Mary, Queen of Scots (1971)

As I've said, movies about real-life British royalty have a good track record with me. This one is by the same director (Charles Jarrott) as Anne of the Thousand Days, so it was apt to feel even more like a sequel thereto than The Private Life of Henry VIII.

The tale begins in 1560, when teenage Mary (34-year-old Vanessa Redgrave) is about to lose her first husband, King Francis of France (Richard Denning). Having no claim to his throne, she decides to return to Scotland, but Queen Elizabeth (Glenda Jackson) will not grant her safe passage through England to get there. Even when Mary arrives home by ship, she finds her reception rather lacking, thanks to the rise of Protestantism and attendant hostility to Catholics such as herself. Indeed, her next 27 years will be riddled with people seeking to undermine her, whether by making her a figurehead in practice, persuading her to renounce all authority, imprisoning her, or assassinating her.

1917 (2019)

It was high time I saw one of the latest nominees for Best Picture. OK, I saw this the day before they were announced, but the hype suggested it would make the cut. I didn't let the name Sam Mendes put me off, partly because war movies tend to bring out another side of directors. And usually do well.

The plot is almost deceptively easy to summarize: In France, English lance corporals Tom Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Will Schofield (George MacKay) are assigned to deliver orders from General Erinmore (Colin Firth) to Colonel Mackenzie (Benedict Cumberbatch) to call off a scheduled attack, because new intel indicates a trap. Unfortunately, thanks to severed phone lines, this delivery requires trekking through land that the Germans haven't entirely abandoned -- or left hospitable.

Since You Went Away (1944)

It had been a while since I last saw a movie with an overture and an entr'acte. This one has the courtesy to change the stills during the overture, the entr'acte being shorter. Alas, the soundtrack, tho Oscar-winning, is far from Lawrence of Arabia, so I opted to skip.

We never meet the "you" of the title: Tim Hilton, a U.S. Army volunteer, leaves his unidentified Midwestern town for war right before the first scene. His wife, Anne (Claudette Colbert), rents out a room to retired Col. Smollett (Monty Woolley) to make ends meet. Their elder daughter, Jane (Jennifer Jones), falls for the colonel's visiting yet half-estranged grandson, Bill (Robert Walker), knowing that he as a corporal may have to leave soon as well. She and sister Brig (Shirley Temple) do their own parts to contribute to the war effort on U.S. soil. From time to time, Anne's ex-boyfriend, naval lieutenant Tony (Joseph Cotten), shows up with a familial atmosphere, to the consternation of the maid, Fidelia (Hattie McDaniel).

The Big Country (1958)

I said before that I couldn't really characterize William Wyler's directorial style. Now I must be getting the hang of it, because as I watched TBC, I thought of two others: Friendly Persuasion and The Westerner. They're all set in the 19th century and have protagonists who are big on peace.

Rather unusually for a western, the hero in this one, James McKay (Gregory Peck), is a ship captain -- and a fish out of water. He comes to the frontier because it's home to Patricia Terrill (Carroll Baker), his intended. Apparently, no one warned him that her wealthy father, Henry (Charles Bickford), is leading one side of a feud with the rugged Hannassey clan, led by Rufus (Burl Ives), over access to a waterhole on land owned by Julie Maragon (Jean Simmons), who's on good terms with Jim and Pat but unwilling to sell to either patriarch. Like Julie, Jim doesn't let social closeness color his judgment of the situation. But to call him neutral would be misleading; he simply seeks a third option....

Ivanhoe (1952)

In the interest of narrowing my many choices, I usually avoid movies with IMDb overall ratings less than 7, barring unusual circumstances like a vacation. Adaptations from classic literature are an exception. This version seemed like the best way to get the gist of the story in less than 2 hours, tho I read up on key divergences. Besides, it did well at the box office and garnered some Academy Award nominations.

In 1194, Wilfred of Ivanhoe (Robert Taylor) has discovered that the missing King Richard (aptly named Norman Wooland) is being held for ransom. Rather than taking the prison by storm, Ivanhoe runs around seeking money from people who prefer him to regent Prince John (Guy Rolfe). During this endeavor, he re-encounters his crush, Rowena (Joan Fontaine), and two John-aligned nemeses from the Crusades, Bois-Guilbert (George Sanders) and de Bracy (Robert Douglas). In surprisingly large roles, both financially and plotwise, are a pair of Jews: patriarch Isaac (Felix Aylmer) and his daughter, Rebecca (Elizabeth Taylor, no relation to Robert), the latter earning the jealous eye of Rowena and the lustful eye of Bois-Guilbert.

Dunkirk (2017)

Wow, Christopher Nolan writes, directs, and co-produces the depiction of a real event for a change. Well, to a point. The individual characters involved are fictitious. But given his usual penchant for sci-fi and mindscrew mystery, it was bound to be unusually realistic for him. Perhaps he wants more of a shot at the next Academy Awards than he had with Inception.

Unlike any other war film I've seen, this one divides itself into three perspectives corresponding roughly to land (designated "The Mole," an architectural term I didn't know), sea, and air. On land, in the course of a week, Allied soldiers at Dunkirk are in the process of retreating, but German forces don't make it easy with all the ship bombing. At sea, in the course of a day, Captain Dawson (Mark Rylance) takes his yacht to join the rescue effort with his young adult son, along with an unexpected rash teenage assistant. They soon pick up a lone survivor of a bombed ship (Nolan mainstay Cillian Murphy), who exhibits PTSD and reeeeally doesn't want to return to Dunkirk. In the air, in the course of an hour, three members of the Royal Air Force (one of them played by Tom Hardy) face off with German fighters in the vicinity.

The Big Red One (1980)

I had put this film off, because it runs 162 minutes. How serendipitous that I should get around to it on Memorial Day weekend.

The title's emphasis falls on "One," as in the numeral 1, sported in red by the 1st Infantry Division of the U.S. Army in World War II. Writer-director Sam Fuller was a veteran, which may explain why the narrator, Pvt. Zab (Robert Carradine), says he enlisted in order to get book material. His squad has the curious distinction of five men who never die or get badly wounded while the replacements drop like flies.

Viva Zapata! (1952)

After watching, I thought I should have saved this for Friday. Further research told me that Cinco de Mayo commemorates an event nearly 50 years before the Mexican Revolution, depicted herein. In fact, Porfirio Díaz, one of the heroes of the Battle of Puebla, is pretty much a villain this time around. It must be hard to remain in the good graces of the common people after 35 years as president.

The focal new hero is Emiliano Zapata (Marlon Brando), one of many peasants whose land has been stolen and who find Díaz unhelpful in their quest not to starve. He becomes a general of the rebellion that ushers in a new president. But the movie's only about half over before he and his brother, Eufemio (Anthony Quinn), find something a greater challenge than war: peace. If "peace" is the right word.

The Robe (1953)

Having declined in religiosity, I don't watch film adaptations of Christian legends/books as much as I used to. But a good swords-and-sandals epic doesn't require devout Christianity for entertainment. Heck, Quo Vadis? (1951) had a Jewish director. Perhaps the panned re-remake of Ben-Hur helped inspire me to try another one (along with the streaming deadline).

The protagonist is Marcellus Gallio (Richard Burton), the tribune who oversees the crucifixion of Jesus, despite pleas from slave Demetrius (Victor Mature). As soon as Marcellus puts on Jesus' robe in the rain, he is beset with mental and physical symptoms. The illness remains in some measure long after Demetrius runs off with the robe. Marcellus hopes to find and destroy the robe for a cure, but his journey exposes him to more and more Christian love and piety, including that of Peter (Michael "Klaatu" Rennie). It's no spoiler to say that he converts -- leaving plenty of time for conflict with other Romans, including mutual crush Diana (Jean Simmons) and Emperor Caligula (Jay Robinson).

Moby Dick (1956)

Even after getting burned by Lynch's Dune, I make a point to watch adaptations from famous novels I'm unlikely to read. Oh, I do read long and heady books for leisure, but enough people have deemed Herman Melville's classic dull that I'd rather take a chance on a two-hour vicarious boat ride, particularly one with respectable IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes scores as well as reputedly decent fidelity. (I didn't trust the facetious stage musical.) Being in a poor position to evaluate the fidelity, I must settle for the cinematic quality.

You should all know the story's gist: Nineteenth-century whaling ship captain Ahab (Gregory Peck) unwisely seeks vengeance on the oddly named white whale. Little did I imagine how late in the story narrator Ishmael (Richard Basehart) sees Ahab's face or hears his voice. I think the island savage Queequeg gets more screen time. Guess Ahab, for all his obsession, has the most stand-out personality on the Pequod. I hardly know how to describe first mate Starbuck (Leo Genn), and he's one of the more famous characters. We learn a lot more names, but in this capsulized edition, they hardly seem worth remembering; only the cabin boy gets my sympathy.

Andrei Rublev (1966)

This may be the longest movie I've seen since I started this blog. Running nearly 3.5 hours with no overture or intermission, it feels like it could easily have been edited down to less than half as much. Even for a Russian classic, that's a lot.

It had also been one of the British Film Institute's favorite films that I hadn't seen yet, at #27 on their list of 50 greatest. But that did nothing to get me psyched for it. I have to say, the BFI's taste doesn't appeal to me nearly as much as the AFI's. Perhaps I'm something of an ugly American after all.

Hakuchi/The Idiot (1951)

I've long known Akira Kurosawa to take inspiration from westerns and Shakespeare plays for his samurai epics. But while I'd seen some dramas of his set in contemporary Japan, it didn't occur to me that they, too, might owe something to foreign artists. In this case, it's the Fyodor Dostoevsky novel with the same title in English.

I picked this one out of curiosity, not for its literary basis but for its DVD case description as having had an especially troubled production and an initially lukewarm reception. It certainly gained popularity after spreading to other countries, judging from its 7.5 on IMDb and 75% on Rotten Tomatoes. The main signs of production problems come in the form of strange scene shifts and inconsistent handling of narration (or lack thereof): Early on, we get a few intertitles, despite this being far from a silent movie; later we get a brief anonymous voiceover, and that's it. We may have to blame the cutting of more than 1.5 hours, tho it still runs more than 2.5.