Dumbo: When you see an elephant fly

No matter what age you may reach, you are never truly too old to enjoy cartoons. One of the reasons for this is that most cartoons are made as family movies which appeal to people of all age groups. Another reason is that animation helps portray certain scenes and ideas which would otherwise be inconvenient to perform in a normal live-action format. This is also the case with the 1941 animated classic Dumbo from Walt Disney.

As storks fly high above a circus and deliver babies to animals in their cages, an elephant by the name of Mrs Jumbo is displeased to not receive her little bundle of joy. As the circus packs up to move to another location, Mrs Jumbo is despondent but goes along nevertheless. En route the train journey, a stork finally comes along and delivers a little baby elephant to the expectant mother. Mrs Jumbo decides to name her newborn Jumbo Jr and showers her affection upon him. But what she is slow to realise is that Jumbo Jr has exceptionally large ears which form the base of ridicule that is cast upon him by other animals in the circus. The glares and lewd mocks are not spared even from the visitors to the circus, the other performers or the ringmaster. This leads to him being nicknamed Dumbo as a degrading remark about his large flapping ears and his clumsy nature. Dumbo is demoted to working as an extra in the routine performed by the clowns as his mother is locked up in solitary confinement in her bid to protect him. He must now prove his worth with the aid of his one and only friend, a mouse.

Dumbo is one of the many Walt Disney feature films which go down as classics in the genre of animation. In hindsight, the film shows plenty of angles of society in the time frame which it was made. The film shows the negative aspects of stereotyping and prejudice which is witnessed by Dumbo during the course of the film. It also shows how members of an elite society try to separate themselves from people they wouldn’t consider to fit the bill of their standards and how they wash their hands off issues that do not concern them which can be seen in the scorn shown by the other elephants towards Dumbo.

One of the few negative aspects of the film can be seen in a racial stereotyping which can be witnessed in a scene where the two main characters meet the crows. There is also a scene involving intoxication and hallucinations which does not seem to fit into the film especially considering the startling style in which the scene has been made and the fact that the film is primarily meant for family audiences.

The animation, the dialogues and the song performances in the film are stellar. There is good reason the film can be hailed as a classic for the ages. It ranks well in the must-watch category.

Leave Her to Heaven: A possessive love affair that creates a storm

Everyone wants to feel loved and appreciated at some point or the other in their life. Being loved is one of the needs of being human and in a sense it completes us and becomes our crowning glory. But when that love becomes obsessive and stifles everything we do it becomes a problem. A possessive love can cause suffocation in a relationship and lead to problems such as the ones presented in the 1945 film Leave Her to Heaven which was directed by John Stahl.

Richard Harland is an accomplished novelist taking a train journey to New Mexico for a vacation at a lodge. On the train, he meets a socialite by the name of Ellen Berent who is also to stay at the same lodge along with her mother and sister. The Berent’s used to visit the lodge frequently and have returned to scatter the ashes of their recently deceased patriarch, a job which Ellen takes up as her own because of her extreme attachment to him. Ellen soon realises that Richard has many resemblances of her deceased father and is immediately infatuated with him. Richard and Ellen fall in love gradually and she abruptly calls an end to her engagement with politician Russell Quinton while immediately announcing her engagement to Richard. They are soon married but not to live happily ever after as Ellen’s increasingly possessive love for Richard wrecks their married life and causes problems for them, Richard’s brother Danny, Ellen’s sister Ruth and the couples unborn child.

Leave Her to Heaven tells the story of a woman who is entirely obsessed with her father to the point of his death. After he passes, she imposes the same love on a man who resembles him in image and likeness to the point where she stifles his freedom by trying to keep him all to herself. It is hailed as a classic which is clear from the use of colour in an early period of film, scenic locations which play an important part of the plot and the course of the plot which lead to the gradual unnerving of a particular character which in turn leads to never before seen circumstances. It also creates a clear distinction of class and then breaks it down which it manages by creating a setting of high society families and eventually leads to their destruction down to a common point of criminal law.

The use of colour and long shots of scenic locations lend to the appeal of the film. While it begins seemingly as a romance, it eventually ends up being much more as it drifts into the throngs of drama-slash-thriller and has often been claimed to be film noir. Gene Tierney plays the role of the deranged Ellen Berent quite crisply as she leads the audience into her charms before unleashing a string of horrors upon the characters in the plot.

A rare to see colour classic in film noir, Leave Her to Heaven peaks as its characters fall deeper into their miseries. It has a charm which leads its audience in before gently shocking them, just as Ellen Berent does to her family and friends.

Laura: A murder mystery for the ages

One of the great styles in cinema which is enjoyable and meaningful is the film noir. Even if a person is not a fan of crime, thriller and mystery, it is very easy to appreciate film noir because of its style and execution. A classic in film noir is the 1944 film Laura which was directed by Otto Preminger.

When a young and attractive socialite is found dead, Detective Lieutenant Mark McPherson steps up to solve the case. He meets her close friend, Waldo Lydecker, who is a famous writer/ journalist. In interviewing Lydecker he finds out about her on-the-rocks engagement to Shelby Carpenter, a man who she nurtured both professionally and personally. McPherson is also introduced to Ann Treadwell, a friend of Laura who is secretly in love with Carpenter. From the descriptions he receives, McPherson decides that Laura was an attractive and much loved woman. Slowly and steadily, over the weekend that McPherson investigates the murder, he falls in love with Laura and makes it his mission to figure out who the killer is, to the extent that he spends hours in her home where she was killed. Just as McPherson seems to unlock a few clues, an unexpected occurrence causes him to rethink his findings in the case and spins him around on his heels.

Laura is considered a classic of film noir. It employs quite a few elements which are considered to be indispensible to film noir, including a narration by a character, use of thematic background score which helps create a tension in the scene, use of toned lighting and shadows, characters smoking cigarettes and the general theme of being a film about crime; in this particular case, the crime is murder. It manages to create an air of hopelessness and suffocation which seem to be the conditions of the characters in the film, and it manages to superimpose these same emotions on its audience. It maintains its suspense through the plot and the mystery of the killer is only revealed in the finale of the film.

Laura is considered a classic and rightly so. Its relevance in this day and age may leave it at just above average, but it has a class of its own which cannot be ignored and underrated under any circumstances.