A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop movie review (2010)
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Penelope Houston on Preston Sturges
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âHer Manâ: A Relic of a Bygone Hollywood, Now Restored
Now streaming, this mildly racy romance, from 1930, arrived before the censorious Production Code. What really sets the film apart is its incredible tracking shots.
Helen Twelvetrees plays a bar girl in Tay Garnett’s “Her Man” (1930).Credit.Museum of Modern Art
May 27, 2021
âHer Man,â a snappy bit of hokum inspired by the venerable crime-of-passion ballad âFrankie and Johnny,â was well received when it arrived in 1930. Decades later, the mildly racy romance, with lightly disguised hookers and pimps, would become a bone of contention between critics conversant with classic Hollywood.
Periodically rediscovered, the movie is streaming in a crisp new digital restoration via the Museum of Modern Artâs Virtual Cinema. Although opinions vary on the American director Tay Garnettâs auteur status, his high-spirited lowlife drama is well worth a look.
You ve been hoodwinked. You ve been had. You ve been took. You ve been led astray, run amuck. You ve been bamboozled.
So said Malcolm X, as quoted by Spike Lee in the production notes to Bamboozled, his perplexing new film. To Malcolm, the bamboozlers were white people in general, but in Lee s films they re the television executives, black and white, who bamboozle themselves in the mindless quest for ratings. The film is a satirical attack on the way TV uses and misuses African-American images, but many viewers will leave the theater thinking Lee has misused them himself.
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That s the danger with satire: To ridicule something, you have to show it, and if what you re attacking is a potent enough image, the image retains its negative power no matter what you want to say about it. Bamboozled shows black actors in boldly exaggerated blackface for a cable production named Mantan The New Millennium Minstrel Show. Can we see beyond the blackface to its purpose? I had