Crashing into the Bishop's Wife before Dinner at Eight

Over the weekend we saw three movies from Netflix - Crash, The Bishop's WIfe and Dinner at Eight.

Crash won the academy award for best picture, and I wonder why. It is a compelling series of stories around human relations - mostly Black/White but with some other things mixed in. The cross currents in the movie are very well developed and the stories are mostly real. But there were two things that were disturbing. First, the music floats in and out throughout the movie - often obscuring dialogue. I guess the effect here was to tell the audience that the dialogue was not important. And indeed you do get some visual effects even with the notion that the dialogue is just so much talk. But I found the music annoying and the technique less than successful. Second, a couple of the assumptions in the movie were too stereotypical for my taste. Matt Damon plays a racist cop who has a father with a serious illness who eventually saves a woman that he molested on a street stop from a car crash. An immigrant shop keeper's daughter buys a gun for protection of their store and mistakenly buys blanks so that when the immigrant goes to shoot the locksmith who he believes mis-handled a door repair (the shop keeper get's broken into after the repair guy said fixing the lock isn't sufficient) and his adorable daughter jumps in front of the (non)bullet. Get the picture? There are just too many loops in the movie to make it credible.

The Bishop's WIfe is the original movie from which The Preacher's WIfe was remade. In this case Cary Grant, Loretta Young and David Niven play the angel, the wife and the bishop. It is a nicely made movie. Nothing heavy here, like the remake (which was also nicely made).

Dinner at Eight is a movie of the Moss Hart play, which by all account should be dated by now. It includes a bevy of major actors in the thirties - two Barrymores, Marie Dressler, Wallace Berry and Jean Harlow. The plot surrounds a society matron planning a dinner party for eight where each has a story. The father (Lionel Barrymore) is a shipping magnate during the depression. Berry is a somewhat corrupt financial type who is married to Harlow. The interactions, like the ones in Crash, are a bit contrived - but the stories are a bit better developed than in Crash. You never get to the dinner party in the end but get a lot of stories around the participants. The movie has three parts. The first is the introduction of the characters. The second is some pretty good comedic lines and the final part is a series of dramatic twists between and among the characters. The divisions are not exactly clean - but I was struck by the change in tone from the comedy to the drama. At the end, as the group is walking into dinner Marie Dressler (Carlotta, playing the old and wise actress) and Jean Harlow (playing the dumb blond wife of Berry named Kitty) exchange the best lines -
Kitty: I was reading a book the other day.
Carlotta: Reading a book?
Kitty: Yes. It's all about civilization or something. A nutty kind of a book. Do you know that the guy says that machinery is going to take the place of every profession?
Carlotta: Oh, my dear, that's something you need never worry about.