THREE WISE GIRLS (1932)

Average pre-Code gold-digger melodrama of three girls, only two of whom are really "wise" in any way, and their romantic adventures in the big city. Jean Harlow is a soda jerk in the small town of Chillicothe, Ohio (or so I assume since she works at the Chillicothe Drug Store) who lives with, and even sleeps in the same bed with, her mother; she gets the itch to go to New York City where her friend (Mae Clarke) is having a high old time as a fashion model and kept woman to a rich and unhappily married man whose wife won't give him a divorce. Soon Harlow has a roommate (Marie Prevost as the plain-looking comic-relief gal) and a job modeling with Clarke. She also quickly acquires a rich lover (Walter Byron) who, she is devastated to find out, is married to a wife who won't give him a divorce. By the end, Clarke's lover leaves her high and dry and suicidal, Harlow's lover finally gets a divorce--and follows her back to Chillicothe to make an honest woman out of her, and Prevost settles down with Byron's oafish chauffeur (Andy Devine). These moral lessons for innocent girls trying to make their way in the big city were apparently quite popular back in their day; in plot, acting, and production style, this is no different from any similar movie. Harlow hadn't quite hit her stride--though she would later that year in RED DUST with Clark Gable; here, she's attractive but not compelling, and her performance feels rather tentative. Clarke (the Baron's wife in the Karloff FRANKENSTEIN), though she has less sex appeal, upstages her, partly because she plays a slightly more interesting character. Prevost does the drab roomie bit well, Byron is stodgy and not especially attractive, and there just isn’t anything more to say about this film. [TCM]

LADY BY CHOICE (1934)

The title of this movie and its star, May Robson, may have led folks to believe that it was a sequel to Frank Capra's hit LADY FOR A DAY, a cute sentimental comedy based on a Damon Runyon story about a poor and elderly apple seller who is turned into a grand lady by her buddies on the streets in order to impress her visiting daughter. But this movie doesn't have Capra or the wit and charm of the earlier film. Here, the homeless Robson is arrested for bar brawling and "sentenced" to an old ladies home. Weeks later, as a Mother's Day stunt, notorious fan dancer Carole Lombard is prodded by her manager (Arthur Hohl) to adopt a mother for publicity, and she picks Robson. After a tentative start, Robson is soon acting like a real mother for Lombard, getting rid of her manager for swindling her out of money, counseling her to take singing and acting lessons, and sharing her gambling winnings. Soon, however, Lombard, frustrated by her lack of a career future, goes after rich lawyer Roger Pryor, who has been Robson's caretaker. It turns out that Robson was the love of Pryor's father's life. Because Robson assumes Lombard is just being a gold digger, she tries to stop the arrangement, and there are more complications before the predictable happy ending. After a good first half-hour setting up the characters, the movie bogs down in melodrama and acting problems--overacting on the part of the women and lackluster acting on the part of the men, the one exception being Walter Connolly as a judge who keeps running into Robson in his court. This winds up far from Capra and Runyon territory, to its detriment. [TCM]

BANK HOLIDAY (1938)

This is a small-scale British "Grand Hotel"-type movie which follows the adventures of a handful of people whose paths cross over an August "bank holiday" at a beach resort in Bexborough. The film begins with sidewalk headlines about revolution and war shadows replaced with more joyful news about weather reports for the upcoming holiday. First we meet Catherine, a young nurse who bonds with a man named Stephen when his wife dies in childbirth. She is scheduled to go off to the resort with her boyfriend Geoff--where they may or may not have sex for the first time--but she clearly would rather stay and help Stephen in his grief. Still, she goes off with Geoff (who keeps seeing posters for a play called "Sinners" wherever he goes) though it's obvious she's thinking about Stephen. The second story concerns Doreen, a small-town beauty queen who travels to the resort to compete in a Miss England contest where she and her friend Milly keep running into the more polished and glamorous Miss Mayfair. The third batch of characters is the working-class family of Arthur and May and their three unruly kids; the most stereotypical of the film's characters, May is burdened with the children while Arthur keeps sneaking away for a drink. The first night, the hotels are full up and everyone except Doreen winds up sleeping on the beach. The next day, they all get rooms at the Grand Hotel and the melodramatics kick into high gear when Catherine rebuffs Geoff's attempts at seduction, then leaves the hotel to go back to the city because she's sure that Stephen in at the brink of suicide (which he is--we periodically see Stephen drifting aimlessly through the weekend, having flashbacks to happier days with his late wife). Doreen winds up comforting Geoff, and Catherine gets a ride with a crook who is stopped on suspicion of theft. Will she be in time to save Stephen from himself? Will Doreen win the beauty contest? Will Arthur get his comeuppance from May?

This comedy-drama from director Carol Reed is mostly enjoyable, if predictable. The lovely Margaret Lockwood is fine and gets the most screen time as Catherine, though Rene Ray (as Doreen) and Kathleen Harrison (as May) are just as good, and Mere Tottenham makes the most of her comic-relief sidekick character of Milly. John Lodge, who plays Stephen, gave up acting for politics, was governor of Connecticut and later served as ambassador to Spain and Argentina. Ultimately, Hugh Williams as Geoff (pictured above with Lockwood) may be the most sympathetic character; even though (gasp!) he wants premarital sex, he's not painted as a bad person, although a little more insight into his background would be a plus. The juxtapositioning of the stories works out nicely, and I was amused by the two off-duty soldiers who keep cropping up in scenes; they're not important to the narrative, but they deliver a nice punch line at the end. The nighttime beach scene is particularly effective. American title: THREE ON A WEEKEND. [TCM]

THE TIGER WOMAN (1944 serial)

aka PERILS OF THE DARKEST JUNGLE

In this serial set in an unnamed jungle country (probably in South America), the Tiger Woman is a white-goddess figure and benevolent ruler to her tribe, who co-exist peacefully with the "civilized" community of Belleville nearby. The Inter Ocean Oil Company, represented by Allen Saunders, is about to lose its lease on some tribe-controlled land and bad guys from a rival oil company are about to swoop in. They know something that Saunders doesn't: Tiger Woman is actually Rita Arnold, an heiress to millions; she and her father were lost in a plane crash years ago--the father died but the daughter was raised by the tribe, and the proof of her identity is sealed inside a sacred urn kept by the tribe elder. The baddies (led by Morgan and Dagget) want to find the proof, dispose of the Tiger Woman, and have someone pose as Arnold to claim her fortune for them. Over the course of 12 chapters, Saunders, his sidekick Jose, and the Tiger Woman battle numerous efforts by Morgan and Dagget to accomplish their evil schemes.

I concluded a few years ago that, although I love the idea of serial adventure movies, in practice, they just don't hold up today for me. One exception is DRUMS OF FU MANCHU; this is another. The formula here is a bit numbing: each 15-minute chapter involves the heroes getting out of the last cliffhanger, some conversations among the bad guys about what to do next, a sudden shootout or fistfight scene, some more exposition, and another action scene leading to the cliffhanger. They certainly cram lots of action in. Chapter 1 opens with one minute of speedily-delivered exposition followed immediately by an action scene. In Chapter 6 alone (Dungeon of the Doomed), there is an out-of-control mine elevator, an ambush in a bar, the hijacking of a truck, a shootout in a cave, and a roaring oil fire inside said cave. There are lots of other interesting action scenes which play out nicely and help push this serial a notch above most. Early on, we see a tribal ritual in which someone is dangled over a lava pit while a young totsy does a sexy dance before the victim gets dropped to his death. In the Cathedral of the Sky God, some villains are killed by their own weapons: weakened stalactites which fall from a cave ceiling. A speedboat crashes spectacularly into a riverboat. Shacks explode. Many vehicles go barreling over cliffs and waterfalls. One fistfight is set in the back of a speeding truck; yes, the actors are obviously fighting in front of rear-projection footage of the road, but it's still effective. As for acting, the less said the better. Allan Lane, better known as "Rocky" Lane in a series of 40s westerns, makes a good hero and Duncan Renaldo (the Cisco Kid on TV) is the faithful sidekick. The bad guys who parade across the screen are interchangeable and unmemorable (and an unusually large number of them actually get killed in gunfights). Linda Stirling makes for a glamorous Tiger Woman, but she can't really act to save her life. No matter; with all these fights and deaths and cliffhangers (and some fairly good sets and matte painting backgrounds), who needs acting? [DVD]

PRIVATE POTTER (1962)

I thought for a few minutes that this was a WWII film, but it's actually set in the late 50's during what's known as the Cyprus Emergency (in which the British fought Cypriot guerrillas). Private Potter (Tom Courtenay), part of a nighttime expedition, screams out loud and freezes up, giving away his group's position and leading to the death of a soldier. He is thrown into solitary confinement and threatened with court-martial, and claims he acted the way he did because God appeared to him in a vision and he was startled. No one quite believes him, but no one really seems to be terribly angry with him, either. Based on a TV play, the bulk of the film consists of people debating his situation--Is he mad? Is he a religious visionary? Is he a coward?--and ultimately coming to no solid conclusion. There is a parallel story involving a local who was working against the British and is caught, but it goes nowhere as well. Toward the end, Potter escapes during a rainstorm, goes into a stream, strips naked, and is eventually found and brought back--I assumed a "holy fool" hypothesis was about to be argued, but it isn't. If anything, the evidence of the film, which ends ambiguously, suggests that Potter is indeed a nut case, and by extension, so is everyone who claims visions of God, from St. Francis to Bernadette of Lourdes. But I might be letting my own beliefs (or lack of them) color my view. Courtenay is not compelling, befitting the overall effect of the movie which wants to be profound but is not. Later movies with similar themes, from KING OF HEARTS to BROTHER SUN SISTER MOON to AGNES OF GOD, work much better; maybe this one was trying to be ahead of its time, but it stumbled badly. [TCM]

THE WHIP HAND (1951)

Reporter Elliot Reid is on a fishing vacation in Minnesota when he's caught in a storm and cuts his head on a rock. He makes it into the small town of Winnoga but is turned away from a gated compound called the Lodge. The town doctor sees to his injury and he learns the story of the town; just after the war, a virus destroyed all the fish in the lake, driving away industry and tourists. Reid takes a room at the local inn and decides to stay and write about the town, but soon discovers he's not welcome, with even the innkeeper (Raymond Burr, pictured with other town toughs) trying to get him to leave. There's a secret at the Lodge and, with the help of the doc's daughter (Carla Balenda), he is determined to discover it. Turns out the ghost town is actually a front for a Commie community; a Nazi scientist (Otto Waldis) who had done work on germ warfare has turned Communist and lives at the Lodge where he and his conspirators (most of the remaining townsfolk) are engaging in inhumane experiments to perfect weapons of terror they plan to unleash in the water systems of major cities.

This B-thriller is a nice variation on the "Body Snatcher" themes of paranoia and dark conspiracy, with the folksy small-towners unmasked as cold-blooded Communists. Here, it turns out that the fish virus was deliberately set loose in the lake by Waldis in order to empty the town and give him free rein. The doctor, like a handful of others, is apparently helping them because he sees no other way out. A grocer who helps Reid get a message out to his newspaper when it becomes clear that Waldis and Burr want to keep him prisoner gets killed, and the climax has Reid and Balenda in mortal danger, though with the Feds alerted, we know nothing too bad will happen to them. [TCM]

MAN'S CASTLE (1933)

In this romantic melodrama set at the height of the Depression, Loretta Young is a starving young woman whom we first meet on a big city park bench. Spencer Tracy, in a tux and feeding pigeons, offers to take her to dinner, which he does, but at the end of the meal, she finds out that he's as broke as she is (he's wearing the tux as part of an advertising gimmick for which he gets paid a few bucks). He talks the restaurant manager into not calling the cops and takes her to the shantytown where he lives, and they quickly shack up together. He's a blustery guy, rather rough around the edges, and she's sweet and innocent, but despite his having a little affair on the side with showgirl Glenda Farrell, they clearly care for each other and make their bumpy relationship work. When she gets pregnant, he gets scared off briefly but returns and has a homeless preacher (Walter Connelly) marry them. However, the urge for going gets strong again, and he gets involved in a robbery scheme so he can leave Young some money. Of course, things don't go smoothly, though, since this is a pre-Code film, the ending is not as predictable as you might think. Tracy and Young are the focus of the film and they're both fine (in other hands, Tracy's character might be quite hard to take as a "good guy"), but equally good are Connelly as the sympathetic Bible-thumper, Arthur Hohl as a nasty little shit, and Marjorie Rambeau as a tough old boozy gal who plays an important role in the climax of the film. A memorable line: a person whips out a gun and says, "This ain't murder, it's housecleaning!" I'm not really a big fan of Tracy's but this is worth seeing. [TCM]

MAID OF SALEM (1937)

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

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

NIGHT TIDE (1963)

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

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

SAILOR OF THE KING (1953)

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

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

INTERMEZZO: A LOVE STORY (1939)

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

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

THE WORLD MOVES ON (1934)

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

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

THE MATCH KING (1932)

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

TONIGHT AND EVERY NIGHT (1945)

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

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

SKI TROOP ATTACK (1960)

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

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

THE MIRACLE OF OUR LADY OF FATIMA (1952)

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

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

DARLING LILI (1970)

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

MAYBE IT'S LOVE (1935)

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

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

GIRL ON A MOTORCYCLE (1968)

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

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

LA NOTTE (1961)

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

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