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Post by NoShear on Feb 5, 2024 16:30:45 GMT
Forgot to say this earlier, but thank you Fading Fast for picking such a great film today. Same here: I should've thanked you earlier, Fading Fast, so thank you... ...and thank you, TopBilled, for this site: Andrea Doria, BunnyWhit, Fading Fast, galacticgirrrl, and TopBilled, I value our film friendships. Sincerely, NoShear
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Post by topbilled on Feb 5, 2024 17:02:21 GMT
Forgot to say this earlier, but thank you Fading Fast for picking such a great film today. Same here: I should've thanked you earlier, Fading Fast, so thank you... ...and thank you, TopBilled, for this site: Andrea Doria, BunnyWhit, Fading Fast, galacticgirrrl, and TopBilled, I value our film friendships. Sincerely, NoShear If you ever want to present a month of Norma Shearer melodramas, just let us know!
My favorite Norma film is ESCAPE (1940).
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Post by NoShear on Feb 5, 2024 17:20:07 GMT
Same here: I should've thanked you earlier, Fading Fast, so thank you... ...and thank you, TopBilled, for this site: Andrea Doria, BunnyWhit, Fading Fast, galacticgirrrl, and TopBilled, I value our film friendships. Sincerely, NoShear If you ever want to present a month of Norma Shearer melodramas, just let us know!
My favorite Norma film is ESCAPE (1940). Wow, TopBilled, I'm touched by your offer! I would decline at this point because I don't think I'm worthy of asking something like this: I need to put some more Sunday participations behind me before being worthy of suggesting some Sundays of my own...
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Post by NoShear on Feb 5, 2024 17:23:14 GMT
...but if I ever did, yes, ESCAPE would be at the top: I enjoyed the 1940 movie prior to becoming a fan of Norma Shearer and would like to see it again from this side...
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Post by Fading Fast on Feb 5, 2024 18:07:57 GMT
NoShear, I understand your desire to wait to see a few more Sunday Lives!, but whenever you're ready, I think you will make a great host who will choose wonderful movies for us to see.
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Post by Fading Fast on Feb 5, 2024 18:20:23 GMT
I have had a very busy 24 hours, but in the cracks between, I wrote the following review because I was so pumped up about the movie. I had a really good time yesterday chatting with everyone about it. I thought it was some of our best give and take and some of our best participation in any of our Sunday Live! screenings. I hope the newer members to our group stay with us as your insights and humor added much to the experience. Thank you to the new and the old members for your participation yesterday.
The Divorcee from 1930 with Norma Shearer, Chester Morris, Conrad Nagel, Judith Wood and Robert Montgomery
To call The Divorcee a good "precode" doesn't do this smartly layered picture justice. It's pre-code in its subject matter, but traditional in its values, in a very believable way. Plus, despite being almost a hundred years old, its major themes are still relevant today.
Norma Shearer and Chester Morris play the leaders of the young, rich and socially prominent "smart set" of New York City. Their marriage is the envy of their friends as it seems as good on the inside as it looks on the outside.
It is, until Morris, intoxicated one night, cheats and Shearer finds out. All the following can be true in the realpolitiks of relationships: she's rightfully hurt, the affair genuinely meant nothing to him as he was drunk and she would have been better off not knowing.
She does know, and though she tries, she can't put it behind her until she has her own affair, with a friend in their set, played by Robert Montgomery. When Morris finds out, he is angry more at being embarrassed because it was with a friend, than he is hurt by her infidelity.
The marriage can't hold after that, so it's off to divorce court, followed by public debauchery for Shearer and the bottle for Morris. But Shearer's "playing the field" is all show as she still has feelings for Morris and does no woohooing behind closed doors.
Rounding out the story are two of their friends, played by Conrad Nagel, who was in love with Shearer before she married Morris, and Judith Wood, whom Nagel married on the rebound and out of obligation and pity when he disfigured her in a drunk-driving accident.
With that awful start to their marriage, it's no surprise it's floundering. Nagel uses that as his opportunity to take another stab at winning Shearer's heart. It's only a secondary story, but Wood's sad plea to keep her husband is heartbreakingly real. Shearer kindly walks away.
In a lighter scene, Montgomery, the friend Shearer revenge canoodled with, dances quickly away from Morris when Morris, innocently, asks Montgomery if he knows who it was in their set that slept with his former wife. Montgomery saw no honor in honesty at that moment.
The climax, no spoilers coming, is powerful because it's real, not because it's necessarily satisfying. It is consistent with a story that says honor and honesty matter, but aren't always absolutes. That's a very not-Hollywood answer to real-life problems.
Even with a strong cast, this is Shearer's movie with her rightfully winning a Best Actress Oscar for her performance. Shearer never lost all her silent-film mannerisms, but her acting here is thoughtful. She delivered the challenging emotional nuance the role needed.
Morris, in one of his better performances, showed good range as a man who finally saw that saving face might be costing him too much in life. Montgomery, in his sweet spot here as the likable cad, was on the brink of a long run of starring roles as a likable cad.
For an early talkie, it's 1930 and Hollywood was still figuring out where to put the microphones, the movie's fast overlapping dialogue is surprisingly modern. It predates 1940's His Girl Friday by a decade, a movie often cited as being the first realistic dialogue picture.
While the actors deserve a lot of credit, director Robert Z. Leonard also deserves note. His picture was ahead of its time with its aforementioned comfort with new technology and its more natural feel. Leonard, not surprisingly, would go on to have a long Hollywood career.
For fans of the era, the clothes, cars and architecture are Art Deco / Jazz Age heaven, as the story was written in the late 1920s before the stock market crashed and the Depression started.
Seeing young men and women dressed to the nines, even for casual outings, can make the movie seem dated, but young men and women, today, still fall deeply in love, sometimes hurt each other by cheating, sometimes divorce or breakup and sometimes regret it.
Living together has reduced some of that risk - or at least made it less outwardly embarrassing and formal - but humans are still humans, cheating still hurts and pride can cause them to make everything worse.
The Divorcee, stripped of all its wonderful style, is no less relevant today than when it was released. The really hard question it slyly asks still has no good answer: can a lie be better than the truth, when the truth wrecks two lives, but a lie would have made everyone happier?
The retort is that it took all the wreckage for Morris' character to truly understand how wrong his behavior was and, maybe, to truly understand how much he loved his wife. Then as now, there are no easy answers.
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Post by Fading Fast on Feb 5, 2024 18:23:29 GMT
I have had a very busy 24 hours, but in the cracks between, I wrote the following review because I was so pumped up about the movie. I had a really good time yesterday chatting with everyone about it. I thought it was some of our best give and take and some of our best participation in any of our Sunday Live! screenings. I hope the newer members to our group stay with us as your insights and humor added much to the experience. Thank you to the new and the old members for your participation yesterday.... "You're welcome." - Fawn
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Post by Andrea Doria on Feb 5, 2024 20:08:44 GMT
Thanks for the excellent review, Fading. I've been thinking about the movie all day and your review helps straighten out all my impressions. Also thanks for the word "woohooing." Heh.
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Post by BunnyWhit on Feb 5, 2024 21:09:02 GMT
...but if I ever did, yes, ESCAPE would be at the top: I enjoyed the 1940 movie prior to becoming a fan of Norma Shearer and would like to see it again from this side... Please do consider, NoShear. You'll be swell. And great!
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Post by Fading Fast on Feb 5, 2024 22:07:18 GMT
Thanks for the excellent review, Fading. I've been thinking about the movie all day and your review helps straighten out all my impressions. Also thanks for the word "woohooing." Heh.
Thank you. It's always challenging to come up with a new word for something that has seemed to have exhausted its euphemism possibilities. Being an old-movie fan, I think "it" and "oomph" are still two of the best and one is a hundred years old and the other, ninety.
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Post by Andrea Doria on Feb 6, 2024 14:16:22 GMT
...but if I ever did, yes, ESCAPE would be at the top: I enjoyed the 1940 movie prior to becoming a fan of Norma Shearer and would like to see it again from this side... Please do consider, NoShear. You'll be swell. And greatOf course NoShear would be great. If I can do it anyone can...
...of course Topbilled always has to help me with everything.
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Post by NoShear on Feb 8, 2024 0:56:08 GMT
I have had a very busy 24 hours, but in the cracks between, I wrote the following review because I was so pumped up about the movie. I had a really good time yesterday chatting with everyone about it. I thought it was some of our best give and take and some of our best participation in any of our Sunday Live! screenings. I hope the newer members to our group stay with us as your insights and humor added much to the experience. Thank you to the new and the old members for your participation yesterday.
The Divorcee from 1930 with Norma Shearer, Chester Morris, Conrad Nagel, Judith Wood and Robert Montgomery
To call The Divorcee a good "precode" doesn't do this smartly layered picture justice. It's pre-code in its subject matter, but traditional in its values, in a very believable way. Plus, despite being almost a hundred years old, its major themes are still relevant today.
Norma Shearer and Chester Morris play the leaders of the young, rich and socially prominent "smart set" of New York City. Their marriage is the envy of their friends as it seems as good on the inside as it looks on the outside.
It is, until Morris, intoxicated one night, cheats and Shearer finds out. All the following can be true in the realpolitiks of relationships: she's rightfully hurt, the affair genuinely meant nothing to him as he was drunk and she would have been better off not knowing.
She does know, and though she tries, she can't put it behind her until she has her own affair, with a friend in their set, played by Robert Montgomery. When Morris finds out, he is angry more at being embarrassed because it was with a friend, than he is hurt by her infidelity.
The marriage can't hold after that, so it's off to divorce court, followed by public debauchery for Shearer and the bottle for Morris. But Shearer's "playing the field" is all show as she still has feelings for Morris and does no woohooing behind closed doors.
Rounding out the story are two of their friends, played by Conrad Nagel, who was in love with Shearer before she married Morris, and Judith Wood, whom Nagel married on the rebound and out of obligation and pity when he disfigured her in a drunk-driving accident.
With that awful start to their marriage, it's no surprise it's floundering. Nagel uses that as his opportunity to take another stab at winning Shearer's heart. It's only a secondary story, but Wood's sad plea to keep her husband is heartbreakingly real. Shearer kindly walks away.
In a lighter scene, Montgomery, the friend Shearer revenge canoodled with, dances quickly away from Morris when Morris, innocently, asks Montgomery if he knows who it was in their set that slept with his former wife. Montgomery saw no honor in honesty at that moment.
The climax, no spoilers coming, is powerful because it's real, not because it's necessarily satisfying. It is consistent with a story that says honor and honesty matter, but aren't always absolutes. That's a very not-Hollywood answer to real-life problems.
Even with a strong cast, this is Shearer's movie with her rightfully winning a Best Actress Oscar for her performance. Shearer never lost all her silent-film mannerisms, but her acting here is thoughtful. She delivered the challenging emotional nuance the role needed.
Morris, in one of his better performances, showed good range as a man who finally saw that saving face might be costing him too much in life. Montgomery, in his sweet spot here as the likable cad, was on the brink of a long run of starring roles as a likable cad.
For an early talkie, it's 1930 and Hollywood was still figuring out where to put the microphones, the movie's fast overlapping dialogue is surprisingly modern. It predates 1940's His Girl Friday by a decade, a movie often cited as being the first realistic dialogue picture.
While the actors deserve a lot of credit, director Robert Z. Leonard also deserves note. His picture was ahead of its time with its aforementioned comfort with new technology and its more natural feel. Leonard, not surprisingly, would go on to have a long Hollywood career.
For fans of the era, the clothes, cars and architecture are Art Deco / Jazz Age heaven, as the story was written in the late 1920s before the stock market crashed and the Depression started.
Seeing young men and women dressed to the nines, even for casual outings, can make the movie seem dated, but young men and women, today, still fall deeply in love, sometimes hurt each other by cheating, sometimes divorce or breakup and sometimes regret it.
Living together has reduced some of that risk - or at least made it less outwardly embarrassing and formal - but humans are still humans, cheating still hurts and pride can cause them to make everything worse.
The Divorcee, stripped of all its wonderful style, is no less relevant today than when it was released. The really hard question it slyly asks still has no good answer: can a lie be better than the truth, when the truth wrecks two lives, but a lie would have made everyone happier?
The retort is that it took all the wreckage for Morris' character to truly understand how wrong his behavior was and, maybe, to truly understand how much he loved his wife. Then as now, there are no easy answers. Re: "...but in the cracks between, I wrote the following review..."!! Fading Fast is writing a book about the pre-Code era. Though he just began it, it will be available reading on March 1st...
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Post by Fading Fast on Apr 24, 2024 10:09:44 GMT
If anyone is interested, I just reread Ex-Wife, the book the movie The Divorcee is based on. I posted my comments on the novel here: "Ex-Wife"
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Post by Andrea Doria on Apr 24, 2024 13:02:06 GMT
Wow, that book sounds good. Who would have thought women were living that 'sex in the city' life so openly in 1920! I love the details about 20's women working out, shopping and then lunching with the girls.
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Post by Fading Fast on Apr 24, 2024 13:06:20 GMT
Wow, that book sounds good. Who would have thought women were living that 'sex in the city' life so openly in 1920! I love the details about 20's women working out, shopping and then lunching with the girls. I agree, I was stunned at how modern it felt. And since it was written in 1929, it's not a modern riff on the past (which too many period novels do today), it is what Parrott must have lived in the 1920s.
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