The Biggest Bundle of Them All

Raquel Welch was one of the people TCM honored this past August in Summer Under the Stars, which gave me the chance to record a couple of her movies that I hadn't seen before. Among them was The Biggest Bundle of them All, which I put on the DVR because the plot sounded fun. I recently watched it, and am sad to say that the movie didn't quite live up to my expectations.

Welch isn't really the star here, of course; as in qute a few of her movies she was added as eye candy. The two stars here are Robert Wagner and Vittorio De Sica. De Sica plays Cesare Celli, an Italian-born man who worked as a mobster in the States for a good portion of his career, only to retire back to Italy. At a funeral, he's picked up by Harry Price (Robert Wagner) and his friends. Only, they don't take him back to his house, but to another place where they inform him that they're kidnapping him for ransom, as Harry has written a bunch of bad checks he needs to cover. Cesare calls some of his old friends back in the States, only to find that nobody can (or is willing to) pay the ransom.

Now, this made me think of two movies, the great Terry-Thomas comedy Too Many Crooks as well as the more recent Anthony Quinn vehicle The Happening. And indeed, it turns out that the producers at Columbia found about about this movie being made and forced MGM into an agreement that they wouldn't release it until several months after The Happening finished its theatrical run. I'm getting ahead of myself, however, other than to point out that if you've seen The Happening, you'll have an idea of what happens next.

Cesare doesn't have any way of raising the ransom money himself; despite his life as a higher-up mafioso, he's really not very rich. But he knows the perfect crime for which he needs a gang, and now he's got a gang that could help carry it out. Further, it would solve everybody's financial problems. But Cesare is going to have to bring in the real brains behind the scheme, "Professor" Samuels (Edward G. Robinson).

The actual details of the heist are more of a macguffin, but the short version of it is that platinum mined in Colombia is sent for processing in Italy, where it's transported by train. The gang will hijack the train, relieve it of the platinum, and fence that in Morocco. The real plot of the movie, however, involves Harry and his gang who kidnapped Cesare not being terribly competent, and, in at least one case, fellow American Benny (Godfrey Cambridge), not even wanting to use a gun!

As for Raquel Welch, she's along for the ride as Harry's girlfriend Juliana, and also serves the purpose of being somebody good-looking enough that characters in the movie can be distracted by her beauty, allowing Harry and his gang to do what they need to unnoticed.

The big problem for me with The Biggest Bundle of them All is that the script felt scattershot, jumping from one point of preparation to the next in a way that didn't particularly feel coherent. The movie is supposed to be a comedy, but it doesn't reach the level that Too Many Crooks did, with substantial portions feeling forced and grating in the humor. One thing that the movie does have going for it, however, is location shooting in Italy, which is very picturesque here.

Overall, however, The Biggest Bundle of them All feels like the sort of movie that in the past a studio would have needed to make in Europe because of capital controls, with the Americans involved in the proceedings there for a vacation and a nice paycheck. It's not a particularly good movie, and a serious comedown for actors like Robinson and De Sica.

Should be on a double bill with The Alligator People

A couple of months back, FXM put a movie into its rotation that was completely new to me: The Frogmen. It's going to be on again tomorrow at 7:50 AM and again Sunday (June 27) at 6:00 AM. So with that in mind, I went and watch the recording I had made of one of the several previous airings.

On an American ship somewhere in the Pacific theater of World War II, one group of guys is trying to relax on the top deck before the regular crew of the ship drives them off having to wash the decks. It turns out that the first group, led by Flannigan (Dana Andrews) are part of the UDT, the Underwater Demolition Team. In short, they're the titular "frogmen", whose job it is to go underwater just off shore of islands and rig things to be blown up, or do other surveillance that can't be done any other way. They're currently on a transport ship captained by Lt. Cmdr. Vincent (Gary Merrill).

From the first scene it seems like Flannigan is the frogmen's commanding officer, but that's not quite true. Their actual CO is Lt. Cmdr. Lawrence (Richard Widmark), who has only recently replaced Cassidy, who died on a mission. So there's a fair amount of enmity between Flannigan and the lower-ranking men, who all really liked Cassidy, and Cmdr. Lawrence, who's more by the books, cold and distant.

The group has three missions during the course of the movie. The first is reconnaissance to determin whether a secondary beach can be a landing point for an American assault on a Japanese-held island. Flannigan gets injured in this mission, and Lawrence thinks the mission is more important than any one man, which leads to even more enmity.

Flannigan might get a chance to prove himself to Lawrence, however. Lawrence gets an injury, having been infected through a scratch on some coral, and is in no position to actually rig the Japanese defenses to be bombed. Unfortunately, Flannigan does something really stupid, which is to have one of his men put up a sign on the beach welcoming the Marines. The man gets shot and fairly seriously injured.

But Flannigan ultimately does redeem himself when the transport ship gets hit by a torpedo that doesn't detonate. Flannigan and Lawrence are going to have to work together to defuse it, all while there's water coming into sick bay where the frogman who had gotten shot is lying, relatively immobile.

Finally, the UDT gets called over to a submarine for a super-secret mission to bomb a Japanese submarine pen. It's a much more dangerous mission, especially once the Japanese discover that the frogmen are right beneath them. One of the frogmen, played by a young Jeffrey Hunter, nearly gets killed.

There's a lot that's fairly standard in a movie like The Frogmen, starting with the whole conflict between the men who have been together a long time and their new commander. But The Frogmen tells its story well enough, with more than competent acting from the leads, and a reasonably good amount of suspense. It's not the greatest war movie made by any stretch of the imagination, but it succeeds at what it set out to do. People who want a war movie they might not have seen before would do well to catch The Frogmen..

After the pirate of color comes a whip!?

A movie that recently made it into the FXM lineup is one that was new to me: The Silver Whip. It's going to be on again tomorrow morning at 4:45 AM, so now's the time to blog about it.

Robert Wagner plays Jess Harker, who at the beginning of the movie is driving a stagecoach on a line that basically nobody uses, from some isolated town to the main line stop at Silver City. There, he gets in a slight traffic collision and needs the help of Race Crim (Dale Robertson), a guard for the line, to get him out of it; this opening scene serves mostly to show that Jess isn't quite considered a true responsible man yet.

Jess wants to do well enough to be able to marry his girl Kathy (Kathleen Crowley), so the local sheriff, Tom Davisson (Rory Calhoun) convinces the manager of the stage line to let Jess drive a stage with a shipment of gold on it to the bigger city, with Race as the guard for this particular stage.

However, we learned that Jess still has some growing to do, so he makes some big mistakes. When the stage gets to the isolated post where they're supposed to change horses, it turns out that bandits have learned that this particular stage has the gold on it and they've hijacked the post. Race tells Jess to ride off but Jess would rather try to help Race, a mistake that results in multiple people getting killed. And then Jess wants to go off in search of the gang of criminals instead of taking the stage back to Silver City.

No wonder people think Jess isn't able to handle responsibility yet. To try to redeem himself, he goes and rides off with the sheriff and a posse to find the members of the gang and Race who is still hunting them down. Eventually, they've killed some of the gang and reach the gang leader Slater (John Kellogg), who went off in a different direction to evade capture. After a shootout, Race has Slater cornered and wants to kill Slater right then and there since he did after all kill multiple people. The sheriff understandably wants the execution to be done all nice and legal, so wants to take him back to town to stand trial. And he's got the force of law behind him.

But the judge isn't around to preside over the trial, so Slater is going to have to remain in prison overnight (no, they couldn't put him on a train to Yuma or something). The sheriff and Jess remain in the sheriff's office trying to keep Slater in jail, although the only people who are going to bust him out are Race and the townsfolk behind him who want to lynch Slater. Jess might just get his chance to stand up for the law and redeem himself....

The Silver Whip is a solid little western programmer. There's nothing particularly new here, but the familiar territory being trodden is handled well. It certainly isn't as memorable as the Technicolor westerns with bigger stars like James Stewart, but also a clear sight better than all the quickie B westerns. I suppose a few years later this would have been cut down from 73 minutes to the mid-40s to be a TV episode of one of the TV westerns popular in the late 50s. Definitely worth a watch if you've got a rainy day with nothing better to do, or if you just like westerns.

The Silver Whip got a DVD release courtesy of Fox's MOD scheme, although for whatever reason TCM's web-shop claims it's on backorder.

The Concorde: Airport '79

I recently mentioned the death of Swedish actress Bibi Andersson, and that she had appeared in The Concorde: Airport '79, which I have on Blu-ray as part of the box set of all four Airport movies. So with that in mind, I sat down to watch it and do a full-length review here.

The basic plot involves one of the Concorde supersonic passenger airplanes, which has been bought by an American airline and is going to go on its first flight for that airline from Washington DC to Paris, and from there to Moscow as a goodwill gesture ahead of the upcoming Summer Olympics in Moscow. (This was obviously made before the US and many other western countries boycotted the games.) Among the passengers on that flight are going to be a team of Soviet gymnasts, coached by Mercedes McCambridge and Avery Schreiber, with American reporter Robert Palmer (John Davidson, not singing "Addicted to Love" here) following along because he's trying to bed one of the gymnasts, I assume in the name of detente and world peace or something.

Another passenger is Maggie Whalen (Susan Blakely), another television reporter having an affair with the head of the Harrison defense contracting company, run by Dr. Harrison (Robert Wagner). Somebody passes documents to her, documents that show that the Harrison company has been illegally arming various militias in a bunch of third-world countries that at the time would have been the sites of proxy wars that were going on because of the Cold War. She's apparently planning to release those documents once she gets to Moscow. We've already seen that people are willing to kill to get those documents back, so when we learn that the Harrison company is going to be doing some testing of drone planes for air-to-air combat, Harrison gets the brilliant idea of using that drone to try to take down the Concorde!

The French Concorde pilot Metrand (Alain Delon), a notorious womanizer who is carrying on with one of the stewardesses Isabelle (Sylvia Kristel), along with the co-pilot Patroni (George Kennedy, who apparently learned how to fly the damn Concorde after every other unrelated job he had in the previous three Airport movies), evade the missile over the Atlantic and, with some minor damage, get the plane to Paris. Amazingly, you'd think that after the suffering the passengers went through on the first leg of the journey, they'd make alternative arrangements to get to Moscow, but no, they stupidly get back on the plane! Harrison tries to take it down again.

Now, this being a disaster movie, we know there should be a bunch of stars each getting a cameo story line. Among them are Eddie Albert as Sands, the head of the airline; Cicely Tyson as Elaine, who is going to Paris to fetch an organ for transplantation into her son; Martha Raye as an incontinent woman who keeps needing to use the bathroom; Jimmie Walker as a pot-smoking jazz musician who plays his saxophone during the first leg of the flight and then, after it gets destroyed, pickes up a fresh sax for the second leg (!!); and Charo as a woman trying to smuggle her dog onto the flight -- she should have called it her service dog. As for Andersson, she plays a high-class "escort" that Metrand procures for Patroni during their layover in Paris.

The Concorde was the last of the Airport movies, and it's easy to see why. It's terrible in oh so many ways. But it's one of those movies that's delightfully awful; you'll be splitting your sides laughing at the thought of it all. There are too many to list, although I've already mentioned everybody getting back on for the second leg as well as Jimmie Walker's second sax. There's the terrible special effects looking like a very primitive Chroma-key, and Patroni firing flares out the cockpit window (!) to try to deflect the heat-seeking missiles from the drone. I think my favorite moment involved Avery Schreiber's character bringing his young daughter into the cockpit to talk to the pilot. Dad is translating in some sort of sign language for the daughter, while I was hoping Patroni would ask the girl if she likes gladiator movies.

I'm glad I picked up this box set, because all four of the movies are worth watching, even if only the original is really good. The other three reach varying levels of disaster in the figurative sense, and are all the more fun for it.

I should probably mention The Hunters

I see that for those of us with FXM, they're running The Hunters tomorrow morning (Sept. 26) at 9:45 AM and then again on Thursday at 7:50 AM. The movie doesn't seem to be on DVD, but for those of you who can do streaming, Amazon has it.

Robert Mitchum plays Maj. Saville, a fighter pilot who has been recalled to active duty during the Korean War. On his way to Korea through Tokyo, he meets Lt. Abbott (Lee Phillips), who is going to be serving under him in Korea. He also meets Mrs. Abbott (May Britt), and finds that their relationship is a bit strained because of his mousy personality. As you can probably guess, Maj. Saville and Mrs. Abbott start to develop feelings for each other which is going to cause a strain on the major's professional relationship with his subordinate.

When they get to Korea, they're going to find the third member of their squadron, hot-shot pilot Lt. Pell (Robert Wagner). All of the American pilots are worried about one particular pilot, a Chinese guy nicknamed Casey Jones (remember, Communist China took part in the Korean war on the North Koreans' side). This particular pilot is such an ace that the Americans all want o be the guy to take him down, but of course being a fighter pilot is risky business.

Sure enough, Lt. Abbott eventually gets shot down. And then Maj. Saville decides he's going to ditch his plane to rescue Abbott. Pell offers cover for the two to keep the Communists from strafing them to death, but Pell too gets shot down. The three men have to make a difficult overland journey south back to safety.

The Hunters is entertaining enough, although it's a fairly standard plot, and the trek back to safety really requires you to suspend disbelief. May Britt was just the latest in a long line of glamorous European actreesses brought over to Hollywood to try to be the next big thing. Britt didn't have a particularly noteworthy career, but she wasn't as bad as somelone like Bella Darvi. Airplane buffs will probably also enjoy The Hunters for the aerial footage, although once the planes get shot down there won't be as much to enjoy.

Fox, I think, would do well to put out a low-priced box set of either Mitchum at Fox movies, or Robert Wagner (since he did a lot more) and include this one. It's not going to be remembered as an all-time great, but it doesn't deserve to be forgotten, either.

Between Heaven and Hell

Even though today was Veterans' Day, TCM decided to spend the day showing other stuff, which doesn't particularly bother me although it's agitated a bunch of people who sounded off on the Internet, apparently. FXM Retro did run some war movies, although I think I had already blogged about all of them. One Fox war movie I finally got a chance to see recently that didn't air today is Between Heaven and Hell. It does seem to be available at Amazon, so you can get a copy there if you do the streaming video thing.

The movie opens with army private Sam Gifford (Robert Wagner) just having been busted in rank and lucky not to face a court-martial for apparently having struck a senior officer, Since it's World War II and they're all in a combat zone on some God-forsaken island in the Pacific, it's apparently the least bad thing that he simply be demoted and sent to serve in a different company, which is how he gets sent to Company G. This company is headed by Captain "Waco" Grimes (Broderick Crawford), who has some peculiar rules of command. Specifically, he wants to be called "Waco" instead of "Sir", being afraid that the Japanese snipers will learn that he's the commanding officer and try to kill him. And Waco is a bit of a martinet, thinking Gifford's middle name Francis is a bit effeminate.

And then we begin to learn a bit about how Gifford got here. Some other soldiers in the company mention the former commander, Col. Cousins, and how sad it was that he got killed in battle. It was especially difficult for Gifford because he married Cousins' daughter (Terry Moore). Cue the first of the flashbacks.... In the flashbacks, which start off before the war, we learn that Gifford was a rich landowner down south, and had a bunch of white sharecroppers working his land. Gifford pushes them hard to get the most out of them, something that bothers his wife Jenny.

Back in the present, Gifford winds up serving with a guy from Chicago and another man, Pvt. Crawford (Buddy Ebsen) who just happens to be from a sharecropper family himself, close enough that he knows all the places Gifford talks about, but not close enough to have worked for Gifford. Gifford takes a liking to Crawford, and this combined with his war experiences begins to temper Gifford's outlook to the point that perhaps things will be different back on the farm if he survives the war.

Of course, to survive the war, he has to deal with Waco, which is a problem. Waco has Gifford command a sortie that is risky enough that you wonder whether Waco is deliberately trying to get Gifford killed. Gifford does a good job, but Waco doesn't want to believe him. Meanwhile, Waco is becoming more and more a difficult person to be around, to the point that you hope he's the one to get relieved. But not before Gifford has to go out on one last difficult mission, this time doing scout patrol up in the mountains.

Between Heaven and Hell is well-enough done, although there are a lot of the tropes of war movies that, I suppose, it's difficult to avoid falling into simply because there's only so much you can do and still be a realistic war movie. Robert Wagner does reasonably well in what is a somewhat atypical role for him; I think he was generally the sort of actor better suited to lighter material. Broderick Crawford shouts and gesticulates much the same way he did in Born Yesterday and All the King's Men, but these are things that befit his character. Unfortunately, the print that FXM Retro showed was panned-and-scanned from Cinemascope down to 16:9.

If you like war movies, I think you'll like Between Heaven and Hell.

The Hunters

Tomorrow on TCM brings up a day of films starring Robert Mitchum. One that I haven't blogged about before is The Hunters, which you can catch at 4:45 PM

Mitchum plays Major Cleve Saville, a US Air Force officer during the Korean War. He's heading back from Japan to Korea to take part in more missions against the Communists' MiGs, but first has to deal with another pilot who has serious self-confidence issues. First Lieutenant Carl Abbott (Lee Phillips) has yet to shoot down a plane, and he thinks he's never going to get a good mission. To deal with this, he's taken to the bottle, which unsurprisingly is a problem for a pilot. Anyhow, Lt. Abbott drinks himself into a stupor, such that Cleve and Carl's wife Kristina (May Britt) have to take him back to the Abbott's place in Japan, which seems impossibly big for a soldier, but that's another story. It fairly quickly becomes apparent that the filmmakers want us to think that Cleve would be the more appropriate man for Kristina, and that this is going to be one of the running themes of the movie.

The other theme, of course, is Maj. Saville's difficulties in dealing with the new pilots the Air Force is giving him. Saville fought in the previous war, World War II, and he's a lifer. Flying in World War II was different from flying in Korea, and the young pilots just don't seem to have the same respect for flying that the Major thinks he has. Get off his lawn, or maybe his cloud. The part of the hot-shot young flyer, Lt. Ed Pell, is played by Robert Wagner.

And so we get the set-up for the dramatic climax of the movie. The pilots go on missions, especially wary of one Chinese pilot who goes by the nickname "Casey Jones" who is the one pilot to be the equal of the best American pilots. He's shot down quite a few American planes, and he's back in action. They'd like to get him, but of course it's not going to be that easy.

Indeed, one of the missions is going to see a pilot get downed behind enemy lines! That pilot is Lt. Abbott, and if it weren't for military discipline, we'd probably be happy to see the jerk get what's coming to him, and Saville and the widow Abbott can get married and live happily after. But of course, that would be a terrible ending for a film, so we need something a little more dramatic. And what we get is certainly that: Maj. Saville ditches his plane, and Lt. Pell lets himself be downed too, so that the two of them can find Lt. Abbott and bring him to safety! This despite behing well behind enemy lines and having no real idea of the lay of the land. It also doesn't help that Abbott is fairly injured.

The result is a movie that treads over a lot of territory that we've seen before in previous war movies. Not that it does most of the stuff badly; it's just that other movies did these things better. What The Hunters has going for it is its color cinematography, as well as the presence of Robert Mitchum, who gives a professional performance as always. If you like war movies, The Hunters is entertaining enough but will never achieve greatness.

White Feather

I only noticed this morning that White Feather is airing tomorrow morning at 10:00 AM on FXM Retro. It's airing again at 4:00 AM Monday, but there's another movie I was intending to do a full-length post on tomorrow. And it turns out that I hadn't done a post on White Feather before; I thought I had after the last time it got a couple of airings on FXM in quick succession.

Robert Wagner stars as Josh Tanner, who at the beginning of the movie is seen riding alone somewhere out in the old West. He comes across the victim of a Cheyenne attack at a river, and the Cheyenne watch him to see if he's got courage. It turns out that Tanner is making his way to the nearby fort. The river is the de facto boundary between the US forces and the native tribe, but the US are currently in negotiations with the various tribes to put them on reservations so that the US can take the land without annihilating the tribes.

Tanner is a surveyor, and his bosses are waiting for that treaty to be signed so that they can get their hands on some of that new land; Josh is being sent out in advance as a surveyor to survey the land for the land company. Not that the folks at the fort like him. The commander, Col. Lindsay (John Lund), is wary of him, while the only place he can find lodging is in the storeroom of the store run by Magruder (Emile Meyer). Magruder has a daughter Ann (Virginia Leith), but apparently she has a past, because her father thinks she's fit for no man and she makes cryptic comments about her past.

Apparently, however, the Cheyenne respect Tanner. They're the only tribe that hasn't signed the treaty to give up hostilities against the Americans, and the Americans are trying to get them to sign the treaty which all the other tribes are going to sign. Chief Broken Hand (Eduard Franz) is beginning to think that perhaps the fight against the Americans with their superior forces is futile, but his son Little Dog (Jeffrey Hunter) is not willing to give up the old ways. Tanner goes into all of this to talk to the Cheyenne.

While there, he meets not only the men in the Indian tribe, but also the chief's daughter Appearing Day (Debra Paget). She falls for him, and the feeling winds up being mutual. Needless to say, this presents all sorts of complications.

White Feather treads over some of the same territory that Fox had covered a couple of years earlier with Broken Arrow. There are also the themes of tradition versus modernity that appear in a whole bunch of movies in all sorts of genres. In White Feather, it all amounts to something that's capable, but which also feels as though we've seen it all before. Still, it's not bad, with the one exception that I wished I could have learned more about Ann, the white woman we kind of expect Tanner to wind up with when the story opens. She clearly has a past, but it's never really gone into. Oh, there's also the other problem of a bunch of white actors playing Indians, but really, there weren't enough prominent Indian actors to play these characters. On the plus side, the cinematography is quite nice if you can catch this in widescreen. I have a distinct memory that when it showed up on FXM a few weeks back, it was in fact in widescreen and not panned-and-scanned like a lot of their Cinemascope movies.

White Feather did get a DVD release at some point in the past, but I think it's out of print based on Amazon's not having new copies regularly available.

In Love and War

FXM Retro ran the retro-World War II drama In Love and War this morning. They're going to be airing it again tomorrow morning at 6:00 AM so you've got one more chance at least to catch it.

The movie starts off with three men in uniform at the rail of a US Navy ship looking out at San Francisco as the ship comes into port. Over all of this is a graphic: "1944". So we know right away that these men, who are in fact not in the Navy but the Marines, have been at war. They've got a day or two of shore leave, and they all plan to use it to the fullest. Nico Kantaylis (Jeffrey Hunter) is of Greek descent, and his family runs a fishing business in San Francisco. He sees them briefly, but has to go off to Monterey to see his girlfriend Andrea (Hope Lange). She's got bad news for him: she's pregnant. Apparently they had sex once and only once, and in the great tradition of Production Code-era premarital sex, that one misdeed must leave the woman knocked up. So Nico says he knows a judge who can perform a marriage ceremony for them, and takes her off to San Francisco to do that and have a brief honeymoon.

Frank O'Neill (Robert Wagner) stops off at Moran's bar before going home to see his family. This shouldn't be a surprise, since he's shown in the opening holding a beer bottle and drinking from it. It's clear he's a drunk. It also soon becomes clear that he's drinking in part to deal with the stress of going home. Oh, he likes his mothers and his young siblings. But Dad died and Mom remarried, and the stepfather doesn't like Frank. Indeed, he thinks Frank is just as much a drunk as Dad was, and that Frank is a coward to boot. No wonder Frank doesn't want to go home. Of course, there's a lot of truth to all of that....

The third Marine is college man Alan Newcombe (Bradford Dillman). He goes off to see his on again, off again girlfriend Sue Trumbull (Dana Wynter). She's taken to drink to, largely because she has mother issues. Her parents were extremely wealthy and she's inherited a good deal of that wealth, which she uses to try to push out of her mind the fact that there's a war on. Alan has finally had it with her partying, so he leaves her to go off with Frank who is planning a big blowout for their final night in Frisco. Frank has his girlfriend Lorraine (Sheree North), now a WAVE, who brings along her nurse friend Kalai (France Nuyen), a Hawaiian-French nurse whose parents were killed at Pearl Harbor. Lorraine has finally had it with Frank's drinking, while Kalai finds herself falling in love with Alan. Alan, however, is clearly the wrong social class for Kalai, at least as the movie morals of the day would have you think, because of that college education and because his father is fairly well-to-do himself.

So the movie spends the first half looking at all these loves and engaging in expository information, before we finally get to the war part. The Marines ship out to the Pacific theatre, which means island hopping as they take one island after another from the Japanese. However, that also means some fairly fierce fighting, as the Japanese weren't about to give up any of those islands without fighting to the last man. All three of the men learn something about themselves....

I don't spend that much time on the "war" part of In Love and War because the movie seems almost to include it as an afterthought. Although there are quite a few war scenes in the last half, they're also interspersed with the women back home. Kalai has a meeting with Sue, although not the one you'd expect; Andrea is shown with her baby; and Lorraine is written out of the movie, with the resolution of her story being mentioned in one blink-and-you'll-miss-it aside. Frank's home life does get one more scene, though.

Ultimately, In Love and War is a by-the-numbers production that probably doesn't deserve as much criticism as I found myself giving it while I was watching. It's not that the movie is bad, it's just that we've seen all of this done before, and done much better. It doesn't help that FXM is running a print that's panned and scanned -- even in the opening credits. So it really only starts obert Wagne, not Robert Wagner. The end screen, however, has been given the Cinemascope diet, squished into a 4:3 box and making Hope Lange look incredibly thin. I don't think In Love and War has received a DVD release, though, so you're going to have to see it chopped up like this.