Okay, falling asleep last night I don’t know why, but I thought of the movie CASABLANCA, still one of my all time favorites, and somehow got hung up on the rhythmic melody of its four-syllable title and thought, hmmmm, that’d make an interesting list.
So this is what I came up with for movies I dig whose titles have only four syllables:
ALL ABOUT EVE
BLACK ORPHEUS
CASABLANCA
DRUGSTORE COWBOY
ERASERHEAD
FROZEN RIVER
GOOD WILL HUNTING
HIGH SIERRA
IN WHICH WE SERVE
JURASSIC PARK
KING OF THE HILL
LITTLE CHILDREN
MY MAN GODFREY
NOTORIOUS
OPEN CITY
PRIZZI’S HONOR
QUEEN CHRISTINA
RADIO DAYS
STORMY WEATHER
THAT THING YOU DO!
UNFORGIVEN
V?
WESTSIDE STORY
X?
YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN
ZORBA THE GREEK
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9 comments:
"Blackboard Jungle."
Where is "The Godfather"? C'mon, M. Also, I must say that I hated "Prizzi's Honor."
TPW
Yeah BLACKBOARD JUNGLE. And TP, I thought of THE GODFATHER but decided I'd try to do it without any "the"'s and "a"s etc. As for PRIZZI'S HONOR, there's an awful lot of fun acting in that flick, not least of all Bill Hickey as the don.
the best noir ever:
KISS ME DEADLY
Got to disagree. OUT OF THE PAST is my favorite film noir, I didn't dig that what was his name, who played the Mike Hammer character. Never liked him in anything actually.
That's pretty funny though that I thought of OPEN CITY before OUT OF THE PAST, especially since I'd just written a post with that title!
OUT OF THE PAST is great,
Mitchum, Douglas, Jane Greer, Rhonda Fleming, what a cast,
a classic plot, the location scenes are perfect and pastoral,
it's a masterpiece——
but it's not out of the past, it's in the past— its tropes are dated— or another way to put it, it's '40s noir,
contrast that with the macguffin in KMD:
a suitcase nuke! (or practically)...
KMD is '50s noir incarnate, and its mushroom cloud climax is still chilling——still relevant to the fears that haunt us today in urban target areas....
you're the expert, but for me, i've watched KMD a dozen times and each time find myself fascinated and captivated by the performance of Ralph Meeker, so brutally mesmerizing, equal in intensity and verve/nerve to Widmark in "Night and the City"——
i don't have the transcript but as i recall it, when Tarantino was interviewed (by Elvis Mitchell) on TCM,
he said something to the effect that Meeker was one of his favorites, and that the actor had been great not only in KMD but in other films as well——
Well, I don't know about "expert," obviously Tarantino has proven his expertise in movies. But I don't share the same taste with him either. I find most of the films he raves about way mannered, even if on the dark end of movie mannerisms. I still relate to much in OUT OF THE PAST but I didn't relate at all to Ralph Meeker either as a kid or now. I find his acting stiff and pushed and self-conscious in a way that is totally dated (and was at the time, since Brando and Clift were updating the limits of realistically being a character rather than "acting" one, etc. and Pacino and DiNiro and in other ways Newman and Redford and Bridges took further (Newman was there too when Meeker was first making his marlk and Brando had already redefined film acting, but Newman's contributions in extending the limits came later, and by the way Mitchum predated all of them with a kind of relaxed realism that made everything he did seem as natural as eating or putting on your pants or whatever. Meeker always looked to me like he had to go to the john but was putting it off until he finished this scene. I loved PULP FICTION by the way, but everything Tarantino's done since has been downhill for my taste.
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