#17 The Last Waltz

The Last Waltz (1978)

directed by

Martin Scorsese

We have a small collection of music documentaries and video collections and we never watch them. One of this project's two-fold aims was simply to WATCH our DVDs, many of which we've bought and never put on.

In 1976, tired of the road and the attendant lifestyle, Robbie Robertson, main songwriter for the Band, decided it was time to get the group off the road for good. To commemorate this, the Band held a Thanksgiving Day concert at the Winterland Ballroom complete with dinners for 5,000 attendees. Accompanying the band was a host of their friends, including Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Muddy Waters, and, of course, Bob Dylan (among many more).

Scorcese serves as interviewer of the members of the Band before the show starts. He elicits some interesting bits about the group's history and that of its members. The best anecdote involves organist and saxophonist Garth Hudson. He was older and professionally trained. When he joined up, he told the other members they'd have to each pay him a little extra for lessons. Robbie Robertson, telling this story, laughs and says he though it was some sort of grift, until he understood Hudson's family would have been upset if he was using his education to just play in a rock band.

The live performances are fantastic. The Band had honed its live abilities to perfection, serving for years as Ronnie Hawkins' band and then as Bob Dylan's. Most of the guests are great too, especially Van Morrison and Muddy Waters. A little surprisingly, Neil Diamond, for whom Robertson had produced an album, is really good.

Unfortunately, problems filming meant some of the live footage was crap. So certain songs were refilmed later on soundstages. They're still really good, but lack that something a live performance with a loving audience has.

In his autobiography, Levon Helm, the Band's drummer (and only American - the rest were Canadian) claimed that the movie did a great disservice in the way it portrayed Robertson as the Band's leader and failed to show adequately the enormous musical contributions of Hudson and pianist/singer, Richard Manuel. I don't know, I wasn't there, but there's been a lot of talk over the years about tensions between the member at the end and how collaborative the song creation was among them.

Whatever the case was, live, the Band is smoking hot. If for nothing else, The Last Waltz is worth watching for the performances. Still, the talking heads stuff is pretty worthwhile, too. These were musicians swimming against the tide of pop music when they started recording and in doing so, with Music From Big Pink and The Band, created two of the greatest albums of the era and helped usher in a degree of respect for roots music.

Verdict: a keeper

Richard Manuel, Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Levon Helm, & Garth Hudson

#16 - 7 Up! and 7 Plus 7

7 Up! (1964)

directed by

Paul Almond

7 Plus 7 (1970)

directed by

Michael Apted

Jackie, Lynn, and Sue

We didn't need to watch this to know we're keeping it, but we needed to watch it because we haven't seen it in years.

If you don't know about the Up series, it began as an attempt to show how class in England locked people in place. The first installment looked at a group of 7 years olds from poor, middle-class, and upper class. It's a lot of fun listening to a bunch of little kids answer all sorts of questions; do you have a girlfriend/boyfriend, what do you think of poor/rich people, what do you think of colored people?

According to Apted, it was he who was intent on making a film about class. He was a researcher for the first film, and took the series over with the second one. He would go on to make 8 movies, reaching 63 Up, before he passed away last year.

7 Plus 7 returns to the kids, now 14, with more pointed questions. What's really fascinating is how sharp so many of the kids are. There's no denying, the rich kids (some of whom were learning Latin at 7), aren't merely knowledgable; they've been taught to reason. They can seem a little pompous, but they're self-assured and thoughtful. The thing is, while the working-class kids may not be as educated, they're thoughtful and have an understanding how the world works that seems alien to kids I meet today.

In both films, it's the two boys from an orphanage that are the saddest. They're there because their parents can't care for them. They don't even know what university is when asked if they might attend one.

The Up series may not have been done with scientific rigor, but it's one of the most impressive and successful long-form documentaries ever made. With great empathy and depth, it followed 14 people (with only a single one dropping out completely) over 56 years of their lives, watching them struggle with life, family, careers, and more.

We'll watch the others as we come back around to documentaries every few weeks. I'll talk more about certain participants later. For now, I just want everyone who hasn't watched these movies to go out and find them. I cannot recommend these enough.

Verdict: keeping, keeping, keeping

Bruce

#15 Scrooge, aka A Christmas Carol

Scrooge (1951)

directed by 

Brian Desmond Hurst

screenplay by 

Noel Langley

We've reached the Christmas movie section of our DVD library and it kicks off with a BANG! This is the version I grew up with and still prefer. We tried the Reginald Owen version and found too many of the edges sanded off. The George C. Scott version that I remembered liking was missing something. I think we found his transition was done poorly - but I'm up to rewatch and reevaluate.

It's Alastair Sim's version, though, we like the most. The movie looks perfect, the roughest edges remain. Bits are added and subtracted to Dickens' material, but the largely serve to add a little depth to Scrooge (and Marley). The supporting cast is terrific. I'm always happy to see Ernest Thesiger turn up in things.

The main thing is that Sim is just so dang good. He gets the mean-hearted Scrooge down perfectly. He could be a great ham - and there's a lot of that in his transformed Scrooge - but not here. There's no mustache twirling, just utter indifference toward the poor and the holiday. He doesn't spit out "And the Union workhouses? Are they still in operation?" He merely asks it with pure Malthusian coldness. The poor are an unsustainable burden who if they wish to live must avail themselves of what society has already provided.

When Scrooge's transformation happens, yeah, Sim is all over-the-top giddiness. It's a little goofy, but it works because he makes you believe he's been suddenly unburdened of twenty-plus years of spiritual and economic miserliness. When he speaks calmly to his maid and later to Fred and his wife, Sim sheds his silliness and portrays real contrition.

I love this movie.

Verdict: even before we put it on, we knew we were keeping it

Michael Hordern and Alastair Sim

#14 All Men Are Brothers, aka Seven Soldiers of Kung Fu

 All Men Are Brothers (1975)

directed by

Chang Cheh & Wu Ma

screenplay by 

Chang Cheh & Ni Kuang

Years ago, I had a friend who became obsessed with martial arts movies, building up a vast collection, creating an online database, and screening them every week for a host of friends. To be honest, as much as I loved many of them, I struggle all these years later to remember more than a few details about many of them. Too many, in looking back, suffer from choppy plots (though how much of that depends on the dubbing is a serious question), and many have plots generally indistinguishable from each other. Still, when the chance came to build up our own little collection (thanks mysterious stranger forced to sell off your movie collection to meet your tax debt!), we did so. For the most part, though, we haven't gotten around to watching them. Now we are.

Chang Cheh was one of the greatest of Hong Kong directors, directing some of the seventies' most fun movies, including The Kid With the Golden Arm and The Five Deadly Venoms. He had directed earlier classics, including Golden Swallow (sequel to King Hu's monumental Come Drink With Me) and The One-Armed Swordsman. He had a taste for elaborately costumed period pieced and big actions scenes when the budget allowed. His movies focused on brotherhood, honor, and lots and lots of fake blood. John Woo served his apprenticeship under Cheh and has talked often about how he was influenced by his teacher.

Unfortunately, All Men Are Brothers is a disappointment. It's a sequel to his own earlier The Water Margin (both are based on The Water Margin, a classical Chinese novel), a movie I haven't seen. The story isn't especially compelling, the characters are vaguely drawn and several are difficult to tell apart from one another, and the action, and this is the most important thing, isn't especially good. There are a few solid fights - a wrestling match, the death of the Tattooed Tiger, and one of two others. Still, there's just nothing that makes me go, yeah, this is great.

Verdict: away it goes

David Chiang and Ti Lung

#13 A Bridge Too Far

A Bridge Too Far (1977)

directed by 

Richard Attenborough

screenplay by 

William Goldman

This suffers from seventiesstaritis. In deliberate imitation of The Longest Day (1962), another film based on a book by Cornelius Ryan, Attenborough stuffed every role, big or small with some star. So we get James Caan as an American sergeant, Liv Ullman, and Lawrence Olivier as Dutch civilians, and Edward Fox and Michael Caine as British commanders. They're actually all ok. Especially good are Anthony Hopkins as Lt. Col John Frost, Gene Hackman as Maj Gen Sosabowksi, and Dirk Bogarde as Lt Gen Browning. Unfortunately, Robert Redford and Elliot Gould are awful as unrepentant men from 1977 playacting at WWII soldiers. Their scenes totally ruin any sense of being back in 1944.

The film does succeed in making the history and the military planning and failures clear. You understand where the various characters and forces are and Attenborough makes it clear what's at stake. The battle scenes are also fairly honest and brutal for their time. The destruction of Arnhem by the Germans and the harm caused to its inhabitants is also presented in a similar blunt way.

There are a lot of good things about this, but I'm not totally sure if I want to keep it. I'm not sure it's something I'm ever going to really watch again. I'm going to think about it a little and maybe watch some of the documentary extras. I know I'm hedging, but for now, I'm going to vote undecided.

Verdict: unsure

UPDATE: following some discussion and several insightful comments on Facebook, we've decided to keep it

Michael Caine and Edward Fox

#12 - 3:10 to Yuma

3:10 to Yuma (1957)

directed by 

Delmer Daves

 

screenplay by 

Halsted Welles

based on "Three-Ten to Yuma" by Elmore Leonard

So here we come to our first non-keeper. My memory of this was "I like it." Ah, memories, so often they let us down. The core of the story is Van Heflin, a farmer in need of money takes on the risk of keeping Glenn Ford, a bandit, under guard until he can be gotten on the titular train and on to incarceration. It's taken from a good Elmore Leonard story, and if that's all there was it might be as great as I remembered it being. Unfortunately, it's swaddled in opening and closing scenes with a terrible song called "3:10 to Yuma" sung by Frankie Laine. Then there's Leora Dana as Van Heflin's wife. It's not her, but the part's written badly, one minute ragging on her husband for being a coward and then again when he's being brave with no exploration of how she gets from one reaction to the other. Ford's instant romance with a bartender/ex-dancehall floozie played by Felicia Farr is cheesy by any era's standards.

Glenn Ford is very good playing against type as the bandit, Ben Wade. Van Heflin is excellent as farmer Dan Evans. There's a sort of damaged reserve to Heflin (also on display in Shane), that I find really intriguing. He was a star in his day, but he's not one of the ones people still rave about. I just heard some good words about Act of Violence (with Robert Ryan), so I need to track that down and see more of his work. There are some good, gripping moments on hand, and Henry Jones as the town rummy is very good. Still, the crappy and cheesy outweigh the good and away it must go.

Ah, well, the whole point of this was to cull out the unworthy, and the rest of my Western collection is damn impressive, even without this.

Verdict: to the thrift store, posthaste

Glenn Ford and Van Heflin

#11 The 6th Day

The 6th Day (2000)

directed by

  Roger Spottiswoode

written by 

Cormac Wibberley & Marianne Wibberley

We only got this and watched it recently so we (really, me) felt no need to watch it again. I think it's barely passable, but it's the sort of sci-fi movie Hallie digs, so we're keeping it. If there's time travel, multiple dimensions, or cloning, Hallie's all in. If you really want a story with cloning, go find a copy of Clifford Simak's "Goodnight, Mr. James."

Verdict: keeper

Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sarah Wynter