How to Marry a Millionaire (1953). Formulaic fluff, but fun to watch.

The Trouble with Harry (1955), a farce by Hitchcock, disappointingly thin. Shirley MacLaine’s first film.

Visited stepbrother last night, and we watched Abre los Ojos (Open your Eyes) (1997). The surprise ending concerns a concept on which I have spent hours happily musing; I had no idea that the concept had gone so mainstream.

Wages of Fear (Le Salaire de la Peur) (1952). Set in a declining oil-boom town somewhere in South America, full of unemployed foreigners who can’t afford to leave. The oil company hires four of the becalmed drifters to drive two trucks loaded with nitroglycerin through the mountains to put out a well fire. It is naturally predestined that only one of the four (played by Yves Montand) will make it alive. The first half of the picture, though slow, was rather interesting to me because most of the foreigners speak Spanish, French and English, as the mood takes them; I wonder how realistic that is. The drivers speak French throughout the drive: Mario and Jo because they are French, Luigi and Dutch apparently because they have French in common.

Kiss Me Kate (1953): some delightful moments such as Ann Miller’s dancing, and a gorgeous look, but overall ho-hum.

Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (1953). I saw this before (probably in 1976-7) but remembered neither the few great sight gags nor the utter lack of plot. — Is there a film by Jacques Tati in which a few objects, such as a flag and a balloon, are hand-colored?

Shane (1953). Classic Western, utterly without surprises. The little boy calling “Shane!” all the time got on my nerves. Shane makes two curiously clashing speeches at the end: to the cattleman he says “your way of life is over, and so is mine [gunslinging], and the difference is I know it”; then to the boy he says “a man has got to be what he is, I thought I could quit my old ways but I can’t, and that’s why I gotta ride on” – to what?

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). Cleverest bit is where Jane Russell bleaches her hair and impersonates Marilyn Monroe. This film is remembered mainly for “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” – which, incidentally, is on my list of works that I first encountered long after becoming familiar with a parody, in this case Madonna’s “Material Girl” video (1984). (Another is Doc Smith’s novel The Skylark of Space (1946), parodied by Harry Harrison in Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers (1973).) A brief bit of “Diamonds” is also parodied, I now perceive, in Julie Brown’s song “Brand New Girl” in the film Earth Girls Are Easy (1988).

The Master of Ballantrae (1953) is a swashbuckler done right; from a book by R L Stevenson. Technicolor, of course, though not as luminous as in Scaramouche.

Fifteen years after Robin Hood, Errol Flynn is my age, which gives me an idea.
Being indecisive by nature, I arrange my Netflix list by date, but I could instead arrange it by the age of the director or lead actor. I could even write a Python program to probe the Internet Movie Database for that information; I wonder how long it would take to go through all the titles from title/tt0000001 (Carmencita, 1894: “The noted dancer, who goes through her graceful act exactly as she does at Koster & Bial’s, New York”) to title/tt0500200 (Bernadette Peters in Concert, 1998).

The castle of “Ballantrae”, by the way, also appears in an episode of The New Avengers (1976).

Technicolor is always fun, and Scaramouche (1952) is a splendid example. Does digital image processing software (such as Photoshop) have filters that try to match the flavor of Technicolor?

Later: Technicolor could not save The Crimson Pirate (also 1952). I abandoned it after about half an hour and two Disneyesque confrontations in which bumbling soldiers are defeated by clowning pirates (led by Burt Lancaster, whose lack of charisma never struck me so strongly before). It didn’t even look like Technicolor; perhaps the DVD transfer sucked the life out.

LanguageHat tells of seeing Kurosawa’s 生きる Ikiru (1952) for the first time, and provides the words of the song “Life is Short”.

In The Importance of Being Earnest, is Algernon Moncrief meant to resemble Oscar Wilde? In the film of 1952 he does.