricted to visits to the cinema or the schedules of three TV channels. That’s right, kids, there was a dark time in our history when you couldn’t grab the remote and watch what you liked when you liked. There was a time, long since passed, when the bovine masses of Britain only had three TV channels to keep them distracted. In the days before pay-per-view, YouTube, DVD or even video tapes, we weren’t exactly spoiled for choice.
Back then, trips to the cinema were like a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. At least, they were for me. And to a lesser degree, movies on TV were events in themselves, far less commonplace than they are today. Looking back, you remember the movies you loved at the cinema, but there are also those movies that you will forever associate with magical childhood afternoons before the magic television box. For me, it was the old adventure movies like Jason and the Argonauts, the Sinbad movies, Jack the Giant Killer, One Million Years B.C. and The Valley of Gwangi. In the age of CGI, it’s easy to forget how impressive stop-motion animated dinosaurs, Cyclops and skeletons were. And boy, they were.
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In this guest blog, writer Joel Gunz presents a pictorial examination of how the art of Salvador Dalí influenced and impacted the works of Alfred Hitchcock. (Whom Gunz lovingly refers to as "Hitch").
Take a look at the two pictures below. If Hitch didn't consciously borrow from Dalí's painting when he came up with the scene in Mother's bedroom in Psycho, I'll eat Magritte's hat.
Mother's final resting-place as seen in Psycho and Dalí's, Surrealist composition with invisible figures, ca. 1936.
The bed with its outline of feminine curves, the water and the bright red gem on a pedestal are all sexual symbols. Undercutting that eroticism, however, is a swarm of ants clotted where the invisible woman's sexual parts would be. (They're hard to see in this picture.) In Dalí's skewed, alternate universe, those bugs represent death and decay. Sadly, his wife, Gala, had recently undergone surgery which rendered her infertile.
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Guest blogger This Guy Over Here writes:
Note: there are some spoilers in this article. Please proceed with caution.
Through the years film’s different genres come and go in popularity. Some films have had their heyday (science fiction), some have seen a second coming (horror), and others have thrived by splintered into subgenres (action/superhero flicks.) But since the beginning of cinema there has been one genre that has remained consistently popular: the mystery.
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Guest blogger Charles Wiebe writes:
Over half a century after The Grapes of Wrath was released, we tend to forget the minor miracle that conservative prewar Hollywood produced a powerful and radical film that according to author John Steinbeck was “harsher” than his Nobel Prize winning book, considered by many to be one of the most radical social documents of its day. Even to this day, biographer Joseph McBride, reminds us it remains “Hollywood’s strongest indictment of Depression era socioeconomics.”
The Grapes of Wrath was almost universally declared an instant masterpiece after its release in 1940. But post war prosperity soon made the story about the struggles of Depression era farmers seem dated. The current economic crisis, however, has given the film new life and a new generation of viewers thanks to recent stage productions. Youtube is now loaded with clips from the film. Biographer Scott Eyman writes “Today, sixty years after it was made, The Grapes of Wrath retains nearly all of its concentrated humanist power.”
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