The Lily of color

Twenty years ago, when TCM was more flush with money, one of the things they did was to have a young film composers' competition in which the winner won the chance to score a silent picture that had an extant print, but no accompanying score. One of the silents that was reintroduced to the world in this way was The Red Lily. The last time it showed up on Silent Sunday Nights, I recorded it, and recently, I finally watched it.

Ramon Novarro is the star here, playing Jean Leonnec, who is the son of the mayor of a small town in western France. He's in love with Marise (Enid Bennett), daughter of the local cobbler. They're even thinking of getting married, at least until Marise's father summarily dies. She's sent to live with her nearest relatives, who treat her like dirt to the point that she wants to escape, even in the middle of a driving rain storm. She meets up with Jean again, but his dad doesn't approve of their relationshp.

So the two young lovers leave for Paris, and just as they're leaving, Jean's dad discovers that there's money missing from the municipal safe, which to him obviously means that his own son must have stolen the money. The lovers reach Paris; at the train station, Jean looks for an information booth to find out where they can go to get married. Instead, he's approached by a couple of gendarmes who inform him he's accused of larceny back in his home town and he's going to have to go with them. He doesn't even get a chance to inform Marise of this, so she sits for hours at the train station waiting for Jean to come back.

Eventually, we learn that the real thief admitted his crime back in the small town, but Jean escaped from the train before he discovered this, so for the rest of the movie he thinks he's a fugitive. Marise, meanwhile, needs a job. She's able to get one in a factory at first, but circumstances turn against her and she eventually turns to prostitution, because the movie insists on piling on more and more for the two lovers to overcome.

Jean makes it back to Paris, always living in the shadows, when he mets Bo-Bo (Wallace Beery), part of the gang of thieves that populated Paris of this era, at least in the imaginations of writers. Jean keeps looking for Marise while trying to stay one step ahead of the police. But what's going to happen if he finally meets her and discovers that she's been forced to turn to prostitution?

The Red Lily is relentlessly melodromatic, at least until the final reel, in that it makes the situation worse and worse for the seemingly doomed young lovers. In that regard, the plot is ridiculous, although I suppose it may have been the sort of material that audiences of the day absolutely loved. While this sort of story line isn't quite my cup of tea, I do have to say that in terms of the acting and the technical aspects of filmmaking, The Red Lily is definitely very well made. It's definitely worth a watch.

End of year briefs

Tomorrow is New Year's Eve, and it's unsurprising that TCM has special programming for the day. Two things that TCM has commonly done to ring in the new year are to play all six of the Thin Man movies, or to show That's Entertainment! and the spinoffs of decreasing quality since the first one used all the good MGM musical material. And wouldn't you know it, but this time the daytime lineup for TCM on December 31 has the Thin Man movies. The Times Square ball drop, however, does not coincide this year with the middle of That's Entertainment! II. Instead, prime time on December 31 has each of the TCM hosts selecting a film that has a prominent scene set at New Year's.

Another thing TCM has done in the past on New Year's Eve is to present a night of concert films. In fact, that's where I first saw ABBA: The Movie, I think 20 years ago when TCM was ringing in 2005. I bring all this up because TCM has decided to give us some concert movies, but during the morning and afternoon of January 1, 2025, rather than prime time. And at 8:00 PM on January 1? Oh, there's That's Entertainment! again. And you can guess the following two movies. This time, however, instead of something like That's Dancing!, the fourth movie, at 3:15 AM, is Soundies: A Musical History. Note, however, that TCM lists this as a 76-minute movie in a 75-minute slot, while That's Entertainment! III is a 113-minute movie in a 135-minute slot.

Posting picked up a bit this year from the past two years, as I'm fully enough ensconced in the new digs Dad and I moved to in March 2023. A new Blu-ray player and larger TV -- yeah, I know 40 inches isn't particularly large any more when it comes to TVs, but that's what fits against the sloping ceiling upstairs where I do my movie viewing -- have made it a lot more convenient for me to watch movies. Indeed, I'm getting close to three weeks ahead in terms of posting. If I get posting back to the slightly higher levels I had throughout the 2010s, post #8000 should come by the end of 2026.

Unsurprisingly, since I put up the post on the night of TCM Remembers movies, a couple of people worth noting died. Foremost among them would be Olivia Hussey, who played Juliet in the 1968 version of Romeo and Juliet that got shown to high schoolers for decades when they studied the Shakespeare play. I mean, I saw it in high school 20 years after it was released. Hussey died on Friday aged 73.

Also dying on Friday was Oscar-nominated screenwriter Charles Shyer. He picked up his nomination for Private Benjamin, which I'll be getting to sometime in 2025 since I recorded it when TCM ran it last Veteran's Day. He also directed, with several remakes among his films: the 1990s Father of the Bride, as well as the 200sremake of Alfie. Shyer was 83.

The seesaw and the shoe

I've mentioned John Nesbitt's Passing Parade shorts, made at MGM in the 1940s, a couple of times before, although I've tended not to do reviews on them so much largely because, to me, the shorts aren't quite as interesting as some of the other series, or standalone two reelers. A good example of this is The Seesaw and the Shoe, which showed up recently to fill out the time slot of a movie I watched off my DVR.

We this time take the true stories of two small, unimportant things, as Nesbitt tells us in his opening narration, that changed our lives for all time. Those things are the titular seesaw and the pair of shoes, but the short tells us how two men were able to use these things to come up with substantial inventions.

For the seesaw, that man was René Laennec, a French doctor circa 1820. He was trying in vain to hear a man's heartbeat well; as you can guess, this is going to lead to the invention of the stethoscope. Laennec purportedly saw two kids using a seesaw to vibrate sound through it, with one tapping at one end and the other with his ear to the seesaw listening to the vibrations. This gave Laennec the idea for a listening tube that ultimately became the stethoscope, at least if you believe Nesbitt's story.

The shoes were a pair of shoes that Charles Goodyear showed off to his friends in the early 1830s. They were made of latex, and as such were waterproof, but subject to melting due to high heat, such as being placed by a fire to dry off. It was going to take vulcanization to produce rubber that remained stable, and according to the short, that process was discovered accidentally after many years of trial and error, as well as supposedly a stint in debtors' prison. Of course, we know Goodyear was eventually successful.

I think the problem with the Passing Parade shorts is how there's no real plot as opposed to the Crime Does Not Pay shorts; no humor compared to Pete Smith or Joe McDoakes; and no time capsule value like the Traveltalks shorts. I can see why they might have been interesting to audiences back in the day, but they just don't hold up as well as some of the other series.

I will always love... Lawrence Tierney?

Another of the movies that I recorded off of TCM because it sounded like an interesting premise was the B movie Bodyguard. Having watched it, I can finally do the review on it.

Lawrence Tierney plays Mike Carter, one of those police detectives who has a tendency to do things not quite by the book, and for which he has a tendency to get in trouble, although he also seems to have a group of kids who love him for it. Most recently, he's tried to investigate a place the vice squad already had on their radar, and his looking into things screwed it all up. So his supervisor is none too happy with him, and calls him into the office to chew him out and suspend him with desk duty. Mike has a nasty temper and responds by smacking his supervisor and quitting.

The next day, Mike is taking some of those kids to a ball game along with his fiancée Doris (Priscilla Lane), who also works at the police department. Showing up at the game is Freddie Dysen (Phillip Reed), who apparently knows that Mike has recently left the police force. Freddie is the nephew of Gene Dyson (Elisabeth Risdon), the owner of Continental Meat Packing. Freddie is worred about death threats against his aunt, and wants somebody who can serve as part investigator and part bodyguard. Freddie is willing to pay a retainer of $2,000, which is quite a bit of money for the late 1940s. Mike, however, isn't interested.

Later that evening, when Mike is back at his apartment with Doris, somebody slips an envelope under the door. It's presumably from Freddie, but it's enough of an inducement to get Mike to go over to Pasadena to see the Dysens. And when Mike is there, somebody fires a shot into the room where everybody is. Now, since this is a movie, it seems like a reasonable assumption on the part of the viewer that this is a set-up. But, unsurprisingly, Mike doesn't get that impression. In any case, he decides to take the job, at least in the form of taking an envelope from Freddie. Gene didn't see the need for a bodyguard, and doesn't know that Freddie has hired him.

Overnight, Mike catches Gene's secretary trying to remove the bullets from the wall that were shot the previous night. Mike then sees Gene heading off very early to one of the meat packing plants, and follows along. But he gets hit over the head, and wakes up to find... his old supervisor on the police force very much dead, and his car stalled on the train tracks, where a train is about to hit the car. Mike realizes he's been framed, and has to try to find the killer before the cops can bring him in.

Bodyguard is an interesting little B movie, although perhaps it's a bit too little at 62 minutes. It probably needed a bit more to flesh things out. However, the use of the word "interesting" is appropriate, and not just becuase the movie itself is worth a watch even if you didn't know anything about what's behind it. In addition to being a relatively early acting role for Lawrence Tierney, it's a relatively early directing job for Richard Fleischer, who would go on to bigger and better things. Even more interesting, however, is that it's based on a story co-written by a very young Robert Altman.

If you can find Bodyguard, it's definitely one to see, even if it's not a great movie.

Katha

I noticed that one of the movies I had in my saved list on Tubi is about to expire at the end of December, so I had to watch it now and juggle my posts around to be able to put up a post on it now. That movie is an early-1980s movie from India called Katha.

The movie opens with a grandmother telling her grandson a bedtime story, Aesop's fable about the Tortoise and the Hare, and the movie cuts to an animated version of that old fable. Except that as Grandma says, this is going to be a more modern version. As we all know in the original, the hare is so arrogant that he thinks he can take a long nap and still win, while the slow and steady tortoise walks right past the sleeping hare. In this animated version, however, the hare climbs up on the tortoise's shell, jumping right off just before the finish line to run ahead. The kid says that's not how the story goes, but grandma knows real life isn't always a fable....

Cut to a chawl, a sort of lower-middle-class apartment block like those old US motels where every room had a front door facing the outside and you climb outside stairs if you don't live on th ground floor, in Bombay. Rajaram Joshi (Naseeruddin Shah) is a clerk for a shoe manufacturer Footprint Shoes trying to get ahead in life, but he's such a timid guy that he's never gotten that far. In fact, he thinks that if he can get his next promotion, he's going to be set for life in a cushy job. He loves Sandhya (Deepti Naval), who lives in another residence in the chawl with her parents, but he's never been able to let the family know about his feelings so they can think about arranging a marriage. Clearly he's the tortoise here.

And then the hare shows up, in the form of Rajaram's old acquaintance Vasudev (Farook Shaikh), who is now calling himself Bashu which, as I understand it not speaking Hindi, is another form of the same name. Bashu has been god only knows where, but he quickly makes himself a fixtur in Rajaram's life, to the point that poor put-upon Rajaram and the rest of us can't help but think of Bashu as a dishonest smooth operator at best and a mooch at worst. Bashu tells Rajaram stories about his past jobs that clearly seem exaggerated, while saying that jobs just fall from heaven. And for Bashu, they really do.

Bashu goes stalking a couple of rich guys playing golf, and at the 19th hole tries to pass himself off as a golf expert. One of the guys is businessman Mr. Dhindhoria, there with second wife Anuradha and daughter from a first marriage Jojo. Bashu charms them so much that Mr. Dhindhoria gives him a job and invites him to the best parties, while Bashu also starts flirting with Jojo.

It turns out that Mr. Dhindoria's company is... Footprint Shoes. Worse for Rajaram is that he stays late to do extra work to try to get ahead, only for Bashu to try to pass that work off as his own. And then Sandhya's parents come over to Rajaram's rooms to talk about marriage... only for Rajaram to learn they want to arrange Sandhya's marriage to Bashu.

Katha turned out to be an interesting movie, one that in some ways plays on universal themes, but one that in other ways is either very much Indian or at least very much not Hollywood. There are four or five Bollywood-style musical numbers, along with a presentation of Indian business culture that's much more predicated on the idea of everybody being out for himself than even in American business culture. At least here in the US getting ahead in life isn't really done with the idea that if you're not cheating, you're not trying, certainly not to the extent it's portrayed as being done in this movie.

I mostly enjoyed Katha, although I do have to point out the print Tubi has runs almost 137 minutes, which I felt was a bit long for a fairly simple story. The print was also not subtitled by default the way the foreign films TCM shows are, but on my Roku box when I turned on captioning, I got English-language subtitles. So give Katha a try before it leaves Tubi in a few days.

Reality TV with Nicholas Ray

With TCM spending this evening looking at the films of some of the people who died in 2024, I decided to watch a movie off my DVR that's nominally a documentary of a man who is dying: Lightning Over Water.

The man in question is director Nicholas Ray, who died in June 1979 after a couple years battling cancer. Some time before that, he had met German director Wim Wenders when they were working on a film together, and became friends. So, when Ray was diagnosed with cancer and wanted to keep working rather than go off someplace and die peacefully, Wenders was willing to work with Ray.

The movie opens up in early April, 1979, about two months before Ray's death. Wenders has been able to secure two weeks away from Los Angeles, where he was working on another project, and flies to New York where Ray is still living. All of this looks like it's done as recreations and on good film stock. Wenders gets to Ray's apartment fairly early in the morning when Ray is still asleep, but appearing to be in rather horrible pain from the cancer that's killing him. When Ray wakes up, at some point the film stock switches to video, which I presume is supposed to represent the idea that this is the "real", raw footage, as opposed to all those recreations that might not have represented any sort of reality in Ray's life.

Ray talks some about ideas he has for a film script, something that's obviously not going to be completed in his lifetime. But Wenders lets Ray talk about this, and then film scenes with Ray in a way that seem obviously scripted and not part of a documentary. Meanwhile, Ray also heads up to Vassar in Poughkeepsie to give a lecture after a screening of his earlier work The Lusty Men. Wenders films the limousine ride, as well as scenes from backstage and a bit of Ray's speech.

Eventually Wenders has to fly back to Los Angeles, but in mid-May, just a few weeks before Ray's death, is able to get back to New York to film more footage, including Ray working on "directing" rehearsals of a production of a Kafka stage play. But, it's not enough footage, as Ray dies, and there's an epilogue filmed after Ray's death.

There have been any number of documentaries of terminally ill or very elderly people who want portions of their lives documented before they die, so doing that for a prominent movie director like Nicholas Ray is not a bad thing. However, in watching Lightning Over Water, I couldn't help but get the feeling that almost none of this is real. It also feels a lot like a vanity project. In short, I think that Lightning Over Water is the sort of movie that fans of Nicholas Ray will like, but that average movie fans, and even more so people who aren't (yet) that big of a fan of older movies, aren't going to care so much for.

Parade of the Dead 2024, plus one more programming note

Every year, TCM does a year-end TCM Remembers piece to commemorate all the movie-related people who died over the past year. Also in December, they've been running a night of movies where each one features a different person who died over the preceding twelve months and who didn't necessarily merit a longer programming tribute. That night of movies airs tonight, into tomorrow morning, and honors six people:

8:00 PM Le Samouraï, with the late Alain Delon as a hired killer in 1960 Paris;
10:00 PM 3 Women, a new-to-me Robert Altman film about three female roommates, including one played by Shelley Duvall;
12:15 AM Blood Simple, honoring M. Emmett Walsh who here plays another hired killer;
2:15 AM Lola, with Anouk Aimée as a married singer who gets involved with two men not her husband;
4:15 AM Romance on the High Seas, starring Janis Paige as a woman who tricks her husband who thinks she might be being unfaithful; and
6:00 AM Fighting Father Dunne, a Boys Town-like story including Darryl Hickman as one of the boys

TCM couldn't really have added any more movies to the tribute even if they wanted to, since the block comes up against the Saturday Matinee block. Following that, at noon on December 28, is the Saturday musical, which I really want to mention because it's Xanadu. Yeah, it's a movie that notoriously bombed at the box office, but it's a fun disaster, and one that you really should watch just once if you've never seen it before.

And since I mentioned the annual TCM Remembers piece, that's been playing for a week or so now, and is also up on YouTube:

An outfit

Some time back I briefly mentioned a 1970s movie called The Outfit. I think I saw it many years ago which is why I thought it looked familiar when I saw it show up on the TCM schedule back in 2016. It got another airing last year, and I recorded that airing. A search of the site suggests I've never done a full-length review of The Outfit, so I watched it again to be able to do that review. Parts of it looked familiar, but parts I didn't remember; I wouldn't be surprised if it was one of those movies that I turned TCM on in the middle of and watched the rest of it.

The movie opens up with a pre-credits scene of taxi driving along what looks like the back roads in the agricultural parts of California, although apparently the movie isn't set in California. The passenger has a suitcase, and opens it up to start putting together what looks like one of those guns that you don't want found out. Eventually, the taxi goes to the home of Eddie Macklin, and the passenger gets out and shoots Macklin dead. Jane Greer has a smallish part as Eddie's wife Alma.

Over the credits, a man is being released from prison. This man is Earl Macklin (Robert Duvall), who as you can guess is the brother of Eddie, although I've mentioned this before an actual viewer of the movie learns all of this. Earl is picked up from prison by his girlfriend Bett (Karen Black), who takes him to a motel. Earl is no dummy, and from talking to Bett figures out that they're at a motel so that somebody else will know Earl is that. That somebody is the hitman Orlandi, and Earl surprises Orlandi.

Earl, having pulled a gun on Orlandi, gets the name Jake Menner (Timothy Carey) out of Orlandi, and goes looking for Menner to gain revenge. Menner, however, belongs to a group called The Outfit, and that's part of why the Macklins are in trouble. (Well, Earl is still in trouble; Eddie being dead is no longer in trouble.) Earl was in prison for bank robbery, but what he didn't know when he and his brother robbed the bank is that they made the mistake of robbing one that was controlled by The Outfit. You hit us, we hit you, as Menner tells Earl. Earl wants money from the Outfit for what they did to him, but the Outfit isn't about to pay out.

Menner calls his boss, Mailer (Robert Ryan), to tell him that Macklin is still alive, which is of course a problem for the Outfit. But Mailer is generally smart enough such that he's not directly involved with anything the underlings do. So it's up to Menner to deal with Macklin. However, there was also a third guy in the robbery, Cody (Joe Don Baker). He's still alive and owns a diner, but when Macklin comes for him he's up for revenge too, especially since the Outfit's men have already tried to get Cody.

The Outfit is a well-enough made movie, but on watching it again I see why it's one of those movies where I felt as though I'd seen it before but didn't really remember it. There's nothing particularly new going on here, other than a 1970s update of the sort of plot line that had already been done on any number of occasions. If you enjoy 1970s cinema, I think you'll definitely enjoy The Outfit.

Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me

Today being Christmas, I thought I'd look for a family-friendly film on my DVR to do a review on. It turned out that I have one in The Sun Comes Up, so I watched that to do a review on.

The nominal lead is Jeanette MacDonald, although the real star of the show is Lassie. MacDonald plays Helen Lorfied, the owner of Lassie, as well as a widowed opera singer who has a son who loves Lassie. Helen is in training for a comeback, and it looks like it's going to be a success. But after the concert, Lassie goes running off into the street, and Helen's kid chases after Lassie, getting run over by a truck in the process. Helen now no longer has any desire to enjoy life, and doesn't care for Lassie, either. But Lassie also has no other family, so Helen takes Lassie with her when she goes off to the country to live.

She winds up in the town of Brushy Gap, in the same sort of mountains we'd see a few years later in I'd Climb the Highest Mountain and sees a house in the middle of nowhere that's available for rent. She rents it from property manager and stereotypical country store owner Willie Williegood (Percy Kilbride). Mr. Williegood is just the first of many people not to be accepting of an outsider, although in their defense Helen doesn't seem particularly well-suited to live in a place like this. Anyhow, the kids from the orphanage use the property to play on, and everybody is none too pleased that Helen puts them out because she doesn't want to see kids.

One kid, however, she's going to have to deal with, because he's actually pretty good at doing work around the place that a city slicker like Helen just doesn't know how to do. That kid is Jerry (Claude Jarman Jr.), who also lives at the orphanage because, as far as he knows, his mother was financially unable to take care of him (he would have been born during the Depression). Jerry also takes well to Lassie, and the feeling is mutual. Helen, of course, is not ready to have another adolescent boy in her life.

There's another hour to go in the movie, though, so we know that the two are going to figure out that they need each other, and it's going to be Lassie that brings the two of them together. Lloyd Nolan shows up as the owner of the house who ultimately convinces Helen to do the right thing, although it's also going to take a climactic fire rescue to bring Helen and Jerry together.

Jeanette MacDonald's singing isn't quite my cup of tea, and to be honest I'm also not the biggest fan of the stereotypical treatment of the locals that seems like it came straight out of the old Variety headline "Stix Nix Hick Pix". But then, this is a Lassie movie, so that's what you watch for, not so much the plot. In that regard, The Sun Comes Up will definitely be suitable for the whole family, although younger children will probably enjoy it more than older children.

Wow, a movie without a Wikipedia article

Several weeks back, I blogged about a movie that was new to me called The Green Slime, which was a part-Italian production that was part of a series of movies about the Gamma-1 space station. TCM ran it as part of a bunch of sci-fi movies from the same people, which included another new-to-me movie, The Snow Devils.

There's a space station shere, but there's no good plot reason for it this time. Instead, the plot opens at a weather station somewhere in the Himalayas. The researchers discover a temperature anomaly in which the temperature suddenly rises fifte degrees or so. This makes no sense, but the crew soon has a biggger problem when one of the windows blows out allowing the cold air and whatever strange forces are out there to get into the station and kill the research scientists.

Up on Gamma-1, they need to get in touch with the one man who could deal with the problem, Cmdr. Rod Jackson (Italian actor Giacomo Rossi Stuart, credited as Jack Stuart in order to make the movie seem less foreign). He and partner Frank Pulaski go flying over the North Pole, and find that it looks like the ice cap is melting! Now, this was in the days before the greenies came up with the idea of mankind creating a worldwide greenhouse, and Cmdr. Jackson can verify that the Earth has not suddenly changed orbit, so there must be some other cause for these changes in the weather.

A crew was sent out to the weather station, where they found everybody in the station dead, and a footprint in the snow. A plaster cast of the print implies that this must have been a very large creature. Now, since it's the Himalayas, the thought is of the Yeti, since that was a well-known myth. So Rod and Frank go to India, and organize a crew to go up into the Himalayas to find out if it really was a Yeti, or something else, that destroyed the weather station.

In fact, they find something much more terrifying. Eventually, up in the mountains, they discover a cave, so the natural thing for them to do is to go in. Lisa, the fiancée of the former commander of that weather station, showed up wanting to be part of the expedition so she could avenge her fiancé's death, and when she gets in the cave she immediately starts screaming because it's natural for the woman to be scared and have to be protected by the big strong man.

Except that she did see a creature that could theoretically pass for the Yeti. It's not the Yeti, of course, but a species from outer space. They're from a planet that was extremely cold, but their planet is dying and the species needs a new planet to live on. The icy sections of earth could do, but it's not enouogh. They really need the whole earth to be an iceball, and fortunately for them they have to power to freeze the earth. But first they need to warm it up enough to melt the ice caps and flood Homo sapiens out of existence.

Compared to the other Gamma series movies I've seen, The Snow Devils is pretty dire. Indeed, there's no need to have the space station. The plot is dopey, and the acting is lousy. The only redeeming thing about is that at least they came up with an interesting plot device to explain how the Yeti myth came about.

Desert Guns

Roger Moore is best known for playing James Bond in the 1970s, as well as Simon Templar on the British TV version of The Saint in the 1960s. So when one of his non-Bond movies shows up, I'm always willing to give it a watch. One of those movies, Gold of the Seven Saints showed up on TCM some months back, and is interesting in part because it's a western, a genre I don't think anybody would associate Roger Moore with. With all that in mind, I recorded it and recently got around to watching it.

Roger Moore plays Shaun Garrett, an Irish immigrant who has been trapping fur with his friend Jim Rainbolt (Clint Walker). As the movie opens, however, Shaun is riding into town one night looking to steal a horse, which is a serious offense. He's caught, and one of the men working for McCracken (Gene Evans), threatens to shoot Shaun. With that in mind, Shaun barters for the horse, paying with the one valuable possession he has: a nugget of gold.

That was an extremely risky thing to do, as Rainbolt tells Shaun when he gets back to Shaun up in the hills. The nugget, as both of them know, came from a gold strike that they discovered and so produced a bunch of gold. So in theory they should be rich, at least once they can get to civilization and deposit the gold with a bank or something. But having used one of the nuggets now, whoever gets paid with it is going to know that there's excess gold somewhere -- and they're going to go chasing after Shaun to find that gold. It doesn't take long before Jim looks back and sees a cloud of dust and white men on horses.

Shaun and Jim keep pressing forward, but because they're carrying all that gold, they can't move as quickly as the men pursuing them, meaning that eventually they're going to get caught. They look for a defensive position, and even hide the gold in a place that Jim can navigate back to, but not Shaun since he doesn't know the territory as well as Jim does. McCracken and his men do get to Jim and Shaun and get in a fight that results in Shaun's getting a broken leg. But Jim and Shaun are saved by a passing doctor, Gates (Chill Wills). As a result, Jim and Shaun are forced to bring him into their confidence. Eventually they wind up at the ranch of an old friend of Jim's named Gondora (Robert Middleton). In theory Shaun can recover there. But certainly word of that gold is going to get out and people are going to come looking for it.

Gold of the Seven Saints is one of those movies that's really only a western because it takes place in that certain time and place. As I thought about the movie while skimming it a second time to do this post, I suddenly remembered the old movie Nightfall, where a modern-day Aldo Ray waits for spring so he can fetch $350,000 buried under the Wyoming snow once it melts. There's something about the present-day setting that let the writers come up with better material instead of relying on western tropes. It's not that Gold of the Seven Saints is bad; it's just pedestrian. I'd probably have a higher opinion of it if had been made in the earlier days of westerns instead of being released in 1961.

Foreign Christmas movies

Some months back I mentioned the French film My Night at Maud's, which is set over the Christmas holidays and which, quite frankly, I hated. It's on early tomorrow (Dec. 23) morning at 4:15 AM, but having blogged about it already, I'm not doing another post on it. Instead, I've got another French film which has its climax in the Christmas season, but is not on the TCM schedule this Christmas: Sundays and Cybèle.

Hary Krüger plays Pierre, who as the movie opens is sitting at the commuter railway station in Ville d'Avray just west of Paris late one evening, seemingly waiting for somebody. Getting off one of the trains are a father and daughter. Dad is looking for directions to a Catholic boarding school. Dad is a widower and can't take care of the child properly, while grandma no longer wants to, so it's dump the kid off at a nuns' school. Pierre tries to make friends with the girl, and Dad is obviously quite put off by this. Pierre also follows the father and daughter to the gate of the school, where the nuns themselves are none too happy that this guy showed up so late.

We then learn that Pierre is unemployed, living on disability because of the experiences he suffered while fighting for the French in Indochina. A nurse named Madeleine took care of him, and this resulted in Pierre moving in with Madeleine after he was demobbed because he had amnesia and apparently no other family.

Pierre, remembering the little girl who was dropped off at the school, decides to go there one Sunday to inquire about her. The nuns think he's the father, since the real father doesn't show up like he said he would. So the nuns let the girl spend the Sunday with him, and the girl is quite happy to do so since she has no real friends at the school and nobody who visits her otherwise. Madeleine doesn't know about any of this.

However, some of Madeleine and Pierre's neighbors figure out what Pierre is doing on his Sundays, and they're worried for perfectly understandable reasons. A strange guy with a young girl who's not his daughter? What's not to worry about? So as Pierre is planning to celebrate Christmas at a gazebo in the local park with the little girl, the neighbors alert the police that something is going on with Pierre.

Sundays and Cybèle is the sort of movie that's close enough to arthouse that normally I shouldn't much like it. But while I didn't love it, I also certainly didn't dislike it the way that My Night at Maud's really put me off. There's at least an interesting premise here, although it's one that I don't know that it always works, in large part because I'd think somebody would have figured out what to do with Pierre by now. That, and I can't imagine the nuns just letting Pierre go out with the girl on Sunday without really knowing who he is. Certainly one of them remembered her being dropped off by somebody other than Pierre.

Of course, people who like more arthouse stuff will probably like Sundays and Cybèle even more, so watch and judge for yourself.

For some values of pleasure

I've been trying to watch the movies that TCM ran during Debbie Reynolds' turn as TCM's Star of the Month last month before they expire from YouTube TV's cloud DVR. I think I've gotten through all of the ones I've recorded, although I also think by the time I blog about them they'll have expired. I'm also pretty certain the order in which the posts on the movies show up won't be the same as the order in which I watched them, in part because at least one of the movies had similar themes to a non-Reynolds movie I wanted to blog about because it was coming up on the TCM schedule. That's more to say that there may be a few things in this or later posts that refer to posts I've already written but are only in the queue to show up on the blog at some point in the future. In any case, one of Reynolds' movies I hadn't heard about before the TCM showing was The Pleasure of His Company.

The "His" here refers to the male lead, that being the character played by Fred Astaire, although we don't see him at first. Instead, we see Reynolds, playing Jessica Poole. She's in a wedding dress at one of those high-class department stores where she's able to try on a gown with just a few attendants and her parents watching. Or, at least, her mom Katherine Dougherty (Lilli Palmer) and stepfather James Dougherty (Gary Merrill). Those two are talking to each other commenting on Katherine's father Mackenzie (Charle Ruggles) walking Jessica down the aisle and giving her away, while it really ought to be Jessica's biological father doing that. But James spent a ton of money sending telegrams all over the world trying to get in touch with bio-dad about the wedding, seemingly in vain.

Enter Fred Astaire. If you haven't figured it out yet, Astaire plays Biddeford Poole, nicknamed Pogo, and is in fact Jessica's biological father. He had some sort of wanderlust that caused him and Katherine to get divorced years ago when Jessica was still aged in single digits, and has spent the time traveling around the world like a playboy and racking up at least one more failed marriage. But he did in fact hear about his daughter's upcoming wedding, and has decided to show up for it. Not that anybody knows, so when he knocks on the door of the Dougherty house, it's there Asian butler Toy who answers the door.

Pogo immediately sets about taking over the house as though it was his all along, and you can see why he wound up divorced multiple times, and why it's a bit of a surprise that this movie is supposed to be a reasonably light comic drama. In fact, Pogo is so selfish that it's tough to see him as a sympathetic character. Surprisingly, Jessica has held a bit of a torch for Dad, if not a romantic one. She's followed his life as he's made the vintage equivalent of the gossip columns, leading her to keep a scrapbook and now be taken with him.

It's almost enough to put a crimp in the wedding plans. Jessica's fiancé Roger (Tab Hunter) is from a cattle-ranching family, and he's decided to change the honeymoon to Hawaii since there are some prize bulls there he's interested in seeing and the new couple can kill two birds with one stone to mix metaphors. But Jessica's dad shows up, and suddenly she wants to see the world with him. And Roger is pissed that Jessica and her dad can speak good French. Additionally, stepdad thinks he's about to lose his wife to her previous husband just because that previous husband is just so darn charming.

The Pleasure of His Company was based on a Broadway play, and maybe the material works well in front of a live audience on a more intimate stage. For me, the movie doesn't really work, largely because I couldn't help but find Fred Astaire's character to be such a selfish jerk, almost from the minute we see him when he moves himself into stepdad's study as if nobody's going to have a problem with this. I can't fault the acting, which is capable enough, but damn if that script isn't an irritant. The Pleasure of His Company is for me, in short, one of those movies where I couldn't really suspend disbelief.

On Moonlight Bay

Although there's a lot in TCM's Christmas marathon that I've both seen and blogged about before, there are surprisingly a few films that I hadn't yet seen. One of those is on my DVR from a previous airing, so I watched it in conjunction with the upcoming TCM airing. That movie is On Moonlight Bay, and you can see it tomorrow (Dec. 21) at noon.

The movie opens sometime in about the summer of 1916. War is raging in Europe, but in the small towns of the American midwest that, like New England, populated the movies of old Hollywood, everything was still peaceful. George Winfield (Leon Ames) is the vice-president of a bank in a small Indiana city, but he's moving on up, if not to a deluxe apartment in the sky, at least to a nice big house in a better part of town together with his wife Alice (Rosemary DeCamp), tomboyish adult daughter Marjorie (Doris Day), bratty son Wesley (Billy Gray), and maid Stella (Mary Wickes). Everybody else isn't thrilled with the move because even though it's just across town, it will take them away from all their friends. (Seriously, how long of a bike ride would it be?)

The two kids, being none too pleased moving into a new house, decide to go engage in a bit of trouble-making, culminating in trying some sort of target practice with a gun. However, they nearly hit neighbor William Sherman (Gordon MacRae). He's just finished up is junior year in college at Indiana University, and as is not uncommon for college students, is quite the radical. He claims not to believe in marriage, certainly doesn't like the sort of popular music that's playing when he and Marjorie go to the local fairground, and even ticks off Marjorie's dad with his comments on modern banking. Dad has a sensible (at least for this point in the movie) idea that Marjorie would be better off with somebody like piano teacher Hubert Wakely (Jack Smith).

Now, we know from Doris Day and Gordon MacRae's names being at the head of the cast that they're going to be right for each other, never mind the fact that Hubert is portrayed as an utter drip, that Marjorie ought to wind up with William at the end of the movie. But we're only about a quarter of the way through, so we know everybody's going to have to go through a lot before we get there. The first comes when Marjorie sprains her ankle just before the big Christmas charity ball, and Marjorie can't be bothered to tell William the truth about what actually happened. Instead, nasty Wesley makes up a story from having seen a silent film that Dad has taken to drinking and beating his wife and daughter. Nowadays, the teacher would be required to go straight to the police, but in those days, it was just gossip, but gossip that William hears when he arrives back in town.

By the time William graduates with the Class of 1917, Woodrow Wilson got the US into the Great War, and William decides he's going to enlist. He'd like to marry Marjorie before heading off to Europe, but her dad still clearly doesn't approve of any of this. How is this going to change?

On Moonlight Bay is one of those nostalgic movies that were quite popular during the years of World War II, and remained popular into the early 1950s, with this being toward the end of the cycle. It's filled with old songs for Day and MacRae to sing, and was a big hit at the box office, which resulted in a sequel, By the Light of the Silvery Moon (which I have on my DVR and will review at a later date). It's a nice little slice-of-life movie, and one that's easy to see why it was so successful. The one issue I had with it was the kid brother character, who is written to be particularly nasty; the bit about claiming Dad was drunk and beating Mom made me think of These Three. But a lot of people think his character provides great comic relief.

I prefer some of the other movies airing in this year's Christmas marathon, but I know a lot of people will enjoy On Moonlight Bay.

TCM's Christmas Marathon

This being December, TCM has been running Christmas-themed movies on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. We're getting closer to the big day, and we've reached the point of TCM's annual Christmas marathon. Starting with prime time tomorrow (Dec. 20) and continuing for 120 hours, through Christmas morning and afternoon but ending when prime time on Dec. 25 rolls around, TCM will have nothing but Christmas movies.

The first film, tonight at 8:00 PM, is Meet Me in St. Louis, which introduced the song "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" that has since become a Christmas standard. Some of the movies have much bigger connections to Christmas than a couple that are somewhat more coincidentally set during the Christmas season and may or may not be thought of as Christmas movies. In this post, I'm going to limit myself to mentioning a couple of films that I first saw as a result of last year's Christmas marathon and are showing up on the schedule again this year.

I'm putting this post up today instead of tomorrow because in fact I have a post scheduled tomorrow for one of the films in the marathon, On Moonlight Bay. See that at noon on December 21. I'm assuming that it's part of the Saturday Musicals series that TCM has been running following the Saturday matinee block (not running this week) and will be presented by Dave Karger.

In the early hours of Sunday, Dec. 22, at 2:15 AM, there's Miracle on Main Street, about a woman with a boyfriend on the run who finds an abandoned baby on Christmas Eve and decides to keep the baby, at least until the boyfriend comes back and shows what a nasty piece of work he is.

Noir Alley doesn't have its usual double airing at midnight between Saturday and Sunday followed by a repeat at 10:00 AM Sunday. However, the film in the 10:00 AM slot on Sunday, Dec. 22, is a noir set around Christmas: Lady in the Lake. I wasn't a fan of Robert Montgomery's use of a POV camera in directing himself as Philip Marlowe.

Silent Sunday Nights and TCM Imports are a part of the Christmas marathon schedule. TCM is running a block called Christmas Past which is a bunch of silent Christmas-themed shorts, at midnight between Dec. 22 and Dec. 23. That's followed at 2:15 AM by Mon Oncle Antoine and at 4:15 AM by My Night at Maud's, which I frankly hated.

Another Christmas noir is I Wouldn't Be in Your Shoes (Dec. 23, 8:30 AM), while The Man I Love (Dec. 23, noon) has noirish elements.

December 24 and 25 repeat a lot of stuff shown over the previous three and a half days.

Sinbad the Sailor

One of those vintage action movies I had never actually seen before is the 1940s Douglas Fairbanks Jr. version of Sinbad the Sailor. So, the last time it was on TCM some months back, I finally got around to watching it, and now I can do the review on it.

As you can guess, it's Fairbanks who plays Sinbad. At the time the movie opens, Sinbad is already quite famous for his voyages and having told tales of seven of them. Famous enough, in fact, that the people he tries to tell the stories to already know all of them second hand. So Sinbad comes up with a flashback to a story of an eighth voyage....

Some time back, Sinbad and his friend Abbu (George Tobias) are on an island somehwere in the Persian gulf when another boat comes along. This leads them to a much larger boat, called the Prince Ahmed, which seems to be drifting. Sinbad and Abbu board, only to find that the entire crew of the boat is dead, having drunk poisoned water! (The movie is in Technicolor and the poisoned water is dyed green to make it especially photogenic and obvious that this is not good water.) By the law of salvage, this should rightly be Sinbad's boat, so he sails it back to the port city of Basra.

While on board, Sinbad discovers a map that looks like it could be the sort of stereotypical map from pirate movies leading to buried treasure, at a place called Deryabar, which is in the movie a reference to a legend of treasure from the days of Alexander the Great. And Sinbad has a medallion he wears with a Deryabar logo, something that he also finds on one of the ship's windows! However, when he gets to Basra, the next morning he sees that somebody has stolen the map. Also, the local authorities have declared a change to the law on salvage such that all rescued boats need be put to auction.

Thankfully, Sinbad is able to discourage all of the sailors from bidding at the auction with claims that the boat is cursed; after all, the entire crew died under mysterious circumstances. However, there's one person he can't stop from bidding. That turns out to be Shireen (Maureen O'Hara), one of the women in the harem of the Emir of Daibul (Anthony Quinn). Sinbad is able to use more trickery first to win the auction and then actually to pay for the boat, and sets off trying to figure out where Deryabar is.

The Emir knows that Sinbad has met Shireen, so he gets on a boat of his own with Shireen to follow Sinbad who will lead them to Deryabar. Except that there are a lot of twists and turns along the way along with shifting loyalties. Rounding out the cast is Walter Slezak, who plays the ship's barber but who clearly has some sort of ulterior motive for being on the boat.

This version of Sinbad the Sailor is one that will probably suit young boys looking for an adventure movie, the sort of audience who don't care anything about historical accuracy and are fine with a fictional world built on tropes that aren't meant to be offensive although some modern-day people will likely complain. Younger viewers are also not going to care all that much about the plot which is rather convoluted, and just sit back and enjoy the action. In that regard, the action is moderately successful, although people with more discerning taste will find the movie a bit lacking, I think.

Did Roger Corman ever work with Jack Webb?

Director/producer Roger Corman died last spring, and over the summer TCM got around to doing a multi-evening tribute to Corman. In addition to the horror movies, there was stuff presumably marketed at the teen demographic, which included the new-to-me The Wild Angels.

The movie begins with an establishing scene of a kid riding a tricycle on the sidewalkand nearly getting run over by a motorcycle, ridden by a guy called Heavenly Blues (Peter Fonda). Blues is on his way to visit his best friend and fellow motorcyclist Joe "Loser" Kerns (Bruce Dern), who is currently working on the oil rigs that are somewhere outside of the Los Angeles area. Loser's foreman is none too pleased about Loser having a guest up on the platform, so fires Loser with cause, and we learn that it isn't the first time something like this has happened.

Of course, it doesn't help that these motorcyclists also like to wear Iron Crosses. They're part of a Hell's Angels-like motorcycle gang that has taken on Nazi symbolism not so much because they seem to have any belief in Nazi ideology so much as it being a sort of rebellion about 1960s square society; in another context these people would be hippies living on a commune. Indeed, as we see, the bikers spend some time at a camp out in the middle of nowhere on their way to a place called Mecca, which also dovetails with why Blues, Loser, and the rest of their gang are going there. Loser's bike is there, and they're going to pick up it, although they have to deal with some Mexican-Americans and, this being the 60s, get in a fight with the Mexicans. The brings the police in contact with the two groups.

Most of the biker gang are able to stay ahead of the police, but Loser isn't, sending one of the motorcycle cops sliding down a ravine. Ultimately, while trying to escape, Loser gets shot, and injured seriously enough that he's taken to a hospital in the Los Angeles area. Loser's girlfriend Gaysh (Diane Ladd, Bruce Dern's real-life wife at the time), shows up at the hospital, where Loser is under observation but only by one policeman. Gaysh tries any number of ruses to draw the cop away, and this is of course a trick for Blues and the rest of the gang to "rescue" Loser. But the gang, being half wannabe neo-Nazis and half hippies, don't even seem to get the importance of the IV bad that's tapped in to one of Loser's veins. They can't properly attend to Loser's medical needs in hiding, so Loser dies.

The last third of the movie deals with the gang's desire to have a proper funeral for Loser, while also needing to stay one step ahead of the police. They're probably not going to be able to do both of those things, and as we see the funeral winds up not going to tradition, which also leads to the police finding out where the biker gang is.

As I watched The Wild Angels, I couldn't help but think of Jack Webb's TV shows from around this same era, especially Dragnet. The look at the biker gangs, despite the fact that the opening credits claimed to use real Hell's Angels, feels like the sort of utterly naïve look that someone who knows nothing about biker gangs would draw up, much like the caricatures Webb did. The only difference is that The Wild Angels isn't a springboard for preachiness on social issues of the day, especially what would have been Webb's strong anti-drug views. Heck, even the cinematography felt like a widescreen version of those cheap 1960s TV shows.

The Wild Angels is an interesting time capsule, but it's not a particuarly grate -- and most likely not a particularly accurate -- movie.

The Post

The next movie that I have on my DVR that's coming up on TCM is a foreign film that was new to me when TCM ran it several months back: Il posto. Various sites say that when it was first released in the US several decades back, it had the English-language title The Sound of Trumpets, but the print TCM ran only has the Italian title Il posto. It comes on early tomorrow (Dec. 17) at 4:00 AM.

A title card tells us that in the Italian region of Lombardy back in the time the movie was released (1961), people would try to get from the small towns in the region to the big and industrializing city of Milan since there was work there to be had. Cut to one of those small towns just outside Milan, where Domenico Cantoni lives with his parents and kid brother in an apartment so shabby that Domenico doesn't have a room of his own, while it's strongly implied that he had to quit his education since the family could only afford schooling for one child and the younger kid seemed smarter.

However, some sort of industrial concern in Milan is hiring for work at corporate headquarters, and Domenico has been accepted to apply for one of those jobs and take the aptitude tests. So the next morning Domenico sets out for Milan in the hopes of getting that job, which at least would provide him and his family with some stability. When Domenico gets to the office building and up to the fourth floor where the tests are to be administered, he finds a whole bunch of other people thinking as well that this is their big opportunity, despite the fact that the tests -- part aptitude, part odd physical testing, and part really weird psychological tests -- give off the decided impression that perhaps this isn't such a desirable place to work after all.

After the tests, Domenico meets one of his co-applicants, a nice young woman about his age whose legal name is Antonietta but who has the nickname Magalì. The two go out for coffee, and you get the feeling that perhaps they could start dating if they lived close enough to each other to do this on their off hours and if they were going to meet each other again. And, of course, if both of them get hired by the company.

Well, both of them do get hired, although they get assigned to different departments such that they work in different buildings and are rarely going to see each other as they don't even have the same lunch hour. And the next time Domenico sees Magalì, she accompanied by a couple of male co-workers about ther age as they're all exiting the building. So while that portion of his personal life is bad, he's also having to deal with a lousy professional life. Domenico has been assigned to administration, except that they don't have any real clerks' jobs open yet. So Domenico is going to have to work as a lowly messenger boy until one of the current clerks leaves. The good life is decidedly not as good as they might have thought.

Il posto is a movie that is more of a slice of life movie than one that has a fully-formed plot. As a result, I can see a lot of people, especially those who are predisposed not to like foreign films either for having to read subtitles or for the reputation of arthouse pretention, not particularly caring for it. However, as I watched Il posto I thought that it was trying to show how bleak things were for those who were in many ways being passed by as Italy was advancing from both a very rural state and the devastation of the war which had ended only about 15 years earlier. In the long run, such advancement is to the benefit of society as a whole, but for the people caught up in it without the proper work skills, it's a nightmare. And both the slowness of the plot as well as the stark black and white filming, really show this. So Il posto is a movie that I think won't work for everybody, but one that did work for me.

Not the cable channel

I think I've got one movie left from last March's TCM programming tribute to Ryan O'Neal to do a post on. That movie is Nickelodeon.

In the early days of film, the cameras, film stocks, and projection equipment had only recently been invented, and the companies that held the still-extant patents on these inventions banded together to make the Motion Picture Patents Company, based on the east coast and doggedly trying to prevent little companies from making movies without paying royalties to the big players. This led to smaller companies decamping to the west coast and ultimately creating the Hollywood motion picture industry. This backdrop is mentioned in a couple of title cards before we get to the main action, which begins in 1910 and is in black and white.

Ryan O'Neal plays Leo Harrigan, a divorce lawyer in Chicago who is about to lose a case through incompetency, forcing him literally to flee the courtroom and his angry client. He tries running away, eventually winding up at the back door of the Kinegraph Studio, an independent producer based out of Chicago and run by H.H. Cobb (Brian Keith), who is unsurprisingly worried about the Patents Company. But when he finds out that Harrigan is not a patent attorney and is also on the run, they wind up on a train together, along with actress Kathleen Cooke. Harrigan cribs from a Saturday Evening Post story to give Cobb plot ideas, and since this was the era when anybody and everybody was able to get into movies -- no film school experience necessary -- Harrigan winds up joining the crew, while Cooke heads off to New York to try to make it on the stage.

Cut to New York, where Cooke shows up at the wrong hotel. Also showing up at the hotel is Buck Greenway (Burt Reynolds), claiming to be selling clothes and also claiming to be looking for the head of a traveling rodeo. Some theater producers overhear this last half and ask Buck if he can ride a horse, which gets him a job in their stage show. Buck and Cooke also find out they wound up with each other's suitcases, right out of director Peter Bogdanovich's previous What's Up Doc?. They meet up again on a train bound for California.

Also on that train is Harrigan, who somehow has a suitcase that looks just like Buck's and Cooke's, so of course that one gets switched too. Harrigan gets off the train in the middle of nowhere in California looking for one of Cobb's directors, and is met at the station by Alice (Tatum O'Neal), who is one of those snottily precocious little girls. At a bar, he meets the crew of that director Cobb is looking for. The director basically vanished after drinking, and the rest of the crew more or less adopts Harrigan as their new director.

Eventually, everybody meets up again as Harrigan and his company start to make movies, become more successful, and want more artistic independence. They've also got patents people chasing after them and Cobb wanting his piece too.

Nickelodeon is another of those movies where it's easy to see why all of the people involved would want to make it. Peter Bogdanovich, when he was getting his start in Hollywood, talked with some of the still-living legends from the silent era, and they must have told him some crazy stories. However, for me, Nickelodeon comes up a bit short in part because it's a bit too zany and slapsticky at times, as well as feeling too much like a product of the 1970s, or at least the then-present as to the sensibilities of the early silent era. Tatum O'Neal's Alice in particular feels like somebody who wouldn't have existed in real life. So I can see why Nickelodeon was not a critical or commercial success.

The Rear Gunner

I was watching a movie off my DVR where it seems as though TCM screwed up the scheduling, as they had a full hour after the movie to fill. They did this with three World War II shorts, and today I'm going to mention the first one I saw, The Rear Gunner.

In the days after Pearl Harbor, lots of men were drafted, such as Pee Wee Williams (Burgess Meredith). When asked what he'd like to do to serve the military, he mentions how he'd like to be involved with one of those "flying fortresses". The military, in its infinite wisdom, assigns him to be an aviation mechanic; presumably he worked on farm equipment back home.

He's noticed by Lt. Ames (Ronald Reagan), mostly for being short. That's an advantage in aviation where space is at a premium. Having had to shoot crows as pests, Pee Wee is told by Ames that perhaps he could try being a gunner. Of course, you knew this was going to happen considering the title of the short. Pee Wee is a natural at this, and goes to a five-week training course run by an instructor sergeant (Tom Neal); also in the course is Benny (played by Dane Clark at the very beginning of his career under his childhood name of Bernard Zanville).

Eventually they graduate and go off to active duty, earning distinction because this is a short released in 1943 and the whole point of shorts like this was to increase morale on the home front and hopefully get more men to enlist. It's well enough made, certainly for what it's trying to do. Looking back on it from 80 years in the future, it may feel pedestrian since there's relatively little going on here. And, to be honest, there were wartime shorts that were better. Certainly, The Rear Gunner could have been improved with Technicolor. But Hollywood and the military's Motion Picture Units were turning out stuff like this so quickly that large budgets and things like Technicolor weren't always a consideration. As it is, The Rear Gunner is an interesting little time capsule.

Note that sources list the original running time as 26 minutes. It was edited down to 20 minutes at some point and that shorter edit is what TCM ran.

The Go-Between

I think I'm down to one last movie that I recorded during the spring airings of Two for One on TCM that's getting its second showing during the autum re-run of the series. This time, the guest co-host is director Todd Haynes, and the first movie he selected is The Go-Between, airing tonight at 8:00 PM.

The movie flashes back and forth between time periods, which I found rather confusing as there were cars that looked like they were from at least the 1930s if not later, while other scenes had what looked like Edwardian fashion and a relatively young character who had a visible war wound from the Boer War. In fact, a reading of the synopsis suggests that the main action takes place around 1900, while the "50 years later" portions are presumably set in the early 1950s as the film is based on a book first published in 1953.

Leo Colston (Dominic Guard), is an adolescent boy who is being raised by a single mother after the death of his father. She's apparently been scrimping and saving, as Leo is able to go to a boarding school together with a much wealthier kid, Marcus Maudsley. Indeed, Marcus has invited Leo to visit his family over the summer as they live in one of those great country houses in Norfolk. Marcus has a sister of marriageable age, Marian (Julie Christie), and the hope is that she'll marry the class-suitable Viscount Trimingham (Edward Fox). Leo sees Marian, and as he's just entering puberty and is beginning to think of girls in a way he doesn't quite understand, he naturally develops a crush on Marian.

For Leo and Marcus, the summer is setting up to be a series of adventures, such as going for a swim in the lake and finding that Ted Burgess (Alan Bates), the farmer who lives across the lake, is already swimming. Apparently they can't swim together because of those class differences, and Marcus is almost snotty about making certain the proper class relationships are upheld. In any case, the adventures come to a screeching halt when Marcus comes down with a case of the measles, forcing him to be quarantined.

Leo, being left by himself, tries to make his own adventures, with one being jumping down a haystack on Burgess' farm. Unfortunately, Leo hits an axe at the base of the haystack, cutting himself badly enough to need first aid. Ted treats Leo, in exchange for Leo's taking a letter back to Marian for her eyes only. Leo would also like Ted to teach him about sex, although this being the early 20th century, it's not phrased quite so directly.

Leo gives Marian Ted's letter, and she actually writes back to Ted, having Leo deliver the letter thanks to those class differences and Marian not being able to be seen having any business with Ted. That, and the fact that she eventually gets officially engaged to Trimingham. Leo discovers that Marian and Ted are writing love letters to each other, and that only makes things worse.

The Go-Between has an interesting premise, although I have to say that I felt the movie was extremely slowly paced. It also doesn't help how the action from time to time comes to the present day. The cinematography is well done and the Norfolk locations scenes are lovely to look at. Also, the cast does a good acting job. But overall, the script (ah, it's Harold Pinter again, back after having made a royal mess of Accident) makes The Go-Between an aggravating movie to watch.

The Freshman

I've got several movies from Marlon Brando's time as TCM's Star of the Month to get through before they expire from YouTube TV's cloud DVR. Up next is one of Brando's later movies, The Freshman.

Brando may be top billed, but the real male lead is played by Matthew Broderick. He plays Clark Kellogg, a young man from Vermont who, having just finished high school, is set to go off to college at NYU's film school, in the big city. It's also partly to get away from his stepfather, who's a fairly extreme animal rights activist. Now, having such a stepfather, and a late biological father who was a professor at a tony private school, you'd think that Clark would have spent at least weekends in a big city like Boston. But no; Clark is presented as more hopelessly naïve than even characters in 1930s movies.

When Clark arrives at Grand Central Station, looking for the subway, he's approached by a guy who seems like an obvious scam artist, a man named Vic (Bruno Kirby) who claims to be a private livery driver. Yeah, right. But Clark is so stupid that he thinks he putting one over on Vic by negotiating a much lower price on the taxi ride. Unsurprisingly, when Clark steps out of the car to take his stuff out of the trunk, Vic speeds off, leaving Clark with no belongings and even no cash, not having carried the cash on his person, go figure.

The next day, Clark is talking to his film studies professor, Prof. Fleeber (Paul Benedict), about his inability to pay for the expensive books (mostly written by Fleeber himself) that Fleeber wants his students to buy in what is one of the big scams of college. As Clark is in that conversation, he looks out the window, and what does he see? Why, it's Vic, walking across the NYU campus! So Clark jumps out the window and starts chasing Vic, eventually catching up with Vic at the entrance to Vic's apartment building. Now, Vic doesn't have Clark's money any longer, or so he claims. Instead, he claims to know somebody who can help him get a good job, down at a "social club" on Hester Street.

Clark goes to that social club and is admitted on Vic's recommendation. There, he's introduced to Carmine Sabatini (Marlon Brando), who looks surprisingly like Vito Corleone from The Godfather which is of course no surprise since that was a Marlon Brando character as well. Carmine does indeed have a job for Clark, and once again it's another thing that should seem too good to be true because, well, it is. Carmine wants Clark to take his Cadillac, drive to one of the airports to pick up some cargo, and transport that cargo over to New Jersey. Depending on traffic, it's a couple of hours, but for doing all that Clark can pick up a cool $500, which was nice even in 1990.

Alarm bells should be going off, but Clark brings his roommate along. The cargo in question is a live Komodo dragon, not caged. It's an endangered species (although not quite as endangered as the movie posits), so bringing one into the country is highly regulated, and bringing one into the country like this certainly must be illegal. But Clark is well past the point of no return, so he takes it to the destination, what seems like a farm owned by Larry London (Maximilian Schell), a seeming collector of exotic animals and a lover of gourmet food.

Clark calls his mother back in Vermont to talk about what's going on, and his stepfather is eavesdropping on the conversation. Stepdad, being an animal rights activist, immediately responds by calling the feds since there's definitely crimes being committed, and they send two men to investigate and eventually try to arrest Clark, using him to go after the much bigger prey in Carmine.

Now, The Freshman is a lot of fun, although it's not realistic at all. Then again, it's a comedy, and a lot of it isn't meant to be realistic, instead giving cast members an opportunity to play overbroad stereotypical roles such as Brando doing his Godfather shtick or Paul Benedict as the college professor. And, I suppose, Matthew Broderick as the ultimate hick even if hicks aren't liable to go to film school. Surprisingly, all of it works. The Freshman is definitely worth seeing if you haven't seen it before.

Young Tom Edison

Mickey Rooney is this month's Star of the Month on TCM, and surprisingly enough there are several of his starring roles that I haven't seen, not even considering the Andy Hardy movies airing later in the month. One of those movies aired on TCM a few weeks back, so I recorded it in order to be able to do a review on it for this month's airing: Young Tom Edison, which will be on early tomorrow morning (Dec. 13) at 4:00 AM.

It doesn't take much to figure out that Mickey Rooney is the star here, and that he is playing an adolescent version of inventor Thomas Edison (1847-1931). As the movie opens, Tom is about 13 years old and living in Port Huron, Michigan with the his parents Nancy (Fay Bainter) and Sam (George Bancroft) and kid sister Tannie (Virginia Weidler); she's a bit of a partner-in-crime in young Tom's schemes as he's already got an inquisitive (and costly) mind. Tom had come up with a scheme to wake his sister up remotely and close her bedroom window, and also likes to putter away on his chemistry set.

However, Tom also likes to think about those inventions as well as things like telegraphy while he's at school, and all that experimenting gets him in trouble, with his teacher and the school board suggesting he be expelled. At the same time, the experiments and other practical jokes lead everybody in town to think young Tom is addled. It's enough to make him want to run away, but first he starts making money for himself. He has some sweets that he and Tannie are eating on the railway platform, and people on the train wouldn't mind having some too. So he buys from the local confectioner and sells at a profit on the train. Eventually, he's able to buy a printing press and get news off the telegraph to distribute to the passengers on the train, at a profit for him, of course. (You'd think the passengers would only buy one or two copies of the paper and share.)

Meanwhile, Tom still can't catch a break at home, and when he brings nitroglycerine on the train, this is one of the final straws that leads to him getting fired. Nobody in town will give him a job, and he's just about to leave for Detroit. But two other things happen that give young Tom the chance to save the day, become a hero, and get a proper start as an adult. One is that his mother gets an infection and needs surgery, and the other involves the railroad bridge being out and Tom figuring out how to stop the train from going into the river. (Nowadays, you'd just use cell phones.)

I don't know how accurate Young Tom Edison is, but as a movie, it's certainly entertaining enough. Rooney was 19 at the time of filming playing Tom from about ages 13 to 17. There's a lot of the stereotypically Rooney "Oh gee willikers" stuff, but I think this time it actually works for a kid who's quite the dreamer and has gotten the reputation of being "addled". Rooney plays Tom with spunk, and I think that works here. Young Tom Edison is another good example of the pre-WWII Hollywood look at biopics, and definitely is worth watching at least once.

Do you remember this movie?

Another movie that's close to coming off my DVR is one that in some ways is a bit difficult to do a good post on, in part because everyone already knows what it's about: John Wayne's 1960 version of The Alamo. But, having finally watched it, I feel obligated to do a post on it.

I'll admit I don't know how well the story of the Alamo is known by people not from the US or Mexico, but the basic story takes place in what is now the million-plus city of San Antonio, TX when it was a much smaller settlement. Texas at the time was part of Mexico, but Americans coming west from Louisiana looking for land. The Mexican government under Santa Anna unsurprisingly didn't want a rebellious population and tried to put down the rebel forces. The rebel leader, Gen. Sam Houston (played here by Richard Boone in a small role) tried to get a small band of soldiers to hold a point along the way -- that mission in San Antonio known as the Alamo -- long enough for Houston to shore up his troops. The Mexicans laid siege to the Alamo, killing all of the defending soldiers, but of course the rebels won the war, winning independence for Texas before it eventually joined the US in 1845.

This version of the movie starts off with Col. William Travis (Laurence Harvey) in command of the soldiers sent by Houston to hold the Alamo, but they're still a good ways away from the Alamo. Travis is trying to recruit soldiers, and has some soldiers in the form of men commanded by Col. Jim Bowie (Richard Widmark). Travis and Bowie, however, are consistently at odds with each other. Coming in from Tennessee is Davy Crockett (John Wayne) with his own band of men. Travis thinks of Crockett as a backwoods hick, not knowing that Crockett had been elected Senator and is actually quite intelligent.

In addition to the subplot of the officious Travis conflicting with the other officers under his command, there's another subplot of Crockett coming across a Mexican wido, Flaca (Linda Cristal), to whom Crockett takes a liking. She, however, is set to marry a local businessman even though it's obvious that this would be a bad marriage for her. Flaca tells Davy that she's grown up enough to handle things herself and doesn't need Davy to save her. However, she does help the Americans by giving them the location of a weapons cache, which will give the Americans some valuable weaponry for when they get to the Alamo.

They get to the Alamo and the officers all realize how hopeless the situation is, although things are about to get even worse because another officer who was supposed to provide relief was ambushed along the way. Eventually Santa Anna shows up, and the rest is, as we say, history, although the movie version of history doesn't always agree with the real version of history.

Rounding out the cast is a young Frankie Avalon, presumably there to appeal to the teenage set; he plays a messenger type called Smitty who is under Crockett's command and who Crockett sends away to spare his life. Then there's the drunkard Beekeeper (Chill Wills in an Oscar-nominated role) who is supposed to be providing comic relief although if I were one of these military men and had to deal with a character like this in real life I'd smack him into the next state.

John Wayne directed, and supposedly didn't want to act in the movie, only being forced into it by the other producers because they wanted yet another name star to help bring people to the theater. I didn't have any big problems with Wayne's direction here. For me, the bigger problem was with the screenplay. Never mind the historical inaccuracies; that's to be expected in any movie like this. Instead, it's that the film runs over 160 minutes, and this is cut down by a good half hour from the roadshow version. The movie takes way too long in getting to the actual Alamo and then gives the battle short shrift.

The Alamo is a nice try at an epic from yet another actor-turned-director, albeit one that doesn't always work. It's not terrible by any means, but it's certainly not great.

What with that situation in the Middle East

I woke up on Sunday morning to the news about the military/political situation in Syria resulting in the ouster of one dictator, with replacement by what won't shock me if it turns out to be another group of dictatorial wannabes. Unfortunately, I did a post on the Cary Grant movie Crisis quite a few years ago, so instead I watched another movie that had been on my DVR, about politics and the Middle East: Protocol.

As the movie opens, some sort of motorcade for a state visit is making its way to Washington DC from the airport. But it gets blocked because of poor Sunny Davis (Goldie Hawn), whose car breaks down at just the right point to cause a major traffic snarl. Not that Sunny has anything to do with politics. She's just a waitress at Lou's (Kenneth Mars) Safari Club, where the waitresses dress in costumes reminiscent of animals and have the opportunity to pick up a few extra bucks by satisfying the male patrons in just the right way.

That night, after her shift at Lou's, Sunny is heading for home when she comes upon a crowd of people lined up behind a barricade the way they would in Hollywood for the premiere of a new movie, hoping to see the stars up close and personal. As they say, politics is Hollywood for ugly people, and this is actually for the diplomats exiting a state dinner for the same Middle Eastern potentate who was involved in that traffic jam over the opening credits, the Emir of Othar (Richard Romanus). As the people in the crowd are jostling, Sunny can feel that one of the swarthy men jostling with her has a gun, which he naturally pulls out as part of an assassination attempt. Sunny foils it by trying to bite the man. Not that she cares about the Emir; as far as she knows they could be trying to kill the President (has that happened recently?). Sunny, for her troubles, gets shot in the butt.

However, stopping the attempt and getting shot in it makes her a national hero, even if an unlikely one. The people at the State Department know there's the possibility of a major international incident, and to be fair, that would be the case with any schlub getting involved in an attempt like this. Nobody seems to think about what's going to happen to Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day after the end of The Man Who Knew Too Much. Sunny is going to be thrust before the press at some point, so the State Department sends one of their flaks, Michael Ransome (Chris Sarandon), to help Sunny. Sure enough, her answers at the press conference are so anodyne that everyone can interpret them as being positive toward them, and a couple of political handlers think Sunny can be useful to the current administration.

With that in mind, Sunny is offered a job in the Protocol Office of the State Department. She's so naïve that she doesn't even know what protocol means in this regard, but when she hears how much of a jump in salary she'll be getting, she takes the job. And, in one of those most highly original plot twists, Sunny decides like Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday that she's going to start doing her homework and learn what protocol actually is. Sunny also doesn't yet realize that the US and Othar have been in negotiations to build a US military base there due to its strategic location -- and that she herself is about to become part of the negotations.

The Emir returns to the US for a private visit, and wants to see Sunny, which could easily enough be seen as a way to thank her away from the cameras for saving his life. The US would like Sunny to show him a good time, which she does by taking him and his entourage to Lou's, ensuring Lou's financial survival. However, this visit was really about getting the Emir to accept Sunny as his next wife and grease the skids for that military base. When Sunny gets to Othar and discovers she's being used, sparks fly. Of course, sparks also fly because the Otharian opposition picked precisely this moment to try a coup d'état.

Protocol is one of those movies that starts off with a reasonably good idea; after all, a lot of reviewers back in the day brought up Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. The screenplay (by Buck Henry), is also written with a view to allowing Goldie Hawn to display her screen persona, which she does quite well. Unfortunately, the second half of the story gets extremely lazy, playing to all sorts of stereotypes. Forty years on, people are going to complain most loudly about the portrayal of the Arabs, but the government officials also wind up being cardboard cutouts and the story line winds up fairly unoriginal.

Still, with Goldie Hawn's performance, she elevates Protocol into an 80s time capsule that's worth one watch.

TCM's Maggie Smith tribute

Michael Caine and Maggie Smith as a feuding couple in California Suite, not part of the tribute but the one picture of her I had

Two-time Oscar-winning actress Maggie Smith died in September at the age of 89. TCM is finally getting around to its programming tribute to her, which will take up all of prime time this evening. There will be five of her movies:

8:00 PM Nowhere to Go, a British movie from early in Smith's career;
10:00 PM The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which won Smith her first Oscar for her role as a free-thinking teacher in the 1930s;
Midnight Travels With My Aunt, with Smith as the bohemian aunt who shakes up her nephew's (Alec McCowen) life;
2:00 AM A Room With a View, where Smith plays the older traveling companion of Helena Bonham Carter in Florence in the early 20th century; and
4:00 AM Young Cassidy, which is really a vehicle for Rod Taylor as Irish playwright Sean O'Casey and sees Smith playing one of O'Casey's many lovers.

I don't think I'd ever heard of Nowhere to Go before; I saw the first half hour or so of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie once many years ago and had it on my DVR at my old house but never got around to watching it before I moved and had to return the DVR when I changed service providers. So I've got two more things to record and eventually get around to reviewing.

America, America

Another of those movies that shows up from time to time on TCM but that I had never actually seen before was Elia Kazan's America, America. With that in mind, the last time it was on TCM, I recorded it, and recently finally got around to watching it off my DVR.

America, America was a very personal movie for Kazan, based on the life story of his uncle who emigrated from the Ottoman Empire to the United States, something that eventually gave Kazan himself the chance to succeed; as a measure of how personal it is there's opening narration by Elia Kazan. The story opens in the mid-1890s in central Anatolia, which is now in the middle of the Asian part of Turkey. The region was much more multi-ethnic then than now, with a Turkish Muslim majority and Christian minorities of Greeks and Armenians, among others. As in many other multi-ethnic societies of the era, the minorities were in a decided second-class position. Stavros, the character based on Kazan's uncle, is friends with an Armenian, Vartan, and the two also work together hauling ice down from the mountain.

But as I said, both are second class citizens, and as the movie opens the authorities in a faraway provincial capital are worried about the Armenians getting uppity and agitating for more freedoms, so the provincial authorities want their local subordinates to do something about it. This leads to a pogrom against the Armenians that leaves Vartan dead, and the rest of Stavros' large family to realize it's dangerous for him even to have an Armenian friend. I guess it's part of the point of what the majority Turks were doing to get the various minority groups pitted against one another.

Stavros has heard about America and how it's a land of opportunity, so his ultimate goal is somehow, anyhow, to make it to America and earn enough of a living that perhaps he can bring over the rest of his family. They, however, only want to get to Constantinople since that's apparently safer for Greeks than inland Anatolia and they've got a wealthy cousin Aleko there who can help them. Still, it's a huge sacrifice just to try to get Stavros there, never mind that he doesn't want to stay there once -- if -- he makes it. It's also a sacrifice for Stavros, as along the way he's fleeced out of everything by a dishonest traveling companion.

Stavros does finally make it to Constantinople only to discover that said wealthy cousin is not wealthy at all, but running a failing carpet business that barely sells any carpets. Stavros, however, in the mind of cousin Aleko, brings two assets, a penis and a pulse. Aleko knows some wealthy Greeks who have a daughter hitherto unmarriageable because of her subpar looks. Stavros would be just the right man for the job, not that he wants it. At best, he would take the dowry money and use it to get to America.

Stavros endures all sorts of horrors in his attempts to get the money to get passage, but thinks begin to look up when an Armenian couple who already emigrated to America and made it come back in order to buy an authentic carpet. The wife is trapped in a loveless marriage, so takes to Stavros, eventually showering him with enough money to book passage and wind up on the same ship as the couple. Also on the boat is a friend Stavros made in Constantinople, who got passage as part of a labor scheme where an American sponsor provides passage in exchange for a couple of years' work on the other side. Both Stavros and his friend, however, are still going to face problems getting through Ellis Island....

For me, the big problem with America, America is that it runs something close to 170 minutes. It's got a glacial pace despite the fact that seemingly a lot happens on the way from the Anatolian interior to Ellis Island. This being a personal project for Kazan, he faces the same problem that a lot of actors who turn director then directing themselves face, that of not knowing (or caring) when to tone things down or rein themselves in. Still, America, America is a worthwhile story, and maybe the sort of thing that should have been written to be paced for a TV miniseries. Not that such miniseries were being made in the early 1960s however, and not that Kazan would have deigned to work for the small screen.

I was an American Spy

Another movie that I put on my DVR because it sounded moderately interesting was the World War II docudrama I Was an American Spy. Recently, I got around to watching it, so now is the time for me to do a review on it.

The movie opens with US Army 4-star general Mark Clark as himself informing us that we're going to see the true story of one Claire Phillips (Ann Dvorak) and hoping that, if Americans should ever be faced with such danger again, would respond with as much courage as Claire did. More amusingly, however, is that Clark seems to keep looking off to the side, when it suddenly hit me that Clark is likely looking at cue cards! Clark was no professional actor or even voiceover guy.

Flash back to the morning of Dec. 8, 1941, in Manila, which was part of the US territory of the Philippines at the time. Now, you'll recall the date of Dec. 7, but since Manila is something like 18 hours ahead, the attack on Pearl Harbor occurred in the early hours of Dec. 8 Manila time, and most people wouldn't have heard about it until the following morning. Needless to say, when Claire wakes up, the place is a mad-house. She works at a nightclub and has a foster daughter, and everybody is telling her to get the hell out of the Philippines since it's clear the Japanese are going to attack.

Claire is obscenely naïve, however, for a woman working in a place like this. She's got an American soldier boyfriend in Sgt. John Phillips (Douglas Kennedy), whom she's been hoping to marry. She thinks she can just call up the base and get in touch with him. Eventually, he does show up, but it's only to let her know briefly they're going to be split up. Claire, her daughter, and a Filipina friend leave Manila, but they're well behind most of the westerners when an American GI drives by in a jeep to inform them he's part of the mop-up crew. Still, by some miracle, Claire is spotted and reunited with Sgt. John just long enough for them to get married.

Some time later, Claire is rescued again, this time by a band of American guerrillas who, for whatever reason, all got separated from their units and escaped to the jungle hills from where they're doing what they can for the war effort. Claire, still being an idiot, wants to go down the hill to look for her husband, but the guerrilla commander, Cpl. John Boone (Gene Evans), tries to inform her of the danger. Eventually they do go down the hill, only to find the Japanese forcing a bunch of soldiers on what we now know as the Bataan Death March. Amazingly, Sgt. John is among them. But he tries to stop for water and gets shot by the Japanese for his troubles. That night, Claire shoots a Japanese soldier.

Cpl. John tells Claire that what the guerrillas really need is intelligence. Claire thinks she can provide that, as the Japanese are less likely to suspect a woman and because she's less use to the guerrillas in the jungle than she is trying to gather intelligence. So she decides to get herself smuggled back into Manila, taking the code name "High Pockets" when Cpl. John sees her stashing stuff in her bra!

In Manila, Claire is able to get the passport of a former Italian friend, since deceased, and pass herself off as Italian which will allow her to stay in Manila since Japan and Italy were fellow Axis countries. Claire sets out to gather intelligence, and is quite good at it, at least until the Japanese suspect something is going on and set out to find High Pockets.

I Was an American Spy is a decided B movie, the sort of thing that a decade or two later probably would have been churned out as a TV movie of the week. There's nothing special here, but the movie is at least moderately entertaining.

Gloria in Brazil

In addition to having a bunch of foreign films on my DVR to get through, I've mentioned that I recorded several films during the spring run of Two for One on TCM. Since that miniseries is being replayed, I've been going through those movies to do posts on as well. Next up is a film that ticks both checkboxes, a foreign film that was selected by Two For One co-host Gina Prince-Bythewood: Central Station. It airs tonight (Dec. 7) at 8:00 PM.

Fernanda Montenegro plays Dona Dora, a retired schoolteacher living in a shabby apartment in Rio de Janeiro. To help make ends meet in her retirement, she goes down to Rio's Central train station every day and provides a service for the illiterates passing through the station: she takes dictation and writes letters that the illiterates want to send to someone in a distant part of Brazil. Dora also seems to act partly as a Lucy from Peanuts-style psychiatric counselor as well as knowing how to help her clients write their letters well. However, Dora is jaded, and sometimes doesn't actually send the letters as she reveals to her best friend and neighbor Irene.

One day, Ana shows up with her nine-year-old son Josué asking Dora to write a letter to Josué's father Jésus, who lives in the northeastern Brazilian state of Pernambuco. Jésus drank heavily and presumably beat Ana which is why she fled to Rio where she could blend in to the mass of humanity. But Josué has been wondering about his father, and Ana is thinking now might be a good time for them to meet. Dora, however, plans not to send this letter either. The next day, Ana comes back asking to edit the letter, but after this meeting, Ana leaves the train station and gets run over by a bus, killing her.

Josué apparently doesn't have a home in Rio to go back to, and certainly doesn't have any family in the city, so Dora takes him back to her apartment. That's not a very good arrangement either, so ultimately one of the other people at the station with a stall has the idea of taking Josué to an "agency" that supposedly sells orphaned Brazilian children to wealthy people in first-world countries looking for a child to adopt. This also gives Dora a goodly sum of money. However, Irene is no dummy, and knows that such "agencies" -- and why would such an agency be located in a nondescript tenement apartment? -- are at best fronts for human trafficking, with the possibility of something much worse. Fearing for Josué's safety, Dora decides to kidnap him from the agency. But the two people who run it want their money back, so Dora knows she's not going to be safe in her apartment. This leads her to try to take Josué up to Pernambuco to the address Ana wanted the letter sent to, in the hopes of reuniting Josué with his father. Along the way, Josué and Dora develop a close emotional bond, but will they ever find his father?

As I was watching Central Station, I couldn't help but think of the Gena Rowlands movie Gloria since I only watched it a few months back and both have the same theme of a woman on the run with a child presenting all sorts of problems. Each movie is excellent in its own way. Central Station has a tremendous Oscar-nominated performance by Montenegro. The story also works well, and the kid playing Josué isn't cloying.

Central Station may be set among the lower classes of Brazilian society, but the story it tells is one that's universal and touches on themes that anyone can get regardless of cultural upbringing. It's a film that's not to be missed.

Clash of the Titans (1981)

I was eight or nine years old when the first version of the movie Clash of the Titans was first in theaters. As such, I was much too young to have seen it in the theaters. Having been produced in part by MGM, it's a movie that shows up from time to time on TCM. Until now, I never actually watched it, so the last time it showed up I finally recorded it and watche it.

The movie starts off with an establishing scene of a Greek king banishing his daughter Danaë, who has recently given birth. That child, Perseus, is actually half-divine, having Zeus (Laurence Olivier) as a father, although of course neither son nor mother actually gets to see Zeus. Instead, they get washed ashore on a more idyllic island where Perseus is able to grow up (to be played as an adult by Harry Hamlin). Zeus, being ticked, kills Danaë's fahter, and released the Kraken, a sea monster.

Once Perseus becomes an adult, the sea goddess Thetis (Maggie Smith) transports Perseus to a Phoenician amphitheater where he meets Ammon (Burgess Meredith), who seems to have a way with weaponry. However, Ammon is being helped by the gods, who also help Perseus. Or at least some of them do, because the gods seem to be at war with each other. Part of that involves Phoenician queen Cassiopeia and her daughter Andromeda, who is supposed to be engaged to Thetis' son. But Andromeda asks difficult riddles of any potential suitor, killing anyone who can't solve the riddle. Perseus is smart, and has a few tricks up his sleeve to figure out the answer to the riddle Andromeda is going to ask him.

This really ticks off Thetis' son, so he gets Mommy to use the Kraken to go after Andromeda before Perseus can marry her. It's really difficult to defeat the Kraken, but once again Perseus is bright and knows who at least has the answer of how to defeat the Kraken, even if those people can't actually do it themselves. To beat the Kraken, Perseus is going to have to get the head of Medusa and use it against the Kraken. Of course, as we all know, Medusa can turn everybody to stone if the look at her.

For a mythology-based movie, Clash of the Titans has a surprisingly convoluted plot. It's probably better known for being the final film from the master of stop-motion photography, Ray Harryhausen, who produced a whole bunch of mythological creatures, some of which work better than others. Pegasus is way too obviously against rear-projection photography, but the owl Bubo is rather better. The big-name actors don't have a whole lot to do, while Hamlin is clearly there because he looks like what circa-1980 though of as a sex symbol what with the wavy hair. Think Michael Beck in Xanadu except that at least Hamlin is slightly more capable of an actor.

All that said, Clash of the Titans is a movie that will appeal to younger viewers who may not care so much about the effects. Fans of Ray Harryhausen will also enjoy it, I think. But it is a movie that is not without its flaws.