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So I finally broke down and saw this classic (from 1953), set in Hawaii just prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. And I just loved it. Everybody is smoking like crazy, drunk at every free moment (and it’s always a little adorable or cutsey…no mean drunks allowed), and folks are falling in love after about 30 seconds. Amazing.
A few months ago, when I told my journalism class that Deborah Kerr died, and that the newspapers were making a big deal about it, they had no idea who she was. I played this clip from the movie, and most said they’d seen parodies of the clip, but never the actual clip. My point to the class was this: if you want to work in news, being “well-versed” in popular culture is never a bad thing, as it give us a chance to reach back a little make some connections in history. What I love about the clip is that not 30 seconds after the kiss (and not pictured here), the SGT basically calls his girl a whore, and then backpeddles after the fact. Awesome.
Oh yeah, there’s Montgomery Clift (scroll down for the FH2E PIX), Donna Reed, and Frank Sinatra. And lest we forget: 13 Oscars nominations, and 8 winners, including this pair (Reed and Sinatra).
I’ve been a little slack in keeping up with the filming of the Pacific War series. Checking in at Dale Dye’s web site, he states that the production is in its 35th week, with a entry called “Surviving the surviving on Peleliu.” So check that here.
Poking around IMDB this afternoon, I’d forgotten about some casting choices. Eugene Sledge is played by the kid from Jurassic Park, Joseph Mozello. Many of the other faces, I’ve seen them around on the tube and in movies, but it’s a low key and really young looking cast. And that seems like a big deal, given what we know about the age of the men, boys really, who were out in the field dishing the dirt.
When I first read on the HC that a series would follow the USS Enterprise in WW2, I thought: “good idea. Folks will watch.” Watching an episode, however, is another matter entirely. The production has one thing down: the interviews and overall look of show (the CGI). All are top notch. But GOODNESS! Are they series with all the add-on seizure inducing manipulation to graphics?
An example: now this is going way, way back to the 1990s. Once upon a time there was a crap movie called Reality Bites, about young 20-somethings trying to find their way in the world. One of the characters is a filmmaker who attracts the interest of an MTV-like network. Her documentary, which was a comment on AIDS and family life, was turned into something cartoonish and silly. That’s exactly what the producers of Battle 360 have done. All the graphic manipulation that is meant to “put us there” distracts from other narrative elements and CGI in the show.
Watch if you must, but keep those with vertigo or epilepsy in the other room.
I saw this gem the other day on AMC (here in the US), and later watched the full version on DVD. I liked it for a few reasons, mainly because I’m a Bogart fan.
But there is another reason, and it had to do with a scene at the bottom of a nearly dried up well. And I didn’t even think about it until I read a poem by Thomas Sayers Ellis (from the Maverick Room) that listed another writer at the top. One of those “for so and so” references. So I googled the name (Thomas Cripps) and found that he wrote a book called Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era. He argues that movies like Sahara helped to define “a new African-American presence both in film and in American society at large.”
It’s an interesting premise thinking about the scene with at the bottom of the well. There are two men, one African and one white American-type, sharing stories of home and hearth in a most friendly and in a “brothers in arms” kind of way. Another scene shows the Bogart character yelling at a German/Nazi type who had reservations about being guarded by the African soldier. This is a paraphrase of the quote: “his color won’t rub off on you.” Or something like this.
Thinking of these two scenes, and in context with Cripps’ premise, Sahara is a movie worth reviewing.
