{"id":150,"date":"2005-12-31T23:49:39","date_gmt":"2006-01-01T04:49:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/63.247.138.3\/~drweevil\/?p=150"},"modified":"2007-09-03T17:29:35","modified_gmt":"2007-09-03T21:29:35","slug":"just-under-the-wire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/?p=150","title":{"rendered":"Just Under The Wire"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>What&#8217;s the best movie I&#8217;ve seen this year? <em>Pickup on South Street<\/em> (1953), which I watched this evening. It was one of the four I bought with the Border&#8217;s gift certificate my students&#8217; parents gave me (plus 7&cent; of my own money):  the others were <em>Rififi<\/em>, <em>Quai des Orf&egrave;vres<\/em>, and (the only non-noir) <em>The Browning Version<\/em>. A relative also bought me the Warner Brothers &#147;Classic Comedy Collection&#148; from my Amazon wish list, consisting of <em>Dinner at Eight<\/em>, <em>Libeled Lady<\/em>, and <em>The Philadelphia Story<\/em>, all of which I had seen on Turner Classic Movies and liked, and <em>Bringing Up Baby<\/em>, <em>Stage Door<\/em>, and <em>To Be or Not To Be<\/em>, which I had not seen. I watched <em>Bringing Up Baby<\/em> a few days ago, and was not impressed. Further thoughts on both:<\/p>\n<p><strong>Bringing Up Baby:<\/strong> Katharine Hepburn&#8217;s character was far more annoying than either she (the character) or the movie-makers seemed to realize. I would have smacked her, and I&#8217;m not at all prone to smacking women &#8212; or men, or children, for that matter. Some of the minor characters were amusing, particularly the crazy psychiatrist, and I liked the idea of leopard-hunting with a croquet mallet and a butterfly net, but in general the movie seemed to be trying too hard to be funny. Perhaps I just wasn&#8217;t in the mood for screwball comedy. Afterwards I realized that I must have seen <em>Bringing Up Baby<\/em> once many years ago, but the only things I remembered were the leopard-loon calls and the final collapse of the brontosaurus.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Pickup on South Street:<\/strong> I only lived in New York for six months in the fall of 2001, but there was still a surprising amount of familiar scenery. I think the subway cars in the opening scene are still in service. The male lead&#8217;s hideout was a wonderful shack in the river with a view of (I think) the Brooklyn Bridge, the characters were interestingly complex, and the plot had sufficient twists and turns to be interesting. Interesting sidelights:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I know nothing of cinematography, but there seemed to be a lot of interesting things going on visually.<\/li>\n<li>Apparently New York had a &#8216;four strikes and you&#8217;re out&#8217; policy at the time, since the pickpocket assumes that one more conviction will put him away for life.<\/li>\n<li>Escaping in the dumbwaiter is an obvious enough idea that the police have someone stationed at the bottom of the shaft. The cat hanging around in the garbage area is a nice touch.<\/li>\n<li>In this movie, even common criminals draw the line at Communism and treason, and the police appeal to this fundamental (if minimal) decency.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What&#8217;s the best movie I&#8217;ve seen this year? Pickup on South Street (1953), which I watched this evening. It was one of the four I bought with the Border&#8217;s gift certificate my students&#8217; parents gave me (plus 7&cent; of my own money): the others were Rififi, Quai des Orf&egrave;vres, and (the only non-noir) The Browning [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=150"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.drweevil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}