I’m at 49 movies for the year so far, but the weather is improving and I’ve been listening to podcasts while I cook and stitch, so the pace should slow…
Lucky Luke (1991)
Cable, original (English)
Terence Hill is a German-Italian actor who made a whole lot of Western movies. Lucky Luke is a Belgian comic book. This is an Italian children’s film in English (the Italian and German releases were overdubbed).
It’s cute; lots of “shooting the gun out of the bad guy’s had but no one is injured” cowboy action, and his horse Jolly Jumper–voiced by Roger Miller, the “King of the Road”– is the real star of the show. It’s not Great Cinema, but it was a pleasant and relaxing evening. (Hill was 52 at the time of the filming, and still easy on the eyes.)
Konstgjorda Svensson (1929)
Netflix, Swedish with English subtitles
In the prologue, the star comes out and explains–and we hear his voice–why he will never make a talkie picture. This was recorded on a record album that was to be played with the picture, not as part of the film; the rest of the picture is silent except for some music that was also on separate records.
Getting past this weird gimmick, the film was funny. Svensson is an inventor, somewhat like Doc Brown in Back to the Future, and agrees to take the place of a Swedish-American friend for his required army service, in exchange for some help with a new invention. (Mildly interesting: European disdain for Americans definitely predates WWII.) The mistaken identity and the inventions form most of the jokes, which landed even though I don’t know much about life in the Swedish army.
Aside: I am fascinated by how different the clothes in movies from the 1920s are from the clothes in 21st century movies set in the 1920s.
Der Junge muss an die frische Luft (2018)
Netflix, original (Deutsch)
Another autobiographic film, where the author/subject appears on the screen. Hape Kerkeling is a German comedian known for inventing personalities, and this film is about his childhood in the Ruhrgebiet in the 1970s. His father is a traveling carpenter; his brother is several years older and “normal.” (Hape is gay, but at this time no one in his family names it. They just know he’s “different from the other boys”.)
His paternal grandmother encourages him to be himself and ignore what other people think about him being different (what must that have been like?! I was only encouraged to always remember what the neighbors are going to say…). His mother has an operation to cure her chronic sinus pain, but it is unsuccessful and her brain is damaged. Hape–about ten at this time–is sort of her primary caregiver; his paternal grandfather takes him camping and tries to give him a more normal childhood. When his mother dies, her mother moves in to care for him. His aunts and uncles are also positive influences.
It was a nice movie; Mr Radish liked it more than I did, since he saw a lot of Kerkeling’s work on television the past thirty years and recognized a lot of the family and neighbors as characters Kerkeling played.
Aside: I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie with Joachim Król that I didn’t like.
3 Godfathers (1948)
Cable, original (English)
The German title, Spuren im Sand, means “Tracks in the Sand” so I did not expect a movie about a baby when I hit “record” on the DVR. (When I see “John Ford” or “John Wayne” in the program listing, I hit “record”. It’s working out so far.)
This is a remake of a lost silent film Ford had made thirty years earlier, about a trio of bank robbers finding redemption in the Arizona desert after they stumble upon a woman about to give birth, alone in a wagon with no water after her husband bollocksed everything up (at least he also got himself killed) and it’s really really good. Great and terrible scenery. A little maudlin in parts, but I think that fits the era.
I don’t understand how this movie is not the Christmas classic instead of Wonderful Life, really. Too much Bible reading for the tastemakers?
The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight (1971)
Cable, original (ostensibly English; I couldn’t understand most of the actors’ dialect)
Even Robert de Niro (whose character is deported after it’s discovered he’s a fraudster living in NYC illegally; the past is truly a different planet) doesn’t make this worth watching. Maybe if you grew up in Little Italy you feel different.
