If I start watching certain movies from the late 1930's, I get hooked and drawn in and before I know it I can't stop watching. It happens when I land on Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz and Wuthering Heights and it also happens with Marie Antoinette which was on last night on Turner Classic Movies, my favorite cable network.
Press here for a full list of 1930's movies, a decade of excellent movie making unlike any since!
Here is Marie Antoinette's trailer. The costumes and sets are unbelievable. The acting is wonderful especially Norma Shearer as Marie Antoinette!
22 comments:
Indeed Father, it is also my favorite channel as well, just wonderful movies when it was all about acting and not sex, cursing, or violence. The greatest movie ever made was Gone With the Wind and the first African-American to win a best supporting Oscar the great Hattie McDaniel such a wonderful person and actress!!! Once again than you Father for offering the TLM!!!
I love thirties films too, in particular screwball comedies like My Man Godfrey, The Awful Truth and the Thin Man series.
It's a shame that only two of the films on this list (Wizard of Oz and Modern Times) made it onto the Vatican's classic film list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vatican%27s_list_of_films
Agreed, but the books were better. GWTW needs to be read in order to really understand the South and Reconstruction. For the more intellectually inclined, W.J. Cash's 'The Mind of the South' is instructive.
I find it fascinating that, on the eve of World War Two, "Gone With the Wind" and "The Wizard of Oz" were produced...GWTW, about an idyllic, agrarian, age of manners, morals, and a certain aristocratic planter's life, carrying within it the seeds of its own destruction. This, to me, is also the story of post-WW II America, the 50's being a sort of Golden Age of America harboring within her the problems or race and foreign intrigue that would eventually destroy her.
Then, "The Wizard of Oz," an even more ominous foreshadowing of Nazi Germany and the evil represented by the Wicked Witch and her mind control, flying monkeys, and her impregnable fortress. Interesting, too, that Baum consciously intended none of this. In his bio, he says that he was not a particularly deep thinker and just wanted to tell a good story. Indeed, he did. Jung would be proud...(Buddy Ebsen was originally chosen for the Scarecrow, but he was ill and so Ray Bolger got the part.)
And those are just the American films from the 1930s. Internationally, some of the best and most important films were made during that decade. I have in mind:
The Rules of the Game
Grand Illusion
M
Vampyr
L'Atalante
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse
I Was Born, But...
And, if you think that 1930s films lend themselves to an anachronistic view of a more morally upright time in America, I suggest you watch Ernst Lubitsch's Design for Living or any of the other "pre-code" films made during that decade.
Eugene, here's a quarter, call someone who cares.
Talk about out of date! Quarter for what, I can barely recall what that saying means ! I doubt your great great great grandchildren do !
What do quarters have to do with calling people?
Gene called me earlier this week, actually. And I was a person who cared. There were no quarters involved.
I'm an ignorant hillbilly, y'all. You are highly educated, sophisticated intellectuals. My reference was to a country song....written and sung by Travis Tritt. It's about a woman who dumped her boyfriend. She wants to patch things up. He doesn't think so. He tells her "Here's a quarter.....etc....) God, I wish I could be smart like y'all.....(Especially like Eugene.)
"M" an excellent movie with Peter Lorre.
''If the devil danced in empty pockets, he'd have a ball in mine,'' Joe Diffie tells us.
gob, I understand from your previous posts that you're rather old. So I wouldn't spend the remainder of your assuredly short time on this earth trying to educate yourself. If it hasn't worked so far (and it hasn't), then it's probably a lost cause. Perhaps if you hadn't wasted your energies mastering the art of being an annoying jerk, you'd have had more time to devote to education and learning sophistication.
Happy Thanksgiving, though! I hope your family doesn't react to your presence with violence. I imagine the holidays are a particularly tense time to be a person who is uncontrollably insufferable.
Hey, Gob...delete all after "hillbilly."
The good old days of slavery, before the Emancipation Proclamation and the civil-rights movement ruined everything (Gene says, without irony).
Remember the O'Hara's were Roman Catholics in the South! Nice of Margaret Mitchell to make them Roman Catholics. Many Catholics died for the cause of "Northern aggression" and many sisters tended to Confederate soldiers in the field and gave their lives on many occasion.
Of course Margaret Mitchell was a very pious Catholic. Her nephew who inherited much of her on-going royalties died a few years back and left a significant amount to the Archdiocese of Savannah. It is said that some it was used to buy the Archbishop's Tara which he sold after a huge outcry in Atlanta spurred on by Pope Francis' concern for bling.
Whatever your name is @ 9:20: I said nothing about the Emancipation Proclamation (which freed no one, btw) or the Civil Rights Act (which also freed no one...there's your irony). The fact that there was, always has been, and still is slavery in the world does not negate anything I said. You and others of low intelligence would condemn everything Western civilization has given us simply because.."ewww! ewww! They had slaves!" Every culture, every nation has its sins. You don't condemn all your gay friends because they like to....well, you know....so, why condemn an entire rich culture because of a gang of slaves who, if they had achieved the same level of civilization in their own culture, would have never been slaves. Get a life.
Gene, of course, the "idyllic, agrarian, age of manners, morals, and a certain aristocratic planter's life," was founded on slavery and could not have existed without keeping human beings as sub-human chattels.
Economically, politically, socially, that society was built on African lives. That is intrinsically wrong and hardly worth celebrating, as you seem to.
The Church had denounced slavery by the 15th century, so to depict the O'Haras as slave holders 400 years later seems like a slur against good Catholics. Excepting Gene, of course.
Gene would probably like it if we called him "Mister Gene".
And, all those great Cathedrals and other artistic religious delights were largely built with slave labor. Slavery still exists, but I hear no one raising very much Hell about it. It was a cultural phenomenon of the day, unfortunate in our eyes and in the eyes of many slave holders (such as R E Lee). It is easy for us in the 21st century to read back into earlier times our own morals and values (most of which would be abhorrent to 14th or 19th century Christians) and whine and wring our hands about slavery. So, which is worse, slavery or open gay sex in the streets of San Francisco in the daytime with children in attendance? Slavery or abortion that has killed millions of innocent babies? Slavery, or openly lesbian bishops and church leaders in protestant denominations and child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church? Slavery, or the welcoming into our Christian culture thousands of Muslims who seek to destroy it? Slavery, or the widespread advocacy of gay marriage and sex with under-aged children? Slavery, or a war in the Middle East that has extended through multiple Administrations and is still going on and which is based upon nothing but the exploitation of oil interests by huge corporations? Slavery or Viet Nam? You want to pick and choose your cultural/national sins and attack the one that is most likely to get you popular support among your Leftist minions. Slavery no longer exists in this country, and the culture built upon slavery has allowed you to live well and has given you a platform for whining. Just shut up, already.
RE: Mister Gene..."Sensei" would be ok, or Sir but, for you Gob and Anonymous @ 4:25, "Massa" is fine. LOL!
Gene: "Blame the gays. Shut up already."
So, whose blaming the gays? They are a symptom, not a cause.
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