Gone With the Wind

Gone With the Wind: 1939 Drama starring Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh, Olivia de Havilland, Leslie Howard and a cast of thousands.



Marc Horton plot synopsis: Scarlett (Leigh) loves, coincidentally, The Scarlett Pimpernel (Howard) but Ashley (as his character is actually named) marries Melanie (de Havilland). Scarlett then gets swept off her feet by Rhett Butler (Gable), who later goes on to hit .300 for the hometown Braves and co-star in the ensemble drama ER.

Scarlett cries. A lot. She cries when the war starts. She cries when Ashley goes off to war. She cries when Melanie has a baby. She cries when the Union Army burns down Atlanta. She cries when she goes back to the plantation, which has been reduced to ashes.

After the house slave informs Scarlett the only thing left to eat are last year's radishes, Scarlett goes into the garden and eats an un-ripe root vegetable and cries some more. She vows to rebuild.

Intermission.

Scarlett cries on Ashley's shoulder. She cries on Rhett's shoulder. She cries and cries some more. All beautifully filmed in glorious colour and all so bloody pointless. After a while it's just a long blur of tears, mercifully concluding after nearly four painful hours with Butler telling Scarlett, "frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."

The hype: Based on a monumentally successful door-stopper that centres on, if Her Indoors is to be believed, a no-nonsense heroine who doesn't take no shit from no body. The producers spent a widely publicized year casting for Scarlett. It was like "American Idol: In Search of the Next Luke Skywalker."

The film made enough money to float the entire 1939 issue of War Bonds. Adjusted for inflation, it works out to $4.3 trillion.

Won a truckload of Oscars: Picture, Director, Screenplay, Editing, Cinematography (I'll go along with that one), Actress (Leigh), Supporting Actress (Hattie McDaniel). Ranks 4th on the AFI Top 100 (1988).

Politically Incorrect Movie Review: Scarlett cries so much you'll hope she dies in the fire.

From Here to Eternity

From Here to Eternity: 1953 Drama, Burt Lancaster, Deborah Kerr, Frank Sinatra, Montgomery Clift. Directed by Fred Zinnerman.



Marc Horton Plot Synopsis: Army misfits in Hawaii just before Pearl Harbour. One's a trouble-making pisani (Sinatra), another's a reluctant boxer (Clift); both have a habit of leaving the base without a pass. They get drunk and fight a lot. Then you've got your career sergeant (Lancaster) and the repressed wife (Kerr) of the unit's captain; they have an affair. The Japanese attack. Another guy meets with a bad end. The end.

The hype: Won a bagful of Oscars in '53, including Picture, Director and Supporting Actor (Sinatra). The scene on the beach where Lancaster and Kerr make out is one of the most famous scenes in Hollywood history. If you believe The Godfather, a washed-up Sinatra got the role because the mob made the Bigshot Hollywood Producer "an offer he couldn't refuse."

The reality: Turgid army soap opera. That beach scene goes by faster than a dog chasing a frisbee. Sinatra gives a Neil Diamond-level performance and Clift is at his Method peak. Kerr is frostier than an Alaskan weather station and Lancaster is stuck interpreting the sorriest character in his illustrious film career.

Politically Incorrect Movie Review: It only feels like an Eternity.

Citizen Kane

Citizen Kane: 1941 drama, Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead, among others.

Marc Horton Plot Synopsis: Here's a real silver-screen heavyweight — and I'm not just talking about Orson Welles. He plays media heavyweight Charles Foster Kane, who treats everyone in his family and his newspaper as a servant and exiles anyone who doesn't play the toady. In that way, it's very much a 21st-century tale. Anyway, he croaks in the beginning, gasps Rosebud, and the hapless reporters are sent about the country to find the missing piece of the puzzle.
Early in the film, he's a happy-go-lucky billionaire happy to blow his fortune on a crappy rag. He turns it into an empire, natch, marries a socialite, dances, sings and runs for governor. But politics isn't any good without some action on the side, just ask these guys, strikes up an affair with some half-assed singer and loses the election. Kane ditches the old lady, marries the singer, and moves into Xanadu — where the film loses its vitality and becomes a bore — kinda like Kane himself. The singer's bored, the servants are bored, his old toadies at the paper are long gone, probably bored to tears, so is his ex-wife and eventually the second wife decides to pack it in and get the hell out. At the end, Kane croaks and the reporters, sans Wikipedia, are still no closer to the Rosebud mystery than they were at the beginning. Only in the final sequence does the viewer find out the missing Rosebud link, kicking off decades of joyful symbolizing merriment and hours of inside-of-eyelids-gazing pleasure at Film Studies courses around the land.
Politically Incorrect Movie Review: It has its moments, the first half of the movie is fast-paced, but then it drags. The greatest film of all time? You can toss those opinions in the same furnace as Rosebud.

It's Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World: 1963 comedy, Sid Caesar, Milton Berle, Jonathan Winters, Buddy Hackett, Phil Silvers, et al.

Marc Horton Plot Synopsis: A bunch of borscht-belt comedians and faded movie stars go in search of buried treasure. Mad-cap hijinks ensue. Ethel Merman shrieks a lot. Celebrities make cameos. Spencer Tracy loses his last shred of dignity after a distinguished career in the picture shows. Buster Keaton rolls over in his grave - and he wasn't even dead yet.

Politically Incorrect Movie Review: It's a Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad Movie.