Summer hits!

In addition to summer things, which is among the reasons I'm posting this late, there was a lot more than DVDs to watch. Paramount unexpectedly put season one of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds up for free for the month on Youtube, and all the new classic movies on TV caught up to me; I've been using a new method for watching and deleting from the DVR, such that when it filled up about the middle of the month (about 100 movies) I had the oldest thirty-some watched and could be deleted and about half the next thirty-some watched -- ideally it would have been every other one, so I could watch one and delete two -- still working my way going alternately between the oldest and the newest.

Working through my DVD collection, I watched:

The Ape (1940) A Monogram Picture starring Karloff as a mad scientist -- as he's a kindly old man, let's call him unconventional -- seeking a cure for a paralyzing disease using human spinal fluid. Meanwhile, a carnival ape has killed its abusive owner and escaped. This was a rewatch from May, because when we came to the part that tied the two plots together, I was lost.. Had I fallen asleep? (I still have 1953's "House of Wax" to rewatch after falling asleep, should have done that closer to having first seen it, now I'll probably have to go through the whole movie again.) No, the first connection of the plots is given mostly by implication. As most of the other plot points are given by one character or another stepping forward to state them in short, declarative sentences, no wonder I missed it. I wonder if the writers were reaching for something more sophisticated than they were able to pull off, or whether there was some last-minute censorship on the scene that would have established this. As this is a Public Domain film, it's possible that the parts of the movie that would have made it clearer to me were lost.

Pardon My Sarong (1942) The four boxsets of Universal's Abbott & Costello movies are one line in my inventory, so dealer's choice, and I hadn't seen this before. Someone has doubtless traced the romantic subplots in this series as it atrophied from A&C being comic relief in "One Night in the Tropics" to it essential being -what?- "plot relief?" to the comedy the audience came to see. Here we take a major part of the running time to get to the tropical island of the theme, as we pause each step for a comedy setpiece. This is probably the only A&C I haven't yetseen that can sidestream into sf, as nogoodniks on the island are pulling the god gambit with a volcano.

The Skin Game (1931) Alfred "The Master of Suspense" Hitchcock got his Public Domain movies thrown into a horror megapack. No, the title is not some predecessor to "Psycho." It's not a horror or suspense, or even mystery, although there are some family secrets, and a tense auction scene. This is just a note.

And that seems to be it.

July is shaping up to be much the same, with activities and with cable bringing me movies as fast as I can empty the DVR.
August will be a theme month on TCM, "Summer Under the Stars" with each day devoted to one star. I may have seen a lot of the major motion pictures they might choose.

--
-Jack

On Fri, 7 Jul 2023 05:17:00 -0700 (PDT), Jack Bohn
<jack.bohn64@gmail.com> wrote:

>Summer hits!
>
>In addition to summer things, which is among the reasons I'm posting this late, there was a lot more than DVDs to watch. Paramount unexpectedly put season one of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds up for free for the month on Youtube, and all the new classic movies on TV caught up to me; I've been using a new method for watching and deleting from the DVR, such that when it filled up about the middle of the month (about 100 movies) I had the oldest thirty-some watched and could be deleted and about half the next thirty-some watched -- ideally it would have been every other one, so I could watch one and delete two -- still working my way going alternately between the oldest and the newest.
>
>Working through my DVD collection, I watched:
>
>The Ape (1940) A Monogram Picture starring Karloff as a mad scientist -- as he's a kindly old man, let's call him unconventional -- seeking a cure for a paralyzing disease using human spinal fluid. Meanwhile, a carnival ape has killed its abusive owner and escaped. This was a rewatch from May, because when we came to the part that tied the two plots together, I was lost. Had I fallen asleep? (I still have 1953's "House of Wax" to rewatch after falling asleep, should have done that closer to having first seen it, now I'll probably have to go through the whole movie again.) No, the first connection of the plots is given mostly by implication. As most of the other plot points are given by one character or another stepping forward to state them in short, declarative sentences, no wonder I missed it. I wonder if the writers were reaching for something more sophisticated than they were able to pull off, or whether there was some last-minute censorship on the scene that would have
>established this. As this is a Public Domain film, it's possible that the parts of the movie that would have made it clearer to me were lost.
>
>Pardon My Sarong (1942) The four boxsets of Universal's Abbott & Costello movies are one line in my inventory, so dealer's choice, and I hadn't seen this before. Someone has doubtless traced the romantic subplots in this series as it atrophied from A&C being comic relief in "One Night in the Tropics" to it essential being -what?- "plot relief?" to the comedy the audience came to see. Here we take a major part of the running time to get to the tropical island of the theme, as we pause each step for a comedy setpiece. This is probably the only A&C I haven't yetseen that can sidestream into sf, as nogoodniks on the island are pulling the god gambit with a volcano.
>
>The Skin Game (1931) Alfred "The Master of Suspense" Hitchcock got his Public Domain movies thrown into a horror megapack. No, the title is not some predecessor to "Psycho." It's not a horror or suspense, or even mystery, although there are some family secrets, and a tense auction scene. This is just a note.

I've always taken it to be about the decline of the Entitled Classes
and the rise of the Grubby Industrialists. JRRT would have been
rooting for the Entitled Classes.

Which may have made it (or the play it was based on) topical at the
time it was done.

>And that seems to be it.
>
>July is shaping up to be much the same, with activities and with cable bringing me movies as fast as I can empty the DVR.
>August will be a theme month on TCM, "Summer Under the Stars" with each day devoted to one star. I may have seen a lot of the major motion pictures they might choose.
--
"In this connexion, unquestionably the most significant
development was the disintegration, under Christian
influence, of classical conceptions of the family and
of family right."

On Friday, July 7, 2023 at 11:16:35 AM UTC-4, Paul S Person wrote:
> On Fri, 7 Jul 2023 05:17:00 -0700 (PDT), Jack Bohn
> <jack....@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >
> >The Skin Game (1931) Alfred "The Master of Suspense" Hitchcock got his Public Domain movies thrown into a horror megapack. No, the title is not some predecessor to "Psycho." It's not a horror or suspense, or even mystery, although there are some family secrets, and a tense auction scene. This is just a note.

> I've always taken it to be about the decline of the Entitled Classes
> and the rise of the Grubby Industrialists. JRRT would have been
> rooting for the Entitled Classes.

Ah, the "Singing in the Rain" model of sf film? Then I would want more of a focus on "how is it done" rather than the "how does it feel" we get. Was _Ivanhoe_ the book that surprisingly had a lot about the Angles displacing the Saxons or whatever? The next time this comes up I will say, "'The Skin Game' is _Ivanhoe_ with diesel engines."

> Which may have made it (or the play it was based on) topical at the
> time it was done.

See also "The Magnificent Ambersons"(1942), although that was set in America, and a generation previously. (It also doesn't need pointing out that "Skin Game" wasn't a "Hitchcock film" the way later movies would be, and the way "Ambersons" was (or, as they say is not) a "Welles film.")

--
-Jack