Who knew Danesploitation was a genre?

In the "yet another of those 1980s films I was too young to have seen in the theater growing up" series, some months back TCM surprisingly ran Red Sonja. To be fair, it was part of a night on movies based on pulp-fiction sci-fi and fantasy novels, and the movie is 40 years old now. In any case, I recorded it and recently got around to watching it.

A group of priestesses is doing a ritual involing the Talisman, a glowing green orb that only woman can touch and that mostly has to be kept in darkness lest its horrendous power destroy the world. While only women may touch it (we see it kill a man who touches it), it's the menfolk, or at least those in the lineage of Lord Kalidor (Arnold Schwarzenegger) who have the duty of making certain that the power of the Talisman does not destroy the world, with the capacity to destroy the Talisman if necessary to prevent its power from being used from serious harm. Kalidor is, in fact, on his way to the current rites since there are serious plans afoot to destroy the Talisman since its power is getting too great for mere mortals to handle.

Unfortunately, he doesn't make it on time, being beaten by Queen Gedren (Sandahl Bergman) and her forces. They murder the priestesses while Gedren takes the Talisman with her to her castle at Berkubane. There, Gedren puts the Talisman in a room of lights specifically so that the Talisman will grow in power that Gedren believes she will be able to control. In fact, she won't, and in two weeks' time its power will be sufficient to destory the world. In one bit of bright news, Gedren's soldiers didn't succeed in killing all of the priestesses. One of them, Varna, escapes, running into Kalidor before dying of the arrow wound she received trying to escape.

Varna is the sister of Princess Sonja (Brigitte Nielsen), known as Red Sonja for her flaming red hair, and Varna wants Kalidor to find Sonja and warn her that the Talisman has been stolen. After all, it's going to take both men and women to deal with the Talisman since only women may touch the thing. Sonja is currently taking swordsmanship lessons from the Grandmaster, and he's the only man Sonja trusts. She thinks all other men are evil, and she's going to show them what a badass she is. So when Kalidor finds her and tells her about the talisman, she sets off by herself, ignoring the fact that in the real world men have much more physical strength than women (sorry, ladies) and would be able to dispatch Sonja easily if they weren't portrayed as preternaturally stupid.

Well, not just stupid, but fat or obnoxiously hubristic. Along the way to Berkubane, Sonja goes through the kingdom of Hablock, where the child king Tarn, who is a spoiled brat, refused to surrender. He and is court jester Falkon are the only two who survived, and they follow Sonja, providing help at key points along the way. It's a journey of redemption for the two of them two. Eventually, Kalidor finds Sonja again and the four make their way to Gedren's palace to try to find the Talisman before Gedren can kill them all.

Red Sonja was savaged by the critics, and it's easy to see why. The acting is terrible, as is the dialogue. The girl-boss trope is unrealistic, but as with blaxploitation icon Pam Greer, people watch the girl-bosses for the vicarious thrills and the skimpy outfits that show off the women's fit figures to good effect. (Sorry, but I don't think very many people want to see Misery-era Kathy Bates as a girl-boss.) But all the things that make Red Sonja a critical failure combine to make the movie a cult classic, and there's a reason why it's remembered well enough that somebody came up with the brilliant idea to do a remake that got a limited release earlier this year.

More Zenda prisoners

About a year and a half ago, I did a post on the 1937 movie version of the 1890s novel The Prisoner of Zenda. I knew that there was another movie version, made in color in the early 1950s, but I hadn't seen that one before. So the last time TCM ran it, I recorded it. The 1952 vesion of The Prisoner of Zenda is coming up on TCM again tomorrow, October 29, at 4:15 PM.

Needless to say, the plot of the two movies is pretty much the same, especially so since to save money, TCM largely reused the 1937 screenplay, never mind both movies are adapting the same source material. Rudolf Rassendyll (Stewart Granger) is an Englishman who's decided to go on a fishing vacation to the tiny Balkan monarchy of Ruritania. As he steps off the train in Ruritania, everybody seems shocked, and frankly as I watched this version of the movie it hit me: nobody bothers to tell him why they react the way they do when they see him. The reason, of course, is that Rudolf bears a striking resemblance, except for his moustache, to the crown prince who is soon to be crowned King Rudolf V (also played by Granger, which explains why they look alike).

Rassendyll is found by Col. Zapt (Louis Calhern) and Capt. von Tarlenheim, who explain the similarity to him (apparently, the two are distant cousins), and invite Rassendyll to meet his doppelgänger. They have dinner together and a bunch of wine, the crown prince known to be a heavy drinker. What they didn't know is that there's one last bottle of wine, which the English Rudolf doesn't drink, that was drugged by the prince's evil brother Michael (Robert Douglas). The idea was that with Rudolf incapacitated, Michael could take over as Regent, with Rupert (James Mason) being the power behind the throne.

But Zapt and company have an English lookalike, and are able to persuade him to take his cousin's place at the coronation. Of course, the English Rudolf doesn't know anything about Ruritanian politics, and one would think he doesn't know the language. But none of that is a barrier since this is a movie. One other problem is that in one of those royal marriages of convenience, the crown prince was supposed to marry a cousin, Princess Flavia (Deborah Kerr). Flavia didn't particularly care for the crown prince, but when she meets the Englishman playing the part of the crown prince, she likes this guy.

Now, the plan was for English Rudolf to go through the coronation and then give the crown and everything else to the crown prince, with nobody knowing the difference. Except that while the ceremony is going on, Michael and Rupert have the actual crown prince kidnapped. English Rudolf has to keep up the charade.

Since the screenplays are largely the same, there's not much to compare between the two movies. And of course, I haven't watched the 1937 version since blogging about it to compare the two movies. I will say, however, that Technicolor is something that works for a movie like this, even more so than modern-day color which is way too often based on a color scheme of teals and oranges for no good reason. There's not much grounding in reality in The Prisoner of Zenda, and the bright three-strip Technicolor is great for that. Stewart Granger is also an actor well-suited to period pieces like this, even if the other actors are better in other genres. Still, they all give it a professional go, and make this version of The Prisoner of Zenda a rousing watch.

Kim

The British Raj era of India is one that shows up a lot in the movies in part because it's a ripe source for action and adventure (never mind what Indians of today think of the portrayals), thanks in no small part to the writings of Rudyard Kipling. An excellent example of a movie that fits into this genre is, unsurprisingly, one based on a Kipling novel, Kim.

The movie is set in the 1880s, a time when Britain ruled India with the help of a lot of local bigwigs. Beyond India was the Khyber Pass in the northwest leading to Afghanistan, and beyond that Russian central Asia. Britain was constantly worried about the idea that Russia was trying to gain access to a warm-water port, and agitating rebellious locals to bog the British down to that end. Indeed, the Russians figure into the movie's finale.

But the story is really about Kim (Dean Stockwell). Kim, as we leater learn, is really Kimball O'Hara, son of an Anglo-Irish soldier who served in Europe up until his death. Mom died in childbirth, and somehow there's no other family to take care of Kim and the British army was unable or unwilling to do anything. So Kim, having been left an orphan, darkens his skin and passes himself off as a begging urchin. But his excellent knowledge of English enables him to move in British circles as well. Kim is a bit of a friend to Mahbub Ali (Errol Flynn, top-billed although Stockwell is the star here), who has information about the Russians that he wants passed to the British army in the person of Col. Creighton (Robert Douglas).

To get that information to Creighton, Ali has Kim fall in with a lama (Paul Lukas) who is liable to be unsuspected and so can travel freely. However, along the way Kim sees a regimental flag that he believes is an important sign, so he goes into the British encampment. The Brits capture him, which is where they find his birth certificate and so learn of his provenance. They send him to a prestigious boarding school for the sons of the British. But he's not quite happy there. And, because of his past, it's determined by the military that he could be trained to be a spy. Since he's already shown he can pass as a local, and because he's an adolescent urchin, who's going to suspect him, just like the lama?

Kim's undergoes a lot of training, and then gets sent on his first assignment, which is to go to a village in the northwest and find out from a local there named Chunder (Cecil Kellaway) what he's learned about the Russians in the area. They're officially there to survey the Khyber Pass, but it's obvious to the British that in fact they're using surveying as a cover for spying. Kim goes there, and finds... Chunder has been killed. Kim's instructions were to get the information from Chunder and bring it back, but with Chunder dead and his place ransacked, there's no intelligence to deliver to Creighton. Kim more or less violates orders to head to the Khyber Pass himself to complete the mission. Somehow, his old lama and Mahbub Ali have also made their way there.

Kim is the sort of movie that adolescent boys are going to love. It's got exactly the right mix of adventure and daring-do that will appeal to just that demographic. For everybody else, well, it's not a bad movie, although it could have been a bit more tightly edited. Stockwell does well with his role. All the Hollywood types playing Indian do as well as they can, and boys of the target age aren't going to care about the racial inaccuracies. A fair bit of location work for the establishing shots was done in the newly independent India, which adds to the quality cinematography. On the other hand, experienced viewers will notice the projection photography; younger viewers probably won't care.

Ultimately, Kim stands the test of time as a great example of the sort of action movie Hollywood could make in the decade after the end of World War II.

King Solomon's Mines

Another of the movies that I had on my DVR and that is coming up again soon on TCM is MGM's 1950 version of King Solomon's Mines. As usual, in order to be able to do a post on the upcoming airing, I sat down to watch the copy already on my DVR. That airing is coming up tonight at 8:00 PM, so now you get the review.

After some nice opening credits in Technicolor with backdrops of Africa as well as informing us what parts of Africa the movie was actually filmed in (what are now Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and eastern DRC), we're informed that the action is set in 1897 Africa, so when Britain was in control of a lot of east Africa, and when Europeans felt they had a moral duty to "civilize" the so-called Dark Continent. One such person is Allan Quatermain (Stuart Grainger), a safari guide working in British East Africa for the past 15 years, which is much longer than the average life span for a (white) guide in that part of the world.

Having come to the region from the UK is Elizabeth Curtis (Deborah Kerr). She's the wife of Henry, an adventurer who apparently had the crazy idea that King Solomon got his gold and gems from mines somewhere to the west of the British colony, in a part of Africa that's unexplored by the white man, and that supposedly many of the local tribes don't want to venture towards. Henry sent Elizabeth a "map" of the quality suitable for Hollywood movies of the era, where you wonder how anybody can find anything. Elizabeth would like Henry to guide her to where she thinks her husband would be if he's still alive, and to help she's brought along her brother John (Richard Carlson).

Allan isn't certain whether he wants to take on the job, but Elizabeth is offering a lot of money. Allan is a widower with a son back in England, and taking this job would help secure his son's future, so Allan reluctantly decides to take the job. It doesn't take long for Allan to think that perhaps he was right not to want to take on this job, as Elizabeth is one of those Victorian women who seems decidedly unsuited to going out on this type of adventure, being scared of every little thing and not properly provisioned.

Along the way, however, Elizabeth starts to become a bit more self-sufficient. She and Allan also go through that movie trope of developing feelings for each other even though there's still the question of whether Elizabeth's husband is alive or dead. The expedition also faces any number of westen tropes about Africa from the period: an animal stampede; local tribes that the guides aren't certain whether they're friendly; and a lot of wildlife. Much of this serves as a hook for a lot of lovely scenery.

There are a few set-pieces, if you will, in and among all the travelogue. One involves finding a white man out in the middle of nowhere (Hugo Haas), although Quatermain eventually determines who that white man is. There's also a lone African from a tribe Quatermain doesn't recognize at all; that guy joins them and his back story is revealed at the end of the movie. And then everyone gets to a cave that may just be what Henry thought was the titular mine. But is there anything there, and will they find Henry?

To be honest, I found large parts of King Solomon's Mines to be slow, largely because the characters have to trek quite a ways to get to the putative mines. There's only so much they can do along the way. With that in mind, the scenery might just be the best part of the movie. For 2024, that's a bit of a sad statement, only because getting color footage of exotic places is so commonplace. For 1950, when the movie was released, it would have been a big deal to audiences, and it's no surprise that this was one of the biggest box office hits of the year.

My comments about the scenery are not to imply that King Solomon's Mines is a bad movie, however. It's more that looking at it from almost 75 years on, it's the sort of stuff we've seen so many times since. But this would have been one the earliest, most previous Africa movies using studio backlots to stand in badly for Africa. So definitely give the 1950 King Solomon's Mines a watch.

Three of the Musketeers

Tomorrow's (Aug. 22) star in TCM's Summer Under the Stars is Geraldine Chaplin. I happen to have recently watched one of her movies that's not part of tomorrow's tribute. But then, I noticed that I happen to have one of tomorrow's movies on my DVR, so I made a point of watching that: the 1973 version of The Three Musketeers. You can see it at 12:30 PM.

Chaplin isn't the star here, and she's certainly not one of the musketeers. Top billing goes to Oliver Reed as Athos, and to Michael York as d'Artagnan. This version of Dumas' story presents d'Artagnan as a naïf from the countryside during the reign of Louis XIII who gets the crazy idea that he could become one of the King's Musketeers. So he sets off for Paris, eventually running into the three men we know from the book: the aforementioned Athos, Porthos (Frank Finlay), and Aramis (Richard Chamberlain). And wouldn't you know it, but d'Artagnan immediately gets himself challenged to duels by each of them.

However, they're interruped by some of the guards representing Cardinal Richeliue (Charlton Heston). Richelieu was the power behind the throne in 17th century France, and wanted to consolidate that power even more, so he had a thing about the Musketeers and wanted to destroy them. The Musketeers and d'Artagnan win the battle with Richelieu's men, and the other three make d'Artagnan an honorary member of their merry band. On to Paris and the king and queen (that's Geraldine Chaplin playing the part of the queen).

In addition to the adventure, there's a lot of love in the movie, as this version of the film is more true to the original novel and thanks to the end of the Production Code even bawdier than previous versions could be. D'Artagnan has started an affair with the queen's dressmaker, Constance (Raquel Welch), while the queen herself is about to get involved with an old boyfriend, the English Duke of Buckingham (Simon Ward). As a token of remembrance, the queen gives the Duke of Buckingham an old necklace that the king had given her but that she doesn't wear anymore.

What the queen doesn't know is that Milady (Faye Dunaway), one of her ladies-in-waiting, saw this, and Milady lets Richelieu know, so that he can get one over on the king by putting him in an embarrassing situation involving the necklace that's no longer there. It's up to the Musketeers to get the necklace back to the queen, but the Duke of Buckingham is already back in England and Richelieu's men are waiting along the way to kill the Musketeers....

When director Richard Lester started shooting The Three Musketeers, the producers' original plan was to make an epic film. But the producers realized that wouldn't work and decided to split things up into two features (which ticked the actors off no end since they sure didn't get paid for two features). As such, it feels like there's some plot missing. Or, at least a lot of what would be plot is instead replaced by ever more elaborate set-piece swashbuckling. What's left isn't exactly bad, but it does feel slightly off, as if it's both too complex and having gaps at the same time.

The swashbuckling, however, means that the action rarely stops, and if you like swashbuckling, then you're definitely going to like this movie. Also, the second movie made from the rest of the material, The Four Musketeers, follows at 2:30 PM. I haven't seen it yet; maybe it will fill in some of the gaps from the first movie.

The Zenda prisoner

A movie that, for whatever reason, I had never gotten around to watching, in fact not any of the versions of it, is the 1937 version of The Prisoner of Zenda. It was on TCM in March for 31 Days of Oscar, and so I recently watched it off the Watch TCM app.

To be honest, I sort of knew the basic story. In that great romantic age of the decades just before the Great War, a British gentleman named Rudolf Rassendyll (Ronald Colman) goes on the sort of trip to mysterious central Europe that only the idle rich could afford to do in those days, winding up in some unnamed kingdom roughly where the border of Hungary and Romania would be today. He gets an odd reception, which isn't explained to him until he meets some higher-up military men. Col. Zapt (C. Aubrey Smith) informs Rudolf that he looks amazingly like their country's crown prince, also named Rudolf; apparently, the two shared a common ancestor five or six generations prior.

Curiosity gets the better of everybody, and the two Rudolfs are introduced to each other. British Rudolf does look surprisingly like the Crown Prince, which isn't that much of a surprise when you understand that the continental Rudolf is also played by Ronald Colman. His coronation is supposed to be the next day, but he parties into the night with his new best friend Rudolf.

That's a mistake though, as Prince Rudolf's half-brother Michael (Raymond Massey) has given the prince a drugged bottle of wine. Rudolf drinks all of it and is unable to be roused for his coronation the next day, something that means Michael would be in line to take the throne. So you can understand why Michael would want to commit such a dastardly deed. Zapt understands that having King Michael would be a terrible thing, so he convinces the British Rudolf to stand in for the prince, as nobody will notice the difference. I suppose it's the reverse of Richard Basehart taking off his glasses and putting on contact lenses in Tension.

Michael, of course, knows there's a ruse, since he's the one who drugged his half-brother. Worse than that, he kidnaps the crown prince, so that when the British Rudolf thinks the hare-brained scheme of being a body double for a prince is just about over, it really isn't: nobody can find the prince who is technically a king now.

Even more complicated is the fact that Prince Rudolf has a personal life, and somehow nobody close to British Rudolf who isn't aware of the ruse is able to figure out that these two aren't the same people. This is especially true of Princess Flavia (Madeleine Carroll), another cousin. She's betrothed to Prince Rudolf, but it's more one of those royal marriages of convenience. She was willing to marry the prince out of duty, but she didn't really love him. British Rudolf, on the other hand is different, and while Flavia notices a change, she can't figure out what caused it.

Meanwhile, there's still the little problem of Prince Rudolf having been absconded with and being held somewhere. His supporters are going to have to rescue him, but Michael is no dummy and has made it very difficult for anybody to rescue him.

The plot to The Prisoner of Zenda is frankly a bit daft. But it's one of those movies where you should just sit back and not try to think too much about all the plot holes. If you can do that, you'll find that it's fairly grand entertainment, at least in the fashion of 1930s Hollywood. Everybody involved does a good job, and the story never really stops moving. It's definitely worth a watch.

Get me that Stone Woman

I mentioned in one of the recent Thursday Movie Picks that I had just watched the movie < a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088011/">Romancing the Stone, and it fit the theme of that week, so I decided to use it and would be doing a fuller-length post on the movie soon. I'm actually a bit ahead in watching movies, so this post is sitting in draft for a little while before going up.

Kathleen Turner plays Joan Wilder, a woman who is successful as a romance novelist, but not so successful in romance in her real life. She lives alone -- well, with her cat -- in New York and cranks out those novels that are surprisingly big sellers, but doesn't have a man in her life. She does, however, have a sister, and one day she hears that her sister has been kidnapped down in Cartgena, Colombia, this being the era when cocaine exports from Colombia were much more in the news than they are now. Whoever kidnapped the sister wants to ransom her, and Joan is just the one to do it since she's presumably got the money from her books.

However, except for the money, Joan really isn't the person to do it. She's not street-wise, and doesn't speak Spanish, and she certainly doesn't know how to deal with the locals in a place like Colombia. And it doesn't help that there are people who know that she's arrived, such as Ralph (Danny Devito). He's looking for some sort of treasure, and apparently Joan unwittingly has information that will lead to finding the treasure, and this is something Joan's sister was involved with.

The best way to deal with it is to waylay Joan and get that information from her. TO that end, the destination plaques on the buses are changed so that when Joan thinks she's getting on the bus for the 20-hour trip to Cartagena, she's really getting on a bus that's going somewhere in the jungle. Joan obviously doesn't know at first that she's on the wrong bus, but it's certainly full of Hollywood's stereotypes of the sort of people who live in the rural section of a poor Latin American country. Eventually, the bus is stopped, and there's shooting.

But Joan is saved! There's an American soldier of fortune, Jack Colton (Michael Douglas), who's in Colombia for reasons that don't really matter to the plot, and he happens to be there presumably searching for whatever information Joan has. In any case, he saves Joan and they set off into the jungle to get away from both the criminals who want what Joan has, and the Colombian military, or maybe a paramilitary.

It turns out that Joan has a map that utterly improbably leads to the location of a cave where some ridiculously large gem has been buried. You can only find the cave if you fold the map just right, the sort of thing that might work in a Hollywood movie but again I can't imagine it working in real life, but there we are. They find the gem, but once again, but the criminals and the military are in hot pursuit, forcing Joan and Jack to go their separate ways and hopefully meet again in Cartagena.

Don't try to analyze the plot to Romancing the Stone. Instead, it's the sort of movie you should just sit back and relax as you watch it, preferably with some friends and a bowl of popcorn or whatever snack you prefer. This is a movie that's designed to entertain rather than to be some sort of high art. And it certainly does entertain, even if it does feel formulaic at times. Turner and Douglas work well together, and Danny DeVito is good as the bumbling henchman.

As for the title of this post? Well, Romancing the Stone was a popular movie when it was released, and Hollywood wanted to cash in on it. There was a more or less sequel made, Jewel of the Nile, while other studios made knockoff movies. Menachem Golan at Cannon did a remake of King Solomon's Mines, and one of his missives to the people actively involved in production was "Get me that Stone woman". They figured this meant a new young actress, Sharon Stone, and signed her, although a lot of the people involved with King Solomon's Mines claim she was difficult to work with. It was only later that they found out Golan really meant "Get me that 'Stone' woman", referring to Kathleen Turner from Romancing the Stone!

The Wild North

Another of those movies available from the Warner Archive collection that I recorded off of TCM some time back is The Wild North. As always, I recently sat down to watch it in order to be able to do a post on it here.

Stewart Granger stars as Jules Vincent, a French-Canadian trapper who has wound up much farther west in Canada instead of northern Quebec. (Granger, unsurprisingly, is about as convincing a Québecois as Laurence Olivier was in 49th Parallel a decade earlier.) Vincent lives in a cabin that's really in the wilderness, but he's in one of those trading post villages that's just accessible enough that one of MGM's Old West towns on the backlot could be repurposed for it.

While in town, Jules meets an unnamed native girl (Cyd Charisse; don't ask about the ethnic casting) who is being accosted by another trapper, Max Brody (Howard Petrie). Jules rescues the young woman and heads out for her home village, which is on the way to Jules' cabin, taking her in tow. However, Brody is also on the trip because there's not much way to get around the wilderness and leaving Brody to walk would probably kill Brody. It's not an optimal solution, and when Brody creates a dangerous situation, Jules acts in such a way that accidentally leads to the death of Brody.

Enter Constable Pedley (virile, sexy action hero Wendell Corey), serving for one of the forerunners of the Mounties. He gets wind of the death of Brody, and he obviously believes that it's murder. Or at least, it's a situation that's going to require a summary trial to prove that Jules was acting in self-defense. So he heads farther into the wilderness, to get to Jules' cabin. Once he gets there, he plans to arrest Jules and bring him back to civilization for the trial.

Now, I don't think James Stewart had made The Naked Spur yet, so perhaps Constable Pedley didn't realize just how dangerous it was going to be to be alone on a long journey with a man who might well want to kill Pedley to maintain his freedom. After all, there was no form of communication so it could have been made to appear that Pedley died before getting to Jules' cabin. Worse, by the time Pedley starts out to bring Jules back from the cabin, it's already the dead of winter, but surprisingly bright outside for someplace that far north. The pair sets off by dogsled to get to town, but who knows whether they'll make it there, and how the writers are going to be able to stay within the Production Code to produce a satisfying ending.

The premise of The Wild North is a reasonably good one, although it does have the problems of having to deal with the Production Code. However, the bigger problem is that the movie is never anything more than a by-the-numbers adventure film seemingly best suited for a Saturday matinee demographic that's made with the production values of a movie with greater pretensions. It also doesn't help that some of the shots are obviously backlot shots and don't fit in with the location shooting. There's also a relatively slow pace since there are a lot of tracking shots of people crossing snowy landscapes filmed in medium-to-long shots.

Younger viewers of the early 1950s might have been thrilled by The Wild North. I have a feeling grown-ups would have been more likely to see through the film's flaws, and also wonder whether the movie holds up for younger viewers of today.

Mansions of Color

Audrey Hepburn had a day in Summer Under the Stars this year, and one of her movies that I hadn't seen before was part of the lineup, that being Green Mansions. So I recorded it and watched it to do a post on it here.

Audrey Hepburn gets top billing, even though she doesn't appear until a good half hour in if not longer. The real lead is Anthony Perkins, playing Abel. Abel is a Venezuelan sometime in the early 20th century, at a time when the country has regular military coups. Abel's father was a cabinet minister in one of the governments that got overthrown, and when that coup happened, Dad was killed and it became unsafe for Abel to stay in Caracas. So he makes his way to the part of the rain forest on the border of the Orinoco and Amazon watersheds, having also heard that there's gold in the area.

This being over a hundred years ago, there are still parts of the rain forest where the pre-Columbian civilizations hold sway, or at least Westerners' fictionalized vision of those civilizations. Abel winds up in the lands controlled by one of those civilizations, a tribe led by Runi (Sessue Hayakawa), with Runi's son Kua-Ko (Henry Silva) being Dad's spokesman. Kua-Ko is about the only one to speak Abel's language, and the rest of the tribe is fearful of the white man, so they torture poor Abel by forcing him to stand until he collapses.

But Abel doesn't collapse, and that earns him at least a little respect from Runi. However, in order to save his skin, he's going to have to do a favor for the tribe. They've got an enemy in the forest near their village, and since the forest is off limits to the tribe, perhaps Abel could go into the forest and kill that enemy. Since the choice is doing that or dying -- well, I suppose there might be a third choice if Abel knew his way through the forest to elsewhere -- Abel decides to go into the forest to find this enemy.

What he finds is a little wisp of a woman named Rima (that's Audrey Hepburn, dressed in her Givenchy rags), who saves Abel's life after he gets bitten by a snake. Rima, it turns out, is a beastmistress, in a time when we hadn't yet had the Beastmaster movie so nobody would have used the term. In any case, Rima has a way with animals, who seem to become less of a threat around her. No wonder the tribe is terrified of her.

Abel finds himself falling in love with Rima, because really, this is what happens in Hollywood movies and the plot wasn't ridiculous enough already. It's about to become even more ridiculous when we find out that Rima lives with her grandfather Nuflo (Lee J. Cobb, who at least is playing a white guy and not one of the native peoples) and that there's some conflict between them because Rima determines that Grandpa took her away from her home for, well, reasons. Nuflo doesn't want to lose his granddaughter and feels threatened by Abel, but he's also the only one who knows the way to Rima's birth village. They eventually go to that village, which surprisingly looks like it's in the Alabama Hills instead of the rain forest. Meanwhile, the tribe is going to be coming after Abel if he hasn't killed Rima....

The top review at IMDb has the title, "I can see why this one lost money at the box office." So can I. The movie is a mess, with talented actors expected to play people of a different race; a romantic relationship between Perkins and Hepburn that doesn't really work; and a plot that lurches from one wacky point to the next. And then there's the establishing shots that were done on location. They're nice, except that you can immediately tell which scenes were done on the backlot. Lee J. Cobb, at least, gets the chance to overact, and runs with it. And the less said about the ending, the better. The one saving grace is that there are times when Green Mansions becomes so ridiculous that it's easy to laugh at the movie.

I've said before that pretty much every prominent actor and director has at least one dud in their career. For Audrey Hepburn, Green Mansions is definitely that dud.

Moonfleet

I've said in conjunction with a number of movies that MGM had a lot of gloss that could be used to bring really high production values to a movie. After World War II and outside of the Freed Unit musicals, though, that competence left a lot of movies with something a little off. Another good example of this is Moonfleet.

Jon Whiteley plays John Mohune, an orphan in England in 1757. Apparently his family had come from wealth down in the village Moonfleet in Dorsetshire some generations back, so his mom left him with a letter to look up one man in Moonfleet, one Jeremy Fox (Stewart Granger). Moonfleet must have changed, however, since one of the things little John finds upon his arrival to the area is a man who's been hanged for smuggling.

John finds Jeremy at a tavern, and Jeremy is none too pleased to see the arrival of a Mohune. Apparently the people of Moonfleet disliked the Mohunes, who were powerful back in the day but rather cruel. The Mohunes also had something to do with Jeremy's being forced to leave Moonfleet and cross the Atlantic to live in the colonies for some time. Worse for little John is that Jeremy is the head of one of the gangs of smugglers!

Jeremy tries to senf John away, but John escapes from the coach that's taking him away and returns at just the wrong time, while Jeremy is entertaining some important people. The only one who realy takes pity on John is Jeremy's lady friend Mrs. Minton (Viveca Lindfors). As for Jeremy, he'd like to get into a privateering deal with local bigwig Lord Ashwood (George Sanders), but having to schlep this kid around would be a problem.

Meanwhile, everybody in Moonfleet is complaining about ghosts in the graveyard. The reason for that is that the old Mohune crypt under the church, extending out into the graveyard, is where the smugglers meet in secret. Johnny goes into the old family crypt, and finds a silver locket in an ancestor's coffin. What he doesn't know is that the locket contains a piece of paper that holds the clue to finding a large and valuable diamond. Eventually that piece of paper is found and Jeremy is able to put two and two together. But by this time the authorities are on to him.

It goes like this, and since the Production Code was still pretty strong, it's tough to figure out a way that Jeremy is going to get out of all of this without facing justice. And what's going to happen regarding his relationship with John, since everybody else is telling Jeremy to ditch the boy?

I think part of the problem is Moonfleet is that the script seems to go all over the place without really doing enough. The other problem is that the movie is unable to break away from the look of obviously being done on the backlot. Everybody is professional, and there's the kernel of a pretty entertaining movie hiding at the center of it all. But the potential is never reached.

Some boys who are into adventure stories will definitely enjoy Moonfleet, but there's also a lot of adventure that's been done better out there.

Gunga Din

Last month TCM did a retrospective of the movies of 1939 since this year is the 80th anniversary of what is often considered Hollywood's greatest year. I hadn't blogged about Gunga Din before, so since that was part of the spotlight, I decided to DVR it and watch it.

Based on a character created by Rudyard Kipling, the movie is set in India under the British Raj late in the Victorian era. Parts of the subcontinent, especially those in the northwest near what is now the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, are still a fraction region, and there is all sorts of anti-British activity going on.

Cutter (Cary Grant), Ballantine (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.), and MacChesney (Victor McLaglen) are three friends who are serving together in this part of India and also getting in a few scrapes. Apparently, Cutter tried to buy what is purported to be a map leading to a large stash of gold which would leave Cutter set for life, and that's gotten the three in a spot of trouble. But up to this point they've always been able to fight their way out of it in cartoonish fashion.

Currently, a group known as the Thuggees (from which we get the word "thug") is rebelling, specifically downing telegraph lines but also attacking towns where the telegraph offices were. The three friends are given the task of dealing with it. It might just be their last mission together, since Ballantine is planning to get married to Emmy (Joan Fontaine) and leave the service.

Meanwhile, the three soldiers have a friend in their water carrier, the titular Gunga Din (Sam Jaffe). He also has his ear to the ground so knows a bit about what's going on, and also has a strong desire to be more British, specifically to be a British soldier. He helps Cutter escape from the brig after Cutter is put their to prevent going looking for that gold.

What they find is a temple which they ultimately realize has gold-plated (if not solid gold) sculptures, so Cutter would be engaging in a form of looting even worse than just leaving the Elgin Marbles to rot in the elements. But this being a 1939 movie, nobody thought of those things. Instead, this is also the temple where the Thuggees are planning their big rebellion. After Cutter is waylaid by the Thuggees, Ballantine and MacChesney follow to find him. The four eventually realize that when the British army as a whole comes, they'll be walking right into a trap. They have to figure out a way to escape and warn the British.

Gunga Din is a rousing action picture well suited to younger boys who want their action dished out with obvious heroes and villains; anybody looking for cultural subtlety isn't going to find it here. If you know that going in -- and you should probably expect it considering that the movie is from 1939 -- it works. I'll admit that I personally prefer the Errol Flynn swashbucklers for their action to Gunga Din, but this one isn't too bad.

Gunga Din is available on DVD.

The final night for Star of the Month Burt Lancaster

We're already up to the final Wednesday in November, which means it's one final night of Burt Lancaster's movies for his turn as TCM's Star of the Month. The overnight schedule includes The Professionals at 1:15 AM. This is another of those movies I thought I had blogged about before, but a search of the blog, as well as a search of the posts on my computer claims no, I haven't. So now would be a good time to blog about it.

The scene is the Amreican Southwest in 1917; a bit later than your standard-issue western, but just before World War I and the social change that would bring. Over on the other side of the border, in Mexico, there's a revolution going on. Sure, the government is bad, but it's just as likely that the rebels are going to turn out to be a problem, too, as we saw in Crisis many years earlier. Industrialist JW Grant (Ralph Bellamy) has had his wife kidnapped by bandits, and taken to a stronghold somewhere on the Mexican side of the border. And dammit, he wants his wife back! To that end, he's willing to hire the best mercenaries, and pay them a substantial sum. Leading them is soldier-of-fortune Henry Fardan (Lee Marvin). Hnery assembles a team of the best fot the operation: dynamite expert and bon vivant Bill Dolworth (Burt Lancaster), who always seems up for an adventure; horse wrangler Hans Ehrengard (Robert Ryan), and tracker Jacob Sharp (Woody Strode). Their mission, as Grant explains it to them, is to go into Mexico, find Mrs. Grant, and bring her back to him, for which they'll be mighty well compensated.

And so, they head off to Mexico, a place that is pretty desolate and tough to live in, as we saw when discussing the movie Bandolero! back in January 2010. But our team of mercenaries braves the conditions and eventually gets to the camp where Mrs. Grant has been spirited away to, which is where they discover the first of their problems. It's the camp of Jesús Raza, one of the more notorious revolutionaries. As a revolutionary, he's pretty well armed, and getting Mrs. Grant out of there is going to be a darn sight difficult. Additionally, with Raza being her kidnapper, there's also the problem that the Mexican government wants Raza, so our Americans dealing with Raza means they're also eventually going to have to deal with the other side of the revolution. But they want their money, and in a nice set piece they rescue the lovely Maria Grant (Claudia Cardinale; where do all these people in Westerns get their trophy wives from?).

At this point, with Maria in tow and Raza and the Mexican government going after them, the team faces its third problem: Maria doesn't want to go back to Grant. Hers is a marriage not born out of love, but out of Grant's rapacious and controlling desire to have a beautiful wife. In fact, Maria loves Raza and is happy to be with him. But our professionals, faced with all the other problems they have, understandably figure that the least bad thing to do is complete their mission and get the money; if Maria wants to escape back to Raza afterwards that's her business. Except that there are going to be complications getting back to the States, with another set in a mountain pass; more difficult is when Maria suggests that Grant isn't going to pay them according to the terms of hte deal he made with them....

The Professoinals is more entertainment than anything else, as it's not rying to address any social issues or make any really dark points the way that a lot of other movies started to do with the destruction of the Production Code in the late 1960s. But there's nothing wrong with a movie being pure entertainment, and in that regard The Professionals succeeds in spades. Lancaster looks like he's having the time of his life making this one, getting to be rakish at times as he gets knocked on his keister wearing just his long johns. Lee Marvin is good, even if he was more enjoyable when he was playing bad guys. Everybody else has smaller roles, but all of them do well. All along the way, The Professionals is lovely to look at.

The Professionals is available for purchase from the TCM Shop.

The Four Feathers

I believe that I have never mentioned the movie The Four Feathers before. It's airing tonight at midnight on TCM as part of a night of movies with Ralph Richardson in the cast.

The star and main character is John Clements, playing Harry Faversham. Harry's father, like all the male members of the Faversham family, served in the military, and now that Dad is retired, it seems as though hsi tim is spent reminiscing about his past, specifically in the form of General Burroughs (C. Aubrey Smith, looking like his usual distinguished self). Burroughs fought in the Crimean War and loves telling anybody who will listen the same tired old story about the batle he fought in Crimea. All the men in the Faversham family have gone into military service, and it's assumed that Harry is going to do the same, although he really doesn't like the idea.

Because it's the expected thing, however, Harry does go to the military academy, where he also falls in love with Burroughs' granddaghter Ethne (Jane Duprez). Harry would rather write poetry than do the military thing, though, and when General Gordon is defeated in Sudan, Britian sends an expeditionary force to Africa to quell the native uprising. This means that Harry and his friends (one of them played by the aforementioned Ralph Richardson) will be sent to Africa. Harry decides that the most honorable thing to do is to resign his commission. Unfortunately, nobody else sees it the same way, and his three buddies in the army as well as Ethne each give him a white feather, this being the symbol of cowardice.

Harry decides there's only one thing to do, which is to become a hero so that he can redeem himself. To do so, he sails for Egypt and has his skin darkened so that he can pass himself of as a member of an Egyptian sect, as opposed to one of the Europeans who would certainly be killed by the Sudanese. Harry saves Richardson, who by this time has been blinded by sunstroke, and then winds up at the Battle of Omdurman.

The Four Feathers is the sort of Victorian adventure story which, I have to admit, is not my favorite genre of movie. That having been said, if you do enjoy adventure movies, you're going to love this one. Not only is it adventurous, but it's got goregous Technicolor photography as well as location shooting (at least for the establishing shots). Military life is thankfully not like this any more, but The Four Feathers is still a story well worth seeing.