Audrey Hepburn, Native American?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Romance of Happy Valley

I've got enough silent films on my DVR that I really should be going through them more quickly. I've got at least one more John Gilbert movie to do, and all the movies I recorded during Silent Movie Day last September. In addition, I recently sat down to watch one that was totally new to me: A Romance of Happy Valley.

This one opened up with what looked like surprisingly modern intertitles, and it turns out that the movie was considered lost for many years until a copy was found in a Soviet archive, naturally without English intertitles. The movie is set in rural Kentucky, where almost everybody seems to be surprisingly OK with their lot in life, despite it not being a very prosperous life. The one person who isn't is Joshua Logan, Jr. (Robert Harron, who died tragically a year after the movie was released). He's apparently read about New York, and the possibility of making big money there. This would allow him to return home and buy his parents' farm and, I'm guessing, offer the family some financial security.

But Dad especially, and to a lesser extent Mom, think the big city is sinful and the rural life is virtuous. Dad, and pretty much everyone else, tries to get Joshua Jr. not to leave, and to become a good Christian and vow that he'll stay in rural Kentucky. The one person who at least has a halfway decent reason for wanting Joshua Jr. to stay is Jenny Timberlake (Lillian Gish). She's the stock character of the girl who grew up with the boy and fell in love with him, with the thought that they'd always get married when they grew up. She's also helping take care of her widower father.

Eventually, Joshua Jr. has had enough of it and runs away in the middle of the night, tellng Jennie that he's going to New York for one year which should be enough time for him to earn the money he needs to return home a success. He gets a job with a toy manufacturer, being given the assignment of making a novelty toy frog that will float in water. (I don't think the sort of clear plastic that would float had been invented yet.) So Joshua Jr. doesn't become a success in year one; instead, it takes him seven years or so to get the money to come home.

Additionally, he's stopped writing, so he doesn't know what's going on back in Kentucky. Dad is in danger of losing the farm, which has a mortgage on it. So the elder Logans have to take in boarders. Joshua does come back, but nobody recognizes him. At about the same time, somebody robs one of the local banks and stops at the Logan place for a room. So all of the plot strands come together for the climax....

A Romance of Happy Valley was made by D.W. Griffith, and I can see why it remained unknown to me until know. I've seen several of the other titles that Griffith made and are the ones that people might think of when they think of Griffith. To be honest, all of those are better. It's not that Romance of Happy Valley is a bad movie; it's more that it feels like there's nothing terribly original or distinctive about it the way there was with the better-known Griffith movies. But it's still worth one watch at least.

Rent, minus the crappy songs

In the latest installment of "Honorees in Summer Under the Stars for whom I have a movie on my DVR that's showing up on TCM", the actor in question is John Gilbert, whose career spanned the silent era and the early part of the sound era. Among his silent films is the 1926 adaptation of La Bohème, which comes on overnight tonight, or in the wee hours of the morning, at 2:15 AM (which makes it still August 19 in the Pacific time zone).

La Bohème tells the tragic story of Mimi, played here by Lillian Gish. But we don't meet her first; instead we meet the future man in her life and his friends. It's the early 1830s in Paris, and bohemianism is already a thing, having taken its name in French from the idea that the wandering gypsies (now referred to as the Romani) came from the Bohemia region in what is now the Czech Republic. But the bohemians here are fully French. Rodolphe (John Gilbert) is a writer who would like the write the Great French Play. But he needs to pay the bills, so he resorts to writing articles for some sort of magazine, at least as they existed in the 1830s.

Rodolphe lives with Marcel, a struggling artist who at least has a girlfriend in Musette (Renée Adorée) who is able to provide Marcel and his friends with some food. The two men have two other roommates, musician Schaunard and Colline (a very young Edward Everett Horton). As for Mimi, she lives in the same building as the men, in a garret apartment where she does piece-work as a seamstress. She, like the men, has a lot of difficulty coming up with the rent money.

It's the first of the month, and the men are somehow able to scrounge up the rent money, but Mimi isn't, which means she's about to be thrown out. She couldn't even get enough money from pawning the few things she owns. But when Musette invites Marcel down for dinner, and he invites his friends, Rodolphe, the last to get invited, sees poor Mimi about to get thrown out and takes pity on her. However, the rich Vicomte Paul, seeing Mimi's beauty, tries to proposition her under the guise of offering her some work.

Mimi rejects Paul's advances, but accepts Rodolphe's, and as you can guess, the two fall in love. This love gives Rodolphe the inspiration for his play. However, he spends so much time writing his play that he runs way behind on the articles he's supposed to be writing for the magazine, to the point that the editor basically fires him. However, the editor only does this when Mimi brings over Rodolphe's latest piece, he being too busy working on his play to go over to the editor's office himself.

At this point, Mimi does something profoundly stupid. She doesn't tell Rodolphe that he's been fired, and is going to have to find some other writing job to pay the bills and give him the time to write that play. Instead, she decides to work double time so that she can earn more money herself and give the extra to Rodolphe, who thinks those are his wages. Mimi promptly works herself to an early grave, and the rest, as they say, is history.

To be honest, I haven't seen either the opera La bohème, or the musical Rent which is based on the opera. This version of the story, however, is at least reasonably well-acted, even though the story is melodramatic and might be eyeroll-inducing for some. Just when you think it can't get tragic enough, it gets more tragic. But that's the fault of the source material, not the actors or director.

While I'd have to say I prefer other movies from the silent output of John Gilbert and Lillian Gish, this version of La Bohème is definitely worth watching.

Four months before Edge of Darkness

One of the box sets I've mentioned a couple of times is my Mill Creek set of war movies produced and/or distributed by Columbia. One of the movies in the set that I hadn't seen before was The Commandos Strike at Dawn, so I recently popped it into the DVD player to watch and do a review on.

The movie starts off in the summer of 1939 in a small village in Norway. It's a happy time as there's a wedding going on, but if you know your history you know that it's not going to be happy for long. September 1, 1939 is right around the corner, meaning the Nazis are about to invade Poland. And it wasn't all that long after the invasion of Poland that the Nazis turned their eyes to countries on the other side of their border. Norway woould be about to fall, although we're getting ahead of ourselves here.

As the movie opens with that wedding, the widower Eric Toresen (Paul Muni) is celebrating with a visiting British woman, Judith Bowen (Anna Lee). She's set to return to the UK where her father (Cedric Hardwicke) is an admiral, making him fairly high up in the British navy. It's a fortuitous coincidence, and something that will provide the romantic angle to lighten the mood in what is about to become a fairly dark movie.

As I mentioned, the Nazis invade, so the middle of the movie is a fairly long section in which the Nazis, led by a local commander played by Alexander Knox, start to visit all sorts of indignities upon the locals, down to little things like taking all the blankets. After all, the Germans need to stay warm, too. Questioning what the Nazis are doing is of course dangerous, as Johan Bergeson (Ray Collins) finds out. But the Norwegians are more independent-minded than some nationalities who were more accepting of the Germans, or at least more passive. Eric is among the townsfolk who think there should be some sort of resistance, and he's willing to be more or less the leader.

But he has to become a fugitive after stabbing one of the Nazis. Hiding out in the forest, he discovers that the Germans are planning to build an airstrip in the vicinity that's going to allow them to attack Britain more easily. Eric has to get to England so that he join the Norwegian resistance there just as there were Czech (Dark Blue World) and Polish (To Be or Not to Be) pilots based in the UK. Once he does, a plan is ut in place to destroy that airfield.

As I was watching The Commandos Strike at Dawn, I couldn't help but think of Errol Flynn as part of the Norwegian resistance, as he starred in a similar movie, Edge of Darkness. But on looking it up, I found that The Commandos Strike at Dawn came first be a couple of months. It's a fairly formulaic resistance movie, as it was made during the era when audiences on the home front needed the morale boost that movies like this would likely have provided; that boost was more important than innovative storytelling.

But the cast does well, and the story is very competently told. As you watch the opening credits, you'll see a lot of people with RCAF titles. That's the Royal Canadian Air Force, as the movie was made in no small part on Vancouver Island which was able to provide something relatively close to resembling Norwegian fjords. The acting is professional if nothing spectacular; the movie is not going to be at the top of the list of anyone's best movies but none of the cast would have had anything to be ashamed of in making this movie.

In short, The Commandos Strike at Dawn is the sort of movie that's perfect to include in a modestly-priced box set, and certainly worth a watch if you haven't seen it before.

Way Down East (1920)

Another movie that's been sitting on my DVR for some time is D.W. Griffith's 1920 silent Way Down East. The movie should be in the public domain but is also available in multiple DVD editions.

Lillian Gish plays Anna Moore, a poor country girl who is sent to the big city by her mother (Mrs. David Landau) in the hopes that her wealthy cousins will take her in. Those cousins don't really care for the naïve country girl, but there is one crazy rich aunt who does, so Anna gets trotted out to the parties. It's at one of these parties that she's noticed by Lennox Sanderson (Lowell Sherman).

Anna thinks he's nice, but that's because she doesn't know better r know anything about big-city ways. Lenox is, in fact, a ladies' man who goes through one woman after another reminiscent of Walter Matthau's character in Cactus Flower. To get the chaste Anna into bed, Lowell comes up with a scheme of making a phony wedding so that Anna will think they're married, and then he can have sex with her. But of course, Lowell dumps her, so she leaves for another small town.

The only problem is that that one night of sex left Anna knocked up, as always happens in Hollywood movies. SO here you have a woman who isn't really married, and doesn't really have any way to support the child she's about to give birth to. The one saving grace, if you can call it that, is that the baby is sickly and isn't going to live very long. Can the movie get more melodramatic? Why yes, it can! Poor Anna gets evicted, and has to find a job.

She's lucky that she's able to get a job with the Squire Bartlett (Burr McIntosh). He's got a sun in David (Richard Barthelmess), and a niece (David's cousin), whom it is hoped David will marry. But David takes a fancy to nice Anna. Of course she has her past that she fears makes her unmarriageable. Worse, she has to deal with the Squire, who has fairly strict Christian values and would probably throw Anna out if he found out about her past. On top of that, Lowell shows up living across from the Bartletts, and clearly he knows a fair bit about Anna's past.

He's not the only one, as there are a bunch of gossips in town, and one of the old biddies who knew Anna back when she had the baby shows up, so you just know Squire Bartlett is going to find out. The end result is that Anna runs out of the Bartlett house at the height of a blizzard and tries to cross a river full of ice floes, an iconic scene from silent cinema.

There's a lot interesting about Way Down East, although it's not without its problems. The climax on the ice floes is certain exciting, and dangerous -- that was really Lillian Gish on the ice. But the movie is very slow developing with the result that at times it feels a bit of a slog. It's also pretty darn melodramatic, as I found myself wondering just how much more Griffith was going to dump on poor Anna. Even with those problems, I'd still highly recommend Way Down East.

Fox remade Way Down East (actually, it was based on an old stage play so technically even the Griffith version could be considered a remake) in 1935, but I haven't seen that one yet.

Judith of Bethulia

I coldn't think of anything to blog about today since a couple of the movies I've watched recently aren't available on DVD and I haven't gotten through my stack of DVDs which would be the movies that pretty obviously are available on DVD. So I decided to see what of Lillian Gish's work was available on Youtube.

I picked her largely because I don't think I've picked her before, but also because I was under the impression that more of her stuff that's in the public domain (pre-1923) would be available because D.W. Griffith had donated copies of a lot of his work to MoMA for preservation. (I think it was the Fragments special that TCM ran that mentioned this.) Surprisingly, a couple of the titles I selected didn't yield any hits on Youtube.

One that did is 1914's Judith of Bethulia, which I haven't seen before. IMDb lists a running time of 61 minutes; there are versions of various length on Youtube. I'm not certain how much of that is down to different frame rates. Gish doesn't play the title role; that's Blanche Sweet.

The Whales of August

Bette Davis is the star for the day in TCM's Summer Under the Stars, and TCM is finishing off the day with Davis' last completed movie, The Whales of August, at 4:15 AM tomorrow.

Davis, who was just shy of 80 when she made this, plays Libby Strong, the younger sister of Sarah, played by Lillian Gish who was past 90 when she did it. They've been spending their summers for decades in a summer cabin on an island off the Maine coast. But they're both getting old, and Libby has gone blind and wheelchair-bound thanks to a series of strokes. It's to the point where Sarah's daughter (unseen) thinks the two sisters should stop heading up to Maine for the summer. In fact, Libby seems more than ready to die.

Meanwhile, they've got a neighbor in Tisha (Ann Sothern) who is also showing signs of aging in that she's had her driver's license pulled. Of course these folks all know each other well since they've been spending so many summers on the island together. They're about to get a fourth, however. Maranov (Vincent Price, who I think was the baby of the cast at 75) has been going fishing at the shoreline, and when he catches a couple of fish, he offers then to the three women if they'll all have dinner together with him at Sarah and Libby's cottage. It turns out that Maranov doesn't really have a place to stay. In fact, he might not even be Maranov, the Russian émigré.

Back to the relationship of the two sisters, though. They're old an pondering the end of life, and in fact are getting sick of each other to an extent. Libby seems to take delight in making life difficult for Sarah, in fact one of the few things in which she takes delight any longer. Sarah, meanwhile, thinks about the past and her late husband.

That's pretty much all that goes on in the movie. The Whales of August is one of those things that's light on action and heavy on character. I don't know that I would even call it a slice-of-life movie, as it's more of a character study. But it's a movie with four interesting characters, and four darn good performances by the actors playing those players.

Ann Sothern got an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her part, the only one of the four to earn an Oscar nomination. Hers is probably the least developed of the four, although that's fully down to the script and not Sothern's performance. She's quite good as the kind person who doesn't quite want to admit she's getting old in the way the two sisters recognize.

Vincent Price was always a capable actor, having done a fair amount of dramatic work before he became identified with the horror genre. For anybody who only remembers Price from those campy horror films, The Whales of August is a good one to watch at it shows him just how good he could be. He's charming and a bit mysterious, reminiscent of the character he played 40 years earlier in Laura, except that this one has a different provenance and is more prominent.

Bette Davis gets to be mean since her character has the physical infirmities of old age, and Davis does a fine job with it. Supposedly Davis and Gish didn't get along so well, which I suppose would give the meanness a bit more of an edge to it. At any rate, Davis does well portraying somebody who's almost OK with life ending.

Lillian Gish is proably best of all here, though. She's the sweet old woman who gave up a part of her life to take care of her sister, but doesn't seem to show much regret or resentment for it. Still, she does have wistful reminiscences, especially of her late husband.

If you want a little movie without a bunch of CGI and explosions, The Whales of August is definitely one for you. The movie did get a DVD release at some point in the past, but it seems to be out of print. That's a shame, since this is a really worthwhile film.

Blow, but no hookers

TCM is spending today with Lillian Gish, who is one of the better-knonw stars of the silent era. One of her last silents is also one that's probably not as well-known as I think it should be. That movie, The Wind, is airing tonight at 11:30 PM.

Gish plays Letty, a young woman from the East who moves to one of those dusty places out west on the encouragement of her cousin Roddy (Montagu Love). She gets there, and finds a harsh environment in more ways than one. One is that Roddy's wife Cora (Dorothy Cumming) doesn't like Letty. Frankly, you can't blame her for having an in-law foisted upon her, but The Wind isn't about Cora. The other big problem, and this is a problem for everybody, is the wind. Sandstorms abound, at times making it impossible for people to get to each other and physically isolating them.

Letty feels not only that physical isolation, but also emotional isolation. To get away from Cora, she marries Lige (Lars Hanson), but it's really a marriage of convenience for the both of them. Letty needs a way to live honestly without her cousin's support, while Lige needs female companionship and wants a family. Trapped in a loveless marriage, Letty is often left alone with only her thoughts to accompany her.... Oh, and with the wind, too. It's enough to drive a woman mad. If that's not enough, Letty gets left alone in a windstorm one more time. Except that this time, it's not just her and the wind; there's another man who's not her husband there! And he tries to take advantage of her!

I have to admit that I might not have done justice to the plot of The Wind. Then again, The Wind is a bit muddled, and the reason to watch it isn't so much for its plot, but for its character study of Letty as she seems to be going slowly mad alone and in this harsh environment. In that manner, the film succeeds quite well, as it's easy to understand by watching just how forbidding Letty's new environs are: she's definitely not of the tough pioneer stock.

The last time TCM showed this, it was a print that had an introduction from Lillian Gish herself, filmed when she presented the movie for British television back in the late 1980s. It's the sort of stuff that would in most other cases on TCM be a Word of Mouth piece shown between movies, but Gish's comments serve as a great introduction. Apparently they shot on location out in the Mojave Desert, and the shoot was difficult, to say the least. The wind machines they used were dangerous, and got the sand into everything. To top that all off, they faced temperatures up to 120 degrees. No wonder Letty goes mad.

The Wind, unfortunately, does not seem to be available on DVD.