January 19, 2010

free free...

5 comments:

Andy Rector said...

--Ida Lupino as Marie in HIGH SIERRA, 1941 (Raoul Walsh).

josé neves said...

Ida! for me, the female actress extraordinaire. Recently i saw her in Peckinpah's "Junior Bonner", a solid memory strenght in the movie.

I wish i saw the movies she made, but i'll always have her "On Dangerous Ground".

Tremendous Ida.

Andy Rector said...

Thank you tremendously José.
You speak as though it's too late to see the movies Ida made.
Is it too late?

I'd like to see her first film, made with Allan Dwan in England. She started her film-life with this Dwan, called HER FIRST AFFAIRE, and ended it with something called MY BOYS ARE GOOD BOYS.

ON DANGEROUS GROUND, yes; me, I can't shake the image of her in THE MAN I LOVE standing in an gray, overcrowded one-room tenement dressed in a sparkling nightclub singer's dress looking at the infected red veins of a workers hand!

josé neves said...

too late blues... the same old story andy, if they don't show i will not see, unless i buy some on line. Tell me, did you see some of them? which one(s) i'll must see?

Another two for memory: the unbelievable "While The City Sleeps" (one of my american Lang's) and "The Big Knife", Aldrich's extravaganza, that suits her so well.

Andy Rector said...

José! I never answered...

I would bring Ida's films to the Cinemateca!, if I knew how...

Of her films: by far her first is one of the most notable of all first films: NOT WANTED.
THE BIGAMIST is a feat of decoupage, expressing a basic truth (intimated in HIGH SIERRA): bigamy and "crime" is many locations and travel. THE HITCH-HIKER is the first of the great road films with an astonishing last statement by a criminal, a criminal one comes to identify with: he just spits on the ground. The physical is immense in her films: dance [NEVER FEAR], blindness [ON DANGEROUS GROUND and HITCH-HIKER], tennis [HARD, FAST, AND BEAUTIFUL], illness, hospitalization, unwanted pregnancy [NEVER FEAR, NOT WANTED]. Not cosmic --as the MacMahonists spoke of her-- but social; no coincidence: her films resemble the reluctancies, ambitions, and slaveries of THE PROWLER and THE LAWLESS by Losey. HARD, FAST AND BEAUTIFUL is one of her greatest films in every way. A nightmare.

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