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 latest entry in the list mentioned is “Be Our Guest”, a song in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, filked in The Simpsons as “See My Vest”.
“Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.” ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
I like the line but removed a spam link. I wonder why a few old posts attract most of the spam! —Anton