TCM's Robert Duvall tribute

Robert Duvall died last month, and TCM altered its schedule slightly to include three of Duvall's Oscar-nominated roles tonight. Those films are:
8:00 PM Tender Mercies, in which Duvall plays an alcoholic country singer; (the night's original lineup was movies with alcoholics)
10:00 PM The Great Santini, with Duvall as a martinet of a father in an Air Force family; and
12:15 AM Apocalypse Now, which saw Duvall pick up a Supporting Actor nomination.

As I happened to have Apocalypse Now on my DVR, I decided that I was going to watch this one to put up the post on it in conjunction with the tribute, instead of doing it fairly quickly after the announcement of Duvall's death as had been my original intention.

Duvall having picked up a Supporting Actor nomination, the star of the movie is actually Martin Sheen. He plays Ben Willard, a captain in the US Army who, as the movie opens, is in Saigon in late 1969/early 1970 during the Vietnam War where he's spending leave drinking heavily in his hotel room and trying to forget nightmares. Voiceover has Willard speaking after the fact, but the action on screen is actually the beginning. His sojourn in Saigon is interrupted by a couple of men who have orders to take Willard to see Lt. Gen. Corman (G.D. Spradlin). Spradlin tells Willard about a colonel named Kurtz (Marlon Brando). Kurtz had a rising career in the army, but it seems that in about 1964 he did an intelligence mission to Vietnam that soured him on the whole thing. He went to Fort Benning and paratroopers' school, returned to Vietnam, and then went native, basically deserting to fight his own war, or at least that's what the official US channels think. Kurtz is a danger to them, and somewhere in the jungle in the borderland between South Vietnam and Cambodia, and it's Willard's mission to find Kurtz, and terminate him with extreme prejudice. It's a top secret mission, and nobody is actually supposed to know why Willard is headed where he is.

Willard heads out to the river system where a small patrol boat is going to take him as close as they can safely get to where Kurtz is suspected to be. For part of the journey, they're supposed to have air support, commanded by Lt. Col. Kilgore (that's Duvall). The boat on which Willard is traveling has a motley crew of men who seem to have been deeply affected by their experiences in the war, although they're not all going to show the effects at the same rate. It's obvious, however, when they intercept a Vietnamese boat carrying goods to a farmers' market.

Willard sees more and more surreal things on his way up to the edge of where the US has any control, such as a USO-type show with Playboy playmates, but eventually gets to people who know where Kurtz are. Along the way, he's been reading up on Kurtz from the classified material the general gave him, and begins to gain some sympathy. He also learns that his is not the first mission to try to assassinate Kurtz. The other guy, Colby (Scott Glenn), is officially MIA, but the classified information suggests he may have joined Kurtz. There's also a photojournalist (Dennis Hopper) who has also turned to Kurtz' side.

As I said, they do eventually find Kurtz, but as to what happens when they do, you're going to have to watch the movie yourself for that.

Surprisingly, I'd never actually seen Apocalypse Now in its entirety before this. I think that's a lot to do with my not being of the generation to be terribly interested in the Vietnam War and movies about it. I'm much too young for the 1960s protest era, and by the time I got old enough to appreciate classic cinema, there would be other Vietnam movies like Platoon that were the big ones.

I have to say that for me, Apocalypse Now is another of those movies that's very well made, albeit a difficult watch. However, I think I'd put it with movies like Raging Bull, Lawrence of Arabia, or Au hasard Balthasar where I see why they're good, but for me not good enough to put all the way at the top of all-time great film lists the way a lot of critics do.

Last Tango in Paris

I had more Marlon Brando movies to go through from his time as TCM's Star of the Month last April than I realized, and had to watch several in quick succession and do the posts on them before they expired from the DVR. But I've written up the post and saved them as drafts to put up on the site after a sufficient period between posts on Brando movies. At any rate, the next Brando movie up is Last Tango in Paris.

Maria Schneider plays Jeanne, a young woman in Paris who has been living with her mother, but has reached the age where she wants to go out on her own. That, and she's engaged to be married anyhow, to Tom (Jean-Pierre Léaud), who makes documentary films. Indeed, much to Jeanne's consternation, he's going to be making one on her, reality TV style, although in those days they didn't do "reality" TV in the way they do it today. In any case, she's looking for an apartment, and asks the concierge for the key to look at one.

However, there's a man up in the apartment, who is also looking for an apartment. That man is Paul (Marlon Brando), an American living in Paris who seems rather depressed for reasons that will be revealed later in the movie to the audience, although not necessarily to Jeanne. Paul comes up with an odd proposal, which is that he and Jeanne should have a sexual relationship, but that the relationship should be only for the sex. Indeed, neither of them should even tell the other their first names. They can use this particular apartment for the sex, but left unstated is how will one of them know when the other is going to show up.

But because we wouldn't have a movie otherwise, Jeanne agrees to this wacky arrangement. She does, however, try to get Paul to reveal something about himself, not that he really will. (Jeanne already figured out Paul is an American as he's not a native French speaker.) We, however, see Paul go back to a hotel, and learn that this is the hotel he manages with his wife. Well, managed, since his wife has died by her own hand, as one of the maids is cleaning out the bathtub where Paul's French wife offed herself.

Jeanne, for her part, didn't exactly have the most virginal upbringing either, in that she had her first sexual experience some year back with a cousin in what looks like one of the small towns in the suburbs of Paris. She grows up and thinks about leaving Paul, but can't bring herself to do it, continuing to have sex with him, including one infamous scene where Paul uses butter since other sexual aids weren't so freely available back in those days. Eventually Paul is the one to break off the relationship, although he decides perhaps that wasn't the best thing. By that time, however, it's too late to start anew.

Last Tango in Paris is one of those movies where it's easy to see why the critics gave it such high reviews. I didn't exactly hate it, but it's another of those movies that rather left me cold on watching it. To be honest, I'm not the biggest fan of sex scenes in movies -- I don't particularly care to watch other people having sex. Other people are going to have issues with the sex scenes on the grounds that director Bernardo Bertolucci wasn't fully honest with his lead actress about where the sex scenes were going to go. (I actually didn't know this going into the movie.)

But while Last Tango in Paris is a difficult movie to watch, it's one of those that definitely would have belonged in a season of the old TCM's Essentials series. Watch it if you haven't seen it already.

Remembering Gene Hackman: Superman: The Movie

Gene Hackman's death was announced the other day, and I mentioned that I had his appearance in the 1978 film Superman: The Movie on my DVR. So I decided to watch it and schedule it now and move some other stuff around to be able to do a review on it.

An opening establishing sequence mentions how the Superman comic book character was created in 1938, and that first issue apparently told the story of how Superman, real name Kal-El, was born on the planet Krypton a long time ago in a galaxy far away (wait, that's a different backstory). However, Krypton orbits a sun that's about to go nova, something that only scientist and prosecuting attorney Jor-El (Marlon Brando) is able to figure out. The rest of the Kryptonian elite don't want to panic the population. Jor-El also happens to be the father of infant Kal-El, so he creates a spaceship to send Kal-El to a distant planet which, as we all know, is Earth.

Kal-El's spaceship is perceived as a meteorite when it crashes into Earth near the town of Smallville, where Kal-El is found by Ma and Pa Kent (Glenn Ford and Phyllis Thaxter) and given the name Clark. They realizes he's got superhuman strengh, but keep the secret for various reasons, right up until the day Pa dies of a heart attack. Clark realizes he has to go off on a quest to figure out what his true purpose for being on Earth is.

Clark's (now played by Christopher Reeve) journey of course takes him to Metropolis, and gets him a job at a cub reporter at the Daily Planet, which is where he meets Lois Lane (Margot Kidder). It's also where he starts performing superhero feats, like when the helicopter Lois is riding in suffers a fault that leaves hanging off the edge of the Planet building. Clark Kent turns into Superman and saves her as well as doing several other good deeds. All of this brings Superman to public attention while nobody is bright enough to put two and two together to figure that Kent and Superman are one and the same. Meanwhile, Lois, despite being a modern woman, has hormones, so of course she's attracted to this big strong guy who saved her.

Superman: The Movie has a listed running time of 143 minutes, and at this point we're already into the second half of the movie without even having reached what is putatively the main plot line of the movie. That would involve supervillain Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman). Lex seems to have only one employee, bumbling Otis (Ned Beatty), as well as a girlfriend, Eve (Valerie Perrine), and lives in a secret lair 200 feet below Grand Centra Station. Lex also knows that one of the things you can't really make more of is land, so land is the key to wealth. And he plans to increase his wealth in a wacky way. You'll know from your geography classes how the San Andreas fault runs through California and how it's moving Los Angeles closer to San Francisco on a millions of years timescale. The thinking is that the part of California west of the fault is going to sink into the sea, so Lex has bought a ton of land to the east so that when the west sinks into the sea, his land will be seafront land worth zillions. Now he just needs to speed things up by exploding the San Andreas fault!

Like I said, it's ridiculous, but it's also the sort of fiendish plot that allows for all sorts of special effects; remember, the all-star disaster movie Earthquake had only come out a few years prior. Lois is out west trying to get a story on the corporation buying up all that land, while Lex has discovered somehow that kryptonite is a chemical that saps Superman's strength. Lex lures Superman to his lair, puts a chain of kryptonite around Superman's neck, and leaves before waiting for Superman to die. So as you can guess something is able to save Superman, and he's able to fly off and derail Luthor's devious plot.

A lot of people give Superman: The Movie very high marks, which I guess is because it's one of the movies that really made the idea of the big-budget superhero movie a viable thing. That, and its iconic John Williams score. However, I have to say that this is a movie where if you find yourself actually doing thinking you'll see how little of it really works. The buildup goes on way too long. Many of the characters are just way too stupid. Even by the standards of the 1970s, I didn't find the special effects very good. I don't know if TCM had a bad print, but a lot of the photography looks oversaturated. And Reeve's acting isn't very good here.

However, it you don't think much about what you're watching, it's easy to see why Superman: The Movie was such a box office hit. It's certainly extremely terribly entertaining despite its flaws. And there is that John Williams score. And Hackman looks like he's having a blast getting to go way over the top with the idea of the supervillain. So while Superman: The Movie has a lot of flaws, on the whole I think the entertainment value does outweigh those flaws, especially if you don't think too hard.

A season of dryness

I'm coming down to the end of the movies that TCM ran during the tribute to Marlon Brando as Star of the Month. Next up is one in which Brando appears, but it's a small supporting role: A Dry White Season.

Brando isn't the star here; that honor goes to Donald Sutherland, playing Ben du Toit. Ben is a schoolteacher in South Africa in 1976. Now, if you know your history, you'll remember that this was still well during the apartheid era in South Africa, when a white minority ran the country and black majority and Asian minority were second-class citizens, with blacks having it far worse than the Asians (mostly from pre-partition India; you may recall Gandhi's sojourn in South Africa in the Gandhi biopic). The racial divide means that whites are able to live comfortably; Ben has a wife, adult daughter, and young son and is able to afford a black gardener all on that teacher's salary.

The black majority, of course, has it badly. Worse, they don't like the state of their education. Although the British had held South Africa as a colony, once it gained its indepence, the Afrikaaners, descended from the Boers who had colonized the place from the Netherlands, gained power, and tried to make their language Afrikaans the dominant language. The black ethnic groups, even though they all had their own languages, were being forced to learn in Afrikaans, and started protesting. At one protest, they refuse to disperse when the police order it, and the police release tear gas and go after protesters, many of them child students. The son of the du Toits' gardener is one such person, who eventually gets tortured to death.

Ben's attitude has largely been one of benign neglect, at least insofar as we can glean from the way he's treated the blacks around him up until now. He doesn't seem to have the disdain for blacks that a lot of the Afrikaans community seems to have, and cares for his gardnerer the way wealthy whites in Hollywood movies liked their black household help, but other than that has apparently been happy to live quietly. But because of it being his gardener's son, and because of the respect a teacher has in the rest of the white community, Ben goes to a policeman he knows, Capt. Stolz (Jürgen Prochnow), to try to intercede. This gets Ben put on a list. The police and the rest of the Afrikaaner power structure had it in for the blacks, but to keep control, they also had to put down any opposition from the white community, and there certainly were dissident whites.

Ben starts working secretly to get evidence from black people, being able to move around somewhat freely since white people did have more freedom to do so. He sees a journalist from an English-language paper, Melanie Bruwer (Susan Sarandon), and ultimately brings the case forward to an attorney, Ian McKenzie (that's Marlon Brando if you couldn't tell), who tries the case at the inquest and trial. Of course it's a rigged trial, and the powers that be win.

Ben's activism is beginning to radicalize him, and this means all sorts of trouble. He loses his job, and his wife is getting extremely resentful. His son still loves him, while his adult daughter joins her mother in being against what Dad is doing. And the authorities have no compunction about resorting to violence to get their way.

A Dry White Season is a well-acted movie, and it does drive home the interesting and often overlooked point that the apartheid regime had to restrict the rights of the white minority to keep its hold on power, even if those restrictions were far less onerous than what befell the black majority. Even without the rest of the world boycotting the country, South Africa would have been a gilded cage, much as was the case in Communist countries for anyone not at the very top.

Looking back 35 years after the movie was made, it's easy to say that it's pat, and that it focuses too much on white people. But it's also the case that history often has more than two sides, and the idea that there were white people on the inside who opposed the idea of apartheid was worthy of telling a story about.

Queimada

I've still got multiple Marlon Brando movies from his time as TCM's Star of the Month to get through watching before they expire from the DVR. Up next is one I hadn't heard of before seeing it show up was Burn!. Since the premise sounded interesting enough, I decided to record it.

Marlon Brando plays Sir William Walker, a British man in the 1840s who is clearly based on the American mercenary of the 19th century who fomented rebellions in Central America in order to benefit US business interests. The movie Walker is being sent to an island called Queimada, a Portuguese colony in the Caribbean Antilles that produces a goodly amount of sugar, having burned the original inhabitatns out. The British would like an interest in the sugar, and figures that the best way to do that is to get the African slaves to revolt against the Portuguese. Once the place is independent, it will willingly trade with the British instead of the Portuguese.

With that in mind, the British have sent Walker, who they think is a master manipulator. And he is that good. But he decides to manipulate multiple sides. He meets with one of the slaves, José Dolores (Evaristo Márquez, not a professional actor at the time he made the movie), and gets him to lead the revolt, in part by robbing the territory's national bank. But Walker is playing both sides of the street, as he talks to Teddy Sanchez (Italian actor Renato Salvatori), leader of an influential group of landowners. The plan is to get them to agree to revolt too, and with Sanchez having been influenced by Walker, they'll agree to let the British control the island's sugar trade.

The rebellion is more or less successful, in that Portugal gives up control of the colony. But there's the question of who should leave it. Walker puts Sanchez in control, getting Dolores to agree to this arrangement in exchange for the abolition of slavery. Walker has satisfied his British masters, so he's free to leave Queimada and foment his next rebellion.

However, he's left behind a relationship that's clearly unstable both politically and socially, and it's only going to be a matter of time before things spiral out of control. Sure enough, the former slaves, although nominally free, are no better off than the sharecroppers of the American south and, having led one rebellion, decide to rebel again. The Sanchez government is unable to put this down, and the British, wanting a stable government, call on Walker again to try to put down another rebellion. It's not going to be so easy.

Burn! was directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, who is probably most famous for The Battle of Algiers, a deeply political film about the Algerian war of independence against France. As such, it's no surprise that Pontecorvo takes the political views with which he imbued The Battle of Algiers and brings them to Burn!. However, I don't think he's quite as successful this time. That might be down to the editing; Pontecorvo's original Italian version was apparently a good 15-20 minutes longer than the English-language version that gets shown in the US. I get the feeling however, that it might be more down to the fact that Burn! is based on a completely fictional place, and portraying a time long in the past. To me, it felt like it was too easy for Pontecorvo to take the route of letting a political message overwhelm the narrative story, unlike The Battle of Algiers where the events were fresh in people's minds and the movie has more of the feel of a docudrama.

As a result, Burn! winds up being an interesting premise that doesn't rise to much more than a curiosity. To me, it's more worth watching to see why it doesn't succeed.

The Freshman

I've got several movies from Marlon Brando's time as TCM's Star of the Month to get through before they expire from YouTube TV's cloud DVR. Up next is one of Brando's later movies, The Freshman.

Brando may be top billed, but the real male lead is played by Matthew Broderick. He plays Clark Kellogg, a young man from Vermont who, having just finished high school, is set to go off to college at NYU's film school, in the big city. It's also partly to get away from his stepfather, who's a fairly extreme animal rights activist. Now, having such a stepfather, and a late biological father who was a professor at a tony private school, you'd think that Clark would have spent at least weekends in a big city like Boston. But no; Clark is presented as more hopelessly naïve than even characters in 1930s movies.

When Clark arrives at Grand Central Station, looking for the subway, he's approached by a guy who seems like an obvious scam artist, a man named Vic (Bruno Kirby) who claims to be a private livery driver. Yeah, right. But Clark is so stupid that he thinks he putting one over on Vic by negotiating a much lower price on the taxi ride. Unsurprisingly, when Clark steps out of the car to take his stuff out of the trunk, Vic speeds off, leaving Clark with no belongings and even no cash, not having carried the cash on his person, go figure.

The next day, Clark is talking to his film studies professor, Prof. Fleeber (Paul Benedict), about his inability to pay for the expensive books (mostly written by Fleeber himself) that Fleeber wants his students to buy in what is one of the big scams of college. As Clark is in that conversation, he looks out the window, and what does he see? Why, it's Vic, walking across the NYU campus! So Clark jumps out the window and starts chasing Vic, eventually catching up with Vic at the entrance to Vic's apartment building. Now, Vic doesn't have Clark's money any longer, or so he claims. Instead, he claims to know somebody who can help him get a good job, down at a "social club" on Hester Street.

Clark goes to that social club and is admitted on Vic's recommendation. There, he's introduced to Carmine Sabatini (Marlon Brando), who looks surprisingly like Vito Corleone from The Godfather which is of course no surprise since that was a Marlon Brando character as well. Carmine does indeed have a job for Clark, and once again it's another thing that should seem too good to be true because, well, it is. Carmine wants Clark to take his Cadillac, drive to one of the airports to pick up some cargo, and transport that cargo over to New Jersey. Depending on traffic, it's a couple of hours, but for doing all that Clark can pick up a cool $500, which was nice even in 1990.

Alarm bells should be going off, but Clark brings his roommate along. The cargo in question is a live Komodo dragon, not caged. It's an endangered species (although not quite as endangered as the movie posits), so bringing one into the country is highly regulated, and bringing one into the country like this certainly must be illegal. But Clark is well past the point of no return, so he takes it to the destination, what seems like a farm owned by Larry London (Maximilian Schell), a seeming collector of exotic animals and a lover of gourmet food.

Clark calls his mother back in Vermont to talk about what's going on, and his stepfather is eavesdropping on the conversation. Stepdad, being an animal rights activist, immediately responds by calling the feds since there's definitely crimes being committed, and they send two men to investigate and eventually try to arrest Clark, using him to go after the much bigger prey in Carmine.

Now, The Freshman is a lot of fun, although it's not realistic at all. Then again, it's a comedy, and a lot of it isn't meant to be realistic, instead giving cast members an opportunity to play overbroad stereotypical roles such as Brando doing his Godfather shtick or Paul Benedict as the college professor. And, I suppose, Matthew Broderick as the ultimate hick even if hicks aren't liable to go to film school. Surprisingly, all of it works. The Freshman is definitely worth seeing if you haven't seen it before.

Guys and Dolls

The next movie coming up on TCM that I DVRed the last time TCM ran it is Guys and Dolls, at 8:00 PM tonight, Nov. 8. IT's airing as part of a night of movies based on Damon Runyan stories.

Guys and Dolls was based on a Broadway musical, and the opening gives that away immediately. There's a long, extremely choreographed scene showing a fictionalized view of Times Square someplace both a bit exciting, but also possibly a bit dangerous because of the crime. Whether the choreography is a good thing or a bad thing is a matter of personal preference, I suppose. The choregraphy is of an extremely high technical standard, but that also makes the whole scene totally artificial, which has always been one of the issues I've had with musicals.

Eventually, the scene stops on two guys: Nicely Nicely (Stubby Kaye) and Benny (Johnny Silver) who are underlings of Nathan Detroit (Frank Sinatra). Nathan has a reputation as a facilitator of gambling, and has been running one of the biggest floating craps games in the city. However, he's recently lost his preferred location, in part thanks to a crackdown by Lt. Brannigan (Robert Keith). That, and he's got a very long-suffering girlfriend in Adelaide (Vivian Blaine), who is the headliner at the Hot Box. She's been pushing Nathan to marry her for years, to the point that she's written totally fake letters to her mom saying that they're already married and have several children. (Wouldn't Mom have come down from Providence at least once in 14 years?)

Also in the original Times Square choreography sequence was a group of Salvation Army-like missionaries, running a mission for the downtrodden which seems like it would be impossible to do in midtown Manhattan if only because of how high the rents would be. The face of the missionaries, because they need a pretty face to try to bring the bums in, is Sarah Brown, with the technical head of the branch being her uncle Arvide (Regis Toomey). However, they're not having much success, and the head of the organization is threatening to shut the branch down.

These two strands come together thanks to the return to New York City of another professional gambler, Sky Masterson (Marlon Brando). Nathan needs $1000 to be able to rent the location where he wants to host the craps game, and thinks he can come up with a sucker bet to get the money from Sky. However, his first idea fails because Sky is no dummy. So Nathan comes up with a better idea. He wagers that Sky can't get a woman to go to Havana with him, where Sky is planning to inspect his operations down there. Nathan gets to pick the target, and picks... Sarah Brown.

Sky is a smooth operator, and even claims to know the Bible thanks to having read all those Gideon bibles in hotel rooms being a well-traveled person. But certainly getting a missionary to abandon her mission to go on a date in Havana? Then again, Sky is no dummy either, and quickly finds leverage, offering to bring a bunch of sinners to the mission's next revival meeting in exchange for Sarah's accompanying him to Havana. Of course, Sky begins to find himself falling in love with Sarah....

I think how much you like Guys and Dolls is going to depend upon how much you like musicals, and how much you like Damon Runyan. I already implied above that I had a bit of a problem with the choreography of the opening scene, and the big craps game at the climax has the same sort of choreography. I also had a problem with the dialog, in that most of the gamblers talked in a very artificial way. It also goes without saying that Marlon Brando was not a professional singer by any means. All of this is a bit of a shame, since at the heart of the movie is a story that's not a bad one. Guys and Dolls really ought to be better than I found it.

The Formula

Marlon Brando was TCM's Star of the Month back in April, and I recorded several of his movies such that I've got a backlog of his films to get through. Next up is one of his later films, The Formula.

The movie starts off with a couple of establishing scenes in Germany in early 1945, before V-E Day but with the Soviets rapidly closing in on Berlin. A meeting of Nazi Reichsministers talks to a general, and gives him a truckload of documents that he's to try to take to the border with Switzerland and use to try to negotiate an amnesty with the Americans, as surrendering to the Americans is considered far less bad than surrendering to the Soviets. The general leaves, but is unable to make it to Switzerland, getting stopped at an American checkpoint headed by a Maj. Tom Neeley.

Fast forward 35 years to the present day (the movie was released in 1980), and Los Angeles. Barney Caine (George C. Scott) is a Los Angeles police detective, divorced, and spending his weekend with his adolescent son at a movie revivl house. Coming out of the theater, he is stopped by a a Sgt. Yosuda, a fellow police detective. Unfortunately, an urgent case has come up and Caine is going to have to give up the rest of his Sunday off to investigate: the murder of one Tom Neeley, who after the war became a higher-up in the police department and Caine's former boss!

Caine interviews the man who found the body, who gives up the information that he works for a wealthy Mr. Clements who liked to host cocaine-fueled parties -- and that Neeley was the one who obtained the drugs for Clements. Further investigation involves Neeley's ex-wife Kay (Beatrice Straight), who seems to be less than honest about what's been going on. The fact that she, too is later found murdered, is pretty good indication that she wasn't quite honest. More investigation brings into the case an oil executive named Adam Steiffel (that's Marlon Brando, looking rather older and bald).

Neeley was working for Steiffel, in a role that involved ferrying large sums of cash over to Europe. All roads lead to Germany -- so Caine feels he needs to go over there to find out what might have been going on with Neeley's business in Germany to cause somebody to murder him. Not that it's too hard to figure out Germany was going to get involved again considering the opening scene.

That involvement, and those documents the Nazis were trying to get to Switzerland, involve a secret Nazi project code-named Genesis. The Germans, being in central Europe, were not in a location that produced much oil, mostly coal. That's part of why they wanted to get to the smallish oil fields in Romania, and larger fields in north Africa and what is now Azerbaijan but then in the Soviet Union. Instead, they made synthetic gasoline by converting their large reserves of coal through the Fischer-Tropsch process. Genesis was a way to make the conversion process much more efficient. And if Genesis could be put into action today, it might well make a world of cheap energy and put the current oil companies out of business. No wonder someone might have wanted to murder people for possible knowledge of Genesis.

The Formula has a pretty good cast -- I haven't yet mentioned John Gielgud as the present-day version of the Minsiter for Energy at the Nazi conference at the beginning of the movie. But the whole trope of "big business using ridiculous conspiracy theory to stifle innovation" is one that had already been done to death in the 1970s, so the result is a movie that feels tired and as though it's going through the motions. In theory an interesting idea, but in practice not the greatest execution.

What if Stanley Kramer did The Best Years of Our Lives?

In looking at the movies that are on my DVR, I notice that I've got quite a few from April when Marlon Brando was TCM's Star of the Month. So even though I've got some older stuff on my DVR, especially foreign films, I decided to fire up one of the Brando films. This time, it was his first feature film, The Men.

The movie begins with one of those prologues that in the earlier days, especially with historical films, would scroll up over the screen. This time, the prologue informs us that the movie is about the struggles men face after returning home from war, and how these can be greater than the actual struggle of combat. We then are presented with an establishing scene of urban combat in which a man is shot by a sniper, leaving him paralyzed. That man, Lt. Ken Wilocek (Marlon Brando), is then overlooked for several minutes while we get to scenes to introduce some of the other characters.

Probably most important here is Dr. Brock (Everett Sloane). He's been doing research into paraplegia, and is working at a veterans' hospital since World War II gave doctors a lot of injured soldiers to treat. Again, however, before we meet the soldiers, we meet the women in the soldiers' lives, wives, mothers, and girlfriends, as Dr. Brock gives them a lecture on what to expect and answers their questions, including some fairly frank questions for a film from 1950 about the regularity of the urinary and intestinal tracts, as well as the ability to father children.

As for the soldiers, they're housed in wards since there seems to be so many of them. The important ones for our movie are Norm (Jack Webb, sporting a ridiculous goatee that Sgt. Friday would have railed against for being the sign of a beatnik druggie), who is a bit of the boss of the ward and head of the hospital's branch of the Paralyzed Veterans of America; Leo (Richard Doolin), who since the war seems to care more about playing the ponies; and Angel (Arthur Jurado, a paraplegic in real life), a Mexican-American who wants to be able to build a better house for his widowed mother and younger siblings. Lt. Wilocek is still in a private room, which is where the more serious cases go, although it really feels as though what's serious about his case is that he, like Dana Andrews in The Best Years of Our Lives has greater psychological problems than physical.

It's easy to think of Dana Andrews here, not just because both characters needed to get wise to themselves. In addition, Ken's old girlfriend from college before the war, Ellen, is played by Teresa Wright. She's still in love with Ken, and she thinks she can make things "better" in some amorphous way. But Ken is trying to block her at every turn. To add to the Best Years of Our Lives comparison, there's a scene later in the movie with actor Ray Teal, who picked on Harold Russell about what good came of his injuries. Here, he picks on the paralyzed veterans at a bar and gets punched for his trouble.

I mentioned several months back when I reviewed Not As a Stranger that, watching a Stanley Kramer movie, it sometimes feels as though the point that he's trying to make is sometimes more important than the story itself. There's a fair bit of that in The Men, starting with the lecture scene. There's also a bit of a feeling that in discussing the relationship problems Ken and Ellen would go through, Kramer and scriptwriter Carl Foreman might have had a laundry list of issues they wanted to discuss.

On the whole, however, The Men does work, thanks in part to a strong performance from Brando, which is unsurprising given what his career would go on to be. Much more surprising, however, is the performance from Jack Webb, who most definitely is not the wooden stereotype he'd go on to be especially in the 1960s Dragnet days.

So even though The Men is not without its flaws, it's one you should probably watch if you get the chance.

Not a reference to anyone in the current or previous administration

Marlon Brando was TCM's Star of the Month back in April, and one of the movies that I recorded during that salute is coming up again soon on the TCM schedule. That movie, The Ugly American, will be on tomorrow (May 30) at 5:45 PM.

The Ugly American was filmed in part in Thailand, but the movie makes pains to inform us right at the beginning that any resemblance to real people or events is strictly coincidental. The movie is not actually set in Thailand, but a fictional Southeast Asian country called Sarkan, which is an obvious stand-in for Vietnam, which was divided at the time the movie was made (1962; released in 1963). The Americans are helping the anti-Communist government of the day, by helping them build a paved highway called the "Freedom Road" from the more cosmopolitan capital into the hinterlands. However, many of the locals worry that having such a highway will facilitate bringing in both American troops as well as Communist troops on the other side of the border who are agitating against the western-backed goverment. To that end, locals waylay and kill one of the American truck drivers working on the project.

This is a debacle for the current ambassador, who was just about to finish his tenure in Sarkan anyway. To that end the US Senate is going through the confirmation hearings for a new ambassador. That nominee, Harrison MacWhite (Marlon Brando), has some experiece in Sarkan. He served in World War II and wound up behind the lines with the Sarkanian resistance, which is how he met Deong (Eiji Okada), who is still highly influential with any would-be revolutionaries, not having gone into government after the post-war independence. The Senators are worried that Deong might be aligning himself with the Communists, given his presence at the Bandung Conference. MacWhite doesn't think Deong is a Communist, and he does get confirmed by the Senate.

MacWhite arrives to Sarkan in a very volatile situation, with the arrival at the airport being met by a bunch of demonstrators who then storm the new ambassador's limousine. It's clear that the question of what to do about the Freedom Road is going to be important, and is also serving as a metaphor about what to do about the broader foreign policy in general.

MacWhite tries to talk to everybody about it: Deong, the King, and the Prime Minister, a man who is not without corruption as he's installed a bunch of relatives to important positions; that unsurprisingly being another bone of contention between the government and those who oppose it. There's also Homer Atkins (Pat Hingle), the American engineer who is in charge of getting the Freedom Road built. Atkins has the most logical take on the road. He, having worked with the locals, understands that they really want a hospital built. Atkins says that if the Americans were to fund that hospital and put it where the US wants the Freedom Road to go, the locals will eagerly build the road.

Meanwhile, Deong is trying to play both sides off the other, meeting with the Soviet ambassador, who brings the Chinese ambassador (this is before the fallout between the two countries in the early 1960s). The Communist countries are happy to work at stopping the Freedom Road from being built, and otherwise sowing discord in Sarkan. Deong, however, wants all of this to be done non-violently, while the Communists may be more than willing to stab Deong in the back to get what they want.

In watching The Ugly American, I couldn't help but think of a couple of other movies. One was Crisis, where the revolutionaries may have been sincere at one point but wind up being overtaken by their own desire to remain in power under the thinking that the opponent is just so bad that the alternative must be stopped by any means necessary. Deong, in the end, may not really be either a Communist nor that committed a pro-Westerner; instead, he's someone who wants peace and true independence for the locals, but has to dance with multiple devils to obtain this. There's also shades of King Monkut in all the versions of Anna and the King of Siam, somebody who knows he's up against forces much bigger than he is and can't really do much about it.

How all this is executed on screen, however, feels a bit dated in its treatment. It's way too talky for its own good, and Marlon Brando is I think not the right person to be playing the ambassador. Eiji Okada and Pat Hingle come off much better here in my opinion. Ultimately, The Ugly American is intriguing and thought-provoking, but not quite as good as it might have been.

Teahouse of the August Moon

If you think about it, Glenn Ford made a surprising number of war movies and service comedies over the course of his career. One that I hadn't seen before, so recorded the last time it showed up on TCM, was The Teahouse of the August Moon. Having watched it, I can finally do a review of it here.

After the opening credits, we get a scene that's going to be rather off-putting for a lot of viewers: that of Marlon Brando as Sakini, a Japanese man who can speak English and lives on the island of Okinawa in 1946. This is not long after the surrender of Japan ending World War II, and Okinawa and the rest of the Ryukyu Islands extending southwest from the Home Islands were put under a greater level of American control than the rest of the country. Sakini tells us how the locals are very good at learning from all the foreign occupations that have befallen his islands, and basically taking the best of it without the occupiers knowing what's really going on.

Cut to the officious Col. Purdy (Paul Ford). He's been given orders to bring the best of America to Okinawa in order to pacify the islands, but finds out that things are decidedly not going to plan. So he needs someone new to implement those plans. Thankfully, he's getting someone new to work under him in the form of Capt. Fisby (Glen Ford). Fisby is a bit of an incompetent at best, and maybe a bit of a dishonest if well-intentioned schemer at worst, having been drummed out of a bunch of other outfits in the Army before being reassigned to a backwater like Col. Purdy's bailiwick. Fisby's duty is to go to a village called Tobiki, and with the help of his interpreter Sakini, get a school built and a ladies' democracy league started.

As I mentioned, the locals are clever at gaming the system, and they don't really need a new school. What they want is to replace the old teahouse, a place where geisha would entertain men, and something that would presumably be good for tourism to the island, not that there was much tourism in 1946. They're going to need to rebuild the economy, however, and Fisby looks for some form of local industry. Back in those days, however, Made in Japan was the same sort of symbol of low-quality cheapness that Made in China is today, so none of the stuff they manufacture helps until it's discovered that the Okinawans are good as making certain distilled spirits.

Meanwhile, Fisby is growing to like the locals, and taking on some of their cultural mores, which is rather a no-no considering that he's got Army orders to get that school built. It isn't getting built, and Purdy is wondering what's taking so long, so he digs up an Army psychologist, Capt. McLean (Eddie Albert) to investigate what's going on. McLean is shocked at first to see what's happened to Fisby, but he too soon comes around to the locals' point of view.

In some ways, it would be easy to see The Teahouse of the August Moon as being a much more comedic version of a movie like A Bell for Adano, and set in Japan instead of Italy. But there was a lot more about it that didn't work for me. Everybody will virtue signal about how terrible it was to have Marlon Brando play Okinawan. But for me, even if the character had been played by someone Japanese I still would have hated the character: Sakini reminded me a lot of the character Barry Fitzgerald played in The Quiet Man, giving John Wayne a bunch of BS when Wayne simply wanted to get where he was going. It's supposed to be charming, but in real life such people are terribly tedious, and that makes The Teahouse of the August Moon a slog to get through.

Don Juan de Marco

Another of the movies that showed up on one of the streaming services was one I knew more for the hit song it spawned and because it came at the end of a famous star's career than for the actual movie itself: Don Juan de Marco. Having watched it, I can now do a review of it for all of you.

Johnny Depp plays the titular character, who at the start of the movie is getting dressed up in a Zorro-like mask, although as you might be able to guess from the title, it's really supposed to by Don Juan, the great lover, or at least one of Don Juan's descendants. Since he's referred to as Don Juan de Marco for most of the movie, that's how we'll call him in this post. Anyhow, after getting dressed up, he goes to a fancy restaurant to meet a woman. However, the real purpose is to tell the woman that he's going to commit suicide.

How to stop a young man from committing suicide by throwing himself off a ledge? In Fourteen Hours, they tried to use a policeman to talk the man down, but here, it's considered better to try a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist in question is Dr. Jack Mickler (Marlon Brando), who is nearing the end of his career. Dr. Mickler is successful, and de Marco is taken to the psych ward where they authorities are able to hold him involuntarily for up to 10 days for evaluation.

Dr. Mickler decides he's going to be the one to do the psychiatric evaluation, while his bosses just want to drug the poor patient into submission. So Mickler starts talking to de Marco, who claims he is in fact Don Juan, and starts telling all sorts of stories that seem like they should be too ridiculous for words, and have all sorts of inconsistencies. A century earlier, perhaps the stories might have been more realistic, but consdering de Marco would have been born in the early 1970s, there's no way any of the things he describes could have happened, which is kind of the point.

However, de Marco's presence at the pyschiatric hospital begins to have an effect. All of the nurses seem to be taken by him, and in Dr. Mickler's case, you wonder whether he's beginning to have difficulty distinguishing fact from fantasy. But de Marco is also helping out Mickler's personal life. At home, Micker is stuck in a rut with his wife Marilyn (Faye Dunaway). Talking to de Marco gives Mickler the gumption to try to put some spice back into his love life.

Still, there's the looming deadline of the 10 days' detention, and the finding of de Marco's grandmother. Grandma informs Dr. Mickler that not only is de Marco's story not true, the real story is somewhat more disturbing. He fell for a magazine centerfold and basically tried to stalk the poor woman until he was told in no uncertain terms to knock it off. At least he only tried to kill himself, not the woman. What will happen when de Marco has his meeting with the staff and a judge at the end of the ten days?

Don Juan de Marco is a movie that has an interesting premise, if one that's fairly unrealistic. It's also well photographed, and has a pretty good performance from Johnny Depp who certainly knows crazy after having been a disastrous relationshp with Amber Heard. Marlon Brando, on the other hand, make you feel like he's sleepwalking through the movie. Then again, I'm not as big a fan of Brando as some people are, so it may be in part my own prejudices. It's also a movie that TCM could show in 31 Days of Oscar since Bryan Adams' song "Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman" was nominated in the Original Song category.

If you want an interesting romantic fantasy, and something with more modern sensibilities than the classic movies I usually discuss, you could do a lot worse than Don Juan de Marco. But it could have been a better movie.

Viva Zapata!

Marlon Brando was one of the people honored this past August in Summer Under the Stars. I already blogged about one of the movies TCM ran that day, The Missouri Breaks. Another that I hadn't blogged about before is Viva Zapata!. Recently, I sat down to watch it and do a review on it here.

Brando plays Emiliano Zapata, who in the movie is presented as a peasant from southern Mexico. In Mexico, as in a lot of other Latin American countries, the question of who holds title to the land is a vexing one, as the land had been given to gentry by Spain before the countries became independent. (This is the main plot point of the biographical film The Baron of Arizona, a movie that I have apparently never done a full-length post on.) The peasants planted what they believe is their land, but wealthy planters came along and abrogated those land right. So Emiliano leads a bunch of peasants to Mexico City to see the President, Porfirio Diaz.

Diaz is a dictator, having led the country for thirty-some years, and he fobs off the peasants by telling them this is an issue that takes time, time that the peasants feel they don't have because they need to plant crops at a set time and harvest them at another set time. All Zapata has done for himself is make some very powerful enemies. Indeed, when Zapata and his fellow peasants try to survey what they think is their land, Diaz sends out the army! So Emiliano and his brother Eufemio (Anthony Quinn) lead a bunch of men into the mountain forests to become a sort of Mexican Robin Hood-type band of outlaws and revolutionaries.

Writer and committed revolutionary Fernando Aguirre (Joseph Wiseman) is able to find Zapata and suggest that he team up with other forces trying to rid Mexico of the malignant presence of Diaz, as it will be more difficult for Diaz to deal with multiple fronts. As for the Zapata of this movie, all he wants is his rightful land as well has the woman he loves, Josefa Espejo (Jean Peters). Josefa's dad is none too happy with this, as he doesn't want his daughter to marry an illiterate peasant, he being a modestly well-off shopkeeper. Eventually, of course, Emiliano is going to win Josefa's dad over.

Getting back to the political situation, it's becoming increasingly complicated as one of those exiled intellectuals is hoping to become the new leader after Diaz is deposed, and he's using his surrogates in Mexico -- Pancho Villa in the north, and Zapata in the south -- to lead those revolutions. Diaz is eventually overthrown, and the question of what to do next comes up.

Zapata is a logical candidate, as he's seen to be more modest in his ambitions than the other revolutionaries. However, as in a movie like Crisis, a lot of the other revolutionaries aren't as modest, and they quickly become as corrupt as the people they just replaced. This includes Emiliano's own brother. Emiliano would still like to be with his wife, but politics just won't let him, and eventually he's seen as too important to be left alive.

I don't know how much Viva Zapata! comports with what really happened in Mexico in that turbulent decade, although the characterization of Zapata as virtuously modest struck me as phony. (Indeed, Wikipedia says the part about him being illiterate and taught to read by Josefa is untrue.) Marlon Brando is not my favorite actor, although people who like him will probably enjoy his performance more than I did. Quinn gives a good performance that earned him the Oscar for Supporting Actor.

Overall, Viva Zapata! is a movie that runs in the grand Hollywood tradition of hagiographic biopics that don't play completely fair with the truth. I generally don't care that biopics be 100% accurate, as long as the desire to put the subject in a certain light (either positive or negative) doesn't overpower the rest of the story. Unfortunately, Viva Zapata! comes fairly close to that line, leaving it a mixed bag as some of the supporting performances and the direction are quite good.

The Missouri Breaks

TCM ran a spotlight some months back on revisionist westerns. Among the titles that I hadn't seen before is The Missouri Breaks, so I recorded it to be able to watch at a later date and do a post on it here.

The title refers to an area in Montana, in the upper headwaters of the Missouri River, where the waters have flowed in such a way such that the landscape is full of "breaks" cut out by the erosion of the river. It's some time after the Civil War but before statehood in 1890, which means Montana is still a federal territory and the law is not always present. Cattlemen like David Braxton (John McLiam) hold a lot of sway, and they're none too happy with rustlers. Indeed, in the opening scene of the movie, we see Braxton carrying out an extrajudicial execution of one alleged rustler.

Tom Logan (Jack Nicholson) is another rustler, leader of a gang of rustlers. He too is none too happy with what's going on, but obviously for opposite reasons. He wants to be able to continue stealing cattle and horses, and doesn't want people like Braxton stopping him and killing his men. He vows to get revenge on Braxton for killing one of his men.

To that end, Logan goes into town and finds that there's some land bordering on Braxton's ranch that's available for purchase. Logan decides that he's going to rob a train to get the money to buy that land and start a ranch of his own, so that he'll be able to rustle more of Braxton's cattle. Meanwhile, Logan meets Braxton's daughter Jane (Kathleen Lloyd), and falls in love with her. The feeling is mutual, as Jane has been chafing at her father's authority and, being naturally rebellious, sees a good way to tick off her father.

Meanwhile, Braxton isn't about to take any of this lying down. He hires what is known as a "regulator", which is similar to a bounty hunter except that this is somebody who goes after rustlers and is in the employ of a rancher. The regular in question is Robert E. Lee Clayton (Marlon Brando), who is obviously different from the normal sort of person you'd meet in a Hollywood western. He serenades his horses and disrupts funerals, among other things, and underneath this odd exterior is a particularly brutal killer. He unsurprisingly figures out that Logan isn't much of a farmer, and sets out to find the men in Logan's gang, killing them one by one. Logan plans to stay alive, however....

The Missouri Breaks is an odd little movie. Well, perhaps it's not such a little movie, as it runs over two hours. It also runs at a fairly sedate pace, being the sort of movie that you feel could have been given a script to run a good 20 minutes shorter. The movie has a good premise, and I personally don't have an issue per se with "revisionist" westerns, so the fact that all of the characters have moral issues doesn't bother me. However, Marlon Brando's character is way over the top, and director Arthur Penn didn't bother to rein him in; as I understand it, directors at the time thought that letting Brando go off like a loose cannon was a good thing. I'm sorry to say I disagree. Also, as I said, there's a whole lot of nothing going on at times.

The Missouri Breaks got scathingly bad reviews at the time of its release. I think that's somewhat unfair, although I can certainly see why the reviews would be significantly less than positive. I would say that it's worth a watch if you know what you're getting into. (I'd guess the critics of the time didn't know what they were getting into.) Also, as always, judge for yourself.

Beware the Ides of March

I didn't intend to blog about multiple movies with Julius Caesar as a character in close succession, but the movies all showed up on one or another movie channel a few weeks apart, so we get a third film featuring Caesar: the 1953 MGM adaptation of William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, tomorrow at 11:45 AM. (Yes, tomorrow is March 16, and the Ides of March are traditionally on the 15th. But because the 31 Days of Oscar grouping of movies by decade, as a 50s movie it had to air on a Wednesday.)

According to the Wikipedia article, this is a fairly close adaptation of the Shakespeare play, but I was in the academic track in high school that did a different selection of Shakespeare plays, so I got Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Macbeth instead. The movie opens not long (history suggests a year, but time is telescoped to make it seem like a couple of days) before the Ides of March on which Caesar (Louis Calhern) would be killed. He's just killed some of his biggest rivals for power in battle, and the braying mob in Rome wants him made king/dictator; as we saw in Cleopatra the idea of anybody being a king was supposed to be horrifying to republican Rome. But Marc Antony (Marlon Brando) seems to be encouraging Caesar to take the crown.

This obviously terrifies any number of Caesar's other rivals. Some of them just want power for themselves, probably recognizing that the Republic had been fatally wounded for several decades already. This notably includes Cassius (John Gielgud) and Casca (Edmond O'Brien), although not so much Brutus (James Mason) at first. Brutus is less after power than concerned about the Republic being preserved, leading to a reluctance to join a conspiracy against Caesar. But Cassius and Casca aren't stupid. They know how to manipulate people, and so make it look as though there are quite a few Romans who want Caesar to be stopped before he gets too much power. Ultimately, after a lot of soul-searching, Brutus agrees to take part in the conspiracy.

Caesar, depsite having heard the warning to beware the Ides of March, and much to the chagrin of his wife Calpurnia (Greer Garson, in a one-scene role), goes to the Senate, where he gets killed, stabbed first by Casca and then the other conspirators, before Brutus has to deliver the coup de grace that leads Caesar to utter "Et tu, Brute".

All of this occurs inside the Senate, but waiting outside is another braying mob. Brutus, the intellectual, gives an eminently logical speech about Caesar, while Marc Antony, the one person not a part of the conspiracy, knows how to whip up that mob to the point they'll turn on the people who killed Caesar. The conspirators are going to have to flee rome, but even then they're not going to be safe, as Marc Antony and the other members of the triumvirate hunt them down.

This version of Julius Caesar is probably best-known for the fact that Marlon Brando was cast as Antony. Brando is one actor who was decidedly not known for being a Shakespearean actor, unlike those British members of the cast, notably Gielgud. (James Mason had also done a fair amount of Shakespeare before becoming a movie star.) Brando was also known at the time for his less-than-stellar diction. To be honest, Brando's diction is not particularly a problem, although there are times where his delivery devolves into something like his character from The Wild One.

Unsurprisingly, Mason and especially Gielgud handle the dialog well; somewhat more surprising is Edmond O'Brien, whom I wouldn't have thought of as being adept at Shakespeare. Louis Calhern dies halfway through and gets a relatively small number of scenes, and the female roles are small and an excuse cast big names. In addition to the aforementioned Garson there's Deborah Kerr as Brutus' wife.

Overall, Julius Caesar is the sort of movie MGM was very good at producing, and the quality shines through in pretty much every scene, other than possibly the battle scenes looking more like southern California than Italy. But there wasn't much that could be done about it without busting the budget. This version of Julius Caesar is definitely worth a watch.

The old lions

A movie that had been sitting around on my DVR for quite some time that I finally got around to watching is The Young Lions.

The movie opens up on New Year's Eve in 1938, with American tourist Margaret Freemantle (Barbara Rush) visiting Germany. She's met an army officer, Lt. Christian Diestl (Marlon Brando), and the two discuss the political situation in Germany, as this would have been a few months after the Munich Conference and several months before Europe would be officially plunged into war. Lt. Diestl is apparently a career officer, since he's not the biggest fan of the Nazis although he can't really say that very directly lest he be overheard by Germans who would happily turn him in to the Nazis.

Some time passes, as it's now early 1942. The Americans are now in World War II, and among the guys who get drafted is Michael Whiteacre (Dean Martin). He's a successful stage actor and singer, who had just signed on to do a new play on Broadway. Sorry, but his understudy is going to have to take over for him. Perhaps he can get one of his friends in Washington to give him a cushier job in the Army doing goodwill tours to entertain the regular schlubs.

The other American is Noah Ackerman (Montgomery Clift), a Jew who doesn't have much family left and doesn't have much of a life, having come back east from California and only getting a job as a department store clerk. But he doesn't particularly want to be drafted earlier, so when Michael meets Noah, Michael immeidately befriends him and invites him to a party at his swanky apartment.

There, we find that Michael's girlfriend is one Margaret Freemantle. She's not particularly happy about Michael trying to avoid his duty by using his influence to get a desk job. Michael introduces Noah to another guest at the party, Hope Plowman (Hope Lange). She seems like one of those young women you'd meet in 1930s or early 1940s films who came to New York from a small middle America or New England city. They immediately fall in love and get married and even get Hope pregnant lickety split, if you try to calculate dates based on the way the plot goes.

The rest of the story cuts back and forth between the various characters' development during the war, mostly Noah and Lt. Diestl. Diestl ends up first in Paris, and then in Africa, with his commanding officer, Capt. Hardenberg (Maximilian Schell); Hardenberg grows increasingly suspicious of Diestl since Diestl seems as though he'd rather sit this war out if he could find a way that wouldn't kill him. Noah gets bullied by everybody in boot camp except Michael for no good reason, but eventually goes over to Europe and fights with some distinction. Michael leaves boot camp when his transfer to a cushy job goes through, but pangs of guilt eventually overwhelm him and send him to the regular troops. You know he's going to meet up with Noah again.

The big problem I had with The Young Lions is that it really feels as though it should be two separate films, one focusing on Diestl and one focusing on the two Americans. As things stand, it goes on for 167 minutes and doesn't really give enough character development to either Diestl or Michael. It also feels at times as though it has some plot points it wants to tick off, and does so in a rather perfunctory way. We just have to have the big reveal of a concentration camp liberation, don't we? And Diestl returning to a bombed-out building.

All three of the male leads do their best, and Martin shows that he was capable of taking on dramatic roles, something he did relatively rarely in his career. But ultimately, all three are done no justice by the script. Still, other people may be more able to overlook the script problems thanks to the good performances.

The Chase

Today's star in TCM's Star of the Month is Robert Redford, which means somewhat more recent movies than most stars' days, since Reford only started in the 1960s. His day concludes overnight tonight or early tomorrow at 3:30 AM with The Chase. I had recorded it some time before when it ran on TCM, so seeing it come up on the scheudule, I watched it to do a post on it.

Redford plays Bubber Reeves, who lived in a small town in Texas before being sent to prison. But he and another inmate break out of prison. To further their escape, they flag down a car presumably to carjack it and drive to points unknown, but the other prisoner kills the driver with a rock and drives off, leaving Bubber holding the bag and knowing everybody will suspect him without an alibi.

Word reaches his home town that Bubber has escaped from prison, and Sheriff Calder (Marlon Brando), one of the few people in town who's truly sympathetic to him, expects along with everyboy else in town that Bubber is going to try to come back as his wife Anna (Jane Fonda) still lives here.

Unfortunately, Bubber comes from a town that's a lot like the one in Violent Saturday, at least in the sense that almost everybody seems to have some sort of secret that threatens to turn the movie into a potboiler. Val Rogers (E.G. Marshall) owns the local bank and a lot of townsfolk think he's installed Sheriff Calder in order to have a toady to deal with any possible legal problems. Val's son Jason (James Fox) has having an affair with Anna while Bubber was in prison. Bubber's mom (Miriam Hopkins) thinks she's responsible for Bubber turning out the way he did. And on, and on, and on.

Sure enough, Bubber is trying to get home, likely to see Anna. Lester, an otherwise innocent black man, tries to go up the back way to Anna's apartment to give her a message about Bubber's whereabouts, and this benig a small southern town, there are a lot of people who would be happy enough to play the race card to try to get him to reveal where Bubber is. Heck, they'll be just as happy to beat the crap out of the sheriff to get the information. Can Calder keep the peace?

The Chase is based on a play by Horton Foote, who wrote the plays that served as the basis for some other movies that I really liked, such as The Trip to Bountiful, as well as screenplays like Tender Mercies. The Chase, however, has some serious problems. The whole thing seemed terribly unrealistic, as though Foote was trying to cram in as many thought-provoking plot points as he could. This also causes the movie to run about 135 minutes, when it really needed some trimming to get down to under two hours.

The acting, however, is pretty good, and I am for the most part not a particularly big fan of Marlon Brando. A couple of people I haven't mentioned yet are Robert Duvall as one of Rogers' employees, and Angie Dickinson as the sheriff's wife. The script, while having problems, doesn't really plum the overheated depths of Southern Gothic that films based on Tennessee Williams works do, such as The Fugitive Kind.

So watch and judge for yourself. While I and any number of other reviewers have problems with The Chase, there are also a lot of reviewers who really like it.

For those who like Tennessee Williams

I was looking through the movies on my DVR trying to figure out what I should watch and do a review on. I eventually settled on The Fugitive Kind. Not having seen it before, I didn't realize until I watched it that it was based on a play by Tennessee Williams. But I watched it anyway to do a review here.

Marlon Brnado plays Valentine Xavier, nicknamed "Snakeskin" because of the snakeskin coat that he wears. He also plays a guitar, which is apparently a symbol to some people that he's up to no good. In fact, he's getting kicked out of New Orleans at the start of the movie, fleeing to wherever he ends up, which just happens to be a small town in Mississippi.

One of the first people he meets there is Vee Talbot (Maureen Stapleton), from whom he asks about the possibility of renting a room and getting a job. Vee informs him that there's a general store in town that might be able to use him. She also feels some attraction for him, since he's a young newcomer and she's probably frustrated by her husband the local sheriff (R.G. Armstrong) and being trapped in a small town.

Vee isn't the only woman interested in Snakeskin. There's also Carol Cutrere (Joanne Woodward), the local loose woman who drinks a lot and likes to go juking, which means doing the grand tour of all the local road houses, having a drink or two at each of them, and some dancing and making out. She's apparently got quite the reputation, since the owner of one of the juke joints insists to Snakeskin that he get Carol out of the place.

And then Snakskin goes to the Torrance store to inquire about that job. The store is nominally owned by Jabe Torrance (Victor Jory), but he's bedridden upstairs with some sort of injury that has him getting injections of what I'm guessing was heroin to which he's addicted, although I don't think the movie made this quite explicit. So the store downstairs is being run by his wife, Lady Torrance (Anna Magnani), who also falls for Snakeskin even though she too has secrets of her own. The sheriff learns from Vee that Snakeskin might be a risk to everybody in town and orders him to leave, but then some of those secrets come to life.

As I said at the beginning, I didn't realize until I saw the opening credits that The Fugitive Kind is based on a play by Tennessee Williams. As you might be able to guess from that opening paragraph, I'm not the biggest fan of Williams, or a lot of Southern gothic, finding the characters overheated and artificial, as well as generally unsympathetic. The Fugitive Kind has that in spades; when Marlon Brando is playing the most sympathetic of all the lead characters you know there's a problem here.

In some ways, that's a big shame, too, since the movie is actually generally well acted. It's just that the actors are all given such ridiculous material to work with, being asked to be loud and obnoxious. Some people are definitely going to love The Fugitive Kind, especially if they already like Southern gothic and wand to see a movie for the acting lessons one can glean. Others, like me, may find it a bit of a slog. So The Fugitive Kind is definitely the sort of movie you're going to want to watch and judge for yourself.

A Streetcar Named Desire

Another of the classic movies that I surprisingly haven't blogged about yet is A Streetcar Named Desire. (Well, maybe not that surprising considering that I'm not the biggest Tennessee Williams fan.) It got an airing on TCM during 31 Days of Oscar, so I recorded it then. It's going to be on again tonight at 8:00 PM as part of the Teacher Guest Programmer spotlight, so I watched it to do a post on here.

I assume a lot of people already know the story. Vivien Leigh plays Blanche Dubois, who always depends on the kindness of strangers (although, surprisingly, that line comes at the end of the movie and, I'm presuming, the end of the play too). She arrives at the train station and asks a stranger from the Navy how to get to a certain address where her sister Stella (Kim Hunter) lives, married to Stanley Kowalski (Marlon Brando). The stranger tells her to take the streetcar named "Desire", which is about the only time we see the titular streetcar.

Blanche arrives to find that Stella and Stanley are living in a crappy little ground-floor apartment with only two rooms; obviously, the couple isn't in a very good financial situation. Then again, Blanche isn't, either. She had been taking care of the family "estate", Belle Rive, up in Mississippi, but the place has been mortgaged to the hilt, necesitating Blanche's leaving to come to New Orleans. That, and she's left her job as a teacher for... reasons.

Stanley is a loud, brutish blowhard, and damn if he doesn't know that Louisiana is governed under a different legal structure from the rest of the United States, civil law based on the Napoleonic Code, with Stanley bringing up "the Napoleonic Code" as though it were a magic incantation. What belongs to a wife belongs to a husband, and somehow this should mean part of Belle Rive is his. He keeps claiming to know people who can fix this sort of stuff or something.

Stanley and the other guys play poker, with one of those guys being Mitch (Karl Malden). The guys can get loud, and Stanley can be nasty to both Stella and Blanche, leading Stella on occasion to hide out in the apartment one floor above theirs and Stanley to cry out "Stella!" much the same way Jerry Lewis would say "Hey Lady!" At any rate, Mitch has a sickly mother who's probably terminally ill, and Mitch thinks Mom wants him to be settled before she dies. So he's willing to settle with Blanche.

At least, that is, until he begins to learn a little bit more about Blanche. She'a an alcoholic, probably propositioned one of her students which led to her having to leave her teaching position, and is probably about as sane as Norma Desmond in Sunset Blvd. When Mitch starts to put two and two together, he dumps Blanche because he actually has some sense. And despite Stanley's being a blowhard, he has some sense too, figuring out what she's really like. Eventually Blanche's close-up comes for her too, albeit in a different way.

You can tell I didn't have as high an opinion of A Streetcar Named Desire as other people are going to have. That's partly because, as I said at the top, I'm not a huge fan of Tennessee Williams or this sort of overheated Southern gothic in general. (Remember I didn't particularly care for Wise Blood either.) But it's also down to the fact that the characters are mostly loud, obnoxious, and unsympathetic. Maybe I should go a bit lighter on Mitch and Stella, but all of these are the sort of people you want to take and shake some sense into the way Bette Davis does to Miriam Hopkins at the end of Old Acquaintance.

Still, all the actors play the parts they're given well, and the movie is definitely atmospheric. So those of you who like Southern gothic will definitely like A Streetcar Named Desire. As always, watch and judge for yourself.

Time for the full-length post on Désirée

At the beginning of the month, I mentioned that the movie Désirée showed up on FXM, but that I didn't have the time to do a full-length post on it for various reasons. It's going to be on FXM again, tomorrow at 10:50 AM and then again at 8:00 AM Thanksgiving, so now's the time to do that full-length post.

Jean Simmons plays Désirée Clary, a young woman living with her family and working at the family's millinery in Marseilles, France in 1794. If you know your history, you'll recognize the date as toward the end of the French Revolution. So who should show up in the Clarys' milieu but Napoleon Bonaparte (Marlon Brando), together with his brother Joseph (Cameron Mitchell)? Napoleon has plans of going to Paris to do great things, and gets more or less betrothed to Désirée in Marseilles. Désirée has a sister Julie (Elizabeth Sellars) who gets engaged to Joseph.

Napoleon does go to Paris, and some time passes. Sadly, Désirée receives no word from Napoleon. So she rather impulsively goes to Paris in order to look for Napoleon. She finds that he's at a party, but it's one of those swanky invitation-only things held by high society, and not only does Désirée not have an invitation; who's going to let her in anyway. Thankfully for her, one of the guests, General Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte (Michael Rennie), shows up without a companion. He's so taken by Désirée's beauty and her ardent desire to get into the party that he makes her his guest.

Désirée, of course, is going to find that Napoleon has met Josephine (Merle Oberon), who is of much higher upbringing than the Clarys and so better for Napoleon to have politically. In theory he still could have loved Désirée -- and in some ways he still does. But he needs a marriage that can help him obtain his ultimate desire, which is power. Josephine can provide that; Désirée can't.

Désirée settles by marrying Bernadotte, and it turns into a marriage of love, which is more than can be said for Napoleon and Josephine. Napoleon also has the problem that Josephine is barren, and he needs an heir once he's crowned himself emperor. But Désirée already has children by Bernadotte, so she's out of the question.

Political events become more heated as Napoleon is trying to take over all of Europe. He's installed his brother Joseph on the throne of Spain, and then it turns out that Sweden needs a new monarch as well. So they call on Bernadotte, offering to make him King because their current royal house has no heirs. He accepts despite Désirée knowing no Swedish.

She's unhappy in Sweden with the austere court life and her lack of Swedish, so she eventually decides to return to France, just in time for Napoleon's disastrous 1812 campaign. This leaves her effectively a prisoner in France under house arrest. And after that comes Waterloo and Napoleon's refusal to abdicate. The other powers all think Désirée is the only one who can get Napoleon to go to St. Helena....

Désirée is a nice enough Hollywood look at history, with the House of Bernadotte being one of the parts of the Napoleonic era not to get much mention in any other Hollywood movie. I don't have much idea how inaccurate the movie is, of course. Still, it's nice to look at, and the main actors all do reasonably well. The one big problem is with the print FXM is running, which was letterboxed and pillarboxed. So if you've got a smaller TV screen, this one is going to look pretty darn tiny. It also doesn't seem to be on DVD, which is a shame.