Michael's Moviepalace: Viewing Classic Movies

2012-01-26T16:46:00.003-05:00

PANIC ON THE AIR (1936)

Lew Ayres is a New York radio personality, broadcasting sports during the day and hot city news at night. During a World Series game which Detroit loses to New York, Ayres wonders why Lefty, Detroit's well-known pitcher, didn't play. It turns out that Lefty wound up in possession of a screwy five dollar bill—the picture of Lincoln had a mustache drawn on it and a code in numbers was highlighted—and even though he spent the bill, a hard-faced blonde and a ruffian were after him to get the bill back. Ayers, whose sponsor, Mr. Gordon of Gordon's Garters, thinks his ratings need a boost, takes off with his sidekick Benny Baker to crack the case before the police, which they do. This hour-long B-mystery from Columbia is about par for the course. It winds up involving a decade-old kidnapping, a criminal's widow, and $200,000 hidden somewhere in the city. Ayers, a couple of years before he started his Dr. Kildare series, makes an appealing hero, though his sidekick (pictured above on the left with Ayres on the right) is a bit too laconic and his leading lady, Florence Rice, rather bland. Lack of background music and, more importantly, lack of action, hurts the film, though one scene set in the darkened office of a cryptologist is nicely atmospheric. There's not much humor, and no real chemistry between any of the leading players, but I did like the running gag of the Chinese houseboy named McNulty. [TCM]

2012-01-21T12:45:00.001-05:00

GIRLS ON THE LOOSE (1958)

This fairly standard B-crime movie starts cold with the robbery of a company's payroll of $200,000 by masked figures; later, it's revealed that the culprits are all sexy young women who bury the money for two years, then intend to split it five ways. The mastermind is nightclub owner Vera (Mara Corday); her younger sister Helen (Barbara Bostock), a singer at the club, is the getaway car driver who didn't realize until the next morning what she was involved in. There's also Agnes, the insider who knew how to time the robbery; Marie, a French hairdresser; and Joyce, a blond masseuse. Of course, as anyone who has seen TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE knows, things start to fall apart before the riches can be claimed. Agnes, certain that her bosses will find out about her part in the crime, gets a little hysterical, so Vera (in a meticulously planned scene) gasses her and makes it look like a suicide… and then there were four. A cop (Peter Mark Richman), knowing Vera and Agnes were friends, comes to the club asking questions and falls for Helen, though Vera does everything in her power to keep them apart. Meanwhile, more tensions arise between the four: Marie wants to claim her share now and Joyce is afraid that Helen will squawk to the cop, so mayhem ensues until it's just Vera and Helen… and the cop.

This isn’t exactly a good movie, but the plot and characters kept my interest. The acting is on a typical B-level, with Corday, a minor B-movie queen in the 50's, great fun. My favorite scene in the movie involves her flirtation with a new grocery delivery boy (Ronald Green, above with Corday). The boy is handsome but terribly wooden; when she asks him if he's as dependable as her previous delivery boy, he looks straight ahead and says, in a monotone, "I'm very dependable, you'll see." They grab each other around the waist and the scene fades out, though he crops up in a couple more scenes (with no lines) as her kept boy. Abby Dalton, who became a substantial TV star (Falcon Crest) is good as Agnes. The movie was directed in a drab TV-movie style by Paul Henreid (Victor Laszlo in CASABLANCA). This was fun to run across on TCM's Underground. [TCM]

2012-01-19T14:21:00.003-05:00

SHADOW IN THE SKY (1952)

Ralph Meeker and James Whitmore (pictured) were Army buddies in WWII and during a battle in the rain-drenched South Pacific, Meeker saved Whitmore's life. A few years later, Whitmore, a mechanic, is married to Meeker's sister (Nancy Davis) but Meeker is institutionalized, a victim of shellshock. He's progressed over time, but whenever it rains, Meeker goes into a hysterical panic. A nurse who has fallen for Meeker (Jean Hagen) comes to Whitmore's home and tells them that Meeker is desperate to get out of the hospital; Whitmore and Davis visit him frequently but aren't sure they’re ready to take him in, especially with two children in the house. Eventually they do and things are fine for a while, but soon tensions develop: Hagen wants Meeker to come to Oregon and work on her family's farm, but Whitmore wants him to help out at the garage, and Meeker just wants to be left alone to renovate an old boat he's bought. And of course, there's always the worry over what will happen when it rains. Of course, things come to a climax during a nighttime storm.

This is one of those serious, earnest psychological melodramas which were popular in the 50s but which haven't worn well over the years. Whitmore and Davis are OK, but they're just so anguished, and that anguish becomes each one's sole character trait. Meeker, on the other hand, gets a decent range of emotions—he's often anguished but he's also nervous and touchy and angry and sometimes funny—and he makes the movie worth seeing (and his appealing physical presence is a plus). Hagen, just before her breakout role as Lina Lamont in SINGIN' IN THE RAIN, is fresh-faced and threatens to be a lively presence (she tools around in a truck and has a tomboyish appeal) but in the last third of the film, her character is reduced to little more than a footnote. The "mystery" of the rain is solved in a satisfying manner, but why no one figured it out long before is a mystery of its own. [TCM]

2012-01-16T14:53:00.002-05:00

DEADLIER THAN THE MALE (1967)

In the 60s, thanks to James Bond, secret agents were all the rage in the movies, and studios were searching for actors and characters who could fuel film franchises--Dean Martin as Matt Helm, James Coburn as Derek Flint, Monica Vitti as Modesty Blaise. This film drags the British character of Bulldog Drummond into the psychedelic era. In a series of movies that extended from the late 20s into the early 50s, he was a former military man turned amateur detective, usually with a fiancée and a comic relief sidekick. Here, played by Richard Johnson, he's an insurance investigator; there's no steady girlfriend but there is a bumbling sidekick, a cute blond nephew (Steve Carlson, pictured above with Johnson) who's back from an extended stay in the States, and it's Carlson who gets into trouble with the females--including one scene of tied-up shirtless torture. Of course, as the title warns, all women are potentially dangerous here, and the two chief baddies are Elke Sommer and Sylvia Koscina, emissaries of an evil corporation (headed by Nigel Green) which sells its services, no questions asked, to companies who are having trouble getting megadeals sealed; their solution usually involves Sommer and Koscina assassinating someone. For a relatively low-budget film, this is surprisingly enjoyable. Johnson, who was on the short list to play Bond before Sean Connery got the part, is good, the women are sexy, and there are a few cool setpieces: a cigar that, when lit, fires a spear backward through the smoker's head; Sommer and Koscina, in bikinis, wielding harpoons; and a climactic battle on a life-sized chess set. Scott Walker sings the very Bondian theme. The widescreen print on the DVD is quite nice. [DVD]

2012-01-12T15:29:00.002-05:00

YELLOW CANARY (1943)

In the fall of 1940, socialite Anna Neagle has become persona non grata in wartime England because she's a Nazi sympathizer (and, it's implied in the opening scene, actively engaging in espionage by signaling to German warplanes), so she heads off to Canada on the S.S. Carina where she is roundly ignored except by polish refugee Albert Lieven who takes pity on her, and by Richard Greene, a Navy commander who is traveling incognito and who keeps a close eye on her. A German ship stops the liner, apparently tipped off by Neagle, and demands Greene be surrendered to them, but a planted spy is given up instead—and a feisty old passenger (Margaret Rutherford) trips the Nazi captain on his way off the ship. In Halifax, Lieven takes Neagle in and she ingratiates herself with Lieven's elderly mother and her circle of friends, despite her toasting to the "new order" when everyone else toasts to "old freedoms." Big surprise #1: Lieven is actually a Nazi spy who is in on a plan to blow up Halifax Harbor. Big surprises # 2 & 3: Neagle is actually a spy for the British who is trying to infiltrate Lieven's ring, and Greene is her contact. Big surprise #4: Guess who's the head of the Nazi spy ring?

This WWII spy thriller has a great storyline and two very good performances by Neagle and Lieven, but it's almost sunk by a generally drab treatment and a slow pace, with the film's style alternating between traditional thriller and faux-documentary, and because of that, some of the key suspense scenes are bungled. Of course, those big surprises above will not really be surprises to anyone who's seen even a couple of spy movies, but it's fun to see all the elements fall into place. Neagle does a nice job keeping her cool and acting like she's really a traitor, even after we know she's not, and Lieven conveys his character’s slippery nature quite well. Greene (pictured above with Neagle) is handsome and suitably heroic, though overshadowed by Neagle. Rutherford has an amusing moment or two. There seems to be a huge plothole near the end when Greene arrives to save Neagle mere moments after she had called him at headquarters. Unless HQ was next right next door, I have no idea how he got there so fast. The title refers (I think) to Neagle's Nazi spy code name. [TCM]

2012-01-09T09:31:00.003-05:00

THE GODDESS (1958)

Maryland, 1930. When Southern belle Laureen's husband kills himself, Laureen and her 4-year-old daughter Emily go to live with her brother and his wife, a stable and sober couple. Laureen, still young, wants to have fun, but is burdened by everyone around her. One night, she has a mini-breakdown, begging her brother to take her daughter, whom she loudly declares she never wanted. Sadly, little Emily hears every word. By 1942, Laureen is a pious churchgoer who spends her evenings praying out loud in the kitchen. Emily is a high school girl with a reputation, though she insists when a gawky lad takes her out that she doesn't go all the way. (She does eventually let the lad make out with her, though how far they go is up to the viewer's imagination.) One night on the town, she runs across a drunken soldier passed out on the street; when she finds out that he's the son of a famous movie star, she helps get him to his apartment. They're both rather messed up—he's tried to kill himself more than once—and they wind up married and unhappy. When he gets assigned to a combat unit, he says he hopes he gets killed, and she says she hopes so, too. She has a baby she is ill equipped to take care of and begs her mother to take the child, repeating Laureen's tirade about unwanted children word for word (she eventually palms the child off on her ex-husband). By 1947, she's changed her name to Rita and is a starlet in Hollywood; the rest of the movie chronicles her rise in the business as a sex bomb (married to and soon divorced from a former boxing champion), and her accompanying collapse into drinking, pills, nervous breakdowns, and suicide attempts. The final scene, set in 1957, shows her having yet another breakdown at her mother's funeral. We're told that the doctors have said that she'll keep making movies, but she's beyond therapy; she'll never be happy or "normal."

Though the screenwriter, Paddy Chayefsky, denied it, this story seems clearly based on the life of Marilyn Monroe (unhappy childhood, early unhappy marriage, suicide attempts, marriage to a sports figure, sex bombness, etc., not to mention the specific years of birth, first marriage, and first movie). This could have been an interesting film, and indeed the first half up to the Hollywood years is compelling. But even though the movie is not physically stagy, it has a claustrophobic feel, in that virtually everything connected with her movie career happens offscreen, and we wind up getting a series of dialogue-heavy scenes in bedrooms and living rooms with two or three people screaming at each other. Kim Stanley, a highly acclaimed stage actress, is fine but she's way too old to be playing a teenager in the middle of the film, and she's never believable as a blonde bombshell, though she might have been if we'd seen her working in front of the camera, or even among her fans. The first part of the film, which has a strong Tennessee Williams vibe, belongs to Betty Lou Holland, who is remarkable as the mother; even near the end of the film, when she comes to L.A. to help Emily out after her breakdown, she almost steals a dramatic religious conversion scene by underplaying as Stanley is overplaying. Steven Hill, who spent many years on Law & Order, is good as her first husband, as is Lloyd Bridges as the boxer (pictured above). Patty Duke has a small role as the very young Emily, and a pre-Col. Klink Werner Klemperer plays a Hollywood producer. Burt Brinckerhoff, who became an esteemed TV director, is the gawky lad, and Louise Beavers can be glimpsed in the background of a scene as a maid—apparently, several scenes were taken out of the final cut by Chayefsky (even though it was directed by John Cromwell) and I'm guessing hers was one. Overall, I'd have to rank this an interesting failure; a different lead actress and more scenes to establish Emily/Rita's talent, or lack thereof, would have helped. [TCM]

2012-01-06T16:33:00.002-05:00

THANKS FOR THE MEMORY (1938)

Bob Hope is a struggling writer, newly married to former model Shirley Ross. They are living in a nice Manhattan apartment in relative bliss except they're behind on the rent. Publisher Otto Kruger (a former boyfriend of Ross's) has read some chapters of Hope's book and says they show promise, but that Hope needs to concentrate more on the book and less on his work and social life. He quits his job and his wife goes back to work as a model, but it's harder to drop their fun-loving friends, including boozehound couple Charles Butterworth and Hedda Hopper, and Roscoe Karns, who has just married an older woman (Laura Hope Crews) for her money. Soon, Hope is upset over his stay-at-home house-husband role, and he's not terribly happy when Ross and Kruger seem to be getting quite friendly. When the pretty Southern belle next door starts hanging around, the stage is set for comic misunderstandings. As is often the case in romantic comedies of the era, a pregnancy solves everything.

Hope and Ross had sung "Thanks for the Memory" earlier in the year in THE BIG BROADCAST OF 1938 and it became his signature song so it seems likely that this movie was rushed through to capitalize on the song. The script, based on a play, is OK but nothing special. What makes this worth watching are a good supporting cast and Hope's effortless comic style. Butterworth is especially good; he's usually fun to see, but here his delivery is drier and less emphatic than in his earlier films. Karns is good, too, and his early scene with Crews is a highlight of the film. Eddie 'Rochester' Anderson gets a couple good lines as the building janitor. Light comedy was not Kruger's forte, but his role is small enough that he can be ignored. In addition to the title song, Hope and Ross also sing a cute song called "Two Sleepy People." [DVD]

2012-01-03T14:38:00.002-05:00

ACTION IN ARABIA (1944)

Damascus during WWII is, we are told, "a breeding place of espionage and intrigue." When reporter George Sanders and his young sidekick Robert Andersen (both pictured at left) get off the plane, Andersen asks, "What is this, the Middle Ages?" and Sanders replies, "No, the Middle East, but it sometimes comes to the same thing." When they witness a lovely young woman meet an older man who had been on the plane under an assumed name, they smell a story and Andersen decides to follow up. Sanders goes on to the hotel where he meets up with Robert Armstrong, an American diplomat, and Alan Napier, the British owner of the hotel and a Nazi sympathizer. Both men, for different reasons, warn Sanders to leave, but when Andersen is found dead, knifed on the street, Sanders stays to get to the bottom of things. He has an encounter with Gene Lockhart, a spy with news about Nazi relationships with Arabs, and gets friendly with Virginia Bruce, who claims to be in the Free French movement; she is supposedly stuck in Damascus with a sickly aunt, but Sanders suspects she has other reasons for hanging around, and he’s right. It turns out that the Arab tribes are meeting to determine which side they will back; the head sheik (H.B. Warner) is throwing his support to the Allies, but the Nazis are out to subvert that, and will stop at nothing to get their way.

I suspect that this was intended as a poor man's Casablanca—Nazis in the desert, a hero in a white suit, a gambling room, and even Marcel Dalio, Rick’s croupier, crops up—but George Sanders, fine actor that he is, is no Bogart, or Errol Flynn, or even George Montgomery (who made an OK B-film Bogart-type in CHINA GIRL. He strikes no sparks with Bruce and never comes off as heroic even when he is. Still, for fans of B-wartime spy films, this has some pleasures. The elaborate hotel lobby set is atmospheric and the supporting cast is strong, particularly Armstrong and Lockhart, who both get to be ambiguous figures who could swing either way (by which I mean Allies or Nazis). Of course, none of the major Arab roles are played by Arab actors, except for Kareem, a tribal leader, played by Syrian actor Jamiel Hasson. The impressive scenes of the Arab tribes coming together in the desert in the latter half of the film are composed of bits of footage shot in the late 30s for a movie about T.E. Lawrence which was never made. [TCM]

2011-12-29T13:41:00.003-05:00

THE GREAT GATSBY (1949)

For my money, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is the Great American Novel, at least of the 20th century. The 1974 film version with Robert Redford looked good but was long and draggy and hollow, and teaches us that actors who might look right for their roles (Redford and Mia Farrow) are sometimes not right at all. The 1949 version was my own little Holy Grail; long unavailable for viewing, it was supposed to be released on DVD a few years back but was withdrawn before it ever saw the light of day. I was finally able to see it on YouTube, not exactly the best way to view a movie, but until Universal (which owns the older Paramount film library) decides to issue it legally, it's the only to go, and it's definitely worth seeing. In the 1920s, young Nick Carraway becomes friends with Jay Gatsby, an impossibly rich and handsome man who gives elaborate Jazz Age parties but whom no one really knows. Nick finds out that Gatsby has amassed his wealth in order to win back his old flame Daisy Buchanan, who is now unhappily married to a cheating brute, and Nick becomes an accomplice in Gatsby's plots to get Daisy to run off with him, with tragic results.

In the book, the source of Gatsby's wealth is ambiguous; here it's blatantly presented that he has built a "dark empire" as a rum runner, but generally as far as plot, this film is fairly faithful to the book. Alan Ladd was never an actor of great depth, but being that Gatsby is mostly a man of surfaces, he's almost exactly right for the part, and certainly embodies the character more satisfyingly than Redford did. Macdonald Carey as Nick comes off as a moralistic prig, the exact opposite of the hero-worshiping Nick of the novel. Betty Field is serviceable as Daisy, nothing more. Same for Ruth Hussey as Jordan, the cheating golfer who flirts with Nick—in this film, they wind up married (!); the entire film is Nick's flashback as he and Jordan visit Gatsby's grave many years later. Barry Sullivan is OK as Daisy's husband. Elisha Cook Jr. is an itinerant pianist who lives in Gatsby’s house and who served with him during WWI. Henry Hull plays Gatsby's mentor in a plotline that has been considerably fleshed out from what's in the book. The best acting comes from Howard Da Silva and Shelley Winters as the Wilsons, a sad couple who are the catalyst for the tragic ending. Though the first big party at Gatsby's is well staged, the movie does not have a strong 20s feel to it. But this version's biggest minus is the lack of poetry and ambiguity that make the novel such a wonderful reading experience; gone is any sense of "boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." There is one line I enjoyed that I suspect is not Fitzgerald’s: Nick: “I’d like to take you over my knee”; Jordan: “Any time, any place!” For all its faults, this is the best film version of the book yet produced. [YouTube]

2011-12-27T13:04:00.002-05:00

WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS (1950)

Dana Andrews is a tough cop, a little too tough for his superiors; he has a reputation for acts of what today would be police brutality, and after his latest scuffle, he's knocked down a rank to second grade detective. His latest case involves a Texas oil man (Harry von Zell) who was brought into a crap game by lovely Gene Tierney, doing a favor for her thug husband Craig Stevens. The oil man loses a lot of money, then starts winning. When he decides to leave the game, Stevens' boss (Gary Merrill) isn’t happy. Stevens slaps Tierney around, blaming her for not getting the oil man to stay. When von Zell steps in to be a gentleman, he and Stevens get into a fight. Fade out to next morning when von Zell is found dead. Andrews fingers Stevens and winds up slugging him a bit too hard, killing Stevens. Andrews panics and tries to make it look like Stevens left town, then when his body is found, tries to frame Merrill, but circumstances lead to Tierney's father being arrested for the murder. To make matters stickier, Andrews has started dating Tierney.

This is a nice little film noir that in the wrap-up lets everyone off a little too easily. There is a deep dark psychological reason given eventually for Andrews' problems, in particular his desire to see Merrill fry, but after spending two-thirds of the film painting Andrews as a dark anti-hero, things lighten up a little too much and some of the impact of the first half of the film is lost. Still, Andrews (pictured) is fine as the good cop/bad cop, Merrill does a nice job as the cocky hood, and Karl Malden, in an early featured role, plays Andrews' newly promoted boss. Tierney isn't given a lot to do besides look lovely, which she does. Ruth Donnelly has a nice bit (in a Thelma Ritter mold) as a café owner who dotes on Andrews and tries her best to advance his romance with Tierney. Neville Brand stands out as a creepy little crook. A solid noir melodrama with the right look and, for at least half its running time, the right feel. [FMC]

2011-12-26T09:52:00.003-05:00

A KID FOR TWO FARTHINGS (1955)

In a bustling market neighborhood in London, young Joe and his mother Joanna live with a kindly tailor, Mr. Kandinsky, while waiting for Joe's dad to come back from South Africa on a (seemingly desperate) business deal. Joe flits around on the streets, making friends with everyone, chasing pigeons, and mourning his pet chicks who never live very long. While keeping Joe entertained, Kandinsky tells him about the magic of unicorns who can grant wishes, and soon Joe finds a young, sickly one-horned goat at the market and buys it from its owner. Convinced that the "unicorn" is real, he begins making wishes for his friends and relatives that eventually come true.

That summary makes this film sound like a sweet whimsical fantasy, but it's actually a non-whimsical slice-of-life comedy-drama, albeit in a mood of poetic realism. Much of it was filmed on location in Petticoat Lane in London, which looks like the Lower East Side of New York always used to look in movies. Because the setting grounds the film in realism, some touches of whimsy would be welcome, but aside from the first sighting of the unicorn, there just isn't enough magic in this movie. Seven-year-old Jonathan Ashmore (in his only acting credit) does a nice job as Joe; Celia Johnson (of BRIEF ENCOUNTER) is fine as his mother. Too much of the film is given over to a subplot involving a "dumb lug" boxer (the beefy but wooden Joe Robinson) and his sexpot girlfriend (Diana Dors, often called the British Marilyn Monroe); neither the actors nor the characters are particularly interesting. Best is David Kossoff as the tailor who seems to truly be looking out for Johnson and her son. Nice use of color is a plus; length of the film (at least 15 minutes too long) is a minus. The goat is cute, and I wound up caring more about its fate than the fates of any of the humans. Some critics have said that the film leaves it up in the air as to whether or not the goat is magical, but I saw absolutely no evidence of such an interpretation: it's a poor little one-horned goat and the outcomes for the humans don't need magic to explain them. [TCM]

2011-12-23T13:32:00.002-05:00

REMEMBER THE NIGHT (1940)

A sentimental Christmas romantic comedy with a bit of an edge, written by Preston Sturges. A couple of days before Christmas, snappily dressed looker Barbara Stanwyck is on trial for shoplifting a bracelet. She's a career crook and DA Fred MacMurray knows it, but he also knows that at the holidays, a jury will always sympathize with a woman, so he gets a continuance until after the first of the year. She can't make bail so MacMurray arranges for it. She thinks he did it because he expects something in return, but he's just a nice guy about to head out to Indiana to visit his mom; when she frets that she has no place to go for Christmas and he finds out she's also from Indiana, he suggests she tag along. However, when her cruel mother turns her away, she goes with him and experiences an old-fashioned, totally functional, rural family Christmas; she begins to lose some of her hardness and falls for MacMurray. His big-hearted mother (Beulah Bondi) takes good care of Stanwyck, but is also smart enough to know that she could be bad news to her straight-shooting son, who worked hard to get where he is and might get derailed by a "bad girl," even one who is ready to reform. On the way back to the big city, he encourages her to skip bail in Canada, but she decides to keep her court date and face the music.

This is a movie full of tonal shifts. It starts with comical big-city courtroom shenanigans as a lawyer (Willard Robertson) gives an over-the-top speech to the jury claiming Stanwyck was hypnotized by the jewels and therefore not responsible. The trip to Indiana has some road-trip comedy I could do without, but it leads to an intense, almost noirish scene with the uncaring mother (think Beulah Bondi as the bad Pottersville Ma Bailey in IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE). The Christmas sequence is touching without passing into sticky-sweetness, but the last 20 minutes turn a little too melodramatic for my taste. Of course, Bondi is fine, as are Elizabeth Patterson as MacMurray's spinster aunt and Sterling Holloway as the sweetly dopey farmhand (all pictured above with Stanwyck and MacMurray). I like MacMurray mocking Robertson's theatrical delivery to the jury with the line, "Quick, Watson, the needle!" I don't so much like Snowflake Toones' drawling valet stereotype. The first time I saw this film (when I was much younger) I was really pushing for Stanwyck to skip bail and resented what felt like a Code-imposed ending, but now it feels more organic to the story. A lovely Christmas movie and one which hasn’t become the victim of over-exposure (yet). [VHS; available on DVD]

2011-12-20T13:24:00.002-05:00

STEPPING OUT (1931)

Two married couples, Tom & Eve Martin and Tubby & Sally Smith, are enjoying an evening together at the Martin's Hollywood home. Eve made Tom promise that they’d make a short night of it as she seems ready for some bedroom time with him, but Tom and Tubby have something else in mind: meeting and greeting a couple of would-be starlets whom they have in mind for a movie they’re backing. When the guys say they have to head to the studio for some unfinished work, the gals decide to hoof it to Mexico for a little vacation. After they leave, Tom and Tubby invite the starlets over for a late-night swim, but of course, the wives return and catch them. Thanks to a silly plot point (the men have been advised to put all their money and property in their wives' names so they won't lose everything if the movie flops), the wives head to Mexico prepared to gamble everything away. The men follow, hoping to make amends, but the starlets also follow. Complicating things, a couple of gigolos posing as Spanish waiters flirt with the wives. Naturally, this being a comedy, things work out in the end.

This mild pre-Code romantic farce is watchable but never rises above that. Charlotte Greenwood (Sally), known for her long legs and crazy kicks, is usually someone I like, but here her character is such a braying bitch that I was tired of her in the first 20 minutes. Lelia Hyams (Eve) and Harry Stubbs (Tubby) are lackluster but acceptable. I enjoyed seeing Reginald Denny (pictured), usually given comic relief sidekick parts, getting a starring role as Tom and doing well with it—of the four leads, he's the only one who really seemed at all sympathetic. Cliff Edwards gets a few good moments in as one of the gigolos (he's supposed to be a college student, but looks every bit his 35 years of age); Kane Richmond is younger and better looking as his buddy, a football star, but doesn't get to do much. Greenwood and Edwards sing a cute number, "Just Like Frankie and Johnny." Apparently, some of the exteriors were shot at the homes of Denny, Buster Keaton, and John Gilbert. [TCM]

2011-12-18T08:57:00.003-05:00

MY SON JOHN (1952)

An interesting entry in the string of anti-Communist propaganda films of the early 50's; the commie plot is secondary at times to the dysfunctional family plot which seems lifted from the works of Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman, All My Sons). Helen Hayes and Dean Jagger say farewell to two of their sons as they head off to the Korean War. Their third son, Robert Walker, who works in Washington for the government, misses the farewell dinner but shows up a week later and we immediately see tensions between the three: Mom and Dad are old-fashioned, God-fearing, hard-working, middle-class citizens (Dad is running for head of the local American Legion unit); Walker is an effete college-educated liberal who does soft office work and seems to be an atheist to boot. Father and son are constantly at odds--during an argument, Jagger literally thumps Walker with a Bible--though Mom seems just a little too adoring of her little boy. Soon, Van Heflin shows up, a Fed who suspects that Walker is a Communist and is giving state secrets to the Russians through a woman who is eventually arrested for treason. Of course, he is, and of course, eventually, he sees the error of his ways and wants to spill everything to the FBI, but will his fellow travelers let him go that easily?

One problem with the film is the acting. Hayes gives an out-and-out bad performance, jittery, wide-eyed and mannered, like she's on a TV soap opera (except she doesn't keep looking at cue cards). Jagger's a bit better; he goes over-the-top frequently, but he does have a certain nervous chemistry with Walker, like a father might have with a son he felt he didn’t really know. Heflin has nothing substantive to do. Walker is the saving grace; as in STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, he's playing a gay character but can't really let on that he is (godless commie + academic + mama's boy = light in his loafers). He does a great job balancing the character's conflicting emotions: genuine love for a family from which he's grown away, genuine belief in Communism as a panacea for the world's ills, and an apparently genuine desire to "reform." Sadly, Walker died halfway through filming, and the climactic action had to be completely rewritten in a way that largely dispenses with Walker's character; some footage of Walker from STRANGERS ON A TRAIN is incorporated and a climactic speech which was supposed to be delivered by Walker at a college graduation is instead presented on tape in an interesting looking but dramatically inert scene. For an actor who always seemed a bit high-strung, he gives a remarkably natural performance. At two hours, it's too long, but worth seeing for Walker. [TCM]

2011-12-16T12:26:00.004-05:00

THE CONSTANT NYMPH (1943)

Charles Boyer is a struggling composer living in a boarding house; when his latest dissonant concert music is played to negative reviews in London, he has a big hissy fit leading to him smash his piano, so he heads off to the Swiss chalet of old friend Montagu Love to recover. He basks in the adoration of Love’s daughters, especially bubbly teenager Joan Fontaine (at right with Boyer). Love sympathizes with Boyer, but chastises him, telling him he’s "ashamed of melody," and encourages him to work on one of his short, lovely throwaway tunes which has caught Fontaine's attention. Boyer is also told that he will learn to write truly great music only after he learns to cry. Fontaine, who has a heart condition, clearly has a crush on Boyer, and they spend some idyllic times together in the mountains, but after Love dies, the girls are put in the care of their uncle (Charles Coburn).

Time passes; the girls are taken to England for schooling and Boyer marries Alexis Smith, Coburn’s daughter. Up to this point, the film has played out like a romantic comedy, but things take a melodramatic turn here and we get a series of emotionally charged conversations between Boyer and Fontaine (who is completely in love with him), between Boyer and Smith (who are having marital problems), between Smith and Coburn (he knows she's not happy), and between Fontaine and Smith (she knows Fontaine's in love with her husband). Boyer finally has an emotional breakthrough when he realizes he's in love with Fontaine, cries, and is able to flesh out his throwaway melody into a symphonic "tone poem" which becomes a huge success when it is played in concert. Fontaine, whose heart weakness spells are increasing, listens to the piece over the radio in ecstasy, but…, well, heart conditions being what they are in movies, the ecstasy is short-lived.

This movie had been out of circulation due to copyright problems for over 50 years and had become something of a Holy Grail for classic movie buffs, so inevitably it's a bit disappointing to finally see it and realize it's just an average romantic melodrama, on the order of other such films set in the world of classical music (INTERMEZZO, HUMORESQUE). Fontaine gives a good performance; she never seems as young as she's supposed to be, but that's a good thing because it would be a bit too creepy to have a real 14-year-old be the romantic object of the mid-40s Boyer. I'm not a big fan of Boyer but he's quite good here, with just the right doses of egocentrism and tenderness. There are some fine supporting players, but their plotlines aren't given enough attention for them to shine: in addition to Smith (pictured above with Fontaine) and Coburn, there's Brenda Marshall as the oldest daughter who, because she dates around, has the reputation of having "gone bad"; Peter Lorre as her off-and-on lover; Dame May Whitty as a high society lady; and Eduardo Ciannelli as a family servant. The tone poem "Tomorrow" was written by Erich Wolfgang Korngold and has taken on a life of its own outside the film. My favorite line, delivered by Coburn to Smith: "Stop moaning about like a woman in a novel." This film was in fact based on a novel. Better than INTERMEZZO, but nowhere as good as HUMORESQUE. [TCM]

2011-12-13T21:46:00.003-05:00

THE MAN WITH TWO FACES (1934)

Mary Astor is making a return to the stage after suffering a nervous breakdown when her husband (Louis Calhern) was reported killed in San Francisco—he was a rotten bastard but he had some kind of strange, almost hypnotic, power over her. Now she's healthy and happy and has the lead in a play that's a hit in its out-of-town tryout; she's acting with her famous brother (Edward G. Robinson), she's friendly with the author (John Eldredge), she's dating the producer (Ricardo Cortez), and she's living in her rich aunt’s mansion. Suddenly, on the night they decide to take the play to Broadway, Calhern shows up, alive and as much of a bastard as ever. Astor immediately falls under his power again and plans for the show appear to be scotched until a French investor arrives wanting to buy Calhern's half of the show from him—ideally, this would give him enough money to clear out of Astor's life and let her get back to acting. But after a meeting with the investor, Calhern is found dead. Everyone in Astor's life is happy but the police still want to find out who did it, and they think it's fishy that the French investor has simply vanished. Who else might be involved?

This old-fashioned melodrama is based on a hit play by George S. Kaufman & Alexander Woollcott called The Dark Tower (which is the name given to the play-within-the-movie) and, though the film adaptation is not especially stagy, the impact of the climax of the play is, I would think, dependent upon a theater audience not being able to see everything up close, and of course, movies tend to be dependent on the opposite: clarity and close-ups. I won't give any spoilers, but a good bit of tension is dissipated here because film audiences will know what’s happening long before a play audience would (the trick involves a character in disguise). Still, it is fun to see things play out to an ending which is clear-cut but with an ambiguous shading or two—the Production Code wouldn't allow the killer to get away without punishment, unlike in the original play. All the actors are fine, particularly Louis Calhern who seems to relish playing an out-and-villain who would certainly be twirling his mustache if he had one. The one weak link is Mary Astor; she's fine as the carefree actress, but as soon as she falls under Calhern's power, she's basically playing a zombie. Also of note: Mae Clarke as a bad actress and David Landau as a cop who ends up wishing he didn't have to make the arrest he will after the fadeout. (Pictured above are Cortez, Robinson, Astor and Calhern) [TCM]

2011-12-06T14:50:00.005-05:00

STRANGE BARGAIN (1949)

This short B-film feels like a cross between a TV show and a movie, specifically Father Knows Best crossed with Double Indemnity. It begins in sit-com land around the suburban breakfast table with Dad (Jeffrey Lynn), Mom (Martha Scott), and the two kids. When the kids go off to school, conversation gets around to the problems the couple is having making ends meet. She talks him into asking his boss (Richard Gaines) for a raise, but as it happens, Gaines tells Lynn that he's about to be let go—the company is in dire financial straits. Over drinks that evening, Gaines makes Lynn a proposition: Gaines plans to kill himself so his family can get his life insurance money, but he asks Lynn to come to the house that night after the fact to shoot a gun through the window to make it like murder and robbery so the insurance company will pay out. Gaines offers Lynn $10,000 so Lynn reluctantly agrees. The plan goes off alright, but when the police start suspecting Gaines' business partner (Henry O'Neill), who had been arguing with Gaines recently, Lynn doesn't know what to do: if he clears O'Neill, he could be arrested on a felony charge and Gaines's family will be destitute; if he remains silent, an innocent man might be charged with murder. But as the cops keep investigating, it starts to look like it might not have been suicide after all.

Though blandly directed, the plot is compelling enough to keep your attention for 70 minutes. Lynn, typically a supporting actor, is a big zero in the lead role, and Scott's character is underdeveloped, so that I ended up not caring what happened to the two of them, but Gaines (who had a small role in DOUBLE INDEMNITY as the clueless head honcho at the insurance company) is good, and even better is Harry Morgan (pictured above, on the left with Lynn in the back seat) who enters halfway through as the police inspector who solves the case (he's given a limp and a cane, though they serve no plot purpose). Katherine Emery is fine as the widow, and Michael Chapin, who plays Lynn's son, is the real-life brother of Lauren Chapin, who played "Kitten" on, to bring this review full circle, Father Knows Best. [TCM] (Note: Tomorrow, I'm off for the Turner Classic Movie cruise, so there'll no reviews for a week or so.)

2011-12-04T14:20:00.005-05:00

WOLF OF NEW YORK (1940)

There's a crime wave going on and the DA (Jerome Cowan) is being blamed for failing to get convictions; he can't beat powerful lawyer Edmund Lowe, known as the Wolf of New York, who keeps getting crooks off in court. Lowe's former secretary (Rose Hobart), daughter of a police inspector, left his employ and now works in Cowan's office, though she and Lowe are still friendly. One of the biggest crooks of all is James Stephenson (pictured at right), investment banker by day, dealer in stolen bonds by night. When one of Stephenson's men is arrested during a robbery, Lowe is hired to defend him and uses an underhanded trick to get the jury to find the man not guilty. Soon, Hobart's father gets a break in a case against Stephenson, thanks to baby-faced Maurice Murphy, an ex-con gone straight whom Lowe has taken under his wing. When Stephenson has the police inspector killed, he frames Murphy who, though defended by Lowe, is found guilty and executed. Later, thanks to a deathbed confession by another con, Cowan realizes that an innocent man has been put to death and resigns. Upset over his inability to save Murphy, Lowe starts drinking and giving up cases, but soon Hobart gets the governor to appoint Lowe DA, and Lowe gets a chance to get the goods on Stephenson.

This mild B-crime film could have used a rewrite (too much narrative, and too much of it related as background exposition) and better leads, but the supporting cast is fun. The urbane Stephenson, who would have his big breakthrough later that year as Bette Davis' lawyer in THE LETTER, is the main reason to watch, though Cowan is fine in his few scenes. Murphy (at left) makes a convincing patsy, and Ben Weldon provides comic relief as a henchman. In fact, the comic lines are better than average here. I'm not a fan of the wooden Lowe, though he comes off a little better here than usual, but Hobart is deadly dull, and the two have no chemistry at all. [TCM]

2011-12-01T13:02:00.006-05:00

4D MAN (1959)

Young, handsome research scientist Tony Nelson (James Congdon) is working with a force field device that would allow an object, like a pencil, to penetrate a material, like steel, without harming the material—something about molecules bonding and using up years worth of energy in just seconds. In his latest attempt, he gets the pencil through a block of metal, but in the process accidentally burns down the lab and gets fired. His older brother Scott (Robert Lansing) is a head researcher for an important scientific firm, and has just perfected a new, completely impenetrable metal called Cargonite, though the old scientist who runs the firm takes all the credit, leaving Scott a little dispirited. Luckily, he has his lovely assistant Linda (Lee Meriwether) to comfort him, but when Tony arrives asking for a job, Linda and Tony hit it off, leaving poor Scott in the lurch. Tony continues working on his force field after hours and Scott keeps brooding; then one night, after Linda gives the Scott the brushoff, Scott breaks into Tony's work locker and starts messing with the device. Surprise: he manages to push his hand through a solid metal block and pull it back out, leaving no marks. Soon, simply through the strength of his brain waves, he can turn this power on and off without the device. The problem: every time he does this, he ages some 10 or 20 years, and can only get back his youth by reaching into a living person and stealing his or her life force, which leads to the victim's quick aging and death. Scott slowly loses his sanity, going on a binge of theft and murder; can Tony and Linda stop him?

This B-film from the director of THE BLOB is an interesting attempt at a "Thou shalt not meddle in God’s domain" story, but the screenplay has a few too many ideas for the film's budget. For example, the way the device works is vague, and when the idea of human will power affecting it comes into play (first with Tony, who mentions that he "willed" his first experiment to work), I was lost. The love triangle has potential, but Meriwether, though sexy, doesn't have much personality, and Congdon (pictured with Meriwether) is so much better looking and more dynamic than Lansing that there's just no contest. The role that the Cargonite material plays in the plot is mostly theoretical—the impenetrable object to Scott's irresistible force—though I think it's crucial to the downbeat but confusing ending. Still, the effects are quite good for a low budget film of the era, and the movie has a rich palette of blues and flesh tones. Lansing is a little drab but gains strength as his character goes crazy, and Congdon is good-looking and intense. Familiar character actor Robert Strauss plays a fellow researcher who is Lansing's first victim, and 12-year-old Patty Duke has a small role. A shrill jazz score is interesting at first, but overused and unwelcome by the middle. [Netflix streaming]

2011-11-29T20:58:00.003-05:00

PREHISTORIC WOMEN (1967)

David is a handsome British safari guide who heads into dangerous territory to finish off a leopard that his middle-aged client only wounded. The land, marked by tree carvings of a white rhinoceros, in inhabited by a tribe that is cursed by spirits of the past, and that insists on killing any white men who trespass because it was white folks that brought on all their troubles by killing off the rhinos. Sure enough, after David kills the leopard, he is captured by the tribe who put on a big dance before they sacrifice him in front of a huge statue of a white rhino. However, as soon as David touches the rhino's horn, time freezes, the rocks split, and David finds himself in the past, among a tribe of fierce (as in, they wear false eyelashes and have fabulous hair) Amazon women. The hot brunettes, led by Kari, have enslaved the hot blondes, led by Saria, and the grungy men (no leader) who seem to have wandered in from some other time and place altogether and who were responsible for past enslavement and destruction. One hot blonde gets sacrificed monthly to appease the rhino god, or something. Kari wants to make David her lover and co-ruler, but he's fallen for Saria, and eventually, with David's help, an uprising against Kari is successful.

This is another of Hammer’s mid-60s forays into exotic adventure-fantasy (see SHE) and lovers of the campier aspects of these films will like this one. Beauty queen Martine Beswick is the main reason to watch this; she bites into her role with gusto, and by playing it mostly straight, adds to the camp value of the film. Her best scene has her writhing about, in a skimpy bikini-loincloth, on her throne, trying to entice David into sharing her pleasures. Michael Latimer as David is attractive but not the heroic-hunk type, and he plays most emotions by scowling or looking off-camera, but you get used to him. Hungarian actress Edina Ronay is the very 1960s-looking Saria. There is a credit for choreography, and there are indeed several tribal dances that are actually kind of fun to watch. Actor and playwright Steven Berkoff, known for his villainous roles in films like Octopussy and Beverly Hills Cop, has a one-line bit at the end. Its B-budget means it was filmed on cheap sets, but it all looks pretty good in widescreen format. [TCM]

2011-11-27T18:55:00.002-05:00

MASTER OF THE WORLD (1961)

It's a boring day in 1868 in Morgantown, Pennsylvania when suddenly a mountain, called the Great Eyrie, erupts and a man's booming voice begins intoning apocalyptic warnings. Some members of the Weldon Balloon Society decide to take a balloon up and check things out. The group consists of Henry Hull, a munitions manufacturer; his daughter (Mary Webster); her boyfriend (David Frankham); and Charles Bronson, a government scientist who is strong and silent and therefore by default the romantic hero. Their balloon is shot at by the airship Albatross, and its captain (Vincent Price) takes them on board. It turns out that Price is the one behind the shenanigans at the Eyrie; he has declared war against war, delivering ultimatums to world governments to give up their armies and weapons or be destroyed. The captive group is witness to Price's bombing of British navy ships. They're torn between action and passivity; should they actively try to stop Price or make the best of their imprisonment? There is some infighting between the gentlemanly Frankham and the realistic Bronson, but when Bronson finally takes a stand, it might mean that all four of them will have to sacrifice themselves to stop Price.

This fantasy adventure is based on two novels by Jules Verne featuring the character of Captain Robur (Price). The film has its moments, but the American International budget was just too small to produce effective thrills and the cast is way too mild to bring about much excitement. Bronson, who would become an action hero in the 70s, plays a quiet, composed hero; we like him, but he's not very exciting. Webster is bland, so we never care about the halfhearted romantic triangle; Frankham shows some promise early on as an antagonist, but despite pulling off a very nasty trick against Bronson late in the movie, never really comes off as very threatening. Hull, on the verge of overacting, seems to be in a whole different movie, and the usually reliable Price seems rather tired. The musical score is inappropriately peppy. Vito Scotti provides some mild comic relief as a cook on the airship, and I rather enjoyed the hunky, blond, and often shirtless airship pilot—I think he was played by Richard Harrison. In the last section, when Price tries to stop a desert war, the pace does pick up a bit, but overall this is a disappointment. [DVD]

2011-11-26T12:43:00.003-05:00

SHE (1935)

This earlier version of Haggard’s "She" has a good reputation and does have its moments, but isn't quite as much dumb fun as the later film. It also changes the plot details considerably. In this film, Leo is set on the trail of eternal youth by his dying uncle; it seems that 500 years ago, a relative of theirs named John went off to the great frozen north in search of a mystical Flame of Eternal Life and may have found it, though he never returned. Leo and his friend Horace head off for the Shuko Barrier in the Arctic, and are joined by a gruff trader and his daughter Tanya—she takes the place of the more exotic Ustane from the book. Once they get to the mysterious land past the Barrier, the action is largely the same as in the later film, though here, Leo turns out to look exactly like his ancestor John, whose embalmed body is still intact. Ayehsa's first appearance, from behind a wall of smoke, is genuinely thrilling. There is a long, heavily choreographed ritual dance that looks like it might have inspired a similar number in DeMille's TEN COMMANDMENTS. Unlike Ustane, Tanya survives, but the rest of the story follows the same course as the '65 film.

Randolph Scott is Leo, and you would think he would have all the qualities needed for the perfect adventure hero, but he seems a bit detached, though he gets better near the end as he falls under Ayesha's influence. Helen Gahagan (above, in her only movie role before she entered politics and became a Congresswoman) is dull and monotone, and lookswise can't hold a candle to Andress. Nigel Bruce provides some fun as the stuffy, mildly amusing Horace, and Gustav von Seyffertitz has the Christopher Lee role, but plays it without much gusto. The rather drab Helen Mack (pictured with Scott) is Tanya, and she irritatingly pronounces Leo "Lay-o" throughout. The film is in black and white, but the set design of the Arctic and the city (which looked like it should have been in Maxfield Parrish colors) is nice. The flame effect is better here than in the '65 film. The final scene, with Leo, Tanya and Horace gathered around a cozy fireplace back in England, is sappy and wrong. Both films are worth watching, though if you can only find time for one, I'd pick the Hammer version, and the book is still worth reading. [DVD]

2011-11-25T18:41:00.004-05:00

SHE (1965)

H. Rider Haggard’s famous adventure/fantasy novel from 1887 is considered one of the earliest of the "lost world" novels, in which adventurers discover a land that has been hidden from civilization. It has been filmed several times, but two versions (from 1935 and 1965) are the most common. I'll start with the '65 version from Hammer Films, which is by far the most faithful of the two. We meet three British soldiers heading home from WWI in Palestine: the older Horace, the young handsome Leo, and the working-class Job. In a nightclub, the lovely Arab Ustane flirts with Leo, but when they leave the club, she leads him into an ambush. He is taken to see the ravishing Ayesha who shows him his startling resemblance to an amulet with the likeness of the long-dead high priest Killikrates, her former lover. She asks Leo to journey across the desert to the secret city of Kuma which she rules, and if he proves himself worthy, she will take him as her lover and co-ruler. Leo and his friends head off, undergo several trials (the slashing of their water bags, an attack by bandits) and finally arrive near the city where they meet up again with Ustane (who has by now taken a liking to Leo). When the suspicious natives decide to sacrifice Leo, Billali, chief assistant to Ayesha, arrives with his men. They are taken to Kuma, a city entirely inside a mountain, where they learn that Ayesha, aka She Who Must Be Obeyed, is hundreds of years old; she has kept her youth by bathing in the Flame of Eternal Life. Convinced that Leo is the reincarnation of Killikrates, she wants him to bathe in the flame as well, though Ustane and Horace aren’t so sure that’s a good idea. Leo begins to fall under Ayesha's spell, and finally does enter the Flame, but bad things happen when Ayesha takes a second dip for herself.

This is adventure done on the cheap, but for a Hammer movie, it doesn’t look bad with some effective use of matte painting effects. The journey drags in spots, but things pick up once they get to Kuma. Swiss bombshell Ursula Andress doesn’t exactly stretch her acting chops (and, to be fair, all her dialogue is dubbed, which never helps) but she looks exactly right as the cold, demanding Queen. John Richardson also looks the part as the hunky blue-eyed, golden-haired hero and is marginally better in the acting department, but is never as commanding as he should be. Old pros Peter Cushing (as Horace) and Christopher Lee (as Billali) steal their scenes easily. Bernard Cribbins as Job has little to do. The nicest touch, and one that I think the filmmakers added, is having Leo actually stand in the Flame and become eternally young, which could have been a nice jumping-off point for a series; there was a sequel, The Vengeance of She, but it has been universally panned. [TCM]

2011-11-23T16:13:00.004-05:00

THE GOLDEN ARROW (1964)

In order to find a new Sultan of Damascus, a contest is held in which whoever can bend the magical Ebony Bow to shoot the Golden Arrow will not only rule the city but have the hand of Princess Jamila. Several try but only the mysterious Prince of the Isle of Flames can shoot the arrow. When he claims his prize, it turns out that he is actually the handsome thief Hassan who, with his band of merry men, er… ragtag rogues, kidnaps Jamila and holds her for ransom. But then we discover via a magic birthmark that Hassan is actually the "chosen one" who should be Sultan anyway. Hassan and Jamila fall in love and he frees her, but the villainous Baktiar, who wants to be Sultan, jails Hassan. Jamila wishes on the stars for help and Three Stooges, er… three bumbling genies come from the sky to help out. They aid Hassan's escape but soon not only are Baktiar's men after him, so are his former buddies, the thieves who are pissed off about missing out on the ransom money. A variety of adventures follow: people are turned to stone, a cave queen lets loose men made of fire, Hassan astral-projects himself to make mischief with Baktiar, an elixir which can restore life is discovered, and a final battle—involving flying carpets, fiery catapults, and levitating objects—lets Hassan finally claim his rightful place as Sultan and husband to Jamila.

On one level, this is a colorful and delightful Arabian fantasy, done on a budget which is a notch or two above the average Italian import of the time (shot probably in Italy or Spain, with a mostly Italian cast and crew). The sets, both interiors and exteriors, are impressive and though the special effects are inconsistent, they're not bad. Had I seen this as a child when it came out, I would have loved it. But as an adult, I'm bothered by the incoherent plot which is simply stitched together from a bunch of Arabian Nights motifs, augmented by echoes of King Arthur, Robin Hood, and Greek mythology. It could have been a rich stew, but the screenwriters can only achieve a watery broth. The acting is about average for this kind of film. Tab Hunter is at his blond, California beach-bum peak, and is a treat for the eye in his silky, body-clinging, pajama-like outfits (white in the first half, brown in the second), but he's not meaty or stoic enough to pull off the heroic "Thief of Bagdad" part effectively—and he's hurt by bad dubbing. Rossana Podesta (pictured above with Hunter) comes off OK as the lovely princess, though she really has little to do. The genies are totally ridiculous, clearly thrown in for the kiddie matinee crowd. The main musical theme keeps threatening to turn into "Misty." Fans of 60s fantasy will enjoy this. [TCM]

2011-11-22T10:05:00.004-05:00

GOG (1954)

At a secret underground government research center in the middle of the desert, scientists of several varieties are working toward the launching of a space station. We see two scientists running a suspended animation experiment on a monkey, quick-freezing him so his heart rate drops to zero, then successfully quick-thawing him back to life. Unfortunately, one of the scientists gets locked in the chamber and is frozen to death, and when the second one returns, she too winds up dead the same way. This is just the first of a series of bizarre accidents at the center, and soon a federal agent (Richard Egan) is dispatched to investigate. One entire floor of the center is devoted to NOVAC, a super-computer which runs the entire building, and which itself is supervised by a German scientist (John Wengraf) who seems a little too intense for his own good; could he be attempting to sabotage the experiments? Eventually, two powerful robots, Gog and Magog, start to malfunction and Egan and his assistant (Constance Dowling) suspect that some exterior force (Commie spies, perhaps) has gotten control of the center. Can a handful of humans overcome a supercomputer and two rampaging robots?

I'm starting my usual Thanksgiving week of sci-fi and fantasy movie reviews with this film which I actually did see for the first time over a Thanksgiving weekend sometime in the mid-60s. The central issue of the film, basically the hacking of a computer system, is one that is still relevant, and the idea that an artificial intelligence is responsible for some of the mayhem would be explored in more detail in Kubrick's 2001. Though this has a sci-fi atmosphere (and the opening credits are presented against deep space backgrounds), it plays out more like a traditional industrial mystery movie—who's gumming up the works at the factory? On the plus side, the color scheme is bright and shiny; on the minus side, the pacing is faulty: the film opens with a nice burst of mayhem (the monkey and the frozen scientists), then drags with lots of exposition and the half-hearted setting-up of a romance between Egan and Dowling, then suddenly comes to life again in the last 20 minutes with robot mischief and radioactive poisoning. The two leads are deadly dull; Wengraf (pictured above with one of the robots) is OK though a little too passionless to be a truly effective mad scientist; and the puppet-like robots are rather silly looking, looking like the friendly robots of Lost in Space and The Jetsons. William Schallert (the father on The Patty Duke Show) is effective in a small role as Wengraf's assistant. The accidents (including a pair of human subjects who get spun too fast in a gravity experiment) are fun to see, and were probably even more fun during the film's original theatrical run in 3D. [Netflix streaming]

2011-11-20T21:06:00.004-05:00

MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION (1935)

Irene Dunne's husband, a well-known doctor, has just died of a heart attack. She is told he might have been saved, but the boat that could have taken him to medical attention was being used to attend to a drunken playboy (Robert Taylor) who fell into a lake. Taylor, being cared for in the same hospital that the doctor founded, is cocky and obnoxious (and quite handsome) but unaware at first that he is being blamed by some for the doc's death. Not wanting to stay in the hospital, he escapes and has a roadside encounter with Dunne. She doesn't hold him responsible, but he is insensitive enough to flirt with her. After going on another bender, Taylor winds up sleeping it off at the house of sculptor Ralph Morgan, a friend of the doctor's, who tells Taylor about the doc’s "secret": he believed that one could be "in contact with a source of infinite power" and improve one's life by giving generously to others without public acknowledgement. It turns out that the doctor had spent most of his life giving away his wealth to needy individuals, Morgan being one of them who then went on to implement the philosophy in his own life. Taylor gives some money to a beggar and moments later runs into Dunne, which he takes as a cosmic sign, but in the act of resisting his advances, she is hit by a car, winds up blinded, and falls into a deep depression. Later he befriends her, not telling her who he is, eventually bringing her out of her shell, but when he "comes out" to her, she opts to leave him, thinking he's with her out of pity.

So far, a solid romantic melodrama. The incredible soap opera turn occurs when Taylor decides to finish up the medical degree he had been working on when his playboy tendencies took over. A mere six years later, he is a world-famous doctor and a Nobel Prize winner to boot. Dunne has been living in isolation and in decline, due to a "slow clot," and Taylor decides to take on her case in a risky operation. Will he save her life and her sight? Let's just say the playboy didn't get a Nobel Prize for nothing! This is based on a very popular novel of the day, and the colorful and glossy 1956 remake by Douglas Sirk is known as Rock Hudson's first big hit (with Jane Wyman as the blind love interest). This version, which has been out of circulation for some time, is less ostentatious and generally a bit more believable. Taylor and Dunne (pictured) have good chemistry, Morgan is fine, and the supporting cast includes Betty Furness as the doc's daughter, Charles Butterworth as her comic relief "older gentleman" friend, Sara Haden as a supervising nurse, and Arthur Treacher as, of course, a butler, who gets the best line: When asked if someone is "dippy," he replies, "If you mean, is he barmy in the crumpet? Yes!" Available on Criterion DVD as a supplement with the Sirk version. [TCM]

2011-11-16T14:50:00.002-05:00

THESE ARE THE DAMNED (1963)

In the seaside town of Weymouth, England, American McDonald Carey gets beaten up by some "teddy boys," leather-clad hooligans on motorcycles, when he gets friendly with Shirley Ann Field. Turns out her brother (Oliver Reed) is the head of the toughs and they routinely use Field as bait to prey on older tourist types. However this time, Field is tired of the rough games and gets friendly right back with Carey. More or less on the run from Reed, they meet up with a free-spirited sculptress (Viveca Lindfors) who lives on a hilly beach, and scientist Alexander Knox who is conducting some secret research at a nearby compound--I initially assumed that Lindfors was Knox's kept woman, but actually she might be "keeping" him. When Reed catches up with Carey and Field, they all wind up in a cave where they discover a group of cold-blooded children, the subjects of Knox's experiments. They've been exposed to radiation since birth and would theoretically be capable of surviving in a post-nuclear holocaust world, but what Carey and Field don't know is that the children are also radioactive.

One of the reasons this film has a reputation is also one of its faults: it's an odd mix of genres. For the first half-hour or so, it's a gang movie, and a fairly uninteresting one at that. The middle-aged Carey is boring, Field is nothing special, and the creepy incest vibe between Reed and Field is really all it has going for it. But Lindfors and Knox, by far the best actors here, save the day, along with the radioactive kids. The film would have been better if it had spent more time on this story, and perhaps let us get to know a couple of the kids. The film has a downbeat ending, which fits with its generally downbeat mood. Flawed but worth seeing. [DVD]

2011-11-15T10:28:00.005-05:00

BRAINSTORM (1965)

One night, handsome research scientist Jeffrey Hunter finds lovely trophy wife Anne Francis drunk and passed out in a car parked across some railroad tracks. He tries to rouse her and fails, but when a train comes down the tracks, he breaks into the car and rescues her. He gets her to the home of her husband, Dana Andrews (coincidentally the owner of the company he works for) and discovers that he interrupted a suicide attempt. A few nights later, she tells him it was all a mistake and invites him to a party; it turns out it's a scavenger party and he is one of the hunted objects, a "scientific device." He takes it in relative good humor and later that night, she admits she hates her husband and they embark on an affair. Eventually Andrews finds out about it and, discovering that Hunter had a breakdown some years ago, begins a scheme to make it seem like Hunter is going nuts again: among other things, Hunter's office is vandalized and the janitor claims that Hunter did it one night in a rage. Hunter decides to turn the tables: he'll act like he really is going insane, and then kill Andrews, using the insanity defense to get away with it. Not surprisingly, things don’t go exactly as planned—Hunter must not have seen SHOCK CORRIDOR where a similar idea goes awry.

This is a glossy 60s take on film noir, specifically DOUBLE INDEMNITY, though it's missing a few crucial elements: lovely as Anne Francis is, she winds up in a supporting role; she's not even a real femme fatale, as, unlike Stanwyck in INDEMNITY, she's essentially passive, not actively engineering events in any way. We also don’t get very close to Hunter, so we don't care as much about his fate as we might if we knew more about him. The film is essentially a three-person show, and though Hunter and Francis are OK, neither is terribly compelling, and Andrews doesn't have much to do. Viveca Lindfors does well with her supporting role as Hunter's therapist. Directed with some visual style by William Conrad, TV's Cannon. [TCM]

2011-11-11T15:07:00.002-05:00

ONE MORE TOMORROW (1946)

At his surprise birthday party, rich bachelor Dennis Morgan meets two very different women: a sexy gold digger (Alexis Smith, pictured standing) and a photographer (Ann Sheridan, pictured seated) who works part-time for a small left-wing magazine. Morgan takes a liking to Sheridan and her publisher (Reginald Gardiner) and buys their struggling publication, to the dismay of his father who wants him to join the family conglomerate business. Morgan wants to marry Sheridan, but she's uncertain how she'd fit into his life and turns him down, so on the rebound, he hooks up with Smith, much to the chagrin of Morgan's butler (and longtime buddy) Jack Carson who sees through her. When they marry, Smith starts running Morgan's life, starting with getting rid of Carson. By the time Sheridan comes back into the picture, Smith has plunged into a backstabbing plan to get Morgan away from the magazine and back with his father. A tug-of-war ensues between the two women for Morgan's heart and soul.

This enjoyable drama, with romantic comedy touches, is a remake of the 30s film THE ANIMAL KINGDOM, based on a play by Philip Barry. The earlier pre-Code version is sexier, but this one fleshes out the backstory in an interesting way, and the cast is solid, not only the central core of Morgan, Sheridan, Smith and Carson, but also supporting players like Gardiner, Jane Wyman (as Sheridan's sidekick), Thurston Hall (Morgan's father) and John Loder (the family lawyer who encourages Smith to set her cap for Morgan in the first place). This may not stick with you for long, but it's fun while it lasts, especially when Smith's diabolical plan becomes clear. Favorite line, from Alexis Smith: "Stop being bitter and get me a drink!" [TCM]

2011-11-09T10:52:00.002-05:00

TARZAN AND THE SHE-DEVIL (1953)

In Africa, where, we are told, "death wears a bright mantle—and beauty has fangs," Vargo (Raymond Burr) and his associates are hunting elephants for their ivory which they sell to the exotic Lyra (Monique Van Vooren, pictured) and her husband. Burr makes plans to go after a large but dangerous herd, and he enslaves men from the Laikopos tribe to help him. But Tarzan (Lex Barker) is a friend to the tribe, so when their women come for help, Tarzan rescues them. Vargo sets out to reclaim the natives and kidnap Jane so Tarzan will help them by using his jungle call to get the elephant herd together for easy capture. Jane manages to escape his men, but their treehouse catches fire and is destroyed; Tarzan, assuming Jane is dead, gives up, and is captured and tortured by Vargo's men. Meanwhile, Lyra's husband finds out that Vargo plans to double-cross Lyra. In the end, Jane's reappearance gives Tarzan the strength to fight, and he gets back at everyone by calling the elephants in for a deadly stampede. This was Barker's last Tarzan film and, though it starts out fine, falls apart when Tarzan falls apart. The Ape Man just sits around and sulks, and even the torture scenes aren't mean or fun enough to be distracting. Burr is a good heavy but Van Vooren is on the lackluster side, partly because she isn't given much to do. Joyce McKenzkie makes for a rather plain Jane, though she and Barker get a nice scene of an early morning, pre-coital dip in the river, after which Cheetah brings them a huge ostrich egg for breakfast. Not the worst in the series, but until the exciting climax, there's not much here to recommend. [TCM]

2011-11-06T11:50:00.001-05:00

MYSTERY LINER (1934)

Potentially interesting thriller with sci-fi overtones from B-studio Monogram, tripped up by a slow pace and no background music. Noah Berry, captain of an ocean liner, is suffering from near-psychotic episodes, so he is relieved of his command and replaced by Boothe Howard, a rather slimy fellow who competes with his first officer (Cornelius Keefe) for the affections of on-ship nurse Astrid Allwyn. This particular ocean trip is important because a new device, named S-505, is secretly being tested. If it works, ships can be controlled from hundreds of miles away via radio remote control. But we soon learn that there are two spies on board determined to steal the radio tube and replace it with a device that will scramble the radio signal. When the inventor is strangled, an investigator (Edwin Maxwell) comes on board to help sort things out. Among the suspects: a dotty but lively old lady, her gayish grandson, and a suspicious Germanic fellow. Complicating things is a report that Berry, the crazy captain (whose illness may have been brought on by a voodoo poisoning) escaped from the asylum and might be on board. All this sounds more interesting in summary than it is in action. The movie starts well, and does work up an exciting final sequence, but bogs down in between with lots of scenes of people entering rooms, talking at each other, and exiting rooms, in the usual Monogram fashion. Keefe and Allywn make a passable pair of central characters (to call them "heroes" would overstate their importance to the film's outcome); top-billed Beery has only two short scenes which he essentially sleepwalks through; reliable supporting pros Maxwell, Zeffie Tilbury (as the old lady) and Gustav von Seyffertitz (as the German) provide most of the acting interest. Based on a story by the prolific pulp writer Edgar Wallace. The print shown on TCM was that rare artifact: a pristine copy of a Monogram film. [TCM]

2011-11-03T13:18:00.002-04:00

THE COMEDIANS (1967)

A political/romantic melodrama set in Haiti during the reign of terror of President-for-Life "Papa Doc" Duvalier. As the times get tougher (a bad economy, a murderous secret police known as the Tonton Macoutes), hotel owner Richard Burton is looking to leave Haiti. The only thing he'll miss is his mistress, Elizabeth Taylor, the wife of a South American ambassador (Peter Ustinov). As Burton returns from New York on a failed attempt to sell his hotel, he runs into Alec Guinness, a boastful but rather comical figure who is trying to sell second-hand arms to the regime; unfortunately, his contact in the government has fallen out of favor and has been tossed in jail, so Guinness is, too. Also newly arrived is Paul Ford, a blustery American businessman trying to open a vegetarian health center in a new development called Duvalierville, and his wife (Lillian Gish) who is quiet but shows backbone when she needs to. These six characters interact with each other and with a handful of natives, including surgeon James Earl Jones and poet Georg Stanford Brown, both of whom have ties to a slowly developing resistance group, and who eventually come to think that Guinness, who's been freed from prison and who brags about his military experience in Burma, could lead their ragtag band in attacks on the Tonton Macoutes. Add to this some voodoo, a nighttime public execution to which children are invited, and lots of anguished kissing between Burton and Taylor, and you've got this mixed bag, based on a novel by Graham Greene.

This movie should have been better than it is. Some critics blame Burton and Taylor, who were pretty much at the peak of their allure as a celebrity couple, but the real problem is the preponderance of long, bloodless conversations—sometimes exposition, sometimes philosophy. There are action scenes here and there, and a startling killing during a medical operation, and much of the film (shot in the West African country of Benin) looks great, even though the dry, barren land is not especially inviting. This is really Burton's movie and he does a nice job as a passive, degraded man stuck in a rut who eventually wakes up and tries to change things. At one point, Burton is referred to as being like a defrocked priest, a nice reference to his role in NIGHT OF THE IGUANA; that Burton was all rage and impulse, but here, he's more like a sleepwalker until, like Bogart in CASABLANCA, he wakes up and decides to join the fight. Taylor's role isn’t very big, but she looks good. Ustinov doesn’t have much to do, but his presence is always welcome. Although it's the white characters we're supposed to care about, it's the black actors who make their characters more interesting. In addition to Jones and Brown, there is Roscoe Lee Browne as a reporter who flits through the film acting like a trip to Haiti is as pleasant as a trip to Disneyland. Raymond St. Jacques is effective as an officer in the secret police: he plays opposite Burton in the same way that Claude Rains did with Bogart in CASABLANCA, except he's a nasty piece of work with no redeeming qualities. Not a popcorn flick, but OK for literary types. [DVD]

2011-10-31T17:13:00.004-04:00

BLACK NOON (1971)

The Reverend Keyes is a pioneer preacher heading through the old West with his wife on the way to a new post when they wind up stuck, sick and hungry in the middle of the desert after their covered wagon breaks down. Caleb and his beautiful but mute daughter Deliverance, from the nearby town of San Melas, come upon them and take them to town. While his wife recovers, Keyes hears about the town, founded by folks from New England, and their recent troubles: an outlaw named Moon has been extorting gold from the town's mine, and the church burned down, killing the preacher. Keyes delivers a sermon which gives the townspeople hope (and cures a young lame boy), and soon a new gold vein is discovered. Caleb says they will build a new church if Keyes will stay on; he seems willing, but his sickly wife isn't so sure. However, when Moon rides into town and tries to kidnap Deliverance, Keyes shoots the man dead. The townsfolk rejoice and Keyes is more inclined to stay, especially when Deliverance regains her voice and begins flirting with him. But he also has strange visions of a bloody, half-naked man, staring at him from the mirror. And why does his wife keep getting sicker? Could it have to do with the wax doll Deliverance keeps playing with? It seems like an evil force is loose in town—Voodoo? Devil worship?—but it may not be easy for Keyes to find it.

This is from the golden age of the spooky TV-movie (TRILOGY OF TERROR, CROWHAVEN FARM, THE NIGHT STALKER, and THE NORLISS TAPES are all from the early 70s) before Lifetime and Hallmark turned the genre into all sappy or snappy modern romances. I saw this when it first aired and never forgot it, especially the super-creepy jolt of the last scene, set in the present (the climactic shot itself doesn’t make sense, but go with it—it's cool anyway, and what made the movie stick in my head all these years). The cast is interesting: Roy Thinnes (above)is effective as the heroic but flawed and confused preacher; Ray Milland does a nice job as Caleb, the town elder; Yvette Mimeux is all old-West sex-kitten as Deliverance. Lyn Loring is rather drab as the preacher’s wife; Gloria Grahame doesn’t get much to do as her nurse, but it's fun to see her. Hank Worden, a supporting player in many Westerns, gives an eccentric performance as a sidekick of Caleb's, but given the oddness of the town, he fits right in. As far as I know, this film was never released for home video, but I found it posted on YouTube in what seems to be a transfer from video tape. It’s not the best quality, but it’s worth searching out until Sony decides to give it a proper DVD release. (YouTube)

2011-10-30T12:31:00.004-04:00

ISLAND OF LOST SOULS (1932)

Edward Parker (Richard Arlen), survivor of a shipwreck, is picked up by the Covena; he wires ahead to his lady friend Ruth that he'll be arriving soon at the ship's next port of call, but he gets on the bad side of the burly, drunken captain and is thrown off the ship at a small island where several crates of wild animals are being delivered. The island is inhabited by a strange looking tribe of natives—brutish and hairy, looking almost like humans that have devolved to an earlier state—and ruled by the rotund Dr. Moreau (Charles Laughton), a scientist who left England in disgrace over some questionable experiments. It doesn't take long for Parker to figure out that the "natives" are actually Moreau's experiments: animals, such as dogs, pigs, and wolves that have surgically been turned into (almost)-human beings. Moreau makes them abide by a law intended to keep them from reverting back to their animal states: do not kill, do not eat meat, do not run on all fours. He manages to control their behavior, but physically, as Moreau notes, the stubborn beast flesh keeps creeping back. Moreau decides to keep Parker on the island a while, making him part of an experiment, hoping he'll mate with his one female subject, Lota (pictured, presented in the credits as a "panther woman," though it's never said in the film what animal she originated as), but soon Ruth (Leila Hyams) arrives, and instead Moreau hopes that she can be paired up with one of his male subjects.

This film has a strong reputation, and with its themes of bestiality and playing God, was often censored during its initial theatrical runs, but modern viewers probably won't find this especially disturbing. Arlen is a wooden hero, Hyams is colorless, and even the great Laughton often seems uncertain what tone to take: sometimes he's gentlemanly, sometimes he's raving mad, and once, he's downright campy, jumping up on a table and leering at Arlen while he explains his theories. Bela Lugosi does a nice job with his small role as the wolfish lawkeeper—and Lugosi's refrain "Are we not men?" became the refrain of one of Devo's best known songs. The striking photography is a plus, and the make-up used to create the animal men is still quite impressive; the close-ups of these bizarre creatures can still create unease. The effective finale invokes the finale of FREAKS which came out earlier in the year (and also starred Hyams). The Criterion print has a few rough spots in the beginning, but mostly looks fine. [DVD]

2011-10-29T16:23:00.002-04:00

THE DEVIL RIDES OUT (1968)
aka THE DEVIL'S BRIDE

The aristocratic Nicolas, now the Duc de Richleau, is meeting his younger friends Simon and Rex for a reunion, but when Simon doesn't show up, they grow concerned and head off to his house where a party seems to be in progress. Simon rather awkwardly tries to play off the situation, claiming that he's having a meeting of an astronomical society, but Nicolas soon realizes it's actually a coven of Satanists, led by the notorious Mocata, and Simon and the beautiful Tanith are about to be given a demonic baptism. They manage to wrest Simon away and get him to sleep with a crucifix around his neck for protection, though Mocata is able to exercise his will from miles away to have Simon nearly strangle himself with the crucifix. The next night, Nicolas and Rex watch a black mass at which the devil himself, in the form of a goat-man, materializes. Joined by Simon, the men take Tanith away to the home of Nicolas' niece and her husband, but even with a chalk-drawn magical protection ring, Mocata conjures up a gigantic spider to scare them, then spirits away the niece's little girl. The angel of death appears (a skeleton on horseback) and takes Tanith, and for the rest of the film the three men try to find the little girl and bring Tanith back from the land of the almost-dead.

Good devil-worship horror movies are hard to find. The best-known one is probably ROSEMARY’S BABY, which is very good but is more creepy suspense than horror. THE SEVENTH VICTIM, one of Val Lewton's well-regarded B-films, is really a grim and cerebral character study. THE BLACK CAT with Karloff and Lugosi is a good film but the Satanic element is fairly slim, relegated to the last few minutes. Some would count THE WICKER MAN but that's really more a pagan horror film. There is a very good TV-movie, BLACK NOON, which I'll be reviewing on Halloween, leaving this film as probably the best Satanic horror movie to date. It's based on one of the best occult novels ever, The Devil Rides Out by British author Dennis Wheatley. The book, which I read many years ago, is long and full of wild, occult incidents, and the movie necessarily condenses the storyline considerably. The budget for the effects can't do justice to the book, but there are still a number of good setpieces to be had here, including the apparition of a large black demon-djinn in Simon's observatory/ritual room, the attack of the spider, and the black mass/orgy. The acting is good, especially Christopher Lee who takes his role as the Duc de Richleau seriously. Beefy Leon Greene (as Rex) and the handsome Patrick Mower (as Simon, shown above, in a mirror, with Lee) provide good support, and Charles Gray (Rocky Horror's narrator) looks the part of the sinister Mocata, though he doesn't get to do much except glower at people. If you like blood-and-thunder occult melodrama, this is one of the best (and try to find the book). [TCM]

2011-10-28T17:10:00.003-04:00

THE BLACK ROOM (1935)

The Berghman family lives under a terrible curse: when the male children are twins, the older one--the one delivered first--will be killed by the younger one in a gloomy onyx-walled place in the mansion known as the Black Room. When Frederick has twins, Gregor and Anton, he tries to defy the prophecy by sending Anton, the younger one, away to be raised elsewhere, and by walling up the Black Room. Forty years later, Gregor has become a hated figure by the townspeople: he is a shaggy, dissolute fellow who is suspected of luring wives and daughters from the village into his castle, from which they are never seen again. When an uprising seems near, Gregor sends for the kindly Anton, crippled from birth by a paralyzed arm, for help. Gregor says he intends to go traveling and hand over the title of Baron and all his lands to Anton. Actually, Gregor has found a secret passageway through a fireplace into the Black Room; a pit in the middle of the room is where he dumps the bodies of his female victims, and after he lures Anton in, Gregor throws him in the pit to his death--so there's no way the prophecy can come true, right? Gregor than impersonates Anton, mild manner, paralyzed arm, and all, and plans to marry the lovely Thea. However, a certain young lieutenant who is sweet on Thea may have something to say about that, as might a certain large hound that belonged to Anton and who can tell that something's not right.

Though packaged in an "Icons of Horror" DVD set, this film isn't really horror as much as a period-piece Gothic melodrama, but it's a little gem anyway for at least two reasons. One is the look of the movie; Columbia, a small B-ish studio at the time, seems to have gone all out on the costumes and sets, though it looks like it might have been shot over at Universal, as the grand sets resemble those used in the 30s Frankenstein films, and the director, Roy William Neill adds some stylish camera moves here and there. The other big plus is Boris Karloff (pictured in both roles) who delivers one of his best performances in the dual role, and as some critics have pointed out, he practically plays a third role, that of the evil brother masquerading as the good brother. Marian Marsh and Robert Allan are adequate as Thea and her protector, but Katherine DeMille (Cecil's daughter) steals a scene as Gregor's saucy gypsy lover who meets a bad end in the Black Room pit. An enjoyable thriller. [DVD]

2011-10-25T18:50:00.002-04:00

THEM (1954)

In a New Mexico desert, a little girl has been spotted wandering aimlessly with a doll in her hands. Cop James Whitmore and his partner Chris Drake find her, seemingly in a trance, not responsive and unable to speak. They then find her home, an empty trailer which has been smashed up, and both men notice a strong smell and occasionally hear a weird whining noise in the distance. A bit down the road, a general store is found similarly smashed up, the proprietor dead. Whitmore goes back to headquarters, while Drake, alone at the crime scene, hears the whining noise, sees something horrible from his car window, screams, and is killed. It's discovered that both dead men had formic acid in their bodies, which is also the source of the strange smell. When the little girl sniffs some formic acid, she becomes agitated and screams, "Them! Them!" FBI agent James Arness is called in, as is scientist Edmund Gwenn (with his daughter Joan Weldon), and soon they're all face to face with gigantic killer ants, apparently mutations caused by nuclear testing in the desert. A plan to bomb the ant's huge underground nest is carried out, but two queen ants escape and make their way to the sewers of Los Angeles where Whitmore and Arness, joined by the Army, try to kill the last of the ants before they can spawn and, as Gwenn quotes from the Bible, there will be darkness and destruction, and "the beast shall reign over the earth."

One of the earliest of the atomic-mutation monster movies, made the same year as the Japanese GODZILLA, this is also one of the best. The ants themselves as a special effect are OK, but it's the above B-level writing and acting that makes this work, as well as strong directorial style from Gordon Douglas. The first half-hour or so feels like a traditional crime drama, and the long opening sequence in the desert, which plays out first in bright sunlight and then in a wicked dust storm, works very well. Craggy Whitmore and handsome Arness make a good pair of heroes, and Gwenn is fun as the voice of science. The little girl (Sandy Descher, above) has almost no dialogue, but she gives a good creepy performance; in fact, sh'’s almost more memorable than the huge deadly ants. [DVD]

2011-10-24T10:22:00.004-04:00

DAUGHTERS OF SATAN (1972)

Tom Selleck (at left, and several years away from Magnum PI fame) is a museum agent working in Manila. He finds a painting of a trio of witches being burned at the stake in 1592 and though it's a piece of junk, he buys it as a curiosity because one of the witches looks exactly like his wife (Barra Grant). She freaks out when she sees it, and soon strange things start happening: a housekeeper who looks like one of the other witches in the painting shows up out of nowhere to be her housekeeper, a big black dog—which she somehow knows is named Nicodemas--starts hanging around, and she hears voices out of nowhere. Soon, a woman named Kitty, who sees the same therapist that Selleck does, is yelling about being forced to kill, and sure enough, she's the spitting image of the third witch. The images in the painting (which include the big black dog) begin to fade, and death and violence surround Selleck and his wife. Yes, Grant and the other two women are apparently reincarnations of the dead witches and they're ready to recommit themselves to the coven and get revenge by getting rid of Selleck—though how that would constitute revenge was never clear to me, unless Selleck is a stand-in for the Phallocentric Chauvinistic Pigs who kept the witches down over the centuries.

This feels like a TV-movie, with the added attraction of some bare breasts now and then, and way more evil imagery than network TV would allow. There's a nice opening scene of a naked woman being tortured by Satanists, and a later scene in which Grant has to spit on a crucifix. Elements of the earlier Rosemary's Baby and the later The Omen make this film seem like warmed-over seconds, and Selleck, hairy and baby-faced and dressed in ass-hugging slacks, doesn't quite seem to know how to play his part. None of the acting is above average, and there are plotholes galore, but a creepy atmosphere is developed often enough to make this a decent choice for October viewing. [TCM]

2011-10-20T14:42:00.003-04:00

THE PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES (1966)

In a small Cornish village in the late 19th century, healthy people are dying and the young doctor (Brook Williams) can't explain why, partly because the townspeople won't allow autopsies. Williams' mentor (Andre Morell) arrives from London to help. It turns out that the local squire (John Carson) and his fox-hunting buddies are using voodoo to kill off folks and bring them back from the dead as zombies to work in his mine. The young doctor's wife winds up as one of the undead, and Morrell's daughter (Diane Clare) is put in danger by the studly Alex Davion, the squire's chief underling. There is some class consciousness here, as the townspeople and the doctors are all intimidated by, and to a large degree, under the thumb of, Carson and Davion, so the script is a tad more serious than some of the other Hammer horrors of the era, but the proceedings of the first half are rather slow. Things pick up later with a creepy scene of masses of the undead rising from their graves, and a decapitation scene that is fairly explicit for its day. The plot structure is right out of Dracula, with good doctors (whose women are in danger) doing "wild work" to get rid of the villain, though in this case not a supernatural creature but a mortal using magic. The voodoo rite scenes are effective, and the actors all adequate, with Morrell at the top of the lot, and Davion giving an interesting sexy swagger to his Renfieldish role. [TCM]

2011-10-18T21:44:00.002-04:00

MESA OF LOST WOMEN (1953)

This B-film from early in the 50s sci-fi cycle begins with some overheated narration about the miserable biped that is man, the possibility of miracles, and a desert that turns people into "dead things." Then we see a dehydrated man (Robert Knapp) and woman (Mary Hill) staggering along near death in the Muerto Desert. They are rescued by a hunky American oil worker (John Martin) and doctored up by a relatively handsome doctor (Allan Nixon) at the AmerExico Field Hospital. Knapp starts ranting about gigantic insects in an underground laboratory, and a rather torturous flashback begins. Mad scientist Jackie Coogan is indeed performing experiments in a lab on the Zarpa Mesa, injecting people and animals with spider venom. Harmon Stevens, a former colleague of Coogan's, visits him and sees a giant spider, a group of dwarves who do the doctor's bidding, and some crazy aggressive women, all created by Coogan. Stevens becomes a subject of experiments but manages to escape. At a cantina, an exotic woman named Tarantella does a bizarre dance, and a clearly addled Stevens takes her, Knapp (who's a pilot), and Hill hostage and makes them fly him to the mesa to get revenge on the mad doctor.

That story sounds more coherent in the re-telling than in the playing out. In addition to the tangled, nonsensical plot (and plotholes), there are other bad movie pleasures: terrible performances—some overheated, some practically nonexistent—cheap sets, bad monsters (there's really only one here, a huge spider puppet that barely moves), sexy but wooden women and men. Tandra Quinn, as Tarantella, doesn’t give a performance as much as writhe and stare. Coogan, a former child star who went on to later fame as Uncle Fester in The Addams Family, is disappointingly bland as the mad doctor. Stevens is the most fun as the pop-eyed man who spends most of the movie in a mild trance. The irritating guitar and piano score, which never seems to stop, was recycled by Ed Wood in his movie Jail Bait. Truly a bad movie for connoisseurs. [DVD]

2011-10-16T13:45:00.002-04:00

BERSERK (1967)

Joan Crawford runs a traveling circus in England. One night, the star aerialist falls to his death, hung by his tightrope, in an apparent accident. Crawford is excited that the news will increase their audience, but her partner (and lover) Michael Gough wants out of the business. Beefcakey American Ty Hardin auditions for the tightrope job by walking the wire with steel bayonets underneath him. He gets the job, and the attentions of Crawford. At the next stop, Gough is killed by a spike through the head and Hardin angles his way in to replace Gough as her business partner. The public does indeed begin to show more interest in the circus, as do the police, and Crawford's daughter (Judy Geeson) who shows up, having been expelled from her boarding school. The next gory death is that of busty circus queen Diana Dors (beware the cutting-in-half trick). Can the Scotland Yard inspector (Robert Hardy) find the killer before the entire circus is decimated? This is better than its reputation as a "scream queen" vehicle for an aging star. Though Crawford is a bit laughable when flirting with Hardin (who was 25 years younger than her), otherwise she's fine in the part, and is still in pretty good shape in her skimpy circus outfits. The circus scenes which provide filler between arguments and murders are actually fun to watch, and the color cinematography is good. At least one of the deaths is a shocking surprise; the identity of the killer, not so much, though it takes some odd narrative convolutions to explain everything. [TCM]

2011-10-15T10:20:00.004-04:00

FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED (1969)

This is certainly one of the best Hammer horror films, thanks to a better-than-average script, good acting, and some nicely unsettling shock scenes. It opens with one of those shocks: a doctor gets out of a carriage and walks up to his office door where a man in hiding uses a scythe to cut his head off, though all we see is gobs of bright red blood spatter against the doctor's door sign. Of course, Baron Frankenstein (Peter Cushing) is behind the death. He is trying to transplant brains into dead bodies, but when a burglar breaks into his lab and discovers the above-mentioned head and a green (and naked) dead man in a large vat of preservative, the cops are on the scene. Frankenstein gets out of Dodge (or whatever Mittel-European town he was in), finds another town to terrorize, and blackmails Karl, a young medical student who has been dealing cocaine on the side to supplement his income, and his girlfriend Anna into letting him take over their boarding house for his experiments. His goal: to take the brain out of his once-brilliant colleague Dr. Brandt (who is currently in an asylum) and put it in a different body—he thinks that Brandt's insanity is due to physical pressure on the brain, and once it's in someone else's head, he'll be sane and can help Frankenstein with his work. Brandt's brain is successfully transplanted into Dr. Richter's body, but Brandt's wife stumbles into the middle of things, and though Brandt/Richter is no longer insane, things get emotionally complicated for him. By the fiery finale, almost the entire cast is dead, a gloomier-than-usual ending for the Hammer studio.

The problem with some Hammer films is not enough plot; here, there is almost too much, but it's nice for a change to have characters we care about. It's also interesting to have Frankenstein be an unambiguous bad guy. Cushing does a nice job as an arrogant bastard who doesn't care a whit about anyone or anything else except his own ends. Most startlingly, he rapes Anna (Veronica Carlson) in a scene which seems to exist only for exploitation. Simon Ward (who later played Winston Churchill in YOUNG WINSTON) is OK but rather emotionless as Karl, but along with Cushing, acting honors go to Freddie Jones (at left) as Brandt/Richter; the subplot involving his wife has real emotional power, something rare in a Hammer film. There is lots of blood and gore (for the late 60s) and several good setpieces, including the burglar in the lab at the beginning, the dead body of Brandt bursting out of the ground during a water pipe break, and the destruction at the end. It doesn't have much that comes directly from the Frankenstein mythos, but it's still a grand Hammer horror. [Streaming]

2011-10-13T19:53:00.002-04:00

THE PREMATURE BURIAL (1961)

Middle-aged Guy Carrell (Ray Milland) is a little spooked about his family history; the men in the family tend to come to sudden and violent deaths. When Guy was a child, his father had a heart attack and was buried in the family vault in the basement of their mansion, but that night, Guy heard his father screaming that he was still alive, and now Guy believes he suffers from catalepsy, a condition in which the victim appears dead but isn't, and has a strong fear of being buried alive. His sister Kate (Heather Angel) is certain that the young Guy just had a nightmare and is afraid for no reason, but she lives with and is highly protective of him. As the movie begins, Guy witnesses a grave being exhumed, and it's revealed that the body in the coffin had indeed not been dead and the person had bloodily tried to scratch his way out of the coffin, to no avail. Because one of the gravediggers (and, as we discover later, also a graverobber) is whistling the folk tune "Molly Malone," Milland begins freaking out every time he hears the song. Feeling he is in no state to inflict himself on someone else, he cancels his plans to marry the young and sexy Emily (Hazel Court), but she won't take "no" for an answer and enlists the aid of Miles (Richard Ney), a family friend, to shake him out of his morbid paranoia. Guy marries Emily, but calls off a planned honeymoon trip to Venice to retreat into a hillside vault and build an escapable coffin; eventually he is talked into making a stab at a normal marriage and agrees to the Venice trip, until the pitiful mewings of a cat that is trapped in the walls of the house freaks him out. Obviously, someone is trying to drive poor Guy mad, but who?

This is about par for the course for the American International Poe films of the 60s. Roger Corman directed and the movie looks good, especially the sets and color scheme (the purples here and there are especially striking). The plot, very loosely adapted from a Poe story, is a run-of-the-mill mystery melodrama hidden by the horror element of the buried-alive theme. The main way in which this differs from the others is that Ray Milland is the lead rather than Vincent Price; Milland is fine, though it would be nice if at least once, the lead was close in age to his romantic interest. Ney is lackluster, leaving Angel and Court to take acting honors as they make us wonder which one is the heroine and which the villain. There is a creepy premature burial dream sequence, followed later by a real one. If you haven't already seen most of these Poe flicks, I wouldn't start with this--its draggy spots are draggier than usual because the campy Price is absent--but it's not a bad October choice. [DVD]

2011-10-11T20:07:00.003-04:00

CRACK IN THE WORLD (1965)

Scientists at the Inner Space Project (headquarters for which seem to be located somewhere in West Africa) have plans to shoot a nuclear missile into the earth's core to tap its magma as a new power source. The head honcho (Dana Andrews) is gung-ho, but his younger protege (Kieron Moore) has serious doubts, worried that the earth's crust has been weakened too much by nuclear testing. Stuck between these two is the lovely Janette Scott, currently married to Andrews, but the former lover of Moore. Andrews wins the day when the project is given the go-ahead by the British government; the missile firing is successful, but soon a series of strong earthquakes are triggered in the vicinity and it's discovered that a deep fissure has opened in the ocean floor which could rip the planet apart. Like many a sci-fi film of the 50s and 60s, a romantic triangle serves as the primary subplot; this one has a shade more meat on it than most. Andrews is older but still looks like a realistic mate choice for the much younger Scott; her main concern is that she wants a child; his main concern, which he hides from her, is that he's dying of cancer. Moore (relatively hunky for a British B-actor of the era) is bland but young, healthy, and proven right in his concerns over the project. This had a decent budget for the time, back in the pre-Star Wars days when sci-fi films never had lots of money to play with, and it looks good with fine sets and good cinematography. It skimps on the special effects until the end when we get some good miniature work. The uncertainty about where the film is set is irritating--people keep jumping into helicopters and heading off to talk to a government minister (Alexander Knox, good as always) and zipping right back to the project. I first thought the project was in Australia, but when we see a map of the quakes, it seems clear that the missile must have been set off in Africa. The ending was a good idea that could not be well realized on screen back then, though with today's digital effects, it would be easy to pull off now. Extra points for having two leads mentioned in the opening song of Rocky Horror. [Streaming]

2011-10-08T12:33:00.002-04:00

FRANKENSTEIN 1970 (1958)

In order to raise money to buy some nuclear power equipment, Baron Victor Frankenstein (Boris Karloff) has allowed a team of filmmakers onto his estate in Germany to film a horror movie. The director (Don Barry) flirts with the leading lady, which pisses off the script girl, who happens to be his ex-wife. Gottfried (Rudolph Anders), the estate overseer, knows the Baron's background—he was tortured during the war, resulting in the scarring of his face, and was forced to take part in terrible Nazi experiments; now Gottfried is worried that Frankenstein is secretly using his new equipment to continue his ancestor's experiment with creating life. (Well, of course he is; his name is Frankenstein.) The Baron seems to be generally friendly and agrees to do a cameo in the film, and even agrees to a live TV feed from the castle, but when folks start disappearing—first Shuter the butler, then the script girl, then a photographer—Gottfreid fears the worst. Yes, the Baron has reanimated the monster, and needs body parts (brains, eyes, etc.) to complete it. When the leading lady goes missing, the director calls in the police and it's not long before the Baron gets his punishment for tampering in God’s domain.

This film is set in 1970 only because the filmmakers thought that personal nuclear reactors would be readily available by then; otherwise, there is no attempt made at futurizing things, though this might be the first Frankenstein movie that does have a relatively modern-looking lab. The screenplay has potential (the Nazi background, the romantic triangle tension) but the characters are flat, and even the usually reliable Karloff doesn't seem happy here, going through his paces slowly and with little spark. The opening, a creepy monster chase through a dark woods, is nice but it turns out to be just the crew shooting their film. Another good scene involving Karloff delivering what seems to be a madman’s soliloquy is another fake-out. The monster is disappointing, basically a big mummy with a boxy head and no eyes, though the last shot of the film, when the dead monster's face is unwrapped, provides one glimmer of what might have been with a bigger budget and more enthusiasm from the filmmakers. The film does look good in widescreen format. [DVD]

2011-10-06T11:39:00.003-04:00

THE LEOPARD MAN (1943)

In a small New Mexico town, nightclub singer Jean Brooks and her manager/boyfriend Dennis O'Keefe concoct a publicity stunt: in the middle of an act by dancer Margo at an outdoor cafe, Brooks comes strutting out with a leopard on a leash and sits down at a table. Margo, not easily rattled, dances toward the leopard and (literally) shakes her maracas at it. That spooks the beast which runs off into the night. The leopard was on loan from Abner Biberman and O'Keefe feels bad about the incident, but he feels worse when later that night, the animal kills a young girl just outside her family's home. A strolling fortune teller (Isabel Jewell) keeps foreseeing doom for Margo, who just laughs at her. Soon, however, the leopard has struck again, attacking a girl who was accidentally locked in a graveyard. O'Keefe and Brooks feel guiltier, but when Margo finally does meet her death in a third brutal attack, O'Keefe tells the local sheriff that he thinks a human being is behind it all; sure enough, Biberman finds the leopard which had been shot dead days ago and could not have caused the last two deaths. Brooks volunteers to be the bait in a plan to bring the killer out in the open.

This is generally considered one of the weaker of the Val Lewton B-horror movie classics of the 40's, though it has a famous shock scene in the killing of the first girl which rivals the famous pool scene in CAT PEOPLE. Young Teresa (Margaret Landry) is sent out at night by her mother to get some cornmeal. She is scared of the dark, but nevertheless goes across town to get the food, and after a couple of false scares, comes upon the leopard. She races home, but when she gets to her door, it's locked and her mother, assuming the girl's screams are out of baseless fear, takes her time letting her in. Before the mother can get the lock undone, Teresa's screams have stopped and a thick pool of blood begins seeping in under the door. The sequence is magnificently done, though I find the mother's struggle with the door at the end an unconvincing way to draw the scene out. The graveyard sequence, though not as famous, is just as tense: On her birthday, Consuelo (Tula Parma) goes there to put flowers on her father's grave and to have a secret rendezvous with her lover (the handsome Richard Martin). She dawdles on her way and he's gone when she arrives. She stays, lost in thought, and is left when the caretaker locks up. A passerby hears her screams, but to no avail.

I think the problem with the film is that it is too ambitious. For starters, there are several potentially interesting characters, but none of them, not even the leads, are fleshed out very well. There are also thematic threads which are left floating. The role of random fate is mentioned several times (and the camera frequently seems to follow characters at random) but goes nowhere. The killer's motivation is nebulous, to say the least--he just couldn't help it! The climax, occurring during a gloomy parade ceremony filled with slowly marching men in cowls, is rushed. The pluses include great sets (mostly stagy but effective), solid building of tension in all the stalking scenes, and Margo (pictured above) who, despite having little dialogue, is memorable--and those castanets make a nice visual and aural touch. The screenplay is based on a novel by noir author Cornell Woolrich, and the film does have a good noir look. It's certainly worth an hour of your time. [DVD]

2011-10-03T14:09:00.004-04:00

ATTACK OF THE 50 FOOT WOMAN (1958)

Alison Hayes is rich, has a devoted butler, owns the world's most fabulous diamond (the Star of India), and for some reason is married to a passive, conniving lout and lives in a small house on the outskirts of a nowhere little town out West. Her husband (William Hudson) is keeping a floozy (Yvette Vickers) at the hotel in town, and doesn’t care who knows. Hayes has developed a drinking problem, or more to the point, re-developed it after a spell in a sanitarium, thanks to Hudson's fooling around. One night, when sightings of a giant fireball in the sky are being reported around the world, Hayes is out driving in the desert and sees a giant glowing sphere land on the road, and a space giant comes out of it and tries to snatch her diamond from around her neck. She heads to town in hysterics and no one believes her. Vickers decides this might be a good time for Hudson to do a little gaslighting, drive Hayes crazy, get her committed, and thereby get his hands on her fortune. But when the space giant returns, he snatches Hayes along with her diamond, and when she is returned, she begins growing to become the 50-foot woman of the title, and is out for revenge against Hudson and Vickers.

Despite this film's reputation as a B-classic, it's pretty bad; it could almost pass for an Ed Wood production except the acting is fairly solid. Critics love to claim this as a feminist take on the traditional man-into-monster movie, and there is potential for a fruitful reading that way, but the weak screenplay and low budget don't allow for the fleshing out of any characters or subplots. This is the kind of movie in which not much really happens on screen; most events occur off-screen (or in the past) and we're told about them in long stultifying dialogue scenes. Hayes and Vickers do the best they can with what little they're given, and though it's Hayes you’ll remember as she strides through town in her toga, ready to wreck havoc, Vickers is the more interesting character—and the better actress. Hudson (pictured with Hayes) works up some good, slimy anti-charm, though as with the lead females, he'd be more fun if he had more to work with. Frank Chase makes his role as the obnoxious comic-relief sidekick deputy bearable. This all could have still worked nicely if the special effects had been good, but they are terrible. The giants are mostly transparent double-exposures, and despite the cool poster picture of Hayes ripping cars off of a freeway, her rampage scene looks like it was shot by high-school kids in someone's back yard. Had Hayes thrown herself completely into the role, this might have been a high camp classic, but it’s not even that good/bad. [DVD]

2011-10-01T12:30:00.003-04:00

HUMANOIDS FROM THE DEEP (1980)

I'll start October's horror movie reviews off with this archetypal trashy-fun B-monster movie. It's JAWS meets CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, with a little bit of ALIEN thrown in for good measure. In a small fishing town, tension is whipped up when the owner of a cannery (Vic Morrow) wants to expand against the wishes of a Native American group, led by Anthony Penya, concerned about the ecology. Morrow has hired a scientist (Ann Turkel) to come up with ways to accelerate the breeding of salmon, but her experiments have gone awry (umm, duh, she's tampering in God's domain) and, unknown to her, produced dozens of humanoid sea creatures who begin rising from the depths to kill human men and mate with human women. The first cool thing that happens is that some of the horror movie rules are violated: children and animals do get killed. On a very JAWS-like fishing trip, a young boy becomes the first victim of the monsters when he falls from the boat and is snatched underwater (in a nifty backwards-motion shot). Then a big old friendly dog is killed and left on the beach in a hideous mess, rather like the first swimming victim in JAWS. Then a bunch of the fishermen's dogs are slaughtered, except for Penya's which leads to suspicions that the Indians are behind the deaths. Two young lovers are attacked on the beach: the boys gets half his face ripped off and dies, and the girl gets raped and survives. The climax occurs during the annual Salmon Festival when a horde of beasts attack everyone and everything in sight. Just when you think all the creatures have been killed, there's a shock twist ending that, despite being shamelessly ripped off from ALIEN, is quite effective.

Gore and nudity are the drawing cards here, with heaping doses of both. The best "Eeek!... Yuck!" moment is when a monster rips a man's head off his body. The beach rape is quite graphic--it has to be for the ending to make sense. With a low budget, the filmmakers have been clever and made most of the "money shot" scenes very short so the cheapness of the effects is not terribly noticeable, with the ripped-up dog being the best example. The festival finale is non-stop screaming and killing and is quite fun. The acting is terrible all around: the hero is a pudgy, going-to-seed Doug McClure, far from his days as a blond hunk in the 60s and early 70s. The female lead, Ann Turkel, is terrible, and everyone else seems like an amateur except Morrow who is OK but doesn't really get to chew the scenery like you expect him to. The monster outfits are best when just glimpsed, and look rather shoddy when dwelt upon, but that didn't stop me from having a generally good time with this as a beer-and-pizza flick. The production was overseen by the unbilled Roger Corman. [DVD]

2011-09-29T22:08:00.002-04:00

I KILLED THAT MAN (1941)

Cheapie Monogram mystery with a few good supporting performances and a moderately clever plotline to recommend it. As convicted murderer Ralf Harolde is led to his death, he tells a roomful of men gathered to witness the execution that he's going to name the man who paid him to commit the murder, but a poison dart kills him first. DA Ricardo Cortez makes the men submit to a strip search but finds nothing. The field of suspects is quickly narrowed down: is it Gavin Gordon, a representative of an anti-death penalty group (which consists solely of himself)?; is it Harry Holman, a candy-store owner who knew Harolde when he was a kid and who had in his possession a cigarette holder that could have been used to shoot the dart?; maybe it's George Pembroke, a laid-back (maybe a little too much so) businessman who has just recently been appointed to the parole board. Cortez enlists a reporter he's sweet on (Joan Woodbury) to help him crack the case, and together they do. I usually like Cortez, but he comes off as bland and colorless here. At least Woodbury has some energy. Both Gordon and Pembroke are good, as is Iris Adrian as the dead man's ex-girlfriend who knows a little too much for her own good. George Breakston, who had a modest career in the 30s as a child actor, has a couple of nice comic relief scenes as Cortez's switchboard operator who has all kinds of theories about the case, based on true crime books he's reading. A point of interest for librarians: the clue that cracks the case open involves a library book call number. If you overlook the bare-bones production values and style (except for a nifty use of triple-split screen during a phone conversation), it's diverting enough. [TCM]

2011-09-25T21:26:00.003-04:00

PANDORA AND THE FLYING DUTCHMAN (1948)

A colorful, moody, romantic fairy tale which is too long for its own good. On the Spanish coast, an exotic woman named Pandora (Ava Gardner) drives a drunkard to suicide when she spurns him. She then goads Stephen, a race car driver and her current paramour, to push his car, named Pandora, off a cliff for her. He does, she just about has an orgasm, and then agrees to marry him. However, soon Pandora becomes fascinated with Hendrik van der Zee (James Mason), a Dutch artist whose schooner is anchored in the bay. She likes to think he might be the incarnation of the mythic Flying Dutchman, a figure who is doomed to roam the earth eternally. Impulsively, she strips naked and swims out to his boat; coincidentally (or is it?) he is in the middle of painting a portrait of the mythic Pandora in her likeness when she arrives. She's a little freaked out, but soon he has become a member of her band of pals, one of whom is the academic Geoff (Harold Warrender) who has an ancient Dutch manuscript about the Flying Dutchman. [At this point, the story of the Dutchman is told: a 17th century sailor (played by Mason) returns home from his travels, assumes his wife to have been unfaithful, kills her, and is charged with murder. In court, he rails against women (generally) and God (specifically) and is sentenced to death, but on the morning of his execution, he has a vision in which he sees that his wife had actually been faithful to him. He walks out of his cell, is led onto a ship, and is cursed to sail alone unless he can find a woman who loves him and is willing to die for him. Every seven years, he can land for six months in an attempt to find this woman.] No sooner have Pandora and Stephen set the date for their wedding then a celebrated matador named Mario comes to town and woos Pandora. (If you're keeping track, that's three men Pandora is juggling, though Hendrik seems to be the only one she's not sleeping with.) Melodramatics occur, and Mario kills Hendrik one night at his villa. Imagine Mario's surprise when Hendrik shows up at the bullfight the next day. This unbalances him in the ring and he is gored to death by the bull. Finally, on the very eve of Pandora's wedding to Stephen, Mason says he has to leave. She finds out that Mason is indeed the Flying Dutchman; will she venture out to the ship or stay on land and marry Stephen?

Except for the fantasy element, much of this feels like a Fitzgerald narrative about the rootless aimless rich and their careless behavior. Some of the things critics don't like about this movie are the things I like. The film is often faulted for its somber tone, but I think if the proceedings were taken any less seriously, it would all fall apart or become cartoonish. James Mason is very good; the beautiful and sexy Gardner is often faulted as being wooden here, but that's nearly beside the point: it's her face and body that drive these men around the bend, and her sometimes affectless performance is spot on. At a full two hours, the movie is too long, and it seems like when a scene isn't working dramatically, the director just cuts to a close-up of Gardner and all is forgiven. Nigel Patrick is fine as the racer and Marius Goring is good in what amounts to a cameo as the suicidal drunkard. This Technicolor movie always looks good, though on the Kino DVD, the colors occasionally come and go in pulses. If you don't mind the length and the moodiness, I recommend this. [DVD]

2011-09-22T21:44:00.003-04:00

REGISTERED NURSE (1934)

Bebe Daniels is married to a boorish alcoholic (Gordon Westcott) who gets seriously hurt in a drunk driving accident, forcing her to go back to work as a nurse. She becomes a popular employee but hides her past, so two doctors thinking she’s at liberty pursue her: the playboyish Lyle Talbot (pictured with Daniels) and the more stable John Halliday. When an insane patient is operated on, Daniels freaks out; it turns out that her husband is in an asylum. With her secret out, Halliday agrees to operate on the husband to try and restore him to sanity, but a meddling patient (Sidney Toler), thinking he's doing Daniels a favor, plants the idea of suicide in Westcott's head, leading to disaster. This pre-Code melodrama moves along nicely, if predictably, and has some diverting characters, including Beulah Bondi as the older head nurse, Minna Gombell as a hard boiled nurse who's engaged to marry a policeman, Renee Whitney as a flirt, and a couple of wrestlers known as Sonovitch the Terrible Bulgarian and El Humid the Bone-Crushing Turk—real-life wrestler Tor Johnson, who found B-movie fame in the 50s as a member of Ed Wood's repertory company, plays the Bulgarian. A couple of amusing lines: Talbot is referred to at one point as having "muffed the op," and someone asks Bondi if she'd like a "bosom caresser"—that is, a drink that warms you "all the way down." [TCM]

2011-09-19T13:46:00.007-04:00

THIS ENGLAND (1941)

This episodic look at the history of one English village was intended to be a morale-boosting propaganda piece in the early dark days of WWII. It begins with an American reporter (Constance Cummings) arriving at the village of Claverly collecting information for a morale-boosting propaganda piece of her own. She doesn’t think she’ll find much—she asks if one of the "yokels" can show her around—but when farm owner John Rookby (John Clements) agrees to share the village’s history, she gets a story of the resilience of the English in the face of invasion and hard times. She and Rookby and his farmhand Appleyard (Emyln Williams) make it through a bombing raid in a tavern, and later as they look out over Beacon Hill, we're told four episodes from the past, all involving Rookbys and Appleyards, all with the same actors (including Cummings) from the modern segment. In 1086, the villagers rouse themselves against an occupying Norman invader who has threatened to disturb their livelihood by forcing all the village men to stop their own work in order to build him a road. In 1588, during the attack of the Spanish Armada, a beautiful shipwreck survivor is accused of witchcraft and treachery by Appleyard. In 1804, the Industrial Revolution upsets things, with older folks lamenting that young people won’t stay on the farm anymore. Rookby becomes rich and loses touch with the villagers, and is blamed when Appleyard’s infant son dies of malnutrition. The final sequence is set during WWI with Armistice Day celebrated as the last of its kind since the World War must clearly be the war to end all wars. A final shot in the present day confirms the heartiness of the English people and the continuity of their way of life.

Like most movies in which propaganda concerns are placed first, or even most anthology movies, this is not totally successful as art. The first segment is the most interesting, partly due to the coherent story, and partly because it features 13-year-old Roddy McDowell in his last film in Great Britain before he came to Hollywood (pictured above with Cummings and Williams). The 1588 episode lost me along the way; I wasn't sure how the hounding of a woman to suicide tied in to the overall theme of overcoming adversity, though it does end with news of the Spanish retreat. The WWI story is the shortest and least compelling—though the print I saw was almost 10 minutes shorter than the length that IMDb reports for the film, so some material may have been missing. The acting is OK, with Emlyn Williams (at left), also a well-known playwright (he wrote dialogue for this movie), stealing all his scenes, except from McDowell. Williams was also quite good in MAJOR BARBARA the same year. [Streaming]

2011-09-17T16:27:00.004-04:00

THE AFFAIRS OF ANATOL (1921)

Anatol and Vivian are on their honeymoon (with her flirty behavior, Vivian is, as a title card tells us, "putting too much honey in 'honeymoon'"). At a nightclub called the Green Fan, Anatol runs into an old grade school pal, Emilie, who has become a gold-digging jazz baby, and is being kept by Gordon, a much older man. Deciding he needs to save her from herself, Anatol takes her under his wing, much to Vivian's dismay. Gordon tells Anatol to go ahead and perform his "noble rescue work" and he'll be back in a few weeks to "pick up the pieces." At first, Emilie seems ready to change, claiming she was dazzled by "the Fairyland of Wealth" into which Gordon placed her, but soon she's taken up with Gordon again; Anatol smashes her room up good, after which Gordon proposes to her. However, this experience doesn’t cure Anatol of his need to be a white knight, and when he and Vivian decide to spend some time out in the country to repair their relationship, he falls into the same trap with Annie, the wife of a farmer who is also a church treasurer; she has spent church money on nice clothes and now needs to pay it back or her husband will be in trouble. She throws herself into the river but Anatol saves her—there is a comic scene of Vivian watching as Annie, who is pretending to be unconscious, primps in a mirror. Once again, Anatol gets taken in by a supposed innocent. The film wraps up with a third segment involving sexy dancer Satan Synne who is actually the most innocent of all of Anatol’s "affairs": she's desperate for money to pay for operations on her critically ill husband, a wounded soldier.

This episodic comic melodrama was directed by Cecil B. DeMille; it was of interest to me for its two main stars: Gloria Swanson, who plays Vivian, the wife; and Wallace Reid as Anatol, both pictured above. Reid, who was a popular silent star, was in an accident a couple of years before this film was made and became a morphine addict; he died in 1923 at the age of 31. This is the only Reid film I've seen so far, but he seems to have been far from his peak—his looks and build were declining by this time; still, he is adequate for the part. Swanson has little to do except be insulted by her husband's behavior, though she does get to indulge in a little side fling of her own near the end of the film. Agnes Ayres as Annie looks surprisingly modern, like she might pop up in a movie tomorrow. There are some color-tinted scenes and title cards, and a couple of elaborate scenes set at nightclubs. Basically fun for silent-movie fans, though at two hours, it does drag a bit in the middle. [DVD]

2011-09-15T11:33:00.002-04:00

CALL OF THE FLESH (1930)

Maria (Dorothy Jordan) lives in a convent in Seville; her older brother Enrique (Russell Hopton) visits to wish her well as she is soon to take her vows, but a little like Maria von Trapp, she's not absolutely sure this is the life for her. One night, she hears singing and cavorting over the convent wall and sees the dashing Juan (Ramon Novarro) performing at a café and she immediately loses her heart to him. Juan lives with his musical mentor Esteban (who thinks Juan is wasting his vocal gifts) and toys around with Lola, his singing partner. The next day, while out with some street kids indulging in some whimsical thievery in the marketplace, Juan meets Maria. They spend the day together and that night, when Juan discovers her story, he puts her to bed alone, determined to be more a brother than a lover to her. However, when her real brother finds out Maria has left the convent, Juan, Maria, and Esteban flee to Madrid where Juan tries for a career in opera. Eventually, he and Maria get engaged, but Esteban shows up, accuses Juan of making a harlot out of her, and takes her back to the convent. Maria and Juan are both miserable; she wastes away while Juan finally has an emotional breakthrough and gets a standing ovation one night when he is called upon to step into the starring role in a opera, though he faints offstage. Will these kids get back together before one or both of them die of heartbreak?

This romantic melodrama has little going for it except for a bravura performance by Ramon Novarro, who acts with depth and does a grand job of singing. Unfortunately, Jordan (pictured with Novarro) comes off like a rank amateur (particularly bad is her over-the-top melodramatic fit as she listens to Novarro's singing for the first time) and she and Novarro have little chemistry. Renée Adorée, who died of TB just a couple of years later, is slightly better as Lola, and Hopton makes the most of his two scenes as the brother. The film feels a bit long, but it's a must for Novarro fans. [TCM]

2011-09-13T16:23:00.002-04:00

THE V.I.P.s (1963)

GRAND HOTEL in an airport (and later, a hotel). Over a period of 12 hours or so, a number of celebrities, businessmen and rich people wait in a V.I.P lounge at Heathrow Airport for flights out which are all delayed due to fog. Industrialist Richard Burton, there to see his wife (Elizabeth Taylor) off for a Jamaican holiday, discovers that she's leaving him for a suave gigolo (Louis Jourdan) who shows her more affection than the workaholic Burton. Film director Orson Welles needs to leave the country by midnight or risk losing a lot of money to the British taxman. Australian Rod Taylor, scrappy owner of a tractor factory, needs to get to New York to fend off a takeover by a big corporation; when he wires a check that he can't cover, he and his faithful secretary (Maggie Smith, pictured with Rod Taylor) try to figure out a way to get out of trouble. A duchess (Margaret Rutherford) who has fallen on hard times is off to Florida to act as a social manager for a resort to raise money. Phone calls are made, plans are changed, flights are canceled, spats are weathered, and finally relatively happy endings are in store for all. This glossy, soapy film is mostly for Taylor/Burton fans, and both actors are in fine form—and as usual, Burton is the better actor, though Taylor is attractive and carries her part well enough. Welles seems to have fun spoofing his own persona as an art-film director who cares more about finances that he’s supposed to. Taylor and Smith work well together, though Smith's best scene is near the end, with Burton. Rutherford, doing her usual blustery, doddering act, is amusing and won an Oscar for Supporting Actress. Predictable plotlines, and directed with little style by Anthony Asquith, but fun for fans of the actors. [DVD]

2011-09-11T16:15:00.003-04:00

TORCH SONG (1953)

Joan Crawford is a Broadway musical star in the middle of rehearsals for a new show; she's a flinty egomaniac who thinks that only she knows what is good for her and her show. She berates a male dancer (a cameo by the director of the film, Charles Walters), insists that she knows more about music than her pianist, and generally abuses her director (Harry Morgan), her agent (Paul Guilfoyle), and her languid boy toy (Gig Young, pictured with Crawford). When the pianist quits, the blind Michael Wilding replaces him, complete with a seeing-eye dog who frequently snarls at Crawford. At first Crawford tries to get him fired for speaking his mind about her musical arrangements, but soon she begins to respect him and even feel affection for him. We learn that Wilding has had a thing for her for some time, and that he saw her perform not long before he went off to war and was blinded. Eventually, he manages to humanize her a bit, and they fall into each other's arms in the last moments of the film.

This odd campy mess reminded me of ALL ABOUT EVE set in the musical theater, except the fact that Crawford is aging is never commented on. She's in fine shape at nearly 50, but she's no singer (her songs are dubbed) and not an especially strong dancer, so the fact that she's still considered the toast of the Broadway musical is hard to swallow—it might have played better to highlight her concern for her age, which would have given her frequent bitchy outbursts more motivation. Wilding is OK, but it's difficult to see what about the milquetoast pianist would attract her on a romantic level, especially when Crawford pretty much plays every scene at a fever pitch, wiping everyone else off the screen. There is an odd scene in which Crawford throws an all-male party; it reads pretty much right on the surface as a gay gathering, even down to her gigolo friend Young. One number, "Two Faced Woman," has become a camp classic with Crawford in brownface, radioactive red lipstick, and a dark wig which she rips off to show her glowing orange hair. The almost amateurishly choreographed number must be seen to be believed. Marjorie Rambeau, who has a totally unmemorable part as Crawford's mother, was inexplicably nominated for an Oscar. I'm not sorry I watched this, but if you're not a fan of campy soap opera or Crawford, you can skip it. [DVD]

2011-09-08T21:10:00.002-04:00

GAMES (1967)

James Caan and Katharine Ross are a mod, swinging, totally 60s Manhattan couple, living a life of playful decadence, collecting pop art (such as pinball machines) and playing games and practical jokes. We see a party of theirs in full swing, with the two performing an elaborate magic trick, much to everyone’s world-weary delight—imagine a less kinky group of Rocky Horror "unconventional conventionists." One day, a door-to-door cosmetic saleswoman (Simone Signoret) faints at their door and they take her in. She, too, has a taste for the mildly eccentric (she carries tarot cards and a gun) and soon, Ross and Caan have more or less adopted her. The three play little games and tricks on other people (including hunky delivery boy Don Stroud, pictured) and each other, with Signoret upping the ante along the way, so that eventually, when Caan seems to catch Ross and Stroud having sex, we don't know if it's real or another game. Things quickly take a more sinister, deadly, and perhaps supernatural turn, but to reveal more would spoil the fun. Actually, with the twisty/mind-fuck plotline practically its own genre now, most viewers will probably figure out what's what long before the ending, but the proceedings are still fun. Caan looks impossibly young, Ross is lovely, Signoret, past her prime, still creates an interesting character, and Stroud makes for some nice eye candy. Fans of character actors will enjoy seeing Kent Smith, Estelle Winwood, and Ian Wolfe. We see a pinball game called Turnpike Pinball which predicts today's violent video games: the game involves traffic fatalities, and the winner "dies" as a death skull lights up. Slight spoiler: If you know Signoret's previous acting credits, you may figure out where this is going the moment she shows up. [Cable]

2011-09-06T20:42:00.002-04:00

SECRETS (1933)

One of only a handful of talkies starring Mary Pickford. Her name is still well known among film buffs, if only because of her role in establishing United Artists with Charlie Chaplin and her husband Douglas Fairbanks, but her films are hard to come by. I’ve only seen one, LITTLE ANNIE ROONEY, in which, at the age of 33, she played a teenage street waif, and none too convincingly. But apparently the public loved her in those roles. By the sound era, she was finally playing adults, but in this, her last film before retiring, she plays a character from youth to old age. The film breaks neatly into three parts. In the first half-hour, set in what appears to be post-Civil War New England, Pickford is a debutante, heading for a boring arranged marriage. She and the relatively dashing Leslie Howard meet cute during a buggy ride, fall quickly in love, and run off together to the Wild West as a pioneer couple. The second part of the film shows them establishing a home on the range (with handyman/sidekick Ned Sparks, a grouchy fellow incongruously nicknamed Sunshine, the best laugh in the movie). They've got a cattle business going, but when rustlers break in while Howard is out, threaten Pickford and her baby, and steal their cattle, Howard and others take the law into their own hands and lynch some of the thieves. Unfortunately, the survivors return for a shootout, resulting in the death of the child (a bloodless but startling scene). In the final section, set several years later, Howard, who has become a wealthy and important citizen, runs for governor, but his dreams are almost dashed when an affair he's been having with a saucy Mexican woman becomes public knowledge.

This fits snugly into the family saga genre, or a subgenre I have dubbed the "abridged family saga," in which a family story which covers many years is told in too short a time to have much narrative impact. Each individual section could probably have been expanded into a film of its own, but as it stands, the parts don’t cohere into an effective whole. Pickford, at 40, is too old to pull off the cutesy ingénue of the opening section, but she handles the rest of the film fairly well, looking a bit like Helen Hayes by the end. Howard is fine as the essentially good man who strays, though because of the "abridgement" of the narrative, we mostly have to take his goodness on faith. Mona Maris is the rather unlikely mistress (we are informed that she is not the first), the reliably gruff C. Aubrey Smith is good as Pickford's father, and Sparks is fun as always. No one else makes an impression (though of course I would notice the attractive Huntley Gordon in a small role as the couple's grown son in the last section). Not a bad film, but mostly of interest to fans of Pickford. [TCM]

2011-09-02T22:24:00.004-04:00

THE GARDEN MURDER CASE (1936)

Jockey Raymond Walton acts like he's in a trance before a big race in which he's riding a horse belonging to rich businessman Gene Lockhart; he seems convinced he's going to die, and he does, in an accident on the racetrack. Walton's father blames Lockhart for his son's death and he's not the only one who doesn’t like Lockhart; his mistress, a nurse, is about to sue him for breach of promise, and his niece (Virginia Bruce) is pissed because Lockhart is about to send her boyfriend (Kent Smith) to Paraguay so she can't marry him. Also in Lockhart's inner circle is a retired British soldier whose wife (Frieda Inescort) was having an affair with the jockey. When Lockhart is found dead in his study, apparently a suicide, Philo Vance (Edmund Lowe) works on the case with the police. There's another suicide before Vance figures out that folks are being hypnotized into killing themselves; will Vance be the next victim? I've noted before that Philo Vance seems to be the least "marked" of the big 30s movie detectives. He's a man of independent means, and that's all we know about him. The character was played by a variety of actors, and therefore never strongly identified with any one star. Lowe, a drab, middle-range actor with no discernible personality, is OK in the part, though not as good as William Powell was in THE KENNEL MURDER CASE. But Lowe's part is relatively small compared to most leading detective men, and the supporting cast is strong, especially Bruce, H.B. Warner as the old Brit, Jessie Ralph as Lockhart's seriously nasty bitch of a mother, and Nat Pendleton as a comic relief cop. The hypnosis angle is obvious from the start, but the plot is blessedly coherent and easy to follow, and I was surprised by the identity of the culprit. [TCM]

2011-08-30T11:05:00.003-04:00

DOUBTING THOMAS (1935)

When a "talent scout" comes to a small Midwestern town to take screen tests (for anyone with the $75 fee), many of the town's citizens line up, including young beautician Peggy. She tries to get the money from her boyfriend Jimmy but he's leery about the whole thing, and his father, Thomas Brown (Will Rogers), thinks rightfully so; he worries that the whole town will go crazy hoping to be discovered. Brown leaves town for a convention and while he's gone, his wife winds up as part of the craze when she takes a lead role in a community theater production. When a disapproving Brown returns, he spreads the rumor that a big Hollywood director named Von Blitzen will be in town to see the tests. The opening night of the play is a disaster and Von Blitzen thinks all the screen tests were terrible—except for a little comedy routine that Brown did. Of course, Von Blitzen is just an actor hired to play a part to teach the townsfolk a lesson, and after Brown smoothes some ruffled feathers, all's quiet in town again.

This mild comedy doesn’t feel like a typical Will Rogers vehicle and it isn't: it's based on a popular play of the day called The Torch Bearers. Rogers gets to do a little of his trademark wise and dry drawling, but this is really an ensemble piece that's been adjusted to focus on Rogers. The actor to watch here is Billie Burke as his wife; in the play-within-the-movie, she gives a hysterically bad performance in a mummified Mae West fashion. The entire play sequence is great fun; it feels like Noises Off, the amusing 90s farce that features the onstage and backstage antics of an acting troupe. Other cast members worth seeing include Sterling Holloway as a prompter who keeps forgetting to give the actors their cues, Alison Skipworth as the pompous director, John Qualen as Von Blitzen, and Frank Albertson as Rogers' son. At times the whole thing feels almost modern, especially the thirst for fame theme (though today the plot would involve casting for a reality TV show), except for Rogers—he's not bad, but with his slower pacing, it feels like he walked in from a whole different movie. [DVD]

2011-08-28T18:25:00.004-04:00

TARZAN AND THE SLAVE GIRL (1950)

Lex Barker's second turn as Tarzan begins much like his first one, with Tarzan and Jane (Vanessa Brown) enjoying a casual day riding elephants in the jungle. They pass some women of the Nagasi tribe out doing chores by the river when one of them screams and vanishes. The leader of the tribe thinks that an evil spirit snatched her away, but when Jane is snatched, Tarzan goes into action, saving Jane and capturing one of the abductors. When the Nagasi try to question him, he falls deathly ill. A doctor from a nearby village diagnoses the illness as highly contagious and makes up a serum. Tarzan, Jane, the doc, his busty nurse Lola, and her lazy boyfriend Neil go to the Nagasi village to administer the antidote, then decide to head further into the jungle to find the source of the disease. It turns out that the kidnapper's village has been overrun by this plague and they're taking women from nearby villages in hopes of repopulating. The prince has his hands full: his father, the king, has just died of the disease and is about to be buried, his young son is mortally sick, and he is about to execute his high priest, who has been no help. Tarzan tries to save Jane and Lola, who have been placed in the majestic and soon-to-be-sealed tomb of the king, but winds up trapped with them; the doctor tries to save the Prince's son but finds he has lost the serum somewhere on the journey. Can Cheetah save the day?

This is less interesting than TARZAN'S MAGIC FOUNTAIN, but Barker's energetic heroics and a moderately interesting cast help make this watchable. Irish actor Arthur Shields is fine as the doctor, Denise Darcel (pictured) is an enticing Lola--she and Jane have a hair-pulling, furniture-crushing fistfight--and Robert Alda and Hurd Hatfield do what they can in the underwritten roles of the boyfriend and the prince. There's a nice action scene involving an attack by camouflaged natives, and in the climax involves a pit with hungry lions. Vanessa Brown is a rather lackluster Jane, though her bullet-bra look will have its admirers. [TCM]

2011-08-24T11:33:00.002-04:00

TANGLED DESTINIES (1932)

A small passenger plane heading from Albuquerque to Los Angeles is forced to land in the middle of nowhere because of an approaching storm. All thirteen people find refuge in a large abandoned house and settle in for the night. Among the characters: Randy, the unflappable pilot; Tommy, the prone-to-anger co-pilot; Ruth, the stewardess who is the object of both their affections; Miss Dagget, a elderly knitter; a math professor; a lawyer; an ex-prizefighter; a minister; a man and his rich fiancée; and a Chinese art collector. They pass the time by playing cards, chatting, and fixing some soup until the lights go out. When they come back on, one of the men, a Mr. Forbes, is found dead; it turns out that Forbes was carrying a small fortune in jewels and his friend MacGinnis was actually a special agent who was supposed to protect him. The old lady finds the gems stashed in her knitting bag, but they're fakes, so someone in the group not only is a murderer but also has the real gems. Other people are unmasked as not quite what they seem to be, and after the lights go out one more time, the pilots solve the case. This is a B-film from the "Forgotten Horrors" DVD set that is certainly not a horror film, but instead a cracking good mystery, if you can get past the cheap sets. The plot is interesting, though the character backstories are occasionally more complex then needed. There are virtually no actors in this film I had ever heard of but they acquit themselves nicely, especially Glenn Tryon (pictured) and Gene Morgan as the pilots and Ethel Wales as the knitting lady. [DVD]

2011-08-21T12:14:00.005-04:00

THE CRIMSON KIMONO (1959)

In the striking opening shots of this cop/buddy movie, downtown Los Angeles looks like the nightmarish Pottersville vision of Bedford Falls in It's a Wonderful Life. Stripper Sugar Torch is chased out of her dressing room and shot down in the street. Cops Glenn Corbett and James Shigeta, Korean War buddies and current-day roommates, investigate and discover that she had been working on a new production number in which she would have played a geisha who was murdered by a brick-crushing karate expert. Shigeta, who has contacts in LA's Little Tokyo, questions a judo instructor who was going to participate in the act. Meanwhile, Corbett talks to Victoria Shaw, an artist who had done a painting of Sugar in her kimono. Both men stir up some trouble, leading Corbett's old friend Anna Lee, herself an artist, to keep an eye on Shaw who has been ID'd in the press as a possible witness. Corbett falls for Shaw, but Shaw soon finds herself more interested in Shigeta, leading to tensions between the two friends, exacerbated by the racial element in the romantic triangle. During what is supposed to be a friendly kendo tournament between Caucasians and Nisei (first-generation Japanese-Americans), Shigeta beats the hell out of Corbett, venting over what he thinks is Corbett's racist belief that Shigeta isn't good enough for Shaw. In a climax set during a Japanese New Year parade, the killer is caught and the friendship seems to be repaired.

One is tempted to treat this Samuel Fuller film as a B-crime film, but it's really more a forerunner of the later "buddy movie" genre; even though Sugar Torch's murder is the starting point, we almost cease to care about the solution to the crime because the cops' relationship and the evolving love triangle take center stage. Corbett (pictured at left, perhaps best known for replacing George Maharis in the 60's TV show Route 66) and Shigeta (star of Flower Drum Song who went on to a long character actor career in TV) work well together, and Shaw pulls off the difficult task of genuinely liking both men but only loving one of them. Lee does a nice job against type as a tough old gal with a heart of gold--though for a while, I was sure she was the killer. This black and white film was shot in widescreen and its many notably striking compositions give it the look of a higher-budget movie. Rarely shown on cable, but worth searching for on DVD as part of the Samuel Fuller Collection from Sony. [DVD]

2011-08-18T16:04:00.002-04:00

SCANDAL SHEET (1952)

John Derek is a star crime reporter for the New York Express, a once-respectable newspaper that is now a sensationalistic tabloid run by the brusque Broderick Crawford. Stockholders don't like the direction the paper has taken, believing they are pandering to the tastes of "base morons." Feature writer Donna Reed is sweet on Derek but also hates the paper's direction and Derek's sneaky ways of getting a story. One night, at a lonely hearts dance sponsored by the paper, Crawford meets up with his wife (Rosemary DeCamp), a woman he dumped years ago, after which he changed his name and hid his past; still bitter, she threatens to expose him but during a vigorous argument, he accidentally kills her. Of course, Derek jumps on the story and Crawford has to simultaneously encourage him to find the killer while staying one step ahead of him, and Reed, and the cops.

This B-thriller with a noir touch is a little gem. There are plot elements from THE BIG CLOCK (the killer boss whose employee is investigating his crime) and DOUBLE INDEMNITY (the older guy mentoring the younger guy). Crawford gives a sterling performance, all sweat and bluster and fear; Derek (pictured above) is handsome and sincere; DeCamp's role is small but she makes a strong impression as a bitter, desperate woman near the end of her rope. Reed is OK--her role is the weakest--but veteran supporting player Henry O’Neill is a standout as an alcoholic ex-reporter who gets involved in the case, with tragic results. Based on a book by Samuel Fuller and directed by Phil Karlsen (KANSAS CITY CONFIDENTIAL). Maybe not a great movie but a very good one, and required viewing for noir fans. [TCM]

2011-08-14T13:47:00.003-04:00

FOUR SIDED TRIANGLE (1953)

When they were young, British boys Bill and Robin were both taken with American girl Lena, though in their swashbuckling games, Robin always won the girl. As young adults, Lena goes back to the States and the boys go to Cambridge where they become scientists who, years later, develop a powerful machine which is variously called the Duplicator or the Replicator or the Reproducer. Lena returns to their village of Haldeen in time to see the machine at work in their laboratory in a barn; they take a gold watch belonging to Bill's guardian and mentor Dr. Harvey, put it under a clear plastic dome, get a lot of electrical doodads going, and an exact copy of the watch appears under another dome across the room. While Robin goes off to London to get their duplication machine company going, Bill begins experimenting with living creatures. He is tampering in God's domain with an ulterior motive: making a clone of Lena, who still loves Robin, so he can have his own Lena. The duplicating is successful, and for a time Bill is happy with Lena II (whom he calls Helen), but while they're on a romantic vacation, he finds out that Helen not only has all of Lena’s memories, she’s also in love with Robin. Can further godless tampering, involving electrically wiping out all of Helen's memories, make him happy?

If you’ve seen or read any version of the Frankenstein story, you know the answer to that. This version must be one of the first SF films to approach the idea of cloning (though they never call it that), and there is great potential here, but it's squandered as the movie hews closer to romantic melodrama than to speculative fiction. Despite all the interesting philosophical ideas that could be raised here (not just the ethics of reproducing people but reproducing medicines, nuclear materials, and even money), virtually no voices of concern are raised except for some mild tut-tutting by Harvey, who actually uses a phrase very much like "God's domain" at one point, saying "You're not God, Bill!" Special effects are minimal, though the raging fire that ends the film is well done, and acting is adequate, no more, with Barbara Peyton (pictured) fine as the two Lenas and James Hayter faring the best as Dr. Harvey. Worth seeing as a historical footnote to modern-day cloning films. [DVD]

2011-08-11T15:48:00.002-04:00

STARS AND STRIPES FOREVER (1952)

Hollywood biopic about bandleader and composer John Philip Sousa starring a butched-up Clifton Webb as the man who wrote all the marches we still know, and which are still played by marching bands all over the country--and incidentally, the music used as the Monty Python theme. The film begins with Sousa, already in middle age, deciding to retire as the leader of the Marine Corps Marching Band because, as much as he loves his work, he's making no money. Young Robert Wagner, who joined the Corps just to work with Sousa, has invented an instrument called the sousaphone, and a flattered Sousa arranges for Wagner to be excused from service to join him in the creation of a commercial band. Wagner's in love with Debra Paget, a singer whom he helps to get a job in the band, but because Sousa won’t allow wives to travel with husbands, the two must marry in secret. Sousa's band is successful and he keeps writing popular marches; Wagner goes to fight in the Spanish-American War and loses a leg, but returns home and Sousa brings him on stage at a concert to play his sousaphone. Even though the screenplay was supposedly based on Sousa's memoirs, few of the movie's major narrative details are true (the sousaphone was commissioned by Sousa himself), the storyline is not very compelling, and Paget is bland, but Webb and Wagner are fun, Ruth Hussey gets a couple of good moments as Sousa's wife, and just when I would be ready to quit watching, there would be a rousing march or other musical number that kept me away from the remote. [FMC]

2011-08-09T15:23:00.004-04:00

NIGHTFALL (1957)

Commercial artist Aldo Ray is in downtown Los Angeles seeming a bit paranoid when he's chatted up near the bus station by James Gregory—we soon find out Ray has good reason to be paranoid: Gregory is an insurance investigator who's been trailing Ray, thinking he's got some missing bank heist money. But it's not Gregory that Ray is afraid of, it's the two tough guys (stoic Brian Keith and sadistic Rudy Bond) who actually stole the money, lost it, and now think Ray has it. Later that evening, Ray is approached in a bar by Anne Bancroft, a fashion model who’s lost her purse and needs Ray to pay for her drink. The two hit it off, but when they leave the bar, Keith and Bond show up and abduct Ray. Ray thinks Bancroft set him up (which she didn't), and Bancroft thinks the men are cops (which they aren't). Ray is taken to an oil derrick, beat up and interrogated, and when he keeps claiming he doesn't have the money, they threaten to tie him down and let the oil pump kill him. Ray manages to escape, finds Bancroft, and goes on the run. Flashbacks fill us in on Ray's backstory: he and a buddy (Frank Albertson) were camping in snowy Wyoming, and got accidently tangled up bank robbers Keith and Bond. Bond killed Albertson and shot Ray, leaving him for dead. He also took the wrong satchel and when Ray returns to consciousness, he grabbed the money but lost it in the snow, where it remains. Back in the present, they all wind up in Wyoming where Gregory, believing Ray's story, helps him and Bancroft look for the cash, with Keith and Bond in hot pursuit.

This is an interesting film noir with a handful of standout features. The first half has that traditional noir look, with lots of shadowy nighttime city streets, but the climax plays out in sunny, snowy hills, not your typical noir setting. The flashbacks are unconventional, presented piecemeal through the first two-thirds of the story. It's not completely clear, but Ray seems to have a memory problem in the beginning, so the fragmented backstory may be reflecting his own dawning realization of what’s going on—the memory thing feels like something that was present in a first draft of the screenplay but largely removed by the time filming started. Gruff, beefy Ray plays against type, not only because he's an artist, but also because he is largely a passive physical presence who reacts to the threat of violence like most average people would; not in a blustery, "bring it on" way but more in a "hey, buddy, don’t hurt me" way, not exactly cowering, but not confrontational. It's fun to see Keith, who I know mostly as kindly Uncle Bill in the 60s TV show Family Affair, as a bad guy. Bond, an actor I was unfamiliar with, does a nice job as a hair-trigger sadist psycho—Keith is able to keep him under control, but just barely. The chemistry between the rough-hewn Ray and the smooth Bancroft (both pictured above) works nicely. At one point, she murmurs to him, "You’re the most wanted man I know." The climax, involving a runaway snowplow, conjures up images of the climax of the Coen Brothers' FARGO (though we don’t see any blood or gore in this film). [DVD]

2011-08-06T14:45:00.002-04:00

SOMETHING FOR THE BOYS (1944)

Three cousins who don't know each other inherit a rundown Southern plantation and decide to fix it up and rent out rooms to Army wives so they can live near their hubbies at a nearby barracks. The mismatched cousins are Phil Silvers (perpetually boorish and unfunny), Vivian Blaine (pleasant if unexceptional), and Latin bombshell Carmen Miranda. Gruff sergeant Michael O'Shea gets sweet on Blaine while they all collaborate to put on a show to cover the renovation expenses. Sheila Ryan provides some conflict as O'Shea’s obnoxious former girlfriend, and Perry Como has one of his few acting roles as the handsome soldier with whom Ryan gets involved. There's not much here if you're not already a fan of Miranda's; she is fun but her running gag about getting radio reception through her teeth gets tiresome. There is a war games sequence and some suspense generated when the house is declared off-limits because of a misunderstanding, but everything is righted in the end. The songs are average, the one standout being "Eighty Miles Out of Atlanta." Several people on IMDb claim this has been shown frequently with reels out of order, but that seems to have been fixed for the DVD release. [DVD]

2011-08-02T15:37:00.004-04:00

TIGER FANGS (1943)

During WWII, animal collector Frank Buck (playing himself) is sent by the government to Malaya to find out what's behind a rash of tiger attacks that is freaking out the locals and slowing work on a rubber plantation, which is in turn hurting the production of Allied war materials. The plantation manager (J. Farrell McDonald) and his handsome nephew (Howard Banks) and lovely granddaughter (June Duprez) are anxious to help Buck and his sidekick (Duncan Renaldo). The natives believe that the tiger attacks are due to the phenomenon known as "djinndaks" (spelling uncertain), the tigers having been possessed magically by the souls of dead Japanese soldiers. We discover quickly that the tubby Gratz (Dan Seymour), head of the Asiatic Animal Export Company, is actually in league with a Nazi doctor (Arno Frey); they poison tigers that they've caught, then let them out of their cages so they'll run crazy and cause havoc. Can Buck and his friends catch them and stop them, and more importantly, can they rescue Duprez when a panther is let loose in her bedroom?

Frank Buck was a real-life adventurer and collector of exotic animals whose slogan (and title of his bestselling book) was "Bring 'em back alive!" He also appeared in a few documentaries and later played himself in a couple of B-films. On the evidence of this one, he couldn't act his way out of a paper bag, but his presence gives the film an aura of authenticity, despite having been shot on a studio backlot with stock footage inserted here and there. He reads his lines one of two ways: 1) like he's reading them off of cue cards: "Thanks for all your…. help, Pete"; 2) or with a little too much growly melodramatic enthusiasm: "That Gratz smells like a Hun!" Duprez (pictured with Renaldo), who gave decent performances in AND THEN THERE WERE NONE and THIEF OF BAGDAD, is almost as bad as Buck. The young Banks, who should be the romantic hero, has nothing to do. This means that the best and most charismatic performances are given by the bad guys, Seymour and Frey. Of course, the writing is not particularly strong; early on, when Buck is told that tigers are carrying off children and killing men and women, he replies, "And the natives are taking it badly?" The film is slow going for a while but the last 20 minutes (out of a one hour running time) are filled with action, and there are two particularly effective scenes, one of a tiger mauling a native and another of an elephant stampede in which a bad guy gets crushed to death inside a cabin. Recommended only as a B-movie novelty. [DVD]

2011-07-30T19:56:00.002-04:00

WAYNE MURDER CASE (1934)
aka A STRANGE ADVENTURE

Totally routine, dreadfully slow B-movie murder mystery of the "reading of the will in an old dark house" variety. Cranky old bachelor Silas Wayne has gathered his good-for-nothing relatives to his home for the signing of his will. Some of them are getting one dollar, including Claude (Eddie Phillips) his seemingly well-meaning but suspicious-acting nephew and secretary, though a valuable (but cursed) diamond is being left to his faithful maid (Lucille La Verne). He's leaving the bulk of his estate to young Gloria, on the condition that she not marry her boyfriend, the slimy and ever-neurotic Dwight Frye (pictured). However, in the middle of the signing, Silas collapses and dies, apparently due to a heart condition, but when the doctor (Jason Robards) discovers a knife in his chest, the police are called in. Detective Regis Toomey eventually gets to the bottom of things with some help from his girlfriend, wisecracking reporter Nosey Toodles (June Clyde). Halfway through the movie, a mysterious hooded figure shows up, mostly, it seems, to scare the bejesus out of shuffling black butler Snowflake Toones. The slow pace of the proceedings is made more unbearable by a total lack of background music. The actors try but can't do much with the bland material. Clyde tries the hardest, but Toomey, who just wasn't leading man material, can't keep up with her. Robards, father of the more famous Jason Robards Jr., sounds at times like he's doing a Jack Benny impression. Only of interest to B-movie buffs. [DVD]

2011-07-27T14:24:00.002-04:00

TARZAN'S MAGIC FOUNTAIN (1949)

It's just another day in the jungle for Tarzan, Jane and Cheetah until they find the remains of an old plane crash with a log kept by Gloria Jones, a famous aviatrix who disappeared in 1928 and is presumed dead. Tarzan takes the log to two traders, Trask and Dodd, but when he finds out that her testimony could free Jessup, a man imprisoned for murder, Tarzan heads for the mysterious Blue Valley, where he knows that Gloria is living, to bring her back to civilization. Even though she’s 50 years old, she looks 25, and Trask and Dodd figure out that something about living in the Valley keeps folks young and healthy. They send a thuggish underling to find the Valley, but the natives, who dress in leopard skins, shoot flaming arrows across the gorge at the entrance, killing the thug. After Gloria gives her testimony, she returns with Jessup, her new husband; being out in the world has caused her to look her natural age and she wants to take Jessup to the Valley where they can live together. Tarzan is reluctant to barge in on the secret land again, so Jane decides to take them. Along the way, the two traders connive to join them. Tarzan follows in secret and gets them out of a couple of jams, then takes Gloria and Jessup into the Valley where he sees the Magic Fountain whose water keeps young. Meanwhile, Jane and the unscrupulous traders, who want to exploit the Valley, are stuck on the other side of the gorge, with flaming arrows heading their way. Can Tarzan save the day?

Johnny Weissmuller had become too old and paunchy to play a hunky jungle hero, so he is replaced here by Lex Barker, who is 30, blond, fairly handsome, and in fine shape. He's from a high society family and looks it, and he doesn’t have the somewhat primitive heft and command of Weissmuller, but he makes up for that with his lithe, athletic bearing. As for acting, that's never a talent called upon very often for the role of Tarzan, but at least Barker isn't sleepwalking through the role as his predecessor seemed to be doing at times. Brenda Joyce is a passable Jane and Evelyn Ankers is fine as Gloria. Albert Dekker brings his villainous glowering to the role of Trask, and handsome B-actor Charles Drake plays well against his usual nice-guy type as Dodd. There's a little too much time given over to chimp shenanigans, though the final joke, with Cheetah drinking some of the magic fountain water, is worth seeing. The flaming spear shooting scenes are quite effective. [TCM]

2011-07-26T14:08:00.005-04:00

THE BUTTERCUP CHAIN (1970)

Twin sisters have children on the same day, one a boy and one a girl. The boy's mother dies young and both cousins are raised by the girl's mother. Separated in their teens when the girl goes off to school, they are reunited in their early 20s. The boy (Hywell Bennett) clearly has a thing for the girl (Jane Asher) and sublimates it by, while on a picnic in the English countryside, declaring his intention to "pimp" her to some appropriate man, and he has success with the first man they meet, a hunky and handsome Swede (Sven-Bertil Taube, pictured with Asher) who makes quite an impression by skinnydipping in the river. Sven returns the favor by getting Hywell a woman, American Leigh Taylor-Young. Hywell and Leigh get it on right away, but when they rent a house in Spain for a 2-week getaway, Jane doesn’t seem quite ready to lose her virginity to Sven. Eventually, she gives in (and Jane catches cousin Hywell spying on some of their trysts) but Leigh, who has been around the block a couple times, picks up on to the incest vibe between the cousins and has a brief affair with Sven. The four head back to the city and live together in Hywell's flat, then rent a countryside vacation house near Clive Revill, Leigh's rich, middle-aged former lover. The vaguely unsettled feeling amongst the four comes to a head when Leigh announces her pregnancy—the father could be Hywell, Sven or Clive. Sven marries her and they go off to Sweden. When the four reunite a year later, tragedy occurs when Leigh's baby dies while left unattended on a rocky beach (while Leigh and Hywell have sex). Leigh goes a little crazy and strips naked on a disco floor. Clive re-enters the scene, and Hywell and Jane finally seem ready to face their feelings for each other—or are they?

On this plus side, this has sumptuous colorful cinematography; on the minus side is most everything else. Really, it's not a terrible movie, but given the era and the free-love-meets-incest plotline, it should have been more interesting (or at least had more nudity). All four main characters are sorely underdeveloped. Bennett (at right) and Asher have some chemistry, but remain curiously bland figures. Taylor-Young gives a flat-out bad performance, part of the problem being that her character remains a total (and totally boring) cipher. Taube gets to show off some chest now and again, and he's the most sympathetic person in sight, but even he's not compelling enough to keep the viewer hooked on the soap opera antics of the young and overprivileged of the late 60s. The title comes from a chain of flowers that Asher makes and gives to Taube during the picnic and which is never referenced again. Chain of Fools might have made a better title. [DVD]

2011-07-23T12:42:00.004-04:00

TARZAN THE APE MAN (1932)

My summer Tarzan marathon (coinciding with Turner Classic's Saturday showings) is not intended to be complete; I missed most of the Weissmuller films so I'll mostly be reviewing films from the 50s and 60s, and I'll be picking and choosing among those. But I thought I should backtrack and re-watch the very first film in the series, before Tarzan got "tamed" by the Production Code and the movies turned into kiddie matinees. In Africa, British trader Parker (C. Aubrey Smith) and his younger associate Holt (Neil Hamilton) are about to head out into unexplored territory to find the fabled Elephant’s Graveyard—so they can harvest it for ivory. When Parker's lovely young daughter Jane (Maureen O'Sullivan) arrives to stay, saying she's through with civilization (though she brings about a dozen trunks with her), they let her tag along. After the group gets past a dangerous cliff and a river full of hippos and crocodiles, Jane is whisked away by Tarzan, a strange man in a loincloth living alone in the jungle who travels through the treetops; he can communicate with animals just fine (partly through language, partly through his infamous echoing yell) but has problems with Jane. He lets her go but she remains fascinated by this primitive man, and when the traders' group is attacked by savage dwarfs (definitely not pygmies, we are told) and about to be thrown into a pit with a wild ape, Tarzan rescues them. They discover the graveyard, at which point old Parker dies; Holt decides to come back with a team of ivory harvesters, but Jane announces she's staying with Tarzan.

Unlike Edgar Rice Burroughs' original character, this Tarzan has no backstory (at least in this film) and speaks only in single words: "Tarzan"; "Jane"; "hurt." Weissmuller, an Olympic swimming champ, does a nice job; he doesn't have to do much acting, he has enough chemistry with O'Sullivan that we can understand why she decides to stay, and he gets to show off his athletic abilities with lots of running, jumping, swimming, swinging through trees (with a trapeze bar often visible), and fighting animals. O'Sullivan is cute and perky and likable. Smith and Hamilton aren't exactly painted as bad guys, though in future films, anyone wanting to disturb the ways of the jungle will be considered a villain. This pre-Code film is not particularly sexy (nude swimming would happen in the second film, TARZAN AND HIS MATE) though it is quite violent, especially in the climax when Tarzan kills an ape with a knife through the eye followed by throat-cutting, and an elephant stampede destroys the dwarfs’ village. Some African location footage is interspersed here and there, sometimes effectively, sometimes not (a scene in which Smith and O'Sullivan supposedly interact with a native tribe is especially badly done). This and MATE are certainly the best of the early Tarzans, partly because the formula hadn’t hardened, and they hadn’t decided to make Cheetah "cute" yet. See my review of the 1959 remake here. [DVD]

2011-07-20T14:47:00.003-04:00

KIPPS (1941)

A Dickensian coming-of-age story based on what I assume is a fairly Dickensian coming-of-age novel by H.G. Wells. Sometime around the turn of the century, young Arthur Kipps (Michael Redgrave, pictured) is parted from Ann, a girl he's sweet on, and sent away from his home village to be an apprentice to Mr. Shalford in his large clothing store (more the size of a department store—the workers all live in a barracks-style building attached to the store). He reaches adulthood and proves to be a fine worker, but is not totally satisfied with his pinched working-class prospects and goes to a school for self-improvement where he takes a class in woodcarving taught by the lovely, upper-class Helen (Diana Wynyard), to whom he takes a fancy. One evening he is almost run over in a bicycle accident by a boisterous actor named Chillerlow. The actor takes Kipps back to his flat where he puts on a one-man version of a play he's written. They both get drunk and Kipps doesn't make it back to Shalford's until morning, missing the curfew, and is fired. By outrageous luck, Chillerlow arrives at the store to tell Kipps that his name is in the paper: he has been left a nice house and a lot of money by his late grandfather. Moving up in the world, Kipps begins to court Helen (and her brother agrees to manage his money for him) but also meets up again with his grown-up old flame Ann (Phyllis Calvert). Further adventures bring further ups and down, and a betrayal by Ann’s brother brings what seems like a permanent financial reversal, but one more time, Chillerlow has a grand bit of luck for Kipps.

This is a very middle-working class movie; the lower class is to be gotten out of, but the upper class men and women, though attractive, are ultimately presented as empty and worthless. (Hint, hint: guess which woman he winds up with at the happy ending?) Redgrave is good, but like the character of Pip in Great Expectations (of which this occasionally reminded me), he comes off as a rather bland and passive fellow, and the cast of characters around him is more interesting. Standouts include Wynyard, Calvert, Michael Wilding (as Wynyard's brother), Arthur Riscoe (whom I'd never heard of) as Chillerlow, Hermione Baddeley as a friendly co-worker at the store, and especially Max Adrian as Coote, one of those smarmy, insincere people who ingratiate themselves with the upper class in order to get what they want, and who is instrumental in Kipps' financial fall--Adrian looks amazingly like Monty Python's Terry Jones. The episodic film takes its time until the last 15 minutes when it rushes to an end; this is probably because the American print, which I saw, runs 82 minutes, but the original British film ran almost a half-hour longer. [FMC]

2011-07-16T10:21:00.004-04:00

SODOM AND GOMORRAH (1962)
aka THE LAST DAYS OF SODOM AND GOMORRAH

Sodom and Gomorrah are cities of "sin and unspeakable vice," ruled by a wicked Queen (Anouk Aimee) who seems to have a love/hate relationship with her brother Astaroth (Stanley Baker, at right)—and that may be literal, as there seem to be sexual sparks between the two on occasion (that is, when she's not flirting with her handmaidens and he's not seducing visiting women). The cities also have a large slave population for working the salt mines. Lot (Stewart Granger) brings his wandering Hebrews to a river near Sodom, hoping to set up living quarters outside the city. When Lot agrees to help Sodom fight the warring Helamites, the Queen gives them some land and they are able to thrive there for a time, but there is tension because of anti-slavery feelings of the Hebrews. The Queen gives Lot, a recent widow with two young and comely daughters, a Sodomite slave girl named Ildith (Pier Angeli) who teaches the daughters to wear make-up (gasp!) but is otherwise a decent sort, and soon Lot marries her. The Hebrews help to drive back the Helamites, but their own land is destroyed and Lot reluctantly decides to move his people into Sodom, which of course, leads to their corruption, though Lot fails to notice because he’s soon living the high life after the Queen appoints him First Minister of Sodom. It isn’t until much later that Lot discovers that Astaroth has seduced both of his daughters. When Lot kills Astaroth in a knife fight during a banquet, the Queen says he's become a true Sodomite, finding it "delicious to cause death." After he sees the error of his ways, Lot has a visitation from two angels (two grumpy old men) telling him to take the Hebrews away, and ordering them not to look back as Jehovah destroys Sodom. The film ends with the city's destruction and the inevitable scene of Lot’s wife looking back anyway and being turned into a pillar of salt.

There is lots more plot to this overstuffed but slow-moving Biblical epic, but not all the narrative threads were clear to me. For example, early on Astaroth strikes a secret deal with the Helamites but I was never clear what this was about. There is a second-in-command Hebrew character named Ishamael (Giacomo Rossi Stuart) but he has little to do except stand around, look handsome, and occasionally act as Lot’s conscience. This isn’t exactly a B-film (though since most of the cast is Italian, the post-dubbed dialogue gives the film the feel of a cheapie Hercules movie), but the effects budget should have been higher. There are two well-done action sequences: the first is the battle with the Helamites, which plays out like the Red Sea story in reverse as the Hebrews flood their land to kill the attackers; the second is the destruction of the cities with lightning, earthquakes, and fire. Though the use of miniature sets is fairly obvious, the scene is still impressive here and there. The best actor is Stanley Baker, who almost makes you cheer for his slimy, treacherous Sodomite character, who, after he's been kissing on one of Lot's daughters, says to her, "Do I remind you of your father?" and then tries to arrange a three-way with a soldier. Granger (pictured behind Baker) tires hard but is rather colorless. At 2-1/2 hours, this is definitely too long, but if you stick with it through the slow first hour, things do pick up. If nothing else, there are lots of attractive men and skimpily-clad women to watch. My favorite line: "Be careful of Sodomite patrols!" [FMC]

2011-07-14T13:37:00.002-04:00

HOTEL RESERVE (1944)

This average spy thriller is set at a small resort hotel on the French Rivera just before the outbreak of WWII. James Mason, a medical student and amateur photographer, is hauled in by the police when the film in his camera is discovered to have some snapshots of military installations, photos that a German spy might have taken. Mason's not a spy and the police know it, but they want him to go back to the hotel and find out which guest might have accidentally used his camera for their espionage. The suspects include a pompous windbag who is wrong about virtually everything he says, a scruffy fisherman, a German loner, a newlywed couple, the female manager of the hotel, and, of course, a pretty young girl whom Mason can fall for while he's risking his reputation and his life with his somewhat sloppy investigation. Most critics compare this unfavorably to a Hitchcock thriller, but I think that’s asking it to be something it isn't and, as an RKO B-film, could never have been, not to mention that the film has three directors given credit, which is never a good sign. It does occasionally have some nice visual touches that wouldn't have been out of place in a Hitchcock film, but the lower your expectations, the more you're likely to enjoy this film. The plot has holes and the acting is so-so, with the standouts being the young Mason, the always reliable Herbert Lom (pictured), and Lucie Mannheim as the hotel proprietress. Not especially memorable, but not a waste of time for fans of the stagy WWII B-spy films, like me. [TCM]

2011-07-12T15:48:00.002-04:00

MOROCCO (1930)

Gary Cooper is a Foreign Legionnaire who is temporarily stationed in Morocco, where he gets the hots for Marlene Dietrich, a sultry singer and dancer in a small café. On her first night, she causes a sensation when she comes out in a tuxedo; the rowdy crowd makes fun of her, but they are silenced by Cooper, who wants to let her do her thing. Her thing consists of strolling through the crowd flirting with everyone (even giving a seductive kiss to a shocked young woman) and tossing Cooper a flower as she leaves the floor. However, the older and richer Adolphe Menjou is also obsessed with Dietrich, and he has the means to help her rise in society. While Cooper goes after Dietrich, he is not lacking for female companionship, and his affair with his boss's wife leads to trouble. Menjou gets the officer to tone down a threatened court-martial and instead Cooper is sent out to the desert to fight Arabs. He wants to quit the Legion and run off with Dietrich, but she's not sure she can give up the creature comforts that Menjou can give her. She moves in with the older man, but at their engagement party, Cooper's troop marches through the streets, on their way to another desert station. The next morning, Dietrich gives up everything to join the "rear guard" of the besotted women who follow the Legionnaires.

As with most of Marlene Dietrich's collaborations with director Josef von Sternberg, the plot is not the point, Dietrich is, aided by the lush visuals surrounding her. She (and Sternberg) don't disappoint here; Dietrich is exotically beautiful and sounds as sexy as she looks. Cooper, young, lanky and confident, is almost as sexy as she is. "Languid" is the word that kept coming to my mind, in a positive way, for Dietrich, Cooper, and the overall tone. One review I read of the movie noted how unusual it is to have a situation in which both the male and female protagonists are sexually experienced; they are both, in their way, "bad." Even better, neither one really has to reform by the end, though Dietrich has to sacrifice her secure way of life. It's beautifully photographed, and though clearly not shot in Africa, the sets and locations provide a plausible Moroccan fantasy, just as they do for CASABLANCA. As a bonus, Dietrich sings two songs in her inimitable style. [TCM]

2011-07-10T15:37:00.003-04:00

TARZAN’S DESERT MYSTERY (1943)

Two confessions: 1) as a lad on the edge of puberty, I was fascinated with Tarzan. I read Tarzan books and comic books, saw bits and pieces of the Tarzan movies on Sunday afternoons (I couldn’t always watch the whole thing because Dad got the TV on Sundays for football), and owned a book called Tarzan of the Movies, filled with pictures of hunky men wearing only loincloths. If it was a book that made me gay, this was it; 2) even though I was a big Tarzan fan, I can only recall seeing two of the Johnny Weissmuller films all the way through: Tarzan of the Apes (his first one) and Tarzan and His Mate (his second one). Of his twelve Tarzan movies, these two are considered the best. By the time Weissmuller made this one (his eighth), even though he wasn't 40 yet, he was going to seed: his face was a bit puffy, his stocky body was way past its prime, and his acting hadn’t improved. Even his famous yell sounds a bit puny here. Still, this movie has its moments and I wasn't sorry to have sat through it.

With World War II raging, Jane is in England working as a nurse; she sends Tarzan a message asking him to send her a rare fever cure found in a jungle past the Arabian town of Bir Herari. That town is run by a well-intentioned sheik with a handsome, Yale-educated son, Prince Salim. Unfortunately, the sheik has allowed a businessman named Hendricks to have too much influence; the working people like the sheik but despise the unfair, hard-driving Hendricks, whom we discover is actually named Heinrichs (and thus probably a Nazi). Meanwhile, Tarzan, Boy and Cheetah cross paths outside town with vaudeville entertainer Connie Bryce who has been sent on a mission to deliver a message to Salim from an old Yale buddy, exposing Hendricks. She goes about singing the Yale fight song ("Boo-la, boo-laaaa…") in order to find the prince but just after she gives him the message, Hendricks and his henchman kill Salim and pin the murder on Kelly, who is sentenced to death. With Tarzan in jail on a trumped-up charge of horse thievery, it's up to Boy and Cheetah to help him escape so they can all free Connie. Then, the real excitement starts as the good guys go racing through a desert sandstorm to reach the jungle to get the fever medicine before the bad guys catch up with them. Tarzan and his pals (and Hendricks) have to face giant prehistoric lizards, giant man-eating plants, and a giant spider before the medicine is found and the proper message delivered to the sheik.

The soon-to-be-bloated Weissmuller seems to just be going through the motions, but this is a fun flick thanks to the exotic setting, the supporting cast, and the youthful energy of Boy, played by 12-year-old Johnny Sheffield. Nancy Kelly does a good job with the underwritten role of Connie, Otto Kruger makes a good Germanic villain, Joe Sawyer is fine as his associate, and Robert Lowery (the first actor to play Batman, in a 1949 serial) is handsome indeed as Salim. In fact, at times this seems barely to be a Tarzan film; it plays better as a WWII B-spy thriller. The spider is laughably bad and most of the other effects are borrowed from other movies, but the last 20 minutes, beginning with the horse stampede that Tarzan uses to free Connie from the hangman's noose, move along nicely. My favorite line is from Kelly, when explaining to Salim about singing the Yale song: "I've had a very liberal education; I've been intercepting Yale passes for years." With Turner Classic running Tarzan films all summer, there will certainly be more Tarzan reviews on the way. [TCM]

2011-07-08T16:18:00.005-04:00

10:30 P.M. SUMMER (1966)

A 60s alienation film, but strictly a second-rate copy of Antonioni by director Jules Dassin. The film opens with a handsome man (Julian Mateos) stalking through a rainstorm, arriving at a house where his wife has just had sex with another man. He shoots them both dead and goes on the run. Cut to four people who are taking a car trip through Spain: a middle-aged couple (Peter Finch and Melina Mercouri), their 7-year-old daughter, and a lovely young woman (Romy Schneider, pictured with Finch) whose exact relationship to the family is never clear; she's having an affair with Finch, she's friends with (and takes one mildly erotic shower with) Mercouri, and sometimes looks after the child. They happen to stop for the night in the village where the murder we saw has just occurred. The depressed, alcoholic and restless Mercouri hears about the whole affair and seems to feel some spiritual kinship with the outlaw. That night, after witnessing Finch and Schneider kissing passionately in the rain, Mercouri sees Mateos in hiding, on a rooftop rolled up in a tarp. She befriends him and helps him hide for the night in a field outside the village. Sadly, when she checks on him the next morning, he's dead. This is the catalyst for another restless day and night for Mercouri, leading to a frenzied flamenco dance scene followed by an ending, copied right out of Antonioni, which is ambiguous but the most satisfying part of the movie.

The screenplay is by New Wave-ish writer Marguerite Duras, based on her own short story, and the characters just haven't been given enough roundness. We learn practically nothing about their past, and their actions in the present seem mostly unmotivated. Leaving Mercouri's relationship with the killer husband hazy is fine, but leaving her role in the potential ménage-a-trois unclear is sloppy--some critics say that she imagines some of the love scenes between Finch and Schneider, but I didn't pick up on that. Mercouri's performance is almost over-the-top in a harsh and ugly way. Finch and the sexy Schneider are good, but poor Mateos (pictured at left) doesn't even get a single line of dialogue (that I can recall). The best thing about the film is the cinematography; the film always looks great, and as lovely as the landscape shots are, the night rain scenes are especially effective. [DVD]

2011-07-05T15:42:00.002-04:00

THE LOCKED DOOR (1929)

Young innocent secretary Barbara Stanwyck goes to a bootleg drinking party on a yacht just outside the 7-mile limit with her boss's slimy son, Rod La Rocque. The yacht is raided just as La Rocque is forcing himself on Stanwyck; a photographer snaps a pic of the two, but La Rocque bribes him to get the photo. Eighteen months later, Stanwyck has married her new boss, William Boyd, and has a new upper-class life which is disturbed when she finds out that La Roque is back, and dating Boyd's beloved kid sister (Betty Bronson). When Stanwyck tells La Rocque to leave their family alone, he tells her he's planning on leaving for Hawaii with Bronson, and if anyone tries to squelch his plans, he'll show Boyd the incriminating photograph. Things come to a climax one night in La Rocque's fancy two-story hotel room to which all the principals arrive at one time or another; one person winds up dead, but two confess to the murder. The ending is satisfactory but relies on a ridiculous plot twist (the dead person is not quite dead yet) to wrap things up.

The title seemingly refers to two different doors: the one that La Rocque locks on the yacht and the locked hotel room door that figures prominently in the ending. Based on a play, Stanwyck's first talking picture is stagy but does incorporate some interesting camera moves, especially the opening, a long tracking shot in which the camera moves along a bar on the yacht as hordes of obnoxious rich people shout orders at the bartenders. Boyd, not the same actor who went on to fame as Hopalong Cassidy, is the weak link here; Stanwyck is fine and though La Rocque overplays his dastardly role a bit, it fits the character. Zasu Pitts has a small comic relief part as a telephone operator at the hotel. [TCM]

2011-07-03T11:19:00.002-04:00

HEAVENS ABOVE! (1963)

The Reverend Smallwood (Peter Sellers) is a prison chaplain who is appointed head at the parish of a small English village. The appointment is an accident—he's the wrong Smallwood—but no one catches it at first. Smallwood is a genial type, but he's upset that the town seems too concerned with money and comfort and not enough with basic Christian values like love and charity. He hires a black garbageman (Brock Peters) as his assistant, lets a large and obnoxious homeless family live at the vicarage, and insults the rich Lady Despard, whose family owns a company that has made a fortune with a wonder pill called Tranquilax (it's a sedative, a stimulant, and a laxative). Surprisingly he gets Lady Despard on his side and she offers to give him all her farm’s excess food (and extra drug products from the company) to give away to the needy. Soon, however, all the town's residents are taking advantage of the offer, and with no one buying anything, the local economy goes belly up, as does the drug company when Smallwood starts disparaging Tranquilax from the pulpit. Eventually, the town turns against Smallwood; he is relieved of his duties and appointed to become the first vicar of outer space. Yes, outer space.

This seems for a while like it's going to go in a heartwarming Capra direction, but the satire, which is directed at virtually all the characters, even Smallwood, is too biting and cynical for that, and the narrative goes off in unexpected directions. The homeless family, which you assume will become pleasant and stand on its own two feet, remains lazy and unlikable; Lady Despard's conversion is surprisingly genuine, and the mild-mannered assistant doesn't have the fortitude to remain by Smallwood's side. Even Smallwood loses his heroic sheen and seems like a naïve boob by the end. Overlong and not for all tastes, but an interestingly bitter little comedy. [TCM]

2011-07-01T14:19:00.003-04:00

MAJOR BARBARA (1941)

This is one of the strangest movies I've ever seen. I've always struggled a bit with the plays of George Bernard Shaw: his dialogue is witty and his characters are interesting, but the messages feel muddled to me, perhaps because I'm unfamiliar with the specific social contexts of the plays, most of which were written between 1890 and 1920. The major of the title is Barbara Underschaft (Wendy Hiller), daughter of a wealthy weapons manufacturer. She believes the family business is evil and she has renounced it (though she still lives her family and relies on their money personally) and works for the Salvation Army saving souls and feeding the poor. When Adolphus (Rex Harrison), a Greek scholar who gives streetcorner classes for workers, sees Barbara electrify a crowd with her sermon, he falls in love with her. He offers himself up to be saved, but is direct with Barbara about his feelings for her. Strange plotpoint #1: She basically says, OK, no problem, we're now a couple, and suddenly what one might expect would be the entire plot of a Hollywood romantic comedy is dispensed with in five minutes. Barbara takes Adolphus home to meet her family and it happens to be the night that Barbara's mother has invited her estranged husband (Robert Morley) for dinner for the first time since the children have grown up. Strange plotpoint #2: The family tradition for passing on the reins of the business is that they must go not to a biological child, but to an adopted child, and Underschaft feels the need to find an heir. Underschaft and Barbara spend much of the rest of the film sparring over their philosophies; he winds up donating a huge amount of money to the Salvation Army to keep it running, and when the Army accepts it, Barbara, feeling it's tainted money made by war and death, resigns. Eventually, Underschaft takes Barbara on a tour of one of his plants, which he runs like a working man's mini-utopia (strange plotpoint #3) and decides to adopt Adolphus (who is technically an orphan) to run the business. Barbara sees that capitalism is more beneficial than giving handouts to the poor, so she joins them.

And that's only about half of the plot of the film. There are other major story threads involving folks at the Salvation Army: Robert Newton plays a drunkard who is upset that his former girlfriend has been saved; he winds up smacking young Army worker Deborah Kerr across the face, and spends the rest of the movie torn between not caring and trying to make it up to her. Emlyn Williams is a poor but sly artist and Marie Ault is an old but sly woman; the two have a particularly good scene together. The movie works fairly well until the last third, but the whole weird "utopia" solution at the end feels like Shaw, who wrote the screenplay based on his own play, is trying to have his socialist cake and eat his capitalist cupcake, too. The fact that England was in the middle of war when the film was made may have had something to do with the contradictory presentation of Morley's weapons work. Harrison, though present for much of the film, isn't a very active presence, and acting-wise, Hiller (pictured above with Williams) carries the movie well, along with Morley and Williams. There are witty lines; my favorite, from Barbara's mother: "You go on as if religion were a pleasant subject." A very odd experience indeed. [TCM]

2011-06-28T19:46:00.002-04:00

PANIC IN YEAR ZERO (1962)

Not long after Ray Milland and his family have left their suburban Los Angeles home for a fishing vacation at a cabin in the woods, the Commies drop bombs on L.A., New York, and other freedom-loving cities around the world. After deciding not to turn around and fight the traffic heading out of the city to check on Grandma, the family heads to the woods; along the way, they witness small incidents indicating the unraveling of civilized behavior (theft and thuggish mayhem). While trying to horde supplies, Milland himself winds up stealing from a hardware store, though he insists he’ll pay the owner back—good intentions make it OK? They get to the campground, tear down a bridge so others can’t follow, and set up house in a cave. Soon, the hardware store guy shows up, as do the thugs they saw on the road, who have more mayhem on their minds.

This Cold War-era sci-fi-ish thriller has potential, but its low budget gets in the way. There are practically no special effects, though the first shot of the sky brightening when the bomb drops is effective. A post-apocalypse vibe is clearly intended, but it all feels a bit like a Gilligan's Island kind of apocalypse, partly due to the presence of Frankie Avalon, just before he hit pay dirt with the American International "Beach" movies, as Milland’s son. Don’t get me wrong, Avalon is actually surprisingly good in the part, but along with mom Jean Hagan (who spent years playing the mom on Make Room for Danny), the ho-hum black & white cinematography, and the suburban woods setting, it all feels very bland and made-for-TV. Most of the budget seems to have been spent on one trashed suburban street set used briefly late in the film. The teenage daughter, Mary Mitchel, is very wooden and didn’t have much of a career after the 60s. Even the actors playing the thugs don’t feel very threatening (though they do kidnap and rape). The loud, jazzy score gives the drab proceedings a jumped-up feeling for a while, but the music gets wearisome. Love the title, though. Milland directed, with little distinction. Michael Bay should re-make this one with blood, sex, and CGI galore. [TCM]

2011-06-25T10:56:00.004-04:00

ARISE, MY LOVE (1940)

An early WWII propaganda film disguised as a romance, or maybe vice versa. Ray Milland, after fighting as a soldier of fortune for the losing side in the Spanish Civil War, is waiting to be executed when an American woman (Claudette Colbert) claiming to be his wife shows up to plead for his release. We know that Milland has never seen this woman before, but the prison warden (George Zucco) is taken in and agrees to let him go. Moments later, Zucco discovers the deception and sends out an alarm, but the two manage to escape, just barely, in a plane. It turns out she's a reporter trying to land a name-making scoop, which she does. Some ridiculously coy romantic escapades occur in Paris, then they fall in love on a train to Berlin where she has a job as a war correspondent. They spend a few nice days in the French countryside until Hitler invades Poland. When Americans are warned to leave Europe, they book passage on the S.S. Athenia and feel guilty about leaving until their ship is sunk by the Nazis (an actual historic incident), at which point they decide to stay and do what they can in Europe. After France falls and Milland is injured in air combat, they go to America to spread the word and fight the isolationists.

This was one of the earliest films to actively support intervention in the European war, a rather controversial point at the time--it was released in the fall of 1940, over a year before Pearl Harbor. The mix of political argument and romantic comedy is awkward (as with the later ONCE UPON A HONEYMOON) and I wish it had been weighted more one way or the other. Milland was as handsome and charming as he ever was and he works well with Colbert. Zucco is a delightful surprise in a mostly comic role, though he's only in the first 15 minutes of the film. The film lacks strong supporting characters; Dennis O'Keefe and Dick Purcell do what they can with the small roles of pilot buddies of Milland's who crop up a couple of times as voices of conscience, and Walter Abel is amusing as Colbert's often flustered boss, but no one aside from the leads has much screen time. The title comes from a line in the Song of Solomon which is quoted a couple of times. Co-scripted by Billy Wilder. [TCM]

2011-06-22T13:09:00.004-04:00

ARCH OF TRIUMPH (1948)

A pale, overlong and overly complicated CASABLANCA retread. In 1938 Paris, just before the outbreak of World War II, a refugee doctor (Charles Boyer) prowls the streets trying to stay a step ahead of the authorities and at the same time, planning to get revenge against the Nazi officer (Charles Laughton) who tortured a girlfriend of his to death. One night, he sees a young woman (Ingrid Bergman) wandering the streets, on the verge of collapse after her lover dropped dead in her hotel room. He takes care of her and introduces her to his friend, a former Russian officer (Louis Calhern) now reduced to working as a doorman. Eventually Boyer is caught and deported, and Bergman is taken in by an old lover (Stephen Bekassy). Act II picks up several months later, in the summer of '39, when Boyer works his way back to Paris where Bergman insists she doesn't love her sugar daddy, though the bitter Boyer isn't sure he believes her—and Bekassy seems loath to let her go. Boyer also meets up with Laughton, who doesn’t recognize him, and the plotlines of Boyer's revenge and Bergman's predicament cross at the climax.

The film is based on a long novel by Erich Maria Remarque, and the original cut was apparently almost as long as GONE WITH THE WIND. The existing print is a little over two hours, which is both too short and too long: too long for the Boyer/Bergman affair, which has a leisurely pace that grows tedious, and too short to give an interesting supporting cast much to do. Laughton's part has been cut down so he has almost nothing to do until the last 15 minutes. Calhern's character is colorful and interesting, and I wish he had seen more of him. Also with Curt Bois, Ruth Warrick, and in a cameo, Michael Romanoff, a famous Hollywood restauranteur of the time. The DVD is murky, but that could be because of the shadowy noir-like look of the film. [DVD]

2011-06-20T08:17:00.003-04:00

OUT OF THE FOG (1941)

I hesitate to be too enthusiastic about this film, for fear of overselling what is essentially a solidly made, minor-key melodrama, but for what was probably intended as a classy B-film to highlight a couple of up-and-coming stars, this is good stuff. One night on the docksides, John Garfield, a small-time racketeer, comes skulking out of the fog, having just set fire to a small fishing boat. His racket is "insurance," and the fire is intended as a warning for tailor Thomas Mitchell and cook John Qualen; Garfield is trying to force them into paying him a weekly sum not to torch their boat. Mitchell's daughter (Ida Lupino) is dating Eddie Albert, a sweet but unambitious guy, but when Garfield starts paying attention to her, her frustration with her boring dockside life bubbles over and she begins making plans to run off to Cuba with him (not realizing how he's treating her father). When Garfield finds out that Mitchell has saved up some money as a down payment on a new boat, he tries to get the money from him, but this time Mitchell and Qualen decide not to be pushed around.

There are lots of things I like about this movie. Though the sets are a bit stagy, they are effective and atmospheric. Oddly, the outdoor scenes, usually thick with fog, feel more claustrophobic than the indoor scenes; the two main interiors, the tailor shop and a restaurant called Caroline's Fish Grotto, are spacious, far more than real dockside storefronts would be. The acting is solid all around. Garfield is tops playing a real shit, but for a few minutes, when he’s talking to Lupino about Cuba and possibly getting married, you feel he might actually have a heart. Lupino seems a bit too wordly for her character and Albert’s character is the only one that feels cardboard (the only one who doesn’t seem to change). Mitchell and Qualen are strong, and there's good support from George Tobias as a fellow merchant, Aline MacMahon as Mitchell’s whiny, sickly wife, Leo Gorcey (of the Bowery Boys) as a bartender, and Jerome Cowan as a D.A.

Based on a play by Irwin Shaw, the movie winds up being a celebration of ordinary folks (the play was called "The Gentle People"). When Mitchell tries to warn Lupino about Garfield, she replies, with a wisdom beyond her years, "That’s the way the world’s made--the strong take from the weak," clearly understanding that people like her father are among the weak, but here the weak manage to come out on top, at least briefly. As one character says, the ordinary can still love each other "just like millionaires and poets." The film's ending (reminiscent of a central plot twist in Dreiser's "An American Tragedy") is different from the play's, due mostly to the Production Code, but I was still surprised at how much the film gets away with in terms of not punishing certain behavior that could be argued to be immoral; in the last scene, even the neighborhood cop has to look the other way. It would be nice if this little film made it onto DVD someday (maybe as part of a John Garfield boxed set), but until then, watch the TCM schedule for a rerun. [TCM]

2011-06-18T11:35:00.002-04:00

BEFORE MIDNIGHT (1933)

One stormy night, police inspector Ralph Bellamy is called to the mansion of millionaire William Jeffery. There is a family superstition that the appearance of a pool of blood on the fireplace hearth means the patriarch of the family will soon die, and this evening the blood has appeared. Just before midnight, lightning strikes, the lights go out, and the windows in the study fly open. Jeffrey indeed drops dead in a roomful of people, apparently of fright, but an autopsy shows that he was poisoned via hypodermic. The suspects include his faithful secretary (Claude Gillingwater), with whom Jeffrey had spent that past several years in China collecting curios, the secretary's somewhat mysterious-acting wife, and the lawyer who is caught breaking into Jeffrey's safe. Jeffrey had a young ward (June Collyer) whom he dearly loved but who was hoping to marry the family doctor, against Jeffrey's wishes. Eventually, another murder is committed and a couple of people are revealed to be not who they say they are before Bellamy and his sidekick (George Cooper) eventually solve the murder. This is a nicely atmospheric little thriller, not quite spooky enough to be considered an "old dark house" movie but still quite fun. Bellamy, before he found his niche as the dopey best friend in romantic comedies, is fine as the detective, and Cooper and Gillingwater are standouts in the supporting cast. [TCM]

2011-06-16T17:32:00.002-04:00

SLIGHTLY SCARLET (1956)

Sexy redhead Dorothy has just gotten out of jail after serving time for theft; she is released into the custody of her only slightly less attractive sister June, who works for Ralph Jensen, a lawyer running for mayor, trying to oust the current crooked crowd who run the city according to the orders they get from mob boss Solly Caspar, who is getting Ben, one of his slick henchmen, to dig up dirt on June to hurt her boss. Of course, that dirt involves Dorothy, who in addition to being a kleptomaniac is also a bit of a tramp. What follows includes Solly throwing someone out of a window, Dorothy throwing herself at Ben—and shooting a harpoon at him, and June trying to take a shoplifting rap for Dorothy and falling for Ben, who is also falling for June. Based on a James Cain novel, this has the trappings of film noir, although it’s in glossy color. It takes a while for the plot to get into gear, but once it does, it moves along nicely. Arlene Dahl fares the best as the sexpot Dorothy; Rhonda Fleming is adequate in the relatively thankless role of the good sister; John Payne is lackluster as Ben, the bad guy turned hero. The well-shot blood-spattered climax is worth waiting for, though overall the movie feels a bit sluggish, and the DVD print from VCI is occasionally murky. [DVD]

2011-06-12T13:30:00.004-04:00

THE KREMLIN LETTER (1970)

This complex Cold War spy thriller begins with Navy officer Patrick O'Neal getting pulled from duty to "volunteer" to finish up an important spy mission in the Soviet Union which is on the verge of failure. He meets his handlers, the renowned Highwayman (Dean Jagger) and his associate (Richard Boone), at the funeral of his predecessor and is sent to gather up a team including a retired spy named The Whore, a gay spy (George Sanders) whom we first see in drag in a gay bar, and a female safecracker (Barbara Parkins). The mission: retrieve a letter stating that the Americans will help the Russians if they decide to go to war with China—the perfect Hitchcockian MacGuffin, as it’s important enough to drive the plot, but is almost completely beside the point. Once in the USSR, the Americans blackmail a Russian spy (by threatening his wife and daughter in the US) to get his apartment to use as a clearinghouse for the information they glean, all of which is collected by and filtered through O'Neal who reports to Boone. Up to about the halfway point, the plot was fairly easy to follow, but at some point, I lost the thread of the comings, goings, and dealings; still, the film remained compelling as characters die, secrets are revealed, and things build to a nice knife-twist of an ending.

This is worth watching if only to see a bunch of actors having fun in a movie that is not fun, that is in fact a dark and cynical take on the more popular James Bond spy story. O'Neal isn't bad but considering he is in most of the scenes, his lack of charisma leaves the film with a bit of hole in its center. Much more fun to watch is Richard Boone, best known for his TV work, especially as Paladin in Have Gun Will Travel, playing a good-guy spy you love to hate as an all-powerful, amoral good-old Texas boy. Part of the blackmail against the Russian spy involves Boone, in his thick drawl, saying that they will convert his daughter into "the most per-verted human being the human mind can imagine": i.e., a lesbian. Max von Sydow, Bibi Andersson and Orson Welles are fine as various Russian characters. Sanders does a decent job playing old and gay, though he seems visibly uncomfortable in his short drag scene (see picture above). This is out on a limited edition DVD, but Fox Movie Channel runs it sometimes, and it looks like it's scheduled for airing on TCM in August. [FMC]

2011-06-10T07:17:00.002-04:00

EAST SIDE, WEST SIDE (1949)

We first meet well-heeled married couple James Mason and Barbara Stanwyck having dinner with Stanwyck's widowed mother, Gale Sondergaard, a retired actress. The two seem happy although past troubles are hinted at--Mason was a philanderer but has apparently reformed. Mason is called away for a business meeting, and afterward, he goes out to a nightclub where he dances with sexy Cyd Charisse before he runs into the incendiary Ava Gardner, an ex-mistress of his. She's back in town and available, and Mason is like a recovering alcoholic who has had a drink placed in his hand. Mason gets into an altercation with Gardner's date and, with tabloid photographers all around, gets punched out. Charisse takes him to her apartment to recover. The next morning, Stanwyck sees the headlines and seeks out Charisse, who explains what happened (leaving out any mention of Gardner). The two women become friendly, and run into each other again at a book party for former cop Van Heflin, who is an old flame of Charisse's. The set-up is now complete: Gardner tries to steal Mason away from Stanwyck, who finds herself attracted to Heflin, and he to her. Suddenly, Gardner is found dead in her apartment and, Stanwyck, who had argued with her that afternoon, is a potential suspect.

At heart, this is a romantic melodrama, and a fairly adult one for its era, with people acting in relatively realistic ways. The murder mystery aspect feels tacked on for a little extra sensationalism, which the movie doesn't really need, since Gardner (pictured above with Mason) gives the movie plenty of sensation. She's a knockout and she gives a very good performance as a wicked femme fatale. The acting is first-rate all around: Stanwyck holds her own against Gardner, and Mason and Heflin are fine. Sondergaard doesn't have much to do, but she’s crucial to the plot at the end and has a nice confrontation scene with Mason. The real surprise is how good Cyd Charisse is--I know she was a hell of a dancer, but I was never impressed with the little bits of acting she got to do in her MGM musicals. She pulls out a solid performance here, even though her character is not terribly important to the overall story. Nancy Davis (better known as First Lady Nancy Reagan) has a small role as Stanwyck's friend, and William Frawley appears as a bartender. Recommended for fans of glossy melodramas and Ava Gardner. [TCM]

2011-06-08T21:58:00.004-04:00

THE RIVER (1929)

Charles Farrell, a strapping but innocent young man who has never known a woman in any way, shape, or form (even his mother died when he was a baby) builds himself a barge and goes sailing down the river to get a look at life. At a dam construction site, he puts in for the winter, just missing a big fuss in which the foreman (Alverdo Sabato) has been sent to jail for the murder of a man who was paying too much attention to Sabato's mistress (Mary Duncan). Left behind are Duncan, living alone with a pet crow which she takes care of but also sees as the eyes of Sabato still watching her, and big burly deaf-mute Ivan Linow, a buddy of the dead man who has vowed to get revenge. Farrell and Duncan meet cute-sexy while he's swimming naked in the river (and exposing, briefly, much more flesh than usual for the average male movie star) and take a liking to each other, engaging in some awkward but sensuous flirtation which causes him to miss his train to the big city. After a number of missed trains, he decides to stay for the winter and they set up housing together, but when he proposes marriage, she tosses him out in a snowstorm, telling him he's not man enough yet. He decides to show her by going on a tree-chopping marathon in the storm, but after the fourth tree, he collapses. Linow finds him unconscious and almost frozen to death, and he and Duncan try desperately to save his life (pictured below).

Added as an extra on the SEVENTH HEAVEN disc in the Frank Borzage boxed set from Fox, this silent film is a reconstruction of a 75 minute movie of which only about 45 minutes remains extant. Missing are the beginning (which sets up the backstory about Duncan, Sabato, and Linow), a couple of scenes in the middle, and the climax, in which Sabato escapes jail and comes to the river to kill Farrell. The disc includes on-screen text summarizing what's missing along with a handful of stills to illustrate the action. Still, what's left is remarkable, and really does tell a clear stand-alone narrative. The pre-Code story is very sexy, with an unusual focus on the hunky Farrell in what would typically be the role of the female: the virginal innocent (whose semi-clad body is often on display) being wooed by a more experienced lover. He's actually quite good at coming off as innocent but also sexy and confident, and Duncan is equally good at being a woman of the world without seeming trampy. The sets, of her cabin, the construction camp, and the ravine with the train track running over it are nicely detailed and almost expressionistic. One perfect scene summarizes the plot, the tensions, and the visual style: one night in her cabin, he sets a checkerboard up on the bed, ready for a good game; she clearly just wants to screw. She throws the board off the bed and lights a candle, but the light causes a huge shadow of the crow and its cage to be cast over the bed, stopping her in her tracks. It's a shame the entire film doesn't exist, but what's left is still quite wonderful. [DVD]

2011-06-03T14:08:00.003-04:00

BRIGHAM YOUNG (1940)

In the 1840s, a band of Mormons who have slowly moved westward to escape persecution are now feeling the heat in Illinois. During a huge celebration, a vigilante mob attacks with torches and guns. They set the house on fire, whip a couple of older men to death, and even shoot one of the few non-Mormons present. When Mormon leader Joseph Smith (Vincent Price) suggests that the Mormons arm themselves for protection, he is arrested for treason, found guilty despite a heartfelt courtroom speech from Smith's friend Brigham Young (Dean Jagger), and killed by a mob. Soon the Mormons are split between staying to compromise with the town businessmen, a position advocated by Angus Duncan (Brian Donlevy), and following Brigham Young on an exodus to Mexico. They wind up leaving, crossing an iced-over river as a mob follows, burning all the Mormon homes. Even Duncan comes along, though tensions remain between the two men--it seems to come down to a question of who is getting the "real" messages from God. The strong implication here is that Young doesn't feel like God is speaking through him, but he has to say so to lead his people. The rest of the film follows their trek west; many of them, including Duncan, want to go on to California and the Gold Rush, but Young is determined to settle in valley they find near a salt lake. Most of the families stay and endure a very hard winter, only to face a horde of crickets who are about to destroy their crops. Just as Young is about to admit his failings, flocks of seagulls appear and eat the crickets. Next thing you know, Salt Lake City is a going concern.

Almost everything I know about Mormons comes from Angels in America or South Park--I had a Mormon friend in high school, but he blended right in with us Catholics and Protestants. I'm sure this film is just as fictionalized as any other slice of Hollywood history, but you can't prove it by me. The historical aspect is very interesting; Joseph Smith and Brigham Young both come across as utopian socialists, advocating living by the laws of nature, not buying or selling land, and working together for the common good so that no one accumulates too much money. Most of the actors are quite good, including Jagger, Mary Astor as Young's wife, Jane Darwell as a Mormon matriarch, and John Carradine as a cornrowed Mormon cowboy, but too much time is spent on a romance subplot between Jonathan Kent (Tyrone Power, pictured in the background, with Jagger) and the non-Mormon Zina (Linda Darnell), who, after her father is killed in the raid, joins up with the Mormons, though she never joins the faith, and spends the rest of the movie dating Kent. Power and Darnell are two lovely people, but they don't work up many sparks, and there's no compelling reason to root for them to marry. Actually, the whole polygamy issue is mostly skirted here--a joke is made early on about multiple wives, and Darnell's chief objection to marrying Power is that she's afraid of becoming just one of many objects of his affection. The movie was, for a time, retitled Brigham Young--Frontiersman in an attempt to bring in Western fans. [FCM]

2011-05-30T16:42:00.002-04:00

NIGHT TRAIN TO PARIS (1964)

On a London street on New Year's Eve, an old man passes a computer tape filled with defense secrets to another man then tries to skulk away, but he's caught by a pudgy man in glasses (Eric Pohlmann) and quickly dispatched. The man with the tape (Hugh Latimer) and his lovely assistant (Aliza Gur) go to Leslie Nielsen, Latimer's old friend who now works as an airlines PR man, to get a flight to Paris to deliver the tape to the proper authorities. All flights are filled, but Nielsen gets them booked on a train chartered by a ski club, traveling with a fashion photographer as a cover. But the pudgy assassin kills Latimer and the photographer, leaving Nielsen traveling with Gur on the train which is ferried across the Channel--along with a bunch of drunken skiers and a man in a bear suit (pictured with Nielsen) who proves to be handy when Nielsen discovers that the assassin is on the train. There are other complications until the final tense chase at the French port of Dunkirk.

This hour-long black-and-white B-movie is a pleasant surprise. For a cheapie second feature, it's filmed in a remarkably stylish fashion, using the wide screen effectively, and has a very nice jazzy score that gives it a James Bond feel. Nielsen is no Bond, but makes an excellent hero, alternately befuddled and confident. Gur is a fine 60s fashion plate who may have a secret or two of her own. The train setting with the revelers and the bear reminds me of the climax of Trading Places. This movie has escaped critical attention (not listed in Halliwell or Maltin) but with its appearance on DVD, this might change. No buried gem, but with appropriate expectations, fun. [DVD]

2011-05-27T13:26:00.004-04:00

THE GLEIWITZ CASE (1961)

Practically every review I've run across of this film says that it was ahead of its time, and it was. It's billed as a re-enactment of an historical event, but today a re-enactment tends to mean one of those rather awful documentary shows on the History Channel which have actors presenting the destruction of Pompeii or a Civil War battle, done with a low budget, bad script, and overbearing narration. This is artfully done; it does more than just follow the facts, but resists the temptation to make a melodrama with fully fleshed-out characters and big actor turns. The event is an attack on a German radio station in August of 1939, supposedly carried out by a Polish commando unit but actually staged by Nazis as an excuse to invade Poland--the action which started World War II. The main character is Nazi officer Alfred Naujocks (played by Hannjo Hasse) who masterminded the incident and who gave testimony about it after the war at Nuremberg. We watch as he collects six soldiers-in-training who have spent time in Poland and can speak the language, and prepares them for their mission. One of the men goes to the radio station, posing as an engineering troubleshooter, to scope out the place. A Polish prisoner (Hilmar Thate, pictured) is chosen to be a fall guy; complete with fake credentials, he will be left dead at the scene, supposedly one of the commandos killed by the SS when they respond to the attack.

There aren't any real surprises as everything goes pretty much as planned. We spend a lot of time with the prisoner (though I don't think he has any dialogue) especially in a long scene showing him being driven blindfolded to the radio station. There are no real character insights, though we do get a strange (and to my mind, misguided) flashback scene that seems to try to explain the character of Naujocks. The director, Gerhard Klein, has a keen visual sense, using lots of artfully composed close-ups and off-kilter shots, and though not a lot happens here in terms of narrative, the film is never boring (perhaps partly because it's very short, around 70 minutes). Very interesting and unusual. [DVD]

2011-05-24T11:41:00.002-04:00

THE GOOD BAD GIRL (1931)

A tired old plot gets an uninspired turn around the block in this lifeless film. Mae Clarke is tired of being the kept woman of gangster Robert Ellis; she’s carrying on an affair with James Hall (at first, the two deliberately don’t exchange information about their lives, not even their names, à la Last Tango in Paris, but that interesting little kink is not explored). Ellis doesn’t want to lose her, especially when he kills a man and wants her to give him an alibi, but she refuses to and marries Hall. Ellis tries escaping to Philadelphia but is caught and goes to jail, but when headlines crop up connecting Clarke to Ellis, Hall, under pressure from his wealthy parents, leaves her. She has a baby which Hall's mother tries to take from her, then Ellis escapes from jail and vows revenge against Clarke. The climax which sorts things out is as predictable as everything else. Clarke is OK, but both of her men are drab, cardboard figures. The melodramatic story was done to death in the early 30s and is not presented in any interesting fashion here. The only fun in the film is the mild comic relief of Marie Prevost as Clarke's friend and Paul Porcasi as her gangster boyfriend. Prevost's best line, when asked if Ellis has gone to Philadelphia: "No one goes to Philadelphia unless they have to." [TCM]

2011-05-21T12:27:00.002-04:00

WESTERN PACIFIC AGENT (1950)

In a small California town, a thuggish hobo named Frank (known by reputation as the West Coast Kid) arrives and asks his father, kindly and respected storekeeper Joe, for another handout. Joe, fed up with his son's bad ways, refuses, so Frank splits and decides to get some cash another way: he murders Pops, a drawbridge operator, and Bill, a railroad paymaster, so he can get his hands on the payroll money. A railroad agent, Rod Kendall, comes to town to investigate. All he has to go on is a fingerprint and the knowledge that the killer has a nervous habit of chewing on toothpicks. Rod gets some help from town doofus Elmer, who can identify the killer, and from Bill's grieving sister Martha. Frank, in hiding in hobo camps and on railroad cars, finds out that because the serial numbers of the stolen bills have been released by the authorities, all that money is useless to him. It isn't long before Joe realizes that it's his son who is the main suspect, and soon everything is tidied up in a climax involving a shootout and a chase up the drawbridge.

This hour-long crime film sounds better in summary than it plays out. The plot is decent, the production values are mid-to-low B, and there is some clever dialogue here and there, but the acting is fairly weak, especially from the leads, Kent Taylor as Rod and Sheila Ryan as Martha (who, to be fair, is given almost nothing to do except marry Rod at the very end). The reason to watch is Mickey Knox (pictured) who gives a solid performance as the vicious, nervous Frank. Morris Carnovsky is good as the father, and Sid Melton is bearable as the sparingly-used comic relief character Elmer. This film actually has Knox say, "Come and get me, copper!" and "They'll never take me alive!" Best dialogue: when Elmer, collecting evidence in a notepad, asks a woman her name, she says, "None of your puny business!" As she walks away, he replies, "How do you spell puny?" That's as funny as it gets. [DVD]

2011-05-19T15:01:00.003-04:00

QUADRILLE (1938)

Carl, an American movie star (meant to be a Cary Grant/Errol Flynn type, I think) arrives for a quick press jaunt in Paris. He is met by Philippe, a newspaper editor, and Claudine, a writer for a New York paper and a good friend of Paulette, a famous actress with whom Philippe has been living for six years, and to whom he is on the verge of proposing marriage. The handsome Carl sweeps Paulette off her feet; they have a one-night stand after which he leaves, to return in two days. Philippe finds out and isn't quite sure what to think or do; Claudine makes a play for Carl herself; Philippe considers going ahead and marrying Paulette and making Claudine his mistress; Paulette makes a half-hearted stab at suicide, but, this being a romantic comedy, happy endings are in store for all, though not necessarily the ending an American audience will expect.

Sacha Guitry is a French actor, director and playwright, well known in his homeland, but not so known here, probably because he never came to Hollywood and didn't make any English language films. I was glad to finally have the chance to see a Guitry film now that Criterion has issued a 4-movie set. He wrote the film and plays Philippe, and, aside from seeming a bit too old for the part (he looks a good 10-15 years older than the other members of the "quadrille"), he does a fine job. But the real joy in watching this, in addition to witty dialogue and an occasional visual fillip, is in seeing how very differently things play out in this French film than they would have in a Hollywood film of the same era. No bones are made about the live-in relationship between Philippe and Paulette, and fact that Carl sleeps with Paulette is equally crystal clear--he begins undressing her while she's on the phone with Philippe. The movie makes light of infidelity and suicide, and the ending, while not as unconventional as the other elements, probably would not have flown in America. The other actors, none of whom I'd heard of but all of whom are good, are Gaby Morlay as Paulette, Georges Grey as Carl, and Jacqueline Delubac as Claudine (pictured above with Guitry and Grey). I thought this was great fun, but most critics say this is the weakest film in the boxed set, so I’ll have to check the others out. [DVD]

2011-05-16T12:34:00.002-04:00

DECISION BEFORE DAWN (1951)

A tense and complex wartime spy story, a bit different from the average spy film. In 1944, Richard Basehart, who was wounded in combat, has been assigned to an American intelligence unit headed by Gary Merrill. They're experimenting with a new strategy: recruiting German POWs to be parachuted back into Germany to bring back information. When some of the prisoners hold a kangaroo court and kill a German who had been making defeatist remarks (even though by this point, Germany was indeed clearly on the ropes), Oskar Werner, a friend of the dead man, volunteers for a mission, thinking that he can help his country by helping to end the war sooner and save lives. Another POW (Hans Christian Blech) also volunteers, for more mercenary reasons (money), and Basehart becomes the third man, the radio operator. Their mission is to get troop movement info that could help a German general who wants to surrender to the Allies. Once back in Germany, Werner uses an assumed identity to get access to an officer who knows the troop plans. He meets up with a sympathetic woman (Hildegarde Neff), but also soon realizes that an SS man is suspicious of him. After Werner is recognized by a family friend and finds out that his father is still alive, he has mixed feelings about his work. In the tense climax, all three men wind up on the run from the Gestapo.

Though Basehart is top-billed, this is Werner's show all the way and he carries it off very well, creating an interesting, three-dimensional character whom we care about but who is also ambiguous enough that we think he might conceivably betray his mission. It doesn't hurt that Werner (pictured above) is a handsome and charismatic actor. At times, the film reminded me of The Sound of Music: the Americans are stationed in a working French abbey complete with nuns all around, and near the climax, Werner and Basehart are discovered hiding in the shadows by a young boy who seems about to give them up to the Nazis. There is some inventive camerawork and excellent use of location shooting in bombed-out post-war Germany. This was nominated for the Best Picture award, but has been largely forgotten since, but it is worth searching out; it's on DVD as part of Fox's Heroes of War collection. [FMC]

2011-05-13T13:17:00.001-04:00

GOODBYE GEMINI (1970)

Blonde twins Jacki and Julian (Judy Geeson and Martin Potter, pictured at right) arrive in London with their big teddy bear Agamemnon to stay at the house of an old family friend. When she’s not as accommodating as they’d like, Julian arranges for her to have a fatal accident on the stairs. With the house to themselves, they leap into the decadent lifestyle of swinging London, becoming part of a circle that includes a closeted gay politician (Michael Redgrave), a not-so-closeted gay art dealer (Freddie Jones), a young man of indeterminate sexuality named Clive (Alexis Kanner) and his supposed girlfriend Denise (Marion Diamond) who nevertheless starts flirting with Julian, who himself does some heavy-duty flirting with his own sister—if you find overtones of incest to be a “yuck factor,” this movie’s not for you. Julian is raped by two drag queens, and pictures are taken of the event. Clive tries to blackmail Julian with the pictures (he needs money to pay off a gambling debt), but Julian and Jacki kill him and separate to go on the run. Jacki, who thought they were just scaring Clive, is traumatized and wanders the streets where she is befriended by Redgrave who seems to genuinely care for her, but who also can’t afford to have his name attached publicly to a murder scandal. Meanwhile, where is Julian?

This is pretty much the definition of kinky, at least mainstream cinema kinky. In the beginning, it has some promise, feeling like a Shirley Jackson novel updated to the sexy, druggy 60s, but the narrative unravels quickly. The twins act like addled amoral children, talking frequently to the teddy bear and blithely unconcerned with the consequences of any of their actions. It’s not really worth doing psychological readings of the characters, though it does seem like Julian’s incestuous feelings are hiding his inner homosexuality. Sometimes the movie looks interesting (the 60s colors, some odd camera angles) and at least two of the supporting performances are worth seeing: Redgrave, who manages to give his character some shadings of depth, and Jones, who adds some much needed humor now and then. A stronger screenplay would have helped make this something more than just a period novelty. [DVD]

2011-05-09T13:01:00.004-04:00

CHLOE (1934)

After fifteen years away, Mandy returns to the swamp near the Colonel's turpentine plantation seeking revenge for the lynching of her husband Sam (for which, as we find out, the Colonel wasn't actually responsible). Jim ferries Mandy and her mixed-race daughter Chloe down the river to Mandy's old shack which has been empty all this time--though Mandy, a voodoo practitioner who talks to animals, believes that a bat she finds in the shack is the soul of Sam. While Mandy plots her revenge, the mild-mannered mixed-race Jim falls in love with Chloe, but she falls in love with Wade, a white man who is works with the Colonel. (Wade meets her when he and Jim save her from an assault by a drunk who leers at her and says, "High yellow! That always was my meat!") The Colonel hears rumors of Mandy's plot but dismisses them, proclaiming that voodoo is just "a mixture of savagery, gin, mumbo-jumbo and drumbeats"--to which his niece replies, "Sounds like the menu at Sing-Sing!" Well, it turns out that Chloe is really the Colonel's daughter, originally named Betty Ann, whom he had assumed drowned in a tragic accident as a child--it was really Mandy's daughter who died, but Mandy took Betty Ann as her own and let others think it was Betty Ann who died). When all this is about to be revealed, Mandy kidnaps Chloe to use in a voodoo sacrifice. The presence in the woods of the drunken would-be rapist complicates matters; can Jim and/or Wade save our heroine?

That’s a lot of plot for a Poverty Row movie that doesn't even run an hour. Most of the film is rather laughable (even more laughable is that has a reputation as a horror movie simply because it involves voodoo), but the sexual and racial politics are interesting, to say the least. For starters, Chloe (pictured above) is played by a white actress, Olive Borden, which does make some sense given what we discover about her parentage. Jim is treated as a black man but looks as white as Wade (Reed Howes), his rival. In fact, the actor who plays Jim is the white Philip Ober (married at one time to Vivian Vance). That leaves Georgette Harvey, as Mandy, and Richard Huey, as the Colonel's servant, as the only black actors in major roles here. Jim's a nice, good-looking guy, and whenever he shows up, we hear the theme song, "Love is Calling You," leading us to believe that he and Chloe will wind up together, but of course when it comes out that she's white, we know that Wade will win Chloe's heart--by which time she's reverted to being called Betty Ann. The circumstances behind Sam's lynching remain unclear, I thought deliberately, but probably due to sloppy writing. As far as the acting, Ober does a nice job in an understated style. Harvey commands the camera, but overdoes the nutty revenge stuff a bit. There is almost constant background music, which grows irritating. Still, this is one of those loony bits of "underground" old Hollywood that needs to be seen to be believed. [DVD]