Brainstorm (1965)

Dana Andrews was TCM's Star of the Month back in July, and one of his movies that I hadn't seen before was the 1965 Brainstorm. (There's the proably more famous 1983 movie Brainstorm, the movie Natalie Wood was making at the time of her death, that has a completely different plot.) The plot of the 1965 Brainstorm sounded interesting, so I recorded it and just recently watched it to, as always, do a post on it here.

Jeffrey Hunter (billed as Jeff, not Jeffrey) plays Jim Grayam (yes, that's the spelling), who works doing computer analysis of weapons systems for Benson Industries, one of those defense contractors that dot the Southern California landscape. One night, as he's leaving work, he spots a car that's stalled on the train tracks. Worse, there's a woman in there who looks to be unconscious if not dead. And Jim can hear a train coming. Not being able to wake up the woman, Jim breaks one of the windows and gets the car off the tracks just in time.

Jim looks through the woman's belongings for identification, and finds that she's... Lorrie Benson (Anne Francis), the wife of Jim's ultimate boss, Cort Benson (Dana Andrews)! Jim is going to have to break the bad news, and worse, Jim figures out that since the car didn't have any mechanical issues, Lorrie was really trying to commit suicide. Imagine having to be the one to do that with one's boss.

Jim gets to the Benson mansion, and finds that Lorrie is deeply unhappy that Jim saved her, as she feels trapped in a loveless marriage with Cort using his power to prevent any other man from getting close to her -- there have been quite a few men before, apparently. But when Lorrie learns that Jim didn't save her for any sort of monetary or work-related reward, she decides that she's going to try to pursue him romantically.

Cort figures out what's going on, and uses his power as head of the company to make it look as though Jim is going nuts at work. Decidedly not helping Jim in this regard is the fact that he already has a history of mental instability, having suffered a breakdown in college. But this, combined with his increasingly falling in love with Lorrie, gives him a wacky idea that couldn't possibly work in real life, never mind in a movie that was made when there were still some of the restrictions of the Production Code.

Jim decides he's going to kill Cort, but also to try to get himself declared not guilty by reason of insanity, so that he'll be sent to a hospital, from where he can then fairly quickly get himself proved not insane after all. When it comes time for the psychiatrists to determine whether or not Jim is sane or not, the head of the committee examining him is Dr. Larstadt (Viveca Lindfors). Jim seems to be falling in love with her, too....

There's a seed of an interesting plot in Brainstorm, but the movie goes off the rails, I think, in no small part from the script being rather unrealistic. The only thing that it does well -- and I wonder whether this was unintentional -- is to make the viewer wonder at the end whether Jim was ever sane. But Cort is never fully fleshed out, and Lorrie seems one-dimensional in her on instability. The direction (by future TV star William Conrad) was somewhat jarring at times with its cuts and pans, but that may have been a deliberate attempt to keep the viewer off-kilter. (If it was deliberate, it succeeded.)

Brainstorm is an interesting misfire that may leave other viewers as frustrated as it left me. But it probably deserves one viewing, at least, if only to figure out where everything goes wrong.

The Whistle at Eaton Falls

A couple of months back, TCM ran the interesting movie The Whistle at Eaton Falls. I had seen that it was scheduled for a Blu-ray release, but I thought the first time I checked, that release was supposed to come in mid-March. Then I checked again, and thought I saw a late March release date, and in late March saw an April 12 release date. Apparently, it's now listed as getting its release on April 15. But since I watched it over the weekend in anticipation of doing a post today, that's the post you're getting.

The opening titles point out that it's produced by Louis de Rochemont, with a story from real life. Now, apparently I haven't mentioned de Rochemont on the blog before, but a bit of introduction to him should tell you the sort of movie you're going to get. Louis de Rochemont apparently got access to a movie camera in the late 1910s, filming the people and places around him. In the 1930s, he started producing the famous newsreel series The March of Time, which were different from other newsreels, in that they were two reels and focused on one story, rather than about a minute per event as other newsreels did. De Rochemont also used dramatic reconstructions of events, which might be controversial, since that technically makes a lot of the "news" not real.

By the mid-1940s, de Rochemont was interested in producing feature films, with the first being the interesting docudrama The House on 92nd Street. He would go on to produce several more docudramas, as well as movies that were slightly further afield from the docudrama, The Whistle at Eaton Falls being in that latter category.

The setting is Eaton Falls, NH, which is a company town. Well, not quite at the beginning, when it's a two-company town. The titular whistle is on the roof of the Granite State Shoe Co., but thanks to rising prices and the same forces that spelled doom for a lot of the mill towns in New England, the shoe company is forced to shut down, putting a lot of people out of work and leaving Doubleday Plastics as the town's biggest employer by far.

Doubleday is not immune to the same economic pressures that closed down Granite State, and Daniel Doubleday, president of the company, calls in the head of the labor union, Brad Adams (Lloyd Bridges), to discuss the problem. In order to cut costs, Doubleday would like to invest in new capital that will increase productivity, which of course means fewer workers to produce the same output. Doubleday's hope is that this will eventually result in more contracts for lower-priced output, eventually allowing everybody to return to work. But the key word is eventually. There would have to be some layoffs that would hopefully be temporary. Brad points out that the union would have to approve the use of the new machines per the contract, but is going to face trouble. He's got some hotheads in the union like Al Webster (Murray Hamilton). On managment side, there's Doubleday's second-in-command Dwight Hawkins (Russell Hardie), who is notoriously anti-union.

Brad is in a difficult situation. He's the one man in the union that the other workers trust, but the economic pressures should be evident, especially considering the recent closure of the other major employer in town. But things are about to get a whole lot more difficult for Brad. In order to try to drum up business, Mr. Doubleday goes on a business trip to meet with the other side of a major production contract. But the plane crashes, killing Mr. Doubleday. Now, the lawyers and bankers want Mrs. Doubleday (Dorothy Gish) to sell and live a comfortable retirement. She, however, doesn't want that, since she knows it would kill the company and put her fellow townsfolk out of work. So she comes up with a radical and risky idea: make Brad the new general manager at the company!

So now Brad gets to see the other side of business. When he goes to keep the appointment that killed his boss, the factory owner on the other side tells him, what would you do if you were in my position? It's not good news for Brad, but it's the obvious answer. And then there's the bidding for plastic buttons for Navy uniforms, which is a brutal process with the low bidder getting the contract period.

Finally, when all seems lost, Brad gets a brilliant idea: have the plastic cutter be part of the same machine as the molder, a process heretofore done by hand because nobody's been able to overcome the technical difficulties. Somehow, he and his assistants are successful. But the companie he's going to sell to has hired Hawkins on, and Hawkins figures out what's going on. So he's going to go to Eaton Falls to rile up the union to get them to reject the deal, so that Doubleday can go out of business and his new company can buy up the machines cheaply.

The Whistle at Eaton Falls is an interesting story, albeit one that seems like a junior high level of sophistication in dealing with complicated issues. Brad Adams gets to see both sides of the problem and finds that -- golly gee, management is just as difficult as labor! Everybody is also either a little too good or a little too bad. But it's a fairly unique story for Hollywood of that period, and it's helped by location shooting and capable acting, not just from Bridges, but many of the supporting stars, some who would go on to a lot bigger things. Anne Francis has a small role as the daughter of one of Brad's older co-workers, while playing one of Brad's co-workers and friends is Ernest Borgnine a couple of years before he became a star.

The Rack

I mentioned earlier that I recorded quite a few of the movies that aired during TCM's tribute to May 2019 Star of the Month Paul Newman, so I'm getting through them slowly. The most recent watch was The Rack.

A bunch of people are waiting at an airport for a military plane bringing a group of POWs from the Korean War home. Among them is Capt. Edward Hall, Jr. (Paul Newman). He's the son of army colonel Edward Hall Sr. (Walter Pidgeon), and also had a brother who died in the war, leaving behind a widow in Aggie Hall (Anne Francis).

Before the POWs can go home, they have to spend some time at the military hospital to be debriefed by army psychologists and the like. While Ed Jr. is watching a movie, another soldier comes up to him, and puts a noose around his neck with a placard reading "TRAITOR". Oh dear, somebody has something against poor Ed. It's not just this one man, either. Ed is uncomfortable being back home, and feels like his father isn't making things any easier for him. Just wait until Dad finds out about what happened over in Korea.

Apparently during the debriefings, enough evidence was obtained to lead military authorities to believe that Ed Jr. collaborated with the Chinese who were holding them prisoner, and this is a really serious offense. Dad can't believe this, as he raised his two sons to be perfect little soldiers. Surely when they hold the trial, the truth is going to come out and Ed Jr. is going to be exonerated.

The trial begins, with Lt. Col. Wasnick (Edmnod O'Brien) defending Capt. Hall, and Maj. Moulton (Wendell Corey) prosecuting the case. It's a difficult defense, as Capt. Hall has admitted that he did the things he's accused of, although he says that he felt it was the only thing he could do to help the men in his command. Wasnick obviously doesn't believe any of this, and he's going to do everything he can to debunk Hall's defense when he takes the stand.

The Rack is another of those movies that's well-made, but which kept striking me as having something not quite right about them. One of the big things for me was the scene resolving the relationship between father and son, which came across as really artificial.. Something also felt off about the trial, although that's probably because it was a military trial, which does have different rules from civilian justice. But where did they get all the evidence that the Chinese would certainly have kept?

However, Newman gives a very good performance and his clearly on his way to becoming a star in the early picture. The supporting cast is also pretty good, even Pidgeon who is normally a bit too stolid for my tastes. There's a nice early supporting role from Lee Marvin, and James Best (Roscoe P. Coltrane from The Dukes of Hazard) and Cloris Leachman have bit parts.

The Rack is available on DVD from the Warner Archive, and isn't a bad little movie.