Nov 30 2025

1947 – The Lady from Shanghai

It’s an american film noir produced and directed by Orson Welles and also stars him along Rita Hayworth as the two main characters. Welles’s screenplay is based on the novel “If I Die Before I Wake” by Sherwood King. It’s about a drifter sailor and how he gets caught up between a corrupt lawyer and his mysterious wife. I rented in on Apple TV for 3.99 Eur

You know what I like having grown up in a different country than I live now? Even though, I fully understand the culture and I can adapt fully, I know of different ways something can be looked at or done. It often leaves a smirk on my face when somebody is enraged that they’re being questioned about the way “they have always done it” or the unwillingness to adapt to new circumstances. I see that in other kids that grew up as citizens of the world and not married to one country, they have a sort of pragmatism about the world without succumbing to cynicism.

So it is here that I chose to have a second movie in a row with Rita Hayworth, because she plays this woman that grew up in China and calls herself a gambler of the world – it just seemed so interesting. Her way of talking, her familiarity about the Chinese culture in the far too few scenes in San Francisco, were fully intriguing. And it left me wondering, she was clearly a very knowledgable person of the world – what was her backstory?

Unfortunately, the film itself has many, many shortcomings. Allegedly, the film is about 60 minutes longer, but Welles was forced to cut a lot out by the studio. It shows. The story is quite abrupt in some places. In my review I had said, the movie needed a good editor, but perhaps when you have to cut that much, well then it doesn’t matter, it’s always going to be janky. As said above, I so would’ve loved to hear more about Elsa’s backstory. No, instead we get weird courtroom scenes, where Mr. Bannister plays the fool on purpose.

In my review, I had also said that the movie went style over substance, but perhaps too much of the substance was cut away in post. But boy, it is stylish; we’re in beautiful locations at sea and in Mexico, where everybody is sweaty and boozed up. The scenes in San Francisco are more muted, but much more elegant, even Chinatown looks enticing, like a whole other world. These scenes were both filmed on location and it ballooned the cost of the movie, but it does look amazing (like you can see the beach of Acapulco in the background and people walking on it, so it’s not a set). And the ending is what sells it to a lot of people, the hall of mirrors giving us a dizzying, disorientating feeling. Even that, was 20 minutes, cut down to just 3, a shame. Rita Hayworth, of course, steals the show as the femme fatale and even Orson Welles would’ve been charismatic and great if not for that very, very strange Irish accent he’s trying to sell (and sometimes forgets to enact).

And lastly, the melodrama. Nah, this time it was ratcheted up to 11 with the violin in the background trying to tug at your feelings. I just wasn’t sold on it. That’s the thing with melodramas, it’s very hard to argue when people get sold on them, sometimes they work and sometimes they just leave people cold. A lot of people like this B-movie noir (I did also seek it out for its quite good, but not excellent reviews), so it is a personal taste, it just didn’t appeal to me.

Nov 16 2025

1946 – Gilda

It’s an american noir directed by Charles Vidor. It stars Rita Hayworth as Gilda, Glenn Ford as Johnny Farrell and George Macready as Ballin Mundson in a deliciously elegant antagonist role. It’s the story about a gambler rediscovering his old girlfriend in Argentina, only she’s out for revenge and is married to his new boss. I rented it on Apple TV for 3.99 Eur.

One of the reasons movies are so special to us is they often transport us to a world that is far beyond our reach. Whether it’s a fantasy adventure like Lord of the Rings or a historic epic like Gladiator, heck, even a Western like The Searchers, you are wholly in an unfamiliar setting. What has become less and less prevalent, are movies about far away lands, the exoticism, coupled with opportunity of a clean slate. Even growing up, the movies of the 80s and 90s were often: “I did a crime, I’m going to Mexico!”. 80 years ago, every country outside our own seemed ripe and full of possibilities, because we didn’t know any better. The world of sophisticated and elegant actors, a dream to journey on for riches.

Today, nothing is exotic anymore, every little cafe in the middle of nowhere has a Google review and GPS makes sure you aren’t lost even in the deepest jungle or the most arid landscape. I’ve been fascinated this year reading about Point Nemo or the adventures of wandering to Bir Tawil, the last truly unknown places. It seems I am not alone with this feeling, one of my favorite YouTubers expressed as much for the way we travel, in that it somehow lost its magic.

So it was nice to travel back in time with this movie, to a place where you could Tabula Rasa your way in – Buenos Aires, Argentina (and also Montevideo later) seemed exotic enough. The war had just ended, the world full of possibilities for gamblers and sinners to start anew.

And boy does this movie look great. It’s not for nothing that Andy Dupree was stricken by Rita Hayworth and put her up on that wall in The Shawshank Redemption, that flick with the hair inmortailized. The hip action in her songs – what amazing rendition of Put the Blame on Mame dubbed in by Anita Ellis. And even old Johnny chap is very nice on the eyes. I only ever knew him for being Pa Kent in Superman, but that smirk and the way he leans… swoon. And the electricity between them is crackling, apparently it was real and they become “on again, off again” lovers during the filming of the movie.

But the plot is a convoluted mess, haha. As I said, go for the exotics, the elegance, the worldliness, but not for the story. Of course the villain is somehow involved with the Germans. Of course the elegant local policeman will be the one handing out sage advice. Of course our hero is a plucky american, a little rough on the edges, but with a little gamble in him, he’ll get what he want. At least the ending didn’t quite adhere to noir tropes. So an entertaining movie all around and a great escape to a time when you could just “escape” to Argentina – just don’t try looking for logic and please overlook the millions of plot holes.

Nov 2 2025

1945 – Brief Encounter

It is a British romantic tragedy directed by David Lean from a screenplay by Noel Coward based on a 1936 one-act play Still Life. It stars Celia Johnson as Laura and Trevor Howard as Alec. I saw it on YouTube thanks to the wonderful restoration by the British Film Institute, the David Lean Foundation and Digital restoration by CineImage

I feel like my life has settled into a comfortable routine nowadays. It’s great, I get to travel the world and do amazing science and get to meet super interesting people. And then I get to go home to a kind and loving family. I have no money troubles, no illnesses, no major burdens. But one thing, I do try to do every so often, is to realize the uniqueness that lives in that routine, the small things you know. It occurred to me when I heard yet another person complaining about air travel, how we have forgotten how magical it is that we get into a metal flying tube and are at our destinations so quickly it was unimaginable just 120 years ago. It’s a bit like being in love sometimes, grateful for it, your senses are more tuned to the world around you and you see the good in everything.

I think that is what I take from this movie the most. It’s about a love story between two married people, that was so brief, it didn’t even fully get off the ground. It was so powerful for them, it makes it seem so powerful to us, too. Yet life around them goes on as normal, I like the little “will they, won’t they” routine the train conductor has with the refreshment room lady or how the kids are petulant, but nice. When they’re in love, suddenly everything, even a lady playing the base weirdly is wildly funny or an excursion to an old stone bridge meaningful.

Did I buy into the romance? Yes, I did. Celia Johnson plays the part marvelously, strikes just the correct balance (for that time acting, at least) to make us see and believe what she is going through. Her change in face when she is lying to her friend on the phone asking her to cover for her to when she hangs up, is well portrayed to us. And Trevor Howard makes it very easy for us, the audience, to fall for him, too. I also like the realism on how it won’t last – like what are they supposed to run away together? It takes me back to one of the final scenes in “The Bridges of Madison County“, how she is clinging to the door handle, but doesn’t act on it.

The movies this is most compared to, is the “Before-Trilogy” by Richard Linklater, the giddiness of the first encounter on the train, the played upon non-chalance in the second movie and the setting in of the realism in the third movie. It’s not just me, one of the top comments on Letterboxd is a misquote from Before Sunset (my favorite one of the three): “Baby, you’re going to miss your train!” (she says plane in the movie) and it’s all we can think of, that Laura (of Brief Encounter now) should give in to her feelings. Sadly, I do give the slight edge to the “Before Trilogy” in that sense, “Brief Encounter” is just a tad too melodramatic.

The final interesting aspect, which I didn’t know, was the music. In the background it kept playing the second movement of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2, but we do now know it by the name “All by myself” made mostly famous by Celine Dion. If you don’t know the story of that note, how it gives you chills how she sang it after he husband died, I fully recommend this YouTube video David Neely made of the song. Anyway, I kept thinking about the sadness of the song as I watched the movie and it fit so perfectly. Well done, David Lean! I am now a bit more melancholic and romanic, but tuned to what is happening around me, thankful for what it has given me.

Oct 19 2025

1944 – Arsenic and Old Lace

It’s a dark screwball comedy directed by Frank Capra and starring mainly Cary Grant as Mortimer Brewster. It’s based on a play with the same name by Joseph Kesselring, which was very successful, so it was stipulated that the film would not be released until its Broadway run ended. I rented in on YouTube, since both Apple and Amazon only had the German version here for sale.

The leaves have been falling like crazy these last few days here in Berlin. Fall is here and with it pumpkins (soups, pies, lattes, jack-o-lanterns, …), corn mazes (though there aren’t as many as in the past…) and Halloween stuff! Also movies; from marathons the streaming services releasing a bunch of horror movies to the over the air TV channels issuing their Halloween night schedule (apparently it’s actual Halloween marathon this year). So this movie fit right into the season, its whole plot unfolding over Halloween night. Plus, it’s not scary, but a macabre, black comedy.

As to what makes it dark – well it’s two extremely sweet, old ladies murdering lonely older gentlemen (they just bagged their 12th victim in the windowsill) out of pity. It’s wrong, but when you look at them, how they prance around the hall with their arsenic infused wine, you can’t help but laugh. They’re pleasant, give toys to the poor, are in good standing with the police and clergy, how can you not love them? And in their sweetness, they don’t feel remorse either. In fact, there’s quite some commentary over how some people do some truly horrible things in the name of pity, going over the heads of the victims, but present themselves as honorable citizens.

But the movie doesn’t linger on this too long. It’s more on the desperation of their nephew to save his aunts from the police by trying to pin it on his delusional younger brother “Teddy”, who things he’s the actual Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy has buried the bodies in the basement (no, that’s not a metaphor) thinking it’s Panama and they were victims of yellow fever. Getting him interned in an insane asylum is a way to bury… ahem… to keep the skeletons in the closet.

But then hilarity ensues when Mortimer’s other estranged brother Jonathan shows up with his sidekick Dr. Einstein (Peter Lorre is really becoming my favorite actor in this blog, he again is a reason why the whole plot doesn’t fall apart). He’s become quite a killer, I mean criminal on his own also claiming a dozen murders on his side of the ledger. Can Mortimer remain sane with all things crashing upon his once very simple world? The murderous aunts, the crazy brothers, one evil, one naive, his new wive, the police, the director of the asylum, the taxi driver in front of his house, etc., etc., Yes, at a certain point it becomes slapstick and the conclusion is also quite rushed, but in the middle it is quite funny, being punctuated by Cary Grant’s excellent over-the-top acting. His “deer in the headlights” look is especially great and we feel for him when he mumbles to himself trying to hatch a scheme to get out of the newest comeuppance driving a dent into the old plan.

It is quite clear that the movie was born out of a play. The whole thing takes place in the main room of the aunts’ house, with some elements on the outside or the stairs, but which can fit the stage quite comfortably. It’s a plus and minus an some points. Plus, because it keeps everything contained and there are no long excursions into a distraction to the main plot, but minus, because it retains too much of the play character. It’s not like filming the play of Hamilton and calling it a movie and there are some cinematic elements (close-ups, the shot from the stairs, the music, …), but overall the movie made me even curiouser about the play. There was even a line where the brother Jonathan grows incensed because the plastic surgery has made him look like Frankenstein’s monster. Everybody says: “He looks like Boris Karloff!”, which makes him angry. Well, in the Broadway play, he was played by the actual Boris Karloff.

So, final verdict. I laughed in quite a few places, so yes, very successful in that, but don’t go around looking for the heart we see just 2 years later in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. It never leaves its screwball roots and as such is a good time and some very good, funny lines, but not much more behind it. Hey, it’s Halloween in 1944, sometimes you just want amusement!

Oct 5 2025

1943 – The life and death of Colonel Blimp

It’s an english epic biography of an english soldier, with elements of war, romance and friendship. It was produced by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. It stars Roger Livesey as Clive Candy, Anton Walbrook as Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff and a very young Deborah Kerr in 3 pivotal roles in Candy’s life. This movie also, thankfully was on YouTube.

We have now reached 1943 and while on the outside World War II is raging, also the number of movies being produced are certainly going down; there were only a third of many movies being made that year than in 1939. Also the themes are changing to include the raging war, but just as last year’s movie, one has to be careful not to fall into outright propaganda movies.

So, this one fit the bill, which was a quite critical of the English mindset of the beginning of the 20th century, with its colonialism, its supposed noblesse oblige, but all through the eyes of a quite naive English soldier stuck in the 19th century with allusions to honor and a carefully smoothed over history (for example, making light of the Boer concentration camps). One aspect I liked, is that that the movie didn’t tell you about it, you’re like two thirds of the way in and it dawns on you, “oh, that’s why it doesn’t sit right, it’s a critique of the old chap, not a celebration!”.

The way his obsession for a woman is manifested in him falling for the same type over and over again – heh, Deborah Kerr playing three roles in three important phases of Clive’s life. Creepy, but sweet at the same time. Thankfully, they’re all three quite independent women, the one in the middle marrying him to go off to see the world.

Another eye-rolling aspect is the “wall of trophies” he has in his own and which serves as a plot device to mark the passage of time. It is quite ridiculous how he accumulates these taxidermy mounts, the most cringe worthy being a whole elephant head. He even puts up a picture of his dead wife prominently in that room. We feel the uncomfortableness that Theo displays when he is shown the room.

But the most poignant point of the movie comes in the form of a speech comes right at the end. Clive is still steeped in his old ways of fighting right until the start of the Second World War. It reminded me of some aspects of Hillary Clinton’s campaign: Michelle Obama’s “When they go low, we go high” or her bringing up the dead Syrian toddler on the beach breaking he heart. It was a dirty fight and to a dirty fight you don’t bring appeals to honor or dignity. The movie explicitly has a speech about it from Theo:

“i don’t think you won it. we lost it — but you lost something, too. you forgot to learn the moral. because victory was yours, you failed to learn your lesson twenty years ago: this is not a gentleman’s war. this time you’re fighting for your very existence against the most devilish idea ever created by a human brain: nazism. and if you lose, there won’t be a return match next year… perhaps not even for a hundred years.”

And he’s like that the whole movie, surprised that the Germans would torture the English to get the location of a bridge, while his own soldiers do the same as soon as he leaves. When he greets Theo in a sea of Germans in the English POW camp like he was running into a friend at the movie theater and is surprised that his counterpart is quiet and reserved.

It’s Theo that ends up being the most fascinating protagonist of the movie. Even when he doesn’t appear through large parts of the movie, his presence is there on Clive throughout. And when he does come back to plead to be accepted by the English we learn how his whole world (view) has been slowly, but surely been destroyed. The sadness of eyes, when he says he lost his two sons… they’re now good Nazis.

I saw “One Battle After Another” last weekend, excellent movie, highly recommend it! And it told the themes of fighting for justice, how sometimes you have to fight dirty or perhaps to go against “the rules” to do right, precisely because the rules are often done by evil people. Also here, in the end, the Colonel sees the need to fight for what’s right, not for the ceremonial rules.

Lastly, some more technical aspects that need to be mentioned, but I’d rather let Scorsese introduce them for me. For a movie about someone’s life, the movie is actually very sparse in telling the most traditional aspects of it – battles won, marriages, deaths – they all get hinted at in newspaper clippings, but never shown. Rather, it is more a collections of meetings which at first don’t seem to mean much, but will define him for the rest of his life. Even the significant duel between Theo and Clive has a ceremonial and ritualistic preparation aspect that goes on for many, many minutes, but when the duel starts, the camera cuts away to the snow. It isn’t important, the build-up is, because it tells us about the type of battle and consequences that it will have.

The other aspect, is the behind the scenes stuff. Clive was supposed to be played by Laurence Olivier, but this was opposed to by Winston Churchill. Roger Livesey brings an amazing performance – this typical english speech, where they don’t even unclench their jaw – so authentic, but so jarring it made me like the movie less. The movie in general was opposed by the war department for the sympathetic depiction of a German soldier and its English critiques detailed above. In a recollection from Powell, he says that he had an interview with the war minister and he had to bluntly ask him if they were going to forbid them outright to make the film. He said something like: “Oh my dear fellow, we can’t possibly forbid you. That wouldn’t do at all. But don’t make it or you’ll never get a knighthood.” So they made it and Powell never got his supposed knighthood. Very on the nose, that one. Ha!