Tokyo under half a minute

Another of the movies that I think I recorded during 31 Days of Oscar and have been meaning to watch before it expires, is the World War II film Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo.

The movie is based on a book, which is based on a true story. As everyone knows Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, sending the US into World War II. The surprise attack was a shock to American morale, and something needed to be done to improve that morale, both among troops who were going to be sent into the Pacific theater, and civilians on the home front. Lt. Col. James Doolittle (played in the movie by Spencer Tracy), came up with the daring idea to try a raid on the Japanese Home Islands.

Of course, this wasn't going to be easy. With the fall of the Philippines and Japan having effective control over a good portion of the western Pacific, there was no land base from which bombers could take off. And over in Europe, bombers could fly from the UK, drop their payloads over Germany or one of the occupied countries, and return to the UK. That's not something that could be done in the Pacific. Instead, bombers would have to take off from an aircraft carrier, which has a notoriously short runway. That, and they wouldn't be able to fly back to the carrier, instead having to fly on and hope they could reach the part of China that hadn't been taken by Japan yet.

Doolittle sets out to recruit men for the mission, with the caveat that they don't know yet what the mission is going to be because of the fact that it has to remain top-secret until the last minute. Among them is pilot Capt. Ted Lawson (Van Johnson), who as the movie opens has recently been married and is about to start a family (Mrs. Lawson is played by Phyllis Thaxter), or at least was hoping to before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Lawson is the main character here mostly because he's the one who in real life after the raids wrote the book Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. Gunner on Lawson's plane Cpl. David Thatcher (Robert Walker).

Lawson's crew, and the crews of a couple dozen more planes are sent to Florida for training, since they have to practice short takeoffs at low speed. Some of the men are smart enough to figure out part of what's going on, but they have to keep it a secret for obvious reasons. Eventually they fly west to San Diego, before the planes get loaded onto ships taht are going to be transported across the Pacific until they can get close enough to Japan to attack -- at least if they can avoid Japanese subs. This portion of the movie, however, is the part for a bit of comic relief as there's a sort of friendly rivalry between the flyboys who are part of the Army air corps (the US Air Force as a separate branch not being founded until after the War) and the Navy men on the ships.

Eventually, the raiding planes take off, earlier than planned once the element of surprise has been lost. They bomb Tokyo and some other places in Japan, and make their way across the Sea of Japan to China, barely making it and in some cases having to ditch just before getting to shore. Lawson and several of his men are pretty substantially injured. How are they going to get to safety? Well, of course we know they do and that Lawson gets back to America since he wrote the book. But it's actually a surprising amount of the film that's set in China.

Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo was filmed in the first half of 1944, with the movie being released late in the year. This was while the war was still raging. As a result the movie is fairly formulaic and more designed to be a morale-booster than something even-handed. Then again, that's in part because what actually happened was fairly well known by the public of the day. Even with all that in mind, watching 80 years later, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo is a pretty good movie.

It's also interesting to see the credits list of the movie as it opens up. This was one of Robert Mitchum's first movies. (Wikipedia says it's his debut, although I could swear that The Human Comedy came out earlier. Perhaps it's his first screen credit.) Several B-listers, like Don DeFore and Leon Ames show up, while Wikipedia says a very young Blake Edwards has a small role.

The Grass is Greener

Back at the beginning of January when I posted about Robert Mitchum being TCM's Star of the Month for January, I mentioned that one of his movies I hadn't heard of before was The Grass Is Greener. Recently, I finally got around to watching it before it expired from the DVR, and now I can do a post on it.

The opening credits, designed by Maurice Binder, oddly show a bunch of infants, with four names getting roughly equal credit and only one name being listed among co-stars. After the credits, we get a song from Noël Coward about British stately houses and how the aristocrats who lived there can now no longer necessarily afford to do so. Cut to one such manor, where Victor (Cary Grant) and Hilary (Deborah Kerr), the Earl and Countess of Rhyall respectively, live, together with their two children. The couple live in a couple of rooms in one wing of the house that are marked "Private", which is because the rest of the house with all its artwork and other museum-quality furniture is subject to guided tours to help pay for the upkeep of the house. They even have to get rid of the governess, giving those duites to the butler, Sellers (Moray Watson, the one non-star in the credits).

During one of those tours, a man walks into what is essentially Victor and Hilary's living room, claiming that he did not see any "Private" sign because it fell off the door. That man, Charles Delacro (Robert Mitchum) is an American oilman who is in the UK on an extended holiday. Hilary is obviously none too pleased at first about seeing this strange man walk right into her living quarters, but the two strike up a conversation and Charles reveals himself to be extremely charming, as they head out onto the grounds. Eventually, however, Victor comes back into the living room from his office, discovering the two, and figuring out (correctly) that there's some sort of budding romance taking place.

Charles heads back to London where he's staying, and Hilary finds a reason to go to London, namely to get her hair done. But the only appointment is first thing in the morning, before the train would get her there, so she's going to have to stay overnight. She calls her and Victor's frend Hattie (Jean Simmons), a recent divorcée living off the alimony, to ask to stay there. What Hilary apparently doesn't know is that Hattie and Victor were romantically involved. Hilary spends several days in London consistently meeting up with Charles, while Hattie goes to see Victor, with the latter two planning a way to get back at poor Hilary.

That "revenge" is to try to get Charles to agree to a duel, and to use that duel to get Hilary to make up her mind about what to really do. Along the way, however, there's a lot of verbal jousting over who knows what about whom. The duel does eventually take place, albeit with somewhat surprising results.

It's mentioned in the opening credits that The Grass Is Greener is based on a stage play, and despite the attempts by the playwrights (who also wrote the screenplay for the movie adaptation) to open up the play, it's always very obviously based upon a stage play. Now, all five of the players give very good performances, and the movie isn't bad by any means. However, I must admit that it's once again the sort of material that probably would have worked better on the stage with a live audience than in this screen version. Watching it by myself, and with the stars not having any audience energy to play off of, it just feels like something is missing.

Of course, it's also not as if The Grass Is Greener is going to be widely revived on the stage for people to be able to see, so this movie version is going to have to suffice. It's a thoroughly professional outing from everyone involved.

Murder, but not my sweet

Robert Mitchum was TCM's Star of the Month back in January, and one of his movies I haven't gotten around to reviewing yet is Farewell, My Lovely. Recently, I finally watched it, so now I can do the review on it.

The movie is based Raymond Chandler's book of the same name, which had already been turned into a movie once before by a major studio, but under the title Murder, My Sweet. Mitchum stars as Chandler's detective Philip Marlowe, here in 1941 Los Angeles, with the passage of time marked by Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak. Other than that, there's not much for Marlowe to look forward to, as he's stuck doing crappy cases finding runaway children or being harassed by the police who want information about one or another case they're investigating.

One night Marlowe finds a runaway teenaged girl working as a taxi dancer. Outside the joint just after getting his money, he's approached by a very large man, "Moose" Malloy (Jack O'Halloran). Moose has just been released from prison after serving a seven-year stretch, and the first thing he did was to go to the nightclub where his old girlfriend Velma worked, wanting to see her again. Seven years is a long time, and in the intervening years the place has changed to one serving a black clientele. So perhaps a private dick like Marlowe can help find Velma.

The new owners of the club, which had been named "Florian's" after the old owner, Jessie Halsted Florian (Sylvia Miles), suggest Marlowe go to the rooming house across the street since someone there might remember the old place. That is indeed the case, and the man suggests where to find Florian and to bring bourbon because she's a hopless drunk now. Jessie gives Marlowe a picture of Velma, and it looks like the case isn't going to be that difficult to solve.

Of course, we're only about a quarter of the way in to the movie, so it should be obvious that there's going to be a catch. The Velma in the photograph is not Velma at all, but a different woman who is now in a sanatorium. The real Velma is going to be much more elusive to find, and much more dangerous. Another guy calls up Marlowe for assistance, but that job goes bad, and the police pick up Marlowe telling him to stop looking for Velma, and that Malloy has gone to Mexico, which I'd think is a parole violation.

But Marlowe wants more information on the other man who hired him, since that guy got murdered on the job he hired Marlowe for while Marlowe was knocked out by unknown assailants. As he continues to poke around, he finds that things are complicated, as he's dealing with some very powerful people. No wonder one of them knocked him unconscious.

I have to admit that I haven't seen Murder, My Sweet in its entirety. But having The Big Sleep and Lady in the Lake, I should point out that at least Farewell, My Lovely isn't quite as convoluted as those other two, particularly The Big Sleep (which I find terribly overrated anyway). The movie has nice atmosphere, and Mitchum is good as the world-weary Marlowe who's getting too old to keep doin this job but doesn't know what else to do.

If you haven't seen Farewell, My Lovely before, it's definitely worth watching.

The golden city

Another of the movies that I think I recorded when Robert Mitchum was TCM's Star of the Month back in January is the western El Dorado. It's finally reached the top of my list of movies I've recently watched off the DVR, which means now is the time for the post on it.

Mitchum is one of the two above-the title stars. We see him after the opening credits, riding into the town of El Dorado, and going into a saloon. He asks the saloon-keeper about a tall man who came in on a particular horse, and we see that Mitchum's character is wearing a badge. He's the local sheriff, J.P. Harrah, and the guy who came riding in in an old friend and the other star above the title: Cole Thornton, played by John Wayne.

However, the two are kinda-sorta on separate sides. Cole was brought to town by one of the large landowners, Bart Jason (Ed Asner in one of his film roles before he spent a lot more time in TV). Cole expects to be a hired gun-hand, but Harrah informs him that the situation is actually quite a bit more complicated than that. Hannah tells him that there's one of those land wars going on, and that Jason is going up against another family, the MacDonalds. The MacDonalds have fallen on a bit of hard times, and Bart Jason is trying to get their land. But the MacDonalds are too proud to sell out, so Bart is trying to switch to more "active" forms of persuasion, which is why they've hired Cole. The sheriff is in the middle of it all, since there hasn't really been anything illegal done yet.

Cole, having heard all this, and trusting his old friend the sheriff, decides to ride out to Jason's spread to inform Bart that he's not going to take the job after all and return the expense money he'd already been given. But you can see himself already making an enemy when one of Jason's men sidles over to his horse to pick up a rifle. Cole is observant enough to see what's coming, and stops it without firing a shot, although that's also in part because Bart has at least a bit of common sense.

The MacDonalds have already heard about Bart's plan, so Cole is already an enemy in their minds, with them having no way of knowing that Cole has turned down the job. Kevin, the patriarch (R.G. Armstrong), has sent his youngest son Luke (Johnny Crawford) out to watch guard, but Luke, being too young, falls asleep, only being jarred awake by the approach of Cole and immediately shooting. Cole is a better shot, so his shot fatally injures Luke. This really ticks off Luke's sister Josephine (Michele Carey), who shoots Cole in a way that leaves him with a spinal injury that's going to get progressively worse.

Time passes, and Cole has left El Dorado. However, he runs into trouble when the gambler Traherne (James Caan) wants to avenge the gunmen who killed his gambler father some time back. The head of the gang, McLeod, has been hired by Bart Jason to do the job Cole wouldn't do. Worse, he informs Cole that in the intervening months, Sheriff Harrah has started to hit the bottle after being jilted by one of the women in town. So Cole, against his better judgment, is going to have to return to El Dorado both to try to keep the violence from erupting as well as to save his old friend the sheriff from likely death.

El Dorado was directed by Howard Hawks, and with him at the helm along with the cast he has here, it's easy to see how he's returning to a bunch of old themes that worked well in earlier westerns that he directed. So there's not really all that much new here, but at the same time the movie works precisely because of our familiarity with the themes and the professionalism of the cast.

El Dorado may not be remembered as an all-time great, but it's definitely better than a fair number of westerns out there.

Robert Mitchum in another invasion movie

Back on June 6 I mentioned The Longest Day about the D-Day invasion of Normandy, in which a ton of Hollywood and international stars, including Robert Mitchum, have roles of varying sizes. Several years later, for Italian producer Dino di Laurentiis, he made a movie about a different World War II invasion: Anzio.

After a horrendously awful song sung by Jack Jones over the opening credits that makes it sound like one of those 1960s potboilers instead of a war film, we see a bunch of Allied soldiers somewhere in southern Italy. The Allies had taken Sicily relatively early since it was an island, while getting across to the mainland was somewhat more difficult. They were able to take some of southern Italy before the Nazi commander in Italy, Field Marshal Kesselring (played in Anzio by Wolfgang Preiss), was able to set up a defensive line that more or less stalemated the Allies as winter was setting in.

Obviously, the Allies were going to try to break out somehow, and while the generals were preparing, the grunts are getting all rowdy in one of the palazzos, observed by war correspondent Dick Ennis (Robert Mitchum playing a composite character; most of not all of the Allies are either wholly fictional or composites based on real militry officers). But then some commanders come in, which can only mean one thing: the big invasion is about to being.

Thankfully, although this is winter, it's Italian winter, so it's not bitter cold like the Allies would get the following winter when they pushed eastward from Normandy, meaning that another invasion is doable if not necessarily easy. The big question is, how much resistance are they going to face from the Germans. In command is American general Lesley (Arthur Kennedy), who wants to make certain the Allies can secure the beachhead, that being necessary before further advances can be made.

So the Allies land at Anzio, and as Gen. Lesley sets about securing the location, everybody seems surprised at the lack of resistance that they're facing. Indeed, the lookout points for snipers seem to be completely empty. With that in mind, Ennis procures a driver and sets out for Rome, which isn't all that far away from the landing site. They even get all the way to the outskirts of Rome, basically facing no resistance whatsoever. The Allies, it appears, could just take Rome right away, which would be a major victory.

However, the difficulty lies in getting in touch with the commanding officers and getting them to believe that the Allies could in fact advance. Lesley has some reason to believe that the Germans are in fact setting a trap, trying to get the Allies to overextend themselves after which the Germans can really put a hurting on the Allies. This proves to be wrong, however, and this delay gives the Germans vital time to fortify their position, more or less trapping the Allies on the beach.

It's not hard to see why someone would want to make a movie about Anzio, and with the movie being made in the late 1960s, it's also not hard to see why moviemakers would want to make something that suggests the futility of war. However, there's something about Anzio that makes it come off as not quite right, already starting from that opening song. I think what goes wrong has a lot to do with the script, and a sense of di Laurentiis wanting to make an epic on a tight budget.

The cast is professional although a lot of them are underused. They do the best they can with the material, but ultimately, Anzio comes off as another of those movies that probably could have been so much more than the final product we get.

Cornelius Ryan

Today is June 6, which is of course the anniversary of the D-Day invasion in Normandy, and this year it's an exact number of decades. So TCM is running a day full of films about the invasion. One that was sitting on my DVR was The Longest Day, airing at 11:00 PM. So with that in mind I watched it to do a post in conjunction with tonight's showing.

The Longest Day is based upon the book by military historian Cornelius Ryan, a man who wrote sprawling epics trying to cover World War II battles from a multitude of angles, his other famous book turned into a movie being A Bridge Too Far (that one is also on my DVR because it has former Star of the Month Dirk Bogarde in the cast). But Ryan's books tried to present things in as factual a way as possible; they're not historical or military fiction.

As a result, the film version of The Longest Day is also mostly a docudrama on an extremely grand scale. A very large cast (named only at the end) portrays the invasion from the point of view of the Americans, British, French, and the Germans. In fact, it starts off a few days or weeks before the invasion. The Nazis knew full well that the Allies were going to be invading on the western front, although the key question was where. The most obvious place to invade would be across the Pas-de-Calais/Strait of Dover as that's the closest point on the Continent to England. With that in mind, the Allies knew that this was also going to be the most heavily fortified area, which is why they thought about invading somewhere farther west despite the English Channel being wider there.

The preparations for the invasion were meticulous and complicated. Soldiers were getting antsy having to sit around in the UK and wait. But at the same time, there was the question of whether to invade in bad weather; rough seas seems like a major no-no for an amphibious invasion and the Nazis knew this. Indeed the Nazis as portrayed here all seemed surprised that the Allies hadn't invaded in May.

Additionally, the invasion is personalized somewhat by having some of the smaller parts of the invasion focused on, such as the need to take and hold a particular bridge or how paratroopers were dropped in on the night between June 5 and 6 before the beach landings at dawn. And then when the landing does come, the Americans under Brig. Gen. Cota (Robert Mitchum) get bogged down on Omaha; it's vital that they break through for the invasion as a whole to succeed.

As we know from history, the invasion did succeed. But does the movie succeed? For the most part, I'd say yes. The screenplay does a good job of explaining everything that's going on without being too dry or didactic. Not having opening credits apart from one title card showing the title of the picture is also a big plus; there are so many big-name actors here that looking for them all from the credits would be a bit distracting. Coming off best is probably John Wayne, who I think has the biggest role as a commander of paratroopers. The wordless look of horror on his face when he sees those paratroopers who died because they were off course and parachuted right into town says more than any dialogue (and John Wayne's delivery isn't the most helpful in that regard) does.

Others who have smaller roles are Henry Fonda and Edmond O'Brien as American generals; Richard Burton as an RAF man; Curd Jürgens as a German chief of staff; and many many more. A lot of the Americans only get one or two scenes, while there are fewer Germans so all those actors get more screen time.

Where The Longest Day doesn't always work, however, is in the pacing. The subject is sprawling, and there's not really enough done either with the subplots or anything to narrow it down. The result is that of a relentless slowness. I understand that the invasion itself took a long time, but cinematically it feels like a whole lot of the same thing happening and not ending, especially once we hit June 6.

Overall, however, The Longest Day is a very well-made movie and one that, if you haven't seen before, you really should.

Teacher O'Zhivago

Robert Mitchum was TCM's Star of the Month in January, and one of his movies that I recorded not having seen it before was Ryan's Daughter. It's on TCM again during 31 Days of Oscar since it got multiple nominations. That airing comes up overnight tonight at 1:45 AM (or early tomorrow depending upon your perspective and time zone), so I made a point to watch in order to to a review in conjunction with the upcoming showing.

The movie starts off with a woman walking along a beach somewhere in the west of Ireland. That woman, Rosy Ryan (Sarah Miles), is the daughter of the local publican, Tom Ryan (Leo McKern). At the pub, we learn that it's around 1917, which would be the later stages of World War I, but before American involvement really turned the tide of war. Also, 1917 was just after the Eastern Uprising in Ireland. Ireland was still a part of the United Kingdom at the time, but a lot of people on the island wanted independence from Britain, while UK soldiers are also stationed on the island.

Returning from a visit to London is the local teacher, Charles Shaughnessy (Robert Mitchum). The first thing he does is go to the cemetery to visit the grave of his dearly departed wife. It's been a couple of years since Charles became a widower and it might be time for him to start thinking about finding another wife. Meanwhile, Rosy wants any sort of romance, just so she can get the heck out of this dead-end of a village, and when she meets Charles, she allows herself to be swept off her feet, even though for him, it's more a matter of practicality. When Rosy discovers that marriage isn't all it's cracked up to be, it leaves her rather disillusioned.

There's still another main character who has yet to be introduced: Major Doryan (Christopher Jones). He's obviously in the British Army, and served with quite some distinction on the front over in France. However, his service resulted in several injuries. One is a leg injury that's left him with a limp. More seriously, however, is a case of shell shock, which is part of why he's being sent to a backwater like this. However, he's a soldier in a uniform, and that's enough for Rosy. As you can guess, the two begin an affair.

But Doryan is English and Rosy is Irish. And this village is one of those places where the locals largely support independence from Britain, so they've been working to try to make life difficult for the British troops stationed there. At the same time, support isn't unanimous as they've got an informant in their midst. So when they try to run munitions, the British are going to find out, which is going to lead to disastrous consequences.

And then Charles is going to figure out that Rosy has been having an affair with Doryan. That also is going to have terrible consequences. Not only is Charles going to be unhappy, but the locals come to the logical conclusion that perhaps Rosy was the one informing on them to Doryan. After all, she was sleeping with the guy.

Ryan's Daughter was panned by critics at the time of its release, and it's not hard to see why. The movie runs 200 minutes, and its an incredibly slow 200 minutes at that. It's more of an intimate story than an epic, which doesn't have to be a bad thing. But here, the movie kept reminding me of Doctor Zhivago, a movie of which I'm not a fan to say the least. Part of that is the direction by David Lean, and part is the overbearing score by Maurice Jarre, who collaborated on Doctor Zhivago. While Lean made some great movies, his direction here is plodding.

As I said, Ryan's Daughter got multiple Oscar nominations, and won two. One was for the cinematography, which is the high point of the movie, and certainly Oscar-worthy, although I haven't seen all of the nominated movies to compare. The other one was for John Mills as Best Supporting Actor. He plays a character who's half Barry Fitzgerald from The Quiet Man -- the Quirky Villager who helps move the plot along at a few key times. The other half, however, is Nick Cravat, a Mills' character is for no explicable reason a mute. Either way, the character is obnoxious.

So as you can tell, I didn't particularly care for Ryan's Daughter. But as always, judge for yourself.

The Best Years of Our Lives on a budget

A movie that I recorded when Robert Mitchum was TCM's Star of the Month in January is getting another airing now in early Feburary: Till the End of Time, tomorrow, February 7, at 4:30 PM. So, I sat down to watch it in order to do the blog post just in time for the TCM showing.

The movie opens not long after V-J Day ended World War II. A bunch of Marines who served in the Pacific theater of the war are getting demobbed, which is a fairly involved process since the government has to move a massive number of people and make certain that none of them end up not getting properly listed which, as in Identity Unknown could get you declared a deserter. There's also the adjustment back to civilian life and the fact that after close to four years a lot of the old jobs have changed.

Two of the Marines getting demobbed are Cliff Harper (Guy Madison, whom RKO was grooming for stardom) and William Tabeshaw (Robert Mitchum, who of course would become the big star at RKO). Cliff was a college boy before the war, having taken one semester at school before Pearl Harbor and his voluntary enlistment in the war. He's got middle-class parents in the Los Angeles area, and Dad is convinced that the place is going to grow in the years following the war. As for William, he had been working as a ranch-hand in New Mexico, and he's hoping to take his saved-up money and buy some land back in New Mexico to start a farm or ranch of his own. But he also likes to party and gamble. And he's got a steel plate in his head as a result of his war injuries.

Cliff gets home and finds his parents out for the day, and finds that he's got new neighbors who moved in during the war. They've got a high school-aged daughter Helen Ingersoll (Jean Porter), who immediately develops a crush on Cliff because in the World War II days, who didn't like a man in uniform? Cliff humors her, but doesn't really care for her as anything more than a friend.

Someone possibly more up Cliff's alley is Pat (Dorothy McGuire), a woman he meets at what in the Andy Hardy days would have been an ice cream parlor but became a bar during the war. Cliff falls for Pat until he sees her husband's picture. Except that it's her late husband, having been shot down over France. Now, she goes on flings with one guy after another.

Cliff can't quite decide what he wants to do, except that he wants to do something different from what he was being groomed to do before the war. This really pisses off his parents (Tom Tully and Ruth Nelson), who want to go back to life the way it was but don't want Cliff to dwell on his having been in the war, something that seems really mean on their part. And, after all, there are a lot of people who can't forget what happened in the war. We see this in one scene where Pat and Cliff run into a man who served and wound up with PTSD and a severe case of the shakes as a result. There's also a subplot involving Cliff and William's friend Perry (Bill Williams). He was a boxer before the war. But he lost both his legs, so he certainly can't box. He's got a kid brother, and damn if he isn't going to take his own broken dreams and put them on his kid brother, trying to train the kid to become a boxer.

It's difficult to watch a movie like Till the End of Time and not think about the Oscar-winning film The Best Years of Our Lives. However, Till the End of Time was released first, about four months before the better-known picture. It really feels like one of those movies that RKO was trying to make into a prestige picture, except that RKO never really seemed to be able to put together the sort of budget necessary to make the prestige movies that other studios could. So there's a bit of a shabby feeling here.

This isn't to say that Till the End of Time is a bad movie by any means. It has an ensemble cast of pretty good performances. Mitchum feels underused, although part of that is because he wasn't the big star yet that he'd become not long afterwards thanks to noirs like Out of the Past. McGuire is quite good, as are several of the supporting players, especially Selena Royle as Perry's mother.

It's understandable that Till the End of Time would be eclipsed by a movie like The Best Years of Our Lives. But it still stands on its own as a pretty darn good movie, and one that you should definitely catch.

Moon Under the Blood

I mentioned last week that Robert Mitchum is the TCM Star of the Month for January 2024. I happened to have one of his movies that I hadn't seen before on my DVR, and that movie is now on the TCM schedule: Blood on the Moon, early tomorrow at 3:30 AM Jan. 10 (or overnight tonight if you prefer to look at it that way).

The movie opens with Mitchum as a lone man on his horse riding somewhere through the old west. It's raining quite hard and getting dark, so the man sets up a makeshift camp for the night. However, not long after that, he hears sounds which he realizes are those of a cattle stampede. He climbs a tree for safety before the cattle come through, destroying his camp. And when the man who owns the heard shows up, he's none too pleased. That man is John Lufton (Tom Tully), who seems to own the entire region, or at least that part of the region that's not part of the Ute reservation. The interloper (Mitchum's character) is Jim Garry, who had been a cattle driver down in Texas before he lost his own herd.

This is one of those regions where homesteaders are beginning to show up, and Lufton is not pleased about that either. He offers Jim a choice, which is either to work for him or to leave the region. No joining in with the homesteaders. When Jim chooses to keep drifting, Lufton gives him a note and asks him to take it to his home in the valley. But before Jim can get to the Lufton spread, he's accosted by a gunman. Well, actually, a gunwoman, who turns out to be Lufton's daughter Amy (Barbara Bel Geddes). Amy is hot-headed, but has an older sister Carol (Phyllis Thaxter) who seems to be more level-headed.

Jim rides on into town, where he learn that he's not exactly a drifter. He had an old friend in the cattle driving business, Tate Riling (Robert Preston), who wrote him to come because he had a business proposition for Jim. Ostensibly, Tate wants Jim to help out the homesteaders, salt of the earth people like Kris Barden (Walter Brennan). To do this involves taking Lufton down a peg, which Jim can do by helping force Lufton to sell his herd. Tate has been working with the local Indian agent, Pindalest, to get Lufton's cattle off the reservation.

Now, Tate and Pindalest are going to play hardball. Pindalest has the power to declare it illegal for Lufton to have his cattle on the reservation, and use the military to get rid of the cattle if necessary. Riling also wants to manipulate the homesteaders into preventing Lufton from driving his cattle off the reservation. That would in theory force Lufton to sell the cattle at an artificially low price. But Lufton hates Riling, and would never sell to Riling. That's where Jim comes in. Lufton might well sell to Jim, who would then resell to the US government as represented by Pindalest, with the three of them pocketing the profits.

Once Jim learns the full extent of what's going on, he's horrified. This is complicated by the fact that Amy eventually starts falling in love with Jim after he informs her of what's going on and his possible willingness to side with Lufton. But can Jim get anybody to trust him?

Blood on the Moon is the sort of more complicated western that was beginning to show up in the years after World War II, and part of that is having someone not normally thought of as a direcor of westerns behind the camera: Robert Wise. Wise takes this complex and grown-up story and does quite a good job with it, helped by the fact that he and star Mitchum were both able to handle the noir-adjacent elements of the story. The supporting cast also mostly does a good job, although I have to say Walter Brennan isn't a particular favorite of mine. He's nowhere near as obnoxious here as he is in some other movies, however.

If you want a movie that's both intelligent and has action, you could do a lot worse than to watch Blood on the Moon.

January 2024 TCM Star of the Month: Robert Mitchum

Robert Mitchum (l.) and Deborah Kerr in Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (Jan. 32, 9:45 PM)

As always, now that we're into a new month on TCM, it's time for a new Star of the Month. (OK, not during 31 Days of Oscar or Summer Under the Stars. But you get the point.) This time, that Star of the Month is Robert Mitchum, who has been honored before but ages ago -- I think I saw somebody else mention that the last time was even before I started blogging. Mitchum started at RKO, I believe, and he made enough movies that it's not awfully difficult for TCM to be able to show five nights' worth of his films, every Tuesday this month and continuing into the Wednesday morning daypart on a couple of occasions.

Robert Mitchum (l.) along with Robert Ryan and Robert Young in Crossfire (6:30 AM, Jan. 3)

I've got a handful of photos of Mitchum in various things, so those are going to be the movies I'm highlighting, not necessarily because they're the best. The spotlight kicks off tonight at 8:00 PM with Out of the Past, among a bunch of noirish movies, but surprisingly, it looks like the photos I currently have from that film are of Kirk Douglas, so instead the noir I'll mention in this first week is Crossfire, airing in the early hours Wednesday morning.

The second Tuesday looks to be Mitchum in westerns. I thought I had recorded The Good Guys and the Bad Guys, but apparently I didn't, and it's not on the Watch TCM app, so nothing much to talk about that night.

January 16 brings the first night of war movies, starting at 8:00 PM with Mitchum's lone Oscar nomination for The Story of G.I. Joe. That's followed by a diverse lineup on the 23rd, with the night being 1950s and 1960s stuff, including a showing of Thunder Road together with Robert's son James Mitchum, at 11:45 PM. If you missed one of the 4259028476 showings of Holiday Affair during TCM's Christmas marathon, this is another chance to catch it, as you can see it at 2:30 PM on January 24.

Oh, I forgot Night of the Hunter at 8:00 PM on January 23.

Finally, on January 30 we get movies from late in Mitchum's career, including Cape Fear which is currently scheduled for 10:00 PM. I say "currently" because as I write this, the 8:00 PM slot is still "to be announced", which means that TCM may or may not be able to get whatever it is they intend to show. Mitchum has a small role in Scrooged, which would be fun to see show up on TCM, and I don't think TCM has had a problem in the past getting the rights to The Friends of Eddie Coyle, so I don't know what they're currently thinking of putting in that slot.

Man With the Gun

I didn't expect to do a pair of Robert Mitchum westerns in fairly close succession, but I had to change a bit of blogging about movies in the order I watch them when The Good Guys and the Bad Guys showed up on TCM earlier this month. The other Mitchum western I had watched was an earlier one, Man With the Gun.

As you might guess, Mitchum does in fact play the man with the gun, a man named Clint Tollinger, although he's actually more or less a good guy. He's what's known as a "town tamer", a fairly itinerant person who goes from one town to the next, wherever the town is having trouble keeping law and order. This time, Clint shows up to Sheridan City, where a rancher named Dade Holman who lives just outside of town uses his surrogates to keep his sort of order, which means everybody else lives in fear of him. Well, maybe not Jeff Castle (John Lupton), who's just dumb enough to try to farm the plot of land he has his eye on even though Holman doesn't want that.

Nobody in town really wants Clint here, and he doesn't really want any interference from them, as he's a sort of necessary evil in that their crime problems won't be solved any other way. Among the people who really doesn't want Clint around is Nelly Bain (Jan Sterling). Nelly runs the local "dance hall", which is still a euphemism since the Production Code was still pretty strong when the movie was made, but, more importantly, Nelly has a past with Clint. She didn't want to be around him any longer because his profession is a dangerous one and she was afraid of losing him to violence. So she up and left him to make a clean break of it, but here he is again.

One of Clint's techniques is to have everybody who comes to town check their guns at the door. As you might guess, this doesn't make Holman's men very happy, and a group of them comes to town trying to get rid of him. Needless to say, that doesn't go well and Holman is only going to try harder to rid "his" town of Tollinger. Clint's personal life is also about to get more complicated, as Castle's girlfriend Stella (Karen Sharpe) finds that she's developing feelings for Clint, who is much more masculine than Jeff. Nelly, for her part, also feels those old feelings stirring up, and making her jealous.

Man With the Gun is a well-made programmer western from the era, the sort of thing you could imagine Randolph Scott having done if only he were 20 years younger. Although the movie is in black and white, the production values are pretty good, and the plot is serviceable, with professional performances from the cast. Since it's only a programmer, there's nothing extra special about it, but there's really nothing wrong with it either. It's the sort of nice 90 minutes of entertainment that fans of westerns will really like.

The Good Guys and the Bad Guys

I'd been writing up posts in advance and scheduling them as soon as I copy them over to Blogger, but then I noticed that one of the movies I've got in my queue is one that just so happens to be coming up on TCM again soon, so if anything looks like it's not quite accurate in terms of dates or if two posts come up in rapid succession, that would be the reason why. Anyhow, the movie that I notice was on the TCM schedule again is The Good Guys and the Bad Guys, which has its next TCM showing on July 11 at 12:30 PM.

Robert Mitchum plays the good guy, a man named Flagg who is marshal in the small town of Progress NM around the time of New Mexico statehood. The area is changing rapidly, and quite a few people even have automobiles. Flagg is beginning to get up there in years much like Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott's characters in Ride the High Country, but he knows that there are still some bad guys out there who haven't aged out and might still commit the sort of crime that was done when Flagg was a younger man.

One such man is McKay (George Kennedy), who was the leader of a big gang 20 years ago but who seems to have been laying low, even though he's still wanted. There's a rumor that McKay and his gang are heading for Progress, as the town is about to get a new bank which means a large transfer of cash by train; either the train or the new bank would be prime targets for the old-style western gangs. Flagg tries to tell Mayor Wilker (Martin Balsam) about the danger, but Wilker seems more concerned with his political future and doesn't seem to believe there's any danger from the old-time gangs. Besides, isn't McKay dead? Nobody's heard from him in 20 years.

Of course, McKay isn't dead, and Flagg is able to find him and bring him into town for the reward money. McKay is no longer really the leader of the gang, as it's a wholly new gang led by Waco (David Carradine) who has new ideas, ideas that are fankly too violent for McKay's changing tastes as he too is growing too old for the crime game. Waco's plan is to rob the train when it stops at the station in town, before the money can be transferred to the bank, but without having to board a moving train as folks in the old days might have done. McKay decides to help Flagg defeat Waco's gang.

This means that Flagg and McKay are going to have to board the moving train themselves, and either get it to stop before getting to town (not very likely), or get it to go through town without stopping, which is doable but also difficult. It doesn't help that Flagg is no longer marshal and so the train crew doesn't believe him that he and McKay are the good guys here.

The Good Guys and the Bad Guys is one of those movies from just after the end of the old Production Code regime where westerns tried to blend seriousness with some lighter comedy. It doesn't always work here, but I would also say that it's not a failure by any means. Instead, The Good Guys and the Bad Guys winds up being one of those movies that entertains for the 90 or so minutes that it's on the screen, but by the end it's not anything groundbreaking or terribly memorable. So it's definitely worth a watch if you want something unknown enough that it's more likely new to you, and if you just want to sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride.

Stanley Kramer makes a medical drama

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Forbidden Past

Ava Gardner was TCM's Star of the Month last month, and that gave me the chance to see one of her films that I hadn't watched before: My Forbidden Past. I'm glad I watched it, but not for the reasons the studio would have wanted back in the day.

Gardner plays Barbara Beaurevel, a young belle in turn-of-the century New Orleans. The movie starts off with having a torrid but illicit relationship with Dr. Mark Lucas (Robert Mitchum), who is some sort of research scientist at Tulane University. Mark is about to go to South America for a couple of months on a research expedition of some sort that's not explained, and he'd like Barbara to go with him and perhaps they can get married down in South America or even on the ship since the captain could perform the ceremony.

Of course, there's a catch. Barbara doesn't have any money, even though she lives in one of those grand old houses that the antebellum upper crust of New Orleans lived in. And it's not even her house, but that of her aunt Eula (Lucile Watson). Eula lives there with her son Paul (Melvyn Douglas), and the two of them most definitely don't approve of Barbara's relationship with Mark, him being a northerner to boot, oh the scandal. Barbara plans to elope, but Paul catches her packing her bags, and blackmails her into staying, writing a letter to Mark instead telling him she can't go and that she'll marry him when he gets back.

Of course, any sane viewer would recognize that Paul isn't about to let Barbara out of the house to deliver that letter, and that when he himself offers to deliver it, you know he's delivering it straight to the circular file. But Barbara doesn't get this, and won't be able to understand why Mark, upon his return, thinks Barbara jilted him.

Before that return, however, two things happen. One is that Mark marries the first reasonably good-looking American woman he meets in Latin America, returning to New Orleans with a wife Corinne (Janis Carter) in an entrance that surprises Barbara when she goes to the boat to meet Mark. The other is that a lawyer comes to the Beaurevel house looking for Barbara. Apparently Barbara had a grandmother with the forbidden past of the title, being engaged in some sort of activity that Eula finds so shocking that one doesn't even mention the name of this woman. (I think the family tree would require this to be Barbara's maternal grandmother, because otherwise it would be Eula's mother-in-law. In fact, since Barbara and Eula share a surname but the dead woman doesn't, that would make it the mother-in-law of Eula's brother-in-law.) The last member but one of that line of the family recently died out in California, leaving Barbara as the closest living relative, and set to inherit almost a million bucks, which is quite a sum of money for 1900.

Eula and Paul don't want Barbara to take the money, because everyone will find out where the money came from and this will somehow make the family's social status go down the drain. Barbara has the understandable idea that she doesn't want to be poor any more, and takes the money. And when she finds out a few months after that Mark has gotten married, she comes up with a plan to use that money to get Corinne out of the way.

If the movie wasn't ridiculous enough before that, it's about to get a whole lot more ridiculous, and that's why I enjoyed the movie. This is supposed to be some sort of serious melodrama, but everything is more like an absurdist comedy, even though that's decidedly unintentional. Mitchum is badly miscast, while Gardner does the best she can with the material. Watson is pretty good as the evil matriarch, if not to the level that Madam Konstantine was in Notorious. And Melvyn Douglas looks like he went back and rewatched Mildred Pierce so that he could learn to play the slimy, smarmy schemer role that Jack Carson so brilliantly portrayed. I don't know that Douglas got to play too many roles like this, and he runs with it for all it's worth.

As a serious picture, My Forbidden Past isn't all that good. But as unitentinal comedy, it's a blast.

Secret Ceremony

TCM recently put out a new book that's a tie-in to TCM Underground, and as part of the promotion, had the book's two authors on in prime time a few months back. One of the movies they showed as part of this block was Secret Ceremony.

Elizabeth Taylor plays Leonora, a woman who's been living in the UK for some time. Long enough, in fact, that her young daughter drowned in the country quite a few years ago. One day, while at the cemetery, Leonora meets Cenci (Mia Farrow). Cenci's mom died some time back but when she sees Leonora, she thinks of Mom. Cenci invites Leonora back to her house. Leonora figures out pretty quickly why she reminds Cenci of her mother when she sees a picture of Cenci's late mother. And, to be honest, Leonora finds herself thinking of her own daughter when she sees Cenci.

Meanwhile, there are a lot of complications. Cenci may have some sort of mental illness, as she's legally an adult but acts like she's much young, to the consternation of her two aunts (Peggy Ashcroft and Pamela Brown), who look in on Cenci from time to time and aren't above taking some of the knick-knacks from the house. They wonder who this stranger is, and Leonora tries to pass herself off as a cousin of Cenci's mother.

And then there's Albert (Robert Mitchum), who is ostensibly Cenci's stepfather, in the mold of the Dirk Bogarde character from Our Mother's House. He may or may not have had an incestuous relationship with Cenci in the past, and Cenci seems not to want that to happen again. Albert, for his part, is a little bit rough with Cenci.

Things get really weird when Leonora takes Cenci with her to one of those fading British seaside resorts, and Cenci decides she's going to fake a pregnancy, a development that as far as I could tell came out of nowhere. And wouldn't you know, but Albert shows up again, leading to the movie's climax when everybody gets back to London.

Secret Ceremony made me think of some of those other late 1960s movies with older stars, made in a time just after the breakdown of the Hollywood Production Code when societal mores were really changing. Some of these movies, like The Big Cube, are gloriously awful and made more fun for wondering what the cast and crew were thinking as they made the movie. Secret Ceremony, however, commits a much bigger sin, which is that it's just plain boring. One gets the impression that the people involved thought they were making something deep and psychological, but instead it's just impenetrable.

Still, Secret Ceremony is a movie that developed a cult following, and you can see why some people might think they're part of a select club by watching this movie and talking knowingly about how great they think it is. So judge for yourself.

Yes she could have

TCM is running a bunch of Robert Mitchum films tomorrow (April 20) morning and afternoon even though it isn't his birthday. I have two of the films on that schedule on the DVR that I want to blog about, so we're getting one Mitchum movie today and another tomorrow. First up is She Couldn't Say No, airing at noon tomorrow.

Now, an eagle-eyed viewer might be able to guess that Mitchum is not playing the "She" in the movie's title. The "She" is instead played by Jean Simmons, as a character named Corby Lane. She's rich enough that she was able to spend a lot of time in England an buy a car in cash now that she's back in America, hoping that the dealer can move the steering wheel over to the right-hand side, just because she's more used to it. It's a relative throwaway scene other than to show just how idle rich Corby is.

But Corby has a plan for the car, and for her wealth. She heads down to the small town of Progress, Arkansas, with a population of about 200 people and the sort of small southern town that led Variety to write the famous 1935 headline "Stix Nix Hick Picks". It's full of stereotypes, starting with the lovable town drunk, Odie Chalmers (Arthur Hunnicutt) who spends his time at the general store/post office, presumably waiting for a relief check. But Corby isn't so interested in him; she's looking for Dr. Sellers.

Corby gets directions to Dr. Sellers' house, but he isn't there, so she rings the emergency bell even tough what she wants to talk about isn't an emergency, and Dr. Sellers (that's Robert Mitchum as if you couldn't tell) thinks it's more likely to be something like the pregnant Mrs. Jordan about to give birth. And Corby isn't exactly pleased to see this Dr. Robert Sellers, as she was expecting somebody much older. In fact, she was expecting Robert Sr., but he's dead and the son took over the practice because Progress needs a doctor.

Dr. Sellers and Corby, using the pseudonym Corby Johnson, go out for a drink, or enough drinks to get Corby incredibly drunk since Sellers is clearly trying to pump her for information about why she's here. That should become clear the next day, after Mrs. Jordan gives birth. Some anonymous donor decided to buy a whole bunch of baby supplies for the Jordans. Too much, in fact, as the Jordans don't have space for it all.

Dr. Sellers, having seen that Corby's luggage is monogrammed "CL", is able to put two and two together. Corby was one of his father's patients a long time ago, when she was just a kid. Her father was working in the oil fields, traveling wherever there was work, and stopped in Progress for a while. But he was a bit down on his luck as Corby fell ill and needed some sort of operation that she couldn't get in Progress. So the townsfolk took up a collection for her to send her to St. Louis (why not Little Rock??) to get that operation. Corby's father eventually made good in the oil industry, and Corby wants to pay back the townsfolk of Progress, albeit anonymously.

The problem is, every way she tries to pay somebody back only backfires. She buys fine alcohol for Odie, only to learn that he being an alcoholic, the bartender has been surreptitiously watering his liquor. Buying the veterinarian a new car leads him to want to leave town. And when she just says the heck with it and anonymously sends everyone in town cash, that makes the news and gets a bunch of greedy little shits from the rest of the country to come to Progress stupidly thinking they could get some money themselves.

She Couldn't Say No is the sort of movie that, 15 years earlier before World War II, would have made a silly little programmer for any studio picking up the story and providing it to two of its contract players. But by the mid-1950s, it feels dated and a bit beneath both Mitchum and Simmons. Not that the two of them are bad; they both give a professional effort and do the best they can with the material. It's more that the material does everybody in. It doesn't help that this being RKO, the movie looks like it was done on a discount.

Still, if you want some pleasant enough fun hearkening back to a different era, you could do a lot worse than to watch something like She Couldn't Say No.

Eddie Coyle's "friends"

I've talked on several occasions about movies that show New York City as it was in the early to middle 1970s, in the era just before President Ford told the city to "drop dead", at least if you believe the old newspaper headline. Recently I watched a film that had a similar depiction of a different city, Boston -- well, most of it is the small towns around Boston and not the city itself. But the movie, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, is definitly worth watching.

The movie doesn't actually start off with Eddie Coyle. Instead, it begins with Jimmy Scalise (Alex Rocco) and friends. They're casing a bank in Dedham, MA, south of Boston. Their ultimate goal is to rob the place, showing up at the bank manager's house just before he leaves for work, and holding his family hostage until they can take the money out of the vault. This particular heist goes off more or less without a hitch.

As for Eddie Coyle? He (played by Robert Mitchum) helped the Scalise gang get the guns for this heist. But Eddie is getting on in years, and has problems in his personal life. He's got a wife and kids, and doesn't want to hurt them. But he was arrested some time back for transporting stolen whiskey, and convicted of crossing state lines with it in a federal court up in New Hampshire. He's scheduled to be sentenced soon, and he can't do a multiple-year stint in federal prison. As it is, the kids' classmates are already making fun of them for what their father has done.

Meanwhile, fellow criminal Dillon (Peter Boyle) runs a bar which he doesn't actually own because of his own convictions that prevent him from owning a liquor license. But he and Coyle know all of the same criminal types in Boston's Irish underworld. Dillon actually helped Coyle get the job transporting that whiskey on which Coyle was unfortunately arrested.

With that sentencing coming up, Coyle would like to do something to get a lighter sentence, and goes to federal agent Foley (Richard Jordan) to ask for help. Foley suggests that Coyle rat out the people he's working with. Coyle doesn't want to be a permanent fink, because he knows that that would mean a near-certain death sentence especially if he winds up in prison. Perhaps Foley could get his family into the witness protection program, but that would depend on the judge up in New Hampshire not giving him prison time, and the judge is apparently a harsh sentencer.

Coyle responds by finding out that Jackie Brown (not Pam Grier, but Steven Keats), the man from whom he's been buying guns for the Scalise gang, is going to a commuter rail station to make a sale, and informs Foley of that sale, not telling Foley about his work for the Scalise gang yet. When the feds arrest Brown, he figures out at least part of what's going on. As for the Scalise gang, they have a problem with one of their heists that results in them shooting one of the bank employees, meaning that they're going to have to give up the game or completely change their modus operandi.

Even worse for Coyle is that he finds out the judge isn't going to be satisfied with just handing over Jackie Brown. He might need to rat out the Scalise gang, and with them on his tail, perhaps it might finally be worth it. After all, if they're going to kill him anyway.... But events transpire such that Coyle might not be able to save himself anyway.

From what I read, The Friends of Eddie Coyle was not particularly successful at the box office. And frankly, it's not difficult to see why. The movie isn't quite a character study to the extent that The Wrestler is. But even with the bank robberies, stake-outs, and other crimes, it comes across as a less-than action-filled movie, having the slower pace of a character study. So the movie's not fitting in squarely with either genre makes it something that a commercial audience might have some problems with.

That's a shame, because The Friends of Eddie Coyle is actually a pretty darn good movie. Mitchum gives a fine performance as Coyle, while the plot ultimately comes together at the end. Also, the cinematography and depiction of the Boston area as it was in the early 1970s is extremely evocative. I particularly liked the Friendly's restaurant in the strip mall from an era before the standalone outlets with the distinctive belfry roof. (Most of the restaurants have closed, but some of the buildings stand, used by other businesses; I've always found it interesting recognizing distinctive business outlets repurposed into other things.) Mitchum is also not the only cast member to give a fine performance; most of the supporting actors are good, too.

If you want a good look at a specific time and place, you could do a lot worse than to watch The Friends of Eddie Coyle.

The perfect movie for Bastille Day

Tomorrow is July 14, which means that the French will be commemorating Bastille Day and the start of the French Revolution. TCM has run French Revolution-themed films before in a block on July 14, but not this year. Instead, we get a morning and afternoon of the films of Robert Mitchum, including The Lusty Men at 10:45 AM.

Mitchum plays Jeff McCloud, who is returning to the old homestead after years away that he spent on the rodeo circuit. Having recently been injured, however, he's looking to settle down, hence the return "home". It's not home any more, of course, since the family moved away and a man named Watrus (Burt Mustin) owns the place, although Watrus does remember Jeff's parents.

Also interested in the house is cowhand Wes Merritt (Arthur Kennedy) and his wife Louise (Susan Hayward). They're not making much, but the big thing for them is that this would finally be a place of their own. Wes recognizes Jeff and helps Jeff get a job at the same ranch where Wes is working.

But Wes wants more. Knowing that Jeff was a relatively big-time rodeo guy, at least in the smallish world of rodeo, Wes wants the taste of that himself. Louise is fairly pragmatic and worries about the physical danger Wes would be getting himself into. After all, Jeff had to quite the rodeo business due to injury. Still, Wes decides that he's going to get the money together and enter a rodeo without telling Louise. Perhaps Jeff can help train him and teach him the behind-the-scenes part of the business, but Jeff wants a substantial cut, and frankly, who can blame him.

Unsurprisingly, Wes does well at his first rodeo, because if he failed badly we wouldn't have much of a movie. Wes, having succeeded, finds that he likes both the rodeo itself, and the money, along with the modicum of fame. As I said, Louise is at least pragmatic enough to decide that perhaps Wes can win enough money to buy the old McCloud place from Watrus, and then retire from rodeo having gotten it out of his system.

Yeah, right. Once again, The Lusty Men would be a fairly boring movie if Wes were that pragmatic too. He's beginning to get pursued by the ladies, and some of the people around the rodeo are putting it into his head that Jeff was a big hit with the ladies back when he was doing rodeo. Wes earns the $4100 that will let Louise make the escrow payment on the house, and Wes responds by saying sorry, but he loves rodeo too much to quit now.

So while there's a lot about The Lusty Men that's formulaic, one thing that's relatively new is that it's set against the world of (semi-)professional rodeo. The one other movie that came to mind was J.W. Coop, which I apparently never blogged about after watching it some years back. Here, Arthur Kennedy is miscast but does his best. Hayward is professional and Mitchum seems cast best of the leads. Probably the most interesting thing, however, is some of the establishing scenes of the rodeos without the leads. The movie probably should have been in color, however, to make those scenes more worthwhile.

The Lusty Men is an interesting change of pace, even if it isn't the first thing I'd think of to recommend to people who want to learn about any of the three leads. It's definitely worth a watch.

The Yakuza

My latest movie viewing off the DVR was the intriguing The Yakuza. It's another of the movies that's available on DVD from the Warner Archive, so I feel comfortable doing a full-length post on it without it airing soon.

Robert Mitchum plays Harry Kilmer, who had served in the US Army during the post-war occupation of Japan, before returning to the US to a modest life as a private detective. One day, he hears from an old army buddy of his, George Tanner (Brian Keith), who had stayed behind in Japan after his stint in the military. Tanner has a daughter who has been kidnapped, and Tanner needs Kilmer's help in finding the girl.

So Harry flies off to Japan, and when he gets to Tokyo, one of the first things he does is to look for Eiko (Keiko Kishi). Harry had fallen in love with Eiko, a widow with a daughter, during the occupation, and even offered to marry her, but she turned him down. Harry helped get her on her feet by getting her a teahouse, and the daughter is now an adult. But there's also a business reason for meeting Eiko. Her brother Tanaka Ken (Ken Takakura; most western sources put Japanese given names first although this movie follows the Japanese tradition of using the family name first, both in dialogue and the credits) is in the Yakuza, the Japanese mafia, and he might be able to help find Tanner's girl.

The reason for this is something known in Japanese culture as "giri", a sort of duty that people feel they need to perform to somebody who has helped them, and in Ken's case that's the support Kilmer gave to Eiko. Ken, it turns out, has retired from the Yakuza, and started a martial arts kendo in Kyoto. But beacuse of that giri, Ken is going to set aside the kendo and help Kilmer in finding Tanner's daughter.

The thing is, Tanner isn't exactly an innocent. He stayed behind in Japan in order to run guns to the Yakuza, guns being highly illegal in Japan. And apparently he reneged on one of the deals, which is a big no-no, so the Yakuza took Tanner's daughter as revenge.

The Yakuza is a thoroughly American movie, which is one of the things I think makes it so intriguing. Directed by Sydney Pollack, you definitely get an outsider's view of Japan, albeit one that really feels like Pollack and everybody (well, all the Americans) in the cast were going out of their way to appreciate Japanese culture (unlike, say Walk Don't Run, which just happens to be set in Japan). And yet, there's a lot in the movie that feels thoroughly like one is just a fly on the wall and a movie written and directed by Japanese would be much deeper.

That's not to say The Yakuza is a bad movie. Mitchum is professional if getting on a bit in years, while Takakura is pretty good too. I did have a big problem with the climactic fight scene, which seemed terribly implausible considering it was two against I don't know how many. All in all, though, I found The Yakuza to be a nice look at something different, even if an Akira Kurosawa could have made something much better.

The Enemy Below

A movie that's been in the FXM rotation for a little while now is The Enemy Below. It's going to be on again tomorrow morning at 10:00 AM and Monday at 6:00 AM, so you've got a couple more chances to watch.

The USS Haynes is a destroyer setting off for a tour of the South Atlantic during World War II, on patrol to prevent German ships and submarines from doing whatever it is they do. The crew isn't necessarily certain of their new captain, Murrell (Robert Mitchum), in part because he lost his last command, a Merchant Marine boat, when it got torpedoed in the North Atlantic by the Germans. Some think Lt. Ware (David Hedison, who I think was still credited as Al as he was at the beginning of his career), the second-in-command, should have been promoted, but as he admits, his experience in captaining is limited to yachts in Miami.

But they're all here to patrol, and with the radar on, they quickly find a surfaced Nazi U-Boat, which is captained by Von Stolberg (Curt Jurgens). Von Stolberg dives and sonar from the Haynes starts pinging the U-boat and following it, trying to keep up the same course and speed so that the Nazis might think this is just an echo and not actually a ship following them. But Von Stolberg is no dummy, having been in command of submarines for years, and fires torpedoes at the US ship, narrowly missing.

Thus begins a cat-and-mouse game between the two veteran captains, but of whom are intelligent and have a pretty darn good idea of what the other is thinking and planning to do, which isn't going to make getting out of this sitation easy for either of them.

It's a bit tough to give much more of a synopsis than the above, mostly because this being a submarine pursuit film, there's not much more that can be done. I suppoe you could build up characters' back stories, but that isn't particularly necessary.

Having said that, however, The Enemy Below is quite good. It does move a bit slow at times, but again I think that's part of the nature of a submarine pursuit movie. Since the submarine is hiding out underwater, there's a lot of waiting going on that just can't be helped. I think I preferred The Bedford Incident slightly for adding a reporter character which opened things up a bit, and even Run Silent, Run Deep. But The Enemy Below is still an excellent example of the genre and well worth a watch.

Unfortunately, the print FXM ran is both letterboxed and pillarboxed (at least on my TV I was able to blow it up and as far as I could tell keep the proper aspect ratio). But it's also on DVD if you want to obtain it that way.