Tonight Charles, Carla, and I had a movie day focused on movies that Katie, Felicity, and/or Dan wouldn't normally let us get away with ... because they weren't here.

Well, mostly movies we couldn't get away with.

The first one they totally missed out on. It was Maniac (dir. Dwane Esper, 1934, USA) which, despite being extremely low-budget and completely stupid, was actually kind of amazing. Even if it lacked the RiffTrax commentary Maniac would have still blown my mind in its own sorry way. I walked away from it feeling as if Ed Wood had gained inspiration from this Dwane Esper flick. It felt like Wood. It looked like Wood. Some imagery felt very close to the overlays in Glen or Glenda (1953) and the whole theme of resurrecting the dead is right at home with Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959). I haven't a clue if Wood ever saw Maniac, but that maybe doesn't matter. This is a movie that feels right at home in Wood's pink angora-wrapped heart.

Maniac also provided some terrific pieces of dialogue that I simply must share:
"By gosh, them stiffs is gettin' heavier and more of them every day."
"I think too much of Satan to use cats as experiments."
"A rat eating a cat? Why, that is news!"

If anything, it's given me a renewed belief that I should write a movie. Why, if Dwane Esper can do something then goshdarnit, so can I.

Moving on, our next movie was The Manchurian Candidate (dir. John Frankenheimer, 1962, USA). I got to gloat because I recognized two actors from very minor roles in other films, namely Reggie Nalder in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) and John McGiver in Breakfast at Tiffany's (1962). Additionally Nalder played Shras the Andorian in Star Trek and Whit Bissell was also in Manchurian as well as Lurry in Trek. This is maybe not surprising because Bissell was in pretty much everything.

On the bright side we learned, through a bit of fortuitous timing, that Mike probably is not under the subversive control of communist agents: Mike > Charles > Mike. Of course, it is entirely likely that Mike simply has a different trigger word, so who knows.

Next up were a trio of Azumanga Daioh (dir. Hiroshi Nishikiori, 2002, Japan) episodes: "Nyamo," "Pool, Pool, Pool," and "Summer Break." The first of these contains one of my favorite pieces of dialogue from the series: "BASKETBALL! Now is the Basketball Era! Come sweat with your teacher and live your youth to its fullest potential! ASSEMBLE NOW!" It also gave us Team Sea Slug and ... well it's all brilliant. Too bad Katie missed it.

Carla had to leave at this point so Charles and I went for movies we'd been talking about but knew nobody else would ever go for.

That meant Gallipoli (dir. Peter Weir, 1981, Australia) because, hey, what can be more fun than World War I? What I like about Gallipoli, despite telling a rarely-told story, is that although the movie starts out as a rah-rah-rah pro-war movie, it eventually descends into a terrifically depressing anti-war film by its climax. It's not like J'accuse (1919), All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), The Grand Illusion (1937), Johnny Got His Gun (1971), or A Very Long Engagement (2004), which are not only also about World War I but each of which are pretty dang anti-war from the outset. Gallipoli offers a nice, lengthy transition from idealist naivety to war-torn bitterness wrought by experience. I commend Peter Weir on that.

Which strikes me as interesting that most movies that I've seen about World War I, whenever they were made, tend to be much more anti-war than movies about World War II. The First World War ended with a great sense of widespread pacifism and desire for it to have been the "war to end all wars." It was political bungling in resolving the postwar tidying up that led to much of World War II, but we don't seem to look back on that second war with the same level of disgust. World War I remains a rallying cry for calling out the horrors of war while World War II is so often presented as a series of examples of honor and sacrifice. Interesting.

Gallipoli, by the way, is a movie whose music consists almost entirely of Jean-Michel Jarre's Oxygene II and Tomaso Albinoni's Adagio in G minor. This seemed to make Charles awfully happy.

Finally, we ended the night with a British silent film, Piccadilly (dir. E. A. Dupont, 1929, UK), staring the woefully misused, hugely talented, and way attractive Anna May Wong. Like Louise Brooks, Anna May Wong was completely wasted by Hollywood and only gained the proper recognition and film roles that she deserved by working in Europe. Hollywood tended to give her the stereotypical "me love you long time" Asian roles, even teaming her up four times with well-known "yellow-face" makeup performer Warner Oland (of Charlie Chan fame). On the other hand, Europe allowed her to perform realistic drama. Brooks made movies in Germany and France; Wong acted in English films. Piccadilly is probably her most well-known role as Shosho the scullery girl who becomes the nightclub's unprecedented star and is eventually destroyed by her rise to power. The ultimate message: "Life goes on."

Piccadilly is a treasure. The film depicted the present day of 1929, as it was happening, so we the viewer are given a nice look directly at parts of London, eighty years ago. It's not a recreation and the social climate is pretty much what one might expect to find, whether in swanky uptown London or in the immigrant section of Limehouse. In any event, it's a great showcase of the Roaring Twenties in England with Anna May Wong, the Chinese flapper, putting the perfect face on the era.

So that's how Saturday went down.