Two Capra Oscar winners

It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, 1934) 

It Happened One Night reminds me of Some Like It Hot, another putative comedy that isn't all that funny. As the AWOL socialite and the street-smart reporter chasing her, Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable are sexy, natural, and even deserving of their Oscars. But the only time they generate spasmodic laughter is when they're not playing themselves, i.e., the scene when they're posing as bickering husband and wife to hoodwink detectives. The hilarious moments belong to tertiary characters such as the oily Oscar Shapeley (Roscoe Karns) trying to pick up Colbert on a bus and, especially, Danker (Alan Hale) who turns everything Colbert and Gable say into a song. The chief value of It Happened One Night, then, is how it puts a later Colbert comedy into relief. One of the many reasons why The Palm Beach Story (Preston Sturges, 1942) is the greatest classical Hollywood comedy is that Sturges ceded much of his story to secondary characters, draining the exigency from the central heterosexual romance and fashioning a more inclusive universe. 

You Can't Take It with You (Frank Capra, 1938)

Anyone upset with Beyoncé for telling the masses to quit their jobs on "Break My Soul" will loathe this film. As per Richard Dyer's famous dictum, You Can't Take It with You tells us what utopia feels like but not how to organize it. Poppins (the perfectly named Donald Meek) is our surrogate. Early in the film, he leaves his position as an accountant for the nasty banker Anthony P. Kirby (Edward Arnold) to join the eccentrics at Grandpa Martin Vanderhof's (Lionel Barrymore) home, an artist and inventor utopia threatened by Kirby's desire to tear it down and expand his empire. We want to be like Poppins and join this collective. But how will we sustain ourselves? How do they sustain themselves? Does Spring Byington's typing bring any money in? Ann Miller's dancing? What about all those inventions blowing up in the basement? Is this the Empire Records of 1938? 

It Happened One Night: B+

You Can't Take It with You: B+

Memorial Day catch up

An evening of eh.

Call Me Madam (Walter Lang, 1953) bears all the markings of 1950s Hollywood bloat. Too long and too expensive, it helped render the musical an increasingly untenable proposition despite containing perhaps the quintessential Ethel Merman film performance. A pop-friendly editor could easily chop 25 minutes from the running time. At the very least, the moments when George Sanders sings (!) have got to go. Still, even the non-Ethel numbers roar, especially a drunk Donald O'Connor in "What Chance Have I With Love?" singing the type of clever/corny lyrics that made Sondheim roll his eyes. Try "Look at what it did to Romeo/It dealt poor Romey an awful blow" or "If an apple could finish Adam/They could knock me off with a grape."

The Affairs of Dobie Gillis (Don Weis, 1953) - That pop-friendly editor would leave just two Youtube clips - Bob Fosse, Debbie Reynolds, Barbara Ruick, and Bobby Van hoofing it up at a college juke joint and Van alone in "I'm Thru With Love." Otherwise, Slog Central even at 72 minutes.

Frozen (Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee, 2013) - The last shot shows Anna and Elsa skating together rather than Anna locking lips with Kristoff (and Elsa remains partnerless). A mildly radical payoff for sitting through a slate of crummy, dead-bottomed songs. Best part - Olaf confessing he has no bones.

The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, 2013) - I'll admit that every time Leo started to explain IPOs or whatever, I wanted to ask him to slow down. But that's no excuse for Scorsese allowing him to abandon the explanations. So, slow down! As Todd Haynes proved with his even longer Mildred Pierce, there's enormous drama in laying out processes. In any event, we need to update Richard Dyer's dictum in "Entertainment and Utopia" to demonstrate that Hollywood films show us not how to organize dystopia but what it feels like (for those who organize dystopia). Sequel: The Schmucks of Any Street - a glimpse into the lives destroyed by Jordan Belfort et al. and an investigation into Belfort's current life of exorbitant speaker fees and pokey paybacks.