In December of 2020, when it became clear we were not going to be returning to normal life any time soon, we purchased a big honking 55-inch 4K TV and settled in for a year of watching movies at home. By Dec. 31, 2021, we had watched 236 movies either together or separately. This is one of series of blog posts about those films.
Sometimes you want to see the latest greatest movie at the theater, and sometimes you’re in the mood for an old classic you just haven’t gotten around to see yet. But sometimes you want to watch a comfortable favorite you’ve already seen too many times to keep track of. Those are the kind of movies we’ll be looking at this time. Mostly.
This batch starts out with Charade, which is often misattributed to Alfred Hitchcock. A.V. Club writes, “Some have called it the best Hitchcock movie that Hitchcock never made.” It is great, it does feel like a Hitchcock movie, but it was directed by Singin’ In The Rain’s Stanley Donen. It has all of the key elements of a great Hitchcock thriller: the ever glamorous Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, moral ambiguity, mistaken identity, murder most foul, and something important missing (in this case, a large sum of money). My Dear Wife had seen it before with her mother, but it was a first watch for me.
Now we move into the true comfort category with The Maltese Falcon from 1941, which was the great John Huston’s directorial debut. It’s based on Dashiell Hammett’s novel and stars Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Gladys George, Peter Lorre, and Sydney Greenstreet in his movie debut. (He had been a stage actor previously.) There’s so many reasons for this to be a favorite – Bogart, Lorre, and Greenstreet together always makes for a great movie, it’s a film noir, and it has all the elements that let the movie play around with the restrictions of the Hays Code. (By the way, if you like this style of movie, be sure to check out Eddie Muller’s late-night weekend show Noir Alley on Turner Classic Movies.)
Return of the Jedi (directed by Richard Marquand) and Rogue One (directed by Gareth Edwards). I have always loved the original Star Wars trilogy. (Ok, I saw the 1977 Star Wars in the theater 13 times the summer it came out. It was pre-VCR, pre-cable. Get over it…) We had been gradually rewatching the initial movies, and it was time to view Return of the Jedi. I do actually own a copy of the original theatrical cut of the movie, but it’s on a non-anamorphic DVD, so it is low resolution with black bars all around on a hi-def TV, so unfortunately I had to see the latest editing of it on Disney+. On the positive side, that copy is in 4K. Anytime I watch a Star Wars movie, I end up needing to rewatch Rogue One, by far the best of the subsequent films and really (in my mind) the fourth movie of the original series. I love the darker elements of it that deal so wonderfully with the fact that the rebellion was really an insurgency. And it has a magnificent score from Michael Giacchino, by far my favorite currently working film composer. This will not be the only time this year I watch Rogue One.
The Man Who Would Be King, 1975, also directed by John Huston. This stars Sean Connery and Michael Caine as a pair of 19th century adventurers going deep into the Himalayas to pretend to be kings, maybe even gods. Needless to say, it doesn’t turn out well for our heroes. The movie also features Christopher Plummer as the narrator, Rudyard Kipling. Kipling, of course, was the author of the novella the film is based on, but he was not a character in the original story. Along with the great director and cast, it has an epic score from Maurice Jarre, best known for scoring Lawrence of Arabia,
Coming Next: Movies from 1935 to 1981