A Gala Night...

Image via Wikipedia...Well a gal a night is enough for me - To paraphrase Groucho (Julius) Marx in Duck Soup. Actually it was a Film Night and this time we watched three. BEWARE SPOILERS BELOW.

We started with "The Four Marx Brothers" (Zeppo was in this one) in the classic Duck Soup. It has more than its fair share of famous Groucho quotes and visual jokes, including the famous mirror routine and Chico and Harpo's hat swapping and knee raising antics. Margaret Dumont (Mrs Teasdale) is magnificent as usual as the object of both Groucho's desires and insults. If you can swallow the idea that she honestly thinks that the duck-walking, cigar-waving lunatic with the painted-on mustache is the ideal candidate for head of state then sit back and enjoy the anarchy that follows.

Zeppo doesn't look entirely comfortable in what is basically a minor straight role (albeit with a little singing) but the usual trio is on fine form and if you think Groucho is an unlikely leader for Freedonia (Hail hail) then it will be positively jaw-dropping to find that the rival country Sylvania thinks that Chico and Harpo are ideal candidates for the intelligence community. Not the world's best spies but if you want someone who can play the piano like a harp, fracture English and snip cigars, ties and tail-coats with a large pair of scissors then "Chicolini" and "Pinky" are your men. An indication of this pair's efficacy in espionage is demonstrated by Chico's report on his supposed surveillance of "Rufus T Firefly" (Groucho):

MONDAY, WE WATCH FIREFLY'S HOUSE, BUT HE NO COME OUT. HE WASN'T HOME.                   

TUESDAY, WE GO TO THE BALL GAME, BUT HE FOOL US. HE NO SHOW UP.                   

WEDNESDAY, HE GO TO THE BALL GAME, BUT WE FOOL HIM ! WE NO SHOW UP.                   

THURSDAY WAS A DOUBLEHEADER, NOBODY SHOW UP.                 

FRIDAY, IT RAINED ALL DAY. THERE WAS NO BALL GAME. 

WE LISTENED OVER THE RADIO.

The writing here is by Kalmar and Ruby who had also penned Horse Feathers a year before. I was quite amazed to be watching this with someone who had never seen a Marx Brothers film. I had certainly seen it more than once but was very happy to re-acquaint myself with Firefly, Teasdale et al and can hopefully look forward to watching more of the DVD set at future film nights as my fellow Film Night companion seemed to enjoy it.

Image via WikipediaThe second part of the "official" programme was a film I hadn't seen before but one that Arthur had seen many years before and remembered fondly along with a number of others he had seen at the Brighton Essoldo in that era.

The film was "Violent Saturday". This is a species of thriller involving a bank hold up but is oddly paced for a crime movie and has some interesting casting. It was directed by Richard Fleischer from a screenplay by Sidney Boehm but for me the most important credit was the one that mentioned messrs Bausch and Lomb. From the outset it was the De Luxe colour and the wide open Cinemascope shots that fascinated me.



My impression was of a B movie about a man wrongly villified as a coward (to the misery of his young son) not having seen action in the war and finally being given his chance to kill as a result of the bank robbery.

The film was elevated somewhat by its cast which included Victor Mature in the lead role and Lee Marvin as the cannon fodder. Somewhere in the mix was an Amish family (Do the machinery-shunning Amish really use trains? Arthur points out that Witness starts in a station...) and the thee and thouing patriarch of this peaceful brethren was the unlikely Ernest Borgnine. Needless to say he didn't stay entirely true to his creed: The moral tone of this film is certainly questionable.

But it would be churlish to critisize casting and plot in the face of the fact that this film looks so good. At one point it had me blurting out that it looked like a Hopper painting. It seems that, like early Technicolour, the richness of De Luxe does not fade as so many other colour media do. After years of suffering the "pan and scan" desecrations perpetrated by television, seeing a Cinemascope film spread across the screen (albeit letterboxed on modern TV's 16:9 "widescreen") was at times quite breathtaking. The leisurely long-take pace of most of the film gave us ample time to appreciate the vistas, pans and tracking shots. For all my reservations about the pacing, writing, casting and directing it was a treat to watch.

Having begun with tea and biscuits and moved on to the traditional glass of beer during the main feature we arrived at the cheese and biscuits and needed something to watch with our vintage cheddar. I had a look through the recently recorded stuff and my friend spotted "The One That Got Away". He remembered it from long ago as having an exciting aeroplane crash-landing at the beginning. On seeing it again he was disappointed and wondering how he could have built up the competant but obviously model-based scene over the intervening 50 years. Nevertheless we found ourselves watching the film (one that I hadn't seen for many years either) and saw it through to the end.

The real Von Werra's 109 Photo via Wikipedia

It's a fascinating true tale of Oberleutnant Franz (Baron) Von Werra, the only German to escape from allied custody back to the fatherland. Sadly (or perhaps arguably not so given that he would probably have killed many more allied flyers) his epic escape from Canada into the U.S. and then on through Mexico and various Latin American coutries ended with his aeroplane going missing over the North Sea the following year. This only appears as a footnote though, the bulk of the film is taken up with his interrogation and various escape attempts before he is shipped off to Canada and his final evasion.

Apparently Hardy Kruger was not the first choice for the role but having served in the Hitler youth and the Wermacht himself, made it his own very convincingly.

Another interesting programme this week and I'm very happy to be stuck in the thirties and fifties for the moment as Arthur revisits films he loved in youth.