Sorry about the delay on these award winners; I’ve been watching ahead and got behind.
:The Life of Emile Zola:
This movie itself had all of the common features of 1930s movie making and culture that have caused them to be so foreign to me that I can’t relate to them.
I’m not a particularly young person, I’m 43, but we are several generations removed from this period and I was not a history major.
In short, I didn’t enjoy this movie.
What I did find interesting when researching this title is the way the real-life Dreyfus Affair, the penultimate event of the movie, is treated. To be brief, the Dreyfus Affair concerns a French Jewish government official wrongly convicted of treason and imprisoned at Devils Island despite the fact that his innocence was known by his superiors who were trying to avoid the embarrassment and scandal of admitting they had gone after an innocent man.
This is interesting but given that I’m blogging about the film what is more interesting to me is how the case was treated in the film. The film got rave reviews upon release, by which time Dreyfus had long been exonerated, but the fact that he was Jewish and the way that this fact influenced the making of the film, was mushy indeed. The fact that Dreyfus was Jewish was barely mentioned in the movie and how that impacted his case was not touched on at all.
Two books have recently been published about Hollywoods relationship with growing Nazi influence in the 1930s.
From Wikipedia: The film is among the subject films studied in two books published in 2013: Ben Urwand’s The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler, and Thomas Doherty, Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939.[6] Denby notes that Doherty provides more context for the studios’ behavior, setting it against the political culture of the period. Urwand learned that Georg Gyssling, the Nazi consul in Los Angeles, occasionally was allowed to review and make recommendations on films. But, in the same period, the studios set up an association office to develop a Production Code, directed by Will H. Hays, who appointed a Catholic layman, Joseph I. Breen as “censor-in-chief,” who after 1934 had even more influence over movies. Denby found the studio heads acting as businessmen, who were sometimes overcautious and fearful of their place in American society.[6]
:The Awful Truth:
This one starred Irene Dunn and Carey Grant. It’s a comedy of miscommunication wherein a couple seeks a divorce after a long string of misunderstandings. All is well in the end of course and despite its officially “zany” designation I could appreciate how well done this was (it won an Academy Award for directing). It doesn’t hold up to my third movie for this year, List Horizon, but for a zany comedy it was good and if you like old comedies I can recommend it. Grant and Dunn were both very good.
B.R. Crissler, New York Times, 1937: . To be frank, The Awful Truth is awfully unimportant, but it is also one of the more laughable screen comedies of 1937, a fairly good vintage year.
:Lost Horizon:
What a treat! In this wonderful Capra creation starring Ronald Colman, the classic book of the same name by James Hilton comes to poetic life. The film was pricey – half a year’s budget for the entire production company – and took two and a half years to create. Also, lots of people in its early years thought it was too long so they kept chopping at it. I saw the restored AFI version which has seven minutes of still images while the surviving soundtrack plays on sprinkled throughout.
Lost Horizon holds the origin of the now-ubiquitously known term Shangri-La. A group of British and American escapees from a war-torn area of China are kidnapped and taken to, simply put, paradise. It’s no accident. I won’t ruin the story for you because it is very much worth watching it unfold.
I was thoroughly charmed by Lost Horizon. I would watch it again and I might even give the book a try although one attempt to do so when I was younger ended in me getting bored and giving up. Hubby has read the book a couple of times and loves it.
Lost Horizon is an example of coming upon a cultural phenomenon from a previous generation (who hasn’t heard the term Shangri-La?) and being delighted by what you find.
:Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs:
Unfortunately this one is not available through Netflix and therefore not reviewed here.
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