Andrew Tilles Movies
- 2001
- NR
- Add Goldwyn: The Man and His Movies to QueueAdd Goldwyn: The Man and His Movies to top of Queue
This documentary, produced for PBS's American Masters series, is based on A. Scott Berg's well-received biography of Samuel L. Goldwyn (1882-1974), Hollywood's first and likely still greatest independent producer. (Berg cowrote the screenplay.) Like many Hollywood pioneers, Goldwyn was born in Europe in modest circumstances, began his professional life in America in another business (selling gloves), and then fell into motion pictures, in Goldwyn's case, just as production was moving to the West Coast. His first film, with partner Jessie L. Lasky, was The Squaw Man, directed by Cecil B. DeMille and shot on location in the newly minted community of Hollywood. Goldwyn's career was slow getting started, but he hit his stride in the sound era, with literary adaptations of Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith and Dodsworth, Lillian Hellman's These Three and The Little Foxes (which Goldwyn, famous for slips of speech, always referred to as The Three Little Foxes), Sidney Kingsley's Dead End, and Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. He also made the first two screen versions of the venerable weepie, Stella Dallas, produced Eddie Cantor's big foray into film, Whoopee, and made the iconic baseball biography, Pride of the Yankees. Goldwyn finally reached the pinnacle of movie success in 1946 with The Best Years of Our Lives, which brought him his first Oscar for Best Picture. His postwar career arc was largely downward; two big musicals, Guys and Dolls and especially Porgy and Bess, failed to capture the public attention in spite of lavish production values and big-name casts. The newly filmed interviews, mostly with the surviving members of the Goldwyn family, including his son Sam Goldwyn, Jr., his daughter from his first marriage, Ruth Capps, and his actor grandson Tony Goldwyn, offer insights into Goldwyn the man, while excerpts from vintage interviews with Bette Davis, William Wyler, John Huston, Rouben Mamoulian, Lillian Hellman, Danny Kaye, Dana Andrews, Merle Oberon, and Laurence Olivier (doing a hilarious impression of Goldwyn) offer glimpses into his working persona. ~ Tom Wiener, All Movie Guide
- 1998
The history of color photography in motion pictures is lovingly detailed with vibrant film clips and first-person interviews in this 60-minute cable TV special. Beginning with such experimental processes as hand-tinting each frame of film (a specialty first of Edison, then perfected by the French Pathe company) and the "Kinemacolor" technique (a cumbersome procedure requiring special high-speed projectors and two separate strips of film), the special then moves on to the swaddling days of Technicolor, with rare vignettes from such silent films as The Toll of the Sea (1922), The Black Pirate (1926), and Ben-Hur. The two-color Technicolor process gives way in 1933 to an improved three-strip format, yielding such splendiferous results as Becky Sharp (1935), The Wizard of Oz (1939), and Gone With the Wind. But because of the dictatorial policies of Technicolor consultant Natalie Kalmus (who gained control of the company in a divorce proceeding), moviemakers were forced to adhere to firmly controlled policies of how the colors could be arranged and toned, with no wiggle room for individual creativity. Fortunately, Kalmus did not wield as much power over British filmmakers like Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger who freed the Technicolor process from the shackles of conformity and corporate thinking in the 1940s, yielding such visual feasts as The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus. The special concludes with the final years of the three-strip format in the early '50s, with interviews from such Technicolorful stars as Esther Williams and Arlene Dahl. Drawing heavily from Turner's vast MGM film library, Glorious Technicolor originally aired over the Turner Classic Movies service. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
