Stop work, it's Monday afternoon cartoon time (M.A.C.T.), which I believe is now official government policy. What could be more suitable for a rainy Monday than a Tex Avery cartoon about a misanthropic cat? Keep watching for the freaky moon creatures at the end. This version seems to have French subtitles, which makes it also educational.
This has got to be one of the jolliest scenes in cinema - tough cookie Barbara Stanwyck teaches the professors how to conga in Howard Hawks' Ball of Fire.
I don't know why I hadn't realised until recently that an incredibly high percentage of my favourite films - His Girl Friday, Spellbound, Notorious, The Shop Around the Corner, Strangers on a Train, Monkey Business, Where the Sidewalk Ends - were at least partly written by one man, Ben Hecht. Maybe it's because the British boycotted his work in the Forties and Fifties due to his criticism of their policies in Palestine, so he wrote many of his screenplays anonymously.
His screwball comedies in particular show up where modern rom-coms go wrong with their mild embarrassments and drippy mopings. People were tougher in the Thirties and Forties: there's nearly always something more serious at stake than humiliation. It might be full of wisecracks but His Girl Friday revolves around preventing the planned execution of a mentally ill murderer, and a desperate woman throws herself out of a window halfway through.
What could be more exciting than the opening titles of old films - as you look at this collection of page after page of movie title stills, you expect to hear the tooting of a fanfare or banging of a gong as the matinee begins. I haven't seen some of these films but Le Salaire de la Peur or The Wages of Fear is a winner: sweaty truckers on an urgent mission drive a load of nitroglycerine veeeery carefully...
This short film showing a fly doing juggling tricks with dumbbells, corks and another fly was made by pioneering filmmaker Percy Smith. By the end it's sitting in a tiny chair to do its routine. It does seem possible the fly is, er, glued on, although Smith claimed none of the creatures he filmed were any the worse for the experience.
Speechification has a post on a great radio documentary about Smith, as well as a link to another of his films, the Birth of a Flower.
A beautiful stop-motion forerunner of Toy Story by the famous Polish animator Ladislas Starewicz. What's incredible is how much character he manages to get into the toys, especially the tough safe-cracking doll, and the poor little dog hanging up as a car's mascot is full of pathos. This version unlike others on YouTube has the original music - you can see parts 2 and 3 here and here.
For a brief respite from Easter chicks and bunnies, try this vintage cartoon set in hell. What could be better on a bank holiday than this Ub Iwerks classic, which features a dragon being milked for its fire and the best dancing imps you'll ever see.
Strange how well animation and sweetly harmonising voices go together in these old 30s cartoons - I don't know what could be more reassuring. Do you think Hugh Harman just determinedly waited for someone called Rudolf Ising to come along, or were they perhaps having a drink together one day when they went, Hey, hold on a minute...
This one is a sort of goldfish version of the Wizard of Oz - perhaps intentionally, since it came out in the same year.
Honeyland, a sweet little cartoon from Harman-Ising. See, I knew spiders were evil and here's the proof. More scared of me than I am of them - ha! I don't think so.
Went to the Curzon Soho on Sunday for a screening of The Moon and the Sledgehammer, a 1972 documentary about a wonderfully strange family living in the Sussex woods. Full of the buzzings and rustlings of the forest, along with the sons tinkering with steam engines, the father playing the organ and musing - "Now you never want to take apart a magneto with a monkey in the vicinity. You can't rely on a monkey." In the Q&A afterwards the director Philip Trevelyan explained that Mr Page had worked as both an engineer and a circus clown, so these are obviously the words of experience.
Totally captivating view of a way of life that's gone - it doesn't close its eyes to the more unsettling aspects of the Pages' life, but always treats them with respect and listens to what they have to say - sensibly, since it's well worth listening to. It's just been released on DVD.
Saturday afternoon viewing: My Man Godfrey. One of those tough but highly moral Depression-era comedies, it's got the best opening I've seen for a long time - as the unemployed try to keep body and soul together on the city dump, some thick rich types turn up in search of a "forgotten man" for their scavenger hunt. These heiresses could teach Paris Hilton and co a thing or two, but they're no match for butler William Powell. All seems frighteningly familiar - short-selling even plays a vital role in the plot.
Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo.
This art/science film about magnetic forces seems to divide proper scientists on the subject of its educational value, but presuming you're not the sort of person who sees a magnetic field depicted as a big green bubble and wonders why you've never noticed it doing that before, I think it does a pretty good job of suggesting the wild nature of the invisible forces around us.
This slightly stunned lull between Christmas and New Year is the perfect time to watch old films - I suggest Capra's You Can't Take It With You. It's uplifting, but also topical, featuring a greedy banker getting his comeuppance during the Depression.
The family of eccentrics that you're supposed to prefer to the capitalists are actually quite wearing - see below. Personally it makes me want to go and get stuck into some serious paperwork at the bank. But there are lots of good little scenes - as above, where James Stewart demonstrates how to embarrass your stenographer-fiancee in a posh restaurant.
This apparently simple educational film from 1954 was actually made by the religious Moody Institute. Evangelist turned scientist Irwin Moon demonstrates the amazing properties of the electric eel. Moon was famous in his earlier life for such miraculous acts as frying an egg on a cold stove, and letting one million volts surge through his body, but here he is happy to make some bemused-looking colleagues jump with a shock from the eel, which seems to be called Joe.
Who'd have thought it? I confess to not having got round to finishing or let's face it starting the original - but Mary Ellen Bute's 1965 film, Passages from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, with its mixture of surrealism, TV parody, sci-fi imagery and straight stagey renactment leads you by the hand through the dreaming and waking of Joyce's story - or at least enough of it to be going on with. It's quite a lovely, strange and funny little film, in that swimmy black and white - and hearing the words spoken means they somehow make a lot more sense. (At Ubuweb, via feuilleton).
Fans of Hayao Miyazaki's charming animation My Neighbour Totoro might like to have a look at the Totoro Forest Project, a scheme to save the Tokyo forest that inspired Miyazaki's tale of friendly woodland spirits. Two hundred artists have donated work to be auctioned for the cause. (via Things).
Meanwhile, if you're in the UK, the Woodland Trust is looking for friends to help them create the largest new native forest in England.
Happy gnomes drop sunshine bombs on a village of gloomy Gothic types in this 1935 cartoon from the Van Beuren studios. Rather a strange message it sends out about the victory of aggressive optimism.
For those who want a more complete picture than that given in this earlier entry, here is the great Stanley Unwin to explain further. (Found via enthusiasm.)
Hope that's all straight now. On the subject of Stanley Unwin, I never realised that he was the star of a very peculiar Gerry Anderson Supermarionation series, The Secret Service. Apparently every week Father Stanley Unwin foiled someone's evil plan by talking nonsense, and sometimes taking the form of a puppet.
Today is the first day of spring, it's official. This Happy Harmonies cartoon from 1936 explains how the technology behind spring works - helpful if you're living in the UK and feeling a bit confused about why it's snowing. It's worth watching til the end to see the test tubes really doing their stuff.
If like me you are suffering from flu, can I recommend this demented Busby Berkeley number as a distraction. It makes a perfect kind of sense when you’re feeling a bit feverish anyway. A poor little seamstress falls asleep and dreams of blonde lovelies made into harps.
If you’re really spaced out you could try the Shadow Waltz - it starts fairly normally but wait til the neon violins turn up:
From the Thirties film Stolen Harmony, with George Raft.
Animals take a romantic rocket trip in this lovely Max Fleischer cartoon from 1935.
Eye of the Goof has this crazy seduction-by-drum solo from the film Phantom Lady. Elisha Cook has a lusty expression not seen since the eye-popping, table-banging wolf in Red Hot Riding Hood, and the lady in the gauze hat appears to have gone completely feral.