MAKSQUIBS CINEMATHEQUE: THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE (1945)

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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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Monday, March 1, 2010

THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE (1945)

Just as producer Val Lewton was ending his famous series of artsy low-budget thrillers @ RKO, Robert Siodmak came over from Universal Studios to make a new batch of cut-rate Gothic entertainments. This one’s probably the best known, a superbly crafted old-dark-house murder-mystery about a mad-man who’s killing off young, but imperfect women. You know from the start that Dorothy McGuire is at risk since she’s a mute servant girl to George Brent, Gordon Oliver & Rhonda Fleming, members of a dysfunctional family who are waiting for their gruff matriarch to kick off. That’d be Ethel Barrymore who gives one of her toughest, most commanding perfs. Fans of the Lewton unit will be pleased to see many holdovers in cast & crew. (Actors Kent Smith & James Bell, expert noir lenser Nicholas Musuraca, scorer Roy Webb.) And if Lewton’s projects revealed the limitations of an inspired amateur (especially once helmer Jacques Tourneur left him), Siodmak shows the gains & losses of professional polish.

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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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ERNST LUBITSCH

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Now Over 5500 Reviews and (near) Daily Updates!

Monday, March 1, 2010

THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE (1945)

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A last thought before we go.

DROP ME A LINE