THE CAMP ON BLOOD ISLAND (1958)

During World War II, on an island off the coast of Malaysia, the Japanese have established two prison camps, one for men and one for women. Commander Yamamitsu and his assistant Sakamura run the men's camp in a brutal fashion, torturing and killing men for trying to escape, and taking hostages whom they threaten to kill when they want information. If the Japanese win the war, Yamamitsu says he will let the prisoners establish new lives in Japan, but if they lose, he will burn down both camps and slaughter all the inmates. As it happens, the Japanese have already surrendered, but because the camp radio is out of commission, Yamamitsu doesn’t know this yet. However, the prisoners, led by Col. Lambert, do know, thanks to a secret radio in possession of a Dutch prisoner (nicknamed, of course, "Dutch"). They're trying to keep the Japanese from finding out, hoping they'll get liberated by the Allies first, but eventually a diplomat named Beattie, who rarely agrees with Lambert's leadership, cracks and tries to spill the beans.

This film has a reputation for a couple of reasons. When it came out, it was seen as a much-needed antidote to the general whitewashing of the behavior of the Japanese army during the war. It opens with a claim that it's based on a true story, but even with all the powers of the Internet, I could not verify that—though a novelization of the movie became a bestseller. The other big selling point of the movie was its graphic depictions of gore and torture. In terms of explicitness, from today's vantage point, it would barely garner a PG rating, but at least two scenes are fairly brutal in tone: the opening in which Peters, a captured escapee, is forced to dig his own grave before he is shot and falls dead into it; and a later scene involving a beheading. An effective non-graphic scene has Sakamura answer the doctor's plea for fresh bandages by throwing the bloody bandages that had been wrapped around Peters' torso on the ground and saying, "He doesn’t need these anymore." Andre Morell is a little too low-key as Lambert; theoretically, there's a plot-point reason for this—he is keeping news of the surrender from the men—but the performance could have used a bit more fire. Hammer horror icon Barbara Shelley plays a female prisoner who makes a daring escape near the end with an American (Phil Brown) who arrives on the island. All of the three major Japanese roles are played by Anglo actors; the best is Marne Maitland as the martinet Sakamura, the villain you love to hate. [TCM]

THE LOWER DEPTHS (1936)

The Baron (Louis Jouvet) gets a dressing down from a government minister; he has borrowed some "secret funds" for gambling and has lost the money. Seeming unconcerned, he makes one more effort to win big, but loses. That night, a thief named Pépel (Jean Gabin) breaks into the Baron's house, but when the Baron tells him that everything of value has been repossessed, the two bond over their dire straits in life, and the Baron comes to stay at the squalid boarding house where Pépel stays. Pépel has his hands full staying out of the hands of the law and dallying with Vassilissa, the young wife of the elderly landlord Kostylev, and Natasha, Vassilissa's sister. Other characters we get to know include a down-on-his-luck actor (Robert Le Vigan) who keeps telling people that he is an "organism poisoned by alcohol," a young, whimsical and frequently drunken accordion player (Maurice Baquet), a cobbler and his dying wife, and a fat police inspector who has set his cap for Natasha. Pépel's love triangle takes center stage until the end when one character commits suicide and another is killed in a brawl—the police are told that it was his life in "the lower depths" that killed him.

Based on a Maxim Gorky play, Jean Renoir's film version retains most of the Russian names (and at least in the subtitles, the Russian currency of rubles) but is set in Paris. For a good chunk of its running time, this almost comes off as a French version of YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU, though one in which Kostylev (the Lionel Barrymore equivalent) is a rotten bastard instead of a sweet fairy-godfather figure. The flophouse, through grungy, is large and open and filled with colorful people, and generally seems like a pleasant place to stay. Gabin and Jouvet (pictured above), who were two of France's most esteemed actors of the time, have a wonderful chemistry together—better than Gabin has with either of his lovers, though Suzy Prim as Vassilissa is fine as a woman you love to hate who is occasionally likeable. Renoir's style feels very modern, with a moving camera that occasionally passes behind objects which obscure the action briefly, as if we were spying unseen on the characters. Another dramatic piece this movie conjures up is Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, in which the down-and-out denizens of a bar are stripped of their illusions by a truth-teller. Here, Gabin is a kind of truth-teller, but he allows most of them to keep their illusions, and even gets a relatively happy ending himself—a weak but not fatal plot point. Some may find the light tone of the movie to clash too much with the underlying narrative—and Akira Kurasawa's version of the same material, made in 1957, is apparently darker and more faithful to Gorky, though I have not seen it—but this is still worth seeing, for Renoir's style and the two lead actors. [DVD]

THINGS HAPPEN AT NIGHT (1947)

The Prescott family, despite still living in the ancestral mansion, has fallen on hard times and is hoping that daughter Joyce's marriage into the millionaire Ebury family will allow them to continue living in the manner to which they are accustomed. The only problem is that the Prescott house seems to be haunted. Unexplained events over the past few weeks include pieces of coal scattered about the drawing room floor, a hat ripped down the middle, pictures on the wall tuned upside down, attic lights going on and off at strange hours, and rugs and curtains catching fire (and see the levitating apples pictured at left). The cook is constantly threatening to leave, and now news about the supernatural shenanigans is spreading in the village, possibly putting Joyce's marriage in jeopardy. One day, three people descend upon the house: Harris, an insurance man looking into possible claims involving a burned rug; Spencer, an investigator from the Institute of Psychical Research; and Ebury, hoping to snuff out the outrageous rumors about a ghost. Spencer decides that a poltergeist is to blame, and that the mischievous spirit has possessed Audrey, the younger sister. Everyone agrees to stay in the house that night while Spencer attempts an exorcism, but soon even stranger things are happening.

I pieced the above summary together, hoping to make sense of what was a cut and disjointed print of the movie; IMDb gives the film's length as 79 minutes, but the print I saw was just under an hour, so clearly there is stuff missing—one obvious omission is a song, "First of Forever" which is listed in the opening credits but didn’t appear in the film I saw. In the first half, the movie reminded me of THE UNINVITED, a serious ghost story told in a light tone, but eventually this becomes more like a slapstick comedy, even though the poltergeist and the possession are presented as real. No explanation is given for who the naughty spirit is or why it has descended on the house, and Joyce, the bride-to-be, is barely in the movie. The last 20 minutes, in which the poltergeist causes much humorous havoc, are fun though things never really get scary. Gordon Harker, who plays Harris, was a famous B-actor in British films in the 30s and 40s. The only other actor to stand out is Joan Young, who does a nice job as the cook.  [YouTube]

THE BEASTS OF MARSEILLES (1957)
aka SEVEN THUNDERS

In 1943, Dave and Jim, two British POWs, have escaped and are hiding out in a rather unsavory quarter of Marseilles. While waiting to be smuggled out in a fishing boat, they are given a room in a shabby apartment building next to a whorehouse which is frequented by German officers. The handsome, dashing Dave (Stephen Boyd) flirts with a blonde beauty named Lise (Anna Gaylor); the slightly less handsome Jim (Tony Wright) forms a bond with an older British woman (Kathleen Harrison) who lets him share her bed and pose as her husband when the Nazis come parading through the building. In a separate plotline, the Germans are trying to find out why almost a hundred people have vanished without a trace. They suspect a serial killer and they're right; the kindly Dr. Martout (James Robertson Justice) has a nice evil business going. He gets a man named Blanchard to send him desperate refugees trying to escape; Martout promises to help them, gets them to bring all their cash or gold, gives them a glass of poisoned cognac, and kills them, throwing their bodies in a lime pit in his cellar. When the Germans decide to evacuate the neighborhood and blow it up to get rid of two problems (the refugees and the killer), Dave and Jim's paths cross with Martout's.

For a while, this is a different and intriguing take on the traditional WWII resistance movie—with a dash of ARSENIC AND OLD LACE. The narrative takes its time developing and we meet several interesting side characters: Blanchard (Eugene Deckers), the man who sends refugees to Martout, thinking he's being helpful, unaware of their fates; the colorful madam of the whorehouse (Katherine Kath) who has good survival instincts; Schlip (Martin Miller) and Bourdin (George Coulouris), two refugees who wind up drinking Martout's cognac; and a German soldier named Eric (James Kenney), a skittish 20-year-old virgin who is out of his comfort zone at the whorehouse and who later accidentally shoots and kills a child, an act which has more reverberations then you'd guess. All the actors do fine jobs. Boyd (pictured with Gaylor), though hunky, is a bit on the bland side, but Wright and Gaylor take up the slack nicely, and Harrison is fun as always. Justice is excellent as the seemingly civilized but cold-blooded doctor who tells Schlip that he's doing him a favor, poisoning him rather than sending him to Auschwitz. Kath stands out in her few scenes as the madam—most fun in a scene in which Harrison discovers that there's a secret passage between her spartan bedroom and Kath's ornately decorated bedroom next door. The movie feels a bit long getting to its climax, and the some of the destruction effects are lame—obvious rear projection or matting of exploding buildings. This doesn't crop up much, so it's worth catching it the next time it does.  The best explanation I've seen for the original British title is that it might be a reference to a verse in the Book of Revelation about seven thunders being heard at the time of the apocalypse. [TCM]

THE GREAT MR. NOBODY (1941)

"Dreamy" Smith is a young, sweet-natured guy who works in a newspaper's classified ad department; his buddy "Skipper" Martin is an older guy who works on a salvage barge. Together, they're ready to leave their jobs, buy a boat, and sail the world, leaving behind their city woes and troublesome women. The problems are: 1) every time Dreamy gets enough money put aside, he loses it somehow, usually by giving it away to someone in need; 2) Dreamy isn't as ready as Skipper is to leave women behind—in fact, he's got a girlfriend named Mary at the newspaper who doesn't want to see him go. When the paper gets a new publisher who gives cash bonus prizes for good ideas to boost circulation, Dreamy's boss, Mr. Wade, starts stealing Dreamy's ideas and passes them off as his own. Skipper and Mary want him to stand up for himself, but for different reasons: Skipper hoping he'll earn the prize money to buy the boat, and Mary hoping he'll earn enough money so they can get married. Or is there a third option?

This is a very cute little comedy that works mostly due to a plot that's a little out of the ordinary, though there is a Capraesque tone to the proceedings, albeit more comic and with less pomp and sentiment. I must admit that, though I liked the characters, I got a little tired of Dreamy's constant self-sacrificing, especially when his charitable acts wound up screwing over his buddy and girlfriend. Eddie Albert (pictured) is perfect as Dreamy, with a sweet and "dreamy" but not dumb persona; Alan Hale is just as good as Skipper (a character name that his son, Alan Hale Jr. would inherit on Gilligan's Island), and Joan Leslie is fine as Mary. The strong supporting cast includes John Litel as mean Mr. Wade, William Lundigan as the handsome new publisher who has his eye on Mary, Dickie Moore as Limpy, a crippled newsboy, and John Ridgeley as a reporter. [TCM]

SPRING IS HERE (1930)

This very cute romantic musical is set at the Braley estate on Long Island and begins on a fine June morning. On the patio, Mary Jane, the youngest Braley girl, is arguing with her on-and-off boyfriend Stacy; they sing "Spring Is Here," a "carpe diem" song in which he lets her know that, at 16 going on 17, she's in danger of getting "old and crusty." In the dining room, Betty gets yelled at by Mom and Dad about coming home too late ("Are you in training to be a night watchman?")  They're anxious to marry her off to her long-time boyfriend Terry, but at the party last night, she got bored with him and went off for a moonlight drive with dashing Steve. Terry tries to get her back by singing her a love letter ("Sincerely Yours") and she sings back that she'll use the song the next time she sees Steve. Mary Jane suggests that Terry act "bad" to get Betty's attention, so at a party that night, he flirts outrageously with several women, including Betty's mom, but his behavior winds up sending Betty back into Steve's arms. However, Mr. Braley throws Terry out of the house, and that gets Betty's juices flowing, and when Steve arrives to elope, she winds up back with Terry.

An early screen musical by Rodgers and Hart, this seems to be a little-seen rarity, and it's worth seeking out. As moviemaking, it's nothing special, with stagy, static camera takes, but there is some clever dialogue, the songs are appealing—"With a Song in My Heart" went on to become a standard—and the actors are all energetic and seem to be having fun, especially Frank Albertson as Stacy and Inez Courtney as Mary Jane (pictured above right). In most romance films, we know who's going to wind up with the girl, but here neither character seems coded as the obvious winner. Top billing goes to the handsome and hearty Lawrence Gray as Steve, which would normally make him the hero, but even though he doesn't really have any major flaws of character, he loses out in the end. Alexander Gray (no relation) is Terry and, as he's not as attractive or chipper as Steve and comes off as a bit stodgy, we would expect him to lose out, but he doesn't. Bernice Claire (pictured with Alexander Gray) is fine as Betty, and Louise Fazenda and Ford Sterling are excellent as the parents. Among the standout scenes: Mr. Braley dragging a marriage proposal for his daughter out of the oblivious Terry; the first song in which Stacy sings that "Spring is the time for love in Vitaphone plays"—a reference to the Vitaphone Company, the talkies division of Warner Bros. which made the movie; Terry kissing everyone at the party; and the next-to-last song, "What’s the Big Idea" in which Stacy expresses his randiness to Mary Jane, and she replies, "The way you use your hands/You're a traveling man." Overall, a delight for fans of early musicals. [TCM]

MUSIC IS MAGIC (1935)

Bebe Daniels is an aging movie star appearing in a new stage show. She's not a big draw anymore but seems completely oblivious to that fact—maybe because her young boyfriend (Thomas Beck) always sits in the front row and applauds wildly—and still makes big-star demands on everyone. Also in the show is a musical comedy trio (Alice Faye, Frank Mitchell, Joe Durant) looking to hit the big time. When the show's tour is canceled, the trio goes to Hollywood where Faye works at a laundry and the two guys work on a streetcar. Faye thinks their manager has arranged for an audition for her with a big producer, but he sneaks her into a Mexican restaurant to sing while the producer is eating dinner. Eventually, she gets a movie role—in a movie with Daniels, who has brought her kid sister to Hollywood. Daniels has big ideas for the movie; her vision for one production number calls for "Rabbits… symbolic… about 150." The sister gets the hots for Beck, Faye gets her big break, and Daniels is finally able to face up to reality, admits the girl she's passing off as her sister is really her daughter, and agrees to take a smaller role in the movie. This short musical isn't bad considering Alice Faye is the star—I've never really warmed up to Faye, and she's no better here, early in her career, than she was later, but there is the novelty that in this film she's done up as a dead ringer for Jean Harlow (as in the picture above). Mitchell and Durant, who were a real-life comedy team, do a lot of physical comedy; some of it works, some doesn't.  Daniels is quite good as an egotistical movie star, playing mostly for good-natured laughs instead of mean jabs. The title song got stuck in my head for a few days, but now I can't recall it at all. It's fun that Thomas Beck's character’s name is Tony Bennett.  [FMC]

LORD LOVE A DUCK (1966)

This is one of those darkly comic satires of the 1960s that probably felt wild and crazy at the time but now feels forced and weird. High school senior Roddy MacDowell (who was in his mid-30s at the time of filming) is a loner and a misfit who calls himself "Mollymauk," after an extinct bird, and who, when excited, starts squawking like a bird. On the day before classes begin, he befriends fellow senior Tuesday Weld (22 at the time) and commits himself to helping her make her dreams of stardom come true. (Is he straight and in love with her, or gay and fascinated by her? I was never sure.) He helps her get the twelve cashmere sweaters she needs to own to join an exclusive girls' club, pushes her into marriage to a young and handsome marriage counselor (Martin West) who works with a minister at a drive-in church, and arranges for her to meet a beach movie producer who has never actually been on a beach (his latest movie: "I Married a Teenage Vampire") so she can get a part in his next flick. When West proves to be an obstacle to her plans, McDowell goes after him, eventually with a bulldozer, and the movie falls apart.

This is all over the map, satirizing everything it can, but never striking very deeply—or coherently. Everyone—kids, adults, free spirits, squares, parents, educators, the church—is made to look silly, leaving no real moral center. For a while, it seems like MacDowell might be a "holy innocent" or perhaps a devil, but I could find no evidence that he's anything more than just an unhinged guy who is good at hypnotism which he uses on a few people. MacDowell and Weld (pictured above) are too old to be playing high school students. I could buy them as college students, which is a compliment to MacDowell who didn't look 18 but also didn’t look over 30, and there seems to be no good reason why they're supposed to be teenagers rather than 20-somethings. Having said that, the actors give themselves whole-heartedly to this mess, with Weld in particular doing a nice job—and looking quite beautiful. Martin West, apparently best known for playing a popular doc on General Hospital, is wholesomely handsome and does a nice job as Weld's clueless husband; Lola Albright is good as Weld's mom; Harvey Korman plays the principal. Good old Ruth Gordon (pictured at right) steals her scenes as West's feisty mother. The craziest (and most uncomfortable) scene has Weld picking out 16 colorful sweaters with her father (Max Showalter), both in states of nearly orgasmic bliss. My favorite line: Weld's major is "adolescent ethics and commercial relationships." Very strange indeed; a must-see only for hardcore fans of 60s movies, or fans of Weld. [TCM]

REVOLT OF THE SLAVES (1960)

Around the year 300, the emperor Maximium, in the midst of a crackdown on Christians, surrounds himself with African protectors rather than the traditional Praetorian guards, who might be too sympathetic to the Christians to trust completely.  The slave Vibio attacks one of the Africans in the streets after witnessing an escaped slave get his hands cut off as punishment. Before Vibio can be harmed, he is bought by Claudius, a Roman patrician. He has a daughter, the saucy Fabiola, and a niece, the more demure Agnes. Agnes is "dating" Valerio but seems to be sweet on Sebastian, so the jealous Valerio has Corvino, head of the Emperor's secret police, spy on her. One night, posing as a cripple, Corvino follows her to a mass meeting at a villa and finds out that she and Sebastian are secret Christians, as is Vibio. Against her better judgment, Fabiola helps Agnes and the others hide, and begins to fall for Vibio. Soon, however, most of the Christians are exposed and rounded up to be slaughtered in the arena, forced to run across the arena to provide practice for gladiators with spears. Vibio leads some men in an attempt to break into the arena from the catacombs beneath, but will they make it time?

Though marketed as a sword-and-sandal beefcake epic, this Italian film is actually an unofficial remake of DeMille's SIGN OF THE CROSS—officially it's a version of a novel called Fabiola—and not a bad one at that. It's well filmed and has spectacular sets, good use of color, and a compelling (if familiar) narrative. The only name star here is Rhonda Fleming (as Fabiola) and, though she's a smidge too old for the part, she still shows some star power. Though the film is definitely not in the Hercules/Goliath/Machiste mold of Italian action movies of the era, there is still a fair amount of male pulchritude on display, especially from the handsome Lang Jeffries (pictured at right, at the time married to Fleming) as Vibio and Burt Nelson as the muscled Christian Catulo. There is also whipping and torture and some bloody spearing. Serge Gainsbourg, better known in Europe as a singer, songwriter, and father of Charlotte Gainsbourg, is fine as Corvino. The events of the movie are based loosely on actual events during the reign of Diocletian—the African guards, the martyrdoms of Sebastian (with arrows) and Agnes—and I'm not sure why they used a fictitious name for the Emperor. Overall, I quite liked this, despite 1) the fact that everyone's dialogue is post-dubbed; and 2) the occasional bizarre line, as when Fleming, upon seeing her father's new mechanical clock, says, "This is the limit!" See it in widescreen. [Netflix streaming]

THE GREEN HORNET (1940)

This 13-part serial was the first visual representation of the radio crimefighter whose place in the superhero pantheon would be solidified by the short-lived 1960s TV series. Britt Reid (Gordon Jones) has just inherited his late father’s newspaper, the Sentinel. The police miss his father’s habit of running hard-hitting editorials which took on the local rackets, and his secretary Casey (Anne Nagel) doesn’t think much of Britt's playboy-type hours. But soon ace reporter Jasper Jenks (Phillip Trent) is on to a story about a dam being built with inferior materials, and sure enough, the dam fails and kills several people, and Reid does an about-face, deciding to expose shady dealings. The police commissioner tells Reid that the city needs a Robin Hood, not knowing that they're about to get one in the figure of the Green Hornet, a shadowy vigilante who wears a mask and drives around in a car called the Black Beauty that makes a hornet-buzz noise.

Yes, Britt is the Hornet, helped by his Korean manservant Kato (Keye Luke), and for the next 12 chapters, the two of them try to find out who is the chief mastermind behind various city rackets, most of which involve forcing companies (trucking companies, airlines, dry cleaners, zoos) to pay protection money or risk becoming the victims of sabotage. Crime boss Monroe (Cy Kendall) orchestrates the threats and mayhem, guided by a mysterious voice that calls in to Monroe’s office every so often and gives instructions to the gang members. The Hornet and Kato track down the bad guys, using a gas gun that emits a puff of smoke that knocks people out, allowing the Hornet to tie them up and leave them for the cops. But the police (along with the newspapers and the public) aren't sure if the Hornet is a good guy or a bad guy, so Britt and Kato usually wind up being chased by police and crooks alike. In a couple of scenes, even Axford, Britt's tough Irish bodyguard (Wade Boteler), tries to give the Green Hornet an ass-whupping, not realizing it's his boss beneath the mask.

The narrative structure gets a bit monotonous: a company is hit by the bad guys, life-threatening sabotage happens, Green Hornet and Kato come to the rescue, the Sentinel exposes the racket, and the crooks try another angle. But that comes with the territory of the serial genre. Production values here are fairly cheap, with some occasionally effective use of stock footage. Perhaps the most surprising moment comes at the very end when the bad guys wind up shooting each other to death. Gordon Jones (pictured) makes for a good hero, though apparently his voice when he has the Hornet mask on is dubbed in by the actor who played the Hornet on the radio. Luke, in the role that helped make a star of Bruce Lee, doesn't have much to do except drive the Black Beauty and save Reid's neck once in a while (though he does get at least one karate chop in). Poor Anne Nagel has even less to do, just sitting at a typewriter or passing along phone messages. Worth seeing for serials fans. [TCM]