MC Yearly Consensus - 1937

[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 thread is locked, 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)

[origami_mustache]

Humanity and Paper Balloons
Pépé le Moko
The Grand Illusion
Lost Horizon
A Day At the Races

[Raiders]

1. Stage Door
2. Make Way for Tomorrow
3. The Awful Truth
4. You Only Live Once
5. The Grand Illusion

[Yxklyx]

1. Young and Innocent (Alfred Hitchcock)
2. The Grand Illusion (Jean Renoir)
3. Stella Dallas (King Vidor)
4. Pépé le Moko (Julien Duvivier)
5. Stage Door (Gregory La Cava)

6. The Edge of the World (Michael Powell)
7. Lost Horizon (Frank Capra)
8. A Star is Born (William A. Wellman & Jack Conway)
9. Easy Living (Mitchell Leisen)
10. Drôle de drame (Marcel Carné)

[soitgoes...]

1. The Grand Illusion (Jean Renoir)
2. Make Way for Tomorrow (Leo McCarey)
3. Humanity and Paper Balloons (Sadao Yamanaka)
4. The Life of Emile Zola (William Dieterle)
5. The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey)
-----------------------------------------
6. The Spanish Earth (Joris Ivens)
7. The Hurricane (John Ford)
8. The Edge of the World (Michael Powell)
9. Porky's Duck Hunt (Tex Avery)

[Kurosawa Fan]

1. The Grand Illusion
2. The Old Mill
3. Lonesome Ghosts

[Boner M]

1. The Awful Truth
2. History is Made at Night
3. Stage Door
4. The Grand Illusion
5. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

[dreamdead]

1. Make Way for Tomorrow
2. The Awful Truth
3. The Grand Illusion
4. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves

[Russ]

1. Make Way for Tomorrow
2. The Awful Truth
3. Way Out West
4. Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba's Forty Thieves
5. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

[dreamdead]

I should again voice my discontent that McCarey's other film still has no dvd release date... :cry:

[origami_mustache]

3. Humanity and Paper Balloons (Sadao Yamanaka)


woops forgot about this...one of my favorites.

[Ezee E]

1. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
2. Day at the Races
3. The Grand Illusion
4. Porky's Duck Hunt

[Derek]

1. Make Way for Tomorrow (Leo McCarey)
2. You Only Live Once (Fritz Lang)
3. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (Disney, various)
4. Stage Door (Gregory La Cava)
5. The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey)

HM's: The Grand Illusion (Jean Renoir), Angel (Ernst Lubitsch), Pepe le Moko (Julien Duvivier)

[Raiders]

Too much Snow White. Not enough Stage Door.

[Derek]

Too much Snow White. Not enough Stage Door.

I'd say not quite enough Stage Door, but the lack of You Only Live Once votes is more disheartening.

[Eleven]

1. Grand Illusion
2. You Only Live Once
3. Stage Door
4. Pepe le Moko
5. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

HMs: The Edge of the World, Lost Horizon, Young and Innocent.

[Qrazy]

1. Grande illusion, La (1937)
2. Pépé le Moko (1937)
3. Day at the Races, A (1937)
4. Awful Truth, The (1937)
5. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

[Weeping_Guitar]

1. Grand Illusion
2. Pepe Le Moko
3. The Awful Truth
4. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
5. Stage Door

[Kurious Jorge v3.1]

1. Humanity and Paper Balloons
2. The Edge of the World
3. Grand Illusion

[Mysterious Dude]

1. Dead End
2. Captains Courageous
3. Grand Illusion
4. You Only Live Once
5. A Day at the Races

[Philosophe_rouge]

ARHGH.

1. The AWFUL TRUTH
2. La Grande Illusion
3. Nothing Sacred
4. Pepe le Moko
5. History is made at night

[Grouchy]

1. La Grande Illusion
2. A Day at the Races
3. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves

[koji]

1. Grand Illusion (Jean Renoir)
2. Pépé le Moko (Julien Duvivier)
3. The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey)
4. A Day at the Races (Sam Wood)
5. You Only Live Once (Lang)

[dreamdead]

:pritch:

I got the hook-up and will be viewing Make Way for Tomorrow tomorrow. Very excited.

[monolith94]

1. Grand Illusion
2. Captains Courageous
3. Young and Innocent
4. A Day at the Races

[Russ]

Tomorrow tomorrow
http://img171.imageshack.us/img171/6448/annie061204198sr1.jpg

[dreamdead]

I got the hook-up and will be viewing Make Way for Tomorrow tomorrow. Very excited.

:eek: Damn. Edited my list accordingly.

[Raiders]

:eek: Damn. Edited my list accordingly.

Alright. Considering the amount of love this has now gotten and the absolutely pathetic amount of love for La Cava's masterful film, I edited my list. I don't care if that's "unethical," I love both films quite equally and this has become a necessary action.

[Derek]

Alright. Considering the amount of love this has now gotten and the absolutely pathetic amount of love for La Cava's masterful film, I edited my list. I don't care if that's "unethical," I love both films quite equally and this has become a necessary action.

Huh? Stage Door is on 6 people's lists. Make Way is on 5.

[Raiders]

Huh? Stage Door is on 6 people's lists. Make Way is on 5.

Placement and points though, definitely favor McCarey's film. I just feel after going through the two films I have a stronger desire to see La Cava's film do well as opposed to McCarey's. Maybe it is that one has a wide availability and still seems somewhat absent overall.

[Derek]

Placement and points though, definitely favor McCarey's film. I just feel after going through the two films I have a stronger desire to see La Cava's film do well as opposed to McCarey's. Maybe it is that one has a wide availability and still seems somewhat absent overall.

True. I won't argue that more people need to see Stage Door, even if it's not on the same level as McCarey's IMO.

[Spinal]

1. The Grand Illusion
2. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
3. Pepe Le Moko

[Kurosawa Fan]

I have Thursday off of work, so I'll keep this open until that morning and then start the tally.

[Kurosawa Fan]

Closed. Results to come later today.

[Kurosawa Fan]

#10
http://img210.imageshack.us/img210/8004/youngandinnocentql0.jpg
Young and Innocent
Alfred Hitchcock

A film actress is murdered and discovered on the beach by her ex-boyfriend the next day. He runs to call the police, however, two witnesses think that he is the escaping murderer. Robert is arrested, but owing to a mix up at the courthouse, he escapes and goes on the run with a police constable's daughter Erica, determined to prove his innocence.

Alfred Hitchcock's cameo in this film comes outside the courthouse, where he can be seen holding a camera as Derrick De Marney escapes. The hand that pulls Nova Pilbeams character out of the hole in the mine scene was that of her future husband Pen Tennyson; they met on this film.

"Thankfully, Hitch never let repartee (or much of anything else) get in the way of an important camera move, and there is one particular shot in Young and Innocent that is worth waiting 70 minutes of the movie to see. A beautifully crisp, smooth, ambitious crane shot (which must have been hell to pull off in little Gaumont British Studios in 1937) starts in a very wide shot of a hotel lobby, and keeps moving, closer and closer, until it finally rests on one of the largest close-ups of a pair of eyes I’ve seen outside of a Sergio Leone picture... [It's] just a simple reminder of just what makes Hitchcock… well… Hitchcock." - Paul Bryant

[Kurosawa Fan]

#9
http://img357.imageshack.us/img357/5931/humanityfy4.jpg
Humanity and Paper Balloons
Sadao Yamanaka

The story develops in the Tokugawa era of the 18th century, in a poor district of Tokyo, where impoverished samurai live from hand to mouth among equally poor people of lower social classes. One such ronin (masterless samurai) Matajuro, spends his day looking for work whilst his wife, Otaki, makes cheap paper balloons at home. One rainy night, Shinza, a barber, and equally penniless, impulsively abducts the daughter of a wealthy merchant, hiding her at Matajuros home. Their desperate plan has grave consequences when a ransom attempt backfires.

Yamanaka was drafted into the Japanese army, entering the service on the day Humanity and Paper Balloons was released theatrically, and died during the war at the age of 29, while stationed in Manchuria. With the exception of this film, and 2 others, Yamanaka's 30+ films were lost after the war.

"Yamanaka could not have made Humanity and Paper Balloons without the collaboration of the Zenshin-za actors, who deliver indelibly nuanced, naturalistic performances, but he was no more a director of filmed theatre than Renoir was. His response to the rise of militarism and the worsening impoverishment of working-class people in the 1930s was to trust an idiom of poetic realism to express his sense of helplessness. Decency and honour, he shows, have become as worthless as a paper balloon blown into an open sewer." - Tony Rayns

[Kurosawa Fan]

#8
http://img210.imageshack.us/img210/8826/youonlyliveoncepo6.jpg
You Only Live Once
Fritz Lang

Joan is the secretary to the public defender in a large city. She is in love with a career criminal named Eddie, and she believes that he is a basically good person who just had some tough breaks. She uses her influence to get him released early, and he tries to go straight after marrying her, but things don't work out, and they both go on the lam.

PCA director Joseph Breen objected to the robbery scene details which were against the production code. Specifically, he listed "no flash of a man's face contorted with agony, no showing of a woman lying on the sidewalk, no hurling of bombs, no cop lying on the street, his face contorted with pain, no truck crushing out the life of a cop, no terrible screaming, no shots of bodies lying around, no figure of a little girl huddled in death, no shrieks." The print received by the PCA ran 100 minutes, and it is clear from the released print that some of these items and other scenes were cut, and the PCA finally gave it an approved certificate.

"Fritz Lang follows up his Fury (1936) with another wallop. You Only Live Once is full of stark and bitter moments, but these bite no more deeply than deftly wrought scenes of tenderness. The self-sacrificing love of the girl for the ex-convict reaches a high level of heart-tugging during their flight as fugitives from the law." - Variety staff, 1937

[Kurosawa Fan]

#7
http://img357.imageshack.us/img357/750/stagedoorkx3.gif
Stage Door
Gregory La Cava

Terry Randall, rich society beauty, has decided to see if she can break into the Broadway theatre scene without her family connections. She goes to live in a theatrical boarding house and finds her life caught up with those of the other inmates and the ever-present disappointment that theatrical hopefuls must live with.

Katharine Hepburn was supposed to star in the original Broadway play of Stage Door, but producer Leland Hayward, supposedly jealous of her deepening friendship with John Ford, gave Margaret Sullavan the role. Hayward later married Sullavan. Sullavan was supposed to star in the film version but was pregnant with their first child. Ann Miller, who was only 14 years-old during casting, secured her role in the film with a fake birth certificate. Lucille Ball always called this movie her big break.

"Fuck All About Eve. The real masterpiece about women and theater is Gregory La Cava's Stage Door, a film which casts Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Eve Arden, Lucille Ball and many other RKO women of the era as out-of-work actresses in a theatrical boarding house called The Footlights Club. Excitingly feminist, marked by the Depression, and obsessed by the sound of women talking, yelping, singing and generally whooping it up, Stage Door, though well-loved by many, has never garnered a big reputation, probably because La Cava himself has been overlooked in studies of major directors of the period." - Dan Callahan, Slant Magazine

[Raiders]

Pathetic.

:evil:

[Kurosawa Fan]

#6
http://img357.imageshack.us/img357/3723/dayatracesqy4.jpg
A Day at the Races
Sam Wood

A vet posing as a doctor, a race horse owner and his friends struggle to help keep a sanitarium open with the help of a misfit racehorse.

MGM executive Irving Thalberg died within two weeks of the start of filming. He was instrumental in bringing the brothers back to greatness with A Night at the Opera (1935) and was the brothers' main supporter at MGM. Groucho claimed that he lost interest in films after Thalberg's death. The "Grand Steeplechase" sequence at the end had to be shot twice. Both times a crew member persuaded Chico Marx to gamble on it and not only to bet on the outcome of a rigged non-race, but to bet on a horse other than the one scripted to win. Chico, all his life an avid gambler, could offer as excuse only, "The odds were 20 to one."

"The major problem with A Day at the Races is that it spends what seems like months establishing its story of foreclosure and narrow rescue from financial ruin. Having the Marx Bros. play comic relief to some kind of half-baked old Hollywood melodrama is the worst kind of yoke. Limiting their riffs in this way is all the more unforgivable for the standard time Marx Bros. flicks are given over to what begin to seem like the same piano/production/harp musical interstitials." - Walter Chaw

[Kurosawa Fan]

#5
http://img111.imageshack.us/img111/1112/makewayzm2.jpg
Make Way for Tomorrow
Leo McCarey

Ma & Pa spend their last day together in New York City, and depart to separate nursing homes from the same train station they had arrived on to being their Honeymoon.

Though they play elderly parents who have been cast aside by their children, Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi were only 61 and 49, respectively, when this film was made. This is one of over 700 Paramount Productions, filmed between 1929 and 1949, which were sold to MCA/Universal in 1958 for television distribution, and have been owned and controlled by Universal ever since.

"If one believes that true cinema artistry is measured primarily by recognition and reward, then Leo McCarey more than earned his place in the directorial pantheon with the popular Cary Grant/Irene Dunne divorce comedy The Awful Truth. Yet when accepting his Best Director Oscar for the film, McCarey offered a mild rebuke to the majority opinion: "Thanks, but you gave it to me for the wrong picture." McCarey was speaking of Make Way for Tomorrow." - Keith Uhlich

[Kurosawa Fan]

#4
http://img111.imageshack.us/img111/4645/pepelemokods5.jpg
Pepe le Moko
Julien Duvivier

Pépé le Moko is a gangster from Paris that hides in Algier's Casbah. In the Casbah, he is safe and is able to elude the police's attempts to capture him. But he misses his freedom, after two years in the Casbah. He meets a gorgeous Parisian tourist, Gaby, and they fall in love. Native inspector Slimane tries to use her to attract Pépé out of the Casbah in order to catch him.

When Walter Wanger produced Algiers (1938), the American remake, he tired to have all copies of "Pépé le Moko" destroyed. Fortunately, he was not able to do so.

"Much of the credit goes to star Gabin in the title role. He plays a French gangster who robbed a bank in Paris of millions of francs and then fled to the Casbah, the Arab quarter of Algiers, with his gang. Fearless, humane, an intensely masculine and unflappably charismatic presence who was completely natural on screen, Gabin is a star for whom there is no exact American equivalent. Often cast as a doomed man, the actor combines characteristics of Gary Cooper and Jimmy Cagney and comes up with an immaculately dressed gangster who makes women feel faint. Pepe may notice a woman's jewels first, but he's too much of a gentleman to say so." - Kenneth Turan, L.A. Times

[Kurosawa Fan]

#3
http://img111.imageshack.us/img111/4360/snowwhiteqc3.jpg
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
David Hand

A young princess finds herself on the run from her wicked stepmother and finds refuge in a small cottage out in the forest with seven pint-sized men who immediately decide to adopt and protect her with their lives.

Fifty ideas for the dwarves' names and personalities were listed in the film's proposal; the list included all of the names finally included except Dopey and Doc (Dopey being the last to be developed). Some of the dwarves were: Awful, Biggy, Blabby, Dirty, Gabby, Gaspy, Gloomy, Hoppy, Hotsy, Jaunty, Jumpy, Nifty, and Shifty. Sneezy was a last-minute replacement for Jumpy. Convinced that it would fail, the Hollywood film industry labeled the film "Disney's Folly".

"If Walt Disney's ''Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs'' had been primarily about Snow White, it might have been forgotten soon after its 1937 premiere, and treasured today only for historical reasons, as the first full-length animated feature in color. Snow White is, truth to tell, a bit of a bore, not a character who acts but one whose mere existence inspires others to act. The mistake of most of Disney's countless imitators over the years has been to confuse the titles of his movies with their subjects. ''Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs'' is not so much about Snow White or Prince Charming as about the Seven Dwarfs and the evil Queen--and the countless creatures of the forest and the skies, from a bluebird that blushes to a turtle who takes forever to climb up a flight of stairs." - Roger Ebert

[Kurosawa Fan]

#2
http://img210.imageshack.us/img210/6626/awfulcuteiq9.jpg
The Awful Truth
Leo McCarey

Unfounded suspicions lead a married couple to begin divorce proceedings, whereupon they start undermining each other's attempts to find new romance.

Much of the film was improvised by director Leo McCarey and the cast during filming each day. Cary Grant was so convinced this film was not working, he begged to released during production. The film turned out to be a big hit.

"The Awful Truth shines for its beautiful mingling of verbal, character-driven humor and superbly paced slapstick. The tale of the hats, the fatal mix-up involving Jerry's and Armand's derbies, is probably the most elegant hat-play on film, Stan and Ollie gone uptown. McCarey almost seems to be working on a dare — taking the lowest piece of vaudeville shtick, putting it on Park Avenue, and making it work." - Alan Vanneman

[Kurosawa Fan]

#1
http://img111.imageshack.us/img111/8963/grandillusionsk6.jpg
The Grand Illusion
Jean Renoir

During the first World War, two French soldiers, the aristocratic Boieldieu and the working class Marechal, are shot down and captured by the polite German aristocrat, von Rauffenstein. The French are placed in a prisoner-of-war camp where they meet and befriend their fellow countrymen held there. They work together to dig a hole in an attempt to escape but are forced to switch camps just before it is completed. After a few years, Boieldieu and Marechal are placed in the supposedly inescapable German fortress, Wintersborn, which is run by von Rauffenstein. There the two French meet with their pal from an earlier camp, a wealthy middle class Jew named Rosenthal, and plan a way to regain their freedom.

Jean Renoir was an aviator for the French Army during World War I, actor Jean Gabin (as Maréchal) wears Renoir's uniform in the film. Orson Welles once said, "If I had to save only one film in the world, it would be Grand Illusion." The little girl who played 'Lotte' never saw the film, having died of the flu some weeks before it was released.

"But if Grand Illusion had been merely a source of later inspiration, it wouldn't be on so many lists of great films. It's not a movie about a prison escape, nor is it jingoistic in its politics; it's a meditation on the collapse of the old order of European civilization. Perhaps that was always a sentimental upper-class illusion, the notion that gentlemen on both sides of the lines subscribed to the same code of behavior. Whatever it was, it died in the trenches of World War I." - Roger Ebert

[Kurosawa Fan]

Final Scores:

1. The Grand Illusion - 76
2. The Awful Truth - 36.5
3. Snow White - 32
4. Pepe le Moko - 28.5
5. Make Way for Tomorrow - 23
6. A Day at the Races - 22.5
7. Stage Door - 20
8. You Only Live Once - 16.5
9. Humanity and Paper Balloons - 13.5
10. Young and Innocent - 8.5

11. Captain Courageous - 8
12. History is Made at Night - 6.5