Author: Bob Westal (Page 161 of 265)

Writer guy Bob Westal was literally born in Hollywood and has commented on the worlds of movies, popular culture, politics, and food ever since. His interest in cocktails is more recent, but he made up for lost time with hundreds of “Drink of the Week” blog posts for Bullz-Eye. In addition to writing and editing, Bob also talks a lot.

Warner Brothers movie moments #4

January 2, 2010 /

I’m wrapping up the salute I started yesterday to the year’s most commercially successful film company with the flip side of the early Warner Brother fame. The same studio that was known for producing the most realistic and socially relevant entertainment was also the studio responsible for the funniest and, with all due respect to Walt Disney, the most on-the-money animations of the classic Hollywood era. Actually, there’s more than a little grit and grime in greatest of the WB cartoons and that’s probably one reason they’ve held up so beautifully over the decades.

It certainly doesn’t get any better than Chuck Jones’ “One Froggy Evening.” The guy at YouTube calls this a “work of art” and I cannot disagree.

Michigan J. Frog: show biz immortal.

External Entertainment, External Movies, Movie Comedies, Movies

Warner Brothers movie moments #3

January 2, 2010 /

I’m still in the middle of my holiday weekend salute to the early years of the most fiscally successful movie studio for the last two years running, back when Warners was known for films which explored the grimy underside of society in highly entertaining ways. First, a pre-code muckraking classic directed by Mervyn LeRoy, produced by Hal Wallis, and starring Paul Muni — the first method actor to become a real superstar and therefore the creative descendant of Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift who together set the mold for probably most of the film stars of the last forty or fifty years or so, to some extent or another.

And here’s is maybe my favorite gangster movie of all time not involving the Corleone clan. Raoul Walsh’s hugely enjoyable “The Roaring Twenties” from 1939. The hype about that year isn’t so far wrong.

Actors, External Entertainment, External Movies, Movie Dramas, Movies

Warner Brothers Movie Moments #2

January 1, 2010 /

Of course, early Warner Brothers wasn’t all gritty depression gangster dramas like the movie I featured in the post below this one, “The Public Enemy.”  They also made actually rather gritty depression early musicals that featured the work of ingenious lunatic choreographer and sometime director Busby Berkeley. And sometimes, Berkeley could get downright weird — usually in a good way.

Check out “Sitting on a Backyard Fence” from “Footlight Parade.” Cagney was actually a great song and dance man as well as being an A-1 leading man, but neither he nor costars Joan Blondell or Dick Powell are in this number which, as you’ll see, maybe be just as well for their dignity. It’s definitely different.

Insert Andrew Lloyd Weber joke here.

Actors, Actresses, External Entertainment, External Movies, Movie Comedies, Movies

Warner Brothers movie moments #1

January 1, 2010 /

Happy New Year.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, since Warner Brothers has ruled the domestic box office for two years straight while setting new records both at home and abroad, I thought it might be fun to take a look at movie moments which epitomize the Warner Brothers style when it was grittiest and most cost conscious of the major classic era film studios.

Few sequences encapsulate the WB style better than this scene from 1931’s “The Public Enemy,” directed by William “Wild Bill” Wellman, one of just a few films which set the pattern for the gangster movie for years to come. It’s all here, the crackling, cynical, fast-paced dialogue, the borderline fatalistic pessimism years before the “film noir” genre would be born, and a great star to deliver the goods in Jimmy Cagney.

And as a brief bonus, we have one of the most famous scenes of cozy marital relations every filmed featuring Cagney and Mae Clarke as the gangster’s unhappy wife. According to Wikipedia this scene — easily one of the most frequently excerpted moments ever made from any film — may have begun as a practical joke on the crew.

Actors, Actresses, External Entertainment, External Movies, Movie Dramas, Movies

This post is inevitable

December 31, 2009 /

This ever-popular clip featuring the song “Jan Pehechaan Ho,” from the 1965 Bollywood murder mystery, “Gunnaam,”  was something I first saw at a friend’s place on a compilation tape of that circulated among hipsters in the nineties. In 2001, director Terry Zwigoff and cartoonist/screenwriter Dan Clowes made it immortal in the West by including it in “Ghost World.”

I love this clip to death despite having seen far more times than I can remember, and it was going to turn up here eventually; I can’t think of a better occasion, can you?

Happy New Year, everyone.

External Entertainment, External Movies, Movies, News

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