Add Charles Laughton's "The Night of the Hunter" to the list.
What a great film.

Greg
gboozell@juno.com


-- "Jerry Monaco" <monacojerry@gmail.com> wrote:
...

The reaction to the old films is "Where is the plot?  Why is every
scene stretched out so much?  Who is who and what is what in this
movie?  What in the world is this camera movement trying to say?"
These  movie unfold too slowly and yet somehow are able to "signify"
shot for shot, camera movement for camera movement, too quickly.

You must become acculturated to such art in order to feel and
understand it.  Most film noir is murky to say the least.   Take a
movie such as Tourneur's "Out of the Past."  I have shown this movie
to half a dozen people of a certain (younger) age and they just don't
"get it".  It moves both too slow and too fast.  The emotional impact
of the ending - where the deaf boy honors Bailey by lying about him -
often has to be seen twice before the impact is  felt.  ("The Big
Sleep" has to be watched at least 5 times just to figure out that the
"plot" has not sollution and wasn't meant to have a sollution.)  If
out of the past had ended quickly on the car crash then we would have
had a sort of Tarantino ending but the film is not meant to stop here.

Take films such as "In a Lonely Place", "The Strange Loves of Martha
Ivers", "Sorry Wrong Number", "Criss Cross", "The Lady from Shanghai,"
or a late comer such as Polankski's "Chinatown".  These are all truly
strange films and there "slowness"  hide the fact that you miss a lot
if you don't look closely.  Not only that but the camera work in all
of these films "signal" in a way that people under thirty are not used
to, unless they were exposed to these moview early.

I find that good "entry films" are " Mildred Pierce" and "Double
Indemnity".  Both of them teach you how to watch them as they go and
both give a little education on how to make a studio film in the
1940s.

I could write about screwball comedy in the same way.  In the first
place many people don't find these films funny.  But this is another
story.

Jerry
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