Oh, Eve! It’s High Opera! I hated Westerns too, until I worked my way through Rosenbaum’s list and discovered Rio Bravo (a chick flick for dudes) and Johnny Guitar. From there to Track of the Cat, Naked Spur, Man from Laramie, Duel in the Sun (talk about camp! Jennifer Jones out Dorothy-Malones Dorothy Malone in that one!), and the Searchers, and I’m no longer afraid of the genre: great art will shine through.
What about the Big Sky?
Nope, nope, nope, no Westerns.
Any of you ever see the great Lypsinka? He uses a lot of these films in his work. I saw him and Flotilla de Barge in Imitation of Imitation of Life a few years ago.
Big Sky’s smaller, quieter. And not campy at all. But one of your better Westerns.
Never saw Lypsinka live, but that sounds HYlarious. And Eve, I will allow your “No Westerns” ONLY if you get yourself through Johnny Guitar. Just that one, OK? Please? It gets even better.
Eve! How could you not mention Written on the Wind? It’s dang near the Platonic ideal of the genre, and it has Lauren Bacall! Mentioning Imitation of Life and All That Heaven Allows and not mentioning Written on the Wind is like . . . well, like claiming to prefer Vile Bodies over Decline and Fall.
. . . Ukulele Ike put you up to that, didn’t he?
I’m a big fan of Imitation of Life, Madame X, Peyton Place (all Doug Sirk, right?) and others of that type, what I think of as the Lana Turner in Technicolor school. They’re just so wildly, wonderfully overdone.
There is a book called Bad Movies We Love that summarizes many of these films hilariously. I especially love the phrase they use, “as so often happens in real life,” to describe some improbable set of events.
Tea & Sympathy never fails to make me laugh. So… a young man must prove he isn’t gay by submitting to having his pajamas ripped off by a group of beefy boys–and to spare him this indignity, his best friend tears his pjs off before anyone else can get their hands on him? No. Nothing homoerotic in that.
Sirk only did Imitation of Life, of the three you mention.
Only in the sense that when I went to compose my post protesting your omission of WotW, that thread was the first thing that popped to mind. Sorry, just couldn’t resist.
War of the Worlds?
Will o’ the Wisp?
Written on the Wind, I presume. Dorothy Malone fondling the model oil derrick in the final scene is probably my favourite piece of camp Freudian, well, subtext in cinema.
Hmm, that reads just as good as “camp Freudian well subtext …”