Wonderful Movie

From my favorite movies..

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

... was my reaction and my desire when I sat through the painful talking portions of this movie. The dialogue was uninspired if not just plain weird and Delores Costello has never sounded more ridiculous. I'll chalk that up to the dialogue coach, since so many early female vocal performances in films sounded similarly falsely aristocratic. She's supposed to be a singer/dancer in a vaudeville-like troupe and they have her speaking like she's the queen of England? See Ms. Costello in Magnificent Ambersons if you want to know what she really sounded like.I still give this film an 8/10 though. As a spectacle film in the De Mille tradition done by Warner Brothers before they had truly emerged into the studio big leagues, it is a sight to behold. No special effects here - those are real buildings falling on real extras and real water pouring onto them. I know director Michael Curtiz had a reputation for holding in great disdain actors who required a lunch break, but you'd think that he at least realized they require oxygen.The silent style of the players is pretty good. In fact, so good there are a dearth of title cards in the silent portion, since everyone is so adept at conveying their feelings through pantomime. The Vitaphone musical score accompanies the action well and the introduction to the film is particularly well done with water swirling around, sound effects, and the rather haunting musical introduction.There's some historically interesting points of view being shown here too. Filmed in 1928 over a year before the stock market crash there is a rather prescient visual montage at the beginning of the film equating stock brokers and their obsession with money with the worship of the golden calf of biblical times. However, the end of the film has a moral that is not so prescient - basically equating World War I as that wasteful pointless war to end all wars when a much more horrible conflict was a little more than ten years away.I'd highly recommend this one for two reasons. For the parts that are silent it is quite a work of visual art. For the parts that are talking it is a good example of how studios were so obsessed with sound that art was thrown out the window in the process, at least for a year or two. I'd rate this as one of my favorite although somewhat guilty cinematic pleasures.

No matter how good this silent movie is, it could never make up for the horribly tragic deaths of several extras due to an indifferent director and studio. When I saw the incredibly spectacular flood scenes, I couldn't help but think about this...as three died to make these scenes.The film is not exactly a film about the flood. Like DeMille's first "Ten Commandments", the Biblical tale is only a small portion of the film--and much of the rest of the film is a heavy-handed contemporary story that only tangentially relates to the Bible. The bulk of the story is about WWI and the film compares this to the flood(!)--about how man's inhumanity that lead to the flood is the same as what lead to the war. And, like the promise of no more earth-covering floods, the film makers were bold enough to promise that with the end of WWI that there would be no wars!! They go so far as to say that the death of over 10,000,000 in the war was NOT in vain! Wishful thinking...especially in light of WWII and countless other wars since! On top of this, the WWI sequence is filled with one amazing one in a million occurrence after another--such as George O'Brien meeting his bestest buddy on the battlefield AND accidentally killing him only minutes later AND having the friend (Guinn Williams) die in his arms! The coincidences were too many to believe and are the result of bad writing--a problem through much of the film.The film goes back and forth several times from the time of Noah to the present. It also throws in several Bible stories that occurred AFTER Noah--and I assume this is because the writers didn't do their homework. There are also one crazy spectacular scene after another--great to look at but poorly written as well, as much of it was just confusing hogwash.A few things to look for (other than amazing special effects for 1928) are the idea of the same characters in WWI playing the sons of Noah and one of their wives. The most prominent of these women is played by Delores Costello--a huge silent star who became one of several wives for John Barrymore (and grandmother of Drew). Also, the scene where O'Brien looks up to Heaven as the rain falls is used on Turner Classic Movies' intro for Silent Sundays.For the most part, the special effects are THE movie. The story itself is confusing, preachy and nonsensical at times. But, in a bizarre way it's all still very entertaining...but hardly a film for the general public. Christians may well object to the fast and loose way the film mixes up the Biblical account as well as creates a lot of back story for Noah's children--from where it got this, I have no idea. Atheists, on the other hand, probably won't like the film because of the whole notion of a world-wide flood and God. So, as a result, much of the potential audience for this film is negated in the process! Overall, confusing, weird yet pretty exciting at times.

The conclusion of the movie leaves a bitter taste in the mouth .In his remake of his classic silent "J'accuse" (1937) ,Abel Gance too proclaimed universal peace.It was not to be the last of all the wars and men are still fighting at my time of writing.And there's another flood "in which we are engulfed which is more treacherous and persistent:the deluge of the mass production (and consummation)moves inexorably forward ,capturing everything that walks in whirlpools" of frozen food,rusted cars,DVDs and CDs,cans ,boxes ,hamburgers ,tons and tons of Bumf (papers) ,growing in an exponential way...Curtiz's movie was obviously intended to match the scale and quality (and commercial appeal)of De Mille'' "the ten commandments " .The structure is the same:a fine mixture of two stories ,a modern one (WW1,the deluge of blood)and a "biblical story" ,reversing De Mille's order .The connection between the two stories is perhaps tighter than in the 1924 work although in the first part of the movie the viewer may sometimes wonder what Curtiz is driving at.The biblical story has been " expanded " ,which was necessary for Noah's story is rather short and not particularly eventful if spectacular. Curtiz borrowed a lot from De Mille in the scenes of the deluge and when God "writes" to Noah (using thunderbolt).But his deluge is superior to John Huston's "the animals went in two by two" sequence in "The Bible" (1967)All in all,this is a very exciting show ,which features talking scenes ,including a whole version of "La Madelon" the Poilus' songs during WW1.The parade on the Champs D'Elysées with a painted Arc De Triomphe in the background and women throwing flowers when Travis sees Al marching on to war is a great moment.Melodrama reaches peaks of kitsch when the same is to execute ...his own wife ,condemned in mistake for spying.When will we see Noah's dove?

I viewed this film this week on a tape I made about 20 years ago. I had not watched it since. Darryl Francis Zanuck (!), who wrote the script, used a familiar device of paralleling "modern" and a "historic" plots. in a more condensed form than Griffith had used the device in Intolerance; however, the parallels were just about as loosely drawn: comparison of World War I(a metaphorical "deluge") with the Biblical deluge that overwhelmed the world. It was interesting that the modern plot also ended like a Griffith film, with what turned out to be the vain vision of the coming of a world without war, as in Birth of a Nation. All that being given, one must say that the two parallel plots were equally well handled. The modern plot of three young people caught up in the war may have been clichéd, but it was so persuasively acted by Dolores Costello, George O'Brien, Noah Beery and, to my surprise Guinn Williams, who never before or after had an equal opportunity to demonstrate his capability as an actor. (His death scene was performed with both a masculine dignity and a display of his masculine love toward his buddy.) In my opinion, the friendship was handled better than the contemporary bond in Wings. Of course, the impact of the film, somewhat skewed by the clumsy interspersing of titles and spoken dialog, and its fame, will always rest upon the re-telling of the Noah legend. The delivery of the ten commandments, with the mountainside opening like a book, is extremely imaginative, even though it borrows from Moses'vision. But the impact of the advent of the flood has never been duplicated. It makes deMille's two-time separation of the Red Sea in a studio tank look weak. Of course, our later knowledge that several extras died in the cascade of water affects our reaction. However, one must say that no computer technology can ever match the sight of real water and real persons running for their lives. Actually, I'm rather ashamed that I can watch the scene and discuss it for its entertainment value. But I personally felt drained by the time the film ended. For me, it is a case of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.