Titas Ekti Nadir Naam

I've mentioned a couple of times over the past few months that I've got a bunch of foreign movies on my YouTube TV DVR that I won't necessarily get around to watching before they expire, for any number of reasons. One that I did, however, make a point to watch before it expired is the Bengali-language movie A River Called Titas.

The movie is really two films in one, with a couple of characters in both halves, with an extra character being the river Titas itself (now in Bangladesh; at the time the novel on which the movie was based was written it was still East Pakistan and the events in the movie are set over enough time that many events are definitely East Pakistan). In one of the villages along the river -- at least along the river for now; it forms channels which apparently dry up and change course over decadal time frames -- the villagers eke out a living by fishing, and by making jute from the appropriate plants from which they can make their nets as well as other things when they have excess fiber. Kishore is a young man in the village, who has a friend Subla. Basanti is a younger girl who, in a world without arranged marriages, might well grow up to marry Kishore. But Kishore goes off to a neighboring village where there's a festival going on, and there he's introduced to Rajar Jhi and summarily married off to her. He's going to bring her back to his village, but on the way back, river bandits waylay their boat and kidnap Rajah Jhi, who later escapes but floats to the river bank where she's found by unknown locals.

Kishore returned to his home village and, assuming that his wife was killed, goes mad. He doesn't know that his wife was found alive, or that he had impregnated her on the one night they were married. Fast forward 10 years, and Rajar Jhi has a son. As a widow she's seen as damaged goods, and she's taken to another village where hopefully they can find useful work for her. Coincidentally, that just happens to be the same village where Kishore and Basanti still live, Basanti being a widow too. Also somehow amazingly, neither Rajar Jhi nor Kishore seem to recognize each other. Well, Rajar Jhi seems to have some idea that she just has to be the soulmate for the poor benighted Kishore, although she doesn't let on why. Eventually Rajar Jhi and Kishore suffer a tragic fate.

More time passes, and Rajar Jhi's kid went off to a big city, where he was raised in polite society. The villagers, with the course of the river changing, are making less money from fishing. As a result, they're falling ever deeper into debt. The cooperative company which holds the debt, and which seems to be run by Muslims while the villagers are Hindus although this theme isn't explored in any depth in the film, wants to call in the debt, take over the village, and use the land for farmers. This takes up the entire second half of the movie, and seems to be an almost completely different movie from the first half although Basanti is still there.

A River Called Titas is a movie that was very well photographed, and would probably look really good if all of the original film elements had stayed in good condition. The bad news, however, is that the movie is all over the place in terms of plotting and pacing, with it in many ways feeling like it really should have been planned as two movies even if some of the characters appear in both halves. Stylistically, it fits in the tradition of Italian neo-realism, or perhaps Agnès Varda's La Point Courte, the latter being about a fishing village and having a clumsy tacked-on plot as well. Still, A River Called Titas probably should be seen once despite its flaws.

Gene Hackman, 1930-2025

Gene Hackman (r.) with Roy Scheider in the film that won him his first Oscar, The French Connection (1971)

Despite the fact that he turned 95 last month, it was still shocking to see the news this morning that Oscar-winning actor Gene Hackman had died. Of course, that's because he died together with his wife and the family dog, which makes it sound like carbon monoxide poisoning or something similar; I haven't paid that close attention to the latest news.

Hackman's career spanned some 40 years, with his first big breakout role being in the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde. It would only take a few more years before Hackman got that Oscar winning role as Popeye Doyle in The French Connection. Several other high-quality roles followed; I've got Superman: The Movie on my DVR but haven't gotten around to watching it yet. Hackman's diverse filmography includes westerns like Unforgiven which won him his second Oscar; action films like the remake of The Narrow Margin; and even period pieces like Reds and Hoosiers.

I haven't seen anything yet about a TCM tribute, although of course TCM's website is terrible for that sort of thing since the new redesign. I'm sure news will come out eventually.

Miracle full of pockets

Fairly early on in the history of this blog, I did a post on the 1993 movie Lady for a Day. It was directed by Frank Capra who, at the end of his career, remade it and slightly expanded the storyline under the title Pocketful of Miracles. The last time TCM showed Pocketful of Miracles, I recorded it, and finally got around to watching it so that I could do the review here.

It's the early 1930s, which means that there's already a Depression on, and it's still in the era of Prohibition. So there's a large financial gap between those out of jobs and those who have amassed fortunes in the illicit part of the economy. In the former is Annie, better known as Apple Annie (Bette Davis). She sells apples to make a meager living; one of her regular buyers is a guy called Dave the Dude (Glenn Ford). Dave is a superstitious dude, buying the apples from Annie because he thinks they bring him good luck. But instead of -- or maybe in addition to -- bringing him luck, he's also brought the presence of one Queenie Martin (Hope Lange).

This time around, Queenie is the daughter of a former acquaintance of Dave's. Her dad amassed gambling debts, and when he couldn't pay, he was killed. Queenie is hoping she can do something to show good faith. Dave, influenced by Annie's advice, gives Queenie a nightclub and makes her a star. Indeed, she's able to pay off the debts with the proceeds from her club, although she's eventually going to have to close once Franklin Roosevelt gets elected President and helps get Prohibition ended.

But that's a subplot, of course. The main story involves Annie. She's got a daughter Louise who somehow wound up being raised by nuns in Spain for reasons that I don't think are mentioned well enough in either version of the movie. Louise is all grown up, and has actually done well for herself, finding a boyfriend Carlos who is the son of a count, Count Romero (Arthur O'Connell). Louise (played by Ann-Margret at the beginning of her career) wants to bring her fiancé and her future father-in-law to meet Mom, which is where things hit a serious hitch.

Mom, of course, peddles apples to make a few bucks. But she's been lying for years to Louise. Instead, with the help of a hotel doorman, she's been getting hotel stationery and claiming to be living in one of those grand old apartment hotels. Annie just knows that when Louise finds out the truth, she'll be heartbroken. Worse, once the truth is revealed, Louise's fiancé will no longer want to marry her. Queenie and the others come up with the idea to put on a charade for just long enough to keep the Romeros in the dark until they head back to Spain that Annie really is a society lady with a judge for a husband and high-class friends. But will the charade work?

Well, if you've seen Lady for a Day, you'll know that the answer is yes, because a movie like this really wouldn't do with a downbeat ending. Having said that, I think Lady for a Day is a better movie for a host of reasons. One is that it was a contemporary film, having been released in 1933. Pocketful of Miracles is instead a period piece, so all of the backlot shooting really feels more out of place than a 1933-set movie actually filmed in 1933.

Pocketful of Miracles is also a good (or bad) 40 minutes longer, given in part to a new subplot about a Chicago gangster visiting New York as well as some nightclub numbers for Hope Lange. Lady for a Day is brisk; Pocketful of Miracles feels plodding. So of the two movies, I'd definitely recommend Lady for a Day well before I'd recommend Pocketful of Miracles.

Reassessing Going My Way

I think I've mentioned a couple of times in the past that I have a disdain for the movie Going My Way, and that I think it's one of the times the people who vote on the Academy Awards really got things wrong. It's on TCM as part of 31 Days of Oscar, and that airing comes up tonight, February 26, at 8:00 PM. As I had it on my DVR, I figured I'd give it another watch to do an in-depth post on it.

Bing Crosby won the Best Actor Oscar, although we first see the other Best Actor nominee, Barry Fitzgerald. (Fitzgerald was nominated for both Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor, winning the latter. The Academy changed the rules so that this couldn't happen again.) Fitzgerald plays Fr. Fitzgibbon, who's been the head priest at the parish of St. Dominic's in New York ever since the church was consecrated back in the 1890s. The church has a mortgage on it, which the holder, Ted Haines Sr. (Gene Lockhart) wants to call in, and Fr. Fitzgibbon is up there in years. It's to the point where he should probably just retire, so the bishop sends in another priest ostensibly as an assistant but whose real job is to take over. That priest is Fr. O'Malley (Bing Crosby).

Fr. O'Malley has a backstory of his own. He grew up in St. Louis and had to choose between music and the priesthood, obviously having selected the latter. His childhood friend Timothy O'Dowd (Frank McHugh) also became a priest, and is working in a neighboring parish. Anyhow, before accepting the calling to become a priest, O'Malley had a girlfriend named Jenny who was a musical talent herself, eventually joining an opera company and traveling the world. It's that travel that caused her not to receive the letter from O'Malley informing her that he was going to take Holy Orders and could therefore no longer have her as a girlfriend. She goes on to bigger things, changes her name to Genevieve (Risë Stevens) and becomes a singer at the Met, running into O'Malley again.

O'Malley, as the stereotypical newcomer often does, shakes things up as everybody seems to love him. He helps a young woman named Carol get a job; Carol eventually meets Ted Haines Jr. and the two wind up getting married without informing his father. O'Malley tries to sell some of the songs he's written, while bringing some music to the parish by setting up a boys' choir that becomes quite successful. O'Malley does enough good work to make St. Dominic's a going concern again that the bishop decides to give him a parish fully of his own and bring in O'Dowd to work as the new "assistant" to Fr. Fitzgibbon. But there are still a few more twists along the way.

Having watched Going My Way again, I still don't particularly like it, although I don't know that I have quite as much disdain for it as I had in the past. That's in part because I realize now that one of the things the movie had going for it was being released in the middle of World War II, at a time when audiences on the homefront were in need of a movie like this to soothe their discomforts in an age when there was thoroughly stressful news of the war all around them.

However, I will also say that I still hold to my view that the Academy got things badly wrong in selecting Going My Way for the Oscars that it won. Alexander Knox should have been a runaway winner of Best Actor for Wilson, even more so if you think that Crosby and Fitzgerald might have split a few votes. It's certainly not the Best Picture of 1944; that honor probably from a hindsight/revisionist point of view would go to Double Indemnity. From the point of view of 1944, even a homefront picture like Since You Went Away is better than Going My Way. And I still believe that 1944 is the one year that Alfred Hitchcock was robbed of the Best Director award. He was nominated five times and the other four lost to some remarkable directorial work. But his portrayal of mob justice in Lifeboat and doing it on a deliberately limited set in the way he does is really quite remarkable; like Knox, he should have been a heavy favorite.

The other thing working against Going My Way is that it runs a little over two hours. Not only is it syrupy, it's a slow-moving syrup where you want everyone to get on with things. Still, Going My Way was wildly popular on its original relase, so maybe some viewers today will liek it too.

Lili

Surprisingly enough, even during 31 Days of Oscar there are some older movies that I haven't done blog posts about before, and that I have on my DVR. Among them is one that I'll admit I hadn't watched before now because I wasn't certain it would interest me. But it's the sort of movie where I probably ought to rectify not having watched it, considering it won an Oscar: Lili. It gets its next airing overnight tonight at 12:30 AM, which is technically February 26 in the eastern time zone but still February 25 in more westerly time zones.

Leslie Caron plays Lili, and as the movie opens she's a 16-year-old girl who lost her mother at some point in the past while her father has just died, leaving her an orphan. She's from some sort of small French town, and has come to another small town looking for an old friend of her father's who might be able to tell her. But that friend has died, too, and Lili, being naïve, is at risk of being exploited by somebody. She's rescued by Marc (Jean-Pierre Aumont), who works as a magician for a traveling carnival. Marc gets her a job, but it's going to require traveling with the carnival.

In response, Lili develops a crush on Marc, not realizing that he's married to his assistant Rosalie (Zsa Zsa Gabor). She's so infatuated with Marc that she doesn't pay attention to the job she has with the carnival, that of waiting tables, instead watching Marc's magic act. She's going to need to do something different than waitressing. And just wait until she learns that Marc and Rosalie are married.

On the first point, she's mildly lucky. Another part of the carnival is the puppet show, with the puppets manned by Paul (Mel Ferrer) and his assistant Jacquot (Kurt Kasznar). Paul used to be a dancer, but he was injured fighting for the Free French in World War II and can no longer dance as a result. This is why he got into puppeteering, but has also left him bitter and using the puppets as a surrogate to communicate with the outside world. Lili, being immature, talks to the puppets as though they're real characters.

But this interaction is actually a stroke of unintentional genius, as using a human to communicate with the puppets as part of the show is something that really draws in the carnival viewers. And Paul and Jacquot use the conversations they have with Lili to turn the puppet show almost into an improv show. But will everybody's personal issues destroy the whole show?

Lili is in some ways a strange little movie, in that it defies genres. You'd think it should be a musical, and there is a fantasy dance number at the end. But it doesn't quite have as much music as the Freed Unit musicals that MGM was putting out did. Lili is also so immature that the way the adult men treat her comes across as creepy at times.

However, Leslie Caron does a fine acting job, picking up an Oscar nomination along the way. Lili was a big box-office hit, and it's easy to see why it would appeal to a lot of people. I don't quite share that appeal, to be honest, but a lot of viewers even today probably will find it appealing.

Not to be confused with the Donna Summer song

Among the actors honored in Summer Under the Stars last August was Ossie Davis, and this of course gave me the opportunity to record several movies I hadn't heard of. (One turned out to be a TV movie, since there apparently weren't enough film roles to spotlight.) Some of the roles were also decidedly supporting roles, as in Hot Stuff.

The nominal star, and also director, was Dom DeLuise. He plays Ernie Fortunato, and as the movie opens he's in a pre-credits car chase, riding shotgun with Doug (Jerry Reed) and their friend Ramon (Luis Ávalos) in the back seat, going along the roads of Miami. The scene makes it seem is though Hot Stuff is going to be some sort of caper movie, although after the car chase and shootout it's revealed that Ernie and friends are actually undercover police detectives in Miami, working for Captain Geiberger (Ossie Davis).

After the credits, Ernie and friends are patrolling the streets of Miami, spotting someone who looks like he's stolen a guitar. The cops give chase, only to be waylaid by a woman, Louise (Suzanne Pleshette). They're none too pleased about getting a gun drawn on them by this woman, but the punchline for this scene is that she too is a police detective and didn't realize that she was aiming her gun at some of her colleagues.

All of them are irritated by the idea that all of the people stealing expensive goods and then fencing the goods are getting away with it. So they come up with a daring idea: find some warehouse space to rent, and set themselves up as procurers of stolen goods, which they'll keep in the warehouse in back as evidence of the crimes that other people are committing. They'll also set up a hidden camera and film the transactions as well as taking down all of the names of the people selling them stolen goods. Capt. Geiberger isn't too certain of the scheme, but lets them go ahead with it on the proviso that if they're caught out Geiberger and his superiors will disavow all knowledge of the scheme.

Ernie and his friends quickly prove themselves to be almost the gang that couldn't shoot straight, to the point that you wonder how they're not discovered to be cops almost from the first transaction. But then Hot Stuff is a comedy. A good portion of the comedy comes from the seeming incompetence of the police, while some comes from the wacky criminals who fence stuff and the stuff that they're fencing.

Eventually, the cops run out of money to buy more stuff, and it might be time to make arrests, but how to do so without breaking cover? Obviously with the first person they arrest everybody else is going to get word and disappear. So the cops come up with another audacious plan, which is to have a big party for everybody who does business with them, and do a mass arrest at that party.

Having watched several Dom DeLuise movies, one thing I've concluded is that he was the sort of actor who worked well as a character actor and needed to have someone as director who could rein him in. In Hot Stuff, however, DeLuise is the nominal lead (although it's really an ensemble cast), and he's directing himself. So the material is somewhat out of control and much of it feels as though you wonder whether DeLuise had any knowledge of police work. Even with those problems, however, the material just about works since everybody seems like they're having a lot of fun making the movie.

Hot Stuff isn't a terrible movie, but having watched it, I can see why it's the sort of movie that fell into obscurity.

Mourning Becomes Electra

I mentioned back in November that TCM had a double-feature of Rosalind Russell movies I hadn't seen before. One of them was the movie version of Eugene O'Neill's play Mourning Becomes Electra, which I finally got around to watching.

The movie, like the play, is divided into three parts. The first, called Homecoming, is set in April 1865. In a small town in New England, news is reaching the locals that it looks as though the Civil War is finally about to end, although news of Lee's surrender hasn't been made official. The town is dominated by the Mannons, although all of them are out of town. Patriarch Ezra (Raymond Massey) and son Orin (Michael Redgrave) have been off fighting, while mom Christine (Katina Paxinou) and daughter Lavinia (Rosalind Russell) are both off in New York, although not together. Tending the house is groundskeeper Seth (Henry Hull), who serves as a sort of Greek chorus for this tragedy, giving a bit of backstory to some locals who have never been in the house because the Mannons have a complicated relationship and keep outsiders out as much as possible.

In New York, Lavinia spies on Mom, and follows her to the house of ship's captain Adam Brant (Leo Genn). Worse, Lavinia sees Mom kiss Adam. This pisses Lavinia off, in part because Mom's being unfaithful, but also in part because Lavinia herself has the hots for Adam. Further complicating things is a legend that Adam is actually a cousin to Lavinia: Ezra's brother ran off with the nurse ages ago, leading Ezra to destroy the previous iteration of the Mannon house and build a magnificent new one. Adam would be the now adult child of that relationship. Meanwhile, Lavinia's got another man pursuing her in the form of Peter Niles (Kirk Douglas). He's been in love with Lavinia, and his sister Hazel (Nancy Coleman) has been interested in Orin. But Lavinia wanted to put off marriage until she knows that Peter would survive the war.

Dad and brother Orin eventually return from the war, although Dad is in many ways a broken man. He's already getting up there in years considering how he's already got two adult children and he's reaching the age where it's not uncommon for a man to suffer a fatal heart attack, especially if he's spent four years fighting a stressful war. Lavinia knows about Mom's dalliance with Brant, and knows that if Dad learns about it, it will kill him. Worse, Mom is becoming the vindictive sort of person who would tell the husband she hates about this affair just so it will kill him and leave Mom free to marry Brant. And if that doesn't do it, Mom can always try to get some poison that will do the job.

Unbelievable, all of this drama happens just in The Homecoming. We're an hour into the movie, and we've got two more sections to deal with. The Hunted deals with the aftermath of the death of the patriarch. Orin doesn't seem ready to take over the family, especially considering the sort of relationship he had with his mother. He too wouldn't be able to deal with learning about Mom's relationship with Adam. Lavinia tries to turn Orin against Mom by making him see that Mom has been having that affair with Adam, while Christine tries to turn him against his own sister by claiming to him that Lavinia is going insane. And then comes The Haunted. By now, Mom has died, too, but Orin and Lavinia can't escape their respective pasts.

I've never seen the stage version of Mourning Becomes Electra, which as I understand goes on even longer than the movie version, which is long at 159 minutes. At least, it's 159 minutes in the print TCM ran. Supposedly the original cut was even longer (which would make sense if the play was longer), and that got edited down to under two hours for American audiences with the British still getting the 159-minute version. In any case, it's a slog. It's easy to see why the movie was a box office failure.

However, Rosalind Russell gives a fine performance and picked up an Oscar nomination, as did Michael Redgrave. Kirk Douglas was just starting out at this point; I think this is even before Out of the Past. So he doesn't have all that much to do, although he shows he's a more than capable actor. It's just a shame that nobody could figure out how to edit the material down into something that would work if conceived as a two-hour film.

The Walking Stick

I think I've mentioned that I've got a disproportionate number of British movies (or, at least, some made in part by the British arm of a US studio) to blog about. One that showed up late last year and was new to me was The Walking Stick. I recently got around to watching it which means that of course you get the obligatory post on it now.

Samanta Eggar is one of the two stars here, and the person who uses the titular walking stick. She plays Deborah Dainton, who at the start of the movie is leaving work in London one evening on her way back home in one of the leafier neighborhoods of London where she lives with her parents and two adult sisters, this being the era when it wasn't uncommon for adult children to keep living with parents until they got married. Deborah uses that walking stick because she had polio when she was young, being a "pre-Salk" kid as she refers to it. She was placed in an iron lung when she was sick as a child, and as a result doesn't like tight spaces or crowds.

When she gets home, she learns that one of her sisters is hosting the sort of grown-up party that adults have, reminiscent of the one in Loving since I just did a post on that a few weeks back. There, she's introduced to Leigh Hartley (David Hemmings). He's a starving artist who lives in a docklands part of London in the era before the gentrification and massive changes of the past 50 years or so. Deborah doesn't care to go out with Leigh, but he's very forward, and keeps calling her up, including at the auction house where she works as an appraiser. So eventually, she gives in and decides to go to the movies with him.

It feels as though this is the first time anybody has really taken notice of Deborah for something other than the disability, and she seems to be somewhat OK with the idea of being with this man bringing new and exciting things into her life. This, even though there are warning signs. When the two go to an estate sale at a manor house, Deborah points out how only one of the porcelain statuettes is authentic, with the rest being late 19th century reproductions. Leigh jokes about stealing the authentic piece, and even hides it under his jacket! And the people who come to visit him at his residence seem mildly dodgy, too.

The big warning sign, however, comes when Leigh is up front about asking Deborah for detailed information on the security systems at the auction house. He claims some people he knows are thinking of stealing the stuff that's stored there, and what difference would it make to the business since they're insured? The information would also be worth the £500 the two need to open up the antiques shop Deborah would really like to run. And yet, instead of immediately going to her bosses and telling them about the security breach, Deborah simply tries to get Leigh to ignore everything.

Of course, Leigh doesn't, and this only draws him and Deborah further into the heist scheme. Well, it draws Deborah further in; she starts wondering whether Leigh wasn't already in on it and the whole point of getting to know her was to get the information needed on the business' security arrangements. The heist happens although one of the alarms goes off. Deborah has to figure out what to do.

The Walking Stick is an interesting movie in several ways. One is as a time capsule of London as it was in 1969/1970. London has undergone a great deal of urban renewal since the production of movies like this (or 10 Rillington Place and Frenzy from a couple years later), and both the culture and physical locations no longer exist. As a film itself it also stands up well due to the good performances of both Eggar and Hemmings. The only issue I'd have is with the technique used to highlight Deborah's claustrophobia, which is to show a scene of young Deborah being locked into the iron lung, set against a black background. It feels way too artificial to me. But that's just a minor quibble. Finally, and it's just a bit of trivia, but this is the movie that introduced the cavatina that is much more famously used in The Deer Hunter.

If you get the chance, definitely watch The Walking Stick.

Not to be confused with 10

TCM had a tribute to Roger Corman back in July, and some of the movies the ran included intros and outros from when Corman sat down with Ben Mankiewicz in 2016 to do a retrospective on his work when he Corman turned 90. One of the films I hadn't seen before was X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes. With a title like that, who wouldn't want to watch it?

Ray Milland plays Dr. James Xavier, and as the movie opens, he's getting an eye exam from colleage Dr. Brant (Harold J. Stone). Dr. Xavier is actually a research scientist working on improving vision for the foundation run in part by Dr. Diane Fairfax (Diana Van der Vlis). Xavier has the idea that perhaps a medicine can be found that would improve human vision beyond the standard range of visible light. Imagine the benefits to mankind if man could see X-rays, for example: doctors could look into the human body without cutting for blurry black-and-white X-ray images, and better diagnose without resorting to surgery what those images show. Or, at least, that's Dr. Xavier's theory; I'm not certain expanding the range of human vision would work that way.

Dr. Xavier has learned all he can by experimenting on monkeys; indeed, when he tries his new formula on one of the monkeys it's able to see through the white cardboard to see the blue and red cardboard as well but is unable to comprehend what it sees and promptly dies. So Dr. Xavier knows that he's going to have to experiment on himself, which seems like a dangerous but typically Hollywood thing to do. The potion Xavier drinks does seem to give him improved vision, although it's going to take him some training to learn how to deal with it.

Unfortunately, the formula also seems to have some side effects, although those don't show up until we get the more humorous and obligatory scenes such as one where his new-found vision ranges makes clothing invisible but not skin so he's able to see everybody naked. Oh, and this happens at a dance; watching Ray Milland try to do 1960s dancing is worth the price of admission all by itself. Eventually, though, it makes Dr. Xavier arrogant. Knowing from having used his X-ray vision that a fellow doctor is going to perform the wrong surgery, Xavier deliberately injures the doctor to prevent the surgery. And then getting into an argument afterwards, Xavier accidentally pushes the other doctor out a window, making him fall to his death.

Xavier knows he faces a murder rap, so he flees, first to the carnival shows at the Santa Monica pier where works for Crane (Don Rickles), and then further underground. But Crane figures out who Xavier is, and eventually Dr. Fairfax shows up again. Xavier has been using up what little of the formula he has left, but at the same time it's both giving him greater theoretical power and making him more unstable. Xavier needs more money to continue his research, and comes up with a plan to get it by reading cards in Las Vegas -- Xavier doesn't need to count cards; he can see right through the deck.

X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes is on the surface a fairly silly idea with a ton of plot holes, as Milland's vision always seems to work in just the way necessary to advance the plot. But it's another of those movies that's a heck of a lot of fun to watch. Milland gives it everything he's got, and Rickles is surprisingly effective in a non-comedic part. It's very much a piece of the 1960s, but that low budget lack of effects (at least by today's standards) is part of what makes X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes charming.

Gene Kelly does Rashomon

One of those movies that shows up often enough on TCM because it's an MGM picture, but that I never actually watched before, is Les Girls. With that in mind, I recorded it the last time it was on. It's getting another airing tomorrow (Feb. 21) at 10:15 AM, so now is a good time to watch the movie and do the post on it here.

The movie opens up in London, as a Lady Wren (Kay Kendall) is on trial for libel. She's written her memoirs, and one of the people she discusses in those memoirs, Angèle Ducros (Taina Elg) is none too pleased about what the good Lady wrote. Hence the lawsuit, which is making big news. Now, somewhat oddly to me although I don't know the finer points of British civil law in this regard, it's the defendant who's on the stand first.

Flash back several years to Paris (this being a civil trial it's happening in London because presumably the book was published there with with Lady Wren being British). Lady Wren is not yet Lady Wren, but a young woman with the given name Sybil who is a dancer and singer in a follies-type show that Barry Nichols (Gene Kelly) has been putting on called Les Girls. Also in the show is Barry himself, as well as American Joy Henderson (Mitzi Gaynor). They need a third woman, and Barry eventually picks Angèle. Now, one of Barry's rules is that the women are going to have to leave the show if they get married, since he understands that juggling marriage and being on the road just isn't going to work. Despite the fact that Sybil is already being pursued by Sir Gerald Wren, it's Angèle who is currently closest to getting married, to Pierre Ducros (Jacques Bergerac). There's also the question of Barry, as Sybil claims Barry is a playboy and that Angèle is interested in him. Angèle can't have Barry, of course, and in Sybil's telling of the story, the somewhat flighty Angèle eventually tries to commit suicide by turning on the gas as a result.

Now, of course, we know that the suicide attempt didn't succeed, and that both Sybil and Angèle will wind up married to the men who were pursuing them at the beginning of the movie, since everything is told in flashback. But, in any case, Sybil having put forward her story in evidence, it's time for Angèle to take the stand. She unsurprisingly has a somewhat different story. Sybil liked to drink, and despite having to keep Sir Gerald a secret, she's also trying to go after Barry. She's not, but that's a little white lie Joy and Angèle cooked up to keep Gerald from seeing his fiancée drunk. That lie causes other problems, of course. The troupe tries to fix things by taking a sojourn to Spain, but Sybil's drinking is enough of a problem that Barry is going to have to let her go, which leads Sybil, not Angèle, to try to commit suicide.

As you can see, these two stories are diametrically opposed, so to try to solve the case, the judge brings in someone more or less neutral in all this: Barry Nichols himself, who's flown in from America. We get the impression that if he's interested in any of Les Girls, it's Joy, since he's got pictures of her in his apartment. When he learns that both Sybil and Angèle have suitors, and the suitors approach him to try to come up with a way to solve the problem without hurting the women, Barry does something that reveals what really happened in Paris, and in a way that all of the principals are more or less happy in the end.

I've said before that I'm not the biggest fan of musicals, although when it comes to those that I prefer it tends to be the backstage musical, since at least in those cases the reasons for having the musical numbers makes more sense. Les Girls is most certainly in that vein, and coming up with a dramatic structure that's much like Rashomon is a very bright idea indeed. To be honest, the musical numbers here aren't the most memorable, with the exception of one between Kelly and Gaynor where he's parodying Marlon Brando in The Wild One. That aside, Les Girls also works as a 1950s version of the courtroom comedy, with enjoyable performances from all the main players.

Starting off on the wrong foot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hold Your Man

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another biggish movie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Man of the People

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Touch of Love

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the World in 80 Days

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Midnight Run

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A season of dryness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Benny's Video

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An incident out west

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Man Who Walked Alone

I've noticed that a lot of the old movies that Tubi has are from Producers Releasing Corporation or other non-major studios. One that I watched recently was The Man Who Walked Alone, still available on Tubi as of this writing.

The man in question is Marion Scott (Dave O'Brien), who as the movie opens is walking along a country road trying to hitch a road into town when he comes along a farmer on the other side of the fence who thinks Marion looks familiar. Marion not having Claudette Colbert's legs, nobody is stopping for him, at least not until he goes out in the middle of the road. A woman swerves to miss Marion, and blows out a tire as a result. She's none too happy about it, and generally a bit of a spoiled brat in general, this being a would-be screwball comedy. So Marion offers to change the tire in exchange for a drive into town.

The woman, who eventually reveals her name to be Willie, wonders why Marion isn't in uniform, the movie having been released in early 1945. But when the car runs out of gas and Marion goes to buy some, Willie looks in Marion's bag and sees a uniform, implying that Marion was probably injured in the war and demobbed after recovering or somesuch. But Willie doesn't let on about having found out. Indeed, she doesn't reveal anything about who she is, which is an issue when the cops pull her over claiming she's driving a stolen car.

Thanks to the Production Code being in effect and this being a light comedy, you can guess that Willie isn't really a car thief, but she's still stringing Marion along. Next, she claims to work for the Hammonds, a wealthy family in town, as their secretary. But she claims doesn't have a key to the home office, goading Marion to break in which of course brings the police back and get the two of them in trouble with the law again.

However, it's finally revealed that Willie is the daughter in the Hammond family and that the car is owned by Willie's fiancé, whom she isn't really in love with. She gives Marion a job, leaving him around the Hammond estate and giving him the chance to pursue Willie romantically. Eventually, Willie's family and fiancé return home, leading to the finale in which everybody's true story is revealed and you can guess who winds up with whom in the final reel.

The Man Who Walked Alone is a serviceable enough B comedy. It's nothing great and definitely formulaic, but it entertains for its brief running time. Still, the B nature of the movie combined with it's not having been made at one of the big Hollywood studios, it's obvious why the movie is one that's largely forgotten. Good enough to pass the time on a rainy day, but nothing great.

Briefs for February 9, 2024

I'm sorry to say that I haven't been paying quite as close attention to the upcoming TCM schedule as I probably should. There are a couple of movies that showed up in the past few days that I wouldn't have minded putting on my DVR but didn't notice aired until looking at the schedule this morning and seeing that they showed up over the past few days. I guess I'll have to open up the Watch TCM app (and sign in, since that one doesn't like to keep people logged in for more than a month or so, which is another story) to see if they're available.

The reason I looked up the TCM schedule is to see what TCM was showing tonight since it's Super Bowl Sunday here in the US. Specifically, I was wondering where there are enough Oscar-nominated movies about football for TCM to do a night of it in this year's 31 Days of Oscar format. Maybe, although I think fewer old movies about football actually got Oscar nominations. Crazylegs, which aired last year, got an editing nomination. And, of course, Walter Matthau won a Supporting Actor Oscar for The Fortune Cookie, which isn't even on this month's schedule. But Knute Rockne, All American? No Oscar nominations. Good News did get one in the original song category. But it all reminded me that back in the day, football wasn't really the subject of prestige movies. Boxing seemed to be a bigger deal, and TCM is doing a night of boxing movies on Wednesday.

For the record, tonight's TCM lineup is movies with trials, starting with To Kill a Mockingbird at 8:00 PM and including the always underrated Arthur Kennedy in Trial (2:45 AM).

I suppose TCM could have done movies in honor of somebody's birthday. Ronald Colman was born on this day in 1891. There's also Kathryn Grayson (born 1922), and among the living, Joe Pesci (turning 82) and Mia Farrow (turning 80). TCM seems to do well at getting the rights to Woody Allen's movies, but using those to honor Mia Farrow might be a bit of a touchy subject for some considering how their relationship ended.

My looks at the TCM schedule have been disproportionately looking at what's already on my DVR that's coming up again soon, since YouTube TV catches every showing of something you've put on your DVR until you tell it not to. The upcoming showings include America, America, tomorrow at noon; The Red Shoes at 5:30 PM Monday; and a couple of musicals on Wednesday, Easter Parade and Oklahoma. Several other recordings are on FXM, since they have a much more limited library.

The shallow six

Another of the movies that's been sitting on my DVR for several months is one from the later part of Alan Ladd's career, a new-to-me war film called The Deep Six.

Unforunately, the first thing I noticed is that the print TCM ran was in 4:3, and considering the image quality, it really did look panned and scanned. (IMDb says the original aspect ratio was 1.85:1.) After the opening credits, we go to Madison Avenue in New York, in September 1942. The war is on, of course, so we've got a lot of women working, such as Susan Cahill (Dianne Foster). One day, she travels out to Long Island to meet with one of the graphic artists, Alec Austen (Alan Ladd). It's quite surprising that he hasn't been called up into service yet, since he was in naval ROTC in college and the navy needs officers like him. Of course, that call up is going to come the following day. In the meantime, Alec develops feeling for Susan even though she's engaged to another man, and spends an afternoon with her on the beach.

Alec does eventually tell both Susan and his mother (Jeannette Nolan in a small part) about the call-up, since he kind of has to lest everyone wonder why he suddenly disappeared. This presents a problem, because Alec was raised Quaker, and Mom's still a practicing Quaker. Now, as you may know, one of the tenets of Quakerism is pacifism, so you might wonder why a Quaker would go into ROTC, but apparently Alec isn't particularly practicing any religion. Alec is stationed aboard the USS Poe, which is scheduled to sail from Brooklyn to San Francisco before heading out to action somewhere in the Pacific.

On the Poe, Alec meets the captain, Cmdr. Meredith (James Whitmore) and the executive officer, Lt. Comm. Edge (Keenan Wynn). Edge is responsible for assigning duties to each of the officers, which includes Alec who has the rank of lieutenant. So of course Edge is going to find out that Alec is Quaker by birth. Edge hates hates hates Alec for this, as he just knows that Alec is never going to be able to be a proper military man. Alec is quartered with the ship's doctor, Lt. Blanchard (Efrem Zimbalist Jr.), although the only true friend he makes over the course of the voyage is CPO Shapiro (William Bendix), nicknamed Frenchy for, well, reasons that are explained although it's not particuarly relevant to the plot.

Of course, the other officers eventually learn that Alec is a Quaker, and it also goes without saying that Alec's ability to perform combat duties are put to the test and found wanting because without that the movie wouldn't have much in the way of conflict or plot development. When the Poe makes it to San Franciso, Alec finds Susan waiting for him. She's willing to marry him now, and I mean now, and is also out there to visit her sister. But then a telegram comes that Susan's brother-in-law has been killed in action, and Alec doesn't want to put Susan under the emotional anguish of wondering where she too will lose a husband to the war.

The final destination for the Poe is Dutch Harbor, in the Aleutian Islands, which is one of the last outposts before the US Navy can head southwest to Japan. Of course, the Japanese did take Attu Island, one of the westernmost of the Aleutian Islands, and that's a plot point in the climax of the movie.

For me, the problem with The Deep Six is that it doesn't feel terribly original. Granted, there's only so much you can do with a war movie, but in the case of The Deep Six the unorigionality felt like a lot of clichés. There's a subplot about an Armenian-American sailor (played by Ross Bagdasarian) that to me came across as particularly tedious comic relief. It also doesn't help that it feels like the stars are mostly going through the motions. So The Deep Six is a decidedly lesser World War II movie.

Two weeks with sex

I'm getting close to the end of the movies that I recorded while Debbie Reynolds was TCM's Star of the Month back in March. This time, it's another of her supporting roles from early in her career: Two Weeks With Love.

As this was early in Reynolds' career, she was not yet the star here; that honor goes to Jane Powell. She plays Patti Robinson, eldest daughter in a middle-class family from the turn of the last century. The family goes up to the Catskills for a summer vacation at the same resort every year, and Patti, just having turned 17, is at the point where she wants to be treated like an adult and is none too pleased by having to go to this resort with her family. She's also irritated with other ways she's not treated like an adult, such as not yet being allowed to wear a corset. Dad (Louis Calhern) loves his family, but like a lot of fathers, doesn't quite know about teenage daughters, while Mom (Ann Harding) doesn't see Patti as an adult. Younger daughter Melba (Debbie Reynolds) is definitely not grown up, and there are two even younger brothers here for comic relief.

The Robinsons aren't the only people who go to the resort every summer at the same time, and the proprietor, Mr. Finlay (character actor Clinton Sundberg) knows all of them, while many of the guests, such as budding actress Valerie (Phyllis Kirk), a year or two older than Patti, looks forward to seeing Patti again. Meanwhile, Finlay's son Billy (Carleton Carpenter) is in the same position as Patti in that he's on the cusp of adulthood but his father won't treat him like a man yet. Billy has a thing for Patti, but she's not into him; instead, it's Melba who would like Billy.

There's one new guest at the resort: Cuban Demi Armendez (Ricardo Montalbán). He's apparently got enough name recognition, and is glamorous enough that any young woman would love to be approached by him. So it's no surprise that both Valerie and Patti express an interest in Demi. Patti, however, screws things up by tripping in the dining room and sending the contents of Billy's serving tray onto poor Demi! Demi forgives her though, and is willing to go with Patti for an ice cream soda, if only Mrs. Robinson weren't there to inform Patti that it's her bedtime. Valerie, of course, has no such curfew, and is there to pick up the pieces.

But Jane Powell is the star here, so we can expect that she's going to end up with Ricardo Montalbán in the final reel. However, it's going to take some twists and turns. Also, it's going to require both of the parents to come to their senses and realize their "little" girl is growing up. Likewise, you can expect Debbie Reynolds and Carleton Carpenter to end up together, especially when they sing the big hit "Abba Dabba Honeymoon".

Two Weeks with Love is an enjoyable piece of fluff, showing the sort of movie that the studio system could churn out and imbue with charm back in those days, and the sort of thing that I don't think could possibly be made today. Sure, it's all backlot stuff, and a latter-day version would look more realistic, but a version made today just wouldn't have the charm. So definitely catch Two Weeks with Love.

Hotel New Hampshire

Another of those movies I had sort of heard about when it first came out ages ago, but obviously never got to see because I was much too young when it was first released was The Hotel New Hampshire, based on a novel by John Irving. It finally showed up on TCM some months back, so I recorded it and only recently got around to watching it.

The movie opens up with a sort of introductory sequence of the parents in the Berry family (Beau Bridges and Lisa Banes) telling their kids yet again the story of how they met. Before World War II, they were working at a hotel and also at the hotel is an Austrian named Freud (Wallace Shawn, and this isn't Sigmund) who has a bear in what is not quite a sidecar. Freud goes back to Europe and survives the war, while the couple obviously gets married.

In the main action of the movie, it's the late 1950s or so, and the couple has five kids. Three of them are high school aged, and going to the same private school where Dad works. Frank (Paul McCrane) is gay; John (Rob Lowe) and Franny (Jodie Foster) share an incestuous love for each other; Lilly is a neurotic who thinks she's never going to grow any bigger; and Egg is the little kid. The Berrys are bullied at school by the richer kids, with the jocks going so far as to rape Fanny. (Seriously, and the movie is supposed to be more comedy than drama even if the rape scene is decidedly not comedy.)

And then one day Dad gets the idea to open a hotel since he teaches at a boarding school and the parents are going to have to have someplace to stay. So they buy an old Catholic girls' school and set about renovating it, eventually calling it the Hotel New Hampshire. They also bring in Grandpa (Wilford Brimley) to live with them. At the hotel, the three eldest kids use the public address system that the school had to eavesdrop on the various rooms, including listening to people having sex, including John when he loses his virginity with one of the maids.

The Berry family continues to have quirky adventures, such as a dog having to be put down and Frank wanting to learn taxidermy so he can stuff the dog; that move however backfires pretty seriously. John takes up weightlifting, which is just an excuse to get him out of his shirt more and have him be even more sex-obsessed. All of these adventures come to and end, however -- are at least become a decidedly different set of adventures, when Dad receives a letter from Freud. Freud has gone blind and is trying to manage a Pension in Vienna and suggests that perhaps the Berrys could come over and take over the place.

Amazingly, they drop everything and do, and wind up at a place that's functioning as a brothel on the top floor, while also being home in the basement to a bunch of Communist revolutionaries who are perfectly willing to undertake a bombing campaign.

For me, the problem with The Hotel New Hampshire is that it's way too quirky for its own good and trying to jam way too much stuff into the movie. I haven't read John Irving's original book, but from the reviews I read this movie is considered to be a pretty faithful adaptation of something that's not a particularly cinematic book, which is why the movie has the problems it does. Never mind the iconoclastic treatment of certain topics, either. I'll also add that as a measure of the complexity of the movie, there are a couple of main characters I haven't even mentioned.

At the same time, because of the quirky nature of the movie, there are going to be people who absolutely love The Hotel New Hampshire. So definitely watch and judge for yourself.

You've got a lovely daughter

TCM's 31 Days of Oscar tends to bring a selection of movies to the channel that is on average more recent. I do, of course, say "more recent" in the sense of only being closer to the present day that the regular selection of TCM movies. One such film that I've got on my DVR only goes back to 1997: Mrs Brown, which airs tonight (Feb. 5) at 8:00 PM on TCM.

Judi Dench plays Queen Victoria, and the opening title cards give some background information to anyone who might not know that much about British history. Victoria came to the throne at the age of 18 in 1837, even before she got married to Prince Albert. By all accounts this was a happy marriage, right up until Albert's death at a relatively young age even by the standards of the day back in 1861. As a result of her beloved husband's death, Victoria went into a period of mourning that lasted for years. This greatly worried many of the people around Victoria, both for personal reasons and the fact that some in Britain began to question the institution of a monarchy.

With that in mind, someone in the entourage around Victoria comes up with an idea. Prince Albert liked to go horseback riding and hunting up at Balmoral Castle in the Scottish Highlands. There, he was assisted by an able servant and highlands guide named John Brown (Billy Connolly). Why not bring Brown down to the Isle of Wight where Victoria is holed up, if you can call it that for such a large entourage, and perhaps Victoria can, with at least horseback riding, take the first steps toward resuming her public duties.

John heads south, and shows able duty, although to the point that it's irritating for the rest of the folks at court because he's so unorthodox and doesn't understand the first thing about royal protocol. He reasons he has no way of knowing when Her Majesty is going to ride, and since not being there when she does would be a problem, he stands in the courtyard with her pony waiting, which is just not the way things are done. And logically, you'd think Brown should know that they'll come to the stables to look for him. Eventually, however, Victoria does want to go for a ride, and Brown accompanies her.

It's the start of a devoted friendship, the nature of which is not truly known by historians even to this day. Brown has an inability to adhere to strict protocol, and his blunt ways shock both the court and the servants. At the same time, however, it seems to be having a bit of a positive effect on Her Majesty, resulting in Brown's promotion. And she really lets loose, at least by the stereotypical standards of Victorian propriety people generally think of when they think of the morality of that era, when the court goes up to Balmoral.

And Her Majesty still hasn't really resumed public duties in the way she's supposed to, such as the "throne speech" that opens a new session of the House of Commons. Prime Minister Disraeli comes north to try to persuade Victoria to do her duty. And with Brown taking an increasingly active role in the royal household, others are resenting him to the point that there's some palace intrigue. Brown is accosted in the stables and beaten, with it being made to look like he was extremely intoxicated. Brown offers to resign, but Victoria won't have it. Brown eventually becomes head of security, but the power is going to his head and his devotion is making him paranoid.

Mrs Brown is another example of the sort of historical drama that the British seem to do such a fine job of making, especially in the era once movies didn't become so tied to the studio lots and moviemakers could do more location shooting. Britain has much more heritage than the US and uses it to full advantage in movies like this. Judi Dench, unsurprisingly, does an excellent job as Victoria, picking up an Oscar nomination. Billy Connolly is also quite good, and the movie is always relatively lovely to look at although it doesn't have that rich a color palette. (There's a lot of green and brown in the Scottish Highlands, I guess.)

I had never actually seen Mrs Brown before, but I'm definitely glad I did watch it. You should too.

The front something, but not a page

Some material gets turned into movies over and over again. I mentioned Somerset Maugham's novel The Painted Veil the other day, but there are other examples, as can be seen by watching the movie Switching Channels.

Kathleen Turner plays intrepid lady journalist Christy Colleran, working at a news channel called the Satellite News Newtork, based out of Chicago. An opening montage shows her doing all sorts of stories that, in a 1930s movie, would have been covered by someone like Bette Davis playing a lady reporter. (I don't think Front Page Woman had such a montage, but there's another very brisk 1930s movie about an intrepid female newswoman.) However, all this reportage -- Christy seemingly works nonstop -- has left her frazzled. So one day when she has a meltdown on air, she goes off on a vacation to a tony isolated resort. This is much to the chagrin of her boss, John Sullivan (Burt Reynolds), nicknamed Sully, who also just happens to be Christy's ex-husband. You can probably guess where this is going if you know your classic films.

At the resort, Christy meets Blaine Bingham (Christopher Reeve), a New York businessman who owns multiple companies, all in the sporting goods field. Their first meeting at the reception desk is a bit of a mess, but again, you know that's just a bit of a comedic device for the two of them to fall in love. So by the end of her time at the resort, Christy knows she's going to get married to Blaine. Not only that, but she's going to move to New York with him, which of course will necessitate her leaving SNN. (In this version of the story, however, she's not retiring, but getting a job with a New York morning show.)

John doesn't want to lose his best reporter, and this particular version is enough of a jerk and rich as Croesus that he can buy up all the plane and train tickets back to New York. (You'd think Blaine would fly by a private corporate jet, obviating all of Sully's machinations.) But Sully has one other trick up his sleeve. There's the Democratic primary for Governor, and this being Illinois, the winner of the primary is going to be elected governor in the general election. Running in that primary is State's Attorney Roy Ridnitz (Ned Beatty), who prosecuted a very high-profile case involving one Ike Roscoe, a man whose son was addicted to drugs, and shot the guy who he thought was supplying his son. That guy, however, was an undercover cop, which means there's all sorts of possibility for corruption here, never mind the fact that this is Chicago which is already corrupt. Ike is scheduled to be executed for the murder tonight, and Sully wants an interview with Ike. Who better than his best reporter Christy, who is still technically his employee?

You've probably already figured out if you didn't already know it about the movie going in, but Switching Channels is yet another remake of the play The Front Page from the late 1920s, which got turned into two movies with the title The Front Page (one in the early 1930s and one in the mid-1970s), as well as the most famous remake titled His Girl Friday. Switching Channels and His Girl Friday added the conceit of having a female reporter that the two versions titled The Front Page and the stage play didn't. Also, being in the 1980s, the movie was updated to be set in the world of television as opposed to the golden age of newspapers.

Switching Channels was not a box-office hit and didn't receive the best of reviews, and it's easy to see why. The movie isn't as stuck in the past as the 1974 version, but there are times where it really feels like it doesn't know what tone to take: an homage to the 1930s, or fully a product of the 1980s. One positive for me, however, was that the story actually introduces us to how Christy meets the new love of her life, something I don't think we see in any of the other versions (the male reporter in the play and movie versions The Front Page is leaving to get married as well).

So Switching Channels isn't particularly great, but I didn't dislike it to the extent that contemporary critics did. And it's also interesting to see an attempted 80s update on a play from 60 years earlier. Like a lot of the movies I blog about, it's certainly worth one watch.