With undeniable charisma Paulette Goddard plays Toni, a nice, smiling, extroverted schemer who’s attracted to Brad (Ray Milland), another woman’s beau. The Crystal Ball (1943) has her trying to lure him via filling in for a fake fortune teller (Gladys George). For Toni it’s all in a day’s work, and Brad does like her. . . Elliott Nugent‘s movie is comedic froth but it really ought to be funnier. Its cakes and ale should be a bit richer. Still, it is interesting and it has verve and Goddard. As a rom-com actor, Milland is not better than Cary Grant, just different. More authoritative—and as handsome as Grant—he is a manly charmer. Grant, I concede, is more aristocratic, though.
Author: EarlD Page 45 of 316
Needless to say, the computer-animated The Peanuts Movie (2015) contains a lot of humor. What it lacks is the excellent wit of Charles Schulz‘s A Charlie Brown Christmas and, of course, the comic strip, although this is not to say it completely lacks wit. No, sir.
Scriptwriters Craig Schulz (Charles’s son) and Bryan Schulz (grandson) purvey a Charlie Brown who causes problems for others as much as for himself, albeit one who is assuredly spared is the sad sack’s love interest. The movie’s central element is C.B.’s hope of impressing The Little Red-Haired Girl, a newcomer to the neighborhood and, here, a lass whose face is very slowly revealed in full. Amid all the slapstick, Chuck keeps his distance from her—but, withal, he does make progress and so a certain sunny vision arises in the flick.
No, it isn’t quite what Charles Schulz gave us, but I agree with the critic who said the movie feels like “the return of an old friend.”
I’m breaking away from the reviewing for a moment to remind my fellow conservatives that it’s a good idea to write your Congress person. And I mean write a letter, a respectful one addressed to The Honorable So-and-So. Forget email—and phone calls. They don’t make an impression. Too, the letter ought to be short.
I’ve usually ignored the series Black Mirror on Netflix, but was gratified by the Season 6 episode “Beyond the Sea”—not great but still respectable sci-fi. The Space Age comprised of 1969 (etc.) just might—multiple years from now—usher in the extraordinary technology in this little film, which is set in ’69, the year of the first moon landing. But all the scientific sophistication in the world will not make attempted wife-stealing and Manson-like murder disappear.
Carefully written by Charlie Brooker, ably directed by John Crowley, the episode is somehow convincing and forcefully dark. Such actors as Aaron Paul and Kate Mara genuinely deepen the drama.
Frank Capra didn’t always have good ideas for his films, but doubtless he did when he chose to direct a movie version of a Damon Runyon story, the title of which movie is Lady for a Day (1933), with a screenplay by Robert Riskin.
There are no idealists or innocents in this Capra film. Instead we see the interesting phenomenon of small-time mobsters and a pool shark trying to help a financially poor woman—the apple-selling Apple Annie (May Robson)—fool the woman’s daughter into thinking her mother is a society lady. This is the fiction Apple Annie has maintained for years. At first the lowlifes treat their service to the old gal as something extraneous, beside the point, but later it doesn’t quite seem that way to them. Basically they are harmless lowlifes, never even roughing anyone up.
Yes, Lady for a Day has a couple of flaws, but it’s a work of a certain purity for which both Capra and Riskin are responsible. It’s one of Capra’s feel-gooders, energetic and droll but without moralism. The director worked well with his actors, the result being that May Robson is exemplary, Warren William amusingly assertive, and Guy Kibbee charming and commanding.
Lady for a Day (Photo credit: Wikipedia)