A Slice Of Life-French Style-Beauty Galore In The Days Of Old-Maybe-Cary Grant’s “Kiss And Make-Up” (1934)-A Film Review

A Slice Of Life-French Style-Beauty Galore In The Days Of Old-Maybe-Cary Grant’s “Kiss And Make-Up” (1934)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Sarah Lemoyne

Kiss and Make-Up, starring Cary Grant, Helen Mack, Genevie Tobin, 1934        

New Introductory note by Sarah Lemoyne: I want to thank site manage Greg Green for manning up to what had happened to me in losing the coveted Hammer Production psychological thriller six-film series due to what he confessed was office politics and the cruel realities of the cutthroat publishing business. I had intended on leaving but his offer of giving me both the Star Wars and Marvel Comic studio film reviews was too good to pass up. Read below to find out just how treacherous this journalism business really is-stuff they don’t have a clue about in journalism schools.

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Admittedly, as I have freely admitted in my bracketed introduction to my first film review, I have a lot to learn about journalism, the ins and outs of journalism, and the internal politics of who and why certain personalities get, or don’t get, certain reviews. That naiveté on my part got me caught in a vise right after my second review of the six-part Hammer Production psychological thrillers when wizened and gnarled ancient Sam Lowell unceremoniously grabbed the series from under me on the basis of some good old boy connection. In that sense I learned fast that you make your own breaks in this world and that you had best defend your turf in this cutthroat business. I get that. What I don’t get is when a turkey of a film, well not a turkey but one that could have been left on the cutting floor and nobody would have cried one single tear, like this Kiss and Make-Up is assigned to me and I am clueless about what to say about the thing except I am fully confused by the point.               

That is when my newfound friend and mentor Seth Garth gave me some pearls of wisdom that he had learned at the feet of that same gnarled Sam Lowell who I refuse to talk to these days as one can understand. Seth told me Sam told him that when all else fails always go to a “slice of life” hook informing a new younger audience of what these old- time films showed about life in those periods. That will be my hook here although in a quirky way.

(By the way I am not talking to Sam especially since I have heard a rumor that the old cretin in taking over my Hammer series has decided that he had to give his take on my first two published reviews in order to make the series his own. Being from all observations practically senile he is looking for me, for Sarah Lemoyne, to write those reviews and basically trash my own reviews as so much insignificant babble since as a stringer I am at the beck and call of this mountebank. He had, has, a well-deserved reputation for either, at least in the old days, just doing a recopy job on the press releases the studios handed out or having a stringer like Leslie Dumont, who clued me in of on Sam’s having stringers write the stuff under his name, write it for him   

Probably for some women, maybe more in the past than now, although maybe I have been sheltered a bit by being around professional women, personal beauty and appearance drives their lives. That is the premise the studio was working on in this wacky sent-up of the very lucrative beauty business where handsome Cary Grant is in Paris as a doctor specializing in make-overs for the rich and ugly women who need all the help they can get in his temple of beauty. (Why the film had to be set in Paris, per se, instead of London or New York since nobody including French Nationals speaks French except I heard that Paris was, and still is, one of the beauty and fashion centers of the world with people like Coco Chanel and Christian Dior running amok). What the good doctor was trying to do is laughable by today’s plastic surgery standards where a tuck here and a pinch there will do wonders, thank you, exercise and diet standards but we will chalk this up to the times and let the chips fall where they may.

Now Cary, whom along with Clark Gable, was my grandmother’s idea of manly handsomeness and to an extend I see her point is not only running this beauty temple but sampling the wares of his transformations, especially one Madame Caron, who has not only been transformed but has become the bane of her husband since she came under Cary’s care. The solution, for the cuckolded husband anyway: sue for divorce with Cary as the co-respondent, the alienator of affections, in those tough divorce times especially in Catholic France in the 1930s when the Church still had some sway. That done Madame and Cary get married and run to the French Rivera for their honeymoon but find they are incompatible since she had become a beauty maven. (By the way what passes for beauty, genuine or bought, in those days would be hard-pressed to even get a date out in today’s meat markets since today pretzel thin upper body with long thin legs and long hair un-permed, or the appearance of un-permed hair is what is considered attractive by fashion magazine and cinematic standards.)           

   

Of course that was only the “front” story. Handsome Doc, who apparently had sold out his professional credentials for filthy lucre after medical school rather than making some research breakthrough that could lessen the ills of humankind, in the end sees the error of his ways. Made to see those errors by his smitten (with him) secretary and chief fixer Anne who is dewy fresh and who could today get dates without lifting a finger both as to looks and brains. Seth tells me this is an old Hollywood “hook” in the storied history of cinematic boy meets girl lines which have salvaged half the films ever made. If you don’t follow the bouncing ball you lose the fact that everything is heading toward some final romance between this pair, despite Cary’s ill-advised marriage, despite the playboy affect, despite the blindness to a genuine companion against some floosy affair.

In the end after being kicked metaphysically in the head Cary finally gets it. If that doesn’t give enough of a slice of life about what was fashionable in a previous age then let me throw this out. This is film is touted as a pre-Code film meaning after the enforcement of the Code came into play that each and every possible connotation of sex, sexual desire, even sexual knowledge was under pressure from the religious crazies and zanies banned from the screen. This included any nude scenes, profanity, erotic touching and the like. Those later post-Code films, especially with scenes of  married, happily married, couples in separate marital beds, certainly could provide a slice of life for the times but what passes for the sexually provocative in the pre-Code period would be laughed at today by eight- year olds with a computer and access to the Internet. How is that for slice of life.        

When Hammer Productions Pulled The Hammer Down-“The Snorkel” (1958)-A Film Review

When Hammer Productions Pulled The Hammer Down-“The Snorkel” (1958)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Sarah Lemoyne

The Snorkel, Peter van Ecyk, Betta Saint John, Mandy Miller, Hammer Productions, 1958  

[Nobody ever said the life of a writer, make that a journalist to be closer to the nub of what is on my mind today, was easy, or was going to be easy. Take the example of Allan Jackson, the editor of this publication both in its original hard copy format and up until recently the on-line version who for years went under the moniker Peter Paul Markin but who got so wrapped up in some 1960s youth celebration fixation kind of thing that the younger writers staged a revolt and that was that. Gone, unceremoniously gone, and while he was permitted to return to write new introductions to an encore edition of the famous The Roots Is The Toots history of classic rock and roll series which he was instrumental in putting together now that that task is over he has gone back to oblivion. Some say he is running a whorehouse down in Buenos Aires and others have him once again begging at now enshrined Mitt Romney’s Republican bid to be the next U.S. Senator from Utah looking to do public relations work from his former nemesis.  

Such is the life at the top of the pyramid, the place where one mistake, which is after all the only one that Jackson made with that 1960s nostalgia business which would probably not have even been one at say Rolling Stone, puts you right back on cheap street. So you can imagine what the reality is like for a free-lancer, a stringer, taking assignments on consignment like they do with decent used clothing and having to haggle for every dime while old-time by-line writers have them do the heavy lifting while they go for long cocktail hours and spent long afternoon in hidden hotels rooms with companions not their spouses. One guy who shall remain nameless since I still like to use his services occasionally was notorious for grabbing whatever came off the AP wire and just putting his name on top. Worse, when he was doing film and book reviews he would do the same with the studio publicity department hand-outs and publishing blurbs. Christ and editors, including me, let the stuff go through were happy to have his name on the by-line.    

That brings us to the case today of young free-lancer, stringer if you like that term better Sarah LeMoyne who I had originally assigned the six-film Hammer Production thriller series from the 1950s so she could get her feet wet in the reviewing business by doing a short series connected to one studio. Then office politics, yes, I will admit office politics on this one, got in the way. Sam Lowell decided that he wanted to do the series since he had done the film noir end of what Hammer Productions had put out, and had done it well. So Sarah, all happy and such to have a nice assignment, as you can see from her short introduction to the film below, got short shrift because, well, because she is a stringer, a by the word stringer if it comes right down to it and Sam Lowell has a by-line respected in this cutthroat business where you are only as good as your by-line writers whatever talents your stringers might have. What got Sarah in a crazy mood, a kill crazy mood if you think about it was that Sam has asked her to do two things. First write the rough drafts for him of each of the six films and secondly to rewrite her own first two published reviews so they reflected his take on the material. In short to trash her own reviews to set up a fake controversy between two reviewers. Christ it was all I could do to talk Sarah out of leaving. I had to promise this introduction AND another series maybe Star Wars or the Marvel Comics studio productions. Yeah, Christ. Greg Green]            

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[I am happy today since my first film review was recently published so the world is beautiful, and I will not bore the reader with long-winded gripes or go off on a tangent like some writers here seem to think is mandatory or else their reviews don’t measure up. Read on. Sarah Lemoyne]    

Having recently been given the assignment to do this six-film compilation produced by Hammer Productions of England and distributed by Columbia Pictures in the United States I agree with Seth Garth who has turned into something of a mentor to me of late that the term “low budget” certainly applies to this one, The Snorkel, as it did to the last. By that he meant, and this runs through the Hammer horror movie and film noir compilations as well which Sam Lowell had reviewed a couple of years ago, that they used mostly unknown British and American actors, didn’t leave much on the cutting room floor and spent about six dollars on set design.   

That is all true in this vehicle as well except somehow they got an interesting story line that helps the viewer forget that the actors were over-emotive and the scenery needed serious work. I don’t know how this one fits into the psychological thriller genre but the premise is not bad. Step-father Snorkel, let me call him that, apparently tired of his wife, or merely looking to get his hands on her dough unimpeded planned and executed the “perfect” murder, or at least he thought so, by drugging her up and gassing up her room sealed while he has fresh air via an air pump tied to his snorkel under the floorboards as she suffocated to death. His alibi complete with passport entry that he had been over the border in France working on a new book or some such baloney. The whole thing was written off as the suicide of a depressed and forlorn woman. Done. End of story.

No, no, no. Enter his step-daughter, a goof teenager which doesn’t help her credibility, accompanied by her nanny, who without any evidence but also knowing her man, knowing this guy was strictly a gold-digger was not buying any of the suicide story-and lets him, and the world know it. Problem about her theory which we already know is a serious one is that freaking sealed room and no evidence of somebody somehow doing the deed. Every time teen angel gathers up a bit of steam either nanny or dad squash the thing tight but teen angel knows that this guy is a bastard. Teen angel knows that she witnessed this guy murder her father in order to marry mother dear so this guy has a track record in her mind. Most of the rest of the film is spent in that tug of war between these deadly adversaries with the nanny pushing toward Snorkel’s side once he puts on the charm machine. But despite the perfect crimes Snorkel feels the heat from teen angel and so he makes what will be his fatal mistake and tries to kill her.

Still nobody is buying her story. This though is where a little rough justice in this wicked old world as Seth likes to say comes in. In one last effort to figure out how the murder of dear mother and then herself could have happened she has a guy from the consulate check a few spots, one of them behind the very heavy cabinet. No go. No go but that cabinet was left in place right over a trap door which had been place where Snorkel hid while he was doing his dastardly deeds. While he is now hiding as they inspect the premises. He can’t move the heavy cabinet from his tight position and he is doomed.  Doomed once teen angel comes for one last look and hears his pleas for life. She walks away leaving him to suffocate. Maybe. Maybe if her stop at the police station doesn’t get the coppers there in time. Beautiful rough justice. Interesting as a perfect murder tag but don’t try this at home, okay.               

The Star Wars Industry Churns Onward-Luke Skywalker aka Mark Hamill Cashes His Check-Director Rian Johnson’s “Star War: The Last Jedi-VIII (Sure, Sure) (2017)-A Film Review

The Star Wars Industry Churns Onward-Luke Skywalker aka Mark Hamill Cashes His Check-Director Rian Johnson’s “Star War: The Last Jedi-VIII (Sure, Sure) (2017)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Will Bradley      

Star Wars: The Last Jedi-VIII, starring the Mark Hamill (the late) Carrie Fisher, Adam Driver, Daisy Ridley, and an ensemble cast backing up the main actors, directed by Rian Johnson, 2017   

No question the Star Wars industry has spawned nothing but gold, more than faux Vegas Canto Bight shown in a sequence in VIII could ever dream of for creators, actors, directors and the thousands needed to keep the operation churning. No question either that from my perspective this thing had been played out, has lost plenty in the script department since this Last Of The Jedi has stuck pretty much to the action-filled and story-thin formula that has driven everything after the first trilogy. Frankly I don’t give a damn about IX although I know as sure as I am now writing that we will be besieged by such a production if for no other reason that to keep the gold coming in.

If all of this sounds a bit cynical then you are right on the money. I did not ask for this assignment, did not want it and hopefully have not dug myself into a hole by griping about my fate publicly. Here’s how this one has played out. Seth Garth and Johnny Callahan, the latter a serious financial angel for this publication, both desperately wanted to tackle this film. Seth had done a few of the earlier episodes and Johnny has actually done the review of the very first one for the hard copy edition of this publication back in 1977. Meaning this: both men have been aficionados since day one. Sensing that this golden operation was finally bringing this monster to a close both wanted to pay homage to, well, let’s call a thing by its right name-their youth. Greg Green, site manager and the guy who hands out the assignments, decided to make a Solomonic decision and pass them both by and look for somebody who was less involved emotionally and cinematically with this saga. Thus I got the call having not even been born when the series started and moreover as disinterested a party as could be about the whole business after falling asleep when my parents rented a tape for the VCR from the local video store  (showing my age at least against those who know only DVDs or streaming).           

Okay where to start. Darth Vader, oops, Kylo Ren, really   Benjy Solo, who turns out to be the late Mr. Vader’s grandson showing how if not incestuous in the direct sense at least in the storyline the whole thing was, is, played by Adam Driver, is up to his born to be bad self continuing from the last episode wreaking havoc on a sullen galaxy where he is acting as a discipline for the chief universal bad guy, a blob named Smoke, no, Snork, no, Snoke. For the good guys, good guys and gals as it turned out with a new generation of possible Jedi Knights coming from the female side of the sexual divide with Rey, played by Daisy Ridley, we have the same old same old leading the charge, leading the Resistance to the bad guys with General Leia, played by the late Carrie Fisher in her last film, and a few young bravos along side Rey and her friends Poe and Finn.             

What no Luke Skywalker? (Hans Solo, Benjy’s dad has passed beyond done in by Benjy’s hands as well although his ever-faithful companion Chewie is still going at it strong helping young Rey out of a couple of jams although he hasn’t improved his English much in the subsequent forty or so years). Yes, Luke is around but he is sulking on some desolate island having apparently given up the virtuous Jedi Knight job. The sulk  inherited from his reaction to his earlier attempts to tame an unruly universe. Half this film is spent with wanna-be Jedi Knight Rey trying might and main to get Luke back in the struggle, back into the resistance against bad boy Benjy, okay Kylo, and his handler Snoke. The other half is the usual fight to the death, yawn, between the good guys and the bad with the bad guys who vastly outnumber the good but who apparently were ill-trained by Snoke and his minions taking a pummeling before the end. Needless to say as things wind up, wind up for this episode anyway, the Resistance, the rebels are still holding on, still around in case the galaxy decides enough is enough with new head bad guy Kylo, okay, Benji and bring down a hell and damnation on his sorry butt.       

News Flash: before the end good old boy Luke does show up for one last hurrah holding off the bad guys to let the good guys and gals escape. That done one Luke Skywalker who Seth Garth and Johnny Callahan speak of in hushed tones cashed his check. What will happen next without his magic wand to protect the universe.