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Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Six

Dan Seeger

#6 — Sullivan’s Travels (Preston Sturges, 1941) This particular fifty film list should make it abundantly clear that I have a pronounced appreciation for the singular cinematic voice of writer-director Preston Sturges. I’d argue that no other filmmaker quite pulls together his collection of traits on the same piquant combo. Billy Wilder probably comes closest, with his mixture of bleakly brilliant comic cynicism and fundamental decency. Yet Wilder doesn’t have the same propensity for pointed social commentary nor a similar weakness for daffy pratfalls, presented not to deviously undercut the more serious subtext but for the far simpler reason that Sturges … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Six

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Baker, Baumbach, Endfield, Hall and Williams, Jacobs

Dan Seeger

Big Hero 6 (Don Hall and Chris Williams, 2014). Like just about everyone else, I believe The Lego Movie should have been Best Animated Feature Academy Award nominee (and I appreciate the creators’ inspired cheeky resilience in the face of the snub). After seeing Big Hero 6, though, I’m not sure naming the most worthy victor in the category was quite as simple as the chagrined consensus suggested. Developed after Disney Studios rummaged through the big trunk of misfit concepts stored up by their acquisition Marvel, the computer animated film about a young robotics genius who responds to personal hardship … Continue reading Baker, Baumbach, Endfield, Hall and Williams, Jacobs

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Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Seven

Dan Seeger

#7 — The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford, 1940) I stand by my longtime belief that John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath is the tome most deserving of the well-worn honorific The Great American Novel. The appeal of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the default choice, is completely understandable given the way it weighs the toxicity of craving upper mobility along with the hollowness of wealth itself, but I find the gut-punch grimness of Steinbeck’s story to hold greater, more resonant truths. Gatsby has added layers, which tickles the inner intellect of literature aesthetes. The Grapes of Wrath gets … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Seven

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From the Archive: Run

Dan Seeger

One of the main reasons I could never take the concept of Patrick Dempsey as “McDreamy” seriously is that I remember all too well when he was a young actor in terrible movies, many of which oddly featured him seducing older women. I don’t remember a bit of Run, beyond lumping it into the big, vague category of Indistinct Junk We Used To Need To See In Order To Fill Out A Weekly Radio Show. Here’s yet another in the brief procession of reviews that needed to employ the nonsense word “thrill-omedy.” I notice I did a terrible job keeping my … Continue reading From the Archive: Run

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Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Eight

Dan Seeger

#8 — Letter to an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls, 1948) Max Ophüls worked on five films during his aborted tenure in Hollywood, including Vendetta, which would have been his U.S. debut had he not been fired from it (one of several directors who passed through the troubled shoot). The moody, elegantly visual style favored by the European director fit awkwardly into the stateside model, even as it had obvious connections to the deliberate film noir approach that prevailed at the time. His movies were too deliberate, too cerebral, too firmly serious to truly succeed in a U.S. market that, even … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Eight

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Oh don’t lean on me, man, ’cause you can’t afford the ticket

Dan Seeger

There’s no disparaging the intent of the film Suffragette. To a large degree, the sterling motivation is spelled out by a crawl ahead of the closing credits which details when various countries across the globe first extended women the right to vote, including more than a few territories that did so only ridiculously recently. In depicting the harrowing track women had to follow to win suffrage in England, which was granted in compromised fashion in 1918 and then more in line with what was afforded men ten years later, director Sarah Gavron and screenwriter Abi Morgan strive for a echoing … Continue reading Oh don’t lean on me, man, ’cause you can’t afford the ticket

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Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Nine

Dan Seeger

#9 — The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (John Huston, 1948) I find it weirdly wonderful that one of the greatest films about the corrosive greed at the core of the United States identity doesn’t take place within the nation’s borders at all. Instead, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre finds broken citizens scuffling around within a northern neighbor, looking to make their fortunes by yanking out some of the gold they just know is up in them thar Mexican hills. The story artfully explores basic human emotions that range across vast swaths of people in very different cultures, but it … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Nine

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From the Archive: Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare

Dan Seeger

After several weeks of copying and pasting for this weekly feature, I pledged to myself that I’d dig out the bin of old, old reviews again. Since it’s Halloween, I also decided I’d open a folder and choose the first horror film I could find. Which brings us to what was theoretically the last installment in the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. Back when my old radio show cohort was regularly posting at his horror blog, Heart in a Jar, I suggested that he could write a really interesting essay on how the listeners to our show in the … Continue reading From the Archive: Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare

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We’ve heard this little scene, we’ve heard it many times, people fighting over little things and wasting precious time.

Dan Seeger

Aaron Sorkin is setting himself as the preferred cinematic chronicler of the major figures of the digital age. So far, that’s working out pretty well. Following The Social Network, Sorkin turns his keyboard to the one person who commands more attention and fascination than anyone else who’s made their millions (or, rather, billions) off of circuit boards fueling nearly miraculous tools of communication and information processing. The late Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple and brilliant orchestrator of modern age cult of personality, has already been the subject of enough film treatments that it’s possible to create a considered list of … Continue reading We’ve heard this little scene, we’ve heard it many times, people fighting over little things and wasting precious time.

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Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Ten

Dan Seeger

#10 — Ball of Fire (Howard Hawks, 1941) Back when I was writing and editing for Spectrum Culture, I had a few little victories that I treasured whenever I was a participant in building one of our semi-regular lists. None of these was more satisfying than leading the campaign to anoint Barbara Stanwyck’s turn as Sugarpuss O’Shea as the Best Comedic Performance of 1941. Despite my booming pride, I don’t think it was all that tough of a fight. Arguably, Stanwyck’s stiffest competition came from her other justly loved comedic acting turns from the same year: as Ann Mitchell in Meet … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 40s — Number Ten