Ta'm-e gilas

I mentioned some time back how I had recorded a double feature of Abbas Kiarostami films from TCM's Imports slot that follows Silent Sunday Nights This time, it the post on the second of the movies, Taste of Cherry.

The movie opens with a man named Badii driving his Range Rover through the outskirts of a city, presumably Tehran, although I don't know if it's explicitly mentioned. Driving along the road, he sees a young conscript who is doing his military service and trying to get back to his barracks after a couple days' leave. Badii offers the young soldier a ride to barracks, although it's quickly revealed that Badii wants to give the soldier a ride for other reasons. As Badii asks the young man about his life, Badii also says that he's willing to offer him a substantial sum of money in exchange for doing a short job. This, combined with Badii's driving past where the soldier would get out to go to the barracks and Badii's questions feeling a bit too personal, understandably makes the young man nervous.

Eventually, Badii stops at a particular location, with an odd request. The parking place is on a hillside overlooking civilization, and somewhere down the hillside there's a hole that Badii has dug. Badii tells the soldier that tonight, he's going to go to sleep at the hole, and would like someone to come the following morning to check up on him to see whether he's alive or dead. If Badii is dead, would the young man cover the hole with dirt and leave this as his grave; if he's alive, could the soldier wake him up? This is all too much for the young soldier, who declines the request and runs off to make it to the barracks on time.

Badii continues to drive along the streets, and winds up at what looks like some sort of roadside rest area. There, he finds another young man who is also an interesting conversation partner: a refugee from the Soviet war in Afghanistan and the Taliban (Taste of Cherry was released in 1997) who is now studying to become an imam. Being rather more devout a Muslim than Badii considering Badii's desire to commit suicide, this seminary student is obviously unwilling to help anybody do anything as part of a suicide plot.

It's on to a third man, who works at a local museum as a taxidermist and gives students there lessons on taxidermy and the local fauna. He's picked up some dead birds for stuffing and for the students to get a lesson on stuffing. But the job doesn't pay enough, and he's got a sick kids who needs money for medical care. He's much closer to Badii in terms of outlook, and indeed he's had experience in his family with attempted suicide. So he starts talking to Badii about that experience, with the obvious intention of trying to talk Badii out of doing the deed. But as he needs that money, he's willing to take Badii's job. What will our taxidermist find in the morning?

Taste of Cherry is one of those movies that gets a whole bunch of praise from the arthouse crowd, although it also drew some surprising criticism for the ending and the seeming lack of characterization. I tend not to be the biggest fan of arthouse stuff, but in this case I'm not with the harsh critics the way I might have been with a movie like Alice in the Cities or Cries and Whispers. I'm a bit more positive than negative, although I think the best way to put it would be the same reaction I had with Au hasard Balthazar: It's a good movie, but I don't understand why so many critics put it so far up the "greast movies of all time" lists.

Defending Your Life

I think I mentioned last year in the run-up to Christmas how TCM ends its Christmas programming right on December 25 and how that's something I don't particuarly care for. Last year, their prime-time lineup for Christmas was movies set in the hereafter, including one that was new to me, Defending Your Life.

Albert Brooks plays Daniel Miller, one of those go-go yuppie types that populated comedies of the 1980s, although this one came out at the tail end of that era, already in 1991. He's a Los Angeles-based ad exec who has finally done well enough in life that he's able to get a BMW, although it's a low-end model at $39K. But it even has a CD player in the sound system, which goes along with the player and CDs his colleagues have just gotten him for his birthday. As Daniel drops the top on his BMW and plays CDs, his fast driving and being in the elements cause the unsecured CD cases to scatter on the floor of the front of the car. Daniel rather stupidly -- or recklessly -- tries to pick them up at the same time he's driving, with the predictable result that he doesn't see the city bus that he's about to hit and in so doing kill himself.

The next thing we see, Daniel is on the way to Judgment City, which is an analogue of the afterlife although this isn't quite a Christian vision of the afterlife. There's a lot the feels like heaven in that there's all you can eat, without gaining an ounce, golf courses galore, or other similar amusements for whatever you're into. And there must be a bunch of Judgment Cities, since this one is specifically designed to be familiar to people from the western part of the United States.

But, as I said, it's not a Christian heaven or even purgatory. The next morning, Daniel is to meet Bob Diamond (Rip Torn). Bob is a sort of defense attorney. He informs Daniel that they know the average human being uses only 10% of their brain and that Daniel is, like a lot of people, average. Here in Judgment City everybody uses close to half their brain or more. And that's part of what Judgment City is about. You'll go on a sort of trial where it's determined whether you're using enough of your brain to overcome your human fears and other sorts of ways of acting that are going to lead to sadness in normal life. If so, you get to move "forward"; otherwise, you'll be reincarnated to try again and hopefully have learned something from your past life that you will however not remember. Bob is, as I said, Daniel's defender. Given the job of proving that Daniel needs to be reincarnated is Lena Foster (Lee Grant).

The "trial", such as it is, involves looking at incident's from the decedent's life where Lena will be arguing that this proves Daniel had all sorts of fears he still needs to work on, while Bob will be trying to show that these incidents show human growth. The whole trial will take several days, during which Daniel will be staying in the lap of luxury and be given the opportunity to spend his free time exploring Judgment City.

One day, Daniel meets Julia (Meryl Streep), who for some reason he feels like he might know. The two hit it off, and visit various attractions in the city in what are in part designed to be a bit of light comic relief from the light drama of the trial. But along the way the two also feel like they're falling in love with each other. This is going to cause a big problem later: Julia's life seems as though she's finally figured things out on Earth and will not be reincarnated, while in Daniel's case that's much less certain. Will our two lovers be able to spend all eternity together?

Defending Your Life apparently got pretty high praise when it was first released. I mostly liked it, although I also have to say that I don't know if I'd give it quite as much praise as contemporary critics did. I'd guess that was in part because Streep hadn't done much comedy in her career before this, and that was a revelation to the critics of the day. Then again, from the othr Albert Brooks movies I've seen he's not quite my thing. The idea in Defending Your Life is quite a good one, although parts of it give off the impression that Brooks was either trying too hard, or else going for an in-joke here and there. It's not that this makes the movie bad or anything so much it was for me more of a, "Yeah, I get it already" feeling.

In any case, Defending Your Life is definitely worth a watch if you get the chance to see it.

Not to be confused with that Richard Widmark movie

Bela Lugosi was TCM's Star of the Month in October 2024, so I recorded several of his movies that I hadn't seen before. One of his non-horror movies that I finally got around to watching just before it expired from my DVR was a murder mystery, The Death Kiss.

The movie stars off with a scene of a woman meeting a man outside a big-city café, kissing him, and walking in, after which the man is shot. The camera then pulls out to reveal that this is in fact a soundstage at a Hollywood studio, where they're filming a movie called, naturally enough, The Death Kiss. They're about to do another take of the same scene when suddenly the lead actress screams: it turns out that Myles Brent, the actor who was shot in the scene, has actually died because somebody presumably put real bullets in the gun. (This was long before Alec Baldwin was born.)

This presents all sorts of problems: the film was behind schedule so one studio boss is worried about the financials; another studio boss, Joseph Steiner (Bela Lugosi in a supporting role) has to deal with the PR mess; and, when the police come in, it turns out that pretty much everybody on the lot had some sort of reason for not being displeased that Brent was killed. This means that anybody and everybody could be a suspect, since it doesn't have to be the person who pulled the trigger who put the real bullets in the gun.

Brent's co-star in the movie-within-a-movie was Marcia Lane (Adrienne Ames), who is also the ex-Mrs. Brent, which in itself is a reason to make her a suspect. She's on the rebound with Franklyn Drew (David Manners), a screenwriter at the studio who is always up for a good mystery because he thinks he can write a better mystery than the real thing. So he starts to investigate, together with a security guard at the studio, Gulliver. Brent quickly finds a bullet casing in the wall of the set which to him conclusively proves this is a murder case since it's of a different caliber than the guns filled with blanks.

And where there's one murder in a movie like this, it's not a surprise that other people are going to be in danger. Never mind that Franklyn also has a personal interest in this case since his girlfriend is going to be one of the suspects, being the ex-wife of the dead guy. It all leads to an exciting climax as Franklyn is about to reveal the identity of the murderer on the set.

Murder mysteries are a common genre in the movies, and were especially common back in the 1930s. Murder mysteries set against the backdrop of making a movie is not uncommon either; I did a review of The Preview Murder Mystery 18 months ago. In trying to find that title, I found two other titles from that era involving murder mysteries at a movie studio, The Studio Murder Mystery and a British film called Murder on the Set. In any case, it's a convenient enough place to set a murder mystery and The Death Kiss does an entertaining job of it, even if one ultimately doesn't care all that much about who actually committed the murder.

Don't look for Farley Granger

I've mentioned in the past that I'm always up for trying early talkies, even if many of them aren't all that good even by the standards of early sound pictures. One that showed up some time back on TCM was a 1929 movie called Side Street that's really more interesting for who is in the cast.

The first thing to note is that the three main characters are played by the three Moore brothers, who had all been silent film stars; here they're playing brothers as well. They're the sons in the Irish-American O'Farrell family. Jimmy (Tom Moore) is a police detective who has a girlfriend Kathleen whom he's looking to propose to and might just be able to now that he's getting a promotion on the force. John (Matt Moore) is a doctor working in the emergency department. He's been helped through medical school by the third brother, Dennis (Owen Moore). Dennis is in "business" that requires him to do a fair bit of traveling. It should be obvious what this "business" entails, but more on that later.

Kathleen gets invited to one of those swanky penthouse parties by hre friend Bunny who is going with her boyfriend. The party is being held in an apartment owned by Muller, who is the head of a notorious gang of bootleggers. At the party, she meets Silk, who is Muller's henchman and a guy who doesn't know how to keep his mouth shut. He claims to be the guy behind Muller's organization, and that the organization arranged for the murder in a case Jimmy is investigating. This is all important to the plot, but just as interesting is the dance number one of the guests stages. Classic movie fans should have no difficulty recognizing George Raft in a very early, uncredited role.

The party gets broken up by a fight. Some days later, Jimmy brings Kathleen and her father over for Thanksgiving, with the other two brothers showing up. Kathleen realizes she's already met Dennis before: he was at the Muller party, and his business is in fact being Muller himself! The fight at the party also has the police investigating, which is how John (called in to provide medical care) and Jimmy (investigating) both figure out what their brother is really doing. However, both of them know that it would break their mother's heart to discover the real truth about her beloved son. So how does the movie give us at least a semi-happy ending?

As I implied at the beginning, Side Street isn't the greatest movie, although I don't think it's as bad as some other reviewers may have you believe. Still, it's another one where the plot feels like we've been down this side street a dozen times before. The Moore brothers also all seem better suited to silent films. It's George Raft as a dancer (which he was in real life before becoming an actor full time) who steals the show with his one scene.

Another "I can save you, but..." movie

Barbara Stanwyck was TCM's Star of the Month some months back, which gave me the chance to record some of her movies that I hadn't seen before. One that has a fairly pedestrian plot, but is redeemed by good performances from the cast, is Gambling Lady.

Stanwyck is the titular gambling lady, a woman named Lady Lee who makes an OK living is the sort of "escort" provided by a gambling syndicate to people who need a dealer or something for a high-stakes poker game or some other form of gambling. Of course, the syndicate wants to boost the odds in its favor even if that's by less than honest means. This is something Lady Lee says she absolutely doesn't care for. As a bit of foreshadowing, one night at the club she meets wealthy Peter Madison (C. Aubrey Smith) who, for whatever reason, doesn't seem to mind being taken by this charming woman.

Not that there's going to be anything romantic between them, since Smith was about 70 at the time the movie was made. And Lady Lee already has someone theoretically more her type pursuing her in the from of horse racing bookie Charlie Lang (Pat O'Brien). For Lady, it's more of a friendship than anything romantic. As she works for the syndicate and makes good money, she keeps coming across young Garry (Joel McCrea), although she keeps rebuffing him even though he's clearly into her. One night he sneaks up to the room where Lady will be playing, only for undercover police to get in the elevator with Garry.

Garry wants to marry Lady, but she claims she won't fit into his society and doesn't want to anger his parents. Except that this is Garry Madison, son of Peter whom we've already met. So they marry and live happily ever after, yeah right since we're only a third of the way into the movie. On their honeymoon they meet Garry's old girlfriend Sheila (Claire), and when Garry and Lady invite society over on their return to America, Sheila has followed them and insists on gambling against Lady. Lady wins a bunch of Sheila's jewels, and takes the betting seriously, not giving Sheila back her jewelry even though Sheila obviously thought this was all a lark.

Things get more complicated when Charlie gets into legal issues requiring a large bail. Garry's money would cause scandal, so Lady pawns those jewels. Except, that also causes difficulties when Lady gives the pawn ticket to Charlie. Garry wants it so he can quietly get the jewels back without Lady knowing. However, Charlie gets killed, and all signs point to Garry since he's got the ticket. In fact, he was with Sheila, who has been trying to break up Garry and Lady's marriage.

Now, is this movie going to have a happy ending? The answer is yes, and that unfortunately is something that requires a bit of a cop-out for the movie to get that ending. The material is stuff that we've seen quite a few times in the early 1930s, and which frankly strains credulity. None of this is the fault of the cast, who all give it their best and mostly succeed. But that script? Oy. Gambling Lady is OK, as long as you can get past the unoriginality of it.

Briefs for September 25-26, 2025

I probably should have put up this post yesterday, since the first item deals with programming that's coming up on TCM tonight in prime time. Apparently it's been 60 years of the UCLA Film and Television Archive. If you've watched enough TCM, you'll have seem movies that have title cards mentioning preservation and/or restoration by the Archive, often together with acknowledgements of people who have helped financially or by providing the materials preserved. TCM is honoring the occasion with a full 24 hours of material that has recently been restored, including both well-known stuff -- the salute kicks off at 8:00 PM with My Darling Clementine and obscure stuff as well as some TV. I don't think I've seen the Myrna Loy version of Vanity Fair (Sept. 26, 11:30 AM), before. Mystery of the Wax Museum shows up overnight at 3:15 AM; I don't know if the restored versions of the movies are actually airing, however.

After the 24 hours of UCLA Archive stuff, Friday in prime time brings us a Guest Programmer. This month it's director Paul Thomas Anderson, who has made such films as Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood. He was also a presenter in the first season of Two for One, selecting Bugsy Malone and The Bad News Bears. He's actually presenting five movies, as the now-infrequent Guest Programmers seem to select a variable number of films:
8:00 PM Running on Empty, which earned tragic River Phoenix an Oscar nomination;
10:15 PM Midnight Run, with Robert De Niro escorting an unwilling Charles Grodin across the country;
12:30 AM The French Connection, earning Gene Hackman the Oscar;
2:30 AM The Battle of Algiers, a political docudrama about the Algerians' attempt for independence from France; and
4:45 AM The Searchers, in which John Wayne searches for a white girl abducted by Indians a good decade earlier.

As far as the obituaries go, I really have to mention Claudia Cardinale. The Italian (technically born in Tunisia to Italian parents) actress who had an international career in Italy with films like 8½ and The Leopard, along with Hollywood stuff like The Pink Panther or A Fine Pair with Ruck Hudson, died on Tuesday at the age of 87. As of right now, I don't see anything of hers on the TCM schedule. I wouldn't be surprised if TCM does put together an evening of her programming.

There's also Henry Jaglom, who died on Monday, also at the age of 87. I recognized the name immediately for some reason although not the films listed, until I realized that Jaglom was the guy who sat down for those conversations with Orson Welles at the end of Welles' life in pursuit of one final project for Welles that never got off the ground.

Powwow Highway

Every December, the Library of Congress selects 25 films to be added to the National Film Registry of films that are "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". For several years now, TCM has run a night of movies highlighting some of the year's selections. One of the 2024 selections that TCM ran was Powwow Highway. Having never heard of it before, I recorded it to my DVR to watch and put up a post here.

The movie starts off at a reservation of the Northern Cheyenne in Montana. Philbert Bono (Gary Farmer) is a member of the tribe and a dreamer who is only able to eke out a living, likely on tribal welfare from mineral rights. Somewhere on the reservation is a junkyard of old cars. Philbert trades for one of the cars, wanting his "pony". Amazing, the car starts, although it's 25 years old and one wonders how many more miles it's got on it.

Also living on the reservtion is Buddy Red Bow (A Martinez), who seems to have applied himself and gotten a job as one of the people working with the reservation to procure cattle for the tribe. He's also become an activist. A mining company from the white man's world wants to renew the contract to mine on the reservation. They claim it will bring good money, but Buddy doesn't believe a word of this and is the sort of person to agitate against renewing the contract on the theory that it will destroy the land without enriching the people who live there.

Cut to New Mexico, where a lower-class woman is driving with her two children when she's pulled over for ostensibly not having a license plate on her car. She claims to have one (so why wasn't it on the car?), but when the police pop the trunk, they "find" a parcel that is presumably some sort of illegal drugs. This woman is Bonnie Red Bow (Joanelle Romero), the sister of Buddy although they have a strained relationship which is why Bonnie is not on the reservation but down in New Mexico. Still, she needs bail money, and blood is thicker than water. What Buddy doesn't know is that this is a ruse to get him off the reservation before the tribe votes on whether to renew the contract.

Buddy just happens to have the money that the tribe has entrusted him with to buy the cattle, and he thinks he might be able to use some of that to bail Bonnie out. But for some reason he doesn't have a car. Ah, but Philbert does have one. So the two set out on a road trip from Montana to New Mexico. Of course, they've got rather different personalities, and Philbert is more than happy to waylay the two by going off to the Black Hills because the land has religious significance for the Cheyenne. They also waste a bunch of money buying a high-end sound system for the car, and Buddy is too lazy to bother reading the instructions, so he immediately thinks the white guy in the store was scamming him.

Eventually, the two do make it to New Mexico. Getting Bonnie out of jail, however, is going to be an issue because it's the holiday season and the two arrive out of business hours, something I'd think the jail wouldn't really have when it comes to bailing someone out, but then that wouldn't lead to the movie's climax.

Powwow Highway isn't a bad movie, but.... One thing is that if this story were a road-trip movie about a couple of white guys, nobody would remember it and it would never have been selected to the National Film Registry. More importantly, however, is that because of the low budget, there's something missing in the script department I think, leading to the plot holes. It also doesn't help that the two lead characters are not always sympathetic characters, sabotaging themselves by either being irresponsible (Philbert going off to the Black Hills) or jerks (Buddy in the car stereo scene).

Still, as road movies go, Powwow Highway could certainly be a lot worse. It's just that it could have been better, too.

Your Cheatin' Heart

Another of those movies that shows up on TCM often enough, having been made at MGM, is the Hank Williams biopic (for some values of biopic) Your Cheatin' Heart. So the last time it was on TCM I recorded it, and recently watched it to do a post on it for the next airing, which is on tomorrow (September 25) at 8:00 AM as part of a morning and afternoon of the films of George Hamilton.

George Hamilton plays the adult Hank Williams, but before the opening credits there's a scene of a juvenile Williams, shining shoes during the Depression in Alabama and singing with local blues singer Rufus "Teetot" Payne (a small role for Rex Ingram) before Teetot dies right in front of little Hank. (In reality, Hank did know Teetot in childhood and did receive some music lessons from him, but lost contact before Teetot's death.)

After the credits, we see an adult Hank William trying to hawk a tonic at a medicine show. He concludes the show by singing a song he wrote, and it's already quite clear that Hank has a tremendous amount of talent. And wouldn't you know it, but showing up at that day's installment of the medical show is a professional musician, Audrey Sheppard (Susan Oliver), together with manager Shorty Younger (Red Buttons) and some backup singers. Audrey sees a meal ticket and gets Hank to join her and the rest of the band on tour, eventually getting him to marry her.

Audrey keeps pushing Hank's career, including sending one of the songs Hank has written to music publisher Fred Rose (Arthur O'Connell) in Nashville. The song is "Your Cheatin' Heart", although in the real world Hank only wrote that in 1952. Rose likes the song, but wants Hank to prove he can write something original. Hank does that to Rose's satisfaction, and Rose gets Hank a job on the Louisiana Hayride radio show out of Shreveport, LA. Audrey keeps pushing Hank's career, but he is for whatever reason not always comfortable with the limelight and turns to drink.

Somewhat surprisingly, not only is that not the likely reason the real-life Hank turned to drink, but the real reason is one that I think would have had no issue getting past the Production Code which still had not fully disintegrated by the time the movie was made. Hank Williams was born with spina bifida, which left him with back pain all his life, exacerbated by various injuries. (The movie does show Hank falling off a horse at one point.) Being of poor Depression-era stock and with medicine not being quite so advanced, Hank basically self-medicated, even if the long-term result was going to be that it destroyed the marriage to Audrey as well as ultimately his life. I presume most American music fans know Hank Williams died aged 29 in the back seat of the car he was being driven in to his next concert.

Your Cheatin' Heart as a movie is in large part typical of the sort of biopic that studios put out in the Golden Age that was by 1964 decidedly waning. It's full of hokum, backlot work, and stuff that just didn't happen at all the way it did in real life. But the movie is also partially an attempt by Audrey Williams, who was credited as an advisor, to burnish Hank's image and bascially make herself look better. That's partly because Hank remarried a few months before he died but there was a serious question as to whether that marriage was valid. In fact, the movie doesn't even mention this second marriage. There's also the casting of George Hamilton as Williams, which will probably really put some people off. The one really bright spot is the music; George Hamilton only lip-synched the songs which are actually cover versions by Hank Williams Jr. who was all of 15 at the time and already showing his phenomenal talent.

Charles Bronson and Marisa Pavan, American Indians

Some time back, I recorded a block, or at least a double feature, of Alan Ladd movies. I already did a review of The Deep Six; the other movie that I recorded was Drum Beat. Once again, having watched it, I can now do the requisite post on it.

The movie is based on a real historical event, the Modoc War of the early 1870s between the Modoc Tribe and the US. The Modoc, like a lot of tribes, had been put on reservations not always on their traditional lands, with the result that some tribal members were unhappy and resorted to violence. The Modoc were originally in northern California but moved north to Oregon, and by 1872 some dissidents were resorting to violence.

Against that background, an Indian fighter named Johnny MacKay (Alan Ladd) is summoned to Washington by President Grant to discuss the issue and what can be done. Johnny's job will be to go back west and renounce violence in the effort to bring peace between the Modoc and white man and subdue those members of the tribe who don't like the status quo. Also heading west is Nancy Meek (Audrey Dalton), whose uncle had fought on the frontier and decided to retire there. Unfortunately, they don't make it to Oregon without incident, as the stagecoach is attacked, and Nancy discovers that there's been an ambush on her uncle's farm with her uncle and aunt having been killed.

The man responsible for all of this is a member of the Modoc calling himself Captain Jack (that's Charles Bronson), and he's a bright if violent man who knows how to use violence to keep the white man at bay. But, as mentioned earlier, there are some Modoc who are also willing to live in relative peace with the white man, or perhaps even in the white man's world and not just on a reservation. Among that latter group are Toby (Marisa Pavan) and her brother Manok, and they can function as a sort of go-between the Modoc and the whites.

Sadly, while there are Modoc dissidents who still want to fight, there are also white dissidents who see the violence from the Modoc and want revenge in the most severe way possible. This threatens to scupper the delicate peace negotiations between the US government, who really do want peace albeit with them in control, and the Modoc. When some whites do bollix things up, that's only bound to make Captain Jack more violent.

Of course, we know how history turned out, and that the Americans wound up victorious; after all, there's no Modoc country today. That requires the defeat of Captain Jack, and the rest of Drum Beat deals with how that happens.

Drum Beat is well enough made, although despite the disclaimer in the opening about how "Fictional incidents and characters have been introduced only where necessary to dramatize the truth", I wonder just how much of this follows the real history, and the extent to which it needed to. Alan Ladd and Charles Bronson both do well, although it is a bit difficult to believe Bronson as a member of the Modoc. It's even more difficult to accept Marisa Pavan as a Native American.

Of course, back in the 1950s when Drum Beat was made, it was normal to cast not just white Anglo Americans in odd ethnicities, but foreigners as well, and everybody does the best they can. Drum Beat is ultimately entertaining enough, if not a particularly great movie.

Because I'm always up for pre-Codes

Some time back I came across another pre-Code on TCM that I thought (correctly) I hadn't seen before. At least, I hadn't done a post on it; if I had seen it, it would have been ages ago. That movie is Bachelor Apartment. Having watched it, I can finally do the review on it.

The movie starts off with the bachelor, a wealthy businessman named Wayne Carter and played by Lowell Sherman. He's interested in lovely ladies, and there certainly seems to be some interested in him, such as married Agatha Carraway (silent star Mae Murray in a supporting role). But Wayne is decidedly not interested in marriage, despite causing a crash between his chauffered car and a taxi just becaues he's seen the female passenger in the car just as an excuse to get the woman to his apartment for lunch.

The scene then shifts from the lunch table at Carter's park avenue apartment to a lunch table in a much more modest apartment. In that apartment, we see two women having lunch. They're sisters, Helene (Irene Dunne) and Lita (Claudia Dell) Andrews, who have come to New York to try to make a better life for themselves in the early days of the Depression. Lita is a would-be chorus girl, although work is hard to come by. However, she claims to have been invited to eat with one Wayne Carter, even mentioning Carter's address before heading off to meet Carter.

Just after Lita leaves, Helene gets a telegram that's addressed to Lita, informing Lita that there's an audition coming up that afternoon. At least Lita had the good sense to leave Carter's address. Helene goes there and finds Carter, but with the woman from the taxi we met a few scenes earlier. However, Lita is there, having lunch with the butler who has apparently been passing himself off as Carter. But Carter himself, being ever the ladies' man, tries to put the moves on Helene and asks her to stay for dinner. Fat chance.

Helen finally gets a job in her preferred work as a stenographer, for the Retrac Investment Agency, which should be an incredibly obvious sign as to where the movie is going, since "Retrac" is simply "Carter" spelled backward. Carter needed a stenographer, and Helene needed a job, so Carter explicitly offers her a job. Helene once again has the perfectly reasonable view that Carter selected her just to be able to put the moves on her. Not only that, but Carter works behind the scenes to try to get Lita a job in a show that one of his friends is backing.

Again, it's not too difficult to figure out where the movie is going to go, which is that Carter finds that he's honestly in love with Helene in a way that he hasn't been in love with all those other women he's pursued. But every time he tries to prove it, something goes wrong to give Helene the impression that really he's still just after her for sex, not that they could talk about it that way even in a pre-Code movie. Eventually, the movie is going to get to its happy ending, although there are a lot of twists and turns along the way.

Bachelor Apartment is one of those movies that might have been interesting to audiences in the early 1930s, but to a lot of people watching today is going to seem incredibly dated and based on sex roles that have undergone a lot of change in the past 95 years. It's not that Bachelor Apartment is a bad movie; instead, it's more that it's an acquired taste. There are other pre-Codes out there that are more adventurous and more likely to be of interest to people who aren't necessarily into pre-Codes.

Hoffmann's tales

TCM did a spotlight on Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger late in 2024. One of their movies that I hadn't seen before was The Tales of Hoffmann. With that in mind, I made a point to record it so that I could eventually get around to watching it and doing a post on it. I did, and having enough movies in the queue, it's only been scheduled for now.

For those who don't know, The Tales of Hoffmann is based on three short stories by 19th century German writer E.T.A. Hoffmann that were turned into a play and then intended to be turned into an opera. Jacques Offenbach, German-born French composer, spent the last several years of his life working on the opera, although he didn't finish it before he died, with work being completed by others. This movie version is, from what I've read, not having seen a production of the opera, reasonably faithful to the opera's adaptation of the three short stories, although it looks like the second and third stories are told in the opposite order from the opera.

There's a prologue in which the writer Hoffmann himself, played by opera singer Robert Rounseville, goes to a ballet in Nuremberg where he sees the love of his life, Stella (Moira Shearer, who appears in all three acts although her singing is dubbed). During the intermission, Hoffman gets up and goes to a local tavern where the college students hang out. There, he tells the youngsters the stories of his three loves.

The first one is "Olympia", in which Olympia (played by Shearer) turns out to be an automaton, a mechanical doll much like the one in the ballet Coppelia, since they're both based on the same short story. Coppelia was also made into a movie with Walter Slezak with two versions, the original titled Dr. Coppelius and the later with an animated sequence added and re-titled The Mysterious House of Dr. C. which has shown up on TCM in the past. Obviously, this can't end well for poor Hoffmann.

Second, we get "Giulietta", which might be the best known of the stories because of the barcarolle that Offenbach wrote for it that I think is known outside of its use in the opera. Giulietta (not Shearer, but Ludmilla Tchérina) is a courtesan whom Hoffmann loves, although the feeling is not returned. She's only working for evil magician Dapertutto who wants Hoffmann's reflection for some reason.

Finally is "Antonio", about a doomed singer who is tricked into singing by an evil doctor, hastening her death.

I'm not the biggest fan of opera so this version of The Tales of Hoffmann is not exactly to my taste. I do have to say that in terms of the technical production values, it is, like Powell and Pressburger's earlier The Red Shoes, extremely well-made, with brilliant colors and fine choreography combining ballet and opera. But the movie also feels extremely slow at over two hours, and for some it may feel overly stylized.

However, I can certainly see why many people would like The Tales of Hoffmann and give it high praise. So if you're up for opera, certainly give The Tales of Hoffmann a try.

Not the right kind of nakedness

I'm always up for Eddie Muller's Noir Alley on TCM because he always makes the movies he selects interesting, even if they're not always quite in the noir genre. So when I see one show up with in an interesting synopsis that I haven't heard of before, I'm going to record it to do a post on later. Such is the case with the Universal release (which might explain why I didn't really know about it before) Naked Alibi.

Sterling Hayden is the star here, as police detective Joe Conroy. But he's not the person we see first, instead meeting local baker Al Willis (Gene Barry). Willis is getting picked up on a drunk and disorderly and doesn't have his ID on him. Conroy and fellow detective Fred Parks (Max Showalter when he was being credited as Casey Adams) are sure Willis is guilty of more and part of the crime ring that's been going around the city, so they try to rough him up before being forced to release him. For their troubles, Lt. Parks gets shot in a phone booth later that night. Worse, later on another two policemen involved in the case also get killed when their car is bombed. And Willis is able to avoid the tails on him by going into a church open 24/7 and slipping out the back.

Det. Conroy is getting angry at this and roughs up Willis some more, to the point that the higher-ups can't avoid it any longer, especially with those good government types investigating everything that's going on in the city. Conroy is put on leave, but uses a PI to keep following Willis and make Willis know that he's still being tailed. So to get away from the tail, Willis leaves his wife behind to go to the Mexican border town not named Tijuana or Mexicali but the imaginatively named Border City. Part of the reason he goes there is to lay low until the heat is off, but the other reason is that he's got a mistress there in nightclub singer Marianna (Gloria Grahame) who doesn't know anything about Willis' family back in the US.

Conroy heads for Border City and when he gets there immediately starts being incredibly unsubtle about trying to find Willis. He's also a bit naïve in that he goes with a guy claiming to know where Willis is, which is clearly a set-up for Conroy to get mugged, or worse. Wouldn't you know it, however, but Conroy is found by a young boy who just happens to live downstairs from where Marianna lives. Marianna, taken with the handsome detective, starts nursing him back to health but also rifles through his things, which is where she finds a newspaper clipping of Willis that reveals to her that he's married back in California, which obviously changes her opinion of him.

There are still a lot of twists and turns to go, however, as Conroy tries to prove that Willis is behind the murder of the cops. To do that, however, Conroy is going to have to get back into the States and find the murder weapon without getting arrested by his fellow cops since there's technically a police brutailty charge awaiting him. Willis, for his part, really is guilty if you couldn't already figure that out. He gets taken by Conroy during a fight at the nightclub, and Conroy heads for home, Marianna in tow.

Naked Alibi is entertaining enough if rather pedestrian. A lot of it belies filming on Universal's backlot, and the movie has the feel of something that, like The Internecine Project that I recently posted about, would have been a made-for-TV movie had it been made well after the 1950s. Hayden is as gruff and emotionless as ever here, while Grahame isn't exactly the most talented nightclub singer beyond having the requisite sex appeal. Anybody who's watched reruns of The Rifleman will have no difficulty spotting Chuck Connors in his small role.

So, while no great shakes, Naked Alibi is OK for a rainy day.

At least the adjective is appropriate

Every now and then, I look at what's on Tubi available to be streamed on demand. There's a lot of stuff that's fallen into the public domain, as well as British movies that didn't necessarily make it to America. That, and 70s stuff where it seems like someone was doing it just for the payday, especially if it didn't get released by a major studio. Falling into that last class, as well as having been made in the UK, is The Internecine Project.

There are actually two Hollywood stars and a character actor here in and among the Brits. James Coburn plays Robert Elliot, a Harvard economist who is up for some sort of presidential appointment that's going to involve congressional approval. His work takes him back and forth across the Atlantic, and as the movie opens he's on one of those drab public affairs shows to talk in platitudes about inflation, along with US journalist Jean Robinson (Lee Grant in an underused role).

The other reason Elliot is in London is because his past work involved industrial espionage, and that's a problem considering that he's up for a position that requires confirmation from the Senate. If the Senate were to find out the full truth about his past, he probably wouldn't be confirmed, as he tells businessman Farnsworth (Keenan Wynn). And there are any number of people who would probably be happy to blackmail Elliot with their knowledge of him given the chance. So Farnsworth comes up with some advice that would fit right in with one of those 1960s Cold War spy movies: eliminate these people.

Thankfully for Elliot, he was actually the spymaster, overseeing four operatives. Alex (Ian Hendry) worked in the Foreign Office; Bert (Harry Andrews) was a masseur at one of those private clubs that rich upper-class gentlemen were members off in old-time Britain; Christina (Christiane Krüger) is a high-class escort; and David (Michael Jayston) is a scientist working at a British defense contractor, making among other things some sort of sonic weapon that uses ultra-high frequencies to kill rats, and which could obviously kill humans.

Elliot comes up with the sort of plan that one could only try in the movies, because in real life there are so many points at which the plan could go totally wrong. Elliott tells each of his four operatives, none of whom know any of the others because they have no need to know, that another person is about to blow their cover which would amount to prison time or worse. So each of his operatives has to kill the person who has the goods on them. It's all a part of the sort of spy work they've already been engaged in. And of course, each of the four has been given another of the four to kill off. Now, you might be thinking, how is the last one going to be killed if the other three are already dead? Well, David is going to be killed with his sonic weapon, so he'll already have killed his victim. And Alex has diabetes and needs insulin, so it will be easy enough for another of the operatives to replace Alex's insulin with Folger's decaffeinated crystals. Wait, that's a commercial from the 1980s; the insulin is simply going to be replaced with a concentrate that will cause him to OD. So only two of the murders have to be direct killings.

The rest of the movie is Elliot's internecine plot, and the aftermath; I won't tell you how it goes wrong or even if it goes wrong. You'll just have to watch the movie to find that out. To be honest, The Internecine Project feels like the sort of material that just a few years later could easily have been done as a TV movie of the week with the various actors involved doing it for a nice paycheck. (Coincidentally, the movie's runtime of 89 minutes would be just the right length to put it in a two-hour US TV time slot with the legally allowed amount of commercials.) The idea is good although the execution isn't the best by any means. This isn't the fault of the actors, but I think of a script that's sub-par. I can see, however, why all of the Americans involved would want to go to London to make this one.

Viva Knievel!

Quite some time ago, TCM ran a day of movies starring sports figures playing themselves. I've already done posts on Crazylegs (football player Elroy "Crazy Legs" Hirsch) and The Jackie Robinson Story. Next up is a delighfully bad movie from the 1970s: Viva Knievel!.

For anybody too young to remember, or if anybody from outside the US doesn't know (I'm not certain how far Knievel's fame extended), Evel Knievel was a motorcycle stuntman who was famous for doing all sorts of insane jumps, with things like jumping over a dozen cars being mild. The most audacious and famous was an attempt to jump over the Snake River canyon. Back in the 1970s, ABC's Wide World of Sports showed all sorts of niche "sports" including things like Knievel's jumps, which is how he became famous.

Unlike the two other films I mentioned above, Viva Knievel! is not a biography, but a fictional film with Knievel playing himself as the protagonist. The movie opens with some image enhancement, as Knievel goes to an orphanage to deliver gifts to inspire the little boys there, one of whom thinks he'll be able to walk again thanks to Knievel. Oh my, the tropes are going to be laid on thick here. Cut to the "real" world, where we're introduced to Evel's manager Ben Andrews (Red Buttons) and his mechanic Will Atkins (Gene Kelly, a couple of years before Xanadu). They're helping Evel prepare for his next stunt.

Will is the subject of several subplot tropes. One is that he used to be a stunt rider himself, until he turned to the bottle after the death of his wife. She died in childbirth, and he blames the kid for it. That kid, Tommy, is now "graduating" from elementary school, and Evel has arranged to spend the summer before junior high reuniting Tommy with Will.

And then there's a rival rider, Jessie (Marjoe Gortner). He's being supported by Stanley Millard (Leslie Nielsen), but that's really a front. In fact, Millard is a drug lord, and is hoping to lure Evel down to Mexico to do a jump so that Millard can sabotage the jump, kill Evel, and then steal Evel's custom-built semi to drive it back to the States. Well, not Evel's semi, but a nearly exact replica that will be used to smuggle drugs, since nobody is going to suspect the late Evel of smuggling drugs in his truck. Eventually, Evel and his crew do go down to Mexico to do the jump, but Evel eventually saves the day albeit with a lot of complications and stunts along the way. He even gets to redeem himself by performing the jump that was sabotaged the first time.

Viva Knievel! is frankly a terrible movie. But it's a fun terrible. The plot is frankly ridiculous; Evel can't act (although at least he's only playing himself); and the messaging is incredibly heavy-handed. One wonders how a cast with as many names in it got themselves roped into this. (One name I haven't mentioned yet is Lauren Hutton as a photographer.) Kelly, I suppose, was nearing the end of his career, while Nielsen hadn't yet had the second-act career revival that Airplane! was going to bring him a few years later.

So, definitely watch Viva Knievel! if you get the chance.

Swing High, Swing Low

Fred MacMurray was honored in the 2024 edition of TCM's Summer Under the Stars, and that gave me the opportunity to record another movie that I had seen the title show up a number of times, but had never actually seen the movie: Swing High, Swing Low. Now, having actually seen it, I can finally do a post on it.

Fred MacMurray is the male lead, although since the movie was made in the late 1930s, the real star is the female lead, played by Carole Lombard. Her character, Maggie King, is working her passage as a beautician on board a cruise ship that goes from the US Atlantic coast to the Pacific and back through the Panama Canal in the days when the US still controlled the Panama Canal and had a strip of land on either side. On this passage through the Zone, she sees a soldier patrolling the shore, and he sees her. His name is Skid Johnson (that's MacMurray as if you couldn't tell), and although he's in the army, he says it's his last day as he's being demobbed tomorrow.

Maggie isn't really interested in SKid, but the next day he's driving a taxi showing Maggie and her friend through Balboa, the city that served as the Pacific terminus of the Canal Zone although today it's part of Panama City. Maggie misses her boat as a result of Skid and his friend/roommate Harry's (Charles Butterworth) showing her around town. Worse, they go to a club where Skid reveals that he's a trumpet player and Maggie reveals she hates trumpet music. But at the bar a man hits on Maggie and Skid, obviously already in love with Maggie, gets in a fight with the man, to the point that Skid gets arrested and Maggie has to bail him out. So now she also doesn't have the money to get a ticket back to America.

So Maggie gets herself and Skid jobs at Murphy's (Cecil Cunningham, a woman even though she has the name Cecil) club in Balboa, Maggie claiming that she's married to Skid. Also workin at the club is Anita Alvarez (Dorothy Lamour), who at some point in Skid's past was his girlfriend, which introduces that romantic tension that's going to drive the rest of the plot. Skid gets famous enough that he's able to get enough money to go back to New York, although it's apparently only enough money for him, not both him and Maggie. This even though by this time Maggie and Skid have gotten married for real.

Back in New York, Skid works at a club where Anita just happens also to be on the payroll. And Anita has no qualms about trying to win Skid back for herslef. Doing this, however, leads to Skid's screwing up his marriage to Maggie, and when she files for divorce, he responds by turning to drink, which threatens to ruin his career, at least until she shows up again.

My being a fan of older movies is part of why I'd always been interested in seeing this one, but I have to say that it doesn't quite work for some reason. I think it's that at times it's too serious a drama for its own good, while at the times it tries to be lighter, it's not really a comedy either. It also doesn't help that despite being about musicians, and not fully developing the characters, it doesn't have particularly memorable music either.

Swing High, Swing Low isn't a terrible movie, but if I were going to introduce people to Fred MacMurray or Carole Lombard, there are other movies I'd pick for that job.

Robert Redford, 1936-2025

Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand in The Way We Were

Robert Redford, the actor turned Oscar-winning director (for Ordinary People) who also promoted independent film with the Sundance Film Festival, has died a month after his 89th birthday.

Redford's acting career started in the 1960s. He starred opposite Natalie Wood in Inside Daisy Clover, and later did a piece for TCM when they honored Wood as Star of the Month many years back -- I don't recall how long ago, but it's a piece TCM trots out often enough when they want to plug one of Wood's films coming up on the channel.

Redford was already becoming a star thanks to that role and other pictures like Barefoot in the Park, but acting opposite Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid really made him a star; the two reunited a few years later for The Sting which won Oscar's Best Picture. A bunch of other interesting roles followed in the 1970s, notably All the President's Men about the Washington Post's investigation into the Watergate scandal. And then Redford abruptly turned to directing with Ordinary People, continuing to direct and act for the next several decades.

Among these later performances, I'd like to mention the film Sneakers, which may not be the greatest movie ever made, but it's a heck of a lot of fun. Redford plays a computer hacker from back in his days in university in the late 1960s who gets roped into doing another job and finds too many secrets -- far more than the bargained for -- working with among others James Earl Jones and River Phoenix. It's one of those 80s and 90s films that has become a bit of a cult classic.

As far as I'm aware, TCM hasn't yet mentioned anything about when a programming tribute to Redford will be taking place. I also have to admit that I haven't been watching the channel live all that much, so I haven't seen whether they're already put out a TCM Remembers spot for him. I'll obviously have more details on the programming tribute when it happens.

The tower of whiteness

Another movie that I recorded some time back and has been sitting on my DVR waiting for me to watch it and do a post on it for the next airing is The White Tower. That next airing comes tomorrow, Sept. 17, at 8:45 AM, so today the post on it goes up.

The movie opens with a Carla Alten (Alida Valli) returning to the village of Kandermatt, Switzerland (IMDb says that, like The Passionate Friends, France is actually standing in for Switzerland here), not having been here since the war some years back. Andreas (Oskar Homolka) at the local inn recognizes her and likes her, but a lot of the other people in town aren't thrilled to see her, at least the mountain guides. It's revealed that Carla's father tried to climb the "White Tower", the mountain overlooking Kandermatt, before the war when Carla was last here with him, only to die in the attempt, which is why nobody involved with mountaineering wants to have anything to do with her.

An international cast of stock character types is spending time at the hotel: Martin Ordway (Glenn Ford) fought in the European theater of World War II, getting shot down and escaping to Switzerland, which is why he enjoys Kandermatt: it's a refuge where he doesn't have to face real life. Hein (Lloyd Bridges) is a German who was obviously a Nazi in the war; the first time we see him he's shirtless and obviously showing off his Aryan physical superiority. Dr. Radcliffe (Cedric Hardwicke) is a British geologist, and much too old to try to make the climb. Finally, there's DeLambre (Claude Rains), an alcoholic Frenchman who's come to Kandermatt to finish his latest book.

Carla needs an expedition of at least four people to do the climb, preferably six. But whom to pick? Carla doesn't particularly care for Hein, and with good reason, but he's also the best provisioned person in town. Ordway doesn't really want to go up the mountain, but eventually changes his mind because he's just so gosh darn in love with Carla, because there's another plot point we've never seen in a movie like this. Of course, the other men are all too old, but eventually all of the men join Carla, because why else would they be in the movie?

The expedition starts off well enough, and they make reasonably good time at least why they're going through the meadows and the lower climbs of the mountain that aren't so steep. But eventually they start getting to steeper sections where ropes are necessary, as well as portions that are more like rock climbing than mountain climbing. And wait until they get to the snow. As you might guess, with a bunch of disparate character types, there's going to be conflicts that open up between various characters. Will they be able to make it to the top? Will they be able to get back down if they do get to the top?

The White Tower is a nice enough looking movie, although heaven knows that it's formulaic. You get the feeling that RKO either had blocked funds they had to use in Europe, or were trying to lure some famous names with the promise of a working holidy in Europe. The White Tower isn't a terrible movie, but apart from the visuals it's not exactly a great movie either.

Because I've reviewed Two Women and 7 Women before

Continuing with the theme of people who died in 2024, next up is a movie TCM ran at the end of December when they were doing their annual night of movies dedicated to people who left us in 2024. This time, the star in question is actress Shelley Duvall, and the movie TCM selected to honor her was 3 Women.

As you can guess, there are in fact three women who are the stars of the piece, although two of them get bigger roles. The movie opens with shots of people walking around a swimming pool, with the camera eventually pulling out to reveal that this is a pool at a geriatric spa which is probably attached to a nursing home, although that winds up not being important to the plot. Instead, we soon meet Pinky Rose (Sissy Spacek). She's just come west from Texas out to the Palm Springs area to start a new life and is looking for a job at this rehab center even though she doesn't seem to have any of the credentials that you would need in 2025. (I'm not quite aware of what credentials one would have needed back in 1977.) In any case, Pinky gets the job, and will the following day be shown the ropes by to-be co-worker Millie Lammoreaux (Shelley Duvall).

Pinky seems to like Millie, which is a good thing for Millie since the rest of the staff aren't the biggest fans of her. That's partly her own fault because she goes off to the nearby hospital cafeteria for lunch with the real doctors instead of the on-site cafeteria. In any case, when Millie makes a comment about her roommate having moved out to get married, Pink immediately talks Millie into taking her on as a roommate in the motel-like apartment where she lives.

At this point, we meet the third woman, Willie Hart (Janice Rule), who with her husband Edgar (Robert Fortier) owns both the apartment complex and a bar in the desert that used to be a tourist trap tied in with the old west and its use as location filming for B westerns or somesuch: Edgar's past job was as a stunt double in movie westerns. Willie is also pregnant, which is going to matter at the end of the movie.

Pinky starts getting closer to Millie, although some of Pinky's habits begin to get on Millie's nerves. Millie doesn't realize that Pinky is actually rather manipulative, as well as trying to learn intimate details of Millie's life. Matters come to a head when Millie comes up to the apartment one night with Edgar, who is drunk, and with whom she plans to have an affair. Pinky jumps into the apartment complex's swimming pool, nearly drowning and winding up in a coma, at which point the movie begins to get really weird.

And for me, that's the big problem I had with 3 Women. It's weird, which in and of itself isn't a bad thing, as there are lots of off-kilter movies that work because the audience doesn't know where it's going. But 3 Women feels like a dream: or, more accurately, it feels like the dream that director Robert Altman claims inspired it. Either way, the characters start changing personalities in ways that don't work for traditionally plotted movies and make things extremely difficult in figuring out who's doing what to whom and why. It also runs a shade over two hours, which frankly is too long for a movie like this.

Critics, on the other hand, loved 3 Women. So you may want to give it a try and find that your opinion of it is closer to the critics' view than my opinion is.

Nowhere to Go

Dame Maggie Smith died last year, and a month or two later TCM did the night of films tribute in her honor. I had seen and blogged on three of the five movies, with two needing a recording so that I could watch them later and put up a post on them. The first of those two is, in fact, Smith's debut role in a British film called Nowhere to Go.

Smith is in a supporting role and we don't see her for some time. The movie begins with a late-night sequence outside a prison. An explosion occurs, and one of the prisoners uses that as an excuse to escape. Well, not an excuse, as that was the plan: the man, Paul Gregory (George Nader), gets out of his cell, climbs over the wall, and makes his way to an apartment in London that's currently lying idle as its owner is out of town for three months. Gregory thinks back to how he wound up in prison, although only about the first third of the movie is subject to the obligatory flashback....

Gregory is a Canadian expat in London, who shows up at an arena for an ice hockey game, which is an exotic thing in London of the mid-1950s but of course not exotic for Canadians. One such Canadian is Harriet Jefferson (1920s star Bessie Love), who is the widow of a man who was a prominent coin collector. Harriet has no interest in coins, so is in Europe to sell the collection, and would like to see the hockey game. Her reserved seat has been cancelled, so Gregory kindly offers her his extra ticket. This is of course a ruse, as he's there to gain her confidence to let him sell the coins. His plan is to sell the coins for cash and abscond with the money, aided by phony coin dealer Sloane calling himself Henderson (Bernard Lee).

Gregory's plan was to put the cash in a safety deposit box, serve the shortish sentence for a first-time offender -- at least in Britain, as he's come here to escape his Canadian criminal past -- and then get the money from the box. But the judge gives him a ten-year sentence, which necessitates the escape. Gregory meets up with Sloane for a penultimate time to get his fake passport and to inform Sloane where to meet him for the second half of the payoff. But then Bridget (Maggie Smith), the girlfriend of the man whose apartment it is, shows up, not knowing that the man went away for a couple of months (or at least it's her story about being the girlfriend, and Sloane's story about the guy having suddenly left England for three months).

Gregory gets to the bank to get the money, but finds... a policeman who arrested him and would certainly recognize him as the escaped convict. (It is, however, surprising that the bank employees don't recognize him.) Sloane wants his money, and when he finds Gregory doesn't have it on hand yet, decides to double-cross Gregory. Things spiral out of control and Gregory winds up killing Sloane and being on the run for that murder as well as for being an escaped convict. But as he's on the run, what should happen but he runs into Bridget again? And she seems willing to help him escape....

Nowhere to Go was made at, of all places, Ealing, but under the auspices of the British branch of MGM who were planning to distribute it in the States. It's not what you normally think of when you think Ealing, but it's a surprisingly good little noirish movie. Maggie Smith doesn't have a lot to do here, but she does a good enough job. Nader is good too as a sort of average Joe who happens to be a tough conman. Nowhere to Go is definitely worth watching if you haven't seen it before.

All About the Benjamins

Another one of those movies that I saw ages ago, before I even started this blog, and never got around to watching another time is Private Benjamin. So, when it showed up on TCM last year on Veteran's Day, I recorded it so I could watch it and finally do a post on it here.

Goldie Hawn plays Judy Benjamin, a Jewish woman from an upper-class Philadelphia family who's about to get married to Yale Goodman (Albert Brooks). Judy has lived a life of leisure and, marrying a rich lawyer-type, she's going to be able to continue that by being the rich wife instead of having to go out into the professional world. The wedding goes off without a hitch but, as Yale is consummating the marriage later that evening, he suddenly drops dead of a heart attack, literally right on top of poor Judy.

As you might guess, Judy is disconsolate, with nobody being able to cheer her up, which frankly is perfectly normal considering her husband not only died on their wedding night, but died under rather morbid circumstances. So she calls up one of those late-night radio shows to pour her heart out, which brings her into contact with an army officer who also calls in, Sgt. Ballard (Harry Dean Stanton in a small role). Ballard pretty much lies to her about what life in the army is like and, being armed with all these lies, Judy decides she's going to enlist as a wy to try to turn her life around.

Judy gets sent to basic training in the Deep South with a bunch of other stock character types you've seen in pretty much every other service comedy, and it's here that Judy realizes she's been fed a bunch of lies, with her superior officers, Capt. Lews (Eileen Brennan) and drill sergeant Ross (Hal Williams) belittling her for her naïveté. Pvt. Benjamin decides she's going to stick it out and not give her superiors the satisfaction of her quitting, while she also makes friends with her fellow recruits. They dumb luck their way into winning war games and, on a weekend furlough to New Orlenas, Benjamin meets a French doctor, Tremont (Armand Assante) who tells her to look him up if she's ever in Europe.

Fat chance of her getting to Europe. Except that she's given the chance to try out for the paratroopers, where her new CO, Col. Thornbush (Robert Webber) goes too far in trying to encourage her to overcome her fear of jumping out of a plane. Rather than create controversy, it's decided among everybody to get Pvt. Benjamin as far away from Thornbush as possible, which means transferring Benjamin... to NATO headquarters in Brussels, where Capt. Lewis just happened to get transferred herself a few months earlier.

At this point, the movie takes a decidedly uneven turn, as it becomes less about Pvt. Benjamin's adventures in the army and more about her relationship with Tremont, a subplot which doesn't always work. Tremont keeps giving Benjamin reasons to believe that he might not be faithful to her or that there are other bits of his past that he's hiding. What future with Pvt. Benjamin choose for herself?

Goldie Hawn received a Best Actress Oscar nomination for Private Benjamin, although I have to say that after watching three of the other four nominees (I still haven't seen Ellen Burstyn in Resurrection) that the other nominees were phenomenal while Hawn was "only" very good. Hawn is quite good when the movie requires her to be comic, but the script somewhat lets her down when it moves to the romance portion in Paris. Eileen Brennan also got an Oscar nomination and she's really good, although I can't judge her against the other nominees since I haven't seen all of them. Of course, Brennan isn't really in the romantic part of the script.

Private Benjamin is mostly a good movie, but it is somewhat uneven due to the two plots. Still, it's decidedly worth watching.

Shameful Scar

It's been a while since I've done a post on a silent film. One that was sitting on my DVR about to expire was Scar of Shame, so I watched it before it expired and wrote up this post to put up at some time in the future.

I didn't realize it at the time I recorded the movie, but Scar of Shame is actually a "race film", produced with an almost entirely black cast and intended for release to black audiences, who liked most of the same genres of films as white audiences even if the filmmakers thought their audiences needed an even more obvious moral message than white audiences were given. In the case of Scar of Shame, that message has to do with a good upbringing being important for making good adults who can prosper and have a happy life.

Alvin Hillyard (Harry Henderson) is the man who has the "proper" upbringing, being into classical music and literature and other morally uplifting stuff. He lives in a Philadelphia boarding house, as does Eddie, who is not into morally good things, preferring to gamble and hang out with a guy named Spike who likes to drink to excess. Spike has a step-daughter Louise (Lucia Lynn Moses) whom he likes to beat to the point that she'd like to get away from it. And Alvin wants to protect her because it's the right thing to do.

So Alvin tells Louise that if she were to marry him, her step-father wouldn't have any reason to hurt her any more, and to an extent he's right since Spike has a bit more of a moral conscience than his friend Eddie, if not a very strong will. Alvin, however, worries about what his mother will think since he's married a woman from the wrong "caste". Say what you will about the racism of that era, but apparently those at the top end of the black community had the same concerns as upper-class whites about those icky class member of their race on the other side of the tracks.

Eddie comes up with a ridiculous idea to send Alvin a phony telegram about Alvin's mom being seriously ill, which is just a way to get Alvin out of town so Eddie and Spike can kidnape Louise and start a club with her as the main attraction which will surely make a ton of money. This plot ultimately ends up in a gunfight in which Louise accidentally gets grazed in the neck, and Alvin takes the fall for it, getting sent to jail.

But Alvin escapes, changes his name to Arthur, and moves way out of town to start working as a music teacher, where he meets young Alice and her father. He falls in love with Alice but can't marry her because of his past. And then one day, Alice asks Arthur to take a note to her father who is out for a night on the town. Arthur finds Alice's dad at the club, and wouldn't you know it but it's the same club Eddie and Spike founded with Louise working there. How all of this gets resolved, you'll have to watch the rest of the movie to find out.

To be honest, Scar of Shame is at times fairly ridiculous melodrama. But it's no worse than a lot of the melodrama that could be seen in white people movies of the era, especially dramas about characters who fall in love despite their parents not approving of the relationship. In fact, much of Scar of Shame could just as easily have been written for a white cast and audience without that much alteration, which is something that I found quite interesting. I also found that, if you don't mind melodrama and a somewhat implausible ending, Scar of Shame is eminently watchable.

Nice job, but who are the Chefs?

Mickey Rooney was TCM's Star of the Month for December 2024, and TCM ran a night of his juvenile roles from before the Andy Hardy movies. One where I didn't actually notice him in the cast was a movie called The Chief.

The chief is played by Ed Wynn, father of Keenan Wynn and at the time this movie was made much more successful for his radio show in which he played, among other things, the Texaco Fire Chief. That character was apparently popular enough to bring Ed Wynn to Hollywood and make a movie out of it. Indeed, the movie ends with the conceit that Wynn was actually doing his radio show and what you saw was a visualization of one of his radio stories or something like that; Ed doesn't quite put it that way.

Anyhow, the story begins back in the 1890s, with Wynn playing Henry Summers, who is the son of a beloved fire chief in the Bowery, now deceased and getting a statue of him dedicated. Henry is one of those incompetent types, so his presentation of the statue goes badly wrong and costing him his job but getting him a new one following in Dad's footsteps as a fire chief in the Bowery. Not that he knows anything about fighting fires, but somehow he bumbles his way into saving somebody the first time a fire breaks out.

For his "heroism", he gets offered his old job back. But it's really an excuse for his boss to get him to run for alderman, this being back in the day when there were ward-heelers would could deliver votes en bloc. It's corrupt, but it's not as if it's any more corrupt than the other side, and it's not as if Henry is going to be elected for his independence. Henry eventually decides to run, but the other side kidnaps his mother in an attempt to get Henry to drop out of the race.

As I said in the beginning, Ed Wynn was apparently quite popular on radio in the early 1930s, but I don't understand why. His character here is absolutely obnoxious, and the delivery only makes it more so. It's supposed to be funny. And maybe it was funny on the live vaudeville stage and on radio. But it's not funny here.

So I think The Chief is really only for the die-hard old-time radio buffs. But, as always, watch for yourself and make your own decision.

Matewan

James Earl Jones died last year, and when TCM did their programming salute to him, it gave me the chance to record a movie that I had seen pop up here and there over the years, but had never actually watched. That movie is the historical drama Matewan.

Matewan is based on the true story of the Battle of Matewan, part of a series of coal mining disputes in West Virginia in the early 1920s. The mine owners hold all the cards economically, and as a result are able to get away with offering little more than lousy conditions to the locals who work the mine. They've been thinking about forming a union, especially once the mine owners effectively lower the wages, but the mine owners can just bring new workers in, and we see a train of such replacement workers as the movie opens, with blacks like "Few Clothes" Johnson (James Earl Jones) and eventually Italian immigrants who speak little enough English that they're easy to exploit.

Into all of this comes union organizer Joe Kenehan (Chris Cooper). He's much like the Ron Liebman character in Norma Rae, although even more here, his involvement with the union has to be kept a secret or else the mine owners are really going to be angry and place Kenehan's life in danger. Still, a man seemingly without a job looking to stay in a company town like this is bound to be noticed, so he tries to be discreet staying in the boarding house run by Elma Radnor with her son Danny, one of those would-be child preachers who gives radical sermons about the local situation which are also a way of informing people rather obliquely what's going on.

The mine owners know something's up, so they send in a couple of detectives, Griggs and Hickey, to try to find out exactly what the deal is, along with trying to get an informant in among the mine workers. Kinehan, for his part, is no dummy, and having seen how the mine owners have brought in replacement workers, sets about trying to get the various sets of miners realize that they all have to be in it together. After all, if the replacements start disliking the conditions, the mine owners can bring in a third set of workers.

Matters escalate when the mine owners attempt to evict the families of striking miners, as the houses are technically owned by the mining company. The mayor and police chief, who are on the side of the miners, attempt to stave this off by pointing out that it might not be legal to just tell the miners they're being evicted and that they have to get court-ordered eviction notices. Some of the miners decide to decamp for the forested hills above town as this gets them off company-owned properties, although being in the hills isn't the safest thing either.

History tells us that tensions are eventually going to boil over, although how exactly that happens and what the consequences are are things that I'll leave to the viewers to find out for themselves. Suffice it to say that Matewan is a very well-made movie. It was, unsurprisingly, a hit with the critics, although perhaps equally unsurprisingly, it wasn't particuarly successful at the box office. I'd put that down partly to the subject material, and partly down to the fact that Matewan has a pretty slow build-up. Despite the box office failure, Matewan is a movie that you should see if you get the chance.

Tourneur Classic Movies revisited

Director Jacques Tourneur was born in November, but for whatever reason TCM honors him from time to time with a daytime lineup of some of his movies. Such is the case today, September 9, and one of his films that I haven't recommended before is the western Great Day in the Morning, which concludes the afternoon lineup at 6:15 PM.

Robert Stack stars as Owen Pentecost, and as the movie opens it's the beginning of 1861. Now, this means the start of the Civil War, although that hasn't happened yet. Owen is making his way west to Colorado, still a territory at the time, and along they way is saved from Indians by Steven Kirby (Alex Nicol). Steven is also helping a northerner make her way west, in the form of Ann Alaine (Virginia Mayo). Owen, however, is from North Carolina, which is going to secede in the not too distant future, but since the war hasn't begun yet Ann is able to stand up for Owen and break up any fighting between northern and southern men.

In a surprisingly small (and snowless, since it's still late March) Devner, they stop at a hotel which, like a lot in town, is owned by Jumbo Means (Raymond Burr) and staffed by barkeep Boston Grant (Ruth Roman). Owen and Jumbo begin to play poker against each other, although Jumbo is an inveterate cheat. Owen spots the cheating and challenges Jumbo to a fair game, eventually bankrupting Jumbo, although the question of how much Boston is helping is an open one: both Boston and Ann have a thing for Owen.

Among the things Owen wins from Jumbo are a bunch of mining claims, as it's thought there's gold in them thar hills. Owen goes out to visit the mining area, and finds a bunch of southerners trying to eke out a living with the hopes of finding gold. They're hoping that in the upcoming war, they'll be able to help the Confederate cause. Owen isn't unwilling, but is there to make money first and foremost. His fellow southerners aren't happy, but Owen has the power.

Pre-war tensions continue to mount and, as you might guess, things break down along the lines of which state people came from back east. Owen would stil rather be more of a mercenary, but with everybody around him being violent, he's forced to defend himself, killing a miner trying to cheat him and winding up taking care of the dead man's orphaned son. And then news reaches Colorado that the Confederates have attacked Fort Sumter, kicking off the Civil War and forcing Owen finally to take sides. The rest of the personal stories of these characters play out against this backdrop.

Great Day in the Morning is another of those well-enough made mid-tier westerns that Hollywood was still cranking out in the 1950s, with them being a bit more grown-up in themes to contrast with what was moving to television. The actors all do a professional job with the material which is competent if not spectactular. The print that TCM ran was also a very good one with nice color and wide-screen photography. If you want to be entertained, you could certainly do far worse than to watch Great Day in the Morning.

TCM Star of the Month September 2025: Peter Sellers

Careful readers of this blog (not that there are many) will note that I didn't do a post last week on the new TCM Star of the Month for September 2025. That's because, for whatever, reason, this month's Star gets four nights in prime time but TCM didn't want to program that on Wednesday or Thursday. So we finally get to the new Star of the Month tonight. That star is Peter Sellers, whose films will be on TCM tonight and each of the following three Mondays. I have one of his movies sitting on my DVR: Tom Thumb, which shows up overnight tonight (or early tomorrow morning depending upon your point of view) at 3:15 AM.

Technically, this isn't Sellers' movie, as he plays a supporting role, in the opening credits as one of "the villains" alongside Terry-Thomas. The real star here is Russ Tamblyn, who plays the titular role of the extremely tiny person. But we don't meet him for several minutes. Instead we meet forest dweller Jonathan (Bernard Miles), who lives a seemingly happy life out in the forest with his wife Anne, except for the fact they don't have children. One day as Jonathan is about to chop down a tree, he's stopped by the Forest Queen, who offers him three wishes in exchange for not chopping down the tree. Jonathan and his wife stupidly use up those wishes but granted a fourth, which is for the child they never had. That's where Tom comes in, mature but not grown up, or at least as grown up as he's going to be, with all of this being a perfect opportunity for special effects work, since the movie ws directed by George Pal.

Meanwhile, Woody (Alan Young) is a friend of Jonathan and Anne's as well as a performer in a traveling band. Jonathan sees the Forest Queen and falls in love with her, except that she's immortal. Or at least she is until Woody kisses her, which as you might guess is finally going to come at the beginning of the movie. Woody takes Tom to the carnival, and Tom gets transported by balloon to the top of one of the castle's towers.

On that tower are the Villains, Antony (Sellers) and Ivan (Terry-Thomas). They're trying to steal the gold that's in a locked vault in the treasury in the castle. Except that somehow, the vault has a ridiculously high ceiling with a grate at the top which just happens to be on the tower where Antony and Ivan are. They come up with an obvious lie that the naïve Tom accepts about the gold being misused as it was supposed to be for orphans. So they get him to help them steal one bag, since he's the only human who can fit through the grate. The folks in the castle do inventory and find one bag of gold coins missing, so they go out looking for it. When the one coin Ivan and Antony gave Tom is found in a bowl of porridge, Jonathan and Anne are put on trial for the theft. It's up to Tom and Woody to save the day and give us the requisite happy ending.

We know we're going to get that happy ending because for the most part the movie has had a light tone. That, and it's Hollywood. So even though it's based on a fairy tale compiled by the Grimm brothers, and many of the tales they compiled were surprisingly dark and violent, we're not getting that. What we do get is a movie that, even close to 70 years on, is going to appeal to children. They won't mind the special effects that seem primitive by today's standards, or the backlot production values. That doesn't mean that it's a bad movie or that adults will be bored by it, although it is a fairly simple story with not much going on and a running time padded by musical numbers and stop-motion photography.

The American Film Theater again

Some months back, I did a post on the movie A Delicate Balance which is an adaptation of a play by Edward Albee and produced by a man named Ely Landau who had a daring idea of bringing prominent modern (or more modern that what Hollywood generall adapted) plays to the screen. The AFT only lasted two "seasons", releasing about 14 films. Another one of the AFT movies that I've had on my DVR is Galileo based on a play by German dissident playwright Bertolt Brecht.

Galileo is of course the famous Italian scientist and astronomer who, among other things, was one of the first to use a telescope in astronomy and in doing so discovered four of Jupiter's moons. As the film opens, that's where the action begins, with Galileo (Chaim Topol) in Padua having discovered the moons and wanting to show his discovery to the Medicis because of its importance. The Medicis don't even want to look into the telescope because they don't believe Jupiter can have moons: the Earth is the center of the universe, and everything must revolve around the earth. Jupiter having moons would decisively prove Copernicus' theory about the universe not being geocentric, which has major theological implications.

Galileo's evidence is controversial, but he has a modicum of safety in that Padua has been aligned with Venice, which can abide with new knowledge of the heavens if it makes navigation easier and safer, thereby saving them money. But the other Italian city-states as well as the Papal States are a tougher nut. Galileo has an ally in the Church in the form of Cardinal Barberini (Michael Lonsdale), who would later become Pope Urban VIII, but there are many more people, and more powerful forces within the Church hierarchy who do not support Galileo's teachings. It's also a problem for Galileo's personal life. He has a daughter Virginia who has for a long time been engaged to the wealthy Marsali. But Marsali doesn't accept heliocentrism, causing him to break off the engagement. Galileo does have several students who support him.

The acting advances to 1633, and the forces against Galileo have become so strong that not even Pope Urban can save him. Galileo is brought to Rome to recant his views publicly, with the inducement being that if he does so, he'll only be subjected to house arrest and will be able to do "research" in scientific areas that Church doesn't have any problem with yet. Otherwise, he faces death: the Inquisition is still that strong. Of course, we know from history that Galileo did recant publicly even if he didn't really believe his recantation. As the movie concludes Galileo has been working on a new treatise the he wants smuggled out of Italy.

Now, one thing to know about Bertolt Brecht is that he was a Marxist and believed is using art -- in his case the theater -- to advance philosophical ideas even above the narrative. So his Galileo was supposed to be the villain of the piece by virtue of his having recanted. But somehow, few directors have been able to Brecht's Galileo that unsympathetic. Having Topol as Galileo certainly doesn't help, although the first translation into English was done by Charles Laughton in conjunction with Brecht; Laughton then played that Galileo on stage and there was no way a Laughton Galileo was going to be unsympathetic.

This 1970s version has another problem, which is that it retains the chorus that Brecht used (from my reading about the play; I've never seen a stage production of it) to inform the audience of what was going to be happening. I'm guessing that Brecht did this in part to try to get the audience's attention on something other that Galileo as a hero as well as to make a more didactic statement as to what the play was about. Here, the chorus is three young boys whose voices have not yet changed; this combined with their singing makes it difficult to understand them.

I think Ely Landau and the whole American Film Theater idea deserve the benefit of the doubt for trying to come up with something daring and new. However, trying to stay so close to the plays doesn't always work, and the flaws in doing that are certainly evident in Galileo. It's not a bad movie, but opening up the play in the right way -- even though that probably would have gone against what the AFT was trying to do -- could have made Galileo so much better.

The Last Detail

I'm working through the last of the movies that TCM ran as part of last year's Two for One programming block. (As I write this, I haven't seen any of TCM's fall schedule to know is TCM is going to rerun this year's Two for One spots the way they did last year.) One of the movies that was selected that I had never actually seen before is The Last Detail. So, I recorded it, and eventually got around to watching it.

At a naval base in Norfolk, VA, Billy Buddusky, nicknamed "Badass" (Jack Nicholson) and Richard Mulhall nicknamed "Mule" (Otis Young) are called in to see the master-at-arms. Now, for those who don't know, the master-at-arms is a sort of police chief responsible for on base law enforcement and base security among similar duties. Neither Badass nor Mule is in trouble, however. Instead, they're being given the task of transporting a young naval recruit, Seaman Larry Meadows (Randy Quaid), to the military prison in Portsmouth NH where Larry will be sent to serve an eight-year sentence. Now, it's not explained how Badass and Mule got selected for this detail since it's not either of their specialties, but go with it. I wouldn't think Norfolk and Portsmouth are that far away (Google Maps suggests about 12 hours by I-95), but the two men are given a week to get Larry there, which I suppose is to make certain he gets there on time.

In any case, Badass figures that since they've got that week, and because they're being paid a per diem, why not use all the time they're allotted and try to pocket some of what's left of the per diem? And then, they ask Larry why he's being sent to prison. Larry turns out to be a naïve young man who is also a bit of a kleptomaniac: he was allowed to enlist in the navy despite several run-ins with the police on shoplifting-related charges, never actually having been sentenced to prison before. This time, however, he tried to steal $40 out of a charity box. That doesn't seem like it would warrant an eight-year sentence, but the charity box in question was being administered by the wife of the base commander, which might explain the long sentence. Piss off the rabble and we don't care; piss off the powerful and screw you.

But Badass in particular develops a sense of sympathy toward Larry. Mule does to a lesser extent, although he knows there's a job to be done and trouble if they don't do it. Badass wants to make Larry's last days of freedom memorable, and so sets up all sorts of experiences including drinking and visiting a brothel so Larry can lose his virginity. A detour to visit Larry's mother is unsuccessful, while getting sucked into a prayer service at a Buddhist cult has a bit more of an effect on Larry. But constantly hanging over the movie is the fact that there is a duty to get Larry to prison, and the question of whether he'll ever try to escape and what would happen after such an escape attempt.

I can see why there are so many film critic and industry types who would love a movie like The Last Detail. I didn't dislike it, although I have to admit that I had a bit of a problem with the Badass character. Unlike Larry, who is clearly sympathetic because he's getting a totally disproportionate sentence, Badass comes off as a loud, obnoxious brute, consistently violating the rules as well as being manipulative. One may think he's doing this stuff for Larry's benefit, but at the same time, he's exhausting to watch and I can only imagine being stuck with him in close quarters for a whole week.

Still, The Last Detail is a movie that's absolutely worth watching.

Woody Allen does Ingmar Bergman again

It's been about three years since I did a post on Woody Allen's movie Interiors, which he was open about making on the grounds that he wanted to make a film in the style of Ingmar Bergman. Allen would revisit Bergman a few years later, although this time with a fair bit of Anton Chekhov mixed it. That movie is A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy.

José Ferrer plays Leopold Sturges, a college professor sometime in the early part of the 20th century. The end of term is about to come up and everyone is about to break for summer, with Leopold telling his fellow professors that he's about to get married to a young woman named Ariel (Mia Farrow) and embark on a summer tour of Europe. But first, he's going to see he cousin Adrian (Mary Steenburgen) out in the country.

Adrian is married and a long-suffering wife to a dreamer of an inventor named Andrew (Woody Allen), the sort of garage-workshop inventor who could come up with new things still in that era, although it doesn't particularly look like most of Andrew's inventions are very successful. They've also reached a point in their marriage where they've stopped having sex, which doesn't seem like a big deal to mention for a 1980s movie but, since the movie is set around 1910, is something you'd think the characters of the day wouldn't mention.

Adrian and Andrew have been expecting Leopold and Ariel, as well as another guest, their doctor friend Maxwell (Tony Roberts). Maxwell is a ladies' man, and has had a string of girlfriends, with Adrian and Andrew expecting him to bring his latest girlfriend. He does, although it's not what people might have been expecting, since he's literally just started a relationship with his nurse Dulcy (Julie Hagerty).

Now, if you've seen the early Ingmar Bergman film Smiles of a Summer Night, you'll have some good predictions of what's going to happen next. When Ariel shows up, Andrew realizes that he met Ariel some time back, and that he might still be in love with her, although of course it would be unfaithful of him to try to start up a relationship with her. And then Maxwell and Dulcy arrive. Maxwell immediately discovers that he too is in love with Ariel, and that the Ariel/Leopold marriage has no real shot of working out. Complicating matters is that Adrian talks with the other women about how to spice up her love life again, while Leoplold thinks he might be falling for Adrian and/or Dulcy.

All of this has the vibe of the aforementioned Smiles of a Summer Night, but also reminded me of the film adaptation of Chekhov's The Seagull that I watched late last year. I'm sorry to say that what Woody Allen does here doesn't quite work. I think that's because of Woody putting himself in the cast. This was still the point Allen's career when he had the screen persona of the nebbish, neurotic city type, and I don't think that works for A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy. If he had been able to cast other people and not himself, and write to their strengths and personalities, I think the movie would have worked better.

Reading other reviews of A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy, I see that it's generally considered of one Allen's lesser films. Having watched it, I can see why. Although it's got some lovely cinematography, in terms of story it's just not up there with Allen's other work.