Have you ever played telephone? Someone whispers in someone else’s ear, then another, and another, until you get to the end, where the phrase at the end usually is nothing like the phrase that went in.
I’m coming to the end of the covid classics I’ve watched this year, and these 6 have been left out of the themed posts I’ve done earlier. So I’m gonna telephone them. I’m gonna tie the Molly Ringwald high school dramedy Pretty in Pink to Charlie Chaplin’s anti war satire The Great Dictator. I’m going to telephone them together using these other 4 films I couldn’t match: Ugetsu, Faces, My Fair Lady, and Brief Encounter.
High school outcast strikes up a relationship with one of the rich kids at her school, which is threatened to be derailed by unrequited love and peer pressure.
Why It’s Good
John Hughes was the high school whisperer. And Molly Ringwald was his best muse. Ringwald’s Andie Walsh is a hipster prototype, designing her own clothes and living life the best she can under the circumstances. Hughes and Ringwald capture that insecurity that comes with learning to trust someone so, so well here. And Jon Cryer’s Duckie is a revelation as Ringwald’s best friend longing to be something more, and hurt mightily when it becomes clear that isn’t going to happen.
Connection to My Fair Lady
Ringwald’s father (played by the great Harry Dean Stanton), is a piece of garbage, relying on his daughter to take care of him while he refuses to do anything to help her because his heart’s been broken.
Connection to Pretty in Pink
Eliza Doolittle’s father literally sells her to the man trying to make her life better, and then marries someone else! What a scumbag.
Poor, Cockney accented Eliza Doolittle is given speech instruction by a phoenetics professor to see if he can con the rich people of Britain into believing Doolittle is one of their own.
Why It’s Good
Cockney accents had a moment in 1964 between Mary Poppins and this film, torturing the Brits for generations via bastardized accent work. This movie is of its time, and has some real creepy gender/age dynamics at work. However, George Cukor keeps the mood light and fun adapting the Broadway play with amazing costume designs and song & dance numbers. Plus, he hired the right woman, Audrey Hepburn, to play the amazingly named Eliza Doolittle, easily fitting into whatever situation she has to be in for the movie to work.
Connection to Faces
All Eliza wants to do, once she’s learned to properly converse is to chat chat chat away.
Connection to My Fair Lady
The characters in John Cassavetes’s film, completely self absorbed and convinced their hot sh*t, would rather talk to death about their sexual escapades than experience them.
Shot simply and naturally, this movie looks at the lives of the exasperated, bored, and married, and what they do with their free time while contemplating what they want out of life.
Why It’s Good
This movie is famously shot cinema verite, essentially adopting the French New Wave style into an American Film. John Cassavetes gives us lots of up close looks of people’s, you guessed it, faces to see how they’re feeling as they talk, talk, talk the nights away. It’s pretty shallow stuff that you might roll and eye or two at, but most of it is extremely well written and acted, that you don’t notice until the brief quiet moments where you and the actors ponder what’s really going on.
Connection to Brief Encounter
John Marley and Lynn Carlin are in a mid life crisis, trying to figure out if their marriage is worth salvaging or not.
Connection to Faces
Celia Johnson is stuck in her marriage, and her connection to Trevor Howard is offset by the lives they lead.
A doctor and a married woman meet on a train platform and start spending more and more time together, potentially threatening the lives each has individually built.
Why It’s Good
David Lean, the epic guy (Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago), directed not even hour and half film. As amazing as Lean’s epics are, this one is just as special, for different reasons. Capturing that ubiquitous melancholy of “what if” and “lost love”, Lean crafts a great romance where nothing really happens unless you’re paying attention. Inside of the story Lean, Celia Johnson, and Trevor Howard mine all the emotions out of this unlikely forged connection and the consequences of giving into their passion. It’s equally beautiful and sad, and will hit each person that watches it with all sorts of feelings, an epic of an emotional journey.
Connection to Ugetsu
Johnson and Howard have fallen so deeply in love with one another, they’re tempted to give into their passion at the expense of everyone they care about.
Connection to Brief Encounter
All of the characters in Ugetsu are tempted to abandon their loved ones for personal gain.
A group of peasants in 16th Century Japan try to move up in the world to achieve the dreams they desire of themselves during a time of civil unrest.
Why It’s Good
Even though Akira Kurosawa gets all the praise (deservedly so), Kenji Mizoguchi is in the tier just below him in terms of great Japanese filmmakers of the era. Mizoguchi’s stories can be usually heartbreaking, focusing on the effects of war on the poor or powerless, specifically women and children. Ugetsu is no different, taking inspiration from a famous Japanese novel. Kinuyo Tanaka is happily married woman making pottery with her husband and raising their kid, poor but happy. Masayuki Mori, married to Tanaka, dreams of better things, so he decides to war profiteer to make more for his family. That pursuit of greed gets him what HE wants, but also leads to consequences for poor Tanaka forced to fend for herself as Mori’s greed slowly got the better of him.
Connection to The Great Dictator
Ugetsu shows the consequences of a life lived profiting off war, and the suffering it causes.
Connection to Ugetsu
Filmed during the Third Reich’s reign in Germany, this movie shows how war and hate causes needless suffering on the downtrodden and picked on.
After WWI we follow two men who look alike (both played by Charlie Chaplin), a simple Jewish barber injured from the war, and Adenoid Hynkel, a cruel dictator hell bent on persecuting the Jewish people for the problems in his country.
Why It’s Good
Even though his target is obvious, Chaplin has lost none of his touch going from silent filmmaking into speaking roles. There’s still the great sight gags like Chaplin sitting on a moving cannon gun or a pan based uprising against his oppressors. His eye for satirical humor is spot on too: his war satirical elements are beautifully silly, and the scene where a group of men has to choose who will sacrifice themselves is wonderfully funny. Chaplin always knows how serious his film is though, and for a man who never really spoke on camera, when he finally opens his mouth at the end, he unleashes one of the greatest monologues in movie history.
And that’s it! We got from Duckie to the Tramp. I think that was Disney’s original title for the spaghetti loving dog movie right?
