Starting off on the wrong foot

Some months back, TCM ran the Oscar-winning movie My Left Foot. I figured it was going to get another airing during 31 Days of Oscar, but it isn't on the schedue. Still, since I have to watch it before it expires, I figured that doing a post on it during 31 Days of Oscar would be appropriate.

The movie tells the story of Irish writer/artist Christy Brown, played by Daniel Day-Lewis in the first of his Oscar performances. As the movie opens, Christy is somewhat later in life, after the publication of his book My Left Foot (the book was published in 1954, but the movie implies this scene is set somewhat later). The book has been a success, and Christy is invited to a big Irish manor house owned by Lord Castlewelland (Cyril Cusack in a cameo performance) to give a speech. He's brought in in his wheelchair and kept in a separate room for the musical performances that precede his speech, because he can be a difficult person to be around.

As we see, and the fame of the movie version makes most viewers probably know going into the movie already, Christy is in a wheelchair and has difficulty speaking because he was born with cerebral palsy, and it's not long before the action dissolves from the Castlewelland estate to a flashback starting with Brown's childhood. Brown was born in 1932 into a very large family with mother Bridget (Brenda Fricker, who also won an Oscar), father Patrick, and a bunch of siblings -- I'm not quite certain how many siblings survived infancy and where Christy was in the birth order. Suffice it to say that having an exceedingly large family left the Browns impoverished in the Ireland of the era. It's suggested that he be put in an institution and that he'll never amount to much, but Bridget won't do this. (From what I've read, the Irish Catholic institutions of that time were brutal.)

Christy may have been born with a fairly limited physical capacity, but his mind does work, and eventually the one part of his body that he is able to exert reasonable control over is that left foot, as we see in a scene where he tries to write numbers from one of his siblings' math exercises. He begins to show more capacity, and the rest of the family loves him, although of course he still has the substantial physicial limitations brought about by cerebral palsy. He's able to draw, however, and that drawing is going to bring him fame.

In the movie telling of the story, he's introduced to an Eileen Cole (Fiona Shaw), who works at a special school for those with cerebral palsy. She helps him, and he falls in love with her, but she's already got a boyfriend, which is going to break Christy's heart when he finds out. She still helps publicize his art, and that's what makes Christy famous as well as leading him to write those memoirs. Some years after the honors at the Castlewelland estate, Christy does get married. The movie does not inform us, however, that the marriage wasn't happy or that Christy died before his 50th birthday in the early 1980s.

My Left Foot is well known in part because of the story it tells which is a memorable one, and in part because of Daniel Day-Lewis' astonishing performance. The other supporting actors also give very good performances. I suppose you could criticize the movie for the feeling that it sugarcoats how things would have been in the Ireland of the 1940s and 1950s. While it's not doe-eyed in the way that Hollywood would have treated the Ireland of that era, not mentioning the later life difficulties Brown faced does feel like a bit of a cop-out.

Regardless, My Left Foot is a fine movie and one that you should definitely see if you haven't seen it already.

Hold Your Man

Another person honored last August in TCM's Summer Under the Stars was Jean Harlow, and somewhat surprisingly considering how she died tragically young there are some of her movies I hadn't seen yet. One of those was Hold Your Man. So I recorded it and recently got around to watching it to do the review here.

We don't see Harlow for several minutes, because we first have a scene with the film's male star, Clark Gable. He plays Eddie Hall, a small time con artist. He's pulling off a con as the movie opens, involving finding a lost wallet with a ring in it that he knows is a fake ring although the mark doesn't. Eventually, the mark catches on, forcing Eddie to beat a hasty retreat. He goes into an apartment building and tries the doors, eventually finding one that's open. When he opens the bathroom door, however, he finds a woman taking a bath! That woman is Ruby Adams (Jean Harlow), and she doesn't give Eddie up to the police.

It doesn't take long from listening to the conversation that Ruby also uses her wits to make her way in the world what with the Depression on. You can also guess that since they've got a con streak in them, they're also going to wind up working together, and even in love. For Ruby, this is only the latest in a series of men; she's also got a current admirer in Al (Stuart Erwin) who meets Eddie when she takes Al to the speakesy Eddie mentioned to her. Eddie clips Al and Ruby isn't happy about it even though just a few minutes earlier she too had tried to con Al.

As I said they wind up working together, but things go wrong because one of the schemes involves blackmailing rich married men the sort of same way the two young lovers in the later Japanese movie Cruel Story of Youth did. Eddie, by now in love with Ruby, isn't particuarly happy with the idea, and when the scheme starts going south it winds up in a scuffle in which Eddie hits the guy, concussing him and causing a fall in which the guy dies. So Eddie has to escape, and the suspicion falls on Ruby since the guy is dead right outside her apartment. She gets sentenced to the women's reformatory for it.

Two other things complicate matters. One is that, in the dorm-like setting of the reformatory, Ruby is in a room with several other women, one of whom is Gypsy, a former girlfriend of Eddie's. The more important one is that Ruby discovers she's pregnant, although at least she knows Eddie's the father. Eddie wants to visit Ruby, and hopefully marry her so that they can take care of the child together after she gets out of prison, but of course he's a fugitive (and a parolee) himself so going to visit her in prison of all places is a big risk.

Hold Your Man was released in 1933 and as such is a pre-Code. At the same time, however, it's not quite as strongly a pre-Code as movies from 1931 and 1932, as the movie tries to have Eddie and Ruby get married and of course has Ruby in prison. At the same time, I don't think the ending would have gotten by the censors a year later. Hold Your Man is in some ways all over the place, but in an interesting way. The presence of Clark Gable and Jean Harlow also makes Hold Your Man well worth watching.

Another biggish movie

Gordon MacRae was honored in Summer Under the Stars last August. He's best known for his musicals, although at the start of his career he wasn't yet cast in muscials. TCM ran MacRae's movie, The Big Punch, as part of MacRae's day.

MacRae is technically not the star here, although he's got as big a role as the official lead, Wayne Morris. Morris plays Chris Thorgenson, a college football star who is planning to go into the ministry (one of those mainline Protestant denominations where you can have a wife, so it's OK for him to have a love interest at the end of the movie) after finishing college. However, boxing promoter Con Festig knows Chris was a college boxing champ too, and offers Chris $50K to take up pro boxing. Chris says no, in a scene that provides just enough ministry to intrigue another boxer, Johnny Grant (that's MacRae).

Johnny thinks he could be a good boxer, but Con has other plans. Even though Con is managing Johnny, he decides to bet against Johnny and have Johnny throw his next fight. This ticks Johnny off to no end, so he decides that he's going to fight honestly and wins the fight by a knockout. As you might imagine, this really angers Cal, who's lost a good $10K. So Cal comes up with a devious scheme. It's fairly obvious that Cal is going to have it in for Johnny and that Johnny is going to realize this, so Cal uses this against Johnny. Johnny has to beat a hasty retreat out of town to avoid Cal's wrath, and Cal uses this to frame Johnny for a murder. The cops will naturally look for Johnny since he's fled town, although for a completely different reason.

Johnny gets on the train and gets a newspaper, which has a blurb about Chris Thorgenson giving up pro sports to take on the ministry, having been given a position in the small town of Longacre, PA. Johnny, now taking the alias Johnny Kilgore, decides to head for Longacre, having remembered the small meeting with Chris a few days earlier. Perhaps Chris can help him, and of course nobody in Longacre will recognize him.

Chris and Johnny arrive almost at the same time. Chris goes to the church where he's going to be the new pastor, and practices a sermon, wanting to win over the congregation. He thinks he's speaking to an empty room because it's late evening and not a Sunday, but sitting there is not Johnny, but a woman: Karen Long (Lois Maxwell), who did her duty during the war as a nurse, but lost her faith as a result; now she's working at the local bank.

Johnny shows up and Chris helps him get a job with the bank, where it seems he and Karen might fall in love. But he knows he's not fit for work like this, and comes to realize that Karen is better off with Chris. Things get more complicated when Johnny's putative girlfriend back in New York starts double-crossing him and finds out Johnny's location.

The Big Punch is the sort of B movie that might have worked a decade earlier, but with the war done, it comes across as decidedly dated. It also doesn't help that neither of the two main leads are properly cast. MacRae shows why he was better at musicals; his is a role that in 1940 could have been played by John Garfield walking in his sleep. And Wayne Morris' performance makes it all too clear that his best fit was as a second banana, especially in the lighter romantic comedies he did at Warner Bros. He probably could have had a long career as a character actor and doing guest starring work on TV if he hadn't died of a heart attack in his mid-40s.

Man of the People

A lot of character actors put up some very good peformances over the course of their Hollywood careers, but didn't necessarily get much chance to be a star of anything above a B movie. Maltese-born Joseph Calleia is one such example. TCM aired some of his movies several months back, including a starring role in an MGM B picture, Man of the People.

Calleia plays Jack Moreno, who grew up in the Little Italy of a big city and was, one can guess, the sort of kid the community had high hopes for and helped get him through law school as a result. The movie opens with Moreno recently having passed his bar exam and getting the framed certificate to hang on his wall as he's about to start a law practice in Little Italy, not that the people can afford the services of a good lawyer. But they're continuing to repay him by having a party and giving him a law library to get him on his way. Crashing the party, literally, is Abbey Reid (Florence Rice), whose car nearly injures a local kid. Moreno invites her up to the party, and you can guess that Moreno likes Abbey, although there's a severe clss difference between the two.

Their paths won't cross again for a while, however. This being a movie from the late 1930s, one of the themes is big-city corruption, with ward-heelers being able to deliver a block of votes from an entire neighborhood. The part of town where Moreno and his fellow Italian-Americans live is run, if you will, by William Grady (Thomas Mitchell). Grady realizes that Moreno can be of use to the "organization", but is also smart enough to know that Moreno could theoretically be a threat since he knows a lot about the local community and they trust Moreno more than they do the organization. Grady sends an emissary to try to get Moreno to fall in with the organization, but Moreno wants to be his own man. In response, Grady rigs cases to make certain Moreno loses all his cases.

So Moreno finally gives in and starts working for Grady, which is eventually going to bring him back into contact with Abbey. That involves Abbey not quite so directly, but in connection with the people in her class. She's got a man pursing her, Edward Spetner (Edward Nugent), whose father Carter (Jonathan Hale), has purportedly come up with a new advance in mining. This advance is a machine that can supposedly find gold so that its user will know where to mine before drilling even an inch. It's something that sounds like an absolute scam, and of course it is. But the con men are slick enough to get a bunch of people to invest, with Abbey's own mother winding up on the board having no idea the company is a scam.

Moreno gets involved here because he's gotten tired of the corruption. Grady was going to push him to become DA, where the corruption would make Grady even more powerful, but Moreno has decided to push back, leading Grady to back another candidate and use vote fraud to win. But Moreno's integrity has brought him to the attention of the governor, who is planning to run an anti-corruption commission. Moreno would be perfect for that, but one of the cases is going to be securities fraud, and the company that Abbey and her friends are involved with....

Joseph Calleia gives a pretty good performance here, and Thomas Mitchell is unsurprisingly good as well. But Man of the People never rises above B status, largely because the script is so dopey. The scam is such nonsense, and yet all the "bright" people fall for it. And the way Moreno breaks the climactic case wide open is so obvious you wonder why nobody else thought of it for as long as the case goes on.

Man of the People is a good example of the sort of product the studios needed to keep churning out to fill theaters with new material in pre-TV days, but it's not a particularly great or memorable movie.

A Touch of Love

TCM had a night of Sandy Dennis movies a few months back, and as always it gave me a chance to record a couple of movies I hadn't seen before. One of those was on the TCM schedule under the title Thank You All Very Much, although the title card on the print TCM ran, and a lot of the sources I've come across, all suggest that the movie is most commonly known by the title A Touch of Love.

Sandy Dennis plays Rosamund Stacey, a British woman who as the movie opens is studying for her Ph.D. and doing research at the British Museum in London. However, she's just gotten the news that the pregnancy test she took yielded a positive result, which is obviously a bit of a problem if she wants to keep studying for that doctorate. Abortion was still technically illegal in the UK at the time the movie was set (the test result she received was dated September 1967; the law making abortion legal, although passed one month later, only went into effect several months following that and in any case the movie is based on a novel first published a few years earlier), so Rosamund thinks about trying to induce a miscarriage through one of those old folk techniques like the one from Saturday Night and Sunday Morning about getting yourself drunk on gin and then taking an exceedingly hot bath.

But she's stopped by a bunch of her friends showing up at her flat to have a bit of an impromptu party or perhaps go out for the evening. Among them are both of the men Rosamund has been dating, Joe and Roger. Well, actually, there's a third man if you believe Rosamund, as she tells both Joe and Roger that the father of the child is a man neither of them has ever met. As it turns out, she's telling the partial truth about this, as there's a third guy around, on George (Ian McKellen in one of his first roles). George works for the BBC as a newsreader, and he's introduced to Rosamund by Joe. They have a one-night stand, and that's what knocked poor Rosamund up.

Rosamund talks to her best friend Lydia (Eleanor Bron) about the baby and they also talk about abortion, and after these conversations Rosamund begins to think about keeping the baby. She can't tell her parents, because they're socialists who have decided to go off to Africa for reasons and in any case have always been emotionally distant from Rosamund.

Eventually, Rosamund carries the baby to term, and this is scandalous because back in those days, it was naturally expected that a single mother would give the baby up for adoption rather than trying to raise the child herself. But Rosamund has by this time decided to do just that, with some help from Lydia with whom she is now living. Unfortunately, the baby is sickly, and this causes even more difficulty with all the hospital nurses who are very judgmental about Rosamund. (That last bit surprised considering that these are NHS nurses and the NHS is treated with religious reverence in the UK.)

A Touch of Love is another of those movies from just after the Production Code in Hollywood went by the boards, when even UK filmmakers could make more "daring" stuff and get it distributed in America. Sandy Dennis isn't quite the right actress to play the British Rosamund, and to be honest I found it hard to care too much about her or any of the other characters in this movie. As I said, it wants to be daring, but 50-plus years on it feels dated. Worse is that it feels like it doesn't go anywhere, with a rather abrupt ending.

But perhaps you may want to give A Touch of Love a chance as a bit of a time capsule.

Around the World in 80 Days

Another of those movies that I had actually never seen before even though it was a studio-era Best Picture Oscar winner and all that was Around the World in 80 Days. It aired recently on TCM, I think for George Raft's turn as Star of the Month since he's got a cameo in it, and it's airing again as part of 31 Days of Oscar, tomorrow (Feb. 15) at 4:45 PM.

It's based on the novel by Jules Verne, and I would assume that most people know the basic story. Phineas Fogg, played in the movie by David Niven, is the sort of quintessential Victorian-era British gentleman that in the invertening years has become a spoofed character type. Fogg is wealthy but of unknown (and I think never explained) means, and notoriously specific in his desires, having dismissed his previous valet for serving toast two degrees too cold. This causes him to look for a new valet, selecting the Frenchman Passepartout (Mexican comic actor Cantinflas), who is a jack of all trades who's never actually worked as a valet before.

Anyhow, at the gentlemen's club, Fogg tells some of the other memebers that he's been doing a bit of calculation, and figured out that with the current-day (1872) advancements in technology, it should be possible to complete a voyage around the world in eighty days, at least with enough lag time built in for connections since timetables were still not exactly precise in those days. So some of the other members bet it can't be done. Fogg has £20,000 in an account at Barings Bank and puts that up, with four of the memebers wagering against him eaching putting up £5,000. The wager becomes a cause célèbre and news story around the world as Fogg and Passepartout set out on the voyage. You may already know how the wager plays out.

One major plot line that is in both the book and the movie is the character of Princess Aouda (Shirley MacLaine). She's a princess in one of the Raj states where the princes tried to curry the favor of the British empire, except that her husband has just died. In that state, the custom is that then the prince dies, there's suttee, in which the widow is also sacrificed at the state. Aouda most definitely doesn't want to die, so Fogg and Passepartout rescue her and take her on the rest of the journey around the world since she can't go home again.

A good portion of the movie, however, is not really in the book. I knew from a fairly young age that a good proportion of the promotion surrounding the movie involved a balloon flight, but reading the book that's not in the book at all. Producer Michael Todd wanted a big spectacle, and also situated the camera in many scenes to serve as a sort of travelogue: think cameras on the front of the train as location shooting has the train going down a track. The balloon ride over France is an excellent example of this, as is a subsequent bullfight. Apparently in the book, although I don't remember it since I was a kid when I read the book, is the Scotland Yard detective Fix (Robert Newton). Just before Fogg set off on the voyage there was a heist at the Bank of England, and Fogg vaguely looks like the description of the bank robber. So Fix follows Fogg around the world, trying to come up with a reason to arrest him.

Around the World in 80 Days is, as I said, an excuse for producer Michael Todd to make a spectacle of the sort that TV couldn't do, in color and wide screen, and bringing as many stars to that screen as possible. As a result, there's a ridiculous number of cameo appearances, and no opening credits to clue you in beforehand of who the cameos are. There's also a pre-plot scene of reporter Edward R. Murrow (in 4:3) talking about advances in technology and Jules Verne discussing that in his books, with a bit of help from clips of the Georges Meliès silent A Voyage to the Moon.

This version of Around the World in 80 Days doesn't really work as a plotted story, in that it goes on much too long and has some plot holes. One thing that only struck me watching now all these years later is Passepartout's leaving the gas in his room on inadvertently. This eats up the £500 he earns for the voyage, but that would come out to £6/5/- a day on gas, which seems obscenely high. In any case, all the cameos keep everything interesting, and the location cinematography is nice, if at times in stark contrast to studio sets. However, I definitely don't think it was deserving of its Best Picture Oscar.

Midnight Run

Another of the movies that's been sitting on my DVR for several months is another relatively recent movie, at least recent by the standards of this blog in that it was released in the summer of 1988: Midnight Run.

Robert De Niro stars as Jack Walsh, and as the movie opens he's trying to pick an apartment lock in a seedy part of Los Angeles, only for the person inside the apartment to shoot through the door at him and try to flee via the fire escape. Jack chases the guy down, but as he's doing so, another guy drives down the alley and opens his car door, deliberately hitting the fleeing suspect. Sounds like two undercover cops, but in fact they're not. Jack and the other guy, Marvin Dorfler (John Ashton), are rival bounty hunters. Jack generally works for bail bondsman Eddie Moscone (Joe Pantoliano), and the next time Jack meets up with Eddie, Eddie has another job for him.

Eddie provided a substantial bail bond for Jonathan "The Duke" Mardukas (Charles Grodin), an accountant who is alleged to have stolen several millions of dollars that were illegal profits for mobster Jimmy Serrano (Dennis Farina). The feds need Duke out in Los Angeles for an upcoming trial, while obviously Serrano would like Duke really most sincerely dead. In any case, Duke fled bail and went to New York, stiffing Eddie on that bail bond. So Eddie would like Jack to fly out to New York, pick up Duke, and fly him back to Los Angeles. It's so easy, it's a "midnight run" since they can just take a redeye back to Los Angeles. Jack wants a substantial sum himself, since he has the good sense to understand it's not going to be so easy.

Jack is, of course, right. And the problems start even before he gets to New York. While doing a bit of research on where in New York to find Duke, Jack is accosted by the FBI, in a group of agents headed by Alzono Mosely (Yaphet Kotto). They want Duke as a witness to testify in that trial, while they also can plausibly tell Jack that he's putting himself in danger by trying to fetch Duke in addition to screwing up the pursuit of real justice. Jack sees dollar signs and a chance at redemption, since his back story involves quitting the police force in Chicago over corruption. Jack somehow steals Mosely's ID and uses that in his quest to get Duke and bring him back to LA.

Amazingly, the quest starts off relatively smoothly once Jack get to New York. He's able to tap into phones and get the location of Duke straight away, and even get Duke onto a plane relatively unseen. But then Duke says he's got a terrible fear of flying, and suffers a panic attack just before the plane takes off. The pilot forces Jack and Duke off the plane, and Jack has to try to get Duke across the country some other way. Further complicating matters, Feds have tapped the line at Eddie's bail bond office. Serrano has also figured out what's going on, and hires Dorfler to try to fetch Duke to bring him not to justice in Los Angeles, but to Serrano so that Serrano can dish out his own form of justice. And Serrano has no qualms about using violence against anybody.

As you can guess, the rest of the movie leads to a cross-country chase, with added shades of the buddy picture genre as the wildly different Jack and Duke begin to develop a bit of respect for each other. Jack, at least, seems to be the one person who wants to keep Duke alive, even if it's only for his own selfish monetary purposes. You can probably deduce that Jack is likely to make it back to Los Angeles as Hollywood wouldn't make a movie that has some unhappy ending, at least not in this genre.

Midnight Run is not exactly a movie I would call "unoriginal", since that work carries a lot of negative connotations. And that would be mean to the movie. Sure, it's not breaking any new ground, but damn if it isn't terribly entertaining for what it does. Midnight Run isn't exactly a comedy, but it's definitely a light action picture, and who knew Robert De Niro of Yaphet Kotto were adept at comedy?

Midnight Run is also a movie that, being of the genre it is, has a lot of plot holes and things that you'd think should make Jack's journey end right then and there. (He only carries one credit card, and the issuer has such lax security for cancelling it? Both of those set of my sense that this isn't right.) But if you don't think too hard, the movie is a lot of fun, and definitely worth watching.

A season of dryness

I'm coming down to the end of the movies that TCM ran during the tribute to Marlon Brando as Star of the Month. Next up is one in which Brando appears, but it's a small supporting role: A Dry White Season.

Brando isn't the star here; that honor goes to Donald Sutherland, playing Ben du Toit. Ben is a schoolteacher in South Africa in 1976. Now, if you know your history, you'll remember that this was still well during the apartheid era in South Africa, when a white minority ran the country and black majority and Asian minority were second-class citizens, with blacks having it far worse than the Asians (mostly from pre-partition India; you may recall Gandhi's sojourn in South Africa in the Gandhi biopic). The racial divide means that whites are able to live comfortably; Ben has a wife, adult daughter, and young son and is able to afford a black gardener all on that teacher's salary.

The black majority, of course, has it badly. Worse, they don't like the state of their education. Although the British had held South Africa as a colony, once it gained its indepence, the Afrikaaners, descended from the Boers who had colonized the place from the Netherlands, gained power, and tried to make their language Afrikaans the dominant language. The black ethnic groups, even though they all had their own languages, were being forced to learn in Afrikaans, and started protesting. At one protest, they refuse to disperse when the police order it, and the police release tear gas and go after protesters, many of them child students. The son of the du Toits' gardener is one such person, who eventually gets tortured to death.

Ben's attitude has largely been one of benign neglect, at least insofar as we can glean from the way he's treated the blacks around him up until now. He doesn't seem to have the disdain for blacks that a lot of the Afrikaans community seems to have, and cares for his gardnerer the way wealthy whites in Hollywood movies liked their black household help, but other than that has apparently been happy to live quietly. But because of it being his gardener's son, and because of the respect a teacher has in the rest of the white community, Ben goes to a policeman he knows, Capt. Stolz (Jürgen Prochnow), to try to intercede. This gets Ben put on a list. The police and the rest of the Afrikaaner power structure had it in for the blacks, but to keep control, they also had to put down any opposition from the white community, and there certainly were dissident whites.

Ben starts working secretly to get evidence from black people, being able to move around somewhat freely since white people did have more freedom to do so. He sees a journalist from an English-language paper, Melanie Bruwer (Susan Sarandon), and ultimately brings the case forward to an attorney, Ian McKenzie (that's Marlon Brando if you couldn't tell), who tries the case at the inquest and trial. Of course it's a rigged trial, and the powers that be win.

Ben's activism is beginning to radicalize him, and this means all sorts of trouble. He loses his job, and his wife is getting extremely resentful. His son still loves him, while his adult daughter joins her mother in being against what Dad is doing. And the authorities have no compunction about resorting to violence to get their way.

A Dry White Season is a well-acted movie, and it does drive home the interesting and often overlooked point that the apartheid regime had to restrict the rights of the white minority to keep its hold on power, even if those restrictions were far less onerous than what befell the black majority. Even without the rest of the world boycotting the country, South Africa would have been a gilded cage, much as was the case in Communist countries for anyone not at the very top.

Looking back 35 years after the movie was made, it's easy to say that it's pat, and that it focuses too much on white people. But it's also the case that history often has more than two sides, and the idea that there were white people on the inside who opposed the idea of apartheid was worthy of telling a story about.

Benny's Video

Unfortunately, I think I've got enough foreign films on my DVR that I'm not going to get through all of them before they expire. One that was about to expire that I wanted to watch more than some of the French films that I recorded more because French cinema has the reputation of being "important" is a more recent film from Austria: Benny's Video. TCM ran it quite as part of a double bill of movies by director Michael Haneke; I already did a post on The Seventh Continent at the end of October.

Benny (Arno Frisch) is a 14-year-old living in Vienna who seems to have a thing for video, both watching movies on video as well as videography. His parents have encouraged this hobby by moving the TV into his bedrood, as well as getting him multiple video cameras, although the question of how they can afford that isn't quite answered. They're part of some sort of farm scheme where they get a fraction of the proceeds of a farm out in the country, and that gave Benny the chance to record a disturbing video: the farmers slaughter a pig using the same sort of stun gun that Anton Chigurh uses in No Country for Old Men.

Benny's parents don't know about this video, as they're absent a lot spending weekends at that farm, which I suppose is part of why they indulge Benny. This also gives Benny's adult sister Evi a chance to use the apartment to run her pyramid schemes, with Benny recording that as well. Benny also likes to hang out with his friends in between going to the video rental place to pick up the latest set of videos that he's going to be renting. It's there that he sees The Girl, a student his age but not at his school. She lives out in the suburbs and commutes to presumably a specialized school, and hangs outside the video shop watching the movies they put up on the screens that face the street. Benny, seeing her a lot, invites her over to his place since his parents are once again away for the weekend.

There, he shows her how he's got a surveillance camera watching the street, and can switch between that and a camera in his room facing the other direction. He also shows her the pig video, before revealing that he stole the stun gun from the farm. He even dares her to shoot him in the abdomen. She doesn't, for obvious reasons, but then he turns the gun around and shoots her! This hurts her enough to stun her and leave her bloody and screaming. Benny, not knowing how to deal with the screaming, shoots in the head enough times until she shuts up, which she does because she's really quite dead.

This presents all sorts of problems. How do you dispose of the dead body and all the other evidence that goes with it? They're in an apartment, so it's not as if Benny has a place to bury the body. And if he tries to leaving the building with a body-sized package, people are going to notice. Hell, Thelma Ritter noticed when Raymond Burr used his salesman's case to take out parts of his wife's body in Rear Window.

So some time after his parents return, Benny nonchalantly shows them the video. Benny's all of 14, so this being a European country perhaps he'd be tried as a juvenile. But Dad thinks that would wind up with Benny being put in some sort of psychiatric institution, and what would that do for the family's reputation, which seems more important to Dad than the dead body. So Dad comes up with a plan that can't possibly work: make up a grandma who retired to Egypt and died there so that Mom and Benny can leave Austria for a week, during which time Dad will dispose of the body. The plan can't possibly work, can it?

Benny's Video is a movie that, like The Seventh Continent, is fairly disturbing and a bit hard to review. One gets the impression that perhaps Michael Haneke was trying to make a commentary on absentee parenting or the effect of media violence on the young. But he sets himself a problem that he doesn't quite know how to solve. The movie is interesting if a tough watch up until the point that mother and son head off to Egypt, at which point it loses steam and also feels like it requires an even bigger suspension of belief than the first half. But I think that people who don't have a problem seeing this sort of violence depicted on screen will find something in Benny's Video worth watching.

An incident out west

Another of the movies that I recorded off of TCM because I hadn't seen it before and am always interested in new stuff to be able to blog about here, and because it sounded interesting enough to give it at least one watch, was a western called The Plunderers. Recently, I finally got around to watching it to do the obligatory post on here.

The movie starts off with a pre-credits sequence of four young men riding into a town called Trail City. Jeb (Ray Stricklyn) is the leader of the group, accompanied by Mexican Rondo (John Saxon), muscle Mule, and the "baby" of the group Davy, who hasn't really had enough life experience to be considered fully a man. Coming in to town, they need a drink, so stop at the saloon where they order one drink each. However, they don't seem to have any cash on them, so when it comes time to pay, they can't. Mike, the owner of the bar, calls in the sheriff (Jay C. Flippen), who puts the four young men in jail for the night. At the bar watching is Sam Christy (Jeff Chandler), who owns a ranch just outside of town. Sam served in the Civil War and wound up with a bum left arm as a result.

Come the morning, the sheriff should order the four men out of town, but he doesn't. By this time, we learned that they had to leave their previous town under cloudy circumstances, but they decid that they like this place and want to spend a bit of time resting up here. They go to the local general store and stiff Ellie (Dolores Hart) and her father the owner, before getting a hotel room from Kate (Marsha Hunt), who didn't know how they had already scammed the store owner. Nobody seems to want to do anything about the four men.

Of course, part of the reason for that is that they're all afraid of the four young men who are armed. And yet, it should be the sheriff's job. When he goes to the hotel room and they humiliate him, they realize they're helpless. The one person who might be able to do something is outsider Sam, although he seems to have more of a past than just having served in the Civil War.

The interlopers are also smart enough to know that it can't stay this way; they're pissing off enough people that somebody could ambush them at night or something. So they decide to confiscate all the guns in town, an effort that is not without violence and results in at least one person getting killed. They're also smart enough to realize that Sam outside of town is still going to have guns at his place. But thanks to the Production Code, we know that the bad guys aren't going to win in the end. It's the question of how exactly the loss comes about that remains to be answered.

As I watched The Plunderers, I noticed a directorial credit for Joseph Pevney. It's a name that I recognized first from the episodes of the original Star Trek series that he directed. Pevney directed more movies than I realized, but still The Plunderers made me think of something that was more suited to TV than the big screen. It's not bad, but it doesn't feel terribly imaginative. Definitely a suitable enough time-passer, though.