Background to Danger

George Raft is TCM's Star of the Month, and it turns out that I've got a film on my DVR that is part of the tribute and that a search of the blog claims I haven't blogged about before. (And, having watched the movie for this post, I don't think I'd seen it before.) That movie, Background to Danger, airs tonight (January 21) at 8:00 PM on TCM.

Although George Raft is the nominal star here, we don't see him for several minutes. Instead, we're transported to Ankara, capital of Turkey. The movie was released in 1943, the middle of World War II, and Turkey was one of the few countries in the region that managed to stay neutral, meaning that both Axis and Allied powers had embassies in the country and there was all sorts of opportunity for espionage hijinks to ensue. One such example in the movie, that actually did occur in real life, was a failed attempt on the life of the German ambassador to Turkey. In the movie, the attempt is portrayed as a false flag operation by the Nazis to attempt to stoke fear in Turkey that the Soviets are going to invade and get Turkey to join the Axis powers. German involvement is quickly determined, and the Nazi behind the scenes, a Colonel Robinson (Sydney Greenstreet) is seen in Berlin very annoyed at the failure of the scheme.

Cut to Aleppo, in northern Syria. It's a main stop on board the rail line from Istanbul to Baghdad. Getting on the train in the same car are American businessman Joe Barton (George Raft) and a mysterious woman named Ana Remzi (Osa Massen) who comes across as though she's clearly lying about who she is. She's also being followed by a slightly burly guy of vaguely not-quite western European appearance with a big bushy moustache. So she asks Joe to hold on to an envelope so that the authorities don't get it when the train crosses the border.

Joe, being a curious sort, rifles through the envelope when he gets to his hotel room, and finds what appears to be photostats of documents that would suggest someone is about to do something to Turkey, but who and why? In any case, Joe goes to return the envelope to Ana at her hotel, where he finds that she's been killed and he's been spotted at the scene such that he's a logical suspect. The police notify him of this, but these aren't real Turkish police. Instead, they're some of Robinson's men who take Joe to a secret location and rough him up to the extent that you'd think he'd have a pretty serious concussion and be out of commission for as long as it takes the events in the rest of the movie to transpire. But they didn't worry about concussions in those days.

Joe is magically saved by a man claiming to be Nikolia Zaleshoff (Peter Lorre), who is coy at first about who he is but then claims to be working for the Soviets, who were nominal allies of the US in the war leading to all sorts of hideous propaganda from Hollywood movies about the virtues of Soviet anti-fascists. He's in Turkey with his purported sister Tamara (Brenda Marshall), and they want that envelope too. As it turns out, Robinson wants the envelope because the documents are propaganda claiming that the Soviets are planning an invasion of Turkey, although again you'd think the Nazis could just draw up some more forgeries to have printed in the Turkish press. But are the Zaleshoffs really who they claim they are? And who was that man following Ana?

Background to Danger was apparently put into production after the success of Casablanca, and based on a novel from the interwar period by Eric Ambler. That would probably explain why when I came across this movie and the plot summary I couldn't help but wonder if I was getting it confused with Journey Into Fear, a Joseph Cotten film about war intrigue in Turkey. Background to Danger is moderately entertaining, at least in the way that a TV show like Columbo was entertaining 30 years later: you knew what you were going to get and that the bad guy was going to get his comeuppance, but the whole production has a perfunctory by-the-numbers feel to it. Background to Danger isn't terrible, but it's no surprise why so many other World War II movies are better remembered today.

Queimada

I've still got multiple Marlon Brando movies from his time as TCM's Star of the Month to get through watching before they expire from the DVR. Up next is one I hadn't heard of before seeing it show up was Burn!. Since the premise sounded interesting enough, I decided to record it.

Marlon Brando plays Sir William Walker, a British man in the 1840s who is clearly based on the American mercenary of the 19th century who fomented rebellions in Central America in order to benefit US business interests. The movie Walker is being sent to an island called Queimada, a Portuguese colony in the Caribbean Antilles that produces a goodly amount of sugar, having burned the original inhabitatns out. The British would like an interest in the sugar, and figures that the best way to do that is to get the African slaves to revolt against the Portuguese. Once the place is independent, it will willingly trade with the British instead of the Portuguese.

With that in mind, the British have sent Walker, who they think is a master manipulator. And he is that good. But he decides to manipulate multiple sides. He meets with one of the slaves, José Dolores (Evaristo Márquez, not a professional actor at the time he made the movie), and gets him to lead the revolt, in part by robbing the territory's national bank. But Walker is playing both sides of the street, as he talks to Teddy Sanchez (Italian actor Renato Salvatori), leader of an influential group of landowners. The plan is to get them to agree to revolt too, and with Sanchez having been influenced by Walker, they'll agree to let the British control the island's sugar trade.

The rebellion is more or less successful, in that Portugal gives up control of the colony. But there's the question of who should leave it. Walker puts Sanchez in control, getting Dolores to agree to this arrangement in exchange for the abolition of slavery. Walker has satisfied his British masters, so he's free to leave Queimada and foment his next rebellion.

However, he's left behind a relationship that's clearly unstable both politically and socially, and it's only going to be a matter of time before things spiral out of control. Sure enough, the former slaves, although nominally free, are no better off than the sharecroppers of the American south and, having led one rebellion, decide to rebel again. The Sanchez government is unable to put this down, and the British, wanting a stable government, call on Walker again to try to put down another rebellion. It's not going to be so easy.

Burn! was directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, who is probably most famous for The Battle of Algiers, a deeply political film about the Algerian war of independence against France. As such, it's no surprise that Pontecorvo takes the political views with which he imbued The Battle of Algiers and brings them to Burn!. However, I don't think he's quite as successful this time. That might be down to the editing; Pontecorvo's original Italian version was apparently a good 15-20 minutes longer than the English-language version that gets shown in the US. I get the feeling however, that it might be more down to the fact that Burn! is based on a completely fictional place, and portraying a time long in the past. To me, it felt like it was too easy for Pontecorvo to take the route of letting a political message overwhelm the narrative story, unlike The Battle of Algiers where the events were fresh in people's minds and the movie has more of the feel of a docudrama.

As a result, Burn! winds up being an interesting premise that doesn't rise to much more than a curiosity. To me, it's more worth watching to see why it doesn't succeed.

A Raisin in the Sun

Tomorrow, January 20, is Martin Luther King Day here in the US. As always, TCM is programming the day with films from a limited set of movies, since of course in the days before the civil rights movement there weren't lot of Hollywood movies that gave a prominent place to black actors. A movie that shows up a lot is the 1961 version of A Raisin in the Sun. This year, that airing comes on at 3:30 PM.

The movie opens up one Friday morning in a cramped apartment in Chicago. Ruth Younger (Ruby Dee) wakes gets out of bed, and goes to the living room/kitchen to wake up her son Travis, who sleeps on a day bed since the family doesn't have the space to give him a room of his own. Also in the family is Ruth's husband Walter (Sidney Poitier), his sister Beneatha (Diana Sands), and family matriarch Lena (Claudia McNeil). There's no patriarch in the family because Lena's husband recently died, and that in fact is a major part of the story.

The late father Younger had a life insurance policy, and that's about to pay off $10,000, which was a nice chunk of change back in 1961 when the movie was released. Everybody has something they could do with the money. Beneatha is a college student who has hopes of going to medical school, and a portion of that insurance money could really help her in that regard. Walter is forced to work as a chauffeur for a rich white guy, something that's been eating away on him as he thinks this is a horrendous indignity. He's got a couple of friends who would like to go into business together by opening a liquor store; some of that money would go a long way to paying Walter's portion of the down payment. And Lena would like a better house for the family, where Travis can have a room of his own and a yard to play in. And it's her money after all.

Further complicating matters is that this is the America of the early portion of the civil rights era, with all the racial issues that entails. Beneatha has two suitors competing for her affection. George (Louis Gossett Jr.) would be the safe choice, but Beneatha has become more radical on race relations, embracing Africa in a way that previous generations didn't; this is influenced in part by the other suitor, Joseph Asagai (Ivan Dixon), actually being from Nigeria. As for Walter, he finds that Mom is profoundly opposed to using the money for demon alcohol, one of many things driving Walter to drink. Ruth finds out that she's pregnant again, and worries about how they're going to be able to afford another child. She even thinks about getting an abortion, but that's another thing that absolutely horrifies Mom.

So Lena decides to force matters by going down to the bank and using a portion of that money for a down payment on a house in a nice neighborhood, part for Beneatha, and the rest for a checking account in Walter's name. Everybody kind of comes around to the idea of having a house of their own. Well, not quite everybody. The Youngers will be the family integrating the neighborhood, and the neighborhood "improvement association", represented by Mr. Lindner (John Fiedler), tries to put the matter delicately that blacks and whites would be better off living apart.

A Raisin in the Sun is a movie with a lot of cultural imporantance, being based on a play that was one of the first big productions by a black playwright and dealing with the racial issues that it does. For me, the movie is a bit of a mixed bag. Parts of it are quite good but at the same time it feels like the movie takes a while to get to the big conflict over segreagation. And when it does get there, the last half hour or so of the movie has the cast, especially Poitier and McNeil, engage in some shocking overacting. I'm not certain whether that's an issue with the screenplay or the director not reining the actors in, but the histrionics are way over the top.

Still, the significance of A Raisin in the Sun makes it a movie that should be seen; tomorrow's airing is your chance to see it.

Avalon

I mentioned yesterday evening that British actress Joan Plowright died on Thursday at the age of 95, and that I had her role in the movie Avalon on my DVR. Not only that, but I'd already watched it intending to do a post on it and schedule it in my queue of movies to blog about. But with the death of Plowright, I've decided to move up my post on Avalon to now.

Sam Krichinsky (Armin Mueller-Stahl) is the youngest of five brothers living in Baltimore in the late 1940s. As the movie opens, it's Thanksgiving, and Sam is telling the generation of grandchildren, who would be roughly in the single digits in terms of ages, how he emigrated to the US when his older brothers could afford to bring him over, which resulted in his arriving in Baltimore on July 4, 1914. Of course, we know what a big day July 4 is, but a newly-arrived immigrant probably wouldn't, so for him all the fireworks and such are a shock and a metaphor for the land of opportunity that America is consistently presented as in the popular culture. The Krichinsky brothers work as wallpaper hangers, which doesn't seem like much but then the trades have always been important. It's at least enough to earn a living.

You get the impression that everyone in the family, even the grandkids, have heard the stories from Sam and the other patriarchs of how they came to America, and were also able to marry nice Jewish immigrant women; among the wives is Eva, who is the character played by the aforementioned Joan Plowright. She eventually gave birth to Jules (Aidan Quinn), and Jules would grow up to marry Ann (Elizabeth Perkins) and start a family of their own. It's not all a bed of roses, of course, as this is still the generation where it wasn't uncommon for three generations to live under one roof, something which grates on poor Ann who only married into the family.

All of the kids in this generation want something better out of life, while one thing the first generation still wants is to make certain the cousins don't grow too far apart, which is why there's still a big family council every week. It's also why, when Jules and Ann finally earn enough to move out of the Baltimore row houses into a nicer place in the suburbs, some relatives aren't happy about having to travel so far to see Jules and Ann. But while Jules and Ann do well, it's as much because the one cousin who's the biggest risk taker in trying to advance the family is Izzy (Kevin Pollak). He comes up with the big idea on going all in on the the new technology of television and opening up a discount appliance warehouse to sell TVs and other stuff to a population that has an increasing postwar affluence.

Along the way, there are all sorts of other vignettes about the immigrant experience: having difficulty with the English language; finding out about a relative who hadn't emigrated; dealing with changing times; and the like. Eventually, Avalon winds up with a sort of coda set in the late 1970s when Jules' kid has graduated college and has a kid of his own, and takes that child to see great-grandpa Sam, by now pushing 90 and in a nursing home.

It's easy to see why director Barry Levinson would want to make a movie like Avalon, which you get the impression was a deeply personal experience for him, he being the child of Russian-Jewish immigrants. In that regard, it's like Elia Kazan's America, America, although it focuses on the American half of the immigrant experience. The personal nature of the movie, however, is not always a help. For someone like me, whose father would have been in the same generation as the Jules character and whose grandfather was the immigrant, there are certainly things that resonate. (Unfortunately, my grandfather wasn't quite so pushy about telling immigrant stories, and my dad being an only child, we didn't have the large family gatherings seen here.) For people not of the generation to have personal knowledge of the immigrants in their family, however, I'm afraid Avalon will come across as a bit too distant and stylized as well as possibly clichéd. It also didn't help for me that much of it comes off as a pastiche of nostalgia for the first half of the Baby Boomer era. As a classic film blogger I obviously have no issue with films made contemporary to that (or pretty much any) era, but I've always been uncomfortable with the doe-eyed nostalgia for the Baby Boomer years.

So Avalon won't work for everybody, but it may well work for you. Give it a chance.

Obituary after obituary after obituary

This has seemed like one of those weeks where an inordinate number of well-known names, and a few lesser-known names, have left us. Some of the people probably deserve a separate post, and I assume there will be at least one standalone TCM programming tribute down the road, but I haven't seen anything of that yet. And with February being 31 Days of Oscar I'd guess that any programming tributes wouldn't be until March.

The first person I had been intending to mention was child actor Claude Jarman, Jr., who died on Sunday at the age of 90. He was the young friend of Juano Hernandez in Intruder in the Dust, which will be on TCM on Monday (Jan. 20) at 2:00 PM as part of TCM's Martin Luther King Day programming. Jarman also played the boy who works for Jeanette MacDonald in the Lassie film The Sun Comes Up. I blogged about that one on Christmas this past year obviously not knowing that Jarman was going to be dying in January, and also not having looked at the January TCM schedule. The Sun Comes Up is on TCM on January 30. Jarman was also in The Yearling, which I thought I had on my DVR to do a post on but apparently don't. That one's going to be on TCM as part of 31 Days of Oscar in mid-February.

The person who probably most deserved a standalone post is director David Lynch. Lynch directed such films as Blue Velvet and Mulholland Falls, as well as the TV series Twin Peaks that I never cared for. Lynch died on Wednesday at 78. It turns out that I've got one of his films on my DVR: Eraserhead. I tried to watch it some months back, but had difficulty getting into it. I'll have to give it another try, as it's coming up on TCM as part of the prime time lineup on January 31, although it's technically in the early hours of Feb. 1. So as of now I'm planning to do a full-length post on it in two weeks' time.

Then there's British actress Joan Plowright, who died yesterday aged 95. Like a lot of British actors and actresses, Plowright did a lot of work on the stage. But she's also known for having married Laurence Olivier, meeting him while they were making The Entertainer. For some reason, I thought that one was also getting an airing during 31 Days of Oscar, but a search of the February schedule doesn't yield any hits. Among Plowright's other movies -- and one that's on my DVR -- is her turn as a Jewish immigrant mother in Avalon So that one is going to be showing up on the blog fairly soon, most likely tomorrow, although I've got a fair bit of schedule juggling to do with my posts since I have a handful of posts on movies that are actually going to be on TV over the next week.

I didn't recognize the name Phyllis Dalton, but she was the sort of behind the scenes person whose work is as important to movies as all the bigger names. Dalton was a costume designer for a bunch of very high-profile movies, most notably Lawrence of Arabia, although that one surprisingly didn't get her an Oscar nomination. She would go on to win two Oscars, however, for Doctor Zhivago and the Kenneth Branagh version of Henry V. Other films included Alfred Hitchcock's remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much. Dalton was 99.

Finally, I should probably give brief mention to Jeannot Szwarc. Szwarc directed some films whose names you might recognize, most notably Jaws 2; he died on Wednesday at the age of 85.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

TCM's "Is it a dream" spotlight this month brings a movie from a star I don't get to mention very often, I think because his movies are generally not from studios part of the old TCM library: Danny Kaye. That movie is The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which comes on tonight at 9:00 PM. (Yes, 9:00 PM ET might seem like an odd starting time for a TCM presentation since prime time begins invariably at 8:00 PM, but the first film at 8:00 is the 51-minute silent Sherlock Jr..)

Danny Kaye plays Walter Mitty, and you probably already know a bit about the character because the movie is loosely based on a short story by James Thurber; the Mitty name has entered the lexicon as a byword for a daydreamer; and there was another film version about a decade ago. Walter Mitty here is a daydreamer mostly to escape his crappy personal life. He lives in the New Jersey suburbs with his overbearing mother Eunice (Fay Bainter); commutes to New York to work as a proofreader at a publishing company that puts out pulp fiction, where his boss Mr. Pierce (Thurston Hall) steals his ideas; and has a fiancée Gertrude (Ann Rutherford) who you wonder whether she's part of an arranged marriage just to give Walter someone for a wife. Indeed, she's got another guy pursuing her. Dr. Hollingshead (Boris Karloff) comes along to give Walter a bad, unoriginal idea for another dime novel, and it's all too much.

So when Walter has to deal with the doctor, he finds himself imagining that he's a doctor, specifically a surgeon performing a celebrated new operation. Later, he sees himself as an RAF pilot fighting the Nazis in World War II, which also gives him the opportunity to sing a song when he's celebrating after another great aerial success. In all of these fantasies, there's a woman involved, a very pretty one indeed. It's also well known to everyone around Walter that he has a tendency to fantasize and is terribly absent-minded as a result, which is why nobody is going to believe him for the second half of the movie.

One day on the commuter train to work, whom should Walter see but the woman who's been in all those daydreams he's had! And, she approaches him! This time, it's a story that you'd think is so crazy even Walter can't believe it. The woman says her name is Roasalind van Hoorn (Virginia Mayo), and that she's being followed by another passenger on the train. So would Walter be so kind as to pretend to be Rosalind's boyfriend? Walter, being a fantasist, goes along at least until he gets to his office. But he forgets his briefcase, and his need to go back and get it is going to bring him much further into the intrigue with which Rosalind is involved.

The actual nature of the intrigue, and what everybody is looking for, is of course a macguffin. Suffice it to say, however, that the bad guys know Walter has (or had) what they're looking for, and they're willing to kill him for it. Moreover, because of all of Walter's daydreams, nobody believes him when he says that there are well and truly bad men after him.

James Thurber didn't care for this movie version of his work, and I can understand why. There's not enough in a short story to turn it into a full-length movie, and the Goldwyn studio both had to do a lot of padding and tailor the material to Danny Kaye's talents, which are not going to be to everyone's tastes. I didn't dislike this version of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, but it's also certainly not a favorite movie of mine.

Tower of London (1962)

Roger Corman died last year, and a few months later TCM had a multi-night tribute to Corman with some movies he produced as well as some he directed. Surprisingly, I haven't seen as much of the Corman oeuvre as you might think, so this gave me the opportunity to record several movies. Among them was the 1962 version of the movie Tower of London, directed by Roger and produced by his younger brother Eugene.

The movie opens up in April, 1483, and as the narrator (Paul Frees, if you couldn't tell by the voice) informs us, it's the night that England's king, Edward IV, is dying. Edward is going to leave behind quite the family. This includes two minor children and two younger brothers. The more notable brother from history is Richard (Vincent Price), at the time Duke of Gloucester. Richard is hoping to become regent, raising the children until they become adults, at which point son Edward V would be a king with full power. However, Edward IV, on his deathbed, announces that the other brother, George, will be regent.

This enrages poor Richard, who responds by inviting George down to the wine cellar to have a talk in private, away from all the wailing women, or at least that's his stated reasoning. In fact, he's down here so that he can murder George without anybody seeing it, and then dumping George's body in a vat of wine! And he does so with a knife that belongs to someone in the family of the Queen Consort. Richard is very clearly guilty, to the point that he sees the ghost of George shortly before some stones fall from one of the parapets, nearly killing Richard. Perhaps he's going nuts.

Of course, there are still those two sons of Edward IV, and they have more of a right to the throne than Richard does, at least in the order of succession to the throne. Richard knows this, and the two kids being relatively young and having no power base, it's not too difficult for Richard to get them confined to palace chambers. Worse, Richard kills one of the ladies-in-waiting as part of a plot to spread rumors that Edward V and his brother are illegitimate. There's a lot of palace intrigue trying to keep the child king and his brother safe, while Richard tries to stop all of this. Eventually, he's successful, at least for some values of successful, in that the two children die (by murder in the movie, of course; how exactly they died in real life is not 100% certain). Richard becomes King Richard III.

Now, as we also, know the Wars of the Roses were convulsing England at this point in history, and if you remember your English history or your Shakespeare, you'll recall that the humpbacked Richard will meet his end on the field of battle at Bosworth Field. This happens here, and along the way Richard sees a lot more ghosts, implying that he's going insane.

This version of Tower of London is never less than entertaining, showing how Roger Corman was adept at taking a modest budget and making something reasonably worthwhile with it. It's not great, in part because it's material that should have been done in garish color but got black-and-white; the other reason being that Vincent Price is not the right actor to play Richard III. But it still succeeds at what it did, and entertains six decades later. Definitely worth at least one watch.

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers

I've mentioned before that musicals aren't my favorite genre of movies, in part because they're even more artificial than other movies in that nobody just breaks out into song like that in real life. Never mind that I don't always care for the voices of the singers. So I have to admit that as a result I've put off watching Seven Brides for Seven Brothers for a while. It was on TCM last month, and is on again tomorrow, January 16, at 6:00 PM, so I've finally gotten around to watching it to do a full-length review.

A title card just after the opening credits informs us that the action is set in the Oregon Territory, 1850. Adam Pontipee (Howard Keel) is a farmer out in the backwoods who has come into town in part because he's in want of a wife. Outside one of those hotel/restaurants you see in old westerns, he meets Milly (Jane Powell). Seeing the way she can handle the rough men who pass through town, he realizes she can handle life on a farm, and so almost immediately proposes to her. This is a rather shocking idea, but back in those days it wasn't as if there was much way for men and women to meet, so she takes him up on the marriage proposal.

It's only when the two of them get back to the farm that Adam informs Milly that he's got six brothers, all of whom work the farm with him. Amazingly, none of the brothers gets jealous and tries to do anything inappropriate with Milly, at least not in the way you'd think of men doing in a place where there's only one woman around. But they are uncouth, not having had the civilizing presence of a woman around, and poor Milly has to try to civilize them.

The brothers go to a barn raising, which is an excuse for the big dance number in the film and the number that everybody remembers with good reason. More importantly, however, its a chance for the brothers to be around women, and for them to cotton on to the idea that they need wives as well. However, they come up with a rather dumb way of trying to find themselves wives. As winter is setting in, they go into town and look for the women they met at the dance... and basically kidnap the women to bring them back to the farm for a marriage ceremony. And they set off an avalanche on the way back so that the women's angry fathers and brothers won't be able to follow them until spring, which will give the women time to accept the situation and fall in love with the brothers the way Milly has fallen in love with Adam. The only thing is, they don't have anyone to perform the wedding, and there's no way the brides are going to consummate a non-marriage relationship. Never mind what the Production Code says. Adam is disgusted with this behavior and goes to a trapping cabin to spend the winter, even though Milly is now pregnant with his child.

Of course, there is that pesky Production Code, so we know that in the end everything is going to be made right. The fact that Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is also supposed to be a light musical also requires the sort of happy ending that we're going to get once spring comes and the brides' families come for the brothers.

Fans of musicals will love Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, although most of those will probably already have seen the movie. I didn't dislike it, although I have to say that I'm still generally more of a fan of backstage musicals about putting on a show like 42nd Street or Gold Diggers of 1933 or biographical musicals since songs and dance numbers tend to make more sense there. It's easy to see why Seven Brides for Seven Brothers has such high critical praise.

Ah yes, it's Tennessee Williams

I think we're up to the first of the movies that ran in TCM's 2024 Christmas marathon that I'm doing a post on this year. That's because the movie is getting another airing on TCM less than a month after its previous showing: Period of Adjustment, which you can see tomorrow, Jan. 15, at 9:15 AM.

Over the opening credits, we see George Haverstick (Jim Hutton). He served in the Korean War, and wound up with some sort of condition that put him in a hospital for it. There, among the nurses treating him, is Isabel (Jane Fonda). The two fall in love during his treatment, and get married when George finally gets out of the hospital. And they live happily ever after, ending the movie. Yeah right. This is based on a Tennessee Williams play, so you know it's not going to be happy ever after, especially considering all of the above finsishes with the end of the opening credits.

George has also been somewhat dishonest with Isabel about his personal life. He'd decided to quit his old job in search of better pastures, and when they get in the "just married" car to head out into their new life, Isabel finds that it's not a regular sedan, but a hearse! Worse, George is only able to take the couple to a cheap roadside motel on their first night to try to consummate their marriage, which he doesn't seem to be able to do.

The couple continue to drive on until they reach the home of George's old army buddy Ralph Bates (Tony Franciosa). Ralph has been married rather longer, to Dorothea (Lois Nettleton), and has a son by her. She comes from money, with Ralph working for her father's (John McGiver) business. Perhaps George may be able to make a fresh start there. But then again, George and Isabel aren't the only unhappy couple, as there's a good bit of strife in the Bates marriage too. Dorothea's father is beginning to think that perhaps Ralph only married Dorothea for the family money. And when George and Isabel show up, it's not hard to give her the impression that perhaps Ralph and Isabel are beginning to develop some sort of feelings for each other.

It's all enough to give everybody in the piece good reason to get overheated and start bickering with each other through the use of overheated dialog, much as in most of Tennessee Williams' other work that I've seen. Now, I'm not the biggest fan of Williams' work, in no small part because it's consistently too overheated and loud for its own good, leading to none of the characters being particularly likeable. And because it's a Tennessee Williams work, Isabel is written as a southern belle, leading to Jane Fonda essaying an obnoxious accent.

People who like Tennessee Williams may enjoy Period of Adjustment. I didn't.

Not at the end of the soufflé

One of the classics of the French Novelle Vague (translation: New Vague) is the Jean-Luc Godard film Breathless. It's not a movie I care for because the main character is a talky jerk. But all the critic and filmmaker types love it. So in the early 1980s, some of them got the brilliant idea to remake it, also calling the movie Breathless. TCM ran it some months back, so I figured I'd give this remake a chance.

Richard Gere stars as Jesse Lujack, a man-child who, as the movie opens, is in Las Vegas seemingly partying, although that's not really why he's there. He seems to be a car thief for hire, as he steals a Porsche with the intention of taking it to his home in Los Angeles. However, he insists on bringing attention to himself by driving recklessly, so it doesn't take all that long before the highway patrol spots him and one of the cops approaches him. Thankfully, Jesse has looked in the car's glove compartment, where he finds a gun. So, he can shoot the cop, not that this was what he meant to do, and head off to Los Angeles to try to get away. Naturally, the cop is going to be found, and when it does, Jesse is the prime suspect, to the point that his picture is already in the papers when he gets back to LA.

Jesse makes it back to Los Angeles, and sees that the cop's murder has already made the news. He looks at his calendar and sees a bunch of women's names on it, which he of course would know as old girlfriends although we don't. One of them is Monica Poiccard (Valerie Kaprisky), a French woman studying architecture at UCLA. Jesse immediately starts harassing her by showing up on campus and then being an utter jerk to her. But there are women dumb enough to want a bad boy, and Monica seems to be one of those women.

Jesse tries to convince Monica to go off to Mexico with him, he trying to get there to escape. She's ambivalent about it, but damn if the sex isn't spectacular. However, Jesse needs money to be able to live on once he gets to Mexico, and he doesn't have that in hand yet. That's going to require him to stay in Los Angeles for another day, and the cops are going to be on his case.

As I said in the opening paragraph, I really didn't care for the original French Breathless, although to be fair I'm not a big fan of the French New Wave. I had big problems with this Hollywood remake, but not quite for the same reasons. Jean-Paul Belmondo, who plays the killer in the original, is a bit more of a glib charmer, but still a somewhat annoying guy. Richard Gere plays the character (or the screenplay has him play it) as a much more obnoxious type of unlikeable antihero. The production design also is stylized in a way that I felt didn't really suit the material.

For once, I'm generally in agreement with the critics in my negative review of the movie, albeit for different reasons. While critics tend to love the French original and not see the need for a Hollywood remake, I didn't care for either version.