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Films Again - all new
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Sin Agog
Sin Agog
2253 posts

Re: Films Again - all new
Aug 20, 2016, 20:15
Think The Lodger may have started out as a play. At least I inherited an old program from a theatrical version of The Lodger, also starring Ivor Novello, after my grandma died. If you're talking about the hardboiled nothingness of the '90s version, then I'm soooo not with you. There was also a straightforward talkie remake in the early '30s which I haven't seen, so don't know about that.

Just watched Chaplin's Limelight for the second, maybe third time, and it really is an underrated masterpiece. I guess audiences wanted him to shut his geggy once he started talking, but God he had so much to say. There are so many lovely lines in this film: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044837/quotes

The plot's melodramatic in that Douglas Sirk kind of way, and some of the acting can be a bit over the top, but it's totally hypnotising and heart-wrenching, and loaded with the kind of insight only someone who wanted to create but wasn't allowed to could deliver (Chaplin was on the verge of being deported for being too humanistic at the time). Of course, the stand-out scene is probably when he and Buster Keaton perform onstage together at the end of the film, but everything leading up to that was lovely, too. Monsieur Verdoux and The Great Dictator are the only two other talking pictures he did worth much cop, but Limelight must have been an influence on everything from Larry Olivier in The Entertainer to Birdman, and it surpasses them all if you're able to accept the melodramatic trappings, which were always there in his pictures from the beginning. His autobiography's proving a great read, too.
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