But no affairs with married women

Another of the many movies that I recorded the last time they showed up on TCM was The Affairs of Dobie Gillis. It's finally getting another showing on TCM, tomorrow (Feb. 11) at 6:00 AM, so once again now would be the perfect time for me to put up this post I've written on the movie after having watched it.

Dobie Gillis, played by Bobby Van, is a young man about to enroll as a freshman at Grainbelt University somewhere in the Midwest. One wonders how he even got into college, considering his philosophy that some people are workers and others are enjoyers, and, well, he's an enjoyer. At the opening registration, Dobie gets a roommate in the form of Charlie Trask (Bob Fosse) who becomes his new best friend.

Dobie also seems to be a hit with the women. There's Lorna (Barbra Ruick), who winds up with Charlie. The only real reason she isn't with Dobie is because another woman got there first. Pansy Hammer (Debbie Reynolds) is in the same freshman composition class and chemistry class as Dobie, and the two of them immediately hit it off, even though the English professor, Amos Pomfritt (Hans Conried) has it in for Dobie. Pansy lives in town because she's a local and can live with her parents (Hanley Stafford and Lurene Tuttle). Mr. Hammer in particular has a dislike of Dobie, because he sees Dobie wants to get by with a minimum of work and that's not a good trait to have in a husband. But then, we wouldn't have much of a movie if Pansy weren't around or there weren't some sort of conflict.

Things go wrong first when Dobie's car breaks down on a date (although Pansy makes a mistake by not going straight up to her bedroom and changing when she gets home) and then when Dobie decides he and Pansy should just start skipping classes to go on dates, forcing the two of them to do a semester's worth of work in one day and leading to Pansy's blowing up the chemistry lab. For this, Pansy's dad sends her to an aunt in New York so she can go to school there, far away from Dobie. Dobie wants to see Pansy, but he doesn't have the money to get to New York.

Eventually Dobie does get the money, although it's in the sort of dishonest way you'd think would get him strung up on an embezzlement charge: he offers to go to New York to find a band for a fundraiser, and spends a goodly portion of the money dating Pansy instead. Worse, not long after returning to Grainbelt word comes in from New York that Pansy has gone missing! Her dad is understandably pissed, but as you might guess from a movie like this, Dobie is actually innocent and there's a happy ending to be had.

The Affairs of Dobie Gillis is an MGM musical, albeit decidedly not a Freed Unit musical, which in some ways makes the movie a bit of an anomaly. It might also be a bit surprising to some that this came out after Singin' in the Rain, when you'd think MGM wouldn't want to cast Reynolds in such a trifle. There's a lot of opportunity for the four leads to sing and/or dance, to more success than failure although Van's solo of "I'm Thru With Love" goes on too long. The problem that the movie has is the plot, which has too many plot holes and left me wanting to take Dobie and Pansy and literally try to shake some sense into them.

The Affairs of Dobie Gillis is also mildly interesting for those with nostalgia for the studio system; I for one was trying to figure out which of the campus buildings (if any) was the one used as the high school in High School Confidential some years later. There's also a set that has a ton of college pennants on it. Oddly, the design also has a pennant from Carvel High School, which you may recall was the high school from the Andy Hardy movies.

Time Without Pity

TCM ran a morning and afternoon of the films of actress Ann Todd some time back. One that I watched just before it expired from my DVR so that I could write up a review of it here was Time Without Pity.

Todd isn't the star here; that would be Michael Redgrave, although we don't see him in the opening scene. Instead, that pre-credits scene is of an older man killing a young woman named Jennie Cole. Then, after the opening credits, we see a plane landing in the UK after a transatlantic flight. Getting off is David Graham (Michael Redgrave). He's an alcoholic who has been away in Canada in some sort of in-patient treatment, which must have taken quite a long time since David missed not just that murder. David's adult son Alec (Alec Macowan) was accused of the murder of that young girl, found guilty, and sentenced to hang, with the execution being the day after Dad arrived back in Britain. We also learn that Dad's alcoholism has been going on long enough that his son doesn't care about his father, and is perfectly willing to be executed even though we know he's not guilty. Dad is convinced his son couldn't have done such a thing, and plans on proving his son's innocence.

The first person David tries to talk to is Agnes Cole (Joan Plowright), the sister of the murder victim. Agnes is a showgirl, and is convinced that Alec must be guilty. Or, at least, that's what she has David believe with the way she's screaming at him and doesn't want to talk to him at all.

Alec, having been forced to spend a lot of time away from his father, became friends with the Stanford family, specificall with the son Brian. Brian's adoptive father Robert (Leo McKern) is a wealthy automobile manufacturer, and it was in the Stanford house that the murder took place. Alec, you see, spent a lot of time there what with his father being away, and was the boyfriend of the murder victim. David doesn't let on who he is when he visits the Stanfords, (Ann Tood plays Mrs. Stanford), and Dad doesn't seem to recognize David, although the son Brian does and doesn't tell his father that David is using a false identity to visit the Stanfords.

David continues to try to find clues, all with a metaphorical clock constantly ticking down the hours until the scheduled execution. It seems ridiculous that this tyro should be able to solve the mystery when the police haven't been able to, even if we already know who the killer is since we see his face in the opening scene. It also seems ridiculous that the trial went the way it must have gone, but then we wouldn't have had a movie if these things hadn't happened.

Time Without Pity is another of those movies where I can see why somebody like Michael Redgrave would want to take the lead. The idea of having to try to prove somebody's innocence against an extremely tight deadline makes for a potentially really interesting story, as we've seen in great movies like Saboteur. Here, however, it seemed to me like it would be so unlikely for the legal system to screw up this badly, to the extent that it makes the movie not work all that well for me. Still, everybody tries, but can't quite overcome the script flaws.

Paris Interlude

Despite my writing this blog for 18 years now, it always surprises how many 1930s movies are that I still don't know about. The latest example of this came when I watched the programmer Paris Interlude.

The movie opens up in 1927, when Charles Lindbergh was making his transatlantic flight in The Spirit of St. Louis, and everybody in Paris waiting for Lindbergh to land. Especially the reporters, who wanted to be the first to get the story. Among those reporters is Sam Colt (Otto Kruger), who was a flyboy in World War I before he lost his left arm. He's become a reporter since, and at one time was a good reporter before he turned to drink and is the sort of dissolute ex-pat who was a thing back in popular culture in the years just before the Depression, although Paris Interlude was released in 1934. In any case, Colt enlists the help of aspiring writer Pat Wells (Robert Young) to help write the stories in a sort of apprentice relationship. It's not enough for Pat to make a living, and he wants to write fiction any way.

All of these characters spend just as much time at a local watering hole that has next to nothing French about it instead being a place for Americans to recreate their fantasy of what Parisian café life is about. Among these people are aimless Julie (Madge Evans), who moons over Sam because he's just so dashing and handsome, while not having any idea what to do with life. There's also fashion designer Cassie Bond (Una Merkel), and Ham (Edward Brophy), a naïve journalist on his way to the Soviet Union to cover the situation there although he never makes it for whatever reason.

Sam proposes to Julie and plans to take her back to the States, and she even tells her folks back there she's planning to come back a wife. But Sam gets an assignment covering the slow-burning Chinese civil war (at the time the movie was set, this would have been before Japan invaded Manchuria, although the movie was released some years after), forcing him to leave Julie behind. She feels she can't go back to America, so she starts working writing about the haute couture scene in Paris with her articles illustrated by Cassie. Pat falls in love with Julie but can't support her, while another American abroad, golfer Rex Fleming (George Meeker) shows up. And then news comes in that Sam has been shot down in China and is presumably dead.

Except that in a movie like this you have to expect that he's not in fact dead. So 20 minutes later into the movie, on the day that Julie is finally about to marry Sam who has sold a story, Sam arrives back in Paris looking just like he would have looked the day he was shot down in China which makes no sense in terms of plot. Wouldn't he have gotten cleaned up? But Sam's arrival makes Julie wonder just whom she should marry.

For some reason, I went into Paris Interlude thinking this movie was going to be a comedy. It isn't at all, and mostly wasn't intended to be apart from the comic relief character. It's not exactly a bad movie, but it's definitely the sort of thing that would have been what movie exhibitors wanted in 1934: something that could run for a week or two as the second feature and give audiences a movie to come to, only to fade into obscurity as something newer came to the screen. It's with good reason that I had never heard of this one before it showed up on the TCM schedule the last time it did.

Between Two Worlds

Many years ago, I did a post on the early sound film Outward Bound which I found interesting for the way in which I felt it actually tried to use sound as a character in the movie. Outward Bound was remade as a somewhat bigger movie during World War II and given the title Between Two Worlds. I'd been meaning to get around to watching it, so the last time TCM ran it I finally recorded it and eventually watched it, wrote up this post, and saved it in drafts for you to get this post today.

The movie starts off at a travel agency in some British seaside port, presumably Southampton although I don't know that the movie makes this explicit. Various people are trying to get passage to America, something which is difficult considering the war going on. Among them Henry Bergner (Paul Henried), a former concert pianist who joined the anti-Nazi resistance in his home country but had to flee to England. He's not allowed to board, and heads home to commit suicide. As he's going through the streets, we see the car that's carrying the other passengers about to set sail get bombed in a Nazi air raid.

Cut to a shot of Henry'a apartment, where we find him having turned on the gas to off himself. His distraught wife Ann (Eleanor Parker) enters the apartment, and decides that if Henry is going to kill himself, she's going to join him because she'll have nothing to live for. Henry, for his part, tries to keep Ann from joining him, but she's insistent.

And wouldn't you know it, the next thing they know is that they're on the boat that Henry had been trying to get a ticket for, which doesn't seem to make sense at first unless of course you've seen Outward Bound before. And in any case, it's explained much earlier in Between Two Worlds than in Outward Bound what's happened. Henry and Ann are dead, as are all of the other passengers on board, although they're being carried to a sort of purgatory where they'll be judged by the "Examiner" before it's to be determined where and how they spend eternity.

The next passenger to figure out what's happened in Thomas Prior (John Garfield). He's the sort of cynical reporter who always seems to have a sharp word for everybody else but has set up such a shield around himself that he claims not to feel anything. And he's more than willing to spill the beans on what's happening even though the ship's purser, Scrubby (Edmund Gwenn), wants everybody to figure it out for themselves that they're already dead.

Among the other passengers are Pete (George Tobias), a sailor reminscent of the William Bendix character in Lifeboat; a wealthy older couple; a local vicar who winds up helping the "Examiner"; gold-digger actress Maxine Russell (Faye Emerson); housemaid Mrs. Midget (Sara Allgood); and war profiteer Lingley (George Coulouris). Eventually the Examiner (Sydney Greenstreet) shows up to deliver judgment on each of the passengers.

I think I personally preferred Outward Bound in part because I have a thing for early talkies and in part because it's a much more compact little picture at almost 30 minutes shorter than Between Two Worlds. However, even I have to admit that Between Two Worlds has much better production values. Ultimately, however, I think a lot of which version are going to prefer is going to come down to their preconceived notions of the stars playing the various characters. The role played by John Garfield is much changed for Garfield's screen persona, the role having been essayed in Outward Bound by Leslie Howard. A little bit of Garfield can go a long way, and here I think he's a bit too cynical. Somewhat like his character in Four Daughters in that regard.

Sydney Greenstreet, on the other hand is excellent in his role, as is Allgood. So it's not without reason that many fans are going to prefer Between Two Worlds. Watch both and judge for yourself.

Olympia

Another of the movies that I had to watch off of my DVR before it expired was Olympia, Leni Riefenstahl's two-part documentary on the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics. Today being the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics, I figured this would be a good time to put up the post on it. Apparently the original plan was to release one movie, but Riefenstahl's edit ran so long that the movie wasn't released until mid-1938, and in two parts as it ran over four hours. Stylistically there's not enough different to justify two full separate posts, so I'm doing a post that covers both Part 1 (Festival of Nations; linked above), and the second part, Festival of Beauty.

The first part starts with a long sequence of Riefenstahl's interpretation of what training for the ancient Greek Olympiad might have been like, with a bunch of nearly naked men wearing nothing more than a codpiece and running or doing throwing events. There are also women who are completely naked, albeit in a form about as artistic as Renaissance art nudes or ancient Greek statuary. We then transition to the Olympic torch relay, starting in Greece and going through southeastern Europe on its way to Germany, leading up to the opening ceremony when the Olympic cauldron is lit after all of the countries (I think 51 of them) march into the Olympic stadium.

The rest of Part 1 deals with most of the track and field events, attempting to document them to show what happened, who won and how, but without running ridiculously long. Berlin is the Olympics where Jesse Owens famously won four gold medals, and these events are shown, with pretty much no more propaganda or racial denigration than one would have gotten from a white American Hollywood production. The recreation of the German radio/public address athletes consistently refers to certain athletes as "the black man [surname]", but that's not much worse than American commentary would have been. But more on the propaganda in the summary later.

Part 2 opens with a shorter sequence of athletes training, which might be a bit controversial in that all the male German athletes retire to the sauna after their run and there's some obvious full frontal nudity. The sports covered here include very brief references to boxing and gymnastics, with more to yachting, and then rowing (showing the American men's win in the eights that became the subject of the book and movie The Boys in the Boat), modern pentathlon, the cycling road race, and the diving, with the diving being the most famous sequence because of Riefenstahl's camera use.

And it's that use of the camera for which Olympia should be rightly remembered. The opening sequences of the two parts are in many ways the most interesting in that Riefenstahl had the most freedom in composing them. When it comes to actual sports, that's a bit harder, since there's only so much you can do to film, say, an actual boxing match. So a lot of the movie has a slightly boring feel to it. To combat this, Riefenstal did as much as she could to put cameras in spots that were unorthodox for 1936, have them moving on rails to track the athletes, or put them under or over the athletes. She also made heavy use of editing, especially in the diving sequence. I think they might have mentioned the winner, but more than any other event that felt beside the point, as she was trying to show the beauty of the human form. Some sequences, however, especially in the cycling and probably in the sailing, look like they have to be recreations.

The beauty of the human body is also where one can start when it comes to discussing the propaganda nature of the movie. Adolf Hitler obviously wanted to show the Germans as a superior people, and all of those nearly-naked bodies are very clearly of a certain narrowly-defined standard of beauty. Riefensthal couldn't show Germans winning events they didn't win -- and she doesn't hide non-Germans winning as with Jesse Owens -- but beauty is clearly a German thing.

There's also the presence of Adolf Hitler. Some of this obviously can't be helped. Berlin had been awarded the right to stage the 1936 Olympics back in 1931, before the Nazis came to power, and it is traditionally the job of the head of state of the host nation to declare the games open. So of course Hitler has to be there. At the same time, one didn't need to show him later on watching the events. There's also a lot of shots of German athletes and spectators giving the Nazi salute to the German flag at various times. During the medal ceremony and anthem playing that's understandable. 90 years on, people are going to be a bit uncomfortable with other shots of it.

All in all, Olympia deserves to be remembered as a movie that introduced a lot of ground-breaking techniques to the coverage of sport, even if it will also always be remembered for director Leni Riefenstahl's involvement with Adolf Hitler.

Who Killed Teddy Bear?

Another of the movies that's showing up on TCM and sitting on my DVR is the 1960s exploitation piece Who Killed Teddy Bear, which will be on TCM tomorrow, February 6, at 6:15 PM. As is always the case, when one of these movies comes up, I make a point of watching it so that I can do the post like this on the film.

The movie starts with a man, face unseen, but with a fairly fit body and wearing just a pair of tighty-whities, making an obscene phone call to poor Norah Dain (Juliet Prowse). Meanwhile, we learn about the titular teddy bear, which comes about when a young girl named Edie Sherman (played as an adult by Margot Bennett) saw her brother Lawrence (Sal Mineo) having sex with someone, which scarred her emotionally and caused her to fall down the stairs, leaving her a brain-damaged adult.

Norah and Lawrence both work at a discotheque run by Marian Freeman (Elaine Stritch) that plays the sort of upbeat pop music that was all the vogue in the 1960s. Norah works as a hostess and playing records, while Lawrence is a busboy. Norah tells Marian about the phone calls, which brings the police into the case, in the form of Lt. Madden (Jan Murray). Madden is a piece of work himself. He's got a young daughter, but no longer has a wife, as the wife was raped and killed some years back. This led Madden to start doing his own independent research on what causes men to become the sort of sex maniac who would make such obscene phone calls or even go further. But, the way he does the research makes you think it's much more than just a professional interest and that he might be about to become one of the criminals he claims to be railing against. Indeed, higher-ups in the police have noticed.

The incident that left little Edie brain-damaged, and forced Lawrence to become her guardian after their parents died, has also saddled poor Lawrence with a lot of guilt in addition to an inability to have a normal relationship with a woman, to the point that he goes to the sort of adult establishments that dotted the streets just off Times Squares in the era before the place was cleaned up and Disneyfied. Meanwhile, the calls to Norah keep coming, so Marian offers to spend the night at Norah's apartment. However, Marian does something Norah considers a sexual advance, and kicks Marian out. But the man pursuing Norah mistakes Marian for Norah since Marian is wearing Norah's coat, and follows Norah and kills her!

Eventually, for the movie's climax, Norah offers to teach Lawrence how to dance. Lawrence reveals his feelings for Norah but, due to his being emotionally stunted, is completely unable to express his feelings in a healthy way.

Who Killed Teddy Bear is an incredibly sleazy movie considering the star power on offer here. That makes it interesting. Unfortunately, as an actual narrative movie it's not quite so good. The story is kind of a mess and it's really not that difficult to figure out who's making those calls to Norah. But the sleaze that makes it interesting also makes it worth a watch.

Un esercito di 5 uomini

Another of the movies that I had on my DVR that I wanted to watch before it expired was one that, unknown to me at the time, is a spaghetti western: The Five Man Army. At the time I recorded it, I only noticed the name of Peter Graves in the screen guide description, but when you watch the opening credits and several of the Italian names show up, it's fairly obviously a spaghetti western.

As I metioned, Peter Graves is the nominal star here, although he's not the first one we see. In a Mexican village in 1914 during the revolution, Luis Dominguez (Nino Castelnuovo) shows up where the authorities are registering men for work permits. Luis has a past, as we later learn, as a bank robber, and so as not to be found out, he takes another man's identity. Luis is then offered a job by a "Dutchman" (Peter Graves).

That job is a heist which is going to require a team of people with various abilities, so in fitting with the formula of a heist movie, we get a series of scenes of the Dutchman finding the right people for the job, all of whom are known to him while they don't know each other. Mesito (Bud Spencer) is a mountain of a man who rustled a rail car of cattle, only to make the mistake of trying to sell them back to their original owner. Mesito also thinks a lot about food, a sort of running joke throughout the movie. There's also the Dutchman's old comrade-in-arms Augustus (James Daly), who is needed because he's the explosives expert. Finally, there's the mysterious "Samurai" (Tetsuro Tamba), who somehow wound up in the US and is good with knives. I don't know if the producers thought Tamba's English wasn't good enough, but there's a conceit written into the script that Samurai is a taciturn man who only speaks when he needs to, and I don't think Samurai has an actual speaking line in the entire movie.

After the five men get together and escape the Mexican authorities again, they learn what the mission is for which Dutchman has assembled them. There's that revolution going on, and the revolutionaries need money. The legitimate Mexican government is shipping a bunch of gold by rail, so as always, why not hijack one of these rail shipments and give the gold to the revolutionaries? Each of them has separately been promised good pay for the work.

Now, the train has a whole bunch of soldiers guarding it, both on open cars and in the one sealed car that actually has the gold. Samurai is good at throwing knives to kill people silently; while Augustus has the explosives knowledge necessary to get into the car with the gold. And Mesito has a key role not on the train. The plan is to unhook that car and shunt it to an abandoned barn; Mesito has to lay a bit of track and operate the switch. And Dominguez, who was in a circus acrobat act before his parents' deaths broke up the act and forced him into a life of crime to make ends meet, is going to rehook the other cars together.

As often happens in heist movies, there are things in the buildup and execution of the heist that threaten to derail it, pun intended. And, of course, even if the heist does go off as planned, it's not unexpected that criminals might wish to get greedy over how much they're going to get paid for it. So with all that, it's not really as though The Five Man Army is breaking any new ground. And yet the road it takes is more than entertaining enough. It's not the world's greatest movie, in part because there's something about the spaghetti western genre's production values that always seems just a bit off. Also, in part because of the cinematography that screams late 1960s with its pans and zooms. But there's more in The Five Man Army that works than doesn't.

The Curse of Frankenstein

Tonight's second night of Bugs Bunny shorts includes a trio of monster/mad scientist-inspired entries in the 1:00 AM half hour. That will be followed by a couple of horror features, including The Curse of Frankenstein at 3:00 AM. Fortunately, I had that one on my DVR from when John Carpenter selected it in last year's Two for One series, so I was able to watch it to do this review.

Frankenstein is, as always, not the monster (called the "Creature" in this movie), but Dr. Victor Frankenstein, who created the Creature. Here, Victor Frankenstein is played by Peter Cushing, and as the movie opens, he's in a Swiss prison awaiting execution. As you might guess, this is going to lead to a flashback in which the main story is told, to a visiting priest.... (I suppose the other plot device could have involved Dr. Frankenstein escaping prison.)

Flash back to when Victor was an adolescent. His father has been dead for some time and now his mother dies, leaving Victor a fairly substantial estate in addition to the Baron title he's already had. His mom's sister shows up together with her daughter, ie. Victor's cousin Elizabeth (the adult Elizabeth being played by Hazel Court). Apparently Mom had given her sister a modest allowance, and she'd like that to continue, although this scene is more a way to introduce the Elizabeth character. Victor being on his own but still a legal minor, needs an adult, and hires a tutor in Paul Krempe (Robert Urquhart).

Krempe proceeds to teach Victor everything he knows about the sciences, and Victor is an adept learner. Victor seems particularly interested in the relatively new field of electricity and what sort of energy animates life-forms. This first bit of experimentation culminates in bringing a dog back to life, which is a pretty neat trick. As you might guess from a Frankenstein movie, however, things aren't going to stop there, and Victor wants to go much farther than Krempe would like, leading Krempe to feel a sense of alarm. Worse, Victor builds his human for the experimentation by obtaining various body parts in highly illicit ways, up to and including murder of an aging professor.

Adult Elizabeth shows up with the intention of marrying her cousin, but Krempe wants her to leave the house right away because he believes she's in danger. Indeed, when Victor kills the professor for the professor's brain, Krempe gets in an argument with him that damages the brain. So when Victor's creature (played by Christopher Lee) comes to life, it's brain-damaged and sociopathic, with a propensity to kill.

The Curse of Frankenstein tells the story of Frankenstein's monster in a very different way from the 1931 Frankenstein with Bela Lugosi. This version focuses on Victor as an openly malevolent person, and that's a take which I think serves the story quite well. This was one of the earliest Hammer horror films, and was extremely successful, which led to all those future Hammer horror movies. Cushing is very good, while Lee doesn't exactly have a whole lot to do here since he doesn't show up in the first half of the movie and doesn't have any lines anyway. If you haven't seen The Curse of Frankenstein before, it's an excellent way to kick off the Hammer horror films.

The Gauntlet

Another of the movies that's been sitting on my DVR for a while that I decided to watch is The Gauntlet.

Clint Eastwood stars as Ben Shockley. During the opening credits, a car is driving through the streets of downtown Phoenix early enough that although the sun is up, there's no traffic on the road. Parking near police headquarters and getting out is police detective Shockley, who drops his bottle of booze getting out of the car, which is a sign that Ben is an alcoholic. Ben runs into his friend and former detective partner Maynard Josephson (Pat Hingle), who warns Ben that Commissioner Blakelock (William Prince), who wants to see Ben, would like to see someone who's polite and polished, things that Ben clearly isn't.

Commissioner Blakelock has a special assignment for Ben. Apparently, there's a trial to be held in Phoenix, Arizona v. Deluca, and one of the witnesses, Gus Mally, is in Vegas. So the Arizona authorities need somebody to go to Vegas and pick up Mally, who is fortunately in the county jail awaiting extradition to Phoenix. Since this isn't much of a job and Shockley is supposedly not much of a cop, he can be spared the day or so it's going to take. Shockley flies to Vegas and asks the duty officer at the jail if they have a man named Gus Mally ready for extradition to Arizona. They don't: the reason is that Gus is actually Augustina Mally (Sondra Locke), making her a woman. She's also one who obviously doesn't want to go to Phoenix.

We fairly quickly learn that it's with good reason she doesn't want to be extradited. Because she's tried to make herself sick, an ambulance takes her to the car that Shockey is going to take her to the airport with. But when they get to the transfer point, the ambluance driver starts the car only to reveal it's been booby-trapped with a car bomb! And somebody from the Mob is following them as they try to get away in the ambulance. They take the ambulance to Gus' house just outside of Vegas, and Shockley calls Blakelock to get the Vegas police to send a car so they can get to the airport. Instead, the Vegas police send an entire divison of man who shoot up the house!

Gus has various reasons for why the Mob would be after her, but it seems the police want her dead too, and Shockley has no idea why, in part because Gus, who doesn't want to testify, still doesn't trust him. But whoever is after Gus seems to be after Shockley too. Gus, not being stupid, has a feeling that perhaps it might have been Blakelock himself who tipped off the Vegas police as to her and Shockley's whereabouts. Shockley doesn't seem to be able to put two and two together, at least not until they reach the Nevada/Arizona border and find the Arizona cops sent by Blakelock seem to have been sent there to kill him. Still, having escaped yet again, Shockley is compelled to get Gus to Phoenix, in part because he wants to show the world Blakelock's corruption, and in part because the Mob is wagering on whether Gus will make it to Phoenix to testify.

The Gauntlet is another entertaining action movie in the 1970s style, although this again means one of those movies where you're kind of going to have to shut your brain off and just enjoy the ride because the movie is as riddled with plot holes as it is with bullets. I'm sure you all know my thoughts about police corruption, but at the same time I find it hard to believe that a commissioner could make a few phone calls and suddenly every policeman would shoot first and ask questions later. And how come none of this stuff seemed to make the news? And why is every sniper such a terrible shot? But as I said, sit back and watch without too critical an eye. I think you'll be entertained.

TCM's Sorta Star of the Month, February 2026

Bugs Bunny in What's Opera, Doc? (Feb. 2, 8:20 PM)

We're into the start of a new month on TCM, which normally means it's time for new programming features including a Star of the Month. However, the Academy Awards are on Sunday, March 15 this year, which means that 31 Days of Oscar is beginning on February 13 so that the final day of it will fall on the same day as the Oscars, so only the first half of February (and then the second half of March, which as far as I know has not had a schedule release yet) have the more traditional themes.

Having said that, there have been years where TCM programmed something like the Star of the Month differently, but doing prime time every night for a whole week. John Wayne and Katharine Hepburn both had their centenaries in the same month (May 2007), and TCM gave each of them a different week in that month. This month, TCM is doing something similar yet different. To celebrate getting the rights to the Looney Tunes (and I think Merrie Melodies and earlier) cartoons back, TCM is honoring Bugs Bunny as their "Star of the Month".

Of course, most of what Bugs Bunny appears in is one-reel shorts, and I don't think there are enough shorts that TCM could run entire nights of prime time with them. So, instead, TCM has picked trios of Bugs Bunny shorts that have something thematic in common, and then paired those shorts with a traditional movie that also fits the theme. Tonight's opening theme has Bugs with Elmer Fudd, and since two of the shorts are the classic opera shorts Rabbit of Seville and What's Opera, Doc?, the movie at 8:30 PM is the Marx Brothers film A Night at the Opera. It goes on like this all week.

NB: Tuesday night opens with three desert shorts, and currently the 1939 version of Beau Geste comes on at 8:30 PM. The TCM schedule lists it as 120 minutes with the next set of Bugs shorts to begin at 10:30 PM, which would obviously clash considering that there should be an intro and outro. Wikipedia and IMDb, however, both list Beau Geste as running 112 minutes. (It's been ages since I've seen it, so I don't recall the running time, or whether that might have changed due to any restoration.)