Hollywood Movie Reviews......... Options

[Reeth]

Please review and express your feelings about the Hollywood movies old and new ,that you have watched,liked & would recommend to the other members ......

I start off with an all time favourite film of my entire family....i have lost count of the number of times
i have watched this since the time.....

The Ten Commandments (1956)






It is one of the Greatest movies ever made in the history of World Cinema...
The film covers the life of Moses from his discovery in a basket floating on the Nile as a baby by
Bithiah, a childless young widow and daughter of the then-Pharaoh, Rameses I, to his eventual
departure from Israel in the wake of God's judgment that he not be allowed to enter the Promised
Land. In between, the film depicts the early adulthood of Moses as a beloved foster son of
Pharaoh Seti I (successor of Rameses I and brother of Bithiah) and general of his armies, his
romance with Throne Princess Nefertari and rivalry with the Pharaoh's own son,
Prince RamesesII.

Critics have argued that considerable liberties were taken with the Biblical story, affecting the film's
claim to authenticity, but this has had little effect on its popularity.....

Aside from winning the Academy Award for Best Effects, Special Effects, it was also nominated for
Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Color, Best Cinematography, Color, Best Costume Design,
Color (Edith Head, Ralph Jester, John Jensen, Dorothy Jeakins and Arnold Friberg), Best Film Editing,
Best Picture and Best Sound, Recording







Cecil B DeMille’s swan song is a movie for the ages. At 75 the legendary director was at the
peak of his fame, his name a house-hold word and his voice recognized by millions. He probably
knew The Ten Commandments would be his last film it almost killed him. He certainly knew it
would be his most important.

Shot in widescreen Technicolor, The Ten Commandments remains the standard by which
Biblical epics -- and many epics in general -- are measured
When Moses turns his staff into a snake and back again, the effect is seamless. His turning of the Nile
into blood is an impressive camera trick, but his parting of the Red Sea is one of Hollywood's most
famous stunts. It's worth sitting through the 220 minutes of movie for this alone....

MAIN CAST

#Charlton Heston as Moses
# Yul Brynner as Pharaoh Rameses II
# Anne Baxter as Nefertari
# Edward G. Robinson as Dathan
# Yvonne De Carlo as Sephora
# Debra Paget as Lilia
# John Derek as Joshua
# Sir Cedric Hardwicke as Pharaoh Seti I

But the Ten Commandments isn’t about God alone.... It’s about a woman, Neferteri the beauty of
Egypt, and whom she marries will become Pharoe and rule the Earth...she prefers Moses who races
chariots and saves old women from being crushed under the monumental obilisk he is raising in honor
of Neferteri’s father — and helped by the fact he’s played by manly-man Charlton Heston who looks
great,She does not want Ramses, the delicious Yul Brenner who wants Neferteri because of the
wealth and power that comes with her.
Moses is banished and Neferteri is forced to marry Ramses instead.
History might know about Moses and Ramses, but DeMille knew about
scorned women.....




It remains one of the five most successful films of all time.It is Cecil B. DeMille’s last and arguably
greatest film.....Definitely worth watching....

[mmuk2004]

Review by Mark Bourne

A number of things make The Great Dictator unlike any previous Chaplin film. Bosley Crowther's New York Times review noted that this was "no droll and gentle-humored social satire in the manner of Chaplin's earlier films. The Great Dictator is essentially a tragic picture — or tragi-comic in the classic sense — and it has strongly bitter overtones." And in a bow to technological inevitability, this was Chaplin's first full-on sound film with dialogue. Knowing that dialogue would destroy the essence of the necessarily silent Little Tramp, cinema's foremost pantomimist retired the character forever at the conclusion of Modern Times four years earlier. So The Great Dictator was the first feature-length film in which he starred as a character other than the Tramp.

In The Great Dictator Chaplin in fact plays two lead roles. One is a meek Jewish barber in the European country of Tomania. Granted, the barber bears more than a passing resemblance to the Tramp, even affecting the familiar bowler hat and cane. But Chaplin was clear that the barber is not the Tramp and The Great Dictator is not a Tramp movie. The barber is a World War I soldier stricken with amnesia in an aircraft accident. After twenty years in a hospital, he returns to the Jewish ghetto where he re-opens his long-abandoned shop, blissfully ignorant of how the world has changed in his absence. Thuggish Aryan stormtroopers patrol the streets to assault Jewish civilians. They paint the word JEW on the barber's shop windows. They wear armbands with the Swastika-like "double cross." The country is under the thumb of Adenoid Hynkel, the power-mad Fooey (that is, Führer), who with his jackbooted armies is determined to conquer the globe. Grinding the Jews in the ghetto beneath his heel is only the start of his plans.

Secondly (and more memorably), Chaplin plays the crazed dictator Hynkel. It's in this savage and undisguised parody of Hitler that The Great Dictator achieves its immortality. A pompous little megalomaniac, Hynkel was a pie in the face to a madman whom Hollywood and the rest of the world had come to fear. Chaplin inhabits Hynkel so fully that the barber is rendered almost perfunctory. Chaplin studied hours of newsreels to capture Hitler properly, and this lacerating sendup of the Führer's oratorical style blends mock-German gobbledygook with a bullseye on his theatrical bombast.

It turns out that the barber and Hynkel are lookalikes. ("Any resemblance between Hynkel the dictator and the Jewish barber is purely coincidental," quips an opening title card.) Hynkel prepares his plans to kill off all the Jews ("then the brunettes") with the aid of his loyal advisers, Field Marshal Herring and Propaganda Minister Garbitsch. Meanwhile, the barber innocently tries to adjust to his new life as a prisoner in his own country. He becomes involved with a young orphan woman, Hannah (Paulette Goddard), and through her falls in with a group of conspirators who aim to assassinate Hynkel. A scene where they consume puddings, and whoever spoons up a hidden coin must embark on the suicide mission, is one of the great Chaplin bits.

Each of Chaplin's pinnacle features — The Kid, The Gold Rush, City Lights, Modern Times, and The Great Dictator — contributed at least one of cinema's all-time indelible images. In Dictator that comes with the inspired scene where Hynkel, alone in his palatial Chancellery, dances a graceful ballet with a globe of Planet Earth. When the balloon-globe eventually pops in his face, the great dictator cries like a spoiled child. The scene is one of Chaplin's most sublime. Artistically, any faults one can quibble about in The Great Dictator are trumped by this famous sequence.

For good measure, Chaplin drives a clown car up Mussolini's ass as well. Vaudeville-trained Jack Oakie turns Il Duce into "Napaloni of Bacteria," a back-slapping, uncouth, low-comedy bulldog of a despot. He competes with Hynkel for everything from the height of their barber chairs (which telescope toward the ceiling in a brilliant one-panel cartoon of political one-upmanship) to whose army invades a country first. It's to Chaplin's credit that he shared so much screen time with the born scene-stealer Oakie, who barrels through the movie like a New York cab driver through a yellow light. The performance earned Oakie an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

Events turn so that the barber must impersonate the dictator in a radio address to the entire world. And here arrives the most controversial scene in The Great Dictator, probably in all the Chaplin syllabus. The barber, disguised as Hynkel, steps up to the podium and through the camera faces us eye to eye. Now Chaplin drops character utterly. He speaks not as the barber, but as himself and from the heart in a screen-filling close-up. In an impassioned six-minute speech he pleads for tolerance and the elevation of the innate greater good of the human spirit, and an end to oppression, industrial dehumanization, greed, militarism, and nationalism.