Change Your Image
A2ZJerry
Reviews
Singapore Sue (1932)
Anna Chang was not Anna May Wong
Sven was completely off-base in his comment, as far as I can tell from some quick Internet research. Anna May Wong was a star of silent movies in the 1920s and it seems unlikely that she would have taken a role in a Paramount short in 1932, especially one where she portrayed a singer in a dive. "Anna May Wong: From Laundryman's Daughter to Hollywood Legend" by Graham Russell Gao Hodges would confirm this but even if you rely on the Wikipedia entry on her, "She spent the first half of the 1930s traveling between the U.S. and Europe for film and stage appearances." A look at her picture shows no resemblance to Anna Chang. According to a review on another site, Chang and Joe Wong, her co-star, were "popular Chinese vaudeville stars." That seems more plausible to me than assuming that Anna May Wong appeared in "Singapore Sue" under a pseudonym.
Slightly French (1949)
A leaden trifle, chiefly of interest to Lamour or Ameche fans
"Slightly French" is a rather a leaden trifle, which today is chiefly of interest to students of Douglas Sirk's films or Dorothy Lamour or Don Ameche fans. I thought the implausible plot would have worked better in the late 1920s or early '30s, and found at IMDb that it was a remake of "Let's Fall in Love," a 1933 vehicle for Ann Sothern. By 1949, passing off a New York Irish carnival dancer as the Parisian cousin of a vocal coach, and tying her starring in a movie to bringing back a fired director, was too great a suspension of nearly anyone's disbelief. (And note that Lamour was 35 in 1949 while Sothern was 25 when she made "Let's Fall in Love." Lamour was far from old but the plot would have been more convincing if she were younger.) The breezy style needed to carry it off was just a memory, at least on the Universal studio lot.
Nevertheless, everyone involved in the production was enough of a professional to keep a not-too-demanding viewer entertained with the plot twists, snappy dialogue and musical numbers. Lamour gets to sing -- in French-accented English -- a short version of Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler's "Let's Fall in Love," the only song in the picture that sticks in the memory, to excuse her calling a playwright at a press party a "plagiarist." She dances a little, too, though in the big dance number set in the streets of Paris the soloist looks younger and thinner. Ameche is a stereotypical egomaniacal director, single and living with his sister in an oceanfront Hollywood-moderne mansion. The explanation for his bachelorhood is excessive self-love, but his best friend producer is similarly single. Inquiring minds inevitably will speculate on the coincidence, though both end up symmetrically in love by the picture's end.
Meant for the bottom half of a double-bill, "Slightly French" never quite gets out of its B-picture category, but for a low-budget black-and-white musical it isn't half bad.
Torch Singer (1933)
The low down on the high life in New York
The soap suds reach almost to the ceiling in "Torch Singer" but that's part of the fun. Claudette Colbert and the rest of the excellent cast have a grand old time as they work their way through the somewhat rusty plot. Colbert sings a couple of songs and wears some smashing gowns as she portrays a chorus girl with a heart of gold who's forced to give up her baby daughter and become a torch singer to earn a living in Depression-era New York. In no time at all she's the toast of the town, with a fancy apartment, a maid, and a boy friend who's a big radio executive. She covers up her need for her daughter by drinking, dancing and carrying on, and does it ever look like fun. But it all works out in the end, and with only minutes to spare.
Look for Lyda Roberti, the Polish bombshell in the first part of the movie as Colbert's friend and roommate. Roberti died tragically young, with only a few films to her credit, notably "The Kid From Spain " and "Million Dollar Legs," in which she played Mata Machree, The Woman No Man Can Resist. "Torch Singer" is kind of tame for a pre-Code feature but it's fun and well worth watching.
The Importance of Being Earnest (2002)
If you know the play you'll be disappointed; if you don't, you might be amused
The new movie of "Important of Being Earnest" reminded me of a story about Walt Disney and Igor Stravinsky. Before a screening of "Fantasia," Disney handed Stravinsky a score to "The Rite of Spring," used as the basis of the origin of life sequence in the movie. Stravinsky was confused; he knew the piece from memory. Why did he need a score? Ah, but what was in "Fantasia" had only a remote connection to the music he wrote. In short, "The Importance of Being Earnest" is that sort of movie: loosely based on the original, cut, rearranged and entirely rethought. In the process of opening up Wilde's play for film and updating it for imagined 21st-century sensibilities, Parker has created backstories for characters, invented locations, inserted fantasy sequences, and changed the ending. Wilde is either spinning in his grave or having a good laugh in whichever segment of the afterlife he found himself in. Around basically good performances by the mostly English cast, Parker has attached a collection of hyperenergetic bits and bobs seemingly to improve upon Wilde's original. One must have expected something like this, but not to the degree to which it's been done. I mean, Gwendolyn getting a tattoo? That's rethinking the character taken to the Luhrmannesque extreme. I guess this is what young folks want these days, and who else goes to the movies? For the rest of us, my suggestion is to either wait for the DVD so you can fast forward through the "extra bits" or find the 1952 film, finally available on tape and DVD in the U.S.
Moulin Rouge! (2001)
perfect musical for the MTV generation
Baz Luhrman has put together a musical starring two non-singers (though with decent voices) and featuring dance numbers cut up into so many little pieces that they register as not much more than retinal images. The hodge-podge of songs, some good, some bad, and all modern, sometimes undercut the story, such as it is, and sometimes just crack the audience up. The camerawork is frequently dizzying, and the tone veers from mocking to mawkish to affecting, which is pretty dizzying in itself. He seems to have jammed together two movies, one which is knowing and postmodern and hyperactive and another which takes its boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl story seriously. Yes, there was applause when it finally ended, but a few people walked out as well. I would have too, especially after the first few songs which were cut at about three shots a second. To put these comments in perspective, of the seven people I saw it with, I probably liked it the least.