Audrey Hepburn, Native American?

Another of those movies that I recorded quite some time back and didn't get around to watching until not long before it expired from the DVR was the 1960 western The Unforgiven, which is of course not to be confused with the Clint Eastwood film Unforgiven. Anyhow, having watched it, I wrote up this post and saved it in drafts for some time when I didn't have other westerns coming up on TCM to do posts about.

The action opens with a panoramic view of a ranch somwhere in west Texas where the nearest civilization is Wichita, KS, or at least where Ben Zachary (Burt Lancaster) returns from. Before that, however, we see the only two people on the ranch at the current time are Rachel (Audrey Hepburn), adopted kid sister of Ben, and their mother Mattilda (Lillian Gish). The camera also pans to a grave stone, which is that of the patriarch, Will Zachary, who was killed by the Kiowa.

And then a strange old guy named Abe Kelsey (Joseph Wiseman) shows up, claiming that Audrey was actually stolen from the Kiowa and adopted by the Zacharys, which might have something to do with why they wanted to kill Will and why Mattilda is ticked with the presence of this man. Meanwhile, the family is working with another family in the area, the Rawlins family. They're headed by patriarch Zeb (Charles Bickford), and have a son Charlie (Albert Salmi) who is thinking of courting Rachel. Kelsey shows up again now that Ben Zachary is back, and this time Ben ticks off Kelsey. Enough so that he starts telling anybody else who will listen the story of Rachel's supposed provenance. That, and he gets a couple of Kiowa to show up at the Zachary place, looking to buy Rachel from the family, a sort of bride price if you will, except that this man says he's actually Rachel's brother.

Best, I suppose, that they marry Rachel off now, and give Charlie permission to court Rachel. For this Charlie gets himself shot by the Kiowa, not that he's actually guilty of anything. But it gets the rest of the Rawlins family pissed at the Zachary family, especially Charlie's mom who gets to have one of those big emotional scenes cursing Rachel and the rest of the Zacharys. Making matters worse is that a posse goes out to catch Kelsey, and when they catch him and bring him back, Mattilda and Ben basically engage in vigilante justice which gets Zeb to believe that the story about Rachel is actually true.

The Kiowa show up again demanding Rachel, who really ought to be allowed to make the decision herself since she's now an adult. But instead Ben and brother Andy kill one of the Kiowa, who respond by laying siege to the Zachary homestead. It's a siege they ought to be able to win because they've got time and numbers on their side. But the Zacharys seem willing to fight to the last man, and woman.

The Unforgiven was produced by Burt Lancaster's production company and suffered a troubled production including Audrey Hepburn falling off a horse and the original director being replaced by John Huston. Huston and Lancaster apparently clashed over the artistic vision of the movie, and I think it shows somewhat in a movie that takes some odd twists and turns tht don't always work. Everybody's professional and the movie is visually nice to look at for the most part, but there's always this feeling that something isn't quite right here.

Still, even though The Unforgiven is a bit of a misfire, it's an interesting misfire.

The Secret Passion

Montgomery Clift was honored in Summer Under the Stars, and one of his movies that I somehow neglected to DVR was the biopic Freud. Fortunately, it was on Watch TCM for a while, so I was able to watch it there before it expired and write up and schedule this post.

As you might guess, the movie is about Sigmund Freud, one of the key names in psychoanalysis, even if a lot of his ideas were oversimplified when he proposed them, simply because nobody else had proposed such ideas before and most theories wind up needing a fair bit of refinement. Freud, played here by Clift, had a long and complicated professional life -- much too long for one movie, in fact -- so the movie only deals with a decade or so in the early part of his career.

The movie opens in Vienna in 1885, where he's engaged to Martha (Susan Kohner), and working at a hospital under Dr. Meynert (a real person, played here by Eric Portman). However, the two doctors get involved in a professional dispute over the treatment of hysteria, a disorder which for a good portion of history was thought to be centered in the uterus ("hysterectomy" comes from the same Greek root). The dispute causes Freud to leave the hospital, delay his marriage to Martha, and go to Paris to study further.

In Paris, Freud studies under Jean-Martin Charcot (another real person who did research into several neurological conditions including ALS). At this point in his career Charcot was studying the possibility of treating hysteria through the use of hypnotherapy, a fairly radical idea at the time, and one which I think the movie treats rather too simplistically, as if you can just hypnotize someone by snapping your fingers. But the idea intrigues Freud, and he starts using hypnotherapy to try to treat some of the more unusual cases he encounters when he gets back to Vienna.

For better or worse, the cases Freud encounters all seem to involve odd sexual hangups. One, Cecily (Susannah York), is being treated by Freud's partner in practic Dr. Breuer (Larry Parks). Her father died in Naples and ever since then she's had partial paralysis and insomnia and a host of other problems. Worse, she starts showing an attraction to Dr. Breuer that results in his handing the case over to Sigmund. In turn, Cecily starts feeling attracted to Freud.

The other case involves young Carl (David McCallum) who describes some really weird dreams and an odd relationship with his parents, with the final result of the first session being that Carl tries making out with a dressing mannequin. Creepy stuff, and it starts giving Freud bad dreams of his own. Physician, heal thyself, some would say, but in a case like this Freud might want to try discussing his dreams with another professional.

However, in dealing with all these cases, Freud starts developing ideas about child sexuality and how not being able to deal with these childhood thoughts properly is one of the underlying causes of neuroses. It's a controversial idea, and needless to say when Freud tries to present it at a medical conference the other doctors are radically opposed to it because, as is also said, science advances one death at a time. Of course, Freud is a well-known and influential name today, so we know how his ideas eventually become a part of the public consciousness.

This biopic of Freud was directed by John Huston, who I think I've mentioned was not my favorite director, certainly not in the later part of his life when the movies became more self-indulgent. I can see why people would be interested in the idea of making a biopic on Sigmund Freud. Huston does, I think, about as well as possible with the material, but I still think Freud isn't going to be a movie for everybody.

Boomerporn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Kremlin Letter

A movie that's been back in the FXM rotation for a little while and that I surprisingly haven't blogged about before is The Kremlin Letter. I saw it once many years ago, and thought that perhaps I had mentioned it at some point here, but a search of the blog says no. It's going to be on FXM again tomorrow (August 21) at 9:50 AM, so, having recorded it from the recent run of showings, I sat down and watched that showing to do a post here.

The first thing I noticed is that, sadly, the opening credits are letterboxed to 2.35:1, but after the opening credits, the print goes down to the 16:9 ratio of today's television sets. After the pre-credits exposition of some sort of espionage business going on in Paris, we get to the main action. Charles Rone (Patrick O'Neal) is a US Navy officer who is called into a meeting with an admiral much above him in the military pecking order (director John Huston in a cameo). The Admrial tells Rone that Rone is being relieved of his duties because civilian intelligence needs him for some sort of super-secret mission, Rone being able to speak several languages and having other qualities suitably for the spy game. Rone is supposed to go somewhere to meet with a "Highwayman" (Dean Jagger) and his assistant Ward (Richard Boone) to find out about that mission.

Rone goes to some small town and meets the two men, who inform him that a letter was written in which the Soviets told the Americans that the Communist Chinese, having gotten the bomb, were a threat, and perhaps the US and USSR should try to work together behind the scenes to neutralize mainland China (remember that at the time the movie was released in 1970, the US still recognized Taiwan as the one China). The US responded, and it's that letter that has gone missing. Perhaps Rone could go to Moscow and get that letter.

But first, Rone is going to have to get a crew together for the mission. Those are a guy codenamed "Whore" (Nigel Green), who is now in Mexico; "Warlock" (George Sanders), in drag playing piano at a nighclub in San Francisco; and "Erector Set", who can get into safes. However, he's too old for the job, so he offers his daughter, B.A. (Barbara Parkins), whom he's trained to do the work he used to do, and is able to open safes with her feet.

Meanwhile, over in the Soviet Union, there's Kosnov (Max von Sydow), the head of Soviet intelligence, who has blackmailed one of his agents in the US. Kosnov is married to Erika (Bibi Andersson), who is on her second husband, the first having died and stashed a bunch of money in a bank in the West. Rone realizes he can use her to get at Kosnov and the other Soviets. There's also Bresnavich (Orson Welles), some sort of high-up official who also has a lot of pull. The other members of the group, along with Rone, set about getting to know various Moscovites who might be able to help them.

Unfortunately, somebody on the Soviet side has learned that these Americans are in town, and they infiltrate the ring, kidnapping BA and leading Warlock to commit suicide, which is what really tips Rone off to the fact that something is terribly wrong. Ultimately, the movie is more about who's trying to mess up the operation than it is about trying to get that letter back.

The Kremlin Letter received poor reviews on its release back in 1970, and it's not too hard to see why. The plot is convoluted and hard to follow, and in the end much of what goes on doesn't really matter. Unlike a fun James Bond movie or the other spy spoofs of the 1960s, this one takes itself too seriously and winds up being forgettable for the things for which it should be memorable, and memorable for things ancillary to the movie.

One of those memorable things is Sanders in drag; another is the movie's use of Russian. There are enough Russian characters that the use of subtitles in what is supposed to be an English-langauge movie is too much. And since almost none of them are played by actual Russians, it's easy enough to go with the old Hollywood routine of having everyone speak English. After all, nobody expects characters in movies like To Be or Not to Be or Steve McQueen's version of An Enemy of the People to speak in what would have been the characters' real language. Here, however, the scenes start off with people speaking in Russian before going into a voiceover. It reminds me of another movie, Town Without Pity, that did the same thing with German. It's an extremely distracting technique.

Still, some people think The Kremlin Letter is great stuff. So it's definitely one of those movies you might want to see and judge for yourself.

Chinatown

If I were taking part in the "Blind Spot" series that one of the other movie blogs runs, in which you blog over the course of a year about a dozen movies that are generally considered must-see but you haven't seen before, one of the movies I might have selected would be Chinatown. I recently had the chance to record it from the free preview of the Showtime channels, and see that it's going to be on multiple times in the next week, starting overnight tonight at 3:55 AM on TMC Xtra and tomorrow morning at 10:45 AM on Showtime Showcase.

Jack Nicholson plays J.J. Gittes, a private detective in 1930s Los Angeles. One day, into his office comes Evelyn Mulwray, saying that she's worried that her husband Hollis is stepping out on her. Could J.J. investigate and get the goods on Hollis? It'll take some money, and Gittes seems to have some pretty high rates for the mid-1930s, but he's willing to take the job.

Mulwray works for the Los Angeles Water Department, which is trying to get a dam built to deal with the chronic water shortages stemming from the fact that Los Angeles is a growing city and that it never rains in southern California. Mulwray, opposes the buidling of the dam, and probably has evidence that building the dam wouldn't be necessary, which is why he's so dangerous. Gittes does his usual bang-up job, gets photos of Mulwray that sure make him look unfaithful, and then lives happily ever after.

Well, that last part about living happily ever after is clearly wrong, or otherwise we wouldn't have a movie. Gittes goes to the Mulwray house to speak personally to Hollis, but Evelyn tells him to look for Hollis at one of the reservoirs. There, Hollis is found -- but he's quite dead, having drowned. So the police investigate, which is where Gittes finds out that it wasn't Evelyn who hired him, but a woman named Ida Sessions (Diane Ladd) who was made up to look like Evelyn. Obviously somebody had it in for Hollis. But who, and why?

So Gittes finds himself investigating a lot more. Among the possible suspects are Yelburton (John Hillerman), now one of hte bigwigs in the Water Department, who gives Gittes a lie about water being sent to irrigate the orange groves out in the San Fernando Valley. There's also Noah Cross (John Huston), who used to work in the Water Department before it was sold to the city. Noah and Hollis had a falling out over that, but also over the fact that Noah's daughter was born Evelyn Cross, the same Evelyn who married Hollis.

Gittes continues to investigate, working somewhat with Evelyn as he had to lie to the police who thought that she had hired Gittes to figure out if Hollis was being unfaithful. Indeed, if the detective investigating the murder, Lou Escobar (Perry Lopez) knew the truth, Gittes could be in big trouble for withholding evidence. And the case is about to get a whole lot more complicated, as Gittes discovers those orange groves are being sold off to dummy buyers as the land would be more valuable as residential tracts -- if only they had enough water. As you can figure, the point of building the dam is to get that water for the putative new housing developments. Oh, and Hollis did drown -- but the water in his lungs was salt water, which raises further questions about where and how he really died.

Chinatown is one of those movies that gets notoriously high rankings on all-time movie lists like the AFI lists or even IMDb's Top 250, which tends to skew towards more recent movies because of their methodology. It's certainly a well-crafted movie, and one worth watching. But it's also something that I found myself thinking I wouldn't put quite as high as all those other critics do. It's not that there's anything wrong with it; it's more that I tend not to buy into hype.

So by all means see Chinatown. It's a darn good movie. It's just that for me it a bit less good than all the other vintage movies on those "best of all time" lists.

Four decades before The Revenant

Some time back, TCM ran a movie that was new to me, Man in the Wilderness. It's going to be on again this evening at 6:00 PM, so I made a point of watching it to do a review on before tonight's showing.

It's 1820 in the Pacific northwest, not that this region of the world was thought of that way back then. An expedition led by Captain Henry (John Huston) has been collecting pelts, but with winter coming, they have to get to the Missouri River to get downstream and back east before the snow comes. For no good reason other than Henry's vanity, they're portaging his boat back to the Missouri rather than making canoes or something useful.

Guide and scout Zachary Bass (Richard Harris) and one of the younger members of the expedition are out hunting to get more food for the crew. Bass is a good shot and the younger guy not so much, so after the younger guy misses, Bass goes after the second deer. Unfortunately for him, also in the area is a bear, which comes out and mauls him.

The mauling goes on for some time, and since it leaves Bass unconscious and with some fairly serious wounds, everybody else around him expects him to die. It's not just Henry and his men; the local Indians, led by a chief played by Henry Wilcoxon, also figure poor Zachary is going to die, so they just leave him there, while Henry and his men eventually keep trying to get to the Missouri.

But based on the amount of time I've spent saying they expect Zachary to die, and the amount of time the movie itself spends on it, you just know that Zachary is in fact not going to die, at least not as a result of the bear attack. At some point he regains enough consciousness to realize that he has to do something serious to survive.

Not only does this mean getting food and tending to his wounds; it also means avoiding the Indians who might well want to attack him (and attack Henry's men in the climax). Zachary, who has any number of flashbacks both to his childhood having to deal with Henry, as well as to the son he left behind back east when his wife died, wants to gain revenge on Henry. Henry and the other men, meanwhile, have this fear in the back of their heads that Zachary did not die and that he's coming for them.

This is based on a true story, the same one that was the basis for The Revenant (which I also haven't seen). It's certainly an interesting story, although I had some decided problems with the telling of it here. A lot of that comes down to John Huston. His character is such a jerk, and even though the credits say the movie was directed by Richard Sarafian, it felt like it had the fingerprints of Huston's direction all over it.

Large portions of the movie are slow and especially the flashbacks come across as a bit self-indulgent, as though the director is trying to add some sort of touch to make the material seem more highbrow than just a simple survival movie. The Robert Ryan movie Inferno did this much better.

Still, somebody who wants another take on the material behind The Revenant will find something of interest in Man in the Wilderness.

Wise Blood

John Huston is one of those directors whose work I've found very uneven as I've gone through it, at least in terms of how much I've liked it. Some of the movies are greats, like The Maltese Falcon or The Asphalt Jungle; others like Sinful Davey and The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean have left me much colder. Another movie that fits into that second category is Wise Blood.

Based on a book by southern writer Flannery O'Connor, the movie stars Brad Dourif as Hazel Motes. Hazel has just gotten out of the army, and returned to his old home somewhere in Georgia, although the exact location isn't mentioned. Apparently his parents must have died while he was in the army and nobody told him, since he gets to the old homestead acting as though he's expecting somebody to be there for him. Instead, the home is dilapidated and everybody's been buried. So Hazel sells off his army uniform, buys a new suit of clothes, and sets off for the big city of Taulkinham.

Taulkinham looks amazingly like the city of Macon, GA, considering how many of the businesses are Macon something-or-others. (As you can guess, and the closing credits reveal, the film was indeed shot in Macon.) After cavorting with a prostitute, Hazel goes out to see the town, which is how he meets Asa Hawks (Harry Dean Stanton) and Hawks' daughter Sabbath (Amy Wright). Asa is a blind street preacher who is so obviously a fraud and con artist that you wonder why on earth anybody would stop and listen to this guy, much less make a donation. Hazel thinks Asa's preaching is nonsense, but he's clearly taken by Sabbath. He also makes his one friend in Taulkinham, another transplant named Enoch Emory (Dan Shor). Or, at least, Enoch considers him a friend.

Hazel decides he's going to find out where Sabbath and her father live, which turns out to be a rooming house run by an unnamed landlady (Mary Nell Santacroce). After some talking with Sabbath and Asa, and Hazel's rejection of traditional Christianity, Hazel decides he's going to become a street preacher too, preaching the Church of Truth Without Christ, or something like that.

How anybody could listen to Hazel either is a mystery that is left unanswered. But Sabbath keeps pursuing Hazel, and Enoch tries to keep making Hazel be his friend. Asa's non-blindness is revealed by Hazel and Asa winds up working with another preacher (Ned Beatty), while Enoch goes nuts and steals a gorilla costume in a subplot that makes no sense whatsoever.

In fact, none of the movie makes sense. Perhaps I'm being too hard on John Huston, and instead should be harder on Flannery O'Connor for writing a story that doesn't translate to film. (Having not read the original book, I don't know if it doesn't work in print form either.) It also doesn't help that there's not one likeable character here. Every one of them is a selfish jerk, and with a bare wisp of a story, it's hard to be interested in these people.

However, some people will probably enjoy this look at a certain segment of society at an unnamed time. As for that time, most of the production design such as the cars suggests the 1970s (the movie was released in 1979), but the themes seem more from the days of The Trip to Bountiful (just after World War II) and Hazel takes what really seems to be a pre-Amtrak train. I assume the themes are supposed to be timeless.

So Wise Blood is absolutely a movie that you're going to have to watch and judge for yourself. You may come to a completely different conclusion than I did.

Sinful Davey

Some months back, TCM ran a new-to-me movie with a synopsis that sounded interesting, so I recorded it to watch and do a blog post on here. That movie is John Huston's Sinful Davey.

John Hurt plays David Haggart, a young man who at the start of the movie is set to be executed, and dictating his memoirs, much like the start of Kind Hearts and Coronets. Flash back to some time in the past....

Haggart is somewhere in the Scottish highlands as a drummer for a Scottish regiment into which he was drafted, circa 1820. Haggart is absolutely not cut out for the military, so at the first opportunity he jumps off a bridge to desert. He escapes in part because they didn't have photographs back in those days to show what David looked like, so he could disguise himself more easily. But when he runs into MacNab (Ronald Fraser), MacNab knows David's true identity.

MacNab is a pickpocket, while David's father happened to be a thief too, albeit a rather more grandiose thief who was eventually hanged for his thievery. David claims he grew up in a workhouse near the prison where his father was hanged, and even built a cairn to memorialize his father although he has no real idea where Dad was buried. All David knows is that he wants to follow in Dad's footsteps, and do the one thing Dad couldn't, which is to carry off a big heist.

But that's going to have to wait a while, because David gets caught, sent to a jail, breaks out, and starts another series of small-scale robberies. All along the way, he's constantly interfered with by his old childhood friend Annie (Pamela Franklin), who love him and claims she's really trying to save David.

Eventually, David steals some aristocratic clothes which enables him to pass himself off as someone of more means when he meets the Duke of Argyll (Robert Morley). The Duke and Duchess are holding a big party, and David sees this as his chance to make a name for himself by robbing the party guests blind with the help of MacNab and MacNab's ladyfriend Carlisle. Now to stay clear of Annie and the police....

Sinful Davey is an amiable little movie that was conceived as a comedy, and I can see John Huston going for a vibe that's part Kind Hearts and Coronets and part Tom Jones. But for whatever reason, Sinful Davey doesn't work anywhere near as well as the other two movies. It feels plodding even though it's got a relatively short running time, and although it's certainly not a heavy drama, it feels like much of the comedy has been sucked out of it. Apparently there were disastrous previews, and when Huston wouldn't edit it into something that might work better, the producers decided to do it for him, with the result that we see. Considering the problems I've had with some of Huston's other movies, such as The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, this really doesn't surprise me.

As for what works, Hurt tries hard, and there's a lot of lovely cinematography, with Ireland (a place Huston loved) substituting for Scotland. The latter scenes, once Morley shows up, also start to breath some life into the movie, but damn if it doesn't take a long time getting there. Sinful Davey is a movie I really wanted to like, but had a lot of trouble doing so. Still, it's available on DVD, so you may want to track down a copy to judge for yourself.

For those who like Tennessee Williams

Another of my recent watches off the DVR was The Night of the Iguana.

Richard Burton plays Rev. Lawrence Shannon, who at the start of the movie is an Episcopalian minister in some middle-class parish of the sort that David Niven had in The Bishop's Wife where everybody seems to attend services. Shannon, however, has some sort of breakdown when he's about to deliver one of his sermons, which results in going on a rant and getting dismissed from this particular congregation.

Cut to Mexico, at some point in the future. Shannon has apparently been down here for quite some time, never having been able to get a minister's post with another congregation. He's leading a tour of little old (well, middle-aged) ladies from Texas, a tour that includes one student, Charlotte (Sue Lyon). She's constantly leading him on, and he seems to be OK with it.

The woman who organized the tour, Miss Fellowes (Grayson Hall), understandably thinks Shannon is the one responsible for the way the relationship between him and Charlotte is going, and to be fair, in some ways he is. But she's also a prudish little biddy who's going to be complaining about the smallest thing. What she's doing on a tour like this, I'll never know.

Then again, I don't really know what everybody's doing in a movie like this. The tour is scheduled to go to Puerto Vallarta, which was apparently a backwater at the time. Shannon commandeers the bus and takes it from the hotel in downtown Puerto Vallarta to a ramshackle resort run by a woman with whom Shannon had a previous relationship, Maxine Faulk (Ava Gardner). He then steals the bus' distributor so that the tour can't leave.

Fellowes and Charlotte and Shannon and Faulk go through a lot of overheated Tennessee Williams dialogue, but if that's not enough for you, they're joined by sketch artist Hannah Jelkes (Deborah Kerr) and her elderly grandfather poet who should have been in a rest home decades earlier, Nonno. Hannah obnoxiously touts her and her grandfather's talents, while tending to Shannon, since she's the one who realizes how broken he is.

The tour group is able to get the distributor back and escape, while Shannon and the other two women do things for another half hour, as if the movie hasn't gone on long enough, until it reaches a conclusion of some sort.

As you can probably tell, I didn't particularly care for The Night of the Iguana. It's partly down to the dialogue from Tennessee Williams, which possibly works better on a stage, although I haven't seen the play either. It's not helped by direction from John Huston, who turned this into another of his indulgent movies. I couldn't help but think of Under the Volcano, which had an excellent performance from Albert Finney, but a Hustonesque ending that nearly sinks the film. The performances here are adequate but not quite as good as Finney's, and Huston thankfully has to hew at least somewhat to Williams' script.

Still, The Night of the Iguana definitely isn't going to be for everybody. If you're a fan of John Huston or Tennessee Williams, you'll probably like it; otherwise, I'd suggest starting with something like The African Queen for Huston and Suddenly Last Summer for Williams.

The MacKintosh Man

I recorded several Paul Newman movies during his turn as TCM's Star of the Month, and I've been working my way through them. This time, we're up to The MacKintosh Man.

Newman plays Rearden, a secret agent of some sort. It's a bit tough to guess exactly what sort, since Newman himself was American, but the movie is set in the UK, and his UK spymaster has Rearden pass himself off as Australian at one point. But his boss MacKintosh (Harry Andrews) is most definitely British. MacKintosh tells Rearden about a new scheme by diamond smugglers that has them using the Royal Mail to send stolen diamonds to locations they only use once, picking up the diamonds somehow and absconding with them. Rearden gets the address of one of those locations, so obviously Rearden is out to break the ring.

No, not quite. Rearden lies in wait for the postman, and when he comes, punches the postman and takes the envelope full of diamonds! The British police are good at what they do, and fairly quickly put the finger on him, leading to arrest and a trial which gets him a long prison sentence.

It turns out that getting put in prison was the point, as Rearden has to go into prison to find out something, which will only become clear later. Among the people he meets in prison is Slade (Ian Bannen), a spy who had passed British secrets to the Communists and is serving a long sentence for that. There's a shady organization that plans prison breaks, and they see Slade as an important prisoner, but are also willing to free Rearden as a decoy.

Rearden is drugged before being taken to a safe house, and when he wakes up he has no idea where he is, trapped in a nice room in a house somewhere together with Slade. This is allegedly for the security of the escapees, but it would immediately raise my suspicions, and it does the same for Rearden. Meanwhile, the people who organized the escape have been doing their research on Rearden's false identity and realize he's not who he's been claiming to be which puts him in great danger.

Back in London, MP Sir George Wheeler (James Mason) is planning to raise holy hell, but his old friend MacKintosh warns him about doing so, which leads to a sudden change in plans for the folks holding Slade and Rearden. Rearden escapes and finds that the real point of the plot was to get Slade out of the country so that he could be shipped back to the Communists, a handoff that's supposed to happen in Malta.

The MacKintosh Man is a movie that's full of twists and turns, requiring a fairly close watch to see where the movie is going. That's not a bad thing by any means, but it nice to have a bit of advance warning. As with a lot of spy movies, you need a healthy suspension of disbelief, with certain plot points feeling as though they should fall apart.

But with that said, The MacKintosh Man isn't a bad little movie. There's nice location shooting in Ireland and Malta, and some parts of the plot that are handled surprisingly well. I particularly enjoyed the car chase along the rutted country tracks of western Ireland. While the movie never quite rises to great, it's more than entertaining and a solid addition to the genre.

The MacKintosh Man got a release to DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive.

The List of Adrian Messenger

When I was making my last set of DVD purchases, I noticed that the Kirk Douglas Centennial Collection had quite a few movies that I haven't blogged about before. Recently, I sat down to watch The List of Adrian Messenger (also available as a standalone DVD) off of it.

The movie starts off promisingly, with a man going into a bank building one evening after hours, when there's only an executive working late on the upper floors. The man sabotages the elevator so that when the executive gets into it, the elevator plunges nine floors, killing him. The mystery man crosses a name off a list, leaving only one: Adrian Messenger.

Messenger (John Merivale) is a writer of several books who is now writing about his experience in World War II. He too has a list of names, presumably people he wanted to interview, only to find out that a whole bunch of them have died accidental deaths over the past several years. Messenger's friend Gethryn (George C. Scott) worked for MI5, so could Gethryn investigate informally?

It's a good thing Messenger asked Gethryn for help, because he's about to go to Canada to do his own investigation, while the man who sabotaged the elevator knows about this. He poses as a vicar and puts a suitcase full of explosives aboard the plane, before going into a bathroom and removing his disguise, revealing that our murderer is played by Kirk Douglas. (This is more of a suspense movie than a mystery.

Gethryn continues to investigate with the help of Frenchman Le Borg (Jacques Roux), who had worked with Gethryn in the war and who was the one survivor on the plane with Messenger. Eventually, the roads lead to a wealthy family out in the English countryside, with the only heir being a young boy. Aha! As with Kind Hearts and Coronets, Kirk Douglas' character must be killing off heirs to a noble title. Not so fast.

The plot of The List of Adrian Messenger is reasonably interesting, but the movie also has a huge problem. If you watch the opening credits, you'll notice some big stars: Frank Sinatra, Robert Mitchum, Burt Lancaster, and Tony Curtis in addition to those whom I've already mentioned. (Dana Wynter and Herbert Marshall are among the supporting roles). And yet, those big names don't seem to show up. That's because the movie was made with a gimmick of putting these big starts under the same sort of heavy disguise that Kirk Douglas' character is under. After the end of the main action of the movie, there's a coda revealing which star had which cameo as they remove their masks Scooby Doo-style. I found it all distracting, not helped by the fact that apparently at least one of the stars only appeared for the unmasking at the end. (In Douglas' case, the makeup was necessary since his character was supposed to be in disguises so as not to be recognized by the people he's killing.) Also, some of the voices are dubbed.

The List of Adrian Messenger isn't a bad movie, but I think it could have been a lot better.

The Red Badge of Courage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Megacetacean vs. Octopoid

And for fun over the weekend, I watched Tentacles, which is available on Blu-ray in a double feature with Reptilicus. (I recorded Tentacles off of TCM Underground, so I don't have Reptilicus to do a review on.)

The movie starts off innocently enough, with pleasant beach scenes somewhere in southern California. A young woman there with her toddler goes to get something out of her car, and gets stopped by one of her friends so the two have a talk. In some clear foreshadowing, we get camera angles some of which would block the mother's view of her baby. So eventually the baby and baby seat are just gone. The mother looks frantically, and finds the seat in the ocean! Her baby is obviously dead!

Ned Turner (John Huston, who thankfully is nowhere near as pompous when he acts as his can get when he directs) is a journalist married to Tillie (Shelley Winters) and they have a young son. Ned hears about the baby's death, and the odd circumstances, and he wonders what's going on. It turns out that it's not the first death, and when Ned sneaks his way into an autopsy, he finds that one of the deceased has basically been sucked clean, leaving just a skeleton.

Apparently some company has been constructing an undersea tunnel, and Ned suspects that company's tunneling of being somehow responsible, so Ned begins to pester the head of the company, Mr. Whitehead (Henry Fonda), and Whitehead's flunky Corey (Cesare Danova). They and the oceanography institute, under a team led by Will Gleason (Bo Hopkins) investigate.

More people get killed, including some of the people doing the investigating, and eventually they all come to the same conclusion we've already been kinda, sorta shown: there's a giant octopus, much larger than anything heretofore known by man, that has been lured out of its lair by the sonic waves or some such from the undersea tunnelling. Frankly, this seems faintly ridiculous to me. Most of the other creature movies used radiation in no small part because it's known to cause genetic mutations. Night of the Lepus had the good sense to use a drug experiment gone wrong.

Anyhow, it's up to the oceanographers to stop the giant octopus before it goes on more rampages and kills more people. One minor problem is that it can come up out of the sea and destroy boats. And then there's the minor issue of the junior regatta, in which Ned and Tillie's kid will be competing. Gleason finally hopes his killer whales will be able to help deal with the octopus.

Tentacles is silly fun, even if it's not particularly good. Fonda phones in his performance the same way he would in The Swarm, never mind that he's not given too much to do. Shelley Winters shamelessly overacts. Bo Hopkins talking to his whales is a hoot. The whole thing is clearly derivative of Jaws, except that this one has ridiculous plot problems. Remember that baby that got killed? Much too far away from the shore for the octopus to get him.

Winters is involved with the best humor in the film. In one scene Ned chides Tillie about eating too much candy, and Tille, referring to her ample size, says, "This isn't candy; this is passion!" Later, as she's entering her son and his friend in the regatta, she says she wishes she could take part, at which point the friend says, "Then we'd need a tornado to move the boat!"

If you're looking for something entertaining to watch with friends and a bowl of popcorn, you could do worse than Tentacles.

Thursday Movie Picks #183: Once Was Enough -- Movies I have no desire to see a second time

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of "Thursday Movie Picks", the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This week's theme is "Once Was Enough", meaning movies that we saw once and don't really want to see a second time due to the difficult nature of them. It's too bad I used Under the Volcano six months ago, because that's one I'd love to use in this challenge. But it turns out I was able to come up with three movies from the 1970s to use in this challenge:

Cries and Whispers (1973). Harriet Andersson plays a woman dying of cancer in Sweden around 1900, and looking after her now that her final days are here are her two sisters (Ingrid Thulin and Liv Ullmann). The family dynamic is screwed up, and all three sisters have flashbacks as to why that might be. One of the sisters cuts her vagina with a piece of glass. Seriously. It goes on like this. Ingmar Bergman directed with an extremely red palette.

The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972). Paul Newman plays the famous hanging judge who was the "only law west of the Pecos" as a complete jerk who makes the TV judges of today look like nice people. It doesn't help that John Huston got self-indulgent later in his career, and this is one of the more self-indulgent of Huston's movies that I've seen.

An Unmarried Woman (1978). Jill Clayburgh plays a modern urban woman who one day is divorced by her husband (Michael Murphy) because he's having a mid-life crisis and wants another woman. She tries to put her life back together, seeing a shrink and meeting another man (Alan Bates). I was about six when this came out and remember thinking back then that it sounded like such a sophisticated movie. Then I grew up and watched it and found out I was most definitely not in the target demographic. I had no desire to hear Clayburgh's character talk about getting her first period.

Escape to Victory

I think in large part because of the subject matter and the high number of athletes in the cast, the movie Victory (also known as Escape to Victory in the UK) gets a reputation as a hilariously awful movie. I bought the DVD some months back, and the movie is nowhere near as bad as it's often given credit for.

Max von Sydow plays Nazi Major von Steiner, who at the start of the movie is accompanying a delegation of Swiss Red Cross workers visiting a POW camp full of Allied prisoners. Steiner recognizes one of them, Capt. Colby (Michael Caine). Apparently, before the war, Colby played soccer for West Ham, one of the big English clubs, and even for the English national team. Colby has set up a makeshift soccer league in the camp.

Eventually, all of this leads to the Nazis having the idea of setting up a propaganda soccer friendly between a German team and a team of international POWs. This presents all sorts of problems because the British wouldn't want its soldiers becoming propaganda pawns of the Germans. Plus, there's really no way the soccer players can train properly. But Colby is told there are any number of internationals who are now POWs, including a Trinidadian (the Caribbean islands weren't independent countries yet) who looks and sounds surprisingly Brazilian, which is understandable when you consider the player is played by Pelé.

At the same time all this is going on, you've got an American who doesn't know much about soccer, and who wants to escape. Capt. Hatch (Sylvester Stallone), when he does play, tries to make American football-style tackles, which are highly illegal in soccer. But he spends more time on his escape plan, except that the soccer match is screwing that up. And then he does escape and make it to Paris, where the Resistance tells him it's possible that the big soccer friendly in Paris could be used as an opportunity for the team to escape! So we get to the big game. Will it be a fair fight? Will the Allies be able to escape at halftime? And what is Hatch doing playing in goal?

Victory is in some ways a familiar movie, what with the World War II theme and the idea of breaking out of a POW camp, topics that were covered in lots of movies. It's more the daft idea of putting a bunch of POWs in a soccer match in Paris that makes people want to bring the movie in for criticism. I find it's not so much that hook that's the problem. It's that the whole movie doesn't just require a suspension of disbelief; it requires disbelief to be levitated and flown off. The Resistance wants Hatch to go back into the camp to inform the soccer team of the escape attempt, but as we saw in The Great Escape, the Nazis just would have shot him in front of the others POWs without him having the opportunity to inform them of anything. Pelé gets subbed out of the soccer match, and then gets subbed back in, which is thoroughly against the rules of the game. And even though the refs aren't so neutral, there aren't even any yellow cards handed out to the Allies. If I watched the movie a second time, I could probably remember more obvious plot holes.

All that aside, though, Victory does entertain, and is nowhere near as bad as it's been made out to be. And the DVD is relatively inexpensive.

Report from the Aleutians

TCM is honoring Walter Huston today, even though I think it was yesterday that was his birth anniversary. I probably should have mentioned Report from the Aleutians a bit earlier, but it's on at 3:00 PM today as part of the salute.

This is another of those movies that was made during World War II by the filmmakers who were enlisted into service; in this case it's John Huston who directed. Japan actually captured two of the Aleutian islands off the coast of Alaska at the start of the US involvement in World War II, and so the US stationed a whole bunch of men on the other Aleutians to stem Japan's advance, and possibly as a precursor to the eventual invasion of Japan's Home Islands that never occurred. Charlton Heston was stationed on the Aleutians, and he mentioned in the Private Screenings interview he did with Robert Osborne that he thinks the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved his life: being stationed on the Aleutians, he knew that he'd be in the early waves of forces invading the Home Islands and that meant a likely death.

As for Walter Huston, he's here in voiceover. The movie is worth a watch for its historical value, and for its Technicolor photography. If you've got Amazon Prime and do the streaming thing you can stream it for no additional cost, but there are also DVDs available.

The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean

Last night, I finally got around to watching The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, which I had DVRed back when it was on TCM as part of 31 Days of Oscar, that's how long ago it was. It's available on DVD from the Warner Archive, so I'm OK doing a full-length blog post on the movie. Unfortunately, I can't say the movie is worth watching.

Paul Newman is Roy Bean, who at the beginning of the movie rides up to a brothel in the middle of nowhere in west Texas, west of the Pecos River. He boasts of having robbed a bank, at which point the men and women in the brothel assault Roy and shake him down (literally) for his money, before putting a rope around his neck and having a horse drag him off to his death. Except that the rope snaps and Roy, tended to by Maria Elena (Victoria Principal), recovers. Obviously he wasn't happy with the way he was treated, so he goes back to the brothel and kills the people there.

He finds there was a law book in the brothel, so he turns the place into a saloon/court, calling himself the "Law west of the Pecos". People get brought into his court, and he sentences them to hang, with little or no rhyme or reason. Along the way, he acts like a complete self-righteous jerk, reminding me of the portrayal of Theodore Roosevelt in The Wind and the Lion. (The movie has one scene praising Roosevelt as the best president the country has had.)

Bean also has a thing for singer Lillie Langtry, even though he's never seen or heard her, there not being any movies or records for him to see or hear. But still, he just knows she's unbelievable beautiful and dammit, he wants to see her. This actually leads to Bean's downfall, as his rival Gass (Roddy McDowall) is elected mayor while Bean is away trying to see Langtry in San Antonio.

After Bean is forced out of town, there's a wholly fictitious sequence about the next 20 years ending in the 1920s; in fact, Bean died peacefully in 1903. But in the movie, Bean gets to return to take the town back from the evil Gass.

Sadly, I found the movie wholly unfunny. Paul Newman's Bean (to be fair, it's not Newman's fault, but that of the screenwriters) is, as I said above, a total jerk who shows no respect for the rule of law and is basically a self-centered totalitarian. And this is presented as a good thing; we're supposed to have sympathy for him and root for him. And the whole Lillie Langtry thing was overdone to the point that I didn't give a crap about Bean's creepy obsession. Apparently, the real-life Langtry did visit Bean's town (which had been renamed Langtry) after Bean's death; that's the closing scene in the movie and Bean is portrayed by Ava Gardner. In fact, a number of well-known actors get small parts in which they only appear in a couple of scenes. Anthony Perkins gets one scene when he's burying the original brothel people; Jacqueline Bissett shows up for the last third as Bean's daughter. But overall, I found this Roy Bean such an irritating character that I just wanted to smack him.

Perhaps you should judge for yourself, however; maybe you'll like the movie. There are enough reviewers on IMDb who do.

The Roots of Heaven

The Fox Movie Channel had at lunchtime today the 1958 movie The Roots of Heaven. My box guide lists the movie as being on FMC again tomorrow morning at 9:15 AM. But Amazon claims you can get a digital copy of it, or an out-of-print Blu-Ray, or a DVD import from Europe, so I gues it's worth mentioning here.

Errol Flynn gets top billing, although he's not the lead by any stretch of the imagination. The actual lead is Trevor Howard, playing Morel. Morel is an early conservationist working in French Equatorial Africa, in what is now Chad. He's tryin gto protect the majestic African elephant, without much success. Indeed, he's been trying to get the colonial authorities to sign his petition to outlaw elephant hunting, but he can't get in to see them at all. In fact, when he finally does get to see the colonial governor, we find that the governor is trying to make things as perfect as possible for the upcoming visit of US TV commentator Sedgwick (Orson Welles, in a small role).

What's a guy like Morel to do? Why not take extreme measures, like shooting would-be elephant poachers in the buttocks? Not to kill them, but to send the message. And it certainly does send a message once Sedgwick gets shot: he goes back to Amreica vowing to use his TV show as a vehicle for ginning up support for Morel's ban on elephant hunting (on the set of that TV show about a half hour in is actually the last we see of Sedgwick). It also has an effect on a couple of locals. One, the barmaid Minna (Juliete Greco) actually becomes the first person to sign the petition. She's followed by Forsythe (the aforementioned Flynn).

Morel goes out into the bush to protet those elephants, while the authorities are after him for obvious reasons. Minna tries to convince the authorities not to arrest Morel, but when they don't agree to that, she goes off with Forsythe in search of Morel! They also wind up not being the only ones to join Morel's Robin Hood-like band of animal lovers. Some, such as colonial administrator Paul Lukas, seem to be sincere; others, especially the native Africans who are in an uprising against the French colonists (the movie was released in 1958, a few years before the big decolonialisation year of 1960) are more trying to use Morel as a way to get their own message out to the west. And if all that weren't enough, about an hour and 20 minutes in to the movie, American press photographer Eddie Albert survives a plane crash not far from where Morel and his crew are hiding, and he joins them as long as it's convenient from him to be working with them.

Unfortunately, The Roots of Heaven descends into a convoluted mess. There are a lot of interesting ideas here, but the plot doesn't resolve very much. Characters also disappear (Orson Welles) and appear (Eddie Albert) too quickly. It's all a bit of a shame, because there is a fair bit about the movie that's good. Errol Flynn's part is a small one, but he does quite well with it. Trevor Howard is very good, playing the sincere man with a lot of Don Quixote in him. Eddie Albert's character provides some comic relief. There's also a scene in which Morel and his supporters punish the matron who runs a safari business -- by spanking her in the middle of a ballroom! It sounds nuts, but fits in well with Morel's preference to be relatively nonviolent (at least not to kill) if he doesn't have to.

John Huston directed, and in that regard I'd have to say The Roots of Heaven makes an interesting bookend with his other film A Walk With Love and Death: both have a fair amount of worthwhile stuff, but otherwise end up misfiring to an extent.

A Walk With Love and Death

Another movie that's currently in heavy rotation over on the Fox Movie Channel that I've never blogged about before is A Walk With Love and Death. It's airing tomorrow morning at 11:15 AM on the Fox Movie Channel, with two further airings in August.

The movie starts off ith on-screen text telling us that our story is set during the Hundred Years' War, and involves the story of two young lovers who were born after the war began, and were fated not to see the war end. Considering that the war actually continued off and on for over 110 years, it shouldn't be much of a surprise that people lived their entire lives during the war. But the introduction also foreshadows that people aren't necessarily going to live happily ever after -- as if you couldn't get that from the title.

Anyhow, Heron of Fois (Israeli actor Assaf Dayan) is a student at the Paris university at some point in the Hundred Years' War. Well, he was a student. One day he walked out of class because he decided he wanted to see the sea, and from there go wherever a boat would take him. The movie is more or less the story of that quest, and the people Heron meets along the way. Now, you'd think that being in Paris, which is right on the Seine river, Heron would have been able to find a boat that was going down the river, which would get him to his destination quickly. One has to guess that because of the war, travel by river wasn't possible, so Heron starts off going on an overland journey, with the first boat he sees belonging to what is basically a cult leader who thinks women are evil, and that our hero needs to give up earthly desires, presumably by having himself castrated. But I'm getting ahead of myself here.

Heron had in fact met a woman. At one of the places he was allowed to stay for a night he sees the duaghter of the estate, the lovely young Claudia (Anjelica Huston). As Heron is preparing to leave to continue on his journey, they meet, find love at first sight, and exchange gifts: he gives her a poem, and she gives him a piece of her outfit. Claudia is the reason Heron can't join the "pure" Christian sect. And who would want to join such a wacky sect, anyway? But with the country being in the midst of war, and with the depradations war has brought upon the people of the countryside, perhaps some felt that this is a better way out. Who's to say whether it's a better or worse pilgrimage than the one Heron himself is taking?

Heron finally gets to the sea, or at least the other side of some high dunes across which he'll be able to see the sea in the morning. It's there that he meets a group of troubadours who have a rather odd performance. But less important than the performance is the conversation Heron has with them. Since they're a group of itinerants, they've been able to see a good deal of the countryside, and were at Claudia's estate. Not long after Heron left, a bunch of peasants sacked the place, killing everybody inside. Claudia, however, was fortunate enough to escape into the forest and avoid death. Heron, however, decides that finding Claudia is more important than getting to the sea, and on the cusp of his goal, decides to go back for Claudia.

A Walk With Love and Death, and Heron's pilgrimage, isn't quite up to the level of the one Art Carney's Harry takes across the US in Harry and Tonto. That's partly down to Dayan not being as good an actor as Carney, and not giving us a reason to care about his journey as much as Carney does. But it's also in part because of the people Heron meets. They don't have anywhere near the emotional impact that and of Harry's fellow travellers do. With the war raging around them, everybody in A Walk With Love and Death has sheer simple survival on their minds, and Heron's pilgrimage is, for the most part, a contrast to that. In fact, a pilgrimage by land seems like it would be impossible, with Heron and Cluudia on more than one occasion being saved by coincidence. This, I think, is also to the movie's detriment.

That having been said, A Walk With Love and Death is an interesting idea that deserves a viewing, since it's so different from what we normally think of from John Huston that it's clear he cared about this movie. It also deserves a restoration of the original widescreen print, since what FMC is running is a pan-and-scan version that takes away from what would presumably be some nice location cinematography. (IMDb says that Italy and an Austrian castle substitute for French locations.) Fox's MOD archive collection has released A Walk With Love and Death to DVD, but I don't know if the DVD has the original aspect ratio. There aren't any reviews on Amazon, but I'veread from other reviews that Fox's MODs have done a terrible job of not doing anything to improve the TV prints before releasing the movies to DVD.

One man's terrorist....

TCM is showing a night of movies directed by John Huston tonight. I've mentioned Bette Davis' wonderful rant in In This Our Life before; that movie airs in the wee hours of the morning at 3:15 AM ET. The movie airing before that, at 1:15 AM, is one I haven't recommended before: We Were Strangers.

Set in Cuba during a dictatorship of the early 1930s, We Were Strangers stars Jennifer Jones as China Valdés, an employee at a local export bank. She's not very politically active until one day when her innocent brother is gunned down at the university by the forces of the evil dictator. At the same time, American Tony Fenner (John Garfield) enters Cuba. He's actually there on a missoin to help out the revolutionaries who are plotting to overthrow the dictator. Needless to say, their lives are about to cross in a bunch of ways. Fenner and his gang of Cuban exiles have been using the bank where she works to funnel money between the US and Cuba. But, more imporantly, China has a nice house that Tony thinks the revolutionaries can use in one of their plots. The house is right next to a cemetery where families of some of the prominent members of the government are buried. Tony figures that if the revolutionaries can assassinate one of the members of the government, the rest will show up at the funeral, and the revolutionaries can bomb the government from below. That, of course, involves tunneling, with the beginning of the tunnel being in the Valdés house.

China agrees and sends the rest of her family to the countryside, while she stays and continues working at the bank. The tunneling commences, and as it goes on, she and Tony fall in love. And, in true Hollywood fashion, there's also a love triangle. The third member of that triangle is Pedro Armendáriz playing Armando Ariete. Ariete is the head of the secret police and as such, has a lot of reason to be inspecting the bank where China works. What he doesn't know is that her brother is the man that was killed by him at the university all those months ago. He also doesn't know that she's become the hostess for those revolutionaries, including Fenner. Still, he falls in love with her.

In some ways, it's fairly formulaic stuff, but We Were Strangers isn't that bad a movie. Jennifer Jones isn't my favorite, and certainly isn't a convincing Cuban, but since this could be a dictatorship anywhere, the miscasting isn't such a big deal. John Garfield is fine as always, the handsome man with a dark and troubled past. And Armendáriz is superbly sinister as the head of the secret police. The supporting cast includes Gilbert Roland and Ramon Novarro as two of Garfield's fellow revolutionaries, and both add quite a bit to the proceedings. The movie has also been released to DVD, so you can watch it any time you like, not just 1:15 in the morning.