Otto Finesse
Which unavailable-to-stream Otto Preminger movie, and which old-age-disguised leads? Forgotten By Fox has the answers, at The Notebook.
Which unavailable-to-stream Otto Preminger movie, and which old-age-disguised leads? Forgotten By Fox has the answers, at The Notebook.
June 25, 2020 at 5:02 pm
Nice comment, David. But talking about bold transitions panning, or passing through decades in a single shot, the most famous of them all is the scene of the Turkish baths at the beginning of “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp”, in 1943, maybe for the first time ;)
June 25, 2020 at 6:26 pm
Ah-hah — well, Erik Charrell precedes that by more than ten years, in his amazing Caravan, which P&P quite likely saw. But Blimp might be the one that brought the trope back into fashion, leading to Enchantment and The Fan.
Before that, the fancy transitions in Citizen Kane, though not as daring, probably encouraged everyone to think creatively about this subject.
June 25, 2020 at 10:14 pm
In 1954 Rene Clair made extensive use of such transitions in “Beauties of the Night”. There the story was a composer who kept drifting into daydreams set in various periods, and it wittily caught the half-awake feeling of one foot in consciousness and the other in hallucination.
June 26, 2020 at 12:51 am
I love that one — that and La Beaute du Diable are my favourite late Clairs.
Transition into fantasy is a little different as a proposition, and invites that kind of thing (one thinks also of the waking up in Woman in the Window). Two of my favourites are in Secret People and a variation so close it must have been inspired by it, in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, when extras hurrying onstage from the wings of a theatre find themselves in a real-life scene.