Burl reviews Design for Living! (1933)

Hi, Burl here to deliver a bit more of the old Burlitsch Touch! Ha ha, I’m not sure if there really is a Burlitsch Touch, but certainly we all know there’s a Lubitsch Touch, and that came of course from good old Ernst Lubitsch, who brought us pictures like Eternal Love, The Shop Around the Corner, and Heaven Can Wait!

All fine pictures in their way, but my very favourite of them all is Design for Living, the picture I want to write about today! Ha ha, this is a pre-Code picture, based on a play by Noël Coward, and is very contemporary in its themes! (They were still making pictures on these themes in the 1990s, though considerably relieved of the wit with which Design for Living is amply supplied – remember Threesomes for example, or Three of Hearts? Ha ha, you don’t? Well don’t worry about it!)

Of course this movie’s best and most relevant antecedent is Jules et Jim, but Design for Living neglects to include the tragic ending, and more importantly omits the implication of mental disturbance as a necessary prerequisite for enjoying a non-traditional romantic or sexual situation! In fact the movie celebrates the capacity for such relationships! Most unusual for 1933, or for almost any period I can think of! Ha ha!

The story kicks off on a train, where two sleeping fellows, Tom and George, are sketched by their compartment-mate, a commercial illustrator called Gilda! (That’s pronounced “Jilda,” by the way!) Tom and George (which is to say Fredric March and Gary Cooper) are old friends and roommates who share a bohemian atelier in Paris! Tom is a playwright, George a painter, and neither can as yet claim much success! Quickly a romantic triangle forms, and this is supplanted by a “gentleman’s agreement” whereby the happy-go-lucky Gilda, played by the delightful Miriam Hopkins, becomes the pair’s “art mother,” and guides them to success and acclaim!

But of course the gentleman’s agreement falls apart (“I, unfortunately, am no gentleman, ha ha!” Gilda laments), and matters are further complicated by a stuffed-shirt advertiser played by Edward Everett Horton! (He played these roles whenever a snippier version of Ralph Bellamy was required!) “Ha ha, immorality may be fun, but it isn’t fun enough to take the place of one hundred percent virtue and three square meals a day!” says Horton several times!

Anyway, the picture is very funny, and the script, which was by all reports, especially screenwriter Ben Hecht’s, vastly overhauled from the original Coward play, is a constant delight! All the performances are good, but I was especially taken with Coop, to tell you the truth! And can you imagine a movie featuring both Edward Everett Horton and Franklin Pangborn? Ha ha, friends, this is it!

Yes, this really is a great picture, and almost certainly my very favourite romantic comedy ever! I mean, When Harry Met Sally is fine and all, but this is the real deal! I give Design for Living four Eaglebauers, which is the highest number of Eaglebauers I have ever awarded a film! Ha ha!

Burl reviews Eternal Love! (1929)

Shhhhh! It’s Burl, here to review a silent movie for you! I really enjoy a good silent picture, and often think I should watch more of them! I haven’t seen that one that came out relatively recently, The Artist, though it seems like the silent aspect might be a bit of a gimmick more than anything! I’ve never seen Mel Brooks’ Silent Movie either, which circumstance I really must remedy one of these days!

The silent movie I’m talking about today is called Eternal Love, and it’s an early picture by Ernst Lubitsch! And yes, before you ask, it has his touch, more so I’d say than his later-period Heaven Can Wait, which was delightful but a bit more ponderous than one hopes for from this brilliant cinematician!

Eternal Love is a mountain picture, and that’s a genre for which I feel a perpetual fascination! From the works of Dr. Arnold Fanck to Leni Riefenstal’s The Blue Light all the way up to Guy Maddin’s Careful, the mountain picture has proven itself to be as packed with delights as a Taverner’s tin is full of fruit drops! Drama, pathos, romantic love: it all seems much magnified in the thin air of the upper altitudes!

In Eternal Love, the hawk-nosed Mr. John Barrymore plays Marcus, a mountain hunter in an early 19^th Century Swiss alpenvillage! He’s in love with the beautiful Ciglia; meanwhile, a wild mountain girl (there’s one of these in every mountain picture, it seems!) named Pia is in love with him! And an upright fellow named Lorenz Gruber is in love with Ciglia! Well, this romantic quadrangle is spun into dissaray when the demon drink gets involved one night after a town dance is held to celebrate the departure of the filthy French! Marcus’s hands get a little too busy, and the next thing you know his bedroom’s been invaded! Ha ha, it all goes south from there, with wedding bells a-ringing, but for the wrong sets of people!

A fearsome alpenstorm sets up the final conflict, as is so frequently the case in mountain pictures! Pia thinks Marcus is lost in the storm, and knocks on every door of the village trying, absurdly prematurely, to raise a search party! She ends up at Lorenz Gruber’s house, and he sees by Ciglia’s reaction to the suggestion that Marcus may be lost that his wife is still in love with this rugged mountaineer! Marcus ambles out of the storm safe as a linebacker, and Lorenz Gruber offers him money to leave the town forever! But Marcus, unhappy in his marriage to Pia – and prone to upending the dinner table every now and then – isn’t going to budge! This sets up the climactic events, which involve an absolutely stunning shot of an avalanche, and is altogether one of the most emotionally devastating endings I’ve seen in a movie for some time!

The narrative is pretty compelling, and the acting only occasionally lapses into the big-eyed gesticulating silent melodramas are known for; but it must be said that Eternal Love’s primary virtues are pictorial! It was shot in the Rocky Mountains of Alberta, and there are no end of breathtaking shots and sequences! There are great camera movements to remind us of how free the camera was in the days before microphones hidden in planters, and just plain marvelous direction! I give Eternal Love, which must have been one of the last silent pictures made (and was goat-glanded with a few sound effects here and there, actually) three and a half grimacing gargoyle masks!

Burl reviews Heaven Can Wait! (1943)

Hi there, it’s Burl here to review an old Technicolor classic, Ernst Lubitsch’s Heaven Can Wait! I thought it might be a sort of American version of that great Archers film A Matter of Life and Death, but it’s not – it’s more of an excuse to tell a story about a man’s life and his obsession with aging, with bookending segments set in, of all places, an antechamber to hell!

Don Ameche is the star – ha ha, you probably remember him from Cocoon! Or was he the old lady in Driving Miss Daisy? Anyway, here he plays Henry Van Cleve, of the New York Van Cleves, a septuagenarian boulevardier who dies and strolls down to H-E-double hockeysticks because that’s where he figures he belongs after a life of cadding about! Well, Old Scratch himself is there, or possibly it’s his secretary (whoever it is, he’s referred to as His Excellency), and he’s a very polite and nice individual who doubts that Henry really belongs in the Great Below. So he listens to Henry’s life story, which we see played out through the movie’s 112 minute running time – a lot longer than most movies of the day, and certainly longer than most other Lubitsch movies!

Turns out Henry’s not such a bad guy! We see very little of his caddish behavior, but we hear about some of it and see the effect on his family, mostly his wife Martha, who is played by Gene Tierney, and who packs up and leaves him at one point to return to her Midwest meat-baron parents, who hate each other and who are played by Eugene Pallette and Marjorie Main!

That’s one of the best things about this movie, the wonderful character actors who fill the supporting roles! Besides Pallette, who I’m sure you remember fondly from My Man Godfrey, and Main, who was Ma Kettle of course, you get Louis Calhern as Henry’s dad, Spring Byington as his mom, and the awesome Charles Coburn as his feisty old grandpa, one of the best characters in the whole movie! And Laird Cregar, who died shortly after this movie when he was still in his early 30s, is great as His Excellency – what a magnificent voice he had, and if only he’d been able to keep acting, we’d have had some dandy performances through the 1950s and maybe right into the Nineties, who knows!

The other great things about this movie include the Technicolor photography by Edward Cronjager, which is magnificent, and the sets and costumes, and the excellent aging makeup! If that website that did a video about terrible aging makeup ever did one on great aging makeup, they should sure include this movie! (Though, ha ha, since we know what an old Ameche looks like, I can’t say they pulled it off with complete accuracy; but they were makeup artists, not Nostrodamuses after all!)

Still, this does have its faults! It’s too long, a little shapeless and, aside from a few moments here and there, and especially one moment involving a book right near the end, doesn’t really have the emotional impact you might expect from a life-story movie! It’s not Lubitsch’s best work, that’s for sure – it’s no Design For Living, anyway – but it still has lots of clever and hilarious little aspects to it! It might not quite have The Lubitsch Touch, but I would say he must have at least breathed heavily on it! I give it three antechambers to hell!