DAISY KENYON (1947)

Enjoyable romantic soap opera with tons of noir atmosphere and Joan Crawford at nearly the peak of her high melodrama period. She plays the title character, a successful commercial illustrator who lives in Greenwich Village (she's not rich, but like TV's "Friends," she certainly lives comfortably) and is the mistress of married lawyer Dana Andrews. He's happy with the situation, but she's feeling ignored due to a string of broken dates. She begins a casual relationship with Henry Fonda, a slightly naive soldier and widower just home from the war; at the end of their first date, he tells her he loves her which freaks her out a little, but with Andrews' non-commital state bothering her more and more, they fall into a more serious relationship. They are aware that they are using each other to escape their respective romantic woes, but they get married anyway and move to a cottage on Cape Cod where Fonda works as a ship builder. Andrews goes out to do a case on the West Coast and when he loses, he returns and tries to start things up with Crawford, but she rejects him. Andrews' wife (Ruth Warrick) finds out about the affair and a nasty, very public divorce ensues. The wrap-up of the triangle plays out a bit like a 30's screwball comedy, except it's not comic. Aside from an overly pat ending, this is interesting viewing.

Crawford is very good, mostly underplaying a role that could have led to real scenery chewing. Andrews is her match as a basically nice guy who seems not to want to hurt anyone, but who hurts everyone, including himself. Fonda was an interesting choice--he's not sexy at all and he's a little too passive, which makes it unlikely that Crawford would settle for him (and it's clear that whatever choice she makes, she would indeed be simply settling), but I got used to him eventually, though he remains too lightweight to play a character with several personal demons--symbolized by crazy cacophonous music played on the soundtrack while he thrashes about in his bed. There's an odd little subplot which implies that Warrick physically abuses her younger daughter (Connie Marshall); though Andrews knows about this, he feels OK about agreeing to give Warrick full custody of her in order to get Crawford off the public hook during the trial, and that just seems wrong, even allowing for the era. There isn't much of a supporting cast; a starlet named Martha Stewart plays Crawford's roommate, Peggy Ann Garner is Andrews' other daughter, and Walter Winchell has a one-line cameo in a scene set at the Stork Club. Although the movie is not film noir, it has a very shadowy, noirish look--I kept wondering if Crawford just couldn't afford to turn on a few lights now and then--which is effective. I like that Andrews calls almost everyone he talks to, including Fonda, "Honeybunch," and I like that Fonda does it right back at him in a later scene. Good melodramatic fun. [FMC]

IVANHOE (1952)

I have an admitted prejudice against 50's movies in general, and 50's costume epics in particular, but I've been trying to expand my horizons lately, so I made a point of watching this, which crops up frequently on Turner Classic Movies. On the plus side, I was pleased and surprised, knowing almost nothing in advance about the original book, that this is a story which is contemporaneous with the events of the Robin Hood legend, and specifically with the wonderful Errol Flynn ROBIN HOOD film from 1938. Robin himself is a (very minor) character here, known as Robin of Locksley, and Sebastian Cabot has a small but noticeable role as one of Robin's men. That's about it for the plus side. Not that the movie is a total disaster, but because it's difficult not to compare it to the earlier Errol Flynn film, it winds up losing on every count. As in ROBIN HOOD, the action is set during the period of the Crusades when King Richard the Lionhearted is being held hostage in Austria and his villainous brother John (Guy Rolfe) has taken the throne. Chivalrous Saxon knight Wilfrid of Ivanhoe (Robert Taylor) vows to raise the money to free Richard and to fight John and his obnoxious Norman cohorts (led by George Sanders). After failing to reconcile with his estranged father (Finlay Currie), Ivanhoe finds help from Jewish community leader Isaac of York (Felix Aylmer), who raises funds for the ransom in exchange for promises of official tolerance. Robin and his men contribute some of the booty they steal from the rich to the ransom as well. Along the way, Ivanhoe fights and jousts and falls in love with two women: childhood friend Rowena (Joan Fontaine) and Isaac's daughter (Elizabeth Taylor, quite lovely at age 20). There is a castle siege sequence which was likely quite rousing in 1952, but which is difficult to take seriously now as it plays out too much like the parody siege in MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL. Robert Taylor is attractive but wooden, as usual. Fontaine is OK, but she loses out to her sister, Olivia de Havilland, who played a very similar role in the '38 ROBIN HOOD. Sanders does a nice job with his usual mustache-twirling villain part, and aside from Aylmer, the only other actor to make much of an impression is Emyln Williams as Ivanhoe's buffoonish squire. The sets and costumes are fine, but this would look more impressive if it had been shot in widescreen. [TCM]

THE OUTLAW (1943)
Or, Four Ways of Looking at The Outlaw.

1) Just the Facts, Ma'am: This film puts three historical figures from the Old West together in a western romance melodrama. Pat Garrett (Thomas Mitchell), sheriff of Lincoln, New Mexico, is happy to see his rowdy old buddy Doc Holliday (Walter Huston) who has come to town looking for the varmint who stole his strawberry roan horse. That person is young Billy the Kid (Jack Buetel), and Doc and Billy enter into a strange friendship, which Doc resents, centered on stealing the horse back from each other. Billy also meets Rio (Jane Russell), Doc's hot-blooded girlfriend, and after an initial (and quite literal) roll in the hay that plays out like a rape, the two take up together, and even get married in secret (surely a ploy to get around the censors of the era). After some spirited chases involving lawmen and Indians, the relationships between the four are sorted out via some gun play and a clever trick that contradicts the historical record (as though historical accuracy was on anyone's mind) but leaves Billy alive to ride off with Rio in the end.

2) All the Fuss: Supposedly Howard Hughes made this movie primarily to show off his discovery Jane Russell, and much has been made of the way her breasts are highlighted here. I must say that at least one shot of Russell walking across the screen startled me right off the couch, but for the most part, she comes off as almost demure compared to the way many a starlet is exposed these days--she's got nothin' on Lil' Kim, for example.

3) A Gay Man Watching The Outlaw; or "Brokeback Outlaw": [Spoilers follow!] Though there's no doubt that both Doc and Billy are full of lust for Rio, and that Billy and Rio do some intense grappling, I found the most compelling love relationship to be the triangle of Doc, Billy, and Sheriff Pat (well, there's also Doc's horse, which Doc seems to like better than Rio but not as good as Billy, but who want to go there?). Pat and Doc have been friends for years, but Billy replaces Pat in Doc's affections (and "affections" is definitely the right word, as Hughes wasn't afraid to have the characters express real affection for each other). When Pat realizes what's happened, he reacts like a scorned lover, breaking things off with Doc "for good and all." In the end, with passions high all around, Doc threatens to kill Billy but instead shoots his ears, then hugs him. Pat kills Doc, but Billy ties Pat up and buries Doc as himself, so he can leave with Rio and let folks think that Pat killed him. Another gayish point: the relationship between Rio and Doc's maid (Mimi Aguglia) is a lot like that of Karen and Rosario on "Will & Grace."

4) The Good, the Bad, and the Gorgeous: I'm willing to concede the title of worst movie ever to either Plan 9 from Outer Space or Manos: The Hands of Fate, but this one is certainly in the running for Worst Movie Ever Made by Mainstream Filmmakers and Actors Who Should Have Known Better--though approached on a camp level, there are some perverse pleasures to be had. Hughes' direction is almost amateurish, the music (which loudly underlines every moment of excitement or humor) even worse. Even Mitchell and Huston, normally excellent actors, are at sea here. Buetel is, at times, absolutely beautiful, but as an actor, he's a glassy-eyed stick puppet. Published accounts have suggested that Hughes forced Buetel into a sexual relationship in exchange for a long-term contract, and for whatever reason, Hughes didn't let Buetel work for the next eight years. At any rate, his career never recovered from his association with Hughes. As far as the good, surprisingly enough, it's Jane Russell. She's sexy and is fine in her limited role; though she's theoretically the catalyst for most of the action, she has little to do in the last third of the film. I did have some fun watching this, but it really is a bad movie, and I'm astonished that some critics (including Maltin and Halliwell) cut it so much slack. Yes, it has its moments of campy fun, and the portrayal of the psychological aspects of the characters' relationships held some potential, but geez, is this ever a bad, bad movie. [TCM]

BOY MEETS GIRL (1938)

Basically, a screwball comedy without the central romantic element that's usually present. Your enjoyment of this will depend on your tolerance for the buddy comedy of James Cagney and Pat O'Brien, kicked here into ultra-high gear. The two play a screenwriting team who are getting tired of churning out formula pix ("boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl") for their studio boss (Ralph Bellamy). Nevertheless, they get assigned to a western which is supposed to save the fading reputation of cowboy star Dick Foran. Pregnant studio waitress Marie Wilson faints in Bellamy's office and the boys get the idea to write their movie around the newborn baby, named Happy. Happy's a hit but no one's happy, and the complications (including a case of measles that sidelines both the baby and the cowboy) pile on rather chaotically to the predictable "happy" ending. The whole thing has the rather forced frantic feel of Cagney's much later comedy, ONE TWO THREE, and I was exhausted by the end of the first hour of this 90 minute movie. There are several small joys to be had, including some jibes at studio thinking: for example, the studio seems proud of the fact that there are no English actors employed in the filming of "Young England"; the baby/cowboy movie is billed as being based on Shakespeare; the baby is billed as "the Crown Prince of Comedy, the King of Tragedy, and the Emperor of Emotion." The trumpeters that barge in at the end of each "act" (the movie is based on a play and it shows) are a hoot. Cagney and O'Brien do have comic chemistry with each other, even if Cagney is constantly in danger of going so far over the top that he'll exit the movie. The fine supporting cast includes Frank McHugh as Foran's agent and Bruce Lester as a British extra who falls for Wilson. Ronald Reagan has a small role as an MC at the premiere of the cowboy movie, and film buffs will recognize James Stephenson and Dennie Moore in bit roles. [TCM]

THE PRISONER OF SHARK ISLAND (1936)

This is the Hollywood version of the ordeal of Samuel Mudd, the doctor who unwittingly set the leg of the injured John Wilkes Booth and was found guilty of conspiracy in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. As in all historical films, the facts are played around with considerably in the service of entertainment, but this is a well-told tale. Warner Baxter is Mudd, presented here as a simple country doctor and slaveowner whose sympathies were with the Confederacy. The movie begins with an understated reenactment of Lincoln's murder followed by Booth's journey through pouring rain to Mudd's home where he asks for medical attention. After he peels off his boots, he tries to scratch his engraved name from the inside, but only partially succeeds. The next day, military police follow Booth's trail, find the boots, and arrest the doctor. A military court, the members of which have been instructed to ignore the legal principle of "reasonable doubt" in order to get guilty verdicts to avoid "the collapse of the Union," finds Mudd (and several others) guilty of conspiracy; most of the prisoners are executed by hanging, but Mudd is sentenced to a life of hard labor on a prison island in the Florida Keys. A sergeant on the island (John Carradine) takes particular delight in torturing this man he assumes had a direct hand in killing the president; back home, Mudd's wife (Gloria Stuart) tries every legal channel in attempts to free her husband. A daring escape attempt, in which Mudd is aided by a former slave of his (Ernest Whitman), is foiled and Mudd and Whitman are thrown into a deadly solitary cell, but when a yellow fever epidemic swamps the island and lays low prisoners and guards alike, Mudd is freed to help fight the disease. This eventually earns him the respect of all, even Carradine, and he is given a pardon and returns home to his loving wife.

In real life, Mudd spent four years on the island and was released after helping fight yellow fever, but he never regained his health or his livelihood. In the film, Mudd's innocence is never in doubt, but actually the case against him did have some merit, as he apparently lied to authorities about not knowing Booth--the two had met at least twice before the assassination, though Mudd insisted that he did not recognize Booth when he set his leg. Baxter is excellent, playing his part without the histrionics that must have been tempting. Standouts in the supporting cast include Harry Carey as the commandant of the island, Maurice Murphy as an orderly who helps Mudd during the epidemic, and Claude Gillingwater as Mudd's father-in-law, an inveterate Confederate (no poem intended). The prison island is referred to in the opening as an American Devil's Island, and indeed the 1939 B-movie DEVIL'S ISLAND stole its basic plot situation wholesale from this film, even though it is set in France and has nothing to do with the Civil War. Not reliable as a history lesson, perhaps, but a compelling movie. [FMC]

EXPERIMENT PERILOUS (1944)

[Spoilers included] A period melodrama which shows some potential in the beginning, but eventually bogs down with two colorless leads taking attention away from two more interesting characters. Doctor George Brent meets a quirky old woman (Olive Blakeney) on a train. She is heading home for a family reunion after several years in a sanitarium (due to a heart condition) and he hears just enough about her family to pique his interest. When she winds up dead a few days later, he gets involved with her brother (Paul Lukas) and his lovely wife (Hedy Lamarr). Lamarr is a docile and distracted person who, among other things, seems to be in the habit of sending herself bouquets of daisies and claiming that she didn't. Lukas fears that she may be mentally ill, so Brent agrees to help. However, when Brent realizes he has accidentally wound up with one of Blakeney's bags from the train, he finds out more information about her family's strange background and quickly realizes that Lukas is the one with the mental problem; he's deliberately trying to drive Lamarr insane, and is completely messing up their young son in the process. It's easy to see that this is a warmed-over take on GASLIGHT, even to being set in the past, with Lukas in the Boyer role, Lamarr as Bergman, and Brent as Joseph Cotten. As such, it mostly comes off as a second-rate gothic thriller, missing most of the thrills and atmosphere that helped make GASLIGHT fairly enjoyable. Lamarr is OK and Brent is his usual wooden self; someone younger and more energetic would have added some needed spark--because I just watched MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET again, I'm imagining someone like John Payne in the role, or even Robert Taylor. I wish more time had been given to the old woman--she's an interesting character, played well, and I wanted to know more about her. Likewise, Lukas's role could have used some enlarging; it never feels like all of his secrets have been revealed. Albert Dekker as a friend of Brent's who, by accident, spills too much info to Lukas and brings about the "perilous" climax, is OK. Jacques Tourneur directed and there are some nice stylistic touches here and there--good period sets, some nice photography--but unfortunately it will always wind up being compared to GASLIGHT, which, while not one of my very favorite movies, is still a better movie on all counts. [TCM]

BLOOD ON THE SUN (1945)

This is one of the first movies that James Cagney and his brother produced as independent filmmakers, trying to break away from the strictures of the studio system. It looks like it was made on the cheap, but after a while, it exerts a certain pull and the last 15 minutes or so are quite exciting. The plot, based very loosely on historical fact, is about an American journalist (Cagney) serving as editor of an English-language newspaper in Tokyo in the late 20's who breaks a story about a secret Japanese plan for world domination initiated by Premier Tanaka (John Emery). A fellow reporter (Wallace Ford) who comes into possession of a copy of the document winds up dead, but not until he has left the papers with Cagney. Sylvia Sidney, a Chinese temptress in league with Tanaka's men, is introduced to Cagney in order to seduce him so she can get hold of the plan, and she does, but after some manhandling by her colleagues, she goes over to Cagney's side and manages to smuggle the plans out of the country while Cagney faces off with a gang of violent goons, using judo to get the upper hand (although his formidable judo skills are of no help when the goons pull out guns in the last few minutes of the movie). As the fisticuffs fly, the plot loopholes grow--when the bad guys realize that Sidney is in league with Cagney, she is essentially put under house arrest in a hotel but we never see how she manages to escape, let alone get out with the plan intact. Frank Lloyd, the director, displays little in the way of interesting visual style, though there is an interestingly shot scene showing one of Sidney's Japanese handlers committing harakiri after he realizes she has escaped. In the Hollywood tradition of the era, most of the major Japanese characters are played by Caucasian actors (including Robert Montgomery and John Halloran) but it's pulled off well and it's not distracting. Rosemary DeCamp, who played Cagney's mother in YANKEE DOODLE DANDY, is Ford's wife, who also meets a bad end, and Porter Hall is Cagney's nervous publisher. The slam-bang ending makes the movie worth watching. [TCM]

BRITISH AGENT (1934)

[Spoilers follow!!!] For its time, this must have been an interesting attempt to combine recent history with romance, but it doesn't really hold up now. I suppose one reason that I found it lacking was that it kept reminding me two much better films, DOCTOR ZHIVAGO and REDS. Leslie Howard is a British diplomat who is on his way to Moscow in 1917 during the tumultuous days of the Russian Revolution. The main concern of the British is that the revolutionaries will pull the Russian troops out of the war against Germany. On a stopover in St. Petersburg, Howard attends a party at the British Embassy which is marred (in a scene echoed in ZHIVAGO) when troops and marching masses collide in the streets. Howard comes to the aid of Kay Francis, who is being hunted for shooting a soldier, and the two hit it off. Later, when Lenin is swept into power, the British close the embassy, leaving only Howard and a few diplomat buddies to sit around drinking and playing poker. Francis, now an important person with the Bolsheviks, returns and flirts with Howard, but when she overhears Howard decode a message that asks him to take on an unofficial "Mission: Impossible" task to influence the current government to stay in the war, she betrays him by telling her bosses. After Lenin is shot and falls into a coma and the government does indeed pull the troops, Howard goes underground to help rebuild the White Army. Francis finds out and is torn in her loyalties. Eventually, she rats on Howard, but when she learns his that the garret where he's hiding is marked for destruction, she goes to him to await certain death. At the last minute, they are saved when Lenin comes out of his coma and pardons all political enemies. The actors are fine; I think they are let down by the script which tries to cover too much in too short a time. The idea of mixing the tumult of the Revolution with personal romance worked better many years later in REDS. I especially liked William Gargan, Philip Reed, and Cesar Romero as the trio of diplomats who hang out with Howard. Ivan Simpson has a nice bit as a loyal butler at the British Embassy. The ending, in which a grim situation suddenly just vanishes and our couple is free to leave for England and a new life together, is a little hard to swallow. [TCM]

SOULS FOR SALE (1923)

This silent film has been part of the Turner Classic library but because it didn't have a music track, it had never been aired. Now thanks to TCM's Young Composers contest, the film has a great musical score by Marcus Sjowall and it's also had some footage restored (though it could still stand some digital clean-up) and it's a delightful discovery. The film begins with a young newlywed (Eleanor Boardman) who runs away from her new husband (Lew Cody) on their wedding night--the only explanation given is that she suddenly feels "revolted" by him, though we quickly learn that he's a slimy con man who marries women for their money than kills them. She spends the night in the desert and wakes up the next morning to a romantic figure of a man on a camel, on a windswept sand dune. She asks, "Are you real or a mirage?" and he replies, "Neither--I'm a movie actor." From here on, the movie becomes mostly a Hollywood behind-the-scenes comedy. The director of the film being shot (Richard Dix) takes pity on Boardman and gives her a job as an extra, which leads to a screen test, a romance with Dix, and starlet status for Boardman. The tone of much of the film (self-referential and satirical) is fairly modern, and much fun is had with Hollywood cliches such as the casting couch and other lifestyle scandals. Boardman's father is a preacher who thinks of Hollywood as an evil place, though we're told that actors frequently party "until the heathenish hour of 11:30" and movie sets are made to seem very tough indeed--one actress has a huge light fall on her, breaking her legs and giving Boardman the chance she needs to move into a starring role.

Another cliche is attacked in a title card during the shooting of Boardman's first film which notes that "the usual sheik crosses the usual desert with the usual captive." There are some fun cameos by real celebs, including Erich von Stroheim (directing a scene from GREED), Charlie Chaplin, and Zasu Pitts. By the end, however, the melodramatic trappings of the beginning return: just as Dix proposes marriage to Boardman, her husband returns to the scene, threatening to expose her to scandal and ruin her career. The climax, set during the shooting of a storm scene which is hampered by a real storm rolling in and setting a circus set on fire, is a doozy. For the most part, the acting is toned down from the usual overwrought silent style of the time, except for Cody as the lady-killer husband. William Haines, in his first billed role, has a couple of scenes as an assistant director. Boardman's character's name is Remember Steddon. Quite fun and exciting, and I think appealing viewing even for folks who aren't really fans of silent films. [TCM]

APACHE TRAIL (1942)

Nifty little B-western with the well-used plot device of a small group of people under siege, in this case, a bunch of travelers stuck in a small way station surrounded by unfriendly Indians. Our hero (third-billed William Lundigan) is the kid brother of a well-known hellraiser and bandit (Lloyd Nolan). After a stagecoach robbery, Nolan got away but Lundigan, who seems to have been mostly an onlooker, was arrested. The amusing opening scene has a traveling judge passing a 60-day sentence on Lundigan without even getting out of his coach. Since Lunidgan has already served 90 days, the judge amends his sentence to 90 and Lundigan is freed. He goes back to his employer at the stagecoach and is given the job of running a way station in the middle of rough and tumble Apache country. With help from a Mexican woman (Connie Gilchrist), her young and lovely daughter (Donna Reed), and a friendly bunch of deputies, Lundigan settles into his job but is soon challenged when a group of travelers are stranded at the small walled-in fort during an Apache uprising. Nolan also shows up, coveting the Wells Fargo payroll box, and it turns out that the Indians are (literally) on the warpath because, in the midst of being made an honorary Apache, Nolan stole a valuable medicine pipe. After an initial raid, the Apaches ask for Nolan to be given up to them or they'll continue their siege of the fort. Lundigan refuses to give up his own flesh and blood, but in the end, Nolan sacrifices himself to save the rest. Nolan and Reed are top-billed, and Nolan is quite good as the shifty villain, but Reed has very little to do except use her best Natalie Wood-style Mexican accent while flirting with the hero. Lundigan does nicely as the handsome, wholesome, and sturdy hero. In notable support are Chill Wills as a wounded visitor who joins the group at the fort, Fuzzy Knight doing a stuttering comic-relief role (and getting a serious moment when his close buddy is killed), Miles Mander as a sickly frontier artist, Gloria Holden (who played Dracula's daughter in the 1936 film) as his wife, Tito Renaldo as a "good-guy" Indian, and Anne Ayars (who at times look just like Ruth Hussey) as a Civil War widow who flirts briefly with Lundigan. There's perhaps a little too much plot here for the hour-long film, but it's an enjoyable hour, and being an MGM B-film, it looks as good as any A-western of the time. [TCM]

THE SPANISH CAPE MYSTERY (1935)

I've read an Ellery Queen story or two and I remember fairly well the Jim Hutton series of the 70's, but I had never seen an Ellery Queen movie until now. There was a short-lived series from Columbia with Ralph Bellamy, but the one I saw was an earlier film from B-studio Republic, with supporting player Donald Cook as the young detective who usually matches wits with his father--though in this film, it's Judge Macklin (Berton Churchill) who fills the older-man foil position. The film opens with Cook taking a couple of minutes of solve a crime for his dad before he and the judge leave for a vacation on the California coast at Spanish Cape (a resort area, I assume). They're staying in a guest house on the grounds and get roped into helping out at the nearby Godfrey mansion during a house party involving a bunch of unlikable gold-digging relatives who are out to crack a will they think is unfair to them. Friendly Uncle Dave (Huntley Gordon) is kidnapped while out for a moonlight stroll with his niece (Helen Twelvetrees). It seems that the thugs who snatched him thought he was actually George Baxter, a man who's been flirting with Twelvetrees (with her encouragement), even though she's engaged to Arnold Gray. After Cook and the judge arrive at the scene, Baxter is found dead, along with a letter indicating that he was cheating the family. Next to go is the greedy Mr. Munn who had been fighting with his wife. When someone suspects Mrs. Munn, the local sheriff (Harry Stubbs) says, "If every woman who fought with her husband killed him, America would be populated solely by Amazons." When Gray is found dead, suspicion falls on Twelevetrees. It takes one more death for Queen to dope out the identity of the killer; in retrospect, it's a predictable solution but I didn't figure it out. Twelvetrees is very good, though it took me a while to warm to her; Cook doesn't have much charisma but he's acceptable, and he handles the humorous banter with Twelvetrees fairly well. For a Republic film, the production values are not bad and the print I saw (from Encore Mystery) was in remarkably good shape. [TV]

MR. DODD TAKES THE AIR (1937)

A rather ho-hum semi-musical bit of whimsy which seems designed as a launching pad for radio singer Kenny Baker's movie career; it didn't quite work, given that he only made a few more films over the next ten years, then retired from the screen. He comes off like a hayseed Dick Powell without the touch of sophistication that Powell brought to his parts. Baker plays Claude Dodd, an electrician from the small town of Pewamo who is discovered singing at the local strawberry festival by a big-city mattress manufacturer (Ferris Taylor, whose company is called Morpheus Mattress). Taylor likes the boy's rich baritone voice, and the fact that his wife fell asleep while Baker was singing makes Taylor think that Baker would be a natural to sing soothing tunes on his company-sponsored late night radio show. But by the time Baker gets on the air, he has had an operation due to an attack of "quinsy" (yes, it's real--Dictionary.com says it's an inflamed abscess of the tonsils) and his baritone has risen to tenor. Taylor isn't happy, but the listening audience loves him and the radio station owner (Henry O'Neill) signs him to a big-money contract to sing on the Toothpaste Hour. In one of the most artificial plot contrivances ever, it turns out that Baker also has an invention that can make old radios sound like new, and this gets him entangled with a swindler (John Eldredge). The somewhat homely and naive Baker also winds up with three women after him: opera singer Alice Brady, conniving Gertrude Michael, and radio station secretary Jane Wyman, who of course is the one he ends up with, but not until a series of con jobs, ransackings, and misunderstandings (not to mention another case of quinsy) sends him back to the simple life in Pewamo. Baker is rather drab, but he is surrounded by a competent cast, highlighted by the delightful Brady, in high diva mode, and the reliable Frank McHugh as his friend and manager. Harry Davenport has a small role as a Pewamo doctor, and if you watch carefully, you may see William Hopper and Dave O'Brien in uncredited bits. Baker's baritone song, "If I Were a Lily," is a hoot, and a later song, "Remember Me," was nominated for an Oscar, but otherwise the music is not particularly memorable. [TCM]

THE BIG RED ONE (1980)

I usually restrict my blog reviews to movies from the 30's to the 60's, but I'm making an exception here because this film was directed by Samuel Fuller, a cult B-movie director whose heyday was in the 50's and 60's. I haven't seen many of his films, but the ones I have seen (PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET, THE NAKED KISS) are excellent. This one from fairly late in his career was released by a major studio but made on a relatively small budget and it shows. The directorial style is a little awkward at times, and the screenplay could have used some more work, but it's an interesting war movie which gains in power as it goes along, and looks rather ahead of its time now. The episodic narrative, based on Fuller's own experiences, follows a group of five soldiers from the First Infantry Divison (the Big Red 1 of the title) through the entire course of WWII. The sergeant is Lee Marvin; we first see him in WWI in a memorable prologue involving a rampaging shell-shocked horse and the killing of a German soldier who is desperately trying to tell his killer that the Armistice has been signed. Marvin and his four young riflemen are the focus of the film, which begins in North Africa in 1942, then jumps ahead through Sicily, Normandy (D-Day), Belgium, and Germany (the German surrender in 1945).

The various episodes range in tone from humorous to gory to surreal, and sometimes all three in one. Natives cut the ears off of dead German soldiers and use them to barter with the GIs for cigarettes. Marvin, in a makeshift hospital, gets a wet kiss on the mouth from an admiring German soldier. The soldiers help a woman give birth in a tank. A young man gets a testicle blown off by a land mine and Marvin causally tosses it over his shoulder, assuring the kid that he only needs one. The most surreal scene involves a raid on an insane asylum; a Resistance member (Stephane Audran) has been planted there, and as she dances about as though she's in another world, she cuts the throats of several German soldiers. When gunfire breaks out later in the dining room, the inmates continue eating as though nothing is happening until one inmate grabs a machine gun and starts firing at random. That night, Mark Hamill (the passive blond solider who is uncomfortable with the idea of killing) has wild sex with Audran right in the middle of a room of sleeping inmates. The other soldiers, all of whom (in direct opposition to war movie conventions) survive the war, are Robert Carradine (a writer and stand-in for Fuller), Bobby DiCicco, and Kelly Ward. A running sick joke is that the soldiers quit bothering to learn the names of new infantry members because they'll just wind up dead, and indeed, like the guest stars on Star Trek, all the newbies do wind up dead, though one guy (Perry Lang as a big blond doofus) actually survives for a couple of episodes, and when he does get killed, he manages to bring his killer down as well. The individual episodes are good, but much of the dialogue is corny or falls flat, especially Lee Marvin's many "punch lines": in a particularly intense segment set in a liberated concentration camp, Hamill fires repeatedly at a German soldier who is hiding in a crematory oven, but the mood is shattered when Marvin comes up from behind and says, "I think you got him." Carradine, who narrates the film, never seems comfortable with a cigar hanging out of his mouth, but generally the actors are fine, though they never look or feel very battle-hardened, at least as such things are generally conveyed in Hollywood movies. The budget constraints didn't allow for many "epic" battle scenes, but I imagine that Fuller's message, "Surviving is the only glory in war," is better served by that. For all its small disappointments, this film (the reconstructed 2-1/2 hour cut currently on DVD) is well worth watching. [DVD]

ABOVE SUSPICION (1943)

This enjoyable film belongs to one of my favorite genres, the light-hearted spy thriller, which flourished in the early days of WWII until the more serious documentary style thriller became popular during the 50's. This one is notable for the unusual star combo of Joan Crawford and Fred MacMurray, who wind up working very well together. The film, set in 1939, begins with MacMurray, an Rhodes Scholar teaching at Oxford, marrying Crawford and taking off for a honeymoon. They are waylaid by an officer of the Foreign Service who asks them to find out the whereabouts of a British contact in Germany who has the plans to some super-secret magnetic mines; he has vanished and the couple is to try and find him and bring the information back. As they follow the trail, they come into contact with a number of fine character actors in interesting roles: Conrad Veidt, fresh from playing the hissable movie Nazi Major Strasser in CASABLANCA, plays a shadowy German figure who winds up being a good guy (and sadly, this was his last role before his untimely death of a heart attack just 2 months after this movie was finished); Basil Rathbone does the villain honors as a former Rhodes Scholar turned Gestapo officer whom MacMurray and Crawford can't quite shake; Reginald Owen is the kidnapped man with the plans; Felix Bressart has a small role as a bookseller contact; Cecil Cunningham is Rathbone's mother and Bruce Lester is a British spy whose wife was killed at Dachau. There is a nice scene right out of THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH involving an assassination at a Liszt concert, and it's fun to see MacMurray and Crawford in old-age makeup near the end as they try to elude Rathbone and get to the border. Though the tone of the film darkens in places, the pace never flags. [TCM]

REPENT AT LEISURE (1941)

A runaway-bride screwball comedy done on a B-budget, which means that some of it works fine, but you keep wishing that the acting and writing were just a little bit sharper. Wendy Barrie is the daughter of department store owner George Barbier; when we first meet her, she is running out on her wedding to gold-digging Prince Paul (Rafael Storm) with the blessings of her father. Jumping on a double-decker bus, in full wedding gown splendor, she bums some bus fare from Kent Taylor, a mild-mannered bespectacled fellow (who looks exactly like Clark Kent!). He's into reading books about success, although he's not having much luck setting the world on fire in his job as an accountant (at, of course, her father's store). To explain the wedding gown, she tells him that she's a model and that she just quit her job because of an abusive boss. He takes her under his wing, letting her stay at his apartment while he stays with a friend. She is taken with him, largely because he's interested in her for herself, not her money. When the store, which is the target for a hostile merger by competitor Thurston Hall, has to make some cuts, they start with unmarried males, so Taylor tells his boss (Charles Lane) he's married, and he proposes to Barrie, who accepts, and they even adopt a baby (a bizarre plot point that doesn't really work; it just seems like an attempt to throw more "madcapness" into the mix). Taylor moves up in the organization, co-workers figure out who he's married to, and the news eventually reaches Taylor. He resents the subterfuge, leaves Barrie, and quits, getting hired by the competition and triggering a heated sales competition. Both the romance and the merger get resolved in a rather rushed manner in the last ten minutes. Taylor and Barrie are about evenly matched and work together fairly well, though both would get wiped off the screen by Grant and Hepburn, or Powell and Loy. Cecil Cunningham is good in a small role in her usual high bitch mode. There's an amusing sequence near the end involving the baby running loose on a department-store floor, but generally the movie is at its best during its first half. [TCM]

CLASH BY NIGHT (1952)

This Fritz Lang movie has been released on DVD as part of a film noir boxed set, but I think it will disappoint true noir aficionados; aside from the fact that much of the action takes place at night, this isn't noir, but a romantic triangle melodrama with good performances and some awfully purple dialogue which comes off like second-rate Tennessee Williams. Barbara Stanwyck is Mae, a woman who returns to her hometown, a California fishing village, having been beaten down by the big city; she was mistress to a rich, married man and was left penniless when he died. She moves in with her hunky younger brother (Keith Andes) and, apparently ready to settle for protective domesticity, starts dating big lug fisherman Paul Douglas, not terribly smart or handsome, but a considerate, salt-of-the-earth guy anyway. However, she soon finds herself attracted to Douglas' buddy, Robert Ryan, a restless type who works as a projectionist at the local theater. Ryan can be charming, except when he drinks, but he is also a cynical and deeply unhappy man stuck in a bad marriage to a traveling burlesque dancer. Stanwyck eventually marries Douglas and they have a baby; a year later, Ryan, divorced, re-enters Stanwyck's placid and boring life, tempting her into a steamy affair. She decides to leave with Ryan, but Douglas won't let her take their child. After Douglas and Ryan come to blows, Stanwyck ultimately decides to stick it out with Douglas and domesticity.

Stanwyck is the reason to watch this; she gives a solid performance, making her character sympathetic and multi-layered. Despite the various twists and turns Mae takes, Stanwyck, in the current vernacular, always "keeps it real." I can't quite say the same for Ryan, though in his defense, the character as written too often feels like just a character rather than a real person. The best scene in the movie is when a hungover Ryan lustily grapples with an emotionally vulnerable Stanwyck at the kitchen sink; you can feel their frustrations, their doubt, and their heat. Douglas is good at conveying the sensitive side of the lug; you can see why Stanwyck likes him (even if you're never convinced that she loves him). There is a vaguely parallel subplot, involving Andes and his girlfriend, Marilyn Monroe, that isn't developed very deeply, but it's nice to see two gorgeous people kiss and bicker occasionally. Andes is nice looking and good in his limited role, and it's too bad he never achieved full leading man stardom. J. Carroll Naish has a small but pivotal role as Douglas' nasty uncle. The opening, a panorama of shots of the sea and a near-documentary look at the fishing boats and the canning works, feels a lot like the opening of John Sayles' LIMBO. [TCM]

SVENGALI (1931)

The name "Svengali" has entered popular culture usage to refer to anyone who has some overwhelming power or influence over someone else, usually in a negative sense. The producers and managers of such "manufactured" music stars as Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys are called "pop svengalis"--you'll get lots of hits on Google with this phrase. The term comes from the character of Svengali the hypnotist in the novel "Trilby" by George DuMaurier, popularized by this early talkie starring John Barrymore. This is sometimes referred to as a borderline horror film, but anyone approaching it that way will be disappointed, though the stark, oversized sets and atmospheric lighting are reminiscent of CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI and make the movie a stylistic kin to the later Universal horror films, especially SON OF FRANKENSTEIN. Barrymore's Svengali is as pathetic as he is sinister; with overly theatrical makeup, he comes off like a grungy cross between Fagin and Dracula. In the first scene, we see him in a shabby apartment with a rich woman (Carmen Myers) who has just dumped her husband for Barrymore, but when he finds out that she neglected to get a cash settlement from the hubby, he glares at her until she goes running from the room and jumps in the river to her death. In the apartment of two artists (Donald Crisp and Luis Alberni) who enjoy pulling pranks on Barrymore, he meets a lovely young model (Marian Marsh) with whom he becomes obsessed. Although she seems to be romantically interested in blond fop Bramwell Fletcher, Barrymore uses his hypnotic powers to make her think that she's just a common tramp and not good enough for Fletcher. He fakes her death and spirits her away, turning her into an operatic sensation. Barrymore realizes he can force her through hypnosis to love him, but he remains unsatisfied because, as he says, making love to her is like talking to himself. Five years later, Fletcher and his artist friends come upon her at one of her performances and her memory is jogged enough to cause trouble. Barrymore and Marsh flee to Egypt but Fletcher follows them and in a nicely melodramatic ending, Barrymore drops dead, Marsh loses her voice and also drops dead, while Fletcher looks on helplessly. I wasn't terribly impressed with Barrymore or Fletcher, but Marsh is quite good (and quite sexy, and even gets a brief nude scene). One scene showing Barrymore's power over Marsh is justly famous: as Svengali stands at his window, the camera pans out of the room and across the roofs of Paris into Marsh's room, where we can tell that she feels his presence (accompanied by the loud sound of rushing wind). As horror, this doesn't quite cut it, but as a period melodrama, it's an interesting exercise in visual style. [TCM]

MY YEAR IN MOVIES

The best classic movies that I saw for the first time this year, in alphabetical order:

BEN-HUR (1925): The silent version of the Biblical epic, with Ramon Novarro. I'm trying to decide if it's worth getting the overblown Heston version on DVD just to get this as an 'extra.' (Mar.)

BORN TO BE BAD (1934): Loretta Young and Cary Grant in one of the last of the naughty pre-Code melodramas; struggling mother Young (in her best bad-girl performance) tries to seduce rich Grant away from his bride-to-be. (Feb.)

CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY (1944): Not really a holiday film, but a good noir with two stars playing against type: Deanna Durbin as a fallen woman and Gene Kelly as the murderous mother-loving thug she married. (Dec.)

DON'T TURN 'EM LOOSE (1936): Perhaps the only anti-parole propaganda film ever made. It's a little B-movie gem with Bruce Cabot doing a fine job as a paroled thug who acts like a golden boy in front of his family (including Lewis Stone as his father). (Nov.)

THE GENERAL DIED AT DAWN (1936): The best Marlene Dietrich movie that Dietrich never made. It's a lot like her SHANGHAI EXPRESS but with Madeleine Carroll as the good/bad lady and Gary Cooper as the hero. Funny, sexy, exciting. (July)

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW (1965): Pasolini's bare-bones, documentary-style take on the life of Jesus. Compelling and at times beautiful. (Mar.)

MILL OF THE STONE WOMEN (1960): A low budget French/Italian horror film with a plot that is a cross between HOUSE OF WAX and EYES WITHOUT A FACE. Acting and atmosphere make this stand out above the run-of-the-mill horror film of the time. (Oct.)

THE MODEL AND THE MARRIAGE BROKER (1951): The wonderful Thelma Ritter gets to play a lead role here as a marriage broker who comes to question her life's work, and it's a wonderful, underrated film, a comedy with some serious overtones. (Dec.)

THREE ON A MATCH (1932): Archetypal pre-Code movie with sex and crime and scandal; three former schoolmates (Bette Davis, Ann Dvorak, and Joan Blondell) meet up a few years later and get involved in each other's lives. It's short, fast-paced, and lots of fun. (Technically, I'd seen this before, but remembered little about it) (Apr.)

THE WIND (1928): Silent film with Lillian Gish as a young woman stuck in a marriage of convenience fighting for survival in a barren, wind-swept part of Texas. Melodramatic, but powerful. (Apr.)

THE WOMAN ON PIER 13 (aka I MARRIED A COMMUNIST--1949): Good cross of noir thriller and anti-Communist propaganda. Stars Robert Ryan and Laraine Day are fine, but the real gem is Janis Carter as the icy blonde bad girl. (May)

I saw some good WWII movies, such as GUADALCANAL DIARY, BATAAN, SO PROUDLY WE HAIL, and THE AMERICANIZATION OF EMILY. I was pleasantly surprised by a couple of Shirley Temple films (BRIGHT EYES and REBECCA OF SUNNYBROOK FARM) and I had fun seeing the 60's camp thriller DANGER: DIABOLIK. Other highlights included Maurice Chevalier in FOLIES-BERGERE, a fun B-movie with Gloria Stuart called WANTED: JANE TURNER, and Errol Flynn in SANTA FE TRAIL. My disappointments seemed few and far between this year, so I won't dwell on those this time. As far as recent films, it was a dry year for me. I didn't see many, and the few I genuinely liked included MYSTERIOUS SKIN, FANTASTIC FOUR, THE ARISTOCRATS, DOWNFALL, and SERENITY. CAPOTE and GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK had great acting but fell down in other areas. I haven't seen the new KING KONG yet but I have high hopes for it. The DVD release of the 1933 original was yet another wonderful package from Warner Home Video.

TENTH AVENUE ANGEL (1948)
CHRISTMAS IN BOSTON (2005)

I'm usually a sucker for Christmas-themed films, but this year, my cinema stocking was rather bare. My annual holiday TV-movie, CHRISTMAS IN BOSTON, on ABC Family, was pretty lame. The plot device had potential: a man and woman who have never met but have been pen-pals for years finally arrange to meet, but then chicken out and each has a friend pose as him or her. The friends wind up falling in love, and so do the pen-pals, without knowing each other's real identities until the end. The acting was OK; Patrick J. Admas fit the bill nicely as the requisite blandly handsome leading man, though I can't say much for Marla Sokoloff as his pen-pal. As an average TV-movie romance, this is pretty average; the real problem for me is that the holiday element is completely beside the point. This could have been set on Labor Day or Arbor Day or June 8th, and the film totally wastes any possibility for using holiday cheer, charm, and magic.

The Christmassy TENTH AVENUE ANGEL is a movie I've avoided watching in the past, mostly because the movie guide critics really hate it and give it one star or less. The "civilian" reviewers on IMDb, however, tend to love it and give it all the stars they can, so I broke down and watched it this year. It's not quite as bad as the professional critics say (Halliwell calls it "icky" and Maltin gives it a Bomb rating), but it's not one I'd rush to watch again. Ten-year-old Margaret O'Brien plays the title character, a whimsical Pollyanna-type who lives in the tenements and zips around on her roller skates, brightening the lives of the neighborhood residents. Her mother (Phyllis Thaxter) and father (Warner Anderson), though loving parents, are secondary characters next to her aunt (Angela Lansbury) and Lansbury's boyfriend (George Murphy). Murphy has just returned home from prison (O'Brien was told he was traveling the globe) and is trying to put his life back together; his buddy at the taxi company where he used to work (Barry Nelson, with an unbecoming pencil-thin mustache) gives him a job washing cabs and promises him that, after his 6-month parole period is over and he can hold a driver's license again, he'll be back in as a driver. However, Murphy finds it hard to escape his past and decides that he shouldn't marry Lansbury and plans to leave town after parole. Meanwhile, O'Brien becomes disillusioned when she finds out that everything adults say isn't necessarily true and she starts moping around, losing her whimsical charm. At Christmas, Anderson is low on money, Thaxter is pregnant, and Murphy is tempted to join up with his crime buddies for one last heist. When Thaxter collapses, gives premature birth, and seems on the verge of death, O'Brien decides that finding a Christmas miracle will somehow help so she goes hunting for a cow at midnight on Christmas Eve to see if it will kneel like the legends say. Guess what? It does, and somehow all the other situations come to uplifting resolutions in the last 5 minutes of the movie. The folks on IMDb who love this movie are mostly Margaret O'Brien fans, and certainly O'Brien is pretty good here, doing the best she can with some artlessly sappy situations and dialogue. Murphy also does a good job, very believable as a nice guy who's trying hard to stay out of trouble and live up to the expectations of others. Rhys Williams does a decent job as a blind news seller who figures in a major subplot. Still, overall, it does lay the sentiment on a little heavily, and the Miracle of the Cow just comes off as silly. [TCM]

STRAIGHT, PLACE AND SHOW (1938)

Yikes! I sat through another Ritz Brothers movie and lived! (see THE GORILLA). It's not a terrible movie exactly, but the Brothers look like they're having much more fun than the audience. The main reason I watched it was to see Ethel Merman in one of her rare screen appearances, but she doesn't have much to do. The Ritzes work at a side show, giving pony rides to kids. At a horse race, they accidentally bet on Playboy, a horse which comes out of nowhere to win. The horse belongs to heiress Phyllis Brooks, but her boyfriend, Richard Arlen, tired of her all-consuming interest in the horse and convinced that the win was a fluke, bets her that if Playboy doesn't win again in three months time, he gets the horse and her. The horse does prove a loser and Arlen sells the horse to the Ritzes with the stipulation that they cannot re-sell it (a lame plot device so that Brooks can't just buy it back). The brothers discover that the horse is better at steeplechase jumping than racing, and Brooks helps them to train the horse and enter it in a big race. Many plot improbabilities later, the Ritzes wind up taking the place of three Russian jockeys who are out to sabotage the race. Arlen gives in and rides Playboy to victory, with the predictable happy ending for all, except perhaps Merman, who plays a brassy babe who loves Arlen but is clearly not quite dainty and feminine enough to compete with Brooks. The Ritzes showiest bit aside from the horse race is a silly wrestling match with the Terrible Turk. One big problem with the Ritz Brothers is that they all look alike and more or less act alike; Harry is usually the Groucho figure, but he only barely stands out from the other two (Al & Jimmy). Arlen and Brooks are a fairly bland couple, though Arlen tries hard. Also featured are George Barbier as Brooks' father, Sidney Blackmer as a gambler, and Lon Chaney Jr. in a tiny part as a chauffeur. Merman sings OK, but the songs are undistinguished. [TCM]

CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY (1944)

This well-regarded but hard-to-find movie is most assuredly not feel-good holiday fare. It's a downbeat film noir which begins on a miserable, stormy Christmas Eve and ends on a less stormy but quite grim Christmas night. Despite the many Christmas trappings during the film's first 20 minutes, it has an appropriately dark look throughout, even in a scene set at a cathedral during Midnight Mass. Even more so than in the average 40's Production Code film, an awful lot of the narrative and characterizations are oblique and reading (or seeing) between the lines is needed for it all to make sense. We begin as new military school graduate Dean Harens, heading off to San Francisco on Christmas furlough to get married, receives a telegram from his intended telling him she's up and married someone else. Harens decides to go on to SF, seemingly to wreck some kind of revenge, but during a ferocious storm, his plane is waylaid to New Orleans where he has to stay the night. A friendly reporter (Richard Whorf) takes the hurt and lonely kid to a night spot which is probably supposed to do double duty as a whorehouse, though of course they could not have made that crystal clear back then. The madam (Gladys George) sets the kid up with Deanna Durbin, a sad-eyed singer, and she asks him to go to Midnight Mass with her. She breaks down crying during "Adeste Fideles" and afterwards, at a late-night diner (and later in his hotel room), she tells him her sad story. In flashback, we see Durbin meet fellow music buff Gene Kelly at a symphony concert. They hit it off and soon he takes her home to meet mother, Gale Sondergaard, a former aristocrat who has hit some bad times. The mother is almost desperately happy that Kelly has shown an interest in Durbin--it seems he's "weak" and irresponsible, and she hopes that between them, they can straighten him out. After they marry, things work for a while, but one night, he kills a bookie and, despite the mother's best attempts, Kelly is caught and sent to jail, which is where he is now. Durbin and Harens part Christmas morning, and Harens decides to leave well enough alone and not confront his former finacee, but just as he is set to leave New Orleans that night, he hears that Kelly has escaped prison. He heads out to the club and is a witness to the final scene with Kelly, waving a gun at Durbin as the police close in.

Durbin is known primarily as a frothy teen star of middling musicals for Universal and many critics say she didn't have the chops for the lead here. I have never seen her in any other film, so I have no preconceptions; I think she seems a bit lightweight for a noir femme fatale, but her casting was certainly not a fatal mistake. In the beginning, she does look appropriately beaten down by life, though she comes off more like a sad waitress than a hooker. Kelly is good playing against type as a smiling, neurotic bad guy, and Sondergaard is even better as a mother from hell. Some critics note the undertones of incest and homosexuality that are present; I certainly caught the weird incestuous tinges in the reciprocated mother-son fixation, but the gay subtext is not as obvious; the only reference I caught was the mentioning of his "weakness" and the mother telling Durbin that, "between us, we will make him strong." The narrative structure is unnecessarily convoluted: the first flashback at the diner shows Kelly coming home to Durbin the night of the murder, and the rest of their story, beginning and end, is told in a second flashback. The shots of the cathedral during Midnight Mass are impressive, and are echoed in the later shots of the concert hall where Kelly and Durbin meet. Harens is OK in what is essentially the role of a passive listener, and Whorf is even better as the reporter who winds up playing a surprisingly large role in the narrative. Based on a Somerset Maugham story, though apparently the details of the characters have been changed greatly for the film. For some reason, this has never been officially released on video which is a shame, especially for noir fans.

WINTER LIGHT (1963)

This is my favorite Ingmar Bergman film, and possibly his bleakest. I think it's his most beautiful looking one, with the possible exception of CRIES AND WHISPERS. In this day and age, a brief plot description for this movie might sound like a Bergman parody: on one cold, overcast winter afternoon in a stark Swedish landscape, a minister (Gunnar Bjornstrand) has a crisis of faith when he: 1) is unable to give solace to a suicidal parishioner, and 2) gives the heave-ho to his long-suffering mistress. The movie takes place in an approximation of real time, from the end of his sparsely-attended Sunday morning service to the beginning of an almost completely deserted afternoon service. During the service, the minister notes the "consolation and bliss" that his parishioners should leave with, but no one there looks happy or consoled. Afterward, a farmer (Max von Sydow) comes to Bjornstrand worried that because China has the bomb, the end of the world may be upon us. Instead of offering help, the minister expresses his own doubts about the meaning of life, and a while later, the farmer is found dead from a self-inflicted gun wound. The pastor is also forced to deal with his rather mousy mistress (Ingrid Thulin); their relationship has been dying for some time, and when she writes him a long confrontational letter (which, in a scene with startlingly intimate power, we see read by her directly to the camera), he replies by lashing out at her, agreeing with all of her comments and saying that it's time they broke it off because, basically, she's ugly and he never really liked her much anyway. The film ends as Bjornstrand prepares for an afternoon service to which no one shows up but Thulin. He questions whether or not to go on, and the movie climaxes with a conversation with another suffering individual, the hunchbacked church sexton (Allan Edwall) who talks about physical pain, loneliness, and the suffering of Jesus Christ. The movie ends with the minister beginning the service, but it does not feel like a "happy" ending for anyone. I choose to interpret it in a kind of Samuel Beckett manner: he'll go on, he can't go on, he'll go on. The movie is acted superbly by its entire small cast, which also includes Gunnel Lindblom as Sydow's wife/widow, and the black and white cinematography by Sven Nykvist is never less than stunning, even though the sets are threadbare and the landscape largely empty and forbidding. Maybe not the best Bergman film to start with if you're not already familiar with his work, but certainly one of his great films. [DVD]

THE GREAT LOVER (1931)

Another movie that doesn't get written up in the reference books, but which is solidly entertaining and worth watching. Adolphe Menjou is a noted opera singer and notorious ladies man, just back from Europe and about to appear in a production of "Don Giovanni." On the ship, he hears a woman sing a snatch of an aria and discovers later that it was Irene Dunne, an aspiring singer. He agrees to tutor her and soon feels she is good enough to open opposite him, which irritates diva (and former lover) Olga Baclanova. He falls in love with Dunne and, ready to renounce his philandering ways, proposes to her; she accepts even though she still has feelings for her ex, Neil Hamilton, Menjou's understudy. On opening night, their first act is an unqualified triumph, but Menjou gets an attack of laryngitis at intermission and she has to go on with Hamilton. We discover later that he is graciously stepping out of the way so she and the understudy can find true love together. It looks like Dunne does her own singing; if not, they've done a very good job with dubbing. She and Menjou are both wonderful; even though he does seem a tad too old for her and would probably wind up making her unhappy, he is still more likeable than the passive Hamilton, so the "happy" ending feels a bit perverse. Cliff Edwards is fun as the opera company's press agent and Roscoe Ates does his usual stuttering shtick as his sidekick. Ernest Torrence is a standout as Menjou's butler, who is given to talking about his boss in the first person plural; he refers to one of Menjou's past lovers as "the red-haired lady who swooned when we kissed her." There is an amusing subplot about a love/hate relationship between an older diva and a male singer whose singing always causes her dog to start barking (she says it's because the dog hates Wagner). Not necessarily a movie to hunt for, but if it shows up again on Turner Classic (perhaps on Irene Dunne's birthday), it's worth catching. [TCM]

THE YOUNGER BROTHERS (1949)

Run-of-the-mill Western which shows handsome B-leading man Wayne Morris starting to go to seed. He plays Cole Younger, one of a number of celebrated outlaws from American history. In real life, Cole and his brothers drifted into lives of crime after Union soldiers burned down his family's home and killed his father; they eventually got a kind of Robin Hood/Bonnie & Clyde reputation before they were captured during a bloody bank robbery in Minnesota. Their real story might have made an interesting movie, but this one is essentially total fiction, another in a long line of Hollywood narratives of the era in which a handsome outlaw tries to go straight, is betrayed by old companions, almost put back in jail, but redeemed at the last minute. Here, Morris and his brothers are waiting out their parole time; if they can stay out of trouble a few more weeks, they will be free for good. Unfortunately, as they ride into Cedar Creek, their reputation precedes them and they are run out of town. The chief instigator of bad feelings against the Youngers is ex-Pinkerton Fred Clark, who helped get them behind bars in the first place and resents their freedom. His wife eventually leaves him because he can't put his obsessions behind him, and Clark winds up going to Kate (Janis Paige), the sister of a former compadre of the brothers who herself now heads up a gang of small-time crooks, and gets her to try and tempt the Youngers into pulling off a robbery. Though Morris has the hots for Paige, he resists returning to his old ways, so Kate's gang goes through with the crime, with the Youngers as kidnapped scapegoats. Our boys still prevail and the pardon goes through, so Clark makes one last attempt to stop them with a lynch gang. Unlike in real life, in which the Youngers all wound up dead or in prison, here they escape in a truncated, almost comic ending. Bruce Bennett and Robert Hutton are fine as two of the brothers, Geraldine Brooks has a rather thankless role as Bennett's wife, and Alan Hale is a sheriff who is fairly sympathetic to the brothers. Morris is OK, but getting old and fleshy before his time (at 35, he looks over 40) and isn't as dashing a figure as the part calls for. [TCM]

BARBARELLA (1968)

I saw this in college in the mid-70's at a revival house and remember being quite disappointed. Seeing its stylistic cousin DANGER: DIABOLIK recently made me want to revisit this 60's pop-art comic book film. Though it's not quite a disaster, it's also not as much fun as DIABOLIK; it's not even as much fun as its posters. The movie is set thousands of years in the future when the cosmos has become a peaceful place; war and violence have somehow been banished (the very idea of conflict seems to exist only in the Museum of Conflict), and, as the Beatles once hoped, all you need is love, at least until some nut goes and ruins it all by inventing the deadly Positronic Ray. Jane Fonda is Barbarella, an intergalactic super-heroine who is called upon by the President of Earth to find the renegade scientist Durand Durand (Milo O'Shea) who invented the weapon. Her sketchy, episodic adventures take her first to a planet of odd children who threaten her with mechanical dolls with razor-sharp teeth--they're a little like the scary African fetish doll that goes after Karen Black in the notorious 70's TV-movie "Trilogy of Terror." She has sex with various partners (usually consensually, but rarely with much joy) including the very hairy man who resuces her from the dolls (Ugo Tognazzi) and a nutty inventor (David Hemmings) named Dildano (with a name like that, you just *know* that sex is in the offing). She is flown about by a blind angel (the hunky John Philip Law, star of DIABOLIK) and trapped by an Evil Queen (model Anita Pallenberg, mostly famous at the time as Keith Richards' girlfriend) on a planet which has a core of molten evil, named the Mathmos. She gets tortured on a keyboard-like machine which is supposed to pleasure her to death, but her innocence defies the device. The Mathmos swallows her up, but her innocence causes it to vomit her up, and the angel flies her and the Evil Queen to safety, a somewhat ambigiously happy ending, I guess. The above description may make it sound like trashy, campy SF fun, but it's really kinda draggy. Law is nice to look at, as is Fonda, and the colorful sets and light-show effects may help keep you awake, but otherwise this movie's reputation is quite overblown. [DVD]

WAR-GODS OF THE DEEP (1965)

I just finished reading a fairly good book about Vincent Price and his horror movie career ("Vincent Price: The Art of Fear"), and next up on my reading list is the Tab Hunter autobiography, so the arrival of this movie, which co-stars Price and Hunter, from Netflix was fortuitous, though sadly it came too late to include in my October horror-themed blog entries. Technically, this is one of American International's Poe movies, based loosely on, or more accurately, inspired by a poem called "City in the Sea," a lush description of a dead undersea city. The movie is set in a Cornish seaside village; when a girl (Susan Hart) is kidnapped, American engineer Tab Hunter and British artist David Tomlinson go in search of her and wind up sucked down through a small whirlpool into an undersea castle, part of a mostly abandoned city on the sea floor which is currently being lived in by Vincent Price and his band of smugglers. They have been there for over one hundred years, their lives extended through an odd mix of elements in the air (pretty lame reasoning for a plot gimmick which isn't even really necessary to the narrative). Some "gill-men," decayed, Lovecraftian descendents of the city's original occupants, also live there, and one of them was responsible for kidnapping Hart, whom Price believes is a reincarnation of his dead wife. However, a nearby undersea volcano threatens the existence of the city and Price gets Hunter to try and find a way to stave off the inevitable. Naturally, the volcano explodes and our intrepid trio manages to escape at the last minute. The low-budget film looks pretty good--the cityscape, though obviously a miniature or a matte painting, is very cool, the sets are fine, and the color scheme of saturated reds and greens works nicely. Price, playing a Captain Nemo type, isn't at the top of his game, and Hunter, handsome as he is, doesn't give a single line reading that rings true (for that matter, neither does Hart). Most critics don't care for Tomlinson's work here (he's best known as Mr. Banks in MARY POPPINS), but given that it's a comic relief role and nothing else, he throws himself admirably into the part and I think he's actually one of few bright spots in the film, though I did get tired of him carting around his pet chicken. The gill-men are shabby cut-rate versions of the famous Creature from the Black Lagoon and aren't really scary for a second. Nevertheless, the movie does work up some occasionally interesting atmosphere, and the print on the MGM disc is in great shape. The last feature film credit for great genre director Jacques Tourneur. [DVD]

BOYS' RANCH (1946)

This MGM programmer seems largely inspired by their own earlier BOYS TOWN, and taken as as a B-movie version, it isn't bad, though the prime era for this kind of film was past by 1946 and it feels a little tired, like everyone's just going through the paces. Still, I guess I have a thing for B-lead James Craig who carries the day here as a smalltime baseball player who, knowing he'll never make first string, retires and heads off with his wife, Dorothy Patrick, to make a living on their Texas ranch. After his last game, two of his teenage fans, Skip Homeier and Darryl Hickman, get busted for delinquency and, rather than see them sent off to reform school, Craig takes legal custody of them and attempts to get them jobs on a nearby ranch. When that doesn't work out, and the boys are about to fall in with a local gang of delinquents, he works out a deal with a landowner (Ray Collins) to set up a ranch for wayward boys that he and his wife will run. They agree to operate it for a one-year trial period before Collins will permanently donate the land; things go well for most of the time, though Skip is a constant pain in the ass to both the adults and the other boys, and soon turns into an accomplished thief. Near the end of the trial period, the boys hold a community rodeo to show how successful the enterprise has been, but when a good chunk of prize money is stolen, all signs point to Homeier and the future of the ranch is in doubt. Hickman, who has been doing double duty to cover up for Homeier's slacking, winds up unconscious in the desert during a heavy rainstorm and Homeier, ready to hit the road with his loot, redeems himself by returning to help save his buddy. Craig and Hickman are particularly good, though Homeier doesn't quite cut it, sounding whiny and childish rather than tough and truly threatening. However, the weakest cast member is the top-billed child actor Jackie "Butch" Jenkins who hit it big as a 6-year-old playing Mickey Rooney's little brother in THE HUMAN COMEDY. At 9, his sleepy-eyed, slow-tongued shtick doesn't wear well and, though he improves has the film goes along, he still slows things down and the film would have played better if his part had been trimmed a bit. Craig grows a mustache halfway through the movie, supposedly to look more authoritative to the boys, but I suspect it had more to do with other films he was shooting. According to IMDb, the concept for the story was based on a real place, Cal Farley's Boys Ranch near Amarillo, which still exists. [TCM]

THE MODEL AND THE MARRIAGE BROKER (1951)

This is a delightful little gem, directed by the great George Cukor and co-written by Charles Brackett (SUNSET BLVD., BALL OF FIRE), which has gone quite underrated and should be out on DVD along with most of the rest of the films of its star, Thelma Ritter. Here Ritter plays the marriage broker of the title, eking out a living in the Flatiron Building in New York City by attempting, without the help of today's computers, to match up desperate single people by inviting pairs who might hit it off to sedate Sunday afternoon tea parties at her home. The folks who come to Ritter tend to be homely and lonely, and though the matchmaking is seen humorously, the people themselves are treated sympathetically. The lonely singles include the tall, gawky Nancy Kulp (10 years before she became Miss Hathaway on "The Beverly Hillbillies"), Frank Fontaine doing a slow-witted character very much like his drunken Crazy Guggenheim on "The Jackie Gleaon Show," and Zero Mostel. One subplot involves a woman (Helen Ford) who stole Ritter's husband from her years ago. Now that he's died, she's rich but lonely, she comes to Ritter for help, and they strike up an unlikely alliance. The focus of the plot, however, is on the model of the title (Jeanne Crain) who happens upon Ritter by accident; she's getting out of a relationship with a married man and Ritter, out of the goodness of her heart, tries surreptitiously to hook her up with doctor Scott Brady, who has just stood up the bride with whom Ritter fixed him up. Things go well for a while, but when Crain finds out what's been happening, she resents Ritter's meddling and tells her off, which leads Ritter to question her entire enterprise. There is a happy ending which involves Crain herself becoming a matchmaker for Ritter, but much of the film has a subtle tinge of sadness which makes it stand out from the typical romantic comedy of the era. Ritter is excellent, as she always is, and this is one of the few films in which she has the central role rather than a juicy supporting part. Brady and Crain are attractive and fine in their roles; Brady especially is just quirky enough to be interesting. There are choice bits from character actors Jay C. Flippen and Dennie Moore. This is well worth poring over the schedule of Fox Movie Channel to catch. [FMC]

PURSUIT (1935)

Tight, fast-paced film which provides a nice showcase for one of my favorite B-leads, Chester Morris. He plays a pilot who is being paid to deliver 6-year-old Scotty Beckett (one of the Little Rascals), a child in the middle of a nasty custody battle, to Mexico to stay with his birth mother. Along with Beckett for the ride is Sally Eilers, who is working for middleman C. Henry Gordon, but they never make it up in the air after the prop plane takes off with the kid in it alone and Morris has to jump in and crash it into a barn to save the kid. The three take off in a car for Tijuana and have a series of mostly comical misadventures, some of which involve getting handcuffed to each other and being followed by snoopy Henry Travers, who is out for some reward money. They dress the boy up as a girl to throw Travers off the track, and a pregnant dog named Perfume provides other diversions. Once they get near the border to meet Gordon and the mother (Dorothy Peterson), Gordon tries to pull a double cross to get the reward money, which is substantially more than he'll get from Peterson, but there's a happy ending in store involving the trio dressing in blackface and driving across the border in an old jalopy in full view of Gordon. Normally, I prefer some decent characterization and backstory, but here the fact that we are given very little background about the characters works well with the short timeframe (the hour-long movie takes place over just 2 days time). Morris and Eilers work up some good B-level chemistry, the kid is fine, and Erville Alderson does a nice comic turn as a befuddled cop. [TCM]

DAVID AND BATHSHEBA (1951)

As Biblical epics go, this one is too serious to be campy fun like Cecil B. DeMille's renowned films, and it's not "epic" enough to be compared to THE ROBE, so it winds up occupying a not terribly interesting middle ground. The narrative begins with King David (Gregory Peck) and the Israelites at war with the Ammonites. After a successful battle, David returns home, leaving his trusted captain Uriah (Kieron Moore) at the front; despite having a number of wives, David lusts for Uriah's wife Bathsheba (Susan Hayward) after he sees her bathing from his balcony. Soon they are in the midst of a heated affair and Bathsheba gets pregnant, which is a problem since her husband has been gone for over a year. Since the penalty for adultery is stoning the woman to death (the man appears to get away scot-free), David devises a plan to get Uriah back for at least one night so that her condition will not be suspicious. However, despite a kind of consciousness-raising talk from David about keeping his wife happy, Uriah instead spends the night sitting up and waiting for his next battleground orders. David then issues secret plans to have Uriah isolated in the forefront of the fighting so he'll be killed, then David can marry his widow. The plan works, but when sandstorms and drought hit Israel (and Bathsheba's baby dies soon after its delivery), holy man Nathan (Raymond Massey) interprets the events as signs of God's displeasure with David's sins, and the people rise up to demand the death of Bathsheba. In the climax, David spends a dark night of the soul communing with God before the Ark of the Covenant, and we see flashbacks to some of his legendary deeds, including the defeat of Goliath. Finally, David leans forward to touch the sacred Ark--an act that we have seen can cause death--and instead of David being struck down, drenching rains bring an end to Israel's suffering, and David and Bathsheba live happily ever after, one assumes. Peck is handsome and, when he appears toward the end in a scruffy beard and sackcloth, he's actually kinda sexy. Hayward is appealing, Massey has an appropriate fire-and-brimstone attitude, and Jayne Meadows, whom I know mostly from her appearances on "What's My Line?" does a surprisingly good job as one of David's conniving wives. George Zucco and Francis X. Bushman have small roles. The production, though not exactly opulent, is satisfactory; the print I saw on Fox Movie Channel was murky and in need of restoration. [FMC]

DON'T TURN 'EM LOOSE (1936)

Just a few days ago, I dissed Bruce Cabot as the leading man in SINNER TAKE ALL. Now I have to note how much I liked him as the lead in this B-crime movie with a unique propaganda twist: it's basically an anti-parole movie. The film opens at a parole hearing for convict Cabot. His sad-looking wife shows up with a baby in tow and helps convince the board to free him, but we find out that the woman is an actress and the baby is rented. Cabot is whisked off to his mistress (Grace Bradley) and continues his life of crime by robbing a dairy company and killing a guard in the process. Then he spends a few weeks visiting his small-town family who think he's an important traveling businessman (Cabot has his henchman Frank Jenks send them postcards from foreign countries to strengthen the illusion). While visiting, he pulls off a jewelry store robbery to get a bracelet for Bradley, and cop James Gleason, who has been after Cabot all along, figures out what's what. He finds Bradley and blackmails her (with incriminating phone calls to another lover) into helping catch him. Cabot winds up behind bars again for possessing a gun while on parole, but pulls off a clever escape, just long enough to gun down Bradley in cold blood, then sneaks back to prison where eventually he comes up for parole again. The twist this time is that his father, Lewis Stone, is now a member of the parole board. When his son comes before him (under an assumed name), he is shocked. Cabot gets Stone to agree to let him off in exchange for never contacting the family again, but the son returns to town for one last heist, on the eve of his sister's wedding. The finale is appropriately vicious and satisfying. Cabot is convincing both as a brutal thug and as a nice all-American boy. Stone and Gleason are fine as usual. Betty Grable is Cabot's sister, Louise Latimer is his almost homely small-town girlfriend, John Arledge is Grable's fiance, and Nella Walker is Stone's wife. This little B-gem has been ignored by Maltin and Halliwell, but it's worth catching the next time it crops up on Turner Classic. [TCM]

BILLY THE KID (1941)

An almost completely fictionalized version of the last days of notorious outlaw William Bonney, a.k.a. Billy the Kid. The real-life Kid was only 21 when he was killed, and Robert Taylor, who plays him here, was 30 at the time, and looked even older, but if you put out of your head any idea that this movie has anything in common with history, you can enjoy it. It's established early on that Billy's father died from being shot in the back, and Billy now has a something of a mania about that. We first see the Kid break his Mexican buddy Pedro (Frank Puglia) out of jail in a small frontier town. The two wind up in the middle of a local brouhaha. Town big shot Gene Lockhart runs not just the saloon and the general store, but also the puppet sherrif (Cy Kendall) and judges, and he is trying to stop British cattleman Ian Hunter from selling his cattle to the Army and undercutting his own prices. First, Lockhart hires Billy on his side, but during a nighttime cattle stampede, Billy runs into Brian Donlevy, a childhood friend, who is working for Hunter and soon Billy is, too. This doesn't sit well with Lockhart and his men, who kill Pedro to prod Billy into a rash act. Donlevy talks him into acting with caution, but when Hunter, who has just been named marshal, is shot to death (and in the back), the Kid can't be stopped, leading to a predictably sad ending. Most critics think Taylor was too old and too glossy for the part, but if you take this as just a movie about an outlaw anti-hero and forget that it's supposed to be based on fact, I think Taylor is fine, as is Donlevy, and neither of them is usually a favorite of mine. The supporting cast standout is Lockhart, as he so often is. Also present are Henry O'Neill (fine as a reporter who stands with Hunter and Taylor) and Mary Howard (colorless as Hunter's sister, and briefly, Taylor's love interest). Familiar faces in smaller roles include Chill Wills, Ethel Griffes, Lon Chaney Jr., Joe Yule, and Grant Withers. The film was nominated for an Oscar for color cinematography, and it does indeed often look ravishing, with some scenes shot on location in Utah's Monument Valley. Even though the studio scenes can't match that, as a whole the movie looks quite good. [TCM]

LADY OF SCANDAL (1930)

Although the title promises a titillating pre-Code movie, this is really a tame drawing room comedy of manners which is quite fun until it takes a turn toward rather drippy melodrama in its last 15 minutes. A British family of lords and ladies is thrown into disarray when they read in the papers that young son Ralph Forbes plans on marrying musical comedy star Ruth Chatterton. It's already bad enough that a cousin, Basil Rathbone, has been carrying on with a married woman who feels she can't leave her invalid husband, but this latest development threatens to send Lord Willie (Herbert Bunston) and assorted relatives through the roof. The family meets Chatterton and, assuming she's a gold digger who has tricked Forbes into a proposal, decides to test her: they say they will OK the marriage if she retires from the stage and comes to live with them for a few months, hoping that Forbes will tire of her during that time. What they don't know is that Forbes is the one who forced the marriage issue by planting an item in the press; Chatterton herself isn't as gung-ho as the family thinks, and even her own father doesn't want her to leave the stage. Over a few weeks' time, she wins most of the family members over, even Lord Willie, but also finds herself falling for Rathbone. The two plan to run off together, but when Rathbone's mistress's husband dies, plans change for everyone.

This has all the strengths (nice set, good writing) and weaknesses (awkward scene transitions, flubbed lines left in) of the early sound MGM movies. The cast is especially good here, even the usually weak Forbes. Bunston (Dr. Seward in the 1931 DRACULA) does a nice job as a pompous fuddy-duddy who slowly warms to Chatterton's charms, even doing an ass-slapping dance to a jazzy gramophone record. Fredrick Kerr is quite funny as Lord Trench, the most snobbish but also the funniest of the family, especially when he gets drunk on "gully washers." His best line (among many candidates) is when someone suggests that, when Chatterton enters, "we all look horrified," to which he replies, "That won't be hard with my wife in the room." McKenzie Ward is the effete cousin Ernest whose breathing exercises are always bothering someone. Though not a musical, the movie does begin and end with Chatterton in a fancy production number. This film is more evidence that Chatterton has been unfairly forgotten by today's audiences. [TCM]

SINNER TAKE ALL (1936)

An MGM B-mystery without much to recommend it aside from a rare screen appearance by real-life reporter (and "What's My Line" panelist) Dorothy Kilgallen, who has about 2-1/2 lines as a "girl reporter" who lends a hand to our hero at the climax. The plot involves a former reporter (Bruce Cabot) who now works as an assistant to lawyer George Zucco, who himself works for the Lampier family, who own the paper for which Cabot used to work. When the family starts getting death threats, the editor of the paper (Stanley Ridges) re-hires Cabot, leaving him working on the case from two perspectives. Two of the sons are killed, one by poison and one in a car crash (though at least one of them may still be alive but in hiding), and suspicion falls on the daughter (Margaret Lindsay) who seems to have the most to gain financially with the others out of the way. Another suspect is Joseph Calleia, shady owner of the Green Lantern night club, who may be having an affair with the editor's wife. If that's true, then the editor is also a suspect. And the final suspect is Zucco, who is almost always a suspect in any movie he's in. The outcome of the mystery plays out nicely, but the film's effectiveness is undercut by the wooden performance of Cabot. Lindsay, Zucco, and Calleia are fine, and it's interesting to see Charley Grapewin, kindly Uncle Henry in WIZARD OF OZ, playing a rich old man with a nasty disposition. The highlight of the movie is a scene near the end in which we see a shadowy figure hiding on top of an elevator in order to sneak into Grapewin's room and throw the old man off a balcony. Not a bad movie, but one that would have been much better with a more charismatic male lead. [TCM]

BLACK NARCISSUS (1947)

This is often cited as one of the most beautiful looking films of all time, and it definitely is a feast for the eyes. As a drama, it has its moments, though the story of repressed passions is not far removed from typical Hollywood psychological melodrama. Deborah Kerr is a young nun who is made Mother Superior of a new nunnery in the Himalayas, in a small castle high up on a cliff overlooking a village. The property has been donated by an Indian general so that the sisters will run a school and hospital, and we find out early on that the place was once a palace for royal courtesans and that a previous group of priests that had been stationed there didn't last long. The British agent in the area (David Farrar) predicts that Kerr's nuns won't last, either. The building is filled with huge open windows and a chilly wind is constantly blowing through, day and night. Things start off well when the natives show up en masse, the adults at the hospital and the youngsters at school, but Kerr is disappointed to find out that they have been paid to do so by the general. Over time, the nuns become more or less undone by the various distractions of the sensual atmosphere. Flora Robson, in charge of the garden, winds up planting lovely flowers rather than the utilitarian vegetables that were planned. Both Kerr and the younger Kathleen Byron are attracted to Farrar (who frequently dresses in skimpy khaki shorts and a shirt open to his stomach) which leads to tensions between the two. A young native woman (Jean Simmons) who is in danger of getting a reputation as a harlot is brought to the sisters by Farrar, and she begins a romance with the Young General (Sabu), who is taking classes with the children. The natives turn hostile after one nun attends to a sick child who dies soon after. Eventually, Byron goes a little mad from her repressed desires, leading to a climax that, in use of sound, music, and visuals is very much like the climax to Hitchcock's VERTIGO.

As most critics note, the movie looks ravishing from first moment to last, and it's all the more astonishing when you realize that it was all shot on studio sets. It never looks studio-bound, and it achieves its atmospheric effects with more artistry than today's computer-generated tricks. The characters are a little underdeveloped; of the nuns, only Kerr gets any kind of backstory, and what’s there is slight--we learn through a handful of flashbacks that she came to her vocation after being jilted by a man whom she had loved for years. Farrar looks nice without a shirt, but the character suffers from a lack of background or a consistent personality. Byron wins acting honors for her descent into madness, but Kerr is good as well. I especially like her in the beginning, when her Mother Superior tells her she is getting charge of the new nunnery--we can't tell if she's happy or angry or excited or frightened; we get a strong sense of a woman trying very hard to repress her feelings. May Hallatt provides some weird comic relief as the native caretaker, but her acting style is overblown and her dialogue sounds dubbed in by someone else, which is a bit distracting. I've only seen this movie twice, and I suspect it's the kind of film that would richly reward repeated viewings. There are some bad video prints out there, so try to get the Criterion DVD or see it on Turner Classic Movies. [TCM]

MYSTERY STREEET (1950)

You could say that this movie was 50 years ahead of its time, as it plays out a little like "CSI: Boston," or as my partner put it when he saw me watching this on Turner Classic Movies, "CSI: TCM." It does a nice job of balancing the genres of police procedural and film noir. The opening segment is pure noir: a blonde bad girl comes to no good end. Trampy Jan Sterling is in a jam with her rent money (and, as we find out later, she's also pregnant) and after she calls her married lover to arrange a meeting to get some money, she promises nosy landlady Elsa Lanchester she'll get the money the next day. However, at the Grass Skirt bar, the lover doesn't show, so Sterling picks up drunken Marshall Thompson, a poor slob whose sick wife is in the hospital having just lost her baby. He takes her out to Hyannis where she ditches him, stealing his car to confront her lover (Edmon Ryan) who promptly shoots her dead and dumps her and the car into the water. Some time later, Sterling's skeleton washes up at Cape Cod and police detective Ricardo Montalban has to find out who she is and who killed her. He solicits the help of Harvard forensics professor Bruce Bennett who uncovers clues from the bones of the victim. A web of circumstantial evidence begins to tighten around Thompson, who is arrested on suspicion of murder, but landlady Lanchester puts 2 and 2 together first and tries to blackmail the real killer. All this leads to an exciting chase at a train station with justice prevailing in the end. Montalban is quite good in the lead, and Lanchester steals all her scenes playing against her usual dithering type as a greedy and fairly cold-blooded schemer. Sally Forrest, second billed as Thompson's wife, doesn't have much to do until toward the end. Willard Waterman has an amusing bit as a mortician and old pal of the deceased. The issues of race and class are brought up briefly when the rich blueblood Ryan casts aspersions on the "upstart" Hispanic Montalban; it's a short and subtle but effective scene. I have no idea how the title fits in. Recommended. [TCM]

SON OF THE GODS (1930)

A strange example of the "exotic" romantic melodrama, quite popular back in the day. When it was released, it was probably seen as a lesson in tolerance, but now its message comes off as somewhat offensive, though it does make for an interesting viewing experience. Richard Barthelmess, an actor without a drop of exotic "otherness" in him, plays Sam Lee, a young Chinese man who can pass for Caucasian. After getting dissed by some college girls when they find out that he is Chinese, he leaves school and goes back home to San Francisco and his father, successful businessman Lee Ying (E. Alyn Warren), who counsels him that only tolerance can combat prejudice. Sam goes out on his own, works below deck on an ocean liner, is befriended by author Claude King, and winds up assisting him on a book. Living a relatively high life in France, he meets soap heiress Allana (Constance Bennett) who takes a shine to him, until she finds out he's Chinese, when she whips him across the face with a riding crop in public at the Casino Royale (a scene similar to one in Clara Bow's CALL HER SAVAGE. Sam winds up back in San Francisco to take over the family business when his father dies. Allana wants him back but he'll have nothing to do with her, so she drowns her sorrows in a life of dissolution. Eventually Sam finds out that he was actually a Caucasian foundling who was adopted by a Chinese couple. That leads to a theoretically happy ending for the two, though the resolution--as long as he's white, he's alright--will leave a bad taste in modern viewers' mouths. There's a flashback scene which was filmed in Technicolor, but in the Turner Classic print, it looks like it's tinted pink. Frank Albertson plays the potentially interesting character of Ticker, Sam's college buddy, though he vanishes after the first 15 minutes. Mildred Van Dorn, as the father's secretary, gives Sam a Catholic scapula (saying it can't hurt to mix religions) and uses the worst come-and-go Irish accent ever. As far as I can tell, there is precisely one Asian actor with a speaking role (King Ho Chang as Sam's assistant) though the experience must have traumatized him as he never appeared in another movie. The direction is stagy and awkward though some of the sets are cool, especially a huge round door in Sam's house. Neither lead is at his or her best: Barthelmess is way too old to play a college-age boy and Bennett is rather lackluster except for her brief whipping scene. [TCM]

DANGER: DIABOLIK (1968)

In my youth (late 60's-early 70's), I was a rabid comic book fan, with hundreds of them stacked around the basement, in order by title and issue number (and they're still there--thanks, Mom!) and I remain fascinated by what is referred to as the Silver Age of comic books. Comic book movies get made regularly now, with huge budgets and big stars, but back in the 60's, they were few and far between, were usually low-budget affairs, and were, in line with the zeitgeist, quite campy and not to be taken seriously. BARBARELLA is probably the best known comics-related film of that era, but this one is much better. It certainly does the best job replicating the comic-book reading experience on screen of any film until the recent X-Men and Spider Man movies. Based on an Italian series, the main character is a super villain known only as Diabolik (John Phillip Law). The episodic narrative, which feels like a string of separate stories from a run of comic book issues, follows Law as he steals from the rich and gives to himself and his sexy partner (Marisa Mell). The opening segment has an armored car company attempting to thwart a possible hijackikng by substituting waste paper for 10 million dollars and sending the real money in a diplomat's Rolls-Royce, but Law manages to waylay the car (using psychedelic fog pumped out of his own Batmobile-type car), snatch it up in the air via magnet, and get the money. We then follow him through a long drive to his underground lair, like the Batcave but much cooler, where he and Mell have sex on a huge circular bed, on top of and covered by the money. This scene is probably the peak of the film in terms of camp appeal. Among the other "episodes": Law dons a skintight cat-burglar suit to scale a tower and steal a priceless necklace; Law and Mell attend a press conference by the Minister of Finance (Terry-Thomas in a brief comic-relief role) and let loose Exhilaration Gas (after taking Anti-Exhiliration Gas Pills) which leaves the whole crowd in helpless giggles; Law rescues Mell from gangster Adolfo Celi, then drops him mid-air from a parachute to his death; Law blows up lots of government buildings (in a scene reminiscent of the conclusion of Fight Club, and, of course, of the events of 9/11); Law steals all of the government's gold, melted down into a 20-ton ingot. In the end, Law's arch-enemy, police inspector Michel Piccoli, seems to get the upper hand when a spray of molten gold covers Law, and Piccoli leaves him for dead, but a last literal wink at the audience lets us know that a sequel could be forthcoming (though it never happened). The movie is lots of fun, and the comic-book style (lots of fast cuts and close-ups) adds to that, but the amoral nature of the anti-hero made me a little uncomfortable--Law is out for himself alone, and doesn't mind killing anyone in his way. Aside from that little moral quibble, this is great fun if you're in a 60's fantasy mood. [DVD]

ANNE OF GREEN GABLES (1934)

I've never read the "Anne" books and I don't think I've ever seen a version of "Heidi" all the way through (though I have seen a couple of Shirley Temple films) so I'm not really an expert on the Orphan Melodrama, but this seems like a perfectly charming example of the genre. The actress Anne Shirley plays the orphan Anne Shirley (the actress's name was Dawn O'Dea but she changed it when this movie came out) who is adopted by Marilla (Helen Westley) and her brother Matthew (O.P. Heggie); they wanted a boy to help out around the farm, and when a whimsical little drama queen (she proclaims that her red hair is her "lifelong sorrow") shows up, they're not sure they want to keep her, but she soon wins them over. The rest of the episodic story follows her adventures living on Prince Edward Island. She has an amusing row with a gossipy neighbor (well played by Sara Haden), gets caught in a lie about being friends with a recent graduate, and, over the period of a few years, has a romance with fellow student Gilbert Blythe (Tom Brown). Their rocky relationship begins when she smashes a slate over his head because he makes fun of her hair. When she decides she wants to get his attention at a hayride, he ignores her, but later he comes to her rescue during a rafting mishap (she's floating along pretending to be the Lady of Shallot). They start seeing each other in secret because Marilla won't allow Anne to see Gilbert (many years ago, Matthew was jilted by Gilbert's mother and Marilla assumes that incident is his lifelong sorrow). Eventually, Anne is sent off to college, and just as she's about to graduate, she learns that Matthew is sick. She comes back home and arranges for Gilbert, now an assistant to a renowned heart doctor, to care for Matthew, leading to a happy ending all around. It's a sweet movie without being cloying or sentimental, and part of the credit for that goes to Westley and Heggie who both nicely underplay their roles. Shirley is fun, Brown is hunky in a mid-1930's way, and Haden does her usual spinster turn to a tee. [TCM]