GAY TRAVELERS MAGAZINE - Curt Loves Oldies - Curt Solash dishes on the best and worst movies of all time

Curt Loves Oldies – Horror Hotel (AKA City of the Dead)

3/24/2021

Curt Loves Oldies – Horror Hotel (AKA City of the Dead)

Movie Review by Curt Solash

I love low budget films that show a successful movie can be made without a lot of money if the director has talent, imagination, and cares about his product. Horror Hotel, or as the British version is known, City of the Dead, is just such a movie. A modest witchcraft film, made in England but taking place in America, it packs quite a punch and expert performances, staging, lighting, pacing, and a great script make it a minor horror classic. Film students would do well to view it for several reasons and horror fans who haven’t seen it are sure to enjoy it immensely.

Curt Loves Oldies – Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?

11/5/2020

Curt Loves Oldies – Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?

Movie Review by Curt Solash

MOVIE DETAILS:

Psychological black comedy/mystery
Warner Brothers 1962
Bette Davis
Joan Crawford
Victor Buono
Anna Lee
Directed by Robert Aldrich

AWARDS:

Academy Awards:
Best Black and White Cinematography
Best Black and White Costume Design
Best Sound.

Academy Award Nominations:
Best Actress - Bette Davis
Best Supporting - Victor Buono.

Other nominations: Cannes Film Festival, Directors Guild of America, Golden Globes, British Academy Film Awards

PLOT:
Two aging sisters, both former show-business stars, live in a decaying mansion awash with lies, secrets, suspicion, mutual hatred, torture, and sadism.

CURT'S THOUGHTS:

A seriously underrated and critically maligned film at the time of its release, a reappraisal shows it to be a tour de force in acting, directed with much nuance and attention to detail, and a whopping good story, entertaining and outrageous.

It's been called camp, kitsch, black comedy, an embarrassing comedown for two former Hollywood stars, and many other things. I call it funny, perverse, crackling good entertainment, and an unforgettably good time
.
Bette Davis and Joan Crawford were long past their glory days as Queens of Hollywood, maybe even on the skids. The scuttlebutt is that Miss Crawford ran across or came up with the idea for this film - two sisters, former show business stars, living in a decaying mansion full of skeletons in closets - and pitched it to director Robert Aldrich. After peddling it all over Hollywood, to no avail, Warner Brothers finally agreed to distribute the film. Davis and Crawford were regarded as completely unbankable at this point. It would be nice to think as a bit of gratitude, given the millions these ladies made for the studio in the 1930's and 1940's, but Hollywood doesn't know from gratitude. the ladies were offered a very low salary and part of the profits. It was that or nothing.

Well, to the consternation to all concerned, it swept the world and became a major hit. One reason is a really ingenious story line. It starts during World War One, when Baby Jane Hudson (Bette, of course, played by a child actress) is the Toast of Vaudeville, whose success is supporting her family, including sister Blanche (Joan). Jane knows she's the breadwinner, alright, and lords it over the whole family; domineering, cruel, demanding, spoiled, never letting anyone forget that she is the Alpha Dog in this arrangement.

Fast forward to the 1930's, and the power balance is a little different now - Blanche is a major Hollywood star. Bette is also making movies, but is considered devoid of talent and basically hopeless. It is great fun when an early scene from one of each actresses' movies appears in the story. Joan's from one of her successes. Bette's from one of her programmers before developing her craft. It is assumed that Jane is very jealous of Blanche's success and one night when the two are driving home from a party, Bette tries to run Joan down with their limousine and cripples her. Or so it appears.

Now, we flash to the present (1962) and it's bizarre to say the least. Joan is a comparatively well-groomed paraplegic, confined to a wheelchair and Bette has turned into a grotesque, half-mad hag who must care for her disabled sister. They live in a highly sadomasochistic relationship, with bitterness and anger aplenty.

Let me, at this point, stress another reason for the success and high quality - the superb acting that both actresses evince. Joan Crawford, with the less showy role and considerably less screen time, shows steely determination and underplays beautifully as the helpless sister who slowly realizes that she is in mortal danger as her sister's mental condition deteriorates. Her fear for her life grows slowly and realistically in proportion to the increasing sadism and torture her sister metes out. Hers is a convincing, poignant performance.

Bette, on the other hand is anything but repressed. Her performance is funny, mannered, often bizarre, but disciplined, nuanced, and very subtle when called for. She supposedly invented the makeup herself, an old woman perversely done up and dressed as the Baby Jane of forty-five years before. This is a drunken slattern who just applies another layer of makeup over the previous day's. If one can get past her outrageous appearance, many things about her performance are superb. She successfully portrays someone with the brain of a perverse child yet sharp as a needle and causes the viewer to feel revulsion and pity at the same time.

Part of her delusional state is her plan to revive her vaudeville act. One of the finest scenes shows her drunk, demented, but never stupid, doing her number in front of a mirror when suddenly, briefly, she sees and understands what she really has become and she crumbles during this brief flash of lucidity. It is an amazing scene and shows her great bravery in being willing to tackle such a freakish role. No one else, I believe, could have done it as convincingly - or had the balls to attempt it. As Charles Laughton once told her, "Never stop daring to hang yourself, Bette." And she never did! It should be mentioned that, insanity not withstanding, she knows everything that's going on in the house at all times. Things are not what they seem, but more on that later
.
Of course, things go downhill. She hires a ne'er-do-well to coach her (the wonderful Victor Buono) She kills Joan's maid. Buono discovers Joan trussed up and being starved to death by Bette and tries to call the police. Bette tries to escape with Joan and the two are ultimately found on a beach. Bette completely in another world, where she's the sweetest of them all Joan almost dead.

The ending is somewhat equivocal. What happens now? Will Bette be committed? Does Joan recover? It does reveal the truth that Blanche was the one who tried to kill Jane and has been largely responsible for her insanity due mostly to guilt. The ending struck me as full of pathos, lyrical, poetic - almost operatic.

If this sounds like fun. and it is, what makes it even better is knowing what went on behind the scenes and how it influenced what happens on the screen. Most of this is well-known Hollywood folklore, but it bears repeating. Bette and Joan utterly abominated each other. Although both started on their best behavior because both needed a hit, it degenerated very soon.

Joan had weights hidden under her clothes for a scene where Bette has to drag her across the floor and Bette severely injured her back.

For the sequence where Bette kicks her around the parlor, Bette was really kicking...hard!

Davis also has an opportunity to be cruelly realistic. imitating Joan's phony upper-class diction on the phone.

For the few in this universe who've never seen it, "Whatever Happened To Baby Jane" offers a good mystery story, torture, sadism, outrageous humor and perversity and two actresses like no other, and as different from one another as can be, in roles that, to a large extent, correspond exactly to how they were in real life: Joan, composed, controlled, phony and Bette, loud, often offensive and full of anger, but down to earth, honest, genuine. Both were more than a little nutty, too, increasingly, as time went on.

Thought not everyone's cup of tea, it's a rousing good show to be appreciated on many different levels and richly deserves its reappraisal.

Curt Loves Oldies: The Oscar - Movie Review by Curt Solash

3/27/2020

Curt Loves Oldies: The Oscar - Movie Review by Curt Solash

THE OSCAR MOVIE DETAILS:
* 1966
* Embassy Pictures
* Director: Russell Rouse
* Cast: Stephen Boyd, Elke Sommer, Tony Bennett, Eleanor Parker, Milton Berle, assorted guest stars-awards:
* Academy Award nomination for Best Costume Design.

PlLOT:
Ruthless, ambitious Frankie Fane claws his way up the ladder to the summit of Hollywood fame, destroying anyone who gets in his way.

MY THOUGHTS:

It's trash movie time again and our choice holds an exalted place in the genre. Perhaps only "Valley of the Dolls" is as good/bad as "The Oscar." I hardly know what to highlight first in the catalog of delights this film offers.

Never has a film been so risible and expert at the same time. Never has a film been so trashy and compellingly realistic at once. Absolutely littered with a huge cast, including many great has-beens of erstwhile Hollywood fame, and one unexpected wannabe, the actors are all both wonderful and terrible, like the movie itself. It is completely irresistible and a treat of the highest order. Or, depending on your tastes, you may head rapidly for the exit.

"The Oscar" is the story of Frankie Fane, a two-bit hustler (played with ferocious intensity by Irish actor, Stephen Boyd) who goes from pimping (primarily Laurel, played by the delicious Jill St. John, the world's worst actress) and working odd jobs for pennies, to a top Tinseltown star the hard way, using, abusing and squashing everyone in his path, then mercilessly discarding them when they are no longer of use to them.

No cliche is overlooked in this Hollywood tale of his greed, ruthless ambition, and psychopathic disregard for anyone but himself. Among those he encounters along the way are (ready?) Kay Bergdahl (Elke Sommer, utterly gorgeous, quite charming, yet almost unintelligible at times with her "Mittel-European" accent and facial tics), a designer who knows exactly what a turd Frankie is, but fall for him anyway (as do all the women in this laugh-fest), Sophie Cantaro (Eleanor Powell), an ageing talent scout, Milton Berle (!), in a surprisingly effective performance as his agent, in addition to ....Joseph Cotton, Ernest Borgnine, Edie Adams, Peter Lawford, Merle Oberon, Frank and Nancy Sinatra, Jack Soo, and Jean Hale. All are top-notch in their roles, giving their all to this campy fun, and many were probably grateful for the work.

Have I forgotten anybody? Indeed, I have, and on purpose, saving the best for last! Someone had the interesting idea of seeing whether Tony Bennett was possible movie material, so here he is as Hymie Kelly (!) - "My mother was Jewish was Irish; wanna make something of it?" - Frankie's friend, errand-boy, and stooge from the beginning, loyal to the very end, when it comes out that he married Laurel, who died on the operating table, pregnant with Frankie's baby. Well, suffice it to say, Mr. Bennett was most emphatically NOT movie material. He is awful, but never mind; his complete lack of acting talent makes the movie even better.

At the end, Frankie's career is slipping (remember, every cliche) and everyone deserts the bastard, but he's been nominated for....The Oscar (for best actor), so who needs them?

When the winner is announced as "Frank", he stands up and then you hear Miss Oberon (the presenter, whose role is all of five seconds long) say, "Sinatra!"

Frankie painfully applauds and slumps to his seat as various audience members who've been hurt by him, lick their lips in gleeful revenge.

As I've said, either you consider it a total delight or you got up and left a long time ago. I hope, like me, you're in the first group. They'll always make bad movies -- but seldom as entertaining as this one!

Watch the trailer for "The Oscar"

copyright 2020 CURT SOLASH

CURT LOVES OLDIES: Curt Solash dishes on the best and worst movies of all time

Curt Solash is a retired educator, an antique advertising collector and a lifelong cinemaphile from New York City who now lives in sunny Florida with his life partner.

Boy erased - Review by Curt Solash

7/30/2019

Boy Erased
Curt Loves Oldies Movie Review by Curt Solash
The film makes clear the "conversion" practices depicted are still legal in the majority of states. Over 700,000 LGBTQ people have endured such "therapy." It is a surprise and a strong statement that such cruel, inhumane, dignity-robbing, shameful attempts to change a person's sexuality is futile at best and literally a crime at worst. <READ MORE>

CURT LOVES OLDIES: WRITTEN ON THE WIND - MOVIE REVIEW BY CURT SOLASH

6/30/2019

Curt Loves Oldies

WRITTEN ON THE WIND

Movie Review by Curt Solash

MOVIE DETAILS:

1956
Universal

Cast:
Rock Hudson, Robert Stack, Lauren Bacall, Dorothy Malone.
Director: Douglas Sirk.

Awards:

Best supporting Oscar - Dorothy Malone
Best supporting actor nominee - Robert Stack
Best music and original song nominee - Victor Young and Sammy Cahn
Best supporting actress Golden Globes nominee - Dorothy Malone.

MY THOUGHTS:

The director called it "garbage". One of its main stars echoed his opinion. It is lurid, sleazy, sensationalistic, salacious, full of dysfunction, alcoholism, sexual inadequacy, suggestion of unfaithfulness, nymphomania, and murder - very heady stuff for 1956. But it's NOT garbage! It is fabulously entertaining with top-notch production values, direction, award winning acting, gorgeous color, a hit theme song, and you won't blink. One of my favorites - Written On the Wind.

It was a tremendous box-office hit, proving that the masses went to see this "garbage" in droves. And, why not? Universal was in a bad way after the war and the honchos bet big that with the right vehicles, and just slightly over the hill female stars, audiences particularly "women" would come by the truckload.

And nobody knew how to direct such movies like Douglas Sirk. Another of the many emigres from Germany in the industry (like Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, etc.), he knew very much how to make "women's melodramas" (Others include Magnificent Obsession, All That Heaven Allows, and Imitation of Life), full of lots of juicy elements - tears, pain, love, self-recrimination, sacrifice - soap operas supreme, all of them. They saved Universal-International from bankruptcy.

This one is about the Hadley clan, a very rich family (oil) who own the town of

Curt Loves Oldies – Twenty Of Curt's Favorite Films

5/1/2019

Curt Loves Oldies – Twenty Of Curt's Favorite Films

Movie Reviews by Curt Solash

My natural modesty rarely permits me to brag, but I know that the thousands of fans I've already garnered on Gay Travelers Magazine eagerly await my next film review. However, I thought for a change of pace that I'd write an article on twenty of my all time favorite movies.

Naturally, the choices are personal and the list includes some movies that would undoubtedly appear on many viewers' "All Time Worst" list, but that just adds to the fun. I think this list will probably make clear my sometimes unorthodox tastes and perverse sense of humor. I certainly hope so. Here they are, dear readers, in no particular order.

1) CAMILLE (1936) - This was the first film I reviewed and it's on my list because I worship Garbo and this is her finest performance. Like a diamond in a perfect setting, all facets of her talent and mystique are on display, as is her sublime beauty. You'll have to excuse my rhapsodizing, but to me, Garbo is radiance personified. George Cukor's direction is careful and sensitive and top cameraman William Daniels (Garbo's favorite) outdoes himself photographing the star.

Curt Loves Oldies: The Damned Don’t Cry - Movie Review by Curt Solash

3/5/2019

Curt Loves Oldies

The Damned Don’t Cry

Movie Review by Curt Solash

At once, a great film noir, an expert crime adventure, often preposterous and frequently (unintentionally?) very funny.

Horror Hotel - aka City of The Dead

2/10/2019

Horror Hotel aka City of The Dead
Movie Review by Curt Solash

This little gem of a movie was made on a miniscule budget, but director John Moxey obviously took pains to make it believable, frightening and completely engrossing.

Curt Loves Oldies – The 1936 Romantic Drama CAMILLE

1/28/2019

Curt Loves Oldies – The 1936 Romantic Drama CAMILLE
Movie Review by Curt Solash
CAMILLE is one of my favorite movies of all time, mainly because it contains what I consider to be the finest performance ever done by one of my greatest idols, Garbo.

Curt Loves Oldies - Curt Solash dishes on the best and worst movies of all time

1/18/2019

Curt Loves Oldies - Curt Solash dishes on the best and worst movies of all time

I have been an avid film fan for almost my whole life and I look forward to sharing with you readers my opinions, observations, thoughts and musings on some of my favorite movies and how
they’ve influenced me.

I realize that this will be a highly subjective endeavor and that some people will disagree with my choices, tastes, and preferences. I welcome their comments and am eager to learn from them - but the bottom line is that this is MY column ; they can always write their own!

The movies I select will run the gamut from classic to barely known ; from expensive productions to “shoe-string” efforts ; from films with “sensible”, timely, universal themes to outré and the frankly bizarre.

Many genres will be represented: color, black and white, musicals, westerns, stark dramas, romances, comedies, noirs, horror and sci-fi films, banned and experimental movies, silent, foreign films, historical sagas-you name it! The vast majority, of not all, my choices , will be at least 30 years old, hence the name of the column.

I look forward to sharing with you readers and exchanging ideas.

Your feedback will be greatly appreciated and I hope to discover many films I don’t know of and many other ways of experiencing and considering a movie.

I eagerly anticipate and await this adventure in sharing and expanding myself. Thank you.

Curt

Even if our visit may have been provided by various travel suppliers for the purposes of reviewing and writing about them, our opinions are not swayed negatively or positively. Our policy: We sometimes are invited to review a venue. We choose to only write positive articles. If you read one of our articles, you know that we had a positive experience. If we have a negative experience, we simply choose not to write anything about that venue. Our tastes may not be your tastes. We want to focus on the positives in life.