Barbara Stanwyck, John Wayne in Alfred E. Green's Baby Face (top); Sandro Panseri in Ermanno Olmi's Il Posto (bottom) In the next few hours, Turner Classic Movies will present one of MGM's last silent films (with synchronized score), one of the best movies of the 1960s, one of the most outrageous pre-Code releases of the early 1930s, and a documentary about the portrayal of women in pre-Code movies. All that in addition to a Wildfire vehicle and a production that sounds a lot like a (however unofficial) remake of Fred Zinnemann's The Search. Either get your various recording devices ready, or start drinking lots and lots of coffee. Starring Renée Adorée (above right), a sensational actress whose style was more naturalistic than that of most performers out there today, Tide of Empire (1929) was one of MGM's last silent-film releases. Allan Dwan, by then already a veteran, directed.
- 1/24/2011
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
De Sica characters in Antonioni landscapes, that’s Ermanno Olmi’s Il posto. The larva-like protagonist (Sandro Panseri) is introduced under a cocoon of bedcovers in his parents’ provincial home before heading off to apply for “a secure job for life” in a Milanese corporation, the post of the title. The test, which consists of a mathematical exam (one hour in a palace’s cavernous storage room to solve a single fraction problem), a physical checkup (squatting and stretching before the company doctor) and a psychiatric interview (“Do you suffer from frequent itching?”), offers the first of several keen adumbrations of Kafka. Suggesting a bull calf in an oversized coat, the lad shyly comes to life while window-shopping and sharing expresso cups or perfume droplets with a fellow candidate (Loredana Detto) during a tentative lunchtime flirtation. He becomes a messenger’s apprentice and she a typist, but separate departments and...
- 2/20/2010
- MUBI
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