Attack

Another movie in TCM's Memorial Day lineup that I had marked for watching was Attack. This one shows up tonight at 8:00 PM, so I made a point of watching it.

The movie starts with a pre-credits sequence in "Europe, 1944". Obviously, this is in the middle of World War II, or more accurately, in the later stages of the European theater since it's after the D-Day invasion. (Place names on the signs suggest they're in Belgium which would place things around the time of the Battle of the Bulge, except that that took place around Christmas 1944 and nothing in the movie looks like winter weather.) A platoon gets caught in a skirmish, and things go badly. Second in command Lt. Costa (Jack Palance) orders a charge that should be backed up by cover fire, but the unit commander, Capt. Cooney (Eddie Albert) inexplicable fails to provide the covering fire, leading to a bunch of American soldiers needlessly getting killed.

Costa obviously has good reason to dislike Cooney, and they're going to be seeing a lot of each other, and not only in combat since they're still in the same unit. When they get back behind the front lines, they're set to meet Cooney's commander, Lt. Col. Bartlett (Lee Marvin). It's at this point that we get some exposition that makes things a bit clearer, and implies that we're going to get a stage-play like drama rather than an action movie. Cooney has a prominent family, and the implication is that it's family connections that got Cooney his rank as a commander. Bartlett, for his part, is worried about what's coming after the war, as he's thinking about politics; whether this is electoral or internal military politics isn't quite clear and not that relevant anyway.

When the three men are set to meet for a poker game, a fourth is also involved: Costa's friend Lt. Woodruff (William Smithers). Woodruff is closer to neutral in all of this, although he definitely gets why Costa dislikes Cooney and shares the belief that commanding troops in battle isn't exactly Cooney's strength. With that in mind, Woodruff talks to Bartlett and asks if it would be possible for Cooney to be given a transfer to a desk job well away from the front lines, as this would be better for everybody, including Cooney. Smithers of course doesn't know about the Bartlett's ties to Cooney, and Bartlett eventually puts Woodruff off by suggesting that after the last skirmish, their platoon is going to get sent to the rear and that, besides, the war is going to be over soon anyway.

Yeah, right, although in Bartlett's defense he couldn't know that the Germans were going to stage the Battle of the Bulge counteroffensive. Needless to say, this requires more American troops at the front, so any R&R away from the action is going to have to way. Cooney's squadron advances on a village, and things don't go well when the Germans turn out to be occupying said village. Cooney on the one hand, and the men under him, especially Costa, have differing ideas on how to deal with their being under fire.

Attack is one of those movies that's gone under the radar, no pun intended, I think in part because it was more or less an independent release through director/producer Robert Aldrich. Although there are combat scenes, the movie is decidedly more of a character study, and not a bad one at that. However, it does feel a lot at times as though it's belying its stage origins.

Intriguingly, Attack doesn't have any screen thanking the Department of Defense for their cooperation in making this movie. That's because the department didn't help at all. They saw the script and how it made some of the officers look quite bad, and basically said no way in hell were they helping. In some ways I think that works to the movie's advantage, although I think it also leads to the look that is at times a bit stagey.

If you want a war movie that's not quite the Hollywood rah-rah without being as revisionist as later movies -- especially those about the Vietnam War-- Attack isn't a bad little movie to watch.

Once a Thief

Toward the end of Summer Under the Stars in August, TCM ran a day of the movies of Alain Delon. This gave me the opportunity to watch one I hadn't seen before, Once a Thief.

The movie starts off with a jazzy scene in a smoky club somewhere in San Francisco, intercut with a hold-up going on in a small store in Chinatown that results in the proprietress getting shot dead, all with the opening credits, implying that there's something edgy and new (well, at least for the mid-1960s) about the movie. We are then introduced to the main characters.

Delon stars as Eddie Pedak, a parolee who served time for robbery and shooting a cop. He's trying to put his life together by working at a shipper on the waterfront, hoping to buy a boat he can do fishing out in the Pacific with. He's also got a wife in Kristine (Ann-Margret) and daughter. And somehow, he was abot to scrape the money together despite having spent time in prison to buy a vintage Ford Model A that looks spiffy.

Van Heflin plays Mike Vido, a detective for the San Francisco police who is the man that was shot by Eddie in that previous holdup. So Vido has a thing against Eddie to begin with. And when it transpires that there was a Model A outside that store in Chinatown, and the bullet from her was fired from the same gun used to shoot Vido, he draws the natural conclusion that Eddie was involved in the shooting, even though the dead woman's husband can't identify him in a lineup. It's enough to get Vido to go to the waterfront and cost Eddie his job.

Eddie protests his innocence, and as we said, the Chinese guy in the store couldn't identify him. Eddie has trouble getting a job, but is also proud enough that he doesn't want Kristine to do the sort of work for which she'd be best suited. Recognizing all of this is Eddie's estranged brother Walter (Jack Palance).

Walter has a plan. Eddie's old employer on the waterfront is going to be handling a shipment of titanium, something that's going to be worth a large sum of money because the relatively rare metal is valuable. Walter has learned this somehow, and has assembled a team of people for the heist. The only thing is, he could use his brother's inside knowledge of the layout of the place, and Eddie doesn't really want to do it.

That's going to change somewhat, however, when keeps being unable to get a job, and it seems like this "one last heist" (sure) is the only way to get the money to pay off the boat. The fact that Walter and his minions are harassing Eddie's daughter doesn't make matters any easier for Eddie.

And then Vido finds an odd car in the garage of recovered stolen cars. It's a Model A that looks surprisingly like Eddie's, but it isn't Eddies. Vido is finally able to put two and two together and figure out that Eddie is framed, and we the viewer can guess that it's Walter who did it specifically to put more pressure on Eddie to go along with the heist. Unfortuntely, the Production Code was still in effect at the time the movie was made, so you can figure out how things are going to end.

Once a Thief isn't necessarily a bad movie, and certainly not a bad movie for its genre. But it suffers from the opening, which give the impression it's going to do a lot more than it ultimately delivers on. Sure, there are a lot of little touches to like, and having Van Heflin and Jack Palance in the movie is always a plus. But in the end it feels like a been there, done that movie that's not going to stand the test of time.

Once a Thief is available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive Collection.

Maybe you should have quit after one of the first 999 times

Several months back, TCM had a spotlight on remakes, with one of the nights devoted to movies with multiple remakes. It's here that I got the chance to record I Died a Thousand Times, the third version of High Sierra.

This one hews closer to High Sierra than the other remake, Colorado Territory. Jack Palance, still in his villainous days, plays Roy Earle, whom we see at the beginning of the film racing down a middle-of-nowhere road and keeping the Goodhues from getting in an accident. They meet up at a service station, where we learn that the grandparents (Ralph Moody and Olive Carey) are taking granddaughter Velma (Lori Nelson) to see her mom who has remarried. Velma has a club foot and needs surgery, but the Goodhues can't afford it.

As for Roy, he's recently been let out of jail in Illinois, and is heading to Los Angeles to loo up Big Mac (Lon Chaney), who has a big job planned for Roy. That involves robbing a hotel vault and stealing jewels and cash worth somewhere in the mid-six-figure range, a nice sum for the mid-1950s. While the plan is being finalized, Roy is going to stay at a cabin up in the Sierras.

Also staying there are Roy's incompetent partners-to-be in the crime, Babe (Lee Marvin) and Red (Earl Holliman). And one of them brought "his" girl Marie (Shelley Winters) up to the mountains. Roy doesn't want her there, but she has nowhere else to go; worse, she doesn't want to be with Babe and Red, but with Roy, because she can tell he's going to treat her halfway decently. Rounding things out is a dog that you just know is going to be trouble because he has so much loyalty to Roy from the first time the dog sees Roy.

Roy has to head back to Los Angeles a couple of times, giving him a chance to see the Goodhues again, and offering to "lend" them the money for Velma's operation. Roy loves her, although he should realize he has no chance at getting not only because of the Production Code but because Velma had a boyfriend back east.

The heist itself goes off OK, but the escape doesn't. Babe and Red are stupid, and take a wrong turn that results in their driving off a steep embankment and burning to a crisp. When Roy goes to see Big Mac for advice, it turns out that Mac has died, and Mac's second-in-command doesn't like Roy. People are going to recognize Roy, too....

I said at the beginning that this is a remake of High Sierra, and it felt like a really close remake (although I'll admit it's been years since I've seen High Sierra). Still, updating the movie with color and widescreen helps, and Jack Palance is good as the nominal bad buy. If I Died a Thousand Times were an original story, and not a remake of a recognized classic like High Sierra, it would have a much higher reputation. It's really a pretty good movie.

I Died a Thousand Times did get a Warner Archive release, but it's one of those that the TCM Shop claims is on backorder while Amazon has the DVD and the movie on streaming.

Le mépris

There are a fair number of people out there who have this idea of foreign films as being pretentious arthouse stuff. Part of the reason for this is that there are actually a fair number of foreign films treated as all-time classics that are really not a good pick to start watching foreign movies with. A good example of this is Contempt.

Jack Palance plays Jeremy Prokosch, an American producer working in Rome on a new production of Homer's Odyssey, to be directed by Fritz Lang (playing himself). He's having trouble, so he's looking to hire a script doctor in the form of Frenchman Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli). So Paul's wife Camille (Brigitte Bardot) has sort of put her own life on hold to be with Paul in Rome.

After watching some rushes, Jeremy plans to go back to his villa, offering Paul and Camille a ride in his convertible. Paul doesn't say much, basically allowing Camille to get in the car alone with Jeremy. She resents this greatly, thinking that Jeremy is trying to seduce her and that Paul is letting her probably to get a better deal on the script. So later in the day when Camille returns to her and Paul's apartment, the two of them get in a big argument about it and a bunch of other philosophical stuff.

They argue for what seems an interminable length of time, pretty much lasting the rest of the movie even though it's not all at their apartment. They go out to see a crappy stage show, and Jeremy invites them to Capri where he and Fritz are going to be doing some of the filming. The philosophical discussion also continues among the men, with Jeremy's real belief that Ulysses spent a decade on the odyssey mostly because he didn't want to go home to Penelope. Paul agrees, but Fritz doesn't. Paul, meanwhile, gets the impression that his own life is beginning to go like Ulysses'.

There's a lot of talking going on in Contempt, and frankly, I found it tedious, especially the argument at the apartment between Paul and Camille. I also really hated the ending, which I won't spoil. The one positive of the film was the cinematography. This looked like a restored print, as the color was eye-popping and the scenery of Capri was absolutely gorgeous. But that's not enough for me to save the rest of the movie.

Amazon is offering a Blu-ray of Contempt, so you can watch and judge for yourself. Oddly enough, the TCM Shop doesn't seem to have the movie available.

Barabbas

TCM ran a bunch of religious-themed movies on Easter, and I recorded a couple that I hadn't done posts on yet. One of those was Barabbas.

Anthony Quinn stars as Barabbas, a name Christians will recognize from one key scene in the Gospels. Jesus is set to be crucified during Passover, and Roman governor Pontius Pilate (Arthur Kennedy) knows of the old Jewish tradition that during the Passover season, one of the condemned is to be set free. So he offers the Jews a choice: Jesus, or the thief and murderer Barabbas. The crowd chooses to pardon Barabbas, leaving Jesus to be crucified.

Barabbas goes home to his girlfriend Rachel (Silvana Mangano), and her mother Sara (Katy Jurado). They actually believe in Jesus and that he's going to rise again on the third day, something Barabbas thinks is nonsense. And yet, come the third day, Jesus has disappeared from his tomb! Barabbas doesn't know what to think or do.

Unfortunately for him, opinion among the early Christians is sharply divided on how to treat him. There's a lot of ostracism of both him and Rachel, and Rachel eventually gets stoned to death, while Barabbas gets arrested by the Romans. They can't execute him because of the prior pardon, so instead they send him to the sulfur mines in Sicily.

The sulfur mines are a brutal life, as the chemicals are blinding, and the lack of light in the mines will blind them anyway if they come back out to the light. Never mind the back-breaking labor. Somehow, Barabbas is able to survive for ages, much longer than any of the other slaves, and is eventually chained to Sahak (Vittorio Gassman). When he saves Sahak during a mine explosion, he gets his sentence commuted to less back-breaking work farming.

It's there that he meets Julia (Valentina Cortese) and her husband Rufio, the two procuring Barabbas and Sahak and making them gladiators in Rome. There, Barabbas meets many more Christians, who by now seem amazed to meet somebody who was actually in the presence of Jesus. But being a gladiator is tough, and dealing with Torvald (Jack Palance), the best gladiator of them all, isn't going to be easy.

Barabbas is an interesting movie that's not without its flaws. Quinn is quite good as the man who has a pretty severe crisis of faith, which frankly would be understandable if your life was spared so somebody else could be executed. He also has difficulty comprehending how the Christians can still have their faith especially in light of the way the Romans treat them. Palance is good as the villain, looking like he's having loads of fun. Everybody else is adequate, getting their scenes and then departing from the movie since this is all about Barabbas.

The big problem I had with the movie is in part due to its production. Dino de Laurentiis produced, with a multinational cast and filming locations around Italy. Valentina Cortese, when she was in Day for Night a dozen years later, had a line about how Fellini (not the director here, but this is I think indicative of Italian movies) let the actors speak numbers and then do their dialogue in post-production. All of the dialogue here had the distinct feeling of having been done in post, and as such feels really detached from the rest of the movie. For some reason more than a lot of other movies, I found it really jarring here.

Overall, though, Barabbas is certainly worth a watch. It's available on DVD too.

Ten Seconds to Hell

Continuing through the backlog of movies I've got on my DVR, over the weekend I watched Ten Seconds to Hell, which aired on TCM as part of a night of Jack Palance movies.

Set in Berlin just after World War II (and filmed on location), the story tells of six Germans returning home from the war to the occupied British sector of Berlin. All six had been put into bomb disposal units because they had had indiscretions in their lives which weren't enough to send them to concentration camps, but enough that the Nazis were willing to let them all die. Erich Koertner (Jack Palance) and Karl Wirtz (Jeff Chandler) are more or less the two leaders of the group, at least under a British commander.

Bomb disposal is difficult work, and all of the men worry that they're going to die, so they set up something similar to a tontine in that they put part of their salaries into a pot, with that pot to be distributed either to the last survivor or however many of them are left at the end of three months. And sure enough, at least one of them is going to die, starting with young Globke. Apparently they're facing a sort of British bomb unknown to them with a double fuse, and they (and their British commander) would like to get information from the Brits on the working of that bomb so they can safely dispose of them and not put the public at any greater risk.

Against the backdrop of all of this, Erich and Karl become boarders in a rooming house run by French woman Margot (Martine Carol). She's not part of the occupation; instead, she made the mistake of marrying a German man who was killed in the war, and with the war over and the Germans having been defeated, she knows people back in France are going to see her as having betrayed their country, so it's off to Berlin where she won't have to face that. What she will have to face is Erich and Karl both developing feelings for her. But that leads to a conflict that might threaten both of their lives when disposing of those pesky bombs.

Ten Seconds to Hell is a movie that has an interesting premise, since bomb disposal isn't seen all that often in the movies (Michael Powell's The Small Back Room as well as Juggernaut come to mind). But this one never really rises above the pedestrian, with a formulaic plot about conflict between the two man men both professionally and with a woman. And it doesn't seem like there's all that much variation from one bomb disposal to the next. They kind of run together and make the movie drag a bit.

Still, Ten Seconds to Hell is available on DVD, so you can judge for yourself.

Sudden Fear

So I watched Sudden Fear off my DVR because the TCM Shop has a restoration Blu-Ray available for purchase. Indeed, when Ben Mankiewicz presented the movie on TCM, in the outro after the movie he mentioned that Blu-Ray, probably in a bit of advertising necessary to get the rights to show the restoration print. In any case, though, we're happy to have seen the movie show up on TCM.

Joan Crawford plays Myra Hudson, who at the beginning of the movie is in New York City watching rehearsals for her newest play -- Myra is a successful playwright and heiress, although she comes from San Francisco and lives there when a new play doesn't bring her to New York. Lester Blaine (Jack Palance) is the romantic lead in her new play, cast by the director and producer, but Myra doesn't think Lester is right for the role. (No offense to Jack Palance, but he really didn't have romantic leading man looks.) So she fires him from the play.

Myra takes the train back to San Francisco, and who should show up on the train but Lester? They talk and eventually fall in love, and Lester decides to follow all the way back to San Francisco. Indeed, they fall enough in love that they decide to get married! It seems rather sudden, and we've seen enough of this nonsense in other movies like Suspicion or Leave Her to Heaven that we know such sudden marriages are going to run into serious problems.

In this case, that other problem is Irene (Gloria Grahame). She was an old flame of Lester's, although as it turns out she's really his current flame. Lester's marriage to Myra is a sham -- not that Myra knows -- and Lester is biding his time until he can get enough money off of Myra to live comfortable. Unfortunately, Myra is making a new will, one that will leave Lester a modest sum, but not as much as he would have wanted. He and Irene discuss this, and figure that they have to make Myra die in an "accident" before she can sign the new will.

Myra, however, finds out! She uses a fancy dictaphone system, and forgot to turn it off when she dictated the new will. And when Lester and Irene discussed offing Myra, they did it in the room with the dictaphone, which of course picked up the plot and recorded it for Myra to hear. So she does what any rational person who finds she's going to be offed does: first she panics, and then she comes up with a plan to foil her would-be killers.

Sudden Fear is reasonable fun, although it does tread territory we feel like we've seen several times before. It also runs a bit long. Still, Crawford and Palance both give very good performances, and both got nominated for Oscars. The climax, with a lot of twists, is suspenseful enough although it does also elicit a few laughs at the absurdity. Part of that absurdity probably has to do with the fact that the writers had to come up with an ending that satisfied the Production Code.

Overall, Sudden Fear is well worth a watch by anyone, but especially Joan Crawford fans will like it. It's too bad that it only seems to be available on a higher-priced Blu-Ray and not a lower priced DVD, but thankfully it's available period.

Another lodger

One of the movies that's had a lot of showings on FXM Retro lately is Man in the Attic. It's getting another airing tomorrow morning (or overnight tonight) at 3:30 AM, and is certainly worth a watch.

The movie starts off with wstablishing scenes of Victorian London at night. An intoxicated woman walks out of a bar, and is escorted back to her apartment by a pair of police officers because it's not safe for women to be out alont what with Jack the Ripper having committed a couple of murders already. The woman tricks teh bobbies, telling them she's home when she really isn't, and goes back outside, at which point a shadow comes up, a woman screams, and Jack has committed another murder.

Cut to a slightly more fashionable part of London. An older couple, Helen and William Harley (Frances Bavier and Rhys Williams, respectively) are sitting around doing whatever it is that older couples do in the evening in Victorian London. This being Victorian London, she doesn't work, while he's suffered some "business reverses", so they've had to take the humiliating step of offering a room to let to a lodger. There's a knock on the door, and the person at the door at this late hour is Slade (Jack Palance). He's interested in renting the room. Furthermore, he claims to be a pathologist, so he could use the attic to do his experiments, and his work will have him in and out of the house at very odd hours. Obviously, however, the juxtaposition of these two scenes sets up the dramatic essence of our movie: is Slade actually Jack the Ripper, or is he an innocent man whom people are going to accuse of being Jack the Ripper?

Enter into the story the Harleys' niece Lily Bonner (Constance Smith). She's about to have her big breakthrough, although it's a bit of a plot hole in that she seems more suited to the music hall based on what we see of her performance, while royalty is supposed to show up to this big premiere. There's also another actress who's clearly fallen on hard times who shows up in Lily's dressing room to wish her luck and to tell Lily of her certitude that Lily won't suffer the same fate she has. Oh, her fate isn't fully written yet you can guess that the only reason for this déclassé actress to be in the dressing room is so that when she leaves, she can get bumped off by Jack the Ripper.

Along the way, Lily begins to fall in love with Slade; Helen suspects that he's Jack the Ripper; and William believs Slade is just a victim of suspicion. When Jack the Ripper is spotted supposedly carrying a black bag, we cut to a scene of Slade trying to destroy his bag. William then shows Helen that he too has a black back, and has hidden it lest anybody suspect him of being Jack the Ripper. There's also a Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Warwick (Byron Palmer) on the case and since he has to interview Lily after the death of that other actress, he meets her and falls in love with her despite that being thoroughly unprofessional.

Man in the Attic is territory that's quite familiar, even if you haven't seen the first two Lodger movies, from Alfred Hitchcock in 1927 and the Laird Cregar version from Fox in 1944. Still, Jack Palance is well-cast as the difficult to get along with Slade character; this was the part of Palance's career when he was playing the heavies. The rest of the cast is serviceable if not great. The end result is a movie that's satisfying enough, if not up to the standards of either of the first two versions of the movie called The Lodger. Apparently it's been released to DVD in the past but now our of print. Amazon Prime members, however, can apparently watch it on streaming video.

The final night for Star of the Month Burt Lancaster

We're already up to the final Wednesday in November, which means it's one final night of Burt Lancaster's movies for his turn as TCM's Star of the Month. The overnight schedule includes The Professionals at 1:15 AM. This is another of those movies I thought I had blogged about before, but a search of the blog, as well as a search of the posts on my computer claims no, I haven't. So now would be a good time to blog about it.

The scene is the Amreican Southwest in 1917; a bit later than your standard-issue western, but just before World War I and the social change that would bring. Over on the other side of the border, in Mexico, there's a revolution going on. Sure, the government is bad, but it's just as likely that the rebels are going to turn out to be a problem, too, as we saw in Crisis many years earlier. Industrialist JW Grant (Ralph Bellamy) has had his wife kidnapped by bandits, and taken to a stronghold somewhere on the Mexican side of the border. And dammit, he wants his wife back! To that end, he's willing to hire the best mercenaries, and pay them a substantial sum. Leading them is soldier-of-fortune Henry Fardan (Lee Marvin). Hnery assembles a team of the best fot the operation: dynamite expert and bon vivant Bill Dolworth (Burt Lancaster), who always seems up for an adventure; horse wrangler Hans Ehrengard (Robert Ryan), and tracker Jacob Sharp (Woody Strode). Their mission, as Grant explains it to them, is to go into Mexico, find Mrs. Grant, and bring her back to him, for which they'll be mighty well compensated.

And so, they head off to Mexico, a place that is pretty desolate and tough to live in, as we saw when discussing the movie Bandolero! back in January 2010. But our team of mercenaries braves the conditions and eventually gets to the camp where Mrs. Grant has been spirited away to, which is where they discover the first of their problems. It's the camp of Jesús Raza, one of the more notorious revolutionaries. As a revolutionary, he's pretty well armed, and getting Mrs. Grant out of there is going to be a darn sight difficult. Additionally, with Raza being her kidnapper, there's also the problem that the Mexican government wants Raza, so our Americans dealing with Raza means they're also eventually going to have to deal with the other side of the revolution. But they want their money, and in a nice set piece they rescue the lovely Maria Grant (Claudia Cardinale; where do all these people in Westerns get their trophy wives from?).

At this point, with Maria in tow and Raza and the Mexican government going after them, the team faces its third problem: Maria doesn't want to go back to Grant. Hers is a marriage not born out of love, but out of Grant's rapacious and controlling desire to have a beautiful wife. In fact, Maria loves Raza and is happy to be with him. But our professionals, faced with all the other problems they have, understandably figure that the least bad thing to do is complete their mission and get the money; if Maria wants to escape back to Raza afterwards that's her business. Except that there are going to be complications getting back to the States, with another set in a mountain pass; more difficult is when Maria suggests that Grant isn't going to pay them according to the terms of hte deal he made with them....

The Professoinals is more entertainment than anything else, as it's not rying to address any social issues or make any really dark points the way that a lot of other movies started to do with the destruction of the Production Code in the late 1960s. But there's nothing wrong with a movie being pure entertainment, and in that regard The Professionals succeeds in spades. Lancaster looks like he's having the time of his life making this one, getting to be rakish at times as he gets knocked on his keister wearing just his long johns. Lee Marvin is good, even if he was more enjoyable when he was playing bad guys. Everybody else has smaller roles, but all of them do well. All along the way, The Professionals is lovely to look at.

The Professionals is available for purchase from the TCM Shop.