Post by mikef6 on May 19, 2017 21:29:52 GMT
I was fairly busy last week (and am this week as well), so I only got a chance to see two or three movies last week (I write "two or three" because I watched most of one but didn't finish the whole thing).
I saw--
The Mystery of Marie Roget (1942)
A whodunit so confusing that after finishing it I had no idea not only about the identity of the murderer but also about anything that happened in the plot (and, unlike The Big Sleep, I highly doubt that was the intention). The Gothic trappings were nice, though--some scenes at the end had sets apparently based on La Boheme--and some performances were above-par (though Patric Knowles seems to be quite literally sleepwalking through his starring role, Maria Ouspenskaya is quite good for those who, like me, only knew her from The Wolf Man and its sequel, and Lloyd Corrigan is amusing as a police commissioner), so I did enjoy it, even if I didn't understand it one iota.
Murder in the Blue Room (1944)
The second remake of the quite fun '33 whodunit Secret of the Blue Room (the first was '38's The Missing Guest, which I haven't seen). Probably just as fun but still, on the whole, weaker, if only because the cast isn't as great. Amusingly enough, more time is devoted to an Andrews Sisters knockoff trio than our nominal hero and heroine! Again, it's still somewhat fun, but I still was called out and had to drop it, so I missed the last few minutes, though I know the ending from the earlier film.
Clark Holloway's Re-Edit of Dracula (1931)
An interesting re-edit of a not-so-great classic (which is still, however, one of my favorites of the Universal monster cycle). Clark is a poster over on Monster Kids Classic Horror Forum, and a few years back he realized that the editing in the Spanish-language version of Dracula is how the script originally intended the English-language version as well. So he re-edited Dracula according to the script (and the Spanish version) and came out with this version. (He and I went through hell and high water to allow me to download his re-edit, so I'm very thankful to him.) Very interesting, to be sure, but I'm not sure how much of an improvement it is--while some scenes make far more sense, others are choppier, and the whole seems not particularly better or worse than the original. Still, I greatly enjoyed watching it and seeing another take.