Fighter Squadron, only on land and in the Asian theater

Another movie that's been sitting on my DVR since TCM's Memorial Day marathon of war movies and is now getting another airing on TCM is Merrill's Marauders. That airing is tomorrow, November 15, at 1:45 PM. So once again, I sat down to watch the movie in order to be able to do a post on it here in conjunction with the upcoming airing.

The movie opens with narration over black-and-white World War II footage about the state of the war around the beginning of 1944. Britain held India, but were worried that Japan would try to break through to meet up with the Germans since Japan held most of Southeast Asia. The UK had even bigger manpower issues than the Americans, and the Soviets had not declared war against Japan, so a conference in Quebec resulted in a multinational force under General Joseph "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell to push back against the Japanese. The American portion of that force was commanded by Brigadier General Frank Merrill (Jeff Chandler).

The first objective is a town called Walawbum, which is inside Burma through miles of jungles and swamps that the Americans are going to have to march through. Merrill himself is part of that, despite the doctor (Andrew Duggan) foreshadowing that Merrill has a serious heart issue. (In fairness to the movie, the real-life Merrill did in fact have a heart issue.) One of the platoons is led by Merrill's protégé, Lt. Stockton (Ty Hardin). Merrill sees great possibilities for Stockton's career, except that Stockton is a bit too close to his men.

Eventually, the men do make it to Walawbum and are able to take the town, leading the Americans to think they're going to be relieved, as this was a very tough campaign that led to a lot of them being either killed or sickened by tropical diseases. Unfortunately for them, Gen. Stilwell shows up and tells Merrill that no, you're not getting relieved; in fact you're going to have to push on to the railhead at Shaduzup. Merrill isn't exactly pleased but has a sense of duty. He also has to give the order to Stockton, who in turn is going to have to deliver the message to his men who aren't going to like it. And we've seen that Stockton already has command issues, like difficulty in writing the "I regret to inform you" letters that go home to the families of the fallen soldiers. But fight on they do, since they don't really have much choice. And of course Stockton starts becoming a better officer.

There's another big battle at Shaduzup, which the Allies win. But there's still another objective, the airstrip at Myitkyina, and the soldiers, by now known as Merrill's Marauders, push on despite being at their breaking point. History tells us that the Marauders did win a battle at Myitkyina, and that the Marauders were disbanded not long after because they had next to nobody left who was fit to fight and they all hated Stilwell.

Merrill's Marauders is a well-enough made movie, done closer to location in the jungles of the Philippines, and has fine performances from both Chandler (in what was sadly his final performance since he suffered a back injury during the shooting and died from complications of surgery after filming wrapped) and Hardin. However, like a lot of other war movies of the era, it has a lot of the same tropes of character development, which is why I mentioned the recently reviewed Fighter Squadron in the title. The Merrill/Stockton relationship is reminiscent of the one between Edmond O'Brien and Robert Stack. There's also a comic relief character with animal involvement. This time, it's a man nicknamed Muley who is the keeper of the pack mule in the platoon. (The real Marauders did use pack mules.) Muley has grown too attached to his mule, while everyone else in the platoon sees it as a source of food.

Merrill's Marauders isn't a bad little movie, and in some ways it's more about the limits of endurance men can face rather than about the actual battles. But I can't help think that if it had been made a few years earlier and with a better budget that it could have been a movie with a much higher reputation than the one it has today.

An incident out west

Another of the movies that I recorded off of TCM because I hadn't seen it before and am always interested in new stuff to be able to blog about here, and because it sounded interesting enough to give it at least one watch, was a western called The Plunderers. Recently, I finally got around to watching it to do the obligatory post on here.

The movie starts off with a pre-credits sequence of four young men riding into a town called Trail City. Jeb (Ray Stricklyn) is the leader of the group, accompanied by Mexican Rondo (John Saxon), muscle Mule, and the "baby" of the group Davy, who hasn't really had enough life experience to be considered fully a man. Coming in to town, they need a drink, so stop at the saloon where they order one drink each. However, they don't seem to have any cash on them, so when it comes time to pay, they can't. Mike, the owner of the bar, calls in the sheriff (Jay C. Flippen), who puts the four young men in jail for the night. At the bar watching is Sam Christy (Jeff Chandler), who owns a ranch just outside of town. Sam served in the Civil War and wound up with a bum left arm as a result.

Come the morning, the sheriff should order the four men out of town, but he doesn't. By this time, we learned that they had to leave their previous town under cloudy circumstances, but they decid that they like this place and want to spend a bit of time resting up here. They go to the local general store and stiff Ellie (Dolores Hart) and her father the owner, before getting a hotel room from Kate (Marsha Hunt), who didn't know how they had already scammed the store owner. Nobody seems to want to do anything about the four men.

Of course, part of the reason for that is that they're all afraid of the four young men who are armed. And yet, it should be the sheriff's job. When he goes to the hotel room and they humiliate him, they realize they're helpless. The one person who might be able to do something is outsider Sam, although he seems to have more of a past than just having served in the Civil War.

The interlopers are also smart enough to know that it can't stay this way; they're pissing off enough people that somebody could ambush them at night or something. So they decide to confiscate all the guns in town, an effort that is not without violence and results in at least one person getting killed. They're also smart enough to realize that Sam outside of town is still going to have guns at his place. But thanks to the Production Code, we know that the bad guys aren't going to win in the end. It's the question of how exactly the loss comes about that remains to be answered.

As I watched The Plunderers, I noticed a directorial credit for Joseph Pevney. It's a name that I recognized first from the episodes of the original Star Trek series that he directed. Pevney directed more movies than I realized, but still The Plunderers made me think of something that was more suited to TV than the big screen. It's not bad, but it doesn't feel terribly imaginative. Definitely a suitable enough time-passer, though.

Abandoned

There's often some dispute over what counts as a noir when you're on the edges of the genre. Some movies have decided noirish elements even if I think they're not quite noir. But I can see why other people might group them in with noir. Such is the case with one of Eddie Muller's Noir Alley choices from several months back, the 1949 crime/suspense movie Abandoned.

After some narration that would have been right at home in The Naked City a year earlier, we're introduced to one of the main characters. Paula Considine (Gale Storm) walks into a police station in Los Angeles looking for the Bureau of Missing Persons. She's arrived in the big city from a small town in Pennsylvania, after having gotten a letter from her big sister. Since then, radio silence from big sister. The man at the desk is about to finish up his shift for the night, so he suggests Paula fill out the form overnight and come back in the morning.

Meanwhile, a fairly nosy man shows up at the desk and starts chatting up Paula. That man is Mark Sitko (Dennis O'Keefe), a reporter for the Mirror. Sitko may have been looking for information on somebody else, but he knows a good story when he hears it, and having heard Paula's story, he suspects a good one here. Eventually they go to the morgue and, looking through the book of unidentified dead people there, Paula recognizes her sister's photo. The sister was found in a car in the garage of a building under construction, dead of carbon monoxide poisoning, in what to the coroner seems like an obvious suicide. Except that Paula knows her sister didn't know how to drive, which to her suggests it's not a suicide.

Then, on the way out of the morgue, Mark is smart enough to realize that Paula is being tailed by a figure in the shadows. Mark comes up with a plan to get the man out of the shadows, and when that happens he recognizes the man as Kerric (Raymond Burr), a private investigator. He claims that he was working for Paula's father to try to find Paula's sister; once Paula left Pennsylvania her dad wanted Kerric to find her too. But of course all of this is several years before the premiere of Perry Mason on TV, so the presence of Raymond Burr in the cast likely means a bad guy.

Meanwhile, it's been revealed to us that the letter Paula received from her sister is on the letterhead of a hospital, and that the sister was pregnant and there to give birth. Mark thinks that there's something fishy going on, and that the sister may have gotten involved with what is not a reputable adoption agency. So they take the case to the district attorney (Jeff Chandler), who informs them that he's swamped, so they're going to have to do some investigating themselves.

As for Kerric, he goes to visit a Mrs. Donner (Marjorie Rambeau), and it's revealed that she's the woman involved with running the illegal adoption ring, paying the expenses of the unwed mothers and then selling off the babies to parents who can't wait to adopt through the normal channels. All of this is within the first 20 minutes or so of the movie, so there's not much mystery here. Instead, as Alfred Hitchcock would argue, it's suspense in that we know who the bad guys are and what they're doing, but will the reporter and sister be able to find out and get out of danger?

Abandoned was the sort of movie something between a B-movie and a programmer that Hollywood produced in the years after World War II; I've argued that MGM's equivalent tended to be the sort of films that paid for the Freed Unit to make all those musicals. This one, however, was made at Universal; that combined with definitely not being a prestige picture and not having the biggest stars goes a long way to explaining why it's not very well known today.

There are some obvious noir elements in the photography and the heavies that make it easy to understand why Eddie Muller would program it for Noir Alley. The fact that I consider it more of a crime/suspense movie than a noir doesn't mean I didn't like it, however. It's quite well done for a movie on a budget, with a fairly effective story and good characterizations, especially from Rambeau.

Abandoned is available on DVD from Universal's MOD scheme, and is definitely worth a watch.

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.

Bird of Paradise (1951)

This morning, FXM Retro ran the 1951 version of Bird of Paradise. As is their wont, they're going to be running it again soon, at 4:00 AM tomorrow. It's also available on DVD from FOX's MOD scheme.

The movie starts off with an expository scene. André Laurence (Louis Jourdan) is on a schooner going through the tropics which takes aboard a passenger who complains about the Polynesians. It turns out that André is on board with his best friend and college roommate Tenga (Jeff Chandler), who is three-quarters Polynesian: his grandfather had married one of the local Polynesian women before being forced to leave the island. André is going to visit Tenga's society.

Tenga, it turns out, is royalty. His father is the chieftain on this particular island, and Tenga has a kid sister in Kalua (Debra Paget). Tenga's family is grudgingly OK with having André on the island, although the local shaman Kahuna decidedly is not. He remembers previous whites who brought violence and disease to the island, and he fears having another white man on the island will be a curse. And Kahuna has some political power.

While Tenga's parents are grudgingly accepting, Kalua is rather more accepting. She's taking by the presence of a nice-looking white guy, while the feeling is mutual. However, the island traditions, strange to a white guy like André, mandate that he and Kalua not speak to each other until they're betrothed. There's also a bunch of other traditions that André doesn't get, although he does try to follow them conscientiously.

And there's the white guy who didn't try to follow them: he was made taboo and sent to a neighboring island. When André is sent there, the other guy warns him about trying to stay on the island with the natives. But André doesn't care, because he's just too damn much in love with Tenga.

Eventually André does marry Tenga, the Kahuna tries to curse the marriage, and Tenga is declared barren after a whopping three months! Somebody has to be punished. Especially when the volcano starts to erupt....

Jeff Chandler doesn't look Polynesian at all, although he didn't look like Cochise either, despite the fact that he had played Cochise a year earlier in Broken Arrow. Paget has also played an Apache in Broken Arrow, and at least the writers had the good sense to remind us of Tenga and Kalua's white grandfather when André wonders why she has blue eyes. Louis Jourdan is of course playing white, so his presence in the cast doesn't matter. The producers just wanted a bunch of eye candy, since the women are in sarongs and the men are shirtless from the moment they get to the island.

The story is OK, but more than the 1932 Joel McCrea/Dolores Del Rio version, this one gave me the vibe of trying to be sensitive to foreign cultures only to wind up all feeling a bit silly. I don't think the 1932 version was trying to have any grounding in reality; plus, it has the benefit of being a pre-Code movie. The 1951 version, for its part, had a title card in the opening about how it was filmed on location in the Hawaiian Islands, and how all the cultural traditions were based on real traditions.

Overall, this version of Bird of Paradise is good for one viewing, but not one I'm actively looking to add to my DVD correction.