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12 Angry Men (1957)
12 Angry Men (1957)
1957 | Classics, Drama

"My first one is 12 Angry Men. I remember I watched it at school, I think I saw it at fourteen for the first time. And when you’re that age, you kind of want to watch big blockbuster movies and all that kind of stuff. And I just couldn’t get over the fact — basically it doesn’t leave the room for the whole movie. And it’s just these guys sitting around discussing this crime, and whether or not they’re going to find the guy guilty or not. I just found it so engaging and stuff. You know the cast and stuff was just incredible with Henry Fonda and Lee J. Cobb, and all these incredible actors. I just thought it was mind blowing, you know? I think it was based on a radio play — I don’t know. And then I figured it was a theatrical play, and then they made a movie. That’s the other thing, I was also just beginning to start to want to be an actor. Or join the theatre group in my hometown. It all sort of happened at the same time, and I was beginning to understand it a little bit more about how they’re engaging, and how you can hold people’s attention for that long just by the performance itself."

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Tracy Letts recommended The Bank Dick (1940) in Movies (curated)

 
The Bank Dick (1940)
The Bank Dick (1940)
1940 | Classics, Comedy
(0 Ratings)
Movie Favorite

"I wish young actors and actresses were better versed in the work of Fields, Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, and even lower-brow comics like the Three Stooges, Abbott and Costello, Jerry Lewis. Actors can partly cultivate a sense of humor from observing and mimicking our forebears. W. C. Fields makes me laugh more than any other film actor. His performances seem effortless, as if Fields is just doing Fields, but he deserves more credit than that. He constructed and honed his character over a twenty-year stage career. That character, known in The Bank Dick as Egbert Sousé, is the cinematic progenitor of a comic archetype: the lazy, drunken misanthrope. Fields wasn’t the innovator that Chaplin or Keaton was, of course, and in fact, his movies are not great. They’re flimsy vehicles for his routines. But I’ve also come to believe that’s part of the joke. “Can you believe they made a whole movie about this guy?” The Bank Dick also features several great comic character actors, such as Franklin Pangborn, Grady Sutton (as Og Oggilby), and Shemp Howard. I wanted to put Contempt on my list but Godard never put Shemp in a movie, know what I’m saying?"

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