MAKSQUIBS CINEMATHEQUE: ALL IN A NIGHT’S WORK (1961)

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Like just about everyone with an interest in the movies, I'm watching more films on DVD and going out to movie houses a lot less. Convenience trumps the better experience.
Of course, you lose audience interaction and the poor film now has to compete with all the comforts of home.
It's a bit like seeing Rembrandts & Titians in a book reproduction, or from posters with iffy color values, no texture or weight to the surface and the wrong dimensions . . . all while snacking on chips & soda. (Oops! You get that at your local cinema,too.)
The ease of instant movie gratification risks turning an art form (well, sometimes) into little more than low-grade eye-candy & mindfodder. So, maybe it's worthwhile to write a bit down on what we're all viewing, just to keep fully engaged.

DVDs: the latest opiate of the people meets the internet, where everyone's a critic.
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Monday, May 12, 2008

ALL IN A NIGHT’S WORK (1961)

You could do worse than compare this romantic comedy about a career gal with an unexplained fur (and all the attendant misunderstandings) with the similar set-up found in another Paramount film from a quarter of a century back (the delicious EASY LIVING/’37) to chart the decline of the Hollywood studio system by the early ‘60s. Stage helmer Joseph Anthony never did get the swing of film megging and his final big studio production is both airless & laughless as it painfully works out its preordained farcical structure. Kooky Shirley Maclaine has to explain how she lost an earring in a magazine tycoon’s hotel room to his successor (a hopelessly miscast Dean Martin) and how she got a fancy mink to ‘wrong-guy’ fiance Cliff Robertson. (Cliff has far more appeal here than Dean, but star status trumps star chemistry.) Comic fillips from Gale Gordon, Charles Ruggles & Jerome Cowan only add to the misery, but dig that credit Andre Previn got for his propulsive score. Who was his agent?

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A last thought before we go.

Well, enough from me. But before we sign off, here's a great quote from Emile Zola's L'OEUVRE (THE MASTERPIECE), which is about painting rather than the yet to be invented medium of film, but which points a fine critical eye toward the whole idea of art criticism. It's a good, if chilly, thought to keep in mind, especially when you surf the net.

"Has it ever struck you that posterity may not be the fair, impartial judge we like to think it is?

"Suppose the artist's paradise turned out to be as nonexistent as the Catholics, and future generations prove just as misguided as the present one and persisted in liking pretty pretty dabbling better than honest to goodness painting. There are some accepted masterpieces for which I myself wouldn't give a twopenny damn.

"Classical training has given us a wrong view of everything and forces us to acclaim as geniuses a lot of fellows who are no more than well-balanced, facile painters, while what we might really prefer is the work of more emancipated but less even artists known only to an initiated few. Immortality at present depends entirely on the average, middle-class mind and is reserved only for the names that have been most forcibly impressed upon us while we were still unable to defend ourselves...

"Perhaps that's the sort of thing that's best left unsaid. It's certainly the sort of thing that gives me the shudders!"- Emile Zola

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Monday, May 12, 2008

ALL IN A NIGHT’S WORK (1961)

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A last thought before we go.

DROP ME A LINE