The scene near the end, where Homer(played by Harold Russell) puts the ring on his bride Wilma’s(played by Cathy O’Donnell) finger, is perfection. He grasps it in the two hooks that serve him for his right hand, as the camera pans over the anxious faces of his friends and family, then neatly puts it on. And she grasps his hand as the benediction is pronounced just as if his hand was ordinary flesh and blood.
There’s also the earlier scene where Homer invites Wilma to his bedroom, to show her what he has to go through to take his clothes on and off. My mother, when she watched the film with me, didn’t know the actor really did lack both his hands, and wondered at the “special effects”
Other than the Wikipedia entry’s video and on YouTube?
There’s one on YouTube where Gertie’s playing with a streetcar, two or three into the YouTube “play all” link, though you’d have to sit through the same “dinner-scene” cartoon three or four times before it turns up.
All Through The Night I love this movie! Humphrey Bogart just wants his cheesecake, someone’s killed the baker. Why would someone do that? Bogart doesn’t even want to get involved. This is hilarious with touches of spy drama/suspense, so good. Worth watching just to hear Bogart try to say ‘Fifth Columnists’ over and over. Made the year before Casablanca.
And Una Merkel as Effie. No competition for the femme fatale there. Nonetheless you make it sound worth watching.
Certainly one of my top favorites is the best dance movie ever done, Swing Time with Astaire and Rogers, and an unbeatable score by Jerome Kern. Yes, this is the one with the blackface Bojangles number, but it was done with such reverence and grace that I, for one, readily forgive the gaffe. This movie has the best dance sequence I’ve ever seen, not the best as the most dazzling or difficult, but the best in terms of how the emotions are conveyed through the music and movements. I’m talking about the “Never Gonna Dance” number near the end. It is epic, please see it if you ever get a chance.
I came in here to say the same thing. The Third Man is one of my favorite movies of any era. The film doesn’t have a false note from beginning to end. It has great characters and great dialogue. The protagonist learns a lot about the world and himself, but the story never becomes sentimental. The movie also has one of the greatest closing shots in film history.
Double Indemnity (1944). Nail-biting suspense. Great, snappy dialog. And Edward G. Robinson plays possibly my favorite movie character of all time.
This movie turned me into a Billy Wilder fan. I could name other movies of his that I love almost as much as Indemnity, but they were released after 1950.
My mum will be 85 this year, and was a movie freak as a kid, so I grew up watching all sorts of 1930s and 1940s films, so it’s difficult to pick one from that era. I’ve also liked Buster Keaton from childhood (mum’s influence again), so many to choose from there.
That said, the pre-1950 film that had the most impact on me was Abel Gance’s Napoleon with a live orchestra (Carl Davis conducting his own score). Show started at 1pm and ended at about 21.45 (two intervals and a meal break). Astonishing experience – Gance’s tricks and techniques with the camera elicited several 'holy shit!'s from the audience during the screening I went to (the pillowfight scene, the POV shots during the snowball fight, the swinging camera during the Marseilles sequence interpolated with Napoleon’s harrowing boat-escape on stormy seas, the triptych finale – not to mention the absolutely bizarre, pink- filtered, bare-breasted, post-guillotine dance party scene).
If you get the chance to see it outside the US, do. (In the US, I think due to a legal battle, you’re stuck with Coppola’s score which isn’t a patch on Davis’s). It’s also great to see with a British audience, especially their reaction to Gance’s jabs at the British themselves. What was released on DVD is not Kevin Brownlow’s far superior restoration.
Isn’t there one where Buster Keaton finds a time machine or something? I think he wears a straw hat in it.
The one where Ginger Rogers and some dude have to share an attic but can’t be home when the other is there.
The one with Ginger Rogers and many other big name stars of that era living in a boarding house.
I love watching the old-timey movies on flights. That’s where I saw “The Grapes of Wrath”, “The Manchurian Candidate”, the original “Psycho”, and the one where the rich little girl goes to live in a boarding school when her father goes to war and then he dies and she’s left destitute and they make her live in the attic and do chores, then at the end she finds her father in the hospital with amnesia.
You may be thinking of the Twilight Zone episode where Buster Keaton builds a time machine helmet. The 1963 scenes were in color, the 1920 scenes were in black & white.