Caltrops - Peter Molyneux's The Movies





	[quote name="Brody Wilder"]<b>WINNER: <i>Double Indemnity</i></b> 1944 was the year Barbara Stanwyck, inventrix of acting for sound, officially transitioned from ingenue to vamp. Here she plays the bored housewife who ropes her <i>Remember the Night</i> co-star (and acknowledged visual inspiration for Fawcett's Captain Marvel), Fred MacMurray, into killing her husband for the insurance money. A new moral low for film noir, <i>Double Indemnity</i> was both written and directed by pessimistic peri-Holocaust Jew Billy Wilder, kicking off his angry Elvis Costello phase while kicking open the doors of depravity for those who would follow. It takes a light touch to break new ground without striking a sewage line, but Wilder delicately navigates the shitstorm of censorship with his trademark black humour. If <i>The Maltese Falcon</i> was Kermit's first film noir, <i>Double Indemnity</i> is when he and Miss Piggy finally <i>fucked</i>. <b>Putting the Pow in Powell: <i>Murder, My Sweet</i></b> '44 was also the year that baby-faced crooner Dick Powell - juvenile lead in all those Busby Berkeley movies I told you to watch - finally "grew the beard", though in his case it was more of a fedora. <i>Murder, My Sweet</i> (the title had to be changed from <i>Farewell, My Lovely</i> because focus groups thought it signaled another musical) sees Powell trading in his dancing shoes for the gum kind as hard-boiled PI Philip Marlowe. Tough as detective stories came up to this point, Powell is beaten, drugged, and screwed over six ways from Sunday - but make no mistake, he gives as good as he gets. This is the sort of role he'd be identified with for the rest of his career, and I couldn't be prouder of the guy. <b>To Get and Get Got: <i>To Have and Have Not</i></b> Director Howard Hawks was never ashamed to borrow, from himself or anyone else. Ostensibly adapting Hemingway's novel of the same title, <i>To Have and Have Not</i> is really just <i>Casablanca</i> again, only this time Humphrey Bogart owns his own smuggling boat instead of just doing a little smuggling on the side. Set once again in a colony of Vichy France, here the Carribean island of Martinique (the novel was set in Cuba), Bogart acts real cool, listens to live piano, and ultimately does the right thing. More action-packed than its Moroccan predecessor and with a much more distinctive directorial style, <i>Have</i> is nonetheless most significant for the electrifying debut of 19-year-old Lauren Bacall. Playing the usual sexually empowered Hawksian woman, Bacall asks Bogart, "You know how to whistle, don't you Steve? You just put your lips together and blow". It was no wonder he fell hard for her in real life. Off-screen, 44-year-old walking corpse Bogart asked his good friend, creepiest man in the world Peter Lorre, what the point would be in marrying her if she was only going to outgrow him in five years. "Five good years are better than none," replied the paranoid child killer from Fritz Lang's <i>M</i>. They were wed in 1945, and remained together until Bogie's death from obvious causes in 1957. <b>Only Mostly Dead: <i>Laura</i></b> Clifton Webb will go down in history as the answer to the trivia question, "Who was the first actor to play Mr. Belvedere?". In 1948's <i>Sitting Pretty</i>, the effete old man brought that literary figure to the screen as an obviously-homosexual child-hating writer who deigns to take a nannying job while he finishes off his book. The joke being, the last man you should supposedly leave your children with turned out to be the best thing for them. (Little of this nuance remained in the AIDS-era sitcom, where Lynn Belvedere was just Mary Poppins, but a fat guy.) In <i>Laura</i>, Webb plays the obviously-homosexual newspaper columnist who inserts himself into the investigation of his female protege's murder. It's entirely down to Webb's performance that the ending is remembered as one of the most unbelievable in the history of film noir. <b>Capra Candycorn: <i>Arsenic and Old Lace</i></b> It's been a pretty moody year, so let's finish off with a classic Frank Capra comedy. Cary Grant comes home on Halloween to discover that his elderly aunts have been murdering vagrants for sport. (Oh God, is there no escape from the bloody meatgrinder of 1944?!) Grant frantically tries to keep his family's crimes under wraps as farcical complications mount. Based on a concurrently running stage play, <i>Frankenstein</i> actor Boris Karloff declined to reprise his role in the film, fearing the show would fold in his absence. His part here went to the condescending scientist from <i>Things to Come</i>, Raymond Massey. I bet Karloff regrets that decision now.[/quote]