Raintree County

Eva Marie Saint is TCM's Star of the Month for July 2024, and one of her movies that's been on my DVR and that I haven't posted about before is Raintree County. It's on TCM again tonight at 10:00 PM, so I made a point to watch the movie to do a review on it now for the upcoming showing.

Once again, Eva Marie Saint is only a supporting actress here, although she shows up a lot earlier than the actual lead actress. The movie opens up in 1859 in Raintree County, Indiana, which is partly a sign that the Civil War is about to hit the US and change everybody's life. Everybody is about to graduate high school, and this being 1859, it's a huge deal that the class is going to be... photographed. Head of the class is John Shawnessy (Montgomery Clift), who is a bit of a dreamer. He's kinda-sort going steady, at least by 1859 standards, with fellow student Nell (that's Eva Marie Saint if you couldn't tell), and everyone expects them to get married relatively soon since younger marriages were much more common in those days.

Except that one of their teachers, Prof. Stiles (Nigel Patrick), tells the class the legend Johnny Appleseed, He went through the midwest planting trees, and supposedly he planted on specific raintree after which the county is named, somewhere in the county's forbidding swamp. Find the tree, and you'll find the secret of life. It's a ridiculous idea, but this is the 1850s when there was more ignorance in the world, and young John is impressionable. So he blows off his girlfriend to go into the swamp looking for the tree.

Visiting the county for some reason is southern belle Susanna Drake (Elizabeth Taylor). Johnny is immediately taken with her looks, and continues to blow off Nell in order to spend time with Susanna. Enough time alone with each other, in fact that there might be the opportunity for Johnny to knock up Susanna before she leaves to go back home. Indeed, they must have had sex because some time later Susanna shows up back in town to tell Johnny that she's with child and he's the father of the child. I'd guess Johnny knew enough about sex to know that if he hadn't done it with Susanna, there's no way she could be bearing his child.

Johnny does the honorable thing and marries Susanna before heading south with her to live in her part of the country. The two stop in a plantation where Susanna grew up, at least before the place burned down in a fire. Johnny, in talking to the people who still live there, learns that Susanna's mom went insane, and Susanna may in fact be inheriting her mom's mental state, not that they quite understood genetics at the time. But it's the reason for the insanity that's a problem: The woman who went insane might not have been Susanna's biological mother, and that Susanna is in fact the product of a relationship between Dad and one of the family's slaves!

Oh, the movie is going to get a lot more ridiculous. John and Susanna move back north, and the Civil War breaks out. Johnny doesn't volunteer, at least not until Susanna runs off with their child to someplace in the south, leaving Johnny to join the Union Army just so he can spend all his time looking for Susanna, which I'd think might involve a bit of desertion. Meanwhile, Nell is still around, and still pining away for poor Johnny.

Raintree County was based on a novel publised a few years after World War II that was a commercial success. It's not hard to see why MGM would want to buy the rights and think that this sort of melodramatic material that has shades of Gone With the Wind would be a big hit. But the movie wound up in production hell in part because the novel's writer killed himself. And then when it finally did get made, nobody seemed to undertand just how wacky the material is. It also didn't help that this is the movie Clift was making when he had the very serious car crash that nearly killed him and delayed production for months.

Raintree County is certainly not the best film for anybody involved in the production, I'm sorry to say.

Rocky Mountain

Errol Flynn is this month's Star of the Month on TCM, and I've recorded several of his lesser movies aleady. Having that many of his movies on the DVR, I decided to watch one to do a review on, and picked Rocky Mountain.

The movie starts off in the present day, with a car driving through the California mountains where they stop at a plaque informing us that they're at Rocky Mountain/Ghost Mountain, where a little-known chapter of the Civil War took place in the closing days of the war. It should be fairly obvious that we're about to flash back to those days at the end of March 1865....

Lafe Barstow (Errol Flynn) is a captain in the Confederate Army. Robert E. Lee knows that there's virtually no shot of winning the war any more, do he's decided one one desperate gamble. There's a man out in California named Cole Smith who has some ability to gather men, and apparently some Confederate sympathies, so if those men could attack the forts in California, it would divert valuable resources from the Eastern front. The job of Barstow and his men are to find Cole and get him to get those men.

Unfortunately, Barstow's crew are interrupted in that mission when they see the area's Indians attacking a stagecoach. Barstow does the human thing, and saves whom he can from the stagecoach, which is the drive and a female passenger, Johanna Carter (Patrice Wymore). She's traveling alone, something not normal for women to do back in those days, because she's on her way to the fort where her fiancé, Lt. Rickey of the Union Army (Scott Forbes) is waiting for her. Unsurprisingly, some of Barstow's men are going to have inappropriate thoughts about Johanna along the way, leading to some conflict.

Since the stagecoach doesn't show up at the Union fort, the Union sends out a detachment to find it, and Barstow and his men ambush that, too, getting several more prisoners, including Lt. Rickey himself. But there's a complication, which is that the Indians have seen what happened, and figured out where Barstow and his men are. They'll be able to surround Barstow's group and slaughter them, so Barstow is going to have to figure out a way to escape. Also, they've already met Cole Smith, who was going by a false name. Still, Barstow sends Smith off to try to get those men, which if he's successful could lead to having enough men to take on the Indians.

Rocky Mountain was apparently the last western in Errol Flynn's career, and the one that introduced Flynn to his final wife (Wymore), but it's not otherwise a particularly important movie or much more than a programmer. It was only given black-and-white treatment, and a couple of the scenes are actually pretty murky. The script is serviceable, and Flynn does a more than professional job, as do the supporting stars. So as a result Rocky Mountain is definitely worth a watch even though there's nothing special or new going on here.

His Trust, Part 1

I wanted to review a movie today and not just do another entry in the Thursday Movie Picks blogathon, so I decided I'd do a short. I popped by D.W. Griffith box set into the DVD player, and the next one on the set that I hadn't done a post on was His Trust.

This being a 14-minute movie, there's not much plot. It's the Civil War, and southern Col. Frazier goes off to fight, leaving his wife and young daughter to be taken care of by their loyal house slave George (Wilfred Lucas in blackface). Sure enough, Col. Frazier is killed in action, followed by nasty Union forces burning down the Frazier place. George, however, stands by the lady of the house.

His Trust has any number of problems, although the one that everybody is going to jump on is that of having white actors put on blackface to play the black characters. Needless to say, this ranges from people looking like the sort of college student who covers his face in body paint at its least bad, to some characters looking quite ghoulish, notably the female servant, who I don't think has a name. George having the wrong color hair doesn't help:

The other big problem is that Griffith conceived His Trust as a longer movie (about 25 minutes), while Biograph insisted on releasing another one-reeler. So the movie got split in two, as a title card informs us at the beginning, with the other half being His Trust Fulfilled. The result is a short that ends abruptly, leaving us with all sorts of unresolved plot points, because, frankly, this isn't the end of the movie. My box set doesn't have His Trust Fulfilled, although there seems to be several edits available on Youtube, since the movie is in the public domain.

On the other hand, His Trust already shows Griffith's adeptness at composition. The battle scene that kills Col. Frazier is well-handled with the exception of the actor playing Frazier keeping his eyes open in death, while there was a really nice shot in the house-burning scene:

I'm glad I picked up the Griffith box set, as movies that old don't show up very often.

The Beguiled (1971)

Some time back, I picked up a box set of Clint Eastwood movies. (Actually, it's a repackaging of two box sets, one of westerns and one of dramas.) One of the movies I hadn't blogged about before is The Beguiled. Even though it's not really a western, it's going to be on StarzEncore Westerns tomorrow at 5:38 AM and 12:14 PM.

Eastwood is the star, although he's not the first person we meet. Instead, that's little Amy (Pamelyn Ferdin). She's wandering through the forest picking mushrooms, when she comes upon a man who's in terrible shape. That man is Eastwood, playing John McBurney. McBurney is a soldier in the Union Army in the Civil War, and Amy is a student as Miss Farnsworth's Seminary for Young Girls, located somewhere in Louisiana. (Location shooting for The Beguiled was, in fact, done in Louisiana.) This of course is a problem since Louisiana was part of the Confederacy.

Amy, not being certain what to do, takes the wounded solder back to the school, where Miss Farnsworth (Geraldine Page) is none too pleased. Don't you know that it's dangerous to go outside school grounds with a war on and marauding Union soldiers getting closer and closer to the school? With any luck, the Confederate patrollers are going to come along soon and they can all turn McBurney over to the patrollers, who will take McBurney to a POW camp where he'll surely die, if he doesn't die before he gets there.

But then, these are women, and they have moral qualms about being that cruel to a wounded man, even if he's fighting for the other side in a war. Perhaps they can at least deal with his injuries before turning him over to the Confederates. With that in mind, Miss Farnsworth, along with the one other teacher Edwina (Elisabeth Hartman), together with the student body of six and the one slave still staying on, set McBurney up in the music room to convalesce.

Of course, you can probably guess what happens next. Some of the girls are too young to have ever been this close to a man, while the few grownups haven't been around a man in a long time, what with the war on. The closest Miss Farnsworth got was having an older brother. We only see him in flashback, and there's some insinuation that there was an incestuous relationship going on, along with the brother having sex with the slave. No wonder Miss Farnsworth seems to have warped views of sex.

McBurney, for his part, plans to use the women's squabbling over him to his advantage, as he wants to get out of here with his health intact. Or at least as intact as possible considering how badly off he was when little Amy found him. Unfortunately, there's enough conflict between the women that some decide something has to be done about him.

The Beguiled, is an interesting picture from Clint Eastwood, and one that as I said I wouldn't quite call a western. Just because it's the Civil War in a fairly rural place doesn't make it a western. It's more of a straight drama, with some possible tinges of horror, albeit not of the supernatural kind. The entire cast is quite good, and the ending, which I won't reveal, was quite surprising. If you haven't seen The Beguiled before, it's well worth watching.

The Beguiled was remade a few years back, but the listings say it's the Clint Eastwood version. That's something else to note if you're looking for it on DVD or streaming.

Operator 13

Another of the movies that I recently got around to watching is a bit of a misfire, but an interesting one: Operator 13.

It's the early stages of the Civil War, and the North has just lost the second battle of Bull Run, creating not a small bit of panic in Washington. Gail Loveless (Marion Davis) is a stage actress in a show with one John Wilkes Booth, just to name drop, since this is a good three years before Lincoln's assassination.

Pauline Cushman (Katharine Alexander) runs the acting troupe, but that's just a front. In fact, she's a spy (called by the euphemism "operator") working under Maj. Allen Pinkerton (Sidney Toler), who is able to get into the South and get secrets out of it. Pauline thinks that Gail would be perfect for spy work, and Pinkerton agrees, so Gail becomes Operator 13.

The two women's first job together is to go down to Richmond to get some information on Confederate troop movements. Pauline is going to be a widow from New Orleans, accompanied by her one-eighth black maid from Martinique, to be portrayed by Gail in blackface that, well, is a topic for some discussion, which I'll get to later. But as a black servant, she's able to move somewhat freely among the other servants and thus get close to their masters and get the secrets. Along the way, she also meets Confederate Captain Jack Gailliard (Gary Cooper). He's actually a spy for the South, trying to figure out who the Northern spy is.

Gail falls in love with Gailliard's charm, although she can't act on it since she's a spy and she's supposed to be black, after all. She'll get a second chance, however. Pauline gets caught, the penalty for which is execution. But Gail saves her at the last minute and they both make it back north.

Gail now has another chance to go south, this time as her normal white self, since nobody will recognize her what with her having been black the last time. One again, she runs into Gailliard, and even has a chance to take the relationship further until she's caught out as a spy herself and has to try to make an escape.

As I was watching Operator 13, I couldn't help but think of Saratoga Trunk, another Gary Cooper movie that has two very distinct halves. In both cases, I didn't think the halves mesh well together. I also didn't find the ending of Operator 13 particularly realistic.

And then there's Davies' black disguise in the first half. Some people are obviously going to be very uncomfortable with this; I tend more to think about the dilemma Hollywood had on how to portray somebody who was of mixed race, since there's a fairly broad range of mixed-race. MGM wanted or needed to communicate to the audience that Davies was playing Martinican so they darkened her skin, but the problem is that it looks so ridiculous that you wonder how any of the Confederates could have thought she was really Martinican. Combine that with her mannerisms and phony accent, and it all comes across as really grating.

One bright spot in Operator 13 is the Mills Brothers, a black vocal group who here play part of a medicine show. Their harmonies are excellent, although they do come across as out of place.

Operator 13 is ultimately an interesting curio, but not a particularly good movie.

Gone With the Bayou

Some months back, TCM ran a one-night spotlight on some of the films of actress Yvonne De Carlo. One that I hadn't seen before is Band of Angels, so I DVRed it and recently watched it to do a post on here.

Yvonne De Carlo plays Amantha Starr, daughter of the owner of a plantation in 1850s Kentucky (however, the opening act has Amantha as a child). Mom died years ago, and Dad has doted on Amantha ever since, mortgaging the plantation to send Amantha to a good boarding school up in Cincinnati where she meets northerners like Ethan Sears (Efrem Zimbalist Jr.) who are firmly opposed to slavery.

Bad news comes when Amantha learns that her father has fallen ill; she can't get home soon enough and Dad is quite dead. It's at Dad's burial that Amantha learns about Dad's having mortgaged the farm. But worse, she learns that Dad had consorted with some of the slaves, and that Amantha is the daughter of one of the slaves. Now, you'd think a doting Dad would have provided for Amantha in his will, at least by setting her free, or doing it much earlier in her life. But somehow Dad never got around to it, and Amantha is somehow still technically a slave. With that giant plot hole, the movie immediately began to go off the rails for me.

As a black person who could pass for white, Amantha can obviously command a much higher price at the slave auction, and Rhett Butler shows up to buy her for the princely sum of $5000. OK, it's not Rhett Butler, but you can be forgiven for comparing Band of Angels to Gone With the Wind. It is Clark Gable, 20 years older and playing a character named Hamish Bond. Hamish takes Amantha to New Orleans, where he makes her his new mistress.

I say "new mistress" because Hamish apparently had a previous slave mistress. He's also got a slave who serves as his factotum, Rau-Ru (Sidney Poitier). Hamish had Rau-Ru educated at great personal risk, since black slaves weren't supposed to be educated as they might get ideas above their station. Indeed, Rau-Ru resents Hamish even more than if he hadn't gotten an education and other "good" treatment from Hamish. After all, Rau-Ru is still a slave.

As the movie opened in the early 1850s and Amantha was just a girl then, you know what's coming up in American history. One of Hamish's friends from his days sailing the oceans brings up the secession of Louisiana, although it's not until after Hamish decamps from New Orleans to a plantation upriver that the attack of Fort Sumter occurs and the Civil War begins in earnest.

The North wins the Civil War, of course, and as they're subjugating Louisiana all of the plantation owners decide to burn their cotton crops so as not to give the North anything useful. This even though it's against martial law and makes Hamish and the other plantation owners outlaws. There's also a subplot about another of the owners, Charles de Marigny (Patric Knowles), trying to put the moves on Amantha.

Band of Angels is one big mess. It's an interesting mess, mind you, but a mess nonetheless. It veers from one plot point to another, having some wildly implausible character motivations. There's also all the tropes that Hollywood had in those days of the Romantic South, as well as an impossible ending. So while I didn't hate Band of Angels, I certainly didn't love it either.

Band of Angels is available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, should you wish to watch for yourself.

Aura Lee

Another of the movies in the FXM rotation that I haven't blogged about before is Love Me Tender. It's going to be on twice this week: tomorrow at 10:00 AM and again Wednesday at 8:20 AM. Most people probably know the movie for the presence of Elvis Presley, but it's a movie that can stand on it own two feet.

In fact, Elvis is not the star here. That honor goes to Richard Egan, who plays Vance Reno, the eldest brother in the Reno family from east Texas. The movie starts on April 10, 1865, which as you may know from your American history is just after the end of the US Civil War. However, with a whole bunch of stragglers, especially among Confederate forces, news wouldn't have gotten to all of them. Among those is Vance Reno, who is the head of a small band of raiders, including younger brothers Brett (William Campblee) and Ray (James Drury).

The raiding party's job is to rob a Union payroll going through a town in western Louisiana which is famous for its idyllic mountain scenery. (Sorry, but the southern California shooting, as evidenced by those mountains, is obvious throughout the movie.) The holdup goes reasonably well, at least until the party gets to what is supposed to be the rendezvous with their commanding officer to give him the money the Confederacy desperately needs. Of course, there is no more Confederacy, as a couple of soldiers walking back to their homes somewhere in the South inform them.

What to do with the money they robbed? The South has been devastated, so Vance decides, and the others agree, that each of the seven men in the raiding party should get an equal share of the money, which clearly adds up to a substantial amount for each man. It'll come in handy when they get back home, as everybody at home is pretty much flat broke. Vance, for his part, can't wait to get back hom since he's got a sweetheart in Cathy (Debra Paget) he's been planning to marry after the war.

When the Reno brothers arrive home, the family is thrilled to meet them, but also very much surprised to see Vance. That's because news had reached the family farm that Vance had been killed in the war. As for Cathy, her family's farm had been raided and burnt to the ground with her parents killed, so she moved in with the Renos. Here, however, comes the kicker. Since everybody thought Vance was dead and the family farm was in such a parlous state, Cathy and Clint decided to marry at the beginning of 1865.

It's a devastating blow for Vance, who is still madly in love with Cathy. Cathy never really fell out of love with Vance, but with him dead as far as she knew, there was no logical point in continuing to carry that torch for him. Still, there's the question of what to tell Clint, who was apparently naïve enough at the start of the war not to realize that Vance was that in love with Cathy. Cathy, for her part, absolutely doesn't want to hurt Clint.

Other matters are going to get in the way however, like all that money Vance's raiders stole from the Union payroll. Army major Kincaid (Bruce Bennett) accompanies the local occupation governor Siringo (Robert Middleton) to ask about that money, as they had come in contact with another member of the raiding party who had returned the money. Siringo is willing to make the generous offer of an amnesty for the raiders (who, in their defense, thought they were committing an act of war and not a crime when they took the money) in exchange for the money. But that means all the money, not just what the three Ringo brothers have. And Vance doesn't want to give that money back. He'd just as soon flee to California, in order to leave Cathy and Clint to a happy life together, Clint none the wiser about Vance's relationship with Cathy.

There are more complications, however. Clint doesn't think his brothers can do any wrong, so when Kincaid wants the brothers arrested and taken to Tyler pending trial, he's willing to bust them off the train even though the other members of the raiding party not under arrest are opposed to getting Clint involved. He also starts to get extremely jealous as he begins to suspect there might have been something between Vance and Cathy.

Love Me Tender has a solid story that could easily have stood on its own as a 1950s western programmer. Egan and Paget are solid, helped by a good performance from Mildred Dunnock as Ma Reno and a nice supporting role from Neville Brand as one of the raiders. But of course there's the presence of Elvis....

As an actor, Elvis probably could have been quite competent had his manager, Col. Tom Parker, gotten him sold roles rather than the 1960s Elvis formula. Indeed, Love Me Tender is not part of the Elvis formula at all. But it was his first movie, and he wasn't yet a good enough actor to handle the anger and jealousy scenes he has to do here. I'm not certain who would have been the right age in 1956 and a god enough actor to take on the role however.

There's also Elvis' singing. His singing career had taken off at the beginning of 1956, and by the time filming started it was obvious just how popular a singer he was becoming. So a couple of songs had to be shoehorned into the movie. The title song is a reworking of a Civil War song (written in 1861) called Aura Lee. As such, it's quite suitable for this movie, and Elvis' rendition is quite good. (Being sung on the farmhouse porch after dinner is certainly a good way to use it, too.) The other three songs he gets, however, don't fit in at all, and certainly nobody in 1865 would have been swiveling their hips the way Elvis did, nor getting the audience reaction he does from the people on film. It's somewhat unfortunate since it breaks up an otherwise pretty good movie.

Love Me Tender does seem to be available on DVD, as well as via Amazon Prime streaming.

Civil War fantasy

Some time back I picked up a DVD of Shenandoah. With my previous DVR having died, forcing me to watch some of my DVDs, I finally put this one in the player and watched.

James Stewart plays Charlie, the patriarch of the Anderson family in western Virginia's Shenandoah Valley in 1864. Now, if you know your history you should know that this is over three years into the US Civil War, and in the Confederacy. By this time the war was already effectively lost for the South. But dammit, it looks as if the war hasn't touched the Anderson place at all. None of his six sons has gone off to fight the war, and they somehow grow or make everything they need, as all the oil lamps stay lit. Indeed, Charlie is pissed that Confederate procurement agents want his horses. (To be fair, I'd be pissed too about it. But you'd think at least one of the sons would have gone off to fight.)

In addition to having six sons, he's got a daughter Jennie (Rosemary Forsyth) and daughter-in-law Ann (Katharine Ross in her movie debut), the latter of whom is married to son James (Patrick Wayne) and pregnant. Somehow, all of these people are able to live a fairly idyllic life with the only real tragedy seeming to be that the matriarch died in childbirth with youngest son Boy (Philip Alford).

But we wouldn't have much of a movie if this idyllic life just kept going on. A couple of things happen. One is that Jennie gets married to Confederate officer Sam (Doug McClure) who has to go almost straight from the wedding back to the front. And then one day while Boy is out hunting, he runs into a Union ambush. Since he had stupidly put on a Confederate cap that he had found, he gets taken prisoner by the Union.

Charlie finds out, and he decides that he's just going to get up from the farm and form a search party to find Boy come hell or high water! And he and most of the remaining children are just able to go off and do the searching, barely being troubled by any of the soldiers from either army going around the area. They find a Union officer (George Kennedy) who doesn't have Boy and suggests a rail transport; there they find Sam but not Boy. Meanwhile, things aren't particularly safe back at the farm....

Shenandoah goes on like this for the entirety of its 105-minute running time. Most of that time I found maddening, since the plot not only strains credulity, it breaks it, stomps on its carcass, and demands that we respect it for having done so. OK, I'm being a bit hyperbolic. But not much. Stewart gives a good performance, and frankly there's nothing wrong with the acting from the supporting players either. It's just that plot.

Well, one other technical problem I had was that Shenandoah uses some battle footage from Raintree County. In and of itself that's no big deal, but Raintree County was in a 2:35:1 aspect ratio, while by the time of Shenandoah the 1.85:1 ratio was much more standard, so all that Raintree County footage looks grainy and out of place.

Still, many of you will probably like Shenandoah much more than I did, so get a copy and judge for yourself.

Don't call me "Crocodile"!

Another of my recent watches off the DVR was Major Dundee.

The time is the end of 1864, which as you'll know is near the end of the US Civil War; the setting is a prisoner of war camp for captured confederates somewhere out in the New Mexico territory. The Apaches have attacked one of the nearby ranches, killing the parents in the family along with an army patrol; they've also taken the three children in the family. The only survivor was the young bugler, Tim Ryan (Michael Anderson Jr.).

The commander of the POW camp, Maj. Amos Dundee (Charlton Heston), is none too happy. This isn't just because of the Apache attack; he doesn't even really want to be in command here, having been sent out west because he screwed up at Gettysburg. Also, all those Confederates are restless because there's a war on and under their commander Capt. Tyreen (Richard Harris), they feel an obligation to make life as difficult for the Union as possible even if they're out in the middle of nowhere in a place that's not going to affect the Civil War one bit.

Maj. Dundee decides that he needs to capture Sierra Charriba (Michael Pate), the Apache warrior who led the raid, not only to teach the Apache a lesson and to prevent further attacks, but to earn back a bit of the glory he lost at Gettysburg. The only problem is, he's way to short-staffed to do anything. The only possible way he can get more people is to recruit from among the Confederate prisoners. And they, understandably, have no desire to help.

But it turns out that one of the Union soldiers the Confederate leaders attacked died, so now they're facing murder charges and a death sentence Joining up in going after the Apache might not be the worst option if it commutes their sentence. So Tyreen reluctantly joins Dundee, along with the Hadleys (Warren Oates and L.Q. Jones) for the Confederates. Lt. Graham (Jim Hutton) is part of the Union contingent along with Dundee and Ryan; a bunch of nameless soldiers and the guide Potts (James Coburn) also join in.

Finding the Apache is going to be hard. Not only do they know the land better than the white man; they decide to escape by going south across the undefended border into Mexico. That presents big problems for Dundee, who follows the Apache into Mexico nonetheless. This being the turn of the year 1864/5, there's not just the Mexicans to deal with but the French as well, this being the period when Napoleon III tried to install a puppet state in Mexico. And the French soldiers are much better than the Mexican soldiers.

Major Dundee goes on like this, and if the movie has a problem, it's this: that it goes on... and on... and on. It only runs a little over two hours, but was apparently edited down quite a bit by the studio over objections from the director, Sam Peckinpah. It's still not tight enough, and has some plot holes. Or, if they're not plot holes, they made the movie more confusing to follow.

The cinematography is nice, helped by location shooting in Durango, Mexico. The actors do as well as they can with the script, although I found Richard Harris to be a bit miscast. All in all, Major Dundee isn't bad, but I find it could have been much better. It's available on DVD should you wish to watch.

Advance to the Rear

Among the movies I recorded during Glenn Ford's turn as Star of the Month back in July was Advance to the Rear. It's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, so now you get your review of the movie here.

Glenn Ford plays Capt. Heath, who's serving on an obscure front of the Civil War for the North, under Col. Brackenbury (Melvyn Douglas). It's obscure enough that it doesn't seem to matter who wins. Each side shoots 30 rounds of artillery at a set time each morning, and that's it for the day. No trying to take land or anything like that. That is, until Heath shows some initiative, and on a patrol actually captures a couple of Confederate soldiers. Brackenbury is ticked, because he knows this means the other side will retaliate.

Sure enough, the Confederate commander does, more or less routing the Union. It leads to an inquiry to figure out what went wrong. When General Willoughby (Jim Backus), who is put in charge of the inquiry, finds out what's been going on, boy is he angry. Something has to be done to make certain these soldiers can't do anything to screw up the war effort. So a plan is hatched to find all of the most incompetent soldiers and transfer them into one company under Brackenbury and Heath, with the intention to send that company to an isolated outpost out west where they'll basically sit out the war.

Meanwhile, the Confederates learn what's happening, so they send a spy, the lovely Martha Lou (Stella Stevens) onto the riverboat the Union company is taking (presumably up either the Missouri or Mississippi) and figure out what they're up to. With a little help from madame Easy Jenny (Joan Blondell), it's determined that Martha Lou's back story is a fraud. But she's so good looking that Heath plans to woo her as if that's going to keep her from her mission. Not that there should be much of a mission of course since the company is being kept out of action.

Except that a snafu happens. When the company arrives at their destination, there's another company there that thinks it's getting relieved. And that other company was part of orders to guard a shipment of Union gold, so now it's up to our company of incompetents to do the guarding. The Confederates might be able to score a victory in at least one part of the war after all.

Advance to the Rear is a fairly light comedy, and I saw reading the IMDb reviews that I wasn't the first person to think of the sitcom F Troop, which came out a few years later than this movie. There's nothing particularly groundbreaking with the movie, but it's a pleasant enough way to spend 100 minutes, and everybody looks as though they were enjoying themselves making the movie. Ford was better at comedy than his list of movies might have you think, and Douglas takes his role and runs with it for all it's worth.

If you want a movie you can just sit back with a bowl of popcorn and have fun watching, rather than a "prestige" movie, you could do far worse than Advance to the Rear.

The Red Badge of Courage

Over the Memorial Day weekend, I took a look at the TCM schedule to see if there were movies available on DVD that I hadn't done a post about before. I noticed that among them was The Red Badge of Courage, so I recorded that, and sat down to watch.

This is based on the 1890s novella by Stephen Crane, who having been born in 1871 had no first-hand knowledge of the US Civil War. Henry Fleming (Audie Murphy) is a young soldier from the North who joined a regiment in the Civil War which is moving south to take on the Confederates. Fleming is worried about what's going to happen when they have to go into battle, as he doesn't want to die.

Probably Henry's best friend in the regiment is Tom (Bill Mauldin), with Jim (John Dierkes) being the voice of experience. For everybody, the war is very much a case of hurry up and wait, as none of the enlisted men seem to understand at first why they're going north to go south in a flanking action. Eventually, they get to engage the Confederates in battle. Henry makes it into the trenches with the rest of the men, but when the time comes for the charge -- he flees.

Henry considers himself a coward, and could probably be court-martialed for desertion if it weren't for the fact that the battlefield can be a very chaotic place. While dealing with some of the other Union regiments, he accidentally gets hit in the back of the head. It changes his outlook, as now he has a wound, even if a slight one. It's his "badge of courage".

On his way back to the regiment, he meets other soldiers who have been injured, such as a cheery soldier (Andy Devine), as well as a regiment mate known as "the tattered man" (Royal Dano). All of it gives Henry a renewed sense of courage the next time he has to go into battle.

There's really not all that much going on in The Red Badge of Courage. Part of that is because the movie was cut down. Director John Huston had considered himself to be making a war epic, but the studio bosses said there were terrible previews that necessitated edits. Huston by this time was in Africa to make The African Queen, so he was in no place to protest. The result is a B movie running just 69 minutes.

The movie that we have is nothing terrible, but it's nothing great either. Murphy was not yet a star, but he already shows he was going to be a more capable actor than people tend to give him credit for. Everybody else is pretty much just there, but does nothing to make the movie bad. For me The Red Badge of Courage was just one of those movies that comes and goes.

It's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive Collection, so you can always judge for yourself.

The Horse Soldiers

Today is Memorial Day, a holiday which was originally about remembering the dead of the US Civil War. So rather than watching all those World War II movies on TCM, I decided to watch a Civil War movie off my DVR, one that's also available on DVD and Blu-ray: The Horse Soldiers.

The time is sometime early in 1863. The Union has wrested control of much of the Mississippi River from the Confederates, but there's one stronghold on the river still: Vicksburg, MS. The Union has been trying to besiege the city, but there's a problem in that there's still a rail line open to the city. That line leads to an important railway junction at Newton Station, so the plan is for a small Union expeditionary force to go to Newton Station and destroy as much of the rails and rolling stock as possible.

There is a big problem, of course, which is that Newton Station is a couple hundred miles inside Confederate territory, so when Col. Marlowe (John Wayne) is asked to lead the force, he knows it's not going to be easy. He also knows that the men are going to hate the mission since it's dangerous and there's a good possibility that they'll be captured and sent to the notorious POW camp at Andersonville. Marlowe gets an even bigger problem thrown in his lap, in the form of Maj. Kendall (William Holden) from the medical corps. Marlowe thinks having a doctor in his ranks is only goin to slow all of them down, and he doesn't like doctors anyway. Kendall doesn't like war and feels his first duty is to sick people period, not to sick Union soldiers.

With all the preparations taken care of, it's time for the forces to set off. They quickly wind up on a farm run by Hannah Hunter (Constance Towers); all the men are either dead or of fighting the war. The Union soldiers commandeer the place to spend the night, but they discover that Hannah and her slave Lukey (Althea Gibson the tennis player in her only acting role) are eavesdropping, so the two women have to be taken along as prisoners since they'll certainly notify the authorities otherwise.

The soldiers continue south facing the possibility of detection by Confederate patrols, and also from time to time having to deal with medical issues. Eventually they make it to Newton Station, and achieve their objective after a short skirmish with tha Confederates stationed in the town. And they all lived happily ever after, or at least the Union folks did.

No, that's not it; they couldn't just stay in Newton Station of course. They have to get back to Union lines, and Marlowe comes up with the daring idea of continuing south to Baton Rouge on the Mississippi. After all, if they turn around and head back north, the Confederates are going to be waiting for them. Nobody expects them to keep going south.

The Horse Soldiers is one of those movies that I found to be solid entertainment, but nothing spectacular. It felt to me as if it was covering ground that had been done in other movies. There was also the problem that much of the soldiers' mission seemed to come a bit too easy for them. The conflict between Marlowe and Kendall isn't fleshed out as much as I thought it could have been. And poor Althea Gibson was given a stereotyped role, never mind her lack of acting ability.

Still, the flaws in The Horse Soldiers don't amount to enough for me not to recommend it. Fans of John Wayne will probably already have seen it, but if not, I can't see why they wouldn't like it. William Holden also does well. And the story is entertaining enough.

Escape from Fort Bravo

A search of the blog claims that I haven't done a full-length post on Escape from Fort Bravo before. It's airing overnight at 3:15 AM as part of TCM's look at the western genre, and is worth a look.

William Holden plays Capt. Roper, an Army captain at Fort Bravo, somewhere in the Arizona Territory. It's the Civil War era, and Fort Bravo is being used as a POW camp for Confederates. Naturally, the Confederates want to escape, and it's Roper's job to make certain they don't. It's a job he can be fairly brutal in, as we see early on when he brings a would-be escapee back all lassoed up.

Part of the reason for having a POW camp out in the Arizona Territory is because it's far away from the front. The other part of it is that it serves the plot device of being in Indian territory, and having various native tribes who just hate the encroaching white man and want to go to war with the white man, which as you can imagine would be a reasonable plot point. Heaven knows enough movies have used it before. And so this one does too, as Roper and his men have to go out and find some stagecoaches that haven't made it to their appointed destination. It's in this search that he finds Carla (Eleanor Parker). She's come to the fort to be at the wedding of her friend Alice (Polly Bergen; Alice is also the daughter of the camp commander who is Roper's commanding officer), and she's survived an Indian attack. Roper takes her back to the fort, and the two immediately begin to fall in love.

Of course, it's all just a set-up. Not just so the plot will have romantic tension; but also because Carla isn't really in love with Roper. In fact, she's in love with Capt. Marsh (John Forsythe), a Confederate officer and POW at Fort Bravo who is technically in command of the Confederate prisoners. Carla is a spy and it's her job to help Marsh and some of his men escape!

This happens, and you can probably guess what happens for most of the rest of the movie. Roper goes after them and eventually catches up. Sparks fly between him and Carla, as she begins to realize she might really be in love with him and not Marsh. And those Indians decide now would be a good time to attack.

Escape from Fort Bravo is a competently-made western that I found had a lot familiar with it. There's nothing particularly bad about it, but I didn't feel it had anything particularly special. The fight with the Indians, which winds up in a siege, is reasonably well handled, however.

People who like westerns will find a lot to love here. People who are relatively new to westerns would probably find some new stuff here, although I'd start off recommending some other westerns first.

Escape from Fort Bravo does seem to be available on DVD if you miss tonight's airing on TCM.

13 Fighting Men

A movie that was new to me when it started showing pu on FXM Retro recently is 13 Fighting Men. I got to see one of the previous showings, and it's coming up again tomorrow morning (January 30) at 6:00 AM. It's decidedly B material, but if you haven't seen it, it is worth a watch.

Grant Williams plays John Forrest, a captain in the Union Army about a day after the Civil War has officially ended: he and his soldiers meet a spy who informs them of Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House, but Abraham Lincoln has yet to be assassinated. Unfortunately, the spy has instructions for a member of Forrest's group: deliver a bunch of Union gold to somebody. Forrest wants to take his men north out of the technically former Confederate territory and back home, since all of them are sick of fighting a war that's officially over, but orders are orders, and they're going to have to guard the money. At least it's only a day or two out of their way.

Yeah right. Cut to a scene of the spy, who is waylaid by a group of Confederate soldiers, led by Major Boyd (Brad Dexter). The spy tells them the war is over, but Boyd and his men discover a couple of Union coins on him, which means they know he must have done some sort of work for the North. They get the information about the gold shipment out of him and execute him for spying. But they also decide that even though the war is over, they could use that money to start new lives. Besides, they still harbor understandable resentment towards the North. So they're going to try to ambush the Union soldiers and take the money for themselves.

The Union soldiers, meanwhile, stop at a farmhouse. Carole Prescott (Carole Mathews) was running the farm and barely scraping by while her husband was off fighting the war. Although the war is over and her husband has returned, she wants out. He's a pacificst coward, and she wants a better life than trying to farm when they have no money to buy seed. Needless to say, the Confederates find the Union soldiers, which leads to a cat-and-mouse waiting game over who will end up with the money and whether any outside forces will come to save the day -- remember, the war is officially over.

I said at the beginning that 13 Fighting Men is B material, but simply being a B movie doesn't automatically mean a movie is bad. 13 Fighting Men does a reasonably good job, as there is a surprising number of twists and turns along the way, and people acting with believable motivations. You can forgive the Confederates, who probably didn't have much of a choice in the first place, for wanting that money. Some of the Union soldiers also decide they wouldn't mind having that money, and since they just want to get home with the war over, you can't blame them either. There's nothing groundbreaking here and the production values aren't much better than episodic TV, but for a 70-minute movie, it's passable material. I just wish FXM would show the movie in its original aspect ratio.

Watch for future TV star Ted Knight in a small role as one of the Confederate soldiers.

Civil War comedy

If Hollywood can make comedies about World War II like Operation Petticoat, then there's no reason why they can't make comedies about, say, the Civil War. In fact, as part of TCM's look at the 150th anniversary of the start of the war, they'll be showing several comedies on Wednesday evening. Tonight's look at the Civil War sees a number of silent movies. However, these silent films include a comedy, that being Buster Keaton's classic The General, overnight at 1:00 AM ET.

Keaton plays a little man in the old South. When the Civil War begins, he wants to enlist just as any other patriotic Southerner would. However, he's deemed unfit, and besides, he's working as an engineer. That's just as important a job as actually fighting in the army. In fact, we get to see its importance when invading Union troops try to capture Keaton's locomotive, take it north to Union territory, and destroy the railroad tracks along the way. Keaton is the only one who can stop the Northerners, albeit with a little help from his would-be girlfriend (Marion Mack).

The General is a fairly simple story, but one that works extremely well thanks to Keaton's typically imaginative and spectacular sight gags. In the case of The General, that meant getting a vintage locomotive and finding a narrow-gauge track in Oregon, and literally destroying things along the way. As with Steamboat Bill, Jr., these are the sort of things that had to be done in one take, lest the actors get seriously injured. If you haven't seen The General before, shame on you! Watch it now, or since it's coming on in the middle of the night, record it. Or get one of the many DVD releases.

But the tribute is still six days away!

TCM has any number of programming blocks that it wouldn't have been a good idea to ditch and replace with the eventual salute to the recently-deceased Elizabeth Taylor, which is why it's not coming until Sunday, April 10. Tonight, for example, sees the start of an eight-night series on the 150th anniversary of the US Civil War. (I hope I'm not spoiling anything by pointing out that the North wins.) Every Monday and Wednesday in April, TCM will be showing movies about the war, of which there are many. I think it's 34 movies that are being shown, and many others, such as The Raid don't make the cut, probably in part because TCM wouldn't have been able to get the rights to them.

With that in mind, I note that one of tonight's selections, Raintree County is an Elizabeth Taylor movie, in which she plays a southern belle with Montgomery Clift as her love interest; it's coming on at midnight. Interestingly, it's also part of the salute to Taylor that will be coming up on Sunday, which makes me wonder a bit why the people programming TCM selected it. Raintree County (which isn't all that good in my opinion, but that's another story) is a 173-minute movie which on Sunday will be put into a three-and-a-quarter hour time slot. You'd think that the programmers could easily find a movie to fit into a 90-minute time slot, and one to fit into a 105-mintue time slot. But, looking at Elizabeth Taylor's work, there's surprisingly little that fits well into the 105-minute slot that TCM would easliy have the rights to.