About 'somerset hotel london'|Albustan Palace Hotel Oman
Westfront 1918 (1930, directed by G. W. Pabst, 4 stars) a movie about German infantrymen near the end of the trench warfare of World War I that managed to show that sound movies need not be visually static, and shocked 1930 audiences with a realism about combat. I think it is of more than historical interest. Ever since watching "Captured on Film," the 2001 documentary on Marion Davies, I had wanted to see one of the movies of the mistress of San Simeon, who also was once a very popular comedienne. Considering the recent elevation of the reputation of playwright George S. Kaufman (enshrined in the Library of America) and that he wrote "Animal Crackers" and "A Night at the Opera" for the Marx Brothers, I expected to be amused by Not So Dumb (produced by Davies, directed by King Vidor, 1930, 1.2 stars). I was not (at all), leaving me unsure whether it was the vehicle or the star. Certainly, the plot and the lines are stupid (is the title supposed to refer to Kaufman's play, "Dulcy," coauthored with Marc Connelly, rather than to Dulcy, its heroine?). The main character is very annoying, her chatter heavily laden with contrived malapropisms. Although only running 76 minutes, the movie creaked and was painful to watch. Pardon Us (1931, 2.3 stars), the first Laurel and Hardy sound feature, runs only 56 minutes, but still drags often, particularly in extended musical numbers (in a prison movie!), but has some moments of inspired lunacy. I was expecting the worst when they went into blackface, but there wasn't anything particularly offensive. Blessed Event (1932, directed by Roy Del Ruth, 3.4 stars) was intended for James Cagney, but became a vehicle for the kind of exploitative cynic Lee Tracy played in a succession of films (of which the best were the publicist he played in "The Half-Naked Truth" with a semi-dressed Lupe Velez and the publicist he played for a "Bombshell" as put-upon as Jean Harlow who played the title role and a publicist from a drunkard actor not unlike John Barrymore in "Dinner at Eight").. There is a running animosity between the gossip-monger Tracy played in "Event" and the crooner not unlike Dick Powell that Dick Powell played . The ending is a mushy redemption of the rogue.. Blondie Of The Follies (1932, directed by Edmund Goulding, 3.2 stars) is a pre-Code representation of a woman from a working-class background finding a sugar daddy and becoming a show girl (reversing the usual order of being picked out of a chorus line and debauched). Marion Davies is plucky and likable in the title role. Although not primarily a comedy (and not at all a musical), Davies gets to do a parody of Greta Garbo partnered with Jimmy Durante doing a parody of John Barrymore (in "Grand Hotel," which Goulding had just directed) that is very funny. Meanwhile, Bille Dove does something of a Garbo number as the used-up and discarded plaything of playboy Robert Montgomery. The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (directed by Fritz Lang in 1932, on the even of the Nazi takeover of power, 4 stars) begins and ends well, and I especially like the echo of "Metropolis" of the rising waters. The beginning, when the audience has no idea who is lurking and then in grave peril is gripping, but there's too much middle, .... and, alas, the German people did not heed the warning against Hitler. The long-unavailable The Old Dark House (1932, directed by James Whale, 2.5 stars) is neither very funny nor very scary, but showcases Melvyn Douglas, Charles Laughton, Raymond Massey, and Gloria Stuart seeking shelter from a storm and having to deal with Boris Karloff, et al. It's not even close to being as entertaining as Whale's "The Bride of Frankenstein," although there are some fine b&w visual compositions. Pardon Us (1931, 2.3 stars), the first Laurel and Hardy sound feature, runs only 56 minutes, but still drags often, particularly in extended musical numbers (in a prison movie!), but has some moments of inspired lunacy. I was expecting the worst when they went into blackface, but there wasn't anything particularly offensive. The 1932 Tiger Shark was the fifth sound film directed by Howard Hawks (after the great successes of "Dawn Patrol" and "Scarface" and two long-forgotten ones, "The Criminal Code" starring Walter Huston, and "The Crowd Roars" starring James Cagney). What was going to happen was obvious to me with the first encounter between Pipes Boley (Richard Arlen) and Quita Silva (Zita Johann). I tried to tell myself that the plot might not have been as predictable in 1932, though the wife marrying out of gratitude, the husband unconcerned by her telling him (before marrying him) that she does not love him, throwing her in frequent contact with his handsome and trusted best friend, their attractions overcoming their scruples (and caution, so that they are caught in each others' arms) is not that different than Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot. Edward G. Robinson played the open-hearted fishing boat captain with an ear-ring and an accent, though the latter sounds more Italian than Portuguese (which is what it is supposed to be). Zita Johann (who played the female lead in the original "The Mummy" and who retired from acting when she wed John Houseman) played the apex of the triangle. WWI Canadian flying ace Richard Arlen (Wings), whose kind of handsomeness has gone out of style, played the character who tries to protect the friend who saved his life. The best scenes are those involving the skiff and the two men in extremis (physical in the first one, psychological in the second), and many hungry sharks. The scenes of early-1930s tuna-fishing techniques are also interesting. The worst scenes involve Robinson being the hearty, simple-minded Portuguese fisherman-with sentimental imaginings of encounters at the gates of heaven with the fisherman St. Peter sentimental in ways reminiscent more of John Ford than Howard Hawks. (Robinson was a more interesting delusional ship captain in "Sea Wolf.") Many later Hawks dramas similarly involved nonsexual male-male camaraderie and (at least somewhat) resourceful and independent women unsettling the male-male relationships, and many involved rough male pursuits, so the movie fits well with auterist theme-continuity emphasis (Thomas Mitchell and Cary Grant in the 1939 "Only Angels Have Wings" leaps to mind, particularly in the similar endings of these two Hawks movies. His next movie after "Tiger Shark," Today We Live (1933) repeated the triangle and self-sacrifice motifs in a World War I naval setting. The triangle went intergenerational in Come and Get It (1936), etc., etc... There was also considerable continuity for Robinson, who played a very similar role in a relocation of the plot, "Manpower" (1941) with Marlene Dietrich as the wife he could not satisfy and George Raft as the pal who could; and had already done an earlier version in the 1930 "A Lady to Love" with Vilma Bánky and Robert Ames, directed by Victor Sjöström from Sidney Howard play "They Knew What They Wanted" that had already been filmed as a 1928 silent "The Secret Hour" with Jean Hersholt, Pola Negri, and Kenneth Thomson. BTW, the outdoor sequences are from (and offshore) Monterey, not San Diego and Mexican waters. I don't know why the setting wasn't identified as Monterey (the setting for "Tortilla Flat." Although running only 80 minutes, many of the scenes in "Tiger Shark" seemed to me to drag. The verbal wit of many later Hawks movies was missing (seemingly not developed until "Twentieth Century" in 1934, rather than MIA), though Hawks was doing impressive action scenes by the time sound pictures began (those in his first one, "Dawn Patrol" and "The Crowd Roared" were reused in later movies directed by others, for instance). (2.8 stars) In 1932 in "They Call It Sin " then-rising-star Loretta Young played Marion Cullen, a Merton, Kansas church organist with artistic pretensions who flees to New York after a flirtation with Jimmy Decker (David Manners between "Dracula" and "The Mummy"). Decker is not only engaged, but is engaged to the boss's daughter (Helen Vinson) and has far too much to lose by following his heart (or whatever) to Marion. Jimmy's friend and doctor Tony Travers (George Brent) is very interested in the fresh young thing, but Marion disappears once she learns that Jimmy is already spoken for. She becomes the protégé of a lecherous musical revue producer Ford Humphries (Louis Calhern was already oozing oil in 1932!). The plot is feeble, requiring a medical miracle among other things. Other than Louis Calhern's leers, the main entertainment is provided by Una Merkel, who plays Dixie Dare, a dancer specializing in doing cartwheels and considerably more savvy than Marion. Roscoe Karns adds his eye-rolling sarcasm as a choreographer accustomed to having to use dancers being bedded by Humphries. Long before her reign on tv, Young was already a clothes-horse. I don't think she was much of an actress, and, to me, her face seems a bit long and horsey, to (another era's notion of beauty, I guess...) or a beauty, but she had some earnest/innocent charm (certainly more than David Manners had!). The dull soap opera picks up once Marion meets Dixie waiting to audition for Humphries. The first half hour offers some more compelling performances than those by Young and Manners (Marion Byron working in a Merton drug store and putting the moves on Manners, and Helen Vinson as a vicious enforcer of respectability as Young' mother). Paul Lukas played a Russian intellectual making his living as a waiter in Grand Slam , directed by William Dieterle (1933, 4.2 stars). It is a surprisingly funny satire of the building up of celebrity. The waiter and the Russian restaurant's hat-check girl played by Loretta Young become America's sweethearts as bridge partners who never squabble (in marked contrast to most bridge partners). With the aid of publicist and ghost-writer 'Speed' McCann (the wonderfully deadpan Frank McHugh) they become walking advertisements for the "Stanislavsky system," a "system" of bidding whatever one feels like (since bids are not rational, there is no basis for recriminations about their stupidity). A duel with displaced bridge guru Cedric Van Dorn (sounds close to Goren, no? and I suspect the choice of the character's name "Stanislavsky" was also a slam at another kind of system), a puffed-up charlatan played very well by Ferdinand Gottschalk, is broadcast on radio stations across America like a prize-fight by Roscoe Karns (another great fast-talking deadpan comic actor of the 1930s). The bridge players are even in a roped-off square, though the audience is above them, unlike in boxing "rings." The movie unfortunately all but drops Glenda Farrell, who plays McHugh's forgetful girlfriend. The wide variety of American types prefigures the comedies of Preston Sturges, though for manufacturing celebrity, "Grand Slam" most calls to mind two better movies from the same (pre-Code) era with Lee Tracy playing fast-talking publicists: "The Half-Naked Truth" and "Bombshell," but "Grand Slam" has its moments, especially for anyone who has played bridge with serious point-counters. The film of Somerset Maugham's The Narrow Corner was obviously pre-Code (1933) in that Fred Blake, the romantic lead escapes the police in two places (even if he wasn't the murderer he was believed to be in either case). I was struck by how far up his waist were the pants worn by Douglas Fairbanks Jr. (above his navel). He and Ralph Bellamy go for a nude swim that is filmed very carefully to be unrevealing, too. The plot is tedious. Dudley Diggs as an opium-addicted physician/sage is the most interesting character, although he has some homilies to deliver. As usual, Bellamy loses the girl (the easily forgotten Patricia Ellis). (2.4 stars) Death Takes a Holiday (1934, directed by Mitchell Liesen, 2.5 stars) is a slow-starting, gabby fantasy about Death going on vacation to learn why he is feared. Fredric March is good as the personification of weary Death, but he and everyone else declaims claptrap. The campy 1934 version of Cleopatra directed by Cecil B. DeMille with Claudette Colbert woefully miscast in the title role alternates perfunctory story-telling with languorous, silly stretches of Orientalist kitsch. The montage battle sequence includes striking images (some recycled from the silent version of "The Ten Commandments"), though it's fairly astonishing that the cinematography (of Victor Milner) was honored with an Oscar (I'd have tapped "The Scarlet Empress" or "The Thin Man," but neither was even nominated). Colbert seems far too sensible and amiable to be a great seducer or a great lover. (She does get off a contemptuous final zinger at Octavius, though.) Warren William musters the greed, craft, bemusement, and hubris of Julius Caesar, if not very a Roman one, and the tall (6'4") Henry Wilcoxon flexes his manly thighs, sneers, rages, and grimaces as an easily manipulable Marc Antony. Although hardly free of kitsch, the 1963 version seems to me to have more convincing performances... although no one would accuse it of being perfunctory. 2.8 stars. Fog over 'Frisco (1934, directed by William Dieterle, 3.7 stars) is of special interest to any San Franciscan for showing the city before the bridges were built. Much of the movie takes place on Nob Hill (the least changed part of the city), but there is a major chase across downtown to China Basin (not "Bullit," but with footage form longer ago). It also has Bette Davis in her amoral blonde party girl phase, and Margaret Lindsay as the good girl (the stepsister how is the apple of their father's eye). It has a lot of plot packed into 68 minutes with multiple romances, a criminal syndicate, bankers, newspapermen, and the police. The i's are eventually dotted with little panache, but has its moments (especially with Davis and a kidnapping). It also shows that Howard Hawks was not the first to use overlapping dialogue in "My Girl Friday." Judge Priest (1934, directed by John Ford, 2.7 stars) shows something of the Will Rogers charm. It also has a whole lot of the sentimentality that marred many John Ford movies, and the racism that marred some, with the now notorious shiftless stereotype embodied by Step'n Fetchit speaking gibberish. It also has Hattie MacDaniels in one of her many maid roles, this time singing as she works (there is an astounding scene of sort-of call and response singing in which Will Rogers sounds like her: that is, one has to watch to know which one is singing!) Although the later Sergeant Rutledge is a superior trial movie intercut with flashbacks of military action, "Judge Priest" prefigures it in having a stiff-necked defendant who is sure he will not get a fair trial and does not deign to explain himself, or even to correct the impression that he is a Northerner. (There is also a farcical trial of the Step'n Fetchit character at the start that ends with the judge and defendant going fishing together, no doubt a common sight in former Confederate states in 1890...) Midnight (1935, directed by Mitchell Leisen, 4.2 stars ) has a surprisingly restrained John Barrymore as a rich man trying to end an affair his wife is having by turning her paramour on to the unsuccessful American chanteuse played by Claudette Colbert. As the taxi driver who loves her, Don Ameche is hammier than Barrymore. The plot is outlandish, but the writing team of Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett gave witty lines and screwball comedy business to the players who made the most of these gifts. Black Fury is not a blaxpolitation movie. It is a 1935 movie, directed by Michael Curtiz (Casablanca) focused on miners and mobsters. Paul Muni (Scarface, The Good Earth) plays (very broadly) Joe Radek, a slow-thinking and loudly blustering, but strong bohunkie" (Hungarian?) dupe for a conspiracy not so much to destroy the miners' union as to foment conflict that the conspirators can then be paid to repress. To make up for having led his friends into disaster, Joe eventually prevents anyone getting into the mine (the laxity of the security is more than a little hard to believe!). With less makeup than in some of his other roles, Muni's look is still manipulated: he has blond hair. He also has a very thick accent. The villains are cartoonish, the crowd scenes are remarkably dull, and the sentimentalizing of the good fellows is very heavy handed in one of the lesser Warner Brothers social problem flicks. (2.2 stars) I tried to watch the 1935 Swedish melodrama Walpurgis Night with the then-rising star Ingrid Bergman. The movie also provided an opportunity to hear silent-screen star Lars Hanson (Flesh and the Devil) and his silent-film director Victor Sjostrom (in The Wind, The Scarlet Letter) speak. (Sjostrom speaks in "Wild Strawberries," but I haven't seen that since seeing any of the films he directed, "Laugh, Clown, Laugh" as well as the Gish-Hanson pairings; I also recently saw "Flesh and the Devil" for the first time with Hanson as the friend of John Gilbert who marries Greta Garbo.) I couldn't stay awake for it, though. (<2 stars) The 1935 version of Enchanted April manages to be simultaneously tedious and perfunctory. It is difficult to show the transformative magic of Italy shooting in a studio with only stereotypical Italian behavior to belabor. The transformation of the four strangers fleeing London is instantaneous in the cut from the first day to a week later. Rather than develop, the screenplay flips a switch and the characters are different. The husbands are boring enough in flashbacks without turning up, even if their presence does not drive the four women back into their shells and/or hostilities. Jessie Ralph has the most fun (moving instead of entirely chewing up the scenery) and Katharine Alexander has some poignant charm out of her husband's shadow (and away from his hideous droning). Ann Harding is unremarkable here (with the Production Code being enforced). She had an appropriate line in an earlier (pre-Code) movie, "When Ladies Meet": "You're not worth a minute of one anxious hour that either one of us has given you," but in "Enchanted April" can only look hurt, rush out, and proclaim fealty to her errant husband. (3 stars) There were two reasons for me to want to watch the 1935 Steamboat 'Round The Bend . One was that the movie was directed by John Ford, and though I don't always like the movies he made, I'm trying to see them all. (Ford's badly dated The Informer also dates from 1935.) The other reason is that it starred the legendary Will Rogers (who was Fox's biggest star and something of a national institution. I know who is (and that he is more than the name on a California state beach), but had never seen him in anything (he died in an airplane crash in 1935 before the movie's release). The role of Doctor John Pearly did not call for dispensing much of the folksy wisdom for which Rogers was famous, but did use one of the talents from his vaudeville acts, lassooing (he lassoes Captain Eli's boat). Eugene Pallette was also on hand as a laid-back southern sheriff, drolly croaking his lines. Doc Pearly, a veteran of the Confederate army, sells patent medicine and owns a broken-down, docked river boat called the "Claremore Queen" (Rogers's hometown was Claremore, OK.) Doc turns it into a floating museum of waxworks, stowing away the patent medicine, which is needed later, during a riverboat race that is also a race to deliver a key witness to avert the hanging of Doc's nephew "Duke" (John McGuire). One additional point of interest is that Duke's "swamp gal" fiancee Fleety Belle (Anne Shirley) shows herself fully competent to pilot the riverboat. No one even comments on this. Alas, the representation of female competence is accompanied by one of the cringe-inducing uses of Step'n Fetchit (Lincoln Perry) as the stupid, painfully slow-talking, and "shiftless n___er." Neither the comedy nor the melodrama have aged well, and it would be easy to stop watching the proceedings. What is interesting is mostly in the last half hour: showing the workings of the paddle-wheel river boats (a proliferation of them not the result of computer multiplication or of miniatures). (<2 stars) |
Image of somerset hotel london
somerset hotel london Image 1
somerset hotel london Image 2
somerset hotel london Image 3
somerset hotel london Image 4
somerset hotel london Image 5
Related blog with somerset hotel london
- kipperonabike.blogspot.com/...several photos of me on the line (12:10pm). Then I went to the Hotel, got my hard earned ‘stamp’ on my verification form, wrote in...
- wherethewildonesgrow.blogspot.com/After spending our first day in London shopping, the next two days...All seven of us walked from the hotel till Somerset House. It took twenty minutes...
- x1brettstuff.blogspot.com/...Moore Wake Me Up - Avicii Sharp Dressed Man - ZZ Top Really Free - John Otway Hotel Yorba - The White Stripes ------------
- myfashionconnect.blogspot.com/...of the Corinthia London Hotel. Photo by Lucia Carpio... during this London Fashion Week are...at the main venue at Somerset House , a few young...impressive views of London, as shown in...
- down-to-earth-with-a-bump.blogspot.com/...10pm we were happy to head back to our hotel. Saturday morning dawned bright and sunny... out early to enjoy a little more of London before we had to head off to the ...
- greenlashesandfashion.blogspot.com/...environmentally-conscious hotels, One Aldwych. The...this month for London Fashion Week (LFW...LFWs new home, Somerset House. Lobby and... Hotel in London and Carlisle Bay...
- mysweetyhomemadecakes.blogspot.com/...private bathroom. Constructed to the somerset palace hotel seoul and shopping facilities..., the buckingham palace hotel london on behalf of the albustan palace hotel oman...
- hg2blog.wordpress.com/...most sumptuous sleeperies. The hotel designed by none other than...entertainment. www.theboxsoho.com Enjoy the London Fashion Week exhibition at Somerset House. Where To Relax Bored...
- robefish.wordpress.com/...particular area and budget. Look for special rates; being very competitive, London hotels offer them frequently. We chose a hotel near Russell Square in Bloomsbury...
- tourism76.blogspot.com/...help·info) In 2008, the band played shows at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall (July 9, 10th and 11th), London Somerset House (July 13) and Galway Radisson Hotel (July 15).
Related Video with somerset hotel london
somerset hotel london Video 1
somerset hotel london Video 2
somerset hotel london Video 3
0 개의 댓글:
댓글 쓰기