MAID OF SALEM (1937)

In the village of Salem in 1692, Claudette Colbert is a young woman of marrying age who seems fated to be matched up with the Ichabod Crane-like Sterling Holloway; she is told it is her "duty to marry and have children to the glory of God and the colony." However, she is a free spirit who dances by herself and dares to wear frivolous hats to church and doesn’t think much of the stuffy Holloway. Fred MacMurray (surprisingly scruffy and hunky) is a tax resister who has escaped from jail in Virginia and is hiding out with his uncle; he and Colbert meet, get together on the sly, and fall in love. Meanwhile, bored teenager Bonita Granville hears stories of girls getting the attention of none other than Cotton Mather by claiming to be bewitched, and the slave Tituba attracts an audience with stories of witchcraft and magic potions (even the respected wife and mother Beulah Bondi, in a weak moment, admits she'd like to live a little and attend a Devil's Feast). When someone stirs up the townsfolk with news of witchcraft in a nearby village, Granville starts faking convulsions, claiming she's being attacked by demons conjured up by local witches. Other girls get in on the act and soon the town is in a frenzy of dark accusations, with suspected witches jailed and hanged; as a title card puts it, "Old grudges are paid with the fatal charge of witchcraft." Colbert, accused of consorting with a dark, mysterious man, is left alone to face charges of sorcery when MacMurray is arrested and hauled back to Virginia.

Given the drama (political, religious, personal, and historical) inherent in the subject of the Salem witch trials, it seems odd that Hollywood hasn’t done much with this dark time in our past. Aside from versions of Arthur Miller's play The Crucible, no other films come to mind. This one just barely begins to scratch the surface of the topic, but for its time (the Hollywood doldrums of the mid-30's) and style (artificial studio sets, middle-of-the-road stars, journeyman director), this is a fairly good first stab at filming the story. Colbert does a nice job early in the film, seems to lack energy in the middle, but rises to the occasion during her climactic courtroom scene; MacMurray is fine, though the plot contrivance of his arrest leaves him absent for crucial sections near the end (suffice it to say that the studios would never leave Colbert to burn, so through more plot contrivances, she's saved at the end). The supporting cast is uniformly fine, especially Granville and Bondi (at left), who makes the most of her handful of scenes. Madame Sul-Te-Wan doesn't get as much screen time as she should as Tituba, who along with Granville is at the center of the mess. Gale Sondergaard, Harvey Stephens, Virginia Weidler, and Halliwell Hobbes also do good work. [DVD]

NIGHT TIDE (1963)

Johnny Drake (Dennis Hopper) is a moody young sailor at liberty staying at the Santa Monica boardwalk who goes to a moody beatnik bar called The Blue Lagoon and meets Mora (Linda Lawson), a moody young woman who works as a mermaid at a boardwalk attraction and lives above the carousel. They both seem like lonely, vulnerable people and begin to bond. Then Johnny finds out about her background: her boss and guardian, Captain Murdock, says that she is descended from a race of siren-type sea people; Mora's two previous boyfriends disappeared and were later found drowned; a mysterious woman pops up now and then who seems to have a strange power over Mora; and, oh yeah, Mora thinks she's actually a mermaid and occasionally goes walking in a trance out to the ocean because she's being called from the depths. Of course, their relationship is doomed, but is it doomed because these people are neurotics, or because Mora really is an unearthly creature?

This moody (sorry, but that's the best word) fantasy/melodrama is often compared to the 40s movies of Val Lewton, I'm guessing because of the gloomy look and the brooding characters (I found a couple of synonyms for "moody"). Make no mistake, the director, Curtis Harrington (whose career peaked a few years later with the tricky thriller GAMES), is no Val Lewton; if anything, this movie, perhaps because of its watery setting and feeling of doomed predestination, reminded me more of CARNIVAL OF SOULS than of CAT PEOPLE. If you only know Hopper from Easy Rider or Blue Velvet, you'll be surprised how handsome and almost delicate he is here; he's very good as the nice-guy sailor with just a touch of loner-oddness about him--he is Dennis Hopper, after all. Lawson is weaker, but her role is so strange that her performance almost fits. Cult star Luana Anders has a relatively small part. The score jarringly breaks the mood at times. There is a nice dream sequence involving mermaids and octopuses, and indeed the best sections of the film are the ones that feel dreamy--the more rational parts bring the film down a bit. Worth seeing, especially widescreen. [DVD]

SAILOR OF THE KING (1953)

During WWI, British Naval officer Michael Rennie, on a five-day leave, meets a young woman (Wendy Hiller) on a train. They hit it off and spend the five days together at a village hotel as man and wife. He proposes marriage, but she tells him that, since they barely know each other and he'll be heading off to sea for an extended time, a marriage would be impractical, so they part. The story picks up in 1940; Rennie is a captain commanding a Navy cruiser which is part of a convoy going after a notoriously deadly German ship called the Essen. Another ship in the convoy, the Amesbury, winds up engaging the enemy; the Essen sinks the Amesbury, and the German ship picks up the only two survivors: a petty officer (Bernard Lee) who has lost a leg and a young signalman (Jeffrey Hunter) who grew up with in Canada with a single mother who trained him from a young age in all things naval. When the ship pulls into an island lagoon for repairs, Hunter arms himself, escapes into the hills of the island, and becomes a sniper, injuring and killing many of the German sailors who are trying to make the repairs. Hunter hopes to keep the ship in the lagoon long enough for another ship from the British convoy to arrive, but the Germans soon catch on and send their own men out to find him.

[Spoilers ahead!] What would be an average wartime thriller is complicated by an interesting plot twist which is telegraphed so subtly, I almost missed it. Hunter is the son of Wendy Hiller, and most likely Rennie is his father. Hunter's sniping trick works and the British capture the entire Essen crew. In the final scene, when both Rennie and Hunter are being rewarded by the Navy for their efforts, the two men meet, though they remain unaware of their actual relationship. In an alternate ending on the DVD, which is apparently truer to the original story by C.S. Forester, Hunter's trick still works, but he dies on the island. Rennie meets Hiller when she arrives to receive her son's posthumous medal and they have a touching reunion. This film feels a bit padded out; it would make a better hour-long TV show. But the acting is good, the sniping sequence is tense and well-played, and best of all, the beautiful Hunter is shirtless (and sweaty in that clean Hollywood way) for much of the last half of the movie. Both endings are interesting and both work well, though to different effects. The meeting with Hiller is underwritten, so I think I prefer the ending in which Hunter survives but Rennie remains in the dark. [DVD]

INTERMEZZO: A LOVE STORY (1939)

This romantic melodrama has a strong reputation among classic movie fans, but I've avoided it largely because I don't have a high tolerance for the genre; the mixture of romance and pathos and high emotion has to be just right for me to appreciate it (as in HUMORESQUE). We first meet Leslie Howard, a famous concert violinist at the end of a successful American tour; he and his pianist (John Halliday), who is retiring, head back to their native Sweden where Howard is happy to catch up with his wife and children. When he meets his daughter's piano teacher (Ingrid Bergman), who is also a protege of Halliday's, he barely notices her until he hears her play and realizes her potential. After a romantic evening together at the symphony, they stroll around town and fall in love. She fights the feeling for a while, but when he suggests she come along on his European tour as his accompanist, their flirtation becomes a full-blown affair. They have an idyllic time until reality intrudes in two ways: 1) his wife serves him with divorce papers, and 2) Bergman gets word through Halliday that she has won a prestigious musical scholarship. Halliday assumes that the two will come to their senses and end their affair, and they do, half-heartedly, but soon a near-tragedy will cause Howard to finally make a decision one way or another.

Though this film is short (70 minutes), it feels longer, and not in a good way. The beginning of the affair is handled well, and Howard and Bergman have a nice, casually intimate chemistry. For a time, when it works well, it feels like the much better British film BRIEF ENCOUNTER, but when melodrama takes over, things get draggy. It might have helped to have given the supporting cast more to do, especially the always welcome Cecil Kellaway as Howard's manager. Halliday is OK, though Edna Best is bland as the wronged wife; Ann E. Todd gets a few good scenes as Howard's daughter. The masterful Gregg Toland does his usual solid work as cinematographer. I suppose now that I've seen this, I'll need to see the other big romance I've avoided for too long, AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER. [TCM]

THE WORLD MOVES ON (1934)

John Ford directed this generations-spanning family saga. In 1825, two powerful families, the Girards from New Orleans and the Warburtons from England, merge their cotton businesses; a young Girard son (Franchot Tone) has some other merging in mind when he falls for Mrs. Warburton (Madeleine Carroll), but after fighting a duel for her honor, he decides not to press the point. By 1914, the business is more successful than ever, and another Girard (Richard, played by Tone) and another Warburton (Mary, played by Carroll) meet and generate sparks, though she is engaged to the German Erik (Reginald Denny) who runs the Berlin branch of the company. To forget her, Richard goes to Europe and when war breaks out, joins the Foreign Legion. Mary becomes the head of the company in Europe and, after Richard is wounded, the two marry, though when he returns to the front, Richard is captured in battle and winds up being interrogated by Erik, now an officer in the German army. After the war, Richard and Mary go to America and by 1925, as a title card tells us (while "Rhapsody in Blue" plays), Richard has forgotten about the lessons of the war; money is his "new morality" and power his "new God." As he becomes richer and more ruthless, he becomes more distant from Mary until 1929, when he loses everything in the stock market crash. The film ends with a prescient montage sequence showing the building of the tensions that would lead to WWII, and a close-up on a crucifix while Mary prays.

As these episodic CAVALCADE-type of films go, this is OK. What with the rush of melodramatic events, the level of acting is almost beside the point; Tone and Carroll are adequate but they don't really get to put an individual stamp on their roles. Of the supporting cast, only Denny shines. Stepin Fetchit does his usual shuffling, barely-articulate bit, though I did chuckle at the scene where he joins up with the Foreign Legion because he thinks he's joining a lodge. A big chunk of effective combat footage, some done with hand-held cameras, was taken from the German film WOODEN CROSSES to which Fox had bought the rights. [DVD]

THE MATCH KING (1932)

A heavily-fictionalized biopic about Swedish industrialist Ivar Kreuger, who built a match monopoly, and supposedly came up with the folk belief that three on a match is unlucky as a publicity gimmick so people would buy more matches. We first see Warren William as Paul Kroll, a flim-flamming cleaning man at Wrigley Field who has come up with a scam involving keeping the names of ex-employees on the payroll, then splitting their money with the other guys. His uncle asks him to come to Sweden to help out with his failing match company; he does, and uses his crooked ways, involving balancing loans, forging, and blackmail, to build the company into a European giant; his motto: "Never worry about anything until it happens." William has an affair with a famous actress (Lili Damita, playing a Garbo type) who eventually dumps him. When he hears an old man has invented an "everlasting match" that can be struck over and over, he pretends to be a sympathetic entrepreneur but actually schemes to get the man committed to an insane asylum. He even commits murder when he gets in over his head in a plan involving counterfeit bonds. By the end, realizing his house of cards is about to come tumbling down, he kills himself. William does a nice job at the center of this fast-moving melodrama, outshining everyone else except perhaps Glenda Farrell and Claire Dodd as two of his paramours—I like both actresses though neither gets much screen time here. [TCM]

TONIGHT AND EVERY NIGHT (1945)

This average wartime musical set in a music hall in London renowned for staying open and never missing a performance throughout WWII is based loosely on the story of an actual theater, The Windmill, which was also the inspiration for a much more interesting film, 2005's Miss Henderson Presents. Here, the theater is mostly just a backdrop for a tediously predictable and underdeveloped romance between American singer Rita Hayworth and RAF pilot Lee Bowman. He flirts with her during an air raid and won't take "no" for an answer, so she agrees on a date, but she gets pissed off when he pulls a fast one to ensure they'll be alone in his apartment. A couple days later, when he's called up for a mission, she suddenly decides she loves him (about the most unconvincing romantic switcheroo ever). Will he come back in one piece? Will she agree to marry him? The only real suspense is in figuring out which character(s) will die, since in a war movie, someone in whom the audience is invested has to die. Will it be her dancing friend Janet Blair? The wispy male dancer Marc Platt, who waits until the movie's almost over to declare his (doomed) love for Hayworth? Florence Bates, the crusty but heart-of-gold manager of the theater? Or will the rather boring Bowman die a hero after all?

There are a few points of interest along the way. Hayworth, in her first starring role, is gorgeous and does a decent acting job with weak material. The Technicolor is stunning, and a couple of the numbers, notably Hayworth's sexy "You Excite Me" and an elaborate production number for an otherwise so-so song called "Cry and You Cry Alone," are fun. Most of the major British speaking parts are taken by thoroughly American actors who can't do an accent to save their souls, and to Bowman's credit, he doesn't even try. Only Texas-born Florence Bates manages to sound authentic. I like that a stab is occasionally made at fleshing out some of the supporting characters, but more attention should have been paid to rounding out the leading couple, not to mention the super-boring Platt and Blair. Hayworth fans won't be disappointed, and devotees of the movie musical might have some fun now and then, but most other viewers will want to skip this one. [TCM]

SKI TROOP ATTACK (1960)

Around Christmas of 1944, a small band of soldiers on skis are in a German forest on a reconnaissance mission. There is constant tension between the leader (Michael Forest) who wants to focus narrowly on their assignment and a sergeant (Frank Wolff) who just wants to kill as many Germans as possible. Several times during the movie, the men get to ski down hills, shooting and knifing Nazis; between times, they tramp around a bit awkwardly on their skis and argue. At one point, they come across a cabin in the woods occupied by a tough German woman. In many war movies, this character would wind up being sympathetic to the Americans, but here she's a faithful German who tries to poison the soldiers. The film builds to a climax in which the soldiers try to blow up a bridge; there is a long chase along a snowy mountainside that slows down the action, and some of the men die, but there are plenty of ski attacks and the bridge gets blown up by the end.

Netflix sends their discs in wrappers which usually have a nice paragraph-long summary of the DVD enclosed. For this movie, the wrapper contained one sentence: “Roger Corman plays a Nazi in this cheapy war flick.” Aside from the misspelling of “cheapie,” this is accurate but misleading. I figured if Netflix had nothing good to say about this, it must be a miserable movie indeed, but it's certainly not as bad as the wrapper would indicate. It is a very low budget B-movie, shot in the mountains of South Dakota while Corman's crew and actors were finishing up a sci-fi film, BEAST FROM HAUNTED CAVE. One of the things that makes it work to the degree that it does is that it was shot in real snow. The action scenes are repetitious (they see Germans in the snow, they shoot at them from afar, ski down a hill, and use their bayonets when they get up close) but the real snow—both on the ground and occasionally falling—adds to the atmosphere. Corman, who produced and directed, does indeed play a Nazi but in a cameo part. All the German dialogue was dubbed in later, though most of the English sounds like it was recorded on set. Not bad for a "cheapy." [DVD]

THE MIRACLE OF OUR LADY OF FATIMA (1952)

Although like Monty Woolley in THE BISHOP'S WIFE, I consider myself to "have no religion," I was raised Catholic and I still find it difficult to resist Hollywood portrayals of Catholicism (if only all priests were like Bing Crosby in GOING MY WAY). Based on an actual event, this film opens with some brief context: in 1910, a socialist uprising in Portugal led to anti-clergy policies including the closing of many churches. By 1917, churches were re-opened but the priests were very cautious about stepping on the toes of the civil administrators. One spring morning, three children playing in a field see a vision of a beautiful lady, in the sky above a tree. She doesn't identify herself but she tells the children to have everyone pray the rosary each day for world peace, and asks them to return to the same spot on the 13th of each month for the next six months. Hugo, a charming village ne'er-do-well (and atheist), advises the children not to talk about the vision, but they do. The priest says they are just suffering from daydreams and downplays the growing talk of a miracle, but soon pilgrims are coming from out of town to try and catch a glimpse of the lady, whom the children think is the Virgin Mary. Eventually, large crowds are present when the children hear the lady warn them that another large-scale war is coming, and she wants Russia consecrated in her name. Government men come in, portrayed a bit like Hollywood gangsters, and try to force the children to recant, but the plan backfires and more people than ever show up for the visitations. On the sixth and final visit, hundreds of onlookers see the sun move erratically in the sky and there are many conversions, including that of Hugo.

This film follows the accepted narrative of the miracle of Fatima quite reverently, throwing in some anti-socialist propaganda for good measure. Perhaps because the protagonists are children, we don't get terribly wrapped in them as characters, though Susan Whitney is fine as Lucia, the oldest child. Gilbert Roland adds some needed interest as Hugo, and Frank Silvera has the thankless role of the chief administrator, the closest thing the story has to a villain. This plays out like a community theater version of the earlier SONG OF BERNADETTE, which was about similar visions which took place at Lourdes years earlier. It must be difficult for filmmakers to decide how much of a heavenly vision to show on screen. In BERNADETTE, we don't see anything, but here, we see a rather static image of a pretty lady in the sky, and we hear her voice talking to the children. Because of this device, it was never clear to me if any of the pilgrims actually saw the Virgin Mary themselves, or were just ecstatic to be in the presence of a miracle. The "Ave Maria" is used extensively in the background score. Directed by John Brahm, who is not nearly as interesting here as he was with his earlier Gothic thrillers THE LODGER and HANGOVER SQUARE. [TCM]

DARLING LILI (1970)

One of the movie musicals that killed (or at least seriously wounded) Julie Andrews' career after her back-to-back successes with Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music. This and the earlier STAR! are both big-budget period-piece disasters, and both are amorphous messes that can’t commit to being either family friendly or fully adult. Neither movie is unwatchable, but both are disappointments. This one, directed by Blake Edwards, who would marry Andrews just before the film was released, is set during WWI, and features Andrews as a British music hall star; we first see her calming an audience by singing during an air raid, but we soon discover that she’s a spy, selling secrets to German officer Jeremy Kemp who poses as her uncle. She goes to work on American pilot Rock Hudson but two things go wrong: the British suspect that there’s a female spy at work, and she comes to care about Hudson. One of the biggest problems with the movie is its awkward shifting in tone, back and forth from serious spy story to frivolous spy story, with musical numbers and instances of irritating slapstick farce cropping up. There is some good aerial footage, and Andrews does a strip tease number, but as attractive as she is, she just doesn't cut it as a hottie or a femme fatale, whether it's her or just our perception of her. Of course, another big problem is the state of the movie musical at the time; just a couple of years after it seemed to have hit a commercial peak (My Fair Lady and Andrews' earlier films), the bottom fell out and the post-Easy Rider audience was staying away in droves. Here, most of the songs are performed on a stage, and one original song, "Whistling Away the Dark," is actually quite lovely. The DVD contains a director-approved re-cut edition, shorn of some 25 minutes (with the cut footage included as extras), but it still feels a bit too long. [DVD]

MAYBE IT'S LOVE (1935)

Act 1: Ross Alexander, a goofy clerk who works for Joseph Cawthorn, is sweet on secretary Gloria Stuart, but so is Cawthorn's son, Phillip Reed. Alexander thinks he's getting a promotion to Havana, but instead the boss wants him to keep an eye on Reed. Complications ensue. Act 2: Alexander and Stuart have a spat, and Reed talks his dad into sending Alexander to Havana after all, but at the dock, Stuart and Alexander make up. They get married, Stuart quits work, and Alexander gets fired. Act 3: Marital problems build up, mostly due to Alexander's gambling and Stuart's well-meaning family always hanging around. They split up and both go back to work for Cawthorn. Eventually Reed helps the two reconcile and Stuart makes her family leave them alone.

This is an average example of the romantic comedy subgenre about a young couple grappling with various problems during a rocky courtship and first year of marriage. It's unusual only in that it's based on a play by Maxwell Anderson, "Saturday's Children," though I think the original and the 1940 film adaptation with John Garfield are a bit more serious than this version. This film seems to be Frank Capra material played at Marx Brothers speed, and the result is not wholly satisfying. Alexander was supposedly a promising young contract player at Warners whose career was scotched by his homosexuality, but I've seen him in a handful of films and he just never seemed like a leading man type; he's certainly the weak link in this cast, which is a shame because most everyone else is fine. Stuart is wonderful as always; Reed, a Tyrone Power look-alike, has more charisma than Alexander; also good are Henry Travers, Frank McHugh, and Ruth Donnelley as Stuart's family members. [TCM]

GIRL ON A MOTORCYCLE (1968)

[Spoilers ahead] A 60's psychedelic morality tale with a girl, a motorcycle, lots of solarized color effects, but not much else. Rebecca (Marianne Faithfull), about to marry the pleasant but dull schoolteacher Raymond (Roger Mutton), flirts with Daniel (Alain Delon), a motorcycle-riding college instructor and regular customer at her father's bookstore. While on a skiing weekend in Switzerland, Raymond wants to sneak into Rebecca's room to do some premarital fooling around, but she can't go through with it and pretends to be asleep. Later that night, however, when Daniel comes creeping in through her window, she's all about the sex. She marries Raymond but occasionally takes off on her motorcycle (a scandalous wedding gift from Daniel) and goes from her home in Alsace to carry on an affair with Daniel in Heidelberg. There is no talk of love, but clearly Daniel has "liberated" something within Rebecca--she thinks she's become a nymphomaniac. Practically the entire movie takes place one day as she's riding her motorcycle to see Daniel; in a skintight leather jumpsuit, naked underneath, she rides and writhes and delivers ridiculous interior monologues as we get her narrative in disjointed flashbacks. At the end, her mind too much on sex and not enough on the road, she is killed in a highway pile-up.

As a period piece, this is fun in spots. The director, famous cinematographer Jack Cardiff (BLACK NARCISSUS, THE AFRICAN QUEEN), uses lots of trippy color effects when we're inside her head, though there is no drug use, or even drinking, at all. If you make it through the weird opening sequence, you'll probably stick around for the whole thing: Faithfull, waking up one morning, has a swirly vision of circling birds and a dream of her husband playing a tedious cello piece in a circus spotlight while her lover rides rings around him on a motorcycle. Faithfull is lovely and has lots of screen presence, and is glimpsed naked once or twice. She and the wildly sexy Delon have good chemistry, though for a movie that is mostly set inside Faithfull's head, we never get much insight into her character, or Delon's for that matter. Obviously, Rebecca is feeling smothered, but we never quite see how or why--she does say at one point that her husband's reasonable nature has turned her into a bitch--and the fact that she is killed in the end for seeking freedom complicates the message. There are some truly ludicrous lines to be cherished: "Sometimes it's an instinct to fly"; "Rebellion's the only thing that keeps you alive"; "Your toes are like tombstones." Most of the motorcycling that Faithfull does is either in front of a rear projection screen or while obviously being towed by another vehicle. The sex scenes aren't all that sexy; the last one, in which Delon whips Faithfull with a bunch of roses while she's on top of him, has potential, but as soon as it gets interesting, the color solarization starts up again and you can't tell what the hell's going on. The Redemption DVD print is not in the best shape, but it's presentable. [DVD]

LA NOTTE (1961)

With this film under my belt, I have now seen all three of the movies in the loose trilogy by Michelangelo Antonioni which are variously referred to as the "Alienation" films or the "Emptiness" films, or the "Doomed Relationships" trilogy, or as IMDb trivia has it, the "Incomunicabiliy" trilogy--and speaking of the difficulty of communication, I'm pretty sure that should be "incommunicability." The first, L'AVVENTURA, is about a young woman who vanishes on a boat trip; what starts out as a sort of detective story as her lover and friend search for her becomes a tale of two people attracted to each other but also bored by each other, and by life. The third, L'ECLISSE (Eclipse), centers on a bored woman who initiates an affair with an attractive stockbroker, only to be bored by him, and by life. LA NOTTE follows a husband and wife through the course of a day and night during which they realize they are, yes, bored with each other and with life. Despite my flippant descriptions, I like these movies, especially the way they look, and think they are all worthy film buff material. But it doesn't seem like Antonioni got very far in developing his thesis, and in fact I think it's the first one that is the richest viewing experience, though L'ECLISSE gets a lot of critical attention for its final long sequence of city street life.

This one has the best acting of the three, probably because the characters are better written. Marcello Mastroianni is a writer, married to Jeanne Moreau (both pictured above). We see the pair visiting an older writer (whom Moreau may have had an affair with in the past), dying in a hospital room, and Mastroianni has an encounter with a woman who pulls him into a room, strips naked, and tries to seduce him, but it turns out she's a mental case. That evening, at a book party, a bored Moreau leaves, wanders the stark city streets, and stops a fist fight. The two go to a club and watch a rather sexy dance/strip number. Later they attend a cocktail party at a large, modern suburban house, all stark white walls and glass; he flirts with Monica Vitti (pictured at right--and honestly, who wouldn't flirt with her?), she leaves for a drive with a young playboy (Giorgio Negro), but both wind up at dawn together in a grassy field. She reads him an old love letter of his, he doesn't recognize it, and they end the film rolling around together in the dirt, in a prelude to a joyless sex act. As in all three films, it is the photography of architecture, and of people framed oddly against buildings and landscapes, that keeps the viewer most interested. But the characters, being better developed than in the other two films, are fairly interesting, even if we never really know what makes them tick, or even really why they feel alienated from each other and their surroundings (the plight of the thinking modern person, I suppose). There are certainly hints: Mastroianni's new book is called The Sleepwalkers; at one point he tells Moreau, "I no longer have inspirations, only recollections"; a discussion topic at the party, among the very well-to-do guests, is about what does or doesn't have lasting value. Plotwise, these threads never come together, but still by the end, you do come away with an almost physical feeling of alienation, or emptiness, or of the sadness of incommunicability. [DVD]

LOOT (1970)

Every so often, I see a movie to which description cannot do justice. Sometimes it's a great movie (like 2001: A Space Odyssey), sometimes it's a terrible movie (like Santa Claus vs. the Martians), and sometimes, it's just fuckin' weird. Loot is that third kind of movie. Actually, it's not quite one-of-a kind; it reminds me in its energy and dark humor of THE WRONG BOX, a manic British farce of the Swingin' Sixties era. That movie had a strong cast and some witty dialogue well delivered. This movie falls down on all those counts, even though it's based on a play by the well-regarded Joe Orton. Still, because it's not on home video and showings of it are rare, this is one to catch for lovers of, shall we say, eccentric cinema. I took notes as I watched, but as I look back over them, nothing seems coherent. Still, I'll soldier on:

Hywell Bennett and Roy Holder (above) are friends who often seem on the verge of being lovers, grabbing and hugging and calling each other "Baby." Bennett works for an undertaker. He and his buddy have a 3-way in a hearse with a meter maid. Holder's mother dies and the funeral parlor where her body is housed is next door to a bank. The boys decide to rob the bank (stark naked, for some reason or other) take mom's body out of the coffin, put the loot in, and make a getaway. Of course, it's not that easy. Richard Attenborough shows up as a odd detective in a Hitler mustache, and Lee Remick is the dead mother's sexy nurse. For much of its running time, the movie is a frantic door-slamming farce which takes place in the odd little village hotel that Holder's father (Milo O'Shea) runs, involving hiding and finding the bags of money and the mother's corpse. But the more frantic a farce, the more it risks coming off as desperate, and that's exactly what happens here. The director throws everything but the kitchen sink at us and about a third of it is amusing, but the rest just seems strange. The art direction is fabulous--every set is garish, largely in tones of purple, yellow and blue, and that's one of the few elements here that works. There are some quotable lines, most likely derived directly from Orton. Holder: "Bury her naked! My mom! It's a Freudian nightmare!!" Attenborough, thinking Holder wants to open the coffin for some hanky panky: "Conjugal rights should stop at the last heartbeat!" Attenborough again: "We only arrest the innocent as a last resort." I liked seeing Bennett who was memorable in THE FAMILY WAY, and O'Shea and Remick are both fine, especially Remick who is tarted up quite nicely, looking like a living sex doll. Attenborough seems uncomfortable, as they all should. You've been warned. [TCM]

YELLOWSTONE (1936)

Young, attractive Judith Barrett arrives for a stay at Yellowstone National Park, and is immediatly hit on by horny, not-so-attractive ranger Henry Hunter. She's there to meet up with her father (Ralph Morgan) whom she thinks has been gallivanting around the globe for 18 years, but we soon find out that he's been in prison all that time for his part in a huge bank robbery, and he's come to the park to claim the loot which he buried there all those years ago. Naturally, it's not going to be that simple: at least two other suspicious fellows (Monroe Owsley and Rollo Lloyd) are tailing Morgan, wanting a share of the money, and a private detective (Alan Hale) is also present on behalf of the bank's insurance company--or so he says. About halfway through the movie, Morgan is killed, his corpse shooting up through a long-dormant geyser. Though he has a bullet in his back, it's determined that he froze to death. As Hale and the cops investigate, Hunter falls under suspicion and, with the help of his slow-minded sidekick (Andy Devine), he has to work to clear himself, if only to stay in Barrett's good graces.

This is a B-movie from a major studio (Universal) but it feels more like a lower-budget Monogram picture: it’s only an hour long, the acting is mediocre, the plotting is not very tight, and background music is used inappropriately. Hunter and Barrett, the romantic leads, are singularly unappealing with zero chemistry, and Devine is damned irritating. That leaves Hale and the slimy Owsley as the most charismatic actors in the movie, and that’s just weird. (I like Alan Hale, but more as background color.) Some of the film's backgrounds were certainly shot at Yellowstone, but most if not all of the actors' scenes look like studio shots. There's potential in the plot, but the uniqueness of the park setting isn't exploited especially well. If Warner Brothers had done this, it would have moved more quickly and had snappier dialogue, and maybe would have had Ronald Reagan and Ann Sheridan as the main couple, and that would have definitely been worth an hour of my time. There is a song, a lonely cowboy tune called "Joggin' Along," co-written by Frank Loesser, that takes up three minutes, but the other sixty minutes are slow going. [DVD]

IT HAPPENED ON 5TH AVENUE (1947)

A homeless man (Victor Moore) and his dog sneak into a Fifth Avenue mansion, as they do every November, to spend a warm winter in the empty, boarded-up home of millionaire developer Charles Ruggles, empty because he winters in Virginia. This year, however, Moore winds up with an entire posse; first, he befriends jobless war veteran Don DeFore, who has just been evicted from his apartment because the building's being torn down so Ruggles can build another skyscraper. Next, Ruggles' rebellious daughter (Gale Storm) runs away from boarding school and comes to the mansion to get some clothes and make her own way in the world. When Moore and DeFore catch her and think she's a homeless girl, she plays along, stays in the house with them, and falls for DeFore. Next come two army buddies of DeFore, with wives (and a kid) in tow, who are having difficulty finding housing. Just as this group is getting cozy, Ruggles comes to town to look for his daughter. She talks him into staying at the house and posing as another homeless man so he can check out DeFoe to make sure that he's an OK guy. Somehow, Ruggles' estranged wife (Ann Harding) ends up there, too. The catalyst for the climax is an abandoned Army base that Ruggles is trying to buy for development; DeFore and his friends (who actually have some money, just no place to live) are also bidding for the land for their own development ideas. Who'll get the land? Who'll get the girl? And what will happen when the police finally discover that the mansion isn't empty?

It's getting harder for me to discover new classic Christmas movies. This is one I'd never seen, or even heard of, though the Christmas setting is not particularly emphasized (it's included in a holiday movies boxed set from Warner Home Video). Frank Capra considered filming this script, but he opted for IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE instead. Capra would have made Moore more angelic, Ruggles more evil (it's never really established that he's a bad person at all, except that he's rich and divorced), and DeFore and Storm more loveable, and I imagine he would have strengthened the Christmas element. Still, it's a cute little comedy with good performances by Ruggles, Moore and Harding. DeFore (pictured above) tries hard to seem a little quirky (his entire first scene is played out in his underwear, handcuffed to a bed--it's not what you think it is) and Storm is the essence of spunky, but the romantic element winds up seeming beside the point. Alan Hale Jr., Gilligan Island's Skipper, is fun as one of the soldiers. I have a bit of a problem with the romanticization of poverty, something that probably attracted Capra in the beginning--Moore is by default the most noble person in the movie, mostly because he's poor, and also the only character who doesn't really change or wind up with any kind of "reward." Still, the first half-hour, as the characters and situations get spelled out, is fun, and Ruggles is always a joy to watch. [TCM]

THE CHRISTMAS COAL MINE MIRACLE (1977 TV-movie)

It’s Christmas 1951 in the coal mining town of Caufield (named for the rich Scrooge-like owner of the mine). On Christmas Eve morning, a methane explosion occurs in one of the mines. No one is hurt, but an expert says the mine needs to be shut down for 48 hours to be properly rockdusted; Caufield won’t do it, insisting the mine is safe. The men don't want to go back in that night, but Mitchell Ryan (pictured), a respected miner, gets the men to work, though he also decides it’s time to get some union men in to organize the workers. Sure enough, that night, there's another explosion and a cave-in, trapping Ryan and his men. Will a Christmas miracle save them? (Hint: check the title)

Surprisingly for a Chrismas TV-movie, the holiday aspect is secondary to the rather mild social commentary story of the miners and their families. Ryan is a good man who is caught in the changing times, both as a worker and as a father. Kurt Russell is the boyfriend of Ryan's older daughter (Karen Lamm); he's a pro-union intellectual who wants to get out of the mines and get an education. Lamm wants him to get her pregnant and take her to the big city, but he wants to wait til they’re married and he can provide for her. There’s also a crippled little brother (who, for a Christmas movie, is surprisingly underused) and a neighbor couple--she's pregnant and he's a budding alcoholic. The story is narrated by 13-year-old Melissa Sue Gilbert, the middle child, and she (the actress and the character) is the biggest problem with the movie. We're supposed to find her feisty and admirable, but she just seems abrasive and a little bratty; at one point, feeling like she’s been cheated at the company store, she throws a rock through the store window and it feels like a dumb, unmotivated plot point with no real payoff. Ryan and Russell are both fine, as is Barbara Babcock as the mother. Lamm, who later married Beach Boy Dennis Wilson, retired from acting, and died at 49, overdoes the whiny frustration. Also in the cast are Andrew Prine (as the drunkard) and John Carradine (as Gilbert's grandpa). Though it winds up being filled with clichéd characters and situations, as a holiday movie, it's a little different from the current crop of dumb romances and doltish fantasies. (This was first broadcast as Christmas Miracle in Caufield, USA, but it was released on tape and is being shown on cable under its current title) [FMC]

MRS. MIRACLE (2009 TV-movie)

I'm about to give up on my annual made-for-TV Christmas movie. They are virtually all romances, which would be fine if all I wanted was a blandly handsome male lead, but I'd really like more than that. This year's film is barely a Christmas movie--it's a matchmaker/Mary Poppins story set against the Christmas holidays. James Van Der Beek is a widower with two incredibly rambunctious kids; the fact he seems oblivious to their behavior is the first plothole; the fact that everyone else sees how rowdy they are but excuses them because their dad is a handsome good guy still in mourning for his dead wife is the second. We see Dad go through a series of housekeepers who quickly lose their cool and quit until, like magic, up pops Doris Roberts, a senior Mary Poppins (her name is Mrs. Merkle but the kids call her Mrs. Miracle) who says she's from an agency, but isn't really. By the time Dad realizes this, she has becomes firmly established as a good influence on the kids. She also works her magic on Van Der Beek, getting him together with a pretty travel agent (Erin Karpluk) who has her own emotional baggage--her sister ran away with her fiancé many years ago and forgiveness is still not in the cards. Or can Doris Roberts work wonders with her as well?

Well, of course she can. The predictability is part of the charm of these stories, but even so, this one has a paucity of twists and turns with any degree of surprise. Cable TV movies tend to feature actors who are either on their way up or their way down. Van Der Beek is best known for the TV show Dawson's Creek, which I've never seen; in fact, I don't think I'd seen him in anything until now, even though his face is familiar; I suspect he's on his way down, or at least in a holding pattern. Karpluk is a Canadian actress who starred in her own show in Canada, but is still on the way up as far as Hollywood goes. She does a nice job; he sleepwalks through his part, though the two do show some chemistry together. Roberts, who is probably cursing Betty White for coming back and getting all the parts that Roberts wants, also feels a little low energy here, and the is-she-or-isn't-she-magical? part of Mrs. Miracle (the movie is based on novel by Nora Roberts) is too a little sappy for her--she gets an occasional wry line, but mostly is too soft for a good Poppins figure. The wrap-up to the "sisters feuding" storyline is satisfying, but little else is here. [Hallmark Channel]

FOREIGN AGENT (1942)

A Hollywood studio electrician is found hung in his apartment. Suicide seems the obvious cause, but actually he was killed by some Nazi and Japanese spies who were after the blueprints for an anti-aircraft searchlight filter he was working on for the government. Hiding behind a front group, the North American Peace Organization, the spies spread isolationist propaganda and continue hunting for the filter plans, certain that the electrician's daughter (Gale Storm), a nightclub singer, has them. Meanwhile, her boyfriend (John Shelton) gets a job spying on the spies for a radio commentator, and her roommate and her boyfriend get held up by the spies who think the filter is in her car. And those are just some of the plotlines that get worked into this short, fast-paced B-thriller. There's wiretapping and reverse tapping, fisticuffs, and a song called "Taps for the Japs" before all is said and done. For a low-budget Monogram production, the plethora of plot strands and characters are easy to follow, and even the McGuffin, the light filter, is explained clearly, not that it really needs to be. Aside from Storm, who went on to become a big TV star in the 50's, I didn't recognize many other players here, but Patsy Moran and Lyle Latell are fun as a sidekick couple. An enjoyable wartime spy film that, for the most part, wears its propaganda lightly. [TCM]

WHERE LOVE HAS GONE (1964)

Mike Connors is an architect who, after several tough years, is slowly carving out a successful career; Susan Hayward (at right) is his ex-wife, a noted sculptor but also a spoiled heiress; Bette Davis is Hayward's conniving mother. While in the middle of an important meeting, Connors is called away to help tend to his teenage daughter (Joey Heatherton) who has been charged with killing Hayward's current lover. The act is considered to be justifiable homicide--apparently the lover was engaged in a violent fight with Hayward--but Heatherton is still sent to a home for juvenile delinquents. As Connors tries to reconnect with his daughter, whom he'd seen very little of over the past several years, we get the story of Connors and Hayward in flashbacks: they meet and squabble over the worth of her sculptures, fall in love impulsively, and Davis tries to "buy" Connors into the family. He marries Hayward but refuses Davis's offer of a vice-presidency at the family bank, so Davis manages to stymie all of his attempts at standing alone as an architect. Soon Connors is working for Davis, is miserably unhappy, and starts drinking; meanwhile, Hayward starts in on a series of one-night stands with young gigolos. They divorce and Hayward gets custody of the daughter. Back in the present, Connors finds out that the 15-year-old Heatherton is not a virgin, and had been writing lusty letters to the man she killed--were mom and daughter both sleeping with the same guy?

This glossy, trashy soap opera was based on a Harold Robbins novel, and the murder on which the story centers was based on the real-life incident in which Lana Turner's daughter killed her mother's lover. Connors, however, winds up being the focus of this narrative, even though it's Hayward and Davis who get to chew the scenery and wind up being the only reason to watch this. Connors is serviceable, but a little drab compared to the leading ladies. Heatherton is flat-out terrible, striking a shrill one-note petulance in every scene she's in. DeForest Kelly (Dr. McCoy in Star Trek) is equally bad as Hayward's agent--he seems to be playing the part as both gay and boring. There is some good campy fun to be had in some of the dialogue: Connors to Hayward: "You're not a woman, you're a disease!"; Hayward to Connors: "You're wallowing in self-pity, booze and recrimination!"; Hayward as her drunken husband tries to initiate sex: "You're not the first today--I'm just getting warmed up!" The ending would be bleak if we really cared about any of these characters. Nice sets and color design. [DVD]

BEHIND THE MASK (1932)

Jack Holt has a prison breakout planned; fellow prisoner Boris Karloff (pictured with Holt), who is set to be released soon, hooks him up with a dope ring on the outside. Holt gets out and we discover he's actually a federal agent tracking down the crooks. There's a doctor (Claude King) involved, though the Feds have been in contact with him hoping he'll turn informer. King has a daughter (Constance Cummings), whom Holt soon falls for, and a creepy maid who is keeping tabs on him, reporting back to some mysterious boss via a clunky answering machine which records messages on a wax cylinder. There’s also a bearded, heavily-accented doctor (Edward Van Sloan) who recognizes Holt as an agent; he and Karloff plot to get rid of him by sending him on a dope run in a small plane and making sure he doesn't come back alive, but of course Holt is always one up on the bad guys. Turns out Van Sloan is hiding dope in the coffins of people he's killed on the operating table, and there’s a nice creepy scene near the end in which Van Sloan, about to operate on Holt without anesthetic, quotes Nietzsche: "Unendurable pain merges with ecstasy!" This is basically a fast-moving second feature-thriller with no pretensions to be anything else. I'm not sure what the title refers to; one of the characters actually is someone pretending to be someone else, though there isn't really a mask involved. Holt is OK; he's been growing on me the more I've seen of him; I don’t think he had a large acting range, but he's more than acceptable as a stolid B-movie hero. The romance between Holt and Cummings is perfunctory and goes nowhere. Much of the acting consists of ominous looks and pauses. Edwards, the creepy mannish maid (played, ironically, by Bertha Mann) is unintentionally comic in her over-the-top melodramatics. [TCM]

THE MOON IS BLUE (1953)

This stagy romantic comedy is an important landmark in Hollywood history: it was the first mainstream film since 1934 released without a Production Code seal. The problem wasn't just language (words like "mistress" and "virgin") but, I suspect, the very light-heartedness with which the movie treats sex. Architect William Holden, who has just broken up with Dawn Addams, meets young screwball Maggie McNamara at the Empire State Building, and the two spend the rest of the day and evening playing romantic games, mostly at Holden's apartment. She is much more forthright about sexual matters than Holden (or a typical 1950s film audience) is used to, asking if he has a mistress and letting him know right off the bat that she's a virgin. Addams, the ex-, lives a floor above Holden with her father, David Niven, who falls for McNamara and tries to buy her love with a cash loan so she can pay her rent. The three do some witty sparring, with Addams eventually entering the picture, but for all the flirting and innuendo, no virtue is lost, though Holden does get a sock in the jaw from McNamara's father. The next day, Holden proposes to her back at the Empire State Building and she says yes.

Though the situations and dialogue are no longer scandalous, one can still get frissons of delight from some of the mildly naughty exchanges. Early on, in order to "save time," McNamara asks Holden if he has a mistress; he says no, apparently making the claim that he and Addams didn't have sex, but later when he says Addams was "pretty all over," McNamara says, "Then she was your mistress!" No, he insists, claiming "it's sort of high school to have a mistress unless you crave one" (mimicking an earlier line of hers about drinking alcohol). When McNamara asks if it's OK to take off her shoes, Holden says, "Take off anything you like." At one point, Niven announces that he likes "steaks, liquor, and sex--in that order." When Holden worries that McNamara is preoccupied with sex, she replies, "Isn't it better for a girl to be preoccupied with sex than occupied?" Eventually, McNamara is accused of being a "professional virgin," using her virtue as a selling point. And so on. McNamara comes off like a virginal Holly Golightly, though it's unclear how much of her flirty manner is deliberate and how much is accidental. I think we are meant to take her at face value, meaning she's a bit ditzy but intends to be a good girl. Once the action settles in Holden's apartment, we rarely leave there (except for a few scenes at Niven's place) and there is a claustrophobic feel to the proceedings eventually. Holden and Niven are fun, but there is a bit of an off-putting distance to McNamara's performance. Largely the film does hold up after all these years, though it's best appreciated as a period piece. [TCM]

CHASING RAINBOWS (1930)

The romantic trials and tribulations of a traveling musical-comedy troupe over one year's time as they tour in something called "Good-Bye, Broadway." The leading man, Charles King, has a comic-partner act with Bessie Love, who is secretly in love with him and has to suffer through his various romances with leading ladies which always end badly, with King melodramatically threatening suicide each time, to no avail. After his current lover leaves with a rich man, King falls for the replacement star (Nita Martan), who is using him to get a foothold in the theatre world and planning to leave him eventually with her secret lover (Eddie Phillips). Love finds out her plans and tries to warn King, but he marries Martan anyway, leading to unhappiness, another suicide announcement, and a happy ending when he realizes that Love is the gal for him.

At one time, this was a musical, but 15 minutes of production numbers, shot in color, are lost, leaving a couple of songs and the tail end of a big number, "Happy Days Are Here Again," at the beginning of the film. So you wind up with a musical mostly without music, always a somewhat sad affair. King and Love are totally unexceptionable; Love's acting style makes her seem casual and spontaneous but that clashes with the rest of the cast's more traditional style, so it usually feels like Love is in a different movie from everyone else. She and King have little chemistry; the more interesting couple is Martan and Phillips (pictured), though they only have a couple of scenes together. Marie Dressler does her usual bigger-than-life thing, with Polly Moran as her long-suffering assistant. Jack Benny does a more than respectable job as the stage manager, with George K. Arthur as his long-suffering (and effeminate) assistant. The jokes come fast and furious, but few really hit the mark. Interesting for film buffs, but otherwise it can be skipped. [TCM]

ON BORROWED TIME (1939)

Prologue: Cedric Hardwicke, a mild-mannered gentleman, hitches a ride with a couple; when the car goes careening off a cliff, only the bodies of the couple are found by police.

Act 1: The elderly Lionel Barrymore and his wife Beulah Bondi live in a small town and have custody of their grandson (Bobs Watson), whose parents were killed in the car crash. The boy loves Barrymore and dislikes his meddlesome maiden aunt whom Barrymore calls a "pismire" (basically, a piss ant). However, Bondi suggests to the aunt that she might be given custody of Watson if anything happens to them. After Barrymore does a good deed, the boy tells him if he makes a wish after doing a good deed, it will come true. The old man wishes that anyone who climbs his beloved apple tree to steal apples would be stuck there until he lets them down. Oddly, the wish seems to come true.

Act 2: Hardwicke appears in Bondi's bedroom; calling himself Mr. Brink, he is Death personified, and he gently takes Bondi with him to her reward, with "Beautiful Dreamer" playing in the background. A little later, when Hardwicke comes to take Barrymore, he tricks Death into climbing the tree, so Death gets stuck up the tree and Barrymore is safe and happy until he realizes that no one on earth is dying. When Watson is tricked into climbing the tree by Death, he falls and is seriously injured, with the doctor saying he doesn’t know why Watson isn’t dead. Barrymore knows, and soon must make a fateful decision.

This is one of those gentle Hollywood fantasies about death, Heaven, and the afterlife that are popular in waves (there was a cluster of them during and right after WWII). Based on a play, the production is stagy and the storyline rather sappy, but the ending is a little surprising in that [SPOILER] both the old man and the boy die, though to cushion the blow, we last see them heading off to heaven to meet Bondi. Barrymore is an actor I appreciated more when I’d only seen him in a handful of roles; the more I see of him, the tireder I get of his homespun scene-stealing antics. Bondi, who was only 50, does a nice job as the sweet-natured matriarch; Watson cries well, but seems to have been tutored in over-the-top sentimental acting by Barrymore. Eily Malyon, who specialized in playing cranky spinsters, is good as the aunt, and other familiar faces include Una Merkel, Henry Travers, and Grant Mitchell. [TCM]

IN THE DUST OF THE STARS (1976)

A spaceship has a rough landing on the planet Tem 4; the astronauts are responding to radioed calls for help. A girl dressed like an old West Indian maiden greets them and takes them to meet Ronk, apparently the leader of the Temians, who meets his visitors while sprawled out on a divan. He insists that the distress call must have been a mistake and invites the crew to a "wild midnight party" (pictured) which plays out like BARBARELLA crossed with a soft-core outtake from CALIGULA. Most of the crew, including the leader, Akala, have fun at the party, but what they don't know is that they were all brainwashed by light beams which played on their foreheads. The next day, Akala's lover Suko, who stayed behind in the ship, becomes suspicious when each of them robotically describes the party as "cheerful and fun." He takes a small probe ship out and discovers hundreds of the native people of the planet, the Turi, who have been enslaved by Ronk's people and are stuck working in intolerable conditions, mining a valuable ore which is sent back to Ronk's home planet. It was indeed they who sent the SOS; can Suko get the crew of the Cynro to help liberate the Turi? This is another East German DEFA production like THE SILENT STAR, though this one is a little less serious and quite a bit weirder in style. The sets are mostly cheap and artificial in a chintzy Thunderbirds style, though still a notch above many Hollywood B-sci-fi films of the era. The wild party is disco/psychedelic (discodelic?), with writhing dancers, flashing lights, and folks dressed in red leather. Guards are decked out in black leather with 70's mustaches and sideburns. The real leader of the Temians isn't Ronk, but a weird dorky guy (known only as The Chief) who looks more like a low-level office bureaucrat than a dictator; we first see him with thinning blue hair and dressed in an sparkly blue jumpsuit (he changes his hair color frequently) playing a strange musical instrument and making scantily-clad women dance to his tempo. He feels an affinity with Akala, and she tries to use this to her advantage to help the Turi. There are even flashes of nudity here and there. It's a weird movie which I can only recommend to lovers of, well, the weird. [DVD]

THE SILENT STAR (1960)

In Siberia, an extraterrestrial artifact is found to be a recorded message from Venus; when radio signals are sent to the planet, there is no response. Although the translation is incomplete, an international crew (an American physicist, an Indian mathematician, a Chinese translator, a female Japanese doctor, an African technician, etc.) is sent to Venus in a spaceship called the Cosmokrator to find out what's going on. Along the way, the message is discovered to convey plans to attack Earth. However, when the team lands, they find no life except some artificial metallic spiders. It turns out that the Venusians were so warlike, they destroyed each other before they could invade Earth. But the earthlings trigger an automated chain reaction involving a large machine (which reminded me a bit the uncontrollable Doomsday Machine in DR. STRANGELOVE) and a seemingly sentient black sludge which are still guarding the planet, so our crew have a rough time getting back home.

This was produced in the middle of the Cold War by the East German studio DEFA, but its propaganda isn't about Communism as much as about getting along--there is an explicit message at the end about not only the need for international cooperation but also for making progress in space exploration. While the plot has holes and the effects are pretty bad (in weightless conditions, spaceship seat belts dangle in the air on clearly visible wires), the sets and art direction are colorful and imaginative. Weird psychedelic fogs, forests of glass, and the aforementioned robot spiders and icky gunk that tries to eat people are all fairly cool in concept and look. The crew is the most multicultural one ever (even before the term "multicultural" was in wide usage). There are explicit parallels between the Venusian apocalypse and Hiroshima: the Japanese doctor (Yoko Tani) was born just after the bombing, a fact that is brought up occasionally, and the only thing left of the Venusians are burned-in shadows on the wall. There's not a lot of character development among the token cast members. The only ones to stand out much are the widowed doctor (her husband died in an accident on the moon) and the American (Guenther Simon) with whom a romance flares up. She tries to discourage his feelings, telling him, "There's no room for extra baggage on a journey like this," but that doesn't stop him from getting all moony (pun intended) over her anyway. There is also a proto-R2D2 robot named Omega; it speaks, but has no personality. Some of the crew escape, some sacrifice and wind up dead or stranded on the planet. This was released in the States in a cut, dubbed version called FIRST SPACESHIP ON VENUS, which I haven't seen but which was bad enough to get aired on MST3K, but this version is serious (very little humor, intended or otherwise) and is worthy viewing for sci-fi buffs. [DVD]

WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE (1951)

Thanksgiving week is when I review science fiction and fantasy movies, reliving my memories of when our local TV stations would program many of these films, for the kids who were off school for a few days (while their parents started Christmas shopping!). This film is probably one of the earliest SF disaster films, produced by George Pal (WAR OF THE WORLDS, THE TIME MACHINE) and a big hit in its day. Generally, the special effects have aged well, but the predictable human drama has not. Scientists in South Africa give pilot Richard Derr an important packet of information to deliver to scientist Larry Keating; a reporter tries to bribe him to give up his "black box" secret but he doesn’t. The bad news is that in a few months a sun and planet from another solar system are about to collide with the Earth, causing the total destruction of mankind. The "good" news, I guess, is that Keating is planning a Noah's Ark-type flight to the approaching planet to relocate a lucky few humans. World governments don't believe it will work, but millionaire John Hoyt agrees to finance the building of the spaceship. A tired love triangle between Derr, Keating’s daughter (Barbara Rush), and her doctor boyfriend takes up some screen time, while virtually no time at all is given to the inevitable problems that would crop up when billions of people realize they are doomed and that a bunch of white American scientists and workers will be saved. The effects showing some of the destruction on the planet are good, and the ship itself looks fine, but where they land looks like Planet Disney. A high level of tolerance and/or nostalgia for these 50's SF epics is helpful in getting through this. [DVD]

NIAGARA (1953)

Joseph Cotten and Marilyn Monroe are an unhappily married couple who are spending a miserable vacation at a cabin overlooking Niagara Falls. Casey Adams (who works in shredded wheat) and his wife Jean Peters are also sharing a cabin on their belated honeymoon. During a party, Monroe plays a record of a love song which causes Cotten to go a little berserk—it’s apparently not their song and he suspects she may be seeing someone else. Soon Peters sees Monroe sneaking a kiss with handsome young Richard Allan; it turns out that Monroe and Allan have hatched a plan: he’ll kill Cotten and skedaddle to Chicago; she’ll report Cotten missing, identify his body when it’s found, and then leave town to meet her lover. However, when Monroe goes to the morgue, she becomes hysterical when the dead body is that of Allan instead. The cops misinterpret her reaction and assume she’s identified Cotten, but soon Peters sees Cotten show up at the cabin looking for Monroe. Peters winds up mixed up almost over her head in the fatal affair.

I saw this movie the day after returning from my own Niagara Falls vacation, so it was great fun to see the real Falls provide the background for the film—and also to notice how much the area around the Falls has changed (I can’t imagine that the falls-side cabins still exist). The film itself is a rather bland thriller, not bad but lacking a bit in terms of characterization and writing; Monroe, Cotten, and Allan are given no backstory so it’s difficult to care about any of them—we know more about the relatively minor character of Casey Adams than about any of the love triangle members. Still, the movie has its pleasures: a murder in a bell tower is almost Hitchcockian, there is nice use of color (and, of course, the falls), and Monroe gives a truly good performance, to my mind the best one she ever gave. She was not yet weighed down by the sex bomb reputation and actually gives a performance rather than relying on breathiness and a heaving bosom. Peters, who is actually the main character, is fine. Cotten seems a little at sea, perhaps because he has no real character to play, just a type with little background or motivation. It’s too bright and colorful to feel like a noir, but uses some of the genre’s conventions. I’d give this a “sure, why not?” [DVD]

THE SIN SHIP (1931)

Louis Wolheim is a rough-and-tough, pug-ugly schooner captain who reluctantly agrees to take a soft-spoken minister (Ian Keith) and his lovely wife (Mary Astor, at left) down the California coast when they miss their ship. A drunken Wolheim locks Astor in her cabin and tries to take advantage of her, but she calls him an animal and he leaves, disgusted with himself. When Keith returns to the cabin, we discover that he is really a crook named Smiley and she's a shady lady known as Frisco Kitty, and they're on the run from the law for a heist he pulled in Seattle. When they stop at a port city, Wolheim is a changed man and apologizes profusely to Astor, who comes to feel some affection for the gruff, lonely man. When the captain gets ready to leave, Keith sabotages the engine in order to keep him there until the heat dies down, but the crew thinks that Wolheim is staying on purpose because he's sweet on Astor. Soon Wolheim finds out the truth about the two and ends up defending Astor against a drunken Keith (in a scene involving one of the worst thrown punches ever in a movie). The cops finally catch up with Keith and, in one of the stranger melodrama endings, the ugly guy actually gets the girl. This is mainly of interest for the presence of Mary Astor in one of her early talkies. She's good, though Keith is actually more impressive as he moves back and forth between being a goody-goody man of the cloth and a thuggish criminal. Wolheim, who also directed, is OK but basically seems like a second-string Wallace Beery; he had a long career in the silents, but died of cancer at 55 just months after making this film. Comic actor Hugh Herbert is fine as the first mate; he's still basically comic relief but he's more subtle here than in most of his later roles. Much of the film is slow and stagy, despite the fact that several scenes were shot on exterior locations. [TCM]

THE BLUE LAMP (1950)

This is an average documentary-style police procedural film of the era, shot on location and with occasional omniscient narration, different only because it's British, and slightly lighter in tone than Hollywood films such as THE NAKED CITY. The movie opens with the narrator telling us about the postwar increase in crime among young people, who are more unpredictable and violent than the run-of-the-mill underworld figures of yore. We see the day-to-day operations of the London Metropolitan Police through the eyes of a rookie (Jimmy Hanley) who is paired up with an older heart-of-gold cop (Jack Warner)—he even rents a room from Warner and his wife. Most of their days seem taken up with patrolling and dealing with domestic squabbles, until we begin to follow the misadventures of two young thugs (Dirk Bogarde and Patric Doonan, pictured, with Bogarde on the right) who, emboldened by a successful jewelry store break-in, pull off an armed cinema robbery during which Bogarde shoots Warner. The older cop lingers for a time then dies, and Hanley steels himself to avenge his partner’s death. Meanwhile, Bogarde's tumultuous involvement with the delinquent teenage girl (Peggy Evans) who helped him plan the heist leads to his downfall, climaxed by a lengthy car chase and a tense finale at a dog-racing track.

This was a big box office hit in England and was Bogarde's breakout film—he indeed exhibits the looks, charm (a rather oily charm in this case), and charisma required of a star in what is theoretically a supporting role, though his character becomes the center of the narrative, detracting a bit from the sentimental old cop/young cop storyline. Doonan is fine as the somewhat dimmer partner, and poor Evans has to undergo the abuse of several slappings, even having a piece of luggage thrown at her. Though Warner's character, George Dixon, dies, he was brought back in 1955 for British TV series that ran into the mid-70's. The use of London locations is quite effective. [TCM]

OLD SAN FRANCISCO (1927)

Let’s see if I can get this plot-heavy silent melodrama down to a clear short summary. In 1906, the once esteemed Vasquez family is down on their luck. Warner Oland, the shady figure known as the Czar of the Tenderloin, wants the Vasquez land and will go to unscrupulous lengths to get it. Though Oland’s office is in Chinatown, he is known as a persecutor of the Chinese, but he has a well-kept secret: he’s half-Chinese himself and keeps his dwarf brother caged up in a secret room underneath his offices. Oland charges a dastardly lawyer with getting the Vasquez land, but the lawyer’s Irish nephew (Charles Emmett Mack) falls for the Vazquez granddaughter (Dolores Costello). Various deceptions and betrayals occur, including Oland’s attempted seduction of Costello; at the climax, Costello is about to be sold into white slavery, and her prayers seem to bring about the famous San Francisco earthquake which saves her from a fate worse than death.

Despite being quite non-PC, this is an enjoyably over-the-top blood and thunder drama, the kind they don’t make anymore (for a number of reasons). Because I know Oland as Charlie Chan, the revelation of his background wasn’t all that surprising to me, but he makes a nicely slimy villain, though he does at one point pray to Buddha for his sins against his own people. He is portrayed as a kind of Dracula figure, recoiling from the sound of the “accursed Christian bells” from the nearby church, for, as the title card tells us, “in the awful light of an outraged wrathful Christian god, the heathen soul of the Mongol stood revealed.” Costello is rather bland, though Mack is likeable as her Irish hero; his best line, to Costello during their rather tentative courtship, “I’m not bold, I’m Irish!” Anna May Wong has a small role as an accomplice of Oland’s, known only as a “Flower of the Orient.” The earthquake scenes are effective, and are tinted red, orange, and purple. The dwarf is played by Angelo Rossito, whose career continued into the 80’s (the bad guy Master in MAD MAX BEYOND THUNDERDOME). Fun for those in the right mood. [TCM]

AIR HOSTESS (1933)

It's the one about the nice-guy pilot who is sweet but passive and nondescript, the hot-dogger pilot who is exciting but irresponsible, and the girl caught between them. This variation begins in the skies over France in WWI; when pilot James Murray's buddy Bob is shot down, Murray guns down his killer. Years later, Murray is a grandstanding pilot who is in the midst of developing a plane with retractable wings which would enable a pilot to use less fuel and fly non-stop from Seattle to Tokyo. The nice-guy pilot, Arthur Pierson, works for TWA and, along with the entire flight and ground crew, keeps an eye on Bob's grown-up daughter (Evalyn Knapp), who works as an air hostess; in an early scene, the guys gang up on a handsome new pilot (pictured) who asks her out on a date and scare him away. To her credit, Knapp is getting tired of their paternal interest, and when Murray flirts with her, she runs off on an overnight trip with him. Of course, this being the movies, the next day, the two announce their engagement. Once they're married, she quits her job, but Murray, who has taken to drink, struggles to make ends meet as he keeps working on his plane. She gets her hostess job back and he finds a financial backer in the person of rich socialite Thelma Todd. Murray sleeps with Todd, and Knapp takes platonic comfort from Pierson, but when a train Knapp is on winds up in danger, the two pilots team up to save her.

This B-picture from Columbia is nothing special, though the air combat footage at the beginning and the planes/train incident at the end are both thrilling. The acting is a problem. Murray, promising star of the silent classic THE CROWD, looks like a less well-groomed Dick Powell; he's fine in the role, but his career, derailed by his drinking, would only last three more years before his untimely death at the age of 35. Knapp tries to be Joan Blondell but she's shrill and exasperating. Pierson has no charisma and practically evaporates onscreen. Todd, another doomed actress, is good as the sexy siren, and Jane Darwell and J.M. Kerrigan are fine as Knapp’s guardians. [TCM]

SPY TRAIN (1943)

Writer Richard Travis, author of a bestselling expose called "Darkest Germany," is at Union Station (with his comic-relief sidekick Chick Chandler), waiting for a train and looking for Catharine Craig, for reasons unknown to us. When Craig arrives (with her comic-relief maid, Thelma White), Travis contrives a meeting under a false name, though she quickly figures out who he is from the photo on his book (which seems to be everywhere). It turns out that her father is a newspaper publisher who has quit publishing Travis' Nazi exposes, and Travis hopes to get to him through her to find out why. Meanwhile, a husband and wife team of Nazi spies are also on the train; their mission is to get a sheaf of secrets out of a suitcase which is in the possession of Craig's maid. However, we know that, through an error, the suitcase on the train actually contains a time bomb set to go off 10:22 (so of course, for our benefit, characters are frequently announcing the time). The suitcase winds up in and out of compartments, as does the dead body of a mustached spy of unknown origin who is killed early on. Who will get blown up? Who will fall in love? Where will the dead mustached guy wind up?

I was able to find almost no information about this Monogram Poverty Row wartime thriller, which was in itself reason enough for me to consider watching it when it showed up on Turner Classic, and the word "train" in the title was added inducement. But when I saw the name of Richard Travis (pictured) show up top-billed in the credits, I almost deleted the movie from my DVR right away. Travis is, to put it delicately, a bad actor. He's not quite as bad in his B-roles, but I've never forgiven him for almost sinking THE MAN WHO CAME TO DINNER in his romantic lead role as Bette Davis's boyfriend; luckily Davis, Monty Woolley, and everyone else in the film is strong enough to make up for his amateurish performance. Here, he doesn't really hurt the film, aside from being totally lacking in charisma and being unable to provide any thrills or heroics. Craig is a non-entity as well, though sidekicks Chandler and White acquit themselves nicely. One bit actor, a heavy-set guy in glasses (I think his name is Herbert Hayes) is wildly hammy as the chief German spy back at headquarters, but at least puts some energy into his role. As is often the case with Monogram films, there are plotholes galore: though this movie came out in 1943, the plot only makes sense if we assume it's set before the U.S. entered the war; I didn't catch any reason for why the time bomb was in the second suitcase, which was supposed to be left at Union Station. Nevertheless, for all my fault-finding, I more or less enjoyed this cheap spy thriller quickie. [TCM]

LADIES OF THE JURY (1932)

Edna May Oliver is one of my favorite supporting players of all time. Her range may be limited, but when she’s in her element, usually as a droll, horse-faced, opinionated spinster, a good time is practically guaranteed. Here, she’s a scatterbrained rich lady who is called for jury duty in the case of a former chorus girl accused of murdering her rich husband. Like a comic version of the later 12 ANGRY MEN, most of the action takes place in the jury room after the lawyers have argued their cases. Among the other jurors are a stutterer, an Irish matron, a doofus, a gum-snapping totsy, a stagy actor, a mannish lesbian, and a real estate agent. Oliver is the only one who thinks the girl is innocent, and slowly, by making friends and sowing seeds of dissent, she gets the jurors, one by one, on her side, even fixing up two of the jurors as a romantic pair. As it appears that they will reach a deadlock, Oliver arranges for the jury to visit the murder scene to reenact the shooting, and while there, they discover what really happened, and Oliver is proven right. This is generally fun because of Oliver at her pushy, obnoxious best; other cast members include Jill Esmond (Lawrence Olivier’s wife at the time), Roscoe Ates (the stutterer), Ken Murray and Cora Witherspoon. I've reviewed several Edna May Oliver films over the years, but here's a link to my review of her Hildegarde Withers films, in which she played a Miss Marple-ish schoolteacher. [TCM]