There’s an old noir movie with Ray Milland called The Thief which has (for me at least) the unique distinction of having a sound track with sounds and noises, including ringing telephones, but not one word of spoken dialog.
Are there movies you’ve seen (or read of) with some unique feature like that?
Memento. Not only a fabulous movie, but time flows backwards. And forwards. You’ll just have to watch it to understand.
Eraserhead. There are plenty of movies that are bizarre and don’t make any sense, or are full of random confusing images. It seems like most of David Lynch’s movies fit that description. What makes Eraserhead unique in my opinion is that it’s totally bizarre, yet has an actual understandable plot. (Well, for most of the movie. I’ve never understood the last chunk of it.) And the baby in that movie’s pretty unique looking.
The China Syndrome has no music.
If only I could remember the name of the movie that introduce Smell-o-vision.
Oh, wait – that’s what Google is for. Scent of a Mystery!
Now to track down a copy…
Daniel
There are other movies that do the exact same thing, but I can’t remember them(short-term memory loss, perhaps?).
Russkij kovcheg (Russian Ark - 2002), a 96-minute movie, was shot in one single take (no cuts) and they had just one day to shoot the film.
Wasn’t that a common trait of a lot of 70’s movies? Or does it just feel that way? For example, off the top of my head, didn’t Dog Day Afternoon have no music?
Hitchcock’s Rope was shot without cuts. Each take lasted as long as it took to run the film through the camera.
Don’t know about that, but I am pretty sure Alfre Hitchcock’s The Birds had no music.
The fact that you have multiple rolls indicates that there is the need for an editor. Russian Ark was shot on video, so it is one long continuous 1 1/2-hour shot. This is what makes it unique.
There are other movies that do the exact same thing, but I can’t remember them(short-term memory loss, perhaps?).
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The film adaptation of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal preceded Memento by 17 years, and a South Korean drama called Peppermint Candy came out the same year using the same device (although, IMHO, it’s a much better film). There have also been other films since then to do the same thing (Irreversible).
Lady in the Lake (1947) was shot completely from a 1st-person POV.
IMDB’s trivia page has this to say about China Syndrome
The IMDB entry for Dog Day Afternoon makes no such claim. However, it does say this for The Birds:
So it looks like China Syndrome is not unique in this regard, and the question writers for Trivial Pursuit have one more bit of misinformation to answer for.
Fahrenheit 451 has spoken credits at the beginning, as befits a movie about a society that bans books. The only thing like it I can think of is one of Orson Welles’ films (I think The Magnificent Ambersons) which has welles speaking the closing credits.
Rope used ten-minute takes, the longest that could be done at the time. But there were breaks between them – film had to be replaced in the camera. Russian Ark, OTOH, was one single take without a break. I’ve seen it; it’s quite impressive and a pretty good movie even without the gimmick.
Speaking of the Birds:
Bill and Coo had a cast made entirely of parrots dressed as people. Jonathan Livingston Seagull’s cast was entirely made of seagulls.
The Terror of Tiny Town, a western featuring midgets.
Well, yeah, not arguing or disputing the uniqueness of Russian Ark. But the editor’s job on Rope consisted of splicing roll 1 to roll 2, etc. Not exactly a creative process.
Wasn’t all the filming for “12 Angry Men” shot in the courtroom, mostly in the jury room? I don’t remember a single scene outside of the courthouse.
Many movies that have been adapted from plays take place in one room, or on one set.
Many MANY many movies have been made without soundtrack music; if Trivial Pursuit claims that makes THe China Syndrome uniques, they’re way WAY wrong.
The Birds has no “music,” but composer Bernard Herrman worked with syntesizers and electronic “music” (if such things were technically synthesizers back then) to create the bird sounds of the soundtrack. So by some definitions it would be considered music.
There’s an outdoors shot at the end of Twelve Angry Men, if I recall correctly.
There is at least one actual on-screen edit in Rope: when the maid comes into the living room to announce that dinner is ready, the movie cuts from a group shot of the guests to a closeup of the maid. And no, it was not a damaged print I was watching! The dialogue on the soundtrack runs continuously from one shot to the next.
This is in addition to the hidden edits between reels, of course.
There are two versions of the musical Oklahoma! (1955), one shot in the 65mm Todd-AO process at 30 f.p.s., the other shot in 35mm CinemaScope at 24 f.p.s. Each version is composed of entirely separate takes of each scene. When this dual-process shooting was used again the following year with Carousel, star Frank Sinatra quit rather than have to make the same movie twice.
Likewise, two versions of The Bat Whispers (1930) were shot, one in 70mm and one in 35mm, each with a different director of photography. And two versions of Doctor X (1933) were shot, one in Technicolor, the other in black and white, although in this case the two cameras usually shot simultaneously during the same takes.
Alfred Hithcock’s Lifeboat (1944) has the smallest set of any Hollywood feature: except for an opening shot moving across the debris from a ship’s sinking, the entire movie is set in the title craft.
Add the early talkie The Terror (1928) to the list of movies whose credits are spoken, in this case onscreen by caped and masked actor Conrad Nagel.
In the Bob Hope comedy Louisiana Purchase (1941), the standard legal disclaimer about the plot and characters being fictional is sung onscreen by chorus girls in a production number.