Our Man in Havana

I've stated on several occasions before that I'm not the biggest fan of those "serious" 1960s spy movies. One (well, technically not a 1960s film) that's not quite so serious, although also not a spoof like the Matt Helm movies, is the 1959 film Our Man in Havana. I had actually never seen it before, so when I noticed it was available on one of the streaming services, I decided to watch.

The movie informs us that it was set before the "recent" revolution in Cuba finally succeeded -- the movie was made on location in Cuba but based on a 1958 book by author Graham Greene. It tells the story of James Wormold (Alec Guinness), who is working as a vacuum cleaner salesman for a British company's Havana office. You would think that this is a job that doesn't pay all that much money, and to make matters worse, James is a widower with a teenaged daughter Milly (Jo Morrow) who has expensive tastes.

Somebody in MI6 back in London, most likely spymaster "C" (Ralph Richardson) has come up with the brilliant idea that they should recruit spies from among normal people, because apparently the professional spies aren't getting the job done and all the professionals on the other side know who the British professionals are, anyway. So the head spy in the Caribbean, Hawthorne (Noël Coward), code number 59200, approaches Wormorld with a proposition to do some spying for his motherland. Wormold isn't so sure, but he could use the extra money, so he takes up the offer.

Of course, part of what is supposed to be the humor in the movie is that Wormold has no idea what he's doing, since he hasn't been given much instruction by Hawthorne. And Wormold is expected to recruit his own spies, like some sort of twisted multi-level marketing scheme. So after a bit of picking the mind of a friend, the American doctor Hasselbacher (Burl Ives), Wormold decides that he's just going to make crap up.

But for better or worse, Wormold is good at coming up with plausible secrets. The folks back in London believe the secrets, while the Cubans think Wormold has come up with something even though he hasn't. With that in mind, the British send a secretary, Beatrice (Maureen O'Hara), out into the field to assist Wormold. The Cubans, meanwhile, assassinate of one Wormold's underlings, and the Cuban authorites in the form of Segura (Ernie Kovacs) start to put the pressure on Wormold. Wouldn't it just be easier to declare him persona non grata and deport him back to the UK?

The big problem I had with Our Man in Havana is that it felt like one of those stories that was trying to be too clever by half, and as a result winds up not being all that great, despite the presence of a pretty good cast. It's not as bad in that regards as the grimmer spy tales of the 1960s, but it still didn't work for me. But because of the cast, Our Man in Havana is one of those movies you're definitely going to want to watch and judge for yourself.

Let No Man Write My Epitaph

Another of the stars honored in last year's Summer Under the Stars was Shelley Winters. One of her movies that I hadn't seen before is Let No Man Write My Epitaph, and since the movie sounded interesting, I decided to record it.

The movie was released in 1960, although there's an introductory scene set in the Chicago of 1950. Nick Romano Jr. is a nice young boy who has a lot of Damon Runyonesque friends that he meets on the street, in what is clearly a poor part of Chicago. There's the "Judge", Bruce Sullivan (Burl Ives), who sells stuff from a pop-up stall and lives in a flophouse; amputee newsstand operator Wart; former prizefighter "Goodbye" George (Bernie Hamilton); and would-be nightclub singer Flora (Ella Fitzgerald). They're all friends of Nick's mom, Nellie (that's Shelley Winters, as if you couldn't tell), who works at one of the bars.

It's Christmas, and Nellie goes and gets herself fired from the bar, so her friends try to cheer her up by bringing an impromptu party to her tenement apartment. The Judge in particular is worried about young Nick, however. He knows Nellie's past, and that Nick's father went to the electric chair for killing a cop, something that Nellie hasn't told young Nick yet. She probably subscribes to the same theory as the folks in Close to My Heart that knowing about a kid's bad ancestry dooms the kid, so she's going to do everything she can to make certain he never finds out.

Not that there's very much she can do. Fast-forward 10 years, and Nick (James Darren) is a high school senior. Mom has scrimped and saved so that Nick can have piano lessons, and Nick has become a pretty good pianist. Perhaps good enough to go to music school. Mom dreams of him becoming a concert pianist, although music teacher would probably be a more likely outcome, not that that's a bad outcome. Still, all the people at the high school seem to know about Nick's dad, and they bully him constantly and pick fights with him for it just because, even though Nick has no real desire to fight. It doesn't help that they also tease him over how Nellie earns her living, which isn't exactly reputable.

One of those late-evening fights sees Nick set upon by multiple gang members, and Goodbye George coming to Nick's defense. This gets everybody hauled off to night court, with the Judge showing up for good measure too hoping to defend him. (Whether the Judge really ever was a lawyer who got disbarred for alcoholism or something else is never fully answered.) Also showing up is Louis Ramponi (Ricardo Montalban), who decides to pay Nick's fine to keep him out of jail. This is really because he's interested in Nellie, having known the elder Nick. Nick's business card has the address of a florist's shop, but that's a front for rather less legal business.

Young Nick notices an alarming change in Mom after she starts seeing Louis, although he thinks she's just becoming an alcoholic, as bad as that may be. Everybody else begins to see it too, but things are going to get a whole lot worse when Nick finds out what's really going on.

Let No Man Write My Epitaph feels like it's the sort of movie that's trying to be a message picture while softening that hard edge through the use of the Runyonesque characters. However as I was watching it felt to me as if the screenwriter had little idea either how to write a message picture, or how to write Runyonesque characters. The characters feel mostly like caricatures, and the message gets way too heavy-handed at times. The one saving grace is that at a lot of other times, the movie feels more like an unintentional comedy. Burl Ives chews the scenery, and Shelley Winters is, well, Shelley Winters. James Darren doesn't quite have the emotional heft necessary to pull this one off.

Unfortunately, the print of Let No Man Write My Epitaph that TCM ran is another one that was panned-and-scanned down from 1.85:1 to 4:3.

Hot Tin Roof Under a Cat

I've stated on a couple of occasions before that I'm not the biggest fan of the work of Tennessee Williams, which I tend to find annoyingly overheated. However, the movie version of his play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a fairly prominent film, and I haven't blogged about it before. So when it showed up on TCM recently, I made it a point to record it so I could watch it at some point and do a post on it here.

Paul Newman plays Brick Pollitt, a man who was a successful athlete in high school and college, enough to become locally famous in the part of Mississippi where he grew up, but not enough to go pro. He'd like to live off that former glory, however, and tries to run the hurdles one more time, tripping over one of the hurdles and breaking his foot, requiring a cast.

Meanwhile, Brick is returning home for his unsuccessful athletic career because it's the 65th birthday of his father, "Big Daddy" Pollitt (Burl Ives). Pollitt runs a successful cotton empire, one that owns thousands of acres and enables him to use a private plane to get around. In fact, Big Daddy and Big Mama (Judith Anderson) are just returning from Memphis, where Big Daddy was going to get expert medical attention for his "spastic colon". Of coruse, a phrase like "spastic colon" is a fairly obvious euphemism to modern viewers, but in times of greater medical ignorance like the 1950s, where doctors wouldn't necessarily inform patients that they had terminal cancer, people are willing to put on a public face of acceding to the illusion that the "spastic colon" is in fact harmless.

The doctor, however, relatively soon informs Brick of the real truth, which is that Big Daddy has terminal cancer and only has about a year to live. Brick tells his wife Maggie, nicknamed "The Cat" (Elizabeth Taylor). The two of them are in a difficult marriage, because Maggie has no children yet and there are rumors that Brick is gay and does not sleep with Maggie. In the play, this is apparently made rather more explicit, but in the movie there's only references made to Brick's football "friend" Skipper, and the fact that on the one hand Maggie tried to seduce Skipper and on the other Skipper committed suicide.

Also being told about Big Daddy's condition is Brick's elder brother Gooper (Jack Carson), an oleaginous lawyer who would like to get Big Daddy to agree to a will that would benefit him. He's got a wife nicknamed "Sister Woman" (Madeleine Sherwood) by Big Daddy, who has already borne Gooper five children, with a sixth on the way. These kids are universally obnoxious, to the point that it's easy to see why Big Daddy so greatly favored Brick.

Over the course of one night, with a whole lot of shouting and florid language, secrets are revealed and a resolution of sorts is reached regarding what Big Daddy is going to do with the cotton empire. Whether or not it's a happy ending is up to the viewer; it'll probably be reasonably happy for Big Mama who hasn't wanted to face the truth, but not for anybody else.

Whether or not you like this version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is probably going to be dependent on whether or not you like Tennessee Williams' work in general. That makes it a bit tough for me to review, since I've never really been a fan of Williams. I can't deny that the movie is well-acted, particularly by Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor. It also has the very good production values that were the hallmark of MGM. On the other hand, all of these characters have to shout a whole bunch of ridiculous and unrealistic dialogue. It's also easy to dislike all of these characters.

If you like Tennessee Williams, you'll probably love Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. But then, if you like Tennessee Williams, you've probably seen it already.