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angery20
Reviews
12 Angry Men (1997)
Lugubrious self indulgent twaddle
This remake of a classic simply sucked. The blame falls squarely on the shoulders of the director.
If I could do a shot by shot, role by role comparison, the major difference is that in this remake the actors are so visibly "ACTING". Each line is freighted with meaning as if it was the most important utterance in theatrical history. The camera angles and lighting all re-enforce these scenery chewing interpretations.
For example in the original we have a man commenting on the rain and telling a simple story about losing a football game because of heavy rain. That's it a bit of exposition an almost throw away line of character development. In the remake that same bit is treated as some quasi-mystical life lesson, an epochal moment in time. The character changes from a guy passing time to a bore who thinks the world revolves around his part time job as an assistant football coach.
Each and every speech in this remake is treated in the same way. There is not one line small enough that it's not treated with the attention usually reserved to Shakespearian soliloquies.
The acting is often bad and that's frequently not the fault of the actors. It's the director that tells the actors to dial it up or down. It's the director that sees the whole picture. The pacing of this remake is amazingly slow and that makes its 117 min run time seem like 3 hours. The original was 96 minutes and was over before you noticed the time.
I would love to go into greater detail but that would require I watch this movie again, and that ain't happening.
The Harder They Fall (1956)
Prino Carnera was right to sue
I saw this film last night on TCM. The parallels between the career of Primo Carnera and Toro Moreno are pretty obvious. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primo_Carnera Carnera was a big strong guy who had most of his fights fixed and he was taken apart in a championship fight by Max Baer. The same Max Baer that takes apart Toro in the movie. Toro may have been more exaggeratedly bad than Carnera was in real life, but once you reach a certain level in the sport there isn't a lot of difference between the somewhat able and the unable.
I would have like to rate this film higher because it was Bogart's last. But that would be unfair to the films that weren't his last.
Bogart gives his usual excellent performance but the character is a bit inconsistent. demanding that the fighters who take dives for Toro get $1000 straight up rather than through their managers. That bit of compassion rings hollow. The revelation at the end that Toro's share of his efforts is $49 comes as too big a surprise to Eddie Willis. I think the idea of Eddie Willis advocating for the boxers as a salve to his conscience might have worked but it wasn't implemented well enough. It's that inconsistency that keeps the film from being one of Bogart's better movies.
An earlier poster mentions the difference in style between Steiger and Bogart. One being a devotee of method acting and the other being more of a representational style actor. I think its a fascinating question, how do the two different stylist interact as craftsmen and artists? I've heard stories about Bogart sitting in front of his dressing room mirror practicing lines and trying different gestures and inflections till he found one he liked. That would be the antithesis of method which demands that all actions occur immediately as the scene is being filmed. I'd like to know how the two men accommodated each other during filming. How ever it was worked out, the end product form both men was a model for any actor.