The Last Films I Watched in 2021

Hey-oh! One more time round the ol' McMulberry Bush.

I remember writing the names of every film I watched on the inside covers of my notebooks 2000-2003-ish. And fifteen years before that. I suppose I took up the trend again twenty years after that, too – just here on the internet, with annotation. Lucky you!

 In chronological order of release:

 

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(1938)

British flying aces in World War One contend with the harsh realities of war.

Howard Hawks remakes his own film from eight years before, this time with Errol Flynn, David Niven, and Basil Rathbone. I don’t believe I’ve seen the original. The planes in this one (they tell me) are not appropriate for the timeframe, but who cares – every shot is gold.

Someone once said Stanley Kubrick would watch any movie that had any kind of flying sequence, and I can understand that. I’m the same way with World War One, so that makes me an easy mark for something like this. 

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(1949)

A hard-as-nails general takes over a bomber unit suffering from low morale and 

whips them into fighting shape.

I first saw this in a Leadership class at the Community College of Rhode Island. I did not expect to enjoy it, which is to say I knew absolutely nothing about it. I got the impression they pulled this out of the closet, so to speak; I bet they were teaching from the same “Principles of Leadership” guide from the 70s. It was a college prep elective that was two nights a week, and no one was paying much attention. But for some reason - and from start to finish - I was spellbound.

I say "for some reason" but of course it's on account of the film's quality; it's engineered to work like that and draw you in. But my teenage mind was somewhat impervious to these things - especially something asking me to sympathize with a tough-as-nails abusive leader type. (Such things provoked an adolescent "don't tell me how to rock" response well into my thirties.) 

I'm glad it did, and it's one I revisit every so often. Gregory Peck’s character (based on real life General Frank Armstrong, of the 306th. It's the 918th in the movie, i.e. 3 time 306 = the fictitious 918th of the movie. I looked around to try and find the reason this numerology was chosen but no lcuk at press time) wouldn’t be appropriate for just any of set of circumstances, granted. Bombing Nazi Germany in the early days of WW2 was a highly specialized situation. His moment of vulnerability in the air (“Get out, Joe!”) and subsequent not-quite-able-to-get-the-lid-all-the-way-back-down is just perfect. (Peck was rightly nominated for the Oscar, but it went to Broderick Crawford for All the King's Men.) A lot of men wrecked their minds and bodies against Fortress Europa. May we never memory hole what happened to these poor bastards or stop thanking them for what they did.

They showed the movie to Curtis LeMay, a notorious crank about anything related to army air power in the movies (or outside the movies) and he surprised everyone by saying they got everything right. I don’t doubt it. You can feel that rumble of authenticity in your chest with each roar of the B-17s. 

 

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(1953)

In 1907, a nurse arrives in the Belgian Congo to work for a missionary doctor 

but meets a grumpy animal hunter who secretly plans to search for 

gold in the dangerous Bakuba tribal region.

Directed by Henry Hathaway (Niagara, Rommel: The Desert Fox, True Grit) and starring (like you can’t see the poster above) Susan Hayward and Robert Mitchum. I meant to do this one for the From Novel to Film series, but I never ended up getting or reading the book. 

I’m not sure I really want to. I like picking up kind of off the radar stuff, and I like this mid-twentieth-century place and setting, but the title is more exciting than what’s actually here, i.e. an American administering to the natives with a gold theft plot, etc. 

Robert Mitchum makes anything watchable, as does authentic African footage, of which this film does indeed have some but was mostly shot on the Fox backlot.

 

 

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(1955)

The story of how the British attacked German dams in World War II by using an ingenious technique to drop bombs where they would be most effective: the dams of the Ruhr Valley.

Oh man, this movie. Okay so the reason you don't see this on TCM will become apparent momentarily, but first and foremost, this really is a masterpiece, and no serious fan of World War Two movies can not see it. The last forty minutes of this movie are (not counting Star Wars which lifted and compressed them into outer space) like no other movie ever made - absolutely top flight stuff. And the first half - figuring out, step by step, how to do all this stuff, in the face of unheard of pressure from all sides - is just as riveting. The Lancaster raids on the Ruhr Valley dams were only partially successful - and knocking on the door of a war crime, if not busting it down outright - but an amazing achievement. (And hard-won; the last line of this movie just guts me.) 

Brilliant stuff. Okay, then here's the catch. The real Guy Gibson, just as he did in the film, had a jet black labrador that everyone in the 617 Squadron loved. On the day of the raid the dog died in a traffic accident. The raid commenced at midnight and as a tribute to the dog - and to boost the spirits of their commander - the staff decide to name one of their codewords (the one the pilots will signal back if successful in one part of their mission) after the dog. Their dead friend will be part of the mission; all the men are touched. The dog's name is repeated a few times so everyone understands. 

Finally, when one of the raids succeeds, the radioman, receiving the codeword, excitedly calls out the dog's name: "IT'S N-WORD!" 

The room erupts into cheers. Democracy is saved.

It was referenced in The Wall. I don't know if people still watch or listen to that one; kids these days have their own alienation movies and soundtracks. It was unavoidable in the last two decades of the twentieth century so I saw it many times. Did I ever realize I was seeing footage from The Dam Busters? Nope. (Leave it Roger Waters to turn a tale of epic British achievement into just another adjunct of his banality.) There's a lot of irony in all of this. But when/where isn't there?

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(1956)

 An American travels to East Africa, where he tries to find out how his brother died.

Christopher Lee as the swarthy French Big White Hunter – an actual occupation, to distinguish from the Little White Hunters. Were there Big Black Hunters? I shouldn't kid, but it's such an odd phrase - is fun. Cornel Wilde is more than credible, as is everyone. The title refers to that last point of departure before “darkest Africa” begins. 

There’s some interesting real-world context here with the Mau-Mau, but of course the Leopard Men here are just fakes paid by the civil-seeming uncle. Who’s also a murderer. A plot straight out of EC more than actual history. (Also, somewhat less charitably, a prime example of the white people in foreground/ black people - despite it being their own country - as chess pieces. "Beyond Mombasa" indeed.) More on that in a second, though. The African scenery that’s here is cool; the rest of it was shot outside of London. 

 

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(1956)

During the Mau Mau Uprising in British Kenya in the 1950s, settler-hunter Ken Duffield is a hired guide for a lion hunting party but he also hopes to find the Mau Mau rebel who killed his family.

The father of one of my daughter's friends is from Kenya, aka the former British East Africa where all these movies I've been watching were set, and at one of the birthday parties that became part of our mutual social calendar a few years ago, we got to talking about movies filled in Kenya. I'd just seen Mogambo and mentioned that one; that's kind of the gold standard for films shot in the country from that era. (He'd been to the famous ostrich farm where some sequences were filmed.) He mentioned this one, which I'd never heard of. The family has since moved, which is too bad as I'd love to talk more about it with him. 

It's the best looking of the African ones mentioned so far. Whether that's Terence Young's direction or just the print I watched I don't know, but although the plot is at times kind of threadbare, (with some characters lifted from Francis Macomber and the like) it's beautiful to look at.

I'd love to have that road sign. 

A word on the Mau-Mau, who've come up a few times now. My Kenyan friend made the point that these movies sometimes neglect to show that the pacification of the Mau Mau (whom he likened to the Viet Cong) as a native accomplishment more than a British one. I only bring this up because I kind of watched it through that lens and may have enjoyed it more as a result. Anyway, I don't mean to present anything as other than what it was. I read to find out things about countries, I watch movies for many reasons but non-fiction-discovery is not the main one.

 

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(1966)

French Army Colonel Raspeguy leads his paratroopers in battle against the Communist Viet Minh in Indochina and against Algerian guerrilla during the Algerian War.

What can I say, I like off-the-beaten-path locales and plots and what not. This was filmed in Andalusia, Spain and not any of the places the story takes place, but Spain’s a good stand-in. (That reminds me of how Coronado and other conquistadores were prepared for every geographical feature of the New World except the Great Plains. All that grassland, all those buffalo, flat as far as the eye could see - must have been terrifyingly alien to anyone raised on the Iberian peninsula!) And Anthony Quinn – who was cast as just about every nationality or ethnicity in the world, I think – is a good stand-in for the real-life French Foreign Legion General he represents.

By 1966 the Algerian War of Independence was – like the French-Indochine War – in the rearview (though just barely) and the French political scene had undergone several shocks to its system (as had the FFL). This was a popular movie in France but off the radar in the US.

I only first saw it this year. It’s not bad – the chemistry between Alain Deloin and Claudia Cardinale works, and it really seems – almost uncomfortably so – that they’re hitting each other in a few scenes.

 

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(1967)

The evil Dr. Who captures King Kong to dig for Element X when his mechanized doppelganger Mechanikong is unable to do the task. Kong escapes and confronts his double.

 

Watching this with a three year old, you can really skip over the silly effects and access the make-believe. Those giant monkeys are punching each other! That’s a jet-ship! Etc. I highly recommend this method. Don't go and kidnap one to test out the theory, just keep it in mind if there's ever a three year old around. Mine is really into this Kaiju stuff lately, wherever and however he finds it, which means I've been watching tons. Really, what it means is I've been watching King Kong Escapes and Destroy All Monsters tons. 

This one is livened up my Mie Hama (You Only Live Twice), Rhodes Reason ("Bread and Circuses"), and voiceovers from Paul Frees, as well as the Rankin/Bass effects.

Were you a fan of Creature Double Feature? Was that a thing outside of New England in the 70s? 100% of my Kaiju love comes from all those Creature Double Features I watched with my brother 1978-1981 on Channel 56. 

 

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(1983)

Chris from a girls' boarding school loves Jim from a nearby boys' boarding school. Jordan also wants Jim and plays dirty. Jim and two friends visit the girls' school posing as girls.

Even I was kind of astonished at the depths of depravity of this one. It’s no wonder the same decade gave us Soul Man or (insert your example here). Everyone must have figured if this was made, anything goes. 

Three things really stand out: (1) the slobbish friend Bubba (Michael Zorek) and the amount of sex this guy has. I mean, more than Phoebe Cates and Matthew Modine and Betsy Russell? This seems realistic? (2) Speaking of Betsy Russell, the audacity of some of the nude scenes here is kind of shocking, even to an usually-un-such-shockable guy like myself. This goes for some of the sex hi-jiks in general. I mean, the students are banging, the parents are banging, the chauffer is wacking off, Boothby, you name it. (3) The scene where Matthew Modine - in drag - is being teased into revealing himself in the dorm room has some close-ups of his face that are about as uncomfortable as anything I've seen on screen. Any of the in-drag scenes. It's a whole 'nother era, whole 'nother brain-set. There ain't enough Sam, Ziggy, and Al to fix this one, but I'd liked to have seen them try.

In keeping with that general rule of 80s filmmaking that if there's a pool in any shot, either a car or someone fully-clothed is going in it. It's like Chekov's Gun. 

 

 

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(1985)

 

The story of two adolescent boys who are guests at a Florida resort for the week-end. Their only interest is, of course, chasing girls, but fate has much more in store for them.

This one is... not good. Even for a genre with as low a bar for admission as "80s sex comedies" this is pretty bad. There's the one guy who's always getting hit in the nuts - the 1980s version of Commedia dell'arte - there's the mistaken-identity hook-up, and there's a silly jewel thief plot, etc. 

I sometimes revisit stuff like this - or Hamburger University or Gotcha' or any of these just-gotta-get-laid-bro! movies. Some feel less exploitative/ have more going on than others. Some are jaw-droppingly rape-culture-y. (The famous scene from Revenge of the Nerds being the leader, there, but it's a dubious race and lots of participants.) Because this era of filmmaking coincides with my own coming of age, I perhaps have a more innocent relationship with them than someone just seeing them for the first time in 2021. Someone - Joe Bob Briggs and Camille Paglia, working together, maybe - should write the definitive guide to the genre.

 

I totally should have watched Private Lessons, here, I'm realizing now, for the trifecta. Ah well.

 

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(1987)

Gym teacher Freddy Shoop has to teach remedial English in summer school, if he wants to keep his job. As he can only teach gym and his students want fun, emphasis is on "field trips" - until he's fired unless all his students pass the test.

Here’s one I watched an awful lot on VHS back in the day. In the same way The Goonies reminds me of my 5th and 6th grade classroom tablemates, this one reminds me of my 8th and 9th grade classmates. Our daily mission was to act like Chainsaw and Dave, pretty much. (Sorry, everyone.)

I've spoken fondly of it over the years but hadn't checked it out in awhile. It holds up a whole heck of a lot better than our last two entries, even if there are similarly icky scenes here and there. The difference is a) the behavior of the protagonist (an arrested adolescent, like 90% of 80s protagonists, but self-aware/ shaggy nobility) and b) more than a little self-awareness of the genre/ larger issues. And the general fleshing out of all the characters. 

One of the kids in class (Larry) is always falling asleep and about halfway through we find out why: he's moonlighting as a stripper. Being found out by Mr. Shoop is one of the funniest and best scenes of the movie. ("I hate that kid.") It kind of sums up the whole deal.

 

 

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(1990)

Rival groups in a skiing school do battle on and off the slopes. One gang is rich and serious; the other is party animals.

Our Dean Cameron/ Patrick Labyourteaux double feature continues. This is one that should remind me of 11th and 12th grade , but I was in a neo-beatnik phase by then and probably stuck my nose up at it. (I call it neo-beatnik, but I’d not have recognized the term at the time. This was before my neohippie and then my neomarxist phases, in case anyone's keeping the timeline. I'd knocked all this crap off by the time I was thirty.) I know I saw it sometime in the 90s on cable. I don’t really remember doing so, though.

One thing’s for certain: the Always Sunny episode that parodies this ("The Gang Hits the Slopes") nailed it so well that I don’t know if you can even watch the movie the same way again. I imagine if they ever made a Lethal Weapon 5 for real we'd discover the same thing. 

The "Lambada" sequence from this movie - and the face/presence of Stu Fratkin - is about as 80s-movies as it gets. I couldn't find the standalone scene, but you can basically tell from the trailer what you're getting into. 

 

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(2011)

An egomaniacal film star develops a relationship with a young dancer against the backdrop of Hollywood's silent era.

My sources tell me there's some kind of backlash against this film? Could this be true? I'm sure it is. There's a backlash against anything. Whatever's going on, pay no attention; what a great film. I saw this with my then-fiance in the theater and it strikes me now that this is a great film to see before you get married. The tale of George Valentin is like the tale of any bachelor who must learn to scale it back and live in a new cooperative union, must let his own talent/ ego (okay mainly his ego) be eclipsed by something bigger than himself, in order to live. Like Neil Gaiman said of Dream from the original Sandman, one of the only stories we ever tell is is "Man must evolve or die." (The other is "Stranger comes to town" and the other is, as the memes tell us, Sharktopus vs. Whalewolf.)

And the soundtrack is absolute dynamite. 

I'd love to do a Best Movie Oscars That Sucked post. If December had two more days, I'd include such a thing in this last run of posts. The Artist would not be on such a list, and if you ever see it included on one, that's how you know you're in the presence of the untrustworthy. Get out while you can.

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(2017)

A newly released prisoner is forced by the leaders of his gang to orchestrate a major crime with a brutal rival gang on the streets of Southern California.

This is a strange movie. The general idea is that institutionalization itself is the problem. Doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from, the institutionalization will brutalize you into a lesser version of yourself, forced to hold diminished pieces together by any (often violent) means necessary.

However, its tone is uneven to the point where it undermines all of that. There are Rocky montages, for example, while the main character escalates through the prison underworld. You'd never know this was a movie about the dangers of institutionalization in these scenes; you can practically hear "Gonna Fly Now" as he and an interchangeable cast of roided-out redneck-Nazis from central casting cheer. There are dubious stretches of brotherhood-building. It’s confused and confusing. And brutal.

The wraparound stories (the cops working on the case and the young up-and-coming Nazis) are likewise somewhat far-fetched. They badly want to make a big point, one I more or less agree with, but this is no Freeway, which makes the same points with much more style. 

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(2020)

Something lurks off the coast of Block Island, silently influencing the behavior of fisherman, Tom Lynch. After suffering a series of violent outbursts, he unknowingly puts his family in grave danger.

Well at least the accents aren't wrong. A little overdone here and there. Someone really needs to establish a New England Accent school out there in Hollywood, with branch offices anywhere films are made. 

One of those movies that just goes through well-established beats and set pieces, almost as if the point of things is just to demonstrate to the audience you know how to do them. A slow burn with no real payoff, just a relentless check-check-check. We've seen all of this, so many times; is it an exercise? If so, it's a perfectly gradable one; technically - like the work of Ti West or so many others that seem to be big these days in this genre - you can't fault it, it's just... why? I just don't get the idea of doing what's been done before without adding anything else to it to make it distinctive. 

The lead’s tortured performance is believable, for sure, but it’s one note, all movie long, as he works against things we’ve seen in a million other places. Likewise the bug-eyed tortured Dad, or the brain-slippery friend who lives on the beach and is the only one who believes in UFOs, who excitedly shares his “research” while eating a sandwich, or the pointless "investigative" plot and the first victim in the trailer, etc.

If you're going to make a film steeped in dread and unpleasantness, have a point, to paraphrase Neal Page; it makes it so much more enjoyable for the viewer. 

 

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I didn't want to end on a down note, so here are two films I watched this week but had not intended to include anywhere.

(1939)

Three adopted English brothers join the French Foreign Legion in North Africa after one of them steals their adoptive family's famous heirloom sapphire.

Well, English with American accents, anyway. What's this, another colonial movie? Like I say, I get bored with conventional settings and plots, sometimes, or new-ish movies in general, and I go through phases. Here's another one I'd picked up years ago planning a From Novel to Film post on but never got round to. 

I still intend to, one of these days, just for myself I guess. Or maybe I'll join/found a Beau Geste Appreciation Society and lecture to empty rooms up and down the eastern seaboard. 

The author once co-authored a popular instruction manual widely used in India and Pakistan. These things are real collector's items these days. 

This long film (directed by William Wellman) isn't much-regarded these days, although at one point they remade it every decade, it seemed. It's a good source material for a variety of takes on things like colonialism, honor, family name, etc. You can basically use it to argue any position you want. The one here is cynical to be sure, but not as cynical (or Marxist, it must be said) as later remakes. 

One of the eeriest openings of any movie I can think of. That slow reveal of finding the fort, with all the dead men pushed up in the parapets, mummified by the desert, is incredible. Great desert footage all around. 

 

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(1931)

The Austrian Secret Service sends its most seductive agent to spy on the Russians.

No one ever suspects the A.S.S.! (I'm sorry, truly, but it was unavoidable.)

Marlene Dietrich has proven somewhat immortal; her image and persona are still used to sell perfumes and what not, or evoke entire eras (Weimar Germany, Mata Hari, cavorting with JFK on the Riviera as the Allies advance to Berlin in newsreels, etc.) It's rare she's upstaged, as she is arguably here by Victor McLaglen. What a great performance/ career in general.

The day I learned that Josef von Sternberg was someone whose films - like Max Ophuls - all the masters insisted you see and know intimately was a day my film appreciation took a quantum leap. If you ever get a chance to see anything by either of these directors, take it; take the day off, even, and really do it right. 

The ending scene of this one is fantastic, marred only slightly by the "IT'S MURDER I TELLS YA, MURDER!" outburst from one of the soldiers. Like the 80s Pool rule mentioned above, I think any film about WW1 (including Dawn Patrol, earlier) has to have a character having this outburst. As John Dos Passos once wrote: 

"It’s hard to overestimate the revulsion wrought by the First World War in the minds of a generation that had grown up in the years of comparative freedom and comparative peace that opened the century. It’s hard to remember in the middle Fifties today that in those years what little military service there was in America was voluntary, that taxes were infinitesimal, that if you could scrape up the price of a ticket you could travel anywhere in the world except through Russia and Turkey, without saying boo to a bureaucrat. If you wanted to take a job it was nobody’s business but yours and the boss’.

Of course, as the labor people were busily pointing out, if you worked in a sweat shop for a pittance and happened to starve to death in the process it was nobody’s business either. When Woodrow Wilson led the country into the European war, however little we approved this reversal of American tradition, most of us just out of college were crazy to see what war was like. We experienced to the full the intoxication of the great conflagration, though those of us who served as enlisted men could hardly be expected to take kindly to soldiering, to the caste system which made officers a superior breed, or to the stagnation and opportunism of military bureaucracy. Waste of time, waste of money, waste of lives, waste of youth. We came home with the horrors. We had to blame somebody."

Anyway, great movie. I don't know if Klum ever saw it; Marlene was his number one. (Or one of them.) If they have my blog in heaven - or wherever the hell heaven sent Klum - one last recommendation for you, old buddy.

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