The Magnificent Seven

We're halfway through August and up to the day honoring actor Charles Bronson. Surprisingly enough, I'd never actually sat down before and watched The Magnificent Seven end-to-end in one sitting, and certainly never done a post on it before, although I have posted about the Japanese movie of which it is a remake, Seven Samurai. So the last time The Magnificent Seven showed up on TCM, I recorded it in order to be able to do a post in conjunction with a future airing. That airing is tomorrow, August 16, at 12:45 PM.

I assume most people know the basic story, and that a lot of readers here have even seen the movie already. The action is moved from medieval Japan to 19th century Mexico, where a village in the middle of nowhere is being predated upon by bandit leader Calvera (Eli Wallach) and his substantial band of bandits. In this most recent raid, one of the villagers gets shot dead, which is the breaking point. They want to fight back, but they don't even have effective weapons. So they head north to the American border since guns are easier to get in the US, trading some of their few possessions for those guns.

When they get to the border town, they find a stalemate where the locals don't want to bury an Indian in their cemetery, so a couple of gunslingers drive the hearse past them, shooting those who actively resist. Those gunmen are Chris (Yul Brynner) and Vin (Steve McQueen). On hearing from the Mexicans, Chris realizes that the villagers would still be ill-equipped to defend themselves even if they had guns. That, combined with a sense of adventure, leads him to tell the villagers that he'll form a band of American gunslingers who will help the villagers defend themselves, even if the pay won't be good.

Over the next half-hour of the movie or so, we get set pieces introducing the rest of them Chris hires. Harry (Brad Dexter) assumes that Chris is only taking the job because there must be a gold or silver mine near the village, so he wants in; O'Reilly (Charles Bronson) needs the money, as does gambler Lee (Robert Vaughn). There's a knife expert, Britt (James Coburn) as well. Finally, there's the young hothead Chico (Horst Buchholz) who wants to be part of the group, only to not reach Chris' standards. But he's so determined, following the other six through Mexico, that eventually Chris does let him join.

When they reach the village they start to teach the villagers how to fight, even without guns, and prepare for Calvera's eventual return. Along the way, some of them start developing emotional bonds to the villagers, notably O'Reilly, who had a Mexican mother and Irish father. It's all leading up to the return of Calvera and his men for the final showdown.

The Magnificent Seven is a highly entertaining film, and it's easy to see why over the years it has gained a reputation as one of the iconic westerns. It's definitely worth watching if you haven't seen it before.

Kisses for My President

Fred MacMurray was honored in last August's Summer Under the Stars on TCM, which means that as I write this in early May I still have a couple of his movies to get through watching on my DVR before they expire, although by the time this gets posted they will have expired. First up is the 1964 comedy Kisses for My President.

The new President of the United States is being inaugurated, and that president is... a woman! Her name is Leslie McCloud (Polly Bergen), and while no real mention seems to be made of her political career before the presidency, she also has a husband Thaddeus (Fred MacMurray) and two children, teenaged Gloria and elementary school-aged Peter.

Thaddeus was a successful businessman before Leslie was elected president, and for ethics reasons since the business apparently contracts with the federal government, Thaddeus has had to sell the company. That would naturally leave anybody a bit disgruntled, I would think. But then Thaddeus gets to the White House and really gets irritated. Apparently nobody had thought of the term "First Gentleman" at the time. Not only that, but everything designed for the First Lady is, well, designed for a woman, right down to the décor in the separate bedroom that the First Lady has from the President. (At least in the context of the movie there's an explanation that since the President has to be ready for a 3AM emergency, there's an office adjoining the presidential bedroom so the President can't really use the other bedroom.)

So what's a First Gentleman with no direction in his professional life supposed to do? Madame President has him entertain a visiting foreign dignitary, President Valdez (Eli Wallach) of some Latin American tinpot dictatorship. Valdez likes any number of stereotypical masculine things like fast cars and bar-hopping that need a male companion. But the visit goes wrong, and since Valdez's country is important during the Cold War conflict with the Soviets, this is a problem.

Also going wrong is when an old friend of the McClouds, Doris Weaver (Arlene Dahl), decides to hire Thaddeus for the McCloud name. She tells him that he's going to develop a line of male cologne and hygiene products, but this is a ruse, in part because as mentioned she wants the McCloud name to help sell product and in part because she seems to want Thaddeus romantically. All of this gets Thaddeus brought before the Senate committee headed by Leslie's political enemy Sen. Walsh (Edward Andrews).

Further complicating matters for the president is that the two kids both let the influence of having a parent be president, with the concomitant Secret Service protection, go to their heads. It's not as bad as anything Hunter Biden did, since these are just kids, but using the Secret Service to get into fights with your classmates or to deal with your boyfriend's hot-rodding are definitely things that would redound negatively on the president herself.

Kisses for My President is a bit of a mess, in part because there's really only the one joke here, and because the movie doesn't know how to resolve the conflict. Interestingly, at the time the movie was made Polly Bergen was only 34 years old, which would have rendered her ineligible to be US President thanks to the requirement in the Constitution that the president be 35 years old. Of course, Leslie McCloud couldn't be 34 and have a high school-aged daughter, at least not in that generation. The movie is also slow, running its joke out for 110 minutes. Maybe the material might have worked in the days of the B movie (with a similarly short running time) before World War II. But not really in 1964.

How the West Was Won

I mentioned at the start of the week in conjunction with Debbie Reynolds being TCM's Star of the Month for March that there was was at least one of her movies that I've got on my DVR and haven't done a post on before. That movie is the epic How the West Was Won. It's coming up early tomorrow morning (March 30) at 4:30 AM, so now we get the post on it.

Spencer Tracy narrates this movie that at times feels like an anthology, but is really more of an episodic movie since some of the characters appear in multiple segments, and many of the characters who are only in one segment are all part of the same family. Anyhow, Tracy informs us that it hasn't been all that long since the American frontier was conquered, and that in the early days of trying to move west it was particularly difficult, at least until the construction of the Erie Canal (completed in 1825) really made it a good deal easier to get to at least western Missouri. We then cut to 1839 for the first segment....

The first segment, called "The River" deals with one family trying to migrate west in search of more fertile land, although west here more or less means the Ohio Valley, which I'd have though was fairly comprehensively settled by 1839; Wikipedia suggests Cincinnati had already been incorprated for a generation and had a population in the mid-five-figure range. In any case, the family, the Prescotts, consists of father Zebulan (Karl Malden), mom Rebecca (Agnes Moorehead) and daughters Eve (Carroll Baker) and Lilith (Debbie Reynolds). They meet trapper Linus (James Stewart) before all of them get waylaid by some dubious pirates of the river (their leader is played by Walter Brennan). An accident in river rapids kills Mom and Dad; Eve marries Linus and Lilith heads for greener pastures.

Those pastures take her to Saint Louis in 1850, where she's workin as an enterainer who finds out that she's somehow inherited a gold mine out in California. So as with Westward the Women mentioned recently, she has to go west to California to take possession of the mine. She's followed by some suitors, notably professional gambler Cleve Van Valen (Gregory Peck).

Back to Eve's side of the story, when the Civil War comes she's got an adult son Zeb (George Peppard). Linus and Zeb both go off to fight, but when Zeb sees the hell that war truly is, a confederate he meets (Russ Tamblyn) suggests the two of them desert and go off somewhere together. But there's a lot more tragedy to come.

After the Civil War, the Transcontinental Railroad gets built. Zeb is still in the Army, now in the cavalry, trying to keep the peace with the various Indian tribes despite the fact that Mr. King (Richard Widmark), the man from the railroad, wants to get the track laid and who cares what the Indians think.

Finally, after leaving the Army, there's one last segment that reunites the two branches of the Prescott family. Lilith is forced to sell her home in San Francisco, deciding to retire to a ranch in the Arizona territory. But she's old, so she invites her nephew Zeb, by now married (Carolyn Jones playing his wife) to come along and run the place. When they get to Arizona, Zeb runs into Gant (Eli Wallach), an outlaw who's there to try to steal one of the shipments of gold.

It's easy on watching How the West Was Won to see why it was such a massive commercial success when it was released. The story is actually fairly pedestrian, but the movie was made in Cinerama, so I can only imagine how spectacular it must have been to see the movie as it was intended to be seen in the original Cinerama.

Unfortunately, however, most people don't have the sort of curved screen necessary to see Cinerama in its original aspect ratio and presentation format. In days past, this meant that TV presentations would be cut down, and there would be severe crease-like lines where the various segments of the print were supposed to meet up. Nowadays, restorers have tried to solve that problem through the use of the "smilebox" format that attempts to replicate the experience one would have had in the theater where the left and right edges of the screen are closer to the viewer than the middle.

I'm sorry to say that this doesn't quite work. First, I get the impression that the smilebox format is really more curved than it needs to be. Some of the photos I've seen of Cinerama screens do show a clearly evident curve, but not as much as the smilebox format has. The bigger problem, however, is how translating Cinerama to the smilebox distorts motion. I've always felt like there was something off in Cinemascope backgrounds when there are scenes with long panning in that the motion in parts of the background don't look quite right. In the smilebox format, this is much more severe, almost like what you'd see if you were moving around a sphere with stuff being reflected off of it.

But if you're the sort of person who doesn't tend to notice such distortion, or if you ever get the chance to see it in the original Cinerama (I don't know how many Cinerama screens still exist; would it be possible to translate Cinerama to an IMAX screen?), give How the West Was Won a chance. It's certainly a spectacle.

How to Save a Marriage... and Ruin Your Life

Stella Stevens died earlier this year, so it was unsurprising that TCM decided to honor her by having an entire day of her movies in Summer Under the Stars. This included a couple of those 60s sex comedies that I hadn't seen before, and I added at least one of them to my DVR: How to Save a Marriage and Ruin Your Life. Recently, I finally got around to watching it in order to be able to do a post on it.

Stevens plays Carol Corman, a shop girl at one of those old-style New York department stores that have largely left other cities, replaced by chains, especially on the lower end of the market. But this is one of those upscale stores that does deliveries. At the end of one day, she offers to make a delivery, no one else being able to do it on their way home. That delivery is an engraved humidor, to one Muriel Laszlo (Anne Jackson).

Carol goes to Muriel's apartment and knocks on the door. Answering isn't Muriel, but Harry Hunter (Eli Wallach). The only thing is, Harry isn't Muriel's husband, which in and of itself isn't such a big deal. But Harry has a wife Mary (Katharine Bard), meaning that Muriel is Harry's mistress. Much worse, however, is that Harry is also an executive at the department store where Carol works, and the two recognize each other. The next day at the office, Harry calls in Carol and tells her she might be promotion material.

Cut to a shot of Mary walking into the office. Except that it's not her husband's office, it's that of another executive, and Harry's best friend, David Sloane (Dean Martin). Mary is able to confied in David in part because of his being Harry's best friend so knowing Mary as well, and in part because he claims to be a confirmed bachelor. Perhaps David can come up with some way to intercede and get Harry to drop the affair. In talking to Harry, he suggests David see the mistress.

Meanwhile, David and Carol wind up in the elevator together now that she's working on the same floor as him. She's taken by him, and it's not after David's conversation with Harry that he figures Carol must be the mistress. With that in mind, and finding Carol nice looking, David gets the idea that perhaps he should seduce Carol. If she winds up with him, he'll have taking Harry's mistress away from him, thereby solving Harry's mistress problem.

Of course, we all know that Carol is in fact not Harry's mistress. And when Harry learns that David has tried to "help" him by seducing his mistress, he gets the bad idea that Muriel is seeing someone else, which is also not true. But Carol and Muriel eventually meet again, and in talking, they learn that the two women have boyfriends who know each other, learning the deceit. They then concoct one of the TV sitcom-type plots to get back at their boyfriends....

How to Save a Marriage and Ruin Your Life starts off with one of those old-fashioned MOR songs used in any number of movies from that era, notably the Oscar-winning theme song "The Shadow of Your Smile" from The Sandpipers. It gives an immediate vibe of being the sort of innocent romantic comedy in the vein of the Doris Day sex comedies from the early 1960s. But with the crumbling of the Production Code, it's also trying to keep up with the times. Unfortunately, it's not doing so very successfully, and feels like it's dated a heck of a lot more than those earlier movies.

If How to Save a Marriage and Ruin Your Life has any bright points, they're in the production design: the fashions and colors are a fairly spectacular rendition of what people in the 1960s thought 1960s glamour looked like. That makes the movie lovely to look at. It's just a shame that it's all in the service of a fairly witless plot.

Boomerporn

A couple weeks back, I mentioned a movie that TCM ran during Anthony Perkins' day in Summer Under the Stars. Another movie they ran is one in which he had a rather smaller part, Winter Kills.

The star here is Jeff Bridges, who plays Nick Kegan. Nick is doing some sort of work on a ship someplace not too far from Southeast Asia, in oil exploration or some other sort of research. He came from powerful stock, however; his half-brother was president of the United States, at least until he was killed by a sniper close to 20 years ago. Dad (John Huston) is the patriarch of the family, having created the family business.

One of Dad's business associates, Keifetz (Richard Boone), helicopters on board the ship to tell Nick that he's got a guest, a seriously injured man claiming to know something about the brother's assassination. Unfortunately, this man can only get part of what he knows out before he dies. But it's enough to send Nick on a possible wild goose chase back to the States to try to prove that there's more going on. Specifically, that involves a second gun which has allegedly been hidden in the same location for the 20 years since the shooting, in a building, which seems to me like utter bullshit. If it had been buried on somebody's land, especially in a rural area, that might be one thing. But between floors of a highly-trafficked commercial building? And wouldn't they dismantle the murder weapon for parts?

I suppose you could say that the conspirators wanted Nick to find this weapon that wasn't really involved in the shooting, leading him to go on a wild goose chase. But Nick and friends do find the weapon, only to have it stolen right from under their noses and Nick's two friends killed. Nick wants to go to his father for help, not suspecting that perhaps Dad might be involved in everything that's going on.

If any of this sounds familiar to you, it's because it doesn't take much of a leap to compare this to all the conspiracy theory nonsense surrounding the shooting of John F. Kennedy. But while the movie starts off as though it's going to be a political thriller (it's based on a book by Richard Condon, who also gave us The Manchurian Candidate), it eventually morphs into an extremely dark comedy with a plethora of stars. Anothony Perkins plays the executive behind the Kagan family empire. Dorothy Malone is Nick's mom, while Sterling Hayden is one of Pa Kagen's political and business rivals. Eli Wallach gets the Jack Ruby role, and so on.

My first thought was that whether you like Winter Kills or not is likely to depend on your view of the Kennedy era. If you're one of those boomer types who was around for the Kennedy assassination, as the critics who wrote the original reviews on first release were, you're probably going to love this movie.

I, on the other hand, have never bought into the Camelot bullshit, and instead see the Kennedys as little more than the Kardashians of the 1960s who gained political power. So I found the material here too obvious by half, and turgidly unfunny. Maybe when the last of the boomers die off we can finally stop comparing stuff to the 60s.

Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man

Another of the movies that's been back in the FXM rotation over the past couple of months is Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man. It's going to be on FXM again, tomorrow (June 21) at 6:00 AM, so I'm mentioning it now.

As you can probably guess from the title, the movie is based on works by writer Ernest Hemingway. Specifically, it's the Nick Adams stories, which I don't think I've actually read although as I understand it they're loosely based on some of Hemingway's own experiences. After all, they always tell starting writers to write what you know about. Nick Adams (Richard Beymer) is a young man of about 20 circa 1916 living with his parents, Dr. Henry (Arthur Kennedy) and Helen (Jessica Tandy) in a small town in northern Michigan. Mom runs the family and is frankly dominating, trying to force Nick into a marriage to nice local girl Carolyn (Diane Baker) and henpecking Dad. Nick has had enough of it, so after a bender one night with his friend George (Michael J. Pollard), he decides he's going to run off and grow up.

Nick tries to ride the rails, but gets knocked off by another man, ending up in the countryside where he makes the acquaintance of a man nicknamed the Battler (Paul Newman). The Battler was a boxer back in the day, but as with Anthony Quinn's character in Requiem for a Heavyweight, he's obviously taken a few punches too many and isn't good for anything. The Battler has a trainer in the form of Bugs (Juano Hernandez). Unfortunately, while Bugs doesn't dislike Nick, he realizes that the Battler needs to be kept away from everybody, so Bugs ultimately sends Nick on his way.

Nick ends up in another small town where he meets the chronically drunk Billy Campbell (Dan Dailey). Billy's job is to put up posters advertising the burlesque show run by Mr. Turner (Fred Clark), only to leave for the next town before Turner shows up to find Billy drunk and try to get Billy into rehab (or "taking the cure", as they called it back in the day). Ultimately neither Billy nor Turner is ultimately a bad person, but they're just incompatible and Billy really doesn't want to deal with his boss' hectoring him about his drinking. Billy and Nick sleep in late one day, not getting out of town before Turner shows up.

Since Nick hasn't been able to do much in life so far, he thinks about giving up, wiring Dad for the money for a ticket home (James Dunn plays the telegrapher). But just before the telegraph gets sent, Nick decides that no, he doesn't want to go home, and goes to New York City, where he thinks he can get a job writing for a newspaper even though he's never done this before. The editor tells him to come back when he gets experience. He then does some odd jobs, ultimately working as a busboy/waiter who is serving an Italian-American effort to raise money for the war effort in Italy, the Great War going on and the US not yet being involved in the war.

Nick signs up to become an ambulance driver in Italy, even though again he's got no experience and can't speak a word of Italian, qualities which understandably vex his commanding officer, Maj. Padula (Ricardo Montalban). Nick gets paired with another American, John (Eli Wallach), and actually does a fairly good job as an ambulance driver. But a bombing campaign leaves him badly injured and sent to a hospital in Verona, where he meets Rossana (Susan Strasberg), a nurse who takes care of him and with whom he falls in love.

Some people are going to like Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man, but I had three substantial problems with it. First off was the episodic nature of the story, although that's the smallest of the problems. There are a lot of people in the movie, but for the most part they come and go and you can't really get that invested in them. Secondly, the movie runs at a very leisurely pace, ultimately lasting 145 minutes. Boy does it feel slow at times.

But the biggest problem was with the casting of Richard Beymer as Nick Adams. To me he just didn't have the charisma to pull off the role. Most of the supporting players do well with their roles, drawing an even sharper contrast with the bland Beymer just walking through his part.

I'm not certain whether fans of Hemingway will enjoy seeing the Nick Adams stories put on film, or feel that Hemingway has been butchered and dislike the movie as a result. In either case, watch and draw your own conclusions.

The part of Tony Rome is now being played by... Kirk Douglas

Some time back I bought the Kirk Douglas Centennial Collection box set, and have been going through the films. Another one that I recently watched is A Lovely Way to Die.

Sylva Koscina, one of those European actresses that Hollywood tried to bring over and make stars of, plays Rena Westabrook, the trophy wife of Loren. But it's not necessarily the happiest of marriages, as the two bicker on the way back from the racetrack, and Rena has taken on a boyfriend in the form of Fleming (Kenneth Haigh). The couple gets home after some car problems outside the house of another wealthy man, Finchley, and as Loren decides to go swimming that night, he's shot to death diving off the diving board!

It's fairly obvious from all that's happened to this point in the movie that Rena and Fleming are natural suspects in the killing, with Fleming as the killer and Rena only an accessory since she would have been in the house not where the bullet came from. Lawyer Tennessee Fredericks (Eli Wallach) is hired to defend Rena both on the murder charge and from the inevitable media circus.

It's to that latter end that Tennessee hires Jameson Schuyler (that's Kirk Douglas, not as if you could miss him). Jameson is one of those stereotypical movie characters of the police detective who has unorthodox methods that get him in trouble with the bosses and lead him to leave the force. In this case, Jameson isn't quite hired as a detective so much as a bodyguard from Rena to keep her from getting herself in trouble.

But based on Jameson's previous police work, it's obvious that he's going to do some detective work. Never mind that this gives us more of a movie than if Jameson were just a bodyguard. Jameson goes to the Finchley place, and gets the decided feeling that something odd is going on there. We know in fact that there is, since the producers show it to us. Jameson also finds at a local road house that Rena might just have an alibi, which is that she was at the place, but does she want it known that she was unfaithful to Loren? In any case it's no matter, as the witness gets killed.

Meanwhile, Rena seems to be playing a game of cat-and-mouse with Jameson, who may or may not be falling in love with Rena. In any case, she's certainly not giving anybody any reason to think that she might be not guilty. And it's all getting Tennessee exasperated. Eventually, we get to the trial, and Jameson wants Fleming found guity since that's who he thinks did it. Rena and Fleming are eventually both found not guilty, but that's not the end of the story, as the real killer may still be out there....

As I was watching A Lovely Way to Die, I couldn't help but think of a slightly earlier detective film from the era, Tony Rome. Not that they're particularly close in terms of plot or anything, but more the idea that Kirk Douglas or somebody close to him watched Frank Sinatras in Tony Rome and thought that what Douglas needed was to play a similar sort of detective.

A Lovely Way to Die is lovely to look at, with nice photography, color and sets among the rich set. But I ultimately found it an entirely forgettable movie, as it's of a piece with a bunch of other movies from the era, and Koscina isn't a notably good actress. Everyone goes through the motions and eventually gets to an ending that's satisfying for the right characters, and that's about it.

If you want something undemanding to go with a bowl of popcorn, you could do worse than A Lovely Way to Die. I'm also glad that it's part of a box set, because I wouldn't want to pay standalone prices for it.

Mr. Kitty Carlisle

Another of the movies I recently watched that's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive is Act One.

The movie is based on the memoir by celebrated playwright Moss Hart (played here by George Hamilton), a man I first knew of as the late husband of To Tell the Truth panelist Kitty Carlisle Hart and her pearls, because I was the right age to see that show and not any of Hart's plays. (Kitty is not a character in the movie, for the record.) Obviously, later on I learned about Hart and his plays such as You Can't Take It With You which were wildly successful both on the stage and the screen.

But Act One tells the story of Hart before he became famous, or at least part of the story. (Hart died before he could write an Act Two.) The action starts in September 1929, when Hart is in his mid 20s. He had dreams of making it as a writer, and wrote several plays of the sort he thought a serious playwright like Eugene O'Neill would have written. His agent Maxwell (Sam Levene) and his friend Joe Hyman (Jack Klugman) both like the plays, but they also know that dramas won't sell as they're a dime a dozen. If you want to hit it big, you have to write a comedy.

Mossy doesn't know what to write about, and comedy is hard, anyway. But he reads an article in Variety about how the advent of talking pictures has caused all sorts of upheaval in Hollywood. So he thinks he can write a comedy about the behind-the-scenes part of the stage and movies. Eventually, he finishes it, and even gets an appointment with Broadway producer Warren Stone (Eli Wallach). Stone makes Moss wait days for that appointment, and then sits on the play for weeks.

In the meantime, one of his friends knows another producer, Harris, and Harris is able to get Moss a meeting with the already successful playwright George S. Kaufman (Jason Robards, who was still using the "Jr." in his name at this point in his career). Now, we know that Kaufman and Hart went on to write You Can't Take It With You, so we know it will ultimately become a successful partnership, but the movie ends before the big successes.

Kaufman reads the play, and likes the idea, but also knows that as it is, it's going to die on the stage because it just isn't funny enough. So he tells Moss that they're going to have to rewrite the whole darn thing. And even then, it's still not a sure thing that the play is going to become a success....

I haven't read the book on which the movie was based, but the reviews of the movie I've read from people who have read the book say that a lot was lost in the translation from page to screen. I don't have nearly as low an opinion as some of these reviewers, but I can understand why people might consider it a disappointment. The movie is OK as far as it goes, but there's always the feeling that there could be something more here. This is probably most notable at a tea party where Moss meets most of the Algonquin Round Table, but that's all we see of those celebrated wits.

Robards comes off best as Kaufman, and there are some interesting faces with recurring roles as Moss' friends who meet at a deli as a sort of round table of their own. There's future game show host Bert Convy as Archie Leach (yes, that Archie Leach, and surprisingly there's a plot point about his going to Paramount in Hollywood -- Act One was distributed by Warner Bros.). A young George Segal plays the friend who gets Moss the meeting with Kaufman, and David Doyle, a man I only knew from reruns of Match Game which mentioned he was a star Charlie's Angels, plays the last member of the group of friends.

You could do worse than Act One, but you could also do better. Still, I'd say it's worth a watch.

Baby Dull

I've mentioned on a couple of occasions that I'm not the biggest fan of Tennessee Williams, or overheated Southern Gothic in general. A good example of this phenomenon is Baby Doll.

Carroll Baker plays "Baby Doll" Meighan, a virginal bride just shy of her 20th birthday. She lives with her husband Archie (Karl Malden), in a decaying Mississippi manor house, in a town where Archie runs one of the cotton gins. Except that business is lousy, as we can see not only by the fact that the house is decaying, but the furniture company is repossessing the furniture. Anyhow, Baby Doll is still virginal because Archie promised her father that he would have sex with her until she turned 20, in exchange for being allowed to marry her. Since that birthday is coming up, he's very eager to be be able finally to have sex with her.

The reason that Archie's business has been falling off is that there's a better businessman who's recently entered the area, Italian-American Silva Vaccaro (Eli Wallach). He's set up his own cotton gin, and it's been taking business away from Archie's. Archie responds as any bad businessman would: he burns down Silva's gin.

Silva is pretty darn sure who did it, but he needs to get evidence. So he decides to go to the Meighan place, having met Mrs. Meighan. His plan is to get an affidavit from her. Not that she realizes this; in addition to being virginal, she's also a bit naïve. Of course Silva doesn't make things easy on Baby Doll by moving thing as though there were a ghost in the house. Eventually, the two play a game of hide-and-seek that results in Baby Doll cowering in an attic she's afraid is going to cave in.

When Archie finds out what happens, he's pissed, more about Silva's pursuit of Baby Doll because it's not until a bit later that he finds out about the affidavit. How Archie reacts provides the climax of the movie.

Baby Doll is one of those movies that has a repuation because of is controversially lurid-for-the-times presentation. To be honest, however, I found the whole thing a bit tedious. The characters are obnoxiously loud, they're unsympathetic, and the story came across to be as being rather unrealistic. Still, it has its reputation for a reason, and a lot of other people really like this one.

Baby Doll is available on DVD, so you can watch and judge for yourself.

Seven Thieves

Among the many movies sitting on my DVR, I finally got around to watching Seven Thieves. It's going to be on FXM Retro again tomorrow at 11:00 PM and sometime Tuesday, so you've got a chance to catch it if you want.

The movie starts off with "Professor" Theo Wilkins (Edward G. Robinson) at the seaside at one of those French Riviera resorts, looking like he's enjoying the life there. But he's really down on his luck, and in France for a different reason, as you can probably guess from the title of the movie. As for why he's specifically at the seashore, well, that's where he's waiting for his young friend Paul Mason (Rod Steiger) to show up. Paul is actaully a protégé of Theo's and somebody Theo believes he can trust, which is going to be extremely necessary for the job he's got lined up.

That job, as you should have realized by now, is a heist; in this specific case a casino heist. They're going to go into one of the ritzy casinos in Monte Carlo, rob it of about $4 million in French francs, that being a very tidy sum back in 1960 even split seven ways. As to how they're going to pull it off, well, that will be made clearer a little later in the movie.

Theo has already assembled a cast of candidates suitable for the job: nightclub singer Melanie (Joan Collins); safecracker Louis (Michael Dante); driver Hugo (Berry Kroeger); Mealnie's protector Poncho (Eli Wallach); and inside man Raymond (Alexander Scourby). But, not all of them are quite thrilled about the plan, in part because they're not being given all the details. How, exactly, are they going to get the cash out of the building? The less they need to know, the better. Further, they don't like that Paul is more or less going to be making all the decisions, leaving the rest of them to take orders. And then Poncho in particular finds that his role in the caper requires him to do something very unpleasant.

But of course everybody agrees to participate, since otherwise we wouldn't have a movie. They get to the casino, and we're treated to a standard-issue caper movie. There's good suspense on a bunch of fronts, with a bunch of twists and turns leading the viewer to ask, "Is this the place where the caper will break down?" Since the Production Code was still in place, the plan must eventually fall apart, but the ways in which it does certainly surprised me, which is a good thing.

Overall, however, Seven Thieves comes across as a bit perfunctory. There's nothing particularly wrong, but there's also nothing particularly fresh and memorable the way there is in other heist movies. Robinson is good as always; Steiger might be a bit too intense; Wallach looks dissipated which is what the role calls for; Kroger looks like he's trying to impersonate Erich von Stroheim's chauffeur scenes from Sunset Blvd.. Joan Collins is nice to look at, and gets to display some ingenuity too. The result is something that does entertain, but also something you may not think to put in for multiple viewings. The movie did get a DVD release, but I'm not certain if it's still in print.