Anybody can type

A Howard Hawks & Cary Grant double bill today with Only Angels Have Wings and Monkey Business. Both are among my favorite directors/actors and both are in great form here. Wings portrays one of Hawks' small groups of professionals doing a difficult job, this time airmail pilots flying a dangerous route over South American mountains. Jean Arthur was great as the female lead; I definitely need to get more of her movies.

Monkey Business has Ginger Rogers, Marilyn Monroe, and funny chimps. I was smiling pretty much all the time. Charles Coburn utters an absolute killer, deadpan line when he and Grant watch punctuation-challenged Monroe sashay (the only word that seems to fit) out of his office. The men look at each other. "Anybody can type."

I had avoided it this far...

But now I have seen Gone with the Wind. Knowing little about it except the general idea, I was surprised how unsympathetic the two main characters frequently were for such a beloved story. Being the losing side in a war was also described more harshly than I expected. The portrayal of slavery was a rather idealized version of what happened, but I guess you couldn't show everything in 1939. Maybe the film is just being faithful to the novel in this respect, I don't know.

What struck me most was how beautiful the movie was. The 70th anniversary restored DVD version is a sight to behold. It was one of the most expensive films ever made at the time, and it shows.

I am happy that I took the time to watch it.

The richest director ever

I have no source to back up that title, but I'd be rather surprised if anyone beats Howard Hughes. Tonight I watched both films he directed, Hell's Angels and The Outlaw.

The best parts of Angels happen in the air, no doubt about that. It's thrilling to see two dozen or so biplane fighters swirling in the sky and know that it's real footage, not CGI. Hughes assembled a small fleet of WWI warplanes and pilots and shot a lot of film, which made the movie the most expensive ever made at the time. There's also some fine model work, used in the nighttime Zeppelin mission over London and the bombing of a German munitions depot. The rest of the film is uneven, to put it kindly, but Jean Harlow is good - good at being a bad girl, that is. Only a few years later the Hays Code prevented this kind of racy material being shown.

The Outlaw is famous for showcasing Jane Russell's breasts and being censored because of that, and her chest is indeed the most memorable element of the movie (her acting, sadly, less so). It's a retelling of the Billy the Kid legend that inserts Doc Holliday in the events, and not a terribly good one at that. There are some good scenes, but more ridiculous ones. At least Walter Huston, father of John, appears as Pat Garrett.

A beginning and an end

On tonight's menu: Stagecoach and The Man from Laramie. Being the beginning of the long collaboration between John Ford and John Wayne, and the last western Anthony Mann and James Stewart made together, in other words.

Everyone raves about The Searchers, but I think I prefer Stagecoach. It transformed John Wayne from a B-movie actor (it was his 80th film according to the IMDb!) into a star, and his entrance is certainly iconic. When Ringo Kid appears, spinning that Winchester with the large loop lever, you can almost hear the movie switching gears. The ensemble cast is faultless and Monument Valley is, well, a monumental backdrop. It's a pity the European DVD release is so bare-bones - the Americans have two different special editions.

Stewart was an all-American hero onscreen and in real life (he was a decorated bomber pilot in World War II). But he wasn't always such a clear-cut nice guy in his post-war films. Laramie is one example of this. Will Lockhart is obsessed with revenge ("I came a thousand miles to kill you," he says) and doesn't let minor problems such as a crippling injury to stop him. The story feels like a majestic theater play which could be adapted to almost any era in history. The epic New Mexico terrain and the endless, vast sky are beautifully photographed. I have now seen two out of five Mann-Stewart westerns; the rest are waiting their turn on the shelf.

Is it already obvious that I like westerns?

Best drinking couple on film?

To kick off the weekend in a relaxed manner I watched The Thin Man, which I had heard would work for the purpose. It did so beyond my expectations - the only problem was that I forgot to pour myself a drink. Maybe I'll do it now!

William Powell is Nick and Myrna Loy is Nora. They are married and they drink a lot. It's fantasy-land drinking that looks impossibly cool and has few adverse effects on anyone, which may or may not have something to do with the Prohibition having just ended when the film was made. There are also some murders to solve, but the mystery is secondary to snappy banter and some great supporting characters. It ends with a traditional "collect all suspects together" dinner and I didn't guess who the killer was. Loy and Powell are a wonderful, natural comedic pair who made many movies together - having seen this, I'd like to check out some of the others.

I think I'll have just one nightcap.