What if Sam Peckinpah directed Smokey and the Bandit?

Not too long ago, I notice a movie that sounded like it might be bad in a fun way was available on multiple of the FAST services: Convoy. I knew it was based on the novelty song from the mid-1970s, so I think I might have vaguely heard the movie but never seen it before. With that in mind, I decided to watch it before it leaves the FAST services.

The song tells about a trucker nicknamed "Rubber Duck", or at least that's his CB handle; those of you old enough to remember the 1970s will recall CB radio. Rubber Duck is played by Kris Kristofferson, and as the movie opens he's driving through Arizona in his semi when he gets passed by a woman in a convertible sports car, Melissa (Ali McGraw). This results in all sorts of dangerous driving, and Rubber Duck getting pulled over by a a cop. He gets out of it, however, by making up a story about the woman driving pantsless, which of course gets the cop to go chasing after the women.

The truckers chat with each other over the CB, as there are a bunch of them out on the road. In addition to Rubber Duck, there's "Love Machine" (Burt Young), who also gets named Pig Pen because he's hauling pigs. There's also Spider Mike (Franklin Ajaye). Then a fourth trucker called Cottonmouth comes on talking about the lack of police. It's a ruse, however, as Cottonmouth is actually the local sheriff (Ernest Borgnine) setting up a speed trap.

Eventually, the truckers decamp to a truck stop where, it turns out, Melissa is there, now without her car, which she had to sell for money to get to a job offer in Dallas. She'll eventually take up Rubber Duck's offer to ride in his truck, but not after some other shenanigans. The sheriff shows up looking for the truckers. He taunts poor Spider Mike, which results in a barroom brawl, and the truckers' case becoming a cause celebre as a whole bunch of other drivers start following them in the hopes that Rubber Duck can make it to Texas where he'll presumably avoid extradtion.

Now, you'd thnk the authorities could simply set up road blocks, but then, we wouldn't have much of a movie. Instead, they decide to jail and torture poor Spider Mike to try to get Rubber Duck to out himself in an attempt to rescue Spider Mike. But a lot of people, including the governor, seem to be on Rubber Duck's side.

I mentioned Smokey and the Bandit in the title of this post, and it should be obvious why. The material here has the potential to be reasonably funny, although Smokey and the Bandit would still probably be better thanks to the starring turn from Burt Reynolds. He had the charm to make this sort of role work, in a way that Kristofferson is just there.

The bigger problem, however, is that the movie was directed by Sam Peckinpah, who was known for his boundary-pushing violent westerns, notably The Wild Bunch. Peckinpah seems unsure here whether he should be directing a comedy, or whether he should try to push the boundaries again. So in things like the big fight at the truck stop, we get a lot of Peckinpah-style slow-motion gore that just doesn't work for the sort of comedy that Convoy is supposed to be. And the treatment of Spider Mike in the third act takes Convoy down much too dark a road.

Then again, Convoy was also based on a song that was well past its sell-by date, so it should be no wonder that it doesn't work. 45-plus years on, the movie is little more than a curiosity.

The Mob

Last week, I talked about the movie Murder by Contract regarding movies that were leaving Tubi at the end of April 2024. I recently watched another movie that's leaving at the end of the month, an early 1950s crime movie called The Mob. (Apparently, both movies did get video releases on Columbia noir box sets, even tough The Mob is to me a straight-up crime movie and not a noir. Just in case you don't get the chance to see either before the end of the month.)

Broderick Crawford is the star of the movie, and considering his pedigree to this point, you'd think he's the mobster. Except that he isn't. He's police detective Johnny Damico, and as the movie opens he's at a pawn shop one night looking for a diamond ring to buy for the girlfriend he's planning to pop the question to! Alas, this conversation is disrupted by a shooting. Damico stops the shooter, who shows Damico his police badge. Apparently, it was much more common in those days for lone policemen to shoot fleeing suspects without a bunch of other people around.

Except, as it turns out, this guy wasn't a police officer. He had shot someone who was a police officer, and then stole that guy's badge to be able to get away with murder, with the victim of the shooting Damico heard being a witness to a grand jury case about waterfront corruption. (Note that The Mob was made three years before On the Waterfront.) Damico's bosses are none too pleased about his letting a murderer get away with it, so they suspend him from the force for 60 days, appparently not caring what the union thinks.

Then again, they aren't really suspending him. They need a way to get him out of town for a bit and into some undercover work. So they get a fake photo of Damico and then send Damico to New Orleans, where he'll be given a union card for a longshoreman. He's to come back from New Orleans with the the fake identity Tim Flynn on the pretense that he's got a criminal record there (the authorities there are creating a fake record in case anyone questions him). When he returns, he's going to get a job on the waterfront and figure out who the "Blackie Clegg" is who is running the corrupt longshoremen's union.

Damico, now posing as Flynn, shows up at the hiring office and the dive bars that service the waterfront, asking way too many questions. The only person who shows anything close to friendship is a fellow longshoreman, Tom Clancy (Richard Kiley). But when Flynn starts asking questions of the guy who hands out the jobs and refers to "Castro", the gangsters are none too pleased. Flynn is taken to meet Castro (Ernest Borgnine in a very early role) to try to find out what the deal is with this mouthy newcomer.

Of course, we know the deal, and we also know that because there's a Production Code, crime is not going to pay. But how we get from where we are to where the movie is going to end is something you're going to have to watch for yourself. There's murder, kidnapping, and the real Clegg being unmaksed.

Apparently The Mob got great reviews when it was released back in 1951. Having watched it, I'd have to say that it's a decidedly competent movie. It's not one I'd give the sort of high praise it got in 1951, but at the same time I'd point out there's nothing terribly wrong with it. Broderick gives a good performance, although I do wonder if the script makes him too curious for his own good. That's not Crawford's fault, of course.

There are any number of familiar faces in the supporting roles, such as Neville Brand as a henchman or an uncredited Charles Bronson whose face and voice are immediately recognizable. It all works, even if it is following a formula. The Mob does what it does more than well enough to entertain.

True Cross

One of those movies that I had seen show up here and there in the listings, but had never gotten around to watching, is Vera Cruz. It looks like Pluto TV has the rights to it among the streaming services, and when I noticed it was one one or another of their movie channels, I decided that I'd finally watch it so that I could do a review of it here.

The movie starts off by informing us that at the same time the US Civil War ended, Mexico was going through a war of its own. The French had sent Maximilian (George Macready) to be a puppet ruler of Mexico in France's interest, and needless to say the Mexican people mostly didn't like this. Benito Juárez (not seen here), led the revolt against Maximilian. More important, however, is that a modest number of Americans, especially those who had fought for the Confederacy, streamed southward into Mexico to make a new life for themselves or to try to make a fortune to regain what they had lost in the US Civil War....

One of thos men is Ben Trane (Gary Cooper), whose horse pulls up lame after the opening titles. Ben is going to have to destroy the horse and get a new one, and he arrives at a small place owned by another American who has multiple horses, Joe Erin (Burt Lancaster). Joe is a bit wary of strangers, even if they're fellow Americans, and you wonder whether Trane is going to be safe with Erin.

Eventually, the two, with a band of American mercenaries in tow, wind up meeting Maximilian and his solders, led by Marquis Henri (Cesar Romero). Maximilian has an important job for them. The Countess Marie (Denise Darcel) needs to get to the port of Veracruz and from there to France, presumably to rally the French in support of Maxilimian. But with Juárez's men all around, that's going to be difficult. So perhaps the Americans could form an armed escort to get Marie to Veracruz. Maximilian, of course, plans to have the Americans killed which would get a bunch of his problems out of the way.

But there's more to the convoy than just the countess, and both Trane and Erin figure out what that something is. The Countess' carriage seems to have a lower clearance than expected, and when they investigate, they realize that the carriage is carrying a whole bunch of gold. That money is going to be used to get more men and arms from Europe for the fight against Juárez. It also goes without saying that once Trane and Erin find that gold, they act like they'd want it for themselves, and not necessarily to share between the two of them.

But still, they're going to have to get to Veracruz so that they can abscond by boat with that gold. And the Juaristas are going to be chasing them all the way. Perhaps they'll kill the Americans before they can turn on each other....

Vera Cruz was made by Burt Lancaster's production company, so it's unsurprising that he gets the showy part. Of course, he was also in that earlier stage of his career where, in action movies like this, he'd really mug it up for the camera. Thankfully he doesn't have Nick Cravat with him this time to be even more obnoxious. But Lancaster comes across as less likable, and for me it wasn't just the way the script was written.

Vera Cruz was also filmed on location in Mexico, which is a big plus for the production; up to this point Hollywood westerns hadn't really been filmed south of the border even if they were set in Mexico. The motley crew of American mercenaries also gave some future stars fairly early roles, such as Ernest Borgnine and Charles Bronson (still credited here with his birth name Buchinsky).

All in all, Vera Cruz is a well-made western, and not a bad one, although there's a reason why it doesn't have the reputation that some of the other westerns of the era have.

Torpedo Run

In looking through my scheduled recordings on Youtube TV, I noticed a couple of movies that I recorded the last time they were on TCM. Ernest Borgnine is the star being saluted tomorrow (August 25) in Summer Under the Stars, and I just happen to have one of his movies on the DVR already that I haven't blogged about yet. That movie is Torpedo Run, which shows up at 6:00 PM on August 25. With that in mind, I sat down to watch the movie in order to be able to do a more timely review of it here.

Technically, the star of the movie is Glenn Ford, in yet another World War II movie, although this time it's most definitely not a service comedy. Ford plays Lt. Cmdr. Barney Doyle, commander of the Greyfish, a submarine plying the Pacific. As the movie opens, it's late 1942, and Doyle gets orders to try to destroy the Shimaru, a Japanese aircraft carrier that was part of the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Meanwhile, everybody on the sub, led by Doyle's second-in-command Lt. Archie Sloan (Ernest Borgnine), is worried about Doyle because of his family.

Flash back to December 1941. Doyle and his wife (Diane Brewster) are living at one of the US military bases near Manila; recall that the Philippines were an American colony at the time. It's also on the other side of the International Date Line, so technically the attack on Pearl Harbor would have happened in the overnight hours between Sunday, Dec. 7 and Monday, Dec. 8 Manila time and the military people in the Philippines probably would have been woken up to the news of the attack, not at a garden party of the sort that's portrayed here. Doyle has been wanting his wife to head back to the States to save her and the kid, but she was born in Manila and considers it her home, so she's going to stay.

Of course, Japan took the Philippines over during the war and interned the westerners. In the context of the movie, Doyle is informed when he gets the order to go after the Shimaru that the Japanese have two destroyers guarding it, as well as a ship carrying a bunch of POWs -- which would include his family since they were on the base -- from the Philippines to Japan. There's a pretty good chance that when Doyle tries to destroy the Shimaru that he might also destroy the ship carrying his own wife.

Sure enough, that happens; worse, the Greyfish goes into Tokyo Bay where it pretty much gets trapped with a limited number of torpedoes and has to try to figure its way out of the bay and back to Pearl Harbor. Doyle has a crisis of leadership with Sloan tries to paper over in the hopes that he can prevent Doyle from being relieved of active command and stuck behind a desk for the duration of the war.

Since the movie is only half over by the time they get back to Pearl Harbor, we know that the Greyfish is going to have another chance to go after the Shimaru. Complicating matters is that Doyle's commander, Adm. Setton (Philip Ober), wants to give Sloan a command of his own as Sloan is one of the best first officers in the fleet.

I've argued before that there's only so much you can do with a submarine movie thanks to the inherent spatial limitations on a submarine. Torpedo Run has that issue; as a result there's not all that much original here. It's not to say that Torpedo Run is a bad movie, more that you've seen it before even if you haven't. If you want a World War II movie you haven't seen before, then Torpedo Run isn't a bad choice.

The Woman Who Shot Liberty Valance

Raquel Welch was honored in Summer Under the Stars this past August. One of her movies that I hadn't seen before was Hannie Caulder, so I recently sat down to watch it in order to be able to do a review on it here.

Welch plays Hannie Caulder, a woman who lives in an isolated part of the old west with her husband, who manages one of the changing stations for a stagecoach company. The Clemens brothers: Rufus (Strother Martin), Frank (Jack Elam), and Emmett (Ernest Borgnine) are an outlaw gang robbing banks. After one of their heists goes wrong, they make a getaway, which is how they wind up at the Caulder station. That's very bad news for the Caulders, as the Clemens brothers kill Hannie's husband before raping her and leaving her for dead when they set the place on fire.

Although they leave her for dead, you know she's going to survive, since all of this happens in the first reel of the movie, and we wouldn't have a movie if Hannie dies right at the beginning. Or, at least, we'd have a much different movie than the one we do. Hannie survives, after which she meets Thomas Price (Robert Culp). Price is a bounty hunter, which means that he has to use a gun to capture the bad guys. So that's two skills Hannie would like: how to find bad guys, and then how to kill them. Because, having been raped by the Clemens brothers, she sure wants revenge, and who can blame her.

Price isn't too sanguine about the idea, since Hannie doesn't know how to use a gun. He also knows that the sort of quest she wants to go on is something that's going to change her, and not for the better. But Hannie isn't to be stopped in her desire to get the Clemens brothers. With that in mind, Price takes her to a coastal cottage where Bailey (Christopher Lee) lives. Bailey is a gunmaker, and Price recommends using Bailey to make the gun that Hannie can then use to try to kill the Clemens brothers, she needing a gun specifically designed for a woman's physical needs. Price also tries to teach Hannie how to act in a gunfight, since it requires different skills from just target shooting.

Still, Hannie has difficulty with all of this, as we see when a different gang approaches the house, resulting in a gunfight in which Hannie does not acquit herself well, at least not by Price's standards, which to be fair to him are a life and death matter. You do want to survive the gunfight after all, don't you?

The Clemens gang are still around, and when Price and Hannie find out where they are, both of them follow the gang for the final showdown, ending the movie in a fairly compact time just under 90 minutes.

Having said that, Hannie Caulder feels a lot like something that would have worked better as an episode of something in one of those old TV westerns where a main character teaches a guest-starring Welch how to win a gunfight. It feels like there's surprisingly little going on in the movie. Not that it's a bad movie, just that it's fairly lightweight. Raquel Welch felt she never got good enough opportunities because she was typecast as a sex symbol, and she and her then husband made this one independently in order to showcase her in something more serious. Welch does show that she's a more capable actress than she's often given credit for, and, given the right script, probably could have been successful at least in supporting roles in more serious stuff.

Hannie Caulder isn't a great movie, but it's certainly a watchable enough movie.

The Whistle at Eaton Falls

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But nobody actually goes naked

The other day, I commented on MGM's smaller movies from the 1950s when I did a post on Cry Terror!. When one of the "bigger" movies is interesting, it's as much because it's a mess as anything else. A good example is Go Naked in the World.

Anthony Franciosa plays Nick Stratton, a man who's just gotten out of the military after a stint, and hasn't decided whether or not he's going to re-enlist. He's in his hometown of San Francisco, but hasn't met his family yet, instead going to a club where he meets Guilietta Cameron (Gina Lollobrigida). She's lovely, and unsurprisingly Nick falls in love with her. Guilietta, however, seems very unsure about taking the relationship anywhere even though she does like Nick.

Eventually, Nick's father Pete (Ernest Borgnine) finds him at the hotel where he's staying. Nick is a Greek immigrant, and a big deal in San Francisco's Greek-American community. He owns a construction firm, and has even offered Pete a job in the firm. Pete isn't so certain he wants it, because it comes with strings attached.

Those strings are that Dad is the head of the family, and dammit, he's going to let everybody know it. The rest of the family sees it as controlling, and they're all beginning to get fed up with it. That is why, for example, Pete might not want to take the job. Pete's younger sister Yvonne (Luana Patten) decides she's going to rebel by staying out all night with a boyfriend, which really pisses Dad off. Mom's been the Edith Bunker type of housewife, but she might finally be beginning to show some independence.

But the story is mostly about Pete, Dad, and Guilietta. Pete keeps seeing her, and gets the brilliant idea of bringing her as his guest to his parents' anniversary party. This turns out to be a big mistake, as we learn that Guilietta is a former "escort" (well, she did more, except that the studios weren't going to go into detail in the early 1960s). That would be bad enough, except that Dad points out that a lot of the people at his party have availed themselves of her services.

This causes Guilietta to break things off with Pete, but he's insistent on continuing to see her again. So he finds out what her new address is, and meets her at a hotel. But Dad finds out what Pete is up to, and sends the vice squad after Guilietta! No wonder everybody thinks he's controlling! Pete figures that the only way he can get out from under Dad's thumb is to elope with Guilietta. They go off to Acapulco, but everywhere they go Pete finds people who had been Guilietta's clients back in San Francisco....

Oh boy is Go Naked in the World a stinker. The one redeeming quality is that it's a stinker in a really fun way. The movie is clearly trying to be lurid and test the constraints of the Production Code, but it's too glossy to be anything other than phony. The dialog is roundly horrible and overripe, and Borgnine is given free rein to overract, which he unsurprisingly takes. His Fred Sanford-style heart palpitations are hilarious.

As I implied in the title of the post, nobody really goes naked either, with the closest being distance shots of Franciosa water-skiing in one of those early 60s square-cut pair of swimming trunks. OK, I think Lollobrigida might have a scene in a negligee or something too. But it's not as if you should have expected any nudity. One other interesting thing was with the set of the Stratton's house. That staircase made me think of a nother equally "lurid" and silly movie that MGM put out around the same time, All Fall Down. I wouldn't be surprised if the set pieces were reused, even though All Fall Down was released a full year after Go Naked in the World.

Go Naked in the World got a DVD release courtesy of the Warner Archive. But it's one I'd only watch the next time it shows up on TCM.

The Phoenix's Flight

In another installment of the "movies that have shown up in the FXM rotation recently and are on again", there's the 1965 version of The Flight of the Phoenix. Its next showing is at 12:35 PM tomorrow, followed by another one at 3:30 AM Thursday.

Frank Towns (James Stewart) is a pilot flying an old airplane in parlous shape togethr with his co-pilot Lew Moran (Richard Attenborough) for Aramco, the oil company operating in various parts of the Middle East. In this case, they're flying from a rig somewhere in the Sahara up to Benghazi, this being a few years before Qaddafi led the coup that changed Libya's history. Considering what they say about the plane itself, the fact that the radio is out, and this is in a sequence before the opening credits, you know something bad is about to happen.

Sure enough, something does when a sandstorm hits. The sand clogs up the carburetor, making the propellers stop and forcing the plane into a crash landing. Worse, cargo falls from where it's been secured, killing two passengers instantly and fatally injuring a third.

The plane has landed off course, in the middle of the Sahara, with no radio, and with nobody knowing for several hours that something's happened to the plane. The only good thing is that among the cargo, there was a supply of pressed dates, so at least the passengers and crew don't have to worry about running out of food. They do, however, have to worry about running out of water, which is much more serious.

Towns is technically boss as his first duty is to the plane and keeping his passengers safe. However, one of the passengers is a former British army officer, Captain Harris (Peter Finch). He just knows he's going to be able to find the oasis that's "only" 30 miles or so away, through a featureless landscape with everybody having no idea where they are. The alternative, of course, is staying where they are and hoping somebody finds them before the water runs out, which doesn't seem appealing either.

Over Towns' objection, Harris eventually sets out with Carlos, leaving behind his underling Sgt. Watson (Ronald Fraser) who picked up a slight injury making him unable to take a trek through the desert. The rest of the men settle in for a long wait that's probably going to result in their deaths unless they're extremely lucky....

Or if somebody can come up with an absolutely ridiculous idea. Another of the passengers is Heinrich Dorfmann (Hardy Krüger). He's a German aircraft designer, and he's done the calculations to conclude that there is a way out of this mess: they can take the parts of the plane that survived the crash, move a wing here, a propeller there, and soon enough, they'll have a plane that at least can fly to that oasis where they can be rescued. It is, of course, nuts, and since World War II is fresh in people's memories, there's some question of whether or not they should trust Dorfmann. But the alternative is to have no hope, so perhaps doing something is the least bad thing.

As you can guess, there's a lot of difficulty along the way, as the other passengers aren't necessarily as fit for labor as Dorfmann's calculations would have them being. There are further complications involving whether or not Towns can let Dorfmann have authority, or whether a group of Bedouins that pass a couple of dunes over might actually be bandits who would just as soon kill all the non-Arabs.

Flight of the Phoenix isn't a bad little movie if you can get past the idea that the plot is so ludicrous that nothing like this could happen in real life. They'd all be long dead. Although there's nominally the action of trying to build the plane, much like the bridge in Bridge on the River Kwai, the story is just as much about the psychology of the interaction among the various stranded people in a time of disaster. There are also shades of Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat what with a German who may not be fully trustworthy amid that disaster.

I thought that FXM's airing might be panned and scanned since it fills up the 16:9 screen, but IMDb claims that the movie was originally filmed in a 1.85:1 aspect ratio and not Cinemascope, so at most there's a little bit off the sides. The movie itself got a DVD release, although that seems to be out of print. There was also a remake in 2004, and that one also got a DVD release that seems to be out of print too. Both versions seem to be available on Amazon Prime streaming video.

Yes we have no bananas

One of my recent movie watches was the heist movie The Split.

Jim Brown plays McClain, a man returning to Los Angeles and his estranged wife Ellie (Diahann Carroll) after some time away. Possibly McClain spent a fair amount of time in prison, since Eliie isn't happy to see him back and doesn't expect him to go straight. And sure enough, McClain meets Gladys (Julie Harris).

Gladys is the money behind an idea for a heist, one that would make the people in it a bunch of money. The Los Angeles Rams play at the Coliseum, and since most of the take is walk-up sales and concessions, there's going to be a lot of cash at the game. So McClain should find a group of experts in the various phases of the heist, and get them to join him and Gladys for a share. They could net close to $100,000 each, which is still nice today but huge 50 years ago.

So McClain goes to a gym where he finds some muscle if you will, in the form of propietor Clinger (Ernest Borgnine). Then there's the getaway car, so McClain goes to Kifka's (Jack Klugman) limousine service to see how good a driver Kifka is. McClain has a prostitute take safecracker Gough (Warren Oates) to a safe where she leaves him on the dead man's switch and tells him to find a way out, which he should be able to do if he's as good a safecracker as advertised. And then for the sniper, there's Negli (Donald Sutherland in an early role).

With the team assembled, it's time for the actual heist, which involves breaking into the Coliseum in the pre-dawn hours and then waiting for the security people in the cash collection area, who apparently don't show up until close enough to game time that our gang has to hold them for that much more than the 2-1/2 hours or so until the two-minute warning. Still, the heist goes off without a hitch....

Or so it seems. Heist movies always have a hitch, and in this case, it happens a good deal after the heist. The robbers are going to wait a day before getting back together to split the loot, and in that time, McClain decides he's going to hide it at Ellie's place since she's clean. But Ellie's skeezy landlord Sutro (James Whitmore) shows up and sees the money, leading him to kill Ellie and take the money! And in the investigation, Det. Brill (Gene Hackman) sees one of the money bands, so he knows where to look.

Meanwhile, the robbers all think, and in their defense quite understandably, that McClain has taken the money and fled with it. So they find him and, naturally, want him to tell them where the money is. Which of course, he doesn't know.

The Split is entertaining, helped out some compared to earlier heist movies by the color photography and the nice location shooting which is at time stylish and at times filled with a gritty verisimilitude. There's a nice ensemble cast, too, even if some of them are underused. Even though The Split is entertaining, it does at times feel a bit like we've seen it before. I do think it's more than worth a watch, however.

The Split is available on DVD from the Warner Archive Collection.

The Badlanders

TCM ran a spotlight on remakes back in December, and one of the pairs that they ran was The Asphalt Jungle together with its western remake of sorts, The Badlanders. The movie is available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, so I recorded it and sat down to watch.

The setting is the Arizona Territory in 1898. We start off at the federal prison there, and meet a pair of prisoners who are about to be released: Peter Van Hoek, known as the "Dutchman" (Alan Ladd), and John McBain (Ernest Borgnine). The two prisoners have no particular friendship for each other, as we see when the hotheaded McCain nearly comes to blows with one of the prison guards over the guard's brutal treatment of a third prisoner -- the Dutchman stops McBain from hitting the guard, but doing so with violence.

The Dutchman, after being released, heads for his old stomping grounds in Prescott, where he had worked as a metallurgist at a gold mine. He was cheated out of his share of gold and framed for arrest when a gold bar was put in his hotel room, so he wants revenge. The marshal knows about the Dutchman's past, and is only going to let him stay in town long enough to catch the next stage out.

The Dutchman's revenge plan involves the fact that he knows where an untapped and very good gold deposit is in the mine. It's down a shaft that's been closed off because it's too dangerous to exploit. So he plans to exploit it and make a big killing. The only problem is that he's going to need somebody to smelt the gold, so he's going to have to go in with somebody else on this deal. That somebody is smelter owner Lounsberry (Kent Smith), who has a mistress in the form of lovely Ada (Claire Kelly).

But the Dutchman isn't the only one with a connection to Prescott, and a desire for revenge. McBain was a rancher who owned the land under which the gold deposits were located, and he had the land stolen right out from under him; his first attempt at revenge is what landed him in jail. So he'd like revenge too, as well as getting back together with his wife of sorts Anita (Katy Jurado). The Dutchman approaches Mac for help in the revenge plot, and is kind of appalled at robbing what he thinks is technically his own property. But there's not much else he can do, and he can use the money, so he joins in.

Also joining in is explosives expert Vincente (Nehemiah Persoff), a Mexican who's been subject to some bigotry as have most of the Mexicans in town. The three are going to have to work according to a strict schedule, since they've only got one day on which they can pull off the heist, and there are the legitimate miners working a section of the mine that's not too far from where the passageways in the abandoned shaft are located.

If you know that The Badlanders is a remake of The Asphalt Jungle (both are actually based on a story by W.R. Burnett), it's easy to spot some of the similarities. But there's also a lot different. The plot has been pared down, since this one runs almost a half hour shorter than the original. In some ways that's to the detriment of our film, since parts of the movie feel rather rushed. There are also some differences in the ultimate fates of certain characters that I found quite interesting but that I'm not going to give away.

On the whole, if you didn't know about the relationship between The Badlanders and The Asphalt Jungle, you'd probably find The Badlanders to be a nice way to spend 80 minutes on a rainy day. The story, with its differences, still works, and the performances are more than adequate. But of the two movies, you'd definitely want to see The Asphalt Jungle first, since it's a great movie while The Badlanders is merely good.

Demetrius and the Gladiators

We've got one more movie showing up on FXM Retro to recommend this week: Demetrius and the Gladiators, which will be on at 11:40 AM tomorrow.

The action in the movie begins about where the action in The Robe left off. You may recall from that movie that the two main characters played by Richard Burton and Jean Simmons (Marcellus and Diana), were executed at the end for their Christian beliefs, with the titular robe referring to the garment that Jesus was wearing on the way to his crucifixion. The robe is given to an elderly Christian witness to the Marcellus/Diana crucifixon for safekeeping, until that guy can give it to "the fisherman", referring to Peter (Michael Rennie), the closest the earliest Christians had to a leader since he wasn't Pope yet.

Emperor Caligula (Jay Robinson) hears about the robe, and the rumore that it confers its owner life everlasting. It may, in the Christian sense of the afterlife, but not in the biological sense. But that's another story. Caligula wants that robe, and he'll stop at nothing to get it. Why can't he be more sensible, like his uncle Claudius (Barry Jones) and aunt Messalina (Susan Hayward)? Caligula sends a Roman legion out to the provinces to find that robe.

Demetrius (Victor Mature) and his girlfriend Lucia (Debra Paget) live in the town where the robe is temporarily secreted until Peter can get it. Demetrius was Marcellus' slave, but a free man now. Not for long, though, because the Romans come through looking for the robe and treat Lucia like dirt, so Demetrius defends her honor. Oh, you don't do that to a Roman legion. Demetrius is taken to Rome, where he'll be made a gladiator.

Although Demetrius as a Christian is supposed to be non-violent, there is some self-defense instinct when Caligula decides to send multiple tigers after Demetrius in the arena. Demetrius slays them all, leading the crowd to want to save him, even though Caligula would rather he died. Messalina in particular takes notice of Demetrius, and tries to tempt him with her love. But Demetrius is a good Christian.

At least until Lucia shows up. She wants to see Demetrius, but the other gladiators get to her first and the way they treat her results in her having a nervous breakdown, not that anybody in ancient Rome knew what that was at the time. Demetrius is powerless to stop it, and God certainly isn't going to do anything about it, so Demetrius abandons his faith and starts taking up with Messalina. At least, until Caligula sends him out to get that robe....

The biggest disappointment for me with the movie is that FXM's print was both letterboxed and pillarboxed. This wasn't the case with Thunder Island, which I mentioned yesterday. The story is OK; there's nothing particularly wrong with it but nothing particularly standing out either. If you like the sword and sandal movies of the 1950s, you'll probably enjoy Demetrius and the Gladiators. I just wish it were a bigger print.

Both the TCM Shop and Amazon claim to have the movie available on DVD, although it's on different box sets.

In which yours truly takes a decidedly minority opinion

I've never taken part in the "Blind Spot" blogathon where people take up the challenge of seeing a bunch of well-known and highly-rated movie that they've never seen before. If I did, one of the movies I could have used this year would have been Sam Peckinpah's 1969 western The Wild Bunch. However, I have to say I was decidedly underwhelmed by it.

There's really nothing wrong with the story. William Holden plays Pike Bishop, an outlaw at the end of the old west era who's looking to score one last haul with his gang so he can go into retirement. The gang includes Dutch (Ernest Borgnine); bothers Lyle (Warren Oates) and Tector (Ben Johnson); and Mexican Angel (Jaime Sanchez). Pike and the gang are planning to rob a railroad payroll in south Texas.

Waiting for Pike's gang is bounty hunter Deke (Robert Ryan). He's able to disrupt the robbery enough to kill a couple of minor members of Pike's gang, but Pike and the big names escape with at least some of the loot. Except that when they get to Mexico they find that it's not loot at all, but steel washers instead of silver coins. They're going to have to do yet another robbery if they want to retire.

Meanwhile, the gang has temporary sanctuary in Angel's home village where a brutal revolutionary officer has taken over. Pike offers to steal a bunch of guns from a US military transport in exchange for a substantial sum that will allow everybody to retire. But he's worried that the general is going to try to fleece him, and he still has to worry about Deke and his gang, who probably don't have any qualms about crossing the border to get him.

In addition to a reasonably conceived story, I also have no issue with the actors. I enjoy all of them, and nobody here is noticeably obnoxious. The Mexican general is a clear bad guy, but that's the way the character is written and not a problem with the actor (Emilio Fernandez).

So what did I dislike about The Wild Bunch? I think it all comes down to Sam Peckinpah's direction. The movie is known for its violence, which was fairly extreme at the time. Now, I don't have any particular problem with gratuitous violence -- I happen to love Bonnie and Clyde, for example, which to me seemed just as violent as The Wild Bunch. And frankly I'd much rather watch gratuitous violence than gratuitous sex. The problem I had was the way Peckinpah filmed it. People get shot and fall off rooftops. No big deal there. But almost invariably, Peckinpah has them fall off in slow motion. Other people who get shot standing (or sitting) on solid ground also die in rather florid mannerisms.

Peckinpah also drew the story out with some flashback scenes that reminded me of one of the problems I had with Marathon Man. Also, the movie is quite languid for much of the running time, telling what is probably a 100-minute story or so in an excruciating 144 minutes. Finally, this being the late 1960s, there are a bunch of those pointless zooms that I like to rail about in movies of the late 60s and early 70s. Here they were really noticeable and served no discernible artistic purpose.

Still, almost everybody else loves The Wild Bunch, so this even more than most other movies is one I'd suggest you watch and make your own decisions about. It's available on Blu-ray at a fairly moderate price.

Neptune is the Roman Poseidon

I only did a brief post on The King and Four Queens this morning for two reasons. One is becaus of how long it's been since I watched it; the other is that I was planning on doing a full-length review of a different movie today: The Neptune Factor, which will be on FXM Retro tomorrow morning at 3:00 AM and 1:20 PM.

A research group has an Oceanlab on the sea floor somewhere out in the mid-Atlantic. (The latitude and longitude the give place it somwhere not too far northeast of Bermuda, I believe.) Dr. Andrews (Walter Pidgeon) is leading the research on the ship up on the surface, while among others, head of the divers MacKay (Ernest Borgnine) starts off in Oceanlab below. But he gets sent up to accompany a fired guy, and this happens just in time. Just before they surface, there's a giant undersea earthquake! Among the effects of the earthquake is to unmoor Oceanlab and send it... somewhere. They can't locate the emergency beacon.

The emergency authorities are overwhelmed, but there's a nuclear sub not too far off, which could help assist in the search. Andrews and company want to get the search on quickly, since it's theoretically possible that the people aboard Oceanlab survived and they've only got seven days' air supply. (I'd think it more likely that they end up like the Kursk submarine, but that would make for a non-commercial story.) Sadly, the folks in the submarine determine that if Oceanlab is intact, it fell into a fissure, and the submarine is too big to enter the fissure.

So the folks on the ship above need a small, maneuverable bathyscaphe, and quickly. There is one, but who knows if it will be able to find Oceanlab in time. That ship is captained by Commander Blake (Ben Gazzara), and he takes along as a crew MacKay, another diver, and scientist Jansen (Yvette Mimieux), who is clearly along because the movie needs eye candy and presumably Raquel Welch wasn't available. Blake and MacKay argue, and in the fissure the crew finds some marine life the likes of which they've theoretically seen before, but never quite like this....

The Neptune Factor is one of those movies that has a reasonably good idea at the base of it. It's reminiscent of Fantastic Voyage or Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea thematically. And yet The Neptune Factor winds up failing pretty badly. I think there are multiple reasons for that, but chief among them is the script. It's slow, slow, slow, and just when you think it's not slow enough it gets slower. Nothing really happens much of the time, as the bathyscaphe crew just sit there and look out the portals.

The script also has some serious continuity issues. There's talk early on about divers being too deep while the Oceanlab is still moored, yet one of the divers is able to exit the submersible when it's even deeper in the fissure. There's also talk about who the pressure that deep would have crushed Oceanlab, but that pressure is apparently not too much for the diver. As with most movies underwater and in caves, the lighting is much too light, but there's not much that can done with this most of the time and still have a movie.

The final problem is the special effects. I know that this was still the early 1970s and effects were nowhere near as advanced as they are now, but the creatures seen at the bottom of the fissure made me think that the makers of The Neptune Factor were borrowing ideas from Night of the Lepus on how to do effects. It's terrible and totally defies reality. Wait until you see the eels.

Still, The Neptune Factor is silly enough for one viewing. Watch and judge for yourself.

Willard

A couple of months back TCM ran Willard and Ben as part of TCM Underground. I finally got around to watching Willard (I haven't watched Ben yet), and since both are available Blu-ray, I'm more than comfortable doing a post on Willard.

Bruce Davison plays Willard, a young man who works in the accounts department at a factory and who is a bit of a loner. It's easy to see why he's become a loner. His boss Martin (Ernest Borgnine) treats him like dirt for even the smallest mistakes, and his home life isn't the greatest either, what with his having to live with his mother Henrietta (Elsa Lanchester) in the old family house that's too big for the two of them, but which she's not about to give up. Mom henpecks her son, which he resents no end. Furthermore, she thinks he should have an executive position in the business, considering that her husband helped found it and she believes Martin cheated him out of it.

The closest Willard comes to caring about anybody are the rats who live in the basement and the backyard that's getting overgrown. Indeed, he's beginning to think about training them to respond to simple cues. But that training goes father than Willard can imagine. He names two of the smartest rats Ben and Socrates, and then sics all of the rats on one of Martin's swanky parties. He also starts taking Ben and Willard into work.

Be careful when you train animals that haven't been domesticated. Siegfried and Roy could tell you about that, although they were dealing with animals that are dangerous because of their size. In Willard's case, the problem is with the sheer number of rats. One rat might not be a problem, but of course once you get a male rat and a female rat, they're going to multiply beyond anything one person can control.

Willard is never going to make anybody's ten best list, but boy is it a lot of fun. It's easy to empathize with Willard and see why he would take solace in those poor rats, and then with his plight when events spiral out of control. I can also only imagine how difficult it was for the rat handlers working on the movie; this after all was the days before CGI could produce more rats than you can shake a stick at. It's also not particularly scary; I found it more of a drama than a horror movie.

If you ever want a good popcorn movie to watch with friends, you could do far worse than to watch Willard.

Emperor of the North (Pole)

Coming up on FXM Retro tomorrow morning at 6:00 AM, and available on DVD, is Emperor of the North.

The movie starts of with a scrolling intertitle telling us that the time is 1933, which means the Great Depression, and a lot of hobos riding the rails. We then see one particular hobo trying to hop a train, except that this time there's a bit of a difference. The conductor, named "Shack" (Ernest Borgnine) is more vicious in getting people off his train, and responds by hitting the guy in the head with a hammer, killing the guy as he falls off the train.

After the credits roll, accompanied to some horrible music by Marty Robbins, we met another hobo, A Number 1 (Lee Marvin). He's one of the more experienced hobos, and knows how to evade detection. He hops on an empty car in Shack's train. And he'd be able to get where he's going too, except that not long afterward, another idiot, young Cigaret (Keith Carradine), insists on getting on the train in the same car as A Number 1. Cigaret is an obnoxious jerk, and thinks he can be just as "good", or renowned, a hobo as A Number 1.

The two hobos eventually have to burn their way out of the boxcar they were riding in after Shack locked them in, but Cigaret decides he's going to tell anybody who will listen that he rode Shack's train. And dammit, he's going to do it again, just to show proof of concept of something, not that they used that phrase back in the 1930s. A Number 1 is none too happy about this, and decides he's going to be the one to show everybody how it's done, although he's going to have to take Cigaret under his wing since Cigaret isn't going to stop following him.

Shack, of course, is brutal, as we already saw from the way he hammered a guy to death. And when Shack finds he's got a pair of hobos riding his train, he's going to try any means he can to get the bastards off. And they're going to try anything they can to stop the train and get on it, leading to the climactic fight scene....

Emperor of the North is entertaining enough, although not without its problems. It runs a shade under two hours, but is the sort of story that could probably have been told in only a 90-100 minute running time. Parts of the story really drag. The bigger problem, however, is the Cigaret character. He's one of those obnoxious jerks constantly screwing things up for A Number 1. Sure, there are characters you want to see get their comeuppance, but good writing can make such characters fun: think the way southern sheriffs are often portrayed as buffoons. Cigaret isn't so well written, and the result is the sort of character I wanted to see A Number 1 smack.

Overall, however, if you haven't seen Emperor of the North, it's a movie well worth a watch.

Pay Or Die

Today's honoree in TCM's Summer Under the Stars is Ernest Borgnine. TCM is running the Private Screenings interview he did with Robert Osborne a couple of years before he died; that comes on at 7:00 PM and is well worth watching if you haven't seen it before. As for the movies, one of his films that doesn't get mentioned so often is the very good Pay or Die, which you can see at 10:00 PM.

Borgnine stars as Joseph Petrosino, a real-life Italian immigrant to the US who lived in New York at the turn of the 20th century, working in New York City's police department. This being Italian immigrants in New York City, and the time period being what it is, you know there's going to be a Mafia. Well, the Mafia as we think of it today hadn't quite fully developed. Instead, we have a criminal organization known as "The Black Hand" that's engaging in the protection racket which is one of the oldest rackets out there. They try to shake down one baker, and when he refuses, the Black Hand trashes the place. This is what finally gets the police involved, and it's Petrosino who takes the case.

Petrosino realizes that a special squad is needed for this, and wants such a squad to be formed, but that requires him to be of a rank that necessitates the civil service exampinations of the day, which is a problem. So the baker's daughter Adelina (Zohra Lampert) helps Joseph prepare for the exam, and unsurprisingly, the two fall in love.

The Black Hand extortion continues, and at one point they even try to extort the great opera singer Enrico Caruso. (This is apparently based on a real incident.) The extortion goes on to the point that Petrosino believes that it's connected to the Sicilian Mafia, and the only way to stop it is to go to Sicily. It turned out to be a fatal move for Petrosino, as he was lured into a trap and assassinated. I don't think I'm giving too much away since this is a biopic, although it is one about a lesser-known figure.

It's a shame that Pay or Die isn't so well-known, since it's really quite a good little movie. Borgnine does well with what is a bit of an atypical character for him: even though Borgnine was of Italian descent himself, I went into the movie thinking it a bit hard to imagine him playing a cop, or at least a serious cop. And yet he does a fine job here. I don't know exactly how much was real here and how much was embellished for dramatic effect, but in any case the story is interesting. If you haven't seen Pay or Die before, it's one you definitely should see.

Pay or Die has also been released to DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive collection.

The Legend of Lylah Clare

Tonight is the last night of Kim Novak's turn as TCM's Star of the Month. Among the movies is a bizarre mess that needs to be seen to be believed: The Legend of Lylah Clare, at midnight (ET; it's earlier Thursday evening in the rest of the US).

Peter Finch plays Lewis Zarken, a formerly-successful Hollywood director whose claim to fame was the discovery of the 1930s actress Lylah Clare (Kim Novak). However, Clare died in mysterious circumstances in the late 1930s, and has been a legend ever since; much, I suppose, in the way that a Marilyn Monroe is a real-life legend because of her early death. Since Lylah's death, Lewis hasn't had a particularly stellar career. So what's a director to do? How about making a biopic of the woman he made a star? There's a great idea!

There's the problem of finding an actress suitable to play Lylah, but that's solved when the filmmakers meet Elsa Brinkmann, a struggling Vicki Lester-type actress. The thing is, she looks amazingly like the deceased Lylah Clare. To be honest, it's really not that amazing, when you consider that Elsa, like Lylah, is being played by Kim Novak. Elsa agrees to do the movie, and everybody lives happily ever after.

Oh, heavens no. You wouldn't have a real-life movie here if the movie-within-a-movie went off without a hitch, and this one has a whole bunch of hitches. Lewis begins to fall in love with Elsa, except that one has to wonder whether Lewis is falling in love with Elsa, or the fact that she's another Lylah Clare: part of the old Lylah Clare mystique is that she had been engaged to Lewis before her tragic death. Elsa, for her part, is really getting into the Lylah Clare role, enough so it's to the point that you begin to wonder whether she's being taken over by Lylah the way Norman Bates is taken over by his mother in Psycho.

As I said, The Legend of Lylah Clare is one strange movie. Making things even stranger, or perhaps just messier, is the fact that part of Lylah Clare's story is told in a series of flashbacks, with the movie switching back and forth from the flashbacks and Elsa, to the present day. Meanwhile, back in the present day, they're having trouble getting the movie made: Elsa has figured out that it's Lylah that Lewis still loves, and not her, so she makes life difficult for him, and everybody else in Hollywood who remembers the old Lylah Clare.

The Legend of Lylah Clare is one of those movies that leave you thinking, "What were the movie makers thinking of when they made this?" The plot is baffling at times; the acting uneven, ranging from wooden to over the top; and the sets and costumes are thoroughly overblown. At times, though, the movie has the feel of watching a train wreck: fascinating for what a disaster it is. The only problem is that there are other movies which are even more entertaining disasters than this one. The Oscar. Skidoo. Some of those bad horror or sci-fi B-movies from the 1960s. But as regarding disasters, The Legend of Lylah Clare is still miles ahead of something like Dondi.

The Legend of Lylah Clare has received a release to DVD from the Warner Archive collection, and is apparently part of a Novak box set too.

The Catered Affair

I'm somewhat surprised to see that I haven't blogged about The Catered Affair before. It's showing up tomorrow morning at 9:45 AM as part of a salute to Ernest Borgnine, who would have turned 96 tomorrow.

Borgnine plays Tom Hurley, a working-class father of a family living in a cramped apartment in New York City. Tom is a taxi driver, and has been saving up money to get his own cab and license to run it -- something that takes a lot of money due to the limited number of cab licenses. (Don't get me started on the economics of taxi medallions.) It's taken a long time because being a cabby in a one-income family isn't exactly the road to wealth, and they've got a bachelor uncle Jack (Barry Fitzgerald) living with him, his wife Agnes (Bette Davis), and their daaughter Jane (Debbie Reynolds).

Jane's about to throw a monkey wrench into all of this, however. She approaches her parents one day and tells them that she's gotten engaged to her boyfriend Ralph (Rod Taylor). Ralph is a teacher and decidedly of a higher social class than Jane, and especially her parents. Now, this is no big deal for Jane. She's perfectly comfortable having a small wedding with a few friends, not wanting to cause problems for anybody and wanting to get on with life. Any sane groom-to-be ought to be happy with such an arrangement, too: if you can get a low-mainenance bride, take her! (OK, I apologize for the insults to any married women her who think I'm describing them as high-maintenance brides. But having seen both of my sisters get married, and having had to bury grandparents and multiple uncles and aunts, I've seen how stressful things can get when you've got a family member who wants things to be just right.)

The problem, it turns out, isn't so much Jane; it's mother Agnes. She's disappointed that she hasn't been able to provide as much in life for Jane as a mother thinks a daughter should be provided for, and dammit, she's determined to see that the last thing she does for Jane is a big thing. As Agnes keeps wanting to do more and more for Jane, Jane gets horrified. But even more than her, it's Tom who's aghast. He's the one who's going to have to pay for the wedding party, and there's only one source of money: the savings that Tom has been planning to use to get his own cab and medallion.

There's not much more to all of the plot than this, and yet The Catered Affair is a wonderful little movie. Borgnine is an underrated actor, I think. Sure, he won the Oscar for Marty, and yet in a lot of his roles he doesn't get the attention a lead actor should deserve. Indeed, The Catered Affair is much more Bette Davis' movie than it is anybody else's. And yet, Borgnine's father character here is eminently believable. The same holds true for Davis, who I think is clearly playing a woman who wants something she couldn't have when she got married. People like to mock the later careers of actresses who were big in the 1930s and had to suffer the ignominies of aging concurrent with the breakdown of the studio system in the 1950s, and point to Bette Davis' work in the 1950s and beyond as a good example of this. Whatever you can say about Davis in a movie like Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte, however, doesn't apply to The Catered Affair. Debbie Reynolds was good in those musicals she did, but in The Catered Affair, she's a surprise, as she more than capably plays the sincere daughter who doesn't want to burden her father, and can't get this point through her mother's thick skull. And even Barry Fitzgerald isn't quite as irritating as he normally is when he's playing the Lovable Irish Stereotype character.

The Catered Affair was based on a teleplay by Paddy Chayefsky, who also did Marty and Network, among others. The screenplay, however, was reworked for the movie version by Gore Vidal. I obviously don't quite know what working-class New York City was really like in the mid-1950s, but the depiction here certainly seems realistic. The Catered Affair is also available on DVD.

TCM's Ernest Borgnine tribute

TCM's tribute to the late Ernest Borgnine is tomorrow, consisting of ten films plus two airings of the Private Screenings interview that Borgnine did with Robert Osborne back in 2009:

The Catered Affair at 6:00 AM;
The Legend of Lylah Clare at 8:00 AM;
Pay or Die at 10:30 AM;
Torpedo Run at 12:30 AM;
Ice Station Zebra at 2:30 PM;
The Dirty Dozen at 5:15 PM;
Private Screenings at 8:00 PM;
Marty at 9:00 PM;
From Here to Eternity at 10:45 PM;
The Wild Bunch at 1:00 AM;
Bad Day at Black Rock at 3:30 AM;
Private Screenings at 5:00 AM.

For some brief comments: Borgnine only had a supporting role in several of these, notably The Dirty Dozen, From Here to Eternity, and Bad Day at Black Rock, but Borgnine does a good job in all three and they're well worth watching for reasons beyond Borgnine's presence.

Marty, of course, is really Borgnine's movie. It's the one that made him a star, as he delivers an outstanding performance in what isn't your typical Hollywood love story.

Borgnine may be the nominal male lead in The Catered Affair, but the film really belongs to Bette Davis and Debbie Reynolds. Reynolds plays a young engaged woman who just wants to get married, while her mother (Davis) wants a big celebration, even if it means using the money Borgnine was saving up to buy his own taxicab.

The Legend of Lylah Clare is a train wreck, although that's not Borgnine's fault; I'd blame a lousy script and a wooden performance from Kim Novak. To be fair to Novak, however, she's playing two parts, and the second one, a Doppelgänger of the first one, is supposed to be a lousy actress.

I'm really looking forward to Pay or Die, which I don't think I've seen before. Borgnine plays a policeman in circa-1900 New York who investigates the Black Hand, the forerunner of the Mafia.

All of the movies, with the exception of Torpedo Run, are available on DVD.

Ernest Borgnine and Anne Francis

The Screen Actors Guild is honoring Ernest Borgnine at its annual awards show this weekend. TCM is getting in on the honoring by showing a night of Borgnine's work. This also includes a re-broadcast of the 2009 Private Screenings interview Borgnine did with Robert Osborne, at 12:15 AM ET. The movies also include Borgnine's Oscar-winning performance in Marty, at 1:15 AM. The first two movies have smaller roles for Borgnine: The Dirty Dozen at 9:30 PM, and this week's TCM Essential, Bad Day At Black Rock at 8:00 PM. That Essential movie deserves a bit more mention because of who else is in the cast: Anne Francis, who died at the beginning of the month.