Red Scare
First Cromwell entry of the week — THE WORLD AND THE FLESH, over at The Chiseler. This delirious slice of sex and Bolshevism stars Miriam Hopkins and George Bancroft (she gives him sex and he gives her Bolshevism, but good) and has to be seen to be believed, which is unfortunate, since it’s almost impossible to see. I realised I had a copy of this oddity, and hastened to view, but my disc is pretty damn fuzzy. It looks like the above image, when it ought to look more like the below ~
Don’t forget to click through to experience the madness.
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December 19, 2016 at 9:31 pm
Re:your comments on how hard it is to do a Bolshevik revolution in Golden Age of Hollywood, I’m surprised it didn’t really pop up much afterwards in Hollywood eras that were more primed for downer endings.
For example, the intervention of the Americans/British/Japanese could have been an excellent setting for an equivalent of the spaghetti western or a DIRTY DOZEN scoundrels on a mission movie.
December 19, 2016 at 9:38 pm
Yes, you would think during the Cold War something of the kind might have been managed.
January 9, 2017 at 1:37 pm
[…] THE WORLD AND THE FLESH still seems to mark the moment when Cromwell really engaged with cinema, and it may have been motivated by his absolute contempt for the script, a farrago of Russian Revolution clichés and fantasies he knew to be utter bilge. Desperation breeds inspiration, and like Sidney Furie stamping on the script of THE IPCRESS FILE before making a masterpiece out of it, Cromwell energized his dormant stylistic powers, and increased in stature forthwith. […]