Nothing much new, unusual or different this month, just a solid line-up of some good movies.
May 1 is Lubitsch's Design for Living (1933), Noel Coward improved by Ben Hecht. Elegant, funny, sexy.
May 2 is Lubitsch's Ninotchka (1939) and Edgar Ulmer's Carnegie Hall (1947), mostly wonderful classical music performances from Rise Stevens, Arthur Rubinstein and many others, framed by a somewhat corny story.
May 4 has Fritz Lang's first American film, Fury (1936), about a lynching, and Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent (1940), production design by William Cameron Menzies.'
May 7 has Howard Hawks's Only Angels Have Wings (1939), about civilian flyers in South America and the 8th has Otto Preminger's Bunny Lake is Missing(1965), in beautiful wide-screen black-and white. Also on the 8th is John Stahl's Imitation of Life, about tolerance and understanding (very different from the later Douglas Sirk version) and two complex and ambiguous films by Antonioni, L'Avventura (1960) and Blow-Up (1966).
On May 14 is Leo McCarey's moving and funny The Awful Truth (1937) and the 15th has Abel Gance's epic silent film La Roue (1922) and Max Ophuls's elegant La Ronde (1950).
May 18 has two good Westerns: Gordon Douglas's Yellowstone Kelly (1959; I wrote about it on Nov.7, 2014) and Anthony Mann's Last Frontier (1956). Sam Peckinpah's Vietnam-era Western The Wild Bunch (1969) is on May 20.
The 21st has one of the earliest films noir, Bill Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944) and the 22nd has Jacques Demy's stylish Lola (1961).
On the 23rd is Gene Kelly's Tunnel of Love (1958), made from Peter De Vries's novel. I prefer the novel (it's funnier) but Kelly knows how to move the cast and the camera.
The 25th has Raoul Walsh's The Strawberry Blonde (1941), a charming period piece and two of Frank Tashlin's best films, colorful satires of the fifties, The Girl Can't Help It (1956, with great music from the period) and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter (1957).
On the 27th is Anthony Mann's corrosive Men in War (1957) and John Ford's film of defeat and victory, They Were Expendable (1945).
The 29th and 30th have two of the best war films ever made, gritty and grim: King Vidor's The Big Parade (1922), about WW I and Raoul Walsh's Objective Burma (1945), about WW II.
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