Mostly movies, also a note about news in the world

[kattahj]

I've seen so many movies these past few days that I thought I'd talk a little about them.

Most recent was Tangled, which I tried to rent online, but the connection messed up (I really must learn to stop trying these methods, they may be legal but they SUCK) so I had to pick it up elsewhere.

Comments

[selenak]

For a Cold War movie, I thought the treatment of Communist Otto was quite interesting - the film pokes fun at his ideology, and his personal sullenness, but has no problem giving him all the success the Cagney character has wished for.

That would be because the film is based on a pre-war comedy by Hungarian comedy writer Ferenc Molnar (in which the Otto character is an idealistic anarchist, and it's clothes, not Coca-Cola which need to be produced) and updated by Billy Wilder who, what with not being American by birth and raising but also a cultural product of Vienna and Berlin, actually knew Communists in person rather than as a scary tale from propaganda. Mind you, the film flopped anyway (one of the few Wilder films that did) because he had very unfortunate timing. Or rather, the East German goverment did. He filmed it just before the Berlin Wall was erected (hence the Brandenburg Gate scenes which would have been impossible afterwards), but when it was released, it was Iron Curtain time. And suddenly no one was in the mood for divided Berlin jokes. By now, of course, it's a classic.

I love it dearly, not least because Billy W. is an equal opportunity emigré making fun of everyone - Germans ("I was in the underground"), Russians, Americans. Oh, and the German actors (Lilo Pulver and Horst Buchholz) had a great time working for Wilder, they mentioned this film in many an interview later fondly despite it having been a flop.

If you're in the moood for Wilder and his lesser known films and Berlin, have you watched A Foreign Affair yet? Features Jean Arthur and Marlene Dietrich, also is set in Berlin (some years earlier, I think that was one of the first post- war films shot by Americans there) and has Wilder being an equal opportunity poker at Germans and Americans again.

[kattahj]

Thanks for all that background info! I had no idea about any of this. The trips back and forth between East and West Berlin was surprising to me (one of my first political memories is the fall of the Wall), although of course I did know that several years passed between the splitting of the city and the raising of the Wall.

And yeah, he really does make fun of everyone. I like that there isn't a character that can be called unequivocally "good" or "bad".

I haven't watched A Foreign Affair, thanks for the tip!

[selenak]

To quote a line from Wilder's most famous film which fits the characters in all his films: Nobody is perfect. :)

Billy Wilder fell in love with the English language as only an immigrant can, and I think, biased as that may be on my part, that he couldn't have made the films he did had he actually been born and raised American. For example, the fact that young Wilder (still spelling his name "Billie" at that point before being told this is the female spelling in English years later - he was born Samuel) when working as a reporter and scriptwriter in Berlin made some additional cash as a dancer/gigolo finds its way into so many things, most obviously Sunset Boulevard but also Lubitsch's Ninotchka (for which he wrote the script) and the "Daphne"/Osgood relationship in "Some Like it Hot", and you know, he wasn't embarassed about this or hid it, which I think an American would have done.