100 Films -- Days 7 through 9

"Attica! Attica!"

Thursday night's movie was Dog Day Afternoon. It's quite a little time capsule of the early '70s. I liked it, but a real downer ending, though.

Friday night was Lowell's game, so no film-viewing. I'm now one day behind schedule.

We usually rent from Hollywood Video, and I can tell by their Classics sections that I'll soon exhaust their supply. I drove over to Morris Movie Classics today in search of more films. I had not been there in...9, 10 years, maybe. I wasn't sure if they were still in business. They are still there, packed in tiny aisles from floor to ceiling. That's the good news. The bad news is that the entire collection is VHS. I can understand, because replacing them with DVDs would be an expensive proposition. The trouble is that I'm trying to watch these movies in as complete form as possible, and many VHS titles were not released in widescreen but in the fullscreen 1.33:1 TV format. For some movies, especially those released before the '50s, that shouldn't a problem. Which leads us to today's choice...

Tonight we watched It Happened One Night with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. We really enjoyed this '30s screwball comedy. Some great dialogue, the kind that you don't hear in movies any more. It has a sentimental sweet side, no doubt due to direction by Frank Capra. And I didn't know that Gable's character was a big inspiration for Bugs Bunny.