Erik Charell. His credits include script contributions to the Hope-Crosby comedy Road to Morocco and the Tony Martin musical Casbah. To learn this after seeing his only two features as director, The Congress Dances (1931) and Caravan (1934), is like discovering there was a guy called Orson Welles who made Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons and spent the rest of his career writing gags for Abbott & Costello.Perhaps Charell wasn't an artist of quite Welles' status. But he'd made a big name for himself in operetta, and both his films are in this mode, though the operetta-film is the genre that time forgot. As out-of-vogue as musicals are, despite anything Damien Chazelle can prove to the contrary, they are the height of fashion compared to actual filmed operettas.The Congress Dances is set in Vienna as pre-wwi world leaders meet and get distracted by romance, except Conrad Veidt as master diplomat...
- 3/3/2017
- MUBI
Claudette Colbert movies on Turner Classic Movies: From ‘The Smiling Lieutenant’ to TCM premiere ‘Skylark’ (photo: Claudette Colbert and Maurice Chevalier in ‘The Smiling Lieutenant’) Claudette Colbert, the studio era’s perky, independent-minded — and French-born — "all-American" girlfriend (and later all-American wife and mother), is Turner Classic Movies’ star of the day today, August 18, 2014, as TCM continues with its "Summer Under the Stars" film series. Colbert, a surprise Best Actress Academy Award winner for Frank Capra’s 1934 comedy It Happened One Night, was one Paramount’s biggest box office draws for more than decade and Hollywood’s top-paid female star of 1938, with reported earnings of $426,944 — or about $7.21 million in 2014 dollars. (See also: TCM’s Claudette Colbert day in 2011.) Right now, TCM is showing Ernst Lubitsch’s light (but ultimately bittersweet) romantic comedy-musical The Smiling Lieutenant (1931), a Best Picture Academy Award nominee starring Maurice Chevalier as a French-accented Central European lieutenant in...
- 8/19/2014
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
In honor of Béla Tarr's The Turin Horse, three successive shots from another film of lavish absurdity, tracking shots, and gypsies, Erik Charell's Caravan (1934), with Charles Boyer and Loretta Young. The first two shots are each about two minutes long; the last about eight seconds, but in a movie that seems mostly made up of minutes-long tracks, every cut becomes more significant as Charell suggests he might have just left his camera running. In Caravan, even when the camera is still, Charell, rather than cut, tends to triangulate the composition among actors whose small gestures of hands and eyes flit about from one to another: a minute choreography that keeps the viewer's eye tracking and the point of focus fluctuating through latent lines of motion.
Other sequences in the movie are even more audacious conceptually: one follows a supporting character slipping in and out of a past memory...
Other sequences in the movie are even more audacious conceptually: one follows a supporting character slipping in and out of a past memory...
- 10/9/2011
- MUBI
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