Just what is going on in that piratical mind of yours?

THE SEA HAWK

1940

Directed by Michael Curtiz

Written by Howard Koch and Seton I. Miller

Spoilers: moderate

Spirit Week: Do you dare to insist that the practice of the occult science is a racket?

YOU'LL FIND OUT

1940

Directed by David Butler

Written by James V. Kern, Monte Brice, Andrew Bennison, R.T.M. Scott, and David Butler

Spoilers: moderate

I loved you, I've never loved anyone else, I never shall

WATERLOO BRIDGE

1940

Directed by Mervyn LeRoy

Written by S.N. Behrman, Hans Rameau, and George Froeschel (based on the play by Robert E. Sherwood)

Spoiler alert: moderate (and severe, I suppose, for the 1931 film of the same name, which I recommend you never watch for fun)

The only law west of the Pecos

THE WESTERNER

1940

Directed by William Wyler

Written by Niven Busch, Jo Swerling, Stuart N. Lake, W.R. Burnett, Lillian Hellman, and Oliver La Farge

Spoiler alert: moderate

Believe women, sure, but Bette Davis?

THE LETTER

1940

Directed by William Wyler

Written by Howard E. Koch (based on the play by W. Somerset Maugham)

Spoiler alert: moderate

Walt Disney, part III: Serious Symphony

FANTASIA

One of the most ambitious cinematic endeavors of all time, Fantasia is the masterpiece of Disney's Golden Age, and perhaps the greatest and most successful experiment in animation attempted by anyone in any age.

1940

"Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor" and "The Nutcracker Suite" directed by Samuel Armstrong; "The Sorceror's Apprentice" directed by James Algar; "Rite of Spring" directed by Bill Roberts and Paul Satterfield; "Meet the Soundtrack" directed by David Hand and Ben Sharpsteen; "The Pastoral Symphony" directed by Jim Handley and Hamilton Luske; "Dance of the Hours" directed by Norman Ferguson and Thornton Hee; "Night on Bald Mountain/Ave Maria" directed by Wilfred Jackson

With Leopold Stokowski, Deems Taylor, and Walt Disney

Spoiler alert: inapplicable

Walt Disney, part II: There are no strings on me

PINOCCHIO

As a lavishly-mounted exercise in how, through magic and hard work, something unliving becomes alive, you could call Pinocchio the very essence of animation.  You could, that is, if you liked it a lot more than I do.

1940

Directed by Bill Sharpsteen and Hamilton Luske

With Dickie Jones (Pinocchio), Cliff Edwards (Jiminy Cricket), Christian Rub (Gepetto), Frankie Dorro (Lampwick), Walter Catlett ("Honest" John Worthington Foulfellow), Mel Blanc (Gideon the Cat's hiccups), Charles Judels (Stromboli), and Evelyn Venable (the Blue Fairy)

Reviews from gulag: First, the news in brief

While I was away, I had the opportunity to watch what I suppose one might as well call a "few" movies.  Here's some of them, in bite-sized form.  Or maybe two or three bites, because if there's one thing even moving to Pittsburgh can't beat out of me, it's my awful long-windedness.  Today's subjects: Citizen Kane, His Girl Friday, Network, and Good Night, and Good Luck.

CITIZEN KANE (1941)
Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles) dies, and a newshound (William Alland) seeks the story of his final words.  He never solves the mystery of Kane for himself—although we are privy to more than he—but he learns through conversations with the great man's friends that he was human like the rest of us, even if he didn't know it.

Orson Welles' Citizen Kane is very likely the single most overrated film made in the sound era.  But that says more about the overreaching critical reevaluation of it—the reevaluation that eventually snowballed into its acclamation as the long-running Best Film Ever on just about any critics' poll you'd care to look at—than it could ever possibly say about the quality of the actual film itself... which is, of course, simply deliriously high.  Yes, fewer pictures have been more talked-about than this one, and Kane has been just about talked to death: its spectacularly well-appointed deep focus compositions; its beautiful lighting schemes; its monumental art direction; its bitterly humorous satire, so viciously on point it might have been slanderous were everything bad not based at least in part on something true; and, of course, its extraordinary lead performance by Welles, taking William Randolf Hearst only as the starting point for his creation of the saddest man in the world—the man who thought he could buy happiness.  So, no, maybe it wasn't particularly close to the best movie ever made, not even back in 1941.  But Goddamned if it isn't still absolutely Great—even after all those decades it spent, condemned to be The Greatest.  Maybe now that Vertigo is the Best Film Ever (an even worse choice, but never mind), we can enjoy Kane for what it is and always was: entertaining, moving, human, and expertly-crafted, too.

Score:  9/10

Cardboard Science: Attack of the tiny temps!

DR. CYCLOPS

Dr. Cyclops is one of those old, old, old sci-fi spectacles, and much of the joy it offers is inextricably bound up in its very vintage.  But even though it may be undermined at every last turn by a score that can't stay put, actors who might be reading their lines phonetically, and a distressing lack of gusto in its pursuit of its classical references, this rear-projectionfest may be more resonant today than it ever was in 1940.

1940
Directed Ernest P. Schoedsack
Written by Tom Kilpatrick
With Albert Dekker (Dr. Alexander Thorkel), Charles Halton (Dr. Bulfinch), Thomas Coley (Dr. Bill Stockton), Janice Logan (Dr. Mary Robinson), Victor Kilian (Steve Baker), and Frank Yaconelli (Pedro)

Spoiler alert: moderate