Movie Notes: All Quiet on the Western Front

All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
Director: Lewis Milestone

This is a very powerful anti-war film.  The film convincingly immerses the viewer into the terrors of the war, and it feels very raw.  It's obvious that the pain of the war was still felt when the movie was made.  It evokes the pain so obvious in the literature of the period.

The only real draw-back is in the too earnest speeches given periodically by Lew Ayres are out of character with the otherwise authentic feeling of the movie.

Movie Notes: Stagecoach

Stagecoach (1939)
Director: John Ford

My four-star first impression of Stagecoach upon my first viewing was that it was a very fun western.  I now think it's something more than that.

Stagecoach is a film, like Casablanca, that exploits stereotypes as archetypes to address real issues at a fundamental moral level as popular entertainment.  This is about as good as Hollywood ever got during its Golden Age to making art -- which is to say Hollywood could do quite well!  It's broad-stroke art, with little enough nuance, but a great deal of depth communicated via short-hand.  Ford communicates so much with a camera that, as a crash course in the art of film in preparing to make Citizen Kane, Orson Welles is said to have watched Stagecoach over forty times.

It's so beautiful.  Monument Valley crowned with majestic clouds.  Horses, riders, and stagecoaches rolling along at break-neck speeds.  Dallas exiting the low adobe house through a long hallway, the encroaching feeling of civilization that communicates.  This is film as film!

The stereotypes, and perhaps more interesting, their relationships, are compelling.  The City, the Desert, and Man; Civilization, the Savage, and the Outcast.  Inside the stagecoach, the characters get to know each other, confront their own selves, and make difficult choices.  Most of them will have a chance at redemption, but only two will truly escape themselves and the "blessings of civilization."

The Lady from Shanghai

The Lady from Shanghai (1947)
Director: Orson Welles

This is a beautifully directed, gorgeously shot, and bizarre little movie by the wunderkind himself.  It's 90 minutes of confusion, discomfort, and a bad Irish accent by Orson Welles.

Still, it's pretty good.  Really, only the accent and the plot drag the movie down.  Everything else is fascinating.  Apparently this film suffered dreadfully at the hands of the studio - its current length is far from Welles' vision, and the cut footage has never been found.  So, it might not be his fault that the movie can be confusing.  Especially disconcerting were the giant jumps in time (from the Caribbean to Acapulco, months later, in a flash).