PANDORA AND THE FLYING DUTCHMAN (1948)

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

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

REGISTERED NURSE (1934)

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

THIS ENGLAND (1941)

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

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

THE AFFAIRS OF ANATOL (1921)

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

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

CALL OF THE FLESH (1930)

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

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

THE V.I.P.s (1963)

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

TORCH SONG (1953)

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

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

GAMES (1967)

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

SECRETS (1933)

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

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

THE GARDEN MURDER CASE (1936)

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

DOUBTING THOMAS (1935)

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

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

TARZAN AND THE SLAVE GIRL (1950)

Lex Barker's second turn as Tarzan begins much like his first one, with Tarzan and Jane (Vanessa Brown) enjoying a casual day riding elephants in the jungle. They pass some women of the Nagasi tribe out doing chores by the river when one of them screams and vanishes. The leader of the tribe thinks that an evil spirit snatched her away, but when Jane is snatched, Tarzan goes into action, saving Jane and capturing one of the abductors. When the Nagasi try to question him, he falls deathly ill. A doctor from a nearby village diagnoses the illness as highly contagious and makes up a serum. Tarzan, Jane, the doc, his busty nurse Lola, and her lazy boyfriend Neil go to the Nagasi village to administer the antidote, then decide to head further into the jungle to find the source of the disease. It turns out that the kidnapper's village has been overrun by this plague and they're taking women from nearby villages in hopes of repopulating. The prince has his hands full: his father, the king, has just died of the disease and is about to be buried, his young son is mortally sick, and he is about to execute his high priest, who has been no help. Tarzan tries to save Jane and Lola, who have been placed in the majestic and soon-to-be-sealed tomb of the king, but winds up trapped with them; the doctor tries to save the Prince's son but finds he has lost the serum somewhere on the journey. Can Cheetah save the day? This is less interesting than TARZAN'S MAGIC FOUNTAIN, but Barker's energetic heroics and a moderately interesting cast help make this watchable. Irish actor Arthur Shields is fine as the doctor, Denise Darcel is an enticing Lola--she and Jane have a hair-pulling, furniture-crushing fistfight--and Robert Alda and Hurd Hatfield do what they can in the underwritten roles of the boyfriend and the prince. There's a nice action scene involving an attack by camouflaged natives, and in the climax involves a pit with hungry lions. Vanessa Brown is a rather lackluster Jane, though her bullet-bra look will have its admirers. [TCM]

TANGLED DESTINIES (1932)

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

THE CRIMSON KIMONO (1959)

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

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

SCANDAL SHEET (1952)

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

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

FOUR SIDED TRIANGLE (1953)

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

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

STARS AND STRIPES FOREVER (1952)

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

NIGHTFALL (1957)

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

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

SOMETHING FOR THE BOYS (1944)

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

TIGER FANGS (1943)

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

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

WAYNE MURDER CASE (1934)
aka A STRANGE ADVENTURE

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

TARZAN'S MAGIC FOUNTAIN (1949)

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

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

THE BUTTERCUP CHAIN (1970)

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

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

TARZAN THE APE MAN (1932)

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

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

KIPPS (1941)

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

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

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

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

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

HOTEL RESERVE (1944)

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

MOROCCO (1930)

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

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

TARZAN’S DESERT MYSTERY (1943)

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

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

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

10:30 P.M. SUMMER (1966)

A 60s alienation film, but strictly a second-rate copy of Antonioni by director Jules Dassin. The film opens with a handsome man (Julian Mateos) stalking through a rainstorm, arriving at a house where his wife has just had sex with another man. He shoots them both dead and goes on the run. Cut to four people who are taking a car trip through Spain: a middle-aged couple (Peter Finch and Melina Mercouri), their 7-year-old daughter, and a lovely young woman (Romy Schneider, pictured at right with Finch) whose exact relationship to the family is never clear; she's having an affair with Finch, she's friends with (and takes one mildly erotic shower with) Mercouri, and sometimes looks after the child. They happen to stop for the night in the village where the murder we saw has just occurred. The depressed, alcoholic and restless Mercouri hears about the whole affair and seems to feel some spiritual kinship with the outlaw. That night, after witnessing Finch and Schneider kissing passionately in the rain, Mercouri sees Mateos in hiding, on a rooftop rolled up in a tarp. She befriends him and helps him hide for the night in a field outside the village. Sadly, when she checks on him the next morning, he's dead. This is the catalyst for another restless day and night for Mercouri, leading to a frenzied flamenco dance scene followed by an ending, copied right out of Antonioni, which is ambiguous but the most satisfying part of the movie. The screenplay is by New Wave-ish writer Marguerite Duras, based on her own short story, and the characters just haven't been given enough roundness. We learn practically nothing about their past, and their actions in the present seem mostly unmotivated. Leaving Mercouri's relationship with the killer husband hazy is fine, but leaving her role in the potential ménage-a-trois unclear is sloppy--some critics say that she imagines some of the love scenes between Finch and Schneider, but I didn't pick up on that. Mercouri's performance is almost over-the-top in a harsh and ugly way. Finch and the sexy Schneider are good, but poor Mateos (above left) doesn't even get a single line of dialogue. The best thing about the film is the cinematography; the film always looks great, and as lovely as the landscape shots are, the night rain scenes are especially effective. [DVD]

THE LOCKED DOOR (1929)

Young innocent secretary Barbara Stanwyck goes to a bootleg drinking party on a yacht just outside the 7-mile limit with her boss's slimy son, Rod La Rocque. The yacht is raided just as La Rocque is forcing himself on Stanwyck; a photographer snaps a pic of the two, but La Rocque bribes him to get the photo. Eighteen months later, Stanwyck has married her new boss, William Boyd, and has a new upper-class life which is disturbed when she finds out that La Roque is back, and dating Boyd's beloved kid sister (Betty Bronson). When Stanwyck tells La Rocque to leave their family alone, he tells her he's planning on leaving for Hawaii with Bronson, and if anyone tries to squelch his plans, he'll show Boyd the incriminating photograph. Things come to a climax one night in La Rocque's fancy two-story hotel room to which all the principals arrive at one time or another; one person winds up dead, but two confess to the murder. The ending is satisfactory but relies on a ridiculous plot twist (the dead person is not quite dead yet) to wrap things up. The title seemingly refers to two different doors: the one that La Rocque locks on the yacht and the locked hotel room door that figures prominently in the ending. Based on a play, Stanwyck's first talking picture is stagy but does incorporate some interesting camera moves, especially the opening, a long tracking shot in which the camera moves along a bar on the yacht as hordes of obnoxious rich people shout orders at the bartenders. Boyd, not the same actor who went on to fame as Hopalong Cassidy, is the weak link here; Stanwyck is fine and though La Rocque overplays his dastardly role a bit, it fits the character. Zasu Pitts has a small comic relief part as a telephone operator at the hotel. [TCM]

HEAVENS ABOVE! (1963)

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

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

MAJOR BARBARA (1941)

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

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