Thursday Movie Picks - Deserts

Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Join us on our journey by picking three movies that fit the week's theme and writing a bit about them!

This week, on Thursday Movie Picks, it's hot and dry. Not a drop of water to be found, we are surrounded by the yellow sands of the desert. Feel the sun beating down with oppressive heat, feel the grits of sand that get caught in orifices you didn't even know you had... it's not fun, but thankfully, we only have to watch, not actually experience it ourselves!

Morocco (Josef von Sternberg, 1930) Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Marlene Dietrich, in a tuxedo, swanning through a French song with nary a care, kissing a woman full on the lips. Ah, the glorious days pre-Hays Code! Movies have never quite recovered from that, have they? Anyway, Morocco is all about how the heat of the desert can inflame passions to the point of explosion, as Gary Cooper's foreign legionnaire romances Dietrich's lounge singer despite the fact that they both admit that neither one of them is in a good place to be having a romantic relationship. If you've never seen it, it's VERY much worth a watch.

The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (Stephan Elliott, 1994) From the sublime to the ridiculous...ly FABULOUS! Three Australian drag queens hop on a bus to travel to a gig across the country, upending expectations and bringing fabulosity wherever they go. When they aren't squabbling, that is. Featuring some beautiful scenery, mind-blowing costumes, and three unbelievably against-type performances by Terence Stamp, Hugo Weaving, and Guy Pearce. Priscilla looks at how the harshness of the desert landscape can bring out the harshness within us, if you aren't careful.

Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999) Extrapolating Herman Melville's famous novella Billy Budd into an elliptical examination of toxic masculinity and repressed homosexuality, Claire Denis's Beau Travail is completely brilliant, if you have the patience of a saint. Not gonna lie, this is a tough sit, but an utterly beguiling one, as a group of foreign legion soldiers in Djibouti is disrupted by the arrival of a pretty, young, innocent thing by the name of Sentain, who invokes the ire of their leader, Galoup. Passions can run high in the desert, so you need to watch your back.

Hit Me With Your Best Shot - Morocco

Written as part of the series hosted by the lovely Nathaniel R. at The Film Experience, THE essential site for film lovers and actressexuals of all shapes and sizes!

What becomes a legend most?

Not caring. Not having any ever-loving fucks left to give. THAT is what becomes a legend most. For what does a legend care for the peons of the world - those people beneath her who would grovel at her feet for the chance of getting a glance from her ever-shrouded eyes, the "little people" who encompass most of us? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.

Oh, she may have her reasons. She could be so insanely talented that everyday trivialities are nothing to her. She could be so unbelievably beautiful that she simply cannot bear to look at anything not as lovely as she. Or, she could have been hurt so deeply and so often over the course of her life that she has realized that there's nothing left in this world she could possibly give a damn about.

Except maybe this man. Because let's be honest, who wouldn't?

Josef von Sternberg's Morocco wasn't my introduction to Marlene Dietrich (that would be Alfred Hitchcock's Stage Fright), but it was my introduction to the work that defined her (with von Sternberg), and somehow I hadn't watched it until now. Well let me tell you, the lady is AMAZING. Amy Jolly is the baddest bitch on the seven continents and then some. Help her pack up her luggage after it collapses open on a boat? Whatever. Employ her to sing at your café in the titular country and give her advice on how to work the crowd? Alright, fine, if you must. But you best believe that when she does deign to pay attention to you, she will only do so with complete and utter disdain:

Silver Medal

Basically, that same insouciance that makes Buster Keaton one of the silver screen's greatest comedians makes Marlene Dietrich one of its greatest Divas. She is the living personification of the old adage "Less is More," and it took me seeing Morocco to realize it.

Bronze Medal

Watch as one by one she singlehandedly disarms every single man around her! Thrill to her shocking performance in... SHOCK... menswear! Gasp as she works the crowd by kissing a woman full on the mouth! IN 1930!!!

She kissed a girl. She liked it.

But when she finally gets Gary Cooper alone, she reveals where that give-no-fucks, take-no-prisoners attitude comes from. She's been let down by a few too many men. Turns out, her strength comes from a place of deep sadness, a mask she puts on to get through the day. We finally see the real Amy(/Marlene) in this shot, just as Cooper's legionnaire tells her that he wishes he had met her ten years ago - before he joined the Foreign Legion:

BEST SHOT

He's all but told her he loves her, and she looks like she's just been told she has forty-eight hours to live, like she's going back into hiding after sticking her nose out of her hole. Von Sternberg even has her dressed in black and boxed into the frame - here she is, in the same trap she's found herself in time and again, and the only way out is to cut it off now, before she gets in too deep. Again. What a beautiful character moment - one that makes you see her in a completely different (but still drop-dead sexy) light.

Thursday Movie Picks - Alfred Hitchcock Movies

Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Come and join us - all you have to do is pick three films that fit the week's theme and tell us about them!

Welcome to October! That means it's Halloween month, and Thursday Movie Picks is celebrating with different scary-movie-themed picks every week. For this week, we turn to the "Master of Suspense", Alfred Hitchcock himself. The man has directed so damn many great films that it's practically obscene. I haven't seen all of them, but I have seen many of them (I had four full VHS tapes of them recorded from a TCM marathon when I was younger), and plenty of episodes of his great TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, too. Yeah, I guess you could say I'm a fan.

But... to pick just three? JUST. THREE?!?!?! Okay, fine. These are not my three favorites. Nor are they what I consider to be his three best (and yes, those are two very different things). They aren't even the three that I would tell people to start with if they had never seen even a single Hitchcock film before. These three are the ones that I think are his most underrated.

Sabotage (1936) - The most famous description of Hitchcock's style was given by the man himself, in his long-ranging interview with Francois Truffaut. It's the famous discourse on the difference between surprise and suspense - if you show a conversation between two people at a dinner table, and after a while a bomb explodes, that's surprise. However, if you show the audience the bomb under the table first, and then play the exact same scene, that's suspense. Sabotage, one of the last films he made in England before going to Hollywood, contains perhaps the most obvious - and cruelest - demonstration of that. It's only a five or six-minute sequence, but it feels twice that long for all the stress the film puts you through. Sylvia Sidney plays a woman whose husband owns a cinema. He's always been nice to her and her (much younger) brother Stevie, but she gradually begins to suspect that he's part of a terrorist gang planning a series of attacks in London. And then one afternoon, Stevie has to deliver a film canister to Piccadilly Circus...

Stage Fright (1950) - You know how everyone talks about Psycho and how shocking it was when Hitchcock killed off the film's biggest star by the halfway point? Well, he had been toying with audience's expectations and cinematic narrative conventions for years before that. Stage Fright is a bit of a lark, a trifle in a filmography as great of Hitch's, but its big twist is one of the greatest cinematic acts of pulling the rug right out from under the audience. Jane Wyman is Eve Gill, a young acting student who hides her crush, acting fellow student, from the cops, who suspect him of murdering his lover's husband. In order to prove his innocence, she becomes the temporary maid to his lover: the great actress Charlotte Inwood (Marlene Dietrich).

To Catch a Thief (1955) - I keep seeing people refer to this one as "lesser" or "minor" Hitchcock, and I just don't get it. No, it's not Vertigo or Psycho or Rear Window or even North By Northwest, but it's possibly the most purely entertaining film he ever directed, with one great scene after another. It's also boosted immeasurably by its stars, Grace Kelly and Cary Grant, neither of whom were ever more alluring than they are here. Retired jewel thief John "The Cat" Robie is forced out of retirement when a copycat criminal leads the police to interrupt his quiet, comfortable life on the French Riviera. He manages to convince an insurance agent to let him keep an eye on their wealthiest clients and their jewels in the hopes of catching the impostor in the act. Only it seems one of them, Frances Stevens, knows exactly who he is... and also has a bit of a taste for danger. This is apparently legendary costume designer Edith Head's favorite film she ever worked on.

BONUS: The Ten Best Hitchcock Films (according to me... my favorites will get their own post)
1. Vertigo
2. Psycho
3. Notorious
4. Rear Window
5. Shadow of a Doubt
6. The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)
7. The 39 Steps
8. I Confess
9. Strangers on a Train
10. Rebecca