The trees of size

There are different types of westerns out there, notably the cavalry/fort type movies on one hand and the marshall-in-town type. Western movie channels like to lump in a third type of movie that's definitely western-adjacent at times, which is the sort of period piece set in a frontier town. Think movies like Revolutionary War films set in the Indian theater of the war, or movies set against the backdrop of the Klondike gold rush. Something that's similarly adjacent to more traditional westerns is The Big Trees.

Kirk Douglas stars as Jim Fallon, who doesn't host a late-night TV show because the movie is set in 1900 when there was no TV. Instead, he runs a lumber camp in northern Wisconsin where he's a bit of a dreamer and a bit of a chancer. Fallon has trouble making payroll, to the point that his right-hand man Yukon (Edgar Buchanan) has to run interference for him. He's also got a long suffering girlfriend in Daisy (Patrice Wymore). Recently, however, Fallon has learned of a new federal law. Apparently, changes to the old Homestead act are going to change who has the logging rights to some of the land in the national forests of the western states. There's big money, and Fallon wants a piece of it, despite never having been to California.

So Fallon sends Yukon out west to size up the lay of the land, while Fallon himself follows not too much farther behind when he can get the money. What he finds is a bit of tension, as a lot of different people are laying claim to various bits of land. Some, who have apparently been living on the land for a goodly length of time, are at risk of being priced out of "their" land in favor of whomever can afford to file a claim. At least Yukon has gotten the current land office man to slow-roll the claims, although in his case it's so that Fallon and the men he's bringing from Wisconsin can make the claims.

The people at threat of being dispossessed are a group of Quakers, led by the Elder Bixby and young Alicia Chadwick (Eve Miller). They're proto-environmentalists in the John Muir mold who see these fabulous redwoods as a sign of God's majesty and providence, and really only want to take what they need for their own use and to make a modest living. Fallon, of course, sees dollar signs in those giant redwoods, and sets out to come up with a way to pull the forest out from under the Quakers even though he claims to be on their side (and even though Alicia is an obvious love interest for Fallon in the romantic conflict subplot of the movie).

Also trying to dispossess the Quakers, and there first, is Frenchy (John Archer), who has a bunch of men who have been trying to file claims and aren't about to let a little thing like Fallon's men stop them. The conflict gets much more severe when Yukon gets named the local sheriff and really starts to take Alicia's side. This he does even to a greater extent than being on Fallon's side, as his belief is growing that Fallon is letting hubris get in the way of morals.

There's also still the Production Code, meaning that the "good" characters are going to have to win more or less in the end, or at least the immoral characters get what's coming to them. And clearly the script has already been set up to have Frenchy and not Fallon be the true villain of the piece.

From what I've read, Kirk Douglas considered this to be one of the least worthy movies of his entire career. I can see why, although I also think that assessment is a bit unfair. It's not that The Big Trees is bad by any stretch of the imagination. It's more that the movie is a bit formulaic, and definitely a modest thing compared to the much more memorable movies with great performances that Douglas had in his long career. This one, for example, was made just before Douglas went over to MGM and made The Bad and the Beautiful. But The Big Trees I think successfull does what it set out to do as a programmer, which is to provide reasonable entertainment. It's just a shame that Cinemascope wasn't around yet, as widescreen Technicolor would have been a big enhancement for the movie.

The sky of size

Another movie that I had sitting on my DVR until it very nearly expired was The Big Sky. So I made the point of watching it before it did in fact expire so that I could get this post on it written and scheduled for some future time.

The movie opens in Kentucky in the early 1830s, although the movie isn't going to stay there for long. Kirk Douglas stars as Jim Deakins who is transporting a body to Louisville. In the woods along the cart path he hears a bird, and when he goes to investigate he finds it's not a bird but a man good at bird calls, Boone Caudill (Dewey Martin), who for whatever reason first gives the name of his uncle, Zeb Calloway. Boone and Jim get into a fight at first, but become fast friends by the time they get to Louisville.

Boone's intended destination is St. Louis, where he plans to look for Uncle Zeb. Zeb (Arthur Hunnicutt) is a trapper who returns to St. Louis with his wares once a year since that's basically the end of civilization in 1830. Trapping in the upper Missouri River valley and the Rockies is difficult not just because of the mountainous terrain and bad climate, and not just because of the violent Indian tribes who for obvious reasons don't like having the white man impeding on their territory. No; there's also the fur company which lays claim to the fruits of the land, having set up several forts along the Missouri to trade with the Indians. They don't like having anyone else trying to trap or hunt in their perceived territory without them getting a cut, and that is apparently just what Zeb's been doing. Zeb's in jail for stealing whiskey from the fur company, and when Jim and Boone get sent to jail on a drunk and disorderly, they get put in the same holding cell as Zeb.

Zeb's plan is to go west again, up the Missouri on a boat captained by a holdover from the days this area was part of the French Louisiana teritory, Frenchy Jourdonnais (Steven Geray). They can always use extra crew, so Boone and Jim are allowed to hire on. The boat is also taking a Blackfoot woman up the river, Teal Eye (Elizabeth Threatt). She had been kidnapped by the rival Crow tribe but escaped some years back. Zeb, having found her and speaking a Blackfoot language better than anybody else in the crew, knows that returning her to her people is going to go a long way toward getting trading rights for them and not for the Missouri Fur Company.

But the Missouri Fur Company isn't going to go without a fight. They have their forts along the river, and send a man named Streak (Jim Davis) to try to sabotage Frenchy's boat. It leads to a series of adventures as the boat goes up the river and the men have to fight both the Crow and Streak's men along the way. Teal Eye and another Blackfoot named Poordevil know the lay of the land and are able to help. Things get more complicated, however, as Jim and Boone both fall in love with Teal Eye. Will they ever make it Blackfoot territory? Will they be able to make it home?

The story in The Big Sky is one of those rousing adventure yarns that boys of a certain age will probably like. I don't know how much historical accuracy there is in this movie however. Meanwhile, the print TCM ran wasn't very good. In fact, it felt like it came from two different prints, with some sections not being so bad while others looked like they were from a bad 16mm TV print. That might have something to do with the fact that the movie was edited down for original release from 140 minutes to 122. The TCM print was back up to 140 minutes. I don't know if the movie would have been better edited down to 122, but I think it certainly would have been better if it had been written to run only two hours if that. It's also a movie that screams for a Technicolor treatment instead of the black and white we have here.

So The Big Sky isn't exactly bad, but it could have been a lot better.

Mourning Becomes Electra

I mentioned back in November that TCM had a double-feature of Rosalind Russell movies I hadn't seen before. One of them was the movie version of Eugene O'Neill's play Mourning Becomes Electra, which I finally got around to watching.

The movie, like the play, is divided into three parts. The first, called Homecoming, is set in April 1865. In a small town in New England, news is reaching the locals that it looks as though the Civil War is finally about to end, although news of Lee's surrender hasn't been made official. The town is dominated by the Mannons, although all of them are out of town. Patriarch Ezra (Raymond Massey) and son Orin (Michael Redgrave) have been off fighting, while mom Christine (Katina Paxinou) and daughter Lavinia (Rosalind Russell) are both off in New York, although not together. Tending the house is groundskeeper Seth (Henry Hull), who serves as a sort of Greek chorus for this tragedy, giving a bit of backstory to some locals who have never been in the house because the Mannons have a complicated relationship and keep outsiders out as much as possible.

In New York, Lavinia spies on Mom, and follows her to the house of ship's captain Adam Brant (Leo Genn). Worse, Lavinia sees Mom kiss Adam. This pisses Lavinia off, in part because Mom's being unfaithful, but also in part because Lavinia herself has the hots for Adam. Further complicating things is a legend that Adam is actually a cousin to Lavinia: Ezra's brother ran off with the nurse ages ago, leading Ezra to destroy the previous iteration of the Mannon house and build a magnificent new one. Adam would be the now adult child of that relationship. Meanwhile, Lavinia's got another man pursuing her in the form of Peter Niles (Kirk Douglas). He's been in love with Lavinia, and his sister Hazel (Nancy Coleman) has been interested in Orin. But Lavinia wanted to put off marriage until she knows that Peter would survive the war.

Dad and brother Orin eventually return from the war, although Dad is in many ways a broken man. He's already getting up there in years considering how he's already got two adult children and he's reaching the age where it's not uncommon for a man to suffer a fatal heart attack, especially if he's spent four years fighting a stressful war. Lavinia knows about Mom's dalliance with Brant, and knows that if Dad learns about it, it will kill him. Worse, Mom is becoming the vindictive sort of person who would tell the husband she hates about this affair just so it will kill him and leave Mom free to marry Brant. And if that doesn't do it, Mom can always try to get some poison that will do the job.

Unbelievable, all of this drama happens just in The Homecoming. We're an hour into the movie, and we've got two more sections to deal with. The Hunted deals with the aftermath of the death of the patriarch. Orin doesn't seem ready to take over the family, especially considering the sort of relationship he had with his mother. He too wouldn't be able to deal with learning about Mom's relationship with Adam. Lavinia tries to turn Orin against Mom by making him see that Mom has been having that affair with Adam, while Christine tries to turn him against his own sister by claiming to him that Lavinia is going insane. And then comes The Haunted. By now, Mom has died, too, but Orin and Lavinia can't escape their respective pasts.

I've never seen the stage version of Mourning Becomes Electra, which as I understand goes on even longer than the movie version, which is long at 159 minutes. At least, it's 159 minutes in the print TCM ran. Supposedly the original cut was even longer (which would make sense if the play was longer), and that got edited down to under two hours for American audiences with the British still getting the 159-minute version. In any case, it's a slog. It's easy to see why the movie was a box office failure.

However, Rosalind Russell gives a fine performance and picked up an Oscar nomination, as did Michael Redgrave. Kirk Douglas was just starting out at this point; I think this is even before Out of the Past. So he doesn't have all that much to do, although he shows he's a more than capable actor. It's just a shame that nobody could figure out how to edit the material down into something that would work if conceived as a two-hour film.

I Walk Alone

Once again, I was looking through the offerings on the various streaming services, and found that one of the PlutoTV channels (which, being owned by one division of Paramount, has the rights disporportionately to Paramount stuff). A movie that was already halfway through where I'd probably heard the title but had never seen it was I Walk Alone. Thankfully, Pluto is one of the services where you can tune in to something already on and watch from the beginning, so that's what I did in order to be able to do a review of it.

As the movie begins, Frankie Madison (a very young Burt Lancaster) is walking into Grand Central, having just gotten off a train. Calling out for him to pick him up is an old friend, Dave (Wendell Corey). As a nice lighting trick puts the shadows from the grille of one of the ticket agents' windows on the floor, Frankie realizes he's never going to escape such bars: it's a sign that he's just gotten out of prison after 14 long years.

As Dave takes Frankie to his new digs at one of those long-stay hotels that populated movies up through the 70s, Frankie asks about a mutual friend, Noll "Dink" Turner (Kirk Douglas). They were all friends before Frankie went off to prison, and in the meantime Turner has made a name for himself, opening up a swanky nightclub and taking on a nightclub singer Kay Lawrence (Lizabeth Scott) who's getting her picture in the press. Frankie wonders why Noll never showed up to see him in prison, and would desperately like to see Noll again.

Cut to the business office of Noll's nightclub. Dave works as Noll's accountant, figuring out how to keep the books balanced while paying as little tax as legally possible. Noll, for his part, has been expecting Frankie, as he knows Frankie is going to be ticked off. He knows that Frankie will believe he's entitled to something after 14 years in prison, and Noll gives off vibes that he's going to try to get away with giving Frankie as little as possible. To that end, he employs the assistance of Kay to try to pump Frankie for information.

This is important not just for Noll, who wants to find out what Frankie is planning, but also for the viewer, as it's an effective way to put in the flashback necessary to show the characters' back story and give motivation to all the characters. Fourteen years earlier, before Frankie went off to prison, was the late stages of Prohibition. Frankie and Noll were running liquor over the Canadian border into the US, when a rival gang decided to try to hijack the load. It led to a murder and the two splitting up, before making a handshake agreement to share everything 50-50. As we already know, Frankie took the rap for the death of the rival gangster, and now he wants his 50 percent.

Except that Noll has been very shrewd in his business dealings. With the end of Prohibition, the old club they had run together fell on hard times, so Noll dissolved it and set up a new club, the one he currently owns. And he got Dave to push some papers in front of Frankie so that he wouldn't have a share of the new organizations Noll founds after the old club folded. Dave has also been exceedingly good at setting up all the finances so that there's no way Frankie can get back into the club. And Noll is more than willing to use violence if Frankie pushes too far.

Meanwhile, Kay had been thinking Noll had the hots for her, only to have her hopes crushed when she learns he's after another woman. So she's willing to get closer to Frankie. This is important because one Frankie does start pushing to far and Noll has his underlings beat the crap out of him, Dave, who was also there, gets shot. Frankie, with his history, is an obvious suspect....

I Walk Alone makes me think a bit about Johnny O'Clock, which I blogged about back in November, as the two movies have some thematic similarities in the idea of a business partnership gone wrong. The both also have a lot of style covering up what isn't really a lack of substance so much as it is that the formula we're given is really nothing new. That is, I think, part of why I Walk Alone got mixed reviews when it was originally released. All three leads show a lot of potential, but this was before Douglas and Lancaster became big stars and legends. Contemporary critics wouldn't have known what the future held for the two actors, of course.

The result is that I Walk Alone is a movie that's eminently watchable, but decidedly not in the class of some of the great movies of the noir cycle, and with reason. It's also a film that would fit right in on Noir Alley, although as far as I am aware Eddie Muller has never shown it.

The Final Countdown

Well, not quite, but always worth watching and listening to

For no particular reason, I wound up watching several movies that have at least a tangentil relationship to World War II in relatively close proximity. One that I watched because it sounded like it had a really interesting premise was The Final Countdown.

The movie starts off in 1980, which was the present day from the point of view of when the movie was released. Warren Lasky (Martin Sheen) works for Tideman Industries, a company that helped design the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz. He's about to board the Nimitz, sailing out of Pearl Harbor, in order to liaise with the Defense Department and figure out ways to make the operations of the ship run more efficiently and smoothly. Captaing the Nimitz is Capt. Matthew Yelland (Kirk Douglas).

The voyage runs relatively smoothly, at least until dark clouds appear on the horizon. Yelland is annoyed, largely because there was nothing in the weather forecast to indicate that they might be running into foul weather. But the weather continues to deteriorate, until some sort of odd lighted circle that looks like some sort of atmospheric vortex or the special effects for a wormhole shows up. The Nimitz is unable to avoid getting swallowed up by the vortex, but when they go through it they discover that the weather is fine on the other side.

Things also seem a little strange, since they can no longer contact Pearl Harbor. Cut to a yacht sailing out in the middle of the Pacific not far from Hawaii. This yacht is carrying prominent US Senator Samuel Chapman (Charles Durning), chariman of an equivalent of the Armed Services Committee. He's there with his executive secretary, Laurel Scott (Katharine Ross). Meanwhile, Yelland has sent a couple of planes to do reconnaissance, and the come up with some shocking photos: the memorial for the USS Arizona is no longer in Pearl Harbor where it's supposed to be.

Chapman knows, because he doesn't need to be told, not having gone through the vortex, that the date is December 6, 1941. In addition to being a Senator, he's considered a candidate to be nominated for Vice-President, since people close to Franklin Roosevelt were terrified by the views of then Vice-President Henry Wallace, which were even more Communist than the rest of the Roosevelt administration and were looking to replace Wallace on the 1944 ticket.

As it dawns on Yelland and the rest of the Nimitz crew what day it is, that they've traveled back in time, and what is supposed to happen the next day in the timeline they've entered, they face the conundrum of what to do. Obviously, there's a lot to be said for saving the lives of all those killed when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. But in that case, the Americans wouldn't have entered World War II and would have had to wait until much longer to get involved against Germany, which would have completely changed the course of the war in Europe.

Matters come to a head, considering that a couple of Japanese Zeros attack Chapman's yacht, and then a Japanese airman is among the survivors rescued from that attack by the Nimitz. The airman naturally tries to escape his newfound captivity, while Yelland tries to figure out a way to keep history right, never mind the fact that the Nimitz is not at war with the Japanese yet.

The Final Countdown is certainly an interesting premise, and one that the writers try to handle as intelligently as possible. When it comes to time-travel, however, especially when travelling to a past that's not only already happened but excedingly well known, that's going to be difficult. The resolution of the time-travel paradox is a bit of a mess that I don't want to reveal. But at least the rest of the movie is entertaining, and definitely worth a watch.

Spartacus

I've got a box set of Kirk Douglas movies that has Spartacus in it. I'd been a bit reluctant to sit down and devote a good 196 minutes to the movie, sort of the same issue I had with Cleopatra a few weeks back. But Spartacus is going to be on TCM tomorrow (Mar. 12) at 4:30 PM, so I recently fired up the DVD player and finally watched Spartacus.

Spartacus (Kirk Douglas) is a slave of Thracian (roughly modern-day northern Greece) origin who at the start of the movie in the 70s BC is working in a mine in Libya, where the slave-masters drive everyone hard until they mostly die a fairly early death. Spartacus is unsurprisingly truclent about it, but there's not much way to resist when you're a slave. He's about to have a bit of luck, if you can call it that, in the form of slave trader Batiatus (Peter Ustinov). He looks at several of the slaves, and buys Spartacus.

However, it turns out that Batiatus runs a training school for gladiatorial combat, and intends to put Spartacus into combat with all the other slaves there, another occupation that has a fairly limited lifespan, since combat is generally to the death. But Spartacus is able to become romantically invoved with one of the females cooking and feeding the slaves, Varinia (Jean Simmons), to the point that she's going to become pregnant with his child. But the two of them are split up when Roman Senator Crassus (Laurence Olivier) buys Varinia. And after Crassus wants to see some combat, Spartacus decides to revolt.

They're able to break out of the training school, but if you think about it, it's not going to be easy to evade detection in Italy. Perhaps the easiest thing to do would be to go north to Gaul, but that's a pretty long journey. Instead, Spartacus contracts with a group of pirates represented by Tigranes (Herbert Lom) to take the ever-increasing group of rebel ex-slaves by boat over to the Balkans, requiring them to head down to Brindisi in the heel of Italy.

The Romans, of course, are up in arms about what's going on, and politics intrudes on what the best course of action should be. Pompey has been fighting a war in Hispania and is brought back to pursue Spartacus' army from the direction of Sicily, while another legion will attack from Brindisi. This will force Spartacus to head back north toward Rome, where Crassus has his own troops, and political reasons for driving Spartacus toward his troops.

In the meantime, there's been quite a bit of political maneuvering going on in the Roman Senate. Crassus, as we have seen, has tried to grab power for himself by becoming the hero in putting down Spartacus' revolt. Gracchus (Charles Laughton), patriarch in an old patrician family, is horrified at this, as he sees this as the first step toward tyranny. (Of course, he was ultimately right, as it would be less than 50 years until Rome became an empire.) A young Julius Caesar (John Gavin) ultimately takes Crassus' side, which I suppose was instrumental in Caesar's eventual rise to power.

The Romans also don't get to live happily ever after. Crassus loses Varinia, who runs away and joins Spartacus' army, and Gracchus is declared an enemy of the state by Crassus because Gracchus is the one person who could still challenge Crassus' power. Crassus also loses his manservant, Antonius (Tony Curtis), a slave who runs off after coming to believe he's going to be made a sex-slave.

The life of Spartacus is the sort of material that would probably work well in a miniseries, assuming that you want to cover the political situation that affects how the Romans handle the rebellion. At 196 minuts, this movie version of Spartacus is a little long, mostly because the final battle in which Spartacus is defeated but not killed comes with a good 40 minutes left in the movie. There's a lot of political ends between Crassus and Gracchus that the writers want to clean up, and a Hollywood scene at the end that's supposed to leave the viewer hopeful.

The version of Spartacus in the box set I have is the 2015 restoration which, if I had a good enough home theater to watch it, would probably look pretty darn good, although not as good as the Blu-ray release.

The Hook

Every Memorial Day weekend, TCM has a war movie marathon, and because Hollywood disproportionately made movies about World War II, that's what the movies in the marathon are disproportionately about. I recorded some of the non-World War II movies this past Memorial Day, and recently got around to watching another one, The Hook.

The movie tells us at the start that it's a story of men in war, not men at war, and the two are different. Also, it could be a story from any war, but that the filmmakers decided to use Korea in 1953 (so not long before the end of the war) for the story. Now, with that out of the way, we can get to the action in the story.

A small group of soldiers is on the coast trying to get a bunch of fuel loaded onto a ship for getting away from the North Koreans in the possibility that any armistice give this area to the Communists. Anything they can't bring with them on the ship, they're supposed to destroy. The group is led by Sgt. Briscoe (Kirk Douglas), with Privates Hackett (Nick Adams) and Dennison (Robert Walker Jr.) serving under him, and a fourth man. A North Korean plane comes overhead and the pilot shoots the truck with the fourth man in it, before the pilot has to scuttle the plane.

The pilot, however, is still alive, so Pvt. Dennison insists on bringing him along, because to do otherwise and just leave him to die would probably be a war crime considering his wounds aren't fatal. So they bring him on board the ship for the long voyage to safety, the captain having to take an evasive course, and hold the pilot (Enrique Magalona), who doesn't speak any English, prisoner in their cabin.

Now, here's where things start to get complicated. This is a UN-chartered transport ship, not a military ship, flying under a Finnish flag of neutrality, so the captain, Van Ryn (Nehemiah Persoff) is in charge here, and isn't going to give the same orders as the military might. And when Sgt. Briscoe is able to get in touch with headquarters, there's a really big problem. Headquarters has been attacked by the North Koreans, and Briscoe's commanding officer has died. So the Republic of Korea officer now in command insists that Briscoe and his men execute the pilot themselves, because surely the South Koreans are going to do it if he reaches there.

Sgt. Briscoe is a career soldier, and Hackett has a past with him, but you get the distinct impression that Dennison was drafted and had no desire to fight in what's nowadays the "forgotten war". Brisco, also being in comman, tries to order Dennison to do the deed, because that's the only way Dennison is going to learn how to be a soldier and act properly in a real life-or-death situation. As for Hackett, he has that past, which involves Briscoe saving Hackett's bacon when Hackett was court-martialed for killing a man while drunk.

But can Dennison kill the North Korean pilot? He definitely has moral problems with it, and it might even be a war crime. But at the same time, you can definitely sense the North Korean planning how to effect an escape, at least as much as you can on a ship. And why doesn't Briscoe just do it himself if Dennison and Hackett won't?

The Hook is most definitely not an action movie, but a thoughtful character study that asks us what we would do in a difficult situation like this. I found the story interesting if one that has a pitfall in just how long it can go on for. As with submarine movies but in a different way, there's only so much you can do with the basic premise. But the acting is good from all four soldiers as well as Persoff's ship's captain.

The Hook is a different sort of movie than one might think of when one thinks of war movies, but it's definitely worth a watch.

The Devil's Disciple

Hollywood didn't make too many Revolutionary War movies, so every year on July 4 TCM trots out a lot of the same ones. One that I hadn't gotten around to blogging about was actually made in the UK: The Devil's Disciple. So I rewatched it on Monday to do a post on here.

It's the middle of the Revolutionary War in New Hampshire, and the British have been putting down rebels including with arbitrary hangings. One of those hangings was a Mr. Dudgeon, father of Richard (Kirk Douglas). At night after the hanging, Richard takes the body down from the gallows and brings it back to Dad's hometown, where Rev. Anderson (Burt Lancaster) is the local minister. Anderson believed in doing the Christian thing, which was to try to convince the British to let him have the body buried, but the British wanted to leave it hanging, pour encourager les autres as they'd say. In any case, with Richard having done the deed and Anderson having buried the body, they're both running afoul of the British.

Dudgeon is a bit of an iconoclast. When he gets home to the old family home to hear the reading of the will, we learn that he's the black sheep of the family, but that Dad left most of the estate to him and not Mom (Eva Le Gallienne). But not is he the black sheep of the family, he's also a non-believer, so you'd think Rev. Anderson wouldn't much care for him. But then Anderson seems to be a man of the cloth who practices what he preaches, as much as being nice to a sinner like Richard might bother Mrs. Anderson (Janette Scott).

Some time later, Rev. Anderson invites Dudgeon over again. But Ma Dudgeon gets sick, and the good reverend is called to attend to her. (Remember, Richard, being the bad son, isn't about to get invited over.) Richard stays behind with Mrs. Anderson, at which point British troops show up. They've got a warrant for the Rev. Anderson.

Even though Rev. Anderson isn't there, Dudgeon claims that he's Anderson, since if he had been honest they'd both be hanged anyway. Probably the first nice thing he's done for anybody, too. But he has to pretend to be Rev. Anderson, which means having a loving wife. Mrs. Anderson begins to get the mistaken belief that perhaps Richard might be in love with her.

General Burgoyne (Laurence Olivier) is set to hear the trial of Anderson, not knowing this is actually Dudgeon, together with his second in command Maj. Swindon (Harry Andrews). The real Rev. Anderson, finding the extent to which people will stick their necks out to save him, decides to throw his lot in with the rebels, and take on the British troops in his home town.

The Devil's Disciple is based on a play by George Bernard Shaw, which means that for some people it might be a bit of a tough go, even though the movie only runs about 82 minutes. I think, for example I blogged about Caesar and Cleopatra before, which I didn't care for, many years back. The Devil's Disciple, however, is much better. All three of the leads are quite good, and director Guy Hamilton very deftly opens the stage play out, including an action sequence in which Anderson tries to sabotge a cache of British gunpowder.

While Pygmalion is probably Shaw's best known play, The Devil's Disciple is more than worth a watch.

The Juggler

Back at the beginning of the year, TCM ran a couple of nights of movies appropriate for Holocaust Remembrance Day, which gave me the chance to record one I had seen show up cut to pieces for one of the digital sub-channels, The Juggler.

The movie opens with a title card telling us that this is Haifa, in 1949. Haifa is the big port city in the then newly independent state of Israel. As mentioned prominently in Exodus and one or two other movies, after the end of World War II and the liberation of the concentration camps, Jewish refugees tried to make their way to Palestine, only to be blocked by the British mandate, but once Israel became independent, the country was able to take in as many refugees as it could handle.

Among the refugees is Hans Muller (Kirk Douglas), a German Jew who had been a juggler and clown in the circus in his native country, and successful enough to be prominent and to have picked up good English along the way (in the context of the movie, Muller doesn't speak Hebrew but does speak English; this isn't just the characters speaking English for the sake of a Hollywood movie). But then he and his family were put in the concentration camps and he was the only one to survive, with his wife and children being murdered.

As a result of the horrors Muller saw, he's got a bad case of PTSD, not that anyone really knew all that much about it in those days, and certainly not in a new country like Israel which had much more pressing needs, like how to get all these new refugees into appropriate work. Muller is put in the barracks of the main refugee camp, which isn't for him because he's had enough of camps, especially if he can see any barbed wire.

So Muller escapes and makes his way into Haifa, although where he's going is a good question. In Haifa a policeman sees him and Muller sees the policeman too. Muller, thanks to his experiences in Germany, has a primal fear of the police, and acts like a cornered animal, trying to fight his way out when the policeman finally does catch up to him. Muller knocks the policeman unconscious and, thinking he's killed the guy, flees.

The cop is found by a Dutch tourist (John Banner) and the police investigate, led by Detective Kami (Paul Stewart). Muller falls in with a group of adolescents, most of whom are with a school group, although there's one kid, Yehoshua (Joey Walsh) who isn't. When Yehoshua learns that Muller was a juggler, he wants to become one himself.

The two eventually wind up at a kibbutz in Galilee near the Syrian border, an area which was mined to prevent the Syrians from invading, since at the time they still held the strategically important Golan Heights. Yehoshua goes boundering off and sets off one of the mines, knocking him unconscious and breaking his leg. The kibbutzniks save both Yehoshua and Muller, Muller being put up in a small house by Ya'el (Milly Vitale).

Predictably, Muller finds himself falling in love with Ya'el, although keeping everybody from finding out the truth about his past is in the back of his mind, and unsurprisingly, the police are closing in on him, leading to the movie's finale.

The Juggler is a movie that's fallen into relative obscurity, and I think it's somewhat understandable why. The movie was produced by Stanley Kramer and released by Columbia, and I wouldn't be surprised if rights issues help up a DVD release. Stanley Kramer's involvement, combined with the subject material, make it an obvious candidate for falling into the trap of heavy-handed social commentary, and that does happen to an extent here. In particular, the movie ends too suddenly, as if it didn't know how to resolve the issues it set up.

On the bright side, there's a good performance from Kirk Douglas, with the highlight being a performance he puts on for the children of the kibbutz. The movie was also the first Hollywood production made on location in Israel, which also works well even if it's only in black and white. Paul Stewart puts in a professional performance. I don't know that he ever got to be a lead, but it's easy to see why he was able to work for decades in so many movies and TV performances as a supporting character. Vitale and Walsh are adequate.

The DVD of The Juggler does seem to be available at Amazon, but last I checked, not at the TCM Shop.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Story of Three Loves

One of the movies in the Kirk Douglas tribute on TCM tomorrow that I haven't blogged about before is The Story of Three Loves, which comes on at 10:00 AM.

Douglas doesn't come into the movie until the third act, but that's be design, since as you might have guessed from the title, this movie is an anthology of three love stories, with the hook tying the three together being that the men in the love stories are all traveling on the same transatlantic liner to the United States.

First up is James Mason, in a story called "The Jealous Lover". He plays Charles Coutray, a choreographer and producer. His love is a tragic one, being involved with ballerina Paula Woodward (Moira Shearer). Or maybe I should say ex-ballerina, since she has a heart condition that is supposed to keep her from dancing. But she's so desperate to dance that she runs off to Charles and does a tremendous dance for him. Too tremendous, in fact.

The scene then goes to young boy Ricky Nelson, playing Thomas Campbell. He had a French governess named Mademoiselle (played by Leslie Caron; "Mademoiselle" is also the title of this segment), who was taking care of him while his family was in Rome. He couldn't handle the French poetry and irregular verbs that Mademoiselle was trying to make him learn. On a dare from another American, he goes to see alleged witch Hazel (Ethel Barrymore), who gives him a special ribbon that turns him into an adult for one night (Farley Granger), a night on which he falls in love with Mademoiselle.

Finally, we get to Kirk Douglas, in a story called "Equilibrium". Kirk plays Pierre Narval, a French trapeze artist who is no longer doing his routine because it was an extremely daring one. Too daring, in fact, as it killed his previous partner. But then he meets Nina (Pier Angeli) and thinks she'd be perfect as his new partner. This even though she knows nothing about the trapeze and has a tragic past of her own, having lost her husband in World War II and having tried to commit suicide as a result. Still, Pierre trains Nina and the two fall in love along the way. But then the time comes for the two to do their most daring stunt without a net....

Anthology films are quite often uneven because each story is self-contained, and naturally some stories are going to be more interesting than others. For me, I found that The Story of Three Loves had a different problem. It was made in nice Technicolor at MGM, and all three stories are very competently filmed. But to me the movie kept having that MGM touch that I've described before where everything seems a little too perfect, winding up cold and sterile instead of full of vitality. Some point out that "The Jealous Lover" has an obvious comparison to The Red Shoes, and to be honest I've never been a fan of The Red Shoes either (not that it's bad, just that I find it a difficult watch). Leslie Caron isn't my favorite actress, so for me the Kirk Douglas story is the best of the three.

But I'm sure that other people will like The Story of Three Loves more than I did, considering how professionally made it is. The movie is available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, so if you can't catch the TCM showing, you can still watch and judge for yourself.

TCM's Kirk Douglas tribute

Kirk Douglas in Spartacus (1960), airing tomorrow at 9:45 PM

Kirk Douglas died a month ago at the age of 103, and TCM couldn't run a tribute during February because of their annual 31 Days of Oscar programming. So TCM got a bunch of movies together and is running 11 of them all day and night tomorrow. The progrmming lineup is as follows:

6:00 AM The Strange Love of Martha Ivers
8:00 AM Two Weeks in Another Town
10:00 AM The Story of Three Loves
12:15 PM Along the Great Divide
2:00 PM Out of the Past
3:45 PM Young Man With a Horn
5:45 PM Lust for Life
8:00 PM Paths of Glory
9:45 PM Spartacus
1:15 AM Live from the TCM Classi Film Festival: Michael Douglas
2:30 AM The Bad and the Beautiful
4:45 AM Seven Days in May

I'm not certain why they stuck the Michael Douglas special in at 1:15 AM; if the programmers had trouble getting the movies to fit into a 24-hour (well, actually 24 hours and 45 minutes) block, stick the Michael Douglas special at the end after all of Dad's movies.

Starless man

With Kirk Douglas' death a few days ago, I went through the box sets I have looking for one of his movies that I haven't blogged about before. I wanted to so a post on Before I Forget, which is on the TCM four-movie box set, but it turns out that that box set is now out of print, so I was going to have to pick something else. With that in mind, I picked out Man Without a Star, a new-to-me western.

Douglas plays Dempsey Ray, who is riding the rails heading north from Texas to Wyoming in search of wide opwn spaces. Joining him on on the freight train is Jeff Jimson (William Campbell), a naïve young man who is conisistently in need of Dempsey's protection, as Dempsey saves him after a fight with a railroad guard and then gets him off a murder accusation.

Eventually the two wind up in Wyoming, where Dempsey meets old flame Idonee (Claire Trevor) and eventually gets a job working for Reed Bowman, who is coming from out east to run a giant spread with over 10,000 had of cattle. Wyoming is still open range, but some of the cattlemen have decided to put up barbed wire because they need to fence off some of the grass to save it for winter.

Although Dempsey doesn't like these ranchers for fening in land, they're really not bad guys because of their good reasoning for putting up the wire. It also doesn't help that Reed turns out to be a cattle queen (played by Jeanne Crain), who simply plans to bring in as many cattle as possible, before the land is no longer fit to support those cattle whereupon she'll move on to greener pastures. It's somewhere between slash-and-burn agriculture and the tragedy of the commons.

Dempsey gets named formean despite his skepticism for Reed's plans, and when Jimson gets in a scuffle with the ranchers putting up the barbed wire, there are people other than Dempsey to protect Reed's interests, those being the group of cowboys led by Steve Miles (Richard Boone) who brought another herd north.

Man Without a Star is a competent western, albeit one that isn't breaking any new ground. Douglas is good, of course, with the exception of his hairdo which seems all wrong. Campbell does his best despite being badly miscast; he made me think of Robert Walker Jr. for some reason. The supporting cast is good although Claire Trevor is underused.

All in all, Man Without a Star certainly isn't a bad way to spend a Saturday matinee, although I'm gladd I was able to get it in a box set. The set I picked up is now listed as being on backorder at the TCM Shop, although there's also a pricey standalone Blu-ray available.

Kirk Douglas, 1916-2020

Kirk Douglas, the legendary actor whose career spanned some 60 years and 90 films, has died at the age of 103. Over the dozen years I've been doing this blog, I've posted a fair number of pictures, and thankfully I had a bunch of them posted together on Douglas' 100th birthday back in 2016, so it was a bit easy to find movies to show his broad range:




The Strange Love of Martha Ivers was one of Douglas' earliest movies, with Douglas playing an ambitious district attorney married to a woman (Barbara Stanwyck) with a secret that's threatened with exposure when former friend Van Heflin returns to town after 15+ years away.



Unfortunately, the photo I had of Douglas in Out of the Past isn't as good, considering I used it to illustrate Jane Greer at some other point. But this was another auspicious movie early in Douglas' career.



Champion is, if memory serves, sometimes considered the role that really made Douglas a star, as he plays a boxer who treats people badly on the way to the top and finds life there isn't all it's cracked up to be. That's Paul Stewart in the photo, while the movie also provided Arthur Kennedy his first Oscar nomination. Kirk also got his first nomination (of three) here, never winning but getting an honorary award in 1996.



Kirk Douglas roughing up George Macready in Detective Story



Douglas as a slimy journalist in Ace in the Hole, a movie still relevant today as journalism really hasn't changed all that much.



Douglas' second Oscar nomination came for playing producer Jonathan Shields in The Bad and the Beautiful, which won Gloria Grahame her Oscar.



Poor Kirk got upstaged by Esmerelda the seal in Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which also sees Kirk doing a bit of singing. (Considering the movie, it doesn't matter whether or not he could sing, much like Jimmy Stewart in Night Passage.)



Douglas' third and final nomination came for playing Vincent Van Gogh in Lust for Life, a movie that won Anthony Quinn his second Oscar.



Paths of Glory is one of the movies that clearly shows Douglas' political conscience, although a lot of people are going to mention his putting noted Communist Dalton Trumbo's name back on screen in Spartacus.



There's also Seven Days in May, in which Douglas ultimately thwarts Burt Lancaster's attempted coup against president Fredric March, is another politically relevant movie, especially considering what has been going on in Washington recently.

But unlike Lancaster, Douglas had the good grace to work with John Wayne despite their political differences, making The War Wagon, a western that's fun if not so well remembered.



I was trying to remember the name of the movie I had recently blogged about in which Douglas starred with Thelma Ritter. It turns out the movie I was thinking of was For Love or Money...



but, I had forgotten that both were also in much smaller roles in



A Letter to Three Wives.

I'm sure that TCM will have a 24-hour salute to Douglas sometime after 31 Days of Oscar ends, although I haven't checked yet to see if it's already been scheduled. If you have StarzEncore Westerns, they'll be showing The Man From Snowy River on Saturday, and a movie I hadn't heard of, Posse, on Sunday. TCM will be running Martha Ivers early Tuesday morning, with The Bad and the Beautiful and Lust for Life later that day.

Along the Great Divide

Walter Brennan was one of the stars TCM spotlighted in this year's 31 Days of Summer. However, one of his movies that I recorded was actually run for a different star's day: Along the Great Divide, honoring Kirk Douglas.

Kirk Douglas plays Len Merrick, a US Marshal out on his new assignment. He shows up just in time, as a bunch of cattlemen led by Ed Roden (Morris Ankrum) are about to lynch homesteader Pop Keith (that's Brennan), on the grounds that he rustled cattle and murdered Ed's son. Keith may well be guilty, but the marshal points out that this is for a court and jury to decide. As the marshal, it's his job to bring the accused into town for a trial.

However, it's going to be a difficult journey, as they're all out in a desert area relatively far away from the town and justice. More important, however, is that Roden and his son Dan (James Anderson) are pissed. They want "justice", which for them means hanging Keith right now. Since they can't really start the journey to town at night, Keith offers to let Merrick and his deputies stay at their place before heading off across the desert to town.

It's partly a ruse, of course; Pop has a daughter there in Ann (Virginia Mayo). If she can do anything about it, she's not about to let the marshal bring her dad into town. But of course there's also Roden and his men, and she's not about to let them kill her father, either. It helps that she's at least halfway capable with a shot.

So, there's an uneasy alliance heading off across the desert, with the Keiths going only for their own survival against Roden's men. Eventually, they get ambushed by the Rodens, but they're able to take Dan hostage, making Ed withdraw until the party gets to town -- if they can.

At this point, the movie turns from more action to more of a psychological drama. In the ambush, the marshal and his party lost their water packs that the spare horse was carrying, so there's a darn good chance of running out of water. And now with one of the Rodens in the group, there's even more people working against the marshal.

Along the Great Divide is a pretty good movie that probably would have benefited from Technicolor photography. I'm not certain if Douglas had done any westerns before this one, but he already shows an adeptness for the genre. Mayo, as with almost all Hollywood star actresses, still looks a bit too glamorous for the harsh west, but this isn't her fault. Brennan is an actor I generally find irritating, but at least here that character trait is a plot point as he's deliberately wheedling the marshal, something that's understandable since Pop doesn't want to have to face justice (which he expects to be a miscarriage of justice anyway).

Along the Great Divide is availalbe on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive collection, and is one that I think western fans will really like.

Not part of Kirk Douglas day

This last day of TCM's Summer Under the Stars is dedicated to actor Kirk Douglas, still alive at 102 unless he's died very recently and the death hasn't been announced yet. I should mention that among the movies airing is Town Without Pity at 6:15 PM. It's one that I haven't seen in many years, and seems to be out of print on DVD. Douglas plays a lawyer for the US Army who gets the task of defending some soldiers stationed in Germany who are being brought up on rape charges, accused of having raped one of the locals. The thing I remember most about the movie was the way translation of German was handled, in a very heavy-handed voiceover that didn't work well.

Anyhow, not having looked far enough forward on the TCM schedule to see that Douglas was going to be honored today, a few weeks back I decided to pop in one of the DVDs from the Kirk Douglas box set I picked up a few months back and watch For Love or Money, a 1963 film which shares its title with several other movies. So that's the Douglas movie you're getting a post on today, even though it's not airing on TCM.

Douglas plays Deke Gentry, a San Francisco lawyer and best friend of wealthy playboy businessman Sonny Smith (Gig Young). They're out on their yacht one day when a helicopter shows up overhead, with the equally wealthy Chloe Brasher (Thelma Ritter) as the passenger. She needs to see Deke about an urgent matter involving her daughters.

Chloe is a widow, and provisions were made in her husband's will regarding the three daughters, who are all very headstrong and not about to follow their mother's advice. According to the will, they've got trust funds set up for them, but the daughters will be cut off from the trust funds if they don't get married to people Mom considers acceptable. So Mom wants Deke to convince the daughters to accept him as the new trustee on the fund, and to marry the husbands she's selected for them.

That's not going to be easy. Daughter Bonnie (Julie Newmar) is what nowadays would probably be a social media influencer, except that they didn't have social media back in 1963. She's a fitness/beauty geek who's got $1/month subscribers the accounting of which is bringing her into trouble with the IRS. Agent Harvey Wofford (Dick Sargent) is assigned to the case, and he just happens to be the man Mom has selected for her! Jan (Leslie Parrish) is into beatnik artist types, and Mom thinks she should marry old friend Sam (William Windom). The biggest hurdle, however, is with eldest daughter Kate (Mitzi Gaynor). Mom's pick for her is... Sonny Smith. Finally to make certain things go as planned, Mom has a private detective Joe (William Bendix) assigned to watch everything.

Unsurprisingly, things don't go as planned, and you can probbly guess how. Getting Sonny to meet Kate hits a bunch of snags, and Deke realizes he's beginning to fall in love with Kate. Meanwhile, Jan sees Sonny, and perhaps she's going to fall in love with him instead of Sam. Now, I'd think that Mom should OK with Kate marrying a nice staid lawyer. And if she picked out Sonny as a husband for one of the daughters, why is it a bad thing if it turns out that another of the daughters were to marry him. But that would ruin the premise of the movie.

For Love or Money is formulaic, but it's a formula that works well enough for undemanding entertainment. Kirk Douglas didn't make very many comedies in his career, but he handles the material just fine. The three daughters are nice to look at, and the older stars (Ritter, Young, and Bendix) all fit their roles like a hand in a glove. There's nothing special here, but also nothing wrong.

The Douglas centennial box set isn't overly expensive, and with as many movies as you get, spending a few bucks for a formulaic trifle like this is no waste.

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.

More journalism movies

Kirk Douglas in Ace in the Hole, tonight at 8:00 PM

The March spotlight on journalism and the movies continues with a night of what TCM is calling "Newspaper Noir". It kicks off at 8:00 PM with Ace in the Hole, in which Kirk Douglas plays an unethical reporter who gets a big story and decides to draw it out. It's a great movie, although I'm not certain I'd call it noir. I'd call The Blue Gardenia (overnight at 1:30 AM) the most noirish of the movies airing tonight.

To be honest, though, I'm really mentioning Ace in the Hole because I knew I had that photo of Kirk Douglas. I had posted it many years ago back when I was hosting all of the blog's photos at Photobucket. Of course, they went and got rid of hotlinking, trying to charge a ridiculous sum to allow it, and then changed to have a watermark when you hotlink your photos. So every time I think of a movie where I'm pretty certain I posted a photo, I look to repost it, hosting the photo on Blogger/Google. I haven't gotten around to editing the old posts, and frankly don't know that I will. I haven't been using quite so many photos recently, but still there are a lot of them to go through.

Gunfight at the O.K. Corral

Another recent movie viewing was the 1957 western Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.

If you've seen enough westerns, you probably know most of the characters in the story and the basic events of the gunfight, at least as it gets portrayed in the movies. (The actual gunfight was only about 30 seconds and, for dramatic reasons, it's usually more drawn out.) The gunfight in this version comes almost at the end of the movie, which focuses mostly on the back story of Wyatt Earp (Burt Lancaster) and his eventual friend of sorts Doc Holliday (Kirk Douglas).

Wyatt, at the time the movie opens, was marshal in Dodge City, KS, having to deal with the cowboys who would come into town at the end of the cattle drive and consistently create a ruckus, not having had any way to have real fun while they were on the cattle drive for weeks at a time. While pursuing a criminal away from Dodge, Wyatt asks for information about Johnny Ringo (John Ireland) first from a lawman nearing retirement age, and then from Doc.

By this time, Doc already has his tuberculosis, a girlfriend Kate (Jo Van Fleet), and a reputation as a gunfighter that forces him to go from one town to the next. Eventually, he's going to wind up back in Dodge City, which makes Wyatt, not yet having Doc as a friend, thoroughly displeased. Things are going to become quite complicated, with the return of Johnny Ringo, and the entrance of lady gambler Laura Denbow (Rhonda Fleming).

Wyatt doesn't want women gambling in the "polite" side of town, but Laura is just so darn beautiful that Wyatt eventually relents, as long as she does it off to the side where most of the public won't see her. But Wyatt is also falling in love with Laura, taking the opportunity to do patrols where he knows Laura is going to be so he can run into her. Laura, for her part, isn't so certain she wants a lawman as her partner, not because she'd be expected to give up gambling, but because of the violent fate that's likely to befall lawmen.

Now, we all know that Wyatt Earp ends up at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, AZ, so he's going to be leaving Dodge. In this movie, it's presented as getting a telegram from his brothers, including Vernon (John Hudson) who is the marshal in Tombstone. Apparently the Clantons led by Ike (Lyle Bettger) has a ranch outside of town, and has bought a county sheriff who looks the other way when the Clantons are rustling Mexican cattle and trying to pass them through Tombstone on the way to getting them to the railroad. Laura just doesn't understand that Wyatt has to help his brothers....

Wyatt goes to Tombstone, and Doc makes it there as well. The Clantons, it seems are itching for a fight, while the townsfolk support the Earps but aren't necessarily willing to put the lives where their mouths are. Wyatt has to deal with Ike's drunken kid brother Billy (Dennis Hopper), while Ike concludes that the only way to get the fight is to make it personal, so he has Wyatt's kid brother Jimmy (Martin Milner) killed. It's enough to make anybody get in a shootout for vengeance....

Gunfight at the O.K. Corral felt to me as if it wasn't breaking any new ground, other than being in color and wide-screen which earlier versions hadn't. Still, the story is solid, and the acting uniformly quite good. Kirk Douglas is probably the best, followed by Jo Van Fleet. Burt Lancaster's Wyatt Earp comes across as having been written as not quite complex enough, so while there's nothing wrong with his acting, the script lets him down a bit. Among the supporting actors, Hopper is quite good, as are Earl Holliman as Wyatt's deputy in Dodge City, and in one scene, Olive Carey as the Clantons' mother.

Gunfight at the O.K. Corral is a movie I can highly recommend.

There was a crooked man...

Quite some time ago I recorded There Was a Crooked Man off of TCM, but I never did a post on it since it turns out that the movie is out of print on DVD. It's going to be on TCM tomorrow morning at 9:45 AM, so now is your chance to catch it.

Kirk Douglas plays Paris Pitman, whom we see at the beginning of the movie leading a gang that robs a wealthy rancher's house. Although he's ruthless, killing other members of his gang who survive the heist so that he'll be the only one with the money, he's also charming in that he suggests his victims just let him be done quickly so they can get back to their hot dinner before it cools. Anyhow, Pitman winds up with a whole bunch of money that he hides in a rattlesnake pit out in the mountains. He's the only one who knows where it is, and even if anybody else got the idea that it was there, they probably wouldn't know about the rattlesnakes. However, he gets caught back in town.

Cut to scenes of other criminals getting caught. Coy (Michael Blodgett) is a young man who accidentally kills his girlfriend's father. Cyrus (John Randolph) is a phony preacher with has assistant Dudley (Hume Cronyn). There's Chinese killer Ah-Ping (C.K. Yang), and Floyd (Warren Oates), who shoots the sheriff Lopeman (Henry Fonda). All of them get transported to a prison in the middle of nowhere in the Arizona territory, where they're put in the same room as veteran bank robber the Missouri Kid (Burgess Meredith).

Pitman, of course, thinks only of breaking out so that he can get to all that money he's got stashed away. The Missouri Kid, however, points out that it's going to be nearly impossible to escape. Not that it's going to stop Pitman from plotting. Of course, prison is a violent place, so there's a melee in which the warden, Le Goff (Martin Gabel), gets killed.

The new warden is... Lopeman, who takes a decided interest in Pitman. Lopeman seems to take an interest in actually reforming these prisoners (good luck with that), and he also wants to know where all that stolen loot is. Not that Pitman is going to tell him. But Lopeman sees Pitman's charisma, and sets Pitman to helping build a new mess hall for the men. Pitman sees that as his opportunity to organize a breakout....

Westerns have never been my favorite genre, and the more I watch, the more I find that I have a difficult time with a lot of the westerns from the beginning of the post-Code era. With that in mind, I had a good deal of problems with There Was a Crooked Man. It started off with the terrible and irritating title song, sung by Trini Lopez over the opening credits. The movie tries to be a comic western, but I found that for me most of the humor missed its mark. And it's also a terribly slow buildup to the climax.

Still, I always like to suggest that other people judge for themselves when I don't much like a movie. People who like westerns, especially 70s westerns, may enjoy this one.