Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

I had never seen a Yasujiro Ozu film, including his oft-mentioned classic, Tokyo Story (1953), when I watched this movie a couple of years ago. I started with Good Morning  (1959) because I figured a comedy would be a good place to start and felt the premise of Tokyo Story to be somewhat daunting. It made me excited to see more examples of his famous "pillow shots," where Ozu cuts away from the narrative to focus on a landscape, an empty room, or a household item, and build his world. This interest in Ozu's framing was only a starting point because now I plan on watching his entire filmography for narrative as well as cinematography and everything else that makes his mise-en-scene and ideas so enjoyable. I will write about fifteen of them for the blog and rank them.  One of his later comedies,  Good Morning  examines how two young boys challenge their parents' rules because they want them to buy a television to watch Sumo matches. As with most of Ozu's ouevre, t...

The Most Dangerous Game , directed by Irving Pichel and Ernest B. Schoedsack is a fast-paced adaptation of Richard Connell's short story in which a big game hunter and author Bob Rainsford (Joel McCrea) is shipwrecked on an island and ends up as the prey of Count Zaroff (Leslie Banks) after he refuses to hunt with him. Rainsford and Eve Towbridge (Fay Wray) are let loose and must fight against the Count to escape the island. Rainsford is adept at fighting the count through cunning as well as fisticuffs, and beats him at his own game. The acting is superb and the action never lets up after the first half hour, which introduces the characters. The mock drunken performance of Martin Towbridge (Robert Armstrong) is undoubtedly the low point, yet is easy to forget once the hunt begins. Leslie Banks instills fear as the count and Wray is charming as Rainford's companion. The film was also shot on the same set as RKO's King Kong .