MC Yearly Consensus - 1932

[Kurosawa Fan]

Submit your five favorite films from this year and in a week I will give you a top ten. IMDb dates will be used.

The point system is as follows

1st Place-5 points
2nd Place-4 points
3rd Place-3.5 points
4th Place-3 points
5th Place-2.5 points

There will be no restrictions on short films. A minimum of three films must be listed. You may edit your post freely up until the time that the voting is closed, which will be in about a week. I will give at least 24 hours warning before tallying votes.

You may begin now.

IMDB Power Search (http://www.imdb.com/list)

[Russ]

1. Trouble in Paradise
2. Freaks
3. I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang
4. The Music Box
5. Island of Lost Souls

[Boner M]

Gonna hold off voting till I see Boudu Saved From Drowning and Scarface.

[Mysterious Dude]

For your consideration: L'Idée

http://brightlightsfilm.blogspot.com/2006/09/big-ide-of-berthold-bartosch.html

[Yxklyx]

1. Boudu Saved from Drowning (Jean Renoir)
2. The Blue Light (Béla Balázs & Leni Riefenstahl)
3. Grand Hotel (Edmund Goulding)
4. Vampyr (Carl Theodor Dreyer)
5. Love Me Tonight (Rouben Mamoulian)

6. I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (Mervyn LeRoy)
7. Freaks (Tod Browning)
8. Scarface (Howard Hawks)
9. Rain (Lewis Milestone)
10. Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch)

Pretty awesome year - too bad about Hayes.

[Raiders]

1. Trouble in Paradise (Lubitsch)
2. Freaks (Browning)
3. Boudu Saved from Drowning (Renoir)
4. I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (LeRoy)
5. A Farewell to Arms (Borzage)

----------------------------------------

6. Horse Feathers (McLeod)
7. The Music Box (Parrot)
8. Vampyr (Dreyer)
9. Scarface (Hawks)
10. The Old Dark House (Whale)

[monolith94]

1. I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang
2. Scarface
3. Vampyr
4. Blond Venus
5. Freaks

[Philosophe_rouge]

1. Trouble in Paradise
2. Scarface
3. One Hour with You
4. Love me tonight
5. Horse Feathers

[Derek]

1. Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch)
2. Freaks (Tod Browning)
3. Love Me Tonight (Rouben Mamoulian)
4. Scarface (Howard Hawks)
5. Tiger Shark (Howard Hawks)
******************************
6. Boudu Saved from Drowning (Jean Renoir)
7. The Crowd Roars (Howard Hawks)
8. Vampyr (Carl Theodor Dreyer)
9. I Was Born, But... (Yasujiro Ozu)
10. Shanghai Express (Josef von Sternberg)

[Grouchy]

1. Freaks
2. White Zombie
3. Vampyr
4. Scarface
5. The Mummy

Am I the only one who's seen White Zombie?

[Derek]

Am I the only one who's seen White Zombie?

Is that the one where Bela Lugosi is more human than human?

Sorry.

[Yxklyx]

Am I the only one who's seen White Zombie?

Sorry, it got beat by 26 other films.

[Melville]

1. Freaks
2. Vampyr
3. Scarface

[soitgoes...]

1. Wooden Crosses (Raymond Bernard)
2. Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch)
3. The Music Box (James Parrott)
4. I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (Mervyn LeRoy)
5. Boudu Saved from Drowning (Jean Renoir)
-------------------------------------------------
6. Freaks (Tod Browning)
7. I Was Born, But... (Yasujiro Ozu)
8. Scarface (Howard Hawks)
9. The Dentist (Leslie Pearce)

[The Mike]

1. The Most Dangerous Game
2. Freaks
3. I am A Fugitive from a Chain Gang
4. The Mask of Fu Manchu
5. The Old Dark House

HM: Scarface, The Mummy, Doctor X, White Zombie

I still need to see Grand Hotel. Great year for horror!

[Spinal]

1. Vampyr
2. I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang
3. Trouble in Paradise

[Weeping_Guitar]

1. Trouble in Paradise
2. Scarface
3. I Was Born, But...

[Mysterious Dude]

1. L'Idée
2. I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang
3. The Music Box
4. Freaks
5. Rain

[baby doll]

1. Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch)
2. Love Me Tonight (Rouben Mamoulian)
3. I Was Born, But... (Yasujiro Ozu)
4. Blonde Venus (Josef von Sternberg)

[baby doll]

One Hour with YouReally? I liked it okay, but it's nothing special. (Love Me Tonight on the other hand...) I blogged about it recently, so if you're at all interested in my thoughts (which I doubt anyone is), you can find it there.

Similarly, I might've voted for Scarface were I not so bothered by the "Wassa matta wit you?" accents. And I found large parts of Freaks similarly corny (I vastly prefer Browning's The Unknown).

[Philosophe_rouge]

Really? I liked it okay, but it's nothing special. (Love Me Tonight on the other hand...) I blogged about it recently, so if you're at all interested in my thoughts (which I doubt anyone is), you can find it there.

Similarly, I might've voted for Scarface were I not so bothered by the "Wassa matta wit you?" accents. And I found large parts of Freaks similarly corny (I vastly prefer Browning's The Unknown).
It's not one of his best, but I thought it was absolutely charming. I prefer the misunderstandings of it to Love me Tonight, though both are good. I've actually been meaning to read your blog for a while, I love Lubitsch.

[baby doll]

It's not one of his best, but I thought it was absolutely charming. I prefer the misunderstandings of it to Love me Tonight, though both are good. I've actually been meaning to read your blog for a while, I love Lubitsch.I found the story fairly threadbare, as if Lubitsch and Raphelson didn't really have their hearts in it. I prefer the style of Love Me Tonight.

[Philosophe_rouge]

I found the story fairly threadbare, as if Lubitsch and Raphelson didn't really have their hearts in it. I prefer the style of Love Me Tonight.
I don't know, maybe it's because I had seen THe Marriage Circle so soon before, which is essentially the same plot... but an all around mediocre film. I haven't seen Love me Tonight in quite a while either. I wouldn't consider One Hour with You to be one of Lubitsch's best though, just middle ground... 1932 is not my favourite year.

[origami_mustache]

1. Scarface
2. Freaks
3. Horse Feathers
4. Trouble in Paradise
5. Island of Lost Souls

hm: Blonde Venus, Vampyr, Grand Hotel, The Old Dark House

[dreamdead]

Embarrassing. Only seen Trouble in Paradise and Freaks from this year. I hope to tackle von Sternberg's films soon.

[Kurious Jorge v3.1]

1. I Was Born, but...
2. Shanghai Express
3. Freaks
4. Vampyr

[Yxklyx]

2. Shanghai Express


Doh! I was going to watch this for the '31 consensus - imdb must have changed the year.

[Kurosawa Fan]

Any more? I'll probably close it this afternoon.

[Kurosawa Fan]

Heh. Just realized I hadn't posted my own rankings.

1. Vampyr
2. One Hour With You
3. The Most Dangerous Game
4. Trouble in Paradise
5. Boudu Saved from Drowning


I'll give this a few more hours before it closes.

[Raiders]

3. The Most Dangerous Game
4. Trouble in Paradise
5. Boudu Saved from Drowning

Ew, really?

[Kurosawa Fan]

Ew, really?

Yep. It's B-movie goodness.

[Kurosawa Fan]

Not going to get to this until tomorrow morning, so I'll leave it open until then.

[dreamdead]

If I can sneak in at the last minute...

1. Trouble in Paradise
2. Love Me Tonight
3. Freaks

[Kurosawa Fan]

Cool. This is closed. Results upcoming...

[Kurosawa Fan]

Another top nine, you half-assed participating bastards. :|

[Kurosawa Fan]

#9
http://img180.imageshack.us/img180/294/musicboxie5.jpg
The Music Box
James Parrott


Like the legendary Sisyphus, deliverymen Laurel and Hardy struggle to push a large crated piano up a seemingly insurmountable flight of stairs.

This won the Oscar as "Best Short Subject" of 1932, the only such honor bestowed on a Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy film, and was also the first short to be so honored. The monumental staircase in the film still exists, in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles, between 923 and 937 Vendome Street. There are 131 steps. These are the same steps that were used by The Three Stooges in their two-reeler An Ache in Every Stake (1941), directed by Charley Chase.

"But it is the perfect encapsulation of Laurel and Hardy’s constant world-view that the world and everything in it is against them that makes The Music Box so special. It was Stan Laurel’s favourite film of the 99 he made with Oliver Hardy and it rightly won the inaugural Oscar for best live-action short film." - The Screen Directory (can't find an author for the text)

[Kurosawa Fan]

#8
http://i36.photobucket.com/albums/e4/mike3245/Iwasbornbut.jpg
I Was Born, But...
Yasujiro Ozu


Two young brothers become the leaders of a gang of kids in their neighborhood. Their father is an office clerk who tries for advancement by playing up his boss. When the boys visit the boss' house with their father, they discover that their dad has been making a fool of himself to please his boss, who's son is an outwitted member of the boys' gang.

One of the brothers is played by Tomio Aoki (1923-2004), also known as Tokkan Kozo, a child star of the 20s and 30s who appeared in several Ozu films. It became the first of six Ozu films to win the Kinema Junpô Critics' Prize. Ozu later loosely remade the film as Good Morning in 1959.

"Watching the co-workers’ reactions, Yoshii’s sons understand instinctively that their father is a figure of fun to the other adults. To a kid, especially a boy, there’s nothing worse than a realization like that, and their violent reaction at home later on is both grueling and fair." - Dan Callahan

[Kurosawa Fan]

#7
http://i36.photobucket.com/albums/e4/mike3245/Boudu_1.jpg
Boudu Saved From Drowning
Jean Renoir


Boudu, a tramp, jumps into the Seine. He is rescued by Mr Lestingois, a gentle and good bookseller, who gives shelter to him. Mrs Lestingois and the maid Anne-Marie (Mr Lestingois' mistress) are far from delighted, for Boudu is lazy, dirty and salacious.

The poet on the bench at the beginning is Jacques Becker, assistant director for that movie. He later directed Casque d'or (1952) and other famous movies.

"For a film that is frequently characterized as an unequivocal cherry bomb dropped in the toilet of middle-class airs (a stance fuelled by Simon's blowsy, sensual, canonical performance as Boudu), Renoir's portrayal of the otherwise pathetic Lestingois is surprisingly warm. Even his character's epigrammatic punchline, "one should only rescue those of one's own class," comes from Lestingois as a bemused quip of self-deprecation." - Eric Henderson

[Kurosawa Fan]

#6
http://i36.photobucket.com/albums/e4/mike3245/lovemetonight.jpg
Love Me Tonight
Rouben Mamoulian


A Parisian tailor finds himself posing as a baron in order to collect a sizeable bill from an aristocrat, only to fall in love with an aloof young princess.

For its post Production Code re-release (after 1934), this film was trimmed down to 96 minutes. Those missing minutes have never been restored and are presumed lost. Among the deletions in the film's 1949 reissue was Myrna Loy's portion of the "Mimi" reprise. In the Production Code era, Miss Loy's negligee was deemed too revealing.

"The spirit of experimentalism didn't escape the famed Broadway composer-lyricist team of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart either. They supply the festivities with a full slate of witty, cheeky tunes that are as willfully facetious ("Mimi") as they are heavily meta (on the artifice of the musical comedy, much in the same way as the more renowned Singin' in the Rain)." - Eric Henderson

[Kurosawa Fan]

#5
http://i36.photobucket.com/albums/e4/mike3245/IAmafugitivefromachaingang.jpg
I am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang
Mervyn LeRoy


Wrongly convicted James Allen serves in the intolerable conditions of a southern chain gang, which later comes back to haunt him.

The final fade came as an accident. Director Mervyn LeRoy had planned to go to a blackout after the final line. During rehearsals, a light blew, taking the fuse with it. The resultant slow fade, starting just before the final line, was so powerful that Leroy decided to shoot the film exactly that way.

"Only with a character as noble as Oliver Twist or David Copperfield are people able to endure such misery, and Paul Muni plays a character so single-minded in his pursuit of freedom, so damned anxious for even the smallest victory, that he makes Fugitive absolutely riveting." - Jeremiah Kipp

[Kurosawa Fan]

#4
http://i36.photobucket.com/albums/e4/mike3245/scarface.jpg
Scarface
Howard Hawks


An ambitious and near insanely violent gangster climbs the ladder of success in the mob, but his weaknesses prove to be his downfall.

This is one of the first films to feature the Thompson submachine gun, known to history as the "tommy gun." The characters never call it anything other than "machine gun," except when Poppy calls it a "bean shooter" and Tommy refers to the gun as a "typewriter" when he first sees one. Another name for a "tommy gun" was "Chicago typewriter." Al Capone was rumored to have liked the film so much that he had his own copy of it.

"It is a stirring picture, efficiently directed and capably acted, but as was once said of "The Covered Wagon," that it was all very well if you liked wagons, so this is an excellent diversion for those who like to take an afternoon or an evening off to study the activities of cowardly thugs." - Mordaunt Hall, NY Times, 1932

[Kurosawa Fan]

#3
http://i36.photobucket.com/albums/e4/mike3245/vampyr.jpg
Vampyr
Carl Theodor Dreyer


Young traveller Allan Grey arrives in a remote castle and starts seeing weird, inexplicable sights (a man whose shadow has a life of its own, a mysterious scythe-bearing figure tolling a bell, a terrifying dream of his own burial). Things come to a head when one of the daughters of the lord of the castle succumbs to anaemia - or is it something more sinister?

The movie was dubbed into English, French, and German versions for different markets. Its actors came from varied national and linguistic backgrounds, and so in certain versions it appears that some of them are speaking their lines phonetically. Additionally, the film was shot fairly cheaply using an experimental sound process, and the technical quality of the soundtrack leaves much to be desired. Most versions in distribution through the late 1990s (including those on video) are composites of the German and French versions, which differ for cuts made by the censors in each of those countries. As of 2004, no prints of the English version are known to circulate.

"Though called Vampyr, the film is almost as much a ghost story. Grey often sees other villagers as walking shadows leading him into the unknown. Sometimes they walk through a lit area or we see them and their shadow in the same shot, so we don't know what's real or fake, dream or reality." - Mike Lorefice

[Raiders]

Another top nine, you half-assed participating bastards. :|

Seems more likely people haven't seen much from 1932.

[Kurosawa Fan]

#2
http://i36.photobucket.com/albums/e4/mike3245/freaks.jpg
Freaks
Tod Browning


A circus' beautiful trapeze artist agrees to marry the leader of side-show performers, but his deformed friends discover she is only marrying him for his inheritance.

After the film had been withdrawn and shelved by MGM, the distribution rights were acquired by notorious exploitation roadshow specialist Dwain Esper. Esper traveled the country showing the film under such lurid titles as "Forbidden Love" and "Nature's Mistakes". F. Scott Fitzgerald was a member of the MGM writing department at the time the movie was in production. He never felt quite at home with all the movie stars and powerful moguls, and so he often dined in the commissary at the table of the sideshow attractions (freaks) during his lunch hour.

"Though Freaks doesn't actively attack Louis B. Mayer (it wasn't until after its disastrous release that the studio honcho removed his famous logo from the film), it's very much conscious of the way an insular society (whether it's the film's traveling circus or the Hollywood studio system) exploits populist notions of beauty for commercial gain. Who are the "freaks" of the film's title then? Why, it's anyone who fails to recognize the humanity of the film's deformed lot." - Ed Gonzalez

[Kurosawa Fan]

Seems more likely people haven't seen much from 1932.

Who invited you to comment in this thread?

[Raiders]

Who invited you to comment in this thread?

Nobody. It was the aroma of the fine whine.

[Kurosawa Fan]

#1
http://i36.photobucket.com/albums/e4/mike3245/troubleinparadise.jpg
Trouble in Paradise
Ernst Lubitsch


Gaston Monescu, world-famous thief, and Lily Vautier love each other for their wicked (and clever) ways. Gaston manages to insinuate himself into the home, and the heart, of wealthy and beautiful Mariette Colet--risking his own heart and Lily's jealousy in the process.

This movie was popular both with critics and with audiences, but was made before the enforcement of the production code. After 1935, it was withdrawn from circulation and was not seen again until 1968. The film was never available on videocassette and only became available on DVD in 2003. Cary Grant was also considered to play the leading part, but in 1932 he was still too young for the part. Ernst Lubitsch wanted the touch of experience in the actor face, so he chose the 42-year-old Herbert Marshall and 33-year-old Kay Francis who can supply that look.

"The sexual undertones are surprisingly frank in this pre-Code 1932 film, and we understand that none of the three characters is in any danger of mistaking sex for love. Both Lily and Mariette know what they want, and Gaston knows that he has it. His own feelings for them are masked beneath an impenetrable veneer of sophisticated banter." - Roger Ebert

[Kurosawa Fan]

Nobody. It was the aroma of the fine whine.

:lol:

Quit stealing my thunder.

[Kurosawa Fan]

Final Scores:

1. Trouble in Paradise - 48.5
2. Freaks - 46.5
3. Vampyr - 27
4. Scarface - 26.5
5. I am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang - 26
6. Love Me Tonight - 17
7. Boudu Saved From Drowning - 13.5
8. I Was Born, But... - 12
9. The Music Box - 10

Close, but no cigar:

The Most Dangerous Game - 8.5
One Hour With You - 7.5