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]

DEATH LAID AN EGG (1968)

We see random shots of people in a hotel: one man puts a bag over his head in a suicide attempt; a couple engage in sexy talk while listening to their neighbors; in a third, a man ties up a prostitute and pulls some knives out of his luggage. This man is Marco (Jean-Louis Trintignat), an executive at a chicken processing company. He and his rich wife Anna (Gina Lollabrigida) run an industrial chicken farm, but labor troubles (they have fired most of the workers) have left them with their hands full. Living with them is Anna's young cousin Gabrielle (Ewa Aulin) who serves as their secretary. Though she has a boyfriend, a PR man named Mondaini, she is having an affair with Marco—and might be ripe for a fling with Anna—and neither woman knows about Marco's possibly deadly S&M sessions. From here, the plot goes off in a few directions. To save money, the financially strapped company is attempting to breed headless chickens--and they succeed, though Marco is horrified at the outcome. Gabrielle and Mondaini are plotting to get their hands on Anna's fortune. Anna is sent an anonymous letter hinting at her husband's dealings with hookers and she determines to disguise herself as a whore and get hired by Marco to see what’s going on. To summarize any more would get into too many spoilers.

The summary details of this movie (whores, knives, headless chickens) make it sound gory and nonsensical, but it's neither. There is little explicit blood, and the chicken subplot—we do see the awful mutations—doesn't really go anywhere. Which leaves us with a nifty giallo (Italian-made sexy mystery-horror films made famous by Mario Bava and Dario Argento) filled with good looking people and fun plot twists that you don't see coming. As I approached the last 20 minutes, I wrote in my moviewatching notes that the plot was falling apart, but actually, it tightens up and finally makes sense (mostly) leaving us with a satisfying ending. The movie was rated X initially in the States, more for mood and themes than for any explicit sex or violence. The title is most unfortunate: it sounds like a goofy comedy (it was first titled Plucked, which is worse) and I passed this one over for that reason the first time it came up as a recommendation. The central trio are all quite good. I remember Gina Lollabrigada's name from my childhood; she was sort of famous for being famous. I've only seen one other movie of hers (GO NAKED IN THE WORLD) and it's terrible so I was glad to see that she actually is talented in addition to being beautiful and buxom. There's a bizarre 60s scene involving a couples-swapping game (ultimately like the headless chicken, a red herring plotline) and a dreadful discordant musical score. Favorite line, from Marco: "So we tumble into our dreams—so helpless and so full of desire." (True dat.) Highly recommended for fans of mysteries or giallo movies or 60s cinema. Pictured are Trintignat, Lollabrigada and Aulin. [Amazon Prime]

SHE LOVES ME NOT (1934)

Spunky chorus girl Curly Flagg (Miriam Hopkins) is dancing up a storm at a nightclub when a mob hit takes place right in front of her. Fearing both the crooks (who don't want her to squeal) and the cops (who might keep her in protective custody until a trial is held), she flees, with only her sparkly abbreviated costume, to the campus of Princeton where she gets student Paul Lawton (Bing Crosby) to let her into his room. Paul, a medical student and aspiring songwriter (who is currently working on songs for the upcoming spring talent show), enlists the help of his upstairs neighbor Buzz, whom we meet tap dancing while writing a class paper. They cut her hair and dress her like a boy, and agree to hide her in their rooms. Buzz contacts his dad, head of Supersound Studios, to try and get her a job in the movies. Paul contacts his dad, who, outraged that he's living with a girl, sends a telegram to the dean complaining of the campus' loose moral code. Paul goes to visit the dean and gets the dean's daughter Midge (Kitty Carlisle) to help him waylay the telegram, and the two promptly fall for each other. But the dean has already been told the telegram's message over the phone and threatens to expel Paul and Buzz. After this, a string of slapstick events leads to Paul's fiancee breaking their engagement—clearing the way for Paul and Midge to canoodle while singing together—and Curly getting a big publicity buildup from Supersound. The gangsters, the cops, and the Princeton student body all get involved before the happy ending, with Curly a star, the students reinstated, and Paul and Midge officially becoming an item.

This feels like an early stab at screwball comedy, though only somewhat successful. The situations fly by, one after another, with appropriate speed, but things rarely feel even remotely real, partly due to uneven acting. Hopkins, for whom this part was something of an outlier (she would thrive in melodramas and more sophisticated comedy), overdoes her brassiness to the point of irritation, but it is fun to see her throw herself wholeheartedly into her opening dance. Crosby, young but a little dumpy, underdoes his role, though he and Kitty Carlisle do work up a little chemistry. Edward Nugent as Buzz gets lost in the wild proceedings; Warren Hymer as the gangster and Henry Stephenson as the dean are fun. There are several songs, pleasant if not memorable, including "Love in Bloom" which became a #1 radio hit for Crosby and was nominated for a Best Song Oscar. Harmless early Crosby fun with a lot of energy if not a lot of coherence. Pictured are Crosby and Carlisle. [DVD]

SLEEPING CAR TO TRIESTE (1948)

At an embassy ball in Paris, the suave Zurta sneaks into a darkened room, opens a safe, and steals a diary that contains potentially explosive information (it's a complete and utter MacGuffin—we don't care, or ever learn, what's in it, only that people want it). He shoots a butler dead on the way out and tosses the diary out the window to his accomplice Karl, then meets his lady friend Valya. The next day, Karl is supposed to hand over the diary, but he double-crosses Zurta and Valya, taking off on the Orient Express (under the name Poole) to sell the diary for himself. Zurta and Valya board the train and find themselves involved with several other passengers, including a married divorce lawyer and mistress, an American G.I. who gets stuck chatting with a man who lectures on birds, the son of a train company executive who has decided to shadow the train's chef in hopes of learning the ropes; an obnoxious author named McBain and his long-suffering secretary, Mills; and an obtuse and talkative Brit named Bishop who has no idea what a pain in the neck he is to everyone else. On top of all this, a famous French detective named Jolif arrives at the last minute. Poole keeps trying and failing to get a compartment to himself; the adulterous couple keep debating their future; and McBain winds up, at least for a while, with the diary, which he wants to use for his own purposes. 

This B-movie train thriller is a little convoluted setting up its characters and motivations, and halfway through, I realized it's based directly on 1932's ROME EXPRESS, sharing not only character types and plot points (and some narrative confusion), but even some names (Poole, McBain, Bishop). I could practically have copied over my ROME EXPRESS review here. This movie is definitely the lesser of the two, but once all the characters settle in and the narrative flow clears up a bit (in the original, the MacGuffin is a painting and there's a movie star on board), this is enjoyable enough. The acting here is definitely of a lesser par. The original had the incomparable Conrad Veidt as Zurta and Cedric Hardwicke as McBain (spelled McBane in the 1932 film); here, we get Albert Lieven and Finlay Currie, both of whom are fine but come in second to the originals. David Tomlinson is quite amusing as Bishop, and I liked Bonar Colleano (pictured) as the American soldier. Eventually there is a murder, and a particularly startling death near the end. Other reviewers have noted that there isn't really a hero here (Jolif is an fairly ineffective cop), or even a main good guy we can unreservedly respect, and that's not really a problem. Because of the messy narrative, I was ready to give up on this at the 20 minute mark, but I'm glad I stuck with it. [YouTube]

PICTURE MOMMY DEAD (1966)

Eighteen-year old Susan has just been released from a three-year stay at a convent/asylum after the trauma of finding her mother Jessica dead in a mysterious bedroom fire--she suffers from partial amnesia about that night. Her father Edward has brought her home where she must adjust to her former nanny Francene now being her stepmother. Jessica's will left everything to Susan--unless she dies or is found incompetent before her 25th birthday, in which case it goes to her father. Francene is hoping that Susan will not fully recover and wind up having to be re-committed, and in fact, Susan begins having hallucinations that her mother has returned. If nothing else, Francene is determined to find a missing, very valuable necklace that belonged to Jessica, which she thinks Susan pinched, and which Francene schemes to find with the help of her former lover Anthony, Jessica's brother and current caretaker of the house, whose face was badly scarred in an attempt to save Jessica from the fire. Soon, an Electra complex theme enters the picture when we realize that young Susan was jealous of her mother because she wanted to be Daddy's girl all by herself. Where's the necklace? Did Susan actually kill her mother? And how far will Francene go to get her hands on the family money?

In some ways, this feels like an attempt to make a "scream queens" movie with a male lead (Don Ameche as Edward) instead of Bette Davis (Whatever Happened to Baby Jane) or Talullah Bankhead (Die! Die! My Darling). With its brightly lit, modern mansion sets--some location shooting was done at the Doheny estate in Beverly Hills—this isn't as baroque or Gothic as those movies. But it's still a B-movie thriller dressed up with the presence of Ameche and Zsa Zsa Gabor (pictured above) as Jessica. B-director Bert I. Gordon cast his own daughter Susan as Susan; she was OK a few years before in Gordon's Tormented, but she was only 10 back then. At 17, it's clear that acting is not her strong suit, and because she's the lead and has more screen time than Ameche or Gabor, she drags the proceedings down fairly often. Ameche is fine in what is basically a supporting role; Martha Hyer is also fine as Francene. The movie verges on camp now and again, especially in a scene where Gordan tears at her mother's portrait so fiercely, her fingertips leave bloodstains. If you care to look, you can see some Hitchcock influences—The Birds, Vertigo, Psycho, Dial M for Murder, and even Rebecca in the mother/nanny/caretaker triangle. The ending throws a couple of surprises at us, and the last shot in particular is nicely creepy, and a shade ambiguous in terms of what the future holds for a couple of the characters. Not a gem but worth seeing. [TCM]

DANCING SWEETIES (1930)

For some, we are told in opening titles, dancing is pleasure,or business, or life. For hunky Bill Cleaver (Grant Withers), dancing seems to be life. Looking to be in his mid-20s, he still lives with his parents and works as a soda jerk, and seems to live only for the madcap evenings he spends at Hoffman's Dance Palace, winning dance contest trophies which he proudly displays on his folks' mantle. His usual partner is a brassy blonde who goes by Jazzbo, and his rival is a slick oily type named Needles. But one night, Bill is captivated by the more wholesome looking Molly (Sue Carol) who is dancing with Needles. Chatting with her, he discovers they both love dancing and both chafe under the parental yolk. He steals her for the climactic waltz contest which they win. When a couple who had won a newlywed contest for a furnished apartment split up before they can claim the prize, Bill and Molly are talked into a quickie wedding so they can win the prize. A month later, the bloom is off the rose; Bill is tired of entertaining boring relatives of Molly's and one night, after telling Molly he has to visit a sick relative, he sneaks out to enter a dance contest with Jazzbo. They win and Molly hears the announcement over the radio. They split up, going back to their families, but months later, they see each other at the dance hall where Molly is dancing with Needles, and sparks fly again.

This is an odd little B-romantic comedy from Warner Brothers, like a comic take on THEY SHOOT HORSES DON'T THEY, the grueling period piece from 1969 about the marathon dancers of the Depression. But the Depression isn't bothering anyone here—these crazy but mostly wholesome kids just wanna dance the latest fads to the latest tunes and compete for cheap loving cups. One might think that a major plot point would be the comic incompatibility of our "wed in haste" lead couple, but their first month together is portrayed as happy, until Bill's dancing feet get the best of him. A happy ending is never in doubt. The last shot is a clever comeuppance scene in which Needles and his wife are walking through the park with their baby in a carriage, and come upon Bill and Molly--with two babies! Withers is handsome and cocky, but occasionally seems like he's working a little too hard to be carefree. He does have good chemistry with Sue Carol who never quite got off the ground as a leading lady and left the business just a few years later, eventually marrying Alan Ladd. Edna Murphy certainly looks the part of the hardened Jazzbo, and Eddie Phillips is a nice surprise as Needles—he's handsome and funny and serves as a good "man you love to hate," though honestly his character isn't all that bad. My favorite bit is Withers continually calling Carol's mom "Mother" in a misguided attempt to be ingratiating. Pictured from left to right: Murphy, Phillips, Carol and Withers. [TCM]