The Lady Eve (1941), Preston Sturges: If a sea cruise is the sort of escape that you dream about this time of year, you’ll find another, more lightweight option in this classic screwball comedy. The first half of the story takes place aboard an ocean liner, where clueless, mild-mannered ophiologist/brewery heir Charles Pike (Henry Fonda) literally falls for beautiful con artist Jean Harrington (Barbara Stanwyck) when she sticks out a strategically placed ankle. The theme of a criminal who inadvertently falls in love with his or her intended victim is as old as the hills, but Sturges’ directing brilliance and Stanwyck’s formidable comedic chops turn The Lady Eve into an intoxicating romp. Charles Coburn as Jean’s cardsharp father and William Demarest as Charles’s shrewd valet provide amusing support.
If you’re not familiar with Preston Sturges’ oeuvre, I can’t think of a better place to start acquainting yourself with this giant of the rom/com genre. I fear that we may never see his like again. This film is compelling evidence for my hypothesis that even in the dark days of the Code, sexual humor could be much funnier (and sexier) onscreen when launched from an oblique angle than when laid on with a trowel, the way contemporary films often do. Sly, silly and sophisticated all at once, The Lady Eve will alleviate your Seasonal Affective Disorder more effectively than several sessions of daylight therapy. I promise.
Lawrence of Arabia (1962), David Lean: Speaking of David Lean, I’ve just unearthed the “Note to Self: Past time to see Lawrence again” that I made during last year’s middling sci-fi epic Prometheus, in which Michael Fassbender’s android keeps watching the “match trick” scene over and over in an effort to remold himself as the enigmatic British agent in the battles between the Arabs and the Turks during World War I. Hey, who wouldn’t want to look and sound like the gorgeous young Peter O’Toole, with those blue-laser eyes?
As history and biography, it may be as full of holes as a good Jarlsberg, but Lawrence of Arabia is still nearly universally acknowledged as one of the greatest movies of all time. And broadly speaking, its themes of the ethical entrapments of war and the difficulty of forging alliances among tribal factions that have been hereditary enemies for centuries still resonate in our efforts to make peace in the contemporary Middle East. It’s a timeless piece of cinema. O’Toole is extraordinary as always, and ably backed by an awful lot of top-shelf thespians of the day: Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, José Ferrer, Jack Hawkins, Anthony Quayle, Claude Rains and Arthur Kennedy, plus a then-unknown Omar Sharif.
Nowadays several different restored, director’s cut and high-resolution versions of the movie are widely available on DVD, so there’s no excuse not to refresh your memory of this cinematic gem sometime soon. And I defy you to feel cold even this time of year while watching those guys dragging their sorry dehydrated butts across the scorching Nefud Desert.
Cat Ballou (1965), Elliot Silverstein: Another good way to spend some virtual time in a nice warm desert climate is by watching Westerns. This one is no great cinematic milestone, but it’s funny and has a great cast. The young Jane Fonda plays the title role of a schoolmarm-turned-outlaw who hires a once-famous gunslinger named Kid Shelleen to avenge her dead father, shot by a hardboiled mercenary with a silver nose called, well, Silvernose.
Lee Marvin is a hoot in the dual roles of Silvernose and Kid Shelleen, who turns out to be a fairly useless, drunken has-been. Dwayne Hickman – once TV’s Dobie Gillis – plays the even-drunker Uncle Jed, who masquerades as a preacher. And Nat King Cole and Stubby Kaye act as a sort of string-band Greek chorus, providing musical interludes as the story progresses. It’s lightweight, silly fun for a dark winter’s day.
Silverado (1985), Lawrence Kasdan: Another favorite Western of mine, Silverado freshens the genre’s clichés with a sophisticated late-century sensibility and the kind of chummy ensemble acting that Kasdan used to great effect in The Big Chill. The good guys are Scott Glenn as Emmett, Kevin Costner as his brother Jake, Kevin Kline as Paden and Danny Glover as Mal, facing off with the corrupt sheriffs Langston (John Cleese) and Cobb (Brian Dennehy) and a greedy cattle rancher named McKendrick (Ray Baker).
Rosanna Arquette plays Hannah, love interest for both of the brothers; but far more interesting in the end is the chemistry between Kline’s character and the saloonkeeper Stella, portrayed by Linda Hunt. This is another movie that should’ve had a sequel just so we could see how that relationship might have played out in the future. The beautiful landscapes of New Mexico also play a starring role in this handsome horse opera.
Melvin and Howard (1980), Jonathan Demme: Demme’s career took off thanks to this quirky fable about the lives and dreams of America’s lower middle class, set mostly in and around Las Vegas. You know the story: A benign-but-not-terribly-bright gas station owner named Melvin Dummar (Paul Le Mat) picks up a scruffy old man (Jason Robards, Jr.) who’s wandering alone in the desert one night and gives him a lift into town. Melvin noodges the cranky old coot into singing a Christmas song with him to pass the time, and the two bond in an odd sort of way. Before getting out of Melvin’s pickup, the hitchhiker identifies himself as Howard Hughes. Several years later, the tycoon dies, and a will turns up naming Dummar as the recipient of $156 million.
The will is eventually declared a forgery, and Dummar goes back to life as usual. But what mainly engages our interest here is the feckless existence of the Dummar family in the intervening years. His wife Lynda (Mary Steenburgen) wins a prize dancing on a game show and parlays it into a big jackpot at a casino, then leaves Melvin after he blows it all and more on a new house, car and boat. It’s all easy come, easy go in Melvin Dummar’s sunny little world, and there’s something Zen about his all-accepting attitude. It’s a strange, sweet and funny little movie, worth seeing especially for Steenburgen’s loopy, luminous performance as the exasperated Lynda.
The Man Who Skied down Everest (1975), Bruce Nyznik and Lawrence Schiller: For some of us, cabin fever in late winter manifests not so much in a craving for deserts or seashores as in a wish for the big snows of yesteryear, so we can go outside and get some fresh air and exercise close to home. If your cross-country skis are collecting dust by the back door, like mine, you might get a charge out of this, my all-time favorite sports movie. It’s a spectacularly shot documentary about the 1970 Japanese Everest Expedition, which included a harebrained scheme to get skier/alpinist Yuichiro Miura up to the Lhotse Face just below the South Col of the world’s highest mountain so that he could ski part of the way down.
The expedition, which also involved the first-ever attempt at scaling Everest’s Southwest Face, had mixed results, with one woman climber making the summit and eight deaths during the ascent. Miura managed to ski more than a mile before taking a tumble that nearly cost his life, stopping only 250 feet from the edge of a crevasse. That’s a spoiler, I suppose; but the scenery and the poetic-awe-bordering-on-transcendence conveyed in the voiceover narration are the real reasons for hunting down The Man Who Skied down Everest, which won the 1975 Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. If you loved Peter Matthiessen’s book The Snow Leopard, you may find this movie to be its spiritual cousin.
