MAKSQUIBS CINEMATHEQUE: 49TH PARALLEL (aka THE INVADERS) (1941)

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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.
God help us.

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Wednesday, June 25, 2008

49TH PARALLEL (aka THE INVADERS) (1941)

Staggeringly effective WWII thriller from the writing/directing/producing team of Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger follows six survivors from a German U-Boat set aground in Hudson Bay, Canada. Led by a sharp & ruthless Nazi ‘superman’ (Eric Portman), they make their way east in picaresque fashion like one of Hitchcock’s innocent-man-on-the-run pics. Except, no one here is innocent. (Perversely, Hitch would set his Nazi Ubermensch story in ultra-close quarters: LIFEBOAT.) Pressburger structures the film as a series of one-act turns for high caliber actors (Laurence Olivier, Leslie Howard, Raymond Massey), but he’s unable to maintain the emotional pitch of the superb sequence set in a self-contained German religious commune which features standout perfs from Anton Walbrook, Glynis Johns & Niall MacGinnis. Technically, the film trickery is something of a miracle (check out the tech credits, yowsa!), plus a score from Ralph Vaughan Williams. It all beautifully tees off the great Powell/Pressburger/ARCHERS films that followed.

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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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Wednesday, June 25, 2008

49TH PARALLEL (aka THE INVADERS) (1941)

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A last thought before we go.

DROP ME A LINE