AND GOD CREATED WOMAN (1956)

In St. Tropez, beautiful young Juliete (Brigitte Bardot) is an 18-year-old orphan who works lackadaisically at a bookstore but would rather flirt and sunbathe in the nude (she is described by one person as "shameless, impolite and lazy"); her frustrated adoptive mother is ready to send her back to the orphanage. Older businessman Eric Carradine, who ogles her but seems to realize that a romance would be out of the question, is trying to buy up land to build a casino, but is being blocked by the refusal of the Tardieu family to sell their shipyard. Antoine, the oldest son, returns to town to engage in discussions with Carradine but is against selling. Carrdine keeps upping his offer, and also suggests that Antoine marry Juliete to keep her in town. Though there are sparks between the two, Antoine suspects she would "put horns" on him fairly quickly. His brother Michel has been harboring a crush on Juliete for some time, and later, when the father dies, the sons agree to sell to Carradine in exchange for a stake in another shipyard, and Michel marries Juliete. They are happy for a short time until Antoine returns to St. Tropez to work at the shipyard. When Michel leaves for a day on business, Antoine and Juliete have sex on the beach. Both feel guilty, and when Michel returns, his mother (of all people!) tells him what happened. Juliete goes out to a bar and loses herself in orgiastic dancing; Michel follows with a gun. Against all odds, there is a happy ending.

This French film is known for being Bardot's big breakthrough in the United States—though she was 22 when she made this film for her husband, director Roger Vadim, she had already made some fifteen films. It is often derided as a bad movie, best appreciated as a mild piece of titillation which shows off the charms of both Bardot and St. Tropez, but actually as a sex melodrama, it's not that much different from such Hollywood films of the 40s and 50s, and seen now, many years after the initial brouhaha, it's still entertaining. Bardot is sexy and earthy and pouty, the very definition of a sex kitten. Her big nude scene, at the very beginning, will disappoint today's viewers; she is lying down on a towel, and when she rises, she is hidden behind a sheet on a laundry line. But she acts well, creating a character we are alternately drawn to and repelled by. Overlooked by most straight male critics is the fact that the movie also has some nice male eye candy. The comely full-lipped Jean-Louis Trintignant (Michel, pictured with Bardot) who gets a shirtless scene, and the slightly older, sleekly handsome Christian Marquand (Antoine) who gets a wet tank top scene, are both quite sexy and give solid performances. All three are basically playing stereotypes but they make the characters rounded and easy to identify with. Curt Jurgens (Carradine), whom I associate with sinister roles (sometimes Nazis), is less dangerous here; we may not like his character, but he's not a villain. There really aren't any villains except maybe the adoptive mother, and the social worker who wants Juliete examined by a doctor for a "virginity certificate" (Juliete's reply: "Don’t worry, you’ve had your vaccine"). 16-year-old Georges Poujouly plays the youngest Tardieu brother, the one misstep in the movie; Poujouly is fine, but nothing is done with the character. Best line, spoken about Bardot: "Her ass is a song!" [TCM]

TELL ME THAT YOU LOVE ME, JUNIE MOON (1970)

Three people who think of themselves as misfits have shared a hospital recovery ward and are about to be released. Junie Moon (Liza Minnelli) is a chipper young woman who had battery acid thrown at her by a psycho date and is now heavily scarred on half of her face; Warren (Robert Moore) is a gay man who was shot at by a guy he was flirting with and is now confined to a wheelchair; Arthur (Ken Howard), a epileptic loner who spent most of his life being made fun of in a orphanage, is recovering from a serious seizure. Their prospects in the outside world seem dicey, so the three decide to move in together. They rent a small house from Mrs. Gregory, an eccentric rich lady, and they all experience ups and downs as they acclimate to their conditions. Arthur gets a job at a nearby fish market run by Mario (James Coco), though he loses it after a jealous next-door neighbor tells Mario that Arthur is a "sodomite"; later, Mario, who has an unrequited crush on Junie, sends the three off on a beach resort vacation. Warren has an interlude with a hunky Black social director who carries him around from place to place on his shoulder; Junie and Arthur take tentative stabs at becoming a couple. By the end, there has been comedy, melodrama, romance, redemption and tragedy.

In her third movie, just after her breakout role in THE STERILE CUCKOO, Liza Minnelli continues to build the perky, flighty persona she would polish to an Oscar-winning sheen in CABARET two years later, and she is the reason to watch this movie. As a narrative, it's kind of a mess. Junie's background is given in a reasonably straightforward, if relentlessly creepy, flashback; we get Arthur's story through a series of dreamlike fragments in which the adult Arthur appears surrounded by the children that mocked him; Warren relates his background involving a gay father figure (with a brief appearance by Leonard Frey) but dismisses his fateful shooting in just a sentence or two. For all the flashbacks, the central three are not terribly well fleshed out—their "misfit" problems pretty much stand in for their characters. It's also a little odd that Warren's "happy ending" consists of him having sex on a beach, all night long, with a woman! Emily Yancy makes that character, Solana, quite appealing, but still I'm sorry that Beach Boy (the possibly bisexual social director, well played against type by Fred Williamson, later a star of Blaxploitation action movies) isn't the one whom Warren spends the night with. Robert Moore (who later directed the classic mystery spoof MURDER BY DEATH) and a young Ken Howard are quite believable in their roles, thin as the writing is. Kay Thompson, author of the classic Eloise books, and Minnelli's godmother, does well in the small role of the strange Mrs. Gregory who starts out as rude, then becomes interesting, and ends as somewhat cruel. Not a film for all tastes, as it's definitely a quirky period piece, but a must for Liza fans. Pictured, from left: Moore, Howard, Minnelli. [TCM]

LAST WOMAN ON EARTH (1960)

Harold Gern is a rich guy who is on the run from a major indictment. He and his wife Evelyn are in Puerto Rico with their lawyer Martin, trying to ride out the scandal, though Martin keeps trying to get Harold to take the situation seriously. They attend a cockfight which sickens Evelyn, and back at the hotel, Evelyn vents to Martin about her frustrations with Harold, then comes on to him, moves which he rejects, though clearly he’s interested. The next day, the three take a boat out for a diving trip. When Martin is stung by a ray, they come back to the surface but none of them can breathe. Leaving their air tanks on, they find the boat captain dead and no one answering on the radio. Soon, they realize that there has been some kind of incident and all the oxygen was sucked out of the atmosphere, though by the time they reach land, the oxygen has returned. Dead bodies and crashed cars are all they find in town, and Martin notes that they may be the last three people alive on the planet. Thus ends any real plot that a sci-fi movie fan might enjoy, and any real excitement that a B-movie fan might enjoy. From here, it basically turns into a stagy melodrama about the squabbling and posturing between three members of a love triangle. Earlier movies in this mold like FIVE or THE DAY THE WORLD ENDED also focused on romantic tensions but didn’t neglect the sci-fi apocalypse elements of the plot. 

Like those other films, the action here moves to an abandoned, isolated house. Harold and Evelyn head to the empty vacation home of a friend of theirs and Harold rather grudgingly allows Martin to tag along. Tensions rise among the three, with Evelyn shifting her desires back and forth between the men. There’s a fight that begins as the men slap each other with fish. The bland dialogue sometimes tries to pass as philosophical; when Evelyn tells Martin she wants to have a child with him, he replies, “All that’s left is fear for us to live with our pain” (whatever that means). Of course, having them decide to live as a threesome would have been too subversive for the time, so [Spoiler!] in the end, a blinded Martin dies in a church in Evelyn’s arms declaring there is no god, and Evelyn and Harold walk off together into an uncertain future. Given the title and the situation, this had promise, but it’s one of Roger Corman’s quickies, shot in about a week at the tail-end of another Puerto Rican production, CREATURE FROM THE HAUNTED SEA. The script was unfinished so the writer, Robert Towne (who later wrote CHINATOWN) kept writing even as he was acting—he plays Martin, rather ineffectively. The other two actors, Betsy Jones-Morland and Anthony Carbone, aren’t that much better; they seem like understudies waiting for the real stars who never showed up. As rough as I’ve been on this film, it’s not unwatchable, since the apocalyptic aspect does manage to hold some interest throughout—the brief scenes of them walking through the deserted town are effective. Pictured are Carbone, Jones-Morland and Towne. [DVD]

BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS (1970)

Kelly, Casey and Pet make up an all-girl rock band who are less into feel-good rock & roll and more into somewhat artsy, gloomy music--the chorus of one song refers to "Lunatic skies of red destruction." Their manager Harris is Kelly's boyfriend, in that loose, free-love Sixties way, and in search of fame and fortune, the four head out to Los Angeles where Kelly's rich, eccentric Aunt Susan takes them in and changes her will to give Kelly a big share of her inheritance--against the advice of her square lawyer Porter. Susan takes them to a huge party (which is shot like the "Laugh-In" party sequence) thrown by record producer Z-Man, a flamboyant, neurotic fellow who signs them to a contract and gets them some hits under the name the Carrie Nations. This pushes Harris out of the picture; he becomes estranged and bitter, especially when Kelly starts dating a pretty-boy gigolo named Lance, so Harris has a desultory affair with porn star Ashley. Pet couples up with Emerson, a law student, who gets jealous when he walks in on Pet having a one-night stand with a famous boxer. Harris becomes drug-addled to the point where he can't get it up with Ashley who implies that he must be gay. Casey, in the meantime, has a one-night stand with Harris which leads to pregnancy, which leads to her getting involved in a lesbian relationship in which she seems to find happiness. When the band performs on national television, a distraught Harris tries to kill himself by jumping from a catwalk above the stage. He survives but is confined to a wheelchair for life, and Kelly decides to devote herself to him. When Pet and Emerson get back together, everyone seems to be settled until Z-Man invites the gang to another more private party. The drugged-out Z-Man tries to seduce Lance (pictured below); when he is spurned, he rapes Lance and reveals that he is halfway to becoming a transgender woman, then goes on a rampage which threatens everyone in the house.

I'm not going to rehash the complex history of this non-sequel to Valley of the Dolls, written by Roger Ebert and directed by hard-R filmmaker Russ Meyer--you can find that on Wikipedia or IMDb. Suffice to say that this film has a reputation as king of the bad camp movies, and the first time I saw it, probably 20 years ago, I could barely finish it, I thought it was such a piece of junk. But time has been kind to it and on this watching, I found it to be more interesting and fun than bad, though potentially offensive to viewers on a number of levels. There is still a lot wrong with it. For starters, the music of the Carrie Nations is not catchy enough for commercial success, except for one song, "Come With the Gentle People" which has a nice Mamas and Papas sound. The acting generally feels amateurish, though in some cases, that adds to the effect--in particular, John Lazar as Z-Man is all over the map (is he gay? Straight? Asexual? Friendly? Boorish? Psychotic?) to the point where the character loses any center, so when he flashes his boobs at the end, you just kind of shrug and say, OK. He also has to contend with lines like, "This is my happening and it freaks me out!" and "You will drink the black sperm of my vengeance!" The central women are all fine, with Dolly Read coming off the best as Kelly (she was married to comedian Dick Martin and retired from the screen by the early 80s). David Gurian is quite appealing as Harris, though he never made another movie. Edy Williams, wife of Russ Meyer, is appropriately sexy as Ashley, and she gives a delicious reading to the line, "You're a groovy boy—I'd like to strap you on sometime"; Michael Blodgett is appropriately sleazy as Lance. 

Random observations: During Z-Man’s first party, we overhear someone say, "Plastics, Benjamin," a reference to The Graduate, and later there's a Midnight Cowboy reference ("Up yours, Ratso!"). During a funny sex scene in a Rolls-Royce, Ashley climaxes screaming the name of another luxury car, "Bentley! Bentley!!" Z-Man's butler wears a Nazi uniform. The character of the lawyer is named Porter Hall, after a ubiquitous 1940s supporting actor. Pet tells someone, "Don’t bogart that joint!" (apparently a steal from Easy Rider). The song "Stranger in Paradise," based on a classical tune by Borodin, plays while Z-Man is trying to give Lance a handjob. In the over-the-top violence of the climax, the 20th Century Fox fanfare theme plays during a decapitation. This is a crazy-ass movie that manages just barely to work, mostly on a camp level. And honestly, even though it has no direct connection to the original Valley of the Dolls, and Jacqueline Susann was well within her rights to sue Fox for pushing it as a sequel (the movie begins with a note that it is not a sequel, but with that title, the damage was already done), it does almost work as a Dolls update set in the music industry. Pictured at top left are two random partygoers. [Criterion streaming]

NIGHT OF THE COBRA WOMAN (1972)

During World War II, two nurses in a Philippines jungle are looking for a legendary "long life" herb. One of them, Francisca, is raped and shot by a Japanese soldier. Exploring in a cave, the other nurse, Lena, is bitten by a rare firebrand cobra. She doesn't die but instead goes through a transformation in which her face briefly becomes snake-like before she turns back to normal. She uses the snake venom to heal Francisca. Some 30 years later, the two live together on the edge of a jungle in Manila. Francisca has aged normally; Lena, thanks to being a cobra woman, hasn't aged a bit. But periodically her skin becomes scaly and she has to shed it. Also, to keep her youth, she has to have sex with young, virile men, after which the men are left pretty much dried out corpses. Joanna, a young biology intern doing anti-snake venom research, hears that Lena has one of the last firebrand cobras in the wild and heads out to investigate. She is chased away by a mutant-looking man named Lopé who turns out to be the adult son of Francisca; as Joanna notes, he looks like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Back home, Joanna masturbates to thoughts of her boyfriend Duff whom she picks up at the airport later that day. After hearing about Joanna's research, Duff immediately heads out to Lena's place where he is bitten by her snake. Lena saves him by sucking the venom out, but she then keeps him around as a kind of sex slave to keep her young and uses him as her pimp, bringing her new victims from town. Joanna returns to Lena's and steals some venom which, after Lena's snake is killed, may put an end to Lena's eternal youth. But it might not...

This is one of those crazy-ass Filipino horror films that is not really very good but is oddly watchable, if only to see what bizarre thing will happen next. I haven’t mentioned that Lopé and the soldier rapist are played by the same actor. Nor that for some reason, Duff is compelled to buy an eagle (which eventually kills Lena's snake, which is named Movini, the same one from the WWII prologue). Nor that Joanna and her mentor test an anti-venom serum on a monkey, with bad results. Nor that Lopé's strange physical and mental condition came about after Lena seduced him. Nor that Lena eventually turns into Movini (I think) and back again. Nor that Lena is driven to instant lust at one point by seeing the butt crack of a young man on the street. The rules about snake transformation and skin shedding and humping to keep her youth are very unclear, as though the movie had been mostly improvised along the way. The acting is about as bad as sub-B-movie acting gets, but even that makes for some interesting watching. Joy Bang (Joanna) seems like a 17-year old who was suddenly shoved before the cameras with no experience, or even much desire to act, and tries to make the best of her situation—she was actually 27 at the time and made several movies including, the same year, Woody Allen's Play It Again, Sam. Maybe the Philippine setting addled her. Or maybe, given the equally bad performance of Roger Garrett as Duff, the director, Andrew Meyer, was at fault. Marlene Clark (Lena, pictured above) is actually pretty good; she sustained a career well into the 1980s and is known for her starring role in the Black vampire cult classic Ganja and Hess. The nicely dreamy score music by Restie Umali is pretty good, giving some of the movie a dark fairy tale feel. But make no mistake, this is only for fans of bad horror movies. [Amazon Prime]

TARZAN AND THE GREEN GODDESS (1938)

Deep in the jungles of Guatemala, the residents of a "lost city" worship an ancient Mayan statue of the Green Goddess, unaware that inside it is a formula for a super-explosive that any number of governments might want to get their hands on. The idol has been stolen but recovered by the British archeologist Martling, working with his buddy Tarzan, but it gets stolen again by the nefarious Raglan whose boss wants to offer it to the highest bidding government. Unfortunately, the Goddess cannot be safely opened without a code—otherwise, it will explode—so Raglan has to try and steal the code book from Martling even as Martling's group is trying to take the Goddess back from Raglan. Because this is a feature film version of a serial, we get a series of short scenes in which our good guys (Martling, Tarzan, an exotic woman named Ula Vale and a comic-relief doofus named George) tangle with the bad guys, getting into and out of some tight scrapes involving a lion, a tiger, a crocodile, a raging waterfall, and a small boat in the middle of a typhoon. The most impressive escape involves a bound Tarzan bursting out of binding ropes by the power of his chest muscles alone (pictured). Of course, the idol is rescued and the explosive formula kept out of the hands of evildoers.

This movie has a complicated history. In 1935, a 12-chapter serial called THE NEW ADVENTURES OF TARZAN, co-produced by Tarzan's author, Edgar Rice Burroughs, was released to compete with the MGM Tarzan series. Most serial chapters run about 20 minutes, but this one had a first chapter that ran an hour, which contained most of the backstory about the idol and the lost city. A version of the first couple of chapters was made available as its own movie, but three years later, this film, an edited version of chapters 4-12 of the serial, was released. Nothing from the first chapter is included—what we need to know is given as exposition—and what is kept is mostly the beginnings and ends of the chapters, in order to keep as many cliffhanger situations as possible. Cutting out the less exciting scenes certainly moves the action along, though I was surprised to hear no background music, which usually heightens our experience of the fisticuffs. Herman Brix (later known as Bruce Bennett) is good as Tarzan; he’s not as muscly as most Tarzans, more slim and lithe like TV’s Ron Ely, and he also speaks perfect English and occasionally wears clothes. 

Because of the slam-bang pace, most of the other actors don’t get to make an impression except for Lew Sargent as the comic relief. You can sense him wanting to be funny, but his material falls flat except for an amusing bit where he chases a monkey that has stolen his yo-yo. Don Castello, who plays Raglan, is actually Ashton Dearholt who co-produced the movie with Burroughs. Ula Holt (playing Ula Vale) was Dearholt's wife. Some location shooting in Guatemala helps dispel the somewhat claustrophobic feel of most jungle melodramas that shoot on sets, though there are plenty of studio sets here. It is claimed that this version of the film has some added footage not in the original serial, but no one seems to know which scenes those might be. Favorite line: Raglan yelling, "Get your hands off that goddess!" [TCM]

RUN FOR THE SUN (1956)

Mike Latimer (Richard Widmark), a famous author and man's man—think Hemingway—has vanished, on purpose. Magazine reporter Katie Connors (Jane Greer) has traced him to San Marcos, a small Mexican village and, posing as a tourist, engineers a meet-cute in an attempt to get a good story. Over several days, he spills his guts to her about his ex-wife's infidelity, and his depression over his writer's block. An attraction grows, and Katie decides to head back to New York but not turn in her story. Mike offers to fly her to Mexico City but a compass malfunction causes them to get lost. When their fuel runs out, they crash land on the wooded, isolated property of an Englishman named Browne (Trevor Howard) and his Dutch brother-in-law Anders (Peter van Eyck) who claim to be archeologists studying nearby ruins. But really, they are Nazis in hiding: Browne was a notorious anti-British radio propagandist and Anders was responsible for the massacre of an entire village. Mike finds out that Katie was writing a story on him and feels betrayed, not quite believing that she had given it up, but when it becomes clear that the two men will not let them rejoin civilization, they join forces to make a run through the jungle to escape. With the two Nazis hot on their trail, how far will they get?

This is billed as an adaptation of Richard Connell's famous short story "The Most Dangerous Game" in which a madman hunts humans for sport, but that plotline is non-existent here—more faithful adaptations were done in 1932 and 1945. This is basically a decent romantic melodrama that turns into an action thriller in its latter half. The characters are much more rounded and interesting than those in the other Dangerous Game movies, and the splitting of the sinister hunter into two people is interesting as some tension develops between them concerning their differing hopes for the future. Widmark isn't my idea of Hemingway but he grew on me; Greer, pictured with Widmark, is attractive but her character is the least developed of the four; Howard and van Eyck take the acting honors here, managing to portray the Nazis as human and not just cardboard villains. The setting is appropriately menacing, though some bad day-for-night photography spoils the tension at times. As a version of the Connell story, not so much, but on its own terms as a melodrama potboiler, not bad. [TCM]

THE SHADOW (1940 serial)

The mysterious Black Tiger is striking fear into the hearts of the city's wealthy businessmen by using sabotage against their industries (transportation, communications). Criminologist Lamont Cranston (Victor Jory) is called upon by the police to help out, and he becomes a regular presence at the meetings of the industrialists at the Cobalt Club. No one knows, however, that Cranston is also The Shadow, a caped and masked crimefighter whom the police assume is actually a criminal himself. When he wants to get reliable underworld information, Cranston disguises himself as the Chinese merchant Lin Chang. Aided by his faithful assistant Margo Lane and cab driver Harry Vincent, Cranston flits here and there on the trail of the Black Tiger, usually managing to foil his evil schemes. Soon, it becomes obvious that the Black Tiger must be a member of the Cobalt Club group, and Cranston works to narrow the field down to catch the right man.

The Shadow is a legendary pop culture figure who began on the radio and moved into pulp fiction and movies. He had an ominous chuckle, could "cloud men’s minds" so he would seem to be invisible, and was said to "know what evil lurks in the hearts of men." There is a short series of traditional mysteries done by Monogram in the late 40s in which Cranston is just a variation on the gentleman crimefighter (Philo Vance, The Saint, etc.), and James Patterson has just begun a series of books that "reimagine" Cranston, but this serial sticks closer to the original character. Jory is the perfect type to play The Shadow; he’s got a nicely sinister laugh and a distinctive profile, and he often played bad guys—I know him best as the nasty carpetbagger who drives Scarlett O’Hara to make a dress out of curtains in GONE WITH THE WIND. As Cranston, he exudes calm confidence (needed to counter the nervous industrialists) and as The Shadow, he looks like he might strike fear into people, but unfortunately this movie has terrible day-for-night effects, and every dark and mysterious nighttime scene winds up looking like high noon, making the Shadow’s appearance less effective. He’s even compelling as Lin Chang if you can get past the racist yellowface and dialect. 

After starting off well in the first three chapters, this falls into the usual serial chapter monotony of cliffhangers, escapes, and new villainous activity. These cliffhangers are notorious for their lazy escapes—usually a room collapses around The Shadow, burying him in wood and plaster, and in the next chapter, he simply stands up, shakes off the dust and goes on his merry way. The same cheap sets are reused, and the henchmen are largely indistinguishable from each other (and sometimes from the good guys). Margo gets a little more action in than the average serial gal pal, but she also has an irritating high-pitched scream. The Black Tiger walks through a beam of foggy light which turns him invisible and he speaks to his thugs through a tiger head speaker that is sometimes attached to a phonograph which plays pre-recorded speeches. His voice, guttural and peevish—he's constantly berating his underlings for their failures—eventually grows irritating as well. Ultimately the industrialists are not differentiated well enough to make us care about the identity of the Tiger, but the ruse that Cranston uses to expose him in the penultimate chapter is clever. As serials go, I'd rank this a notch above average for Jory's performance and look (at least when he’s shown in shadows as the bright daylight works against him) and also for some effective comic relief there and there. Pictured at top is Jory with the Black Tiger's speaker. [DVD]

THE PENTHOUSE (1967)

We watch what appears to be the usual morning ritual of young British couple Barbara and Bruce in their penthouse apartment: Barbara, who has a job at a dress shop, gets up first to make coffee while Bruce, a real estate agent, lingers in bed. But we soon discover the truth: the two are having an affair, with Bruce making empty promises that he will ask his wife for a divorce, and the fancy apartment they're in belongs to a client of Bruce's who is out of town. The building itself is still under construction and the elevator to the penthouse isn't operational. Soon, Barbara answers a knock at the door to find two men who say they have come to read the meter. She lets them in but their behavior is strange as they dawdle and make the occasional cryptic comment. Sure enough, after a few minutes, it's clear that the two men, named Tom and Dick (who refer to a third named Harry who will be arriving soon), are staging a home invasion. Bruce gets tied up and made fun of (one of the men taunts him by saying, "Sleeping in his underwear—not very civilized, not very hygienic") and Barbara is plied with liquor until she is willing to have sex with Tom, and later Dick. However, despite the hovering threat of physical violence—and the question of how consensual the sex with Barbara really is—most of the pain dealt out is psychological as Tom and Dick seem to enjoy playing mind games and brandishing their potentially threatening presences more than their weapons (at one point, one does pull out a switchblade). Eventually, they leave on their own accord and a horny Barbara starts to flirt with the still-tied-up Bruce until another knock on the door announces the arrival of Harry, a professionally dressed woman who says she is the parole officer of Tom and Dick, and she wants permission to bring the two men in to apologize—or is this just another mind game?

I'm not really a fan of home invasion movies, though this one is perhaps a notch above the average. The situation, the dialogue, and the performances all make this feel like a Harold Pinter play. If that sounds appealing, I can recommend this to you; otherwise, this probably won't be your cup of tea. No character is particularly appealing, so when the two thugs start going through their predictable home invasion tactics, I found it difficult to work up much identification with the adulterous couple. Suzy Kendall (Barbara) is lovely; she began her career as a model and later was married for a time to Dudley Moore. Her character is the center of the story more or less by default since we know little about any of them, and she's the most vulnerable. Most reviews of this movie mention the two rape scenes, but they (especially the first one) don't play out as rape so much as drunken seduction scenes, though it's clear that, even if physical brutality isn't used, the threat of such is never far from the surface. Terence Morgan as Bruce is a beta male who seems to have lucked into his affair with Barbara. The thugs (Tony Beckley and Norman Rodway, pictured) are physically intimidating, but also seem to function more as symbols in this psychological drama rather than as three-dimensional characters. Most interesting of all, if just for the sheer ambiguity of her character, is Martine Beswick as Harry, though she only has about ten minutes of screen time. As in a Pinter play, don't expect any clearing up of ambiguities or loose ends, though I did find the ending satisfying enough. [YouTube]

VACATION FROM LOVE (1938)

Bill (Dennis O'Keefe) is a saxophone player at the Club Bolero who has fallen head over heels in love with Pat (Florence Rice), a wealthy socialite he sees in the audience. Even though he's never met her, and she's about to marry T. Ames Piermont III (with that name, you know he's as rich as she is), he still thinks he has a chance to sweep her off her feet. Bill finagles his way into her wedding and when the minister asks if there are any objections to the marriage, Bill objects loudly, saying the groom's eyes are too close together. This being a screwball comedy, Pat agrees and the two run off together. Her father, John Lawson (Reginald Owen) is not happy, but Bill and Pat decide to marry, with their vow being, "Love, honor, obey, and always have fun!" Two years later, Bill is an advertising executive with Lawson's company--he's making lots of money, but it seems like the "having fun" of their vow has been forgotten. The breaking point comes when Bill forgets to attend their anniversary party, instead getting a little drunk with his former bandleader and the girl singer from the band. Soon enough, Pat files for divorce, but, this being a screwball comedy, a madcap adventure in Paris soon shows that the couple can still have fun. 

It took me a while to start enjoying this B-comedy, as neither O'Keefe nor Rice (both pictured at right) is charming enough to carry off the improbabilities of the opening sequences. O'Keefe just seems a little simple and Rice is not quite attractive enough to warrant the kind of instant and intense crush that O'Keefe has for her. But by the anniversary party, I went with the flow, and the final Paris scenes, partly played with no dialogue and at a slightly sped-up speed, are fun indeed. Still, I had to take their love for granted, as the two never really develop much chemistry and we don't see them interact as a couple very much. A decent supporting cast helps: Reginald Owen as Lawson, the epitome of befuddled irritation in the beginning until he comes around to appreciate Bill's whimsey; June Knight as the band singer; Edward Brophy as the band leader; J.M. Kerrigan as a Hansom cab driver; George Zucco in a small role as a psychiatrist—when he tells Owen early on that Bill is mentally fit, Owen shouts, "He’s sane? You must be mad!" Mild fun. [TCM]

ESKIMO (1933)

Mala, member of a Northern Alaskan Eskimo tribe, is a husband and father, and the best hunter in the tribe. When a stranger with two wives shows up, having lost contact with his tribe, Mala takes him in. One of the wives is constantly grinning and chuckling, but the other one, Iva, is younger and sexier, and looks longingly at Mala. Numaka returns from a visit to Tjaranak, an inlet where trading ships dock, in possession of a gun. Mala decides to take his family there to trade for goods. Along the way, they run into Urajak, who lost his wife in a bear attack, and Mala offers him his wife Aba for a night of intimate company. At Tjaranak, trading occurs, and the captain talks Mala into leaving Aba in the ship overnight; he then gets Aba drunk and sleeps with her. The next day, while Mala participates in a whale hunt, Aba is dragged back on ship by drunken sailors and the captain rapes her. When she stumbles out onto the ice, she is shot and killed by a hunter who mistakes her for a seal. In revenge, Mala impales the captain with a harpoon and leaves. Back home with no wife, the stranger offers Mala his wife Iva as a wife and mother to his children. During a caribou hunt, Mala has a vision of the dead captain and is advised to pray to the gods to give him a new name so the captain's ghost cannot find him. He takes the name Kripik. Meanwhile, a couple of Canadian Mounties go after Mala for the captain's murder. They wind up almost dead in the snow and Mala (as Kripik) nurses them back to health. The men form a bond, but when the Mounties discover he is really Mala, they reluctantly do their duty and arrest him. That night, bound in handcuffs, Mala struggles mightily and painfully (and bloodily) to escape and sets off on a grueling journey back to his tribe, forced to slaughter and eat all of his sled dogs. Knowing he's being pursued, he and Iva leave the village via an ice floe just as the Mounties arrive. Sgt. Hunt is torn between his admiration for Mala and his duty as upholder of the white man's laws. Will he shoot Mala or let him float off to an uncertain future?

This was mostly shot on location, using footage of an actual Alaskan tribe as the backdrop for the story (fiction but based on two adventure travel books by Peter Freuchen, who also plays the captain). All the dialog delivered by the Alaskans is in their native language, translated by title cards. The film was touted as a partial documentary, probably the reason they got away with a brief shot of a native woman breastfeeding. Scenes of real seal, whale, and caribou hunts are interesting, though there is some obvious use of rear projection shots for some of the more exciting moments. An onscreen note at the beginning of the film says that the cast is all native and the only actors in the movie are the Mounties, but that’s not quite true. The man playing Mala, also named Mala (pictured), was born in Alaska, but had been involved in the film business in Hollywood since 1925. He went on to a fairly long acting career (see LAST OF THE PAGANS). Similarly, Lotus Long, who played Iva, was of Japanese and Hawaiian background but was born in New Jersey and went on to a solid career in B-movies. The film's director, W.S. Van Dyke, has a small part as the chief Mountie inspector. The actor with the most English dialog is Joe Sawyer as Hunt; Sawyer made almost 200 movies, always in support, usually as a cop or a henchman or a comic relief sidekick, and he's fine here as the conflicted Mountie. At 2 hours, it's a bit too long in its middle sections, but it remains watchable after all these years, both as a novelty and as a unique adventure film. [TCM]

BLOODLUST (1961)

Captain Tony has chartered his boat to two young couples on a vacation: handsome, hunky Johnny; his gal Betty whom we discover, when Johnny gets too lovey-dovey with her on deck, knows some judo moves; Pete, who wears glasses (which of course means 'nerd,' though he's never as nerdy as you expect him to be); and his gal Jeanne who is fairly nondescript. At the height of the afternoon, Tony passes out cold drunk and the four passengers decide to take a dinghy to a small nearby island to do some exploring. (What they don't see is Tony waking up, seeing them at sea, and trying to warn them not to go to the island.) Once there, a clambake seems in order, but Johnny falls into a deliberately-set trap in the woods, and suddenly they find themselves facing three armed men: the bearded Dr. Balleau and two guards. Despite their threatening appearance, Balleau seems kindly, if a bit aloof, and takes them back to his small house, explaining that he is a wealthy retired man who lives mostly alone on the island to satisfy his yearning for hunting, having animals shipped onto the island to be bagged and stuffed as trophies. Also living in the house are Belleau's considerably younger French wife Sandra and a family friend named Dean who is always soused but whom Belleau keeps around because he's a good chess player. The four want to go back to the boat, but Belleau insists they stay the night because of the nighttime dangers in the jungle. Soon they find out about other dangers: Dean, who only fakes being a drunkard, is Sandra's lover, and the two are desperate to get off the island because Belleau is a madman—he has Tony procure people to drop off on the island and Belleau hunts them, always killing them and then stuffing them to put on display in his private trophy room. The six of them make plans to steal a boat and escape, but we all know what happens to the best-laid plans, and these plans aren't particularly well-laid.

As you may have figured out, this B-thriller is an uncredited remake of the short story "The Most Dangerous Game," most famously filmed in 1932 with Joel McCrea and Fay Wray, and also in 1945 as A GAME OF DEATH. Among the three versions, this comes in last, mostly due to the low budget (cheap sets, weak writing), and also because of the lackluster performance of Wilton Graff as the madman. He never comes off as mad, sinister, or even particularly threatening—his brutal guards are more effectively scary than he is. Of course, British actor Leslie Banks set a high bar in the 1932 film that is unlikely to be bested unless someone like Anthony Hopkins were to do a remake. For a cast of B-actors who mostly remained unknown, the rest do fine, though the only real standout is Robert Reed (as Johnny), who went on to eternal fame as the dad in The Brady Bunch. Here, he spends most of his time showing off his nice build in a skintight t-shirt (with sweat stains that are so consistent, I feel they must have been applied on purpose by a continuity person). His bearing as a rather reluctant hero (he's not foolhardy and doesn't seem to want to be the gang leader) is convincing. Bobby Hall is also convincing in the wordless role of Jondor, an ill-treated assistant to Belleau. I must also mention Troy Patterson as Tony, better when he's sober than drunk, and the uncredited Harry Wilson as a shrieking madman who is loose in the jungle—every time he shows up, he's unnerving. Scenes of Belleau killing people with a crossbow are fairly explicit, as is the last scene of Belleau getting his deserved end. I first saw this on MST3K where it was mocked mercilessly, but seen on its own, it does at least hold your attention (or maybe it was just Robert Reed's t-shirt that kept me watching). BTW, the title is from the explanation Belleau gives for his bent: he was a gentle museum curator who became a sniper in the war, and could never get rid of that… Bloodlust! Pictured are Reed and June Kenney (as Betty). [DVD]

ADVENTURE GIRL (1934)

The backstory on this is complicated and rather more interesting than the movie itself. Silent movie actress Joan Lowell published a memoir in 1929 called Cradle of the Deep, which purported to tell of her adventurous life as a child spent on a schooner with her sea captain father. The book was a bestseller but was later exposed as mostly fiction. Years later, Lowell went to sea with her father (by now over 70) and two sailors on a 48-foot boat called the Black Hawk, intending to recreate some of her adventures for the movies. This is the result of that shoot. Even though the film begins by telling us that this is a "reenactment" and even refers to a "fictional" portion of the story, the publicity when the film was released sold it as a documentary. It certainly is presented as such, with all the footage shot without sound (with sound effects and occasional background dialogue added later) and narrated like a travelogue by Lowell. But it also feels like a matinee serial, complete with bad guys and cliffhangers.

Joan, her father Nicholas, and sailors Bill and Otto take off from New York in their boat; the first cliffhanger involves a big storm at sea (which has obviously been re-created, with some shots showing a clear and bright sky in the background) as Joan bravely leaps into the water to save one of the sailors. With the boat needing major repairs, the gang discovers a shipwreck graveyard where they salvage some supplies, primarily a new mast. Joan finds a pirate's treasure map showing a valuable giant emerald buried in the jungles of Guatemala, and she decides she wants to find it. After fighting thirst and watching a mongoose battle a deadly snake, they wind up in the jungle village where the emerald is hidden. Joan gets the permission of the village matriarch Princess Maya by lying about her intentions, and when her machinations are exposed, the villagers attempt to burn her at the stake. At the last minute, Bill saves Joan and they make a fraught escape down a river back to their boat.

This comes off like a Tarzan movie with three big differences: 1) there's no dialogue, only narration; 2) it purports to be true; and 3) the "heroes" are actually the bad guys, attempting to desecrate the villagers' land—in a Tarzan movie, Joan would be the villain whose plans Tarzan would be foiling. To her credit, Joan realizes she's doing wrong and leaves the emerald behind. I can't imagine that any savvy movie viewer would think this was a documentary—the cameras follow Joan and Bill into the jungle, but they also follow the villagers who are trying to thwart her. The attempted burning, which serves as the climax, is not terribly convincing. Most of the natives are actual villagers, though Princess Maya is played by Ula Holt, a California-born woman who would play in a real Tarzan serial (New Adventures of Tarzan) the next year. Pictured at top are Bill and Joan. [TCM]

OSS 117: MISSION TO TOKYO (1966)

Secret agent Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath, more simply referred to as OSS 117, endures a car and helicopter chase in which he manages to kill the bad guys, but is unsuccessful at getting information from an agent who had infiltrated a mysterious organization trying to blackmail the United States government by threatening to use new powerful and undetectable weapons. One American military base has already been destroyed, possibly by miniature fighter planes (we now know them as drones). Sent to Tokyo, OSS 117 discovers that Eva Wilson, an employee at a base there, is being blackmailed to leak information to the villains allowing them to target the bases. 117 poses as her American husband, hoping the bad guys will contact her again. He gets knocked unconscious outside a strip club, shot at with a poisoned dart, has a knock-down fight with a Sumo wrestler-type guy, and gets in a swordfight. Then Eva's husband shows up and turns out to be a bad guy. The finale, on a huge ship, has overtones of sci-fi and plays out very much like a James Bond climax. This is a fairly engrossing entry in the OSS 117 series. Frederick Stafford, later the leading man in Hitchcock's Topaz, looks more like Sean Connery than the previous OSS 117 (Kerwin Mathews) and is more down-to-business. Marina Vlady is fine as Eva, with few standouts in the rest of the cast. If it doesn't manage to break out of the pack of 60s Bond imitators, it's still an entertaining action spy flick. Pictured is Stafford. Also known as Terror in Tokyo; apparently it also received a release of some sort as Savage Desire. And from what I can put together from the movie's IMDb page, it may never have gotten a theatrical release in the United States. [DVD]

HIGH SCHOOL HELLCATS (1958)

Joyce, the new girl at the high school, is given a hard time by rough-edged Connie and her even rougher-edged buddy Dolly (she likes to play with jackknives). They're the heads of the local girl gang who call themselves the Hellcats. The gang meets in the balcony of a dilapidated theater which they enter through a secret entrance, and using intimidation, they force Joyce to attend a meeting and put her through an initiation period to join the gang. She has to shoplift, get no grade higher than a "D," and ask out a guy who already has a girlfriend. Joyce goes along with most of it, though she fakes the shoplifting, and spends some time unloading on Mike, a cute clean-cut college boy who works at a small diner. Soon, the two are dating, but despite Mike warning Joyce to stay away from the Hellcats, she continues with the initiation. At a party (held in a house the girls have broken into) complete with booze and boys, Connie takes a fatal tumble down the basement steps. They leave her body to be discovered by the homeowners, and soon the cops come calling on the Hellcats. Crazy Dolly is sure that Connie was pushed down the steps and, thinking that Joyce has been too forthcoming to the cops, invites her to a private meeting in the theater with revenge on her mind.

Before the beach movie craze of the 1960s, American International made a number of teenage movies with a focus on juvenile delinquents (JDs). I haven't seen many of these, but this one seems to be a pretty representative entry in that genre. The heroine or hero, good and relatively innocent, is tempted to the bad side by some JDs, despite the advice of a clear-headed boyfriend or girlfriend. The parents are, at best, disconnected, and at worst, actively awful (Joyce's dad is a slapper and her mom is just oblivious). Sex and substance abuse are not really present here; there's a little booze at the party, and a little lights-out petting but as illicit parties go, this one is kinda square. However, [Spoiler] murder is a plotpoint: Crazy Dolly gave Connie the fatal shove, wanting to take over as leader of the pack. Yvonne Lime (Joyce) does the best she can with the good girl role; more impressive are Jana Lund as Connie and Suzanne Sydney as Dolly; the climax with Dolly going murderously nuts in the theater balcony is memorable. Brett Halsey is fine as the boyfriend—his sleepy puppy dog eyes, which were irritating in THE ATOMIC SUBMARINE, are more suitable for this role. Pictured are Lime and Halsey. [TCM]

THE MYSTERY OF THUG ISLAND (1964)

3-year-old Ada, the daughter of a British officer, is kidnapped by a thuggee cult because they believe that she will become the human incarnation of Kali when she turns 18. Fifteen years later, as Souyadhana, her Thug handler, is preparing for her transformation, her father, Capt. McPherson, has closed in after all these years on her possible whereabouts on Snakes Island, where the Thugs live underground in secret. Also on the island is a group of snake hunters, one of whom, the handsome Tremel, eyes Ada (known by the cult as the Sacred Virgin) from afar and falls for her. They soon meet and Ada begins to question whether she really is the Sacred Virgin that Souyadhana insists she is; she is especially concerned with the human sacrifices that are made in her name. When Tremel is caught with Ada in the Thuggee lair, Souyadhana exclaims that Tremel has ruined what Souyadhana has spent years doing—trying to make her “insensible to human passions”—and forces him to return above ground and kill McPherson and bring back his head, which, when she is told that her birth father is dead, will make her hate Tremel and harden her feelings again. Can Tremel figure out a way to short-circuit Souyadhana’s nefarious plans and return Ada to civilization with him?

This is a German-Italian production with one Hollywood name, Guy Madison, first-billed in the credits, though he’s not the traditional lead. Though Madison was mostly known as a B-movie hero, here he plays the wicked Souyadhana. The hunky romantic hero is played by Italian actor Giacomo Rossi Stuart, who had a wide-ranging career in sci-fi, horror, and action films. Both actors are fine, as is Ingebog Schoener as Ada the Virgin. You’ll recognize Peter van Eyck, who usually played icy blond Nazis, as Ada’s father. The look of the movie is very cheap, not aided by the fact that the only print I could find of this was on YouTube and is a sometimes blurry pan-and-scanned version. There is a man vs. tiger scene which is so pathetic that I imagine even 8-year-old me would have groaned at its fakiness. Whenever a sacrifice occurs, some cartoonish theremin music plays for no obvious reason. But as a flashback to a kiddie matinee flick, this kept me interested, and on that level, I’d recommend it. Also known as KIDNAPPED TO MYSTERY ISLAND. Pictured are Schoener and Madison. [YouTube]

THE ATOMIC SUBMARINE (1959)

Mysterious problems are threatening military submarine traffic in the Arctic Sea near the North Pole, with some ships either being destroyed or vanishing after seeing a strange glowing light. A meeting of the Arctic Theater powers leads to navy commander Holloway (Arthur Franz) heading up a trip on a submarine called the Tiger Shark which has been outfitted with new high-tech tracking equipment. He's excited to be joined by the equipment's inventor, an old buddy named Neilson, but then he discovers that it’s Neilson's son (Brett Halsey) traveling in place of his ailing father. The son is a pacifist and is known for calling his dad out publicly as a war monger, and Holloway constantly (and unprofessionally) picks fights with Neilson. Their squabbling comes mostly to a halt when a strange electrical storm hits the Tiger Shark. Soon, the crew discovers a pattern of storms that have encircled the North Pole, coinciding with places where other ships were hit. Could this be an alien intelligence of some kind keeping man away from the pole? When they discover an underwater UFO with a single glowing "eye," they call it Cyclops and try to make contact. They ram the spaceship and enter, eventually meeting up with a Cyclopian creature who kills some of them but also establishes telepathic contact with Holloway, and he learns that the ship, which is a living thing, plans to head back to its home planet and return with a colonizing force. Can Holloway and Neilson manage to work together to save the Earth?

It takes a while for this talky movie to get going, and even when it does, it's only occasionally interesting. Generally, the effects—the miniatures, the alien—are cheap and not terribly effective, but the interior of the spaceship, with an almost surreal dark and empty look, is effective (pictured) and worth hanging around for. Even the climax is fairly hum-drum; the narrator has to get us worked up when he tells us about the plan to attack the escaping spaceship at the end: "It was foolish, it was insane, it was fantastic!" Franz lazily blusters his way through the movie in an unlikable way. Halsey, young and handsome, is only slightly more bearable; he spends most of the movie with a pitiful, wounded puppy dog look on his face as he somewhat masochistically lets Franz berate him. Old-timers Dick Foran and Tom Conway are fine in supporting roles. Busty blond Joi Lansing has a small role as Franz's lust interest, and the end is basically a silly punch-line delivered by Franz about the alien ship getting away with his little black book. Not a waste of time but not essential viewing. [DVD]

THE CARPETBAGGERS (1964)

The opening defines "carpetbaggers" as men who leave their mark on the world, good or bad. (Hmm, that’s a pretty broad definition, in addition to assuming that women can't do such a thing, but we proceed). This is the story of one such man, Jonas Cord (George Peppard), a rich man's wastrel son whom we first meet (in the 1920s) buzzing his biplane dangerously low over his family's chemical plant. His father bawls him out for the stunt and for his latest headline scandal, the attempted suicide of his latest girlfriend. Jonas replies by calling Dad a "greedy, insensitive drunk" (which he almost certainly is); Dad responds by dropping dead of a stroke. Jonas takes over the company but Dad leaves everything else to Jonas's young stepmother Rina (Carroll Baker) who, get this, was Jonas's lover years ago. She invites him into her bed for a roll in the hay, but he demurs and she calls him a "scared little boy." The rest of the movie follows Jonas's business successes in plastics, airplanes, and eventually Hollywood, and his failures in personal relationships. Over the years, he can't quite get Rina in the sack, but he does make her a movie star in a string of westerns starring his old buddy Nevada Smith (Alan Ladd). He marries Monica, the daughter of a business rival, but when she expresses her desire for a family life, he leaves her and takes up with good-hearted hooker Jennie. But over the years, his insensitive behavior drives everyone away, including his faithful lawyer, an old-time business partner, and even Nevada Smith. Is there a path to redemption for this shell of a man?

There were quite a few movies from the 50s into the 1970s, often based on bestselling novels by authors like Harold Robbins (who wrote the novel this is based on) and Sidney Sheldon, that focused on the rise and fall of a central male figure, sometimes a nice guy, sometimes not, including Parrish, The Young Philadelphians, Elmer Gantry, and Giant. But this reminded me most of The Oscar, in which the main character is a total bastard, out only for himself, hurting (and eventually being left by) everyone around him. The very handsome Peppard (pictured) is good at being a bastard while retaining just enough charm that we can see how people get sucked into his circle. The character is based on Howard Hughes, who got rich in aviation and movies, and who jump-started the career of Jean Harlow, but the Rina character here is, except for being blond and sexy and having a tragic end, nothing like Harlow. This episodic film is entertaining, though never quite as sleazy as it wants to be, perhaps because of the constraints of the Production Code, which would collapse a year or two after this came out. For the most part, the supporting cast is solid: Martha Hyer as the hooker, Elizabeth Ashley as the long-suffering wife, Lew Ayers as the lawyer, Robert Cummings as an agent, Ralph Taeger as the airplane buddy, Martin Balsam as a studio head and Audrey Totter as a kindly prostitute who helps Jonas recover from a multi-day drinking binge. The only real casting misstep is Alan Ladd who is too old and tired and charmless for the part of Nevada. The movie is cinematic fast-food, probably not good for you but fun to indulge in. [DVD]

THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE (1951)

As the scene is set during the Civil War in September of 1862, opening narration explains that this film is based on Stephen Crane's novel, and that somehow writing the book made Crane a man--though he had never even seen battle when he wrote it. The story is told through the eyes of Henry (Audie Murphy), a young Union soldier. His regiment is tired of waiting and practicing rather than fighting, but Henry is plagued by doubt, worried that he'll turn coward and run rather than face death in battle. His buddy Tom (Bill Mauldin) hears a rumor that they are about to be sent to the front, and very soon they are. Settled in that night near some woods, Henry is on patrol when he is warned by a Confederate soldier across the river that he can be seen clearly in the moonlight and would make an easy target for a "red badge," that is, a bloody and possibly fatal wound. Tom, certain he'll die, gives Henry a keepsake watch to send back to his folks when he does die. The regiment, in a defensive position, succeeds in holding back the rebels, but when a second wave of soldiers attacks and the battlefield becomes chaotic, Henry indeed runs away to hide in the woods. Later, he joins up with a line of wounded men and learns that the regiment actually held their position. On his way back to his group, he has an encounter with another soldier and gets cracked on the head with a rifle. He now has his "red badge," and when he meets up with Tom he realizes that no one saw him retreat, so he tells Tom he got his wound from a bullet. When the men are sent on an offensive attack, Henry becomes almost foolheartedly courageous and winds up grabbing the flag out of a dead soldier's hands and leads the regiment to victory. He almost confesses to Tom that he deserted, but can't quite bring himself to do so. The film ends with the men leaving, hoping to be back home in Ohio for spring planting and, as the narrator tells us, with scenes of peace and tranquility in their heads.

This John Huston film has a reputation, like Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons, of being a masterpiece that was mangled by the studio in post-production. Originally over two hours, the film had poor responses at previews and when Huston left to start production on The African Queen, MGM ruthlessly cut the film to just 70 minutes and released it as a second feature with an Esther Williams musical. In the early days of home video, MGM tried to do a restoration but could find none of the cut footage. Frankly, I think the movie's short length is a plus; the novel, at around 150 pages, is really a novella, and this cut of the movie is lean without a wasted shot or line of dialogue. Real-life war hero Audie Murphy is excellent as Henry, very believable both as the scared kid at the beginning and the hailed hero at the end. The rest of the acting takes a little getting used to. At first, it seems like everyone is reading their lines off of cue cards with little to no inflection, but soon the style begins to feel more like naturalism. Mauldin, a famous (and Pulitzer Prize-winning) WWII Army cartoonist, is very appealing as the likable Tom; it's a shame he didn't continue acting. John Dierkes has a standout scene in the middle of the movie as a dying soldier who refuses to stop walking. The film has an authentic tone thanks largely to lots of close-ups of ragged and tired faces of soldiers going through various emotional states. This is part of TCM's Memorial Day line-up this year, and I highly recommend it. Pictured are Murphy and Mauldin. [TCM]

DECEPTION (1946)

Pianist Christine (Bette Davis, at right) goes racing through the rain to a small university concert hall to see cellist Karel (Paul Henreid) play. She is moved to tears and goes backstage to see him—we find out that the two had been lovers, but that Karel got stuck in Europe in 1940 for the duration of the war. She assumed he was dead, but he has just returned to the States, and now they hope to resume their relationship. But even though her concert engagements have dried up, he is shocked to find that she has a large and lavishly appointed apartment in the Village. She says she gives piano lessons to rich college students, but he remains suspicious, especially when he finds a signed photograph of the great composer Hollenius (Claude Rains). Nevertheless, they get married the next morning, and soon after Hollenius arrives. It's clear to us that Christine has been kept by Hollenius, her current, or perhaps former, lover, but Christine manages to keep the truth from the jealous Karel. Of course, both men become jealous, and soon Hollenius begins playing a cat and mouse game of trying to unnerve Karel concerning his talent. When Hollenius offers to let Karel play solo cello in the premiere performance of his new concerto, Christine sees that, during rehearsal, the composer is trying his best to make Karel question his own talent, and when she learns that Hollenius has hired an "understudy" for Karel, Christine decides to take drastic actions to make certain that her husband is a success.

Based on a two-person play, this remains a fairly stagy melodrama, despite its large and atmospheric sets—Christine's apartment, Hollenius' apartment, a fancy restaurant. Almost every scene is a heated discussion between various combinations of the three leads and it makes the film seem long and draggy. But the film noir look and the acting of the leads kept me interested. Davis can do no wrong, Rains chews some scenery in a generally pleasing fashion as he expresses his obsession with Davis, and Henreid is better than usual (I usually find him to be a boring actor, but he has his moments here). John Abbott makes a brief impression as the cello understudy. The plot could have been handled better. It's one of those movies that led me to say to myself, if Davis had just been honest with Henreid when they first walked into her apartment, a lot of misery would have been avoided. Of course, there'd be no movie, either, but I wish the writers could have conjured up better reasons for Davis to lie—the reason she keeps her affair from Henreid is because he is still a little fragile from his war experience, but honestly, he doesn't seem any more high-strung that your average classical musician in the movies. Some critics have read repressed homosexuality into the Rains character, and indeed, he reminds me at times of George Sanders in ALL ABOUT EVE, a possibly gay character whose attraction to a woman seems to be more about power and control than about sex. Is it really noir? I don't think so, but it definitely has that look, and I do love Davis' apartment. Is it worth two hours of your time for that? If you are a fan of any of the three leads, probably. [DVD]

EXILED TO SHANGHAI (1937)

Cocky newsreel reporter Ted (Wallace Ford) returns from Spain to face fellow reporter Charlie (Dean Jagger), angry because Ted cheated Charlie out of the assignment. Charlie has since been made an editor, and, out of spite, he assigns Ted the demeaning assignment of interviewing a sweepstakes winner, though both men are warned by their boss that newsreels are being made obsolete by newspaper and radio wire services. Meanwhile, young Nancy (June Travis), who dreams of leaving her boring small-town life, wins a television slogan contest ("Television—the eyes and ears of the future") and gets a one-week trip to New York City. Her Aunt Jane and Nancy's fiancé Andrew disapprove but she goes anyway. At the train station, Ted mistakenly interviews Nancy instead of the sweepstakes winner and when the newsreel is shown, Ted gets in trouble. He quits seconds before he's fired and decides to work on his idea for "television newsreels" (what we now know as TV news). Assuming television ownership will soon go through the roof, Powell, the owner of Supreme Television, likes his idea. A demonstration is set up for investors, using real-time coverage of the landing of an airship, but Ted finds out that the airship actually crashed on landing and they didn't get the story because Powell, worried that the broadcast wouldn’t work, substituted stock footage of a past airship landing. Nancy is in hot water herself, as everyone assumes she deliberately fooled the public about her identity. Aunt Jane and Andrew show up in New York, but Nancy has grown sweet on Ted, and vice versa. Ted confronts Powell which leads to a room-demolishing fistfight but Ted is still blamed for shadiness, and even Nancy starts to believe that he's just a conniver. In a rapid-fire climax, Charlie gets assigned to cover the war in China, Ted steals his plane ticket, Charlie sends him a telegram supposedly from Nancy that all is forgiven, and Ted parachutes out of the plane to land near the train that homebound Nancy is on. Somehow, all is forgiven and Ted marries Nancy, leaving Charlie to cover the war.

You will notice that I didn’t mention Shanghai once in my summary. Nor did I mention any exile. The title of this B-movie has nothing whatsoever to do with the content, except that we see Charlie in China in the last seconds of the film. But he hasn't been exiled; he's gotten what he wanted all along. I could forgive the misleading title, but the slapdash script practically falls to pieces at various times—to be fair, the print I saw was about five minutes short of the running time listed on IMDb so maybe some crucial scenes were missing. Wallace Ford is fine in supporting roles, but in B-lead roles like this one, he's lacking in charisma and romantic appeal. June Travis made 30 movies between 1935 and 1938, almost all B-films, and never caught on with the public. She's absolutely average here. The reason to watch this film is the young Dean Jagger who has a personality and an acting range that Ford and Travis do not. William Bakewell is effective as Andrew, the fiancé you love to hate, and Arthur Lake, later Dagwood Bumstead in the Blondie movie series, has a couple of fun moments as Ford's assistant. Newsreels were a big deal back then, with some theaters in big cities showing only newsreels all day long, and the TV news aspect of the story is nicely prescient. Still this is only worth seeing for Dean Jagger (pictured above to the left of Ford). [YouTube]

HAWAII (1968)

We begin with a brief history of how a tribe from Bora Bora, feeling their gods were threatened, uprooted themselves to live on the Hawaiian island of Maui, in a village called Lahaina. In the early 1800's, young prince Keoki comes to the States, hoping that Christian missionaries will help his people fight the bad influences of white traders who are setting up businesses on the island. Divinity school student Abner Hale (Max von Sydow) feels a strong urge to go, but he must be married to be sent off (with marriage assumed to be a tool to fight intimate fraternization with the female villagers). The Reverend Thorn sets him up with his lovely young niece Jerusha (Julie Andrews), recovering from an apparent abandonment by her suitor, a sailor named Rafer who hasn't communicated with her in some time. Abner is shy and unworldly, and to push them together, Thorn takes a packet of letters from Rafer that had been lost in the mails and hides them from her. She enters willingly into the arranged marriage and they head off to Hawaii on a missionary ship. But once there, Abner has a tough time gaining converts, though he manages to get on the good side of Queen Malama, who insists that Jerusha become her personal teacher of English. Relations begin to fray more seriously when Abner discovers the incestuous ways of the island people; Malama is married to her brother Kelolo, and when Malama dies (and a predicted wind of destruction sweeps over the island), Keoki will have to marry his sister. 

Over the years, Abner builds a church and helps the villagers, though few of them actually become converts. He manages to stop the informal prostitution of young village girls with visiting sailors, gaining the wrath of one particular merchant who turns out to be Rafer, Jerusha's former suitor. Though still attracted to him, Jerusha turns down his offers to take her away from the hard island life. When Rafer finds out that it's Abner’s influence that has threatened his mens' recreation, he leads a band of sailors to burn down the church, but afterwards, the villagers band together and drive the sailors back to their ships. Abner's hardest time comes when he tells a dying Malama that she must renounce her love for Keolo or she will not be with Jesus when she dies. She does, but when she dies, the predicted punishing wind does indeed arrive and blows down Abner's church. An angry Keoki defies Abner and reverts back to his native religion and marries his sister. There are more plot points: Jerusha has three children, Keoki's child is born deformed, and a measles epidemic, brought by a white sailor, kills off hundreds of villagers. By the end, Abner has shifted his concerns from conversions to trying to save the island from encroaching "civilization" by corrupt businessmen.

This movie, at nearly three hours, is based on only a small part of James Michener's huge novel of the same name. Shot largely on location, it's often lovely to look at, though it feels every bit of its running time, and the early arduous ocean crossing to Hawaii goes on far too long. Julie Andrews is top-billed, as this came out after her twin hits, Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music, but it's von Sydow's show and he's compelling as the imperfect and intolerant minister who is tragically slow to adapt to circumstances. Richard Harris is equally good as Rafer, and fine support is offered by Gene Hackman, John Cullum and Lou Antonio as fellow missionaries. Carroll O'Connor, a few years before his TV success as Archie Bunker, has a small role as Andrews' father. The Tahitian Jocelyne LaGarde, as Malama (pictured with Andrews above left), is quite good and snagged a Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for the only movie she ever made. After Malama dies, some of the narrative steam vanishes but the ending is satisfying. I wouldn't call the movie anti-Christian, though one of its major themes concerns the blinkered intolerance of Christian missionaries—most of the men who come with Abner loosen up or leave their vocation. In the beginning, it's impossible not to see Andrews as a variation on the young nun Maria in Sound of Music, and sadly she doesn't get to flesh out her character very much, though her makeup as she ages helps transform her into the careworn old-before-her-time woman she becomes near the end. This film is sometimes viewed as a commercial bomb and the beginning of Andrews' career decline, but in fact, the movie was a hit, one of the top-grossing movies of the year, as was her next film, Thoroughly Modern Millie. But Andrews generally fades into the background. Its real problem is that its genre, the big-budget self-important saga, has not aged well. Recommended for a lazy Sunday afternoon or a snow day. [Blu-Ray]

BACK STREET (1932)

In Cincinnati during, as we are told, the good old days before Prohibition, Irene Dunne is a footloose and fancy-free young woman who works at her family's store by day and hangs out at Over the Rhine, a fancy beer garden, in the evenings, engaging in innocent flirtations. George Meeker, who has a bicycle shop but loves tinkering with cars, is in love with her, and her father suggests that, even if she isn't in love with him, she could settle for him and not hold out for something better that may never come along. At a train station, Dunne meets John Boles, a handsome, well-to-do man visiting town because he is engaged to a local girl. Sparks fly between the two, and soon Boles is ready to give up his intended and make a life with Dunne. Boles arranges for her to meet his mother at a bandstand concert, but just as Dunne is leaving for the park, her sister confesses that she is "in trouble" and suicidal because her boyfriend is about to leave town. Though Dunne says her appointment at the bandstand may be the most important moment of her life, she gives in and agrees to talk sense into the boyfriend, and therefore misses meeting Boles and his mother by mere moments. Five years later, Dunne is a working girl in New York City and has a chance meeting on Wall Street with Boles. He's married with children, but sparks fly again and soon they are deep into a passionate affair. He sets her up in an apartment and they live for their stolen moments. She realizes she has become a "backstreet wife," always to live in the shadows of Boles' married life. At one point, Dunne hooks up with Meeker, now a success in the auto business, and even goes so far as to return to Cincinnati to marry him, but Boles follows her and she cannot deny her feelings for him still remain, so she breaks it off with Meeker and goes back to New York to resume her backstreet life.

This is a well-made, well-acted example of the suffering woman melodrama. I have tended to avoid these over the years—I remember liking ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS, not liking RANDOM HARVEST—but this one, as an early pre-Code example of this plotline, was worth seeing. (It's been remade twice but I'm not rushing to catch those.) In a way, despite the romantic masochism Dunne gives into, it's kind of a story of female empowerment; Dunne is (at least in the first half) an independent working woman, and the choices she makes along the way are made with her eyes open, and with Boles being honest about his situation. No spoiler here, but the ending is particularly interesting in the way that Boles' son sort of comes around to at least sympathizing with Dunne's situation. Dunne is very good, and Boles is OK—I don't see what about him, either physically or personally, drives Dunne so strongly to sacrifice so much to remain by his side. William Bakewell, as Boles' son, is strong in the final scenes. ZaZu Pitts has what amounts to an amusing cameo, and Jane Darwell has the small role of Dunne's stepmother. I like that the bandstand moment remains a sad touchstone in Dunne's life; it’s a resonant moment that feels real. [TCM]

THE MAN WHO HAUNTED HIMSELF (1970)

Harold Pelham (Roger Moore, pictured) is driving like a bat out of hell, looking like a man possessed, careening recklessly in and out of traffic until he finally crashes. In the hospital, he flatlines briefly on the operating table but his vital signs return, though for a few seconds, two separate heartbeats register on the machine. He recovers and goes back to his wife and his workplace, but things begin to seem a bit strange. One night, a co-worker shows up for drinks at the Pelhams; they weren't expecting him, but he claims that Pelham invited him to stop by when they met at their club last week, though Pelham insists he wasn't at the club then. His wife sees an unusual silver sports car parked outside their house on occasion. Other co-workers begin claiming to have seen Pelham out and about though he swears he wasn't. Finally, while at a casino with his wife, a sexy woman walks up to him in an intimate fashion and says, "I didn’t know you were married." Understandably, his wife is upset at this intimation of an affair (especially since their sex life has been nonexistent lately) though Pelham claims he doesn't know the woman. He becomes convinced that a double of his is running around, trying to ruin his life (there's a subplot about industrial espionage at work in which he is implicated), though a therapist suggests that he may be experiencing a kind of split personality in which he is living out suppressed fantasies. 

On holidays, my husband and I usually spend the day in our pajamas watching a themed movie marathon. The most recent was “doubles and doppelgangers.” I had never even heard of this movie though it crops up on almost every Internet list of doubles films, and it turned out to be a good find. It is practically an archetype of a modern doppleganger story, the granddaddy of which is probably Poe's "William Wilson." (See SPIRITS OF THE DEAD for an adaptation of that story.) I won't spoil the ending, except to say that, though it is satisfying, it doesn't worry too much about explanations. Moore, in his last movie before he took on the role of James Bond, is very good as a man unmoored by his experiences. For much of the film's running time, we're not sure if this is a story of psychology or of the supernatural, and Moore does a nice job balancing those two possible outcomes. In fact, the ending suggests that both are at play, and the ambiguity that is left is rather tantalizing. Recommended wholeheartedly. [Streaming]

GO, JOHNNY, GO! (1959)

Johnny Melody is the star of DJ Alan Freed's big rock & roll show, being watched from the wings by Freed and superstar Chuck Berry, who is impressed with Melody. Backstage, Freed relates the story of Johnny's rise to Berry. Johnny was an orphan choirboy who was booted from the choir for squeezing in some rock singing at rehearsals. He gets a gig as an usher at an Alan Freed show, but gets fired from that for dancing in the aisles. Before he leaves, he hears Freed announce a new talent hunt for a star he'll name Johnny Melody. We discover that this is just a publicity stunt, but Johnny takes it seriously and saves up some money to cut a demo. He runs into Julie, a former orphan who is trying to get her own start as a singer. She takes a liking to Johnny and helps him out, even though he's a bit slow on the uptake to realize that she's romantically interested in him. Johnny cuts a demo but signals get crossed and his record is ignored by Freed. Berry finally gets Freed to listen to the song; Freed likes it, but Johnny's name and number have gotten lost, so Freed plays the record on his show that night and asks the singer to get in touch with him. But in an unnecessarily melodramatic (and wildly implausible) plot twist, before Johnny hears this, he smashes a jeweler's store window to get a necklace that Julie has been pining after. Freed and Julie arrive just before the police and Freed takes responsibility, saying he was drunk and disorderly. And a star is born.

Despite a thin narrative and dirt-cheap production values, this film has some interest for fans of 50s pop music. Its biggest asset is Chuck Berry who performs a few songs, including "Johnny B. Goode," and, though an obvious amateur as an actor, is still fun to watch as he earnestly plays a sanitized version of himself. Freed does the same thing with more screen time if a little less effectively. Jimmy Clanton, who had a handful of top 40 hits, is fairly bland in the lead role, and Sandy Stewart, who went on to a career in jazz singing, can't make much of an impression. The bulk of the movie is made up of clips of other 50s performers including Jackie Wilson, Eddie Cochran, The Flamingos, The Cadillacs (the worst song in the movie, a comic relief bit called "Jay Walker"), and most interestingly, Ritchie Valens, best known for "La Bamba" and for dying young in the plane crash that also claimed Buddy Holly just a few months before this movie came out. His song is unmemorable but this is apparently the only footage that exists of Valens in performance. I kept hoping the movie would take off, but it never does, despite a structure that goes back and forth between the present and Johnny's rise. Pictured are Berry and Freed. [TCM]

THE SILENT PASSENGER (1935)

Windermere is a professional blackmailer. His latest victim is Mollie Ryder; though married, she has been conducting an affair with Windermere and he talked her into leaving England with him, but as they wait for their train, she has second thoughts. However, he has a batch of love letters she wrote to him which he's holding to keep her with him. In his hotel room as Windermere packs his bags for the train trip, another victim, Camberley, confronts him, bashing him over the head and killing him. He stuffs Windermere's body in one of his bags, but before he can leave, Mollie's husband John, who knows about the letters, arrives. He assumes that Camberley is Windermere; they fight and John gets the letters and takes Windermere's tickets so he can surprise Mollie on the train. So, the situation on the train is: John is traveling under Windermere's name and with his luggage, and has made up with Mollie, with neither one knowing that Windermere is dead and stuffed in a trunk that John is traveling with. In France, at customs, the trunk is opened, the body found, and John sent back to England. At Scotland Yard, John is freed while they investigate, but a detective is assigned to trail him—Camberley, the killer. Luckily, amateur detective Lord Peter Wimsey is also on the case.

Wimsey is the famous detective featured in a series of novels by Dorothy Sayers. It's a little odd that here, Wimsey (played by Peter Haddon) is basically a supporting character--John Loder, who plays John Ryder, is top-billed, and Wimsey doesn't really enter the proceedings until about 20 minutes in. Haddon plays him in a slipshod way as a silly fop and never really brings the character to life. (I've read one Wimsey novel, Gaudy Night, and seen one other Wimsey movie, Busman's Honeymoon, aka Haunted Honeymoon, which featured Robert Montgomery playing Wimsey more like Nick Charles from the Thin Man movies.) Fans of Wimsey will be disappointed, but fans of B-mysteries or of train thrillers will be more satisfied. Loder (pictured) is fine as Ryder; Shakespearean actor Donald Wolfit is good as the killer; Aubrey Mather, as Wimsey's valet, is more fun than Wimsey. The film moves along fairly well, with a very good climactic chase around a trainyard at night. Diehard Sayers fans may want to skip this, but fans of classic-era British B-films will enjoy it. [YouTube]