90. Our Town (1940, Dir. Sam Wood) - I'm reading Bordwell's book on 40's Hollywood narrative strategies, and since he had a whole chapter named after this film I figured I should watch it.
I'm not familiar with the stage play its based on, but the film version is kind of weird. There's no real external conflict to speak of, no real obstacles. It's mostly just the lives of two families in the town of Grover's Corners.
In a sense it kind of reminds me of The Tree of Life, though as you might guess it doesn't have the lyrical quality of Malick, opting more for kind of theatrical fourth wall breaking. One of the town citizens, a storekeeper, will directly speak to the audience, will narrate certain scenes, will invite other tertiary to give information about the history of Grover's Corner. In one scene, standins for film audiences will speak through the fourth wall to ask the storekeeper questions, who answers them, and in one part even has to cut one of them off at one point saying the time for questions is over. It's strange. He's constantly narrating about how characters are going to die in the future too, which adds a weird layer of darkness over most of the otherwise light-hearted film, until an important sequence in the ending.
One of our characters, a pregnant woman, seems to die in child birth and has a terrible vision where's she meets the ghosts of her loved ones who have previously passed. It's a weirdly surreal bit, where the dead are as emotionally dead as they seem to be literally dead.
^Our character is the one in the back left here, all lit up.
Later she tries to take refuge in her own memories, but the past being the past, she can't actually change them and it's a kind of existential hell for her, as she wishes she would have paid more attention to and appreciated the quiet parts of life.
^She becomes a kind of ghostly figure, watching her younger self talk to her mother, unable to get the attention of either of them, as the past has already happened.
The whole thing kind of reminds me of Instrumentality in Evangelion, but instead being attached to sci-fi its in this weird Hollywood film. It ends up only being a dream sequence, but with so much death looming over the rest of the film its easy to actually believe she's just straight up died and gone to a personal hell of some kind (And in the original play, she apparently did die in childbirth too, though the point isn't lost by having her live in the film either).
This weird film was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar for the films of 1940, though it lost to Hitchcock's Rebecca.
91. Stranger on the Third Floor (1940, Dir. Boris Ingster) - This one is a doozy. One of the earliest examples of film noir, a newspaper reporter is the key witness in a murder trial and gets a man set on death row. After the guilty verdict is passed, the man believes the accused may actually be innocent, and that the real killer may be a strange man he saw hanging around his apartment building, played by Peter Lorre.
Its interesting how much of what we typically associate with noir (Voice over, subjectivity, morally compromised protagonists, a man falsely accused of murder etc.) is already in place here. Even Lorre here seems to be playing a variation on his arguably sympathetic murderer from M, which itself is kind of a proto-noir anyways.
There's also a pretty whacky sequence where the reporter character imagines himself being falsely accused of murder that I can't possibly do justice to by describing or even posting screenshots. It only really makes sense in motion and in context, but its worth checking out (And this movie is only a little over 60 minutes long anyways), and kind of begins his downward spiral. Rather interestingly, with like 15 minutes remaining the reporter's girlfriend becomes the main character and does more than he does to actually solve the mystery.
Its worth taking a look at.
92. The Grapes of Wrath (1940, Dir. John Ford) - Holy hell, what a movie. I'm not familiar with this particular Steinbeck novel, but based on what else I've read of his, him and Ford are like a magical combination. Fonda's speech at the end...jesus.
One particular thing that interested me about this film was how Ford filmed machinery, something he didn't really do a lot of in his other movies that I've seen. The "cats" for example that threaten farmland are filmed very as very oppressive, dehumanized weapons, filmed more like tanks in a war movie...
And this pattern of dehumanized vehicles is only really broken when in a slightly later flashback when one of the operators is recognized as "Joe Davis' boy" and there's a brief discussion about his motivation for brazing through farmland that isn't entirely unsympathetic toward him.
Ford doesn't seem completely cynical about machinery though, since the noble jalopy of a truck (Often just barely held together) that Fonda and his family use consistently stands in contrast as a very personal vehicle, and remains so for the entire film.
"[Cinema] is a labyrinth with a treacherous resemblance to reality." - Andrew Sarris
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It does amaze me though that people think it's acceptable to watch films on a phone. I kinda get doing it on a flight or something where there's no access to a TV, but even there I'd insist on only watching stuff like comedies that aren't about visuals and sound.
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