Classic Movies: Are these worth watching?
/
I'm continuing to take evening writing breaks and watch movies considered classics that somehow I never got around to seeing before. Many are not available for streaming; thank goodness for the public library system, which seems to be able to find DVDs of anything ever released.
Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960) intrigued me. Some of it, such as the character's wearily empty search for hedonism, has dated a great deal. But the cinematography – particularly the use of camera movement and the shifting of who we as the viewer must be — goodness, some of this seems incredibly fresh today. I can only imagine how it must have grabbed audiences over sixty years ago.…
Lawrence of Arabia (1962) regularly appears on the lists of all-time-great movies, yet I had resisted watching it. I generally get bored with wide-screen sweeping "epics" of the 50s and 60s — they often come across as self-important and dull.
So this movie surprised me greatly. It is archly camp, particularly at the beginning. It's as if someone took Denis Villeneuve's 2021 movie Dune and cast Roger Moore at his mid-70s campy height in the lead role, utterly changing the tone.
Lead actor Peter O'Toole certainly has some of the peacock-like elements of Moore's James Bond or the early Beatles here. He saunters through large events, sometimes deeply moved, yet often with a sense of fey, vague, untouchable otherworldliness. It's clear the Swinging Sixties were on their way when this movie was made. With all the elements of an epic (sweeping tracking shots over large vistas, grand set pieces with hundreds of extras), it also has a tongue in cheek disdain for overpompous authority and the ability to poke fun at itself even in the midst of brutal desert battles. Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, and other non-Arab actors in dreadful Brownface somehow add to the vaudeville sense of it all by their inappropriate casting.
The movie cleverly begins by casting doubt on Lawrence's versions of events. We are therefore never sure if what we subsequently see is Lawrence's attempt to aggrandize himself by telling a tale where he somehow manages to be pivotal to every event as some sort of White Savior.
I love the desert, and director David Lean captures the majesty of Jordan here masterfully. I was reminded of my own desert hikes in North Africa and in the American Southwest. Usually photos and moving images don't capture the stark clarity that is the desert experience. This movie does. I was expecting ponderous "epic" shots of sunrises and sunsets. Instead, the desert is more like a perfectly placed character that Lawrence hurls himself into. In doing so, he finds a purpose that had previously eluded him in life.
Double Indemnity (1944) is considered to be the template of Film Noir movies, despite the lead casting. Fred MacMurray is an odd choice – an actor more often seen playing light comedy. Somehow this makes the movie even more compelling as the plot takes darker and darker twists. To see a happy-go-lucky insurance salesman drawn into a murder plot – and to see he is quite willing to spearhead the details – reminds us that evil cannot be spotted by looking at someone. Some of the most infamous mass murderers look trustworthy and harmless. The movie is almost perfectly paced and plotted, and – most disturbingly – quite plausible.
Tokyo Story (1953) is considered one of the best movies ever made, and I can see why. It's not immediately obvious; the story could be considered nothing special. Yet there is something about the mundane disconnect between the elderly parents and their children, something about the very lack of drama, that seeps into the viewer as we watch and gives it a quiet power. The low camera angles and the way people often speak without facing each other is subtly done. But over time, we feel that we are looking into little rooms within little rooms, boxes within boxes within the screen. It's entrancing, pared down to the subtlest essentials.
Perhaps the best thing I can say about this film is that I can't say why it is so good. You just watch, and it slowly mesmerizes.