A Big Hand for the Little Lady

As I've mentioned on a reasonable number of occasions, I've got a bunch of movies on my DVR that I need to get around to watching before they expire from the DVR. With that in mind, I've got movie posts scheduled a good three weeks in advance, along with several left in draft form either so I don't have a bunch of movies in the same genre or with the same star coming up in rapid succession. Some draft posts then get re-edited if I seem them on the TCM schedule only after I write the first draft, so things might look a bit off. Such is the case with our next movie, A Big Hand for the Little Lady. I had written a post some time back and scheduled it, and then saw the Summer Under the Stars schedule release. Henry Fonda is being honored tomorrow, August 24, and A Big Hand for the Little Lady shows up at 2:00 PM.

It's sometime in the late 19th century, possibly in the New Mexico Territory or west Texas, although there's reference to a "Laredo Territory" which I don't think ever existed. Benson Tropp (Charles Bickford) is driving his hearse as the town's undertaker, picking people up, although he's not picking up the dead, and the people he's picking up seem to want to be picked up. The other men he picks up are Drummond (Jason Robrds), a cattleman whose daughter is about to get married; and prominent attorney Habershaw (Kevin McCarthy); another rancher named Wilcox is already in town as is storekeeper Buford (John Qualen). They all gather in the back room of Sam Rhine's saloon, and everyboy in town seems interested in their presence.

The reason for this gathering is that it's that time again for the annual high-stakes poker game, which seems to have as its only rules that they'll play a marathon session until one person has all the money, and that if you can't call the current bet, you're out. This, combined with no mention being made of a maximum bet, is something that I'd think would cause a problem if one person could just bet everyone else out of the game, but then maybe their game doesn't work like this. You get the impression that these men have been coming together for years, and budgeting to take part in the match.

Into town comes Meredith (Henry Fonda). He's got a wife Mary (Joanne Woodward) and son Jackie. They're traveling through Texas to San Antonio, where Meredith is intending to buy a plot of land for the family to make a new start in life. That also means that Meredith has the money for that plot of land on hand, in cash since this wasn't an era of electronic funds transfers. And he's going to be in town for a night because the wheel on their wagon needs to be repaired before the family can get back on the road. Everybody else in town is interested in the poker game, so it seems natural for Meredith to be interested in what's going on too. But he also has more interest as he's an inveterate gambler, with the assumption that the family is moving in part to escape Meredith's past gambling losses.

As you can guess, Meredith gets really interested in the poker game. The others have never really been interested in bringing somebody new into the game, but they get the feeling that Meredith might make a good mark: if you don't know who the mark at the table is, it's probably you. So they do let him into their game, and he predictably starts losing money, up until it comes time to make the big wager, at which point he suffers a medical issue that will force him out of the game and giving him no more chance to win back the family money he lost. At that point, Mary makes the insane request that she should be allowed to finish the game for her husband, even though she doesn't even know how to play poker.

A Big Hand for the Little Lady is another of those movies where you can see why the people involved would read the script and think it's the sort of material they could have a lot of fun making. And to be fair to all of them they do a reasonable job with the film, while looking like they're enjoying making this one. The only thing is that the material is pretty darn thin, the sort of thing that in the generation before World War II probably would have been written to be a two-reel short instead of a feature-length movie. So A Big Hand for the Little Lady will probably appeal more to other people than it did to me. Not that it's not worth watching, however.

The Rear Gunner

I was watching a movie off my DVR where it seems as though TCM screwed up the scheduling, as they had a full hour after the movie to fill. They did this with three World War II shorts, and today I'm going to mention the first one I saw, The Rear Gunner.

In the days after Pearl Harbor, lots of men were drafted, such as Pee Wee Williams (Burgess Meredith). When asked what he'd like to do to serve the military, he mentions how he'd like to be involved with one of those "flying fortresses". The military, in its infinite wisdom, assigns him to be an aviation mechanic; presumably he worked on farm equipment back home.

He's noticed by Lt. Ames (Ronald Reagan), mostly for being short. That's an advantage in aviation where space is at a premium. Having had to shoot crows as pests, Pee Wee is told by Ames that perhaps he could try being a gunner. Of course, you knew this was going to happen considering the title of the short. Pee Wee is a natural at this, and goes to a five-week training course run by an instructor sergeant (Tom Neal); also in the course is Benny (played by Dane Clark at the very beginning of his career under his childhood name of Bernard Zanville).

Eventually they graduate and go off to active duty, earning distinction because this is a short released in 1943 and the whole point of shorts like this was to increase morale on the home front and hopefully get more men to enlist. It's well enough made, certainly for what it's trying to do. Looking back on it from 80 years in the future, it may feel pedestrian since there's relatively little going on here. And, to be honest, there were wartime shorts that were better. Certainly, The Rear Gunner could have been improved with Technicolor. But Hollywood and the military's Motion Picture Units were turning out stuff like this so quickly that large budgets and things like Technicolor weren't always a consideration. As it is, The Rear Gunner is an interesting little time capsule.

Note that sources list the original running time as 26 minutes. It was edited down to 20 minutes at some point and that shorter edit is what TCM ran.

Clash of the Titans (1981)

I was eight or nine years old when the first version of the movie Clash of the Titans was first in theaters. As such, I was much too young to have seen it in the theaters. Having been produced in part by MGM, it's a movie that shows up from time to time on TCM. Until now, I never actually watched it, so the last time it showed up I finally recorded it and watche it.

The movie starts off with an establishing scene of a Greek king banishing his daughter Danaë, who has recently given birth. That child, Perseus, is actually half-divine, having Zeus (Laurence Olivier) as a father, although of course neither son nor mother actually gets to see Zeus. Instead, they get washed ashore on a more idyllic island where Perseus is able to grow up (to be played as an adult by Harry Hamlin). Zeus, being ticked, kills Danaë's fahter, and released the Kraken, a sea monster.

Once Perseus becomes an adult, the sea goddess Thetis (Maggie Smith) transports Perseus to a Phoenician amphitheater where he meets Ammon (Burgess Meredith), who seems to have a way with weaponry. However, Ammon is being helped by the gods, who also help Perseus. Or at least some of them do, because the gods seem to be at war with each other. Part of that involves Phoenician queen Cassiopeia and her daughter Andromeda, who is supposed to be engaged to Thetis' son. But Andromeda asks difficult riddles of any potential suitor, killing anyone who can't solve the riddle. Perseus is smart, and has a few tricks up his sleeve to figure out the answer to the riddle Andromeda is going to ask him.

This really ticks off Thetis' son, so he gets Mommy to use the Kraken to go after Andromeda before Perseus can marry her. It's really difficult to defeat the Kraken, but once again Perseus is bright and knows who at least has the answer of how to defeat the Kraken, even if those people can't actually do it themselves. To beat the Kraken, Perseus is going to have to get the head of Medusa and use it against the Kraken. Of course, as we all know, Medusa can turn everybody to stone if the look at her.

For a mythology-based movie, Clash of the Titans has a surprisingly convoluted plot. It's probably better known for being the final film from the master of stop-motion photography, Ray Harryhausen, who produced a whole bunch of mythological creatures, some of which work better than others. Pegasus is way too obviously against rear-projection photography, but the owl Bubo is rather better. The big-name actors don't have a whole lot to do, while Hamlin is clearly there because he looks like what circa-1980 though of as a sex symbol what with the wavy hair. Think Michael Beck in Xanadu except that at least Hamlin is slightly more capable of an actor.

All that said, Clash of the Titans is a movie that will appeal to younger viewers who may not care so much about the effects. Fans of Ray Harryhausen will also enjoy it, I think. But it is a movie that is not without its flaws.

Young Anthony Hopkins

It's only a couple of weeks ago that I blogged about Anthony Hopkins in The Remains of the Day, by which time he was quite famous, it being after his first Oscar win. Back in October for Halloween, TCM aired a much earlier Hopkins movie that I hadn't seen before, which sounded interesting, so I recorded it: Magic. Recently, I finally watched it off my DVR.

Hopkins plays Corky, a struggling magician working the nightclub scene in New York; his British accent is explained away by the fact that his parents emigrated to work the Borscht Belt which is how Corky wound up in America. That Catskills upbringing however does come in as a plot point later in the movie. When we first see him, Corky is nervous and despite doing his mentor Merlin's tricks and doing them well, the show flops because of Corky's nerves and lack of delivery. Merlin tells Corky that he needs a gimmick, so he goes off and gets one.

Fast forward some unspecified amount of time, and Corky is back at that same club we first saw him in, only this time his agent Ben (Burgess Meredith), who knows about Corky's new gimmick, shows up with a network representative in tow. Corky starts doing his routine, which looks a lot like the same one he was doing as the movie opened. And that show seems to be bombing just as badly as the first one. So badly, in fact, that a man starts heckling him from the back of the room.

In fact, that's the gimmick. Corky isn't getting into a double act like Martin and Lewis in The Stooge; in fact, the heckler is a ventriloquist's dummy, named Fats, and the idea that Corky can throw his voice that far is impressive in itself. But Fats serves as the distraction a magician needs for his sleight of hand. Corky also gives Fats the persona of an off-color heckler, injecting humor into the routine. Fats turns the show into a success, enough that the guy from the network wants to offer Corky a pilot.

But there's a catch. One of the clauses in the standard contract is that the person getting the pilot needs to do a physical, and Corky is flatly against that, which he says is from principle, but the way it's all presented foreshadows that there's probably something darker going on. Indeed, we've seen Corky carrying on a conversation with Fats with no one else around. Corky runs away heading back for home, except that all his family are dead and gone.

Corky really has another reason for heading back to the Catskills. When he was in school, he had a crush on lovely Peggy Ann (Ann-Margret), and is looking to see her again, stopping at the motel her parents owned. But it's Peggy who's there, having been given control of the motel when her parents left for Florida. But since the Borscht Belt is dying by this time, the business isn't going well and she lives in a loveless marriage with her husband Duke (Ed Lauter).

At this point, the movie starts getting really dark. The voice of Fats inside Corky's head doesn't go away, and when Corky rekindles his relationship with Peggy, going farther than he did in high school, it's not only Duke who has a problem with it; Corky does as well. Fats senses the danger, and things start to spiral out of control from there....

The old horror anthology trope of a ventriloquist's dummy that seems to take on a life of its own has been done a lot of times, but I don't think it's so common that it's been extended out to a full-length film. Magic does it fairly well, helped by an intelligent way of introducing the premise. That, and fairly good performances, especially from Hopkins and Meredith. Magic, for some reason, has fallen through the cracks, and isn't so well remembered today, which is a bit of a surprise considering the star power of the cast. It's definitely one that deserves better, and deserves a watch.

Burnt Offerings

I had never seen Burnt Offerings before , but it showed up on TCM this past October as part of the horror movie themes, so I recorded it in order to be able to watch it and do a post on it here. Recently, I finally got around to watching it.

The Rolfs are a family led by father Ben (Oliver Reed), who has a wife Marian (Karen Black), and 12-year-old son David (Lee Montgomery). They're looking for a place to spend the summer on vacation, in part so that Ben can work on whatever writing it is that he needs to do. Ben and Marian think they've found just the place, the old Allardyce mansion. They meet with two of the representatives of the family, sister Roz (Eileen Heckart) and wheelchair-bound brother Arnold (Burgess Meredith). The two seem slightly dodgy and creepy, especially when they're talking about their elderly mother who lives in a room on the top floor and rarely leaves, having her food brought up to her twice a day.

This ought to be a big warning to the Rolfs, but they decide to take the house for the summer since the Allardyces are offering it for the extremely good price of $900 for the whole summer, which wasn't much for such a place even in the 1970s. The Rolfs bring Ben's aunt Elizabeth (Bette Davis) along with them, ready to enjoy a summer once they get the house in order, as it's a bit run down from Roz and Arnold's inability to deal with the upkeep.

More red flags show up vrey early when they get to the house and find that Roz and Arnold have left without leaving any way to contact them, and announcing that they've left Mom behind for the Rolfs to take care of. That seems like a huge breach of contract to me, and I would have thought about getting in touch with somebody to deal with that, but no, the Rolfs can't be bothered to do that, with Dad trying to get the pool ready for swimming and Mom taking care of the inside of the house.

And then Marian goes up and knocks on the elderly Mrs. Allardyce's door -- and gets no answer. My immediate thought would be that there might be something seriously wrong with Mrs. Allardyce, and I'd open the door to check up on her. God forbid she suffered a heart attack or something considering her kids' having neglected her. But Marian doesn't do any of that.

Meanwhile, creepy things start happening, especially when Ben and David both go swimming and Dad is much too hard on his son when they're "roughhousing", with Dad nearly drowning his son. This being a horror movie, it's a sign that there's something clearly wrong and that there's more to come. To be fair, that particular incident isn't something that the Rolfs themselves ought to notice, but for an outside observer watching the movie, it's just the first of many. Ben also starts having dreams from when he was a kid and his father died, with the driver of the hearse being super creepy, reminiscent of the "room for one more" story in Dead of Night.

It goes on like this, with things getting more serious when Aunt Elizabeth has some sort of medical issue that ultimately kills her. Surely this is going to get the rest of the Rolfs to break off their summer vacation, go home to bury Elizabeth, and stay home! Who on earth would want to stay in a creepy rental mansion after that?

Even more than a lot of other horror movies, Burnt Offerings is one that to me really seemed to rely on the characters making profoundly stupid decisions that nobody in real life would make. I know that suspension of disbelief to some extent is a thing when watching the movies, but Burnt Offerings required a bit too much suspension of disbelief for me. It didn't help that the ending is pretty darn easy to see coming. The other big problem that the movie has is that it runs pretty darn slowly. It's only a shade under two hours, but felt like it could have been better told in a good 20 minutes less.

Burnt Offerings is a movie that would do well paired in a horror double-feature on TCM next October with something like House.

20,000 Years with John Garfield

I see that I still have a couple of movies left on the DVR from when Ann Sheridan was TCM Star of the Month back in June. Among them is Castle on the Hudson. Sheridan and male lead John Garfield being Warner Bros. contract players, it's unsurprising that this one got a DVD release courtesy of the Warner Archive.

Garfield plays Tommy Gordon, a gangster living the high life who seems to get away with the crimes he commits, except for the fact that he doesn't want to commit any crime on Saturday because that's his unlucky day. (That's a lot of foreshadowing.) Sheridan plays his girlfriend Kay, who'll stick by him through thick and thin.

Unfortunately, Tommy's underlings get him involved in a crime that takes place on a Saturday night, and sure enough, the police pinch him at a high-class nightclub that's presumably a mob front. In any case, Tommy gets convicted and sent up to Sing Sing.

Tommy thinks he'll be able to waltz through prison, especially since he's got a bunch of money. Obviously he'd seen Blackwell's Island and how the gangster prisoners there were able to run the place. But the warden here, Long (Pat O'Brien) isn't about to have any of that nonsense. He's one of those wardens who actually believes in rehabilitation, but is also not a softy. Everybody gets the same level of discipline until they show they deserve more or less, and that discipline is going to rehabilitate them.

In prison, Tommy becomes friends with Steven Rockford (Burgess Meredith), who is planning an escape. Steven sets up the plot such that Tommy should be able to escape with him, but then Tommy realizes that the planned break is on a Saturday. Fat chance of Tommy taking part in it. And sure enough, the plot fails, with Steven getting killed by the guards in the process.

Tommy may not exactly be a model prisoner, but he is at least more docile from the time he spent in solitary and the other indignities that Warden Long visited upon him for not wanting to go along with the prison rules. And Long eventually thinks that perhaps even someone like Tommy is being rehabilitated.

But then poor Kay is the passenger in a car crash that nearly kills her. Tommy gets a telegram, and Long rather bizarrely gives Tommy a one-day furlough -- on the honor system! -- so that Tommy can go to New York and see Kay before she dies. Some of Tommy's enemies see him and set up an attempted hit, which is foiled by... Kay, who shoots Tommy's enemy dead. Not that the authorities are going to believe any of this, even if Kay should survive.

If the plot sounds familiar, that's because Castle on the Hudson is a remake of Warner Bros. pre-Code movie 20,000 Years in Sing Sing. It's basically a programmer for Garfield, who was a rising star at Warner Bros. from the very beginning of his career, as well as for Sheridan, running about 77 minutes.

Even though it's just a programmer, having the cast that it does ensures that it's a pretty good movie. It might be better remembered if it weren't such a close remake of 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, which had even bigger stars, but that's unfair to Castle on the Hudson. It really can stand on its own, and the movie's big fault, that furlough, is a problem in both movies.

So you should probably watch both Castle on the Hudson and 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, and judge for yourself.