mikefive

Leone in his eulogy to High Noon at the beginning of this film wanted the three guys to be Eastwood, Wallach and Van Cleef. Eastwood refused so he replaced them with Woody Strode,Jack Elam, etc. In my opinion Leone wanted to show how anti Shane he was, so Henry Fonda kills the little boy. That was a direct blow to Shane. By showing Monument Valley Leone shows how influenced he was by John Ford. If in My Darling Clementine, Clementine stood for the dignity coming to the West, and Chihuahua (Linda Darnell) was a prostitute, her opposite, Leone joins both of them. Claudia Cardinale is the woman that will build the West. She was a prostitute, like Claire Trevor in Stagecoach. So High Noon, Shane, My Darling Clementine, Stagecoach, The Iron Horse are all combined in Leone's second best film. (The first is TBTGTU)

This moving film is about people helping people, in this case using the radio. The story starts when a fishing boat on the North Sea has all its crew getting ill with an unknown disease. Through a radio amateur a message is sent and received by someone in Togo who gets in contact with the local doctor who gets to the conclusion that they had food poisoning caused by ham. The only person on the boat who is well is Mohamed who did not eat the spoiled ham because of his religion. A message is sent to Paris where they find the antidote, but the problem now is sending it to the boat. The only way is to parachute it. There is a cooperation between a German, an American, a Polish air hostess, the Russian Air Force, and a Danish plane to get the medicine to the boat. A film not to be missed, it takes its title from a poem (song?) by Paul Fort that says that if all the men and women in the world would hold hands, happiness would be for tomorrow. John Lennon had the same idea in his song Imagine.

Uncle Moses because of the fact that he owns a sweatshop on the lower East Side is treated like a king by all the poor people that know him or work with him. It is a very short step from being treated to believing and that happens with Moses, specially when he wants to get married to a young woman who does not love him but is forced to do so by her parents. Maurice Schwartz gives a great performance as Moses, in this excellent film spoken in Yiddish. He makes Moses a likable character, that in spite of his defects, is a "mench". By the fact that the film was made in 1932 it is also fascinating from an historical point of view because you see the lower East Side alive, with its carts, its people, its stores and restaurants. Also it shows how the workers start changing by joining the union in a search for better conditions.