Missouri loves company

In looking through the offerings on Tubi to see what was available, I came across a movie I had never heard of with a halfway prominent cast and a premise that sounded interesting enough. At the very least, there was one member of the cast who would go on to win an Oscar some years later in the form of Lee Marvin. That movie was The Missouri Traveler.

Unfortunately, the print that Tubi ran had washed-out color and was panned-and-scanned from the original 1.85:1 aspect ratio down to 4:3, since the movie has apparently fallen into the public domain and got lots of video releases in the days before TVs went to 16:9. Brandon De Wilde is the nominal star here, and he too seemed destined to go onto big things before the car accident that killed him at the age of 30. De Wilde plays Biarn Turner, who as the movie opens is walking through rural Missouri circa 1911. He's picked up at the side of the road by Tobias Brown (Lee Marvin), a local farmer with a lot of land. Biarn, it turns out, is an orphan who claims to want to get to Florida, but goes to the town of Delphi instead because there's no marshall to capture him and return him to the reform school or wherever he came from.

In town, Tobias shows himself to be not particularly popular, as he parks his carriage next to the statue of the town's founding father and that brings out seemingly everybody in town, played by a whole bunch of character actors, with a couple of exceptions. One is Doyle Magee (Garry Merrill), who publishes the local newspaper and has a past of his own that we're going to learn about as the movie goes on. The other is local socialite and granddaughter of the town's founder, Anne Price. She's played by Mary Hosford, who didn't go on to become a successful actress but instead married extremely well and became Marylou Whitney, the eventual doyenne of the Saratoga racing scene. These two are going to be somewhat against Tobias for the rest of the movie, and try to give Biarn a better shot at life.

Not that Biarn wants their help that much. He wants to be independent and self-sufficient, and figures that the only way he can do it is to become a farmer, just like Tobias is. However, Biarn doesn't have any money of his own to get a start, or any land. He wants to learn from Tobias, but Tobias isn't exactly going to be generous. At least, not in the way one normally thinks of when one thinks generosity. Tobias is one of those tough people who knows how tough life can be and figures Biarn is going to need to learn that lesson. As an example, one of the running plot points in the movie is how Biarn should always make certain to get everything in writing.

Over a series of episodes, Biarn learns to plow land, is allowed to raise crops on it by Tobias, and then eventually wins the town's hearts over in the run-up to the big finale set on the Fourth of July. The Missouri Traveler is another of those movies where I can see why the people who made it would have wanted to make it. However, it's also another of those movies that comes across as less than the sum of its parts. The movie was distributed by Buena Vista, a company set up by Disney in the early 1950s to distribute live-action movies. As such, the movie comes across very much like a lot of the other Disney family-friendly movies of that era, both for good and bad. Families of today with younger children, especially boys, may still enjoy it. But The Missouri Traveler comes across as awfully saccharine too.

Attack

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Donovan's Reef

Another movie that shows up a lot on one or another of Pluto TV's movie channels -- I think Paramount Classic or whatever that channel is called -- is the John Wayne movie Donovan's Reef. I'd never seen it before, so recently when it was on I once again used Pluto's option to start the movie from the beginning in order that I could finally do a review of it here.

Somewhere in French Polynesia, a sailing ship is plying its trade among several of the islands. Nearby is the island of Haleakaloha, where one of the passengers, Gilhooley (Lee Marvin), is hoping to get off. That's because he wants to see his old friend, Donovan (John Wayne), who lives on the island and runs a dive bar. But the boat wasn't planning to stop there, so Gilhooley starts a fight to be able to jump ship and swim to the island. Shows you what type of person Gilhooley is. And Donovan isn't much different.

After about 20 minutes of their monkeyshines, the action suddenly shifts to Boston. That's the headquarters of the Dedham Shipping Company, a venerable company founded in 1763 that has somehow survived for 200 years. The company is tightly held within the family, mostly old spinster/widow aunt types, although there's a young lady among them, Amelia Dedham (Elizabeth Allen). She's technically not an orphan, although she's never seen her father, who fought in the South Pacific in World War II and never returned to Boston after the war. One of the old shareholders in the company has just died, bequeathing a bunch of shares to Amelia's father. The rest of the family doesn't want this, so they send Amelia out to the South Pacific not to punish her, but for her to get information on her father that would let the rest of the family assert he's violated a morals clause in the will and thereby forfeit all those shares.

Amelia is hoping to get to the island without the islanders -- especially her father -- knowing who she is at first. Dad (Jack Warden), it turns out, served in the medical corps in the Navy during the war, and when he found out that his wife (and Amelia's mother) had died, he decided that the people of Haleakaloha and the neighboring islands needed a doctor like him far more than Boston did, and that Amelia was in better hands with her Boston family than with him. So he stayed behind on the island. Of course, we don't learn all of this at first.

Now, when Amelia gets to the island, Dad is one one of his tours of the outlying islands, giving whatever medical care he can to the residents of those islands. On the island, he had remarried and fathered three more children, Amelia's half-siblings, but because he's away at the time Donovan takes it upon himself to suggest that he's the widowed father of those kids. It's clear that he and Amelia are going to become closer, although it's going to be a difficult road to get there. Meanwhile, the French colonial governor of the island, the Marquis de Lage (Cesar Romero), wouldn't mind starting a relationship with her.

Donovan's Reef is in some ways an amiable movie, of the sort that doesn't really have the plot you might think, but is instead more about the relationships between the characters and everybody's story of personal growth as Amelia learns more about this island of seeming racial harmony while Donovan and his friends finally mature a bit. Once you get past the fact that the plot is a bit thin in the telling, it's not exactly a bad movie. The other issue, however, is that this is directed by John Ford, and his movies with John Wayne, and their friendship over the years, have a decided reptuation. If you've ever seen the TCM Word of Mouth piece that Maureen O'Hara did about having to take a drunk John Wayne to his club on John Ford's orders, you'll know what I'm talking about. And the movie has that attitude in spades. If that's not your thing, you might have some issues with Donovan's Reef.

Overall, however, Donovan's Reef is a fine little movie with lovely location shooting in Hawaii that's definitely worth a watch.

Stanley Kramer makes a medical drama

Whether producing or directing, Stanley Kramer was known for making "message pictures" dealing with important social issues. Sometimes, his style was blunt enough that the message came across as more important than the picture. One good example of this is Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. This was something I kept thinking about as I was watching his debut directorial effort (although he had already produced several movies), Not As a Stranger.

Lucas Marsh (Robert Mitchum) is a medical student at Big City Medical School, studing under Dr. Aarons (Broderick Crawford) and lightening the mood with his best friend, Alfred Boone (Frank Sinatra, and yes, everybody is pushing 40 and much too old for the parts they're playing). Watch also for a young Lee Marvin as another medical student, although he's not part of the second half of the movie. Marsh is highly driven and pretty darn intelligent, but this causes him to clash with the established doctors. To be fair, part of this is that they may not be up to date on the latest medical techniques.

Also causing problems for Marsh is his father (Lon Chaney in a small role). Marsh's mom died some time back and left him a fair amount of money which should help pay for medical school. But Dad is an alcoholic, and drank away the money, leaving Lucas with no money to pay his upcoming tuition. Thankfully for him, however, he does meet somebody who has a little bit of money saved up. That's nurse Kirstina (Olivia de Havilland), who has been saving up money, and who for some reason is part of the Swedish immigrant community along with Oley (Harry Morgan), forcing her to essay a ridiculous Swedish accent for no discernible plot reason. Lucas marries Kristina for her money.

Eventually everybody graduates from medical school and does their internship before going into practice. Alfred decided to go the route that Robert Donat did for a while in The Citadel, of becoming a wealthy doctor in private practice, although he's going to remain Lucas and Kristina's friend and show up when necessary to advance the plot. Lucas, on the other hand, decides to go to a small town that looks partly like a studio backlot and partly like a smaller city than a small town. There are some farmers around, and Lucas will certainly be serving them, but there's also a surprisingly well-equipped hospital and some ritzy areas.

The ritzy areas and farm life come together one evening when Marsh goes out to attend to a farmer who got kicked by his horse. The farmer's wife says that Miss Lang (Gloria Grahame) wants to see him, even though it's 1:00 AM. Now when you see the name Gloria Grahame in the credits, you can guess that the character is a bit of a vamp, or a femme fatale. Well, more than a little bit. Lang lives in a big house with a sort of hobby horse-raising concern attached to it, and she leads a lonely life drinking more than she should. You can guess that Lucas is going to find himself falling in love with her, and that this is going to cause a problem with his marriage to Kristina.

I mentioned at the beginning that Stanley Kramer made a bunch of message pictures, and boy does he try to insert as many of the medical drama tropes as he can to get The Message across. At times this makes the movie become unintentionally funny. There are montages of the doctors treating patients which look like they could have come from a medical issue of the week TV drama. Worse, or more hilarious depending on your point of view, is Kramer's use of horses when Marsh finally falls and becomes unfaithful with Lang. There's also the blatant foreshadowing. Kristina talks so much about having a family that you know that she's going to get pregnant, and it's obvious way before we see the scene of Dr. Boone telling her that it's already happened.

The casting is also interesting. Robert Mitchum is clearly miscast, much like epileptic research scientist Ronald Reagan in Night Unto Night. And as I mentioned, why Kramer made de Havilland and Harry Morgan take on Swedish accents was beyond me. On the other hand, Broderick Crawford shows he could play more than tough guys. Charles Bickford plays the elderly small-town doctor who takes Marsh into his practice, and he does well too.

Overall, Not As a Stranger is a movie that's more interesting for how it lets The Message dominate the movie than it is for being any sort of truly great movie. But it's still worth a watch.

Pocket Money

Lee Marvin (I think) was one of the people honored in TCM's Summer Under the Stars this past August. That gave me the opportunity to record a movie I hadn't seen before, Pocket Money. Having recently watched it, now is the time for the post on it.

Although Marvin has nominal top billing, the real star here is Paul Newman. Newman plays Jim Kane, a modern-day rancher living in Arizona near the border with Mexico. However, he hasn't been very successful, with an ex-wife and a bunch of odd jobs to show for it. Indeed, he tries to buy a bunch of horses, but the sale goes sour when they're found to be diseased and forced to quarantine.

While trying to deal with a possible extension on his loans, he runs into Stretch Russell (Wayne Rogers). Stretch represents another man, shady Bill Garrett (Strother Martin), and offers Jim money to go down to Mexico and drive a bunch of cattle north. Jim ought to have qualms about the deal, but he needs the money, so he heads off to Mexico.

It's in Mexico that he runs into Leonard (that's Lee Marvin), who is in Mexico for whatever reasons. It doesn't much matter to the plot, just that Leonard is as down on his luck as Jim. The result is that the two team up to do the job. Of course, as two Americans in a foreign land, they're going to run into all sorts of difficulties, not helped out by the fact that Stretch and Bill are looking for a way to fleece them.

On the way to do the job, Jim and Leonard have a bunch of mishaps, which results in Jim having to spend a bit of time in a Mexican prison and Leonard having to sell Jim's truck in a deal that also seems to be rather shady. Eventually they find the cattle that they're supposed to move north, but they don't have enough money to pay for transporting them for the last portion of the journey by rail. And they may not be able to get the money from Stretch and Bill....

Pocket Money is quite a bit of a mess, mostly because the plot does little more than amble on. In fact, it would be easy enough to say that the movie is more a series of vignettes than a fully-fleshed out plot, even if that's not quite the case. Newman and Marvin are both more than capable actors, and they both try their best, but the material is rather thin here, which really brings the movie down.

I'm sorry that I can't say all that much good about Pocket Money, but there it is. It's had a DVD release courtesy of the Warner Archive, but it's the sort of movie I'd wait to see show up on TCM again before watching it. As always, though, make your own judgment about the movies I give poor reviews to.

Save me from tomorrow

No, not that Ship of Fools

Stanley Kramer's Ship of Fools aired on TCM during 31 Days of Oscar as it was nominated for a bunch of Oscars. It's getting another showing tomorrow at 5:15 PM on TCM, so I recently sat down to watch it and do a post on here.

After a montage of stylized pictures of the cast assembled into the shape of an ocean liner, wet get the opening words from a dwarf, Glocken (Michael Dunn), breaking the fourth wall to tell us that the ship is packed with fools of all kinds. Shortly we'll get to meet all of those "fools".

It's 1933 in Veracruz, Mexico. A German ocean liner is about to disembark, and if you know your history, you'll know that 1933 is the year that the Nazis came to power. So there are powerful changes coming as everybody makes their way back to Europe. Among the passengers are:

Rieber (Jose Ferrer), a German who is sympathetic to the Nazis' anti-Jewish propaganda. He's married with a wife and kid back in Frankfurt, but has an affair with a young woman on the ship;
Lowenthal (Heinz Rühmann), a German Jew who because of his Jewishness is excluded from the captain's table and is seated with Glocken. Lowenthal thinks the Jews have been too good for Germany for the Nazis to carry out their threats;
Freytag (Alf Kjellin), a man who gets demoted from the captain's table when Rieber finds out Mrs. Freytag is Jewish;
The Huttens, an older couple with a dog; and the Lutzes, who are traveling with their adolescent daughter;
David (George Segal), an artist who in a relationship with Jenny (Elizabeth Ashley), which seems more about the sex than real love;
La Condesa (Simone Signoret), a Spaniard who has an opiate addiction and is being deported to a prison in the Canary Islands);
Mary Treadwell (Vivien Leigh), a wealthy divorcée who seems to be looking for a younger man; and
Bill Tenny (Lee Marvin), a failed baseball player who meets Mary and finds the hatred is mutual.

There's also the ship's doctor, Schumann (Oskar Werner), who treats the Condesa and finds that he's falling in love with her. He's sickly, having had a heart attack in his early 40s, and wants to leave his wife behind and treat the Condesa if possible.

So, on the face of it, there's a lot going on, with things getting even more complicated when the ship is more or less forced to pick up 600 migrant workers that the Cuban government is throwing out and deporting back to Spain. Most of the passegners try not to pay attention to those poor Spaniards down in steerage, instead focusing more on their own personal dramas that nobody else on the ship really cares about.

Frankly, it's hard as a viewer to care about these people. There's just too many stories going on, and the characters seem more like archetypes who are there to fit the pontifications of Katherine Ann Porter (who wrote the novel on which the movie is based) and director Stanley Kramer, who never shied away from putting even more of a message into his social message pictures.

Other people, however, will probably enjoy Ship of Fools more than I did, so definitely give it a go and judge for yourself.

Avalanche Express

I've mentioned before that pretty much every big-name star out there who made enough movies had at least one dud in their career. For Lee Marvin, that movie might well be Avalanche Express.

The movie starts off in the Soviet Union, with a bunch of high-ranking KGB officials discussing a germ warfare project code-named "Winter Harvest" and how information about it is getting leaked to the west by some guy named "Angelo". Angelo has passed information on a cassette tape to an American in Zürich, and the information keeps getting passed until the head of the operation, Haller (Mike Connors) can decode it. The Americans should meet Angelo at La Scala opera house in Milan at a particular time when he will reveal himself.

Angelo is really the code name of Marenkov (Robert Shaw), a KGB general who is not one of the hard-liners, and troubled that they're gaining the upper hand, hence going forward with Winter Harvest and his planned defection to reveal everything he knows about it. Haller and second-in-command Harry Wargrave (Lee Marvin) want to debrief Marenkov right then and there, but he already agreed that he'd only be debriefed when he reached the US. Plus, he's got a plan of his own.

Marenkov wants to defeat the head of the hard-liners, General Bunin (Maximilian Schell), but to do that is going to require getting him out in the open. So, Marenkov and Wargrave come up with the idea that they take the "Atlantic Express" train that goes from Milan to Rotterdam in the Netherlands (even though none of these places are near the Atlantic) from where he can be flown to the US. This would give the Soviets ample opportunity to try to get Marenkov, opportunities which are a double-edged sword as the CIA can flush out a whole bunch of Soviet agents and liquidate them.

Among the Americans who were already involved in getting the casette from Angelo are Leroy (Joe Namath) and Elsa Lang (Linda Evans). Complicating matters is that Elsa and Harry have an estranged romantic relationship, something that seems like it would be a problem amongst spies, but what do I know. At any rate, the train inexorably makes its way toward Rotterdam, with various groups of Soviet agents trying to ambush the train on one occasion, and setting off an avalanche (hence the title) in the Swiss Alps. Will Marenkov make it to America?

The big problem with Avalance Express is that it seems more like a bunch of set pieces with a threadbare plot, and a bunch of characters who are given overly complicated relationships. Robert Shaw and director Mark Robson both died during post-production, and from what I've read Shaw was already quite ill during primary filming. I can't imagine the Soviets being this violent, either, considering the number of innocents around, but then, we probably wouldn't have much of a movie.

I remember when TCM did a spotlight on the special effects of MGM's A. Arnold Gillespie that one of the modern-day effects artists they had discussing the movie said a big problem trying to film water effects is that the drops can only get so small, so if you're using miniatures you want them as large as possible lest the water droplets look too big. That was the same problem that the avalanche (which I think is supposed to be the highlight of the movie) has, only with snow instead of liquid water.

Overall, Avalanche Express doesn't really work, and feels like a tired late-era entry in a genre that had been played out. It's available on DVD, though, should you wish to watch for yourself.

The Killers (1964)

A couple of months back when TCM did a spotlight on the Film Foundation. One of the movies they showed was the 1964 version of The Killers. It's going to be on again as part of Noir Alley, overnight tonight at 12:30 AM and then again tomorrow morning at 10:00 AM. So I sat down to watch it and do a review here.

As you may know, there's a 1946 movie called The Killers based on a short story by Ernest Hemingway and building a fuller story around that short story. This 1964 version is a sort of remake in that it takes the original Hemingway story and, like the earlier movie, extends it, although as it turns out not in quite the same way. John Cassavetes plays Johnny North, who is teaching at a school for the blind. Two men come in, Charlie (Lee Marvin) and Lee (Clu Gulager), looking for Johnny. It turns out that these two are contract killers, with a $25,000 contract to kill Johnny. They find him, and Johnny seems strangely resigned to his death.

That's more or less where the Hemingway story ended, but both movies decided to add a much bigger story: why was Johnny so accepting of his fate that he doesn't do a darn thing to keep these guys from killing him? Charlie is the brains of the operation, and realizes that there must be something much more than the $25,000 out there or else why would anybody want Johnny dead? So Charlie decides he and Lee are going to find out what the bigger payoff is, to see if they can get at it themselves.

This leads them to Miami, where they meet Earl Sylvester, a mechanic working on muscle cars and other sports cars. Earl had known Johnny out on the west coast when Johnny was a racecar driver. But Johnny got in a smash-up that more or less ended his career. Along the way, he had met Sheila (Angie Dickinson) and fallen in love with her, but Earl warned Johnny that Sheila was the kept woman of Jack Browning (Ronald Reagan), so any romance was doomed.

But there's more to Johnny and Sheila's relationship. At some point after the smash-up, Johnny has been reduced to doing demolition derby and short dirt track racing, but as related by Mickey (Norman Fell), Browning's right-hand man at the time, Sheila finds Johnny again. He would be perfect as the driver in a scheme Jack is cooking up. That plot is a heist of a mail delivery which will be carrying the takings for a bunch of resorts on the Pacific coast, and should be close to seven figures. Johnny could use the money, and this is a chance to see Sheila again. Not only will he get to see Sheila; perhaps he can figure out a way to double-cross Browning so that he and Sheila can run off with the money and live happily ever after.

Now, we know from the beginning of the movie that Johnny and Sheila don't live happily ever after. But what happened to sour the relationship? Well, for that, you're going to have to watch this version of The Killers.

There's a lot different between this movie and the 1946 original, but both are absolutely worth watching. The 1964 version was originally conceived as a TV movie, but the network rejected it because of the amoral violence, so it got pitched as a movie, turning out to be Ronald Reagan's final film before he would switch to politics and run for Governor of California.

There are any number of places in which the TV movie origins are evident, most notably in the interiors, which really look like they've got a TV budget, as though they came out of episodes of the 1960s Dragnet, even though that series debuted later. There's also some scenes that are obviously done on the Universal backlot.

But the movie itself is solid, with Cassavetes good, Marvin playing a character similar to the one he essayed in Violent Saturday, and Reagan being surprisingly good cast against type since his forte was really good guys. Here, Reagan acts and delivers his dialogue as though he's channeling Jack Webb's Joe Friday, if Webb had believed that the cops weren't your friend and instead on the take. It might be a strange characterization but it works; after all, somebody like Browning wouldn't be the sort of oafish hoodlum that Clu Gulager comes close to playing (rightly, I think).

So despite the low budget, the 1964 The Killers is a very entertaining way to spend an hour and a half. Criterion released a DVD with both versions of the movie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Listening to the winds of change

During one of the previous free preview weekends for Epix, I had the chance to record Gorky Park. It's going to be on again multiple times this week, starting tomorrow afternoon at 3:50 PM on Epix Hits (and again Friday on Epix 2 and Saturday on Epix).

One winter's night near the skating rink in Moscow's Gorky Park, somebody runs across three decomposing bodies, which is of course disconcerting. The militsiya, the local civil police (not a "militia", and a four-syllable word, despite everybody in the movie calling it the "militia"), led by Arkday Renko (William Hurt), is called in. Renko is the son of a World War II hero and good at what he does, although on previous cases he's butted heads with the KGB, something that really worries him.

He's going to have good reason to be worried, as the three bodies are clearly murder victims, with their faces and fingertips cut off so as to make identification that much more difficult. There are still small bits of evidence, with a couple of them being surprising. One is a pair of ice skates which have a woman's name on them. Renko goes to see that woman, Irina Asanova (Joanna Pacula). She's unsurprisingly evasive in her answers.

The other surprising clue is that one of the dead men has dyed red hair, and dental work using materials not currently used in Europe, identifying this man as likely American. This means a posible international incident. Indeed, Renko is invited to visit the dacha of Chief Prosecutor Iamskoy, where he meets American furrier Jack Osborne (Lee Marvin), who has been importing Russian sable, one of the finest furs. There are also people from the KGB there, worrying Renko even more.

Osborne turns out not to be the only American Renko meets. One day he gets waylaid by somebody who beats the crap out of him, and in investigating further, winds up at a hotel for foreigners where he makes his way to the hotel room of one William Kirwill (Brian Dennehy). On going through Kirwill's stuff (no search warrant here, this not being the US), he finds information on the triple murder case, and parts that assemble together to make a gun -- but then Kirwill walks into his room!

It turns out that Kirwill is a police detective from New York City, and that the dead American is most likely Kirwill's kid brother James, who had studied in Moscow and who wanted to help people defect from the USSR, a very dangerous game indeed. Renko decides eventually to accept whatever help Kirwill could give him despite being constrained by being a foreigner in Moscow.

Renko also discovers that Osborne and the KGB may well be involved in the triple murders, as the three were building a chest that could hide religious icons being smuggled out of the country. Perhaps this could allow Renko to crack the case wide open, but then, there's still the KBG to deal with....

Gorky Park is a well-constructed mystery, at least up until the third act, as a longish final act is tacked on that I felt made the story bog down. Still the acting is uniformly good and nobody really tries to recreate a phony Russian accent, which is also a plus. This having been made in the Soviet era, they obviously couldn't film in Moscow, so Helsinki stands in and mostly does a good job other than a few buildings that didn't look Russian to me at all.

Gorky Park is definitely worth a watch. It's been released on DVD with TCM having it as part of a set of three movies and Amazon having the standalone DVD. Amazon also has it on Prime Video if you can do that.

The Rack

I mentioned earlier that I recorded quite a few of the movies that aired during TCM's tribute to May 2019 Star of the Month Paul Newman, so I'm getting through them slowly. The most recent watch was The Rack.

A bunch of people are waiting at an airport for a military plane bringing a group of POWs from the Korean War home. Among them is Capt. Edward Hall, Jr. (Paul Newman). He's the son of army colonel Edward Hall Sr. (Walter Pidgeon), and also had a brother who died in the war, leaving behind a widow in Aggie Hall (Anne Francis).

Before the POWs can go home, they have to spend some time at the military hospital to be debriefed by army psychologists and the like. While Ed Jr. is watching a movie, another soldier comes up to him, and puts a noose around his neck with a placard reading "TRAITOR". Oh dear, somebody has something against poor Ed. It's not just this one man, either. Ed is uncomfortable being back home, and feels like his father isn't making things any easier for him. Just wait until Dad finds out about what happened over in Korea.

Apparently during the debriefings, enough evidence was obtained to lead military authorities to believe that Ed Jr. collaborated with the Chinese who were holding them prisoner, and this is a really serious offense. Dad can't believe this, as he raised his two sons to be perfect little soldiers. Surely when they hold the trial, the truth is going to come out and Ed Jr. is going to be exonerated.

The trial begins, with Lt. Col. Wasnick (Edmnod O'Brien) defending Capt. Hall, and Maj. Moulton (Wendell Corey) prosecuting the case. It's a difficult defense, as Capt. Hall has admitted that he did the things he's accused of, although he says that he felt it was the only thing he could do to help the men in his command. Wasnick obviously doesn't believe any of this, and he's going to do everything he can to debunk Hall's defense when he takes the stand.

The Rack is another of those movies that's well-made, but which kept striking me as having something not quite right about them. One of the big things for me was the scene resolving the relationship between father and son, which came across as really artificial.. Something also felt off about the trial, although that's probably because it was a military trial, which does have different rules from civilian justice. But where did they get all the evidence that the Chinese would certainly have kept?

However, Newman gives a very good performance and his clearly on his way to becoming a star in the early picture. The supporting cast is also pretty good, even Pidgeon who is normally a bit too stolid for my tastes. There's a nice early supporting role from Lee Marvin, and James Best (Roscoe P. Coltrane from The Dukes of Hazard) and Cloris Leachman have bit parts.

The Rack is available on DVD from the Warner Archive, and isn't a bad little movie.

When the Alpha, Beta, and Gamma Forces fail

So I watched The Delta Force off my DVR since it's available on DVD and Blu-ray in multiple editions, and Amazon has it in the streaming thing, too.

The movie starts off with a sequence that isn't quite necessary to the movie, but establishes the Delta Force. In 1980, after the Iranians took US embassy workers in Teheran hostage, a plan was hatched to rescue them by sending in helicopters. The plan failed, and eight people died. In the movie, this plan is credited to the Delta Force, with commander Col. Alexander (Lee Marvin) and his second in command Scott McCoy (Chuck Norris).

Fast forward six years. For those who don't remember, the 1980s were a time with a lot of terrorism, especially in Europe. One of the more memorable incidents was that of TWA Flight 847. Hijackers (played in the movie by Robert Forster and others) got on the plane in Athens and hijacked the plane, forcing it to land in Beirut. The plane then went from Beirut to Algiers, and then back to Beirut.

In the movie, the hijackers, being from an Arab terrorist group, want to kill all the Israelis, but there are supposedly no Israelis on board. So instead, they want all the Jewish men. There were a couple of men with Jewish-sounding surnames (Martin Balsam and Joey Bishop, with their wives played by Shelley Winters and Lainie Kazan respectively), a couple of young Navy guys, and a Catholic priest (George Kennedy) who all got taken to the front of the plane, presumably to be treated differently from everybody else.

Anyhow, it's time to call in the Delta Force. As far as they know, there are two hijackers on the plane, which is now heading for Algiers. What they don't know is that at the fuel stop in Beirut, the two hijackers smuggled in about another ten accomplices, making the Delta Force's task much more difficult. The mission in Algiers gets aborted as the plane heads back to Lebanon. However, the hijackers had magnanimously let the women and children off the plane.

Back in Beirut, they deal with the remaining hostages, while Delta Force scrambles to figure out a way to rescue them. This is going to be a bigger problem, as the US was able to get the cooperation of the Algerian government. Lebanon, however, was in the middle of a civil war at the time, and there was no way they'd be able to get in normally.

The Delta Force is very much a movie of two distinct halves. The first half deals with the hijacking up until about the second landing in Beirut, and the second half deals with the Delta Force's rescue operation. The two halves couldn't feel more different. The first half is a generally tense, dramatic, and suspenseful affair, with shades of movies like The Incident when you wonder why nobody fights back. But once the Delta Force lands in Lebanon, it becomes a 1980s action movie, with increasingly ludicrous premises (the motorcycle Chuck Norris' character rides, for example).

Having said that, the action half still entertains and winds up being a lot of fun as long as you know you're getting something that's not prestige movie material. Don't pay too much attention to the acting here since there's not much. Well, fat-era Shelley Winters gets to overact some more which is always enjoyable. And George Kennedy is a more believable priest than OJ Simpson was in The Cassandra Crossing. Acting honors probably go to the actor playing the Greek Orthodox priest in Beirut, a man named Shaike Ophir I'd never heard of. (I don't recognize most of his movies either.) This was a Cannon movie, at a time when the studio was owned by Menahem Golan, so much of the filming was done in Israel and the movie got one of the bigger budgets in the studio's history. It shows, I think.

The Delta Force is ultimately very much a product of the 80s, but also a fun way to spend two hours if you're looking for a popcorn movie.

Emperor of the North (Pole)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Kelly's Blues

If you liked Jack Webb last week in The D.I., you're in luck. One of the movies TCM is showing in honor of Star of the Month Janet Leigh was directed by and stars Webb. That film, Pete Kelly's Blues, airs tomorrow morning at 9:00 AM on TCM.

Webb, unsurprisingly, plays Pete Kelly. (Having your own production company making the movie helps.) Pete is the cornetist in, and leader of, a 1920s jazz combo, playing at a Kansas City-area speakeasy along with clarinetist Al (Lee Marvin) and drummer Joey (Martin Milner). This being the 1920s, it obviously means Prohibition, and all the concomitant problems that brings. One of the big problems is the rise of the gangster, which in this context means the protection racket. Local gangster Fran McCarg (Edmond O'Brien) wants to take over the entertainment racket, charging every band a piece of the action in order to be able to play. The band thinks it over and says no, with Joey being particularly strident in his view that the gangsters shouldn't be taking money from bands.

Of course, McCarg's offer wasn't a request; he's not going to let a little thing like the word "no" stop him. So while the band goes off to a private function, Fran is plotting to use force to get Pete and his band to comply. Janet Leigh finally shows up here, playing Ivy, the woman hosting the party and falling in love with Pete there, although at first the feeling is not mutual. On the way home from the party Fran's goons try to run Pete and has band off the road. Joey still refuses to give in to Fran, and when the gangsters continue their policy of vilently harassing anybody who says no to them, Joey gets in a fight with one of the underlings, thus sealing his fate. He abruptly gets rubbed out. This ultimately gets Pete to give in to Fran.

Of course, that's not where Fran's pressure ends. Fran has a girlfriend named Rose (Peggy Lee), although she's not particularly enamored of him any longer. Rose is a singer, and Fran is trying to push her career, reminiscent of James Cagney and Doris Day in Love Me or Leave Me. So Fran tries to push Rose on Pete's band, even though the styles of music aren't a mesh at all. Eventually Fran strikes out at Rose, and that's what gets Pete to do the right thing and cooperate with the law.

Even if Jack Webb weren't playing Pete Kelly, the movie would still have his fingerprints all over it: the clipped dialog and the obvious right versus wrong, practically hitting us over the head with all of it. Still, it's obvious from watching the movie that Webb had an affection for the material and as with The D.I., directs it almost as a labor of love: in addition to Peggy Lee's singing, Webb was able to get Ella Fitzgerald The result is a movie that, while it has its flaws, is a lot better than you'd think if you only knew Jack Webb from the 1960s version of Dragnet and the other TV shows his production company made at the time. (Martin Milner would go on to star in Dragnet's police-drama companion Adam-12.)

Pete Kelly's Blues did get a DVD release several years ago, but it seems to be out of print now, as the TCM shop no longer offers it for purchase.

The final night for Star of the Month Burt Lancaster

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

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

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

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

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

The Professionals is available for purchase from the TCM Shop.

Somebody's been asking

I wish I knew how Blogger/Google's search statistics work, because some of them don't seem to be believable. Some of the top "search keywords" make sense in that they're full names or titles: "Eugene Pallette" or Portrait of Jennie, for example. But some of them are too-specific phrases to have multipler searches. Google claims one of the popular searches is "a stranger got off the train spencer tracy". Now, I can understand that someobody would remember a movie beginning with Spencer Tracy getting off of a train, but not being able to remember the title of the movie. But multiple searches using the exact same words? I'm not so sure. The movie in question is of course Bad Day At Black Rock, which I blogged about in June 2008, and for which I used a still of Tracy having gotten off the train.

Another popular search is "scene lee marvin throwing coffee". That scene is from The Big Heat, which I blogged about only a week before Bad Day at Black Rock. It turns out that that particular scene has made its way to Youtube, although you'll have to sit through a little over five minutes of build-up:

Lee Marvin, comedian

I'm not a big fan of the movie, but some of you may want to catch Cat Ballou tonight at midnight on TCM.

The title role, Catherine "Cat" Ballou, is played by Jane Fonda, a woman of the old west who's gone east to train to become a schoolteacher, and is now returning home to teach. Home life isn't exactly peaceful, however, as her rancher father is in a dispute with the railroad (one of the western genre's oldest clichés); it's a dispute that eventually leads to his getting shot. Cat vows revenge, and she's going to get it in the form of famous gunfighter Kid Sheleen (Lee Marvin). Unfortunately for her, Kid turns out to be the drunkenest gunfighter you've ever seen. Still, Cat presses on....

If you didn't guess it from the title of this post, you should get the point early on in the movie: Cat Ballou is, if anything, a spoof of the tradiitonal Hollywood western. Marvin not only plays Kid; he plays the bad guy, Tim Strawn, whose most noticeable trait is a silver nose, having lost his original nose in a gunfight years ago. There's also musical accompaniment/exposition provided by Nat King Cole and Stubby Kaye.

All in all, it adds up to a movie that's very well made and presented from a technical standpoint. All of the pieces fit together, and the movie should be a funny sendup of more traditional Hollywood westerns. And yet, there's something about it that's not quite my cup of tea. I'm not quite certain what that something is, although I must say that musicals and westerns aren't my favorite genres to begin with. Don't let that deter you, however; it would be unfair to call Cat Ballou a bad movie. For anybody who normally likes westerns, Cat Ballou should work very well.

It kills bugs, too!

Coming up at 7:00 AM ET tomorrow morning on the Fox Movie Channel is the interesting historical movie The Raid. What's interesting about it is that it's based on a real event.

The movie starts in September 1864 at a POW camp for Confederate soldiers located in northern New York. Confederate Major Benton (Van Heflin) leads his fellow POWs in a breakout which is successful and which enables them to get to neutral Canada where they can meet up with some of their Confederate sympathizers who have a plan hatched. That plan is to cross the border and raid the nearest moderately-sized town, St. Albans, VT. There, they'll rob all the banks to get the money necessary to buy arms for the Confederates still fighting in the South.

To that end, Benton goes to St. Albans with the view of finding a suitable farm where the Confederates can congregate in preparation for the raid. Posing as a Canadian, he puts up at the hotel run by the widow Mrs. Bishop (Anne Bancroft), who has good reason to hate Confederates, and no reason to suspect that her new boarder is one himself. Likewise her son (Tommy Rettig), who begins to look up to the new father figure in his life.

Benton eventually gets a place outside of town and begins to bring in some of the Confederates who will take part in the raid, but it's not so simple. Some of the soldiers, notably Lt. Keating (Lee Marvin), are rather more vocal in their defense of the Confederacy. That just won't do, since this is an operation where subtlety is called for, lest the townsfolk figure out what's going on. Eventually, the day of the raid comes....

The Raid is good enough, but not particularly great. The parts of the story embellished for Hollywood's purposes are fairly pedestrian and predictable, but don't do anything to take away from the real-life story that's quite interesting in its own right. The cast is competent, although you get the feeling at times that they've all been doing these character types for years, particularly Marvin and his mean bastard routine. Still, there are much worse ways to spend an hour and a half. Unfortunately, The Raid isn't available on DVD.

The Day They Robbed the Bank of Peyton Place

Tonight's prime time lineup on TCM starts with Violent Saturday, at 8:00 PM ET. Lee Marvin, Stephen McNally, and J. Carrol Naish play three men who come into the lives of a small California town when they decide they're going to rob it one Saturday afternoon at closing time. What they don't realize, however, is that the town hsa a lot of secrets, just like Peyton Place, New Hampshire, and the movie combines the various backstories of the townsfolk with the robbery plot. It's also an excuse to give the viewer an all-star (or all semi-star) cast.

Unfortunately, it doesn't completely work, although it's always interesting seeing just how many different stories and actors they can cram into this sort of thing. In the case of Violent Saturday, that means Victor Mature as the town coward, who didn't serve in World War II and is ashamed of that fact; Sylvia Sidney as the town's kleptomaniac librarian; Tommy Noonan as the bank manager, who also happens to be a peeping Tom; and a nurse who could make everybody a peeping Tom. Perhaps the most fascinating story, however, is that of Ernest Borgnine. Here, he's cast as an Amish farmer who for whatever reason has decided to try to make a go of it in California (how many Amish are there in California, anyhow?). The Amish are, of course, non-violent by their religious teaching, but the bank robbers have decided that Borgnine's secluded Amish farm would be a great place to hide out after the heist. They do return, bringing violence with them, which might just make Borgnine rethink his pacifist stance....

Violent Saturday is, as I said, a movie that has problems. Lots of problems. But it's also quite fun and well worth seeing. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have made it to DVD yet.

Lee Marvin is being mean again

Our next selection is the little-seen movie A Life in the Balance, airing at 7:30 AM ET tomorrow on the Fox Movie Channel. Given its cast, you'd think it would be more remembered than it is, but such are the vagaries of time.

Ricardo Montalban plays a widower in Mexico City struggling to raise his young son. He only works intermittently, and as a result, money is always a problem, and the neighbors want to take custody of the son because they can take better care of him. However, Montalban knows a woman who owes him a bit of money, and he goes to her apartment to collect it. Unfortunately for him, the woman winds up dead, the victim of a serial killer -- and Montalban was the last person seen with the woman, so he's the natural suspect for the police. In fact, at the time of the murder, Montalban was at a pawn shop buying a guitar for his son, where he met the lovely Anne Bancroft. He was on his way to a local night spot, where he was going to meet his son again, and takes Bancroft there with him, so at least he's got an eventual alibi.

The son, on his way to meet his father, happens to see the real murderer, Lee Marvin. Unfortunately, Marvin sees the kid, and kidnaps him. Worse, Marvin is perhaps even more psychotic here than he was in The Big Heat. Eventually, the police decide to use Montalban as bait to find the real killer....

The movie isn't bad, although truth be told, it's not great, either. Everybody is competent, and yet it feels like something is missing. A big plus, however, is the location shooting; the movie was made in Mexico City, and the locations are more than suitably ramshackle. But perhaps the lack of anything special is why the movie isn't so well-remembered, and why it's never been released to DVD. Still, it deserves a viewing.